Up Till Now (39 page)

I called David E. Kelley’s office a few hours later. “I don’t want to do it,” I said.

Sound effect: The phone drops onto the floor. “What?”

I’d thought it through, I explained. “If it works it’s going to get picked up for a series and I don’t want to do another series. I’m not going to work every day. I know, you’re going to tell me it’s an ensemble and I don’t have to work every day, but let me tell you something. Every time I’ve done a series I’ve lost a wife. I’m not going to lose this wife. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life sitting around a set. I just don’t want to work that hard anymore.

“Look, if you want me to do the six episodes of
The Practice
I’ll do that. But I’m not going to give them an option for a series.”

Eventually I was convinced that if the show did move forward it would be an ensemble piece. Each actor would have a week to star. It meant that I wouldn’t have to work five days each week and I wouldn’t be responsible for the success of the series. So we negotiated a mutual option that would allow me a limited work schedule if it became a series. And I put on Denny Crane’s immaculately tailored suit for the first time.

In my first episode of
The Practice
I was hired to defend James Spader’s character, the intense, socially conscious Alan Shore, who had been fired by his law firm for his somewhat dubious ethical practices in defense of truth and morality. “What’s with the red tie?” were my first words to Shore. “Around here we wear cold ties. Blue. Black. Hard colors. Tough colors. Red is soft. Soft does not work around here.”

After I walked away an associate explained to Shore, “That’s Denny Crane.”

“
The
Denny Crane?” Shore said, impressed. And so a character— and a relationship—was born.

Crane’s brilliance became obvious in the very next scene. After Spader had explained his legal problem, Crane considered the options for a moment and then asked, “You Jewish?”

Shore was confused. “Am I Jewish?”

“Best bet we argue they fired you because you’re a Jew. No defense against that.”

“Well, I would ordinarily agree,” Shore responded. “But they didn’t fire me for that. And I’m not Jewish.”

I lowered my Denny Crane eyes. “I didn’t hear that.”

Our conversation was interrupted by a young attorney from another firm who was in our offices to try to work out a settlement in a negligence case. Unfortunately his firm was not offering enough money, so I had been delegated to convince him to increase his offer. “Did Mr. Billings explain that Marie Sennet is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and I’m like a brother to her late husband?”

The associate calmly corrected me. “It was actually her brother who died. Not the husband.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and corrected him. “Really? You know what? Medical records aside, if
Denny Crane
tells the jury it was the husband, they’ll believe it was the husband.” Denny Crane’s huge ego was immediately defined as he told this young associate, “I’ll bet later tonight you’ll be on some barroom stool trying to finesse your way into some legal secretary’s panties. You want to get there faster, son? Tell her, earlier you held court with . . . Denny Crane.” I paused and repeated in an urgent whisper.
“Denny Crane
.
”

Seconds later Alan Shore was standing outside my office complaining to another lawyer. “He’s a whack-job...He’s asking me to plead Jewish.”

“I promise you,” this lawyer said, awe dripping from his voice. “Once he stands up in court . . . he’s Denny Crane.” And then he repeated it,
“Denny Crane.”

Alan Shore wasn’t convinced. After the first courtroom hearing he complained to me that he didn’t want Denny Crane to speak. Denny Crane corrected him. “You want Denny Crane to talk. When Denny Crane talks, E. F. Hutton listens.”

The story arc continued in the next episode. I was walking across a lobby in the first scene, and I saw Alan Shore. “Denny Crane,” I said, shaking hands.

“Why do you always tell me your name? Is it so
you
won’t forget?”

And here Denny Crane described completely his unique character. “Let me tell you something, soldier. I’ve learned from experience that people can’t actually believe they’re in the room with Denny Crane. They think it can’t be true. So I let them know it is true. I look them in the eye, Denny Crane. Gives them something to tell their grandkids. Denny Crane.”

