Up Till Now (37 page)

There were times when we were afraid people were beginning to figure out that this whole thing was a hoax, particularly when one resident pointed out, “With William Shatner you never know what’s going on. You don’t know if he’s just whacko!” But somehow we managed to keep the secret. Certainly the most difficult thing for us to do during the shoot was continue the deception. Each day it got more difficult to continue lying to these people. Sometimes at our meetings at night people would begin crying about the lies they had to tell. Personally, I began to dread the moment when we would have to reveal the truth. For some reason I had visions of the towns-people carrying torches as they came up the mountain toward Dr. Frankenstein’s castle.

This was the first time since making
The Outrage
in a small Southern town more than three decades earlier that I started planning an escape route.

We couldn’t quit, though. This was a comedy reality show and we had to continue the deception. And then, just when I thought the
situation couldn’t possibly become any more difficult, Don Rath, who had already bestowed upon me the honor of wiping my face with his good-luck raccoon penis, gave me his handmade mustache cup and asked me for a favor in return. “Come with me,” he said.

Don Rath took me up to the town cemetery to visit the grave of his wife, who had died in 2001. There was Don with his walker and I standing in this sort of barren cemetery before his wife’s tomb-stone. “Look, Mom, look who I brought up to see you.”

If the citizens of Riverside, Iowa, had known what we were doing and wanted to turn the joke back around on us, this is precisely the way they would have done it. The man was taking me to visit his wife’s grave. And as he spoke he began crying. Oh my goodness, I knew exactly how he felt. Exactly. As it would be forever, Nerine’s death was never further than a thought out of my mind and my soul was deeply wounded. The real emotion of that moment was so strong that Don and I hugged and I started crying. No reality show in the history of television has ever been more real.

That was not the funny part. Trust me.

Eventually the time came to reveal the truth. Coincidently it was April first. We invited the key townspeople to a dinner-picnic. It was left to me to tell them the truth. Oy, this was tough. We had absolutely no idea how any of them were going to react. There was every chance it was going to get ugly. There is no movie, I said, my heart thumping wildly. This whole thing is a reality TV show. That was met with the longest silence I’d ever experienced in my life. Finally, someone said, “You dirty dogs.” And other people started laughing.

This group of people loved it—with one exception. This man was a farmer, a big, powerful guy with tremendous dignity. I wanted him not to be angry—and he was fucking angry. “You mean you played us the fool all along . . .” His body language was far worse than his words—he was turned halfway away from me and his arms were locked in front of him. We had learned what each of our principals wanted—one man had dreamed his whole life of going to Hawaii, we sent him and his family to Hawaii. A woman needed money for
her efforts to adopt her grandson, we helped finance her successful effort. Our ingénue desperately wanted to bring her horse to Riverside but couldn’t afford it, we paid to board the horse for a year. Another cast member wanted to see Paris, we gave him a trip there. Each person received either gifts or cash worth several thousand dollars. But when we reached our farmer, he had left. He didn’t want anything to do with us.

I felt awful. Just dreadful. That night we were meeting with the entire town to reveal our secret to them. The local members of our cast had kept our secret. And as they arrived they were greeted by their neighbors with a red carpet and cheers. And at the end of the line was the farmer—with a big smile on his face. As we found out, he’d gone home and discussed it with his family, who convinced him our prank was harmless and fun. The citizens of Riverside took the joke good-naturedly—particularly when we told them we would be contributing one hundred thousand dollars to the town treasury. In addition, our crew and actors raised an additional thirteen thousand dollars which was used to buy books for the elementary school.

Spike TV eventually ran the show as a miniseries and it received very good reviews. Several reviewers specifically pointed out my success at self-parody, writing that finally I’d “got it.” Of course, that just proves once again that my acting skills had not dulled—I was not doing self-parody. That was...William Shatner!

The movie death of Jim Kirk turned out to be a new beginning to my career, but I believed completely that Nerine’s death was the end of my married life. And perhaps it also meant that I would never again have an intense loving relationship with a woman. If there was one thing I had proved, it’s that marriage just didn’t work for me. And as difficult as it was for me to deal with that particular reality, it was pretty obvious that I was doing something wrong.

