Up Till Now (6 page)

I remember doing a show with Lon Chaney Jr., who had a drinking problem. In the first act we had a big fight scene in which we completely broke up a room. The furniture was all props, breakaway tables and chairs made of balsa, the vase was made of some kind of hard sugar, but because we had such a small budget we couldn’t afford to actually rehearse the action. If we broke it we couldn’t replace it. So instead we walked through the scene, each of us describing our actions. Chaney had memorized his movements: “Right here I pick up the chair and hit you over the shoulders with it and you roll backward. Then you fall over the table, which will break and I’ll pick up the leg and hit you over the head. You go down right on that mark
and the cameras’ll pick you up.” We went through it every day, being very careful not to break any of the breakaway furniture. Chaney was great. He showed up on time, sober, and had his lines down cold.

I guess he began to get nervous during the dress rehearsal in the afternoon. But we went through the scene and everything seemed okay. “...I pick up the chair and hit you over the shoulders...”

At the end of the dress rehearsal the director gathered the cast around him and gave us his final notes. “We’re going on in exactly forty-seven minutes. Good luck, everybody, it’s been a pleasure working with you. I know we’re going to have a wonderful show. Now you have a little time to eat because we’re going on in exactly forty-three minutes...”

So we all went back to our dressing areas and got ready to do the show. Apparently Chaney started getting very nervous and to calm himself down had a few drinks. Forty-two minutes’ worth of drinks. He managed to get through the first part of the show until we reached the fight scene. As the scene started he looked at me angrily and said, “Right here I pick up the chair and hit you over the shoulders with it and you roll backward. Then you fall over the table...”

With that the stage manager lifted his head and screamed, “We’re on the air, you son of a bitch!”

That was the problem—and the excitement of live TV—it was live. Fortunately, my stage training had taught me how to deal with unexpected events. Once, for example, I was in a play in which the whole plot hinged on my shooting another actor, but when I reached for the prop gun it wasn’t there. The stage manager had forgotten to put it back after the previous performance. But the guy had to die or the play was over, so I picked up a corkscrew and screwed him to death.

That presence of mind was perfect for live television. On one show I was involved in a shoot-out. The actor who had to shoot me got much too close, and when he shot me, the blank shell—which was made of wax—hit me right under my eye. It was painful as hell, but I just kept going. Keep going, that’s what actors do. Except the blank had caused a huge blood blister to form, a big red blot right under my eye. And it just kept growing, it kept getting bigger and
bigger. It was like the blimp of blood blisters. It was like a clown’s red nose stuck to my face, growing and becoming a deeper shade of red. Of course I didn’t know that, I couldn’t see my face, but it was the only thing every other actor could look at. And they looked at it with great wonder, this mammoth red golf ball growing on my face. This was a murder mystery but they couldn’t say two lines without breaking into complete hysterics. And naturally because the other actors were looking at something on my face and couldn’t stop laughing I became very self-conscious. I was trying to look down, which of course is impossible, but worse, it forces the viewers at home to look down too. The red pustule had become the focus of the entire show. And somehow we got through it. We always got through it, although there were some difficult times.

For aging movie stars just trying to keep their careers alive by working on TV the hardest thing to do was memorize their lines. In the movies they’d only had to remember a few lines at a time and if they forgot them the cameras stopped and they reshot the scene. But this was live television, there was no going back. Paul Muni had to be fitted with an earpiece because he just couldn’t remember three sentences. I co-starred with Bert Lahr in a play called
The School for Wives
, Walter Kerr’s adaptation of a Molière comedy, on
Omnibus
. Bert Lahr! The Cowardly Lion himself, the great burlesque comedian. Sidney Lumet was directing. It was thrilling for me, for the whole cast. We were all nervous for him, we didn’t want to see him struggle with this new medium. When he came in to rehearsal the very first day we all sort of held our breath, all of us ready to help him. But he didn’t even glance at his script. He had memorized every single word. So while we were stumbling through the first reading he had already mastered the nuances. Well, this was great. The next day we came in and we’d all learned a little more and Bert Lahr forgot a couple of words. As we got closer to the airdate most of us knew large sections of the play and he was forgetting full pages. The more nervous he got, the more he forgot. By the time we went on the air he’d forgotten almost the entire play and we ended up ad-libbing large sections of the Molière comedy. I know there had to be people
watching that play and wondering why they’d never heard those lines before.

