Up Till Now (34 page)

As I put the car back into reverse she said softly, “Please don’t leave me, Bill.”

“I’ll be back later,” I said and kept going. I spoke with her several times during the day. By eight-thirty that night I was in the car driving home. My daughter Melanie called me on my cell phone. “I can’t raise Nerine on her cell,” she said. “Can you call her on the land-line?” I tried calling the house several times, but there was no answer. When I got home about nine-thirty the house was quiet. We had three wonderful, loving Dobermans and they were attached to her—but they were in the kitchen. If she had been home they would have been with her. I called her name several times, walking around the house. When I got no response I just assumed she’d gone out. But I checked the garage and all the cars were there. I began to get a very strange feeling.

The phone rang. My first thought was that it was her, calling to tell me where she was, asking me to pick her up. It was her AA sponsor. “I don’t know where she is,” I told her. “I can’t find her.”

Her sponsor asked, “Have you checked the pool?”

A chill went down my back, but I quickly dismissed it. “No. The gate was closed and the dogs were downstairs.”

“Check it,” she insisted. I put her on hold and went outside. The pool area was dark, although part of it was dimly illuminated by lights from the second level. “Nerine?” There was no one around the pool. I looked into the pool, and in the darkness I saw a dark shape in the deep end. I wasn’t certain, it could have been a shadow—or it could have been...It had to be a shadow. It couldn’t be my wife. I took several steps backward to try to avoid the horror in front of me. I turned my back on the pool as I picked up the phone. This wasn’t possible. How could this be happening? “She’s in the pool.”

“Call nine-one-one.”

“Help me. Call nine-one-one.” I hung up on her and called the number I knew so very well. Nine-one-one. “Oh my God,” I said. “My poor wife is at the bottom of the pool.”

The dispatcher spoke evenly, just as I’d heard so many times on the show. “OK. Did you get her out of the pool yet, sir?”

“No. Not yet.” “I want you to take her out of the pool right now.”

I put down the phone and dived into the pool. I had enough breath for one deep dive. One of her arms was floating above her and I grabbed her by that arm and lifted her, pulling her toward the shallow end. As I did that I remember screaming, “What have you done! What have you done!” As I did that I looked up into the sky—and a helicopter was hovering over my house. I may have realized that it was a news copter, which had been monitoring the 911 calls.

I laid her down on the side of the pool. Her skin was blue. Her strawberry-blond hair was still curled. I remember every second. I put my finger in her throat to try to breathe life into her, and I heard a click. Later a policeman suggested that was her neck breaking, but it wasn’t. Something was caught in her throat. This was my nightmare. This was grotesquery. I couldn’t believe this was really happening.

Until that moment I had never truly experienced horror in my life. But this was horror. Oddly, I had never seen a dead body. I’d seen countless thousands of actors play dead, but death . . . She was dead.
There was nothing I could do to save her. She was dead. The emergency responders arrived within minutes. I had to go down and open the gate for them, but I was confused, I didn’t want to leave her body alone. This time there would be no happy ending. My daughters came quickly. Reporters and news crews gathered outside the front gate. Everything was happening so quickly. I was in shock, in complete and absolute shock. This didn’t happen to me and the people I loved. This was the type of event I read about in the newspapers, it wasn’t about me.

My memory is that I spoke with the police that night. At least I think it was that night. “This is an accident,” the commanding officer told me. They had seen this scenario before. What appeared to have happened is that she had been drinking outside by the pool— they found a broken bottle—slipped and hit her head, and blacked out. An autopsy eventually found that her blood-alcohol level was 0.28, more than three times the amount considered intoxicated, as well as that there were traces of Valium in her system. But this officer did say to me, “I have to tell you, if there was any hint of foul play, you’re the first suspect.”

Maybe he didn’t actually use the word “suspect,” but that certainly was his inference. It sounded like dialogue from...from
Hooker.
It was absurd. Who could possibly think any such thing? “What are you talking about?” I said. “I mean, this is the woman I loved more than my life. I wouldn’t hurt her.”

I remember lying in bed that night. The police had left, the coroner had come, my children started taking turns staying with me. I remember my head pounding, I remember feeling that my head was moving in time with my heartbeat. The shock and the grief were overwhelming, and along with that came the knowledge and the fear that I was alone again.

Very early the next morning I walked down the long driveway to make a statement to the mob of reporters. Apparently they’d stayed there all night. I picked up the day’s newspaper that was left in the drive and I told them, “My beautiful wife is dead. Her laughter, her tears, and her joy will remain with me the rest of my life.”

After the O. J. Simpson debacle I suppose I should have known what was going to happen. I hadn’t, though. It was so clear what had happened that night; there didn’t seem any room for doubt or for questions. But that didn’t stop people or the media from asking those terrible questions. Did Shatner kill his wife? A day after I’d made my statement about loving her forever someone sent a note to the police, “Anybody who is innocent doesn’t stop and pick up a newspaper.”

It dawned on me then that people were watching me to see how I acted. It was insane. Exactly how do you act when the woman you love has died and people are wondering if you had anything to do with her death? The fact that people could even think this way was stunning to me. Everybody reacts to horror in their own way. It’s one thing to have someone you love who has been sick or struggling die, but this? There’s no way of preparing for a cataclysmic event like this. The feelings I had were vaguely similar to the pain I’d experienced as a little boy, when I’d come home from school one day and found my dog lying in the street. My mother had left the door open and my dog had run outside and been killed by a car. I had completely forgotten that until once again I was experiencing that intense grief. I remember, I’d picked up my dog and carried him home. We had a brick stairway in front of the house and my father had covered the area under those stairs with latticework. There was a little opening so you could get underneath the stairs. I took my dog’s body and I opened the latticework and crawled in there. Sunlight streaming through the latticework formed rectangles that lit this hidden space. And I sat there holding the body of my dog and sobbing.

As a little boy I’d lost the thing I’d loved the most, and now it had happened again.

Within a few days of her death I learned that the
National Enquirer
was going to run a story asking, basically, “Did he or didn’t he kill her?” All the facts had not yet been made public, and as disgusting as it is, people were wondering what had happened that night. I wanted to get the true story out as quickly as possible. We called the
Enquirer
and offered them a deal. “Don’t run that story. Instead, we’ll give you the exclusive story of what happened that night.” In
exchange they contributed $250,000 to what would eventually become the Nerine Shatner Foundation, which I intended to form to help addicted women. That was the only interview I did for months and I did it because they were going to run a tabloid story, so the fact that I was able to give this money to charity somehow made it seem sensible. Whether or not I would have done it given more time to think I don’t know. Some of her friends didn’t like me saying she was an alcoholic and have resented me ever since.

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

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.