Up Till Now

by William Shatner

  The only thing keeping me in the air was that throttle and I was holding it down with my pinkie. I didn’t have enough altitude to release my grip and quickly grab hold again to restart the engine— besides, I was too nervous to attempt that. So I just held on with my pinkie, pressing down as hard as I could, literally holding on for life. And suddenly I realized I was in the middle of another why-amI-doing-this moment. Why am I risking my life for a stunt?

  I barely made it over the river. As I looked down and saw the thousands of people gathered there for this paintball war looking up, for the first time it occurred to me that all of them had exactly the same thought in mind: I’m going to shoot Captain Kirk.

  The object of a paintball war is to compile points by shooting enemy soldiers, capturing his flag, and shooting his commanding officer. Shooting me. The primary rule governing the battle is that there is no primary rule: everything is legal. You can cheat, lie, do anything you can to score points. For example, I had paused for lunch when one of my soldiers walked into my tent—and confessed he was actually a spy sent to shoot me. He’d changed his shirt to get through my lines. “But I can’t do it,” he said. “I love you and I can’t shoot you.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said, and so our plot was hatched. He took me prisoner and we marched back to his headquarters. Unfortunately, as we got close I began to feel a sharp, throbbing pain in my left arm. It had been an amazing day: after flying in a paraglider I’d been running around in the heat all morning, wearing very heavy protective clothing. I was covered with sweat. I sat down in the shade and leaned against a tree. My breathing became loud and labored. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” I said with astonishment.

  The action stopped as the news spread quickly: Shatner’s having a heart attack. Instantly, people came running from all over. Somewhere behind me I could hear someone calling for an ambulance. Finally the commander of the enemy came over to help me. It was obvious he was very concerned. He leaned over, and asked, “How you feeling, Bill?”

  “Fine,” I said, smashing him in his chest with the two paintballs I was hiding in my hand. “Gotcha!” Hey, it’s not my fault they forgot I was an actor. Captain Kirk lives!

  The truth is that for some inexplicable reason physical fear has never bothered me as much as emotional fear. I have never worried very much about getting hurt, while I have spent many a sleepless night being terrified of failure. Terrified I would never get another acting job, terrified I wouldn’t be able to fulfill my responsibilities. During these times my daughters would refer to me as Black Bill, as in: “Dad’s being Black Bill,” meaning I was in a dark mood. I withdrew, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. After Star Trek was canceled, for example, I went through one of the most difficult periods of my life. I wasn’t particularly worried about myself; I’m a resilient person, I knew I would be fine, but I spent many sleepless nights worrying about how I was going to support my ex-wife and my three daughters.

  Star Trek was mostly perceived to have been an interesting and expensive failure. It had lasted only three seasons; we had just barely made enough shows to allow it to be sold in syndication. But as far as I was concerned, I’d put away my phaser forever. My greatest regret was that it did not lead to any other substantial offers, so I really had to start all over again. Leonard accepted a starring role on the already successful series Mission: Impossible, a role he played for two seasons and very quickly grew to despise.

  Once more, I was broke. I needed to earn some money very quickly, so I decided to perform in a play on the summer circuit. I went on tour in a very flimsy British sex comedy entitled There’s a Girl in My Soup. When it had opened on Broadway Edwin Newman described it as “the sort of English play that prevents American theater from having a permanent inferiority complex.” I played an aging bachelor pursuing a beautiful young woman whose greatest talent was her microskirt. It was a perfect play for the suburbs. We played a different theater each week. To save money, I’d bought myself a ram-shackle pickup truck, put a camper-shell in the rear bed, and drove it cross-country with my dog. Each week I’d park the truck way in the back of the theater parking lot and live in it. Just an actor and his dog, living in the back of a truck. It was depressing beyond any imagination. I was absolutely broke, terribly lonely, terrified of failure, and starring in a comedy.

