Where’s William?

Searching for William (you can call him Bill) Shatner in the murk of modern celebrity culture.

By James Martin

1   |   2   |   3   |   Home

Photo by Chris Buck

Bill – that’s how he introduces himself, just Bill – is a guy. A guy sipping green tea in a memorabilia-crammed office in L.A.’s Studio City district. His cheeks are a bit ruddy, his eyes a little watery, his black Rolling Stones tour sweatshirt a touch tight.

Bill likes music. He likes listening to music, especially jazz radio, though he blanks on specific musicians: “If you named some, I might know them.” He likes making music too, “even though I can’t sing!”

Someone gave Bill a free iPod. The thing holds 5,000 songs, “but I don’t know three.” Downloading wasn’t an option: “At 99 cents a song, that’s $5,000 and 5,000 minutes, right there!” So he walked around listening to an empty iPod.

“It was like being insane,” he recalls. “My mind was empty. I had no memories, no musical identity. I’m not supposed to say this, but what the hell: Someone said, ‘Well, I’ve got 4,000 songs on my iPod…’ So they downloaded their iPod into my iPod, which is apparently illegal. I now have someone else’s musical personality. I am bipolar.

“I got my iPod and I put in the ear things. I don’t usually listen to music with the ear things because I’m afraid of setting my ears ringing. I played – and this is last year – the White Album by the Beatles. Now I’ve heard those songs, as we all have, many times, and I thought they were kind of simplistic, and I had sort of discounted rock ’n’ roll when it first came on the scene. But because those earphones were drilling the sound into my head, I heard all the layering. I thought, Wow! This is a great record!

“So now I’m a rock ’n’ roll enthusiast. I’ve discovered the Beatles.”

As F. Scott Fitzgerald scribbled on a napkin, there are no second acts in American lives. Canadian-born William Shatner’s career, however, is more resilient than Rasputin. After his fame-cinching turn on TV’s Star Trek (1966–1969), the Stratford-trained actor spent the better part of 20 years as a Hollywood joke. He recorded The Transformed Man (1968), a maligned album pairing literary monologues with dramatic readings of rock songs to “unfold multiple perspectives of the same subject,” according to the liner notes. He never wanted for work (hey, T.J. Hooker and Rescue 911 were hits!), but he just couldn’t shake his rep as a self-serious ham who harboured delusions of acting greatness.

Then he lightened up.

On Saturday Night Live, he played himself as a fan-hating crank, famously telling Trekkies to “get a life.” He became one of the first dot-com celebrity shills, parodying his own musical ambitions
in a series of ads for Priceline.com. He played a regal outsize Hollywood cut-out of himself in TV commercials for Chrysler.

But here’s where things really get interesting. In 2005, he released Has Been, a winking, critically acclaimed album produced by hipster Ben Folds on which he soberly reflected on the drowning death of his third wife and laid down an awesome version of Pulp’s song “Common People.” He’s earned a hat trick of Emmy Award nominations and two statuettes (at press time, he was up for a third) for his portrayal of Denny Crane on Boston Legal. He’ll soon release a new album: his narration of David Itkin’s oratorio Exodus, backed by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and a 350-person choir.

After years of shouldering his way to the front of the Let’s-Laugh-at-Shatner lineup, he’s finally being taken seriously. And it has made him bulletproof.

His career isn’t the usual camp-to-cool spectrum. We haven’t learned to read William Shatner differently; he’s learned to read us better. The result is a multiplicity of Shatners – acclaimed actor, clueless curmudgeon, hipster collaborator, shameless cornball – all co-existing simultaneously. Take your pick; it’s all the same to him.

1   |   2   |   3   |   Home