Up Till Now (4 page)

After my third year with the Canadian Rep I was once again invited to join the Stratford Festival to play the juvenile roles. This time I accepted the offer. The Stratford Festival had begun when a Canadian named Tom Patterson, who lived in the small town of Stratford, Ontario, had a very strange vision: he was going to create a theater in Stratford using Canadian players to perform all the classic plays. So he went to England and actually managed to convince Sir Tyrone Guthrie, then considered one of the greatest stage directors in the world, that he should come to Stratford to run this theater.

And so it happened, and Guthrie brought with him to Stratford some leading designers and actors in England. Alec Guinness starred in the first play, and the Stratford Festival almost immediately earned a reputation as the finest classical theater in North America.

I packed my belonging—that’s not an exaggeration—into the back of a used Morris Minor my father had bought me and headed for the bright lights of Toronto. A Morris Minor was a compromise between a very small car and nothing. While driving to Toronto in a fierce rainstorm I crossed over a bridge; as I did, a sixteen-wheeler, water spewing out of its front tire wells, raced passed me going in the opposite direction. The force of the truck and the water almost blew me over the side of the bridge into what must have been the Ottawa River. And I remember thinking that if this car went into the river there would be no marks on the earth that I had ever lived. There would be no residue of my presence other than the sorrow of my mother and father. Essentially I had no friends who cared about me, no girlfriends with whom I’d established any kind of bond, and no accomplishments. That was a devastating thought, and it summed up how little I was leaving behind in Montreal. It reminded me of a line from
Macbeth
, “A tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing.”

At Stratford we presented three plays a season, from May through September. We rehearsed the first play and while it was running began rehearsing the second play. The same actors worked in all three plays. I was one of a half-dozen young actors in the company and we competed with each other for roles. Mostly we were supporting players, usually we were the chorus. Getting a few lines was an accomplishment. We all lived in awe of God, who took the human form in Stratford of Tyrone Guthrie. Guthrie was legendary in England. All of the great actors either worshipped or at least respected him. When he came to Canada the few people serious about acting felt the horizon was moving toward us. And so we trembled at the sight of him, this great man who had come to us to cloak us in his wisdom.

Guthrie was about six-foot-six with a huge potbelly and a hawk-like nose. The theater was little more than a large hole in the ground covered by a great tent. We would be on the raked stage at the bottom of this pit and the tent flap would part and the sunlight would burst in and from that great brilliance Tyrone Guthrie would emerge. It was quite an entrance. And he would stand there and pronounce his decisions, “And you will play the role...”

It was hypnotic, “Yes, I will play the role...”

Tyrone Guthrie wasn’t much of a teacher. He didn’t offer a lot of instruction; to read a line or interpret the meaning of that line, you had to work on and discover by yourself. But he was a master at the grand design, at producing extraordinary theater, at creating memorable events on stage. Once, I remember, he put his arm around my shoulders and said earnestly, “Bill, tell me about Method acting.” Me, explaining Method acting to Sir Tyrone Guthrie? I began to explain what little I had read about it, how an actor can become the character and feel the emotion flowing through...

After I had explained what little I knew, he asked, “Why don’t they think of a beautiful sunset?”

I understood that wasn’t really a question, but rather a suggestion. He was reminding me that there is a greater scheme at play in a beautiful sunset than in simply trying to call up some emotion to service a character. And that an actor should not get so caught up in perfecting technique that he misses the lyricism and beauty of everything that is going on around him.

Within weeks of arriving in Stratford I was playing a small role in
Henry V,
starring Christopher Plummer. Chris Plummer and I are about the same age but rather than going to college he had started working in the theater and was probably the leading young actor in Canada. He was part of the very small community of successful actors in Montreal, very much part of the “in” crowd. He was prematurely mature and I had envied him. At Stratford he played all the young leading-man roles. In
Henry V
I was assigned the role of the Duke of Gloucester, for which I was onstage about five minutes, as well as understudying Chris Plummer.

King Henry V is one of the longest roles written by Shakespeare, so when we weren’t rehearsing I studied those lines. Whenever I had a few extra moments, at night or in the bathroom, I memorized all of his speeches. Because we had opened the play after only a few weeks’ rehearsal there had been no time for an understudy run-through. During the staging of the play the understudies kept an eye on the
roles we were supposedly preparing to play, but none of us thought it was possible that we’d actually have to go on one day to replace a sick actor. The company consisted of young, healthy, ruddy-faced, beef-eating, apple-chomping Canadian actors; nobody ever got sick. Basically, the rule was that if you took more than two breaths a minute you were still alive and had to go on.

