In June 1992, with the sheen of Star Trek VI fading, Bill signed a contract with HarperCollins to write a book about his experiences working on the original series. The deal was reportedly worth just under $1 million and was sealed after a bidding war that also involved Simon & Schuster and Putnam. Bill was paired with author Chris Kreski, who’d cowritten the memoirs of actor Barry Williams, a.k.a. Greg Brady on the early ’70s ABC sitcom The Brady Bunch. That book, published by HarperCollins and called Growing Up Brady, sold over two hundred thousand copies in its first six weeks.
The Brady Bunch, which ended its five-season run on ABC nearly twenty years earlier, had a kitschy quality and, like Star Trek, enjoyed a syndicated resurgence after its mediocre network run. But it had nothing approaching the fan worship of Star Trek, and no big-screen movies with the original cast—though it did spawn several television reunion films; a variety show, The Brady Bunch Hour; and several big-screen spoofs. If Barry Williams could sell hundreds of thousands of books, HarperCollins figured, imagine what William Shatner could do?
The Shatner-Kreski book, Star Trek Memories, was published in 1993 and clocked in at over three hundred pages. In its pages, Bill walked readers through his experiences of shooting Star Trek at Desilu Studios and becoming involved in the series, and he shared memories of his favorite episodes, mixing in behind-the-scenes tidbits and anecdotes and breaking down each of the show’s three seasons on NBC. The final chapter, entitled “Captain’s Epilogue,” included Bill’s feelings about Gene Roddenberry and their relationship.
Bill took his literary pursuit one step further in the book, interviewing most of his Star Trek costars. James Doohan refused Bill’s invitation, hinting at the long-simmering distaste that most of Bill’s costars held for him through the run of both the television series and the big-screen Star Trek movies. In the coming years, that bile would spill out onto the pages of the memoirs written by Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Doohan, and Walter Koenig, all cashing in their Star Trek chits. “I was never rude, I was never angry at anybody, I loved them all,” Bill said in his own defense in Star Trek Memories. “They can’t be angry at me because I loved them. So how can you be angry at somebody who loves you? You can be annoyed, you can be a little jealous—whatever the things are, I have no animosity.”1
(Leonard Nimoy’s two Star Trek-related books—I Am Not Spock, published in 1975, and its follow up, I Am Spock, published twenty years later—focused mostly on his Vulcan alter ego. DeForest Kelley, by all accounts a humble, gentle man, never wrote his memoirs and never publicly criticized Bill. His biography, From Sawdust to Stardust, was published in 2005, six years after he died at the age of seventy-nine.)
The book’s “Captain’s Epilogue” chapter also included Bill’s recollections of spending most of a day in February 1993 interviewing Nichelle Nichols and “laughing, flirting and catching up with each other.” Bill wrote that, as their chat was ending, Nichols said to him: “Wait a minute. I’m not finished yet. I have to tell you why I despise you.” Bill thought she was kidding at first, but the look on her face indicated otherwise. He quoted her at length as she told him: “You can be very difficult to work with, and really inconsiderate of other actors who need to be considered! . . . You may not realize it, but there are times when you get totally involved in yourself, and you’re unkind.”
