William Shatner spends the first six pages of his autobiography deciding how to begin his autobiography, mulling over nearly a dozen options. Among them: an Associated Press article detailing his sale of a kidney stone to raise money for Habitat for Humanity; an account of his journey from Montreal to New York in an Indian outrigger canoe; an excerpt from an episode of Boston Legal in which his Denny Crane character proposes the idea of taking God fishing; and anecdotes about pursuing a wild African elephant, spotting extraterrestrials in the desert, and being sexually harassed by Koko, the San Francisco Zoo’s sign language–savvy gorilla.
He does not want to begin his story with his well-worn catchphrase, “Beam me up, Scotty.” “In fact,” he writes, “I am determined that this phrase will not appear anywhere in this book.” (But, of course, it just has.)
Two things, then, become apparent in the first six pages of Shatner’s 2008 memoir, Up Till Now. First: William Shatner’s persona is extremely slippery. Second: William Shatner knows this. He works rather meticulously to curate this slipperiness, to perfect his Cheshire smirk. He’s doing it right now. And there may be another thing, a question that Up Till Now seems to ask the reader from page one: for all his knowing, smirking, winking, grinning, elbow-nudging, self-conscious cleverness, is William Shatner just genuinely weird? Or what?
Beginning his autobiography with “Beam me up, Scotty” might have been weird, a corny overture to the legion of Star Trek fans who see him as inextricably bound up with the persona of Captain James Tiberius Kirk, the role that made him a household name. But kowtowing to Kirk would undermine the primacy of a far more remarkable and curious fictional character: William Shatner.
As Kirk, he may have phaser-stunned plenty of Klingons; been chased ‘round perdition’s very flames; and, in 1968, shared the first interracial kiss aired on a network television drama, with Trek co-star Nichelle Nichols. But Shatner has his own constellation of achievements, many even stranger than the craggy desert topos of Talos IV or Ceti Alpha whatever. Because as Shatner, William Shatner served as Christopher Plummer’s understudy at the Stratford Festival, famously lost his marbles at 20,000 feet on The Twilight Zone, just as famously beseeched Trekkies to “get a life” as a guest host on Saturday Night Live, played cops and robbers for four seasons on TV’s T. J. Hooker, starred in a film presented (and produced) entirely in Esperanto, and lampoonishly covered pop songs by Elton John and the Beatles in herky-jerk spoken word. He appeared nude opposite Angie Dickinson (“As a total package,” he writes, “she was delicious”). He’s hawked All-Bran and clunky Commodore VIC-20 computers, and shilled for Loblaws, and served as “chief negotiating officer” for the travel website Priceline.com. To demonstrate his good humour, he willingly subjected himself to a thorough roasting by a crack team of comedians assembled for a Comedy Central special (stand-up Patton Oswalt, holding a brown paper bag: “Settle a bet for me and my friends. Could you act your way out of this?”). And yes, in 2006, he sold a hardened calcium deposit he had coaxed through his urinary tract, for $75,000. For charity.
Weird. Yes.
And now Shatner, who turns eighty this month, inhabits what may prove his weirdest role yet: star of a gratingly conventional television sitcom based on entries culled from the micro-blogging website Twitter. When $#*! My Dad Says made its debut on CBS on September 24, 2010, over 12 million Americans tuned in, presumably enticed by the prospect of William Shatner saying a bunch of shit. Twelve million. It was a high-water mark for network television weirdness, surely as strange as any established by Twin Peaks, The X-Files, or The Outer Limits. As a phenomenon, it can only be described as “Shatnerian.”
Born 03/22/1931 (stardate unstipulated), William Shatner grew up in Montreal’s mostly Anglophone Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. His childhood nickname: “Toughie.” The image of him as grade school roustabout, bobbing around NDG’s tree-lined boulevards with a chip on his prepubescent shoulder: impossible to resist. His father, Joseph, a Jewish immigrant who came to Canada from Eastern Europe at age fourteen, worked in the schmatte business, tailoring cheap suits for working-class Montrealers. His mother, Anne, was an elocution teacher who enrolled Toughie in the Dorothy Davis School for Actors, a conservatory for would-be thespians run out of a local basement, when he was just seven or eight. From there, it was Baron Byng and West Hill for high school, McGill for a degree in commerce, radio plays, local theatre, and then Stratford.
Much of the persona Shatner would develop — onstage, off, and in between — is indebted to his training as a Shakespearean actor. (The Shakespearean and the Shatnerian are closely, maybe inextricably, linked.) At Stratford, he worked under classically trained actors such as Anthony Quayle and James Mason, and alongside Christopher Plummer, now considered the grand heir to their Shakespearean legacy. (Plummer and Shatner would square off as nemeses in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a mostly dismal effort that featured Plummer’s Klingon General Chang deploying Shakespeare quotes with minimal provocation.)
Acting for the stage, much more so than for television or film, requires sturdy vocal projection — the ability to hurl out lengthy, lofty, and loud soliloquies that begin in the diaphragm and resonate in the theatre’s nosebleeds. Such grandiosity lends itself to overacting. Combine this with a tendency to… Read. Almost. Every line. Just a few. Words. At a time (perhaps a function of growing up under a mother who hammered home the principles of articulation, emphasis, and inflection) and the essence of the Shatnerian begins to take root.
But just as “Kafkaesque” doesn’t just describe the condition of having too much paperwork to do, “Shatnerian” isn’t merely shorthand for hammy acting demarcated by a certain truncated enunciation. More than that, to be Shatnerian is to be dynamically, effervescently alive in a role. Not to get lost in it, in the style of master thespians and method actors, but to attack it with an urgent swagger — to chew through so much scenery you spend the downtime between takes picking chunks of it out of your teeth. The Shatnerian actor doesn’t so much become the character. The character becomes him. A truly Shatnerian performance can be bombastic, sure, and maybe even a bit of a joke. But it’s a joke that any adept pupil of the school of Shatner is always in on.
In 1961, Shatner appeared in a Broadway production of Harry Kurnitz’s murder-mystery farce A Shot in the Dark, opposite Walter Matthau and Julie Harris. He played a bungling investigator (a role later immortalized by Peter Sellers in a 1964 film adaptation) convinced, in keeping with the genre cliché, that the butler did it. In one performance, he fumbled the character’s exultant delivery of the line “The proof is in the pudding,” instead cracking “The poof is in the pudding!”
