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Authors: William Shatner

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BOOK: Leonard
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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 later in his life, “I'm shocked that there was so much of that going on around Hollywood and I was so totally out of touch with it.” He remembers having to get an FBI clearance to play a bit part on the show
West Point
. I'm not sure I ever did, maybe because I wasn't an American citizen.

When the blacklist was finally lifted, Corey began working again, eventually costarring in many movies like
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit,
and
Little Big Man
. Leonard had been studying with Corey for more than two years when Corey finally was able to resume his career; when Corey went back to work, Leonard began teaching some of his classes. After doing that for a couple of years, Leonard opened his own acting studio. Among his students were pop singers Fabian and Bobby Vee, as well as Alex Rocco, who played the role of casino owner Moe Greene in
The Godfather
. Originally, the Italian Rocco auditioned for the part of a gangster, but Leonard apparently was such a fine teacher that director Francis Ford Coppola auditioned the Italian Rocco and decided, “I got my Jew!”

Leonard was a highly trained actor; I was not. Our acting techniques were quite different. In his studio, Leonard taught his version of the then very popular technique known as Method acting. Until that time, acting styles were very broad, often verging on melodramatic. It was very formulaic acting, sort of like acting off a menu of choices. Method acting, which Lee Strasberg had made famous at the Actors Studio in New York and Leonard was teaching in his studio, taught students to “become” the character and express that character's real emotions. It meant studying the character's social, physical, and psychological condition. It meant learning as much as possible about the character, even if the actor had to create that backstory himself to understand the character's—here it comes—motivation. It meant deciding what clothes the character would wear that accurately reflected his or her personality. It meant utilizing body language years before anybody even used that term. It was revolutionary; rather than showing the character's emotion, the actor actually had to feel it.

An actor's knowledge of his character started with the script. Leonard always was in awe of the written word, and when he himself wrote, he brought the same diligence and respect to the page as he did to his performance. The script should provide clues to the actor about who his or her character is, what process this person is going through, and how he or she responds. An actor also had to understand the purpose of each scene, “the spine of the scene” he called it, what knowledge is supposed to be conveyed to audience through the action and dialogue in each scene. And then the subtext—what is the intention of each line? What is the character really trying to say? Once an actor understands that, he or she can layer the performance in terms of bringing both voice and mannerisms to that moment. “There are numerous ways of saying, ‘I love you,'” he would explain. How it might be said depends on the situation and the actor's overall objective. If, for example, a man is telling a woman for the very first time that he loves her, it requires complete devotion; if, on the other hand, it's a way of ending an argument, it would be said a very different way.

An actor trained in that technique, Leonard believed, would always bring honesty to the role. “A character is like a plant,” he said. “The richer the soil, the better it grows. One of an actor's jobs is to nourish his plants.” In 1977, for example, he was hired to follow Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, and Tony Perkins as child psychiatrist Martin Dysart in the Broadway hit
Equus
. It's a difficult role in the complex story of the psychiatrist hired to treat a young boy who blinded six horses for some unknown reason. To properly prepare for the role, Leonard advertised in
The New York Times
, looking for a “horse psychiatrist to help in research.” He received more than two hundred responses from psychologists, veterinarians, trainers, jockeys, and gamblers. He hired an ethologist, a person who studies animal behavior, and, he said, he “came away with a feeling of awe at the power of the horse in the night mind of man.”

To me, describing acting as a technique has always seemed kind of … technical. Meanwhile, my technique is quite different; it is the classic nontechnical technique: I memorized the script and played the character. I tried to find the core of my character, the one word, the one line in the script that best described that character's intentions, and then moved out from that. Like Leonard, I found clues in the script. My hope is that I can characterize something with enough emphasis that it is very different from myself, the actor. If I could make that core line real, then the rest of the character would follow. Too often, the actor bleeds through his or her portrayal and the character becomes just another version of other characters he or she has played with just a different name and a different costume. When Leonard and I began working together, we approached the material from very different places, but fortunately, perhaps because of the nature of the characters, it worked beautifully. But by then, both of us had been working regularly for a long time.

As an acting teacher and coach, as well as a working actor, Leonard became part of LA's community of young actors. Like every other business in the world, relationships are important in the entertainment industry. Soon after Leonard was discharged, Boris Sagal, for example, cast him in an episode of
Matinee Theater
that he was directing.
Matinee Theater
was a daily live hour-long dramatic show. There were four days of rehearsals and then the actual performance, so there were always five shows in progress at the same time. That meant a lot of work for actors. Sagal hired Leonard for an under-five-line part in a drama starring Vincent Price. Price played his normal madman role, a husband planning to blow up his wife by filling the house with gas, then rigging the phone to spark when he called. Leonard played a nosy deliveryman.

He was hired for another episode, but the director wasn't comfortable with Leonard's choices, and he was replaced. That was devastating for Leonard. He didn't do anything casually. Even when he had only a single line, he worked at it, so to be told he wasn't good enough or he didn't understand the character was a real attack on his integrity. He was fighting to establish a career, and this was a big step backward. It actually took him some time to get over it.

Because of the way he worked, in some ways these bit parts were more difficult for him than larger roles. The more dialogue a character has, the easier it is to become comfortable in the role. With only three or four lines, it's hard to establish any rhythm or create a believable character. But it was work, it came with a paycheck, and so he never turned down an offer and tried his best to create something. In
Get Smart,
for example, he played a sinister character lurking in the back of a poolroom. So he wore dark clothes and dark sunglasses—this was long before people wore sunglasses inside—and kept the sunglasses on throughout the entire episode. Ironically, the one thing he was rarely permitted to do on camera was smoke. Leonard was a heavy smoker off camera; in fact, a lot of actors were, as it helped them relax between takes. I smoked too. Once, he was playing an outlaw in a western and asked the propman for one of the hand-rolled brown cigarettes cowboys smoked. He intended to use it to help create his character. The propman turned him down. Ziv was churning out these shows without knowing which companies might end up sponsoring them. They were concerned that cigarette companies might not be willing to sponsor a program if bad guys were seen using their product, so bad guys didn't smoke in those shows. Only heroes relaxed with a cigarette.