He asked Nichols to explain herself, and she recounted how “this went on, on the set, from day one to this day,” citing one specific example in which Bill pulled a Star Trek director aside during a scene that included her character, Lt. Uhura, telling him: “Look, Uhura doesn’t NEED to say that! It’s extraneous.” Bill noted in the book how “a couple of other cast mates have publicly been rather cool to me” and how, shortly after his interview with Nichols, he learned that she and spoken to Koenig, Takei, and Doohan, who all agreed to confront Bill when it was their turn to be interviewed for Star Trek Memories. (This was before Doohan decided not to participate in the project.)2 Leonard Nimoy came to his friend’s defense. “What can you say, Bill is a power on the set,” he said. “He was very powerful and aggressive, not necessarily in a way that was intended to damage or to injure, but because of what he felt he had to offer and what he thought was appropriate in a given moment.”3
Next on Bill’s interview list for the book was George Takei, who decided to shy away from confronting Bill—who described him in the book as “wonderful” with a “pleasant demeanor” during their long talk. Takei would have more to say soon enough. Walter Koenig, in his chat with Shatner, expressed sentiments similar to those of Nichols, though he and Bill apparently spent more time talking about Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry than about any personal conflicts. Doohan cancelled his meeting with Bill, refused to return his calls, and then “flatly refused” to speak to him. He was, he said, convinced that Bill would not use anything he said, particularly if it was negative. Bill’s response? “Certainly, this makes me angry, but for the most part it just makes me sad.”4
Doohan got his revenge three years later with the publication of his memoir, Beam Me Up, Scotty. He kept it brief but concise. “I have to admit, I just don’t like the man,” he wrote of Bill. “And, as has been well-documented elsewhere, he didn’t exactly have a knack for generating good feelings about him. It’s a shame that he wasn’t secure enough in himself or his status to refrain from practicing that sort of behavior.”5
Star Trek Memories was released in December 1993 and generated generally positive reviews. Publisher’s Weekly called it “candid, captivating . . . packed with stellar anecdotes and backstage lore,” while the New York Times praised the book: “Sprinkled throughout this memoir are wonderful bits of gossip” that “even non-Trekkers will find engaging.”6 Kirkus Reviews thought that “there’s enough here to satiate the most avid Trekker, delivered with pop and pizazz,” while People magazine called Star Trek Memories “a breezy, entertaining memoir.” The hardcover book hit the bestsellers list and remained there through 1994, when HarperCollins published a paperback edition.
* * *
As the calendar turned to 1994, Bill kept up his frenzied work schedule, plowing ahead with movies, television shows, and books—almost as if he was trying to keep the personal wolves at bay. The year ahead would prove to be a difficult one for the sixty-three-year old actor, who faced the breakup of his marriage, scathing assessments from several of his Star Trek costars, and legal problems. There was some positive news—his return to the big screen as Captain Kirk, the television series premiere of TekWar—but overall, 1994 was best viewed for Shatner in his rearview mirror.
The year began inauspiciously. In February, Bill and Marcy announced their plans to divorce after twenty-plus years of marriage. The writing was on the wall; to anyone who knew the couple’s rocky history, it couldn’t have been a surprise. Bill’s roving eye was legendary, and he’d settled two palimony suits brought against him. Marcy reportedly threw him out of the house several times; it seemed only a matter of time before their marriage irreparably imploded.
Bill and Marcy issued a public statement calling their divorce “amicable” and admitted that they had been separated for several months. “Life took us apart and it was time to move on,” Marcy said diplomatically. “We both share the highest regard for one another and our loved ones.”7
“I hadn’t learned anything from the failure of my first marriage,” Bill wrote in his memoir Up Till Now. “Marcy and I had a very passionate relationship; when we were in love, we were really in love, but when I got angry . . .”8 Their divorce, finalized in 1996, cost Bill around $8 million.9 He also forked over their luxury condo in Vail, Colorado, and their time-share homes in Mexico and Indonesia. There was one unusual clause in their divorce agreement: each year, Bill was to provide Marcy, who continued to breed horses, with fresh samples of semen from one of his prized stallions. (Frozen sperm wouldn’t cut the mustard.) That proviso would, like one of Bill’s stallions, rear its head further down the road.
The year 1994 also saw the publication of Nichelle Nichols’s book, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, and George Takei’s memoir, To the Stars. Both painted unflattering portraits of Bill, and both were unsparing in their antipathy toward their former costar.
