Bill’s divorce from Marcy didn’t have much of an impact on his romantic life. “I’ve never been good at being alone,” he wrote in Up Till Now. “I’ve had a lot of casual relationships: one-night stands, two-week stands, six-month layabouts . . . But almost always I’ve lived with the hope of a long-term relationship.”
He was in Toronto in 1993 directing “Secret Place,” an episode of the syndicated television series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, when he met Nerine Kidd, a thirty-four-year-old model and actress who was in the city visiting friends. Bill recalled meeting Nerine in a hotel bar, how he was “struck instantly by her beauty and this marvelous sort of fuck-you attitude” and her “strawberry-blond hair and freckled pale Irish skin . . . and a spectacular figure.” The attraction was mutual and soon blossomed into a full-blown romance, which they no longer needed to hide from the public once Bill divorced Marcy.1
Nerine was born in 1959, the second oldest of five children, and grew up in Roslindale, a heavily Irish and Italian neighborhood in South Boston. She spent summers with her family in their vacation cottage near a lake in Sandown, New Hampshire, and, from the get-go, displayed a gregarious personality which was described by family members as “bold, almost fearless.” Nerine grew into a willowy, striking blonde and aspired to become a model and actress. She also had moxie; when she was in high school, she contacted Boston’s famous department store, Filene’s, after seeing one of its commercials on television. “She called them up and said, ‘I’ve seen the girls you use as models. I think I’m better, if you want to give me a try,’” her father remembered. “Apparently, they liked her.”2
She also brought a handful of modeling photos to Boston modeling agent Janet Chute, who remembered her “cute little nose” and Nerine’s Boston accent, “as thick as chowder.” Nerine asked Chute if she wanted to see her modeling “pitchers” and charmed her with her outgoing, wisecracking personality and her model-ready good looks. Chute agreed to take her on as a client, and within a year of graduating high school—and losing her Boston accent—Nerine moved to New York City and soon found work on various photo shoots and through runway-modeling jobs. “She was a typical girl from a working-class family who knew nothing about this business,” Chute said. “But she was also spirited. And in a business where there’s a lot of deadheads, she really stood out.”3
Nerine’s modeling career also took her to Europe, where her circle of exotic friends included model Suzanne Gregard, who was married for a brief time (in 1986) to Dodi Fayed, killed eleven years later with Princess Diana and their limo driver while being chased by paparazzi in Paris. In 1987, Nerine starred in a television commercial for Brut cologne (“For every man who wears Brut, there’s a woman who loves what he smells like”) and, three years later, landed a small role as Rose Schwartz in the 1990 movie Artificial Paradise. The biopic of Hollywood director Fritz Lang was shot in Yugoslavia (in Slovenian) and was screened at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
Nerine had a penchant for dating older men—one boyfriend designed yachts, another beau raced cars—and for alcohol. She was also very generous, and once flew her sister from Boston to New York by helicopter. “She was like a windup doll that never wound down,” her brother Warren remembered. “Family was her source. Nerine always took care of us. She was the one who held us together. That was Nerine’s way. She made all of us feel special.”4 Bill later alluded to Nerine having spent some time in rehab prior to their relationship, apparently for a cocaine addiction.
Bill and Nerine continued their long-distance romance for a while until she eventually moved into his beach house in Malibu. “I had met the girl of my dreams,” Bill wrote later. “I fell in love with her and believed she was everything I’d spent my life looking for in a woman. She had the beauty and brains and a joy for living that I had rarely seen before.”5
Bill turned sixty-five on March 22, 1996, but this “senior citizen” showed no signs of slowing down in his professional life. With his advancing age, though, came some health issues.
