Up Till Now

by William Shatner

  Several years later I was doing Star Trek and there was a part for an Asian girl. They asked me how I felt about casting France Nuyen. It was all these years later, and I was curious what she would be like. Hire her, I said, she’ll be great. When she came on the set she was delightful. That defensiveness I remembered so well seemed to have disappeared, and I found myself wondering what could have possibly gone so wrong. And then she needed some makeup and she said, “Makeup. Come here.” And it all came back. It was the arrogance, I remembered every bit of it.

  Obviously France and I both grew older and wiser and smarter and better looking and... and well, we’ve worked together on several more projects. Although we’ve never discussed those old days.

  Before we continue with the narrative of my life, just let me pause here for a few seconds to check out the latest new additions to ShatnerVision.com, the Web site run by my daughter Lisbeth, who has not yet been born. In this book, I mean. ShatnerVision is a compilation of short videos. Oh, look at that, that’s clever. Good, I see they’ve added the little piece I did especially for you. Take a look at it, it’s easy to find, it has your name on it.

  But please, don’t mistake ShatnerVision for WilliamShatner.com, which is my official Web site. That’s an easy mistake to make, but they’re very different. For example, the wonderful store from which you can order anything from a DVD of a movie in which I starred named Incubus—the only feature film ever made in the artificial language of Esperanto—to an exclusive Wrath of Khan twenty-fifth-anniversary bloodied Kirk action figure, is at WilliamShatner.com, but the video of me explaining why I don’t like to take off my pants on Boston Legal can be found on ShatnerVision. What surprised me most were the incredibly low prices on an array of remarkable items. I could buy my own autograph for considerably less than I would have expected to have to pay for it. And if I sent a check, I would have to sign it, putting me in the somewhat unique position of using my autograph to sign a check to buy my autograph. Of course, you wouldn’t have that problem. So, that should clear things up.

  Now back to my life. Somehow I managed to escape Suzie Wong with my reputation intact. In fact, once the show had settled in I began working on television programs during the day, then rushing to the theater at night. By day I was a respected television actor, playing the blind senator in a show written by Gore Vidal, appearing on Hallmark Hall of Fame with Ellen Burstyn, Carol Channing, and Maurice Evans, and starring in one of the first nationwide broadcasts on PBS, The Night of the Auk. This was a play that had flopped on Broadway several years earlier, starring, naturally, Chris Plummer and Claude Rains. It took place on a spaceship returning to Earth from the first successful manned landing on the moon. I played the wealthy young man who had financed the entire expedition. This was my first voyage on a television spaceship and it established one of the enduring truths of drama: if Shatner is aboard a spaceship, it is guaranteed that something is going to go wrong. In this story it’s atomic war on Earth and a lack of oxygen in the ship. There are five passengers, but only enough oxygen left to enable two of them to survive long enough to get back to Earth in time to die in the war. I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, so let us just say I don’t die in the atomic war.

  I’ve never had great fortune planning my career. That is a luxury enjoyed by very few actors. Insecurity is part of the job description. I would describe my career plan pretty much as answering the telephone. My problem was that I never had anyone I felt comfortable soliciting advice from; no one whom I trusted to direct my career. So I made my own decisions based almost entirely on my gut feeling. Acting is one of the few professions in which you feel good about turning down work. Later in my career, after my three children were born, I found myself accepting jobs only for the money and feeling bad about it—and conversely feeling very good when I felt secure enough to turn down a job I knew I shouldn’t accept. I’ve subscribed to the notion that work makes more work—the more producers and directors see you work the more chance there is they will offer you more work. There were many times in my career that I’d taken roles I shouldn’t have in terms of creating a long-term career—but it was a paying job and hanging over me always was my father’s plea that I not become a hanger-on.

  When do you accept a role, you never, ever have any concept of what the end result will be. Did I know when John Lithgow offered me the prestigious role of the Big Giant Head on his sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun that I would be nominated for my first Emmy Award? Did it occur to me that people might recognize the subtle skills it took to properly convey the emotional life of Head? What I knew was that I was going to show up and say all my lines and they would pay me. That’s acting.

