Live Long and . . . Page 3

  By eight o’clock, Hartford was closed. Lucky Dave asked me, “Now what are we going to do?”

  I looked him in the eye. Lucky Dave is an adventurous soul. We discovered we were thinking the same thing: We have to drive it.

  Let me review: I was eighty-four years old. My bills were all paid and there was more money in the bank than I would ever spend. The theater manager from Joliet had called Kathleen and told her he would understand if we had to cancel. There literally was no compelling reason that I had to get there.

  It never seriously occurred to me to cancel the show. I was booked. The show had to go on. I’d spent seven decades showing up on time and prepared. Something inside me whispered that the day I stopped showing up was the day I started dying. Lucky Dave told me, “A friend of mine is coming to the show tonight. He weighs more than two hundred pounds. He can sit in the back.” Lucky Dave then reminded me he was a New Yorker and didn’t have a driver’s license, but his friend, Big Pete, would spell me behind the wheel.

  Okay, we had a plan. No one said it was a good plan, but it was a plan. When the show ended at ten o’clock, we were going to get into a small four-wheel-drive Fiat and attempt to outrace the snowstorm.

  The show started late because of the impending storm. By the time I finished the usual meet and greet and signed some autographs, it was almost eleven o’clock. We threw everything into the car. Lucky Dave got in the passenger seat. Big Pete squeezed into the back. We took off! I was determined: “If we can just get over the George Washington Bridge before it starts snowing…”

  We made it over the bridge and onto the Jersey Turnpike. I was totally focused. At that moment there was nothing in my life more important than making it to Joliet in time to perform my one-man show. I was obsessed. I had to get there. We made it to US 80, still no snow. And then, just after midnight, I saw the first snowflakes in my headlights.

  We were in Pennsylvania when the blizzard really hit. I could barely see ahead of me. Most of the traffic were very large trucks, which raced by me going seventy, eighty miles an hour. From the back, Big Pete finally admitted, “I don’t know how to drive in snow.”

  It didn’t matter. I was the commander of this ship and I was taking us to Illinois. I was from Montreal. I had learned to drive in snow. Of course, living in California for the past five decades hadn’t provided a lot of opportunity to practice. I decided I would get behind a truck and let it clear my path. I found a truck going a reasonable speed and tucked in behind it.

  Conditions were getting worse. There were at least six inches of snow on the road, which was beginning to ice up. I stayed about forty yards behind the truck, which suddenly moved over to a side lane—and directly in front of me was a silver Audi, stopped in the middle of the icy highway. I managed to ease over and just missed hitting him. As I went past the stalled Audi, I saw it was turned around, pointing directly at us, and all its lights were on—blinkers, brake lights, it was all lit up. I glanced at Lucky Dave. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes opened wider than I had ever seen.

  We kept going. I was driving as if my life depended on getting to Joliet, which, as we were experiencing, it actually did. We continued for another hour, then decided to stop for gas and sustenance. We had been passing rest areas and I had noticed that the large trucks were huddled there, like rows of elephants, waiting for this blinding snowstorm to let up. I finally pulled into one of the rest areas. As Big Pete went into the McDonald’s, I began tracking the storm on my cell phone. Fifty miles ahead of us there still was a hundred percent chance of snow, but thirty miles beyond that there was only a 90 percent chance.

  “There’s an opening!” I shouted to Lucky Dave and Big Pete. A 10 percent chance seemed like quite a bit at that moment. We jumped back in the car and took off. We got back on the highway and settled in. And no more than seven or eight minutes later, there, stopped right in the middle of the road, was the silver Audi. I steered around him again, and this time the brakes locked up. Somehow we slid right past him. “That’s the ghost Audi,” I said. It was incredible. I had been going fifty miles an hour or more for at least two hours. We had stopped for no more than ten minutes. How could it possibly have gotten ahead of us? There was no rational explanation, but there it was.

  It began snowing harder. I just kept going. What we were doing made no sense. I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. There was no one else on the road; the biggest trucks had pulled to the side. I kept going. I was terrified we were going to slide off the road into a snowbank. We didn’t have anything we might need with us; we didn’t even have a blanket. Big Pete finally spoke up, suggesting that maybe it made sense to stop in a rest area.

  Sense? Stop? “I have to get to Joliet,” I said, my eyes focused on whatever road I could see.

  As we got to the 90 percent area, the snow seemed to slow. Then we got to 80 percent. And boom, we drove out of the storm.

  We reached Joliet in the morning. I slept several hours and did a performance. No one seemed to care that I had risked my life to get to Joliet. They had paid their money for tickets and they wanted to be entertained.

  After the show, I had planned to get some sleep, but I was so wound up that it was impossible. We got into the Fiat, Big Pete crawled into the back, and we drove directly to Detroit. I dropped Big Pete at the airport, and he flew back to New York. I did the show in Detroit that night and the next day I flew home.

  How foolish I was. Three guys in a Fiat 500? What drove me to do it? Well, certainly not Big Pete, as he didn’t drive at all.