In the late 1980s, while he was walking on the beach in Malibu with Marcy, Bill thought that the ocean sounded louder than usual. He asked Marcy if she noticed anything amiss about the roar of the waves. She didn’t. From that point onward Bill noticed a dull ringing in his left ear, which never fully dissipated. “At first the hissing noise was sufficiently low, so I could kind of forget it,” he said. “What caused it? I really don’t know.”6Leonard Nimoy told Bill that he, too, suffered from a constant ringing in his (right) ear, which he thought was caused when they filmed a scene for the 1967 Star Trek episode “Arena,” in which Bill and Leonard were standing near a prop explosion on the set. The dull roaring sound in his ear, Bill said, sounded “like a radio left on, but just the static. And you can’t turn it off.”7
He was eventually diagnosed with tinnitus, a disorder of unknown origin that causes a buzzing, clicking, hissing, or ringing in the ears and afflicts untold sufferers. (Estimates range from 12 to 40 million people worldwide.) The ringing in his ear, Bill claimed, drove him to the point of considering suicide. “It can be frightening, and my terror came from two things: One is the sound itself. The other is that it is going to get worse, and you’re never going to be able to sleep or concentrate again. I began to think, ‘What are the ways to take my life? How does one kill oneself?’ I went so far as to start making plans.”8
His heavy workload offered a bit of relief—he could concentrate on learning his lines and focus on a given project—but his tinnitus grew progressively worse. Bill tried various remedies to ward off the hissing—herbs, eardrops, earplugs, masking devices, and recordings of soothing sounds, including Japanese music. But nothing seemed to work, and he was at his wit’s end. He paid a visit to Dr. Howard House, founder of the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. Of the visit, he said: “We had had tears rolling out of our eyes because he too suffered from tinnitus. Our tears were tears of loss, because we realized that we would never hear a silent night again or hear the crickets alone. They would always be mitigated by this ‘wrenching’ sound.” Bill went “hysterically around to anyone I thought could help” and was fitted with a hearing aid, but he was convinced the feedback from the device would make his tinnitus worse, and he threw it away.9
Bill’s son-in-law also suffered from tinnitus, and in 1996, he recommended that Bill go to see Dr. Douglas Mattox and Dr. Pawel Jastreboff at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Mattox and Jastreboff invented a device that resembled a hearing aid; once placed in the damaged ear(s), it emitted a white noise that helped reduce the chronic ringing. They claimed an 80 percent success rate with their invention, including their most famous patient, William Shatner, who became a convert and helped to publicize the doctors’ efforts. “There’s something comforting about it, like hearing rain on the roof or traffic in the background but not listening to it,” he said of the curative white noise. “My anxiety has left me. My ability to deal with the noise I’m hearing is more or less 80 percent there. I’ve got tinnitus, but it doesn’t affect me in my general life.” He was so impressed that he offered to help raise money for the American Tinnitus Association, the University of Maryland, and Dr. Jastreboff.10
* * *
As Bill’s romance with Nerine charged full-steam ahead, he began to notice, with some alarm, that she was drinking heavily, and that the alcohol altered her demeanor and attitude. But he brushed it off and was unwilling, at that point, to admit to himself that Nerine was exhibiting the classic signs of an alcoholic: “I thought she just had a mean streak,” he wrote. “I didn’t like it, but because I loved her, I accepted it: nobody is perfect.” A reformed heavy smoker—he’d gone cold turkey during the second season of Star Trek—Bill knew how difficult it was to break an addiction. But he had stuck to his guns; surely it couldn’t be that difficult for Nerine to curb her drinking.11
It was.
Bill proposed to Nerine, and they targeted the fall of 1997 for a wedding date. But the impending nuptials did little to stanch Nerine’s drinking. Earlier that year she was arrested for drunk driving after picking up Bill’s daughter at a spa in Palm Springs, stopping at gas stations during the ride back home to down shots of alcohol in the ladies’ rooms. Nerine’s driving grew erratic, and she was pulled over by a patrolman after exiting the freeway. “What kind of insanity, what kind of mental illness, allows someone to do that?” Bill wondered. “To drive drunk with a young person in the car?” Nerine swore to Bill that she would never again drive drunk—and was then arrested a second time for driving while intoxicated right before their wedding, forcing Bill to postpone the nuptials for a week.12 He believed that Nerine could overcome her demons—he wanted to believe that—but he wasn’t diving into their marriage wearing blinders. Or maybe he was. Shortly before their wedding, Bill, Nerine, and several other couples were invited to a dinner party thrown by Leonard Nimoy and his wife, Susan. Leonard was himself a recovering alcoholic who had battled the bottle since the original run of Star Trek. As the evening progressed, he began to notice that Nerine was acting “erratic in her behavior” and called Bill the very next day, asking him if he realized his bride-to-be was an alcoholic. Bill told Leonard that he was aware of her problem, but that he loved Nerine and was going to go through with the marriage. “You’re in for a rough ride, then,” Leonard told him. Bill ignored that pearl of hard-fought wisdom.
