Up Till Now

by William Shatner

  Many years later I’d make a movie for television entitled Secrets of a Married Man in which I played a husband so straitlaced I wore a tie and jacket when having dinner with my family. Michelle Phillips played my wife and Cybill Shepherd played a call girl with a heart of cash. In one scene I was sitting at a bar with a cowboy-type who looked at a prostitute and said admiringly, “Whoa. Now, that’s somebody that’ll teach a man how to yodel. For a price.”

  But for me it wasn’t like that at all. I was sitting in a bar and these were my friends. How I could not be curious about their lives I don’t know, but it was something we never discussed. So I sat there with them week after week, month after month, searching for jobs in the day, passing the nights, waiting for the Stratford Festival to reopen so I could regain some prestige.

  One night one of the girls took me home with her. She wasn’t really much older than me, but she seemed so worldly. And she took me into her life and became my teacher. We slept in her bedroom while the other girls with whom she shared that apartment were talking in the living room. That began a relationship that lasted several months. It wasn’t a love affair, we weren’t in love with each other, but it was warm and soothing and nurturing. She cared about me and offered me her being. It was lovely.

  Some months later I’d written a play, Dreams, for the CBC and cast a beautiful young woman to play the female lead opposite me. Her name was Gloria Rosenberg and I fell in love with her. Both figuratively and literally, she was the woman of my Dreams. That wonderful summer I called her every night from Stratford. We were on the phone so often that the operator from the Canadian Exchange felt sorry for me and allowed me to call for free. I didn’t fit into any of the groups that had formed at Stratford and I was very lonely there without Gloria. Finally I told her, “I love you, please come up.” She raced to be with me in Stratford, it was so romantic. It seemed like there was only one thing to do: I asked her to marry me.

  Marry me? I’d known her for only four months. After she’d gone home to make preparations for our wedding I began wondering if this was the right thing to do. One night, I remember so well, I was caught outdoors in a thunderstorm and as the rain fell and the wind raged and the thunder burst above me I thought, I’m living an experience from a Shakespearean play. It was an incredibly dramatic moment and I had no one there to share it with; I was so lonely and I was in love and so we were married.

  At the end of the season we returned to Toronto. I remember one cold fall night coming out of a theater with Gloria and her parents. As we stood there I saw my prostitute walking down the sidewalk. Working in the night. I can close my eyes and see her now: a low-cut dress, red hair, black pumps. But when I saw her that night I turned my back on her. I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, I was terrified she would recognize me as she walked by.

  She was so wise; as she walked by she did nothing to indicate she knew me, but she subtly acknowledged my presence. As she passed I looked at her, and she looked back over her shoulder. I know she saw me but she kept walking and the moment was gone and I never saw her again.

  This was a woman who had taken a naïve, middle-class, untutored boy, an alien really, and gave me the comfort I so desperately needed. And then, when it became convenient for me, I turned my back on her. In the end, that was the true source of my shame—I had turned my back on someone who had been good to me. It was a moment I’ve never forgotten and I still feel shamed by it.

  As if it’s any excuse, I was in love for the first time in my life. Of course I had absolutely no idea what love was, but she was a beautiful young woman and she was attracted to me and when I was with her I felt something very special. That feeling had to be love, I figured. She was an actress, professionally known as Gloria Rand. Oh, that was perfect, I thought, we shared a passion for the theater. We shared the same dream.

  As I discovered, there is only one problem when two actors marry: they’re both actors! Actors tend to be extremely focused, of necessity narcissistic and often highly competitive. One dream isn’t big enough for the two of them. If both careers are progressing even roughly equally it can be wonderful. But when one is having success while the other is staying home with kids, it can be less than wonderful. Difficult. Of course, Gloria and I didn’t know any of that. We were both young and...

  Oh, I just found out that the New York Post, in an article listing the 100 best cover songs of all time, named my version of Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year” number 60—ahead of Elton John’s cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (72) and Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” (86). Note to self: Do cover versions of every song ever written.

