Up Till Now (31 page)

In all the years of my career, with all the fascinating places I’d traveled to and all the shows I’d done, there was still one thing I had never learned how to do. I didn’t know how to not work. The curse of the actor’s life. I am absolutely fascinated as I look over my shoulder at my past—and Jerry Lawler—at how the simplest decisions I’ve made have had the most complex reactions. A career is a series of connected events. So when I turned down an offer I wasn’t simply rejecting a job and a paycheck, I was completely eliminating the possibility that it might lead to something else. When you turn down an opportunity to work you’re also turning down an experience, maybe even an adventure, and a universe of possibilities.
The Transformed Man
led to Priceline.com. Saying yes to possibilities has been the core of my career.

Let me give you a perfect example. In addition to acting and producing and directing and writing and doing commercials and appearing at conventions I also worked quite often as a host or narrator of some kind of special. I had become ...the voice of authority! I hosted
Heroes and Sidekicks,
which celebrated motion-picture heroes
. The Love Boat Fall Preview Party
celebrated love on a boat. On
The Search for Houdini
famous magicians attempted to re-create some of Houdini’s most famous illusions—and in a live séance at the end of the show we tried to contact him. Obviously he was out that night, as he didn’t call back. I hosted the
Dick Clark Bloopers Show,
Don
Rickles’s bloopers show
Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders, An Evening at the Improv, The Best of Us Awards Show, TV’s Funniest Game Show Moments, The Horror Film Awards, MTV Movie Awards.
I had gotten quite good at standing in front of a camera and reading lines with great sincerity. So when producer Arnold Shapiro called and asked me to host a series of three specials he was doing about people calling 911 for help, I immediately agreed.

Arnold Shapiro and I had first worked together for a couple of days more than a decade earlier, when he’d produced the
Science-Fiction Awards
on which I’d performed the classic “Rocket Man.” A few years after that he’d produced a tribute to the Air Force on its fortieth anniversary called
Top Flight
—and had hired me to host it because I was known for piloting a rather impressive spacecraft.

We also worked on
Rescue 911
which had started with a terrible crime. Late on December 14, 1988, in Arlington, Texas, an eighteen-year-old thief armed with a knife broke into an apartment. There was some speculation that he was on drugs, but obviously he intended to rob the place. A man and his two children, a fourteen-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl, were asleep inside the apartment. The man woke up and confronted the thief, who attacked him with the knife. The kids woke up and the nine-year-old had the presence of mind to dial 911 for help. She started screaming into the phone, “This man’s attacking my dad! He’s got a knife!” Suddenly there was an explosion—the fourteen-year-old had grabbed his father’s shotgun and fired once, killing the thief. The entire 911 call was recorded; the girl screaming, the shotgun being fired, and finally the police arriving. Journalist Charles Osgood got hold of the chilling tape and ran it on his radio show,
The Osgood File
.

The president of CBS’s Entertainment Division, Kim LeMasters, heard Osgood’s show while driving to work. He wondered if similar tapes existed, maybe even enough of them to fill an hour of television. Norman Powell, then the head of CBS Productions, hired Shapiro to produce two or three specials based on 911 calls. Documentary specials needed a celebrity host to do promotion and attract
an audience. Kim LeMasters had a great idea for that host, suggesting, “What about Leonard Nimoy?”

“And as soon as he said that,” Shapiro once told me, “I thought, no, what about Bill Shatner? He’d played T.J. Hooker, a police officer, and police officers participate in rescues. It worked for me.”

Coincidently, ABC was developing almost the exact same show, to be hosted by Pernell Roberts. So we were in a great race to get on the air first. We beat them by two weeks and got a very good rating— they broadcast their show against
60 Minutes
and got a very bad number. No one could rescue the ABC show.

