Up Till Now

by William Shatner

  Other tabloids did run variations of that story. And people were trying to twist facts and create some kind of conspiracy scenario. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. But to think that any sane person in this world would believe that I had anything to do with killing a human being, let alone contributing to the death of this woman that I loved so much, was beyond my comprehension. I just couldn’t stop thinking about her standing next to my car that morning begging me, “Please don’t leave me, Bill.” I’d left. Twelve hours later she was dead. For anyone to even think, I’ll bet he killed her, is the worst possible thought. It makes me so sad that anyone would think that way.

  About a week after Nerine’s death the police released a tape of my call to 911 for help. These were the kinds of tapes that we had used as the foundation of Rescue 911 for seven and a half years. I heard the familiar anguish and desperation, except this time it was my voice on that tape. I had no expectation of privacy; as every celebrity knows, the price you pay for all the positive things written about you is the surrender of any claim to privacy. It’s a deal and we all make it: once you use the media for publicity you lose your right to complain about the media using your life to sell its product. But admittedly, hearing the worst moment of my life being used as a form of entertainment was extraordinarily painful.

  Irresponsible people made accusations or tried to create suspicion. I guess the question asked most often was why did I call 911 before diving into the pool to try to save her? For a long time I’d wondered about that myself. Why didn’t I dive right in? It took me years to fully understand, and even then it was only because of my fourth wife, Elizabeth. Every year on August 9 we would go up to the pool in the evening to try to understand what happened. The moon is in the same position, the lights are the same. On one of those August nights I stood there with Elizabeth looking at the pool and suddenly I knew. The water in the pool had been still. That’s why I didn’t immediately know she was there. There wasn’t a ripple. Any movement in the pool agitates the water, it moves and continues moving long after it has been agitated. When I looked at the pool that night it was placid. Still. And somehow I had known that whether I dove in and rescued the body and then called 911, or called 911 and then rescued the body, it would have made no difference. Obviously it wasn’t a conscious thought, but had there been any sign of life I know exactly what I would have done.

  Other people talk about problems in our marriage. There was only one problem: alcohol.

  I don’t think you ever really get over an event like that. You deal with the grief, then as that passes you absorb the substance and it becomes part of you. For a while you think about it every day, and then a little less, and a little less, and then a word or a place triggers a memory. But we go on. No matter how awful, we go on. The only positive thing that came out of it was the Nerine Shatner Foundation. I was able to raise several hundred thousand dollars in her memory, which was used to finance the Nerine Shatner Friendly House, a place where women with addictions can go and be safe and try to recover. Nerine had often said that when she was finally sober she wanted to help other women fighting the same battles. Friendly House had taken her in when she needed a place, and in 2001 we were able to help them open a twenty-four-bed facility in Los Angeles. Several times since then I’ve had people tell me that the facility made a difference in their lives. I hope so.

  Still, I can never think about Nerine or talk about her without feeling pain, and I live with an appreciation for the woman she was and regret for the person she could have been had she not had this incredible flaw—and I will never believe it was her fault.

  I had believed that the force of my love for her was enough to effect a cure, I couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t enough, but to my sorrow I learned that sometimes love is not enough.

  I did write a song about Nerine that was part of my album, Has Been. It was called “What Have You Done?” It ended:

  My love was supposed to protect her

  It didn’t

  My love was supposed to heal her

  It didn’t

  You had said don’t leave me

  And I begged you not to leave me

  We did

  TEN

  My name is Lisbeth Shatner. I wanted to tell you a great story, another this-is-Dad-in-a-nutshell story. When Nerine was still alive he took the whole family on an amazing trip to Botswana. I know he got some sort of discount on the tickets, I believe he bought an African safari for two people at an auction, so he paid much less than the regular cost. Then he decided he should share this trip with his three daughters and their significant others. “That was the reason the company donated the trip,” he pointed out. “They expect you to do that. I didn’t want to let them down.”

  He wanted to go to Botswana because its government concluded a long time ago that keeping their animals alive and in their natural habitat is good business because it draws tourists. The terrain in Botswana goes from desert to savannah to rain forest to swampland. They have giant waterholes around which animals congregate. So it’s an ideal place to see a lot of beautiful wild animals. But it also can be very dangerous. For some reason they don’t attack humans in an open car; they don’t recognize it as prey, so lions literally come right up to the front fender. But if you get out of the car you can die. They continually remind people not to get out of the car for any reason. People have gotten out of their car to take a picture and been killed. And the guides don’t want anyone dying in their midst, as it definitely would be bad for business.

  The same thing is true for the camps. We spent the nights in tents or thatched huts. These are only temporary structures. But we were reminded over and over, do not leave your hut at night. These animals are wild and they will eat you. One night I thought there was a lion outside my door and I thought, if I die I’m at least part of the natural cycle. I just hope it doesn’t hurt too much. There were no locks on the door and apparently the animals don’t know how to open doors. Nevertheless, I thought this will be the one that finally figures it out. The one thing I was really afraid of was bugs, because the bugs are not ordinary American-sized bugs. They were size of cockroaches and...

