Photo by Melanie Dunea
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Overdue Bill
By Margaret Guroff, May & June 2006
Fame—even immortality—came early for William Shatner. But satisfaction just arrived
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William Shatner's horse is spinning like a weathervane. Perched on a tooled-leather saddle, the actor—ever in command—leans into the horse's studied turn, then cuts it short, bringing the animal to a sudden standstill in a puff of dust.
From the corral at a Simi Valley ranch, Shatner flashes a conspiratorial smirk. "Seems simple," he says, "but it's not."
The actor's assessment of the equestrian sport called reining—one of his many, many passions—could as easily describe his own remarkably durable career. Turned into a nerd-cult godhead by the Star Trek science-fiction TV series of the late 1960s, Shatner spent decades in the shadow of the character he created: the overawed, overwrought, oversexed Captain James T. Kirk.
"My cry had been 'This wasn't the career I had sought,' " says Shatner, who trained as a Shakespearean actor alongside fellow Canadian Christopher Plummer. "The answer is 'Well, this is the career you have.' "
Though he worked steadily through the decades as an actor, director, writer, pitchman, and impresario, it is only now, at age 75, that Shatner has finally begun to relax into his own success. "I think this is a very special, golden time for him," says daughter Lisabeth Shatner. "It's the culmination of a lot of years of hard work."
Winning his first-ever Emmy in 2004 (and a second in 2005) for his role as egomaniacal attorney Denny Crane on The Practice and Boston Legal can't have hurt. But Shatner says the sense of repose he feels "is not from an award; it's from my ease of artistry, whatever part of me is an artist. To have my art at my fingertips, whether it's writing, directing, or horses."
Longtime manager Larry Thompson puts it even more poetically: "This period of his life is almost as if, all along the way, everything he did were these precious pearls, and now they've been strung together as a necklace, and that's what you're seeing."
Of course, one man's necklace is another man's noose. Yes, Shatner's career has had its share of highs, including the 1980s cop drama T.J. Hooker and the protoreality show Rescue 911. But it has also had its share of howlers, from 1972's Want a Ride, Little Girl? to Celebrity Bowling. Perhaps the biggest clunker of all was The Transformed Man, an unintentionally hilarious and universally panned 1968 album that alternates soliloquies with haltingly spoken versions of trippy pop hits such as "Mr. Tambourine Man."
"William Shatner is not only an actor," his manager says. "He is a three-ring circus."
But in a way, that horrible album was the germ of Shatner's current resurgence. Because at a certain point Shatner's stock-in-trade became his willingness to make fun of William Shatner. As "The Farmer's Almanac of Celebrity Worth" on Fametracker.com puts it, "He made himself a punch line with such debonair cunning that—guess what?—the man is not a punch line anymore." The site's bottom line on Shatner: "Current approximate level of fame: Ed McMahon; deserved approximate level of fame: Moses."
The only son of a clothier in Montreal, Shatner felt pressure to go into the family business. Though already a radio actor by his teens, he reluctantly majored in business at McGill University and then got a job in theater management. "I lost tickets and money and was a total failure," he once said. To recoup those losses, the director cast Shatner in a play, which led to more roles and eventually to the 1958 film The Brothers Karamazov. Shatner did TV guest spots and starred on Broadway before landing Star Trek in 1965. By then he was married to fellow actor Gloria Rand and had three daughters.
On the Star Trek set, Shatner sometimes lorded his star power over the rest of the ensemble, raiding their lines to beef up his own and earning at least one mortal enemy, the late James Doohan, who played Mr. Scott. "Bill doesn't like anyone to do good acting around him," Doohan once said.
The original Star Trek series lasted only three years, by the end of which Shatner's first marriage was over—and so, it seemed, was his career. Living with his dog in a camper, Shatner scrounged for TV work and regional theater gigs. By the mid-1970s he was flogging Promise margarine with his second wife, Marcy Lafferty, whom he had met on the set of a 1970 TV movie.
And then, once again, Star Trek became hot. The success of Star Wars in 1977 and the growing culture of Star Trek fan conventions convinced Paramount Pictures to make 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first of seven films featuring the original cast. Shatner was back in the saddle.
