Slowly, Bill returned to work.
Miss Congeniality, released in December 2000, featured Bill in a comedic supporting role as a vain beauty pageant host opposite stars Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, and Candice Bergen, his future costar on Boston Legal. The fluffy comedy about an FBI agent (Bullock) who goes undercover at a beauty pageant marked Bill’s first mainstream movie appearance in nearly a decade (since Star Trek VI in 1991) and generated mostly positive reviews. (“There are scores of boob jobs and chin implants among the contestants, but none has had as much work done as Shatner,” noted one critic.)1 The Boston Herald claimed: “[Bill is] dead-on as the unflappable but clueless pageant host who keeps singing no matter what is happening around him. Given the declining value of Priceline.com stock, it’s good to know that Shatner continues to have other opportunities to mock himself.”2 The movie did well enough at the box office to inspire a 2005 sequel, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous, in which Bill reprised his role as emcee Stan Fields.
He lent his voice to the character of “Mayor Phlegmming” for Osmosis Jones—a big-screen comedy mixing animation and live action that also featured Bill Murray, Chris Rock, Laurence Fishburne, Molly Shannon, and Frasier star David Hyde Pierce. It bombed at the box office and was quickly relegated to the home video market. In 2001, he appeared in an episode of Seinfeld costar Jason Alexander’s short-lived ABC sitcom Bob Patterson.
In the meantime, he’d fallen in love again.
In the wake of Nerine’s death, Bill was inundated with letters from fans and people concerned about his plight. Most of the letters offered advice, sympathy, and words of comfort for the grieving widower. Some of the letters from women included their pictures, hoping Bill might take a further interest in them. He claimed to have read all the letters—but one stood out from the rest.
It was from Elizabeth Martin, a onetime high school homecoming queen from Indiana who owned a saddlebred farm in Montecito with her husband, Mike, and was acquainted with Bill through their mutual connections in the horse world. She was born Elizabeth Joyce Anderson in December 1958 and was riding horses by the age of five. By the age of eight, Elizabeth owned her first horse, and six years later, she was teaching horseback riding and judging competitions with the Indiana Arabian Club. She attended Purdue University, where she studied equine and animal science, and then transferred to Butler University in Indianapolis, studying telecommunications.3
Elizabeth eventually became a professional horse trainer and, in 1983, married Mike Martin, who died from bone cancer in August 1997—nearly two years to the day before Nerine’s death. When Elizabeth heard the news about Nerine’s death, she reached out to Bill, writing him a letter and telling him that she knew what he was going through. “Since then I’ve been through all the stages of grief,” she wrote. “I know what it is. If there is anything I can do to help you get through this period, I’d be delighted.” Bill wanted to call Elizabeth to thank her for her letter, and got her number from his business manager, who owned a horse Elizabeth had trained. They spoke on the phone every day for months, but Elizabeth’s busy schedule precluded them from meeting each other in person.4
“She was a trainer for thirty years and we had met at horse shows,” Bill said. “We spent a long time talking to each other and gradually we fell in love. There’s temporal love and physical love, which is also very important—it’s central, critical, the chemistry.”5 They finally met each other in person on the pier in Santa Barbara and dined at a restaurant Elizabeth had frequented with Mike. She wasn’t familiar with Star Trek—she’d never watched a complete episode, according to Bill—and he invited her to join him on a two-week nature photography trip to the South Pole. When Elizabeth turned down his offer, Bill cancelled his plans for the trip, not wanting to spend any significant amount of time away from her.
Bill continued to pursue Elizabeth, and shortly thereafter invited her to join him for a long weekend in New York City (separate rooms, of course). She accepted the invitation, then accompanied him on a three-hour car ride to Albany, where Bill was participating in a charity event. The romance took off from there. They shared their first kiss, Bill wrote in typically dramatic fashion, in a field “covered with fresh snow just glistening in the moonlight.”6
He proposed six months later.
They planned to get married in Indianapolis, on the farm owned by Elizabeth’s father, and took out a marriage license at the Boone County Courthouse in February 2001, eighteen months after Nerine’s death. (He wore leather, she wore fur—they paid $62 for the marriage license, which required them to get married within sixty days.) The timing was right: not only would they be married in Elizabeth’s home state, but Bill was slated to host the Miss USA Pageant at the Genesis Convention Center in Gary, Indiana, on March 2. (The pageant was televised on CBS.) Bill could thank his Miss Congeniality role as smarmy pageant emcee Stan Fields for the Miss USA gig.
Bill would be turning seventy in March following his fourth marriage. Elizabeth was forty-two. “I think one thing that both Bill and I have learned is nobody really ever knows what’s going to happen, so if I let the fear of an age difference get in the way of my having this experience of this phenomenal, interesting man, then that’s just fear-based living,” Elizabeth said. “And I chose not to do that.”7 They married in a small ceremony on February 13, 2001, after moving the wedding to the home of Elizabeth’s sister, Gayle Anderson, in Lebanon—about fifty miles from Indianapolis—once word leaked to the media about their taking out a marriage license. (They were “remarried” in Los Angeles the following year when they discovered that their 2001 nuptials were illegal; since they’d moved the wedding to another county, their Indiana marriage license was invalid.)