  So, Gloria and I were both young and... and young. That really explains it.

  We both wanted to work in America, so we took the $750 I’d won as Stratford’s Most Promising Actor and moved to New York City. We got a small apartment in Jackson Heights, in Queens, four subway stops from Broadway.

  It was during this time that I’d made my American television debut. I suspect because of my considerable experience as a featured player at the prestigious Stratford Festival I was offered a role that utilized all of my many talents. I was given the opportunity to create the role of Ranger Bob on the Howdy Doody Show, co-starring with several puppets and a live clown named Clarabelle who rather than speaking honked her answers on a bicycle horn. “And how are you this morning, Clarabelle?”

  Honk, honk.

  Admittedly that cut down on the dialogue between us. And made it unusually easy for Clarabelle to remember her honks. But there are a limited number of things an actor can do when playing opposite a clown who honks. A good actor responds to whatever emotion is presented to him or her by another actor, although, admittedly, on this show there were times when I wasn’t always certain how best to respond to the bevy of honks.

  I had a little more success on Canadian television. My first major TV role in Canada was the lead in Herman Melville’s tragedy Billy Budd, co-starring with Basil Rathbone. Basil Rathbone! I’d grown up watching him playing Sherlock Holmes in the movies. He was a very well-respected stage and movie actor, but this was one of his first, if not his very first, live television appearances. Some people wondered how he’d respond—a lot of veteran actors had difficulty making the transition to TV—but during rehearsals he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit anxious. “Do you know why I’m not nervous?” he asked me.

  I could hear the confidence of many years’ experience resonating in his voice. I shook my head.

  “Because, you see, in the United States there’s thirty to fifty million people watching a television program, but in Canada it’s only five to ten million.”

  Oh. Only ten million? That rationale seemed absurd to me, but if it worked for him, hey, that’s all that mattered. The night of the broadcast he really was perfectly calm. This was just another acting job for him. We went on the air and the first act was progressing very well, right until the moment he walked onboard the ship and stepped into a bucket. His foot got caught in the bucket and he couldn’t get it off. The camera shot only his upper body so none of the viewers could see him madly shaking his leg, trying to get his foot out of that bucket. He was working so hard to get his foot free that he forgot his lines. And when he forgot his lines he began to sweat. The rest of us tried to feed him his lines, but that was hard to do because we were too busy laughing. It was like acting in a cartoon: Basil Rathbone had caught his foot in a bucket and was hobbling through the scene. It was a disaster. But fortunately it was seen by only ten million Canadians.

  Gloria and I moved to New York, right into the Golden Age of Television. Of course at that time nobody realized it was the Golden Age, a lot of people still considered TV a gimmick that would eventually fade away. But immediately I started working regularly. I was exactly the type of actor television producers were desperately searching for: I worked cheap and was always available. And I had substantial stage experience. TV was considered a very long step down from motion p
ictures, the theory being that if the audience could see you for free they wouldn’t buy tickets for your movies. So established movie actors wouldn’t risk their careers by working for a small salary on the tiny black-and-white screen. New York’s theater community disdained the medium but loved the work; actors could work on a TV show during the day and earn enough money to survive, and still be able to perform on the stage that evening.

  My experience onstage had taught me theatricality. I knew what to do with my voice. I knew how to stand and how to walk and how to memorize lines. And I knew how to respond without panicking when Basil Rathbone got his foot caught in a bucket. I was dependable.

  I began by appearing regularly on the Sunday morning religious shows like Lamp Unto My Feet. There was sort of a perfect symmetry: these shows were the answer to a young actor’s prayers. They paid about seventy-five dollars and needed six to ten actors every week. These were Biblical dramas and they required all the actors to speak in hushed tones: St. John never yelled, St. Peter didn’t have a Brooklyn accent, and St. Matthew didn’t forget his lines.

