One of the guest directors at the La Salle Playhouse had recommended Bill Shatner to Tyrone Guthrie. In 1953, the legendary British-born director, then fifty-three years old, had cofounded the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, with Canadian native and journalist Tom Patterson. Patterson’s vision for the Stratford Festival was to create a theater featuring only Canadian actors performing the stage classics. He was given a grant of $125 by the Stratford City Council to seek “artistic advice” for his idea from Laurence Olivier in New York City. When he failed to connect with Olivier, Canadian theater pioneer Dora Mavor Moore arranged a transatlantic phone call between Patterson and Guthrie—who, intrigued by the idea, flew to Stratford, surveyed the physical and cultural landscape, and agreed to become the Festival’s first Artistic Director.1
At the time of Guthrie’s arrival, the Festival’s outdoor venue was almost literally a pit covered by a giant canvas tent. It could accommodate around two thousand people. The stage facilities, or lack thereof, mattered little to Guthrie’s colleagues in the theater; such was his stature and influence that he was able to lure British stars Alec Guinness and Irene Worth to Stratford—Guinness to star in its inaugural production of Richard III in 1953, and Worth following as the star of its second production, All’s Well That Ends Well.
Guthrie was a giant in the theatrical world who inspired mostly fear in those who met him for the first time. He was, Bill Shatner recalled, “a giant, like a god from Olympus”2 when he met Guthrie for the first time in 1954, after packing his belongings into the car his father bought for him (a British-made Morris Minor) and making the four-and-a-half-hour drive from Ottawa to Toronto in a fierce rainstorm—narrowly avoiding being forced off a bridge into the Ottawa River by a passing truck.3 He arrived in Stratford in time for the start of the new Festival season.
Bill was in good company; his fellow players included Ottawa native and future Bonanza star Lorne Greene—who once convinced a naïve Shatner to invest $500 in uranium commodities (he lost it all)—and Christopher Plummer. “He was the most extraordinary genius, really,” Plummer said of Guthrie. “He was funny, and he could absolutely collapse you with laughter. He worked with all the greats; he taught Charles Laughton. He worked with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. He was just extraordinary in how he let you go absolutely free and then reined you in. One day I remember we were improvising and making bloody fools of ourselves in rehearsal and he said, ‘Absolutely terrible taste. But keep it in.’”4
Shatner and Plummer were not strangers to each other when they joined the Stratford Festival. They’d worked together before, both in theatrical productions and in radio and on television (mostly in Toronto). “Radio was huge in the late forties and early fifties and television hadn’t really made its big mark quite yet,” Plummer said. “We were doing theater and radio. Radio to make a living, and the theater because it was the best coach in the world. Bill was in all those productions. We were both used to playing leading roles, even then.”5 They worked in both English- and French-speaking radio shows, including French-language soap operas and a weekly Bible series. Shatner and Plummer costarred in a production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline staged by the Russian director-designer Fyodor Komisarjevsky, affectionately known as “Kommie,” who Plummer called “the guru of all time.” Kommie arrived in Canada having already headed the Imperial and State Theatres of Moscow and the Old Vic in London. Bill Shatner was “Kommie’s favorite of all,” Plummer said. “We adored him, and I think he liked us. One particular line Kommie said to both Bill and me was, ‘When you play king, everyone else stand up and you sit down.’ It was a wonderful, simple piece of direction I’ll remember all my life.”6
Money was tight in those early days, and Bill was burning through the funds his father had given him after his graduation from McGill. He was working semi-steadily in radio and television, but those jobs didn’t pay much (around thirty-five dollars apiece). Bill rented a room in the top floor of a rooming house just blocks away from the CBC; the bed, he remembered, had a rope mattress. He was “desperately homesick” that first year and lived in fear of just about everything—his new colleagues, his future, and even “of being knifed in the back when I walked down the dark streets.”7 He ate most of his meals, alone, at a nearby restaurant with a cheap buffet and a sketchy bar that opened for business once the cafeteria closed. He became friendly with the prostitutes who hung out there and worked in the upstairs rooms; eventually he began a relationship with one of them that lasted “several months,” claiming, “It wasn’t a love affair, we weren’t in love with each other, but it was warm and soothing and nurturing.”8