  During the day I would do whatever publicity the theater management asked me to do. After each performance I would wait outside to greet the audience and thank them for coming. And then I would go home to my truck. This was the difference in life between comedy and tragedy: when I had been starting my career, if I’d been this carefree bachelor living in a truck, inviting women over to see my carburetor, it would have been a very funny situation. Instead, I’d been a working actor for decades, I’d starred in three failed TV series, and I was a divorced father of three children living in the back of a truck. That was a tragedy.

  A summer later I co-starred with Sylvia Sidney and Margaret Hamilton in a Kenley Players production of Arsenic and Old Lace. The producer, John Kenley, had been very successful on this straw-hat circuit by bringing television stars to his theaters in Ohio. As those who worked for him know, John Kenley was a...an... interesting man. Or woman. Or both. He would spent summers in the Midwest as a man and the winters in Florida as a woman named Joan Kenley. When Merv Griffin wrote that John Kenley was “a registered hermaphrodite,” Kenley responded, “I’m not even a registered voter.” Although in his autobiography Kenley admits, “Androgyny is overrated.”

  I do remember that at the cast party following our opening, John Kenley insisted on the first dance—with me.

  Nobody was even pretending I was going to be a star anymore. Those days were over. I had made the transitions from young male lead to leading man to guest star and character actor. When I got back to Los Angeles at the end of the first summer I went to work doing guest-starring one-shots. I appeared on all the popular series; I was a mean drifter on The Virginian, an arrogant doctor on Medical Center and a dedicated doctor on Marcus Welby, a burglar on Ironside and a criminal kingpin on Mission: Impossible. I was an undercover policeman on an episode of Playhouse 90 and a private investigator on Hawaii Five-0. When the phone rang I said yes even before I answered it. I did Efrem Zimbalist’s The F.B.I., Mannix, The Bold Ones, Kung Fu, Ironside, The Six Million Dollar Man. Name a series, I appeared on it. Barnaby Jones. I did the movie pilot for Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law with Arthur Hill. I was working for paychecks: I became a frequent guest X on the quiz show The Hollywood Squares. I was a celebrity guest on the well-known psychic show The Amazing World of Kreskin.

  For several weeks after returning to L.A. I lived in a motel, but finally I rented a small and inexpensive apartment on the beach in Malibu. I wanted to be near the beach so when I got my daughters on Sundays we could play in the sand together. The apartment was quite reasonable—perhaps due to the fact that my landlady was absolutely insane.

  I saw true madness. This was an older woman occasionally visited by demons. Suddenly my front door would fly open and she would rush screaming into the apartment waving a hammer and chasing a being or an animal that only she could see, then seconds later she’d turn and rush out of the apartment. All without even acknowledging my presence. It was crazy, it was a life out of Arsenic and Old Lace—but without the laughs. And then every so often I would come home to find the closet door open and a hole smashed through the drywall in the back, leaving a view of the ocean, or I would find a small object smashed to smithereens. There was an element of danger to this apartment, but I just wanted a safe place to live, a place my daughters could visit. Instead I’d walked into someone else’s breakdown.

  I worked regularly, but without any satisfaction. Most of these programs are long forgotten, especially by me. On occasion one of these programs is shown on late-night cable but I never watch them. In fact, I’ve rarely watched any of the shows I’ve done; a performance is made in the editing room and an actor has no control over th
e editing process. By the time a show is broadcast there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my performance; someone else has already decided what the audience should see. I don’t have the objectivity to simply be satisfied with my performance, so rather than risk frustration, I simply don’t watch. I’ve never seen myself as the Big Giant Head and at most only a few minutes of being Denny Crane.

  But every once in a while a very special role came along, a role that poked me in the heart and reminded me why I so loved this profession. A role that allowed me to be an actor. A decade earlier George C. Scott had starred on Broadway in The Andersonville Trial, the true story of the post–Civil War trial of the commandant of the particularly horrifying Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. At Andersonville thirteen thousand Union prisoners had died of starvation and exposure; the survivors had been forced into cannibalism. This was the first soldier ever tried for war crimes. Much of the dialogue came from transcripts of the trial. PBS had hired George C. Scott to direct a television version of the Broadway show, and he picked me to play the role of the Union prosecutor that he’d created on Broadway.

