Bill and Marcy sold the ranch in Three Rivers in 1985 and bought a 360-acre horse farm in Versailles, Kentucky, from acclaimed horse trainer Donna Moore. That same year they also changed their address in Los Angeles, moving from their ranch house in the city’s Hillcrest section to a bigger place on Berry Drive in Studio City. The mountaintop house had a panoramic view of the city. They also bought a beach house in Malibu.
They kept the Belle Reve name for the new farm in Kentucky (it was officially known as Belle Reve Farm), and Donna Moore stayed on to manage the place and to oversee breeding its award-winning line of American saddlebreds and quarter horses—including a world champion stallion, Sultan’s Great Day, which was put out to stud at Belle Reve.
(That wasn’t the end of the story for Sultan’s Great Day. Several years later, Bill was sued by acclaimed Kentucky horsewoman Linda Johnson over breeding rights to the stallion. Bill won the suit in 1990, with a judge ruling that he hadn’t agreed to a lifetime breeding agreement with Johnson. Bill testified that he bought Sultan’s Great Day from Johnson and her business partner for $300,000, acknowledging that he allowed Johnson to mate her mares with the stallion from 1984 to 1988—but that he had never agreed to a lifetime breeding commitment.)1
The new horse farm paid immediate dividends. In November 1986, just before Star Trek IV hit the nation’s theaters, Bill—“wearing a maroon jacket, navy plaid, and a nervous grin”—rode his American saddlebred, Kentucky Dream, to a blue ribbon at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. (Bill claimed he changed the horse’s name from Sinatra because it just didn’t sound right.) He “kept his hands held high and his face impassive,” even when the crowd recognized him and started cheering every time the judge looked in his direction. “I knew there were 10,000 pairs of eyes staring, but my focus was on the horse the way an actor’s focus stays on his role,” he said.2
His focus was also on other, more pleasurable, pursuits—including his romance with onetime T. J. Hooker guest star Vira Montes, which reared its head in a very public way as Bill turned fifty-six in March of 1987. The show-business gossip mill shifted into high gear when word broke that that Marcy had “stormed out” of Bill’s birthday party in Hollywood, angry over the alleged Montes affair and over allegations that Bill claimed Vira was a relative when they were spotted in public.
Marcy’s reported outburst was a rare public display of friction between the Shatners. That same month, journalist Vernon Scott, who covered the Hollywood beat for United Press International, wrote a glowing article about Marcy and her starring role in Vivien, a play about the life of actress Vivien Leigh that was being staged at the Melrose Theatre in Los Angeles and was adapted from a ten-minute film, also called Vivien, that Marcy wrote, produced, and starred in four years earlier.
Marcy was a longtime admirer of Leigh, the two-time Oscar winner (Gone with the Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire), dating back to her days as a drama student at USC. She never met Leigh, who died in 1967, but avidly researched her life and her career. “I own a beautiful white ball gown that Vivien wore onstage in 1955 for the play Lady of the Camellias,” she told Scott. “I read thirteen biographies about Vivien and more than fifty lengthy articles about her from all over the world. A lot of the dialogue for the play was inspired by interviews she gave after [Laurence] Olivier left her.” Scott ended the article with a quote from Marcy about Bill’s support for the project. “Bill has been very supportive and encouraging about my devotion to this play,” she said. “I’ve done more than fifty plays, but this is the greatest experience of my life.”3
There was more trouble four months later, in July, when Bill was spotted walking on Sixth Avenue in New York City outside Radio City Music Hall with a woman who was not Marcy but was identified in press reports as “his enticing brunette companion.” (Bill was in town to fill in on CBS’s morning show for a few days.) Mike Ferguson, a photographer for Globe Photos, attempted to snap a picture of Bill and his companion, and when Bill accosted him, Ferguson asked Bill why he was trying to grab his camera. “I just want my privacy,” he replied. As Bill’s companion slunk into the background, trying to avoid what became a very public scene, Bill handed Ferguson twenty dollars for the negatives (after Ferguson threatened to call the cops). Bill’s agent, Carmen Lavia, told the New York Post that, as far as he knew, Bill and Marcy had been living together the past four months: “I haven’t heard different from either one.” Ferguson later identified Bill’s companion as Vira Montes.4
* * *