And honestly, for a long time after Nerine’s death I had little interest in women. The concept of dating at that point in my life did not seem very appealing to me. To fill some of the enormous loneliness I was feeling in those months I found considerable solace just being with my horses. In the early 1980s we were filming an episode
of
T.J. Hooker
where we needed a police car with its siren whining to race through a horse barn. We ended up in a barn where saddlebreds were stabled. I had been involved in a minor way in a quarter horse breeding operation, but as I stood in the barn that day looking at these magnificent animals I was...I was stunned. It was an enchanted moment. Looking across a crowded barn I fell in love with saddlebreds. One look and I was smitten. Saddlebreds are works of art. These horses are bred to be beautiful and to move beautifully. These horses are an esthetic delight and the pleasure they give your eyes is magnified by the grace of their movement.

Well, that day I had discovered a new passion. These were obviously the most magnificently proud beasts on earth. I thought it was impossible to look at them and not want to fill fields with them. There was one in particular that just mesmerized me. I asked the owner its price and when he named it, I said flatly, “I’ll buy him.”

The next day I flew home to Los Angeles. I called a trainer I knew and asked him to handle all the details for me. He called me a short time later. “You know that horse you bought two days ago for X dollars?” Yeah? I said all excitedly
.
“Well, now the price is two-X dollars.”

Welcome to the horse breeding business, Bill.

Actually, raising the price was illegal. In that business the price you name is the price. Period. But I was so naïve I decided I probably hadn’t heard them correctly. I was so in lust with this horse that I was willing to pay almost anything. And so I did.

I was taken for a ride—literally and figuratively. But that was the beginning of what has grown to be a substantial horse breeding business. A very expensive horse breeding business. Eventually I bought a ranch in Lexington, Kentucky, Belle Reve Farm, an eighty-seven-acre spread. At various times I’ve owned as many as sixty horses. But of all the horses I’ve owned, the most magnificent of them all was Sultan’s Great Day. A two-time World Champion in his category, Sultan’s Great Day was all black, and when he ran he looked like a silhouette in motion. Just looking at him made it clear his choice would have been to be running free in the woods; he did not easily accept being domesticated. I rode him at his leisure. We put him out
to stud and his offspring have won almost one hundred World Grand Championships and Reserves in all the major saddlebred divisions. I admired him, loved him, and respected him. He was a great thrill to own.

But by 2004 he was done. It was time to end his life. I wanted to be there when the vet put him down so I flew to the ranch. And then, on a warm spring afternoon, the two of us went for a final walk in the pasture. I led him into a shady dell and then stood there, content to watch him graze. Wanting to stop time, really. I was anticipating, and dreading, the moment when the vet would arrive to give him his final shots. All of a sudden, from across the field, three horses came running toward us. Great Day raised his head and then, in an instant, became the stallion of old, the great protector of the herd. His instincts took hold and on his feeble rear legs he reared high, proud, pawing the air with bandaged front feet, neighing his defiance. The other horses rightly turned tail, and ran.

He was a champion. A champion.

Great Day settled back down, defiant and proud. As someone remarked later, he went into the next world feeling like a stud horse.

Probably the least expensive aspect of owning horses is the initial cost of the horse. It’s everything that comes after; the housing and feeding and training of that animal. The cost of medical attention and the proper equipment. If it’s a competition horse there is the cost of getting to the competition; the trucks and the feed and the care. And then there are the people who actually run the operation, the good people as well as those who quit and those who cheat. And then, if you choose, there are even more esoteric ways of spending your money—for example, consulting an animal psychic.

While I was growing up in Montreal, I’m certain I never thought that someday I would be successful enough to consult an animal psychic. There is one woman I know who channels dogs.

Fish who talk is a concept I have for an animated undersea movie. A woman who channels dogs is a person I’ve paid to find out what my dog is thinking. I don’t actually remember how I found her. But what happens is she focuses on an animal and sits at a computer and
goes into a trance and types the animal’s thoughts. This is for real, this is not seeing aliens in the desert again. Often she doesn’t actually see the dog or its environment, but she told someone I know that their dog was barking like crazy because someone had taken away its plaid blanket a month ago—and sure enough, the owners had thrown out that dog’s ripped plaid blanket.

