Up Till Now

by William Shatner

  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 wa
nting to help me but also wanting me to experience how incredibly difficult the life I’d chosen could be.

  After my third year with the Canadian Rep I was once again invited to join the Stratford Festival to play the juvenile roles. This time I accepted the offer. The Stratford Festival had begun when a Canadian named Tom Patterson, who lived in the small town of Stratford, Ontario, had a very strange vision: he was going to create a theater in Stratford using Canadian players to perform all the classic plays. So he went to England and actually managed to convince Sir Tyrone Guthrie, then considered one of the greatest stage directors in the world, that he should come to Stratford to run this theater.

  And so it happened, and Guthrie brought with him to Stratford some leading designers and actors in England. Alec Guinness starred in the first play, and the Stratford Festival almost immediately earned a reputation as the finest classical theater in North America.

  I packed my belonging—that’s not an exaggeration—into the back of a used Morris Minor my father had bought me and headed for the bright lights of Toronto. A Morris Minor was a compromise between a very small car and nothing. While driving to Toronto in a fierce rainstorm I crossed over a bridge; as I did, a sixteen-wheeler, water spewing out of its front tire wells, raced passed me going in the opposite direction. The force of the truck and the water almost blew me over the side of the bridge into what must have been the Ottawa River. And I remember thinking that if this car went into the river there would be no marks on the earth that I had ever lived. There would be no residue of my presence other than the sorrow of my mother and father. Essentially I had no friends who cared about me, no girlfriends with whom I’d established any kind of bond, and no accomplishments. That was a devastating thought, and it summed up how little I was leaving behind in Montreal. It reminded me of a line from Macbeth, “A tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing.”

  At Stratford we presented three plays a season, from May through September. We rehearsed the first play and while it was running began rehearsing the second play. The same actors worked in all three plays. I was one of a half-dozen young actors in the company and we competed with each other for roles. Mostly we were supporting players, usually we were the chorus. Getting a few lines was an accomplishment. We all lived in awe of God, who took the human form in Stratford of Tyrone Guthrie. Guthrie was legendary in England. All of the great actors either worshipped or at least respected him. When he came to Canada the few people serious about acting felt the horizon was moving toward us. And so we trembled at the sight of him, this great man who had come to us to cloak us in his wisdom.

  Guthrie was about six-foot-six with a huge potbelly and a hawk-like nose. The theater was little more than a large hole in the ground covered by a great tent. We would be on the raked stage at the bottom of this pit and the tent flap would part and the sunlight would burst in and from that great brilliance Tyrone Guthrie would emerge. It was quite an entrance. And he would stand there and pronounce his decisions, “And you will play the role...”

  It was hypnotic, “Yes, I will play the role...”

  Tyrone Guthrie wasn’t much of a teacher. He didn’t offer a lot of instruction; to read a line or interpret the meaning of that line, you had to work on and discover by yourself. But he was a master at the grand design, at producing extraordinary theater, at creating memorable events on stage. Once, I remember, he put his arm around my shoulders and said earnestly, “Bill, tell me about Method acting.” Me, explaining Method acting to Sir Tyrone Guthrie? I began to explain what little I had read about it, how an actor can become the character and feel the emotion flowing through...

  After I had explained what little I knew, he asked, “Why don’t they think of a beautiful sunset?”

  I understood that wasn’t really a question, but rather a suggestion. He was reminding me that there is a greater scheme at play in a beautiful sunset than in simply trying to call up some emotion to service a character. And that an actor should not get so caught up in perfecting technique that he misses the lyricism and beauty of everything that is going on around him.

  Within weeks of arriving in Stratford I was playing a small role in Henry V, starring Christopher Plummer. Chris Plummer and I are about the same age but rather than going to college he had started working in the theater and was probably the leading young actor in Canada. He was part of the very small community of successful actors in Montreal, very much part of the “in” crowd. He was prematurely mature and I had envied him. At Stratford he played all the young leading-man roles. In Henry V I was assigned the role of the Duke of Gloucester, for which I was onstage about five minutes, as well as understudying Chris Plummer.

