And to which part of me are you addressing that compliment, madam?
While I was very pleased that Star Trek was finally getting the attention it deserved, financially it wasn’t doing me any good at all. The actors received only a small royalty for the first few reruns, but nothing after that. There had been some benefits, of course. For example, it was while Star Trek was on the air that I had launched my renowned singing career. Until that moment my singing career had been limited to auditioning once for a Broadway musical and being told by the director to focus on acting. But in 1968 Decca Records asked me if I was interested in doing an album. I hesitated, I wasn’t a singer—but then it was pointed out to me that the first note of the musical scale is do.
During appearances on several talk shows I had spoken the lyrics of several popular songs without causing any permanent damage. But on my first album I wanted to do more than that, I wanted to explore the unique relationship between classic literature and popular song lyrics. I wanted to emphasize the poetry of language, in both its written and musical forms, used to express the extraordinary range of human emotion. That was my concept for this album.
What I decided to do was find a selection of beautiful writing and use that as a lead-in to a song that complemented it. Or at least served as a corollary. For example, I would use a selection from Cyrano de Bergerac ending, “I can climb to no great heights, but I will climb alone,” to segue into Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which had been interpreted to be Dylan’s allusion to his experiences with LSD— and I would perform it as a song sung by an addict bemoaning the fact that he is incapable of surviving without his drugs. In much the same way Hamlet’s classic speech, “To be, or not to be,” led directly into “It Was a Very Good Year,” made famous by Sinatra.
It all made perfect sense to me. But apparently it was a bit obtuse for some other people. Okay, for many other people. All right, for most people.
The album was called The Transformed Man and Johnny Carson invited me on The Tonight Show to promote it. I decided to do the Cyrano-Tambourine Man cut on the show. It went very well in rehearsal, but it was six minutes long. Producer Freddy de Cordova told me I had to cut it down to three minutes. “Just choose the literature or the song,” he told me. Hmm, I decided I would talk the song, which would be more commercial and certainly more popular.
Here, let me talk a few lines for you: “Hey. Mister. Tam. Bour. Ine. Man. Take me for a trip. Upon your magic swirling ship. My senses, have been stripped. My hands can’t feel to grip. My toes too numb to step...”
As I finished this song I glanced over at Johnny Carson, who had a look of astonishment on his face vaguely similar to the look on Spock’s face when his brain was missing. Without the literary lead-in, I was singing the song as a drug addict looking for a fix. Hey, where are you, Tambourine Man? I need you, I’ll follow you anywhere.
The song was inexplicable to the audience. What the hell is that guy doing? The reviews were very mixed; while some critics wrote that it was the worst album ever produced, others felt just as strongly that there had never been an album like it ever before.
I didn’t mind. I’d pushed the envelope, perhaps I’d pushed a little too far, but I’d tried. I’d taken a creative risk. I’d tried to do something unique, something very different. And I’d learned very early in my acting career that you can’t improve without taking risks, and sometimes that means making mistakes. The good news was that now I knew for certain that I had a lot of room to improve. I mean, a lot of room.
Years later, decades later, my debut album The Transformed Man would lead directly to one of the most successful commercial ventures of my career—and another album! But the only reason I was permitted to... let’s call it singing... sing on television was because of Star Trek’s loyal fan base.
The end of the initial run of Star Trek’s seventy-nine episodes was actually the beginning of an entirely new phenomenon. For me, Star Trek was done. The only thing I expected were a few pitiful checks for the first few reruns. At that time there was no such thing as residual payments. Two or three years later the Screen Actors Guild was able to forge an agreement with producers that actors would be paid each time a show was broadcast. So none of the actors on Star Trek ever received a residual check.
After my divorce from Gloria I was just about broke—once again eighteen hundred dollars in the bank became my goal—and I began looking for work. I had three kids and an ex-wife to support. I had absolutely no idea that the show was about to become a much bigger hit in syndication than it had ever been on network television. There have been many attempts to explain the reasons that so many people connected so strongly to Star Trek. But certainly at the core of it there was one simple truth: It was fun. Just as sports serves as a common denominator for many people, and just as strangers can bond over discussions of their favorite movies, Star Trek became a language that bound together a large group of people with common interests. It became a sun with great gravitational pull that drew all kinds of people to it, where they could meet others just like themselves.
Wearing costumes.
The very first unofficial Star Trek convention apparently was held in the Newark, New Jersey, public library in March 1969, when a small group of Star Trek fans got together to celebrate the show. At this gathering they sang folk songs inspired by the show, showed slides of the Enterprise set, had a panel discussion about the Star Trek phenomenon, and gave a brief lecture about the connection between Star Trek and science.