  The lesson that has made a difference in my life is that success always begins with showing up. I think it is accurate to state that not every show or movie in which I appeared could be considered prestigious. I give a great deal of thought to turning down anything; instead I see each job as an opportunity to practice my craft—and get paid for doing it. I have to admit when I accepted was the role of “the TV producer” in the 1982 film Visiting Hours, the story of “a deranged, misogynistic killer who assaults a journalist. When he discovers that she survived the attack, he follows her to the hospital to finish her off.” I didn’t expect to receive critical acclaim. I expected to do my job to the best of my ability, get my paycheck, and then, I hoped, get another job.

  It was a job and I accepted it. I showed up. I chased the killer through the halls of the hospital.

  There is a story I heard a long time ago that has stuck with me. Very few people know that young John Wayne was one of the first singing cowboys. Wayne made a series of B Westerns. They cost almost nothing, they had very little plot beyond the guy in the white hat beating up the guy in the black hat, and they had to be shot in six days. Apparently one day during the Depression he was walking on the Fox lot and ran into the great humorist Will Rogers. “How’s it going, kid?” Rogers asked him.

  In response, Wayne released all his frustrations, complaining that the studio had him making terrible B movies, they had him singing songs; he went on and on.

  Rogers listened patiently, and when Wayne finally calmed down he gave him the best advice Wayne ever received. “You working?” he asked.

  Wayne nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Keep working,” he said, and walked away.

  That really sums up what I believe: Keep working. Show up and do your job and good things are going to happen. And sometimes that means doing your job under less than ideal circumstances.

  An actor is most often entirely dependent on the decisions of other people to keep working. And the reality is that the older you get in this business, the more difficult it becomes to find roles. At some point in every actor’s career, casting agents begin looking for a “William Shatner type,” for example, because William Shatner can no longer play William Shatner. But if you’re extraordinarily fortunate, as I have been, you become so well known that people continue to enjoy your work. In order to fill those blank pages on my schedule, I created my one-man show. It’s performance art. I wrote the show and I helped create the
staging. I take the show on the road for a week or more several times a year. I like to refer to it as William Shatner Without the Dancing Girls.

  It’s just me, onstage for almost two hours. My friend Brad Paisley wrote a song that includes the lyric “I’m an entertainer, and that’s all.” That’s the object of my show: Let me entertain for ninety minutes. I tell some stories; I sing a few songs; I schmooze. When I first started doing the show, I was onstage with another person. I usually recruited a well-known DJ from a local radio station to sit opposite me and ask questions. But when I was invited to perform the show at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway, I changed the structure. I eliminated the questions and replaced the other person with a chair. The rolling chair becomes my prop: It’s my motorcycle, it’s my horse, it’s a Fiat 500 with an imaginary Big Pete stuffed into the backseat—but I also need it so I can sit down for a few minutes.

  The prospect of opening on Broadway fifty years after my last appearance was thrilling to me. New York audiences are the most demanding, the most critical, and the most loving—so I rewrote my show and restaged it in preparation for this appearance. I added material; I took out material; essentially it was a new show, and I was doing it for the first time on opening night.

  I was extremely anxious. I wondered, What the hell are they going to think? The night before my opening, Elizabeth and I and my manager, Larry Thompson, had an early dinner, so I could get to bed and be well rested for my performance. I had a simple hamburger in a very good restaurant. I awoke the next morning with food poisoning.

  My stomach was dancing. I felt deathly ill. I spent the entire day in my hotel room. I didn’t dare move more than a few feet away from the bathroom. The amazing Dr. Mehmet Oz came to my hotel room to help me. I was completely dehydrated, but I couldn’t keep anything down. I was sick and I was weak. But there was never any consideration of canceling the show. I was doing a one-man show on Broadway. I had been preparing for this night for fifty years.

  I finally made it to the theater. The Music Box was sold out, the critics were in their seats, and I was suffering from food poisoning. I walked out onstage into the warmth of an audience. It was the best possible medicine. As I began the show, my fears disappeared and, for a few minutes, so did my food poisoning. I forgot all about it—for a short time. And then it hit me again.

  I was surprised to discover I had anything left inside me. But about halfway through the show, I crapped in my pants. Everything I had learned, everything I believed about the show going on, was tested that night. I remember standing onstage thinking, Someday I will tell this story from a historical point of view and people will laugh at my embarrassment. It will make a wonderful story—but not tonight. Not right now.

  I told the audience, “I’m sorry, but we’ve had a slight technical difficulty. I will be right back.” I ran upstairs and took a quick shower. Elizabeth was there. I changed my pants and ran back downstairs and back onto the stage to finish the show. To my amazement, that was the last of it. The show received very good notices and I had no further problems for the remainder of my run. The show ran and my runs ended.

  Showing up often requires simply saying yes. Someone I know lives by a standing rule: When the phone rings, the answer is “yes.” It doesn’t even matter what the question is: “Yes” is the answer. That also might be the actor’s credo. Few actors, especially at the beginning, the middle, or the end of their careers, can afford to turn down an opportunity to work. Work leads to more work. “We want you to play a rock with feelings. Do you want me to be a boulder or a pebble?” “We want you to star in a movie being filmed in a language no one speaks”? “Kie estas la necesejo?” Which in Esperanto means either “I’ll take the job” or “Where is the nearest toilet?” A producer I have often worked with and admired wanted to put me on top of a glacier by helicopter all by myself and then fly away. My two greatest fears are loneliness and heights, and this would combine both of them. “Yes,” I said.

