Boldly go, p.2
Boldly Go, page 2
In my life, I have been very lonely at times. Perhaps it is just the nature of who I am. I didn’t grow up alone—I had two parents and two sisters—but my condition was always one of solitude and yearning for companionship, a deeper connection perhaps than I felt to my own family. Much of this recognition about myself came in my adult years, and it is something with which I am still coming to terms. As a younger man, and as a boy before that, I had no clue what I needed. I would venture that few people do. I’m often reminded of a quote concerning maturity that has been attributed (although some say mistakenly) to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” I am sure many of us have felt similarly about our own supposed journeys in maturity, and those of our parents, and yet I wish I had a better understanding of me at a younger age. In spite of my success (and I certainly don’t mean to sound in any way ungrateful for all that life has brought me), I still wonder sometimes how my life would have turned out if I could have taken steps to mitigate that essential loneliness.
Even as our souls yearn for that bloodline bond to our relatives, the world does things to pull us apart. Instead of living and laboring on the family farm all of our short lives, now we have opportunities that compel us to branch out. They create physical and emotional distance from the core of this unit we have found so crucial to our survival as a species. You go off to university, which takes you away from home; you get a degree; and in your field, a job offer may present itself in another city, another state, another country even, and so off you go. Or you meet someone from a different place, and your desire to be with them, to begin starting your own family unit, compels you to follow them to their homeland. We gain something from fulfilling ourselves on professional and personal levels, but in doing so, we cannot help but rob ourselves of the close roots we had known.
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I wish I’d had this awareness when I was younger. I lived at home until I graduated from McGill University in downtown Montreal at the age of twenty-one. I’m proud to say that all these years later, the student union center at McGill is known as the Shatner Building.
I never had a car during my early years, so I would take a twenty-minute streetcar from my home and walk to the campus. I did not attend quite as many classes as I should have, but I partook in all manner of extracurricular activities, largely centered around the arts department. After graduating, I did summer theater. From there, the manager hired me to go to Ottawa to do professional winter theater during the season. I got myself a car, moved all my belongings into it, and set off to seek my fortune. I networked with people based in Toronto who were organizing the Stratford Shakespeare Festival; they asked me to join them, and so, again seeking the next chapter of my journey, I went to Stratford, Ontario.
I remember feeling so isolated and lonely. Trying to make it on my own, I faced some of the most existential struggles of my life—literally. There were days when I would have to go without meals. I ate mostly at the five-and-dime; how much money I had in my pocket determined what I ate. Some days it would be coffee and toast for breakfast and then a small dinner at day’s end, or a fruit salad for lunch, which would have to last me until the next day. I was struggling to survive, earning about $40 per week. From that I paid my rent and bills, put gas in my car, and tried to have enough left over for some semblance of a life, starting with food.
Years later, after Star Trek and my divorce from my first wife, I found myself in a similar existence, paying alimony and child support and living in my pickup truck with only my dog to comfort me. If you have ever been in such a position, you know that survival becomes your obsession. In some ways, that feeling never goes away.
Here’s the thing: on some level, it doesn’t matter how much wealth I acquire or how secure I feel at any given moment; in the next moment, I will feel that I am one step away from poverty. That’s what living in a pickup truck can do to you. That’s what being Jewish and growing up in the Great Depression and the time of the Holocaust can do to you. I wasn’t told that life was fleeting; it was more something learned through osmosis. Being Jewish, I just had an understanding that at a moment’s notice, you might need to go. When it came to financial security, you had to carry your skill, because one day, you might have to move quickly. The expression of that was evident in the favoring of certain careers over others: be in jewelry, so you can scoop it up and go; be in banking, so you can get out of town before they get you; be a doctor; be a lawyer—be something that allows you to carry your skills.
The idea of being Jewish and choosing the performing arts was not normal when I came of age. Even without that background, acting is a bit of a scofflaw profession. We are all beggars. It’s the nature of the job. You’re always begging: “Can I have a job? I’d be perfect for that part! Look at my range!”
For a long time, mine was not a secure living by any stretch. My goal, for some arbitrary reason, was to see if I could get to $1,800 in my bank account. It would happen, especially during Star Trek, but with a wife, three kids, and a mortgage, it rarely lasted. After my first divorce, I fell on particularly tough times, and in those days, television shows didn’t pay residuals when they were rerun. My life got desperate. I recovered, thank goodness, but that feeling in your gut of not knowing where your next meal was coming from, sadly, on some level, never really goes away.
As silly as it may sound, even though my family and I are taken care of financially, I still want to ensure I’m getting it right when it comes to money. I want to be paid what I think I’m worth; I want to save money on purchases where discounts are achievable. My survival instinct is still at play all these many decades later.
I wonder sometimes if my compulsion to do everything in my power to pursue my acting ambition was a point of pride, a subconscious desire to prove that my exodus from the comfortable family structure that had kept me fed and warm had to be for something. If we are programmed by nature to create and be part of these units for essential survival as well as comfort and some degree of happiness, then when we choose to disconnect from them in pursuit of something else, there must be a driving force that says we simply must achieve it. We risk so much just for the opportunity.