As a character actor, Leonard played an amazing array of characters, although his specialty was being the heavy, the bad guy. While some Ziv shows would not use actors more than once, other shows were far more relaxed about it. He did eight episodes of Lloyd Bridges's
Sea Hunt,
for example, playing everything from a revolutionary student to an explosives thief. In one episode, he would have a mustache; in another, he'd take off the mustache and wear a hat. He did a variety of accents, whatever it took to earn a paycheck. Most Ziv shows paid $80 a day and were shot in two days;
Sea Hunt
was one of their most successful shows, so it had a larger budget—they paid $100 a day and shot in two and a half days, so if they needed a Spaniard with a mustache and glasses, Leonard said, “
Sí, señor,
” pasted on the mustache, and wore glasses. During the next few years, Leonard appeared in many of the most successful series on television, working with some of our best actors—and gaining a reputation in the business as a go-to bad guy.

He became a regular on westerns, playing both cowboys and Native Americans, appearing in
Colt .45, Tombstone Territory, The Rough Riders, Mackenzie's Raiders, 26 Men, Tate
—the adventures of a one-armed gunfighter—
Outlaws, Death Valley Days, Cimarron City,
three episodes of
Broken Arrow, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Rebel,
and Doug McClure's
The Virginian.
He worked with Academy Award winner Ernest Borgnine in one of his four appearances on
Wagon Train,
Clint Eastwood's
Rawhide, Bonanza,
and of course four episodes of Jim Arness's
Gunsmoke,
as well as all the others. He played a soldier in Dean Stockwell's infantry platoon on the last day of World War II on
The Twilight Zone,
a submariner on three episodes of
The Silent Service,
and a sailor on
Navy Log
. He played both cops and robbers, he did two episodes of the science-fiction show
The Outer Limits,
and he worked on medical shows from
General Hospital
to
Dr. Kildare.

A lot of professionalism and little money went into these shows. There was no time for preparation or rehearsal; you just did it. When these shows went on location, they shot from sunup to the last light. They literally would chase the sunlight, running away from the encroaching shadows. The crew would take the camera and reflectors and run up a hill, staying just ahead of the shadow, stopping and shooting for a minute, then picking up and moving another ten feet. Close-ups were often shot against a wall so they could be done after the sun went down simply by lighting a small area. If there was a way to save money, they figured it out. They didn't deceive themselves into believing they were creating art; they were making television shows.

“It was great training,” Leonard once said. If you flubbed a line or made a mistake, the camera kept rolling, then they would go back and just pick it up one line earlier. There were no lengthy retakes, no second or third takes of a scene. Often the actors didn't know the context of the scene when it was shot. It was make your entrance, do your exit. Then they shot the close-ups. That was the one chance to show any kind of expression. He believed that “whether or not you got called back had to do with whether or not you could hit your marks and say your lines on demand. I tried very hard to be proficient at that so I would be invited back.

“I remember doing an episode of
M Squad,
a cop show starring Lee Marvin. I played an arsonist; my brother was played by James Coburn. We worked together for three or four days. One morning we were supposed to be in makeup at 7:30 and on the set, ready to go, at eight o'clock. I got there on time, no Jim Coburn. Eight o'clock, I'm made up, ready to go, on the set, no Jim Coburn. I heard through the buzz that he had overslept. That was unheard of that an actor would hold up a television company. We scrambled and did some other things. I thought, oh this poor guy just ruined his career. We finished the episode and Jim Coburn's next job was in the movie
The Magnificent Seven
. He became this big hot star and I remember saying to myself, I was on time; where's my stardom!”

Leonard was not a star, he never got top billing, but he worked regularly. He took whatever was offered. On the first of his three appearances on
Broken Arrow,
for example, he played a Native American accused of a hanging crime—and he had no lines. He spent most of the show sitting in the prisoner's dock listening silently to testimony.

Like the majority of actors, Leonard continued to work at other jobs to support his career. In addition to teaching acting and driving a cab, at various times he ran a vending machine route, delivered newspapers, was a movie usher, and even worked in a pet shop selling exotic fish. It was never an easy life, and as he pointed out, “I went a long time before I could make a living as an actor. Before
Star Trek,
I spent about fifteen years in Los Angeles looking for work as an actor, and during that time, I never had a job that lasted any longer than two weeks.”

Those were the “character-building years,” as Leonard later referred to them, and every person who has ever tried to earn a living in this profession can relate to that—and knows how hard it is to maintain the dream. Even he admitted that at times he would be very unhappy, very angry. Those feelings are part of an actor's life; you see people you've worked with, people whose talent you doubt or you know aren't as good as you, get parts that you should be playing or on occasion even become stars. At times, you begin to wonder,
Why not me?
It often is more frustration than jealousy, but you just keep going. It affects every part of your life. Sometimes, though, that frustration explodes. Leonard's wife Sandi once told an interviewer, “We had terrible fights. There were times he wanted to give up acting and take a sensible job, and I wouldn't let him.” Believe me, every struggling actor's family can relate to Sandi when she continued, “Leonard wasn't much fun in those days. And I didn't always appreciate what a strong husband and father he was.”

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