Producer Joel Katz knew his upcoming television series, For the People, was dead on arrival as it sped toward its premiere on CBS in January of 1965.
That was a shame, Katz thought, since the series, a legal drama created by future Cool Hand Luke director Stuart Rosenberg, boasted an unusually strong pedigree. Its two stars, William Shatner and Jessica Walter, were young but seasoned.
Shatner, thirty-three years old and a Shakespearian-trained actor, had a decade of live television and series work on his resume and several big-budget Hollywood movies under his belt. He was also a hot Broadway commodity, coming off successful starring roles in The World of Suzie Wong and A Shot in the Dark and three guest-starring appearances on The Defenders, a popular CBS series executive-produced by Herbert Brodkin (who was also the executive producer of For the People).
Shatner was confident in his newest television role as earnest assistant district attorney David Koster, fighting the good fight in the labyrinthian New York City legal system. “I’ve been in a lot of shows headed for Broadway, and there’s a smell of success about the hit ones. I sense the same about this TV series, an excitement on the set, a feeling of victory,” he said. One week before the premiere of For the People, Shatner, looking dapper in a tuxedo, promoted the show, appearing as a guest panelist on the CBS television game show What’s My Line? alongside Kitty Carlisle (filling in for Arlene Dahl), Bennett Cerf, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, and host John Daly.
(“It’s on right after Ed Sullivan,” Shatner told Daly about For the People. That week’s “mystery guest” on What’s My Line? was actor Jack Lemmon, who was there to promote his new movie, How to Murder Your Wife. He was correctly identified by a blindfolded Carlisle.)
Jessica Walter, twenty-four, had also appeared on The Defenders and on several other high-profile television shows, including The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Ben Casey, and Route 66. She, too, was a Broadway veteran, most recently starring in the comedy A Severed Head. The For the People cast also included, most notably, Howard Da Silva and Lonny Chapman, who had over forty years of acting experience between them.
But For the People was a midseason entry on the CBS schedule, replacing the Craig Stevens series Mr. Broadway, which premiered the previous fall to disappointing viewership numbers and was cancelled after thirteen episodes. The network’s executives, showing little faith in For the People, slotted the series to air on Sunday nights at nine opposite NBC’s Bonanza, the top-rated series on television.
Katz still felt the sting over fifty years later.
“CBS just needed a thirteen-week fill-in, and they had something ‘big’ coming in behind it,” he recalled. “They didn’t promote [For the People]. It was probably predestined to have just that one run. It did well enough for [CBS] to say, ‘Okay, moving on.’” The series premiered on January 31, 1965, and in late March, CBS pulled the plug, burning off the remaining episodes, which aired through mid-May. The network ultimately replaced For the People with its veteran legal drama, Perry Mason—and it, too, was demolished on Sunday nights by Bonanza. “For the People was opposite Bonanza, which was the most popular show at the time,” Shatner said. “And Bonanza killed us, so we went off the air after thirteen weeks.”1
But the television gods work in mysterious ways, and the cancellation of For the People allowed Shatner to explore other opportunities, including a new science fiction series at NBC. A pilot episode for the series had been shot throughout the fall of 1964 and into early 1965, but network executives found it “too cerebral,” and there were problems with its star, Jeffrey Hunter. NBC officials believed in the project and, in an unusual move, gave its creator, Gene Roddenberry, the green light to shoot a second pilot.
Star Trek was looking for a new leading man—and William Shatner was available.
* * *
An acting career didn’t seem to be in the cards for William Alan Shatner when he entered the world in Côte-Saint-Luc, Montreal, on March 22, 1931, the first son of Joseph, a clothing manufacturer, and his wife, Ann.
Joseph Schattner was born in Austria in 1898 to Wolf and Freyda Schattner. At the age of fourteen, Joseph became the first member of his large extended Jewish family, which included ten brothers and sisters, to emigrate to North America. In 1912, he boarded a steamship in Austria bound for Montreal, which had a thriving Jewish community that comprised roughly 7 percent of the city’s population. Joseph changed his surname to the more Anglicized “Shatner” and made a living in his new country by holding down several odd jobs, including selling newspapers, before entering the clothing business. He did well enough, those first few years, to bring the rest of his brothers and sisters to Montreal, where they branched out into various lifestyles. Joseph’s younger brother, Louis Shatner—William’s uncle—was arrested in 1956 for allegedly running a gambling ring in Montreal. He claimed he his lost his life savings in a bad mining investment.2
Ann Garmaise, who was seven years younger than Joseph, was born in 1905 into a financially comfortable Jewish family in Montreal. Her parents, Jacob Garmaise and Yetta (née Kahn), were from Eastern Europe; Jacob emigrated to Canada from Lithuania and Yetta from Germany. The family—which also included Ann’s brothers, Max and Bernard, and her sister, Pearl—was “relatively well off,” and Ann grew into a brash and boisterous young woman who enjoyed being the center of attention. Years later, when her son became famous, she would tell anyone within earshot that “I’m William Shatner’s mother,” much to his embarrassment. “My mother was a bit of a clown and never really pursued her acting in a professional way, but she had talent,” Shatner’s sister recalled.
