Up Till Now. The Autobiography

my aides suggested they change the name of the town to... Did you really think I was going to let loose of this idea?... Bill-ville, they actually printed petitions and handed them out, then helped us make and hang a large sign reading, WELCOME TO BILL-VILLE. They also went along with our producer, who whispered to them just before the townspeople vs. cast and crew softball game, “Bill doesn’t like to make an out. So whatever you do, it’s very important that you let him get on base. Otherwise he’s going to be in a real bad mood for the rest of the day.” So they did—and amazingly I then successfully stole second base and third base and then I stole home! Yeah, Shatner!
    And no matter what we did, our new Priceline.com spokesperson was always somewhere in the background, wearing his Priceline.com shirt and hat, and occasionally I would point to him and he would immediately do a promo for Priceline, “Go to Priceline to save a lot of money.” And when we thought Priceline had enough mentions, we made him the spokesperson for Brylcreem.
    When one of my assistants explained I’d always wanted to ride on a fire truck and fight a fire, a member of the Riverside Fire Department actually set fire to an old car. We raced to the fire and they let me man the hose! However, they were a little reluctant to go along with my suggestion that we tell everybody that I’d saved the lives of two people by pulling them out of the front seat.
    Just about the only thing we suggested that they absolutely refused to do was smash the hundred-year-old extremely valuable stained-glass windows in the church. In fact, when we made that suggestion they were... dumbfounded. And even after we told them it was absolutely necessary to break just one window, a small one, when the aliens showed up, they refused.
    There were times when we were afraid people were beginning to figure out that this whole thing was a hoax, particularly when one resident pointed out, “With William Shatner you never know what’s going on. You don’t know if he’s just whacko!” But somehow we managed to keep the secret. Certainly the most difficult thing for us to do during the shoot was continue the deception. Each day it got more difficult to continue lying to these people. Sometimes at our meetings at night people would begin crying about the lies they had to tell. Personally, I began to dread the moment when we would have to reveal the truth. For some reason I had visions of the towns-people carrying torches as they came up the mountain toward Dr. Frankenstein’s castle.
    This was the first time since making The Outrage in a small Southern town more than three decades earlier that I started planning an escape route.
    We couldn’t quit, though. This was a comedy reality show and we had to continue the deception. And then, just when I thought thesituation couldn’t possibly become any more difficult, Don Rath, who had already bestowed upon me the honor of wiping my face with his good-luck raccoon penis, gave me his handmade mustache cup and asked me for a favor in return. “Come with me,” he said.
    Don Rath took me up to the town cemetery to visit the grave of his wife, who had died in 2001. There was Don with his walker and I standing in this sort of barren cemetery before his wife’s tomb-stone. “Look, Mom, look who I brought up to see you.”
    If the citizens of Riverside, Iowa, had known what we were doing and wanted to turn the joke back around on us, this is precisely the way they would have done it. The man was taking me to visit his wife’s grave. And as he spoke he began crying. Oh my goodness, I knew exactly how he felt. Exactly. As it would be forever, Nerine’s death was never further than a thought out of my mind and my soul was deeply wounded. The real emotion of that moment was so strong that Don and I hugged and I started crying. No reality show in the history of television has ever been more real.
    That was not the funny part. Trust me.
    Eventually the time came to reveal the truth. Coincidently it was April first. We invited the key townspeople to a dinner-picnic. It was left to me to tell them the truth. Oy, this was tough. We had absolutely no idea how any of them were going to react. There was every chance it was going to get ugly. There is no movie, I said, my heart thumping wildly. This whole thing is a reality TV show. That was met with the longest silence I’d ever experienced in my life. Finally, someone said, “You