Up Till Now (3 page)

I know what she’s gonna do;And I can’t wait for her to do it. She knows me and I know her; what I hate and what I prefer. Dum de dum, dum de um. I know her scent, I know her touch; where to hold her and just how much.

My lady belongs here and so...

Okay, I’m back. Where was I? Growing up, the concept that I could continue to do this playing as an adult was not something that occurred to me. It was just something that I loved doing. In high school I played football and acted in school plays and for the first time I allowed myself to dream. Under my photograph in my senior yearbook I finally admitted it out loud: I wanted to be an actor. Not
that
out loud of course, not loud enough for my father to hear me.

While still in high school I got my first real job in the theater—as a stage manager. I was fifteen years old and I had absolutely no experience. Looking back, I suspect I got the job because I was young and
good-looking and oh so terribly naïve. A well-known French male singer was starring in a play at the Orpheum Theatre, which housed all the touring companies. It was thrilling for me. I was in the theater; backstage, but inside the theater. The actor was tall and good-looking and early in the run he asked me if I wanted to join him for dinner.

Well, I thought, I must be a great stage manager. The star of the show has asked me to have dinner with him. Naturally I accepted his invitation. As we left the theater that night he asked me if I had a jacket with me. “No,” I admitted.

“That’s fine,” he said casually. “I’ve got a jacket that’ll fit you in my hotel room.”

Welcome to show business, Shatner. The strongest memory I have of that night is being chased around the bed. Football season had recently ended so I was in good shape and strong. I stayed out of his reach. Incredibly, I didn’t even know what he wanted. I was unaware of homosexuality. I didn’t know that men could be attracted to other men. It was not something spoken about in middle-class Jewish homes.

What happened that night changed my attitude toward women for the rest of my life. I understood the anger and frustration that a woman feels when she says no, and means no, and the man believes she is saying yes.

Acting had become my passion. I was hungry to stand before an audience and perform. I accepted every opportunity offered to me. When I was sixteen I got a part in a production of Clifford Odets’s
Waiting for Lefty
being done at a Communist organization meeting hall in Montreal. Every serious young actor wanted to do meaningful theater, even if we didn’t understand the meaning. I didn’t know anything about Communism, but I knew the history of Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre. I remember being on stage, looking nobly to the ceiling, my fist raised, screaming, “Strike! Strike!” And the audience—my God, they went out of their minds! “Strike! Strike!” When the audience responded I could feel the power of my performance. Me, little Billy Shatner from the west end of
Montreal, not quite Westmont, holding this audience in my hand. Strike! Strike! It was magnificent, beautiful. Strike! Strike!

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. No understanding of political philosophy. I was acting, that’s all. Giving life and emotion to words written on paper. The red-baiting movement started several years later, just as I was beginning my career in America. I was terrified that someone would ask me about my work for the Communist party.

At West Hill High School I was never a very good student, more because of a lack of interest than a lack of ability. In school, those things about the world that would one day intrigue and delight and fascinate me didn’t even interest me. I wanted to act and play football, that was it. I barely graduated from high school and yet was accepted to the McGill University School of Commerce. The business school. I was admitted under a Jewish quota that existed at that time. With my grades they must have been marking on a very large curve. My family believed I was at McGill to learn how to bring modern economic practices into my father’s clothing business, so I could turn it into the hugely successful corporation we all knew was just the completion of my college education away. But I knew I was there to perform in their shows.

I spent considerably more time in the drama department than going to class. I got by, I always managed to get by, but more important, I wrote and produced and appeared in several campus productions. I was also working part-time as a radio announcer at the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Here, remember these words: “Stay tuned for our next exciting program.” That was me.

Growing up, I wanted to be like the kids who lived in Westmont, the moneyed part of the city. I wanted to be like the upper-class English kids who drove their MGs to college. I remember when I was five or six years old I found a five-dollar bill. That was all the money in the world to a child, but I wanted to share it with my only friend—so I tore it in half.

