Up Till Now (8 page)

“Are you out of your mind?” is what I should have said. Instead I asked her what was wrong.

The bear looked at me and said in a broken, nasty French accent, “I saw Logan.”

It got worse every night. Meanwhile, she had fallen desperately in love with Marlon Brando and wanted to get out of the show. The producers refused to release her from her contract, so she decided that she would catch pneumonia. At intermission one performance she went outside and stood in the rain, then came back onstage absolutely soaking wet, as if she had been in the shower.

From performance to performance I never knew what she was going to do. Sometimes she would simply walk off the stage and not return. Other times she would refuse to speak. I didn’t know which way the bear was going to turn. I was onstage for the entire play, so I began to prepare monologues for myself in case she decided not to come back onstage.

Something happened between us. Perhaps it was that cigar that I inhaled deeply and exhaled in her face, but she stopped talking to me too. Most of the cast was young and Asian and as inexperienced as she was and they all stopped talking to me too. So I was the lead in a Broadway show, my name above the title, Mr. Broadway, my town, and nobody in the cast was speaking to me except for a couple of white-skinned actors. Thank goodness, I thought, at least I have someone to talk to; of course that was before the brawl.

One of these actors was an Australian who had been an Olympic swimming champion, and unfortunately he felt he should receive better billing. Merrick refused to give it to him, so he was angry too. He had one big scene in the show with me in which he was supposed to get a big laugh. Now, normally, at the end of the final dress rehearsal a show is frozen, meaning that’s the way it is supposed to be performed every night. What generally happens is a show slips, the timing changes slightly, and over a period of time that slight variance in timing has become gigantic. Every play slips and usually the director comes in every few weeks and redirects it. But Logan wasn’t permitted in the theater so he never came back. Instead the stage manager redirected the play and it began to go lopsided. It fell apart.

After this Australian actor said his laugh line he put his hand on my shoulder. After a few weeks I noticed that if he got his laugh he laid a nice firm hand on my shoulder—but if he didn’t get that laugh
this Olympic swimmer who was built like an Australian Olympic swimmer pounded on my shoulder. Finally I appealed to the stage manager, “I’m living in dread of this moment. If he doesn’t get his laugh he whacks me on the shoulder. Could you ask him nicely, ‘Please don’t hit Bill on his shoulder’?”

Well, that just made him angrier, and he began to clap me harder and harder. I went to Josh Logan, I went to the union. I tried everything to stop this guy from slamming me on the shoulder. But nobody could help me because the play had become chaotic. It was completely out of control.

Before a performance I went to his dressing room. “I’ve asked you nicely,” I explained. “Now I’m telling you. You hit me on the shoulder one more time, I’m going to hit you back right on the stage.”

Rather than a warning, he took that as a challenge. In our next performance he clapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and punched him. He was stunned, though somehow he got off the stage. The moment the first act ended and the curtain came down he raced across the stage and reared back to throw a punch at me that might have put me into Shubert Alley. I ducked, and instead he hit our eighty-six-year-old prop man. He knocked him out cold on the stage. That’s when the Act 2 curtain started to go up.

I was desperate. I had a wife and a child and a mortgage. So in my desperation I began to speed up my lines. I changed the intonation and the emotion. Just by speaking faster and putting emphasis on different words I shortened the play by fifteen minutes—and people began to laugh. I
love
you, had become, I love
you
? We were making fun of this turgid melodrama. We turned it into a lighthearted comedy.

The show became a hit. A comedy. We ran for fourteen months and I won several acting awards from major theater organizations. And when the movie version of it was made, I was invited to buy a ticket to watch William Holden playing my part. I was quite surprised by Holden’s performance. Apparently he didn’t understand the play—he thought it was a serious love story.

Several years later I was doing
Star Trek
and there was a part for an Asian girl. They asked me how I felt about casting France Nuyen.
It was all these years later, and I was curious what she would be like. Hire her, I said, she’ll be great. When she came on the set she was delightful. That defensiveness I remembered so well seemed to have disappeared, and I found myself wondering what could have possibly gone so wrong. And then she needed some makeup and she said, “Makeup. Come here.” And it all came back. It was the arrogance, I remembered every bit of it.

