The cancellation of Star Trek left Bill Shatner at a crossroads in his life. Within a three-month period, he’d lost both his marriage and his network television show—and he entered a period of professional and financial uncertainty from which it would take him years to recover.
On the other hand, the end of his marriage, and of Star Trek, freed Bill from the constraints of the network publicity machine—and of maintaining the image of the happy husband. He didn’t have to play that game anymore. Never the easiest of interview subjects, his attitude grew ornery, sometimes downright hostile, in the years that Star Trek was still airing on NBC—particularly when the attention was focused on his personal life. This was apparent in an interview with Bill that ran in the Los Angeles Times in May 1968.
His date of birth? “I tell you, sweetheart, that’s unimportant.” According to the clips he is thirty-seven. One attempts to talk about his early years—and with some diffidence, saying, “If one may ask . . .” “You may not . . . I prefer not to tell you.” When did he graduate? “It doesn’t matter . . . After I graduated, I did sixty plays in two years.” Today the Shatners live in Beverly Hills with their three daughters: Leslie Carol, nine; Lisabeth Mary, six; and Melanie Ann, three. “No, I don’t want to talk about my wife or [my kids] at all. They’re involved too much at this point.”1
He was free now to date whomever he pleased without calling undue attention to the state of his marriage or to the network paying his salary. “I took affection anywhere I could find it,” he said of that time. “It seemed like there was always someone around who had her own needs to be fulfilled, so lust and romance and passion all began playing a more important role in my life . . . During much of this period I was single, and I certainly had opportunities to be with many women, and I grasped a great many of those opportunities.”2
Bill’s newfound sexual freedom was dampened somewhat by his professional opportunities. While it was liberating to be single and unfettered and partaking in the dating scene, Hollywood is a cruel mistress that does not take kindly to perceived failure. Doors that were opened just months before to William Shatner, Television Star, were quickly closing. Captain Kirk was just another forgettable lead character on a forgettable television show. In the immediate aftermath of the Star Trek cancellation, a few small guest-starring roles trickled in for Bill—The Virginian, Medical Center, The FBI, The Name of the Game—but it was getting tougher for him to pay the bills and fork over his monthly alimony payments to Gloria.
There was no quick fix for Bill’s precarious financial health, and there would be no injection of cash vis-à-vis residuals for any of the Star Trek cast when the series was launched into syndication in a handful of markets in 1969—including New York City (on WPIX, in September) and Philadelphia (on WKBS). The money would have helped, but it wasn’t until four years later, in 1973, that the Screen Actors Guild—under its president, actor Dennis Weaver (then starring in McCloud on NBC)—ensured that its members received residual checks in perpetuity for shows airing in syndication.3 Bill claimed (perhaps apocryphally) that his financial situation became so bad that he couldn’t even cash a check for fifteen dollars. “I was able to put together enough money to make the down payment to buy a little house,” he said. “And I furnished it with used furniture and damaged furniture from downtown Los Angeles. I furnished the house I bought for three hundred dollars. With a sofa and a bed that had a torn mattress—that had come from a damaged crate.”4
As the calendar turned to 1970, Bill, now turning thirty-nine, was virtually homeless—at least when he was on the road acting in local dinner-theater productions and living in the back of his pickup truck. “I had three kids and was totally broke,” he said. “I managed to find work back East on the straw-hat circuit—summer stock—but couldn’t afford hotels, so I lived out of the back of my truck, under a hard shell. It had a little stove, a toilet, and I’d drive from theater to theater. The only comfort came from my dog, who sat in the passenger seat and gave me perspective on everything. Otherwise, it would have just been me counting my losses.”
Bill crisscrossed the country in his pickup truck, starring in locally produced stage productions such as The Tender Trap (which included short runs at the Bergen Mall in Paramus, New Jersey, and at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut) and There’s a Girl in My Soup opposite British actress Jill Haworth. (Stops included the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, and the Playhouse in the Park in Philadelphia.) “That was probably the time where he was the most frustrated and the most dejected,” recalled his daughter, Lisabeth. “It was hard for him to get work because Star Trek had been so iconic. It was hard for people to look at him as an actor with a lot of facility, which was really what he was.”
He also directed; his July 1969 production of There’s a Girl in My Soup at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, New York (on Long Island), received a “cold, laughter-less opening night reception” according to News-day critic Barbara Delatiner. She spent the next day with Bill as he met with a group of local (mostly bored) children who didn’t know why they were dragged to an elementary school on a rainy day until “Captain Kirk!” and “the boss of the Enterprise!” walked into the room. “I’m out among the people for the first time since Star Trek success,” Bill, wearing “celebrity-sized sunglasses,” told Delatiner afterward. “It’s my first summer-stock tour, and I really can’t get over it. The impact of television. Old ladies giggling at the sight of me. Little girls shaking with fear when they’re brought backstage. It’s remarkable.” The article noted that Shatner would be on the road for six more weeks, “and then it’s cross-country in his economical camper, in which he sleeps parked outside the theater.”5
He chugged along in his truck, joined by his “dumb-as-a-brick” Doberman, Morgan, who disrupted a performance of Travels with Charley by somehow getting into the theater and walking down the center aisle—right after being sprayed by a skunk.6 Sometimes the jobs were closer to home, but the results were the same. In December 1970 he costarred opposite Anne Francis in a stage production of Remote Asylum at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. There were high expectations for the show, which was written by Mart Crowley, whose first play, The Boys in the Band—about a group of homosexual friends—opened off-Broadway in 1968 and ran for over one thousand performances. Remote Asylum, which took place at a resort in Mexico, didn’t fare as well.
