Captain Kirk gets jiggy with the Gorn!

SHAT HAPPENS: What's William Shatner's secret?

I think one of my first Shat memories was on a TV program, not Star Trek at all (for I had just started watching it and had decided I liked Spock best,) but The Ed Sullivan Show, something we watched with religious regularity. It was just unthinkable NOT to watch Ed Sullivan (which meant we had nothing better to do on a Sunday night). 

Along with the plate-spinning acts, contortionists and Topo Gigio, there was the odd - very odd - monologuist, some ehk-torrr who got up there and recited something tony like Dylan Thomas or Shakespeare. This was the Culture part of the program, and there seemed to be some kind of quota. I vaguely remember Richard Burton, probably held up with some sort of stand, and David Hemmings (briefly famous after the movie version of Camelot) doing And Death Shall Have No Dominion with an orchestra playing  in the background.

Speaking of Dominion, that used to be the name of a chain of grocery stores in Canada, but it was never quite as popular as Loblaws. Which is why you see William Shatner doing a Loblaws commercial in this video in about 1978, a lean period when he supposedly lived out of his truck. But before all that, before the magnificent rise and fall, there was Shatner the young Shakespearian actor, and there he was on Ed Sullivan doing Hamlet's soliloquy.

Canned culture, for sure, but I remember my father looking at him and muttering, "This guy is supposed to be the next big thing in acting. Hmph." That "hmph" sealed it for me. If my father hated him, Shatner was officially "in".

I don't remember much about that reading, but I did find a YouTube video in which he does the same passage, "to be or not to be", on the Mike Douglas show. And - he's good. Actually, a little understated; maybe he needed to bring up the intensity a bit. But he did a creditable job and said all those antiquated words as if they actually meant something. 

It's funny, but I do not remember anyone complaining about his overacting during the 3-year run of the first Star Trek series. Nobody said boo because nobody thought he overacted. I've been watching those old Treks for the eleventeenth time (and somehow they must have enhanced them for HD, because they look a hell of a lot better now, except for Sulu's acne which is worse), and so far I'm not laughing or groaning. That's because I think he's good. 

All this Shatnerian overacting business seemed to be retroactive (so to speak). The parody came later, and Shatner sort of fell into it, went along with all of it because it meant more public exposure, more work. He has been criticized for ubiquity and self-caricature, but that's like criticizing someone for having fun with their job.  

Myself, I've begun to think that Shatner on Trek was just being true to Captain Kirk, who was always a bit of a drama queen. Like Anthony Perkins and a lot of other dreamy leading men of the period, the young Shatner had a slight peach-fuzzyness about him, appealing to be sure, but just a touch androgynous. And dynamite to young women.

Shatner always works, always has, and at 82 or something, some insane age like that, he's still at it, and will do anything it seems, even make a safety video about the dangers of deep-frying a turkey. He's just around and seems not to need to sleep. He has sort of enlarged since his fox days (and he WAS a fox, make no mistake, especially during his Twilight Zone years when he was downright painfully fox-ish). He doesn't seem exactly fat, just "blown up" or expanded in some way. He does not have the saggyness and seams and crinkles that all other old people have, nor does he look freakish like Mickey Rourke, so it's doubtful he has done too much to his face. So what gives here? His skin has gone kind of like orange peel, thicker, but not slack. He'd be harder to peel, so to speak.

Sometimes I think he's like that character on one of the old Star Treks, the guy who was a gazillion years old and had been all these different famous people on earth. (The only one I really remember is Brahms.) He must be doing something different, or. . . I don't know. He acts the buffoon so frequently that no one would ever suspect that he ISN'T "one of us", but comes from some other place or has been subjected to some sort of "treatment", experimental to be sure, but which in his case seems to have worked. Like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, he doesn't seem to know how to die. How will he look at 100. . . 110. . . 150? Has he sold his soul to the devil or made a bargain with the turkey farmers or what? 

It's a secret. A William Shatner secret, and I doubt that he is ever going to tell it. But when he outlives all his children and then his grandchildren, the world is going to be asking some pretty tough questions.

You don't look like that at 82, you don't sound like that at 82, and you don't go around doing turkey videos unless you have something going for you that is very, very strange indeed.

This is my usual p. s., meaning I forgot a whole bunch of stuff. I am a big fan of Shatner's quirky series Weird or What, in which he explores a whole bunch of bizarre phenomena every week with his usual wacko wit. The self-parody here reaches the level of the sublime: when he points to a shelf full of books he has written, one of them is about synchronized swimming. And it is just so cool when he rides in on a horse. I don't know if I believe any of the stuff he examines on the show, but some of it is intriguing (like the signals from Russian cosmonauts that I blogged about a long time ago). 

Then there is that other thing, the thing that kind of shocks me now: there was a Star Trek episode called The Deadly Years in which everyone caught a horrible disease and began to age at a frightfully accelerated rate. The thing is, the makeup on this show was really bad, so no one really looked like an old person. Scotty looked like he'd stuck his face in a banana cream pie. Kirk, well. . . Kirk looked dumb, but absolutely nothing like his "old" self. Not even close.

When you think about it, it's all so - 

Whatever became of the wildwood flower?