Joseph and Ann were married in 1926 in Montreal and settled in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a heavily Catholic, mostly English-speaking middle-class neighborhood in the city’s West End. The locals called it “NDG” for short. They moved into a house at 4419 Girouard Avenue with William and his older sister, Farla. There are Internet records showing that a son, David Shatner, was born to Joseph and Ann in April 1935. David died that December at seven months old and was buried in Back River Cemetery in Montreal. There is no mention of a David Shatner in any of William Shatner’s official biographies, and Bill has never publicly mentioned or written about a deceased brother, so the veracity of this information is unclear.3 Farla and William’s little sister, Joy, arrived eleven years later.
Joseph worked his way up in the clothing business by tackling different facets of the trade, from packing boxes to eventually becoming a salesman before starting his own company called Admiration Clothing. The factory was located on 8 Briardale Road in Montreal’s Hampstead section and manufactured men’s suits for French-Canadian stores—or, as William Shatner recalled, “basically suits for working men who owned only one suit.”4 Joseph was, his son recalled, “a stern but loving man”5 who worked extremely hard, smoked heavily, and relaxed on Saturday, the Sabbath, when he would recline on the family room couch and listen to the Metropolitan Opera crackling over the radio from New York City.
The tools of Joseph’s trade were burned into his son’s memory; Bill recalled the smell of his father’s factory, the “unforgettable aroma of raw serge and tweed in rolled-up bales, mixed with the smell of my father’s cigarettes.”6 Joseph imagined that Bill would, one day, take over the business (after going to college, of course). He gave Bill a job in the factory—packing suits. As a teenager, Bill, dressed in his best suit, would sometimes accompany his father on sales calls to clients in and around the Montreal area (and sometimes to far-flung locales).
When Bill was three or four years old, the family moved to a larger house on Marcil Avenue in a neighborhood where both French and English were spoken freely. “Many of my young friends were French so I spoke French on the streets somewhat easily,” he said later. “Both of my parents spoke French; my mother, being Canadian, was taught it in school and my father, being a businessman, had learned it as a necessity. I learned it by osmosis on the streets of Montreal.”7
While Ann raised her children, she found time to give elocution lessons to the neighborhood children as well. Bill thought, in hindsight, that she was a frustrated actress, and that the elocution lessons gave her the chance to emote, sometimes rather theatrically. She would often act out monologues at home, entertaining her family. Ann kept a kosher home, and the Shatner family joined a Conservative Jewish synagogue, Shaare Zion, where Bill attended Hebrew School. The original synagogue held Shabbat and holiday services at Victoria Hall in the city’s Westmount district; in 1939, Shaare Zion moved to a new facility on Côte-Saint-Luc Road, where Bill was Bar Mitzvahed in 1945.
Sundays were spent visiting Ann’s parents and other relatives who lived nearby. At night, the Shatners listened to their favorites on the radio, including comedians Jack Benny and Fred Allen, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (with his sidekick, Charlie McCarthy), and Arch Oboler. Bill had a special affinity for Oboler, “a mastery of mystery and suspense” with shows such as Lights Out. He was also an avid fan of radio dramatist Norman Corwin.
(Years later he had the chance to work with both of his idols. He costarred in Oboler’s Night of the Auk, which aired on New York City’s public television station in 1960 and, decades later, acted in a Corwin radio play called The Curse of 589, broadcast on National Public Radio.)
