Up Till Now. The Autobiography

heel dance on the toes of anybody who crosses my way.”
    This was it, for real, this was the show that was going to make me a star. Herb Brodkin was producing it. Not only was Brodkin the most successful producer in live television—he also did the most meaningful programs. We had the finest New York actors and writers and directors. We were considered the companion show to The Defenders , a top-rated program. Critics loved the show. Many people were rooting for Howard Da Silva, whose career had been destroyed by the blacklist, and this was his comeback. Justice was going to triumph in real life as well as on the show. The show went on the air in January 1965.
    Let me explain what happened this way: They will never be making a twelve-inch action figure of passionate Assistant District Attorney David Koster.
    In its great wisdom, CBS decided the perfect time slot for our show was Sunday night at 9 P.M. Now, what other program would every man in America be watching at that time? How about the most popular television program in America? The number-oneranked western, Bonanza . Now, sometimes you really do wonder if all the top CBS executives happened to be sitting around after work one day and one of them said, I got a great idea, let’s play a big joke on Bill Shatner. We’ll spend all this money to make a TV series, we’ll make him think that this is reallllllllllly the show that’s going to make him a star, and then we’ll put it on the air opposite the top-rated show on television. And they all laughed. I never understood why CBS would bother going through all the trouble and expense of hiring talented writers and actors and technicians and then dropping a very good program into the worst time slot in television. Lamp Unto My Feet had a better time slot—which I know for certain because I played a Roman soldier who picked up the cape worn by Christ, after which I converted to Christianity, while For the People was being run. Test patterns had better time slots.
    But I was still optimistic. I figured, maybe people are tired of well-made westerns. Bonanza starred my old friend Lorne Greene, whose investment advice years earlier had cost me my five-hundred-dollar life savings. This was my chance to get even with him for uranium.
    Got me again. As philosophers like to ask, if a TV show broadcast opposite the number-one program on the air is canceled, does anyone know it? For the People never had a chance. After thirteen weeks it was canceled.
    Almost every actor goes through periods of great frustration, when you wonder seriously why you’re pursuing this often-impossible profession. Usually it happens when you know you’ve done very good work, when you’re proud of what you’ve accomplished, and no one sees it; it disappears. And when that has happened several times you begin to wonder, what am I doing this for? Am I wasting my life? I was born in 1931, right into the Great Depression. While I don’t remember details, I can remember the sense of desperation that seemed to pervade our lives. My father gladly accepted responsibility for many members of his family and it was the money he gladly shared that helped keep many of them alive. I had the same sense of responsibility, and there were many nights I lay thrashing in bed wondering how I was going to support my wife and our children, how Iwas going to make the mortgage payment. The reality of my situation was pretty cold: I was constantly struggling to support my family, I was living from job to job with no security, and talent didn’t seem to make any difference between success and failure. Believe me, there were times when I thought about giving it up, when I never dreamed that someday I might achieve the kind of success that would lead to Howard Stern inviting me to join him in his famous homo room.
    Actually, For the People was not the first series in which I starred, just the first one that got on the air in America. In 1963 I had been hired by producer Selig J. Seligman to star in a weekly series as Alexander the Great. Seligman, who had actually been an attorney at the Nuremberg Trials, was then producing the successful World War II series Combat! And although I didn’t realize it, Alexander the Great was intended to be Combat! in drag. It was going to be a big costume drama in which the men wore little loincloths and the women carried trays of grapes and wine and wore as little as permissible.
    We filmed the two-hour pilot in Utah—for six