When confronted with the possibility of failure, as I attempted to navigate greener pastures in the entertainment industry, I would reassure myself that I could always go to Toronto and find enough local acting work to sustain me. I don’t remember ever saying to myself, “Well, I can always go into business with my father and manufacture men’s suits,” or “I can always go home and sleep in my old bedroom.” Those thoughts never occurred to me; in turn, it never occurred to me to give up. There wasn’t anything to give up. I simply was not going to do anything other than perform.
What saddens me in hindsight is that when I went off to pursue these goals, I really did break some of those bonds without paying any respect to them. I didn’t have the maturity to understand the deeper implications. I paid no extra attention to my family; I did not seek to compensate for my physical distance with more letters or phone calls. I wonder if my loved ones suffered for that. I have no doubt in looking back that I did.
In the last year, I have completed work on my latest album, Bill. (It’s available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music—you’ll be able to find it; go buy it or stream it or whatever you do with music these days!) I know the style of performance on my albums is not typical of singer-songwriters; it is more of a spoken-word poetry set to music. I’ve spent countless hours writing and refining the lyrics, and working with musicians to achieve the end result, and it is always incredibly meaningful to me. Each word, each phrase, each note, is chosen with purpose and deliberation.
I wrote a song on this album called, simply, “Loneliness.” My vision was to express a sense of isolation, and originally, I had planned to do so in an orchestral fashion through what I believe to be the loneliest sounding string instrument: the cello. Something about the timbre of the cello reminds me of the wail of the wind or the cry of a loon. For me, it embodies that loneliness with which we are all born. I had written to Yo-Yo Ma to ask if he would play on the song, but his schedule did not permit it. From that, however—and I’ll fill you in on the details in a later chapter—we found a completely different way of looking at and orchestrating that feeling of loneliness. Because we all feel it.
And yet.
There is family. There are friends. There are ways to mitigate the loneliness, to share in life experiences, and, as was expressed by actor Laurence Luckinbill as Sybok in Star Trek V (in one of its better moments, I believe), to “gain strength from the sharing.”
I am fortunate: most of my own family is close by. Two of my three daughters live within a couple of miles of my house, while the other lives about fifty miles away—super easy to visit, barely an inconvenience.
My three daughters—Leslie, Lisabeth, and Melanie—and my wife, Elizabeth, are the absolute lights of my life. Each of my girls has such a distinctive personality that some people find it hard to believe they all had the same mother, but it’s true. Their mother, Gloria, and I were divorced about twelve years into the marriage, after all three children had been born.
At this moment, most of my grandchildren also live within that same nearby circumference. I strive with objective knowledge to do what I didn’t do all those years ago: to keep this wonderful unit thriving and to keep us all involved in each other’s lives. During the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, when in-person gatherings were dangerous and prohibited, we turned to technology. Every Sunday, we met in a big Shatner Family Zoom. Often, we had as many as fifteen participants, each in their own window, with their own backdrop, talking, sharing jokes and stories, living that essential family life with a modern twist.
Some of our younger members were busy and couldn’t join each session, but I was filled with immense gratitude to see that my daughters have adopted the same mindset toward family that I now hold dear. All three are keenly family oriented and have kept their children and their father close. I feel truly blessed to be fully engaged in the continuation of these connections, which, as we know, are not always easy to achieve and maintain. The grandchildren are less intense about the need for our collective to thrive; I remember too well that I was the same way. It pains me sometimes that I am not the picture-perfect grandfather I want to be. Even at my age, I don’t have all the answers. I cannot simply say to my grandchildren, “Yes, my dears. I have all the wisdom. Listen closely and I will tell you how it all goes.” But I am trying. Every day, I am working to learn more, to be better, to fulfill the promise of my brief existence here on Earth.
Our children and grandchildren bring us so much. My favorite moments are when I am surprised. During the shutdown, certain parts of the world were opening up, while others were lagging. My eighteen-year-old granddaughter was in Italy as the nation began to emerge from the effects of the virus. She had gone there to learn Italian and to immerse herself in a different culture. It was her first foray away from home, and I was able to watch with fascination as she came into her own. In some ways, she went power mad with the autonomy she was presented with. She could make any decision she wanted, her possibilities limitless. I’ve tried to instill in her that the most rewarding aspects of this freedom are the choices she can make to continue to involve her family in her journey.
To my frustration, my Italian-adventuring granddaughter is often hard to reach, but recently she called me on FaceTime. She was in an Italian square somewhere in Rome, hanging out with three or four very good-looking young guys. There was my granddaughter, a being I have cradled from birth: a beautiful young woman, the center of attention of these boys. I instinctively jumped into playing grandfather.
