Up Till Now: The Autobiography

realism, then go ahead and rent the DVD of my miniseries Invasion, Iowa , in which I took an entire movie crew to Riverside, Iowa—the town that promotes itself as the future birthplace of James T. Kirk—and faked the making of a science-fiction movie while we were really playing a practical joke on the entire town! Now that’s a real fake, unlike this skit on Saturday Night Live .
    When I read the script I decided the best way to make it funny was to play it seriously. If I had been nervous about doing it, if I had been worried about the reaction of Star Trek fans, I would have played it very broadly, as a comedian. Instead, having been to enough conventions to know that most Trekkies were able to laugh at themselves, I did it as an actor.
    And most of them realized it. Most of them loved it. Most of them. In fact, at conventions they started telling each other, “Get a life.” And eventually, when I wrote a book about the phenomenon of Star Trek conventions, it was titled Get a Life . Which, naturally, was sold at conventions. And coincidently is currently available at www.WilliamShatner.com for the bargain price of only $7.95.
    In a very strange way, doing that sketch allowed me to erase some of the distance I’d kept from the Trekkies. With that sketch, as well as some of the others I did on Saturday Night Live , I think they appreciated the fact that I had a sense of humor about myself that perhaps I had not shown very publicly before. I not only could take the joke, I could make it.
    The conventions had become a grand show in themselves, complete with costumed characters, panel discussions, trivia contests, speeches, screenings, and those guest appearances. We were treatedlike rock stars. I was told that there were female Trekkies who kept lists of all the members of the cast with whom they’d slept. I was told this! Told it! But I knew that if I ever ended up on a list the news would circulate at warp speed. It actually put me in the odd position of having to find a way of saying no to a woman without being insulting.
    Not that I was shy around women. Truthfully, I have always enjoyed the company of women. During much of this period I was single and I certainly had opportunities to be with many women and I grasped a great many of those opportunities. Never at warp speed. Admittedly, there were times when the woman I was with said, “So this is what it’s like to be in bed with Captain Kirk.” That was definitely a downer, in every sense of the word.
    Although none of them ever asked me afterward, “Did the universe move for you, too?”
    Among the lessons I learned was the price of my new celebrity. For example, I was very privately dating a young actress and suddenly a photograph of the two of us appeared in the tabloids. I was thunderstruck; this was a part of my life I did not want my young children to know anything about. I couldn’t figure out who could have seen us together, and where and when and how. The woman was just as upset, telling me that she was sick about it. So I stopped seeing her for about six months, and then gradually resumed our relationship. Within a month a second story appeared—only then did I realize that this girl was feeding the story and pictures to the paper to further her career.
    While my celebrity made women available to me, I had learned to wonder why these women were available to me. What was their objective? Everything that I do, that any actor does, can potentially impact their career as well as have legal and even economic consequences. I learned to be very careful. I even had to be careful where I looked when I was in public. In the days before cell phone cameras it was slightly more difficult for a photograph to be taken without my knowledge, but now, now every minute I’m in public I am aware that someone might be snapping a picture. So eyes straight ahead.
    Years after going off the air Star Trek was more popular than it had ever been. Fans couldn’t get enough of it. It was generating millions of dollars in merchandising—of which the cast got almost nothing. But after only seven or eight years Paramount suddenly realized it owned an extremely valuable intellectual property and was doing nothing with it. Somebody came up with an interesting concept: let’s do a TV show! Eventually that concept became six major movies, but that would be later in my career.
    Captain James T. Kirk eventually became one of the best-known and most easily recognized