Bill’s loneliness was offset, in part, by the local work in Toronto and by the Stratford Festival, which staged three plays each season, from May through September. The company’s actors appeared in all three productions, with the new guys, including Shatner, relegated to supporting roles or to the chorus. “Getting a few lines was an accomplishment,” he said, but no one complained. “We were all vying for roles and . . . we struggled for roles and opportunities and we wanted bigger roles to play the next year,” he said. “There was security in being the member of a [theater] company but we wanted to be better than a member of a company.”9
They were all in awe of the six-foot-six-inch Guthrie, whose protuberant belly and hawk nose complemented his dominating mien.10 After a time, Guthrie, recognizing something in Bill Shatner’s acting ability, started to take him under his wing—even likening him to “an actor in the tradition of Olivier.”11
“All of us little actors in Canada saw the horizon advance toward us” with Guthrie’s presence, Shatner said. “We trembled in his sight. One time he put his arm around me and said, ‘Bill, tell me about method acting.’” Shatner prattled on about a subject he knew nothing about, trying to impress his mentor, when Guthrie stopped him. “He paused and said, ‘Why don’t they think of a beautiful sunset?’ rather than trying to call up some emotion. He was a master at crowds and panoply and grand design; perhaps less successful at ‘Here’s how to read a line’ or the meaning of the words.”12
Bill found work on the CBC in live television productions that ran the gamut from classical literature to situational comedy. It helped to pay the bills. In 1955 alone, he costarred in an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd opposite big-screen star Basil Rathbone—who was said to have admired Shatner’s elocution and his use of “universal English.” Bill remembered the stately Rathbone telling him that he wasn’t too nervous about their live production of Billy Budd; after all, Rathbone said, he acted on live television productions in America before an audience of thirty million viewers. Billy Budd would be a piece of cake, seen by maybe five million viewers if the television stars aligned. On opening night, Rathbone proceeded to accidentally step into a bucket on stage, which got stuck on his foot as he frantically tried to shake it off. “He blew his lines and was destroyed from that moment,” Shatner said with some satisfaction.13 There were other television appearances that year: The Coming Out of Ellie Swann, alongside Hugh Webster and veteran actress Kathleen Kidd; Forever Galatea, in which he costarred opposite Jane Graham; and On a Streetcar, costarring Janet Reid.
When Bill Shatner wasn’t acting in the festival or in television or radio productions, he was expanding his performing repertoire with singing, dancing, fencing, and voice lessons. And he was also writing, furiously. They were, mostly, television plays, including Dreams—“a story of a young couple who meet and fall in love under false pretenses”—which he wrote for the CBC’s On Camera series.14 One of the Dreams cast members was a young actress named Gloria Rand (née Rosenberg), and Bill fell hard for her. She was, he said, “a lovely, doe-like woman who came and was tremulous and on the edge of the pasture of life and just struck my fancy.”15 They began dating and he was soon calling her every night from Stratford, telling her he loved her and imploring her to join him there. “We were on the phone so often that the operator from the Canadian Exchange felt sorry for me and allowed me to call for free,” he said.16 She eventually acquiesced and followed him to Stratford. They were engaged four months later.
In the meantime, Bill’s roles in the Stratford Festival’s productions were growing bigger as his first year segued into his second year and then into his third year as a member of the company. He started to be cast in high-visibility roles, including Julius Caesar and Castle in the Air with Canadian stage veteran Amelia Hall. “William Shatner, a newcomer, is making an excellent impression as individualistic Scots man-of-all work—incidentally the only actor who adopts an accent and sticks to it,” noted one critic.17 The New York Times singled him out for praise for his role in The Merchant of Venice: “As Gratiano, William Shatner has a boyish swagger that refreshes another commonplace part.”18
By Bill Shatner’s third year in Stratford, Michael Langham had succeeded Guthrie as the festival’s Artistic Director. Christopher Plummer, too, was enjoying a lot of success at the festival and, in the summer of 1956, was tapped by Langham to star in Henry V, with Shatner as his understudy. In August, Plummer, who was “plagued by kidney stones,”19 was forced to miss a performance, later attributing his pain to a sexual encounter the night before. “I woke up alone the next morning . . . (pain) all around my groin and lower abdomen . . . I started to whimper like a whipped dog. ‘So, this is what syphilis is like?’ I thought. ‘I suppose I deserve it, but Christ, how the hell was I to know?’”20 (It was, indeed, a kidney stone.)