Sports on the radio was also big; when he was around nine, Bill rushed home to listen to the Joe Louis–Billy Conn fight, only to find the front door locked. He pounded on the door until someone let him into the house. In a similar story, younger sister Joy was listening to a hockey game on the radio. “Billy was ringing the doorbell to come in to listen. I did not hear the doorbell and he kept ringing and ringing and I still did not hear it, and so he broke into a window on the side [of the house] and came in and practically killed me, he was so upset. So, he had a little bit of a temper.”8
As he got older, Bill’s personality began to take shape. He was slight of build, though ready for a fight if necessary, and earned the nickname “Toughie” for never backing down from a challenge. He claimed to be a rather quiet, shy boy who didn’t have many friends. When he was around six years old, or so the story goes, he found a five-dollar bill in a field and, wanting to share it with his best friend, tore it in half. In another oft-repeated Valentine’s Day scenario, young Bill would send himself a valentine in school, knowing that none of his classmates would include him in this juvenile rite of passage. “There was love at home, but there was still a loneliness,” he said. “I’ve always had to deal with loneliness and how to overcome it.”9
He was “a bit of a prankster,” his sister, Farla, recalled. “I remember when I would have little birthday parties and my brother would come in in the middle [of the party] and start telling ghost stories and close the lights and make everyone scared to death.”10 In another family story, he was walking with his mother and his sister, Joy, in downtown Montreal. “Suddenly Billy disappeared, and we finally found him dancing to the organ grinder,” Joy recalled. “Billy got everybody watching him and dancing with him and laughing with him and he loved performing in front of that organ grinder.”11
He dreamed of being just like the kids who lived in the upper-class Westmount section of Montreal where, he figured, the constant undercurrent of anti-Semitism was not as prevalent as it was in the NDG. When he walked to Hebrew school, Bill would cross to the other side of the street and pretend he didn’t know where his synagogue was—looking both ways before bolting inside to make sure no one saw him. “There was a lot of discrimination in those years for being Jewish,” he recalled. “I had to fight . . . quite regularly with kids who would take me on. There was a lot of scuffling; nothing horrible beyond children throwing punches but it was nightmarish at the time.”12
Shatner wasn’t exaggerating, according to his boyhood friend, Arthur Weinthal, who grew up near Bill in Montreal’s West End. “There was an anti-Semitic environment in Montreal,” he said. “The city had a lot of French-speaking people—it was their province—but the aura that emanated out of the politics of the city was anti-Semitic. I always felt separate and alone and segregated, in my mind. One of the great anomalies of Montreal was that on Sherbrooke Street, near Decarie Boulevard, there was a place called the NDG Kosher Meat Market. As an adult I always thought, ‘Isn’t that interesting, Our Lady of Grace Kosher Meat Market, since that’s what ‘NDG’ means—‘Our Lady of Grace.’”13
Bill struck up a friendship with his Marcil Avenue neighbor Pierre Lafond, who was slightly older and whose father owned a French-Canadian summer camp for boys. “Bill lived downstairs, and we lived upstairs,” Lafond recalled. “He was a year younger than I was, but we became close friends because of the proximity, for one thing, but also in those days, there was a lot of street life and we were all together. We played football on the streets; we played baseball and hockey.” Pierre’s younger sister, Suzanne, recalled one day when Bill and Pierre, playing baseball in the street, accidentally shattered a neighbor’s windshield with a batted baseball; they both fled to the relative safety of a darkened theater nearby and never fessed up.14
Bill and Pierre joined the “Marcil Gang,” a group of kids who lived on the street and who gave themselves nicknames like “Peanut” and “Sweet Pea.” Bill’s first pangs of lust were ignited by a local girl named Betty—Pierre remembered her as Betty Beck—who was part of the Marcil Gang. “Betty was my entrée into sexuality, not necessarily sex, but being aware of a voluptuous girl,” Shatner said. “We used to play tackle football—and, if you tackled Betty, it could change your life.”15 Despite his claims that he was lonely, Pierre remembered Bill as “being very attractive,” claiming that “the girls loved him” and that he was quite talkative when it came to the opposite sex. “He was extroverted. He wasn’t afraid to talk.”
During the school year, Bill walked to nearby Willingdon Elementary School, where he earned decent grades. He didn’t share the walk with Pierre, who attended a different elementary school because his French-Canadian father wanted him to improve his English-speaking skills.
When Bill was around seven or eight years old, Ann, the frustrated actress, began taking her son each Saturday to the Montreal Children’s Theatre, which was established in 1933 by Dorothy Davis and Violent Walters and was originally located in a residential basement. The theater’s stated mission was “not necessarily to create young actors and actresses”; instead, it claimed that “good speech, self-esteem and confidence were primary goals.”16 Both Davis and Walters would live well into their nineties, and the school, now called the Children’s Theatre, has staged over seven hundred plays. Young Bill Shatner’s classmates included Richard Easton, a future Tony Award-winning actor, and Beatrice Picard, later to become a star on French-speaking Canadian television (and with whom Shatner had one of his very first onstage love scenes, which ended with a kiss). “He was exposed to the theatre early on and given a sense of ambition, I think, by his mother,” Shatner’s boyhood friend, Hilliard Jason, recalled years later. “His mother, I think, dreamed that her son would be a star one day.”17
It was during his time at the Montreal Children’s Theatre that Bill caught the acting bug. “I don’t remember being taught how to act because I don’t believe you can be taught how to act,” he said. “But you can learn the discipline of learning words and having to appear and to say them. I don’t ever recall thinking, ‘I’m too scared to do this, therefore I won’t do this.’ To me the show had to go on and I understood that concept from a very early age.”
Bill and his fellow Children’s Theatre actors would stage plays at the local Victorian Theatre, in a nearby park, and on local radio, where Bill appeared on a show called Saturday Morning Fairy Tales. He was “madly in love” with Violet Walters, who with her dyed black hair and violet lips he thought “bore a striking resemblance, all of it manufactured, to some of the silent-screen stars.” He was one of the few males at the school: “I think she was desperate for any male to say the words.”18 Young Bill would anger Davis and Walters by hiding behind the curtain when it was time to rehearse, but he was an overall likeable kid and the women never took his unruliness too seriously. Ann Shatner never missed a performance; if Bill auditioned for a radio role and didn’t get the part, she would be on the phone, screaming at the poor producer on the other end for not hiring her son.