I understood the importance of money—but acting was more important. I knew I would never make as much money acting as my father
earned in the schmatta business, but I didn’t care. I suspect every actor has a financial goal when they begin. Mine was a hundred dollars a week. I thought, if I could earn a hundred dollars a week as an actor I will be a very happy man. Leonard, whose father was a barber, wanted to earn ten thousand dollars a year, but Leonard always had extravagant dreams.

Telling this to my father was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. My father’s dream was that we would work together one day. As a teenager I would go with him on sales calls. We’d put on our best suits and drive to these small French villages outside Montreal. He had friends in every village—this is my old friend Jake, my old friend Pierre, my old friend Robert—people he had sold to for years. To each of these men he would proudly introduce me, “This is my son,” and they would comment on how tall I was, how much I looked like him. It was the salesman’s dance. I was being brought into the family business.

I didn’t know how I could tell him. One afternoon, during my third year in college, for some reason we were in my bedroom and he asked me casually if I’d thought about my future. Just as casually I told him I wanted to be an actor. And his heart just plummeted.

He sat down on my bed as the enormity of that hit him. He didn’t understand the theater. Acting wasn’t a job for a man. Actors were bums. For him, it was like being a minstrel. The chances of succeeding, of having any kind of meaningful life were very, very slim. I knew he was devastated, but the only thing he said to me was, “Well, you do what you want to do. There’s always a place for you here. I don’t have the money to support you, but I’ll help you the best I can.” The only thing he asked of me was that I not become a “hanger-on.” By that he meant being dependent on other people, on unemployment insurance, a man who couldn’t earn his own keep.

How brave he was to put aside his dreams so I might pursue my own. And how it must have hurt him. He was a man rooted deeply in the reality of a paycheck; the life of an artist was inconceivable to him. But rather than trying to talk me out of it, or offering advice, he gave me freedom.

And he always kept that place for me. Just in case.

I graduated from McGill University with my degree in commerce and I immediately put that degree to work. Mrs. Ruth Springford, a woman who had directed me in several college plays, was the director of a summer theater, the Mountain Playhouse. Having seen my work, she hired me as the assistant manager. The company was performing mostly one-set Broadway shows like
Roman Candle
and
The Seven Year Itch.
In those days playwrights were writing shows with minimal scenery and sets, knowing that if their play was successful on Broadway the number of companies that produced it in local theaters—and paid those royalties—would depend greatly on how many sets it had. Generally those plays were light comedies featuring a young guy—often a shy or bumbling young guy—with an innocent smile big enough to reach the back rows.

I was a terrible assistant manager. A disgrace to my commerce degree. I kept losing tickets and mixing up reservations, which were basically the only responsibilities I had. Actors were easily replaceable, but the survival of the theater depended on getting the ticket sales right. Most actors get hired; to save the theater I was fired into the cast. I began playing all those happy young man roles.

These were Broadway shows coming to Canada; the audience was ready to laugh. My talent was knowing my lines and waiting until the laughter stopped before speaking. I had no formal acting training, I never did. I would read about actors in New York City studying The Method. Well, I had my own method, I said my lines as if I were the character. I learned how to act from acting. The audience taught me how to act. If I did something and the audience responded, I did it again. So this experience of working every night, learning new roles, studying lines, experimenting with movements and expressions, that was my acting class.

A few years later, when I was a member of the company at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, they held classes in technique and voice production and even swordplay for the young actors. The problem was that we were working much too hard as actors to find the time to take classes to learn how to act. By the time I had
learned technique we had already opened our second show of the season and were in the middle of rehearsals for the third show. But at Stratford I did work with classically trained actors, among them James Mason and Anthony Quayle. We worked with experienced actors every day, we rehearsed with them, we played small roles, we understudied, and when we weren’t onstage we watched them. I learned to act by watching other actors, reading about acting, and living with actors. I studied my craft, but I learned acting by acting.