Bill also started work on his next movie project, Groom Lake. He wrote, directed, starred in, and partly financed this low-budget science fiction tale, which he called “a memorial” to the Shatners’ late spouses, Mike and Nerine. (He claimed his California ranch was inhabited by the spirits of Native Americans and “the spirits of Nerine and Mike” and said, “It’s a magical place and there’s where my grief exists as well.”8)
The Groom Lake narrative unfolded in Area 51, the remote US Air Force facility in Nevada mythologized in pop culture for supposedly harboring extraterrestrials (and where scientists conducted extraterrestrial autopsies). The film was shot in Bisbee, Arizona, on a shoestring budget, and Bill was bedeviled by problems with the movie’s spendthrift producer, in one instance losing his personal credit card when he ordered pizza for the movie’s extras.9
Bill played Air Force commander Gossner, who’s conducting highly classified experiments on an extraterrestrial at Groom Lake, near Area 51. A dying young woman and her husband (played by Amy Acker and Dan Gauthier), who are searching for evidence of life after death (so they can be reunited), kidnap Gossner’s alien test subject. He seeks vengeance. “It just didn’t tie together smoothly,” Bill recalled, though he praised Groom Lake’s “fine performances by some very good actors” and figured he eventually broke even on the production vis-à-vis tax write-offs.10
The movie came and went without a ripple, but it did have one added bonus when Bill was approached by executives at cable’s Sci-Fi Channel to come up with more ideas. He eventually pitched a movie called Alien Fire, which he planned to direct on a $1.5 million budget, but other commitments precluded his involvement. In 2002, after a hiatus from Priceline. com, he resumed his role as the company’s spokesman in a series of radio and television ads, touting its Priceline Super Computer “that toils day and night to find airline tickets, hotel rooms, and other travel products at discounts.” Priceline.com sweetened the deal for Bill’s fans with a collectible William Shatner bobblehead doll, free to anyone making a travel purchase on the company’s website. The new ad campaign eventually crossed the Atlantic to the United Kingdom in a series of radio ads. “William Shatner is as much a fixture in UK households as he is in the US,” Priceline.com’s chief marketing officer noted.11
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Their love of horses had, in a roundabout way, brought Bill and Elizabeth together, and equine-related activities (breeding horses, horse shows, charitable foundations) continued to play a leading role in their lives. Elizabeth was very much involved in the Hollywood Charity Horse Show, which Bill founded in 1990 after watching an exhibition called Ahead with Horses, in which children with severe disabilities went through a series of exercises riding on the backs of horses.
The celebrity-driven Hollywood Charity Horse Show was sponsored by Priceline.com and Wells Fargo and continues to be staged to this day in Burbank, raising funds for Los Angeles-area charitable organizations that support children with special needs and US military veterans. The Shatners’ philanthropic pursuits would lead them, in 2010, to start the All Glory Project. Spearheaded by Elizabeth, who was inspired by a program called Central Kentucky Riding for Hope, the All Glory Project (named after one of the Shatners’ standardbred horses) offers injured war vets the chance to improve their balance, strength, and flexibility—and emotional well-being—while working with and riding horses.12
Bill and Elizabeth’s philanthropic pursuits vis-à-vis the horse world expanded internationally, to Israel, where they partnered with the Jewish National Fund for the William and Elizabeth Shatner/Jewish National Fund Therapeutic Riding Consortium Endowment to help raise $10 million for the thirty therapeutic riding programs located throughout Israel, including the Red Mountain Riding Center at Kibbutz Grofit in the Negev desert. “We want all kids—Jews, Bedouins, Israeli-Arabs, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Egyptian—to benefit from these therapeutic horseback riding centers,” Bill said, recalling how he learned a phrase in Hebrew while in Israel: “Sussim osim nissim,” which translates to “horses make miracles.”13
Bill’s love of horses reared an uglier head in his life in late April 2003, when Marcy took her ex-husband to court for allegedly breaching a clause from their 1995 divorce agreement. The unorthodox clause required Bill to provide Marcy with fresh horse semen samples each year from three of his prize stallions. Marcy claimed that the March 2003 sample arrived frozen—and not in the “fresh cooled format” agreed upon in their divorce agreement. “Mr. Shatner’s offer to provide semen from the three stallions in question in frozen form is unacceptable to Ms. Lafferty,” the suit stated. “Potential buyers of the breeding privileges do not want the semen in frozen format.”
Marcy made no financial claim for damages; according to a report in the Lexington Herald-Leader, she claimed the offspring of her horse Espere and Bill’s horse, Sultan’s Great Day, could have yielded as much as $165,000 had the “fresh cooled” semen been used (instead of the frozen semen). The details of the case were fodder for snarky headlines (E! News: “The trouble with Shatner’s semen”). Bill’s attorney argued for the suit to be dismissed, claiming the divorce settlement didn’t contain any restrictions on the form in which the semen was to be delivered. Bill, he said, was never personally served with the lawsuit, which was dismissed by joint agreement in June. Settlements details were not disclosed.
Save for Groom Lake, the bulk of Bill’s onscreen work in the new millennium found him in comedic roles (3rd Rock from the Sun, Osmosis Jones, Bob Patterson, Airplane II, Miss Congeniality, and its sequel, Miss Congeniality 2) and acting in other mediums. In 2003, Bill—heavily stubbled (and heavy) and wearing a tight black T-shirt—parodied American Idol judge Simon Cowell in a reality-show-spoofing video for “Celebrity,” a song by country music star Brad Paisley. (Actors Jim Belushi and Jason Alexander also appeared in the video.) Bill starred in humorous television commercials for Crest toothpaste and, in the United Kingdom, in a series of light commercials for Kellogg’s All-Bran (in which he interacted with couples). He reteamed with Star Trek costar Leonard Nimoy for a few Priceline.com commercials, with the jokey premise that Nimoy is replacing Bill as the company’s spokesman, but a reluctant Bill just won’t let it go.
His comic appearances did not go unnoticed—particularly by television series writer/creator David E. Kelley, whose quirky CBS comedy, Picket Fences, amassed fourteen Emmy Awards during its four-season run (1992–96). In 1997, Kelley launched two competing ensemble legal shows, both based in Boston but airing on different networks: The Practice, on ABC, premiered in March; it was followed, in September, by Ally McBeal on Fox.
Both series were successful and garnered multiple Emmy Awards. By the time Ally McBeal called it quits in 2002, The Practice was teetering on the verge of extinction after ABC moved it to Monday nights (from its longtime Sunday-night perch). “It was a terrible blow for us,” Kelley said. “Our ratings struggled, and it quickly became clear [that], okay, we were not going to survive on Monday nights. We were an aging show, creatively, at this time, as well . . . We had run our course with a lot of our storytelling.” It looked as though the series would be cancelled.14
In May 2003, just days before ABC announced its fall schedule to advertisers, Kelley got a call from the network’s chairman, Lloyd Braun, asking if he would be willing to bring The Practice back for one more season—at half the price. “I had about five minutes to think about it,” Kelley said. “It wasn’t the worst thing to sort of shake up the show. The idea was that we come back for one more year and one more year only.”
ABC fired seven of the show’s eleven regular cast members—including stars Dylan McDermott, Lara Flynn Boyle, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Chyler Leigh, Marla Sokoloff, and Kelli Williams—and brought in James Spader to play the show’s new protagonist, the brilliant, ethically-challenged lawyer Alan Shore. “The show caught on creatively again,” Kelley said.
