Up Till Now. The Autobiography by William Shatner Page B

and then the guide walked into the woods to search for that bear. The camera crews were behind him. They found the dead bear in the bushes. In the sunlight, with the shadows of the branches moving across this giant animal’s back, it looked as if it were still alive and that alone was terrifying. We poked at it to make certain it was dead.
    At that moment I changed from being a hunter to someone who will catch a fly and let it loose out a window. I have never shot at any living creature again. Looking at that magnificent animal, the amazing stupidity of what I’d done just humbled me. I realized that to destroy life was to destroy part of myself. The vanity of it, the idiocy of it, but until I faced that bear it had nothing at all to do with courage.
    Which brings us to being onstage with the very beautiful France Nuyen in The World of Suzie Wong. Gloria and I moved back to New York and we bought a little house in Hastings-on-Hudson for nineteen thousand dollars. This was an amazing step for me, this was roots. For an actor, that kind of commitment can be terrifying. But I was confident I could afford it, I was going to be paid $750 a week to star in a Broadway show. That was a tremendous amount of moneyin 1958. My name was going to be above the title, WILLIAM SHATNER IN... It was in lights, WILLIAM SHATNER IN... I remember when the titles first went up on the marquee. I walked up and down West 44th Street just looking at it, and then I went back at night to see it all lit up.
    Of course I knew the risks. A Broadway show can open and close in one night. If you get enough bad reviews you clean out your dressing room the next morning. If that happened I would be paid one-seventh of my weekly salary, so I’d get a hundred dollars for my performance and a hearty handshake. And the mortgage would still be due at the end of the month.
    But I wasn’t worried about that. I was working with Broadway royalty: Merrick, Osborn, and Josh Logan. Logan had directed shows like Mister Roberts and South Pacific and Fanny and Annie Get Your Gun; he’d won a Pulitzer Prize and a year earlier had been nominated for an Oscar for directing Sayonara . Merrick had produced Fanny and The Matchmaker . Paul Osborn had written the Broadway classic Morning’s at Seven as well as the screenplays for East of Eden and South Pacfiic . Their names on the marquee had been enough to generate the first million-plus-dollar advance ticket sale for a drama in Broadway history. A lot of that money had come from a new Broadway phenomenon: suburban theater groups, large groups of people who purchased blocks of tickets before a show opened based on word of mouth. In our case I suspect some of them mistakenly believed they were buying tickets for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new musical, Flower Drum Song, which was opening across the street. But I couldn’t have been more confident. Hello, Broadway, here I come. I was Mr. Broadway, I got the town by the tail.
    I don’t remember precisely when I knew The World of Suzie Wong was a complete disaster. It might have been during rehearsals, when my co-star, France Nuyen, stopped speaking to Josh Logan so he stopped coming to rehearsals. Or it might have been early in our run, when I had that unfortunate fistfight onstage with a member of the cast who swung at me and missed, accidentally coldcocking an eighty-six-year-old prop man. Or it might have been that night earlyin the run when I heard a member of the audience whisper loudly, “Will you still love me after this?”
    Merrick and Logan must have known, they were too smart and experienced not to have known; my guess is that by the time they realized that they were about to launch the Titanic of Broadway shows there was too much advance money in the box office to close it. The problems began with France Nuyen, who only three years earlier had been working in France as a seamstress when she was discovered on a beach by Life photographer Philippe Halsman. Almost