  I’d met George Scott when I came to New York in Tamburlaine the Great. A talented actress named Colleen Dewhurst was a member of that cast, playing a minor role as a native girl. I don’t think she had any lines. She introduced me to the man she was dating, a tough-looking, growling New York actor. Eventually they married and divorced and remarried, and at this point Scott was at the very top of his career, having just won—and rejected—the Oscar for Best Actor for Patton. So he picked a group of working actors he respected to do this play he loved. The cast included Jack Cassidy, Cameron Mitchell, Buddy Ebsen, Martin Sheen, and Richard Basehart.

  The other shows I was doing all worked on a very tight schedule, with very little time to rehearse. On Star Trek, for example, we shot each show in six days and finished each day at exactly 6:18. There was no provision for overtime in the budget. So even if we were in the middle of a scene, at 6:18 we shut down and went home. Six-eighteen, done. Most series worked pretty much the same way. We weren’t creating art, we were churning out television shows. I showed up on time, performed my role, and went home. If it’s Tuesday I’m a doctor with a gambling problem. Six days later I’m a newspaperman introducing publisher Gene Barry to the world of witchcraft. But The Andersonville Trial was a very different situation, this was... public television! This was a prestigious production! I knew it was prestigious because it paid less than network shows.

  We had almost two weeks of rehearsal. Rather than being filmed, the show was being done on tape so it would have the look and feel of a stage production. The play itself explored the moral ambiguity of the situation, in which the accused prison commander had apparently tried to get food for his prisoners but had been torn between his duty to the Confederacy and his obligation to his prisoners. I had a scene near the end in which I was questioning the commander, Richard Basehart, about his actions. I’d been a stage and television lawyer for many years, so I knew how to question a witness for the camera. But toward the end of rehearsals Scott sat down with me and said, “You know, the way you’re playing that last scene is the way I played it to begin with.” But then he proceeded to tell me that his performance had evolved during the stage run. Instead of attacking the witness with the fury of an angry DA, he said, eventually he’d identified with the pain of the commandant who had been caught in this terrible situation. “You know, what I found was that rather than expressing anger, anguish worked a lot better there.”

  It was only a small suggestion, but it changed my entire interpretation of my character. It added yet more depth to the play. “Gee, George,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Just try it,” he suggested.

  Of course it worked. It was the best piece of direction that I can remember being given in all those years. The program was an artistic success, winning three Emmys—including the Outstanding Single Program of the Year—and a Peabody Award. As it turned out, this show changed my life—although not as I might have expected.

  During rehearsals I’d met a lovely woman named Marcy Lafferty, a young actress George Scott had hired to run lines with the cast. Apparently I was the only member of the cast who took advantage of her—to rehearse my lines. To rehearse my lines! But as Marcy once said, “Bill didn’t want to get involved...I fell in lust with him.”

  We dated very happily for a couple of years. My girls liked her immediately, and on weekends we’d take them camping and skiing. Marcy had a wonderful sense of humor and was a ready participant in my adventures. She even willingly went with me to see every single kung fu picture ever made. Our relationship was so comfortable it never occurred to me that we should get married. I’d been married and I wasn’t very good at it. But early in 1973 she casually asked one day, “Look, I don’t want to rush you or anything, but I can’t go on like this. Are we going to get married in the next five years?”

  “Well,” I said, “what about next week?” This was my first second marriage. I remember reading a newspaper story about the marriage in which Marcy was quoted as saying she was very surprised when I proposed. And I thought, she was surprised? During our marriage ceremony I remember hearing a sob coming from somewhere. I turned and looked around curiously to see who was so moved emotionally by my marriage that they were crying. It turned out to be me. I was sobbing.