In February 2004, with The Practice having reclaimed a bit of its creative and ratings mojo, word broke that Bill would guest-star in a semi-comedic role as a quirky, egotistical, eccentric attorney. (Bill wasn’t the first big name hired by Kelley for The Practice that season. Sharon Stone guest-starred on a three-episode arc as a brilliant, schizophrenic litigator named Sheila Carlisle, who hired Alan Shore to defend her in a wrongful termination suit.)15
“Apparently David Kelley wanted me for the role,” Bill said. “And so, on one fateful morning, we met for breakfast . . . he described this role he was writing that would go, I think, six shows in The Practice. I didn’t want to do another series; doing a series is debilitating in every way, for your health, your relationships . . . but you’re making money, so that weighs in the balance.” Bill figured his role would be supporting in nature, with a finite ending, something impressive to add to his fifty-plus-year acting resume.16
Seventy-three-year-old William Shatner signed on to appear in four of the season’s final six episodes as Denny Crane, the pompous head of Crane, Pool & Schmidt. Denny is hiding a secret: he’s battling Alzheimer’s disease and repeats his own name (“Denny Crane . . . Denny Crane”) in what appears to be a personality quirk but is, in actuality, his way of remembering who he is. In the universe of The Practice, Crane, Pool & Schmidt butts heads with Young, Frutt & Berlutti. Actor Vince Colosimo was also added to the cast as Denny Crane’s junior partner, Matthew Billings. Kelley had the option of bringing both actors back for additional episodes.
Bill made his first appearance on The Practice on March 21, 2004, in an episode entitled “War of the Roses,” in which James Spader’s Alan Shore, who’s about to be fired, sabotages his firm’s computers and hires rivals Crane, Poole & Schmidt to sue for wrongful termination. Crane’s habit of repeating his name in the third person—“You want Denny Crane to talk. When Denny Crane talks, E. F. Hutton listens”; “I’m Denny Crane, dammit!”—endeared him to viewers and critics alike.
“Something magical happened that I’ve only seen happen in a play, where the author sees what’s happening . . . and starts to write and create more because it has audience appeal,” Bill said. “And that’s what started happening with Denny Crane—Kelley began to create more, and I began to get the idea of how to play the guy. And so, there was this symbiotic relationship between David Kelley and myself.”17 In an effort to avoid alienating long-time viewers of The Practice, Kelley took “small steps” to incorporate Denny Crane’s firm into the series’ story line.
Kelley’s faith in Bill paid off: In September 2004, nearly forty years after the premiere of Star Trek, Bill won his first Emmy Award, beating out Bob Newhart (ER), Matthew Perry (The West Wing), James Earl Jones (Everwood), and Martin Landau (Without a Trace) as Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. “I was exultant,” he said of the Emmy win. “It was the first time [winning an Emmy] after a lifetime of making a living at it and it was just extraordinary. I was delighted.”18 His costar, James Spader, won an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
“I’m always suspicious of icons [like Shatner], because sometimes they’re not always able to laugh at themselves,” Kelley said. “We definitely have to be willing to laugh at [Denny Crane] and with his character and sometimes we’re not going to know the difference. And when Denny speaks, we won’t always know what he’s talking about. From Day One [Shatner] came in and inhabited his character and started walking around saying, ‘Denny Crane, Denny Crane.’”
By that time, The Practice had morphed into its spinoff series, Boston Legal, which premiered on ABC in September 2004. The dramatic and comedic foundation of Boston Legal was built on the weirdly symbiotic relationship between Alan Shore and Denny Crane and the world of their law firm, Crane, Poole & Schmidt. (Candice Bergen played founding partner Shirley Schmidt.) Rhona Mitra and Lake Bell returned for Boston Legal, reprising their roles as Tara Wilson and Sally Heep from The Practice.
Bill had some trepidation in accepting a role as a series regular and was well aware that the grueling schedule would keep him on the set for long hours and away from Elizabeth. “I’d been married two or three years before and my promise was that we would explore the world and each other and friends and I had to renege on that promise to my wife that I would slow down,” he said. “In fact, what happened was that I sped up.”
Perhaps, but Boston Legal and Denny Crane would usher in another remarkable chapter in Bill’s career. “[Shatner] and James Spader were the show,” said Stephen McPherson, who replaced Lloyd Braun and Susan Lyne as President of ABC Entertainment in April 2004. “It was about those two, and it wouldn’t have been Boston Legal without them, and I don’t say that lightly. In this case, the casting of those two guys was absolutely critical to the show, and I think their chemistry is what made it so successful.”19
Bill described Denny Crane as a cross between the blustery Big Giant Head from 3rd Rock from the Sun and some of his more dramatic roles. “[Denny resided] somewhere in this marginal area,” he said. “I found that all the notes that I can play as an actor were there for me and I was playing chords of harmonics that were only me. I’m sure there are many other actors who could play the role better, or worse, but not the way I played it—because it was uniquely me.”
He credited David E. Kelley, whom he rarely saw throughout the entire run of Boston Legal, with creating a unique character, a prism through which Bill could refract the many different facets of his own personality. Denny, Bill said, was a man “who vacillated between the arrogance of his talents and the humiliation of his failing memory and his ability to think things through and losing it.” Bill had personal experience with the ravages of Alzheimer’s after watching Elizabeth’s father struggle with the disease. The family bought her father a tape recorder so he could record some of his memories daily but, after a week, the recordings descended into nonlinear, disjointed thoughts. “I remembered looking at him and thinking, ‘What can be more frightening than to be conscious of the insanity of your brain rotting?’” Bill said. “And that’s the approach I took [for Denny]—the fear, the absolute terror.”20
Sometimes, Bill was just lucky and instinctive. He recalled a scene between Denny and Alan, early in their relationship, in which Alan asks Denny if he’s gay. Bill had no idea how Denny was supposed to respond to the question and asked one of the show’s executive producers for guidance. His reply? “I don’t know, why don’t you just do nothing?” “So, I probably did nothing,” Bill recalled. “Now, having had the benefit of playing the character [for so long], I would have thought of something to do. Or maybe ‘nothing’ was the right way, so that’s funny in itself. In any case that sort of thing happened all the time.”21
Kelley, who wrote most of the Boston Legal episodes (a monumental task), frequently had Denny breaking the so-called “fourth wall” of reality, as if he was speaking directly to the audience with lines like “Cue the music!” or “Fade to black!” Denny eventually explained to Alan that he used those lines because he felt that his own life was like a live television show in which he played the starring role. “The character used to say his name all the time and so it occurred to me he would say [his] name like feeling somebody out,” Shatner said. “I once likened it to a lizard sticking his tongue out, darting it out. Smell that air. ‘Denny Crane. Denny Crane.’ Every time he said it, it would be a query, a different reason, like saying hello with a different nuance every time you say hello. Kelley wrote a lengthy scene in which all I said was my name, but I said it innumerable times, so I searched for different ways to say it . . . and that evolved and so I didn’t know enough to change anything.”