Bill spent most of the winter, spring, and summer of 1988 preparing for the rigors of directing and starring in Star Trek V, which was scheduled to begin filming in the fall with a reported budget of $30 million. Somehow, he found time in his crammed schedule to costar with Susan Blakely in a forgettable ABC television movie called Broken Angel, playing a father searching for his errant, rebellious daughter (Erika Eleniak) in the seedy underbelly of teenage suburbia. “If mannequins could walk, talk, write, and direct, they would put out a better movie than this,” sniffed People magazine. The Los Angeles Times was more succinct: “Shatner woefully overacts.”5 6 In April, he spent half an hour with Koko, the famous sixteen-year-old “talking” gorilla who understood roughly two thousand words of spoken English and six hundred signs. “We touched hands and we touched minds,” he said in his best Captain Kirk voice, invoking a bit of Spock-ian Star Trek imagery.7 “I got right in front of her and said, ‘Koko,’ and looked into her deep brown eyes. I said, ‘I love you, Koko,’ and she put her hand out and grabbed me by the balls.”8
Earlier that year, Bill’s youngest daughter, Melanie, appeared in a television ad for Oldsmobile (“My father drove a Starship so it’s only natural I fly around in something space age”), with Bill materializing in the car’s front seat—all in the name of helping to sell “the new generation of Olds.” Melanie was pursuing an acting career; she appeared briefly (and uncredited) as a jogger in Star Trek IV and reappeared in Star Trek V, this time as the captain’s yeoman, after auditioning for another part. “My dad called and said I didn’t get the part,” she said, “but there was another small role . . . if I wanted it, and I said of course.”9
Bill’s contract to direct Star Trek V included the proviso that he also develop the story with Star Trek veteran Harve Bennett. It proved to be a problematic process in a “too many cooks” kind of way. Bill insisted on his vision for the story and Bennett had big reservations about the plotline Bill cooked up. “Bill would come in and present a concept and he thought he was discovering the wheel,” Bennett said.10 It was not a recipe for success. The movie’s executive producer, Ralph Winter, put it bluntly: “Star Trek V almost killed the franchise.”11
There were others who felt that Bill wasn’t ready to direct a big-screen movie—that his outsized ego and alpha-dog personality were not well suited to interacting on such a close and personal level with his Star Trek castmates. But it was that very Shatner-type doggedness and determination that spurred him along. No one ever accused Bill Shatner of lacking in self-confidence; he was sure that his vision was the right way to go, and he tried to mold Star Trek V as closely to that vision as possible.
“My one idea was, ‘Star Trek’ goes in search of God and instead of finding God they find the devil,” Bill said. “During the finding of the devil the three main characters are at each other’s throats for various reasons. The devil grabs McCoy and takes him into hell and Spock and Kirk . . . join forces, go back down to the River Styx and rescue McCoy and bring him out.”12 Gene Roddenberry hated the idea. The concept of God, he told Bill, meant different things to different people. “Gene did come down strongly against the story and set up circumstances that were negative and unfortunate,” Bill said. “There’s nothing wrong with a good story about the search for the meaning of life.”13 Paramount agreed with Roddenberry, and the story arc was changed. “After the success of Star Trek IV, they wanted to make sure that we retained as much humor and fun as possible, because they felt that was one of the reasons for the big success of that film,” noted Star Trek V screenwriter David Loughery. “They just wanted a balance between the darker elements and some of the lighter stuff.”14
Filming on the movie, now called Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, began in October 1988. The pressure on Bill was intense—not only was he directing his first big-screen movie, but he was answering to studio executives questioning his ability, both technically and financially (to stay within the movie’s budget). Bill’s intensely competitive nature posed another self-imposed challenge: could he equal, or maybe even surpass, Leonard Nimoy’s success directing Star Trek III and Star Trek IV? And, if so, would it open other doors for him? Nimoy followed his two Star Trek stints behind the camera by directing two successful big-screen movies, Three Men and a Baby (in 1987) and The Good Mother (1988).
Bill, meanwhile, was also facing competition from another corner: the Star Trek franchise itself.
Gene Roddenberry’s long-talked-about Star Trek follow-up, Star Trek: The Next Generation, had finally premiered in late September 1987, over eighteen years since the final episode of Star Trek aired on NBC. The syndicated television series, starring Patrick Stewart as USS Enterprise-D Captain Jean-Luc Picard, was set in the year 2364, ninety-nine years after the original Star Trek began its five-year mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Nearly 27 million viewers watched the new show’s two-hour pilot, which aired on over fifty stations nationwide in prime time. Reviews were mixed; the New York Times thought that “the Enterprise and its new crew simply fail to take flight,”15 while the San Diego Tribune critic enthused that “it has captured much of the original magic.”16 Fans ignored the critics and embraced the new series. The Next Generation garnered solid ratings in its first season, averaging around 9 million viewers per episode, and was renewed for a second season scheduled to air in conjunction with the premiere of Star Trek V. The heat was on Bill to keep the Star Trek faithful interested in the big-screen movies, which now had new competition in the form of The Next Generation.
