Not only do I find Germany unsexy, but I also find it unsettling. Why?
RULE: Never Watch the History Channel before Visiting Germany
Please don’t take it personally, Germany, but the little Jewish kid inside of me from Montreal who grew up during World War II just doesn’t like the sound of Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg.
FUN FACTNER: William Shatner was in the film Judgment at Nuremberg along with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, and Montgomery Clift. The film won two Academy Awards.*
* ADDENDUM TO PREVIOUS FUN FACTNER: The above Fun Factner is the only “fun” fact ever associated with Nuremberg.
The trunk of my rental car was filled with everything I’d need to put myself at ease in Germany: several pairs of lederhosen and a return-trip ticket. I was really questioning my decision to visit, but I was in Germany because of that most important Shatner Rule: Say “ja!”
I had been asked to appear at an event for German television, along with that other famed German television icon: Charlton Heston. We were both receiving some kind of lifetime achievement award.
Charlton Heston was a fine actor and a movie icon, but I didn’t know the man and was really looking forward to meeting him. I am drawn to controversial figures, and in recent years Heston had grown more and more political and—to some people—a little polarizing. The man had played Moses, but he was currently a God to gun owners across America.
FUN FACTNER: Both Charlton Heston and William Shatner served as Bacchus King at Mardi Gras. Only one of them had the courage to go pantsless.
This was around the time Charlton Heston was standing before NRA gatherings, raising a musket in his hand, and bellowing, “From my cold dead hands!” Since he was joining me for this event in Germany, I could only assume he softened that stance when passing through airport security.
Before our awards show, I was to meet Heston in person, as we were both going to be guests of honor at a dinner for the event advertisers at a German restaurant. Although if we were really guests of honor, they would have taken us somewhere besides a German restaurant.
One German horror not chronicled by the History Channel is the food. To be fair, around this time, I had become a bit of a food snob, having just come off hosting Iron Chef USA. We had shot two specials, featuring myself and celebrity judges Steve Schirripa, Brande Roderick, and comedy writer and Hollywood Squares fixture Bruce Vilanch.
And by the way—if you’re going to have Bruce Vilanch on a cooking show, expect one or more hairs in your food.
It was similar to the popular Japanese program, except now I was the chairman, swaggering around Kitchen Stadium in what can best be described as an “Edwardian spacesuit,” lording over such contests as “Dungeness Crab Challenge!” In fact, my experience on Iron Chef USA brought across my palate a dessert concoction that celebrity chef Kerry Simon called Crab Gelato. It was an ice cream that was the true essence of crab!
Was it the essence of good?
Well, I was relieved not to see it on our menu that evening at the German restaurant. And Simon was in tears when the judges on Iron Chef USA spat it into their napkins.
FUN FACTNER: After doing Iron Chef USA, William Shatner cooked Kentucky burgoo on a television show called Cooking’s a Drag, featuring a sassy transvestite chef named Betty Dee Lishous. Mr. Shatner no longer does cooking programs.
As soon as Elizabeth and I arrived at the restaurant, I was introduced to Mr. Heston, and he was . . . a little chilly. Somewhat aloof. Occasionally, those of us who have plied our trade in television get a bit of the cold shoulder from the actors who have spent most of their careers on the big(ger) screen. Although I’m not sure if he was being distant or just being . . . Charlton Heston: square-jawed, iconic, ready to remove damned dirty ape hands from his person at a moment’s notice.
Which brings me to my rule: When I’m not being Shatner, I turn it off.
Depending on the location, when you meet me, you probably won’t meet Shatner. I will probably be in Bill mode. Bill’s a very nice guy. He likes horses, and his kids and grandkids. Bill adores his wife. Bill turns the lights off at night and makes sure the bills get paid, and he memorizes his lines during his spare time so he doesn’t get fired from his current job. That’s who Bill is. (He tries not to speak of himself in the third person, but sometimes it just slips through.)
The real William Shatner is a fairly decaffeinated version of the one you see on TV. I can’t keep that energy, that intensity, up all the time. I am not even allowed to drink caffeine. Elizabeth’s efforts to keep caffeinated beverages out of my hands are sometimes tantamount to spousal abuse.
RULE: Mention Spousal Abuse in Any Autobiographical Work. It’ll Help Sell Some Copies.
William Shatner—as you have hopefully learned by now—is a bit of a character. But I’m not the William Shatner character. I’m not the hyper, arrogant, bombastic fellow people are laughing along with. (You’re laughing with him, not at him, right?) When we meet, I will not lace my fingers together and club you like Kirk, I will not ride on the hood of your car like Hooker, and I will not try and sell you the best deal possible on airfares and hotels like The Negotiator.*
*Unless, of course, you like saving money! Do I have some deals for you!
Besides, it’s hard for me to be Shatneresque because . . . well, how do I put this in a “Shatneresque” way?
I . . .
Don’t . . .
Watch . . .
Myself.
Yep. When Shatner comes on the TV, Bill changes the channel. I have spent a huge part of my life in the public eye. Everybody’s public eyes but my own.
