Up Till Now: The Autobiography

“Ready, Bill?”
    Action. I got the horse running, I yanked the reins, the horse falls. Perfect. And I almost get out of the way. Part of my shin was caught under the horse. The horse struggled to get up, but couldn’t, and it was lying on my leg. And I can’t get my leg out from underneath. It felt like it was broken.
    As it turned out, the dirt in the pit was actually clay; they had watered the clay and it was hardening. The horse kept rolling on my leg. Finally the horse got up. I was shaking with pain, but I was determined to complete the scene. I wasn’t going to go through all that and not get it done. So I said my lines. Then, cut! “Bill, are you okay?”
    “No. I think I’m dying.” My foot was swelling rapidly. My boot had to be cut off. They rushed me to the Emergency Room of a large downtown hospital. I was lying on a gurney in this urban hospital, all around me were victims of shootings and stabbings, cops were walking around. People were moaning and screaming, crying. It was as if I’d been dropped into a scene out of a Tyrone Guthrie–directed Greek tragedy in downtown Los Angeles. I was lying there on a stretcher, dressed in my cowboy costume, my face covered with my full pancake makeup—and nobody even noticed. I was the most normal-looking person there. Actually, I suppose, it could have been a lot worse. Later in the episode we were filming I was costumed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
    The producers were incredibly concerned. They saw me lying in pain and said with great sympathy, “When do you think you can get back to work?” The doctor put an air cast on my leg. Two days later I was back at work. Limping, but working.
    People always tell you when you have an accident while doing something that the best thing to do is try it again as quickly as possible. It’s like falling off a horse, they explain, you have to get right back on the horse. In this case I had fallen off a horse, which completely ruined that metaphor. But I did get right back on, and through the years I’ve fallen off several times.
    Years later, for example, I had been invited to sing five songs nominated for Song of the Year on the very first MTV Movie Awards show. I was scheduled to go into the studio the afternoon before the show. That morning I was out riding with my close friend Danny Giradi at his facility. I was on a young horse, a three-year-old, that was a little skittish. “You know, Bill,” he told me. “The type of horse you’re on is very sensitive. If you put your hand on their kidney area, their hip area, they’re really sensitive.”
    That was interesting. I reached back, “You mean like this?” Apparently that’s precisely what he meant. The horse bucked, throwing me into the air. I was out cold for more than a half hour. When I came to I asked the woman who was helping me, “What happened?”
    “Well, you got knocked out by the three-year-old.” “Oh. Well, what happened?” “You got knocked out by the three-year-old.”
    It was like I was walking slowly out of a deep haze, I couldn’t process the information. “Really? So what happened?”
    Eventually I was taken to a doctor who decided I was all right. But then I remembered I had to record my five songs. I was still covered with dirt and manure and dust but we went to the studio. Knowing that I intended to speak the lyrics, I told MTV I needed some instruments to carry the melody. MTV had provided a xylophone and bongos. That was my accompaniment. “What’s my first song?” I asked the lovely woman from MTV.
    She said, “I Want to Sex You Up.”
    Rapidly I came out of my fog. “What’s the first song?” “I Want to Sex You Up.”
    As I discovered, the lyrics were very simple: “I want to sex you up,I want to sex you up. Sex you up, sex you up, I want to sex you up.” Oh perfect, I thought, a love song. With bongos.
    It actually was a very funny show. For example, the first MTV Movie Award given for Best Inanimate Object went, I believe, to Vanilla Ice, who just beat out the wallpaper from Barton Fink . So naturally my performance was duly appreciated.
    I got to ride almost weekly when we were filming Barbary Coast in 1975. This was the first series I’d done since Star Trek, the original version and the animated version. I played a special investigator, a master of disguise, working for the governor of California on San Francisco’s lawless Barbary Coast in the 1870s. My partner, played initially by Dennis Cole,