  Thank you Lisbeth, I’ll take it from here. Sorry, I was away from the page for a while. I was just looking at a book someone sent me, The Encyclopedia Shatnerica. It’s an encyclopedia of my life until 1998. Full of information about me that I can’t imagine people find interesting. For example, because of Rescue 911 I appeared on the cover of the National Safety Council’s First Aid Handbook. It includes my grandmother’s recipe for matzo kneidlach, about which I’m quoted: “To prevent rising beyond your station, my grandmother put a kneidel in your stomach. It made it very difficult to rise at all.” I don’t remember saying that, but I can’t imagine I would be mis-quoted about matzo kneidlach. It also has an entire entry entitled Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park and the fact that one of my favorite dogs, a Doberman pinscher named China, is buried there.

  Actually there have been several books chronicling my life and my career. I don’t read them, I was there for most of it. But it certainly is flattering. All of the attention and the affection I receive is unbelievably flattering. There is something quite... quite... satisfying about hearing actor Ed Norton say in the movie Fight Club that of all the celebrities in history, of all the people who have ever lived, if he could fight just one of them, it would be “Shatner. I’d fight William Shatner.” I can’t really explain the reasons for it. Apparently I once said, “Possibly there are aspects to me which people see that I’m not aware of,” and that’s true. But I do appreciate it, and I enjoy it, and whatever it is I’m doing that engenders it I’m trying to do more of it.

  Where were we? In Africa, Botswana, with Nerine and my daughters. So the guides emphasize not to go out of our huts at night because if you do the animals might kill you and eat you. As one of my daughters may have said, that’s a whole new way of having a movie star for dinner. Now, on the night Lisbeth was writing about,
the night she thought she heard a lion, we had all settled into our flimsy wooden huts with thatched roofs. At some point during the night I was awakened by an overpowering stench. And then I felt our hut move and heard a rustling on the thatched roof. I looked out the one window but it was completely black outside, there wasn’t a star in the sky. And then I realized there was something standing in front of that window that blocked it, something very big. I think it was about then that I figured out an elephant was standing there eating the roof of our hut. None of the guides had told us what to do when an elephant ate your roof, so I began frantically looking for the safety manual we’d been given hoping there might be something in there under “roof, elephants eating.”

  Just then Nerine woke up. I whispered some extremely important instructions to her, somehow imagining that elephants, who have the biggest ears of any living thing, wouldn’t hear me say, “Don’t go to the bathroom.”

  And then that thing about myself that I fear most kicked in: my ability to completely lose sight of the consequences of my actions. I suspect others might call it a complete lack of good sense or perhaps, for short, nuts. It’s the thing that makes me want to ski hills beyond my ability. Or get behind the wheel of a race car and drive 160 mph. Or skydive. Or do a stunt on top of a train. I thought, wow, a wild elephant, you certainly don’t get to see a wild elephant up close very often.

  I opened the door of the hut just in time to see the tail of the elephant disappearing into the bush. I thought, what a great adventure. Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t have even considered following that elephant into the bush if I wasn’t under the impression that, for the most part, I can communicate with animals. I hold this concept that I can communicate with them based on my love of animals; they can instinctively feel that I mean them no harm, and that I bring peace and love. And I bring my hands, which can stroke them and make them feel good. That’s what was going on in my mind when I opened the door of the hut and told Nerine, excitedly, “I’m going to go out there.”

  I felt so alive. My whole being resonated with the incredible feeling that I was going to go visit with an elephant on a starlit moonless night in Africa. How amazing! And I was going to visit that elephant in my underwear. I took my flashlight and I started running after the elephant.

  At that moment the classic Groucho joke, “I shot an elephant in my underwear last night. How he got into my underwear I’ll never know,” did not occur to me. I don’t know what the elephant was thinking. I do know that my daughter Melanie was awake and saw what appeared to be lightning flashes in the camp, then realized it was someone running with a flashlight. “That’s my dad,” she told her husband, Joel.

  “It couldn’t be,” Joel said. “We were told not to leave the huts.”

  “Trust me,” she responded knowingly. “That’s my dad.”

  I had lost sight of the elephant. I ended up running all the way to the river, thinking the elephant might have gone into the water. The elephant was not there, but a herd of hippopotami was bathing there. They paid no attention to me. That was fortunate, as I learned later that hippos are foul-tempered animals. Rather than peace and love they’re more into kill and eat. So I turned around and went back to my hut.

  The next morning our guide told us that there had been a lion in our camp during the night, and he showed us the paw marks right outside Lisbeth’s door. Apparently two years earlier that same lion had killed one of the workers in the camp. While showing me those marks the guide told me, “If you had been out there when the female was there, there is no telling what she might have done.” When the gamekeeper found out that I’d gone outside he was furious. But contrary to the way my daughters describe this, he never actually used the word “psychopath.”

  He did, however, radio ahead to our next camp to warn the guides there, we’ve got a bad one. That was me.

  We stayed in this camp for one more night. An elephant, probably the same one, came back in the night and started foraging right next to our hut. And while he was doing it he leaned against the wall—and the whole hut started leaning. I thought it was going to collapse. If that elephant had decided to sit down on our hut we were going to have to make a run for it.

