Up Till Now: The Autobiography

the center of this phenomenon. I might have been smiling as I remembered the decade of rumors and false starts we’d gone through to finally get to this theater. And I might well have been thinking, thank goodness, if this thing is successful I won’t have to do any more quiz shows!
    How can I describe all the quiz shows on which I appeared? What’s another word for “every single quiz show ever done in the entire history of television?” Trust me, I’m going to tell you the truth about this or my name isn’t William Shatner. I’ve got no secrets. I mean, can you think of any reason I shouldn’t have done quiz shows? Who are the two men who created many of the greatest quiz shows in television history? Should I stop asking questions? What do you think the number one answer was when I asked that question?
    The popularity that I’d gained from Star Trek made me a welcome guest on game shows. Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, who produced so many of those shows, really liked me. There were a lot of actors, the Robert De Niros of the industry, for whom doing a quiz show or a game show might have been considered a bit of comedown, but it hasn’t been one for me at any time in my career—especially atthat time. Game shows were fun and I enjoyed doing them. They provided great exposure—it was very good publicity for whatever project I was doing—but mostly for me. And finally, by any ordinary standards the money was good. Maybe not to the $10 million per picture actors, but to me. If I hadn’t enjoyed doing these shows, well, I would have done them anyway. We would tape five shows in one day, and I could just hear my father telling me what to do. “Are you crazy? You’re going to turn down a thousand dollars for one day’s work? You know what I could have bought for a thousand dollars? And you call that work? Sitting there and playing a game? I’ll tell you what work is!”
    Among the game shows I did were Hollywood Squares, The $20,000 Pyramid and The $25,000 Pyramid, Rhyme and Reason, Liar’s Club, Tattletales, The Cross-Wits, To Tell the Truth; I was the celebrity guest on the premiere episode of the Blankety Blanks show. That’s not censorship, that was the name of the show, Blankety Blanks . On The Storybook Squares, the Saturday morning children’s version of Hollywood Squares, I appeared dressed as Captain Kirk—that was okay, on the same show Paul Lynde was dressed as the evil queen from Snow White. I even rolled on Celebrity Bowling . I could continue but you get the idea: if they wanted me, I was there.
    Here’s one game that you can play along with me: Masquerade Party . On this show the celebrity guest came out dressed in a costume that hid his or her identify. Based on the costume the panel asked questions until they figured out the identity of the guest. The mystery guest in this sentence is dressed as Cap’n Andy, the captain in Jerome Kern’s classic Show Boat, and the set was the deck of a paddle-wheel steamer. Can you guess the identity of the guest? All right, here’s the clue the mystery guest gave on the show, “We’ve got a lot of stars on our boat!”
    Give up? Okay, it was me! As was very well known, I had played the role of the... captain of a starship! Now, I never said these shows were difficult, just fun.
    A very good writer named Sean Kelly once approached me with the most unusual concept for a game show that never went intoproduction. It was called Land-A-Million, and obviously he approached me because I had my private pilot’s license. The way this show worked was I took off with the contestant in a small plane carrying a million dollars in cash. To qualify, the contestant could not have ever piloted a plane in his life. As soon as we got to five thousand feet I bailed out. And then, if the contestant was able to land that airplane he got to keep the money. I don’t know what happened but this show never went into production.
    Almost all of the game shows were taped all day Saturday in New York. So I’d get on the red-eye Friday night in L.A. and land at JFK at 6 A.M. I’d take a cab to the studio and be there by eight o’clock, nine o’clock at the latest. I’d hoped to sleep a few hours on the flight, but usually I failed, so I was tired before we started. We would shoot five shows in one day. In several of the theaters my dressing room was up several flights of stairs and I would have to change my wardrobe between each show. So I’d be rushing up and down