Bill said he based Denny, in part, on a friend from Kentucky he knew through horse circles: “A phenomenal character who became a friend of mine over the years . . . he was a wild guy, especially in his youth... he was into drinking, drugs, women . . . losing and winning millions of dollars. He’d be up and down . . . he was vivid and laughs and has got a big voice. Somewhere in there are some antecedents of Denny Crane.”22
Television viewers warmed to the oddly endearing relationship between Denny Crane and Alan Shore, and before too long Boston Legal even had its own cultural calling card, ending each episode with Denny and Alan smoking cigars on their office balcony and ruminating about life. “What we didn’t know was that the chemistry [between Shatner and Spader] was going to be so special,” said Boston Legal executive producer Bill D’Elia, who joined The Practice in the spring of 2004 and worked with Bill and James Spader to hone their characters for the spinoff. “Nobody knew. David [Kelley] didn’t know. I didn’t know. We discovered it along the way and the two actors could not have been more different. Bill is very spontaneous and likes to make stuff up. James is very specific and very organized and likes to rehearse. Bill doesn’t like to rehearse, but for whatever reason we had Abbott and Costello. We had this chemistry that was evident right from the start, and I can tell you that because of that, the balcony scenes became a staple of the show.”23
D’Elia and Bill got off to a rocky start. Early in their collaboration, they had a serious disagreement about how Bill should play a scene. D’Elia told the crew to take a break while he and Bill repaired to the star’s dressing room for a heated discussion. “We stood, almost toe to toe,” D’Elia recalled. “He had his point of view, I had mine, and I was trying to convince him that all I was trying to do was help him discover this character, and that I thought he was going in the wrong direction. He argued vehemently that he was right, because he’s always right. It’s another great attribute of his, actually.”
The scene was shot the way D’Elia wanted. “That scene in his dressing room was pivotal to us understanding each other and his understanding that I was there to help him, and my understanding of what was driving him,” D’Elia said. “And I think that was the critical moment that he and I began a real working relationship and a real friendship.”
The Boston Legal balcony scenes featuring Denny Crane and Alan Shore, which became the show’s trademark, were, in fact, a happy accident. The original Boston Legal pilot, directed by D’Elia, had a different ending, which David E. Kelley thought was “too funny, too silly” and not true to the show’s thematic context. “It wasn’t the two guys on the balcony . . . So, we tinkered with that some more and I shot some additional scenes that David wrote, and we went back and forth with this to try to find exactly what the tone of the show might be,” D’Elia said. “David wrote the very first balcony scene as a result of those changes. It was originally designed so that Denny Crane should have a balcony because he’s the most important character—to himself and to the firm. So, I wanted him to have this big balcony out off of his office and that’s why we built it.” The initial thought was to use the balcony only occasionally. On the day that the first balcony scene was scheduled to be filmed, D’Elia, who was on the sound stage by himself, took two chairs that were facing Denny’s office, turned them around, and asked Bill and Spader to sit in the chairs while the scene was being shot. The moment was born.
“It resonated with the audience, so it became a standard thing,” Bill said of the balcony scenes. “It became a mainstay of the relationship between the two characters, and what started to happen was a genuine feeling of affection that turned to love between two men. That love that [David E.] Kelley began to explore between two heterosexual men became an element of the show—how to have two guys who really love each other and be sexually attracted to women.”24 “The very first scene, something just seemed to work right,” Spader recalled. “It worked right for the two of us working together and it worked right for the two characters.”25
“We just caught lightning in a bottle,” D’Elia said. “Now, the two actors discovered the same thing that we’d discovered and so they had a real working relationship that they both respected. Those two guys were never going to be buddies off-screen, but they were friends, if you know what I mean. Just the way we are all friends during the course of a production. You hang out and you like people, but [Shatner and Spader] were so different in their personalities—and that’s why it worked.”26
The premiere episode of Boston Legal, “Head Cases,” aired on October 3, 2004, and snared over 13 million viewers. Reviews were mixed. Variety thought: “[It] suffers from the pervasive feeling of been here, seen this . . . Kelley’s fertile mind still disgorges occasional gems, but for the most part here, he’s delivered more rhinestones than diamonds.”27 The New York Times, in an article headlined “Old-Time Sexism Suffuses New Season,” criticized the show’s characterization of women as “bustier-busting sidekicks . . . which dilutes the funny and iconoclastic James Spader by pairing him with William Shatner, who plays an even more eccentric, licentious law partner.”28
Other critics disagreed.
“Shatner, for one, is having a ball playing his technicolor blowhard: In one scene, he eloquently dares an angry client to kill him,” noted Entertainment Weekly. “Sure, he could just tell the guy that his gun is a useless starter pistol, but then he’d miss out on some prime humbuggery. Having the self-referential Shatner play a man who’s become a crafty spoof of himself is another of Boston’s meta-amusements.”29 The Los Angeles Times: “Here are at least two reasons to watch Boston Legal . . . and their names, in alphabetical order, are William Shatner and James Spader. They are not the only reasons—there are some other interesting players on board . . . But Shatner and Spader, as lawyers with elastic ethics—unconventional methods, shall we say—are the twin islands upon which the show has been built, and all else flows around them or against them.”30
The show’s strong opening numbers continued throughout that first season, with Boston Legal averaging 13 million viewers a week. The one-two punch of Denny Crane and Alan Shore also resonated with Bill’s and James Spader’s industry peers, who nominated them for Emmy Awards. On September 18, 2005, Bill won his second Emmy as Denny Crane, this time for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, beating out Naveen Andrews (Lost), Alan Alda (The West Wing), Terry O’Quinn (Lost), and Oliver Platt (Huff). Bill looked a bit surprised as the CBS television cameras captured the moment: wearing a black suit jacket, white shirt, silver tie, and big white carnation in his lapel, he hugged Elizabeth in the audience at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles before walking up to the stage to accept his award from actress Kyra Sedgwick, joking in his acceptance speech about his lack of interaction with series creator David E. Kelley.