I consulted this psychic when a dog I loved very much got sick. This was Kirk, a champion Doberman who was dying from what is known as wobblers, a condition in which vertebrae come loose and impact on the central nervous system. When this dog started to show the first signs of wobblers I was desperate, hoping that I could save his life. So I went to see this woman whose expertise is talking to race horses before a race to build up their confidence.

She lived in Southern California. I put the dog in the car and we drove to her house. When we got there she had a psychic conversation with my dog. Truthfully, at no point did I think of Leonard doing a mind-meld. “He says he’s got a headache,” she told me. “He’s been dropped on his head. Have you shipped him anywhere lately?”

Several weeks earlier we had shipped him to Seattle to breed. “He says they dropped his crate. He’ll be fine, but you need to take him to an acupuncturist.”

I believed every word she said. I mean, how could she have known that he’d recently been on a trip unless he told her? That is the extraordinary power of hope. And it is how I ended up taking him to the animal acupuncturist twice a week. And for about an hour after each visit he would be fine, as if his pain had gone away. But it quickly came back and my dog died within the time frame predicted by the vet.

Actually, there are several well-known animal psychics. A friend of mine once discovered one of them in a stable, standing directly in front of his horse. “Excuse me,” he said politely. “But you’re making this horse nervous.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I talk to horses. Tell me, what kind of horse is this?”

He smiled. “Ask the horse.”

I’m passionate about horses and dogs. The presence of animals in my life has made a great difference. No matter what else was going on, they were always there for me and even in the worst circumstances provided great comfort.

And eventually—and certainly unexpectedly—it was my horses that brought me the most surprising happiness of my life.

One
of the most beautiful shows we did on
Rescue 911
was the story of a young woman who had been killed in an auto accident. Although we rarely told stories in which people died, while this young person was on life support her parents had made the agonizing decision to donate her organs to several people. We invited those recipients whose lives she had changed forever to appear on the show.

That was not the case when I sold my kidney stone on eBay. I was on the
Boston Legal
set in the fall of 2005 when I suddenly felt this incredible pain in my back and fainted. They were afraid it was a heart attack and rushed me to the hospital. As it turned out I was passing a kidney stone, which was only slightly more painful than taking a knife and sticking it into your side. Once it passes, it’s done, no aftereffects. The story got some minor coverage, people thought it was amusing. I thought it really hurt a lot.

Soon afterward we got a call from an online casino who wanted to buy it. Because it is an offshore business this casino is not permitted to promote gambling in the United States, so they advertise their presence with stunts that will get the name of the casino in the newspapers. These were the same people who had bought a decade-old half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich with the image of the Virgin Mary on it for twenty-eight thousand dollars—and then sent it on a national tour. They were calling to ask if I would donate my kidney stone. Donate? Donate? Who gives away their kidney stone? What is its value, I asked. Is there a black market in kidney stones?

The casino told me this donation would generate a tremendous amount of publicity. Right, publicity for them. Finally they offered to pay for it. I decided to donate whatever they paid to Habitat for Humanity. There was only one problem: I didn’t have my kidney stone. The last time I’d known where it was, was when I was in the hospital. At that point it had been right inside my kidney. I contacted the hospital. I would not be party to selling a fake kidney stone. The hospital was not certain they still had it. I was really hoping we weren’t going to have a legal battle over ownership; from what I have been able to determine the Supreme Court has never ruled on who owns a kidney stone after it has left someone’s body. It’s still very much unsettled law.

On the other hand, I didn’t know exactly how the casino could determine if the kidney stone I gave them was the kidney stone in question—although when it was in my body it felt more like a kidney rock. We decided they probably could do a DNA test. But when the hospital claimed they found it, I believed them. Who lies about
a kidney stone? The casino offered fifteen thousand dollars. An insult, I felt, for a kidney stone of my quality. Didn’t they know where that kidney stone had been? And it also did not seem very much for the amount of publicity they could reasonably expect to gain from it.

So I decided to determine its actual market value on eBay! One of a kind, I hope. I told all bidders, “If you subjected it to extreme heat it might turn out to be a diamond.”

Finally the casino folded—raising its offer to seventy-five thousand dollars, which I accepted and donated.