Filming on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was completed in late December 1988. The shoot was not an easy one for Bill, who worked extremely long hours and oversaw almost every aspect of the production—including on-location shooting in Yosemite National Park for a scene in which Kirk scales a mountain. Notwithstanding Nimoy and, to a lesser extent, DeForest Kelley, Bill wasn’t particularly close to his Star Trek castmates. There was the usual friction with supporting players James Doohan, Walter Koenig, and Nichelle Nichols—and, to a lesser extent, with Nimoy and Kelley. James Doohan recalled seeing Nimoy and Kelley “snickering” to each other about Shatner, “waiting for him to make some new mistake.”17
Still, Bill insisted that he had fun directing Star Trek V. “This was the first time that I had my hands on so much money,” he said. “It was quite an experience just from that point of view . . . On the other hand, I made a vow not to take it too seriously. And I did enjoy the whole thing tremendously.”18
“He’s argumentative and has a very, very healthy ego, and an ego fueled by watching his costar reap the benefits of directing the previous two movies,” the movie’s publicist, Eddie Egan, said of Bill. “Unfortunately, I just think he wasn’t as collaborative as Leonard is by nature.”19 Bill admitted how difficult it was for him to direct his Star Trek cohorts: “I suppose it’s like having a child who has a characteristic you wish he wouldn’t have, and you don’t know what to say . . . Some of the cast have characteristics you wish they wouldn’t do and, politically, it’s hard for another actor to say, ‘You’d do so much better if you wouldn’t do such-and-such.’ But as a director, it’s your duty.”20 He also talked about the difficulties of directing himself, calling it a “dangerous proposition” that he was unsure about heading into the project. “You know, a lawyer who conducts his own defense has a fool for a client,” he told a reporter. “I think the same thing can apply to a director who is acting in his own picture. He has an actor of dubious qualifications.”21
Personality conflicts were one thing; interactions between actors, however much they might detest each other, could be faked onscreen. (They’re actors, after all.) The consensus by those working on Star Trek V was that it suffered from a weak plotline, and not bad chemistry among the cast—and that was more difficult to overcome. “It failed because of the story concept,” Koenig said. “I don’t think it was well thought out. We had the same problem on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” “All we needed, and all of us say this, was a good script,” said Doohan. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have one in V.”22
The movie opens with Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy camping at Yosemite National Park. As the plot lurches forward, the Enterprise and Spock’s half-brother, Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), breach a barrier to land at Sha Ka Ree—the planet where creation began. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Sybok beam down to the planet’s surface. An entity Sybok believes is God (it isn’t) attacks Kirk; Sybok sacrifices his life in order to save the others, and the entity is destroyed by a Klingon ship pursuing the Enterprise. The crews of the Enterprise and the Klingon ship reach a détente—and Kirk, McCoy, and Spock resume their camping trip in Yosemite.
The happy ending of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier did not carry over into the film’s post-production process, which was plagued by delays and snafus regarding the movie’s special effects. “We ran out of money for the ending,” Bill said. “We had a lot of technical problems, but there are wonderful moments in Star Trek V that I’m very proud of.”23 The movie was still undergoing revisions in April 1989 before it was finally deemed ready for its premiere.
That didn’t go well, either.
Star Trek V had the misfortune of opening on June 9 against a backdrop of big-budget sequels, including Ghostbusters II and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Initially the signs were positive; the movie grossed over $17 million in its first week with a publicity blitz that included a tie-in computer game, a novelization (which spent four weeks on the bestsellers list), a Star Trek clothing line, and even a Star Trek marshmallow dispenser courtesy of Kraft. By its second week in release, Star Trek V was fading fast, and in the end, the film tallied only $63 million worldwide. Paramount reaped a profit of $30 million, but it was not the windfall the studio expected.
