Up Till Now: The Autobiography

much less on the wing of an airplane in flight. It was just unbelievable, everyone knows that a real creature playing on an airplane wing at twenty thousand feet would be considerably more aerodynamically shaped.
    But viewers didn’t care what the creature looked like, that was the brilliance of the story. They could have put someone out there with a lamp shade on his head and people would have been scared. One reviewer commented that this show “Did for the fear of flying what Psycho did for showers.”
    However, as tribute to this program, you can buy a twelve-inch action figure of the gremlin holding a piece of the wing—in fact, there are two different gremlin action figures, both of them dressed in that same cheesy costume. Not from my store at WilliamShatner
    .com, of course, but elsewhere.
    While I had been offered the lead role in several different TV series, I’d turned them all down. I had been trained in the old school, although that was in the formative years of television so it actually was the new school: a real actor did not sign to do a series because then he couldn’t accept the starring role in the Broadway play orHollywood film that was going to make him a real star. Or, worse, you would become typecast, locked into a specific category of roles which could mean the end of a career. So I had turned down several offers to star in a series—and watched as Richard Chamberlain became a major TV star playing the role I’d turned down as Dr. Kildare and Robert Reed became a star playing the role I’d created in “The Defenders.” Maybe they had stardom and security and more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank, but I still had my actor’s integrity!
    Unfortunately, I was also starting to get typecast—as an actor who starred in meaningful movies that didn’t make a lot of money and every TV series from The Nurses to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. But truthfully, a guaranteed weekly paycheck was beginning to look very enticing. And I was practically a regular on The Defenders ; I made five appearances on that show and six on Dr. Kildare . For someone who didn’t want to be tied to a series, I was tied to just about every series—without the publicity or the paycheck. Based on the success of his show featuring father-and-son defense attorneys, The Defenders producer Herb Brodkin created another show that told legal stories from the points of view of an older and a younger prosecutor. He asked me to co-star with a fine veteran actor named Howard Da Silva.
    This is it, he told me, this is really truly cross-my-heart no kidding honest-to-goodness the show that is going to make you a star. It’s your turn, Bill.
    Finally. Once again. Of course, this was long before we’d learned the hard reality of life that just before Charlie Brown kicks the football, Lucy is always going to pull it away from him. So I accepted the role of Assistant District Attorney David Koster in Herb Brodkin’s For the People. It wasn’t The Defenders, it was better than The Defenders . This wasn’t a repeat of something that had been done before, at that time this was a new and exciting idea. The trials of a passionate prosecutor, a dedicated man with a single-minded zeal to defend the criminal justice system of the United States of America. And it was perfect for me: I mean, maybe I’d never been inside a real courtroomin my life, but I’d often played a lawyer or a criminal on TV. So I knew the TV legal system inside and out.
    Howard Da Silva, who played my understanding boss, had been blacklisted by McCarthy, but somehow managed to retain his idealism. He was a terrific actor and while making this series we became good friends. I loved him. Jessica Walter played my beautiful wife, a free-spirited musician who performed in a classical string quartet. While the scripts focused on my work, they also included plot lines about our family life, which was a very innovative concept at that time. That was as close to a real family life as I was living. We shot thirteen episodes in New York so I had to leave Gloria and our three girls in Los Angeles while I stayed in the city. Working.
    For the People was a very good show about meaningful legal issues. TV Guide wrote that it was “more compelling” and “probing” than The Defenders, and that it put me in the “big leagues” of TV actors. The character I played, as I told a New York reporter, was the kind of dedicated prosecutor who did “a regular Spanish Flamenco