Up Till Now: The Autobiography

stuntman’s girlfriend was kneeling over him, but as I approached she stood up and sand trickled down onto his face. This girl looks at me, tears in her eyes, and says to me, “Mr. Shatner, could I have your autograph?”
    Several months after we’d finished shooting the segment New-land invited me to meet astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who had become known for conducting paranormal experiments from space, and was going to host the program. That was very exciting for me; obviously I had tremendous admiration for the astronauts. When we met he shook my hand firmly and looked me directly in the eyes and said, “Bill Shatner, I’ve admired you for a long time, Captain Kirk, it’s great to meet you. Boy, that is some amazing story about what happened to you in the desert.”
    He thought it was true. I had made up this whole story, and he believed it. How could I tell an astronaut that he was being fooled? That this never happened? “It certainly was amazing,” I agreed.
    The show never went beyond that special episode—but for more than three decades the tabloids have been telling and retelling the story of the day William Shatner’s life was saved by an alien.
    I truly love making up reality. I did a movie entitled Free Enterprise in which I played myself, but a me whose dream it is to do a musical version of Julius Caesar in which I play all the parts—except Brutus, of course, but only because of the technical difficulty involved in stabbing myself in the back. Free Enterprise was a low-budget movie being made by young filmmakers, so we were asked to provide our own wardrobe. In an army-navy surplus store in Westwood I found a beautiful leather bomber jacket, a white scarf, and a World War II captain’s hat. I bought them for about fifty bucks and wore everything in a scene.
    The producers entered the film in the Cannes Film Festival and invited me to come to France to assist in promotion. The producers had decided to donate my bomber jacket, scarf, and cap to the Hard Rock Café. They held a press conference there. Reporters asked me about the clothing and I told the truth as quickly as I could make it up. “I found this jacket,” I said. “It’s Eddie Rickenbacker’s jacket.”Eddie Rickenbacker was one of America’s first aces in World War I, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting down twenty-six enemy aircraft. “This was his original jacket,” I continued. “It was in a glass case in a museum, I believe, and it was stolen. I found it in a used-clothing store and I’ve treasured it ever since. His jacket, scarf, and this is his hat. I would like to donate it to . . .” The Hard Rock Café in Cannes, France, where it occupies a case of honor.
    That’s the true story of how I made up a story. So, I’m onstage with Walter Matthau in A Shot in the Dark at the Booth Theatre and there is a scene in which I’m about to reveal the result of my investigation—the murderer is the gay butler, who had been carrying on a secret affair with the married chauffeur! As the audience knew, Julie Harris’s character, Josefa Lantenay, and I had literally cooked up a plan—we had baked the victim’s wedding ring into a bread pudding and at the climax of my brilliant explanation I was to exclaim, “The proof is in the pudding!” And we would produce the wedding ring.
    This being a farce the plot couldn’t be that obvious. The actual murderer was Walter Matthau, who was in love with Julie Harris and believed she was having an affair with the chauffeur, who really was just using her to cover up his secret affair with the butler, so Matthau’s wife, who was in love with the chauffeur, would leave him alone, which is why Matthau had to kill the chauffeur. That’s farce. So in the middle of my dramatic discourse in which I explained precisely how I had maneuvered through the twisted turns of the labyrinthine murder plot to reach the inevitable conclusion that the butler did it—all the time being chided by Matthau who believed I was an incompetent idiot—just as I reached the moment at which I was to whirl around and point an accusing finger at the gay butler, unbeknownst to me the gay butler took a sip of poisoned wine and fell face forward into the pudding.
    “And so,” I exclaimed, whirling around and pointing my finger at the butler now lying dead facedown in the bread pudding, “I can now reveal that...the poof is in the pudding!”
    Matthau and I just locked eyes. The audience knew that