I have never felt comfortable watching myself. I didn’t do it early in my career, and I don’t do it now. I don’t like watching my work, or the work of that old devil, Time. On the occasions when I have directed myself in something, when my face appears in the dailies, I actually raise a hand to block out my face. I also can usually find some fault with my performances. My toughest critic is me, but fortunately he doesn’t watch me and attack me in the press.
Upon meeting Heston, I realized he was one of those guys who didn’t have an Off switch. And I, and my dinner companions, became acutely aware of this after our main course.
We were all full of sauerbraten, knockwurst, pretzels of the hardest variety, and Gaisburger Marsch. (No idea. I wished it tasted as good as crab gelato.) We had met all the advertising folk; I tried to be my best charming Bill, hobnobbing with the German TV execs, and now all there was to do was eat dessert.
Heston pushed his chair back and stood, cleared his mighty throat, and declared, “I suppose you would all like to hear me recite some passages from the Bible.”
Before any of us could get out a “nein,” Heston leapt into a performance of the Bible. He was “Bible acting.”
I know “Bible acting.” I did quite a bit of it when I was a young actor. There was a weekly TV show called Lamp unto My Feet. I acted on the Sunday morning religious anthology Insight. I was in several episodes of a program called The Psalms in 1962, which was shot by a young cameraman by the name of George Lucas. (This was before we both discovered the joys of galaxies far, far away.)
RULE: Always Be Nice to Your Cameraman
“Bible acting” involves speaking in very soft, rounded, accent-free tones. It is quiet, hushed. Words are spoken with great reverence. You must act in a way that suggests you are deathly afraid of waking up the nearby Baby Jesus. And this is what Heston was doing.
For about thirty minutes.
“Begat this, begat that, begat whatshisname.”
There I was, a Jew in Germany, stuffed with brats, getting the full God treatment from Moses. Heston went Old Testament, he went New Testament, no one went to the bathroom. We just sat there, frozen, unsure of what to do or say. Ho
w do you stand up and say, “Hey, Charlton Heston, let’s cut to Revelations so we can all get our strudel”?
You can’t, of course. He’s Charlton Heston, and he’s being Charlton Heston.
What’s the lesson? You have to be able to turn it off. For your sake, and for the sake of your dinner companions.
EPILOGUE
The event was great, and both Heston and I wowed the German TV audience. At least I think they were wowed, although when I ordered them all to march into Poland they seemed a little dumbfounded. (I guess charisma only gets you so far in Germany these days.)
When I got home, there was a bill waiting for me from my German hotel. I had spilled a glass of red wine on my room’s white carpet, and the hotel was attempting to charge me $40,000! I told them I was Bill, and that they should send the damage fees to William Shatner.
I hear he can negotiate his way out of anything.
CHAPTER 14
RULE: Grab Life by the (Golden) Throat!
Two men sat in my Ventura Boulevard office one morning. They called themselves the Foos Brothers. And no, they didn’t appear to be a vaudeville act.
They were nice enough fellows, we shared a few laughs and pleasantries, but I wasn’t quite sure . . . who they were. My ubiquitous presence on the media landscape is the result of projects that stem from many meetings such as these, and sometimes I get people mixed up.
They had a pitch of some sort. I listened politely while craning my neck to get a look at my daily planner. The day was, as usual, very full, and the word “Rhino” was filled in between 10 and 11 A.M. I like rhinos. In fact, there’s a picture of me riding a rhino in my office. What a great day that was when I met the rhino—I also got to swim with an orca and hold some cheetah kittens. Around 1987? My mind was drifting as the Foos boys were pitching; I looked at my rhino picture, and smiled.
Again, very nice young men, but what did they want—?
A record.
They wanted me to record an album. They used to be with Rhino Records, and now they had a new label called Shout! Factory.
Now, Rhino was familiar. What did they do . . . ?
Golden Throats.
Oh no. The guys who produced Golden Throats were in my office, asking me to make a record. Perhaps this could be a perfect opportunity to wring their golden throats?
For the uninitiated, Golden Throats was a series of compilation albums released starting in 1988, which featured cover songs performed by people who were not known as traditional singers. Among the highlights: Eddie “Green Acres” Albert’s take on Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Mae West singing “Twist and Shout” at an age when she could barely do either, Dragnet’s Jack Webb doing a “just the facts” rendition of “Try a Little Tenderness,” and Leonard Nimoy hammering away at “If I Had a Hammer” and “Proud Mary.”
Leonard was one of two artists featured on the album twice. The other was me.
My renditions of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”—from my 1968 album, The Transformed Man—were highlighted on Golden Throats. Being highlighted on that album was not a tribute; it was a form of mockery. Needless to say, Golden Throats is not on my iPod. For one thing, I’d have to know how to put things on my iPod.
I let these Foos chat on, aware that their intentions for me were probably not the best. I sent my assistant down to the corner for coffee and gave her the wink, which was the signal for “put something nasty in their cups.”
I clasped my hands behind my head, and let my mind wander again, back many years ago, to the release of The Transformed Man.
RULE: When Writing a Lengthy Account of Your Musical Career, Alert the Reader to the Presence of a Flashback so They Don’t Get Confused. . . .