Plummer’s understudy, Bill Shatner, stepped into his shoes. Would it be the proverbial big break? “I heard that he was totally original in the part,” Plummer said diplomatically, over fifty years later. “He sat down where I stood up. He stood up where I laid down. I mean he completely did the opposite to what I did, which was very brave, actually, for an understudy. And I thought, ‘That son of a bitch!’ He made a big hit and I couldn’t wait to get back to dethrone him.”21
Shatner insisted that he wasn’t trying to upstage the show’s star, attributing his contradictory stage movements to not knowing what he was doing, since he didn’t have enough practice as Plummer’s understudy to nail the role note for note.22 “Without one word of rehearsal . . . I pulled it off because I was understudying one of two plays we were rehearsing to begin with,” he said. “I was there all the time and saw the choreography and learned the lines—that was the key thing.”
As Plummer’s understudy, the thought never crossed his mind that he would be called upon to fill in for the star. “I hadn’t even talked to those actors,” he said of the play’s other leads. “We’d butted heads a couple of times and I’d spoken to the other understudies. But the lead actors in the parts? I’d barely spoken to them and now I was going to have to deliver lines of great verve and force and wear a costume I never wore before and walk in steps I never had gone before and face two thousand two hundred people . . . and none of that daunted me.”23
He froze once, in a later scene after the Battle of Agincourt when Henry is on the battlefield with his brother, the Duke of Gloucester (the role Shatner was supposed to play). He approached the actor playing the Duke, hoping for help with his next line. He was met by a blank stare. “That guy had memorized everybody’s line in the play,” he said, still baffled years later at the memory. “Later, someone said, ‘What a brilliant piece of choreography—exhausted, brother goes to brother and leans on him for strength and comes back, renewed.’ Little did they know.”
The reviews of Shatner’s performance the following day were, for the most part, excellent (with a few minor quibbles).
“To sum up the performance in a word, Shatner rose magnificently to the occasion,” observed a writer for the Montreal Gazette. “But he is not yet equipped to play Henry to the hilt . . . He can assume the confident swagger and the knowing leer. Those who saw him in Julius Caesar will also remember that he can also move an audience with quiet sincerity.”24
Sydney Johnson wrote a lengthy critique of Shatner’s Henry V performance in The Montreal Star, praising the actor’s ability to emote “not in the great speeches but in the short dialogue passages, though he reached great heights of eloquence in the prayer before the battle in Act IV . . . Shatner had practically everything except a majesty of delivery.”25 He (gently) critiqued Shatner’s inability to vocally carry those scenes requiring lengthy speeches, writing that “his characterization lacked nobility of expression . . . he needs more training and experience to play a king . . . Still and all, considering the circumstances this was a truly great performance and Mr. Shatner thoroughly deserved the ovation he received from the audience and his fellow players.”
“Understudy Shatner, with only a few afternoon hours’ rehearsal, took over Friday night and earned three curtain calls—one solo,” noted the Canadian Press wire service, following up with some incorrect information about Gloria. “Today he is scheduled to marry Gloria Rand, a blonde English beauty he met in Toronto last winter. He said a honeymoon will be postponed until after the Stratford company’s appearance at the Edinburgh Festival later this month.”26
It was quite an eventful August for Shatner. Less than two weeks before his one-night starring role in Henry V, he was one of four winners of the Stratford Festival’s third annual Tyrone Guthrie Award. Shatner and fellow winners David Gardner, Robin Gamell, and Marie Day were given their citations by Canada’s governor general, Vincent Massey, in a private ceremony. The award came with a $750 scholarship “for furthering their knowledge and experience in acting.”