The play opened to excellent reviews.
The New York Times
called it a “stunning piece of work...penetrating and exuberant.” Chris Plummer got rave reviews, the show was sold out for its entire run. This was by far the most successful work I’d done; I was a member of a prestigious company, working with some of the most respected actors in Canada. Darn right it was penetrating and exuberant. Mondays were my only day off, and one Monday morning about two weeks into our run I got a call from the production office. Chris Plummer was suffering from a kidney stone; could I go on that night?

Could I go on that night? Could I go on that night? Replace Plummer in one of the greatest roles ever written for the stage? Absolutely. Without doubt. Of course.

Clearly I was insane. I had never even said the lines out loud, but merely muttered them between flushes of the toilet. I hadn’t done a single rehearsal in that role so I didn’t know the staging. I hadn’t even met some of the other actors. Any actor in their right mind would have said, sir, how dare you ask me to go there and risk my reputation. Or something like that.

And they would have responded, of course we can’t. It’s impossible. We’ll call off the performance and refund their money and...

Refund their money? Ah, there’s the rub. The production office tried to schedule an emergency rehearsal but finding actors on a day off is even more difficult than getting a profit participation check from a movie studio. At about five o’clock someone suggested I try on the wardrobe to make sure it fit. Fortunately Chris and I were about the same size so it fit me well.

The odd thing was that the impossibility of what I was about to do hadn’t hit me yet. I was completely calm and confident. It never
occurred to me that I was risking my career—not that I actually had a career, of course—but if this turned out to be a debacle I was the one who was going to get the blame for it. And it had the kind of big debacle potential that inspires comedy writers.

Tyrone Guthrie wasn’t even there. Moments before I was about to go on Michael Langham, the director, asked, “Are you all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine,” I said, thinking I knew the play. There are few moments in the life of a stage actor as dramatic as this one. It is the actor’s cliché: I was the unrehearsed understudy going out on that stage as a nobody and coming back as probably a bigger nobody. I don’t know why I wasn’t nervous. Certainly any rational person should have been close to panicking. Instead, I was excited.

Stratford had a thrust stage, meaning it was surrounded by the audience on three sides. There are no wings. All entrances and exits are made at the back of the stage. So when you’re onstage you’re almost in the audience. If you forget a line there’s no way somebody can feed it to you—unless it’s a member of the audience.

There were twenty-five hundred people in the audience, including most of the critics who had originally reviewed the play. Apparently they had learned that an unknown understudy was going on and didn’t want to miss what promised to be a memorable night in the theater. Finally the lights went down and I walked out onto the stage to begin the most important performance of my life. Whatever happened in the next few hours, if someday I ended up in the Ottawa River, I would have had this one night.

I looked around the theater and...

This is where we should pause for a word from our sponsor. I’ve spent so much of my life on television that I’m used to building to a first-chapter climax and cutting to commercial. However, as this is a book we haven’t sold commercial time. However, there will be space available in the soft-cover version.

. . . and felt exhilarated. I had been doing a play a week for three years. I had learned the lines of hundreds of characters. I had been a comedian, a charlatan, and a convicted con man. That night I was ready to be a king.

Perhaps the proper word to describe the way I was feeling is stupefied. I was completely calm, in the zone, Zenned out, at one with the stage and the audience. It came together in a way it never should have. A few years later I would be working for Rod Serling in
The Twilight Zone,
a place where unimaginable things happened for which there could be no explanation. Like my performance that night. I was “Once more into the breach, dear friends”-ing as if I had been playing this role for seasons. “Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

A stage actor needs a minimum of ten performances in front of an audience to understand the timing, because the response of the audience has to be incorporated into that performance. Audiences react in unexpected places, and you learn where to leave room for the audience to respond. You don’t want to walk into their reaction with your next line, which might be key to the plot. So the audience becomes a character in a play, but you don’t see that character until you are in front of the audience.

Except for that night. I took from the audience an internal strength that made me capable of an inexplicable performance. Until near the very end, the last few lines, only seconds away from perfection.

The play changes character for the last few scenes. After all the grander and marshal speeches, Henry has some playful scenes with the French princess and the play is over. I got through all the breaches, all the blood of Englishmen, after the battle of Agincourt, all the way to the brilliant repartee with the princess. And then it hit me.