One reason I was in demand was that I learned my lines very quickly. Those years doing a play a week in Canada were paying off. Only once did I have a problem. I was doing a two-parter called
No Deadly Medicine
for
Studio One,
in which I played a young doctor trying to save the reputation of an aging doctor no longer capable of practicing safe medicine. Lee J. Cobb played the older physician. At that time Cobb was probably the most respected actor in America. He had starred in the original production of
Waiting for Lefty
, the play I’d done at the Communist meeting hall; he’d created the role of Willy Loman in the Broadway production of
Death of a Salesman.
And he’d been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in
On the Waterfront
. Every serious actor was in awe of him. And I was co-starring with him. It was the most important role of my career. And the fact that Lee J. Cobb was starring in a two-part show on television made it a major event, so we knew we were going to have a huge viewing audience. In one scene all I had to do was walk across the set. I took three steps and suddenly I remembered Basil Rathbone’s words, “There’s thirty to fifty million people watching . . .” And it hit me, thirty to fifty million people were watching me walk.

More people were watching me walk across that set than had seen Julius Caesar in his entire lifetime. More people were watching me walk than the entire population of most of the countries in the world. And I became conscious of the way I was walking. Was I walking too fast? Were my strides too long? Did it look natural, was I walking like I really walked? Was I acting like I was walking or walking like I was acting? I felt my legs begin to tighten up. I couldn’t believe it, I was getting stage fright. Walking may well be the most natural of all movements—and I couldn’t remember how to walk naturally. It probably took me eight steps to get across the set, the longest eight steps of my entire life.

Many years later I was narrating a documentary series entitled
Voice of the Planet,
for which I traveled around the world. For one
amazing shot a helicopter dropped me off on top of a twenty-thousand-foot-high glacier and left me there alone. “Don’t move,” the producer warned me. “There could be a fault line here somewhere covered by snow. You might step into a crevasse and no one would ever know it.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’m not going to move.” Move? I wasn’t so confident about breathing too deeply. The concept was that the chopper would rise slowly to the top of the glacier and suddenly see one man standing there, the only living thing in this vast sea of snow. It was a great idea—until the helicopter took off and left me there more alone than I had ever been in my life. That feeling of loneliness was absolutely incomprehensible. I kept reminding myself that soon the helicopter would be coming back to get me off and I’ll be with my friends and we’ll go down to the village and eat and drink and laugh and talk about what a great shot we did. But then I looked down and realized the helicopter’s landing pads had left two deep impressions in the snow, which would spoil the shot. I’ve got to move just a few feet, I decided.

I moved several inches at a time, small, tentative steps, testing the snow before I put my weight down. It took me at least ten minutes to move about twenty feet.

And that’s exactly how I felt walking across the set on
Studio One.
It was an extraordinary time, we were creating television on a weekly basis. The only rule was that there were no rules, you could do anything you could get away with. Most of the TV studios were converted live theaters, and we also did a lot of filming on city streets. It was all very seat-of-the-pants. We didn’t have trailers, we changed our costumes in restaurant bathrooms or even telephone booths. We froze in the winter and sweated in the summer. We dealt with whatever problems occurred. For example, I was shooting a
Studio One
on a midtown street and the script required me to bump into someone, which led to a fight in which the other actor fell and hit his head and was killed. There were no such things as permits and shutting down streets; you got a camera and went outside and you shot the scene using available light. It was important to film only the
backs of pedestrians so the producers didn’t have to ask them to sign a release, so most of the time we had to walk against the flow. So I bumped into the other actor and started the fight and suddenly I felt people grabbing me and trying to break it up. What could I tell them, we’re not actually fighting but please let me kill him?