"When you're down and you hang around long enough, you're up," says Shatner now. "Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. But I don't feel up and down. I've never had an unemployment check," which makes Shatner a rarity among full-time actors. "I've never not paid a bill."
He survived the lean years through a prodigious work ethic. Along with acting, directing, and philanthropy, such as his annual Hollywood Charity Horse Show, Shatner has written 30 books, mostly science fiction. And he was not too proud for game shows, conventions—and even, one suspects, the odd shopping center opening. "William Shatner is not only an actor," explains manager Thompson. "He'll host your event; he'll sweep when it's over with. He really is a three-ring circus."
Shatner, who was divorced from Lafferty in 1994 and has been married twice since, lives his whole life with that same intensity. As recently as 2002 he arrived at a charity event via parasail—that is, flying through the air attached to a parachute. "I've never seen anybody who embraces life and who puts more into it than Bill does," says country singer Brad Paisley, a friend and sometime guest at Shatner's regular Monday Night Football parties. Adds daughter Leslie Shatner Walker: "If you spent a week with him, you would be sick tired."
Still, family and friends say, Shatner may be calming down. "He might actually think for ten seconds now before he jumped out of a plane," jokes daughter Lisabeth. "Ten years ago there would have been a two-second delay."
Shatner's transition from object of ridicule to winking self-mocker was gradual (and deliberate), but there was a watershed moment: a skit on a 1986 episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live. Playing himself at a Star Trek convention, Shatner becomes exasperated with the fans' obsessive questions and ends up urging them to "get a life!" Though roles in some forgettable film comedies followed, by 1998 the transition was complete: Shatner became the spokesperson for online travel site Priceline.com, in ads that had him "singing" ŕ la The Transformed Man and tweaking his strange place in the celebrity firmament. The ads practically defined the dot-com era's Age of Irony.
Always a prankster in private—once, when Star Trek costar Leonard Nimoy chained his own bike to his car to prevent Shatner's stealing it again, Shatner had the car towed—Shatner has simply brought his mirthful side to the fore. Says Adrian Zmed, Shatner's costar on T.J. Hooker: "Everybody's beginning to see now the Bill that I knew."
Shatner married model Nerine Kidd in 1997, but within two years he would enter one of the darkest periods of his life. Kidd, who had a problem with alcohol, drowned in their pool in 1999. It was Shatner who found her. "I was thinking that's the end, I'll never recover from this," he would later say.
The mourning husband eventually came to terms with his sorrow. "You feel so assailed by fate—why me? And then you realize it's not you, it's everybody," he says now. "Grief is as much a part of our life as hunger. And how you deal with grief is part of who you are."
One catalyst for this understanding was Elizabeth Martin, a willowy, blond horse trainer who knew the Shatners slightly from the show circuit. She sent Shatner a condolence note "like everybody," she says, and its red calligraphy caught his eye among the mountains of unopened mail. Though younger than Shatner by more than 30 years, Elizabeth had lost a spouse to cancer two years earlier, and Shatner contacted her to talk. The two became closer as he worked through his grief. They were married in 2001.
Today, Elizabeth and Bill Shatner are, in her words, "just like any other couple," spending as much time as possible together and with his children and five grandchildren. "We are just having a ball," she says. "We have come from a perspective that makes us grateful for every good moment. We've come through the fire."
Between his ongoing role on Boston Legal and projects such as Has Been, a thoughtful and purposely funny 2004 rock album produced by musician and friend Ben Folds, Shatner is on yet another career high. "He's so hot right now, he's on everybody's speed dial," says figure skater Scott Hamilton, another close friend. "He just can't do enough; he wants to do it all."
In these happy, golden days, William Shatner thinks a lot about dying. "I'm horribly frightened by the prospect of death," he says. "There's so much in life to be passionate about. One of the great fears of dying is leaving that passion." Nor is he comforted by his place in television history, which will afford him a certain immortality as long as Klingon is spoken anywhere. "So there's a rerun of Star Trek going on," he says, eyes widening. "Big deal. I don't want to die!"
Shatner knows, though, that he has been lucky, especially with his health. "I feel so good that I don't even think of the word aging applying to me. This is what it can be," he says. Then he corrects himself. "This is what it is; it isn't what it can be. This is what I am."
Features editor Margaret Guroff wrote about comedian Shelley Berman in the November-December 2005 issue.
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