which stemmed from her mother giving her away, and linked this to Star Trek saying "when I was let go from Star Trek, it was a psychic pain which pushed me into alcoholism. I couldn't stand the pain, so I drank to get away from it." Return Whitney returned to the set on several occasions during the production of the series, and was also invited to come back for cast parties. But over time these visits decreased gradually as she found it painful to be on set with her friends, but not able to appear on the show. She was continuing to take amphetamines and had developed a drinking problem. Despite this, and despite Whitney being let go from the show, Harlan Ellison wrote the character into his original script for "The City on the Edge of Forever". Roddenberry rewrote the script, resulting in a feud between the writers – but the writer was also very disappointed in general that Rand had been removed from the series. After Whitney had left Star Trek, she dated Ellison for a time. Whitney had no further involvement with Star Trek until 1976, when she happened to meet DeForest Kelley at an unemployment office in Van Nuys, Los Angeles. He informed her about a Star Trek convention coming up that was organised by Bjo and John Trimble called Equicon. She received such a reception upon making an appearance there that she was inspired to think more about the series and wanted to appear at more events. In 1977, after reading the back cover of the book Letters to Star Trek by Susan Sackett and finding that "Whatever happened to Grace Lee Whitney?" was one of the ten most frequently asked queries, Whitney got in touch with Sackett and was invited to meet at Roddenberry's office at Paramount. When he entered, he was happy and excited to see her and immediately offered to bring back Rand for the new television series Star Trek: Phase II. Roddenberry told her that removing Rand was the biggest mistake he had made, saying that the character should have stayed so that "when Captain Kirk came back from having affairs with all these other women on all these other planets – he'd have to deal with [Rand]. What a great plot-thickener that would have been!" Instead, he blamed the decision on executives at NBC, but apologized for it to Whitney.