Grace Lee Whitney (born Mary Ann Chase; April 1, 1930 – May 1, 2015) was an American actress and singer. Her entertainment career spanned over a half century in a variety of capacities in radio, on stage, in music as a singer and songwriter, in television and in movies. She played Janice Rand on the original Star Trek television series and subsequent Star Trek films.
Whitney was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and was adopted by the Whitney family, who changed her name to Grace Elaine. The family moved to Detroit where Whitney attended school. She started her entertainment career as a "girl singer" on Detroit's WJR radio at age 14. After she left home, she began to call herself Lee Whitney, eventually becoming known as Grace Lee Whitney. In her late teens, she moved to Chicago, where she opened in nightclubs for Billie Holiday and Buddy Rich and toured with the Spike Jones and Fred Waring bands. During this time she trained to be a nurse for a year.
Whitney was the original Chicken of the Sea mermaid character created in 1952. Chicken of the Sea has maintained the mermaid as its mascot over the years. Whitney came to play the iconic mermaid character while appearing on The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show on CBS Radio. The show was broadcast in a front of a live studio audience with Whitney in costume and singing the tuna jingle.
Whitney debuted at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in Top Banana, with Phil Silvers and Kaye Ballard in 1952, playing Miss Holland. Here she met her future husband, Sydney Stevan Dweck, who was a freelance drummer and percussionist and band member for the show. Following the successful run of the show in New York, she joined the cast in Hollywood, where she recreated the role in the 1954 musical film of the same name.
She was a chorus girl in the off-Broadway musicals Great to be Alive! (1953) and The Pajama Game (1956).
In 1960, while in Los Angeles, Whitney auditioned for and was cast in the starring role of Lucy Brown in the first national tour of The Threepenny Opera, taking over the role from Bea Arthur, who had played the part in New York off-Broadway.
Her movie debut was in House of Wax (1953) in an uncredited role. Whitney was cast as a member of the all-female band in Billy Wilder's comedy Some Like It Hot (1959). She shared several scenes with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, including the "upper berth" sequence. She had uncredited roles in The Naked and the Dead (1958), The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961). Whitney was credited as Tracey Phillips in the drama A Public Affair (1962) and as Texas Rose in the Western The Man from Galveston (1963). Billy Wilder then gave her the featured role of Kiki the Cossack in Irma la Douce (1963).
Whitney made more than 100 television appearances following her television dramatic debut in Cowboy G-Men in 1953 (credited as Ruth Whitney.)
She appeared on episodes of The Real McCoys, Wagon Train, The Islanders, Hennesey, The Roaring 20s, Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson, The Rifleman, 77 Sunset Strip, Mike Hammer, Batman, The Untouchables, Hawaiian Eye, The Outer Limits, Bewitched, Mannix, Death Valley Days, The Big Valley and The Virginian.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Whitney was a frequent semi-regular on over 80 live television shows, including You Bet Your Life hosted by Groucho Marx in 1953, The Red Skelton Show, The Jimmy Durante Show and The Ernie Kovacs Show, largely appearing in gag sketches. From 1957 to 1958, she appeared as a "Vanna-type adornment" on the popular daytime show Queen for a Day.
Whitney first met Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry when she was cast as the female lead "Sgt. Lilly Monroe" in Roddenberry's TV pilot Police Story which was filmed just weeks after the second Star Trek pilot in 1965.
Both shows shared many of the same crew including associate producer Robert H. Justman and executive in charge of production Herbert F. Solow and eventual Star Trek co-star DeForest Kelley. Police Story was not picked up but Star Trek was. (Police Story was later screened as a TV movie in 1967 along with several other failed pilots; by this time Star Trek was in its second season. The networks again chose not to pick up the show.)
Roddenberry cast Whitney in Star Trek as Yeoman Janice Rand, the personal assistant to Captain James T. Kirk. While the stars of the show were William Shatner (Captain Kirk) and Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock), Whitney shared the same billing as DeForest Kelley, who played Dr. McCoy.
On September 1, 1966, one week before the first episode screened on NBC, Whitney, Shatner and Nimoy were interviewed by Barbara Walters on The Today Show where they discussed the new show. The first promotional photographs for Star Trek also featured Shatner, Nimoy and Whitney—separately and together—with pre-production costumes for all and an early version of the "beehive" hairstyle that Whitney's character had in the filmed episodes.
Whitney appeared in eight of the first 15 episodes, after which she was released from her contract. The official reason given for Whitney's departure from the show was that her character limited romantic possibilities for Captain Kirk.
At the time Whitney was guaranteed to appear in seven of the first 13 episodes and contracted for four days of work on each. However, she was used for nine additional days. On September 8, 1966, also the date of broadcast of the first episode of Star Trek, "The Man Trap", Whitney's agent was informed that her contract had been terminated, which was around a week prior to the shoot of her penultimate episode, "The Conscience of the King". Roddenberry told Whitney that he did not want to lose Rand as he wanted her relationship with Kirk to continue. In a memo to Star Trek showrunner Gene Coon on October 27, 1966, Roddenberry suggested bringing Whitney back as Rand, albeit with a different hairstyle, similar to the one she had in Police Story, as this "made her look much younger and softer", but she was never invited back to the series.
Whitney said that, while still under contract, she was sexually assaulted by an executive associated with the series. Later, in a public interview, she stated that Leonard Nimoy had been her main source of support during that time. She went into more details about the assault in her book The Longest Trek, but refused to name the executive, saying in the book, "This is my story, not his."
In between TV guest spots Whitney returned to singing and in 1968 opened her own dress design firm, modeling her own designs while performing. She starred in the 1968 Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color two-part TV episode "Way Down Cellar."