FLASHBACK!
Sometime in 1968, Fred de Cordova, the executive producer of a famous late night television show, looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Three minutes.”
I pled, “But the song is six minutes.”
“It’s two songs,” he insisted, “Do one or the other. If I were you, I’d do the Dylan number. The kids like that.”
My rehearsal for an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had just ended, and we had run through the second track of side one of my album, which was “Theme from Cyrano/Mr. Tambourine Man.” On that tune, I read a poem from Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac in which “I may climb to no great heights, but I will climb alone” dovetails into Dylan’s song, which I performed as a drug addict hungry for a fix.
Sound heady? It was heady! It was 1968!
It was the year the Beatles visited the Maharishi, it was the year Hair opened, side 2 of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat album featured the seventeen-minute-long “Sister Ray,” the Amboy Dukes took us on a “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” Richard Harris’s seven-minute-long “MacArthur Park” went to number two, Iron Butterfly released the eighteen-minute-long “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Our minds were expanding, and so was our patience for long, freaky pop numbers. And I wanted to be as long and freaky as the rest of them.
Come on! Six minutes of William Shatner was nothing compared to eighteen minutes of Iron Butterfly, but Fred de Cordova wouldn’t hear of it. I could do Rostand or Dylan, but not both.
How dare you, Mr. de Cordova? I was a musician! And I had the concept album to prove it.
And it’s not like I had never sung on a talk show. Earlier in the year, I had broken out into song on The Mike Douglas Show, singing a tune called “Keep It Gay.”
FUN FACTNER: While it means something completely different today, in the 1960s, “gay” meant “happy,” “cheery,” “full of merriment,” and “homosexual.”
It was a great performance. In fact, if you type “William Shatner” and “Keep It Gay” into YouTube, you can watch the clip.
RULE: In Whatever Way You Can, Help Shatner Destroy YouTube
I tried to explain to Fred what I was attempting to do with The Transformed Man, which was link great literature of the past with great modern literature—the poetry found in many songs of the sixties. Taking one song out of context would destroy the connection. Elsewhere on the album, I paired Hamlet with Sinatra, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” with a poem called “Spleen.” It all made sense in context.
Can you dig it, Fred de Cordova?!?!
But my pleas fell on deaf—and hopelessly square—ears. De Cordova, not digging it and in a hurry to oversee the wrapping of Johnny’s Carnac the Magnificent turban, told me, “Do the Dylan number. Nobody knows the Cyrano thing.”
So I did “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a junkie, and my allotted three minutes didn’t allow me to outline some of the headier concepts presented in The Transformed Man to the millions of people watching The Tonight Show. I was uncertain, but I performed it like only I can.
As I worked my way through the number, I eventually collapsed to the ground, in front of Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band, looked heavenward, and screamed, “MR. TAMBOURINE MAAAAAANNNN!”
I finished, turned toward Johnny, and saw him mouth the words, “What . . . the . . . fuck?”
It seems most of America mouthed those words as well. That was the beginning of the end of The Transformed Man, an album frequently mocked, but one I am proud of. It vanished pretty quickly, and I moved on. And then . . .
Golden Throats came out. It all came rushing back to the pop culture landscape.
Which brings me back to my meeting with the ex–Rhino Records executives. They continued on about how great it would be for me to record another album with them, how they would enlist their full support, shoot videos, blah, blah, blah. These guys were just looking for a gag version of The Transformed Man, and I wanted no part of it.
My album became a joke to many people, and for better or worse I had learned to go along with the joke as time went by,
but . . . no thanks. I was ready to show the Foos boys the door when . . .
I got a phone call. It was Ben.
Ben whatshisname.
FUN FACTNER: William Shatner can never remember the last name of his good friend and frequent collaborator Ben Folds.
Ben Folds! Yes. Ben Folds was on the line! Right in the middle of my meeting with Shout! Factory.
Full disclosure: I can never remember Ben Folds’s last name. The only way I can is by applying a methodology, a mnemonic, in which I bend myself in the middle, creating a folding action after Ben’s name. I suit the action to the word—it’s the same way you act Shakespeare! So needless to say, I will be folding myself over as I write the rest of this book whenever Ben’s surname comes up.
Ben (fold) Folds is a wonderful singer and songwriter from North Carolina, a beloved figure in the world of alternative pop, and a longtime fan of . . . The Transformed Man. When he picked it up at a garage sale as a kid, he had never seen Johnny Carson and had not yet heard of Golden Throats. He was a fan of Captain Kirk and his rather wild and strange record album. And in 1998, he asked me to provide some vocals on his record Fear of Pop. I had heard of his music, loved it, and agreed.
RULE: If You Want to Seem Rock-and-Roll, Don’t Admit That You Had Never Heard of Ben Folds and Consented to Do It Only Because Your Daughter Told You To
So out of the blue—in the middle of my meeting with the Foos boys—Ben calls me. I spoke to him briefly, didn’t quite listen to what he said, but then looked up at the record execs, and declared, “I’ll do a record, but only with Ben Folds.”
Shatner Rules Page 8