  My first starring role on TV was in a play called All Summer Long on the Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1956, one of the many dramatic anthology series then on the air. Every major corporation seemed to be sponsoring its own series. These shows did an original drama, live, every week. The great television director Daniel Petrie had seen me on Broadway and offered me the role. After that I began working regularly. In the next decade I would play leading roles in more than hundred different TV dramas. I played every type of character imaginable, including blind U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, foppish Englishman Sir Percy Blakeney (who in reality is the swash-buckling Scarlet Pimpernel), a town marshal and a town bully, a priest and a physician, a killer and an attorney, an explorer and a terrified plane passenger. I played married men and single men, I even played a Burmese seaman. Very quickly I became one of the busiest actors in the city. It seemed like I was always working. Just about every morning I’d take the subway from Queens to the East Village, to Sixth Street and Second Avenue, to a famous rehearsal hall directly above Ratner’s Kosher Delicatessen. We’d rehearse all day and then I’d get back on the train and go home to Gloria. On air dates I’d do the show—and then get on the subway and go home. One show ran into the next; from week to week I didn’t know if I was doing a Kaiser Aluminum Hour, a U.S. Steel Hour, Studio One, or a Kraft Television Theatre. I suspect I’m one of the few actors to have starred in quirky dramas on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspense, The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, and Boris Karloff’s Thriller. I did a scene from Henry V on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, I co-starred with Christopher Plummer in Oedipus the King on Sunday after-noon’s Omnibus, and I played Marc Antony in Play of the Week’s Julius Caesar. It was all the same to me: show up, know my lines, do the show, and start looking for the next job the next day. Occasionally programs would overlap, but generally producers were very good about arranging rehearsal times around other jobs.

  For the first time people began to recognize me on the street. They didn’t know exactly where they had seen me, but they knew my face was familiar. I can’t begin to tell how often people stopped me and said, “I know you from somewhere. Aren’t you a teacher at the high school?”

  I often found myself working with legendary movie stars, but generally they were older actors whose film careers had pretty much ended but whose name recognition made them valuable to TV producers. Many of them had difficulties adapting to the demands of live TV, including the short rehearsal schedules, the small budgets, the fact that they had to memorize their lines, and the unique technical demands. Movie sets were large and the cameras moved freely, often on cranes; TV studios were very small and the cameras were attached to long cables. Directors had to choreograph the movement of the cameras to ensure that the cables never crossed, so the actors were restricted in their movements. There was no room to improvise, you had to do a scene exactly as it had been done in rehearsal.

  I remember doing a show with Lon Chaney Jr., who had a drinking problem. In the first act we had a big fight scene in which we completely broke up a room. The furniture was all props, breakaway tables and chairs made of balsa, the vase was made of some kind of hard sugar, but because we had such a small budget we couldn’t afford to actually rehearse the action. If we broke it we couldn’t replace it. So instead we walked through the scene, each of us describing our actions. Chaney had memorized his movements: “Right here I pick up the chair and hit you over the shoulders with it and you roll backward. Then you fall over the table, which will break and I’ll pick up the leg and hit you over the head. You go down right on that mark and the cameras’ll pick you up.” We went through it every day, being very careful not to break any of the breakaway furniture. Chaney was great. He showed up on time, sober, and had his lines down cold.

  I guess he began to get nervous during the dress rehearsal in the afternoon. But we went through the scene and everything seemed okay. “...I pick up the chair and hit you over the shoulders...”

  At the end of the dress rehearsal the director gathered the cast around him and gave us his final notes. “We’re going on in exactly forty-seven minutes. Good luck, everybody, it’s been a pleasure working with you. I know we’re going to have a wonderful show. Now you have a little time to eat because we’re going on in exactly forty-three minutes...”

  So we all went back to our dressing areas and got ready to do the show. Apparently Chaney started getting very nervous and to calm himself down had a few drinks. Forty-two minutes’ worth of drinks. He managed to get through the first part of the show until we reached the fight scene. As the scene started he looked at me angrily and said, “Right here I pick up the chair and hit you over the shoulders with it and you roll backward. Then you fall over the table...”

