Up Till Now. The Autobiography

down the long driveway to make a statement to the mob of reporters. Apparently they’d stayed there all night. I picked up the day’s newspaper that was left in the drive and I told them, “My beautiful wife is dead. Her laughter, her tears, and her joy will remain with me the rest of my life.”
    After the O. J. Simpson debacle I suppose I should have known what was going to happen. I hadn’t, though. It was so clear what had happened that night; there didn’t seem any room for doubt or for questions. But that didn’t stop people or the media from asking those terrible questions. Did Shatner kill his wife? A day after I’d made my statement about loving her forever someone sent a note to the police, “Anybody who is innocent doesn’t stop and pick up a newspaper.”
    It dawned on me then that people were watching me to see how I acted. It was insane. Exactly how do you act when the woman you love has died and people are wondering if you had anything to do with her death? The fact that people could even think this way was stunning to me. Everybody reacts to horror in their own way. It’s one thing to have someone you love who has been sick or struggling die, but this? There’s no way of preparing for a cataclysmic event like this. The feelings I had were vaguely similar to the pain I’d experienced as a little boy, when I’d come home from school one day and found my dog lying in the street. My mother had left the door open and my dog had run outside and been killed by a car. I had completely forgotten that until once again I was experiencing that intense grief. I remember, I’d picked up my dog and carried him home. We had a brick stairway in front of the house and my father had covered the area under those stairs with latticework. There was a little opening so you could get underneath the stairs. I took my dog’s body and I opened the latticework and crawled in there. Sunlight streaming through the latticework formed rectangles that lit this hidden space. And I sat there holding the body of my dog and sobbing.
    As a little boy I’d lost the thing I’d loved the most, and now it had happened again.
    Within a few days of her death I learned that the National Enquirer was going to run a story asking, basically, “Did he or didn’t he kill her?” All the facts had not yet been made public, and as disgusting as it is, people were wondering what had happened that night. I wanted to get the true story out as quickly as possible. We called the Enquirer and offered them a deal. “Don’t run that story. Instead, we’ll give you the exclusive story of what happened that night.” Inexchange they contributed $250,000 to what would eventually become the Nerine Shatner Foundation, which I intended to form to help addicted women. That was the only interview I did for months and I did it because they were going to run a tabloid story, so the fact that I was able to give this money to charity somehow made it seem sensible. Whether or not I would have done it given more time to think I don’t know. Some of her friends didn’t like me saying she was an alcoholic and have resented me ever since.
    Other tabloids did run variations of that story. And people were trying to twist facts and create some kind of conspiracy scenario. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. But to think that any sane person in this world would believe that I had anything to do with killing a human being, let alone contributing to the death of this woman that I loved so much, was beyond my comprehension. I just couldn’t stop thinking about her standing next to my car that morning begging me, “Please don’t leave me, Bill.” I’d left. Twelve hours later she was dead. For anyone to even think, I’ll bet he killed her, is the worst possible thought. It makes me so sad that anyone would think that way.
    About a week after Nerine’s death the police released a tape of my call to 911 for help. These were the kinds of tapes that we had used as the foundation of Rescue 911 for seven and a half years. I heard the familiar anguish and desperation, except this time it was my voice on that tape. I had no expectation of privacy; as every celebrity knows, the price you pay for all the positive things written about you is the surrender of any claim to privacy. It’s a deal and we all make it: once you use the media for publicity you lose your right to complain about the media using your life to sell its product. But admittedly, hearing