Up Till Now: The Autobiography

absolutely furious. At that moment I didn’t want anything to do with her, so I decided to walk home. Walk all the way home, at least eight miles. Unfortunately, I was wearing new cowboy boots at the time. But I was going to walk home, I wasn’t going to give Marcy the satisfaction of accepting a ride or calling a cab. As it turned out those particular boots were not made for walking, they were made for driving in a car. Within the first couple of miles the blisters began forming. My route took me right through Boys Town, the gay section of Santa Monica. I just kept going and by the time I got home my feet were bleeding. But I made it. I proved my point. Whatever that point was.
    My youngest daughter, Melanie, remembers Marcy as “the most beautiful, perfect caretaker imaginable. My dad really didn’t want to have any more children and she really did want to have children, so I became her surrogate child. I needed a mother and she needed a child and we agreed, ‘Okay, you’ll do.’ “
    There’s a story actors tell that took place during the Depression, when work was hard to find. A young actor named John Wayne was just beginning his career, playing the first singing cowboy in a series of B-Westerns at Republic Studios. Supposedly he was walking across the lot one day, muttering to himself, when he bumped into the legendary philosopher-comic Will Rogers. “What’s the matter, kid?” Rogers asked him.
    Wayne shook his head. “Oh, they got me making these ridiculous singing cowboy films...”
    Rogers listened to Wayne complain, and when he finally stopped he asked, “You working?”
    Wayne nodded. “Keep working,” Rogers said, and walked away.
    This was my own depression: I was working, I’d made prestigious films, I’d been a Broadway star, a television star, and I’d made some good movies; I’d gotten wonderful reviews, I’d won awards—and I’dended up living in the back of a truck or renting an apartment from an insane landlady. I was always professional about my work; I was proud to be an actor, so no matter how outrageous my role I treated it with respect: When necessary I became a well-meaning homicidal maniac.
    I made a lot of theatrical B-movies and television movies during this period. I knew what they were; the reality is when you open a script entitled The Horror at 37,000 Feet you can be certain you’re never going to hear those magic words, “The nominees for Best Picture . . .” In many instances I just came in for a few days, did my few scenes, and left. I never saw the picture or read the reviews. Several of these movies were actually quite good, they explored controversial issues, but the majority of them were just terrible. Terrible doesn’t begin to express how truly awful some of these movies were. There’s an Esperantoese word to describe these movies: Oy! Some of these movies were so awful I wouldn’t even sell them in my online store, WilliamShatner.com.
    Let me give you an example: One of the first TV movies I did was Perilous Voyage, which originally was titled The Revolution of Antonio DeLeon . We filmed it in 1968 in San Pedro, California. This film was a disaster; not a disaster film, just a complete disaster. I played a drunken playboy on a luxury cruise ship hijacked and held hostage by a South American guerilla and his followers because it is carrying weapons they need for their revolution. There were several good experienced actors in the cast: Lee Grant, Victor Jory, Frank Silvera, Stuart Margolin, and Michael Tolan. The whole plot hinged on the fact that this guerilla leader, Antonio DeLeon, was so handsome, so charismatic that several women passengers couldn’t resist falling in love with him. Supposedly he was a Che Guevara type. A talented, handsome young actor named Michael Parks was hired to play that role. Michael Parks should have been a star, but as it turned out he was just too arrogant.
    On the first day of filming he arrived on the set made up to look like a sixty-year-old Mexican bandit out of 1940s B-movie Western. He had a potbelly, a gold tooth, and was wearing a white suit. It couldn’t have been more wrong if he had been made up as SantaClaus. The director tried to convince him to play it differently but he was adamant: “This is the way I’m going to play it.”
    The actors were transported back and forth from the ship on a small speedboat. One afternoon several of us were on this boat when its engine failed. We started drifting out