Bill caught the eye of Rupert Caplan, a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and started to appear regularly in roles both big and small on CBC radio shows, including an adaptation of Lies My Father Told Me, Ted Allan’s tale about an Orthodox Jewish boy growing up in 1920s Montreal, and Daddy Long-Legs, which merited a local newspaper photograph of teenaged stars Bill Shatner and Elizabeth Karabiner. Bill played Jimmie McBride in the Children’s Theatre stage production of Daddy-Long-Legs, which was based on the 1912 Jean Webster novel. The CBC’s reach was expansive; Shatner’s voice was heard not only in Montreal but on radios in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, and even five hundred miles away in Halifax. He participated in the Children’s Theatre on weekends all the way through to his high school years.
* * *
When he reached the age of six, Bill started spending summers away from home at Jewish sleepaway camps that dotted the picturesque Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. He had his first summer camp experience at Camp Rabin, owned by one of his aunts. He loved the athletics—playing baseball, swimming, and, especially, boxing—but he felt lonely and homesick. His older sister, Farla, was also at Camp Rabin, so that helped a bit, and his parents would often drive up to visit on a summer Sunday. He recalled a starring role in a camp production of Winterset, in which he played a young Jewish boy in Europe forced to leave his home and his beloved dog (played by a fellow camper “costumed in painted newspaper”) as the Nazis approached. “The people at the camp, the parents, were very much aware of the situation, and that a massacre was going on [in Europe],” he said. Shatner remember crying onstage, which, in turn, brought the camp audience (mostly parents) to tears.19 “I remember the warmth of my father holding me as people told him what a wonderful son he had. Just imagine the impact that had on a six-year-old child. I had the ability to move people to tears. And I could get approval.”20
In the fall of 1944, Bill entered West Hill High School, not too far from the duplex on Marcil Avenue. He tried out for the school’s football team and made the cut, becoming, as he said in a self-deprecating manner, “part of a great high school dynasty that won the city championships for several years . . . I was on the second team and, quite clearly, I was, at most, second best.”21 Bill had always enjoyed skiing in the Laurentian Mountains and joined the West Hill High School ski team. He kept a busy social schedule, dating a few girls off and on, but there was no high school sweetheart in the picture.
Bill began to lose touch with his upstairs Marcil Avenue pal, Pierre Lafond, who went to a different high school. Their friendship trailed off, and they eventually lost touch. Pierre, like his boyhood friend, found later success in California. After graduating from McGill University with a degree in architecture, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1957, inherited his father’s liquor store there, and expanded the business—eventually starting the Santa Barbara Winery, which continues to operate to this day on one hundred and five acres in the Santa Ynez Valley, and Lafond Winery & Vineyards.
* * *
Bill spent many of his boyhood weekends at the movies, often watching two double bills on the same day, starting at noon on Saturday and not leaving the theater until later that evening. Sometimes Bill and his pals would cut class on Friday and head to downtown Montreal to catch a burlesque show at the Gayety Theatre on Sainte-Catherine Street. “Lily St-Cyr was usually there stripping, and they had the comics and I used to cry with laughter at the burlesque,” he said.
Bill joined the high school drama department and acted in several plays, and while he devoted more and more time to studying and absorbing the craft of acting, his grades began to suffer. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work—he was bright, intuitive, and curious—but all he cared about, at this stage of the game, was acting and sports. He felt more complete as a person, more at ease when he was on the stage inhabiting someone else’s skin, and he enjoyed the adulation of the audience. Perhaps the acting and the warmth of an audience was a panacea to the loneliness he claimed to feel in his everyday life as Bill Shatner. His devotion to acting was frowned upon by his buddies on the football team, who thought it was “weird.” It was, he said, “tantamount to carrying your violin case while passing the school.”22 But he persevered, seeking out new avenues for his passion and accepting any acting jobs that came his way, including a production of the Clifford Odets drama Waiting for Lefty that was staged at a Communist meeting hall in Montreal. He was sixteen and didn’t understand the play’s message, or know the first thing about Communism, but said later he was lifted emotionally by shouting “Strike! Strike!” on the stage.23
When Bill was fifteen and “oh so terribly naïve,” he got a job as a stage manager at the Orpheum Theatre in Montreal, where he caught the fancy of a French singer who was performing there. The male singer (Shatner never identified him by name) invited Bill out for dinner at a nice restaurant. The eatery’s dress code required a jacket, which Bill didn’t have. No problem, the singer told him, he had a jacket back at his hotel room that he was sure would fit Bill. They went upstairs to retrieve the alleged jacket, and the situation spiraled into a farcical scene as the romantically aggressive singer chased Bill around the bed before he could make a panicked escape. “I didn’t know that men could be attracted to other men,” he said. “It was not something spoken about in middle-class Jewish homes.”
