Up Till Now: The Autobiography

I wanted to make in Free Enterprise .
    In fact, I was such a good stunt fighter that I almost got myself badly hurt. When my daughters were teenagers the four of us went to a go-cart track. They were very pretty young women and naturally they attracted teenage boys. As my girls rode along these boys were zipping back and forth, trying to cut them off, doing anything to get their attention. I was riding behind my daughters, trying to protect them. I was being the old bull, protective of the herd, trying to keep these young bucks from cutting in.
    Finally I herded my daughters off the track and these three teenaged boys came over to us and started acting like young adolescents. Now I know that eighteen years old is an interesting age for boys, emotionally they’re still kids, but they’ve got the physical presence of men. Of course, having teenaged girls I didn’t quite understand that. So I stood up to those kids, demanding, “What do you think you were doing with my daughters? You keep that up you’re going to kill somebody.”
    “Yeah? Who’s gonna stop us?” Obviously they were real wiseguys. I wasn’t going to take that from these... kids. I took a bold stepforward. And suddenly I thought, I can take all three of these guys. I’d been fighting stuntmen for decades. Just a week or so earlier Leonard Nimoy and I had taken six stuntmen. Just the two of us. We’d beaten six tough men. In my mind I began to plan my strategy, so when I went into action I wouldn’t make any missteps. As Kirk I’d often done a fighting stunt in which I leaped into the air with a double-scissor kick and pushed off against a stuntman’s chest. He would reel backward into a wall which knocked him out cold, while I hit the ground and rolled, then hit the second bad guy with an elbow and then...
    Wait a second, I realized. That’s pretend. Then I remembered Newton’s third law: For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. If I actually leaped into the air and pushed off against some-one’s chest, absolutely nothing is going to happen to him but I’m going to fall onto the floor. So if I tried to do that to these kids, they were not going to go reeling backward and be knocked unconscious. I was going to end up on the ground and they were going to kick me. And I would get hurt.
    That certainly wasn’t a good idea. So instead I began thinking about employing diplomacy. Kirk had often been called upon to use diplomacy to prevent one world from...
    I do remember the most truly dangerous stunt I ever did. For real. What I don’t remember is why I did it. We were making an ABC Sunday Night Movie called Disaster on the Coastliner . The Coastliner was a train set on a collision course by a deranged engineer attempting to avenge the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter—and among the passengers were the vice president’s wife and daughter. We were filming on a deserted stretch of track in Connecticut. I played a con man with a heart of gold plating. In a key scene I had to stand on top of a speeding diesel locomotive and fight a stuntman while a helicopter was trying to swoop down and rescue me. When I read the script I thought it was an impressive stunt, but I didn’t know how they intended to do it.
    When we started filming I asked the director, “How are we going to do this? Are we going back to the studio to do a green screen?”When he admitted he hadn’t figured it out yet, I suggested, “Well, why don’t we do it in real life?”
    It was let’s-put-on-a-play-in-the-barn, boys and girls, time. I have no idea what I was thinking when I said that.
    His face lit up. “Really?” “Yeah. Sure, why not?” Why not? Because I could have gotten killed, that’s why not. But listening to myself talk I started getting excited. “Here’s what we’ll do. The train’ll go five miles an hour and I’ll get up on top and you can get some close-ups, then you can speed up the film and it’ll look like a real fight.”
    “Really?” I think he was as stunned as I should have been. But there was a difference between the two of us. I was the one climbing up on top of the train. He was the sane one. “Okay,” he said enthusiastically. “Let’s do it. You go ahead and climb up there.”
    The problem, I quickly discovered, was that this was a diesel engine, meaning there was no smokestack, nothing to which we could attach safety cables. It’s aerodynamic, flat. The only way I could be attached to a safety