Up Till Now: The Autobiography

remember too many auditions, but this one I will never forget. By thetime I got back to New York I had memorized the entire script, I knew all my lines. As I started to say the words, I dramatically threw down the script and continued.
    Josh Logan told me later, “That’s what got you the part. That you had the panache to do that, the arrogance, the bravado. It was perfect for the character.”
    The World of Suzie Wong was the show that was going to make me a star! Merrick, Osborn, Logan, and Shatner, that was it. My problem was that I was under contract to M-G-M. Before giving me the part in The Brothers Karamazov the studio had insisted I sign a multi-picture deal. If that picture made me a star, they wanted to own me. I didn’t know how I was going to get out of that deal.
    Fortunately, the first of many projects that were going to make me a star had not made me a star. A year earlier, for the first time in its history, M-G-M had lost money and was actually trying to get rid of its contract players. If they were letting actors like Paul Newman go, they certainly weren’t going to fight to keep William Shatner. I suspect that when I officially requested to be released from my contract executives must have leaped in the air and started cheering.
    Ken Hollywood didn’t even wave good-bye. I didn’t mind, I was going to New York again to be a star.

THREE

    I’ve faced death several times in my life. I hunted a brown bear, one of the most ferocious of all animals, armed with only a bow and arrow. I had become an archer while making the movie Alexander the Great . I loved archery; I reveled in the beauty of the recurved bow and the perfectly balanced arrow. Hitting a target with a handmade bow is truly an art. I had practiced and became proficient at it. I had hunted deer and a pig, so when the TV show American Sportsman asked me to hunt a brown bear in Alaska with a bow and arrow it seemed like an exciting adventure.
    I had no concept of what I was getting into. Somewhere in my mind was the thought that I don’t get hurt, only the stuntmen get hurt. I think I began realizing that wasn’t precisely true as we got off the airplane in Anchorage, Alaska, and watched as two men on stretchers were carried out of a small plane and rushed into an ambulance which immediately raced off with sirens wailing. What was that all about, I asked a guard, and he explained grimly, “They got mauled by grizzlies.” Someone else told me about a large World War II Quonset hut whose entire rear wall was covered by the skin of a giant grizzly. And I heard stories about an Indian village that had been ripped apart by a maddened grizzly that had killed twelve people. The grizzly bear is an astonishingly powerful animal. Over a short span it is faster than a racehorse, it can break a caribou’s back with a single swipe of its paw, and when threatened it attacks.
    The brown bear is larger and more savage than the grizzly bear. The brown bear can be nine feet tall and weigh as much as a thousand pounds. I had my bow and arrow.
    We flew up to the Aleutian Islands. This was actually more complicated and dangerous than an ordinary hunt—and I’d just seen the results of an ordinary hunt carried off an airplane. This was a hunt for television. Meaning that the camera crew had to be standing directly behind me and get the entire sequence in a single shot. The “kill shot” it was called. If the audience didn’t see my arrow hitting the bear, we believed, then people might suspect it had been edited. In addition to myself, our team consisted of two two-man camera crews and a professional guide armed with a high-powered rifle.
    We lived in a shack on the riverbank for ten days, which was more than long enough for me to begin to question my sanity for doing this. Is there anything more horrific than the thought of this mammoth creature eating you alive? Not knocking you unconscious, not starting at your throat, but ripping at your entrails with his huge claws while you’re conscious. Bears kill by scooping out your insides; you don’t die right away. I started having nightmares about how I was going to react at the moment this animal reared up and looked at me and I had to shoot. One shot, that’s all I was going to get.There was no stuntman, no retakes, just me armed with a bow and a single arrow. This was crazy. That bear did not know that I was only an actor.
    What am I doing here? I wondered every day. Finally, after ten days we