Hollywood came calling in 1957. Early in the year, Bill signed a two-picture deal with MGM that would launch his movie career while giving him room to continue working in television. It seemed to be the best of both worlds, and the Shatners, both tiring of Bill’s bicoastal ping-pong commute, decided to relocate to Los Angeles, keeping the apartment in Jackson Heights so Bill had a place to stay when he worked in New York. They rented an apartment, for $125 a month, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood; the complex had a pool and was a popular short-term landing spot for people in the show-business community. Bill and Gloria made the four-day cross-country drive in Bill’s new Austin Healy sports car, but it seemed anything but celebratory; later, he recalled the hours of ominous silence as they drove to California. Gloria got pregnant in early 1958, and that August, their first child, daughter Leslie Carol, was born.
Bill’s first movie for MGM would be The Brothers Karamazov, starring Yul Brynner, Lee J. Cobb, and Claire Bloom. Legendary Hollywood heavyweight Pandro S. Berman was producing the picture; he’d seen Shatner in an episode of Studio One on CBS and thought he would be perfect for the role of Alexey Karamazov, an idealistic monk (with “Mamie Eisenhower bangs,” as one pundit wrote) who was the youngest brother of Dmitri Karamazov (Brynner). Shatner met with MGM casting director Mel Balarino and then with Berman, who sent him to meet the movie’s director, Richard Brooks (The Blackboard Jungle, The Catered Affair). Bill tested for the role, and MGM executives thought his cheekbones resembled Brynner’s facial structure. Alexey and Dmitri Karamazov could easily pass for brothers . . . at least on the big screen.
There were rumors that Marilyn Monroe was negotiating to play the role of Grushenka; when that fell through (for various unconfirmed reasons), Carroll Baker was considered, but she was on suspension at Warner Brothers for refusing to appear in Too Much, Too Soon and the studio refused to loan her out to MGM. The role went to Austrian actress Maria Schell, the older sister of actor Maximillian Schell, who was making her American screen debut.
Shooting on The Brothers Karamazov began on the MGM lot in Los Angeles in June and lasted for several months, including on-location filming in Paris and London. Bill Shatner’s introduction to Hollywood studio life began inauspiciously; when he arrived at MGM for the first time, he was barred from passing through the studio gate because the security guard (whose name, Shatner claimed, was Ken Hollywood), didn’t know who he was. (Why he wasn’t on the studio call sheet remains anyone’s guess.) Bill returned to his apartment and got a frantic phone call from the studio, wondering why he wasn’t on the set. He rushed back—and, this time, Ken Hollywood let him through the gates. Parts of the movie were also filmed on location in Paris and London.
Shatner’s main job in The Brothers Karamazov “was to stand in the background looking saintly,” and he got along swimmingly with his costars. He was, though, unsure of how to interpret Yul Brynner’s habit of literally kicking him in the pants. (Was it a form of initiation? Hostility? A practical joke? He was never quite sure, though years later Brynner had nothing but good things to say about working with Shatner.) Bill had memorized the entire script before shooting began—thanks to his years of stage training—and was surprised to watch as a few of his costars learned their lines, on the set, the day they shot their scenes. Such was the Hollywood way.
The October 26, 1957, issue of Maclean’s, Canada’s popular weekly newsmagazine, turned Bill Shatner’s introduction to Hollywood vis-à-vis his role in The Brothers Karamazov into a feature-length article. The story was headlined “Bill Shatner’s Adventures in Hollywood” and was written by Barbara Moon. It provides a snapshot of Shatner’s first foray into big-time moviemaking, both on the set and during his off-hours with Gloria, “a beautiful, shy Toronto-born girl with wheat-colored hair, high cheekbones, wide eyes and a wide soft mouth.” (Moon mistakenly claims Gloria met Shatner when he was acting in Tamburlaine the Great on Broadway, saying: “[Gloria was] dancing in the Copacabana line. ‘The Copacabana,’ Gloria explains in her breathless young-girl’s voice, ‘is the one where they wear clothes.’”)1
Shatner was earning around $5,000 every three weeks, Moon reported, and right after signing his MGM deal, he was going to buy a house “with two fireplaces, a pool, a barbecue pit and a glass-enclosed living room” before his agent talked him out of it—warning Bill not to “mortgage yourself to Hollywood!” The article described Shatner’s “tiny disquietude” at being ignored by the studio and at not being introduced to his The Brothers Karamazov cast members before filming began—and not meeting director Richard Brooks until a few days before shooting his first scene. He ate his lunch, alone, in the studio commissary on day one; his initiation into moviemaking improved as the long days on the set progressed.