In her book, Nichols skewered Bill as a self-absorbed, arrogant jerk who pushed for Kirk’s famous interracial kiss with Uhura (on the “Plato’s Stepchildren” episode of Star Trek) only after learning that, in the original script, it was Spock who locked lips with Uhura. Bill, she wrote, thought he “could generate a lot of publicity” from the historic kiss (the first of its kind on national television) and demanded that the script be changed. Elsewhere in Beyond Uhura, Nichols wrote: “[Bill] began to make it plain to anyone on the set that he was the Big Picture and the rest of us were no more important than the props. Anything that didn’t focus on him threatened his turf, and he never failed to make his displeasure known.” She described him as feeling threatened by male costars during the run of Star Trek (particularly by Ricardo Montalban in the “Space Seed” episode), and she contradicted several scenarios mentioned by Bill in Star Trek Memories, including the details of their one-on-one interview in early 1993.10
George Takei’s book, To the Stars, was also published in 1994. Takei, for the most part, painted Bill in an unflattering light. He had nothing but nice words for Bill and costar John Cassavetes when they appeared together on “Wind Fever,” an April 1966 episode of NBC’s Chrysler Theater. Bill, he wrote, “was crafting a fascinating portrait of an idealist with a dark under-side” and was a “cracking-good” actor. He also praised Bill as “brilliant” in the Season 1 Star Trek episode “The Naked Time,” writing that “given the constraints of television, Bill’s performance . . . was an amazing display of virtuosity.” That tone darkened in Takei’s retelling of working with Bill on the Star Trek movies, including their reunion on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when Takei and the other cast members suspected Bill of masterminding rewrites that magically cut their lines of dialogue from the script. Or maybe they were just imagining a worst-case scenario. “Bill’s almost ingrained behavior troubled and puzzled me,” he wrote. “He was the star of the picture. Why was he so insecure about any of us even getting a brief chance to shine? None of us were threats to his position.”11
Takei recalled an incident during the filming of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock when, during a lull in his filming schedule, he took a stroll around the Paramount lot. He was returning to the soundstage when he encountered an irate James Doohan, who was “in a flying rage” when he suspected Bill of changing a camera angle to ensure that Doohan’s Scotty was out of the camera frame. “It’s that bastard!” Doohan sputtered to Takei. “I’ll never let him do that to me again! I mean it!” Takei chalked it up to Bill’s “self-absorption” and “deep-seated insecurity.”12
Bill didn’t fare much better in Walter Koenig’s memoir, Warped Factors (1998), in which Koenig portrayed Bill as a smug, egotistical camera hog. Koenig described an instance during the filming of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan when, during a setup for a scene in which Kirk is surrounded by several characters, including Chekov, Bill asked him to move and move . . . until he was virtually out of the camera frame. But he was honest and self-analytical in never having criticized Bill to his face. “We have complained about him to each other and in interviews and at conventions and in books,” Koenig wrote, “but no one ever looked him in the eye and said, ‘Cut the shit, Shatner!’ And because we haven’t, I’m not sure we can be quite so self-righteous about feeing dishonored.”13
Koenig did, however, write that his relationship with Bill improved while they were shooting Star Trek Generations, most likely because Bill was a small cog in a bigger picture. “Not carrying all the baggage did wonders for his sense of proportion. He was much more a regular guy than I had seen him be before.” The bad feelings, though, never quite vanished completely. In 2016 I sent an e-mail to Koenig, requesting an interview for this book. His response? “Unless you will have several photos in your book showing Mr. Shatner having sex with a horse, I must politely decline.”
The Star Trek-related memoirs from Nichols and Takei were perfectly timed; although their big-screen careers aboard the USS Enterprise were over, Star Trek and its crew remained a big part of the zeitgeist. The second Star Trek television series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, premiered in syndication in 1993, which allowed its predecessor, Star Trek: The Next Generation, to gracefully bow out of production the following year in order to transition to the big screen with Star Trek Generations (also referred to as Star Trek: Generations). That movie featured Bill, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig in smaller supporting roles opposite the Next Generation cast, headed by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. “Bill had a bit of a brutal reputation that precedes him, particularly in his relationship with his colleagues and I was uneasy about that,” Stewart recalled. “But when we finally sat down together it was perfect, because it gave us the opportunity to really talk. We didn’t talk about our careers. We certainly didn’t talk about Star Trek. We talked about very personal things and it was the foundation to help us work so well together when the movie began. He became a good friend.”14
It also marked the end of Captain James T. Kirk, who dies at the end of the movie. “They said, ‘We’re going to make movies with that cast and we’re not going to use you guys anymore, because you guys are getting older and top-heavy with salaries,” Bill recalled. “[They said], ‘We’re going to make a transitional movie. You can come and die, or not. I decided to die. The pay was good.”