Obviously France and I both grew older and wiser and smarter and better looking and... and well, we’ve worked together on several more projects. Although we’ve never discussed those old days.

Before we continue with the narrative of my life, just let me pause here for a few seconds to check out the latest new additions to ShatnerVision.com, the Web site run by my daughter Lisbeth, who has not yet been born. In this book, I mean. ShatnerVision is a compilation of short videos. Oh, look at that, that’s clever. Good, I see they’ve added the little piece I did especially for you. Take a look at it, it’s easy to find, it has your name on it.

But please, don’t mistake ShatnerVision for WilliamShatner.com, which is my official Web site. That’s an easy mistake to make, but they’re very different. For example, the wonderful store from which you can order anything from a DVD of a movie in which I starred named
Incubus
—the only feature film ever made in the artificial language of Esperanto—to an exclusive
Wrath of Khan
twenty-fifth-anniversary bloodied Kirk action figure, is at WilliamShatner.com, but the video of me explaining why I don’t like to take off my pants on
Boston Legal
can be found on ShatnerVision. What surprised me most were the incredibly low prices on an array of remarkable items. I could buy my own autograph for considerably less than I would have expected to have to pay for it. And if I sent a check, I would have to sign it, putting me in the somewhat unique position of using my autograph to sign a check to buy my autograph. Of course, you wouldn’t have that problem. So, that should clear things up.

Now back to my life. Somehow I managed to escape
Suzie Wong
with my reputation intact. In fact, once the show had settled in I began working on television programs during the day, then rushing to
the theater at night. By day I was a respected television actor, playing the blind senator in a show written by Gore Vidal, appearing on
Hallmark Hall of Fame
with Ellen Burstyn, Carol Channing, and Maurice Evans, and starring in one of the first nationwide broadcasts on PBS,
The Night of the Auk
. This was a play that had flopped on Broadway several years earlier, starring, naturally, Chris Plummer and Claude Rains. It took place on a spaceship returning to Earth from the first successful manned landing on the moon. I played the wealthy young man who had financed the entire expedition. This was my first voyage on a television spaceship and it established one of the enduring truths of drama: if Shatner is aboard a spaceship, it is guaranteed that something is going to go wrong. In this story it’s atomic war on Earth and a lack of oxygen in the ship. There are five passengers, but only enough oxygen left to enable two of them to survive long enough to get back to Earth in time to die in the war. I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, so let us just say I don’t die in the atomic war.

I’ve never had great fortune planning my career. That is a luxury enjoyed by very few actors. Insecurity is part of the job description. I would describe my career plan pretty much as answering the telephone. My problem was that I never had anyone I felt comfortable soliciting advice from; no one whom I trusted to direct my career. So I made my own decisions based almost entirely on my gut feeling. Acting is one of the few professions in which you feel good about turning down work. Later in my career, after my three children were born, I found myself accepting jobs only for the money and feeling bad about it—and conversely feeling very good when I felt secure enough to turn down a job I knew I shouldn’t accept. I’ve subscribed to the notion that work makes more work—the more producers and directors see you work the more chance there is they will offer you more work. There were many times in my career that I’d taken roles I shouldn’t have in terms of creating a long-term career—but it was a paying job and hanging over me always was my father’s plea that I not become a hanger-on.

When do you accept a role, you never, ever have any concept of what the end result will be. Did I know when John Lithgow offered
me the prestigious role of the Big Giant Head on his sitcom
3rd Rock from the Sun
that I would be nominated for my first Emmy Award? Did it occur to me that people might recognize the subtle skills it took to properly convey the emotional life of Head? What I knew was that I was going to show up and say all my lines and they would pay me. That’s acting.

Sometimes, though, it is about the role. About the opportunity to use the talent I had been given to make an important statement. Obviously actors have to survive, but occasionally you do get offered a role that you just savor, that you really want to do.

