Shatner Rules (6 page)

I
t was November 1969. Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and I was on all fours, in a dense tunnel of underbrush on California's San Clemente Island. My bow and arrow were slung over my back, and there was barely any room to move. I was hunting.

What was I looking for? What was my prey? A wounded wild boar—one that might come charging at me at any moment, with my arrow sticking out of its bristly hide.

Star Trek
's five-year mission had recently been cut short at three years, and in that very moment I wasn't concerned with forever being known as Captain Kirk. In that tunnel, I was now concerned with forever being associated with the newspaper headline
ACTOR KILLED BY PIG.

There was only one way out of this tunnel for the massive, tusked, wounded beast, and it was through me.

Now, I have stared down formidable beasts before in the course of my career. Remember Lee Van Cleef? He was a sinister layer of marinara in many a spaghetti Western. In 1963, I was acting in an episode of the anthology program
The Dick Powell Theatre
, in which I played a Swedish (of course) rancher fighting off a hostile land grab by his bigoted neighbors. I played the part with a thick Swedish accent, and in some scenes I wore a too-small bowler hat with a feather.

Never mind that rule. The entire episode is on YouTube. You can watch nearly everything I've ever done on YouTube, good and bad, highlights and lowlights. Nearly every week, things I've done in my career that I've long forgotten about come charging back at me, courtesy of YouTube, like a wounded pig in a tunnel.

Which is why I started talking about Lee Van Cleef, right?

Lee was well over six feet tall, a huge man, powerful. And like a wild boar, he had a cold, calculating look. Even when the cameras weren't rolling, he was an intimidating figure. He was missing part of one of his middle fingers, but it didn't matter—his whole body had a way of flipping you the bird.

And he and I had to fight in this show.

A movie fight consists of throwing blows, missing by a foot, and actors snapping their heads back. But I was still kind of new to this whole movie/TV acting business. During filming, Lee and I were throwing punches, while I was predominantly occupied with not knocking off my too-small bowler hat.

And I took one swing and hit the tip of Lee Van Cleef's nose.

Cut!

Take two! I swing again, and clipped his nose again.

Cut!!!

Take three. And my fist once again connected with Van Cleef's snout.

Let's take five!

Even though this was a few years before
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
I could hear the Ennio Morricone music sting as he sauntered over to me. He got right into my face, obscuring the sun and all of my hope for the future, leaned down, and growled, “If you do that again, I
will
 . . . knock . . . you . . . out.”

Terrifying, which brings me to one of the most important of Shatner Rules, which is . . .

(NOTE: Lee Van Cleef died in 1989. This should probably be the easiest rule to follow.)

While in the tunnel, I figured that if I could survive my encounter with Lee Van Cleef, I could certainly survive my encounter with a wounded wild pig. I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and trudged forward.

How did I get into this situation? Well, I love Thanksgiving. I love to say the word “Thanksgiving.” It's a beautiful word and the intrinsic meaning of the word, to me, is “love.” And I would be spending that Thanksgiving—the Thanksgiving of 1969—without my loved ones.

I had just divorced my wife Gloria, and she and my daughters were spending the holiday elsewhere. I would be alone. And do you know what's more terrifying to me than a wounded and angry wild boar? Being alone.

I hate being alone. I've spent most of my life filling up my existence with reservoirs of company, family around me, friends. I cherish the people I love for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they keep me from being alone. I went through a lot of loneliness as a child, as a kid, and as a young man, and I fear it more than anything.

(NOTE: If you are seated next to William Shatner on an airplane, please be quiet. He doesn't hate being alone THAT much.)

Fortunately, a couple of days earlier,
Star Trek
cinematographer Al Francis called me and invited me over to his house for the holiday. I was thrilled. I asked, “What can I bring?” He suggested ham. And for some reason, my mind leapt to wild boar! I didn't want a piece of meat in a can you had to open with a key. I wanted a slab of meat on the hoof you had to kill with an arrow!

I must admit, for some reason Thanksgiving and danger sometimes go hand-in-hand with me. In recent years, my family has been witness to William Shatner's Thanksgiving Blastoff. And no, “blastoff” is not something having to do with bowel abnormalities. It refers to my fondness for deep-fried turkey.

Deep-fried turkey is the most delicious turkey I've ever tasted. The oil sears the skin, so the oil doesn't go into the meat. Amazing! The only problem is, the specific gravity of a turkey and the amount of oil you should have for the boiling period is never carefully calculated.

You don't want to have too little oil, because any turkey above the oil line won't cook. You've got to completely immerse the twenty-pound turkey in boiling oil, heated by an open propane flame below. So you don't want too much oil. Do you see the potential problem?

Every year I could be seen sprinting, in my shorts and sandals, away from a plume of flame, a trail of liquid fire leading to our house, my fork in one hand, oven mitt in the other.