  With that the stage manager lifted his head and screamed, “We’re on the air, you son of a bitch!”

  That was the problem—and the excitement of live TV—it was live. Fortunately, my stage training had taught me how to deal with unexpected events. Once, for example, I was in a play in which the whole plot hinged on my shooting another actor, but when I reached for the prop gun it wasn’t there. The stage manager had forgotten to put it back after the previous performance. But the guy had to die or the play was over, so I picked up a corkscrew and screwed him to death.

  That presence of mind was perfect for live television. On one show I was involved in a shoot-out. The actor who had to shoot me got much too close, and when he shot me, the blank shell—which was made of wax—hit me right under my eye. It was painful as hell, but I just kept going. Keep going, that’s what actors do. Except the blank had caused a huge blood blister to form, a big red blot right under my eye. And it just kept growing, it kept getting bigger and bigger. It was like the blimp of blood blisters. It was like a clown’s red nose stuck to my face, growing and becoming a deeper shade of red. Of course I didn’t know that, I couldn’t see my face, but it was the only thing every other actor could look at. And they looked at it with great wonder, this mammoth red golf ball growing on my face. This was a murder mystery but they couldn’t say two lines without breaking into complete hysterics. And naturally because the other actors were looking at something on my face and couldn’t stop laughing I became very self-conscious. I was trying to look down, which of course is impossible, but worse, it forces the viewers at home to look down too. The red pustule had become the focus of the entire show. And somehow we got through it. We always got through it, although there were some difficult times.

  For aging movie stars just trying to keep their careers alive by working on TV the hardest thing to do was memorize their lines. In the movies they’d only had to remember a few lines at a time and if they forgot them the cameras stopped and they reshot the scene. But this was live television, there was no going back. Paul Muni had to be fitted with an earpiece because he just couldn’t remember three sentences. I co-starred with Bert Lahr in a play called
The School for Wives, Walter Kerr’s adaptation of a Molière comedy, on Omnibus. Bert Lahr! The Cowardly Lion himself, the great burlesque comedian. Sidney Lumet was directing. It was thrilling for me, for the whole cast. We were all nervous for him, we didn’t want to see him struggle with this new medium. When he came in to rehearsal the very first day we all sort of held our breath, all of us ready to help him. But he didn’t even glance at his script. He had memorized every single word. So while we were stumbling through the first reading he had already mastered the nuances. Well, this was great. The next day we came in and we’d all learned a little more and Bert Lahr forgot a couple of words. As we got closer to the airdate most of us knew large sections of the play and he was forgetting full pages. The more nervous he got, the more he forgot. By the time we went on the air he’d forgotten almost the entire play and we ended up ad-libbing large sections of the Molière comedy. I know there had to be people watching that play and wondering why they’d never heard those lines before.

  One reason I was in demand was that I learned my lines very quickly. Those years doing a play a week in Canada were paying off. Only once did I have a problem. I was doing a two-parter called No Deadly Medicine for Studio One, in which I played a young doctor trying to save the reputation of an aging doctor no longer capable of practicing safe medicine. Lee J. Cobb played the older physician. At that time Cobb was probably the most respected actor in America. He had starred in the original production of Waiting for Lefty, the play I’d done at the Communist meeting hall; he’d created the role of Willy Loman in the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. And he’d been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in On the Waterfront. Every serious actor was in awe of him. And I was co-starring with him. It was the most important role of my career. And the fact that Lee J. Cobb was starring in a two-part show on television made it a major event, so we knew we were going to have a huge viewing audience. In one scene all I had to do was walk across the set. I took three steps and suddenly I remembered Basil Rathbone’s words, “There’s thirty to fifty million people watching . . .” And it hit me, thirty to fifty million people were watching me walk.