Bill’s directorial debut was met, at turns, by eviscerating criticism and a modicum of praise. The Washington Post dubbed Star Trek V “a shambles, a space plodessy, a snoozola of astronomic proportions,” and wrote that “the story is uneventful, the effects warmed over from Star Wars.”24 “Of all the Star Trek movies, this is the worst,” sniped Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert. “Star Trek V is pretty much of a mess—a movie that betrays all the signs of having gone into production at a point where the script doctoring should have begun in earnest. There is no clear line from the beginning of the movie to the end, not much danger, no characters to really care about, little suspense, uninteresting or incomprehensible villains, and a great deal of small talk and pointless dead ends.”25
Other critics were more forgiving. USA Today: “Though [Shatner] doesn’t exactly parallel-park Star Trek V . . . into a meteor, the journey is (at best) an amiably lazy Sunday drive.” The Los Angeles Times: “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is as much a spiritual odyssey as a space adventure . . . It has high adventure, nifty special effects, and much good humor, but it also has a wonderful resonance to it.” The Boston Globe: “There are times when Star Trek V seems padded and low-impact, but there are things to like, too.”26
In July, one month after the movie’s release, Pocket Books published Captain’s Log: William Shatner’s Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The book was cowritten by Bill and his daughter Lisabeth and chronicles Bill’s first-person account of the movie’s production. (“As told by Lisabeth Shatner,” the book noted on its cover.)
Captain’s Log wasn’t the only literary effort Bill undertook as the decade was drawing to a close. Perhaps emboldened by his involvement with the Star Trek V story—and considering himself steeped in the science-fiction tradition (and, by extension, its community of fans)—he signed a deal with Putnam to “write” a series of sci-fi novels called TekWar on which he collaborated with prolific author Ron Goulart, who was well versed in the fiction and non-fiction genres.
Goulart was uncredited on the book jackets, which listed Bill as the sole author. But Bill was very complimentary of him when discussing the TekWar books and their working relationship—which was conducted mostly over the telephone by tossing ideas back and forth. He also thanked Goulart profusely in the original book’s introduction: “Ron Goulart, a wonderful writer, showed me the way out and showed me the way in to completing the novel.”
The protagonist of TekWar was a futuristic detective named Jake Cardigan, who Bill said he based on T. J. Hooker. The first book was set in the twenty-second century, and “tek” refers to the illegal, mind-altering drug, in the form of a microchip, that Cardigan is accused of dealing. (He was framed, of course.) Cardigan is sentenced to a fifteen-year prison sentence aboard an orbiting prison. He’s released four years later and vows to hunt down the tek drug lords responsible for dealing the evil drug. “In my book, computer software is the drug,” he said in describing the first TekWar novel. “People use software to alter moods. I let my imagination run wild. I had talked to policemen for almost five years during the [T. J. Hooker] TV series. I found their lives interesting and strange and vital. They live on the edge with anxiety and tension—where the action is.”27
TekWar was published in October 1989, and the reviews were mixed. People magazine panned the book: “Shatner tries to disguise language and narrative weaknesses under a blizzard of futuristic details and a pell-mell plot. It’s a nice try, but Tek War is undone by superficial characters and stilted dialogue. Even devout Trekkies won’t care to become tekkies.”28 Other critics were kinder: “While it’s unlikely that Shatner’s prose will ever rival Isaac Asimov’s for density of plot . . . Shatner has nonetheless delivered a witty, no-nonsense rollicking adventure. If Trekkies fork over their cash for TekWar, it will be assured a place on the bestsellers list. Strangely enough, it deserves one.”29 Publisher’s Weekly: “While the writing is awkward in spots, the pace is unrelenting.”30
The Shatner-Goulart partnership proved to be a fruitful one as TekWar hit the bestsellers list and would spawn nine further books in the series that were published through the late 1990s. There were other TekWar spinoffs, both literary (an Epics Comics/Marvel comic book series called Tek World, set fifty years in the future) and electronic (a video game, “William Shatner’s TekWar”). Bill wasn’t shy about his desire to translate the TekWar franchise onto the big screen, and he would eventually achieve his goal of getting it onto film—though not in the medium he envisioned—when his TekWar television series premiered in 1994. “Shatner’s a good storyteller, and he has a very good sense of how to reach a large audience,” Goulart said. “That’s always helpful. All the suggestions he has made are toward making this thing work.”31
* * *
Television, meanwhile, continued to be the one constant in Bill Shatner’s life. He was fifty-eight now and a millionaire, thanks mostly to the Star Trek movies and his frenetic work schedule, which never slowed down. His marriage to Marcy, which had peaked years earlier, seemed to be mostly valleys now, but they remained a couple, at least publicly, and continued to breed horses on their Belle Reve Farm in Kentucky. There were reports that Marcy, tired of Bill’s roving eye, walked out on him in the spring of 1989, only to return several months later when he promised to change his ways.