Bill played a tennis star named Tom, and Francis (replacing original costar Dina Merrill) was Tom’s mistress, Dinah, an ex-film actress in danger of losing her two children to her ex-husband. “William Shatner is lost and out of place, both physically and spiritually, as the tennis player,” sniffed one critic, adding: “[He] needed about a week in the steam room before his next match . . . The part appears to have been written for Farley Granger—probably another example of misplaced cinematic influence.”7
“Imagine Honey West and Captain Kirk as uneasy lovers in a plush retreat in a faraway country, a sort of Mexican Shangri-La with electricity,” critic Robert C. Wylder sniped, alluding to names of Bill and Ann Francis’s best-known television characters. “Sound interesting? Well, it isn’t, really.”8 He fared better in a 1972 dinner-theater production of The Seven-Year Itch in suburban Chicago. “Shatner is extremely innocent, even impish . . . he has expertly caught the flavor of the part,” a critic noted—before scolding “the inconsiderate people who clink their glasses and talk out loud and cigarette and cigar smokers who litter the air with a blue haze.”9
Bill wasn’t always such a hit with his costars on the dinner-theater circuit, one of whom described him as “toxic” when they appeared together in The Seven-Year Itch, which ran for about two weeks at the Pheasant Run Theater in suburban St. Charles, Illinois. She recalled:
Shatner shouldn’t have tried to do comedy because he’s not funny and he directed the show, too, and you need to have a sense of humor to do comedy. There was an actor in the cast (Douglas Mellor) who had a drinking problem and he was very nervous . . . and from the moment this poor guy would arrive at the theater, Shatner would be giving him notes and you can’t function like that, you have to be free to be able to perform . . . and he was so tied up in knots by these constant notes that he got onstage and he couldn’t function. There are certain people who like to feel superior by making other people feel like they can’t do their job, and that’s what I found with Shatner.
Bill, she said, “came across as a nice guy” when he first arrived.
I went out to dinner with him the first Monday night—I was very young and naïve and I thought, “Oh, it’s a nice thing, you take your leading lady out to dinner.” It could have turned into something but I got out of it.
I was also doing a children’s theatre production of The Wizard of Oz so I’d go out matinee days and bring in a sleeping bag. There was a couch in the hallway of the dressing rooms and I would take a nap between the two shows and Shatner would come in and bother me. It was harassment. I didn’t know the word then. He’d kind of say “come on” and I said, “Please, somebody might come,” and he said, “Yeah, you might.”
There was another girl in the cast just out of acting school and playing a small role. On the second day of rehearsal she came in and said, “Last night, Bill made me your understudy,” and the next day she came in and said, “Bill made me assistant director.” You kind of roll your eyes at that.
She recalled that the actress playing Bill’s wife in that production of The Seven-Year Itch had to carefully orchestrate her movement onstage, because “every time her hand got up toward the toupee, it was kind of crazy—he would kind of work her arms down.”10
“I took jobs—unbelievable jobs,” Bill recalled of those days. “I took jobs for two hundred fifty dollars that took me out someplace to . . . I did everything. I did some game shows that were demeaning. I went places, did things, night after night—I’d travel—two or three jobs in one day, if I could—just to make money to get this thing together again. I became frantic, obsessed.”11
He talked about being “insane, the way an animal is insane,” during this time, having lost his wife, his family, and his television show. He wasn’t suicidal, he said, but he met people and embarked on relationships with women in the early 1970s that he blocked out in his emotional fog. “People come up to me—I see people I met then and knew, in fact I had a whole relationship with them, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and those relationships, those people—I see them now and I don’t remember them,” he said. “I don’t remember what I did. I don’t remember what I felt . . . I was scrambling, clawing to get everything back and put it together again.”12
His frenzied work schedule didn’t help him escape the shadow of Captain Kirk in what he called his “lowest ebb” as an actor. “Typecasting became the real hero,” he said. “The bad part was being identified with the role continually.”13 The constant traveling impacted his relationship with his three daughters, who wouldn’t see him for long stretches at a time. “He was gone like the whole summer, almost, and I remember when he returned, I’d gotten so used to not seeing him we had to kind of reestablish our relationship again,” Leslie said. “That was a difficult time.”14
Bill wasn’t winning many new fans back in Canada, either. “American show biz (not as mild as Canadian) does funny things to people and it has certainly worked its evil wonders on Montreal’s own,” John P. Hardy noted in a 1971 interview with Bill in the Montreal Gazette. “Shatner may smirk at the cliché, but he carries himself and seems to enjoy being a personality . . . perhaps it twists the abused adage to conclude that ‘stardom is in the eyes of the beholder.’”15 The article noted, as an afterthought, that Bill Shatner would be seen more on Canadian television screens in a few months: Star Trek was making its debut in syndication on Montreal’s CFCF-TV.
It didn’t help that his television appearances were, for the most part, un-distinguished and forgettable. The New York Times criticized his “unenthusiastic” performance opposite “an overworked” Elizabeth Ashley in the NBC movie The Skirts of Happy Chance, and he took a shot at NBC’s cancellation of Star Trek in an interview about the movie with the New York Daily News: “What would be amusing to me is if the reruns of the series, which are being slotted in Jerry Lewis’s Tuesday night 7:30 time period on the network, would wind up pulling down big ratings. Imagine how the NBC executives would feel once they’ve cancelled the show and dismantled the sets.”16 He didn’t realize at the time the prescience of that scenario.