Beautiful, just beautiful. What an extraordinary character to be permitted to play. Denny Crane is an actor’s amusement park; you can find anything you want there. For my work in
The Practice
I was again nominated for an Emmy, this time as Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama. Oh, I wanted to win. I’d always professed not to have felt slighted that I wasn’t even nominated for
Star Trek,
but I was. We often did some very good work on that program. So this time I wanted to win as strongly as anything I’d ever wanted in my life. It’s my time, I thought, I’m older now, this isn’t going to come around again. I wanted to win so badly that I managed to convince myself I wasn’t going to win, that way it would not be so painful when I didn’t win. I didn’t dare write a speech because if I did, it would mean I thought I might win. So as long as I didn’t think I could win, there really was a chance I could win.

Liz and I were sitting in the audience when my category was announced. A camera was focused on each of the nominees. Believe me, I was as aware as a pinprick that a camera was right on my face. Don’t show any disappointment, I told myself. Don’t dare frown.

I focused my eyes on the lips of the presenter. This is absolutely true. I was looking for the pursed lips of a “W.” And when I saw his lips purse I squeezed Liz’s hand. “William Shatner!”

The audience cheered. Literally cheered. I received a loud ovation. It was obvious the people in that room were genuinely happy for me. I was so moved because I’ve always felt like an outsider in this business. I’ve never felt like I belonged. This was a vote from my peers and it was so incredibly meaningful to me. As I walked onto the stage I had absolutely no concept of what I was going to say. I wanted to express my gratitude, I wanted to tell these beautiful people who had
so honored me how deeply I was indebted to them for their love and support. So I opened my mouth and said honestly, “What took you so long?”

Denny Crane. Denny Crane!

After the successful introduction of Denny Crane on
The Practice,
ABC bought David E. Kelley’s spin-off,
Boston Legal
. My reluctance to commit to the series had changed so drastically that rather than being reticent, I was very upset when I was offered a 7/13 contract, meaning they would only guarantee that I would appear in a minimum of seven of the first thirteen episodes rather than an all-shows-produced deal. That didn’t seem right. I was Denn...William Shatner. Emmy Award–winning William Shatner.

Denny Crane is a brilliant, outrageous, unpredictable, funny, sexist—”A hundred women there and you didn’t invite me? That’s two hundred breasts and you kept them all to yourself”—courageous, occasionally looney character. Creating Denny Crane was a collaboration between the producers, the writers, and me. He is an extraordinarily complex character, capable of moving almost instantly from serious drama to the comedy of the absurd, without ever acknowledging to the audience which aspect of that is real. When he confides to Alan Shore, “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of...I think I have mad penis,” it has to be said with such honesty, such fear, that the audience will wonder how much he believes that and how much he is playing with Shore. Is he truly crazy, with moments of laserlike insight or is he absolutely brilliant, using absurdity to control his terrain? It took us several shows to clearly define the character as indefinable.

Denny Crane was described as a man whose great financial success as a litigator is visible. He wears only expensive suits, he’s always perfectly dressed, smokes the best cigars, and drinks the best scotch—and knows the difference. Apparently in early meetings

F. Lee Bailey’s name was mentioned. The sets were designed before the first script was written, which was somewhat unusual. Basically, it takes place in the plush offices of a respected Boston law firm, one of those places where the carpet is so thick the only sound you hear
is the perfect-tone chime of an arriving elevator. In one show, for example, Denny Crane admits, “I’m so far up the ass of big business that I view the world as one great colon.”

The most difficult aspect for Kelley was finding just the right balance between drama and humor in the scripts. So after we shot the pilot David E. Kelley decided it wasn’t substantial enough and rewrote it. He asked one of the producers, “What if we made it
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
set in a law firm?” The second version of the pilot was much funnier than the initial script. Then he wrote another version which was extremely serious and tended to minimize the relationship between Denny Crane and Alan Shore. The draft was, it was finally agreed, a very good episode of
The Practice
and would disappoint those people expecting it to be a truly new show. Then he rewrote it again and that was the version we finally shot.