  Sometimes, though, it is about the role. About the opportunity to use the talent I had been given to make an important statement. Obviously actors have to survive, but occasionally you do get offered a role that you just savor, that you really want to do.

  The great C-movie producer-director Roger Corman offered me such a role. Seriously. That Roger Corman, who was already becoming well-known for films like Attack of the Crab Monsters, Creature from the Haunted Sea, and Little Shop of Horrors, cheap, get-em-made exploitation horror, T&A, and shoot-em-ups with low budgets and lower production values. But for some reason he wanted to do this film. By this time he had made seventeen films, all of them profitable, but every studio he approached with this script turned him down. Apparently making this film meant so much to him that he and his brother Gene mortgaged their homes to pay for it. Now, it’s possible I made that up, but I remember Roger and Gene did something very courageous to raise the money they needed to make this movie. Roger had seen me in Tamburlaine the Great and sent me the script. As soon as I read it I knew I wanted to play this role. This film changed my life.

  The movie was called The Intruder. It was from a novel by a very respected writer named Charles Beaumont. The Intruder took place in the Deep South just after the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered schools to integrate. It was based on the true story of a white supremacist from New York, a neo-Nazi who traveled throughout the South organizing Ku Klux Klan–type citizen groups and fomenting riots. This was easily the most despicable character I’d ever played. But it was a wonderfully written portrait of the worst kind of bigot. I had grown up in Canada, I didn’t know this kind of institutionalized racism existed in the United States. I was stunned when I found out it was all true.

  We shot it in black-and-white in three weeks, and the entire budget was about eighty thousand dollars; that was probably just a little more than lunch on Karamazov. In order to help the Cormans make this film I took a percentage of the gross rather than a salary. There were times I was an embarrassment to my economics degree. In the end I earned about two hundred dollars more than it cost me in expenses.

  What made this project unusually exciting is that for some inexplicable reason Roger Corman decided that we would shoot this movie in the South. This was 1961, when schools throughout the South were still being forcefully integrated. This was less than five years after President Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard to escort black teenagers into Little Rock High School. And we went to Charleston, Missouri, which was in Mississippi County, a few miles from the borders with Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, to film it.

  The entire cast and crew was housed in a small motel just outside of town. The day we arrived we were briefed by a policeman, who advised us, “Now, if I were you, I’d just take a few minutes and plan my escape route.” Escape route? As he explained, the town had found out what this movie was about and they were not happy about it. Really not happy. The only integrated group in the whole town was a prison gang and supposedly this gang had been hired to kill us in the motel. “We’ve got all this spotted,” the policeman said, “but we can’t hold back the waters.”

  Kill me? But I’m an actor! And I was only being paid a percentage of the gross.

  There had been some unpleasant moments in my career, but this was the first time
I actually had to make an escape plan. I had a pretty good one. There was a window in the bathroom that looked out on a cornfield. If it became necessary I was going to climb up on the toilet, wiggle out that window, and start running into the corn-field. I figured I could hide in the cornfield.

  I think there were only five professional actors in the cast. To save money the Corman brothers hired local people to play the minor roles. But just to be on the safe side, they gave them a different script than the one we were actually shooting, a script that didn’t include some of the more inflammatory language and scenes. One of the professional actors was Leo Gordon, who had made a nice career out of playing tough-guy roles, but in this film he was cast as a hardworking, kind of average Joe. In fact, Gordon had been a boxing champion in the military and knew how to protect himself. We were talking one day near his car and he casually opened the trunk—and there was practically an arsenal in there. The trunk was filled with guns. He took whatever he wanted out of the trunk and slammed it shut, never even mentioning the trunk was filled with guns.

  Okay, he’s an actor too. But he’s a well-armed actor. I began re-thinking my escape plan.