Bill continued to spend his summer vacations at various (mostly) Jewish summer camps throughout his high school years and eventually graduated from camper to counselor. For several summers, he worked as a counselor at Camp B’nai Brith, located on a lake in the Laurentian Mountains in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. One of his co-counselors, Howard Ryshpan, was two years younger and, like Bill, was bitten by the acting bug. Their paths would cross again a decade later when they were both working in Canadian television.
“Saint Agathe at the time was like the Catskills. There were a lot of Jewish hotels and people went there for the summer,” Ryshpan recalled. “A lot of the guys who worked the Catskills worked up in Saint Agathe. The camp itself was very pretty; there was no electricity at the time, and, at night, we’d have to spend an evening on duty in case the kids got up during the night. We had kerosene lamps on the porch of each of the bunks. So, you would see these lamps in the darkness, and you would hear the loons out on the lake at night and it was very lovely.”
Shatner was a popular personality in the camp and made some lifelong friends, including Hilliard Jason, who later embarked on a distinguished medical career. (He insisted on being called “Hilliard,” even back in their camp days, Shatner said.)
Camp B’nai Brith was comprised of thirteen bunks, each with two counselors, and was nonsectarian, though most of its campers were Jewish and attended the Friday-night Sabbath services. World War II had ended just a few years earlier, and many of the kids at Camp B’nai Brith were refugees from Eastern Europe who had witnessed unspoken horrors during the Holocaust, losing family members, including parents and friends. “I was in charge of arts and crafts, Hilliard Jason was in charge of the waterfront and Bill was in charge of drama,” Shatner’s boyhood friend, Arthur Weinthal, recalled. “I think one year he did a Gilbert and Sullivan something-or-other.”
Over sixty years later, Weinthal could still remember the refugees who arrived at Camp B’nai Brith, “kids who had been released from camps in Europe.”
Most of these kids were orphans. The Jewish Community Service in Montreal gave each of them a little suitcase with a T-shirt, soap, a towel, a toothbrush and a pair of shorts. I was also a counselor in addition to being in charge of arts and crafts, and I had a bunk of eight to ten kids—and the sounds you heard at night from those kids were incredible. They were shell-shocked . . . and in the morning we used to take their bedsheets, which were covered in urine, and hang them over the balcony.
Over the course of three weeks the number of bedsheets over the balcony would lessen and the noise at night would lessen and the faces which were haunted and pale when they arrived were now sunburnt.24
“It stretched us a great deal,” Hilliard Jason said. “You had to grow up very fast . . . taking care of kids who needed you in a parental role—in some cases rather desperately.”25
One of those frightened young campers was future Canadian diplomat Fred Bild, who arrived at Camp B’nai Brith as a thirteen-year-old Jewish refugee from Belgium. Seven years earlier, Fred’s father was grabbed off a street in Brussels and sent to his death at Auschwitz; Fred’s mother hid him and his younger brother on a farm in the Belgian town of Lubbeek for two years. The family was reunited after the war, and Fred’s mother remarried, moving with her new husband and children to Montreal. Because he was Jewish, Fred was not allowed to attend a French school (one of the rules back then), and he spoke no English that first summer at Camp B’nai Brith in 1948.
One of his counselors was Bill Shatner.
“To me, he was a grown up. He certainly had this sense of authority. But he was a very, very congenial person,” Bild said, vividly recalling Shatner seventy years later.
He obviously took his job seriously. I didn’t know what a counselor was. I had been in organizations like that for young people, where they were put together and there were supervisors over them. I guess that’s kind of what he was, but he immediately . . . I can remember the first words he spoke to me. I didn’t speak a word of English when I arrived. I only spoke French and German. He immediately spoke French to me. His French wasn’t perfect; it was the kind of French that Montreal boys spoke. But it was certainly understandable and made me feel at home.
He asked me where I came from and if was this my first time at camp, and he asked me what sports I liked. And I didn’t know what to say because I hadn’t practiced any sports. There were a couple of other boys like me who were recent arrivals and he was very solicitous of us. He didn’t make a huge fuss over us, but he did take special care of us.
Bill spent a lot of time with Fred and the other recent arrivals from Europe, taking them on nature hikes, teaching them how to play baseball (“I didn’t understand the usefulness or the entertainment value in it,” Fred said), and trying to help them improve their English skills. Fred spent three weeks at Camp B’nai Brith that summer and returned the following summer with one year of Canadian schooling under his belt. His English had improved to the point where he didn’t have much trouble communicating. And, once again, Bill Shatner took Fred under his wing.
“The second summer, that was ’49, he put on a play,” Fred recalled. “By that time, I had improved my English. He congratulated me; he thought I made tremendous progress. But he continued to correct me, to show me how to pronounce words and to phrase certain sentences. That’s why I say he ‘taught me English.’ We didn’t have formal sessions of learning English, but he would say ‘This is what you normally say.’ He didn’t make me feel I was doing something wrong or that I needed correcting—nothing of the sort—and that’s what I remember most about him. Anything he ever taught you, he did in the nicest way. It was very natural.”