He fared better in Shadow Game, a CBS Playhouse presentation about the cutthroat world of advertising, which aired in May 1969 and was written by Loring Mandel, one of the shining lights of TV’s “Golden Age” in the 1950s. While the New York Times singled out star Daniel Massey’s “warmly intelligent performance as the one decent young executive in this advertising zoo,” it noted that “he is overshadowed by the gritty, stinging performances of William Shatner as the glandular and brutal Peter Hoyt, a man for whom betrayal is the most intriguing game of all.”17
There were some bright spots amid the professional gloom. In 1970, he was cast opposite Cameron Mitchell, Jack Cassidy, Martin Sheen, Richard Basehart, and Buddy Ebsen in The Andersonville Trial, a television adaptation of the hit 1959 Broadway drama. Directed by George C. Scott, it told the story of the 1865 war-crimes trial of Henry Wirz (Basehart), who commanded the notorious Confederate POW camp in Andersonville, Georgia. Bill played Chief JAG Prosecutor Norton Parker Chipman (the role George C. Scott played in the Broadway production). “William Shatner as the Judge Advocate, and Jack Cassidy as the civilian defense attorney, found mutuality of doubt over the proceedings,” the New York Times opined in its review of the special.18
The Andersonville Trial aired on PBS in May and went on to win three Emmy Awards for “Outstanding Single Program,” for technical direction and camera work and for writer Saul Levitt’s adaptation. It also earned a Peabody Award for its “mounting tension and, ultimately, a numbing impact. This extraordinary production . . . probed deeply into man’s continuing dilemma of the conflict between duty and conscience.”19
* * *
The Andersonville Trial had an even bigger impact on Bill Shatner’s life.
He met Marcy Lafferty during rehearsals for the PBS production. Marcy, a twenty-four-year-old actress, had been hired by director George C. Scott as a production assistant to help the cast rehearse their lines. “Apparently I was the only member of the cast who took advantage of her—to rehearse my lines,” Bill later joked.20 They grew close and began a romantic relationship, despite their fifteen-year age difference, though it took him two weeks to call her after filming on the show ended. “I fell for him, hook, line, and sinker,” Marcy said. “Bill had just been through a terrible divorce and a folded series. He didn’t want to get involved. But I hung in there and wormed my way into his heart.”21 Marcy was no stranger to show business; her father, Perry Lafferty, had worked in radio since the 1940s as a producer and director and was married to radio actress Frances Carden. In 1965, he was hired by CBS as its West Coast programming president and oversaw hits including All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Maude before moving to a similar job at NBC in 1976.
Marcy graduated from the University of Southern California and pursued an acting career. She landed small roles on television series, including Hawaii Five-O, Dan August, The New People, and Medical Center. She also acted on the stage; in February 1967, she was mentioned, by name, in a New York Times review of A Coney Island of the Mind, a collection of works by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti that was hammered into a television production by NBC’s Los Angeles affiliate, KNBC. (It aired on WNBC in New York City.) The production featured actors, including Marcy, from USC’s School of the Performing Arts “and underscored how television working in conjunction with an outstanding university drama school has an exciting role to play in publicizing and encouraging new artists.”22
Marcy admitted to having a “schoolgirl crush” on Bill after they met on the set of The Andersonville Trial and their relationship slowly unfolded. “It’s really not one of your great romantic beginnings, because he was going with someone else at the time,” she said. “It was a pretty low time in my life. It was about two weeks after the show, and I had really given up hope he would call—and then the phone rang.” She noted a sadness and a bitterness in Bill that seemed to lift when he talked about his children. “I just turned to jelly,” she said after their first kiss, shared over a hamburger. “As they say in all those terrible books, my knees buckled, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say.”23
Marcy thought her new boyfriend was selling himself short by saying yes to nearly every role that was offered to him and accepting those jobs at a discounted rate. “He had children to support, houses to support,” she said. “And he didn’t do what so many actors have done after a series—in fact—price himself too high. He couldn’t say no. He literally could not afford to.”24 Marcy got along famously with Bill’s daughters—Melanie called her “the most beautiful, perfect caretaker imaginable”25—and she often joined Bill and the girls on their weekend jaunts to the ski slopes or to the woods on camping expeditions.
Bill was still a fairly marketable commodity as a veteran, dependable actor who could be hired for an episode or two, learn his lines, and nail the role. Following his costarring turn on The Andersonville Trial, the television floodgates opened once again—provided his appearances were one-offs or short-lived guest-starring roles: Men at Law, The Sixth Sense, Hawaii Five-O, Mission Impossible (two episodes in 1971 and ’72), Marcus Welby, M.D., Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, The Bold Ones: The New Doctors, Kung Fu, Barnaby Jones, Mannix, The Six Million Dollar Man, Ironside (four episodes) . . . the list goes on. He showed up on time, did his best with the material given to him, and left—in some cases jumping from one series to another within a matter of days.