In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."

Not at dawn, but at morning coffee hour, I get up and find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.

Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.

 

I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.

At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.

At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.

There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.

At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.

It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.

That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.


Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime  shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!" 

The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially in The City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?

Rocket Man by William Shatner

Ay ay ay ay! I just deleted about four posts because the accompanying videos wouldn't play. Some restriction or other, but I hope this one does, bad quality or not. I'm tired of going over the reasons why I'm posting this - something about a six-year-old William Shatner roast on Comedy Network I sat through last night, paralyzed by too much sugar, and how unfunny most of it was. But this made me laugh my ass off! The thing that's weird is, no one in the audience laughed at the time (1978, some sort of SciFi/SF/SyFy awards). Shatner was between gigs here: post-Trek, pre-T. J. Hooker, in the black hole during which he did Loblaws commercials and appeared on the Mike Dougas Show singing Keep it Gay, supposedly from The Producers (though I don't remember it, do you?) I can't post that one either, unless I dredge up one with no restrictions.  Anyway, this is the short version, goddamn it.

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Lost Penny: Shatner, pre-Trek

You don't have to watch all of this episode: in fact, you don't even have to watch all of the excerpt of this episode to get my point. Pre-Trek, Shatner was a good-lookin' dude by just about anyone's standards, though not particularly cocky about it. Not rugged, mind you: a little softer around the edges, a little androgynous, like Elvis or Tony Perkins. And he didn't overact, not here anyway. All the swaggering came later on.

My point is, if it hadn't been for Captain Kirk, Shatner might not have turned into the hulking ham-o-saurus he is today. But then again, he might have vanished, gone the way of Tony Franciosa and guys like that. Ah, the cost of fame! Something about Trek or Kirk or the '60s or SOMETHING made him explode into the kind of gut-busting histrionics which soon became his trademark.

Now he just plays on it endlessly, getting older and larger and showing up in ever more places, three or four series at a time it seems, plus ads. Every once in a while the nearly-reclusive Nimoy (who now makes a living taking pictures of fat women) shows up, shrivelled as an old matchstick, and I get the feeling that if you averaged the two of them, you might just have something like a normal human being. But still they dwell in their parallel universes: Obla-Di and Obla-Da.

Keep it gay by William Shatner

Shit, Shat. . . Shot.

Lucy! In! The! Sky! With! Diamonds!

Guess I better say something about this. Before he became a total self-parody and general all-around show biz phenomenon, Shatner liked to speak-sing in the hammiest manner possible. Believe it or not, he was considered a good actor then, and it's true he could be a pretty good journeyman actor if he put his mind to it, which he usually didn't. I remember watching the Ed Sullivan show (I'm dating myself here, but there's no one else available tonight) and my Dad said, "Look who's coming on. It's that William Shatner fellow. He's supposed to be the next big thing, you know." He did, amazingly, Hamlet's Soliloquy. I don't remember how well he did it, but he wore an outfit sort of like the Jolly Green Giant, a tunic and tights (green, I think, but - oh, I don't know! I had a b & w TV!). It brought to mind all the soliloquys he did on the show (damn, that word is hard to spell): every week he had Some Big Important Speech. "WE. . . the PEOPLE!!!", or "You're gonna be. . . just. . . like . . .them" (the "grups"). "No more blah blah blah!" "I'm a grup. And I. . . Want. . .To. . .Help. . . You." Looking back at some of his photos, he was quite a good-looking guy, with a hint of sweetness to soften his masculinity. He ran to fat however, not a good look in polyester, and in one show where both Kirk and Spock had their shirts off, Nimoy won hands down in the bodacious space-bod category. He was very hairy, but in a nice way. A good Jewish boy, but so's Shatner! Not everyone knows that about him. He grew up in Montreal in the Jewish quarter. He 'n' Nimoy are best friends. I'll try to find the video about that. It's cute and very touching. And blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahbl

Weird or. . . ?

No, this post isn't about William Shatner (much), or the Loch Ness Monster or All-Bran Cereal or any of the other fine products he's pushed over nearly 80 years. I can just see him lumbering around, looking not so much like a fat octanogerianerean (or however the bleep that's spelled - 80 years old, anyway) as a fat, lumbering seventyarian. In other words, he's pretty well-preserved.

What I really want to write about are the twists and turns, the contradictions that drive writers mad. I just finished reading an article in the Huffington Post (give it a try if you haven't seen it - I'm still trying to figure out their mandate), by some writer-or-other - hell, my memory is lousy these days, but I think her name was Muffy - who in essence is saying that writers should suck it up, quit their bellyaching and get down to the nitty-gritty of sending out their manuscripts (one by one, by post, with a stamped, self-addressed envelope: "You do want your manuscript returned, don't you?" reads the withering directions on one publisher's web site), rather than bitching away on Twitter and Tweeter and Woofer and all those other sociable networks about how publishers are rotten and unfair and don't understand genius when they see it.