Around the country, and eventually around the world, small groups of fans of the show were getting together to watch the reruns or just talk about it. These weren’t commercial events, nobody was making any money from them, people just wanted to get together to honor the show. But in January 1972 the first official Star Trek Convention was held at New York’s Statler Hilton Hotel. Gene Roddenberry was there and NASA sent an eighteen-wheeler filled with scientific displays. The organizers were actually shocked at the number of people who showed up; at most they expected a couple of hundred people; instead, a thousand people were there. The vendors had brought enough merchandise for a weekend—but by Friday afternoon many of them had already sold out. The conventions took just a little longer to tribble. In 1973 three conventions were held, two years later there were twenty-three conventions. In Chicago, organizers planned for ten thousand people—instead, thirty thousand Trekkies—that was what they called themselves— showed up. A year later there was an average of a convention a week; security actually had to close the entrance to a convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center in 1976 because there was no more room inside. By the early 1980s as many as four hundred Star Trek conventions were held annually.
I vaguely knew that these conventions were taking place but I really didn’t want anything to do with them. That was my past, I’d done that. Truthfully, I wasn’t in touch with anyone from the show—even Leonard. I certainly did not want the highlight of my career to be three years as Captain Kirk in a failed science-fiction TV show. My focus was on the future. The very near future. The end-of-the-month future when the bills had to be paid. And truthfully, the whole thing made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want anything to do with a group of obsessed people who paid to get together—some of them wearing costumes—to talk incessantly about a TV show that had been canceled. It wasn’t logical.
...autographs, certificates, trash cans, collector’s albums, calendars, lamps, bed covers, computer games, miniatures, Snoopy as Star Trek characters, wallets...
I attended my first Star Trek convention at New York’s Americana Hotel in November 1975. Did I mention that the first—and last!—notes of the musical scale are do? The money they offered me to attend this convention was...do I dare? Yes, I do! Out of this world! I didn’t prepare any remarks. Just be yourself, the organizers told me, Captain Kirk. But when I walked onstage to thunderous applause I was stunned. I had expected perhaps a thousand people, but the room was completely filled. As far as I could se
e people were jammed together, they were on the sides, in the balconies, sitting on the floor in front of the stage. They were ready to hear words of wisdom from James T. Kirk and I didn’t have anything of importance to tell them.
It didn’t matter; the audience was an actor’s dream. They responded to my slightest smile. I had them in the grip of my phaser. Eventually I would develop a little bit of a routine; for example, I would tell them about the day Dee Kelley came to the set and was crying. Dee was a wonderful man and clearly he was very upset. “Dee,” I asked with great concern, “what’s the matter?”
It was his beloved Chihuahua, he told me. This little dog who had meant so much to him had died tragically.
“Oh, Dee,” I said. “I’m so terribly sorry. I love dogs and I know the pain of losing a dog you love. How did it happen?”
And through his tears he told me, “Well, I let her off the leash in my front yard and she was running around, she was so happy, and then she ran into the sprinkler head and died.”
Naturally, I laughed. And Dee didn’t speak to me for two years. But at that first appearance I didn’t have a speech, so I fumbled around for a little while and, in desperation, I asked hopefully, “Does anyone have a question?”
Instantly eight thousand hands went up. I knew I was home free. Questions I could answer, and if I didn’t know the answer I could always make up a good one. Except when their questions were so specific I barely understood the question, much less knew the answer. I learned very quickly that most of the people who attended these conventions understood the universal joke—and simply wanted to have a good time. It was playtime for adults. As a volunteer at the very first organized convention once admitted, “If the man from the funny farm came to take us away right now, there’d be absolutely nothing we could say in our defense.”
After that I did start attending conventions, often appearing on stage with Leonard. It was while appearing at those conventions that we started to become really friendly. While the cast of the original series, and then the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation were the biggest stars, pretty much anyone who ever appeared on the show could be invited to appear at a convention. True fans didn’t care, even the slightest connection to the show was sufficient: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the doorman on the Enterprise! Yeaaaaa!
My mother and my sister, Joy, were even invited to appear at a Star Trek convention.
Truthfully, while I attended several conventions, I did not fully appreciate the passion that the fans felt for the show. To me, it was a TV show; a show that I had enjoyed doing and I was very proud of, and certainly I was grateful for everything that had happened to me because of it, but it was a TV show. Then, in December 1986, I was asked to host Saturday Night Live.
The opening skit was a parody of me addressing a Star Trek convention. Facsimile trekkies were asking me questions I’d actually been asked, “Um, like, when you, um...left your quarters for the last time? And you opened up your safe? Um, what was the combination?”
Finally, in this skit, after a decade of attending conventions and being asked hundreds of these inane questions, I’d had enough. I finally told these people exactly what I had been thinking for all those years. “You know, before I answer any more questions, there’s something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and I’ve spoken to many of you, and some of you have traveled, y’know, hundreds of miles to be here, I’d just like to say... get a life, will you, people? I mean, for crying out loud, it’s just a TV show. I mean, look at you! Look at the way you’re dressed! You’ve turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a colossal waste of time!
“I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves? You! You must be almost thirty...have you ever kissed a girl? I didn’t think so. There’s a whole world out there. When I was your age I didn’t watch television. I lived! So...move out of your parents’ basements! And get your own apartments and grow the hell up! I mean, it’s just a TV show, dammit, it’s just a TV show!”