Bill expected to direct the next Star Trek movie, which was projected to start filming sometime in 1990. There were rumors that Star Trek VI would be the final movie using characters from the original television series. If Bill wasn’t working on his next TekWar novel or materializing at Star Trek conventions—signing autographs, posing for pictures (for a fee), and engaging fans in the requisite question-and-answer sessions—he was acting on the small screen. His projects around that time included Voice of the Planet, a ten-hour, $3.5 million Turner Broadcasting miniseries, based on the Michael Tobias novel, in which Bill costarred (with the voice of Faye Dunaway) as a university professor who heads for the Himalayas and encounters the spirit of the Earth. The miniseries was two years in the making and included twelve months of shooting in eighteen countries; Bill shot his scenes before beginning work on Star Trek V. “I chose William Shatner because I admire his great acting ability,” Tobias said. “Will brings a life and sensitivity that is unique to the character.”
In early 1989 Bill was hired to host three CBS specials spotlighting the real-life experiences of paramedics, police, firefighters, and other emergency responders. Network president Kim LeMasters ordered the specials after hearing an episode of The Osgood Files, a CBS Radio program hosted by Charles Osgood, which featured a frantic 911 emergency call made by a nine-year-old girl whose father was being attacked by an intruder, who was gunned down by the girl’s older brother. NBC was already airing its popular series Unsolved Mysteries, with host Robert Stack, which focused on true crime and the paranormal. But first responders? That was an untapped television genre.
Enter Rescue 911.
LeMasters initially suggested that Leonard Nimoy host the new series, and executive producer Arnold Shapiro countered with Bill Shatner. “[Le-Masters] said, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting idea. Explore it,’” Shapiro recalled. “The reason I’d said that was because I’d worked with Shatner twice before. I’d done two years of a special called the Science Fiction Film Awards, which was a syndicated two-hour special. The first one aired in 1978 and was hosted by William Shatner and Karen Black, and the second one, we figured since Shatner did such a good job, he could just handle it himself, and that’s what we did.”
In 1987, Shapiro hired Bill to narrate a CBS special called Top Flight to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the US Air Force. “The thing about Bill is he can do narration,” Shapiro said. “And on-camera, he is good. So, CBS business affairs reached out to Shatner’s representatives and a deal was made” for him to host the Rescue 911 specials.32
The specials were scheduled to air in April and May of 1989, and Bill promoted them enthusiastically in newspaper interviews, telling the New York Post that he’d experienced his own 911 emergency several years earlier, while driving in Philadelphia, when he witnessed a man threatening a woman with a knife. He said he called 911 and police soon arrived at the scene. “It has two things going for it,” he said of Rescue 911. “It rips your head off with excitement. You hear the real telephone calls, see the news footage, and watch the harrowing things that are happening in front of you. And it serves a purpose by showing what a 911 call does . . . it’s useful information.”33
The first Rescue 911 special aired on April 18, 1989, highlighting, among other first-responder heroics, the rescue of children stranded in a bus crash and a babysitter tossing eight babies out of a window during a raging fire. The special won its time slot and was followed three weeks later by the second special. That, too, won its time slot in total viewership. CBS smelled a winner. “They told us that it was likely that we were going to get a series and to hold the third special to be an episode of the series, which is what happened,” Shapiro said.
In May, the network announced that Rescue 911, with host William Shatner, would return in the fall as a regular prime-time series. Bill was in a sound booth doing a voice-over for the special when the news broke. “We got the news that we had been picked up for more episodes and he was thrilled,” recalled Rescue 911 director Nancy Platt Jacoby. “I mean, he jumped out of his seat. It was like a first-time actor getting a pickup. I mean, it was such a surprise to me. We were all thrilled.”34
Bill’s Rescue 911 shooting schedule was flexible and could accommodate his other projects; he filmed his on-camera appearances every other Sunday at a 911 call facility in Huntington Beach, thirty-five miles from downtown Los Angeles, which also housed a fire department and ambulances. Filming was often interrupted by real 911 calls and would resume only after the situations were handled. “I can’t tell you how many times Bill would be in the midst of a perfect take and the phone would ring,” Shapiro said. Bill recorded his voice-over narration for Rescue 911 every Friday at a sound studio in Hollywood.
“He was the face of the show,” Shapiro said. “In that era of so-called ‘reality television,’ you pretty much needed a host. In a period of one year, Rescue 911 came on the air, Cops came on the air. There was Unsolved Mysteries at NBC, America’s Funniest Home Videos on ABC, America’s Most Wanted on Fox.”35
“One day, we were filming in the dispatch center when a woman called and said her husband had shot himself,” Bill recalled. “He was still alive. You’re standing there, once removed from the tragedy, as the dispatcher calmly tries to help the woman on the other end whose life has been shattered.”36
As it turned out, Bill could have used the help of Rescue 911 in his personal life, too.