Star Trek
changed lives,
Rescue 911
saved them. We know we saved at least 350 lives, but the true figure may well be thousands. After both of our specials had won their time period CBS decided to turn the show into a full series. Now, please pause here with me for a moment as I savor a delectable situation. I want you to pretend you’re a CBS executive, sitting in your office, leaning back in your comfortable chair with your feet up on your desk and looking out the window, feeling very good about the amazing ratings these two specials received and confident about the prospects for the new series. What’s this? A knock on the door. An assistant walks into your office with a troubled look on his face. “Guess what?” he says reluctantly. “Somehow we neglected to sign Shatner to a deal for a series.”

The actor wins! The actor wins! Remember how ABC did not renegotiate my contract when
T.J. Hooker
was changed from an ensemble to the show in which I worked in almost every scene? Now it was my turn. This was one of the very few times in my career that I had the advantage over the producer—and we milked that advantage. As producer Arnold Shapiro describes it, “Needless to say the deal that we made was very favorable to him. In fact, to that time there probably never had been another deal like that in television.”

Rescue 911
was on the air for seven and a half years. What set this show apart from the reality shows currently on the air was that our stories were real. We didn’t create reality. We made approximately 185 episodes. At one time it was on the air on CBS every Tuesday night—as well as in sixty countries. For almost three years we were
one of television’s top twelve shows. It was a series dedicated to the men and women who saved the lives of strangers, often at the risk of their own lives, ranging from emergency medical technicians to good samaritans. Each episode was an hour long, consisting of between three and five pretty amazing stories. We used existing footage and when necessary our own re-creations, and whenever possible when we did re-creations we used the actual people involved in the event. As host, I introduced the show—”True stories of dark despair and unexpected heroes on...
Rescue 911
”—and each segment—”On October 3, 1985, Michigan state trooper David Ayer was only an hour away from the end of his shift. But on this day David would not be able to serve out his time uneventfully. Instead he was forced to watch as a freak accident on a road outside Northville, Michigan, changed the lives it touched...forever.” “Children’s curiosity can drive them to the heights of achievement. But it can also push them beyond the boundaries of what is safe, as Rene Durschell discovered on June 23rd, 1995, at her home in Boynton Beach, Florida.”—and then I did the closing. We actually filmed my stand-ups on Sundays. Every other Sunday we’d set up at an EMT center—in Glendale, Manhattan Beach, everywhere—and shoot several shows. I did a lot of walking and talking with police cars, fire trucks, or ambulances in the background, depending on the type of story we were telling. With the number of different takes we did and the time it took to set up, we were there most of the day. And pretty much every Friday I’d be in a Hollywood sound studio doing voice-over narration. That was my job, show up and read my lines every Friday and every other Sunday. It took a full-time staff of about seventy-five people to do the show, yet somehow the audience perceived
Rescue 911
to be my show.

We told an extraordinary range of amazing stories on the show. An Idaho hunter mistakes a couple for a bear and shoots them. A police officer leaps onto runaway boxcars that are pushing an automobile down the tracks. Children lost in the mountains. Divers trapped underwater. A toddler falls into a hole. A teen touches a hot power line with a pool pole. People shot and stabbed by intruders. A truck’s brakes fail and he plummets forty feet into a swamp. A young
boy trapped under ice for forty-five minutes. A plane whose landing gear won’t deploy. A unconscious skydiver. A seven-year-old girl helps deliver her mother’s baby. A ten-year-old boy performs the Heimlich maneuver to save his choking brother. A duck gets its head stuck in the plastic rings from a six-pack of soda. A good samaritan dives into a river to try to save two women trapped in a submerged car. A woman is trapped in her smoke-filled home when her TV set explodes. A pregnant deer is hit by a car. A woman has to drop eight babies from the window of her burning apartment. Explosions, fires, floods, shootings, stabbings, runaway cars and trucks and trains, falls and accidents with tools, and heart attacks and difficult births—and almost always, nobody died. Perhaps most amazing was that almost all of the stories we told had a hap . . . satisfactory ending. Only when we told a cautionary tale did people die—the teenager who inhaled cleaning fluid to get high and couldn’t be saved. People who took absurd risks. A litany of dangerous acts that we wanted to warn our viewers not to do. In truth, a high percentage of the calls answered by these medical technicians do end in a death, but we concentrated on their successes. The reality of television programming is that people don’t die on Tuesday-night reality shows.