Shatner also appeared in his second movie, a filmed (color) version of the Stratford Festival’s production of Oedipus Rex that was directed by Tyrone Guthrie and starred Douglas Campbell as Oedipus. Most of the actors wore masks in the tradition of ancient Greek theater. (The New York Times, reviewing the movie in January 1957, called the masks “monstrous and grotesque.”) Shatner, a member of the chorus, also wore a mask. However, in the beginning of the film, he appears sans mask (briefly) as he appears onstage and gives the chorus leader (William Hutt) his mask. “For students and all with classical interests, this film is a jewel of great price,” noted theNew York Times in its review. Shatner was not mentioned.27
Bill Shatner and Gloria Rand married after a four-month courtship on August 12, 1956, in her parents’ home in Toronto. Lionel Caplan was among the guests. “It was held in the garden of her parents’ house, a pleasant but by no means extravagant occasion,” he said. “And while in many Jewish weddings the bridegroom is accompanied to the chuppah by one or both of his parents, Bill, typically, walked down the aisle on his own.”
He was twenty-five, riding high on a burgeoning acting career, and setting his sights on more television work. So, too, was Gloria. In February 1955, she flew to New York City to costar in an episode of Goodyear Playhouse, NBC’s live television anthology series. The episode, “Backfire,” revolved around a sociology professor (Larry Gates) who reassesses his principles after witnessing a crime. Her role was visible enough to earn her a bit of newspaper ink. “Young Gloria Rand was the horrified daughter and Mark Richman was the young man who helped show the professor that people must be adjudged as separate individuals, not in scientific groupings. ‘Backfire’ turned out to be excellent, thought-provoking drama from start to finish.”28 She followed that up a year later with a costarring appearance in an episode of the CBC’s GM Theatre called “Tolliver’s Travels.” For both Bill and Gloria, it seemed like the sky was the limit. “As far back as I can remember there were only two things I always wanted to do,” Shatner said at the time. “Be an actor and see America.”
* * *
He was able to check off the second box earlier that year, when Tyrone Guthrie cast Shatner in a bit role (as Usumcasane, a name Shatner loved to pronounce) in a short-lived Broadway production of Tamburlaine the Great, which ran for twenty performances at the Winter Garden Theatre from mid-January to early February of 1956. It had the unfortunate timing to open among such stellar shows as Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell, and Inherit the Wind, starring Paul Muni—not to mention My Fair Lady and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Guthrie directed the production, which was originally scheduled to run for twelve weeks with Lloyd Bochner in the lead role and David Gardner and Colleen Dewhurst among the show’s large cast. “Maybe I wasn’t the toast of Broadway,” Bill said later, “but I certainly was a shot glass of whisky of Broadway.”29
Later accounts of Bill Shatner’s short time on Broadway—in a small role that mostly required that Usumcasane help carry Tamburlaine (Anthony Quayle) on a sedan chair—had him being offered a seven-picture movie deal by an executive at 20th Century Fox, who saw the show and promised Bill the princely sum of $500 a week. (He was making eighty dollars a week at Stratford.) But he declined to sign the deal on the advice of a fellow actor (or of “some weird guy at some party”—he told several versions of the story). Bill’s agent “gnashed his teeth” over his decision.30 In another version of the story, Bill was being represented by his cousin, a recent law school graduate whose mother was a secretary at 20th Century Fox. Cousin Bill was his first case. It’s unclear if that’s the way it really played out.
After Tamburlaine closed and he returned to Canada, Bill was offered a television role in New York and was scheduled to return to Manhattan in March. But he and fellow actor Robert Christie were denied permission to enter the country under the McCarran Act, which stipulated that Canadian actors taking jobs in the United States were required “to be outstanding artists or to play a part no American citizen could fill.” The Actors’ Equity Association of Toronto filed a grievance on the actors’ behalf, but to no avail.31
Bill would get his artistic revenge soon enough.
* * *
The Shatners were optimistic about their careers as the calendar changed to 1957. They both had eyes on the New York television and theatrical world, and they moved to the city from Toronto early that year, settling into a small apartment in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, a short subway ride from Manhattan. Live television was experiencing its “Golden Age” and New York City was its hub in a medium that exploded in the past decade and virtually wiped out serial radio dramas. (Los Angeles was still playing catch-up vis-à-vis television production but was quickly gaining steam on its way to supplanting New York.) CBS, NBC, and the fledgling ABC networks were all headquartered in Manhattan. Live dramas including Studio One, Lux Video Theater, Kraft Television Theater, and The United States Steel Hour ruled the nightly airwaves along with variety shows (The Jackie Gleason Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Red Skelton Show) and sitcoms. A plethora of cheap-to-produce soap operas (As the World Turns, Guiding Light, The Edge of Night), game shows, and fifteen-minute early-evening newscasts rounded out the networks’ schedules.