The French princess entered and I went totally blank. And I’m standing onstage with twenty-five hundred people looking at me with rapt expectation and there was nothing. A dead pause. The hopelessness of my situation began to hit me. I didn’t have the slightest idea where to go, what to do, what to say. It was the equivalent of being at an important business party and starting to introduce your wife to your boss and suddenly realizing you can’t remember your wife’s name. Into that breach, dear friends, flowed the tidal wave of panic.

I looked across the stage, hopelessly. I have met so many thousands of people in my lifetime that sometimes it’s difficult to recall the names of people I’ve known for years. Yet as long as I live I will never forget Don Cherry. Don Cherry, with blondish hair and the longest blond eyelashes I’ve ever seen. There stood salvation. Don Cherry had a photographic memory. He knew the entire play! Every line. During rehearsals if someone forgot their line he would give it to them. And he was only twelve feet away from me, playing my usual role. So Henry walked over to him and put his arm around his shoulder, an extraordinary piece of staging that had never occurred to anybody before or since. The exhausted king goes to his younger brother and leans on him for support. I leaned in closely and said, “What’s the line?”

And Don Cherry with his photographic memory looked at me blankly. He had not the slightest idea. But in that instant I remembered the words I was supposed to say and continued on successfully to the end of the play. I received a standing ovation. Even the cast was applauding. The critics loved it, lauding my instinctive and original movements onstage and my halting interpretation of the part. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

That was the night I knew I was an actor. Now if I could only find a way to make that hundred bucks a week.

At Stratford I rose from bit parts and walk-ons to become a leading player in
Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew,
and
The Merchant of Venice.
In our third season Guthrie resurrected a play he’d had great success with in England, his own version of Christopher Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine the Great
. Anthony Quayle was the lead and Guthrie told me, “When we do this, you will play Usumcasane, the second lead.” As it turned out the second lead consisted mainly of carrying Anthony Quayle around the stage in a sedan chair. But obviously I did it well because Guthrie named me the Festival’s Most Promising Actor that year. The Stratford production received such good notices that the legendary Broadway producers Roger Stevens and Robert Whitehead decided to bring us to New York.

I still thought of myself as this little Jewish kid from Montreal,
Billy Shatner, who was just trying to figure it all out—but I was going to Broadway, to New York City, to the mecca of serious actors.

This was my second time in New York and this time I was going in theater style. My first trip had been very different—I’d paddled there in an Indian canoe.

Like
paramotoring down the Ohio River into the largest paintball fight in the world or hunting a brown bear in Alaska with a bow and arrow or singing “Rocket Man” on national TV, this was one of those grand ideas that falls into the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time category. At the end of a summer during which I’d worked as a counselor at a B’nai B’rith camp, the head of the camp announced he was going to paddle an Indian war canoe up the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, across Lake George, then down the Hudson River all the way to New York, and invited six of us to go with him. I have always loved history and the concept of traveling this ancient waterway to America—just as the Indians must have done hundreds of years ago—enthralled me.

I have always had a love affair with America. I believed completely in the American myth, that the president of the United States was a great and noble man and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court rose to that position because of his experience and equanimity and wisdom and that J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was watching out for us all. Hoover wearing a dress? How could anybody believe something so preposterous?

I remember being frightened by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s warning that Communists were hidden in the State Department and then realizing that Americans had seen many crises yet somehow the Constitution survived and actually grew stronger. I thought of America as this place of promise, where dreams were possible. I had always wanted to go to America.

So seven of us climbed into this wooden war canoe and our journey began. It was a romantic vision, we were paddling a thousand miles to America. And within a few strokes I remember realizing: we’re paddling a thousand miles to America?

It certainly didn’t take long for that romance to end. Within a day we were exhausted and cold and there was nothing we could do but keep paddling. I remember standing up in the canoe in the middle of Lake Champlain on a gray day and trying to pee into the lake. Six guys turned to look at me and I got so self-conscious I couldn’t do it, so I sat down. The media loved the story, seven kids paddling from Canada to New York. We were scheduled to stop in Kingston, New York, for a big celebration the Jewish community had prepared for us, but just before we got there a sailboat threw us a rope and began towing us—right past Kingston. The welcoming committee was standing on a dock waving happily to us. We waved right back to them and just kept going.