  As it turned out there really was only one thing wrong with our marriage. Me. I hadn’t learned anything from the failure of my first marriage. Marcy and I had a very passionate relationship; when we were in love, we were really in love, but when I got angry ...One night, I remember, we were in a restaurant and got into a big argument. I have no memory what it was about, but I was absolutely furious. At that moment I didn’t want anything to do with her, so I decided to walk home. Walk all the way home, at least eight miles. Unfortunately, I was wearing new cowboy boots at the time. But I was going to walk home, I wasn’t going to give Marcy the satisfaction of accepting a ride or calling a cab. As it turned out those particular boots were not made for walking, they were made for driving in a car. Within the first couple of miles the blisters began forming. My route took me right through Boys Town, the gay section of Santa Monica. I just kept going and by the time I got home my feet were bleeding. But I made it. I proved my point. Whatever that point was.

  My youngest daughter, Melanie, remembers Marcy as “the most beautiful, perfect caretaker imaginable. My dad really didn’t want to have any more children and she really did want to have children, so I became her surrogate child. I needed a mother and she needed a child and we agreed, ‘Okay, you’ll do.’ “

  There’s a story actors tell that took place during the Depression, when work was hard to find. A young actor named John Wayne was just beginning his career, playing the first singing cowboy in a series of B-Westerns at Republic Studios. Supposedly he was walking across the lot one day, muttering to himself, when he bumped into the legendary philosopher-comic Will Rogers. “What’s the matter, kid?” Rogers asked him.

  Wayne shook his head. “Oh, they got me making these ridiculous singing cowboy films...”

  Rogers listened to Wayne complain, and when he finally stopped he asked, “You working?”

  Wayne nodded. “Keep working,” Rogers said, and walked away.

  This was my own depression: I was working, I’d made prestigious films, I’d been a Broadway star, a television star, and I’d made some good movies; I’d gotten wonderful reviews, I’d won awards—and I’d ended up living in the back of a truck or renting an apartment from an insane landlady. I was always professional about my work; I was proud to be an actor, so no matter how outrageous my role I treated it with respect: When necessary I became a well-meaning homicidal maniac.

  I made a lot of theatrical B-movies and television movies during this period. I knew what they were; the reality is when you open a script entitled The Horror at 37,000 Feet you can be certain you’re never going to hear those magic words, �
��The nominees for Best Picture . . .” In many instances I just came in for a few days, did my few scenes, and left. I never saw the picture or read the reviews. Several of these movies were actually quite good, they explored controversial issues, but the majority of them were just terrible. Terrible doesn’t begin to express how truly awful some of these movies were. There’s an Esperantoese word to describe these movies: Oy! Some of these movies were so awful I wouldn’t even sell them in my online store, WilliamShatner.com.

  Let me give you an example: One of the first TV movies I did was Perilous Voyage, which originally was titled The Revolution of Antonio DeLeon. We filmed it in 1968 in San Pedro, California. This film was a disaster; not a disaster film, just a complete disaster. I played a drunken playboy on a luxury cruise ship hijacked and held hostage by a South American guerilla and his followers because it is carrying weapons they need for their revolution. There were several good experienced actors in the cast: Lee Grant, Victor Jory, Frank Silvera, Stuart Margolin, and Michael Tolan. The whole plot hinged on the fact that this guerilla leader, Antonio DeLeon, was so handsome, so charismatic that several women passengers couldn’t resist falling in love with him. Supposedly he was a Che Guevara type. A talented, handsome young actor named Michael Parks was hired to play that role. Michael Parks should have been a star, but as it turned out he was just too arrogant.

  On the first day of filming he arrived on the set made up to look like a sixty-year-old Mexican bandit out of 1940s B-movie Western. He had a potbelly, a gold tooth, and was wearing a white suit. It couldn’t have been more wrong if he had been made up as Santa Claus. The director tried to convince him to play it differently but he was adamant: “This is the way I’m going to play it.”