There were television movies, too, including The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973). “Terrible doesn’t begin to express how truly awful some of those movies were,” he said. “I knew what they were; the reality is when you open a script entitled The Horror at 37,000 Feet you can be certain you’re never going to hear those magic words, ‘The nominees for Best Picture . . .’”26 In 1973, he spent twelve days in Tampa, Florida, filming his role as grifter/serial killer Matt Stone, who preys on elderly women, in the low-budget (read: schlocky) big-screen movie Impulse (originally titled Want a Ride, Little Girl?).
Bill broke a finger during the filming of Impulse in a scene gone wrong, in which Matt Stone tries to hang Karate Pete, played by Harold Sakata, the actor best-known as “Odd Job” from the James Bond movie Goldfinger. Sakata almost died because the rope was too tight; he was saved by a quick-thinking crew member—and by Bill, who broke his finger trying to support Sakata’s substantial girth. Marcy had a small role in the movie as a hotel clerk. “I’ve forgotten why I was in it,” Bill said later. “I probably needed the money. It was a very bad time for me. I hope they burn it.” Impulse went on to gross $4 million.
He started appearing in commercials to help pay the bills. In 1974, he was hired as the spokesman for Promise Margarine and starred in a series of ads. (“Promise tastes like butter,” he’d say, holding up his hand in a Spock-like gesture, “Promise.”) He shot a series of television commercials in Canada for Loblaw’s, the country’s biggest grocery chain. (“Don’t get left out in the cold, come on in and stock up that freezer!”) “The money is very good, and I think the commercials are very good,” he said, noting that John Wayne, Lucille Ball, and Arthur Godfrey had all appeared in commercials. “It’s all part of the total picture surviving in the business today.”27
* * *
William Shatner’s role as white supremacist Adam Cramer in Roger Corman’s 1962 movie The Intruder was one of his biggest triumphs (and his best acting) in the years leading up to Star Trek.
In 1974, hoping, perhaps, to reclaim some of his big-screen mojo, Bill reunited with Corman on Big Bad Mama, a cheesy, Depression-era shoot-’em-up action flick starring Angie Dickinson as Wilma McClatchy, who takes over her lover’s bootlegging business in Texas after he dies and embarks on a crime spree with her two comely daughters, Polly (Robbie Lee) and Billy Jean (Susan Sennett). Wilma falls in love with bank robber Fred Diller (Tom Skerritt), who joins her gang; Bill played William J. Baxter, a dishonest gambler who beds Wilma and tangles with Diller.
All of the Roger Corman calling cards were on full display in the movie: soft-core sex, nudity, and plenty of cleavage. Bill’s sex scene with Angie Dickinson was uncomfortable in more ways than one. (She bared all, he didn’t.) They’d worked together shortly before filming Big Bad Mama on the ABC television movie Pray for the Wildcats, in which Bill played Warren Summerfield, a disgruntled advertising executive who’s forced by sociopathic executive Sam Farragut (Andy Griffith) to take a dangerous dirt bike trip to Baja, California, in order to compete for Farragut’s business. He’s joined by colleagues Paul McIlvain (Robert Reed) and Terry Maxon (Marjoe Gortner); Dickinson played Paul McIlvain’s wife, Nancy, who’s having an affair with Summerfield. She and Bill “got along great” during the filming of Pray for the Wildcats, she said.
We were very attracted to one another—not necessarily [in a] sexual [way] but we just got along great. . . . So, then a couple of years later, Big Bad Mama comes up and I remember saying to [director] Steve Carver on our first meeting, “Do we have to do all that nude stuff?” And he said, “Yeah.” Because I really think if they took three things out of that movie, one being Tom Skerritt with the young rich girl, one where he’s chasing my two girls and they’re all going to sleep together and the one of Shatner and me making stupid love with the camera—oh God, it’s just so embarrassing, awful, and stupid . . . it’s a total ripoff of Bonnie and Clyde. They even used the same getaway car—and yet, it’s a very good movie.28
Big Bad Mama was shot over twenty-one days on a Roger Corman-like budget of under $750,000; Bill arrived on the set on the eleventh day of production, eventually clashing with costar Tom Skerritt and irritating several other cast members while shooting his scenes with them. “We had readings of the script and Bill was in Canada or somewhere where he wasn’t available, and this is one of the problems that I think created the animosity on the set,” said director Steve Carver. “He wasn’t there for the reading, and when he showed up on the set, he was basically an outsider to the camaraderie that we created on those first ten days of shooting between Tom and Angie and the girls [Robbie Lee and Susan Sennett].
“Bill had developed that technique of talking during shots, and actually, if he was off-camera in some of the close-ups, he talked to the actors,” Carver said. “So, when you’re rolling the camera, if he flubs a line, rather than cut the camera and do another take he says, ‘Keep rolling.’ And it infuriates actors because then they have redo everything and rekindle the whole thing. They didn’t like that . . . And his whole approach was very irritating and frustrating to a lot of the actors, because he would talk during the take as if the camera wasn’t rolling. It created a little tension.”29
Carver also noticed some bad blood between Skerritt and Shatner, which escalated as the shoot progressed and tempers flared. “I noticed something was going on between Tom and Bill. I thought it was part of the characterizations at first, where there’s an animosity because that’s what’s written into the script, and these guys [Diller and Baxter] don’t like each other,” he said. “But off-camera they didn’t like each other. I noticed this and words were said.”
The situation between the two actors came to a head four days later in a scene shot at a racetrack. “That’s when it all blew up,” Carver said.