We camped out at night, under the mosquitoes. To keep the meat we’d brought with us fresh we trailed it behind us in the water—and it got just as rotten as it would have if left in the sun. Within a couple of days the only thought in our minds was, we gotta get out of this damn canoe. It might have been about that time that I understood that I wasn’t an Indian, I was a Jewish kid with blisters on his
hands from all that paddling. But finally we made it to America, to New York City, tying up at the 79th Street marina.

This was my first time in New York City and I was truly naïve, an innocent in the big city. I had heard all the stories of this city and I knew I had to be very careful. But the people were so nice. I was walking past Radio City Music Hall and a nice man asked me, “Would you like to go to the show?”

Wow, who knew New Yorkers were so friendly? He bought me a ticket and we sat down and the lights went down and the Rockettes came onstage and he put his hand on my knee...I stood up and literally ran right out of the theater.

I remember walking through Times Square and seeing the Broadway theaters for the first time and being totally enchanted by the bright lights and the overwhelming sense of life going on all around me. I wanted so much to be part of it. On another day I met someone else and we started talking and I told him I wanted to be an actor and finally he said, “I’ve got some people you’d like to meet.” I went with him into a club and into a back room. There was a large rectangular table with probably ten people sitting around it. When we walked in he looked at me and smiled warmly, then said, “We were expecting you.”

I ran right out of that room, too. This was some city, this New York.

A couple of years later I spent a summer hitchhiking across the United States. Following my freshman year at McGill, a friend and I had decided to explore America. We had no money, so we made signs reading TWO MCGILL FRESHMEN SEEING THE U.S. and hit the road. We spent three months living in cars and sleeping on the grass and on the beach. We made it from Montreal to Washington to San Francisco, then Vancouver and home. We had no fear and no problems at all. We got rides easily. We made it to Santa Barbara and we were sleeping on the beach, near train tracks. Very early one morning a train stopping at the local station woke me. As I looked at a Pullman car somebody raised the blinds in a compartment and I saw, just as it might happen in the movies, it was a beautiful, naked
woman. Well, in my memory she was beautiful, but I am sure she was naked. She saw me looking at her and closed the blinds and minutes later the train pulled out. California certainly is an amazing place, I thought. I’m sleeping on the beach and I look up to see a beautiful, naked woman. One thing became certain at that moment: I definitely was going to Hollywood!

But my dream was to live in New York, to work in the theater with the greatest actors in the world. From the time I had started working at Stratford I’d been saving my money so one day I could move there. After a couple of seasons I’d managed to save five hundred dollars. That was all the money I had in the world. One of the good acquaintances I had made in Toronto was Lorne Greene, then a famous Canadian radio announcer who had been hired by Guthrie because of his stentorian voice to play a Roman senator, and who eventually became the star of
Bonanza
. Lorne wasn’t much of an actor, but he was a wonderful man. And almost every day he and this other actor used to go to the office of the local stockbroker to day-trade. They invited me to come with them one day and I’d never seen anything like it. It was a very small office with a moving ticker running across the wall showing the movement up and down of various stocks. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen: Lorne and this other actor would go into the trading room with a small amount of money and within a few hours they would come out of the room with more money. Every day! Well, this certainly was an amazing discovery. And neither of them had their degree in commerce from a prestigious university. I wondered why they hadn’t taught me about this miracle at McGill.

They were speculating in options, commodities. In commodities trading you buy a contract on a commodity, anything from gold to pigs, with the hope or expectation that the value of that contract is going to increase. To purchase the contract you’re required to put down only a small percentage of the total value. If the value goes up you can sell the contract for a profit. If it goes down...I didn’t know, that didn’t seem to happen to Lorne Greene. All the two of them did was make money.

I had my very hard-earned five hundred dollars. I had been guarding it with my life. I thought, I want to go to New York to look for work as an actor after this season. I’ll bet if I follow these guys, I can turn my five hundred dollars into a thousand. The way I lived I could survive in New York for quite a long time on one thousand dollars.

In the summer of 1955 the hot commodity was uranium. Apparently it was the necessary material for atomic power, so naturally it was very valuable. So on a Thursday I went with my friend Lorne and this other actor to the stockbroker’s office and spent my entire life savings buying uranium futures. And I heard the voice of God, Lorne Greene, tell me, “You’re going to make a lot of money, Bill.”

I thought, wow, I’m going to make a lot of money. I went to the office Friday morning to check out my contract and uranium was doing very well. But when I arrived at the theater Friday night Lorne came over to me and said, “I’ve got some news for you, Bill. It’s not good.”

Not good? What about my savings?

