Up Till Now. The Autobiography

Eventually I was offered the role of Alexei, the youngest of the four Karamazov brothers. Yul Brynnerwas my oldest brother, Dmitri, who was scheming to get our father’s fortune. Lee J. Cobb was our lecherous father, whose character was described in his line, “Each man should die on his own chosen field of battle—mine is bed.”
    This was my big break, this role was going to make me a star! While it wasn’t going to make me rich, it would make me financially secure for the first time in my career. Even working as often as I did, I still had not managed to save more than eighteen hundred bucks. That was my goal, to have more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank, and this role would enable me to do that.
    Gloria and I had bought a little sports car, a convertible. We packed all our belongings, put down the top, and drove across America. When we got closer to Los Angeles I put up the top and in that sudden quiet I realized I hadn’t spoken with my wife in four days. That trip put a distance between us that I’m not sure we ever really closed.
    We rented an apartment in a complex in Westwood that was popular with people in the entertainment industry. Among them was a beautiful young woman who would sit around the pool all day wearing large sunglasses, always by herself and never talking to anyone. She was so wonderfully mysterious. What was the secret behind this beautiful young woman who never left the building and refused to speak to anyone? Only later did I find out she had been stashed there by Howard Hughes, who never showed up. That was her job, waiting for a man who was never going to arrive. But seeing her there, day after day, fit so perfectly with my image of Hollywood.
    This was my initiation to the movie business: as I drove to the M-G-M lot on the morning we were to begin work I thought about my father’s plea that I not become a hanger-on. Five years he’d given me, and here I was literally on my way to becoming a movie star. It was an extraordinary feeling. I pulled up to the front gate and the guard asked for my pass. His name was Ken Hollywood, and I will never forget it. I didn’t have a pass. I was in a major motion picture, I explained, I didn’t need a pass. He looked at his clipboard and shook his head, “You’re not on the list,” he said.
    “I’m William Shatner,” I said, and for the dramatic purposes ofthis book I’ll assume beads of sweat began forming on my forehead. “You see, I’ve got to be on the set at nine o’clock...”
    “You’re not on the list,” he repeated firmly, directing me to make a U-turn and leave M-G-M. I drove all the way back to Westwood and sat in my apartment all morning until the confusion was cleared up. Apparently someone had forgotten to put me on the list. Perhaps that should have given me some idea of my importance in this production.
    The Brothers Karamazov was my first experience on a big-budget film. Most of the television shows I’d done had taken less than a week to complete and the budgets were so small we had to wear our own clothes; the shooting schedule for this movie was several months. From the very beginning what surprised me was the ease with which vast sums of money were spent on things other than the actual production. Lunch cost more than an entire Playhouse 90 production. The meals, the cars, the perks, the amount of money that was spent on everything but the movie was astonishing. And nobody seemed to even notice.
    The process of making this movie had absolutely no relation to any acting experience in my career. It seemed to me that most of the other actors would learn their lines on the set. I was working as I had learned to work: I knew the entire script before I got to Hollywood. To me, that’s the work of acting. Acting is memorizing, absorbing the words and knowing what they mean to the character and how you want to say them. Once you’ve done that, it’s sandbox time. Playtime. What we’re doing is pretending, so let’s go ahead and pretend with the tools we have, the shovel and the pail, or in the actor’s case your lines and your knowledge of the character. But several actors literally would be learning their lines as we were shooting.
    Director Richard Brooks was a bit of a perfectionist. I was actually witness to nineteen takes for the word no. It wasn’t me, it was someone else, and it took nineteen takes to get it exactly the way he wanted it. Until that day, I didn’t know there were nineteen