  We survived. And years later, after Nerine’s death, my daughters basically moved into the house and kept me from chasing elephants in the night. And we survived.

  Even during the worst of times I was able to escape into work. I put on my costume and said words written by someone else, and for a few moments at least I could escape the complications of my own life. When you show up on a set nobody is interested in your problems at home. They’re dealing with their own issues. They want you to be there on time and prepared. I was able to work because half of my life has been spent masking my true feelings before the camera. Acting is getting away with it, putting on another face for the camera and internalizing my true feelings.

  What was especially ironic was that several years before Nerine’s death I had to deal with the death of a wonderful part of myself. I had been James Tiberius Kirk for almost thirty years when Paramount called to ask if I was willing to play his death scene.

  I was Jim Kirk, but I didn’t own the rights to me. Paramount owned the character and could do anything they wanted to him. The decision had been made by the studio that after twenty-five years the original crew of the Enterprise had finished its five-year mission. The Star Trek movies had an average gross of about $80 million. The executives believed they might make more money with Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his Next Generation crew in command. They were determined to kill off Captain Kirk so the movie torch would be passed cleanly to Patrick Stewart’s Picard. They explained their decision to me with the great sensitivity I had come to expect from the studio: Kirk was going down, baby! There was a New Generation in space. If I wanted to appear in the movie it would be to play his death scene. But whether I agreed to appear in the movie or not, Kirk was going to die.

  They also asked Leonard to appear in the film, but after reading the script he felt that Spock was not being treated with sufficient respect; he declined and Spock’s few lines were given to Scotty. After agreeing to put on my Kirk one last time I wondered how I was going to die. What would be the appropriate death for James T. Kirk? He certainly wasn’t going to die of old age or get run over by a rocket. I knew it was going to be heroic. So I read the first draft with considerable expectation.

  In the early drafts of the script Kirk took control of the Enterprise from Picard and flew it into combat against the Klingons—and died fighting for mankind at his station. Wow. That was certainly a noble way to go. But probably not exactly what Patrick Stewart had in mind. The later version that they decided to film had the mad scientist Dr. Tolian Soran, played by Malcolm McDowell, shooting him in the back with a phaser. That coward. Shot in the back?

  So that’s how Kirk dies, shot in the back. But the challenge became making it meaningful. As an actor I had died a hundred deaths. At first I’d played the cliché, my head would snap back and my eyes would close. But eventually I began to realize that’s not the way people die. People die differently, for different reasons in different ways. They die calmly and they die in the midst of a panic. They die peacefully or fighting. And as I did not yet know, they die at the bottom of a swimming pool. As an actor, I had choices. So I began spending considerable time wondering how Jim Kirk should die.

  Eventually I started focusing on an event that had happened about a year earlier. I had been riding a three-year-old saddlebred in the World Championships in Lexington. As I was coming back to the stable a golf cart was driving toward me. The golf cart spooked the horse, who reared into the air. As I started to roll off I made the mistake of grabbing hold of the reins, which pulled the horse toward me. I hit the ground and this large horse fell on the inside of my right leg, then rolled over on top of me. The horse got up, it was fine. People came running to help and I wanted to reassure them I was okay. I’m fine, I’m fine, I said. I tried to get up, and I couldn
’t. I’m fine. I tried to get up again. And failed again. And all the while continuing to insist I wasn’t hurt.

  I kept telling them I wasn’t hurt even as they put me in the ambulance and rushed me to the Emergency Room. I didn’t want to be hurt. I could move my arms and legs, so I wasn’t crushed. I was sore but I wasn’t in terrible pain. But sometimes a serious injury doesn’t hurt. I refused to admit that I was hurt. I was okay, but for some reason I couldn’t stand up. It turned out that my leg was bruised badly from the groin to the knee and I’d torn some ligaments. Nothing that wouldn’t heal over time. But I remember that feeling of trying to get up, of wanting to get up, and falling down. So I decided that was how Jim Kirk would die. I would try to get up and fall down. Try it again and fall down—and gradually lose my strength and die. I thought that would be an appropriate way to express the indomitable will of this man who refused to go willingly into the dark night.

  Executive producer Rick Berman agreed. “Okay, that sounds dramatic. Let’s do it that way.”

  The night before we actually did the scene I tried to imagine the feelings I would have. I began imagining my own death. This was the first time in my career I’d ever done anything like this. I tried to look at it technically rather than emotionally. I drew on my experiences; I remembered being knocked unconscious. I also remembered fainting from putting too much cold beer in an overheated body. As you lose consciousness there is a moment when everything slows down; that horse falling on top of me slowed down. You are completely aware of everything that’s happening around you: oh my God, that horse is falling on me. Oh my God, I’m tied into this kayak and I’m turning upside down and I can’t get free and I can’t breathe. Oh my God, I’m in a stunt plane and I’m supposed to land and I can’t line up the runway. As you lose consciousness you first lose your peripheral vision, you get tunnel vision. You’re aware of what’s happening until the very last instant, until that last bit of being aware that you are no longer going to be aware. And then.