The Shatners bought a second car, a used Nash station wagon, for Gloria to drive when her husband was working; on weekends, they sometimes sailed to Catalina Island or drove to Tijuana to watch the bullfights. Director Richard Brooks seemed to be pleased with Bill’s performance; Brynner gave his rookie costar one of his “big-bowled” pipes. Gloria, Moon reported, enrolled in a ballet school but wasn’t having any luck landing an acting job of her own. “In short, Shatner has found nothing in Hollywood that he can’t relate to his familiar routine as an actor or to the film world he’s read about,” Moon wrote. “He knew it would not be glamorous. He was not really surprised to find that it was nerve-wracking, occasionally lonely, often uncertain. ‘This is just the big break, the first plateau,’ he says. ‘From here I could go forward, or I could go back.’”
Filming on The Brothers Karamazov wrapped in August and the movie opened in February 1958 to mixed reviews. Bill was surprised at his star billing—“because I have so little to do in the picture,” he told journalist Sidney Fields—but he was pleased with the critiques of his performance opposite heavyweights Brynner, Cobb, Bloom, Schell, and Richard Basehart.
“Shatner is a very good actor—still only at the halfway mark insofar as his potential is concerned,” said his Brothers Karamazov costar Cobb, whose work in the movie earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. (Burl Ives won for The Big Country.) “The third son, William Shatner, has chosen his way of survival in contest with his father; he has retreated into the church as a monk,” Variety noted in its review of the movie. “The explosion that these figures ignite comes when Brynner imagines Schell has gone to his father in preference to him . . . William Shatner has the difficult task of portraying youthful male goodness, and he does it with such gentle candor that it is effective.”2 Director Richard Brooks praised the entire cast, including Shatner, as “actors of great talent and sensitivity.”3
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With his first Hollywood movie under his belt, Bill went back to his busy schedule of television work. He played the role of a gentle English priest on an episode of The U.S. Steel Hour and won kudos as the villain in Rod Serling’s A Town Has Turned to Dust, a Playhouse 90 drama about a lynching. “Mr. Shatner gave one of the best TV performances of his career,” noted New York Times television critic Jack Gould. “As the town bully and ringleader of the lynching party, he was the embodiment of hate and blind physical passion. Mr. Shatner’s attention to detail in putting together the picture of an ignorant and evil social force was remarkable.”4
He reappeared on The U.S. Steel Hour, this time in a Western-themed episode called “Old Marshals Never Die.” “This time I’m a good guy,” he told the New York Times. “As a matter of fact, it’s a Western in which we’re all good guys. The only type of role I’ve never had on TV is a young romantic one.”5 There was talk that Bill was being considered for a role on Broadway in a new Budd Schulberg drama called The Disenchanted, a fictionalized version of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (that never materialized); television directors Sidney Lumet and Robert Mulligan called him “one of the brightest and most sensitive young actors we’ve ever directed.”6
In June of 1958, veteran Broadway producer Joshua Logan announced that he’d chosen William Shatner to star in a dramatic version of The World of Suzie Wong, based on British author Richard Mason’s 1957 novel about Robert Lomax, a British artist living in Hong Kong who falls in love with a local prostitute named Suzie Wong. Bill flew to New York to meet with Logan and co-producer David Merrick at Logan’s country house and reportedly left their meeting fifteen minutes later with a signed contract paying him $750 a week. “By the time I got back to the city I had the job,” he said.7 The show was scheduled to open in October at the Broadhurst Theatre on Fifty-Fourth Street. “The male lead in The World of Suzie Wong goes to William Shatner, a comparatively unknown performer on Broadway,” the New York Times reported. “In 1956, the Canadian player made his local debut in Tamburlaine the Great. Although he was listed in the program, his chore was a minor one.”8
Signing the Broadway deal for The World of Suzie Wong meant that Bill now had to extricate himself from his MGM contract, which took him longer than he expected and forced him to forfeit $100,000. Bill and Gloria moved into a small house in Hastings-on-Hudson to make his commute into Manhattan bearable. Gloria stayed at home, taking care of six-month-old Leslie. Once they were settled in, Bill spent the following weeks sitting in with Josh Logan and Paul Osborn, who was adapting Mason’s book for the stage, while a parade of actors tried out for the other leading roles. “There was much rewriting and here too I was brought into the discussions,” he recalled.9 In a nod to Shatner’s Montreal roots, Logan and Osborn decided to make Robert Lomax a Canadian artist. (Which also negated Bill having to adopt a British accent.) For the role of Suzie Wong, Logan and Osborn chose France Nuyen, a nineteen-year-old Vietnamese-French actress who was discovered on the beach in 1955 by Life photographer Philippe Halsman while working as a seamstress. Three years later, she graced the cover of Life magazine.