Some months after Nerine’s death it finally occurred to me that in all probability I would never be married again. That was very depressing. While I believed I would never again love someone as deeply as I had loved Nerine, I was just so lonely. So in my mind I began making a list of those things I wanted in a woman. I created my fantasy woman: obviously she had to be single. She didn’t have to have children of her own, but she couldn’t want to have children with me. Certainly I had to find her attractive. Okay, beautiful. She had to be free to travel with me. She had to have a big sense of humor. And she had to truly love horses. It was an impossible list, I knew, I could never find anyone like that. I was resigned to spending the rest of my life alone. That was hard for me to accept because I had all the desires and the passions and the physical ability that I’d always had.

After Nerine’s death I had received hundreds of letters from people offering their condolences or advice or sympathy. Eventually I read them all. One of them attracted my attention, mostly because the calligraphy on the envelope was so striking. It was from a woman named Elizabeth Martin, whom I knew vaguely from the horse world. Elizabeth and her husband, Mike, had owned and operated a very successful saddlebred stable in Montecito, near Santa Barbara. They were well-respected trainers and had won several championships. I knew them from competing against their horses. I remembered having thought in passing that she was a beautiful woman, but I don’t think we’d ever said more than a few words in passing. I had heard that her husband had gotten cancer and she’d nursed him for
several years until his death. The last time I’d seen her I’d been with Nerine at a horse show. Elizabeth had been one of the judges.

Her letter was a surprise. “My husband died of cancer two years ago,” she wrote. “Since then I’ve been through all the stages of grief. I know what it is. And if there is anything I can do to help you get through this period, I’d be delighted.” When I read the letter I thought fate had handed it to me: you gave me the list, here’s the woman who fulfills that list. I remember telling some friends, “There’s a girl in Santa Barbara that I think I’ve got to meet.”

Other women were sending me letters with their pictures in them. This was a lovely letter offering what I most needed, understanding of what I was going through. It was a sincere letter of sympathy and the message that eventually you heal; she didn’t even include her phone number. She had trained a horse owned by my business manager’s wife, so I got her phone number from him. And I called. We became friends on the phone. We spoke every day for several months, but she just didn’t have time to meet me. She was too busy; in addition to running a large business she was helping her mother deal with her father’s Alzheimer’s. Her parents were staying with her and, as she explained, she had learned enough about loss to know how to make the most of the time you have with the people you love. All she wanted to do was help me get through this period. I was so fearful of being alone that I wanted to cling to someone right away. As often as I told myself I didn’t want to get married again, that it was too painful, I also admitted to myself I needed to be with someone. Somehow that seemed logical at the time.

Finally we made plans to meet for dinner. I’d spent that day in San Francisco, interviewing scientists for a show we were planning about the Human Genome Project, which fostered a competition between the government and private industry to map out the entire human genome. Fascinating stuff, and as I was listening to these brilliant people discussing the very matrix of life I was thinking, I can’t wait to see her tonight.

I was exhausted when I got home; I drove up to Santa Barbara in
the last stages of sleep deprivation. We met on the pier in Santa Barbara. I got out of my car and immediately saw this beautiful lady standing beside her car, looking so elegant and dignified. We had dinner that night in a quiet restaurant on the pier, a place she had often gone with her husband. She sort of knew I was an actor, but had never seen a full episode of
Star Trek
and knew nothing about the show. In fact, many months later we went to dinner with Patrick Stewart and his wife, and Elizabeth was listening to our conversation and interrupted, “I’m not sure I understand. How can you be the captain,” she said, pointing to Patrick, “if he’s the captain?”

So it became obvious she wasn’t after me for my
Star Trek
action figures—which, by the way are still available at The Store on Shatnervision.com. In fact, it quickly became even more obvious that she wasn’t after me at all.

During dinner I had asked her if she would ever come to L.A. Absolutely not, she said. She was much too busy. So instead a few days later I called and invited her to the South Pole.

I had been invited to accompany a world-renowned nature photographer on a camera safari to Antarctica. They were going to fly me to Patagonia and we would sail from there. It was a two-week trip and I could bring someone with me. “You can have your own cabin,” I said. “It’ll be a great adventure.” Then I added, “An opportunity like this may never again happen in our lifetime.”