That’s when the physical fights happened. We were in this car, and Bill was supposed to stay in the car while Tom and Angie and the girls go into the racetrack office to rob it. And Tom gets up out of the back seat, Bill is sitting in the passenger seat, and his elbow purposely hits Bill’s hat and knocks his wig askew while the camera is rolling. Bill jumps out of the car, tackles Tom to the ground, and they’re wrestling and throwing punches and the whole crew is in shock and I jump in there and I try to pull them apart. Here’s these two guys just beating the hell out of each other. From then on it was a war. They were not pulling punches as far as the dialogue was concerned, as far as their physical nature, their attitude, their body language. Everything was real. There was no love between them.30
Bill’s relationship with Skerritt was awkward enough, but the atmosphere on the set of Big Bad Mama grew downright strange when it came time for Bill to shoot his sex scene with Angie Dickinson. “Steve Carver should be hung by the balls for that,” Dickinson said nearly forty-five years later. “It was just the worst scene in the world from all points of view. It ruined sex for everyone, ever.”31
According to Carver’s recollections, Bill wanted to film the scene a certain way, much to Dickinson’s chagrin. “He told Angie what he wanted to do [in the love scene] and Angie said, ‘No way,’ I’m not doing that,’” Carver said. “I remember to this day [during the scene] he would wet his fingers and run them on her shoulder or back or wherever and she hated that. She said no. And she would try to coax him into something that was more subtle. One would call it erotic, but to me it was kinky. So in any case the love scenes were awkward.”
Dickinson, who was six months younger than Shatner, was topless during their bedroom scene; Bill, for reasons known only to him, took a more modest approach. Initially, he walked onto the set wearing only his underwear, much to Dickinson’s amusement. Carver told Bill that his underwear would be visible on camera and would ruin the shot and asked him to remove his skivvies. “I tried to talk around it a little bit. I was even embarrassed a little. I don’t know how to talk to guys about being nude,” Carver said. He said, ‘I’ll use a little tape.’” According to Carver, Bill disappeared into the makeup room—and reappeared a few minutes later wearing thick gaffer’s tape over his private parts. “He used the heavy-duty stuff,” he said.
He came in with all this silver tape on him and boy, it looked like it hurt, you know, just to put it on, let alone take it off.
So Angie made another joke or said something, and he got real pissed off and he started ripping [the tape] off. I was just cringing from watching that. But then he demanded everyone leave the set and Angie said, “No, I want everybody on the set. Don’t go.” So, we compromised, and we got most of the people off [the set] and we shot the scene. I tried to make Bill feel comfortable, telling him exactly how we were shooting it. We were shooting it waist up and we weren’t shooting full masters and we were lighting it subtly. We weren’t doing any pornography, although with Roger it was, “Shoot as many breast shots as possible.”32,33
Big Bad Mama was the last time Carver worked with Bill Shatner, and he remembers him fondly—despite the Shatner–Skerritt contretemps and Bill’s awkward sex scene with Angie Dickinson. “I had no problems with him,” he said. “We had a lot in common as far as religion and background . . . I would sit down with him over lunch and chat. He would tell me about stuff. I would talk to him about Star Trek, and he was very pleasant. I thought he was a really good guy.”34
The movie opened to scathing reviews. “Big Bad Mama is mostly re-hashed Bonnie and Clyde, with a bit more blood and Angie Dickinson taking off her clothes for sex scenes with the crooks in her life,” Variety sniped. But through the years it has achieved a cult-like status and even inspired a 1987 sequel, Big Bad Mama II, once again produced by Roger Corman (Jim Wynorski directed) and once again starring Angie Dickinson as Wilma McClatchie. Dickinson, though, never worked with Bill again. “I have read about him and I’ve watched him and everything else,” she said. “He is a difficult man. There is no real explanation. But he is difficult. I don’t want to say he’s not a pushover, because that’s not what I mean, but he brings difficulty to the room. I admire him tremendously and he’s had quite a career and he’s a real icon, but I think it’s the Aries in him—he’s got that power that they can carry. He’s not an easy fella to have fun with.”35
* * *
Bill’s romance with Marcy Lafferty culminated in a marriage proposal, and they were wed in Brentwood, California, on October 20, 1973, in the home of Marcy’s father, Perry Lafferty. Bill went public with the wedding four days later. “I was perfectly happy with the way things were for a long time,” Marcy said. “He made me happy. It wasn’t ideal, but nothing is. I had no grand marriage scheme—there just came a time that I didn’t feel I could continue to give so much of myself if he didn’t share deep-laid feelings.”36 Bill was forty-two and Marcy was twenty-seven; she was fine knowing that he didn’t want to have any more children. She shared her new husband’s love of horses and Doberman Pinschers and she continued to act sporadically, snaring small roles in television series (The Sandy Duncan Show, The FBI) and in television movies (Tell Me Where It Hurts, Coffee, Tea or Me?). Bill and Marcy eventually bought a ranch house on McConnell Drive in the Hillcrest area of Los Angeles, south of Beverly Hills.
* * *
A funny thing happened to Star Trek on its way to the television graveyard: it became an unexpected hit in syndication.