On a weekly basis I was working with legendary movie figures like Alfred Hitchcock, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey, Ralph Bellamy, and even Billy Barty, as well as talented young actors just beginning their careers, such as Lee Marvin and Jack Klugman, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen. I worked with Steve McQueen in a classic legal drama titled “The Defenders” on
Studio One
. Ralph Bellamy and I played father-and-son lawyers defending McQueen on murder charges. At the conclusion I used a courtroom trick, fooling the only eyewitness by planting a McQueen look-alike in the spectator section, to get him off—at the cost of my father’s respect. I remember watching McQueen work and thinking, wow, he doesn’t do anything. He was inarticulate, he mumbled, and only later did I understand how beautifully he did nothing. It was so internalized that the camera picked it up as would a pair of inquisitive eyes. Out of seemingly nothing he was creating a unique form of reality.

The show was so well received that CBS decided to develop it as a series, offering the leading roles to Bellamy and myself. We both turned it down. I was too smart to get caught in that trap. Serious actors didn’t do a TV series. Instead E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed starred in the show, which has been recognized as one of the great courtroom dramas in TV history. Among the young actors who worked on the show were Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, James Earl Jones, Martin Sheen, and Ossie Davis.

I also turned down several commercials for the same reason: serious actors did not do commercials. I couldn’t imagine the audience accepting an actor in a dramatic role after they’d seen him selling cigarettes or laundry detergent. A serious actor has to draw the line. I was adamant, I would not sell laundry detergent!

I had become one of the leading men of television. There were few roles that I wanted and didn’t get. It was magical. I learned to
love doing live television. There was an indescribable excitement and energy that came from knowing you had only one opportunity to get it perfect. No cover shots, no second chances. The cameras we used were very large and contained a lot of very hot tubes, and so they also had small fans in them. The fan made a low wooooooooooooossssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhing sound as it cooled the innards of the camera. If you listened closely, it almost sounded like they were purring. Behind the camera was the cameraman, but often he was mostly hidden by it, so it looked like it was moving on its own. One time I saw two cameras on electrical dollies get loose. They came toward each other, hit, and fell over, like massive prehistoric animals.

And when the red light came on it was as if they were alive. Watching you, moving after you. If I had to make an entrance in the middle of a scene I would stand right next to the camera, feeling its warmth, hearing it purr. I loved that camera, you could pet it, savor it, but it never frightened me.

I was getting the kind of notices every actor dreams about. On
Studio One, Variety
raved: “Both Lee J. Cobb and William Shatner were magnificent.” After I played a bigot and the leader of a lynch mob on
Playhouse 90,
the
New York Times
wrote: “...the embodiment of hate and blind physical passion, Mr. Shatner’s attention to detail in putting together the picture of ignorant and evil social forces was remarkable...Two of the season’s superlative performances by Rod Steiger and William Shatner.”
Variety
described my performance on
The U.S. Steel Hour
as “moving... [Shatner] is unforgettable as the young priest.”

The only problem I was having in my life was with Gloria. I was becoming a star; she was remaining my wife. And for an actor, the role of a star’s wife is not a very pleasant one to play. She was working, but not as often as I was and in smaller parts. But finally she was invited to audition for a role for which she was absolutely perfect. It was as if it had been written specifically for her. This was going to be the role that established her—and she didn’t get it. It was devastating, the worst possible thing that could happen to a person with such
a fragile personality. It was the ugliest side of an actor’s life: from the euphoria of the possible to the despair of reality. It was very difficult for me to enjoy my career when every success I had was a painful reminder of her lack of success. This beautiful girl who had a great deal of talent just wasn’t getting the opportunity to work. She was terribly frustrated. Every success I had seemed to magnify her lack of success. There was always this underlying feeling that I’d better not talk too much about what happened in rehearsal that day or mention I was offered this part. So I acted all day and then went back to Queens and played another role.