I was a serious actor, I knew I must be a serious actor because I wasn’t making any money at it. Those days prepared me very well for much later in my career when I would be a well-known television actor and wasn’t making any money from it. I still dreamed of one day earning one hundred dollars a week, but that seemed far away. At least once a day, sometimes more, I spent twenty-seven cents for a plate of fruit salad at Kresge’s lunch counter. I lived on fruit salad and grew to hate fruit salad. My one luxury was my forty-dollar car. That’s what I paid for it, and it was worth that price. The driver’s door was jammed shut, so to get in and out I’d have to climb through the window, and it burned so much oil that every forty or fifty miles I’d stop at a gas station and pour used oil into the crankcase. In those days you could buy oil that had been drained out of other cars very cheaply, which was my price. Generally I’d pour in oil once a day.

When that summer ended Mrs. Springford recommended me to the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa—as their assistant manager. Again my uncanny ability to lose tickets and mix up reservations—although sometimes I would mix up tickets and lose reservations—ended up with me joining the cast—at a salary of thirty-one dollars a week!

During my second season in Ottawa a woman contacted me and told me very seriously that a company was being formed to perform Shakespeare in Stratford and invited me to join the company. I thought she was kidding. Give up a secure job that paid thirty-one dollars a week to go to some little town and become a member of some
Shakespeare company I’d never heard of? What did they think I was, an actor?

“Thank you,” I said, “but I have a regular job and I’m going to keep that one.”

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival opened and within months had become celebrated throughout Canada and eventually around the world.

But I had my job. I worked at the Mountain Playhouse in the summer and at the Canadian Rep in the winter. We would do a different play every week, rehearsing and performing every day. They were almost exclusively laugh-a-second Broadway comedies. It wasn’t just laughs, it was laughs within laughs. When you’re doing a comedy silence is absolutely deafening; you not only can hear it, it cuts right through you. Oh no, what did I do wrong? That got a laugh last night, what did I do differently? When you’re onstage and you don’t get a laugh there is a clang in the mind of every performer on that stage; everybody immediately adjusts and tries to find the rhythm.

I did those comedies for almost three years. I thought I had experienced the worst possible clangs until I had this great idea many years later. This was long after James T. Kirk had become so well known. This was one of those epically bad ideas that seem so good at the time, and only later cause you to question the very existence of life: I was asked to perform at the Comedy Club in Los Angeles and I said, “I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to go in there like Shatner thinks he’s Captain Kirk, and I’m going to go in there like Captain Kirk thinks he’s funny.”

The owner of the club looked at me seriously, “Bill, that’s not funny,” he said.

Now really, who’s going to know what’s funny? The actor who had spent several years performing light comedies in Canada or the owner of a comedy club that features stand-up performers every night? I said, “Let me explain this to you. It will be very funny because they will get that I’m Captain Kirk who thinks he’s funny, but he’s not funny, which is why he will be funny.”

I remember that very strange look he had in his eyes. It was clear to me then that he did not understand the essence of comedy. I told all the usual Van Allen Belt jokes—you can probably imagine them: “Hey, a funny thing happened to me on the way to Zetar,” “Take my Klingon, please.” “A Romulan walked into the transporter room with a chicken on his head...”

That audience laughed like a roomful of Vulcans. Oh my, it was just awful. The problem, I discovered, was that the audience did not grasp the intricate sophistication of my act. Rather than understanding that I was playing Captain Kirk who thought he was funny, but wasn’t funny, which was why he was funny, they watched me perform and instead decided, “Wow, Shatner’s terrible.”

That was the worst comedic night of my life. But I had started preparing for it in Ottawa. I struggled in Ottawa. My father’s offer, there would always be a place for me, resonated in my head. It would be unfair to say I was a starving actor; I wasn’t making enough money to be starving. My father gave me a few thousand dollars, telling me, “I can’t do any more.” It was enough to help me survive but not enough to really live on. I know he must have been torn between wanting to help me but also wanting me to experience how incredibly difficult the life I’d chosen could be.