  King Henry V is one of the longest roles written by Shakespeare, so when we weren’t rehearsing I studied those lines. Whenever I had a few extra moments, at night or in the bathroom, I memorized all of his speeches. Because we had opened the play after only a few weeks’ rehearsal there had been no time for an understudy run-through. During the staging of the play the understudies kept an eye on the roles we were supposedly preparing to play, but none of us thought it was possible that we’d actually have to go on one day to replace a sick actor. The company consisted of young, healthy, ruddy-faced, beef-eating, apple-chomping Canadian actors; nobody ever got sick. Basically, the rule was that if you took more than two breaths a minute you were still alive and had to go on.

  The play opened to excellent reviews. The New York Times called it a “stunning piece of work...penetrating and exuberant.” Chris Plummer got rave reviews, the show was sold out for its entire run. This was by far the most successful work I’d done; I was a member of a prestigious company, working with some of the most respected actors in Canada. Darn right it was penetrating and exuberant. Mondays were my only day off, and one Monday morning about two weeks into our run I got a call from the production office. Chris Plummer was suffering from a kidney stone; could I go on that night?

  Could I go on that night? Could I go on that night? Replace Plummer in one of the greatest roles ever written for the stage? Absolutely. Without doubt. Of course.

  Clearly I was insane. I had never even said the lines out loud, but merely muttered them between flushes of the toilet. I hadn’t done a single rehearsal in that role so I didn’t know the staging. I hadn’t even met some of the other actors. Any actor in their right mind would have said, sir, how dare you ask me to go there and risk my reputation. Or something like that.

  And they would have responded, of course we can’t. It’s impossible. We’ll call off the performance and refund their money and...

  Refund their money? Ah, there’s the rub. The production office tried to schedule an emergency rehearsal but finding actors on a day off is even more difficult than getting a profit participation check from a movie studio. At about five o’clock someone suggested I try on the wardrobe to make sure it fit. Fortunately Chris and I were about the same size so it fit me well.

  The odd thing was that the impossibility of what I was about to do hadn’t hit me yet. I was completely calm and confident. It never occurred to me that I was risking my career—not that I actually had a career, of course—but if this turned out to be a debacle I was the one who was going to get the blame for it. And it had the kind of big debacle potential that inspires comedy writers.

  Tyrone Guthrie wasn’t even there. Moments before I was about to go on Michael Langham, the director, asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Sure, I’m fine,” I said, thinking I knew the play. There are few moments in the life of a stage actor as dramatic as this one. It is the actor’s cliché: I was the unrehearsed understudy going out on that stage as a nobody and coming back as probably a bigger nobody. I don’t know why I wasn’t nervous. Certainly any rational person should have been close to panicking. Instead, I was excited.

  Stratford had a thrust stage, meaning it was surrounded by the audience on three sides. There are no wings. All entrances and exits are made at the back of the stage. So when you’re
onstage you’re almost in the audience. If you forget a line there’s no way somebody can feed it to you—unless it’s a member of the audience.

  There were twenty-five hundred people in the audience, including most of the critics who had originally reviewed the play. Apparently they had learned that an unknown understudy was going on and didn’t want to miss what promised to be a memorable night in the theater. Finally the lights went down and I walked out onto the stage to begin the most important performance of my life. Whatever happened in the next few hours, if someday I ended up in the Ottawa River, I would have had this one night.

  I looked around the theater and...

  This is where we should pause for a word from our sponsor. I’ve spent so much of my life on television that I’m used to building to a first-chapter climax and cutting to commercial. However, as this is a book we haven’t sold commercial time. However, there will be space available in the soft-cover version.

  . . . and felt exhilarated. I had been doing a play a week for three years. I had learned the lines of hundreds of characters. I had been a comedian, a charlatan, and a convicted con man. That night I was ready to be a king.

  Perhaps the proper word to describe the way I was feeling is stupefied. I was completely calm, in the zone, Zenned out, at one with the stage and the audience. It came together in a way it never should have. A few years later I would be working for Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone, a place where unimaginable things happened for which there could be no explanation. Like my performance that night. I was “Once more into the breach, dear friends”-ing as if I had been playing this role for seasons. “Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

  A stage actor needs a minimum of ten performances in front of an audience to understand the timing, because the response of the audience has to be incorporated into that performance. Audiences react in unexpected places, and you learn where to leave room for the audience to respond. You don’t want to walk into their reaction with your next line, which might be key to the plot. So the audience becomes a character in a play, but you don’t see that character until you are in front of the audience.