Up Till Now (12 page)

That half-hour has been parodied numerous times, including an episode of
The Simpsons
entitled “Terror at 5
¹
⁄2 Feet” in which Bart sees a gremlin tearing apart his school bus, and a music video made by the metal band Anthrax. And when a full-length
Twilight Zone
movie was made in 1983 this episode was one of the three chosen to
be remade, with John Lithgow playing my role. They had actually asked me to appear in the film, but I was doing
T.J. Hooker
and couldn’t get a release.

Believe me, at the time nobody realized we were making a classic television episode. This was the fifth season of
Twilight Zone
and they were just churning them out. I met Rod Serling, but I certainly didn’t get to know him. He always seemed so busy to me, so removed from the actual production, but perhaps he didn’t consider working with an actor worth the time it would take.

This was a series in which they spared every expense. But the writing was so good, as was this script by the great Richard Matheson, that the story overwhelmed the cheap production values. The gremlin was portrayed by an acrobat named Nick Cravat in a ridiculous furry costume; it looked sort of like a distant relative of Chew-bacca, and by distant I mean several light-years away. This was such a cheap costume, it looked like the actor was molting. That animal would have been uncomfortable in a tree, much less on the wing of an airplane in flight. It was just unbelievable, everyone knows that a real creature playing on an airplane wing at twenty thousand feet would be considerably more aerodynamically shaped.

But viewers didn’t care what the creature looked like, that was the brilliance of the story. They could have put someone out there with a lamp shade on his head and people would have been scared. One reviewer commented that this show “Did for the fear of flying what
Psycho
did for showers.”

However, as tribute to this program, you can buy a twelve-inch action figure of the gremlin holding a piece of the wing—in fact, there are two different gremlin action figures, both of them dressed in that same cheesy costume. Not from my store at WilliamShatner

.com, of course, but elsewhere.

While I had been offered the lead role in several different TV series, I’d turned them all down. I had been trained in the old school, although that was in the formative years of television so it actually was the new school: a real actor did not sign to do a series because then he couldn’t accept the starring role in the Broadway play or
Hollywood film that was going to make him a real star. Or, worse, you would become typecast, locked into a specific category of roles which could mean the end of a career. So I had turned down several offers to star in a series—and watched as Richard Chamberlain became a major TV star playing the role I’d turned down as
Dr. Kildare
and Robert Reed became a star playing the role I’d created in “The Defenders.” Maybe they had stardom and security and more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank, but I still had my actor’s integrity!

Unfortunately, I was also starting to get typecast—as an actor who starred in meaningful movies that didn’t make a lot of money and every TV series from
The Nurses
to
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
But truthfully, a guaranteed weekly paycheck was beginning to look very enticing. And I was practically a regular on
The Defenders
; I made five appearances on that show and six on
Dr. Kildare
. For someone who didn’t want to be tied to a series, I was tied to just about every series—without the publicity or the paycheck. Based on the success of his show featuring father-and-son defense attorneys,
The Defenders
producer Herb Brodkin created another show that told legal stories from the points of view of an older and a younger prosecutor. He asked me to co-star with a fine veteran actor named Howard Da Silva.

This is it, he told me, this is really truly cross-my-heart no kidding honest-to-goodness the show that is going to make you a star. It’s your turn, Bill.

Finally. Once again. Of course, this was long before we’d learned the hard reality of life that just before Charlie Brown kicks the football, Lucy is always going to pull it away from him. So I accepted the role of Assistant District Attorney David Koster in Herb Brodkin’s
For the People.
It wasn’t
The Defenders,
it was better than
The Defenders
. This wasn’t a repeat of something that had been done before, at that time this was a new and exciting idea. The trials of a passionate prosecutor, a dedicated man with a single-minded zeal to defend the criminal justice system of the United States of America. And it was perfect for me: I mean, maybe I’d never been inside a real courtroom
in my life, but I’d often played a lawyer or a criminal on TV. So I knew the TV legal system inside and out.