“The other day I saw David Kelley and said, ‘Hi, David.’ That was the longest conversation I’ve had with him in two years of doing this show,” he said to much laughter in the audience. “If he had given me a chance, I would’ve said, ‘David, I admire and respect your great talents.” He also singled out James Spader, the show’s cast, and “my wife Elizabeth.” Spader, too, took home an Emmy that night for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. “Although he never saw Boston Legal, I think he might have liked it,” he said of his late father. “He wouldn’t have known what the hell to make of my character but,” he said, pointing to Shatner, “I think Bill would have made him laugh.”
Bill and Spader’s onscreen chemistry were a big part of the show’s success; so, too, were the parade of guest stars who appeared on Boston Legal throughout its run, including Betty White, who recurred on the series sixteen times as Alan’s childhood neighbor, Catherine Piper. “William Shatner is one of the most brilliant actors you could possibly ask for and also one of the brightest minds off camera,” she said. “I was a big Trekkie. I loved Star Trek and Captain Kirk was my hero. But Bill Shatner is something altogether different [on Boston Legal] and he’s playing such a complex role . . . this egotistical, wonderful lawyer . . . who’s losing it, just a little bit, and everybody knows it. It’s like a blowing curtain; sometimes he loses it at the wrong times . . . but less and less the other characters on the show are beginning not to trust [Denny]. They know that he’s in a little bit of trouble.
“This makes a wonderful week in, week out thing,” she said. “Every once in a while, you see this little shadow come in, something bad is happening there, and that’s when the writing gets exciting and all of the sudden you see somebody about to put that on the page and then Bill execute it. It’s just wonderful.”31
Bill and Spader did not socialize off-camera and would not keep in touch with each other once the series ended, but Bill got a kick out of his costar and continued to praise him in public. “I love him, he’s a great guy, and we became—I don’t know how you define friends, really, but by many definitions we’re great friends,” he said. “I laughed for days.” He recounted one instance where Spader regaled Bill off-camera about the fragrance of his Hawaiian plumerias (the flowers used by some cultures to make leis), and their effect on him in his new house. “He said, ‘You know, I got stoned the other day. And I got into the plant.’ And then he looked around to see if anybody was looking, and he inhaled the fragrance—this is acting—well, he did it like he must’ve done after he had taken a couple of hits,” Bill said. “I started laughing. It was . . . the best acting I’ve ever seen.”32
“I’ll tell you one little story showing the difference between James and Bill,” said Boston Legal executive producer Bill D’Elia.
I was directing [an episode], this was during the course of the season . . . it was a scene between Bill and Candice Bergen and as he was getting ready to go on, Bill was doubled over in pain. I went over to him and said, “Are you okay?” and he said, “My back is really bothering me, but let’s keep going.” He was insistent. I said, “Action!” he straightened up, he went in, did the scene, I said, “Cut!” and he doubled over in pain. We did two or three takes. He went to the hospital the next day and passed a kidney stone. He was back at work the next day. James came in and pulled the crew together and he said, “I just want everybody here to know, that if what happened to Bill last night happens to me, I’m out six months.” And that is really the difference between the two guys.
Bill’s work ethic also impressed his Boston Legal costar Rene Auberjonois, who played lawyer Paul Lewiston, and who and called Bill’s friendship “one of the great gifts” of acting in the series. “There would be hours when we would be sitting in our directors’ chairs in the dark and we would just talk, talk, talk,” he said. “I just adored him. I love the guy. He’s a character and he’s got a reputation. He’s . . . Shatner. But he’s genuine and he’s interested in other people. In real life he’s right there. He’s really interested, and he loved my artwork. He always reminds me, he says, ‘You know, in the bathroom in my office is a whole wall of your drawings.’”33
* * *
Bill’s back-to-back Emmy victories and the success of Boston Legal underscored his remarkable career resurrection. Thanks in no small part to his Priceline.com ads, he was now in demand as a pitchman, appearing in a series of regional television commercials for attorneys (in Connecticut, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Maine). And, in 2004, feeling emboldened by his professional resurgence, he ventured back into the recording studio to cut his first album since mangling the songs of Bob Dylan and the Beatles on The Transformed Man in 1968.
This time around he enlisted the help of singer/songwriter/producer Ben Folds for Has Been, a spoken-word/indie rock mashup released by the Shout! Factory label in October to dovetail with the premiere of Boston Legal. (Shout! Factory was run by brothers Richard and Garson Foos and Bob Emmer, who’d reissued parts of The Transformed Man as a comedy album.)
Has Been was recorded over a two-week period in Nashville and was, at turns, introspective and autobiographical. Tracks on the album included “What Have You Done?”—a spoken-word ode to Nerine and her tragic death, which continued to haunt Bill. “The death of my wife was a cataclysmic event in my life,” he said around that time. “And that kind of thing, that suddenness and that shock, of that kind of death . . . I have never lost my sense of grief with Nerine, never gotten over the sadness of a life that left us, the waste that it was because she was so bright and beautiful.”34
He dedicated another track, “Ideal Woman,” to Elizabeth. “I’m trying to distill moments of my life, so I can enlighten my loved ones,” he told one interviewer. “This album was made for the people I love so that they can remember what it was I was feeling, thinking.” In addition to Ben Folds, who produced and arranged the album, Has Been included appearances from Joe Jackson, Aimee Mann, Lemon Jelly, punk icon Henry Rollins, guitarist Adrian Belew, and country music star Brad Paisley, who wrote a song entitled “Real” specifically for Bill.
Novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) contributed the song “That’s Me Trying,” about a father trying to mend his relationship with his adult daughter (Bill’s nod to Leslie, Melanie, and Lisabeth?). Folds, for his part, had been a Bill Shatner fan since buying The Transformed Man at a yard sale as a kid and getting “a little Shakespeare burned into my head, and hearing that next to Bob Dylan, that’s pretty interesting.” He said he “locked onto” Bill’s voice and his timing on The Transformed Man and appreciated that album’s “method behind the madness.”35
Has Been was not the first collaboration between Bill and Folds. Bill appeared on Folds’s 1998 album, Fear of Pop, Volume 1—performing two spoken-word pieces—and Folds returned the favor by costarring alongside Bill in a Priceline.com commercial. “I recognize Bill as being a brother in working-class entertainment,” he said about their collaborations. “You do your job, you do it with integrity, and you don’t worry about the reviews and what the cool kids think.”36 Bill wrote or cowrote eight of the eleven tracks on Has Been, including “Together,” sharing songwriting credit on the song with Elizabeth and Lemon Jelly.
Has Been was released in early October 2004 and reached a very respectable twenty-two on the Billboard charts; the online music magazine Pitchfork called Bill “the ultimate icon for Generation Irony,” noting that the album’s “humor and candor give it a fair amount of staying power... It’s so confusing, enthralling, sincere, profound, and trite that it’s nothing short of a mirror to society’s own incongruities. Which, really, is quite an achievement.”37 “Has there ever been a more eminently slappable man in American pop-cultural history than Shatner?” asked one critic, referring to the “sheer chutzpah” of Shatner’s rendition of Pulp’s “Common People.” “He’s aware of his own limitations and has managed to cannily stitch them into his public façade, but he’s essentially still untalented.”38
Entertainment Weekly called the album “alternately comic and, believe it or not, touching,” and in late October, Ben Folds, who was performing at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, beckoned Bill onstage to a raucous welcome. Reading lyrics on a music stand, Bill performed “Has Been” (with Joe Jackson singing backup vocals and Folds on drums and keyboards), “It Hasn’t Happened Yet,” and, removing his sports jacket, “Ideal Woman,” “Common People,” and “I Can’t Get Behind That” (which he performed on the album with Henry Rollins). Then, raising his arm above his head, he gave the audience the finger before launching into his The Transformed Man rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The crowd ate it up. Others weren’t as charitable.
“At the El Rey on Thursday night, Shatner ended his five-song perf with “Lucy,” but something felt off. He’s in on the joke now,” Variety noted. “The aud is still laughing at him, but Shatner knows it now and plays up the awfulness, turning it into camp. It’s brittle and desperate (and not just a little sad) to see the Emmy-winning actor turn himself into a singing monkey. The material from his recently released Has Been fared somewhat better.”39
Bill’s collaboration on Has Been with Henry Rollins resulted in an unlikely friendship between the two men, who were thirty years apart in age but lived only blocks from each other in Los Angeles. They became “pals,” and Bill would often invite Rollins over to his house to watch Monday Night Football along with his other celebrity (and non-celebrity) friends. “At least for me, Bill is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life and it’s one of the oddest friends I have in that I’ve been going to Bill Shatner’s house every year since 2003,” Rollins said. “Every once in a while, his assistant will contact me: ‘Hey, Bill really wants to see you. Are you free for next Wednesday?’ It’s great to see him and his amazing wife and I truly value that friendship—I look forward to seeing him and I really enjoy hearing what he’s up to . . . and it’s become this thing where I really look forward to football season.”40
Has Been took on a life of its own; in 2007, Margo Sappington, the choreographer behind the controversial 1969 off-Broadway revue Oh! Calcutta!, infamous for its onstage nudity, adapted Has Been into a vehicle for the Milwaukee Ballet. She called the show Common People (the album’s opening track). Bill financed a filming of the Milwaukee Ballet’s performance of Common People, which appeared two years later as the documentary William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet, premiering at the 2009 Nashville Film Festival.
* * *
Bill turned seventy-five in March 2006 and showed no signs of slowing down. Boston Legal, now in its second season, continued to be a popular draw for ABC in its new Tuesday-night time slot, and Bill’s peers continued to laud the series. For the duration of its run and in its various iterations, John Laroquette, Taraji P. Henson, and Saffron Burrows, among others, joined Boston Legal. Bill earned four consecutive Emmy Award nominations as Denny Crane but no further statuettes.41 James Spader won his second Emmy Award as Alan Shore in 2007, and Boston Legal won a Peabody Award in 2005. That same year its season was cut short to accommodate a new ABC medical drama called Grey’s Anatomy.
“I consciously made the decision how I thought Denny Crane would be the great lawyer he was supposed to be and had been, and that remnants of that great lawyer were still around,” Bill said of his onscreen alter ego. “What I gathered from all the words I had to learn [as Denny Crane] . . . was that his legacy really didn’t matter. He wanted to live life to the fullest while he still could, and if that meant doing something illegal or unpalatable, he would do it because it would cause [his] enjoyment of life. I think the character believed that he had been a great lawyer and was filled with the torment that he no longer was.”42
Bill kept busy in other venues. He starred in a silly reality show for Spike TV called Invasion Iowa, in which he (and a retinue of actors) descended on the bucolic town of Riverside, Iowa (known in Star Trek mythology as the birthplace, in 2233, of Captain James T. Kirk), where they snookered locals by pretending to shoot a science fiction movie on location. He was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in New York City, accompanied by Elizabeth—“who is young, tall and slender, and wore a slinky knit dress, cut perilously low in the back.”43 He informed reporters covering the festivities that he recently passed a kidney stone, which he later auctioned off for $25,000 via Julien’s Auctions to the website GoldenPalace.com—donating the proceeds to Habitat for Humanity. “This takes organ donors to a new height, to a new low, maybe,” he said. “How much is a piece of me worth?”44
Bill’s colorful, quirky public image—and his ability to laugh at himself (to a point)—translated into ratings for cable’s Comedy Central network, which invited him to be the fourth celebrity “roasted” (following Denis Leary, Jeff Foxxworthy, and Pamela Anderson) on a no-holds-barred television special. The Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner, hosted by “Roast-master” (and huge Shatner fan) Jason Alexander, aired in late August 2006 with “roasters” including Farrah Fawcett, Nichelle Nichols, Kevin Pollak, Betty White, and George Takei. (White: “We all know Shatner’s nuts, but George has actually tasted them!”)