That balance between drama and comedy was extremely difficult to find and it took some poking around to get there. We struggled with it for several shows. As brilliantly as the shows were written, there was a lot about Denny Crane that wasn’t on the page. In one of our very first scenes, for example, Alan Shore asks Denny Crane, “What are you, homosexual?” The way it was written I didn’t respond. I had to say something. Why are you asking? Nice of you to care. So’s your old man. Anything, but I had to respond. Yet there was nothing written to indicate Denny Crane’s reaction. And I had to stop and think about it. How would this character react? He’s a tough guy, a former military officer, always calling people “soldier” and fixing their ties, and sexual harassment be damned—he’s never afraid to tell a woman how sexy she looks. And what he would like to do about it. I was left completely on my own to develop this character, which is right because that’s why they hired me. So my first reaction to it was to laugh. Denny Crane a homosexual? Now that’s funny, soldier. I had no idea how to play it. I didn’t know how to deal with it and that kind of scared me. Do you like this guy or not like him? Is he sardonic or not sardonic? I needed an emotion to color my words and I didn’t know it yet, I didn’t know Denny Crane well
enough to know how he would react. But I learned. As Denny Crane went through a variety of sometimes very unusual experiences, from being caught in a passionate embrace with a blow-up doll made up to resemble his partner, played by Candice Bergen, to falling in love with the midget daughter of a former girlfriend, I learned who he is. Denny Crane was once a great lawyer and at times is still at the top of that game. He is a great reader of human nature, which gives him a great advantage. And he reads people with the skill of a great poker player.

Each decision we made further defined the character. In the first episode an old friend sadly told Denny Crane that his wife was having an affair and he was asking Denny to investigate. “I want you to find out what’s going on,” he said.

As it turned out Denny Crane knew exactly what was going on— because he was the one with whom she was having the affair. When this friend found out he pulled a gun on Denny Crane and threatened to kill him. Rather than pleading for his life, or warning the man of the consequences, Denny Crane became the aggressor. “Go ahead, pull the trigger. Because that’s the way Denny Crane should go out. It’ll be front-page news in
The New York Times
.” Great writing, strong character definition—but my question was, how do I play it? I knew what Kirk would do, and Hooker. I wanted to walk around my desk and confront this man; I wanted to be bold, get up right in his face. I wanted to show him that a mere gun doesn’t scare Denny Crane. That seemed the right response to me. But our director, Bill D’Elia, strongly believed Denny Crane would sit behind his desk defiantly and say quietly and resolutely, “Go ahead and pull the trigger . . .”

We argued about it. Voices got raised. We stood toe-to-toe. Mano a mano. Actor-to-director. The creative process at work. Loudly. He followed me back to my dressing room, both of us defending a position that we knew might not even be the best answer. Finally I agreed to do it his way. It worked, and further colored the character.

Although certainly it didn’t work as well as walking around the desk and confronting him.

Scene by scene Denny Crane was shaped. David E. Kelley’s writing fed my performance which further fed the writing which enhanced my performance which was reflected in the writing... Everything I’d learned in my career went into his creation, so when I read a line the underlying emotion had to come from the life I’d invented for him, rather than from my own life. When Denny Crane is asked by Alan Shore if he’s lonely, for example, I could say no and mean it or I could say no and mean, yes, I am desperately lonely. But in order to do that I had to say it with the conviction of an arrogant lawyer whose attitude is, I can convince a jury that anything I say is true. An actor’s choice is to say the lines as he or she thinks they should be said, or say them through the filter of their character’s life. And the more I learned about Denny Crane the more he was able to speak for himself. Although, truthfully, Liz believes that sometimes I experiment with Denny Crane at home. And as he is a broad exaggeration of what I am, and she knows me so well, it’s difficult for her to separate Shatner from Crane.

But there was one thing that I insisted Denny Crane was not— Captain James T. Kirk. In one of our first scripts I had a line in which I insisted members of the firm call me “Captain.” I told D’Elia, “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to say this line. I don’t want to be called Captain.”

D’Elia agreed. “I bet I know why.” I smiled and nodded, and then he asked, “Okay, so how about Commander?”

Admittedly, by the end of our second season I was feeling so comfortable in Denny Crane’s expensive suits that while talking to my partners I did describe myself as “the captain of the ship.” And in another episode Alan Shore did refer to sealice as “cling-ons,” to which I responded, somewhat startled, “Did you say ‘Klingons’?”