Howard Da Silva, who played my understanding boss, had been blacklisted by McCarthy, but somehow managed to retain his idealism. He was a terrific actor and while making this series we became good friends. I loved him. Jessica Walter played my beautiful wife, a free-spirited musician who performed in a classical string quartet. While the scripts focused on my work, they also included plot lines about our family life, which was a very innovative concept at that time. That was as close to a real family life as I was living. We shot thirteen episodes in New York so I had to leave Gloria and our three girls in Los Angeles while I stayed in the city. Working.

For the People
was a very good show about meaningful legal issues.
TV Guide
wrote that it was “more compelling” and “probing” than
The Defenders,
and that it put me in the “big leagues” of TV actors. The character I played, as I told a New York reporter, was the kind of dedicated prosecutor who did “a regular Spanish Flamenco heel dance on the toes of anybody who crosses my way.”

This was it, for real, this was the show that was going to make me a star. Herb Brodkin was producing it. Not only was Brodkin the most successful producer in live television—he also did the most meaningful programs. We had the finest New York actors and writers and directors. We were considered the companion show to
The Defenders
, a top-rated program. Critics loved the show. Many people were rooting for Howard Da Silva, whose career had been destroyed by the blacklist, and this was his comeback. Justice was going to triumph in real life as well as on the show. The show went on the air in January 1965.

Let me explain what happened this way: They will never be making a twelve-inch action figure of passionate Assistant District Attorney David Koster.

In its great wisdom, CBS decided the perfect time slot for our show was Sunday night at 9 P.M. Now, what other program would every man in America be watching at that time? How about the most popular television program in America? The number-one
ranked western,
Bonanza
. Now, sometimes you really do wonder if all the top CBS executives happened to be sitting around after work one day and one of them said, I got a great idea, let’s play a big joke on Bill Shatner. We’ll spend all this money to make a TV series, we’ll make him think that this is reallllllllllly the show that’s going to make him a star, and then we’ll put it on the air opposite the top-rated show on television. And they all laughed. I never understood why CBS would bother going through all the trouble and expense of hiring talented writers and actors and technicians and then dropping a very good program into the worst time slot in television.
Lamp Unto My Feet
had a better time slot—which I know for certain because I played a Roman soldier who picked up the cape worn by Christ, after which I converted to Christianity, while
For the People
was being run. Test patterns had better time slots.

But I was still optimistic. I figured, maybe people are tired of well-made westerns.
Bonanza
starred my old friend Lorne Greene, whose investment advice years earlier had cost me my five-hundred-dollar life savings. This was my chance to get even with him for uranium.

Got me again. As philosophers like to ask, if a TV show broadcast opposite the number-one program on the air is canceled, does anyone know it?
For the People
never had a chance. After thirteen weeks it was canceled.

Almost every actor goes through periods of great frustration, when you wonder seriously why you’re pursuing this often-impossible profession. Usually it happens when you know you’ve done very good work, when you’re proud of what you’ve accomplished, and no one sees it; it disappears. And when that has happened several times you begin to wonder, what am I doing this for? Am I wasting my life? I was born in 1931, right into the Great Depression. While I don’t remember details, I can remember the sense of desperation that seemed to pervade our lives. My father gladly accepted responsibility for many members of his family and it was the money he gladly shared that helped keep many of them alive. I had the same sense of responsibility, and there were many nights I lay thrashing in bed wondering how I was going to support my wife and our children, how I
was going to make the mortgage payment. The reality of my situation was pretty cold: I was constantly struggling to support my family, I was living from job to job with no security, and talent didn’t seem to make any difference between success and failure. Believe me, there were times when I thought about giving it up, when I never dreamed that someday I might achieve the kind of success that would lead to Howard Stern inviting me to join him in his famous homo room.