Nothing was off-limits on the roast, save for jokes about Nerine (at Bill’s request). His colleagues took potshots at the predictable Shatner targets: his sketchy hair, his girth, his Halting. Acting. Style. Leonard Nimoy couldn’t attend, but he and Bill pre-taped a sketch in which Bill calls Nimoy at home, inviting him to participate in the roast. Nimoy forcefully declines. “Roasts are for pigs!” he says. “Why are you doing this? Is it for the food?” Bill hangs up, thinking Nimoy is off the line (he’s not): “Pointy-eared pussy!” he says. The roast opened to nearly 4 million cable viewers—big numbers for Comedy Central—and was nominated in 2007 for a Primetime Emmy Award as Outstanding Variety Special. That award went to Tony Bennett: An American Classic.
Bill ponied up $200,000 to be launched into space on Richard Branson’s planned Virgin Galactic space ship, joining a long waiting list for a project that, nearly fifteen years later, still has not come to fruition. In 2007, during a hiatus from Boston Legal, he played an investigative reporter in the ABC miniseries Everest, which was based on the true story of the first Canadians to reach the vaunted summit of Mount Everest. Although he had a frenzied work schedule, Bill found time to complain about being left out of the eleventh Star Trek movie, a prequel film called, simply, Star Trek and directed by J. J. Abrams, with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto playing Kirk and Spock, respectively. “How could you not put one of the founding figures into a movie that was being resurrected? That doesn’t make good business sense to me,” he griped. “I’ve become even more popular than I was playing Captain Kirk—I’m good box office and I get publicity.”45
(“I know he’s upset,” said Leonard Nimoy, who appeared briefly in the movie, “but his character died three movies ago, so it would have been very difficult to get him into this one.”46) The omnipresent Star Trek franchise would reappear in Bill’s life five years later.
In March 2006 Bill poked fun at his musical career in Living in TV Land: William Shatner in Concert, a surreal journey through his daily life that aired on oldies cable network TV Land and was loosely tied to the 2004 album Has Been. Bill was a co-producer on the special, which followed him behind the scenes on the set of Boston Legal, riding broncos at a rodeo, flying to a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas with Leonard Nimoy and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Discovery), and accepting his Emmy Award for Boston Legal. It also featured his friends, family (wife Elizabeth and daughters Leslie, Lisabeth, and Melanie) and costars (including Candice Bergen) who offered up their (sometimes cheeky) takes on Bill Shatner and his music. “I found out early on that he’s William Shatner, not Captain James T. Kirk,” said his Boston Legal costar Mark Valley. “I hate to say it, but there’s a certain amount of disappointment that goes with that.”
Age was starting to catch up with him—but just a little.
In late January 2008, nearing his seventy-seventh birthday, Bill had hip-replacement surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The routine surgery reportedly took a short-lived alarming turn when Bill’s heart started beating erratically before returning to its normal rhythm. He was both shaken and stirred and vowed to lose some weight once he returned home and began his recovery. Within days of returning from the hospital, Bill was up and walking and issued a statement denying that anything had gone awry during his operation. “I’m in absolute perfect health. I’ve never felt better in my life,” he said. “Somebody made up an absolutely foolish story. My Best, Bill.” He felt well enough to appear four weeks later as a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime television talk show, Oprah, on one of its “TV Icons” segments (and to pitch his upcoming autobiography, Up Till Now)—walking onstage with a cane but otherwise looking fit and healthy in a dark brown sports jacket and blue shirt.
* * *
In the spring of 2008, ABC renewed Boston Legal for a fifth and final season comprising thirteen episodes, including a two-hour series finale. Viewership had fallen from a high of nearly 13 million viewers in 2004, its maiden season, to around 9 million viewers a week in Season 4, and ABC didn’t see the point of spending any more money on a series that was ranked fiftieth among all prime-time shows. “When you do an odd show that tonally is just distinct, I think the shelf life is a little shorter,” series creator David E. Kelley said in retrospect.47 “When it’s really a series about mining the eccentricities of its characters, after a while that gets a little old. I felt our race was pretty much run. The worst thing we could all imagine is that we continued to work on it and stopped loving it. The time was right to say goodbye.”48 Bill fired a parting shot at ABC, saying, “[Boston Legal was] on the wrong network . . . I don’t think NBC or CBS would have cancelled us.”49
The plan in that final scene was for Denny Crane’s Alzheimer’s disease—always lurking just under the surface—to progress to the point where it would impact his career. “There’s an interesting chord being played, in a scene I’m paying a lot of attention to, in which I say, ‘I think I’m slipping,’” Bill said before the season launched. “Later on, I say, ‘I’m slipping.’ Then I say, ‘I know I’m slipping.’ I think Kelley is planning on something dire, with some disposition or some disposal.”50
The two-hour series finale of Boston Legal aired on December 8, 2008, with a suitably whimsical, eccentric episode, “Last Call,” in which Alan Shore and Denny Crane get married. It was Denny’s call: he wanted to marry Alan, he said, for practical purposes, and since same-sex marriages were legal in Massachusetts, that would give Alan the power of attorney to make critical medical decisions for Denny as his Alzheimer’s took over. “I’ve always wanted to remarry before I die. I just have,” he said to Alan. “And like it or not, you’re the man I love.”
The episode ended with Denny and Alan and Carl (John Larroquette) and Shirley (Candice Bergen) marrying in a double civil ceremony in Nimmo Bay—officiated by (ultraconservative) Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (played by actor Jack Shearer), who, in the episode’s plotline, happened to be in the area on a fishing trip. (Shearer reprised his “Scalia” character in the 2008 HBO movie Recount, about the 2000 presidential election.) It was the liberal-leaning Kelley’s final Boston Legal “fuck you” to the right. Bill had the honor of uttering the series’ final line. “It’s our wedding night,” Denny says to Alan as they slow-dance on the balcony. Bill later wrote about the “intensity of the relationship” between Alan and Denny: “Certainly there has never been a stronger bond between two men portrayed on a series.”51
Bill segued seamlessly from the end of Boston Legal to the premiere of his next television series, Shatner’s Raw Nerve, which premiered on cable’s The Biography Channel (partly owned by ABC) about a week before the two-hour Boston Legal series finale.