  Naturally I tried to make friends with as many people in the town as possible. There was one man in particular who showed up almost every day to watch us shoot... filming. He was a big guy, a huge guy, and the word was that he was one of the really bad people in the town. But obviously he was intrigued by the making of a movie and continually volunteered to help. Let me move this lamp for you. You can’t, it’s a union job. But I want to help. He was one of those few people whose offers to help sound suspiciously like threats.

  Somehow I befriended him. Maybe I thought I could manage him by including him in the process. But eventually he actually became a member of our crew, and he was so big that when other grips were carrying one light, he would take two. He did a fine job, but even if he hadn’t it wouldn’t have mattered. Believe me, nobody was going to fire him.

  Eventually he found out that I loved fast cars and horses. “You know, we have a lot in common,” he told me. “I got the fastest car in the whole four-state area. I got a Daytona racer.” He brought it to the set to show me. It truly was a beautiful car, immaculate on both the outside and the inside. He had customized the engine to increase its power by who knows how much. “This is the one I win all the time with,” he explained in the true manner of Southern generosity. “I got my soul in this car, but if you wanna borrow it to take it into town, you just go right ahead.”

  Well, that was extremely gracious of him.

  “Tell you what,” he continued. “I also got me a quarter horse. That boy is faster than lightning. But you can ride him anytime you want.” He opened up the trunk. “This here’s where I keep the chaps I wear when I ride him. These are my lucky chaps—long as they’re in the car this car’s gonna win every race. I love these chaps. But any time you want you put on these chaps and take my horse for a ride.”

  One day I needed to drive to Cairo, Illinois, and I asked to borrow his car. He was thrilled to lend it to me, because I was his friend and that’s what friends do for each other. “One more thing,” he told me. “See the backseat over here? Down there’s where I keep the fire extinguisher. You got to know where that is, ‘cause sometimes, not too often, but sometimes the raw gasoline going into the air cleaner catches fire. It’s no big deal, but if you smell fire you just got to open the hood and hit the fire with the extinguisher, just blows it right out.”

  This was a beautiful, finely tuned race car, and on those back roads I could let it out. I had a fine drive into town and on my way back I stopped at a light. Purely coincidently somebody from our company pulled up next to me and shouted, “Your car’s on fire!” What? “There’s flames coming out the bottom of your car.”

  I leaped out of the car. Smoke was coming out from underneath. I knew what to do: raise the hood, get the fire extinguisher, and blow out the fire. Unfortunately, I immediately discovered I didn’t know how to raise the hood. I looked around desperately for the hook or something, a lever, anything to pop it open, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The smoke was starting to get a little thicker. I was beating on the hood with my fists, trying to get it to pop, but it was locked shut.

  Okay, I figured, I’ll get the fire extinguisher and crawl under the car. I can blow it out from there. I opened the door and grabbed for the fire extinguisher, and then grabbed for it again. The fire extinguisher had fallen beneath the seat. I couldn’t reach it. By now the smoke was starting to get very thick.

  I opened the trunk and grabbed the first thing I could find. As I started to shut it I saw a crowbar. Great, that’s what I needed. I took the crowbar and literally pried open the hood. Then I started beating out the fire with that thing I’d grabbed out of the trunk. I beat that fire again and again but it was much too late, the engine just melted. Eventually I stopped and just stood there, leaving that smoking rag I’d used to beat down the fire sitting on top of the melted engine.

  Oh man, I thought, now what am I going to do? And it was just about that time that I realized I had tried to snuff out the fire with this guy’s lucky chaps. I’d melted his car and destroyed his lucky chaps, it was just awful. Incredibly, this man accepted my apology because I was his friend, and because I had enabled him to become part of the movie company. Apparently that was one of the great thrills of his life. In fact, just to show me that he truly wasn’t angry, a few weeks later he invited me to take his horse for a ride.

