Read Up Till Now. The Autobiography for Free Online Page A

rehearsals if someone forgot their line he would give it to them. And he was only twelve feet away from me, playing my usual role. So Henry walked over to him and put his arm around his shoulder, an extraordinary piece of staging that had never occurred to anybody before or since. The exhausted king goes to his younger brother and leans on him for support. I leaned in closely and said, “What’s the line?”
    And Don Cherry with his photographic memory looked at me blankly. He had not the slightest idea. But in that instant I remembered the words I was supposed to say and continued on successfully to the end of the play. I received a standing ovation. Even the cast was applauding. The critics loved it, lauding my instinctive and original movements onstage and my halting interpretation of the part. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.
    That was the night I knew I was an actor. Now if I could only find a way to make that hundred bucks a week.
    At Stratford I rose from bit parts and walk-ons to become a leading player in Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice. In our third season Guthrie resurrected a play he’d had great success with in England, his own version of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great . Anthony Quayle was the lead and Guthrie told me, “When we do this, you will play Usumcasane, the second lead.” As it turned out the second lead consisted mainly of carrying Anthony Quayle around the stage in a sedan chair. But obviously I did it well because Guthrie named me the Festival’s Most Promising Actor that year. The Stratford production received such good notices that the legendary Broadway producers Roger Stevens and Robert Whitehead decided to bring us to New York.
    I still thought of myself as this little Jewish kid from Montreal,Billy Shatner, who was just trying to figure it all out—but I was going to Broadway, to New York City, to the mecca of serious actors.
    This was my second time in New York and this time I was going in theater style. My first trip had been very different—I’d paddled there in an Indian canoe.

TWO

    Like paramotoring down the Ohio River into the largest paintball fight in the world or hunting a brown bear in Alaska with a bow and arrow or singing “Rocket Man” on national TV, this was one of those grand ideas that falls into the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time category. At the end of a summer during which I’d worked as a counselor at a B’nai B’rith camp, the head of the camp announced he was going to paddle an Indian war canoe up the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, across Lake George, then down the Hudson River all the way to New York, and invited six of us to go with him. I have always loved history and the concept of traveling this ancient waterway to America—just as the Indians must have done hundreds of years ago—enthralled me.
    I have always had a love affair with America. I believed completely in the American myth, that the president of the United States was a great and noble man and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court rose to that position because of his experience and equanimity and wisdom and that J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was watching out for us all. Hoover wearing a dress? How could anybody believe something so preposterous?
    I remember being frightened by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s warning that Communists were hidden in the State Department and then realizing that Americans had seen many crises yet somehow the Constitution survived and actually grew stronger. I thought of America as this place of promise, where dreams were possible. I had always wanted to go to America.
    So seven of us climbed into this wooden war canoe and our journey began. It was a romantic vision, we were paddling a thousand miles to America. And within a few strokes I remember realizing: we’re paddling a thousand miles to America?
    It certainly didn’t take long for that romance to end. Within a day we were