Star Trek Generations was directed by David Carson from a screenplay by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore. (Doohan and Koenig were hired after Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley declined offers to appear in the film: “I guess this is called working one’s way down the food chain,” Koenig wrote.15) Its plot, in a nutshell, featured Captain Kirk, who was presumed dead earlier in the film, returning to team with Captain Picard to prevent the mad scientist Soran (Malcolm McDowell) from blowing up the planet Veridian IV. They accomplish their mission, but Kirk dies during a fight with Soran when the shaky metal bridge he’s clambering on collapses and falls down a steep cliff, pinning him underneath its twisted metal. Kirk’s death scene was filmed in Nevada’s Valley of First State Park on June 3, 1994. In the scene, Captain Picard finds Kirk pinned underneath the twisted metal, blood running out of his mouth. “Did we do it?” the dying Kirk asks Picard. “Did we make a difference?” Assured that he did, Kirk signs off with his final words: “It was . . . fun,” he says, a slight smile on his face. Then, sensing his last breath, a look of wonderment crosses his face as whispers his final words: “Oh my.”
Picard then buries Kirk underneath a pile of stones in a plain grave atop a hilltop, placing Kirk’s Starfleet insignia atop the grave to mark his final resting place.16 “We all got emotional when we shot Captain Kirk’s death scene,” Stewart said. “We were saying goodbye to a legendary, iconic, fictional character of television—and, in a sense, too, we were saying goodbye to a great part of Bill Shatner.”17
“I thought about dying, my death, and this beloved character who’s going to be put to rest,” Shatner recalled of the scene. “How do I play it? You know there’s got to be a moment, you’re alive, and you’re going to die, now you’re alive and now you’re going to die. There has to be a moment when we all, at the moment of death, we say, ‘Holy cats, I’m dying!’ And you’re dead.”18
The critics were not pleased when Star Trek Generations opened on November 18, 1994, though most of the criticism was leveled at the movie’s script (and not at Bill or Patrick Stewart). The New York Times wrote: “[It’s] predictably flabby and impenetrable in places, but it has enough pomp, spectacle, and high-tech small talk to keep the franchise afloat . . . Mr. Shatner can’t match Mr. Stewart’s thespian manner and Shakespearean intonations. But he’s the one with the twinkle in his eye and the pampered, cosseted look of a star beloved by a gazillion fans.”19 “Picard meets Kirk, Stewart meets Shatner, baldy meets the super-rug,” noted the Washington Post. “Toupee or not toupee? By the end, there’s no question that Kirk is the captain of captains . . . Stewart’s captain is thoughtful, a bit hesitant. Shatner’s goes as boldly as a photon torpedo.”20 Entertainment Weekly wrote that Bill “ambles through his relatively brief on-screen time like the winningest of retired football coaches.”21 22
Roger Ebert, who was never a fan of the Star Trek franchise, thought the movie was “undone by its narcissism,” while Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan thought that Star Trek Generations felt “more like engaging in some kind of recurring religious ritual than taking part in the conventional moviegoing experience.” He sniped that “Stewart makes Shatner look like a graduate of the Klingon Academy of Dramatic Arts.”23
It didn’t matter, really, what anyone thought of the movie. Star Trek was here to stay, and its impact even began to spill over into academia. In the Washington State city of Olympia, Evergreen State College was offering a course on the Star Trek television series and its movies and required students who signed up for the class to take it for two full semesters. The course included a science professor analyzing early episodes of Star Trek; students searched for hidden elements in the movies and then wrote a script for an imaginary Star Trek episode.24
There was also news for Bill on the TekWar front, both in the publishing world and on television.