“The prime minister of Canada’s giving a speech tonight. Canada is going to stop buying uranium because they’ve stockpiled enough. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen to the market Monday morning.”

We did three performances that weekend. And all I could think about was my five hundred dollars. On Monday morning uranium plummeted. I’d blown my entire life savings on uranium. And somewhere in the back of my mind was the feeling that the prime minister had heard about my investment and decided to get out of that market.

So when Guthrie told us we were going to New York in
Tamburlaine the Great
, to the largest theater on Broadway, I was elated. I knew this was fate: even the collapse of the uranium market couldn’t keep me out of New York. We opened at the Winter Garden Theater in January 1956. It was a limited run, originally scheduled for twelve weeks. It was even more limited than that; we closed after eight weeks.

This was one of the greatest seasons in Broadway history. Among the shows playing on Broadway in 1956 were
My Fair Lady, The Most
Happy Fella,
Leonard Bernstein’s
Candide
, Rosalind Russell in
Auntie Mame,
Paul Muni in
Inherit the Wind,
and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Of all those shows, we were the only one that featured beautifully choreographed violent battles, murder, mayhem, and torture. So in retrospect, it was probably not the right play for the theater groups from Long Island. But it was great fun to do, a truly primal stage production. Obviously unlike anything else on Broadway that season. We received excellent reviews: according to Louis Kronenberger it was “an evening full of stunning theater, of slashing rhetoric, of glorious spectacle, with scene after scene suggesting a kind of richly lighted Delacroix canvas.”

And even in a supporting role I attracted attention. For the first time agents began calling me. I’d heard about agents, I knew what they did, but I’d never had an agent of my own. Suddenly agents wanted to represent me! And I had offers from the great movie studios, asking me to sign long-term multi-movie contracts, telling me I could be a movie star. M-G-M offered me a five-year contract at exactly seven hundred dollars a week. Or maybe it was a seven-year contract at five hundred dollars a week. I was living rent check to rent check and they were offering tremendous security. It was every actor’s fantasy.

The night before I was going to sign that contract I went to a New York party. An actor I didn’t know, and who I don’t believe I’ve ever seen again, advised me not to sign it. Somehow that made sense to me. The next morning I told the agent I had decided not to sign the contract. That was the moment I learned the definition of “apoplexy.” When the wind’s blowing right I think I can still hear him screaming. I really couldn’t explain to him why I’d changed my mind because I didn’t know the answer. I still don’t. Maybe I wasn’t the toast of Broadway, but I certainly was a shot glass of whisky of Broadway. An extraordinary world was opening up for me, I had made it to Broadway, the New York columnists were writing stories about me, agents were calling. I just didn’t want to give up control of my career even before it had really started. The mystical dreams of
the actor had conquered the prosaic needs of the commerce student from McGill.

Anything seemed possible. Although I do have to admit that anything probably didn’t include the fact that one day I would be starring on a television show making love to a blow-up doll and costumed as a pink flamingo.

My ambition was to be a serious actor. I turned down all those offers and returned to Toronto with the Stratford Festival. In the winters of those years I was managing to eke out a living performing in radio dramas on the Canadian Broadcasting Company on Jarvis Street, getting occasional small parts on early Canadian television, even writing half-hour plays for the local TV stations. There were about thirty professional actors in all of Canada, meaning these were men and women who did nothing else to earn a living. I was one of perhaps twenty professional actors living in Toronto. We got up in the morning, searched for work, or were actually working that day.

Each job lasted the length of the show and then we started all over again. I’d get a job Tuesday, work Wednesday, and begin looking for the next job Thursday. Then I’d have to wait two weeks for my thirty-five-dollar check. For the first time I lived every day with the feeling that this job might be the last job I’d ever get; that after this job my career might be over. Fortunately that feeling has lasted only sixty years.

I lived in a tiny studio apartment on the top floor of a rooming house a few blocks away from the CBC. The bed actually had a rope mattress. For most of my first year in Toronto I was desperately homesick, it was only when I was working that I could forget how lonely I was. I was younger and less experienced than most of the people I was working with, so I wasn’t part of that group. I had some acquaintances but no real friends.

I was living in a garret and I was starving. I was always cold, I was frightened of being alone in my room; afraid of the present, afraid of the future, afraid of being knifed in the back when I walked down the dark streets. I was living a fearful life. I told myself that this was
the life of an artist. I didn’t dare believe I was paying my dues—I couldn’t have afforded that.