Of course I was talking about the trip to the South Pole. Of course. She said, “I have to figure out the pros and cons. I’m going to write them down.” Well, that was efficient. And she called me back and said, “The cons have won. It’s just not practical.”

She was talking about the trip to South Pole. Actually, she really was.

Eventually I turned down the offer. The prospect of being alone in the Antarctic, perhaps the most isolated place in the world, was a lot more than I was ready to face. But perhaps a month later I had to go to New York for a long weekend. Again I invited her, and I used those very special words, “separate rooms.”

While I was there my New York agent, Carmen La Via, asked me
to participate in a fund-raising event for a young girl with cancer up in Albany, about a three-hour drive from the city. I suggested Liz spend the day at a spa in the hotel, but she volunteered to come with Carmen and me. Our conversation in the car that day was about life and death, and she expressed such empathy and humanity, and by the time we got to Albany we knew each other. The rest of that day was equally magical. The fund-raiser was held at a bowling alley. There were three hundred bowlers there and several thousand bowling alleys across America participating on some sort of closed-circuit network. I hadn’t bowled in fifteen years. I picked up a ball and threw a strike. It was amazing. Then they auctioned off my bowling ball for several thousand dollars. After the event Liz and I walked around and found a toy store that had stayed open later than normal. We’d heard that this little girl was not permitted to see her dog and missed it terribly. She had shown us pictures of him. In that toy store we found a stuffed dog that looked just like her dog. We bought it and went back to the hospital.

Carmen did not come back to New York with us. It was a cold night and the heater in the limo didn’t work, so we snuggled in the backseat. As we passed an open field I asked the driver to stop. The field was covered with fresh snow just glistening in the moonlight. We walked into the middle of the field and I kissed her for the first time.

It all seemed too perfect. Liz wondered if it was some sort of elaborate setup. And then she realized it didn’t make any difference because she was freezing. On the ride home she slept in my arms.

From New York she went with me to Belle Reve, my horse farm in Kentucky. I knew she was confused. As she explained, she had never been with an actor before and she was scared, because she didn’t know how to determine whether an actor is acting or telling the truth. If I was really a good actor, she said, she couldn’t know that I was being truthful.

How could I respond to that? Convince her I was a bad actor? Incredibly, I had found the woman who fulfilled all the criteria on my list. It was some sort of miracle: I’d made a list of all the qualities
I needed in a companion and suddenly there she was in front of me. I had been describing her without knowing her. I had to convince myself not to be fearful. I had to grasp this opportunity and I had to urge her to grasp it too, because it was not going to happen again. While we were in Kentucky I asked her, “Have you ever thought about getting married again?”

Not that I was thinking about it, of course. Not me, not really. It was just conversation, what movies do you like, pass the salt please, you interested in getting married? Okay, perhaps I was rushing things a bit; I was talking about marriage and she was still wondering whether or not she should be going out with me.

But I couldn’t resist. Since Nerine’s death I hadn’t been able to regain a foothold on life. I’d been drifting through the days and the nights...the nights were dreadful. Thoughts of death and loneliness visited me every night. I was angry and remorseful; I was frustrated and even afraid. Ironically, though, it was not death that I feared, I was afraid of life. My health was deteriorating and my doctors were extremely concerned that the stress was slowly killing me. And then I met this woman. This intelligent, funny, wise, compassionate, and loving woman named Elizabeth Martin.

Was it truly possible? Were there really happy endings in life? To meet a woman as young and vital as Elizabeth Martin at this point in my life, to have all the mutual interests: movies and literature and poetry and dance and horses—and to be available for the possibility? Didn’t I make that movie years earlier?

Six months after we’d begun dating she agreed to marry me. She told me that her fantasy was to be married by the author Marianne Williamson. As she explained, during her husband’s terminal illness they had been reading her book
Illuminata,
and as he died she had been reading a prayer for a peaceful death. Marianne Williamson is a Jewish woman who is a minister in the Unity Church, which emphasizes love and common sense. The religious aspect was not particularly important to me and if it meant that much to Elizabeth then I wanted to do it. “This is William Shatner,” I said when I reached Marianne Williamson in Detroit. “We’d like you to marry us.”