The book series, still being written by Bill and Ron Goulart, continued to hum along. The fourth book, Tek Power, was published in 1994. Two years earlier, Marvel Comics published the first TekWorld comic book. Bill also extended his literary reach by teaming with author Michael Tobias, with whom he’d worked on Voice of the Planet, on a sci-fi-tinged historical novel called Believe. Published by Putnam in June 1992, it paired escape artist Harry Houdini with Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and was based on an actual contest that was sponsored by Scientific American magazine in 1923 and revolved around the age-old question: is there life after death? Believe didn’t make much of an impact upon its publication, but it reared its head two years later, in 1994, when Bill was sued in Bucks County Court in Pennsylvania by Ralph Miller, the owner of the Bucks County Playhouse, for more than $150,000, for reneging on a promise to costar with Leonard Nimoy in a stage production based on Believe at the Playhouse.
Miller claimed that he struck up a friendship with Bill in the spring of 1972, when Bill and Marcy were starring in a production of Love Letters at the Bucks County Playhouse. In June, Bill and Miller went tubing on the Delaware River, and Bill said he wanted to stage a play based on Believecalled Harry and Arthur, in which he and Nimoy would costar. According to Miller, the deal was sealed in a limousine while Bill was doing a round of interviews in New York City. Harry and Arthur would be staged the following spring, with Bill and Nimoy each being paid $4,000 a week provided the show amassed over $50,000 in ticket sales. There was a proviso: Harry and Arthur would be pushed to later in 1993 if Bill’s obligations to another Star Trek movie or to his new series, TekWar, interfered. Bill announced his plans for Harry and Arthur at a Star Trek convention in Philadelphia in July and on the cable-television sports network ESPN, according to Miller. The premiere was postponed twice and was rescheduled a third time; Miller wanted to recoup the money he claimed was spent on promoting the show and selling tickets.
Bill’s agent, Carmen Lavia, said that Bill never announced the production and that a date was never set, though Bill “had all good intentions” of staging the play, but that when he was contacted by the Playhouse in March 1993 to arrange rehearsal dates, he said he couldn’t make it—though the Playhouse printed new brochures announcing that Harry and Arthur would run December 8–16. According to Miller’s lawsuit, Bill called him in August to tell him he couldn’t do Harry and Arthur because of his filming schedule on TekWar and followed up with a letter:
It was my intention to do the play, Harry and Arthur, sometime in the 1993 season with Leonard Nimoy also starring in it. Surprise. Leonard is directing a major motion picture. Surprise. TekWar sells to television. Worst surprise of all, I don’t get to do Harry and Arthur at the Bucks County Playhouse. Let me tell you another fantasy of mine. I would love to think that both Leonard’s and my schedule will open up in the next year so that we can do the play at Bucks County Playhouse . . . I hope this explains the comings and goings of your advertising to some extent and let the audience know that I apologize for the inconveniences that may have occurred for them and you. I will be there.
Harry and Arthur never made it to the stage; it is unclear what became of Miller’s lawsuit.25
Rescue 911 kicked off its fourth season on CBS in September 1992, with Bill hosting the series every Tuesday night at eight o’clock, introducing its reenactments and providing voice-over narration. Since its premiere in 1989, over one hundred people had written into Rescue 911, claiming it saved their lives. “It shows people in a good light, in a positive light,” Bill said. “It shows that ordinary people are capable of such total unselfishness.”26 “I think it kept him on network television,” said Rescue 911 executive producer Arnold Shapiro. “We were on Tuesday at 8 p.m. on CBS and we never moved. I mean, that’s like Milton Berle’s record. He was on Tuesday at 8, too, but on NBC. Sometimes CBS would call and say, ‘Somebody didn’t deliver, we need another episode of Rescue next week.’