Shatner’s Raw Nerve was an interview show in which Bill chatted with celebrities on a studio set as they sat inches apart from each other in chairs—and, starting with Season 2, on an S-shaped couch (designed by Bill). “I wanted to be on the edge of personal space that is shy of violating a person’s privacy but close enough to suggest intimacy,” he said. “I was trusting my intuition from my past [talk show] experience when I’d ask myself, ‘Why is this desk in between me and the person I’m talking to?’”52 The show’s producer, Scott Sternberg, added: “He wanted to have direct eye contact [with his guests] and not be at an angle. He wanted to be able to touch them, and for them to be able to touch him . . . he is just curious about everything and I think that’s what makes him really good in terms of asking questions—he’s a really good listener.”53
Each celebrity (among them Kelsey Grammer, Judith Sheindlin, a.k.a. “Judge Judy,” porn star Jenna Jameson, Scott Bakula, Regis Philbin, and Bill’s Star Trek castmates Leonard Nimoy and Walter Koenig) was asked to bring an item from their personal lives to their interview as they sat opposite Shatner on the couch. “That was Bill’s idea, to bring something from home that was meaningful for them,” Sternberg recalled.
He felt he could get a really good story out of it and really open up his guest a little bit more to things that maybe would not come out in other talk shows that are limited to six-minute segments, at best. One of the things we did is that we never stopped recording the show; it usually went to an hour or an hour-and-a-half knowing we had to cut it down to a half-hour show. But you never know when the magic or gold was going to happen—and normally [on Shatner’s Raw Nerve] it did.
When we booked people on the show they were not coming to talk to a talk-show host, they were coming to talk to Bill Shatner—and that was an experience for them. They couldn’t believe they were there.
“I’ve spent my life enjoying myself talking to friends . . . and rather than dally with the incidental stuff, I find myself going to the heart of somebody’s issue—whether it’s a momentary issue or a deep-seated issue,” Bill said. “I sort of acted by intuition to begin with [on Raw Nerve] . . . it was a voyage of discovery in the first few shows and then I began to realize that . . . the character of this show would assume the character of my personal life.”54
Bill proved to be a considerate, penetrating interviewer; at times, Shatner’s Raw Nerve was thoughtful and provocative. A bald Walter Koenig—who surprisingly accepted an invitation to appear on Shatner’s Raw Nerve after criticizing Bill in his 1998 autobiography, Warped Factors—was extremely blunt when it came time for him to sit opposite his nemesis on the S-shaped couch. Koenig told Bill that he and the other Star Trek costars lived in fear that Bill would fire them at any time, despite never witnessing such behavior on his part, and scolded Bill for “frequently” stealing scenes from the supporting players. “There was a self-involvement on your part. Where was the guy who was supposed to be the leader of the troupe?” Koenig said. “Where was the guy who was supposed to be the guy we could go to, our friend? And we never felt that way.”
Bill didn’t flinch and appeared to take Koenig’s criticisms to heart. “That resonates with me,” he said, cradling a coffee mug. “The man I am now is much more inclusive . . . and now that I hear you and hear the human wail of ‘What about me?’ coming from a young actor makes me cry inside for you and regret in all my heart that I never reached out to you guys and put my arm around you and said, ‘You guys are great, this is a wonderful show, I hope we make another movie together.’ I am so sorry that I wasn’t capable then of doing that.”
“The amazing thing is the reason that Walter was booked [on the show] was because he wanted to come on and blast Bill and really resolve the issues between them,” Sternberg said. “Bill said, ‘I didn’t realize the dislike, or I didn’t remember any of that kind of stuff’ and ultimately he apologized to him, which I think helped close the circle for Walter.” No circles were closed when Leonard Nimoy sat opposite Bill on Shatner’s Raw Nerve. “These two guys were like brothers but also had issues,” Sternberg recalled. “Bill would say, ‘Well, Leonard, don’t you remember when...’ and Leonard would say, ‘That’s not the way it happened! What the fuck are you talking about Bill! You’re making it up!’”55
Walter Koenig’s visit to Shatner’s Raw Nerve gave Bill the opportunity to bring up another sore subject when he implored Koenig to “Help me with George Takei.” In 2008, Takei married Brad Altman in a Buddhist ceremony, with Koenig as his best man and Nichelle Nichols as his “best woman.” Bill wasn’t there. Was he even invited? Takei insisted he was. Bill insisted he wasn’t. That fueled yet another in a long list of public spats between them over perceived slights that were initially ignited by Takei’s 1995 memoir, To the Stars. Old grudges died hard between Mr. Sulu and Captain Kirk . . . if they died at all.
Two months after Takei’s wedding, Bill was interviewed online when the subject arose. “There’s such a sickness there, it’s so painfully obvious that there’s a psychosis there,” he said of Takei by way of explaining why he wasn’t invited. “. . . There must be something else inside George that is festering . . . Why would he go out of his way to denigrate me?” Takei, in turn, criticized Bill during his frequent visits to Howard Stern’s radio show (Takei’s “Oh my” exclamation was a favorite Howard Stern Show sound bite) and implied that Bill was picking another fight to drum up publicity for Shatner’s Raw Nerve, which was about to premiere. He also slammed Bill for not attending a 1994 event honoring their Star Trek costar James Doohan (Scotty), who was very ill at the time. “It was shocking,” he told Stern.56 Their on-again/off-again feud would continue to erupt for another decade. “I really haven’t rubbed anyone the wrong way,” Bill insisted to the New York Post while discussing Shatner’s Raw Nerve. “I think you’re referring to some cast members from Star Trek. I’ve asked them numerous times to see if I can assuage their bitterness. I don’t know what their problem is, quite frankly, so I’ve given up on trying to make it better. I don’t like any ill-feeling, and if there was something I could do to correct it, I would. But nothing seems to work.”57
What worked for Bill Shatner was keeping busy, and his workload only seemed to increase as he neared his eightieth birthday and shifted his slate of projects into high gear. In early 2010, fourteen months after the finale of Boston Legal, Bill signed on for his next network television series, a starring vehicle placing him front-and-center. He followed that, in quick succession, by releasing another album and revisiting Star Trek (and Captain Kirk) on the big screen.