  And he didn’t even complain when his horse came up lame. The script included some incredibly powerful and potentially volatile scenes. In a key scene I had to stand on the courthouse steps and inflame the townspeople. I had to make them rise up, I had to put the fear of the devil in them, I had to implore them: Take to the streets! Stop the integration of the high school! Save the South!

  Dressed in my white suit, I told them, “They kept the facts away from you! . . . What I’m gonna tell you is gonna make your blood boil. I’m gonna show you that the way this country’s gonna go depends entirely, and wholly, on you!...Now, you all know that there was peace and quiet in the South before the N-double-A-C-P started stirring up trouble. But what you don’t know is this so-called advancement of colored people is now, and has always been, nothing but a Communist front headed by a Jew who hates America...

  “[T]hey knew that the quickest way to weaken a country is to mongolize it...So they poured all the millions of dollars the Jews could get for them into this one thing...desegregation. [The judge] belongs to a society which receives its funds directly from Moscow! Your mayor and the governor could have stopped it—but they didn’t have the guts...The Negroes will literally, and I do mean literally, control the South!... [If you want to stop it] right here, today, I’m with you. Because I’m an American and I love my country, and I’m willing to give my life if necessary to see that my country stays free! White! And American!”

  It was an extraordinary speech for anyone to dare give on the steps of the courthouse in a Southern town in 1961. Luckily, as it turned out, two days before we were scheduled to film this scene I came up with a case of laryngitis. This is absolutely true. The doctor told me if I didn’t speak for an entire day my voice might make it through the scene. I didn’t say one word for more than twenty-four hours. If I wanted something I wrote it down. By the next night my throat felt just a little better.

  At dusk that night about three hundred people, mostly farmers, gathered in front of the courthouse. It was a lovely town, the courthouse was on the town square with a beautiful old tree right in front of it. Roger decided that he would begin by shooting the crowd-reaction shots over my shoulder, and to save my voice I shouldn’t say my lines. Instead he read some absolutely innocuous lines to get reaction. Let’s go, Missouri Tigers! We love the St. Louis Cardinals! Let’s hear it for the red, white, and blue! Who wants apple pie! How about that big sale at Sears! When he needed anger he asked those people how they felt about the Unive
rsity of Alabama football team. Roger got that crowd screaming, cheering, pumping their fists, whatever reactions he needed. By midnight most of the crowd had gone home. Being an extra in a movie is fun for about a minute. After the first few hours it gets really boring. So they went home.

  That’s when he shot me doing the real lines. My voice was there and I shouted for them to rage and pillage and burn. The following morning Roger and I were walking down the main street and the publisher of the local newspaper stopped us. He’d stayed the whole night because he was working on a story. “You guys are unbelievable,” he said. “You really did a smart thing.”

  We did? “Darn right. See that tree right there,” he said, pointing to the tree in front of the courthouse. “That’s where they lynched a Negro about fifteen years ago. A lot of people in that crowd were there. That tree is the symbol of white supremacy ‘round here. Had those people heard what you were saying . . .” He shook his head. “Your picture might’ve had a real different ending.”

  We believed we were in danger every day. We were prevented from shooting certain scenes in the town, Roger received a series of death threats, and the local police and one night even the state militia had to come in to stand guard. We saved the most harrowing scene for the last day. In this scene a long parade of Ku Klux Klansmen in their white hoods drive slowly through the black section of town. The scene takes place at night. We all checked out of the motel and packed our belongings. We shot that scene and just kept driving—all the way to St. Louis.

  The Intruder was a powerful movie, so powerful in fact that Roger had an extremely difficult time finding a distributor. We got great reviews, the Herald-Tribune called it “A major credit to the entire motion picture industry.” The Los Angeles Times wrote that it was “the boldest, most realistic depiction of racial injustice ever shown in American films.” I won several Best Actor awards at film festivals, but the subject was so controversial theater owners were afraid to screen it. It showed in only two theaters in New York City, for example. That was unbelievably frustrating for me. I believe this was the only film Roger Corman ever made that lost money. His next film was The Premature Burial.