Up Till Now: The Autobiography

who was replaced by Doug McClure, owned the local casino. I can’t begin to imagine the number of different costumes I’ve worn in my career. I know it sounds glamorous and even romantic; wow! My job was dressing up as a pirate or a lawyer or a cowboy. But this was television, not motion pictures. We didn’t have the luxury of new costumes. We had to use whatever was hanging in the wardrobe department—and some of those costumes had been hanging there for years. So in reality I was putting on old clothes that didn’t fit and were full of lice, wigs that smelled awful and itched, and shoes that were always too small or too large and caused blisters.
    In our two-hour pilot film I worked undercover as a one-eyed pirate and a blind beggar, a well-suited bank examiner and a Ku Klux Klan member, a priest and a Chinese man.
    Working on this show made me appreciate the beauty of Spock’s ears. Each morning we began with the wardrobe person going through racks of clothes until he found exactly what he wanted; at the same time a makeup man was inventing my makeup. When my makeup was on and I was in costume I’d look into the mirror and get into character. It took about three hours to do the costume, makeup, and preparation. As soon as I got done the assistant director notified the director, “Shatner’s ready.” They would stop whatever they were doing and move to my next location and get set up. We’d shoot my scene, then cut!
    Baaaaaack I went upstairs while they returned to whatever they were shooting. It would take me about an hour to get out of my makeup. My face got raw from peeling off rubber. Then the wardrobe man came back to create my next costume and the makeup man went back to work. Three more hours, shoot my scenes in that character, back upstairs. We did that at least twice every day.
    Having the lead in a series is the hardest work in show business. It’s physically debilitating, backbreaking, marriage-wrecking, mind-blowing work. It’s fourteen to eighteen hours a day on the set, and then when you’re done working you begin doing the publicity necessary to promote it.
    ABC was extremely enthusiastic about the series. We were stealing concepts from several of the most popular series on TV. They hung large signs all around the lot, WELCOME TO BARBARY COAST. They spent money decorating the sets. When we began shooting we would have 130 extras crowding the saloon, a piano player and a banjo player in the background, and in the street we had a dozen horses tied to hitching posts. That went on for about six weeks, until our first show was broadcast.
    We got poor notices and our ratings weren’t very good. The next week I noticed that there were only a hundred people in the bar, the banjo player was gone, and there were eight horses hitched in the street. Our ratings went down again the following week; there were seventy people in the bar and the piano player had been replaced by a player piano. There were four horses in the street and I was doing only one costume change a day. We knew we were in serious trouble when the signs started coming down. Each week the cast got a little smaller, until we were down to ten people standing in a corner of the bar, a drunk was singing in the background, and the hitching post had been removed. I put on one costume Monday morning and wore it for the entire episode. I wouldn’t even bother putting on makeup, they just pasted a mustache on my face. We were canceled after thirteen weeks and I was thrilled about it. I had done fifty different characters in thirteen weeks. When the series was canceled I could finally get back to doing what I did best, worrying about getting the next job.

SEVEN

    Now , I know that a true autobiography is supposed to reveal to the reader those signifi-cant events from which the subject learned the important lessons that impacted his or her life. The takeaway lessons for the reader. Lessons far more important than “Don’t take Esperanto as your second language in high school.” And so I am very happy to be able to do so.
    I have learned some very valuable lessons in my life, lessons that are indeed worth sharing. For example, at one point I was invited to participate in a televised poker tournament, The World Poker Tour , which was being taped at Trump’s Taj Mahal Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City. I had never played competitive poker, truthfully I’d never quite understood what it was all about, so I agreed to do it.
    I knew the basic