France Nuyen’s resume was like Bill’s in that it included one major Hollywood movie, the musical South Pacific—produced by Logan and written by Osborn—in which she played Liat, the daughter of “Bloody Mary” (Juanita Hall). Nuyen had no previous stage experience and her command of the English language was, at best, limited. Even before the show’s premiere, Logan and Merrick impressed upon Shatner the responsibility he bore for the play’s success; he was eight years older than Nuyen, had a decade’s worth of acting experience, and was something of a “name,” which was important to the show’s backers looking to recoup their Broadway investment.
There was trouble from day one. Following four weeks of rehearsals in Manhattan, The World of Suzie Wong embarked on its test runs in New Haven, Connecticut, and in Philadelphia. Logan and Osborn retooled and rewrote the play constantly—not an unusual occurrence during out-of-town dry runs. But there was a growing tension between Nuyen and Logan, which reached a boiling point when Logan refused to attend rehearsals at a critical juncture. Nuyen, who wasn’t a trained actress, learned her lines phonetically and was often unable to absorb their deeper emotional meanings. “The feud between Logan and France was very dramatic,” Shatner said. “She was a lovely young lady. She had this beautiful face, and when acting in films—for the immediacy—she was wonderful. But having the discipline of a theatre actor is different. She’d never been onstage. She wasn’t an actress.”10 She would often forget her lines onstage and needed prompting from her costar. The script, Bill said years later, “was cut to shreds and became a ghastly apparition of what it was.”11
The World of Suzie Wong opened on October 10, 1958, to mixed reviews. It didn’t help the show’s cause that some theatergoers thought they were going to see an Asian-themed musical similar to Flower Drum Song, which was playing across the street at the St. James Theatre with stars Larry Blyden and Myoshi Umeki. “France Nuyen, an attractive Eurasian, plays Suzie with considerable charm and validity,” noted the New York Times. “Her accent is pleasantly naïve, and her style of playing is simple and affecting. As the bemused painter, William Shatner gives a modest performance that is also attractive—a little too wooden perhaps, which is one way of avoiding maudlin scenes.”12 “William Shatner . . . plays the artist with gratifying restraint and a strong note of sincerity,” the Washington Star opined.
“Its manly hero is played with an oddly melodramatic gloss and many a deep-seated sigh by the normally interesting Canadian actor,” noted the Herald Tribune.
Bill’s hometown newspaper, the Montreal Star, lauded both the play and Shatner’s performance. “How can it miss? It doesn’t . . . William Shatner, product of Montreal’s acting groups . . . plays the artist with gratifying restraint and a strong note of sincerity. France Nuyen is very fetching, and also effectively sincere as the Chinese call-girl with the heart of gold.”13
But ticket sales were lagging, and it didn’t take long for the Broadway rumor mill to kick into overdrive. There were gossipy stories about tension between Bill Shatner and France Nuyen and between Shatner and Ron Randell, with the two costars exchanging backstage blows one night during a performance. Shatner didn’t deny any of it. “It’s true. France Nuyen and I have had differences of opinion since the show opened last October,” he said. “But what’s unusual about that? She’s a very sensitive and highly skilled performer. She also has some very definite ideas on how a scene should be played.”