Bill gave Fred a part in the camp play, which was “something with Cowboys and Indians” that included a rousing song. “It wasn’t great theater, but it did give me a role which I was very pleased with,” he said. Fred formed a gang within his bunk, tattooing an anchor on everybody’s arm with a ball-point pen. Shatner helped the boys compose a song in the vein of Gilbert and Sullivan. “He was an extremely nice guy,” Fred said. “He took his counseling duties seriously. He never lost his temper, never insulted us like some other counselors did that. They would berate their kids and say, ‘You’ll never amount to anything because you’re not as good as the kids next door.’ He never did anything like that. He was encouraging, he was full of praise for us and he considered it his job to teach us things.”
That was Fred’s last summer at Camp B’nai Brith. He eventually graduated from Concordia University in Montreal, earned a diploma from University College in London and a foreign student’s diploma from the Ecole nationale d’administration in Paris, and went to work for the Canadian government. He held diplomatic appointments in Japan, Korea, and France; was the Canadian Ambassador to Thailand; and, in 1990, was appointed as Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China and Mongolia. But he never saw Bill Shatner again, and never had the chance to thank him. Until now.
There were other, more lighthearted camp adventures. At the end of one summer, when Bill was eighteen or nineteen, he and a group of his Camp B’nai Brith staff members were invited by the camp director to accompany him on a “wooden war canoe” trip from the Laurentians to New York City—a journey of over nine hundred miles. Shatner retold the story many times over the years, recounting how he couldn’t pee in the middle of Lake Champlain (too embarrassed in front of his canoe mates) and how this group of guys from Canada were supposed to be feted by local Jewish groups in Kingston or Schenectady (the city often changed in Shatner’s retelling) but were forced to bypass the welcoming committees for various reasons. They finally made it to Manhattan, tying up their canoes at the Seventy-Ninth Street marina (sometimes the Seventy-Second Street marina) and walking through the midtown streets. In one version of the story, Shatner said he was asked by a male passerby to accompany him to a show at Radio City Music Hall—where the man attempted to seduce him. In another version, Shatner and his pals were featured on a local newscast recounting their canoeing exploits. Where the group stayed in Manhattan, or for how long they were in the city, is lost to the mists of time.
* * *
Bill Shatner graduated from West Hill High School in June of 1948, three months after his seventeenth birthday. Despite his mediocre academic record, he was accepted into McGill University, most likely because the school needed to meet its quota of Jewish students. The McGill campus was only two miles from Marcil Avenue in Montreal, and Bill saved himself considerable expense by living at home during his four years attending the school. He was passionately devoted to acting, but his father still expected him to join his clothing business, so Bill acquiesced by enrolling in McGill’s School of Commerce. He attended classes infrequently and relied on the kindness of classmates to lend him their notes, “passing exams by one or two marks, getting fifty or fifty one percent right on answers” while devoting as much time as he could to the school’s drama department.
He recalled spending “eighteen hours a day”26 writing plays and musicals, acting in student productions and doing whatever he could to stay involved in the school’s theatrical life. “It didn’t occur to me that I could be an actor,” he said. “I was in Montreal and was going to do something else, probably be in my father’s clothing business, but I continued this routine of not going to school and reading other people’s notes.”27 Given his background and experience in radio, he was hired for some local radio productions, which helped him earn some extra cash. He also earned some money doing voice-over work as a part-time announcer at the CBC. He joined McGill’s five-member radio workshop and became its vice president, eventually ascending to its presidency; he staged and produced the school’s annual Red and White Revue (Hilliard Jason was its technical director), joined the Players’ Club, and acted in a production of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. “He had good time, a good voice, and was a very accomplished performer,” recalled Lionel Caplan, a fellow Camp B’nai Brith counselor who became friendly with Shatner when they reconnected at McGill. They were soon joined by Camp B’nai Brith alum Arthur Weinthal, a future Canadian-television executive, and the trio became fast friends.
