Up Till Now: The Autobiography

angry and remorseful; I was frustrated and even afraid. Ironically, though, it was not death that I feared, I was afraid of life. My health was deteriorating and my doctors were extremely concerned that the stress was slowly killing me. And then I met this woman. This intelligent, funny, wise, compassionate, and loving woman named Elizabeth Martin.
    Was it truly possible? Were there really happy endings in life? To meet a woman as young and vital as Elizabeth Martin at this point in my life, to have all the mutual interests: movies and literature and poetry and dance and horses—and to be available for the possibility? Didn’t I make that movie years earlier?
    Six months after we’d begun dating she agreed to marry me. She told me that her fantasy was to be married by the author Marianne Williamson. As she explained, during her husband’s terminal illness they had been reading her book Illuminata, and as he died she had been reading a prayer for a peaceful death. Marianne Williamson is a Jewish woman who is a minister in the Unity Church, which emphasizes love and common sense. The religious aspect was not particularly important to me and if it meant that much to Elizabeth then I wanted to do it. “This is William Shatner,” I said when I reached Marianne Williamson in Detroit. “We’d like you to marry us.”
    “That’s what I do,” she said. Well, this was great. Marianne Williamson agreed to perform the ceremony, but wanted to speak with both of us together to confirm the arrangements. We set a date and time to speak about a week later.
    I was making Elizabeth’s fantasy come true. This was just great. Unfortunately, the day before this appointment Elizabeth and I had a terrible argument. Just terrible. At 9 P.M. the following night we were on the phone with Williamson. “Hello . . .” Elizabeth said, and then started crying. Not just crying, bawling, loud uncontrollable bawling.
    “What’s wrong?” Williamson asked.
    And Elizabeth cried even louder. “You two need work,” Marianne Williamson said. “I’m sorry, I can’t marry you.”
    We had been rejected by Marianne Williamson.
    For the next hour we debated what was more important, being right or wrong, or spending the rest our lives together. Everything cleared up; both of us gave up our need to immediately fulfill our anger and spite and all those negative emotions in exchange for the other person’s love.
    Eventually we called Marianne Williamson back and again she agreed to marry us. The ceremony was to be held at Elizabeth’s father’s farm in Indianapolis, Indiana. A few days before the wedding Marianne Williamson called—she had laryngitis and her doctor wouldn’t let her fly. So again we weren’t going to be married by Marianne Williamson. We decided to go ahead with it. It was going to be a very low-key ceremony; no publicity, no media, just family. It was going to be beautiful. We got our marriage license at the town hall in Lebanon, Indiana. Nobody recognized us. We took a nice walk around the town square and as we got back in the rented car my cell phone rang. It was my manager, Larry Thompson, calling from Los Angeles. “Congratulations!” he said. I had signed the license about ten minutes earlier— and the story was already on the news in L.A. To evade the media—in Indiana—and protect Elizabeth’s father, we secretly moved the ceremony to her sister’s home about fifty miles away.
    For almost a year we believed we’d gotten married that night. Then we discovered that because we’d moved the ceremony to another county, our license wasn’t valid. So we had to get married again in Los Angeles.
    I was legally married, but for the first time I had to learn how to be married. And that was not particularly easy for me. In my past, marriage had been relatively simple—I earned the money, my wife ran the house. It was very traditional. And to a point, those marriages were successful. That point came when my wife wanted more than I was capable of giving emotionally. Then the relationships changed—and I was not flexible enough to understand that or deal with it. So I had to learn that a lopsided relationship doesn’t work. The exercise of power is inevitably self-defeating. What happens is that the person without power loses their self-respect, their whole entity becomes less, and the reasons their partner fell in love with them disappear.
    So Elizabeth turned out to be the culmination of all my relationships—all