The series that most American television viewers didn’t care about the first time around was finding a second life in reruns that began airing on local stations in the fall of 1969, mostly as cheap filler for the stations’ late-night or early-evening time slots. Before too long, the number crunchers at those stations, including WPIX in New York City and KTVU in San Francisco, discovered that a surprising number of people were tuning into the repeats—and that Star Trek was finding the audience in local markets that had proven elusive during its original run on NBC. “Star Trek did great on independent stations at eleven o’clock at night, because it ran against the news,” said Richard Block, the vice president and general manager of Kaiser Broadcasting Corp., which was syndicating the series in the early 1970s. “The news skews old, and Star Trek got younger viewers.”37
There were several theories for this resurgence. One was the show’s underlying message of diversity and acceptance, of peace and love in Gene Roddenberry’s “Can’t we all just get along?” vision of humanity. Then there was Bill Shatner/Captain Kirk’s ham-fisted, staccato delivery . . . Of. His. Lines. Or Leonard Nimoy’s King of Cool Mr. Spock. Or Dr. “Bones” McCoy’s (DeForest Kelley) self-righteous exclamations (“I’m a doctor, not a flesh peddler!” “I’m a doctor, not a scientist!”—it’s a long list) or his most-quoted line: “He’s dead, Jim.” Maybe it was James Doohan’s cranky chief engineer, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (“I’ve given her all she’s got captain, and I can’t give her no more!”). As the Star Trek reruns caught on, “Beam me up, Scotty” crept into the nation’s parlance—a jokey reference to situations gone awry or awkward. Others found the show’s cheesy, low-budget special effects particularly intriguing.
“I think the thing people dug was that Star Trek was one show that was optimistic about the future,” Roddenberry said in 1972 about the show’s resurgence. “The series constantly asked, is this good, is this bad, is this beautiful? Star Trek emphasized that we shouldn’t interfere in the lives of other people. Maybe the kids saw something about Vietnam in that.”38
“We never had a gigantic audience [and we] were never one of the top ten shows,” Nimoy recalled. “What we had was a very dedicated and vocal audience, smaller than what we would have hoped for but an intense audience . . . that really, really cared about the show a lot.”39
Star Trek also had Bill Shatner’s unique acting style—at turns hammy, overblown, understated, combative, and sensitive. A young Jason Alexander, later to star as Jerry Seinfeld’s obnoxious friend George Costanza on NBC’s acclaimed series Seinfeld—considered by many to be the best sitcom in television history—cited William Shatner as the biggest influence on him as an actor. (They became chummy in later years, and Alexander served as Roastmaster for Shatner’s Comedy Central roast in 1986.)
“I know it sounds like a joke. I became an actor because I wanted to be William Shatner commanding the Enterprise,” Alexander said. “And before I had any training or lessons or anything, I would basically do William Shatner. I just thought if you . . . broke . . . sentences . . . down, that you could play any . . . role,” he said, imitating Captain Kirk. “It worked for many years. I did Shakespeare as William Shatner. I once played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls as William Shatner. Who knew? I thought that was great acting.”40
The first Star Trek convention, Star Trek Con, was held in the Newark (New Jersey) Public Library on March 1, 1969, while the original series was in its death throes on NBC. It was organized by superfans Shema Comerford and Devra Langsam, who coedited Spockinalia, the show’s original fanzine, which appeared during the show’s inaugural season. Star Trek Con was free and was reportedly attended by over three hundred people. Langsam, in the grassroots pop-culture groundswell following the show’s cancellation, also helped to organize Star Trek Lives!, which was held at the Statler Hilton in New York City from January 21 to 23, 1972—and, this time, featured celebrity guests, including Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, costar Majel Barrett (who’d married Roddenberry in 1969), series writer D. C. Fontana, Isaac Asimov, and noted science fiction writer Hal Clement. Star Trek Lives! was attended by over four thousand people and proved so successful that four more iterations of the convention were held in New York City, one each year through 1976. Guests included Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, and Captain Kirk himself (in 1975).
The Star Trek revival started to pick up steam as the series was syndicated to more and more local television stations in the United States (125 stations by the spring of 1972) and was sold to sixty foreign countries. Students attending Emerson College in Boston during the 1971–72 academic year could attend screenings of Star Trek at graduate seminars, while other colleges and high schools around the country followed suit. “A few hospitals show certain episodes to mental patients,” an Associated Press story noted in April 1972.41 There were community theaters staging Star Trek-inspired plays, and over one hundred privately published fan magazines devoted to the series sprung up nationwide. “Fans write episodes, poetry, and music,” one report noted. “One fan created a Vulcan musical scale, a Vulcan book of songs, and a Vulcan dictionary.”42
In February 1973, the Star Trek Lives! convention attracted over seven thousand people (each paying a five-dollar admission fee) and featured twenty-five stalls selling everything from Star Trek play money to fortune-telling equipment to a twenty-five-foot-wide replica of the USS Enterprise. The press started comparing the fervor of the newly minted “Trekkies” or “Trekkers” (both terms were used) and their devotion to all things Star Trek to the hysteria of Beatlemania in the 1960s. “We’re into what you could call speculative reality,” said a twenty-four-year-old Hunter College psychology major attending the second Star Trek Lives! convention. “If you feel the world outside is too constraining, this is a way to remove the restrictions of here and now.” Earlier that year, Star Trek was voted the most popular series among viewers aged fourteen to eighteen . . . in West Germany.43
* * *
Star Trek’s growing postmortem popularity in the early to mid-seventies did little to impact Bill Shatner’s career. The residuals, which eventually rolled in, helped a bit, but he was having a tough time escaping the long shadow of the USS Enterprise. If anything, the Star Trek resurgence and the series reruns airing worldwide only underscored the Shatner-as-Kirk connection in the minds of the public and Hollywood executives (as it did for Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock and, to a lesser extent, the supporting cast members). “There are Trekkies, kind of spaced-out groupies who follow me wherever I’m doing a play in summer stock,” he said at the time. “They want to know all about the show but everything I can remember has been distilled into one long hiccup.”44
Star Trek’s rebirth in syndication did, however, reteam Bill with Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and James Doohan when Star Trek: The Animated Series launched on Saturday mornings in the fall of 1973 on NBC.