Bill and Nerine were married on November 15, 1997, in a black-tie ceremony in Pasadena several weeks after Nerine’s second arrest for drunk driving. Bill was sixty-six; she was thirty-eight. Several members of Nerine’s immediate family were invited, including her brother, Warren, and her sister, Jeanine. Leonard Nimoy served as the best man. Bill tried to keep the wedding as under-the-radar as possible, but the tabloids were alerted, causing a circus-type atmosphere. “We changed locations, did all that stuff, and we thought we should have just hired the guy from the tabloids to take our picture,” Nerine joked. “We thought this guy did a better job than the person we hired.”13
Bill wrote a heartfelt poem for the ceremony, reading it aloud to Nerine—pledging his love and allegiance “to you, Nerine, my queen.” He placed the ring on her finger. “When it is dark and there is trouble, you need but wave that bauble and there will be light,” he said to his bride.14
Nerine, in turn, pledged her “sobriety” to him. “I married against the advice of my family and friends, against my own good sense,” Bill wrote later. “But I thought it might be the only chance we had.”15 They partied the night away, and Nerine didn’t touch a drop of alcohol. By the next morning, she was drunk; later, Bill found little bottles of vodka that she had hidden around the house. Shortly thereafter, as her drinking continued unabated, Bill installed an electronic device in Nerine’s car that made it impossible for her to start the engine with alcohol on her breath.
Leonard Nimoy tried to help Nerine when he could, talking to her about her addiction and accompanying her to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sat next to her for support. But Nerine couldn’t shake her demons; she checked into rehab facilities three times, including one visit to the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, California, founded by the former First Lady. Her third trip to rehab was cut short within days when she was kicked out of the facility for drinking. Bill, at his wit’s end, threatened to divorce her, “but the monster had her in its grip and would not let go.”16 They separated for a short time, but Nerine begged Bill to take her back and swore she would get sober. She followed one of her stays in rehab by returning home sober—and then getting drunk the very next day. She nearly drank herself to death several times, once registering a blood-alcohol reading of 3.9 (0.08 was considered legally drunk) and spending four days in a Santa Monica hospital—then getting drunk one day after Bill brought her home. On another occasion she disappeared—and Bill, who was frantic, got a phone call three days later from a “flophouse” in downtown Los Angeles. The person on the other end told him there was a woman there calling herself “Mrs. Shatner.” It was Nerine.17
Bill filed for divorce on October 21, 1998, asking the judge not to award alimony to Nerine. She never responded to the lawsuit, and they reconciled shortly thereafter. Bill did not pursue the divorce, though he did not have it dismissed.18
Through it all Bill continued his frenetic work pace, barely stopping long enough to catch his breath. He returned to the Star Trek orbit by lending his voice (as Captain Kirk) to the video games Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and Star Trek: Generations, and in 1998, he flew to New Zealand with Nerine to star as “The Storyteller” in A Twist in the Tale, a television series for and about kids that ran for fifteen episodes in New Zealand. Nerine appeared in one episode of the series entitled “A Ghost of Our Own.” They accompanied the show’s producer on a chartered plane to Kaikoura, a town on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand, to observe the region’s marine life—where they were “overwhelmed” by witnessing a sperm whale surfacing from the ocean, causing a look of “sheer wonder and joy” in their eyes.19
That same year, Bill spoofed himself in a big-screen romantic comedy, Free Enterprise, starring Eric McCormack (later to find fame as Will Truman on NBC’s Will & Grace) and Rafer Weigel and written by Star Trek gurus Mark Altman and Robert Meyer Burnett (with music provided by Scott Spock). The movie concluded with Bill rapping out lines from Julius Caesar in a musical number called “No Tears for Caesar.” (In the movie, “Bill” wants to be taken seriously as an actor and is working on a one-man musical version of Julius Caesar.)
A decade earlier, in an interview with Playboy magazine, Bill said he believed he would never slow down as long as he could “keep upping the limit of what I think I’m capable of doing.” He tested that theory in early 1999 when he guest-starred in a Season 3 episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, an NBC sitcom about four extraterrestrials (played by John Lithgow, French Stewart, Kristen Johnston, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sent on a mission to study earthlings in Ohio, where they identify themselves as the all-American Solomon family.