  His last words to me as the helicopter took off, leaving me completely alone thousands of feet high in a mountain range, were, “Don’t move around too much. There might be a crevasse close by.”

  Oh, the one thing he didn’t have to worry about was my moving around too much.

  Saying yes is a beginning, and by saying no or equivocating you cut yourself off from opportunity. It’s like saying no to a blind date. That man or woman might not be the ideal person for you, but short of having dinner with a serial killer you are giving yourself an opportunity to see a new world, to meet new people, to have new adventures.

  Sometimes saying yes when logic and common sense tell you to say no does make a significant difference. At the beginning of my career I was fortunate enough to be working for the great director Tyrone Guthrie at the Stratford Festival. It was a remarkable opportunity for a young actor to work with some of the finest actors of our time. I was a supporting actor, meaning I filled whatever small roles were available. When we did Henry V I played the small role of Duke of Gloucester, as well as understudying our leading man, Christopher Plummer.

  I was onstage for about five minutes; Chris Plummer carried the show. This is one of the longest roles ever written by Shakespeare. It is a complex role that requires peeling away layers of a man’s soul, and Chris Plummer was brilliant in it. He received rave reviews. But being diligent about my work, I studied the role. I was certain it was mostly a good learning opportunity, as these were limited-run productions and the leading man or woman almost never missed a performance. And because we were usually rehearsing the next play while performing in the current run, the understudies never had an opportunity to actually perform the role on a stage.

  In fact, it required nothing less than death or an extremely painful kidney stone to prevent the leading actors from going on. One morning shortly after we opened I received a call from the production office: Chris Plummer was in excruciating pain with a kidney stone. Could I go on that night?

  Go onstage to replace one of the most respected young actors in the theater, performing one of Shakespeare’s most complex roles in a play that I had never rehearsed? In fact, I had never said the lines out loud. I hadn’t met some of the other actors. We hadn’t had a single run-through, I didn’t know if the costume fit. My entire preparation consisted of watching Plummer perform the role.

  There really is only one correct answer to that question: “Absolutely!” I said yes, of course, definitely. I didn’t know how to say no.

  I did not even consider the risk I was taking. I was a young actor no one had ever heard of. I was courting disaster: My career could have ended that night. “Shatner? Isn’t he that guy who made a fool of himself at the Stratford Festival?”

  Looking back on this more than sixty years later, I have great admiration for that kid. I can’t remember what I must have been thinking, but I am thrilled that I had the guts to say yes, even at that early point in my life. There are people who would have said no; clearly that was the sensible answer. But not me. This has been another of those threads that have run through my life. I say yes.

  What I remember most about that night was the lack of fear that I felt. I should have been nervous. I was about to go onstage completely unrehearsed in front of a full house in one of the more prestigious theaters in the world. Why wasn’t I terrified? Where did that confidence come from? Or was I simply so naïve I didn’t know any better?

  I did not know the staging, so my biggest concern was not knocking over any of the other actors. Knocking over actors during a performance is generally considered bad form. When a show opens, the director “freezes” it, meaning that the actors are supposed take the same actions and say the same lines the same way every performance. The slightest deviation causes a ripple effect, forcing every other actor to respond to it.

  The night I went on for Christopher Plummer, my staging was pretty simple: When Plummer had sat down, I stood up; when he had stood up, I sat down. The performance went beautifully. It went extraordinarily w
ell. The other actors were supportive; I could feel the audience rooting for me. I didn’t miss a line or a cue—until one of the last scenes. As the French Princess entered, I looked directly at her and went blank. I knew I had a line, but I had no idea what it might be. (“Hi, Princess, how’s it going?”)

  It was at that moment that I realized “yes” might not have been the right answer. I stood there in noble silence. I was in the middle of the actor’s nightmare. Also in the cast was the fine young actor Don Cherry, who was playing my younger brother. Most important at that moment was the fact that Don Cherry had a photographic memory. He knew the entire play, word for word. I invented my own staging, and ignoring the French Princess, I walked over to Don Cherry and threw my arm over his shoulder and whispered, “What’s the line?”

  Don Cherry smiled but didn’t have the slightest idea. But in that instant I remembered my line! I spoke it as if I had known it the whole time, and only the entire cast understood what had happened. I received a standing ovation and grand reviews. In many ways that night transformed me from a performer into an actor. It marked the real beginning of my professional career. At Stratford I began getting larger roles, which led to other opportunities.

  I said yes, and that made all the difference.

  Admittedly there have been other times I said yes that might not have turned out so well. Earlier in my life, fifty years ago, I was a hunter. I can’t imagine now how I could have found it acceptable to kill animals for sport, but I did. I was not one of those people who claim they need to hunt for food. I went to restaurants for food. I hunted for sport. Today I am philosophically, socially, morally, empirically against hunting. I haven’t gone hunting in decades. But at that time I made several appearances on those outdoor hunting TV shows. The exposure was considered good for an actor’s career.