(Walter Koenig’s Pavel Chekov was missing from the cartoon version; the role was cut for budgetary reasons, but Koenig was assuaged by the offer to write an episode for the series, “The Infinite Vulcan,” which aired in Season 1.)
The Animated Series hewed as closely to the live-action original as possible; in addition to Shatner et al. voicing their Star Trek characters, it brought back several of the show’s original writers, including D. C. Fontana, David Gerrold, and veteran Star Trek director Marc Daniels. “The joy was in the fact that we didn’t have to worry about where the zipper was on the costumes,” said Fontana, who was an executive producer (along with Roddenberry). “We could do what we couldn’t do on the live-action show . . . we did not talk down to our audience and we did not write down to our audience. We were doing Star Trek.”45
What was different about the Saturday-morning cartoon version was that Shatner and company recorded their parts separately, which was standard operating procedure for an animated series. Shatner called it “the strangest form of acting” he’d ever done; he would record his lines—usually in the nearest bathroom—on whichever movie or television set he happened to be working at the time (“Apparently the acoustics in a bathroom are particularly good,” he said).46 The series’ animation was crude by today’s standards—“It was limited in motion and [in some character] expression,” Fontana said—but its writing, and the cast’s commitment to the series and to their characters, appeased the majority of the show’s fan base. “NBC’s new animated Star Trek is as out of place in the Saturday morning kiddie ghetto as a Mercedes in a soapbox derby,” noted the Los Angeles Times. “It is fascinating fare, written, produced, and executed with all the imaginative skill . . . that made Gene Rodenberry’s famous old science fiction epic the most avidly followed program in TV history.”47
Star Trek: The Animated Series aired a total of twenty-two episodes through mid-October 1974. Perhaps its most notable achievement was revealing that the “T” in James T. Kirk stood for “Tiberius” (in an episode written by Gerrold).
As Bill Shatner approached his mid-forties, the slog of the mind-numbing guest-starring roles continued apace, offset by the occasional movie or game show appearance (sometimes with Marcy in tow). Petrocelli, Kodiak, Police Surgeon (two episodes), Police Story, Amy Prentiss (starring his For the People costar Jessica Walter), Police Woman (headlined by his Big Bad Mama lover Angie Dickinson), The Rookies . . . they all seemed to blend together into one indistinguishable mass.
In 1974 and ’75, Bill and Marcy appeared on a handful of episodes of Tattletales (“The game of celebrity gossip!”), a CBS daytime television game show hosted by Bert Convy, in which celebrity couples—one better half on camera and the other backstage (wearing large headphones)—answered personal questions about each other. (The Shatners competed against the likes of Kojak star Kevin Dobson, Phyllis Diller, Elke Sommer, Orson Bean, George Hamilton, and Scoey Mitchell, all joined by their spouses.) Bill retained his Canadian citizenship, just in case the Mother Country came calling with an opportunity. “But it hasn’t,” he said. “It’s as if my country doesn’t want me.”48
His movie career was also flatlining—with one notable exception (for all the wrong reasons). In late 1974, Bill flew to Mexico to start shooting on The Devil’s Rain, directed by B-movie horror maven Robert Fuest, best known for directing Vincent Price in the 1971 underground classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Bill’s costars on The Devil’s Rain included Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, frenemy Tom Skerritt, Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn, Joan Prather, and future Welcome Back, Kotter star John Travolta, making his big-screen debut at the age of twenty. The movie’s technical advisor was Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan. He had a small onscreen role as (what else?) the High Priest of the Church of Satan. (The film’s tagline: “The 300-year search for the power to damn mankind is over—and the towering of a devil on earth is now unleashed!”)
Bill played Mark Preston, whose family is cursed after betraying the Satanic priest Jonathan Corbis (Borgnine). Corbis has harassed the Preston family for decades regarding a Satanic book that holds great power. Ida Lupino played Mark’s mother, Emma; Skerritt and Prather played Mark’s older brother, Tom, and his wife, Julie, who search for Mark while he battles the evil, shape-shifting Corbis (who takes the form of a goat-like demon). Travolta played Danny, one of Corbis’s minions. In the canon of unverifiable pop-culture lore, Travolta is said to have been exposed for the first time to the Church of Scientology, by Joan Prather, while filming The Devil’s Rain. The movie opened in August 1975 to poor reviews; Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, called it “painfully dull,” while the New York Times branded it “as horrible as watching an egg fry.”49
But The Devil’s Rain lived on and achieved a modicum of notoriety among hard-core horror fans (and trivia buffs). Following the release of John Carpenter’s 1978 big-screen horror classic Halloween, it was revealed that the creepy mask worn by the movie’s serial killer, Michael Myers, was produced from a mold of William Shatner’s face taken during the production of The Devil’s Rain (for use as a special effect in a scene where Mark Preston’s face melts away). The mask was made by Don Post Studios and was purchased by the Halloween production team from a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard and then spray-painted white. It was donned by actor Nick Castle for his scenes playing the knife-wielding maniac Michael Myers.