In late January 1990, Vira Montes—who met Bill back in 1984 and who had appeared in an episode of T. J. Hooker—sued him for palimony. She claimed they had a years-long affair and that Marcy eventually learned about their trysts and threatened to kick Bill out of the house if he didn’t end the relationship, perhaps alluding to the incident in 1987 when Marcy stormed out of Bill’s fifty-sixth birthday party. Montes hired pit bull attorney Marvin Mitchelson to handle her palimony case. Mitchell pioneered the palimony precedent (“marriage with no rings attached,” he quipped) when he sued actor Lee Marvin on behalf of Marvin’s former live-in girlfriend, Michelle Triola, in what became a landmark legal case.
Mitchelson’s link to Bill actually dated back to 1970, when Gloria Shatner hired him to defend her as she fought for a percentage of Bill’s residuals from Star Trek. (She won the case.) “I’m sure the charge has no validity,” Shatner’s agent, Carmen Lavia, told the press about the Montes palimony case. “The phrase ‘palimony’ makes no sense. Palimony assumes you’re living with someone. It’s hard to live with someone when you’re living with someone else.”
Bill was on vacation (with Marcy and his three daughters) when the news broke but released a statement to the press without mentioning Vira’s name. “It’s a shame this had to happen,” he said. “The case she presents is ridiculous. She was a friend whom I tried to help. Someone obviously got to her and convinced her that she could possibly make a killing by suing me.”37
In her $6 million palimony suit, Montes claimed that she met Bill when she was a twenty-two-year-old medical assistant and that he promised to maintain a high standard of living for her for “the rest of her life,” that he promised to marry her, and that he talked with her about having a child together.38 She claimed that her affair with Bill included a jaunt to Vancouver for their “unofficial honeymoon” and that, in 1986, he bought her a house in the San Fernando Valley and visited there frequently. Bill was terrific in bed, she said, despite his wearing a toupee and a corset: “We would make mad love, then he would race back to his home in time for dinner,” she said. “I heard he had lots of women, and the only thing I insisted was that I should be the only one apart from Marcy.”39 She also claimed that Bill promised to buy her a car, horseback riding lessons, an Arabian horse given to Bill by Wayne Newton, and another horse for her eight-year-old son.
The case was quietly settled out of court for an undisclosed amount—as was another palimony case, this one for $2 million, that was brought against Bill in late 1989 by Eva-Marie Friedrick, who was hired by Marcy in 1986 as an associate producer and personal assistant. Friedrick claimed she and Bill embarked on a two-year affair in the same time frame he was allegedly bedding Vira Montes.
In court papers filed in late December 1989, Friedrick sued Bill for breach of contract, fraud, negligent infliction of emotional distress, violation of state labor laws, and negligence—charges he called “totally unfounded.” Friedrick claimed that Bill “promised her that she wouldn’t be stuck behind a desk and she’d learn to become a producer,” that they had an “intimate relationship,” and that Bill abruptly ended the affair after she was seriously injured in a car accident in October 1988. She was fired a month later, she claimed.40 The case was featured on the syndicated television newsmagazine Inside Edition, which breathlessly reported on Bill’s “showdown with a human Klingon—a woman, determined to cling on to what she insists is rightly hers.”41 Bill declined to comment.
British network Thames Television chose this embarrassing, tabloid-y time in Bill’s life to feature him as its surprise guest on This Is Your Life, its long-running biographical series adapted from the original NBC version, which premiered on television in 1952 with host Ralph Edwards. (This Is Your Life debuted on the BBC in 1955 with host Eamonn Andrews.) Bill was popular in the United Kingdom, and the BBC had been airing Star Trek since 1969, repeating the series off and on throughout the 1970s and ’80s and generating a big fan base almost as devoted as their American cousins. T. J. Hooker was also a big draw in England, premiering on ITV in 1983 and airing regionally on Friday and Saturday nights.
Bill’s episode of This Is Your Life, which aired on December 27, 1989, was shot at Universal Studios in Florida. In order for the show to succeed, it needed an element of surprise, and the show’s unofficial “rule” called for an episode to be cancelled if the intended subject was tipped off beforehand. Bill, who was dressed in a suit and tie and was standing on a replica of the deck of the USS Enterprise, thought he was going to be interviewed about Star Trek before a live audience. This Is Your Life host Michael Aspel ambushed the honoree, who appeared genuinely shocked, throwing his head back and laughing. “You’re kidding!” Bill said. “Oh, my Lord, I have seen this show in the United States, you know the idea that you stole. I’ve seen it and I can’t believe it!”