It was meant to be a joke. I was kidding. I was just having a little fun, making fun of myself and the whole phenomenon. I mean, please. What kind of reader are you to think I was being serious? Get your head out of those books and watch more television! Then you’ll know that Saturday Night Live is a comedy show, not a documentary. In fact, if you want realism, then go ahead and rent the DVD of my miniseries Invasion, Iowa, in which I took an entire movie crew to Riverside, Iowa—the town that promotes itself as the future birthplace of James T. Kirk—and faked the making of a science-fiction movie while we were really playing a practical joke on the entire town! Now that’s a real fake, unlike this skit on Saturday Night Live.
When I read the script I decided the best way to make it funny was to play it seriously. If I had been nervous about doing it, if I had been worried about the reaction of Star Trek fans, I would have played it very broadly, as a comedian. Instead, having been to enough conventions to know that most Trekkies were able to laugh at themselves, I did it as an actor.
And most of them realized it. Most of them loved it. Most of them. In fact, at conventions they started telling each other, “Get a life.” And eventually, when I wrote a book about the phenomenon of Star Trek conventions, it was titled Get a Life. Which, naturally, was sold at conventions. And coincidently is currently available at www.WilliamShatner.com for the bargain price of only $7.95.
In a very strange way, doing that sketch allowed me to erase some of the distance I’d kept from the Trekkies. With that sketch, as well as some of the others I did on Saturday Night Live, I think they appreciated the fact that I had a sense of humor about myself that perhaps I had not shown very publicly before. I not only could take the joke, I could make it.
The conventions had become a grand show in themselves, complete with costumed characters, panel discussions, trivia contests, speeches, screenings, and those guest appearances. We were treated like rock stars. I was told that there were female Trekkies who kept lists of all the members of the cast with whom they’d slept. I was told this! Told it! But I knew that if I ever ended up on a list the news would circulate at warp speed. It actually put me in the odd position of having to find a way of saying no to a woman without being insulting.
Not that I was shy around women. Truthfully, I have always enjoyed the company of women. During much of this period I was single and I certainly had opportunities to be with many women and I grasped a great many of those opportunities. Never at warp speed. Admittedly, there were times when the woman I was with said, “So this is what it’s like to be in bed with Captain Kirk.” That was definitely a downer, in every sense of the word.
Although none of them ever asked me afterward, “Did the universe move for you, too?”
Among the lessons I learned was the price of my new celebrity. For example, I was very privately dating a young actress and suddenly a photograph of the two of us appeared in the tabloids. I was thunderstruck; this was a part of my life I did not want my young children to know anything about. I couldn’t figure out who could have seen us together, and where and when and how. The woman was just as upset, telling me that she was sick about it. So I stopped seeing her for about six months, and then gradually resumed our relationship. Within a month a second story appeared—only then did I realize that this girl was feeding the story and pictures to the paper to further her career.
While my celebrity made women available to me, I had learned to wonder why these women were available to me. What was their objective? Everything that I do, that any actor does, can potentially impact their career as well as have legal and even economic consequences. I learned to be very careful. I even had to be careful where I looked when I was in public. In the days before cell phone cameras it was slightly more difficult for a photograph to be taken without my knowledge, but now, now every minute I’m in public I am aware that someone might be snapping a picture. So eyes straight ahead.
Years after
going off the air Star Trek was more popular than it had ever been. Fans couldn’t get enough of it. It was generating millions of dollars in merchandising—of which the cast got almost nothing. But after only seven or eight years Paramount suddenly realized it owned an extremely valuable intellectual property and was doing nothing with it. Somebody came up with an interesting concept: let’s do a TV show! Eventually that concept became six major movies, but that would be later in my career.
Captain James T. Kirk eventually became one of the best-known and most easily recognized characters in the history of American entertainment. One night, for example, decades after the show went off the air, I was watching a TV show. A scene took place in a lawyer’s office, and as the camera panned across the room I noticed that hanging on the rear wall, just over the main character’s shoulder, was a framed photograph of Captain Kirk. I literally had become part of the furniture.
But the incident I remember most took place in the early 1980s, as I was driving to the Academy Awards with my second wife, Marcy. We were on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, a very main road. There was a lot of traffic and directly in front of us two cars were jockeying for position. As I watched, it was clear that this was a serious case of road ego. These drivers were both recklessly swerving in and out of traffic, trying to cut off the other’s car. Finally the two cars ended up right next to each other. I could see the passenger in the car on my left leaning out his window and screaming at the driver of the second car, who apparently was screaming right back. And then he just took a deep breath and spit at the driver. That was it. The second driver swerved in front of the first car, cutting him off, and slammed on his brakes. His door flew open and he jumped out of the car. The passenger swung open his door and got out. They started screaming at each other and finally one of them threw the first punch. They started pummeling each other. An incident of road rage had escalated into a dangerous fight.
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