* * *
After six years in the television wilderness, Bill finally got the chance to star in another series when he was offered Barbary Coast, a hybrid of The Wild, Wild West and Mission Impossible that first aired in May 1975 as a two-hour ABC Sunday Night Movie directed by actor Bill Bixby and starring Bill and Dennis Cole in the lead roles. Viewership for the movie was promising, and ABC rubber-stamped Barbary Coast as a weekly series set to premiere on its fall schedule. Cole was replaced by veteran television actor Doug McClure, with whom Bill had worked ten years earlier on an episode of McClure’s NBC series, The Virginian. McClure, appearing on his sixth series, hadn’t seen the Barbary Coast pilot. He won the role after calling his friend, series creator Douglas Heyes, to say hello—and Heyes hired him for the series. He also hired several writers from Mission: Impossible, including Harold Livingston, who later wrote Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Bill adopted a number of quick-change disguises for his role as 1870s government agent Jeff Cable, who teams with con man/gambler Cash Conover (McClure). Conover owns the Golden Gate Casino, located in San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble red-light Barbary Coast district, and together Jeff and Cash tangle with criminals and foreign spies, often in a light-hearted vein; McClure said Heyes et al. tried to tone him down because, he claimed, “I can go too far. If it goes overboard, it’s not funny.”50
The series was created by veteran television producer/director Douglas Heyes, who hired several writers from Mission: Impossible, including Harold Livingston, to write scripts for Barbary Coast.
Filming on the series, originally called Cash & Cable, started in the summer of 1975. Bill got off to an inauspicious start on his new series when he broke the tibia and fibula in his right leg while filming a scene on a muddy, slippery street and the “falling horse” (a horse trained to take a spill) on which he was riding took a spill and landed on him. The horse was uninjured, but Bill needed a fiberglass cast on his leg and was unable to work for several weeks. (The fiberglass cast broke several times, delaying production even further.)
In the run-up to the show’s September 8 premiere on ABC, Bill downplayed comparisons between Barbary Coast and The Wild, Wild West and also the show’s violence, or lack thereof, which was an offshoot of its 8 p.m. time slot—the so-called “family hour” in prime time. “I wear a hell of a lot of disguises,” he said. “I pose as an organ grinder in one story, an Oriental in another and you name it.”51 He managed to wrangle a role for his wife; Marcy appeared as “Tranquility Smith” in the episode entitled “The Ballad of Redwing Jail.”
Jeff Cable’s clever disguises didn’t help Barbary Coast attract a sizable viewership, nor did ABC’s decision to schedule the series opposite two CBS spinoffs from The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Valerie Harper’s hit sitcom Rhoda, starting its second season, and Phyllis (starring Cloris Leachman), which premiered that fall and found an instant audience. “Barbary Coast is half adventure, half spoof, and all complicated,” TV Guide noted in its review. “The plots are so involved that it takes someone with nothing else on his mind to understand them. If there’s anything that makes a spoof go poof, it’s not knowing what’s going on—before they start making fun of it.” The relationship between Jeff Cable and Cash Conover didn’t work because it was “too vague,” noted the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner critic.
The New York Times ripped the show and its “two man-boys, the types who will spend the rest of their lives joshing one another with undisguised love and admiration” and disdained its production values: “Barbary Coast is the type of program in which, when bagpipes are playing in an adjacent room, a character goes to the doorway, pulls some heavy curtains across it, and the sounds of the bagpipes are totally silenced.” Bill and Doug McClure were spared the paper’s critical wrath.
The ratings for Barbary Coast were bad, and before too long, television veteran Cy Chermak (The Virginian, Ironside, Kolchak: The Night Stalker) was brought on board as the show’s executive producer. “I assumed they wanted me to try to save the show,” he said. “Comedy Westerns never worked well. I invented a watchword logo, ‘Good, clean, dirty fun.’ We never used it. I soon realized that they didn’t want a [show] doctor, they wanted hospice care. They kept cutting back on the budget and soon the show was cancelled.”52 Still, not all was lost: one of the supporting players who appeared on Barbary Coast was a twenty-six-year-old actor named Leslie Moonves. “That was my first role where I delivered a telegram to William Shatner and literally said, ‘This is your telegram, sir.’ He gives me a tip and I leave and that’s how I got my Screen Actors Guild Card,” Moonves recalled. “He was very nice. You remember when you’re a young actor the guys who are very nice to you.” Moonves’s acting career stalled, but he found enormous success in other areas of television, eventually rising to Chairman and CEO of CBS where, thirty-five years later, Bill would star in the short-lived sitcom $#*! My Dad Says.53
ABC pulled the plug on Barbary Coast in late 1975, and its final episode aired on January 9, 1976. ABC eventually replaced the series with the sitcoms On the Rocks and Good Heavens (the latter starring Carl Reiner). It would take Bill seven years to return to television as the star of another series.
In a way, though, shooting Barbary Coast on the Paramount lot turned out to be fortuitous for Bill since he had the chance to revisit the sound stages and sets that had been his home while shooting Star Trek. As he was walking around the studio one day, he heard the clackety-clack-clack of typewriter keys and, following the sound, he discovered Gene Roddenberry in his office, sitting in a corner and pecking away at his typewriter.
He told Bill that he was working on a Star Trek movie.54