He also fessed up to the fistfight with Randell. “Ron and I had a misunderstanding backstage one night some time ago and I suppose it’s correct to say a few punches were thrown. But the fact is no punches landed,” he said. “We’re much better actors than boxers. Because of what happened, Ron and I are better friends than ever.”14 In a later version of their fight, Shatner claimed that Randell took a swing at him, missed, and clocked an eighty-six-year-old prop man in the face.15
(In Shatner’s autobiography, Up Till Now, he claimed that Randell, who was playing ex-sailor Ben Jeffcoat in the show, had a habit of putting his hand on Shatner’s shoulder in their scene together onstage; if he got a laugh, he would lay his hand on Shatner’s shoulder. If he didn’t get a laugh, he “pounded” Shatner’s shoulder. Shatner complained to Logan to no avail and then confronted Randell about the situation. When it happened again at the next performance, Shatner punched Randell onstage and their brawl continued once the curtain came down.)16
What The World of Suzie Wong did have in its favor were local suburban theater groups, which would purchase tickets in large blocks, ensuring that the money would continue to roll in and keep the show going, at least for the immediate future. Shatner claimed that audiences hated the show and that he once heard an audience member whisper loudly to their significant other, “Will you still love me after this?”17
“We were panned universally. It was a very turgid drama . . . people were screaming ‘kill this play,’ but the producers were not going to give the money back—the largest advance ticket sales of a straight play up until that time—so they ran the play,” he said. “Over the next few months we cut fifteen minutes from the running time and changed the reading of the lines from being a turgid drama to essentially a comedy.”18
Behind the scenes, things got worse before they got better. France Nuyen was still angry at Logan, and she would stop what she was doing onstage if he entered the theater in her sight line. Shatner claimed that on other nights she would stare into space instead of delivering her lines, leaving him to improvise dialogue. He said that Nuyen had fallen in love with Marlon Brando, and, attempting to get out of her contract, she had stood in the pouring rain one night during intermission and then appeared onstage, soaking wet, hoping to catch pneumonia. On it went. Offstage, she refused to speak to her costar. “For a while she wasn’t speaking to me, or anyone else, at all,” he said. “She’d go onstage hating me and I was afraid it would hurt her performance and the play. Things have improved lately. We’re now exchanging a few civil words—but it’s not a war as it used to be.”19
Slowly, though, ticket sales picked up, and whatever bits of stage “business” Shatner undertook because of his truculent costar—including comic asides to the audience and straying from the dialogue—engaged theatergoers. “People kept getting up and leaving, so in one performance I said, ‘Sit down . . .’ and then I said ‘. . . Suzie’, and the guy getting up sat down,” he said. “I tell the story of forcing people to sit down, talking in a staccato fashion, to make sure nobody got up and left. Then I say, ‘And you wonder why I talk like this,’ which gets a big laugh.”20 Shatner and Nuyen caught the attention of CBS, and on November 16, 1958, they appeared together on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing a scene from The World of Suzie Wong in an episode that also featured Lou Costello, the Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster, comic actor Arnold Stang, and Dody Goodman.
By the end of October, advance ticket sales had reached $1 million, ensuring that The World of Suzie Wong would run through at least the beginning of the next year. It did better than that—in the end, when all was said and done, the show ran for 508 performances before closing on January 2, 1960. Shatner was awarded the 1958–59 Daniel Blum Theatre World Award (along with Nuyen and others, including Tammy Grimes and Rip Torn). Still, the bad feelings generated by The World of Suzie Wong persisted with him, even years after the show was a distant memory. “That turned out to be one of the great mish-mashes of our time,” he said. “My part was sliced to virtually nothing and, while I worked steadily for two years, I tend to look on it as two years out of my life.”21,22
Maybe, but not only did The World of Suzie Wong put Bill Shatner on the Broadway map, it reintroduced him to the American television industry. While costarring on Broadway he’d kept his toe in the television waters, appearing on Sunday-morning shows such as Look Up and Live and in prime time on NBC’s Sunday Showcase (as Senator Thomas P. Gore). He said he was offered the lead role in a planned television series production of Ellery Queen but turned the role down. “I like TV,” he said at the time. “I’m an actor, not a property.”23 (The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen aired on NBC from 1958 to 1959 with both George Nader and Lee Philips in the title role.)
In 1959, CBS signed Shatner and portly actor Kurt Kasznar to costar in a pilot that would be the basis for a television series based on Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe detective stories. (Sydney Greenstreet starred in an NBC radio adaptation, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, which ran from 1950 to 1951.) CBS, which was enjoying success in the legal mystery courtroom genre with Perry Mason, starring Raymond Burr, was eyeing Nero Wolfe for a potential Monday-night time slot (10 p.m.); the series would be shot in New York City, with Kasznar, starring on Broadway in Look After Lulu!, as the titular armchair detective and Shatner playing Archie Goodwin, his eager young colleague and the narrator of Nero Wolfe’s exploits. (The role was played in the radio series by several actors, including Lawrence Dobkin and Harry Bartell.)
