LOS ANGELES — I am as giddy as a schoolgirl at the prospect of meeting William Shatner, the 75-year-old pop-culture icon who's up for another Emmy Award this weekend.
He is, after all, a Canadian legend who started off as a respected Shakespearian thespian at Ontario's Stratford Festival, meteorically rose to fame at the helm of the USS Enterprise and crashed back to earth as an object of camp ridicule, only to rise again by lampooning his own larger-than-life persona.
Despite my hardened journalistic misgivings, I desperately want to believe that somewhere inside this pompous, bloated, over-the-top caricature Shatner performs so well, there really is a humble man willing to laugh at himself.
The interview starts off full of forced hilarity and brief promise when I find the actor in his private dressing room at the Los Angeles studio where he shoots the TV series, Boston Legal. He is seated at his newly installed Bowflex exercise machine, hamming it up just like he did in those self-deprecating All-Bran cereal ads.
When co-star Candice Bergen pokes her head in the doorway to see what all the grunting is about, he pumps up the theatrics. “It's a monster!” Shatner says of the workout equipment, huffing and puffing with blustery bravado. “With special permission, you can use it.”
“I don't think so,” Bergen replies, drolly biting into a quesadilla. “I'll just eat and watch you.”
Shatner shrugs as she walks away, and hauls himself off the machine. Straightening his shirt over a pumpkin-sized pot-belly, he lugs himself over to the couch and gets right down to business.
“You've got lights? What kind of lights?” he says to the photographer I've brought along, and becomes suddenly annoyed when she excuses herself to fetch said lights from her car. Perhaps he's still upset The Globe and Mail refused to pay the $600 (U.S.) fee for hair and makeup that his assistant requested.
“I wouldn't go far if I were you,” Shatner warns her. “My mind starts to wander after five or six minutes.”
He's not kidding. The next hour is a maddening game of cat and mouse. I ask serious questions, he jokes. I joke, he gets serious. I goad, he rambles. I probe deeper, he shuts down. The man is as impossible to read as a pointy-eared, emotionless Vulcan.
We begin with Denny Crane, the bombastic, semi-senile, oversexed law partner Shatner plays on Boston Legal. Shatner has already won one Golden Globe and two Emmys for the role. Tomorrow night, he will vie for a third. ( How William Shatner Changed the World, a documentary about scientists inspired by the original Star Trek series, is also up for an award.)
Shatner immediately makes it clear he isn't going to reveal any secrets about the upcoming season. “You'll have to get that information somewhere else,” he curtly informs.
Okay. How about we discuss Denny Crane's significance to Shatner's career?
Captain James T. Kirk may have turned Shatner into a household name, and eventually made him millions, but the sci-fi space stud brought him little critical acclaim. After more than a half-century in the business, Shatner is finally earning some respect. Is it possible that Crane will eclipse Kirk as Shatner's defining TV persona?
“Oh, I don't know. That will be up to you and your readers,” he says nonchalantly, his watery blue eyes drifting.
“You just keep saying the words,” he adds, suddenly switching to the second person, “and someone else comes out.”
Shatner has certainly kept saying the words, as he so humbly refers to the acting profession. Some have called Boston Legal a comeback, but the truth is Shatner never went away.
From his first TV appearance in 1954 as Ranger Bill (a live-action sidekick to the freckle-faced marionette on Howdy Doody) to his upcoming role as host of the inaugural Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts to be held in Richmond, B.C., next month, Shatner has never stopped working.
But who is this “someone else” Shatner so blithely refers to?
In many ways, Crane is Kirk's mirror image: old where the captain was young; fat where he was fit; cynical where he was optimistic; irreverent where he was earnest. Boston Legal creator David E. Kelley wrote the character specifically for Shatner.
“He's totally me!” Shatner once said to a reporter.
To another, he explained: “With Denny Crane I have tried a lot of things — to play within the bounds of almost-farce, and then go right back to reality, so you don't know which is which: when the reality is farcical or when the farce is real. I'm toying with your mind, and I'm consciously doing it.”
Indeed, Shatner has been messing with us for the past 20-odd years. And from the outside, it seemed like a brilliantly calculated career move.
After the original Star Trek series ended in 1969, Shatner hit a dry decade in Hollywood. The first year was particularly tough. His first wife, Gloria Rand, had just left him (he has since remarried three times), taking his three daughters with her, and socking it to him with alimony payments based on the Star Trek salary he was no long earning. As recounted in his biography, Get A Life!, Shatner spent the summer of '69 driving across America doing small parts in stock theatre and sleeping in the back of a pickup truck.
In 1979, his career began taking off again when Paramount produced Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Before long, he was back on TV with the hit series T.J. Hooker, followed by a long stint as host of the re-enactment series Rescue 911.
Throughout it all, he dutifully attended Star Trek conventions and made several more Star Trek movies, produced three Star Trek-related memoirs, and helmed the ghostwritten TekWar sci-fi novels (adapted into made-for-TV movies) and the recently launched William Shatner DVD Club. Somewhere along the line, he loosened up with Captain Kirk and began spoofing the heroic, skirt-chasing space traveller in such films as National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon and Free Enterprise, in which he played a drunken, demented version of himself who crushes the illusions of the two Star Trek-obsessed lead characters.