Bill and Aspel were then “beamed” via cheesy special effects onto an adjoining sound stage furnished with several rows of chairs, including several empty seats to be filled by the surprise guests. Smiling Star Trek V producer Harve Bennett was there, though he didn’t say a word but was identified and shown on camera. Following a montage of Captain Kirk locking lips on Star Trek with a bevy of women—somewhat awkward, considering Bill’s recent palimony cases—the rest of the half-hour show unfolded. Aspel introduced Bill’s daughters—Leslie, Lisabeth, and Melanie—and Marcy (who recounted how they met on the set of The Andersonville Trial and how she fell “madly in crush with him”). Bill’s longtime friend Hilliard Jason was there, recalling their days as counselors at Camp B’nai Brith—where “as our one talented member of the staff,” Bill created a character called “The Mad Professor,” which he was called upon to perform time and again—including right then and there. (He gamely gave it a whirl.)
Bill’s costar from A Shot in the Dark, Julie Harris, appeared on the episode via videotape (“Let’s do it again, let’s go back to Broadway!”), and following a brief clip of Bill and Spencer Tracy from Judgment at Nuremberg, Leonard Nimoy came out on the stage, regaling everyone with the long-in-the-tooth Star Trek-era bicycle story (“He’s a terrible person! He took it upon himself to torture me with this bicycle!”) but getting a lot of laughs nonetheless. T. J. Hooker costars Adrian Zmed and Richard Herd were there in person and each said a few words (Zmed telling a funny story about Shatner’s “warp speed” driving while filming a particular scene), while another T. J. Hooker alum, Heather Locklear, appeared via videotape. (“I learned so much from you. You were always such fun to work with. You always had a great sense of humor.”) Bill’s love of horses was addressed by trainer Donna Moore, who appeared on tape from the Shatners’ horse farm in Kentucky with Bill’s pride and joy, stallion Sultan’s Great Day, and said a few (scripted) words. The episode closed with a brief appearance from Bill’s son-in-law, Gordon Walker (Leslie’s husband), holding Bill’s grandson, twenty-month-old Grant.
* * *
Bill turned sixty in March 1991 and, in April, shooting began on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
The original NBC television series was turning twenty-five that year, and Paramount’s original plan was to celebrate the milestone with a prequel movie, overseen by Harve Bennett, called Star Trek: The Academy Years—recounting how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy first met at Starfleet Academy. Bill and Leonard Nimoy (but not DeForest Kelley) would appear at the beginning and end of the film for contextual purposes. Star Trek fans gave the idea a big thumbs-down, as did the original cast members (why miss out on another paycheck?), and the plan was abandoned. Bennett quit in a huff. “I wasn’t too clued in on the politics of what was happening,” Bill said, somewhat disingenuously. “I heard about the prequel and was considering my options, but it was never approved, and we didn’t know whether or not there would be another Star Trek until the last second.”42
With the twenty-fifth anniversary quickly approaching, and the prequel movie idea scrapped, Paramount had to act quickly. The studio tapped Leonard Nimoy to be the movie’s executive producer. Bill expected to direct Star Trek VI, hoping to redeem himself after flopping behind the camera with Star Trek V, but Nimoy bypassed him in favor of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer. “Let’s face it, nobody wanted to have anything to do with anybody who had anything to do with V, except as necessary,” noted Star Trek VI cowriter Denny Martin Flinn. “I don’t think Star Trek V was entirely Shatner’s fault by any means . . . but no one was happy with it.”43 Bill was disappointed but took the high road, claiming he felt “a sense of tremendous relief” at not having to direct the movie under severe time constraints and with a frugal budget and Paramount executives breathing down his neck.44
The Star Trek VI script, written by Meyer and Flinn, was based on a story by Nimoy, Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal and was completed in October 1990—one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It transposed that historic event onto the context of the Star Trek universe: a détente between the Federation (the United States) and the Klingons (Russia). The Star Trek gang returned for their big-screen swan song—Bill, Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, George Takei, and Walter Koenig. Future Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall joined the Enterprise as Vulcan helmsperson Valeris; David Warner, Christopher Plummer (Shatner’s old pal from their Stratford Festival days), and Rosanna DeSoto played Klingons Gorkon, Chang, and Azetbur. Future star Christian Slater, best known at the time for his role in the big-screen dark comedy Heathers, had a small role as a young ensign (perhaps due to the persuasive powers of his mother, a Hollywood casting director).