Bill Shatner had attracted notice the previous year during his short run in Tamburlaine the Great; now, the television floodgates opened and the work came fast and furiously for the handsome young actor: Lamp Unto My Feet, Goodyear Playhouse, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Playhouse 90, Omnibus (in which he costarred with his old pal, Christopher Plummer), and Climax! He played a young pathologist in a two-part Studio One drama, “No Deadly Medicine,” written by Arthur Hailey and costarring Lee J. Cobb, James Broderick, and Gloria Vanderbilt. “William Shatner was very good as the younger pathologist,” noted Jack Gould in the New York Times.32 What Gould and the viewers at home did not know is that Shatner had a fit of stage fright in the middle of the live telecast, during a scene where he had to walk across the stage. It was a minor blip and went unnoticed (by everyone except Shatner).
He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing a scene from Henry V, and he filmed an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “The Glass Eye” with costars Jessica Tandy and Tom Conway. He played an embittered young man opposite crusty Ed Begley in an episode of ABC’s The United States Steel Hour—his performance was labeled “superior,” and Variety gushed that he was “unforgettable as the young priest.” He seemed to get every role he auditioned for. He couldn’t miss. “Very quickly I became one of the busiest actors in the city,” he recalled. “It seemed like I was always working.”33 He started to be recognized on the street; he was offered several television commercials, which he turned down. Sure, the money would come in handy, but acting in commercials wasn’t “serious” work—and he was working with some of the biggest names in show business. How would that look? “I was one of the most popular actors on live television, getting role after role after role,” he said. “But they only paid six hundred dollars and it took about two or three weeks to do a live TV play. The rent was one hundred dollars. So, by the time you got through with all your expenses—you could never get ahead—for years.”34
He loved the adrenaline of live television, the sport of learning his lines, hitting his mark (usually a piece of masking tape on the stage floor), and getting into the “zen” zone of separating himself from the audience while being aware that millions of eyeballs were watching his performance. There was little room for error. He even loved the whirring noise that emanated from the bulky television cameras as their internal fans cooled down the hot camera tubes. “For all you might know it was breathing,” he said. “There was this warm camera, there was someone behind it, but he was kind of hidden behind this massive thing . . . I thought the camera was alive; if you make an entrance, it purred at you.”
His acting in those heady New York days didn’t go unnoticed by Richard Matheson, a thirty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn. “He so often gets a bad rap for overacting, but I just don’t see that,” he said later. “I used to go out of my way to watch Bill perform on TV in New York in the early part of his career. And he was fascinating to watch . . . very theatrical.” Matheson went on to carve a legendary career as a screenwriter and novelist and, in the 1960s, wrote two classic episodes of The Twilight Zone starring Shatner (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Nick of Time”) and the 1966 Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within.”35
While Bill Shatner’s television career became a frenzied existence of hopping from job to job—sometimes flying to Los Angeles, other times shuttling back to Canada for the occasional one-off—Gloria’s career was stalling. It wasn’t for lack of trying; she auditioned for roles but wasn’t getting called back, and that began to wear on her fragile nerves. She won a small role on an episode of Goodyear Playhouse but couldn’t build on the momentum—and had to watch from the sidelines while her husband became a hot commodity. It was frustrating to her, and Bill tried not to talk too much about his work once he arrived home at night in order to not upset his wife: “So I acted all day and then went back to Queens and played another role.”36
Many of the industry’s biggest movie actors, during that “Golden Age” of television, were wary of the small screen. Most of them considered television below their station, maybe even a passing fad (they knew better, but had a tough time admitting it). It was unusual for big-screen actors to cross the line from movies into series television; Broderick Crawford was an early exception, signing on for the syndicated series Highway Patrol in 1955, five years after his Oscar-winning turn in All the King’s Men. Crawford made millions from Highway Patrol and enjoyed fame far beyond his movie work. Those actors working primarily in television, including Bill Shatner, had a different mindset: the steady work was great and provided a decent paycheck.
But the brass ring was a Hollywood movie.