Shatner was just as successful when he started poking fun at his much-parodied musical ambitions. In his early ads for priceline.com (which sells discount airline tickets), he plays an aging lounge singer delivering hipster monologues over music. The ads were a sly reference to his 1968 album, The Transformed Man, now a camp classic, which included widely pilloried spoken-word interpretations of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Mr. Tambourine Man.
Shatner, of course, got the last laugh when Has Been, another spoken-word CD, produced by Ben Folds, was released in 2004 to favourable reviews. Eventually, the send-up version of Kirk was supplanted by increasingly blurred variations of Shatner playing himself. In Invasion Iowa, a reality series for Spike TV, he descended on Riverside (long cited in Star Trek as Kirk's birthplace) where he pretended to film a sci-fi movie, but was actually punking the entire population and capturing their reactions to the silliness of Hollywood.
As cruel as it sounds, Shatner got away with duping a small town of hayseed farmers — and actually made it seem endearing — because he has so willingly been the butt of his own jokes for so long. And in truth, no one does it better: “The only thing that hurt me about tonight is that none of it was funny,” Shatner quipped last Sunday, after being roasted on the Comedy Central cable network in The Shat Hits the Fan, which will air in Canada this fall on the Comedy Network.
Shatner says there was never a defining moment when he began playing the clown. Looking me straight in the eye, he goes so far as to suggest there is no inside joke: He really isn't laughing at himself.
“Is it possible I never made fun of it, it just seemed funny?” he offers.
He is consciously toying with me, I'm sure, but I badger on regardless. Let's take the laxative-cereal ads, in which Shatner, playing himself, moved in with an unsuspecting suburban couple, and urged them to take the All-Bran Challenge and “feel lighter in two weeks.” Was he not making fun of his weight or surname in those ads?
“I don't know, I just sort of go with the flow,” he jokes — finally — while distractedly brushing his neatly groomed silver hair. (If it's a hairpiece, and that roast would suggest it is, it's a good one).
“When you're playing yourself, you're not really yourself. You're an exaggerated version of something you are. Or you're one aspect of what you are. If you're talking about the All-Bran commercials, the idea was to try and interest the observer to try the brand. So how to make it an entertaining message that this will keep you regular? You fool around until something occurs.”
Did it work for him?
He scowls. “More importantly, did it work for the brand? They seem to keep coming back for more.”
So what part of Denny Crane is real?
“Well, the buffoon, and the forgetfulness,” he say with a sigh. “The outgoing, outrageous facilitator, who cares nothing about public image, and is selfish, yet has occasional lapses of generosity.”
And which parts of Shatner does he keep to himself?
“Oh, I don't know. I never know how to answer these questions,” he says impatiently.
Shatner perks up slightly when we turn to his early years in theatre. When he played Lucentio, Bianca's suitor in The T aming of the Shrew at Stratford in the mid-fifties, the late Robertson Davies said of his performance: “All through the play, he gave a dimension of comedy to a character which can very easily be a romantic bore.”
“I love comedy,” Shatner exclaims. “I love people who can fashion a joke, because the good jokes require observation. It's as much an art form as any other. Not only are you an artist if you can make a good joke, but you are also an entertainer. People looking at a painting may not get it. A joke, usually people get. And they signify that through their laughter. So you communicate.”
He becomes melancholy when I ask about his third wife, Nerine Kidd, whom he found dead in their L.A. swimming pool on Aug. 9, 1999. An autopsy detected alcohol and diazepam, and a coroner ruled the death an accidental drowning.
He and his fourth wife, Elizabeth Martin, commemorated the anniversary earlier this month. Shatner says they have a ritual. “We go up to the place where she died. At the same hour. When I got there,” he says dramatically, invoking the famous “Shatnerian” pauses. “It's just after dark. It's a full moon. The air feels the same. Everything is the same. It's remarkable how there is a continuity that we're not even aware of.”
Then the phone rings, he picks it up, and the contemplative moment is gone.
Shatner met his current wife at a horse show. They now breed American Saddlebreds together at their 360-acre ranch in Kentucky. He waxes romantic about his four-legged obsession.
“It was the beauty of the horses that attracted me,” he says. “And along with that beauty of form following function, it's ability to run and stop and turn and do all those things that horses do. It's like a prima ballerina. They are what every human being aspires to be — the beauty, the grace, the physical elegance.”
The ugly feet?
“Yes, but not from a distance.”
Many members of the original Star Trek series — George Takei (Sulu) and the late James Doohan (Scotty), in particular — remembered Shatner as a vain, egocentric prima donna who stole all the best scenes for himself.
Shatner says the accusations came as a total shock. “What they said absolutely astonished me,” he says. “I don't know what they were talking about. I'm no different now than I was then, in terms of my professionalism.”
Then he turns to the photographer, as if on cue, and cries: “You don't want it from that angle. You're shooting up my nostril. And I didn't even use any makeup.
“So you see,” he continues. “‘Prima donna' is not in my lexicon.”
As our time comes to an end, he trundles back to the exercise machine. “It's a mental exercise as well, you know. I still have to figure out how it works.”
He fiddles with some levers, seemingly confounded. “Why does this pass in here? This thing's got to pull out? Can you try it? I want to discover why it's doing that.”
I reluctantly hop on. “Keep going, don't stop, I think I've got it,” he urges.
Now he's playing me. And while it might not sound very funny, it did seem comical at the time. Finally, I get it. Shatner is a nut, all right. And a tough one to crack. But the joke's on us.