The great C-movie producer-director Roger Corman offered me such a role. Seriously. That Roger Corman, who was already becoming well-known for films like
Attack of the Crab Monsters, Creature from the Haunted Sea
, and
Little Shop of Horrors,
cheap, get-em-made exploitation horror, T&A, and shoot-em-ups with low budgets and lower production values. But for some reason he wanted to do this film. By this time he had made seventeen films, all of them profitable, but every studio he approached with this script turned him down. Apparently making this film meant so much to him that he and his brother Gene mortgaged their homes to pay for it. Now, it’s possible I made that up, but I remember Roger and Gene did something very courageous to raise the money they needed to make this movie. Roger had seen me in
Tamburlaine the Great
and sent me the script. As soon as I read it I knew I wanted to play this role. This film changed my life.

The movie was called
The Intruder.
It was from a novel by a very respected writer named Charles Beaumont.
The Intruder
took place in the Deep South just after the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered schools to integrate. It was based on the true story of a white supremacist from New York, a neo-Nazi who traveled throughout the South organizing Ku Klux Klan–type citizen groups and fomenting riots. This was easily the most despicable character I’d ever played. But it was a wonderfully written portrait of the worst kind of bigot. I had grown up in Canada, I didn’t know this kind of institutionalized racism existed in the United States. I was stunned when I found out it was all true.

We shot it in black-and-white in three weeks, and the entire budget was about eighty thousand dollars; that was probably just a little more than lunch on
Karamazov
. In order to help the Cormans make this film I took a percentage of the gross rather than a salary. There were times I was an embarrassment to my economics degree. In the end I earned about two hundred dollars more than it cost me in expenses.

What made this project unusually exciting is that for some inexplicable reason Roger Corman decided that we would shoot this movie in the South. This was 1961, when schools throughout the South were still being forcefully integrated. This was less than five years after President Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard to escort black teenagers into Little Rock High School. And we went to Charleston, Missouri, which was in Mississippi County, a few miles from the borders with Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, to film it.

The entire cast and crew was housed in a small motel just outside of town. The day we arrived we were briefed by a policeman, who advised us, “Now, if I were you, I’d just take a few minutes and plan my escape route.” Escape route? As he explained, the town had found out what this movie was about and they were not happy about it. Really not happy. The only integrated group in the whole town was a prison gang and supposedly this gang had been hired to kill us in the motel. “We’ve got all this spotted,” the policeman said, “but we can’t hold back the waters.”

Kill me? But I’m an actor! And I was only being paid a percentage of the gross.

There had been some unpleasant moments in my career, but this was the first time I actually had to make an escape plan. I had a pretty good one. There was a window in the bathroom that looked out on a cornfield. If it became necessary I was going to climb up on the toilet, wiggle out that window, and start running into the corn-field. I figured I could hide in the cornfield.

I think there were only five professional actors in the cast. To save money the Corman brothers hired local people to play the minor roles. But just to be on the safe side, they gave them a different script
than the one we were actually shooting, a script that didn’t include some of the more inflammatory language and scenes. One of the professional actors was Leo Gordon, who had made a nice career out of playing tough-guy roles, but in this film he was cast as a hardworking, kind of average Joe. In fact, Gordon had been a boxing champion in the military and knew how to protect himself. We were talking one day near his car and he casually opened the trunk—and there was practically an arsenal in there. The trunk was filled with guns. He took whatever he wanted out of the trunk and slammed it shut, never even mentioning the trunk was filled with guns.

Okay, he’s an actor too. But he’s a well-armed actor. I began re-thinking my escape plan.

Naturally I tried to make friends with as many people in the town as possible. There was one man in particular who showed up almost every day to watch us shoot... filming. He was a big guy, a huge guy, and the word was that he was one of the really bad people in the town. But obviously he was intrigued by the making of a movie and continually volunteered to help. Let me move this lamp for you. You can’t, it’s a union job. But I want to help. He was one of those few people whose offers to help sound suspiciously like threats.