It is an odd thing. Many souls who champion ethical principles in their work prove to be startlingly unethical in their day-to-day life. One of the most striking examples was playwright Arthur Miller, whose entire body of work (The Crucible; Death of a Salesman; All My Sons, and others) was soaked-through with ethical parables and pleas for ethical conduct. After Miller's death, it was revealed that he had a son, Daniel, born with Down Syndrome in 1966. Though Miller was a multi-millionaire with abundant resources and Daniel was a high-performance Down Syndrome child who could be educated to live a normal life, Miller had the boy institutionalized through his entire childhood, virtually never visited him, and barely provided for him in his estate. Another white knight with a black heart was Clarence Darrow, the legendary trial lawyer who fought in court for justice and against bigotry, censorship and the death penalty, but was also unfaithful to his wives, dishonest and stingy to his colleagues, and completely uninterested in his son.

Then we have the strange case of Gene Roddenberry, the creator and producer of "Star Trek" whose scripts, plots and themes celebrated ethical values and urged mankind to create a more generous, fair and honest future. When composer Alexander Courage died this month, several media sources repeated the tale of how the famous "Star Trek" theme Courage composed led to his refusing to do any further scoring work for Roddenberry or the show after its first few episodes. Roddenberry tricked Courage into a agreeing to a contract that allowed lyrics to be written to his musical theme for the show. Then Roddenberry, who was to lyric writing what William Shatner was to subtle acting, wrote these lyrics himself:

Beyond the rim of the star-light
My love is wand'ring in star-flight
I know he'll find in star-clustered reaches
Love, strange love a star woman teaches!

I know his journey ends never
His star trek will go on forever.
But tell him while he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me!

Yechhhh!

Roddenberry was a good enough producer to know such putrid doggerel should never make it to the air, and indeed, his awful lyrics are only recalled today as a monument to camp and bad song-writing. But the song is also a monument to trickery and greed. Once the lyrics were written and copyrighted, Courage was legally required to split the royalties for his Star Trek theme with his "lyricist" every time the music was played, on the show or elsewhere. Courage protested that this was unethical, since the lyrics had only been written to transform his musical composition into a "song" for the sole purpose of transferring half the royalties from the composer to Roddenberry. Roddenberry didn't disagree. According to the excellent urban legends website (www.snopes.com), he said, unapologetically, "Hey, I have to get some money somewhere. I'm sure not going to get it out of the profits of Star Trek."

Of course, Roddenberry did make money, a lot of it, out of "Star Trek." But he did it without Alexander Courage, who chose not to work for someone who would manipulate the law to cheat him. Meanwhile, Gene Roddenberry continued to champion ethical values for the human race, even as he was willing to abandon those values to take half of a talented and trusting artist's earnings, using some of the crummiest lyrics ever written.