Up Till Now: The Autobiography

months. Adam West and John Cassavetes were also featured in the cast. I rarely do any research beyond reading the script, but in this case I saturated myself in the lore of Alexander the Great. And I was enthralled by him. What an extraordinary human being. What a truly inspiring life he led. How can this show miss, I thought? It’s got action and adventure and beautiful women and guys fighting on horseback—and it’s based on fact. Perhaps it wasn’t as exciting as a hillbilly family moving to Beverly Hills or a Martian sorting out life on Earth, premises for two of the most popular shows then on the air, but nothing like it had ever been done before on television.
    I had yet to figure out that by this time when something hadn’t been done on television, there probably was a good reason it hadn’t been done on television.
    Alexander was a soldier and a philosopher, taught by Aristotle, who marched his army over twenty thousand miles in eleven years, conquering most of the known world. He never lost a battle andintroduced a common language—no, not Esperanto—and currency to a great part of that region, before dying at thirty-two years old. Coincidentally, I was precisely the same age he was when he died.
    I spent more than a year preparing to play this role. This time I believed this role could make me a star. I worked out with weights and got myself in the best physical shape of my life. This is when I learned how to shoot a bow and arrow. I learned the elements of sword fighting and I learned how to ride a horse at a gallop bareback because Alexander had disdained a saddle as being too weak for his manliness! I learned how to do a flying mount, swinging up onto a horse from the side while it’s moving. And I worked with an expert horse trainer, for example, to learn how to mount a horse from the rear, which is very difficult and can be dangerous and unusually painful. Let me give you a little bit of advice here: horses do not like to be mounted from the rear. They do not come equipped with a rearview mirror and, like any animal, they don’t like to be surprised from behind where they are defenseless. But I learned how to do it.
    Seligman wanted this show to be as historically accurate as possible. I had been outfitted in the hardened leather armor Alexander would have worn. During a pause on the second day of shooting, as I walked along holding the reins of a beautiful saddle-bred five-gaited champion, the director approached me with a worried look on his face and told me we had to reshoot a scene we’d done the day before. “We lost the sound when you were leaning over the dying soldier and saying kind words,” he explained. “All that leather you’re wearing is creaking and we can’t hear the dialogue.”
    I looked out over all that I could survey of the hardened plains of Utah, dressed as Alexander had been dressed, holding a horse that could have been his legendary horse Bucephalus, and I thought, I’m talking about a problem that Alexander had to have dealt with because they rode at night. They would ride great distances at a great pace, binding their horses’ hooves in rags, and make silent forays into the camp of the enemy. In a flash I knew that Alexander had told his aides, “The noise we’re making with our leather armor is warning our enemy. We’ve got to do something about it.”
    At that moment history came alive for me, it all sort of mystically came together.
    Of course, Alexander didn’t have to deal with sensitive microphones and studio executives. There wasn’t too much we could do about the problem—they made some technical adjustments.
    The pilot episode opened with a sonorous voice-over, proclaiming, “Persia, 2,297 years ago. A land of rock . . .” Unfortunately, Seligman couldn’t sell the pilot of a show taking place in a land of rock to the networks and eventually recut it to movie length. Released as a theatrical film in Europe, it was very successful. But by the time it was finally shown on American television, to be accurate the voice-over should have begun, “Persia, 3,001 years ago . . .” With so much wonderful historic material to work with, the scripts were just riddled with clichés. Now, perhaps if we had put Alexander in a time machine and had him transported to Beverly Hills where we could see his wacky adventures, that show might have worked, but this show did not.
    I took a lot of pride in the fact that I did all of my own stunts. Except for those