“He was the one who encouraged me to join the Red and White Revue,” Caplan recalled. “In one Revue he played a thick, punch-drunk gangster, which was extremely funny. In our third year at McGill he produced and directed the Revue. I was the script coordinator. At the end of the run, at the last performance, it was customary for the producer to say a few words and Bill said something like, ‘For a rounded University education all you need to do is take Philosophy 101,’ which he had done, and participate in the Red and White Revue.” Shatner also directed one of Caplan’s “pretty awful” plays which was meant to be an anti-war anthem, but, according to Caplan: “One of the critics accused of us of being Communists. This was the period of McCarthyism.”28
Weinthal remembered “going to movies together,” saying: “I never knew him as ‘William Shatner,’ only ‘Bill,’ that’s who he was. The three of us would go to the Monkland Theatre and the Empress Theatre and then we’d go out and have a hot dog and some fries on the Strip. We were very good friends and we were particularly good friends with Lionel Caplan because he was the only one who could get his father’s car. Lionel was a hero to us.”29
Bill’s later stage career encompassed the works of Shakespeare, but there’s no record of him acting in any Shakespearian productions at McGill—unlike his fellow B’nai Brith camp counselor Howard Ryshpan, who appeared in the school’s production of Twelfth Night. One of Ryshpan’s castmates in Twelfth Night was Leonard Cohen, who graduated from McGill in 1955. Born into a Jewish family in Montreal in September 1934, Cohen grew up only blocks away from Shatner; separated by three years, they attended different elementary schools and high schools (Cohen graduated from Westmount High School) and were not friends at the time. (If they were, neither man recalled any interactions between them.) There is some evidence, unearthed by online historians, that Bill Shatner and Leonard Cohen were related to each other as fourth cousins through their shared Garmaise lineage (Shatner’s maternal side of the family). After graduating from McGill, Cohen achieved international acclaim as a folk singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2010, he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He died in November 2016 at the age of eighty-two.
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In 1951, while at McGill, twenty-year-old Bill Shatner somehow found the time to make his big-screen debut playing “a crook” in a low-budget movie called The Butler’s Night Off. (He was credited as “Bill Shatner” for the only time in his professional acting career.) The details surrounding his involvement in the movie are murky; directed by trained cinematographer Roger Racine, The Butler’s Night Off was shot in and around Montreal and had noirish pretensions and a labyrinthian plot. Bill was most likely asked to appear in the movie by Stanley Mann, who wrote the screenplay and who had directed the Red and White Revue at McGill the year before Shatner (and who, like Bill, was a veteran of CBC radio). The Butler’s Night Off cast included Henry Ramer, Paul Colbert, Peter Sturgess, and Maurice Gauvin. The movie, less than an hour in length, has been lost to history, but thanks to the digital age, a few choice clips can be found on YouTube. Mann would go on to a successful television and Oscar-nominated screenwriting career, including credits on The Mouse That Roared—which put Peter Sellers on the map in North America—The Collector, Eye of the Needle, Conan the Destroyer, and Damien: Omen II.
That summer of 1951, Bill and Lionel Caplan decided to take a road trip to the United States, winding their way in the direction of California. They (wrongly) assumed they needed to obtain a permit to travel, but when they went to the US Consulate in Montreal, they were told they needed to post a bond—about $400—to ensure they would not disappear in America without returning to their native country. “While I had some savings and could manage, Bill didn’t, and had to borrow money from his mother which, being proud and independent, annoyed him intensely,” Caplan recalled. The two friends joined a couple who were on their way to Kansas and wanted passengers to share the driving and the expenses. “He was a theology student, so there were many interesting discussions along the way and Bill lost no opportunity to challenge his beliefs, which didn’t always endear him or us to our hosts,” Caplan said. “Most nights [the couple] spent in motels along the way, but to save money we slept in their car.” After reaching Kansas, Bill and Lionel hitchhiked to Colorado, where they visited Arthur Weinthal, who was spending the summer with his sister and her husband in Denver, working at an inner-city day camp for underprivileged children.
From there it was on to Utah, hitchhiking there with a group of Mormons, and then on to Nevada after getting a lift from two drivers from New Jersey. “They dropped us in front of a brothel which they were intending to visit,” Caplan said. “Brothels were about to be declared illegal in this part of Nevada.” Once they arrived in California (finally!), they spent a few days with an aunt of Bill’s, who was married to a professor who taught at the University of California, Berkeley. “We heard all about the rampant Mc-Carthyism affecting many academics,” Caplan recalled. “On the West Coast, when we weren’t visiting relatives, we spent our nights in cheap hotels—but if we arrived somewhere after dark we would sometimes sleep on beaches. I especially remember Santa Barbara.”30 They hitchhiked up the West Coast to Vancouver—“to earn money we worked for a very short time humping sacks of something or other around the railway yard”—and Bill, selling his acting experience, was able to get a part in a radio play on the CBC, “which helped with the finances,” Caplan recalled. “Then through a relative of his we got a lift to Chicago with an elderly couple who wanted us to drive them.” After a short stint in Chicago, Bill and Lionel headed to New York City, where they saw several Broadway shows, including Guys and Dolls, before returning to Montreal.
The traveling was a fun diversion, but Bill knew that his father expected him to join the business after he graduated from McGill—and that expectation “hung over him like a cloud”31 (though not enough to stop him from cutting classes). “I knew this is what I loved to do,” he said about acting, “but it was . . . beyond concept to even think about that. I don’t remember even thinking that I could possibly become an actor. I put myself through school . . . although I lived at home, I paid my dues and bought my books and had my spending money by acting on radio in Montreal.” He occasionally joined his father at the office, where he “got instantly tired” and realized he could never be happy in the clothing business—in which he had absolutely no interest or acumen.