The Undiscovered Country opens with the explosion of the Klingon moon Praxis, which destroys the Klingons’ ozone layer and forces them to sue for peace with the Federation. The Enterprise, captained by a resentful Kirk (whose son, David, was killed by Klingons), is sent to escort Klingon Chancellor Gorkon to Earth. Kirk and McCoy are wrongfully accused of assassinating Gorkon and are arrested by General Chang. They’re found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on the frozen asteroid Rura Penthe. (Bill and DeForest Kelley shot their Rura Penthe scenes on a soundstage, with a real Alaskan glacier used for establishing shots.)
Through a series of events that includes their encounter with a shape-shifter, Martia (played by the fashion model Iman), Kirk and McCoy are eventually beamed back aboard the Enterprise by Spock, who’s captaining the ship in Kirk’s absence. Gorkon’s real assassins (including—gasp!—Valeris) are found, peace talks between the Federation and the Klingons are saved (Chang is killed trying to sabotage the summit), and Kirk proclaims that the Enterprise has flown its last mission.
The old on-set problems between Bill and his Star Trek family occasionally flared up during filming of The Undiscovered Country. Bill, George Takei later wrote, held up the shooting of a scene because he disagreed with the way director Nicholas Meyer wanted to film it, only because Kirk was not the scene’s intended focal point: “Bill had changed over the years. He had hurt people and seemed ignorant of the pain he had inflicted. He had denigrated his colleagues and blithely giggled about it. He had taken without feeling. And in so doing, he had diminished himself . . . The vibrant young actor radiating star energy whom I met back in 1965 had reduced himself to the sad, stubborn, oblivious butt of derisive jokes.”45
Bill enjoyed reconnecting on the set with Christopher Plummer, who, he recalled, was a part of the “in” group when they were both at Stratford. “He was flamboyant and would hoist a few with the guys, and I was on the outside looking in at all these people,” Bill said, “so I now had an opportunity to examine who this man was, and it was wonderful.”46
Gene Roddenberry flew off into the eternal sunset when he died at the age of seventy on October 24, 1991, six weeks before the official Star Trek VI premiere. (He was well enough to attend a screening of the movie in early October.) The creator of Star Trek lived a hard, fast life and had been in declining health since suffering a stroke in 1989. Bill, for reasons of his own, did not attend Roddenberry’s memorial service, which was held on November 1 at the Hall of Liberty in Los Angeles. “He was the only one who was not there,” George Takei said. “As always.”47 Takei was there along with Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols (who sang two songs dedicated to Roddenberry, one of them Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”). James Doohan paid his respects, and Star Trek: The Next Generation stars Patrick Stewart and Whoopi Goldberg joined Isaac Asimov and several others in sharing their memories of Gene during the memorial service. Bill, writing in later years about his relationship with Roddenberry, described it as “lousy: rather formal, cool, and strained.” But he regretted that Gene died “before [he] ever really got to know him.”48
Paramount put on a full-court press to promote both Star Trek VI and the television show’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In November, Leonard Nimoy appeared as Spock in a two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to ramp up interest in Star Trek VI. (He was reportedly paid $1 million for his cameo.) The episodes averaged over 25 million viewers, huge numbers for the series. Paramount planned marathon screenings of all the previous Star Trek movies. On December 5, one day before the official premiere of Star Trek VI, Bill, Nimoy, and the other Star Trek regulars participated in that vaunted Hollywood tradition of signing their names into the concrete on Hollywood Boulevard in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
All the promotion paid off. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country opened on December 6 and grossed over $18 million in its opening weekend, setting a new record for a film series as the weekend’s top-grossing movie. When all was said and done, the movie earned nearly $75 million at the box office (in North America) and grossed nearly $97 million worldwide. It was nominated for two Academy Awards (sound effects editing and makeup) and was the first Star Trek movie to win a Saturn Award as the year’s best science fiction film. The reviews, most of which were quick to point out the cast’s advancing ages, were overwhelmingly positive.
The New York Times: “There are no signs of waning energy here, not even in an Enterprise crew that looks ever more ready for intergalactic rocking chairs.”49
USA Today: “Star Trek VI more than upholds the tradition, making it a satisfying send-off for a mighty ship of foils.”50
Variety: “Weighed down by a midsection even flabbier than the long-inthe-tooth cast, director Nicholas Meyer still delivers enough of what Trek auds hunger for to justify the trek to the local multiplex.”51
The Hollywood Reporter: “The film has a conviction and pulp-adventure integrity that cannot be underestimated . . . Not the best of the series, but a suitable farewell.”52
But Bill wasn’t quite ready to throw in the Star Trek towel just yet, even though the lucrative movie franchise was receding into his rearview mirror.