Elizabeth eventually destroyed my deep fryer. She didn't sell it. She didn't donate it. She didn't leave it out on the curb—she destroyed it. She decided that William Shatner's Thanksgiving Blastoff would never again claim another victim with its fiery deliciousness.

So in 1969, in the fine tradition of Shatner Thanksgiving danger, I chose to hunt and kill a wild boar for the Francis family and their guests. I grabbed my bow and arrow, hired a guide, and took off to San Clemente. I noticed my guide had a .45 strapped to his side, explaining, “If things get really bad, I'll use the gun.”

My guide, the expert, had a gun, and I had a bow and arrow. It then occurred to me:
What the hell am I thinking?

Perhaps it was a control issue? My marriage had crumbled, my job had ended, and my daughters were living somewhere else.

Perhaps my desire to go out and hunt my own food was a primal urge to control my destiny, my survival. But once I got out to the island, I began to think that a safer way to act out my primitive man urges would be to rediscover fire or paint a picture of a horse on a cave wall.

So I'm trudging, and slightly trembling, around the island, and before long a massive male boar emerges from the underbrush. A giant. I pull back the string on my compound bow, aim, and release the bolt. A direct hit!

A hunting arrow works with three cutting blades, and your prey bleeds to death. You lodge an arrow into an animal, and then you don't move. You sit down and wait for an hour, for nature to take its course, for the animal to bleed out.

(NOTE: When hunting with a bow and arrow, bring a book. Or, if you have a sense of irony, a copy of
Vegetarian Times
.)

Unfortunately, no one hipped my pig to the whole “fall and slowly die” thing.

After the hit, he took off into the underbrush, my arrow in his massive flank. My guide ran after the beast. I stood there for a second, surprised, not sure what to do. It was then that I noted an entire pack of wild boar had emerged from the bushes, some even bigger than the one I hit. The guy with the .45 was gone, and I ran after him as fast as I could.

The guide came running back to me and said, “The pig went through this hole.” There was a very neat—and small—tunnel in the underbrush.

He said, “I'll tell you what I'll do. I'm going to go around this brush. I'll go around and get to the other side; you go in and flush him out.”

Before I could say, “Maybe I could borrow that .45 for my flushing,” he was gone.

And I was crawling through the densest thicket, being pricked and poked, breathing in earthy air, my bow and arrow over my shoulder. Even if the pig did come charging after me, there would be no way to arm the bow and use it.

I was a sitting duck for a wounded pig and my goose would soon be cooked, or something like that.

Luckily, it turned out the beast had just made it out of the tunnel of brush, collapsed, and died. All my apprehension and terror was quickly replaced with the joy of the kill.

We field dressed the pig right then and there. I gave the guide a share of the meat, and headed back to Los Angeles. I dropped the kill off with Al Francis, and the wonderful and warm Mrs. Francis. Primal Shatner had hunted well.

The next day, Thanksgiving, Mrs. Francis informed me that the meat was no good. Spoiled. After I left the day before, she dutifully went to the public library and researched the proper method for preparing wild boar for consumption. Who knew the library even had a “Wild Boar Preparation and Consumption” section? She stayed up all night, taking the temperature of the flesh every two hours, bleeding it out, and to no avail. The only thing to be thankful for was that we all didn't perish from trichinosis.

I brought twenty steaks to the celebration the next day, and they were delicious. I had a wonderful time with my surrogate family.

But I couldn't help thinking about the implications of so much meat being consumed. The boar was dead, now a cow was dead. Perhaps hunting wasn't something I was entirely comfortable with? Perhaps Primal Shatner wasn't a fellow I wanted to be.

So in the 1970s, like many people, I hitched a ride to vegetarian enlightenment. I became a strict herbivore. I swore off the meat stuff. In fact, I even became a bit of an anti-meat zealot.

Vegetarian Times
magazine? I was on the cover in 1983.

Bill celebrates vegetarianism, albeit briefly, in 1983.(
Courtesy of
Vegetarian Times)

My interview with the magazine promoted a documentary I hosted and narrated called
The Vegetarian World
, which also featured Pulitzer Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and actress Betty Buckley. In it, I espoused the virtues of such (then) exotic items as falafel and eggplant Parmesan, and solemnly declared, “Most major cities now feature several vegetarian restaurants.”

And like everything I've ever done—you can watch it on YouTube.

I could not bring the pig or the cow back, but I was going to make sure that they did not die in vain. With each Thanksgiving going forward, I would give thanks—for my enlightened sense of compassion toward all living things.

Yes, well, I fell off the vegetarian wagon not long after I made the documentary.

Perhaps Primal Shatner will always be a part of Shatner. I no longer kill pigs for Thanksgiving, but after Elizabeth destroyed my turkey deep fryer, she bought me a very elaborate smoker and grill. I am now quite legendary around the Shatner household as an accomplished “pig butt smoker.” I've been called worse.

