Up Till Now: The Autobiography

imagined was climbing that wall—but if I fell I was going to break every bone in Bill Shatner’s body. Through it all, though, one thought resonated in my mind: The star doesn’t get hurt! The star doesn’t get hurt!
    This show received somewhat modest reviews, but I was extremely proud of it. I once said that it was a program I would be proud to pass along to my grandchildren. That’s true, but more important, what I have passed along to those grandchildren is the love and appreciation for this Earth that I gained while making it. For me, it was an epiphany. I suddenly became aware of the way we were using up the Earth, and until very recently doing so without any concern. I became a committed environmentalist and have done my best since then to be responsible about my own use of our resources— although truthfully every once in a while I haven’t been above giving Mother Nature a little pinch in her oil reserves.
    My status as television’s leading man of science and technology was assured in 1978 when I was invited to co-host the first televised Science-Fiction Movie Awards. It was just a simple awards show, not very different from the numerous awards shows broadcast each year, and ordinarily it would have been quickly forgotten. And it would have been, except for those fateful few words I said to producer Arnold Shapiro: “You know what, how about if I sing something?”
    And thus a legend was born, a legend that will live in television history for what I think is going to be a long, long time. For it was on that show that I performed my unforgettable version of the Elton John and Bernie Taupin song “Rocket Man.”
    It has been said about my singing that I have great courage. But beginning with the album The Transformed Man I’ve tried to emphasize the poetry of the lyric by performing it dramatically rather than just singing along to some melody like all those other people, the Sinatras and the Streisands of the world. In fact, during this timeI was touring with a one-man show in which I did dramatic readings from great science-fiction literature, accompanied by a complete philharmonic orchestra. For example, I would read an excerpt from an Arthur C. Clarke story while the orchestra played Stravinsky’s Firebird . The live show was a tremendous success—at the Hollywood Bowl we drew eighteen thousand people, at Anaheim Stadium we had twenty-eight thousand people.
    When I was asked to perform this song I thought I’d try something very unusual. I’d perform the song in its many layers, doing part of it like Sinatra might do it, another part of it emphasizing the rock-it, man, hip aspect of the song and, honestly, I’ve forgotten the third level. Lyricist Bernie Taupin actually introduced me at the Science-Fiction Awards Show. I was sitting on a stool on an otherwise bare stage, dressed impeccably in a tuxedo, smoking a cigarette. And I began talk-singing the story of the lonely rocket man on his way to Mars. “...I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife. It’s lonely out in space. On such a timeless flight . . .” Eventually, using chromakey video techniques, a second version of me appeared, a sadder version. And a few lines later a third Shatner appeared, a tired, disheveled, perhaps even dissolute man. And together the three Shatners finished the song. “. . . and I think it’s gonna be a long, long time...”
    The audience was stunned. People watched in shock and awe and then asked the question, Is he kidding? There is a very thick line between performing a song seriously and doing it in mock seriousness— doing it well enough to confuse the audience about that is the actor’s art. Was I trying to make my performance humorous? Was it intended to be a parody of meaningful singers with cigarettes? Or was I simply out of my mind?
    As so many of the great science-fiction movies remind us, there are some things that mankind was never meant to discover. I will simply report that this remains the best-known performance of the song “Rocket Man” ever done.
    For two decades stories about this performance have been passed down from father to son and rare bootleg copies of the video werepassed around. Men boasted of owning a first-generation copy and invited women home to see it. Parodies of my performance have been done on several shows, including Family Guy and Futurama. But now several dozen versions of it can routinely be accessed on the Internet, particularly on YouTube—with more than a