At the same time, feeling in much the same state myself (after sending out one too many stamped self-addressed envelopes and having them seemingly disappear), I sent a distress-call to one of my favorite writers. One of the best in the country, as far as I am concerned, with an impeccable track record of beautifully-wrought, gripping novels. I've reviewed several of them, and every time I was assigned one I thought, "ahh, I'm in for a good ride." And I was never disappointed.

This selfsame writer answered my moaning email with, in essence, this statement: I'm going through exactly the same thing. Publishers have turned me down repeatedly, and agents just aren't interested. A good, even a great track record means essentially nothing. The industry has tightened up so much, there's so much anxiety about survival that they want a "sure thing", something that will rake in as much money as possible.

I don't want to dump on publishers. They're doing business, for heaven's sake, or trying to, in a culture that is reading less and less. In no other field would there be such nasty criticism of the need to make a profit in order to survive. It's almost as bad as the head-shaking writers provoke by insisting that they want to be published. Shouldn't art be its own reward? What kind of egotist actually wants to see his work in print, or needs people to read it?

There's another factor at work here. I can only imagine how many unsolicited manuscripts every publisher (micro to macro) is constantly deluged with. Most probably aren't readable, let alone publishable. Somehow they have to pick through all this and find books, real books that might work on the shelves. Books someone might want to buy.

But at the same time, I get a feeling of a deep disconnect between the lightning communication of 2010 and the horse-and-buggy approach of the SASE and the printed-out, mailed manuscript (each setting the writer back about $12). Something ain't adding up. And success is getting more dicey with each passing year.

The whole field is. . . weird. . . or what.

I think William Shatner should investigate this, give it one of his histrionic voiceovers, one of his "hey-I'm-just-in-this-for-the-money" things. He should have some scientist slide over a giant ice field with his breath puffing out in clouds. He should show rare fossils (Shatner? - or editors who've been around too long?). Lights should flash in the sky, probably some kid with a flashlight, but never mind, that's pretty weird in itself, isn't it?

Writers have to be: tough but sensitive; not care what anyone thinks (art!!), but constantly and feverishly working to get attention; solitary (sit alone at the keykboard for hours) but sociable (get out there and mingle and work the room!). They have to be so many opposite things that it's no wonder so many of them go crazy.

Getting published is the Holy Grail, and sooooo many writers seek it, the "cuppa Christ" Indiana Jones craved. They just assume that, once they get their hands on it, everything will go smoothly from then on. (Haven't I written about all this before? Sorry. This one is really about William Shatner.) The truth is much more complicated. I don't feel so alone now, knowing that one of the foremost writers in this country is having a lot of trouble getting his books in print. But I also feel somewhat gobsmacked.

I shall have to regroup.

Like some nut, I won't quit, because this is what I do. But I have to say, this field I'm in is the strangest I've ever heard of, full of impossible twists and turns. Publishers want something original, of course. Not the usual boring stuff. At the same time, they want a sure thing, "more of the same", so that their ready-made audience will keep buying books. Harry Potter sells better than Campbell's Soup.

I don't have Twitter or Tweeter or whatever that stuff is, marking me either as a dinosaur or as someone with a whole brain who doesn't communicate in idiotic, ungrammatical fragments. (Is that why people can't get published? Do they think a novel is just a series of glued-together tweets?) So I'm hopelessly behind, and no one will ever know who I am. It took me centuries to decide to write a blog, and I don't think I have a huge fan base. I keep doing it anyway, mostly because it's pretty enjoyable and a great way to dodge my real work (which is, right now, letting publishers know that I have the best novel in 30 years tucked under my arm and will let them see it if they ask real nice.)

Oops, I said this was about William Shatner. William Shatner has written novels. Well, sort of. Someone writes them for him, just as someone eats All-Bran for him. He just provides story ideas, probably retreads of the original Trek series (which I'm watching again, and enjoying hugely - it wasn't as tacky as people say it was, and broke a lot of new ground).

I kind of like the fact that this actor was working steadily in 1966 (and '67, and '77, and '87, and. . . ), and in essence has never stopped. Self-parody doesn't bother him, and somehow or other he has mastered the art of marketing the Shatner brand. And he will probably go on until he drops.

Smart. . . or what?

**************************************************
POSTSCRIPT. These things always come on a bad day, somehow. I just got a statement from my first publisher stating the amount of royalties earned and the number of copies sold in the past year. The royalties totalled almost -$100.00 (yes, MINUS a hundred), and the number of copies sold worldwide was two.

Reviewers called the novel "a contender for the Leacock medal", its style/charm/allthatstuff comparable to Ann Marie MacDonald (an Oprah pick) and Gail Anderson-Dargatz. "Fiction at its finest". Now, do I really owe them a hundred bucks???

William Shatner Loblaws commercial

I also remember an ad he did in the '70s for Shirriff Instant Pudding with Mini-Buds, in which he tasted the pudding with a histrionic "MMMMMMMMM!!". Maybe the lowest point in his career.

And now, for something. . .

It's only Thursday, but surely the weekend is at hand (?). Until then, something to cheer your soul. I love these: I'm watching the old Trek series again (this comes around every 5 years or so), perhaps prompted by the extremely hokey Weird or What? series on History Channel, starring the ubiquitous William Shatner in yet another of his interminable parodies of himself. Bring it on.