“Maybe in Season 3 we had one hundred stories with two sources of verification that the show had been responsible for somebody being alive. So, we decided to do a ‘100 Lives Saved’ special as an episode,” he said. “I think we did maybe four or five stories that we re-created; the rest we showed the photograph of the person with their name and age. It was everything from toddlers to senior citizens. You couldn’t help but get teary when you watched the montage of photographs. We kiddingly said it was the only show on CBS that was saving lives—but that was a fact.”27
* * *
Bill had always intended TekWar to transition from the written word to the screen (big or small), and he continued to push the idea in the five years since the first TekWar book’s publication. The studio chiefs in Hollywood felt the project would be too expensive, but Bill persisted and, through his Lemli Productions company, signed a deal with Canadian production company Atlantis Films to turn TekWar into a television series. (Atlantis Films president Seaton McLean bought a copy of TekWar in a bookstore and saw its potential.) Writer Stephen Roloff was hired to develop the project, which eventually morphed into four two-hour television movies, budgeted at $4.5 million each, to be produced in conjunction with Universal Studios. Universal planned to air the movies under its “Action Pack” umbrella of twenty-four action-adventure movies scheduled to air throughout the year—including movies from Animal House director John Landis and Hal Needham. The deal was finalized in early 1993 and the two-hour pilot was scheduled to shoot in Toronto in May, with Bill directing. He considered taking the role of TekWar protagonist Jake Cardigan. While he was in good shape at the age of sixty-two, he thought better of the idea and hired forty-year-old television actor Greg Evigan, best-known as the costar of the NBC sitcom My Two Dads (opposite Paul Reiser), to play Jake. Bill was also an executive producer and would appear occasionally as Jake’s boss, Walter Bascom. Warren Zevon composed the theme music.
“I had a great time working with Bill,” Evigan said. “We became what I consider good friends. I had a humorous audition, which was a great way to start off because he has so much respect for other actors. I mean, I’m sure there are reports that don’t say that, but from my point of view he had great respect for me.
“When I came into the room [to audition] he just went on about how much he loved my work and the funny thing was, he said, ‘I don’t want you to read. I just want to tell you how happy I am that you are here and that I love your work.’ We talked for a little while and then he said, ‘OK, let’s read.’ By the time I got home my agent was all over my answering machine telling me I got the part.”28
The first of the four syndicated movies, TekWar, featuring guest star Barry Morse (best-known to television audiences as Lt. Gerard from the classic 1960s ABC series The Fugitive), adhered closely to the first book’s plotline. (It was set fifty years in the future, in the year 2044, mostly for budgetary reasons to keep the special effects manageable.) TekWar premiered in the United States in mid-January 1994, about a week before airing on CTV in Canada, a pattern that would be repeated with each movie.
The show-business bible Variety gave the movie an enthusiastic review: “Viewers expecting a strong Star Trek influence, based on the involvement of exec producer/director/creator Shatner . . . will be surprised to find TekWar owes more to T. J. Hooker than to Star Trek . . . The story may be a little too clever—the complicated plot will challenge viewers of all ages—but there’s plenty of imagination involving characterizations and compelling conflicts to keep viewers interested.”29 The Los Angeles Times, however, wasn’t as enthralled—“No one will confuse William Shatner’s TekWar with serious science-fiction”—while Entertainment Weekly ripped it as “your average cop show in a post-20th-century setting . . . Intended to be hard-boiled, the dialogue in TekWar is instead just pitiful.”30
Ratings for the TekWar premiere were strong in Canada, and in the United States it boosted viewership significantly on local stations nationwide. The movie’s inaugural telecast spiked viewership by 350 percent from the previous November on San Francisco’s KOFY, while WPIX (Ch. 11) in New York City scored the biggest TekWar ratings in the country. St. Louis and Miami also reported sizable increases in viewership—129 percent and 225 percent, respectively—over the previous November.31
Bill visited NBC’s The Tonight Show in June and revealed that TekWar would air as a television series on cable’s USA Network, with Greg Evigan reprising his role as Jake Cardigan. In August, USA announced that the series would premiere in January 1995, with Bill executive-producing and returning as Walter Bascom. USA also bought the rights to the four two-hour TekWar movies airing in syndication.
The TekWar series premiered on January 7, 1995, to record viewership on USA Network, earning a 3.4 rating as the most-watched premiere episode in basic-cable history. Variety hated the opener, calling Evigan “David Hasselhoff without the charisma” and ripping the show’s “humorless script” and the “problematic pastiche” of its production design while calling Bill “cool, calm and all-knowing” and “the coolest thing on screen.” Viewership eventually tailed off, and in June, USA cancelled the series after airing fourteen episodes. In January 1996, the four remaining episodes were moved to USA’s cable sister network, Sci-Fi Channel, while it aired on CTV in Canada, completing its run in February.