“You’d better leave my granddaughter alone,” I implored them, using a jocular (but really only half or quarter jocular) tone, “and get a haircut!” We all had a good laugh, and my granddaughter referred to me by some popular adolescent term. I don’t remember if it was “You’re the dope” (which I certainly am) or “You’re the bomb,” which sounds like a bad thing but is apparently a good thing. Either way, I took some comfort in knowing that I’d achieved a level of familial fame by being referred to in up-to-the-minute colloquial language.
My other granddaughters are a little younger, and we are close in different ways. One of them is very much an intellectual, and as I am always striving for knowledge in every possible way, I encourage those similar instincts in her. I send her articles and documentaries that resonate with me. I hope our shared interests tighten the bonds we have established, even as I recognize that there will be times when those bonds will stretch and fray. As she goes through those same experiences others do in that time of their lives, family will not seem as important.
As parents, we want to give our children better lives than we had. In my lifetime, as people moved out of the Great Depression, past the Second World War, and, in many cases, into prosperity the likes of which had never been seen, parenting began to change. Education went on longer, new industries emerged, and new activities for enrichment became available and affordable. For parents with means and time to support extracurricular activities, the possibilities were endless. They tried to enrich their children, encouraging them to try everything. Learn the violin. You don’t like that? No problem, here’s a trumpet. Hey, why don’t you go outside and play baseball? You’re not enjoying that? Give soccer a go. And then, for all that enrichment, research has shown that no matter which way or how hard their parents direct them, kids are going to figure out their interests on their own.
Certainly, you can expose your children to different activities, but there seems to be a delicate line between ambition and encouragement. I knew so many kids in Montreal who were great skiers. They were pushed by their parents and took to it like ducks to water (Do ducks ski? Could they take to the ice?), but when they got older, they gave it up. It wasn’t their ambition; it wasn’t their interest. It was their parents who had hoped their kids would share their love of skiing and had encouraged them to become great at it. So, how can we ensure our children find fulfillment? We just don’t know. When I was a child, I only wanted to act. Yes, I played football, and I tried other activities, but I had no illusions of making a vocation out of them. They were just activities I drifted in and out of. Like a stream, the water carried me along, but my end goal was always on the horizon. With clarity.
What I find charmingly ironic is that it was through my pursuit of acting that I was actually led to all manner of hobbies and interests that would not otherwise have crossed my mind. I have ridden motorcycles across the country, become an avid horseman, jumped out of airplanes, stood atop monumental peaks, traveled all over the world, renovated my house on camera, even peed out a kidney stone for charity and presented it on national television. These aren’t the milestones one necessarily envisions as a child (at least not the kidney stone one), but they came to me in spite of my singular focus on one professional goal.
I don’t know what to call that. Is it luck? Is it the universe looking after me, somehow? Encouraging me because I try to see and learn about my connection within it? That sounds a bit arrogant, I know. The truth is, I have no idea. As a result, when it comes to supporting my loved ones in their pursuits, I just try to be there for them—a steady hand at the ship, available to play father and grandfather, and to keep making mistakes as I attempt to get it right.
I also try to get it right in my marriage. I am fortunate that my daughters have been so understanding of their father’s difficult love life. I was married to their mother, then divorced; they were partly raised by my second wife, and developed a strong bond with my third, Nerine, before her tragic passing. In 2000, I met Elizabeth Anderson Martin, a delightful soul with whom I shared so much in common—in both our passions and tragedies.
Elizabeth and I were both dealing with the heartbreaking loss of our spouses, her husband having died of cancer in 1997. Elizabeth was a brilliant horse trainer, which is how we met. We began a close friendship; she lived in Santa Barbara and I was in Los Angeles, so I would drive up, spend some time with her and her horses, have dinner, and then make my way back. We were both still grieving from the loss of our loved ones, but it was a form of healing to talk to someone who was going through the same pain.
A short while later, I was invited by a National Geographic photographer to join an expedition to Antarctica. I called Elizabeth and invited her. “It’ll be an adventure,” I told her, assuring her that there would be separate staterooms and that I wouldn’t try to redefine our relationship in the middle of an isolated continent from which escape would be impossible. Elizabeth debated the decision in a timeworn process she’d learned from her mother: she made a pros and cons list, and, unfortunately for me, the cons outweighed the pros.
What she didn’t tell me at the time was how badly the cons outweighed the pros. “The cons were numerous,” she later explained. “I didn’t know you well; I owned a business and had a lot of responsibilities; I would be stuck on a boat in Antarctica. What if we didn’t get along? What if it got awkward? What if something dangerous happened on the expedition? The only pros were that it might be an outrageous adventure and maybe I’d see some penguins.”
Adventure and penguins. Nothing good about spending time with yours truly? I have to say, though, I admired Elizabeth’s methods. Her pros and cons list hadn’t let her down, and her process came from the heart. She just didn’t think she should make the trip. I knew then that there was something truly special about this woman; just as this trip promised an adventure, the thought of getting to know her better seemed an even greater adventure. With much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I ultimately decided not to go. It was something akin to the line at the end of Good Will Hunting: “I had to see about a girl.”