A brownstone in Gramercy Park was used in the pilot episode to replicate Wolfe’s lair from the Rex Stout novels. The episode, “Count the Man Down,” was shot in March 1959 with guest star Alexander Scourby and revolved around the mysterious death of a guided-missile scientist during a launch at Cape Canaveral. CBS, though, passed on turning the pilot into a series. Television critic Donald Kirkley of the Baltimore Sun thought that Nero Wolfe with Kasznar and Shatner was a victim of its own success, declaring in June 1959 that it was considered “too good” for a half-hour show.
But television pilots come and go, and Nero Wolfe was only a blip on Bill’s radar screen. The television roles continued to roll in like a tsunami, and the twenty-eight-year-old actor found himself highly in demand and barely able to take a breath between acting jobs—many on top-shelf series. He returned to Alfred Hitchcock Presents as a creepy mama’s boy in the 1960 episode “Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?” and made the first of his two starring appearances on Rod Serling’s classic CBS sci-fi/thriller anthology series The Twilight Zone in “Nick of Time,” playing strapping newlywed Don Carter, who visits a small-town diner in Ohio with his wife, Pat (Patricia Breslin), to kill some time while their car is being repaired. (They’re on their way to New York City.) Don grows obsessed with a coin-operated napkin holder/devil-headed fortune-telling machine that accurately predicts his future (including a job promotion); as he spirals into mania, dropping coin after coin into the machine and asking questions about his future, a distraught Pat finally convinces him to wrest himself away from the diner. They get their car and triumphantly drive away—just as another, older couple sits in the same booth, the man obviously held in sway by the bobble-headed napkin holder as Don had been. That led to a role on the Twilight Zone-ish ABC series One Step Beyond; other television roles for Bill that year included The DuPont Show of the Month, Outlaws, and Moment of Fear. Perhaps out of fear, he continued to write; he was given a “Story by” credit for a 1961 episode of the CBS detective series Checkmate starring Anthony George, Sebastian Cabot (as a college professor), and Doug McClure, Shatner’s future Barbary Coast costar.
Bill hoped to star in the Checkmate episode, but CBS had other ideas. “You’ll get a kick out of this,” he told columnist Hal Humphrey. “I just sold a script to the CBS Checkmate series and naturally figured I’d play the lead guest part. Then comes word from the sponsor that they want a bigger name. They’re trying to get Bob Newhart, the comic, but I understand he’s never done any acting.” CBS eventually cast Tony Randall as an egomaniacal killer who vows revenge on the man who helped send him to prison: Dr. Carl Hyatt (Cabot). “It’s a tough game to lick,” Bill said. “If you do a TV series it’s got to be for the money, because it’s impossible to get quality from it. There is never enough time for rehearsal or for the writer to work on the script. If you don’t do a series, then there’s the waiting between jobs. It doesn’t leave much choice for the actor today.”24
He considered himself a “real actor” who couldn’t be tied down to one particular show, since “a real actor did not sign to do a series because then he couldn’t accept the starring role in the Broadway play or Hollywood film that was going to make him a star.”25 He turned down the chance to star in a new television series, Dr. Kildare, which premiered on NBC in 1961 and turned Richard Chamberlain, the show’s handsome young intern, into a household name. (James Franciscus also turned down the lead role.) Dr. Kildare ran for five seasons and 191 episodes; Bill settled for appearing on the series six times as a guest star.
He also declined an offer to star in The Defenders, which was based on a two-part 1957 Studio One episode, written by Reginal Rose, called “The Defender,” in which Ralph Bellamy and Bill costarred as a father-and-son lawyer team trying to prove a nineteen-year-old (played by newcomer Steve McQueen) innocent of murder charges. Four years later, CBS resurrected the episode as a series, with E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed taking over the roles played by Bellamy and Shatner in the Studio One episode. The Defenders ran four seasons and won thirteen Emmy Awards (including one for Marshall and three consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series). If Bill was chagrined at turning down starring roles in two groundbreaking television shows, he wasn’t admitting it. “There were few roles that I wanted and didn’t get,” Shatner wrote in his autobiography. “It was magical. I learned to love doing live television.”26
He had his integrity. What he didn’t have, after nearly five years since his last big-screen appearance in The Brothers Karamazov, was a hit movie.