Up Till Now: The Autobiography

I wasn’t under the impression that, for the most part, I can communicate with animals. I hold this concept that I can communicate with them based on my love of animals; they can instinctively feel that I mean them no harm, and that I bring peace and love. And I bring my hands, which can stroke them and make them feel good. That’s what was going on in my mind when I opened the door of the hut and told Nerine, excitedly, “I’m going to go out there.”
    I felt so alive. My whole being resonated with the incredible feeling that I was going to go visit with an elephant on a starlit moonless night in Africa. How amazing! And I was going to visit that elephant in my underwear. I took my flashlight and I started running after the elephant.
    At that moment the classic Groucho joke, “I shot an elephant in my underwear last night. How he got into my underwear I’ll never know,” did not occur to me. I don’t know what the elephant was thinking. I do know that my daughter Melanie was awake and saw what appeared to be lightning flashes in the camp, then realized it was someone running with a flashlight. “That’s my dad,” she told her husband, Joel.
    “It couldn’t be,” Joel said. “We were told not to leave the huts.”
    “Trust me,” she responded knowingly. “That’s my dad.”
    I had lost sight of the elephant. I ended up running all the way to the river, thinking the elephant might have gone into the water. The elephant was not there, but a herd of hippopotami was bathing there. They paid no attention to me. That was fortunate, as I learned later that hippos are foul-tempered animals. Rather than peace and love they’re more into kill and eat. So I turned around and went back to my hut.
    The next morning our guide told us that there had been a lion in our camp during the night, and he showed us the paw marks right outside Lisbeth’s door. Apparently two years earlier that same lion had killed one of the workers in the camp. While showing me those marks the guide told me, “If you had been out there when the female was there, there is no telling what she might have done.” When the gamekeeper found out that I’d gone outside he was furious. But contrary to the way my daughters describe this, he never actually used the word “psychopath.”
    He did, however, radio ahead to our next camp to warn the guides there, we’ve got a bad one. That was me.
    We stayed in this camp for one more night. An elephant, probably the same one, came back in the night and started foraging right next to our hut. And while he was doing it he leaned against the wall—and the whole hut started leaning. I thought it was going to collapse. If that elephant had decided to sit down on our hut we were going to have to make a run for it.
    We survived. And years later, after Nerine’s death, my daughters basically moved into the house and kept me from chasing elephants in the night. And we survived.
    Even during the worst of times I was able to escape into work. I put on my costume and said words written by someone else, and for a few moments at least I could escape the complications of my own life. When you show up on a set nobody is interested in your problems at home. They’re dealing with their own issues. They want you to be there on time and prepared. I was able to work because half of my life has been spent masking my true feelings before the camera.Acting is getting away with it, putting on another face for the camera and internalizing my true feelings.
    What was especially ironic was that several years before Nerine’s death I had to deal with the death of a wonderful part of myself. I had been James Tiberius Kirk for almost thirty years when Paramount called to ask if I was willing to play his death scene.
    I was Jim Kirk, but I didn’t own the rights to me. Paramount owned the character and could do anything they wanted to him. The decision had been made by the studio that after twenty-five years the original crew of the Enterprise had finished its five-year mission. The Star Trek movies had an average gross of about $80 million. The executives believed they might make more money with Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his Next Generation crew in command. They were determined to kill off Captain Kirk so the movie torch would be passed cleanly to Patrick Stewart’s Picard. They explained their decision to me with the great sensitivity I had come to expect from the studio: Kirk was going down, baby! There was a New