Leonard by William Shatner Read Free Book Online Page A

dialogue.
    Before coming to New York, I had done several shows on the CBC. In my first major role, I had costarred with the great Basil Rathbone in a live version of Melville’s tragedy Billy Budd . Rathbone had created the role of Sherlock Holmes in the movies, and I probably had seen every picture he’d made. It was a tremendous opportunity for me to learn from a respected veteran actor. Admittedly, I was probably a little nervous, as an estimated ten million Canadians would be watching. The performance seemed to be going very well until that moment Rathbone stepped onto the ship and somehow managed to get his foot caught in a large bucket. While the camera shot him only from the waist up, he was madly shaking his leg trying to get the bucket off. Naturally, he forgot his lines, and when an actor forgets his lines, he begins to sweat. So the great Basil Rathbone, whom I had admired for so long, was standing there shaking a bucket off his foot while sweat poured down his face as he tried to remember his lines. Never in the history of performance has anyone literally tried to act normally with so little success.
    But that was quite typical of the things that happened in the early days of television. While Leonard was in Hollywood doing mostly Ziv shows, I was in New York doing live television. While he was playing Native Americans, I was working regularly on Sunday morning religious shows like Lamp Unto My Feet. While I continued learning my craft by rehearsing and working, Leonard believed in learning how to act by studying acting.
    I didn’t take acting classes. Not that I didn’t recognize their value, but I learned by doing; Leonard studied his craft. Leonard spent most of his career refining his craft. I actually think Leonard’s acting ability often was underrated, primarily because he made it look so easy. Spock, for example, seemed to be easy to imitate—but it took great skill to create that blatant dispassion. Just before joining the army, for example, he had joined a group of young actors forming a company so they might work onstage. One member of that group, it turned out, was James Arness, and he and Leonard became very friendly. A year later, Arness happened to be in Atlanta promoting a movie he’d made with John Wayne, and Leonard called him. Arness told Leonard he’d just signed to star in a new cowboy series based on the popular radio show Gunsmoke .
    Two years later, James Arness was a major television star. That wasn’t too surprising. We were surrounded by that kind of success, so we knew it was possible. So we kept working and hoping that eventually our turn would come. Later, people would remark how amazing it was that Leonard and I appeared together in an episode of U.N.C.L.E . It wasn’t at all amazing; we worked so often with so many different people that it might have been more unusual if we had never done the same show.
    Leonard had resumed taking acting classes when he got back to LA, this time with an actor named Jeff Corey. Corey was a very talented actor who had been blacklisted, meaning he was suspected of having Communist sympathies, so no producer would hire him. So he opened an acting school and was well respected. Among the students who Leonard became friends with was Vic Morrow, who eventually starred in the series Combat! That was another link in that long chain that eventually would make all the difference in the galaxies to Leonard’s career.
    As incredible as it may seem, most of us were only vaguely aware of the blacklist. I don’t remember ever talking with him about it. It was one of those subjects that just didn’t seem to affect our lives, even though we were right in the middle of it. As Leonard once explained, we were young, naïve, and so totally preoccupied with trying to earn a living that we paid little attention to it. Leonard, who eventually became very politically active in progressive causes, told an interviewer much