Bill’s grades at McGill plummeted as he devoted more and more of his time to the theater, acting onstage and in productions produced through McGill’s radio workshop. Finally, in his junior year, he screwed up the courage to tell his father what he really wanted to do with his life. It was, he said, “one of the most difficult things I have ever done.”32 He was in his bedroom on Marcil Avenue when Joseph asked his son if he’d thought about what he would do after he graduated. He dropped his bombshell, and it hit Joseph like a ton of bricks; Bill remembered his father sitting on the bed, trying to absorb the news that his son wanted to be an actor—an actor!—while Bill paced back and forth, trying to explain his decision. “He was very upset, totally against it,” he said. “He argued with me for days. And I had to keep saying, ‘I want to try.’”33
Eventually, his father came around to the idea. Sort of. “Well, do what you want to do,” he told his son. “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.”34 Bill figured that if he could earn one hundred dollars a week, he could support himself as a working actor. “I could live, and that was my ambition when I was in my twenties.”35
Bill graduated from McGill in the spring of 1952 with a degree in commerce and chose a quote from the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet John Keats to accompany his graduation photo in the school’s yearbook: “There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.” He did not attend the graduation convocation; he’d failed a math class and needed to pass that hurdle before getting his college degree.
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If Bill was going to pursue an acting career, he needed a job. Shortly after his college graduation, he was thrown a lifeline by Ruth Springford, who had directed him in several plays at McGill. She also ran a summer theater in Northern Ontario called the Mountain Playhouse, which was billed as “the only English-speaking Summer Theatre in the Province of Quebec,” and she sent Bill to see its actor/manager, Bruce Raymond. “My one and only fifteen minutes of fame were realized in the summer of 1952 while I was actor/manager of a now long-gone summer theater, the Mountain Playhouse, situated at Beaver Lake on the top of Mount Royal,” Raymond remembered nearly sixty years later. “A newly minted BCom graduate approached and asked for a job as an actor. As he wanted the then-princely salary of thirty-five dollars a week, I could only afford to hire him if he also took on the job of the Assistant Box-office Manager. William Shatner agreed.”36
Bill’s main job was to oversee ticket sales for the Mountain Playhouse, and he failed miserably shortly after arriving there. “I didn’t know anything about the business,” he said. “I flunked accounting two years in a row. And my father tried to dissuade me from taking the job. But we made a deal. He gave me five years to make it as an actor. If I didn’t, I’d go into his business.”37 His career as the theater’s assistant manager was short-lived; Ruth Springford fired him shortly thereafter but kept Bill on as a performer, which is when he “began playing all those happy young man roles.”38 He costarred in a 1952 Mountain House production of Castle in the Air and, that same year, played Richard Stanley in The Man Who Came to Dinner starring Barry Morse, Corinne Conley, and Jack Creley. (Bill was also billed as Assistant Manager.) In 1953, he costarred in When the Sun Shines opposite Creley and Suzanne Finley.
He wasn’t exactly starving; Joseph had given him a few thousand dollars after he graduated from McGill, and now he used that money to support himself. “I always thought, ‘Well, I can go back to Montreal if this doesn’t work out,’” he said. “I thought that for years.”39
Springford’s connections in the Canadian theater world ran deep, and when the 1952 summer season ended, she recommended Bill to a friend at the Canadian National Repertory Theatre, housed in the La Salle Academy Playhouse in Ottawa. Bill was hired as an actor-manager for thirty dollars a week and was, initially, relegated to mostly playing roles as juveniles—more “happy young man” parts. “I went there as an assistant manager and couldn’t keep track of the money and tickets and I was fired again but hired as an actor.” Again.
One Academy Playhouse anecdote landed Bill in the gossip columns nearly a decade later, once he attained a modicum of stardom in Canada. The story, perhaps invented by an imaginative publicity agent, found young Bill Shatner appearing in a production of The Seventh Veil and playing a piano, onstage, while waiting for the leading lady to make her entrance. Bill didn’t know how to play the piano and was supposed to mime his movements on the keys while accompanied by an actual (unseen) pianist playing offstage. A blanket was placed inside Bill’s piano to muffle the sound; on opening night, as he started to “play” his piano on cue, the offstage pianist was silent for around thirty seconds, leaving Bill to mime in silence—until the real pianist finally came crashing in just as Bill lifted his arms off the keys to stretch them. “The unexpected comedy broke up the audience and for the balance of the play they laughed at everything,” the item noted. “The heavy drama wound up as a farce.”40
Still, the theater company was important enough to warrant a mention in the New York Times, which ran a brief item in November 1953 about the Noel Coward comedy Relative Values, making its North American premiere at the La Salle Playhouse later that month with star Araby Lockhart, the Toronto-born actress known for her work on the Canadian stage and on television. “The supporting players include Lynne Gorman, William Hutt, and William Shatner,” the story noted.41 Relative Values costar Amelia Hall had appeared opposite Alec Guinness at the esteemed Stratford Festival in Ontario the previous summer—Shatner’s next destination as he climbed the acting ranks.