Bill played The Big Giant Head, the leader of the Solomons’ mission and “Ruler of the Galaxy” who pays them a raucous visit in a two-part episode. He reprised the role in three more episodes the following season, and a later plotline revealed that The Big Giant head was, in actuality, Dick Solomon’s (Lithgow) father. The role garnered Bill his first Emmy nomination in 1999, but he lost to Mel Brooks, who snared the award for his role as Uncle Phil on NBC’s Mad About You.
* * *
In 1997, a forty-two-year-old, Cornell-educated inventor/entrepreneur named Jay S. Walker founded a company called Priceline, a service that offered consumers discounted rates on airline tickets, car rentals, hotel rooms, and vacation packages—telling its customers to “Name Your Own Price” in order to get the best available deals. It was a brilliant marketing ploy, and the following year, with the fledgling Internet in its infancy and revolutionizing the digital economy, Priceline.com was launched, making the service available to anyone able to log on to the worldwide web.
Walker, seizing on the opportunity to reach millions of consumers, planned a Priceline.com media blitz in the form of $15 million radio advertising campaign. He needed an official spokesman for the radio ads. “We were going to be the largest radio advertiser in America, we wanted a radio voice,” he said. “I approached what I thought was the best radio voice in the world: Bill Cosby.” The comedian took a hard pass—or, rather, his representatives did (all while demanding a huge salary). “He said, ‘Absolutely not. We’re not talking to you.’” Walker considered actor James Earl Jones before turning to his third choice: William Shatner.20
Priceline’s marketing whiz, Jord Poster, had a personal connection to Bill—his ex-wife was Marcy’s college roommate—and he arranged a ten-minute meeting between Bill and Jay Walker in the bar of the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. “I said, ‘Look, I’m gonna build a giant company, you need to hear what I’m gonna do,’” Walker said he told Bill. “We met for ten minutes [and] when it was an hour later he says, ‘Okay, I’m in, how much are you gonna pay me?’ I said, ‘I have no money, I’m paying you in stock.’” Bill agreed to record a series of radio spots, which became famous for his tagline dubbing Priceline.com’s deals as “Big, really big.” He agreed to take the bulk of his $500,000 fee in Priceline stock ,which amounted to 100,000 shares—by the following year, the shares were worth about $7.5 million. Walker wrote the copy for the radio ads.21
The ads proved to be a hit, but Bill was hesitant when, in 1999, Walker wanted to expand the company’s radio marketing campaign to television.22
“He was on his horse farm, and Jord went down to the farm [in 1999]. He literally had to get Bill Shatner off the horse because he was pretty much retired and done,” Walker said. “His career was pretty much finished at the time. So, Bill Shatner’s whole second career is because of Jord Poster. In those days of the Internet, there was nobody who hired celebrity brands, and there was nobody who did advertising on radio and television for Internet brands, for e-commerce brands. There was nobody doing that.”23
In Walker’s retelling of the story, Bill then sent a representative in a limousine to the Priceline headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut, to check things out before he would agree to appear in the TV ads. “The giant stretch limousine pulls up and the guy opens the door, and a little dog gets handed out of the stretch limousine. This little lap dog,” Walker said. “Jord takes the lapdog, and then this woman’s leg comes out of the limousine, and this incredibly tall, beautiful bombshell steps out of the limousine. No Shatner, just her. And she says, ‘Bill Shatner has sent me here to do due diligence on what you guys are doing.’” Jord Poster walked the unidentified woman through the Priceline headquarters and back out to the limousine. “She said, ‘I will tell Bill everything here is just as I expected.’”24
Bill still needed to be convinced. “Jord basically persuaded Shatner to do television for very little money because he convinced Shatner that this would be good for the Shatner brand, and by the way, it was great for the Shatner brand,” Walker said.