Actually,
For the People
was not the first series in which I starred, just the first one that got on the air in America. In 1963 I had been hired by producer Selig J. Seligman to star in a weekly series as Alexander the Great. Seligman, who had actually been an attorney at the Nuremberg Trials, was then producing the successful World War II series
Combat!
And although I didn’t realize it,
Alexander the Great
was intended to be
Combat!
in drag. It was going to be a big costume drama in which the men wore little loincloths and the women carried trays of grapes and wine and wore as little as permissible.

We filmed the two-hour pilot in Utah—for six months. Adam West and John Cassavetes were also featured in the cast. I rarely do any research beyond reading the script, but in this case I saturated myself in the lore of Alexander the Great. And I was enthralled by him. What an extraordinary human being. What a truly inspiring life he led. How can this show miss, I thought? It’s got action and adventure and beautiful women and guys fighting on horseback—and it’s based on fact. Perhaps it wasn’t as exciting as a hillbilly family moving to Beverly Hills or a Martian sorting out life on Earth, premises for two of the most popular shows then on the air, but nothing like it had ever been done before on television.

I had yet to figure out that by this time when something hadn’t been done on television, there probably was a good reason it hadn’t been done on television.

Alexander was a soldier and a philosopher, taught by Aristotle, who marched his army over twenty thousand miles in eleven years, conquering most of the known world. He never lost a battle and
introduced a common language—no, not Esperanto—and currency to a great part of that region, before dying at thirty-two years old. Coincidentally, I was precisely the same age he was when he died.

I spent more than a year preparing to play this role. This time I believed this role could make me a star. I worked out with weights and got myself in the best physical shape of my life. This is when I learned how to shoot a bow and arrow. I learned the elements of sword fighting and I learned how to ride a horse at a gallop bareback because Alexander had disdained a saddle as being too weak for his manliness! I learned how to do a flying mount, swinging up onto a horse from the side while it’s moving. And I worked with an expert horse trainer, for example, to learn how to mount a horse from the rear, which is very difficult and can be dangerous and unusually painful. Let me give you a little bit of advice here: horses do not like to be mounted from the rear. They do not come equipped with a rearview mirror and, like any animal, they don’t like to be surprised from behind where they are defenseless. But I learned how to do it.

Seligman wanted this show to be as historically accurate as possible. I had been outfitted in the hardened leather armor Alexander would have worn. During a pause on the second day of shooting, as I walked along holding the reins of a beautiful saddle-bred five-gaited champion, the director approached me with a worried look on his face and told me we had to reshoot a scene we’d done the day before. “We lost the sound when you were leaning over the dying soldier and saying kind words,” he explained. “All that leather you’re wearing is creaking and we can’t hear the dialogue.”

I looked out over all that I could survey of the hardened plains of Utah, dressed as Alexander had been dressed, holding a horse that could have been his legendary horse Bucephalus, and I thought, I’m talking about a problem that Alexander had to have dealt with because they rode at night. They would ride great distances at a great pace, binding their horses’ hooves in rags, and make silent forays into the camp of the enemy. In a flash I knew that Alexander had told his aides, “The noise we’re making with our leather armor is warning our enemy. We’ve got to do something about it.”

At that moment history came alive for me, it all sort of mystically came together.

Of course, Alexander didn’t have to deal with sensitive microphones and studio executives. There wasn’t too much we could do about the problem—they made some technical adjustments.

The pilot episode opened with a sonorous voice-over, proclaiming, “Persia, 2,297 years ago. A land of rock . . .” Unfortunately, Seligman couldn’t sell the pilot of a show taking place in a land of rock to the networks and eventually recut it to movie length. Released as a theatrical film in Europe, it was very successful. But by the time it was finally shown on American television, to be accurate the voice-over should have begun, “Persia, 3,001 years ago . . .” With so much wonderful historic material to work with, the scripts were just riddled with clichés. Now, perhaps if we had put Alexander in a time machine and had him transported to Beverly Hills where we could see his wacky adventures, that show might have worked, but this show did not.