We saved at least 350 lives. That’s not an estimate, that was based on letters we received from viewers telling us that because of a story they saw on
Rescue 911
they either were able to save someone else’s life or their life had been saved. We never anticipated that happening. This was a prime-time program on CBS; our primary objective was to save our jobs. So when we started getting these letters we were astounded. And very, very pleased.

The first letter we received came from a family in St. Louis. On a very cold Tuesday in November 1988, they were moving into a new apartment. The apartment was freezing and they had great difficulty figuring out how to keep their furnace lit. The husband had spent the day transporting boxes from their old apartment as his wife and their four children unpacked. But as the day progressed she felt progressively sicker. Finally she told him, “You need to take me to the Emergency Room right now. I think I’m dying.”

The Emergency Room was crowded and as her problem was not visibly life threatening this couple was told to wait. As they waited they watched a TV in the waiting room, which happened to be tuned to CBS. The second story we did that night was about a woman who suddenly and for no apparent reason got very sick. Coincidently this couple had been having problems with their furnace too, and her husband had been smart enough to call the gas company. A technician rushed to their house and discovered a potentially lethal carbon monoxide leak.

The couple in that waiting room was stunned. The story had accurately described her symptoms. In a voice on the edge of panic she asked her husband, “You think that’s what could be wrong with me?” Both of them realized instantly that their four children were asleep in that new apartment. The husband raced home—by the time he got there three of their children were unconscious. The fire department rushed them all to the hospital where their lives were saved. As the doctor who saved them said, “In another half hour one or more of these kids could have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

It was miraculous. Nobody really expects CBS to save lives. But that was just the beginning. The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
did an article about it, which got picked up and was reprinted around the country. And then we began receiving letters from people who had saved someone’s life by applying the Heimlich maneuver, which they had seen demonstrated on our show, or by using CPR as we’d shown it, or by picking up an extension cord that had been hidden under a heavy piece of furniture and discovering it was badly frayed. When we first went on the air I was told that slightly less than 50 percent of communities even had a 911 system—by the time we went off the air the nation was well on the way to almost 100 percent coverage. After we did several stories in which the person calling 911 couldn’t correctly identify the location from which they were calling, many communities switched to a more sophisticated emergency system in which the address came up automatically. Eventually we had documented more than 350 situations in which information from
Rescue 911
had saved lives. Undoubtedly there were many more.

Our stories came from police and fire departments, 911 dispatch centers, hospitals, newspapers, and viewers. It was impossible to meet these people, to do this show, without developing a tremendous sense of appreciation for what they do on a daily basis as well as satisfaction with the entire system. It works. When someone needs help, the system gets help there literally in minutes. It may well be the one government agency that delivers what it was established to deliver. Of course, there were many stories we couldn’t tell. One man, for example, managed to get his tongue stuck to the door on his freezer compartment and couldn’t get free. We had several stories about naked people who had somehow managed to become wedged into the space between their toilets and the wall and couldn’t get free. Several thieves got caught in chimneys, and I remember a pair of burglars who robbed a store then had to call 911 because the doors were locked and they couldn’t get out. We didn’t tell the true story about a local fire department that was called to help a squirrel whose head had gotten caught in a hole in a tree. And we definitely could not tell the story about the couple who liked to play sex games.

I was told by our producers that this was indeed a true story: apparently a man dressed in a Batman costume had tied his willing partner to the bed. The man in the Batman costume then climbed up on a bureau. The plan was that he was going to leap onto the bed—Batman arrives to save the day! Unfortunately, when Batman jumped into the air he hit his head on a beam and plummeted straight to the ground, unconscious. Somehow the woman managed to call 911, and the firemen who rushed to the scene found the naked woman still tied to the bed and Batman lying unconscious on the floor.