Bill’s Priceline.com television ads, in which he played “The Priceline Negotiator,” began airing in 1999. In the ensuing years he starred in dozens of ads, all underscored with comic earnestness, including one ad in which he smashed a guitar and ad-libbed, “If saving money is wrong, I don’t want to be right,” which became the slogan for the entire ad campaign. Was Bill lampooning his own celebrity? He never quite answered the question. “The line between the sincerity of a true performance and the farcical irony, however you might characterize what it is I’m doing, is so fine that you don’t know when you treat it,” he told Connie Chung in a 2002 interview on CNN to publicize his new VH1 series, One-Hit Wonders. “You don’t know where it is. But somewhere in that area is an ironic look at that.”25
He reaped millions of dollars from his association with Priceline, mostly in stock options, and sold off around half of his company stock in early 1999 for an estimated $3 million. He also lost around $9 million in September 2000 when the company’s stock collapsed, dropping 53 percent in one week alone. (At one point in 2000, Priceline stock was selling for $104.25 a share; that dropped to $5.56 in October 2000; in November, it dropped to $4.28.)26 Walker, by comparison, lost an estimated $410 million and left Priceline later that year.27
The ads kept Bill in the public eye and triggered a slew of dot-com ads featuring celebrities, with everyone from supermodel Cindy Crawford (Estyle.inc.com) to Sister Act star and Oscars host Whoopi Goldberg getting into the game. “I pay homage to William Shatner because he made it viable to go to folks like me,” Goldberg said. “It was an opportunity to make a little dough . . . It doesn’t make you feel bad [that] you didn’t have a huge opening weekend.”28
* * *
Nerine turned forty on July 13, 1999. Her third trip to rehab in August (the instance when she was asked to leave because she was drunk) would be her final push to get better. Bill felt completely helpless and hopeless regarding his wife’s addiction, and after picking her up from rehab, he once again floated the idea of a divorce. He called the director of the rehab facility and “begged” her to take Nerine back and she said that she would, provided that Nerine could stay sober for one day. Bill then called a friend of his in New York City, a psychiatrist specializing in addiction, who suggested that staging an intervention could save Nerine from her personal demons. Bill called some friends and planned the intervention for Tuesday, August 10. He would take Nerine back to rehab the next day hoping for a better resolution this time around.
Bill spent most of August 9 in Orange County, visiting with two of his daughters, but he made certain to check in with Nerine at regular intervals to make sure she was okay. By 8:30 that night he was back on the road, heading for home in Studio City, when his daughter Melanie called. She was alarmed that Nerine was not answering her cell phone and told Bill to call the couple’s landline. He tried the home phone several times. There was no answer.
Bill finally arrived home around 9:30 p.m. to a quiet house. He found their three beloved Doberman Pinschers, who were usually attached to either Bill or Nerine, in the kitchen. There was no sign of Nerine. Bill walked around the house and called out for his wife several times, assuming she was out when she didn’t answer him. He checked the garage. All the cars were there. Where could she be? The phone rang: it was Nerine’s sponsor from Alcoholics Anonymous. “‘I don’t know where she is,’” Bill recalled telling the sponsor. She asked Bill if he’d checked their backyard pool. Nerine liked to drink a cocktail of Gatorade and vodka before taking a dip. Bill put Nerine’s AA sponsor on hold and walked into the dark backyard. He saw something floating in the deep end of the pool—and he knew, instinctively, that it was Nerine. “It had to be a shadow. It couldn’t be my wife. I took several steps backward to try to avoid the horror in front of me,” he wrote. Nerine was lying naked, face down in the pool.
Bill staggered back to the phone and told Nerine’s sponsor his wife was floating in the pool. She told him to call for help—life imitating life in Bill’s personal nightmarish version of Rescue 911. He dialed 911 and screamed to the operator—“Oh my God! My poor wife is at the bottom of the pool!”—then ran into the backyard. He dove into the pool and dragged Nerine’s body out of the water. “I had enough breath for one deep dive,” he wrote. “One of her arms was floating above her and I grabbed her by that arm and lifted her, pulling her toward the shallow end,” screaming “What have you done?!” as he struggled to lift her out of the pool. Bill noticed that Nerine’s skin was blue, and that her hair was still curled. He also noticed the news helicopter already circling above like a mechanized vulture, its local television station alerted to the unfolding tragedy at William Shatner’s house by monitoring the area’s 911 calls.29 While Bill tried frantically to revive Nerine, a female neighbor redialed 911. “We kept the lines open through the neighbor and we gave her first-aid instruction to relay to [Shatner],” an LA City Fire Department spokesman said later.30