Now my Thanksgivings are spent surrounded by loved ones, no longer alone, and thankful for a life well lived. But every year I raise a quiet toast of thanks to that mighty beast on San Clemente Island. He was a tough customer.

Not as tough as Lee Van Cleef, though. That guy still spooks me.

T
hat means “When, and how much?”

Yes. I starred in a feature film shot entirely in Esperanto in 1965. It was called
Incubus,
and a rather enterprising man named Leslie Stevens directed it. And by “enterprising,” I mean he was a little
freneza
.

That's Esperantan for “crazy.”

Esperanto was a language invented in the late 1880s by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, a man who spoke Russian, Yiddish, Polish, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English, and had probably been called “smarty-pants” in each tongue. Not content with knowing every language under the sun, he invented Esperanto as a universal language to be spoken by all the world's peoples, believing that a common vocabulary would bring all the citizens of Earth together.

Well, Leslie Stevens wanted to bring all the Esperanto-speaking citizens of the world together to see a horror film shot entirely in the language, and asked me to star in it. And what's the most important of all the Shatner Rules? Even in Esperanto?

Diri jes!

Stevens c
reated the 1960s science fiction anthology TV series
The Outer Limits.
And since it was a 1960s science fiction anthology series, I acted in it. I starred in an episode called “Cold Hands, Warm Heart,” in which I played an astronaut who returned from Venus with a malady that made him cold all the time. (Nowadays, that malady is traditionally called “Being a Senior Citizen.”)

FUN FACTNER:
In the 1964
Outer Limits
episode “Cold Hands, Warm Heart,” William Shatner's character was involved in a mission called Project Vulcan. Isn't that weird? It totally foreshadowed his work in . . . a 1964
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
episode called “The Project Strigas Affair.” “Project”
and
“Project”? Crazy! Also, that same 1964
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
episode that William Shatner guest-starred in also featured Leonard Nimoy. Who would later, of course, star with William Shatner in . . . an episode of
T.J. Hooker.
Weird!

Stevens started work on his script for
Incubus
after
The Outer Limits
had been canceled, and enlisted the help of cinematographer Conrad Hall, who would later win Oscars for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
,
American Beauty
, and
Road to Perdition
.
Fine films all, hampered only by their use of a language people around the world understand.

You know that language, right? English? I chose to write this book in it. Also, the copy of the
Incubus
script I got when I signed onto the project was also written in English. The contract I signed saying I would be in
Incubus
? English! The whole “shooting the film in Esperanto” thing was a secret that Leslie Stevens decided to keep to himself.

But the story spoke to me—on that level that doesn't really require a language. It was an allegorical tale in which I played a soldier arriving in a mysterious town to heal my battle wounds with the water from a miraculous spring. Demons lurked within the shadows of the village, preying on the souls of the narcissists who would exploit this fountain of youth. Kind of trippy. Watching
Incubus
might impair your ability to operate heavy machinery.

Leslie felt that the only people who needed to know about his Esperantan epic were the world's two million Esperanto speakers. Why? Because every last one of them would buy a ticket to see this film, virtually guaranteeing a big profit!

Well, not necessarily, especially if you give the world's Esperanto speakers the shaft. Word is, some Esperantists reached out to Stevens to help with the production, and he rebuffed them. (Imagine the brief thrill some Esperantists felt when the possibility emerged that they might make some money from their ability to speak this language fluently.)

Forget the experts! Leslie Stevens alone was going to make the first movie ever shot in Esperanto—including directing the action in the language—and he was going to do this in a lightning-fast eighteen days, not including the ten days his actors had to learn their lines. Phonetically.

(NOTE: Learning . . . things . . . phone . . . et . . . i . . . cally . . . is easy . . . for . . . William . . . Shatner.)

Incubus
eventually debuted at film festivals around the world. And while Esperanto speakers believe in uniting people under the banner of a common language, they aren't big believers in uniting their pals for movie night, and the film—despite some glowing reviews—quickly sank without a trace. The original print was destroyed in a fire, and it was considered a “lost” film. Most people forgot about poor, hopelessly bold and experimental
Incubus
. Except those people touched—
by its curse
!

Yes, some people believe there's a curse attached to
Incubus
.

True, some tragic elements did unfold after the film wrapped. Milos Milos, the Hungarian actor and bodyguard who played the Incubus, died in a murder/suicide around the time of the film's release. Ann Atmar, who played my character's sister, committed suicide
as well. Other actors suffered kidnappings, murders; Leslie Stevens's company went bankrupt. I promptly started on
Star Trek
.

Which—was not a curse; it was a blessing.

How did I escape the
Incubus
curse?

Well, it's complicated, but . . . I'd better write the rest of this in Esperanto.