Within minutes paramedics arrived at the Shatner home on Berry Drive. But there was nothing they could do. Nerine was dead. Once her body was removed, Bill spoke briefly to the flock of press assembled outside the house’s wrought-iron gate. “My beautiful wife is dead,” he said quietly. “She meant everything to me. Her laughter, her tears, and her joy will remain with me the rest of my life.” He felt his composure about to slip and quickly went back into the house. Sobbing, he called Nerine’s parents, June and Warren, to tell them the horrible news. He emerged briefly the next day to embrace friends on his driveway who’d come to console him. “I appreciate your concern,” he said to a reporter. It was only five years since the double-murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and the acquittal of O. J. Simpson following his sensational 1995 trial. Bill was keenly aware that there were some people who suspected that Nerine’s death was not an accident or suicide—that it was a case of another celebrity getting away with murder. “A day after I’d made my statement about loving her forever someone sent a note to the police, ‘Anybody who is innocent doesn’t stop and pick up a newspaper,’” Bill wrote. He was never seriously considered a suspect.31
The LAPD eventually ruled that the cause of Nerine’s death was an accidental drowning with no foul play suspected. “Subsequent investigation revealed Mrs. Shatner was home alone for a short period of time and accidentally drowned while swimming in the family pool,” said LAPD Det. Mike Coffey.32 “Nothing was apparent through the physical exam at the scene.”33
One of Nerine’s unidentified relatives thought that the way in which she died was “kind of odd . . . I mean, Nerine grew up in a lake. She water-skied, and she was an excellent swimmer. It’s just odd that she would die in a pool.”34 An autopsy was scheduled. “I had called her the night before and I couldn’t understand a word she said,” recalled her lawyer, Peter Knecht. “She didn’t appear to be in good health.”35 Even Bill’s first wife, Gloria, weighed in. “She liked to tipple a little,” she said of Nerine. “That was the fault that did her in, I think.” She was also asked about Nerine’s recent stints in rehab. “I don’t know the details, but it didn’t work out,” she said.36
Nerine’s agent at LA Talent told the Los Angeles Times that Nerine was a strong swimmer who regularly swam laps in the pool. “That’s why it’s so strange what happened,” she said. “Nerine was in great shape. She was the kind of person, if anything was really important to anybody, she was always there. She was like a comet, very bright, vivacious, the biggest heart you could come across.”37 It was yet one more devastating loss for Nerine’s family: one of her brothers, who was hit by a car in 1994, was still in a convalescent home; in 1995, another brother, Robert, died in his thirties of a brain aneurysm.38
The results of Nerine’s autopsy were released in mid-October, showing that she’d been drinking heavily that night and taking sleeping pills. She had a blood alcohol level of 0.27—over three times the legal limit for driving—and doctors found bruises on her face and two cracked neck vertebrae, indicating that she dove into the pool, banged her head on the bottom, and lost consciousness. “The totality of the whole investigation indicates an accident,” said LAPD Det. Mike Coffey. “Drinking was definitely a problem for her. Everyone knew she was an alcoholic. She just couldn’t beat her problem.” He added that Bill was, officially, never considered a suspect, but that he’d provided a time-stamped restaurant check proving that he was in San Clemente with his daughter at the time of Nerine’s death.39
Bill spent the following weeks grieving. He sat Shiva, the Jewish tradition of mourning, and established the Nerine Shatner Memorial Fund to help those suffering from alcoholism and drug dependency. He heard that the National Enquirer was going to publish a “Did he do it?” story and, in an effort to short-circuit any more lurid speculation, gave the tabloid an exclusive account of what happened that night, donating his $250,000 fee to Nerine’s memorial fund. It was a noble gesture; still, Bill said that some of Nerine’s friends never forgave him for talking about her alcoholism so publicly in a tabloid notorious for its blaring headlines and sensational stories. Bill made sure that proceeds from the Nerine Shatner Memorial Fund were used to finance the Nerine Shatner Friendly House, a twenty-four-bed haven for women with addictions located in Los Angeles on South Normandie Avenue. It opened in 2001 and continues to help women to this day.
He leaned on family and friends for support, including Leonard Nimoy, who “enveloped me in his arms as his brother, and we cried together.”40While Bill was still mourning Nerine, he had an idea: why not turn this experience into a big-screen movie? He planned to direct and produce The Shiva Club, whose plot would revolve around two young showbiz hopefuls who turn up at the home of a famous Jewish comic (perhaps Bill’s role) grieving the loss of his wife. “During the process of sitting Shiva, the concept occurred to me: Grief can be funny,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2000. The project remains in limbo two decades later.