Michael Muller/CPI

The lounge at the AKA Sutton Place hotel in midtown Manhattan. Shatner, 81, who's in town for three weeks to perform his one-man show, Shatner's World, on Broadway, is running a little late.

SCOTT RAAB: You all right?

WILLIAM SHATNER: I'm all right. I ate something at the Four Seasons, and the next morning, I'm ill. I thought it was food poisoning. "It'll be gone in an hour," I said. Then it stayed around. In the meantime, I'm summoning my strength to go onstage. The flu. You want to die. But I'm on the mend.

SR: Are you enjoying doing the show? Getting sick is not a good way to start.

WS: [long pause] I'm trying to choose the right words. The show is very emotional for me. Because if you accept the show, you accept me. I gave myself a mission to perfect it as much as I could. I made sure each word synthesized the right feeling — the anguish and the love. I spent months in that period of time between five and seven in the morning, when you're half awake and half asleep — which, for me, is the most creative time. I would say things out loud while running in place in a warm pool. Then the possibility of failure began to enter my head. And I thought, What if people don't like it? This is really me. And it became a nightmare. It became a beast I had to conquer every day. I put my head down and kept doing what I was doing, trying to find the right stories, the right words, the right intonations. And the nightmare never left me until The New York Times liked it.

SR: The reviews are very good.

WS: I don't read reviews.

SR: But you said The New York Times liked it.

WS: That much I know. But I don't read reviews, for fear that there'll be an untoward word and my feelings will be hurt. So all the nightmare and all that obsession has kind of fallen away. And here I am.

SR: Do you have some sense, at least intellectually, of how beloved you are?

WS: No, I don't. But when the audience rises up, it moves me to tears. I fight the overwhelming emotion. I allow the emotion to be there, but to break down would be improper. But that's how moved I am.

SR: What's coming back from that audience is not just about Captain Kirk. It's about your body of work.

WS: I don't think of it as a body of work. If I'm given an opportunity to do something, I do it. Or else I fool around with it. I wrote a song about success, which I called "It Hasn't Happened Yet." Because success is never there. Success should always be just beyond your grasp. I haven't thought about this until now, but the epitome of searching around in some creative fashion is this: Years ago, I came across an album of whale sounds. I loved the idea of thinking about whales as sentient beings. And then I came across a poem by D. H. Lawrence: "Whales Weep Not." "They say the sea is cold," it begins, "but the sea contains the hottest blood of all." And I thought, Whale sounds and this beautiful poem ... Several years ago, I put them together at the Hollywood Bowl, which seats 18,000 people. In the beginning, it was another one of those "What the fuck is he doing?" But when I finished, it erupted. I was with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

SR: You employed whale sounds with the Los Angeles Philharmonic?

WS: In between Mahler and Mendelssohn, I did whale sounds. I learned the sounds of the whales like it was music: [Whale sounds.] "They say the sea is cold." [Whale sounds.]

SR: You've had close relationships with animals. You bred Dobermans at one point. You train horses.

WS: Right now, my wife, Liz, and I are here aching, our thoughts permeated with the desire to get back to our dogs and our horses. My wife and my three kids and my grandchildren are my life, but my horses and my dogs are everything else. I have two Dobies at home. I've been breeding Dobies for years. Almost won the breed in Westminster at one time. And our horses are competition horses, reiners and things like that. We work them to a degree of finality. The head should be right. "No, no. Right there. Now, let's now both go to the right. That was too much. There. No, I told you, I want you to go to the right. I know you don't feel like it, but you have to do it." And that's what we do, day in and day out, with that kind of conversation taking place. And the dogs? The dogs understand English. I say to my dog, "I know you're thinking of dying" — he's 11 — "Tell me what you're thinking. No. Come over here. Come sit. I want you to tell me." I've never been without a dog. I've made trips across the country with a dog. I've been in that angst of loneliness, where you're really alone in the universe, except for the dog.

Joan Marcus

SR: Do you really have a resting heartbeat of 38?

WS: 38? A resting heartbeat? No. It's 52. The doctors go, "Is that your heartbeat? Did you take something?" Now they're taking me off medication because my blood pressure's too low.

SR: That's fantastic.

WS: The word fantastic was used the last time doctors looked at my numbers. What can I tell you?

SR: Do people live a long time in your family?

WS: No. My dad died of a stroke. This morning I was at the doctor's because of this flu, and they did this whole workup. They said, "When did your father die?" My dad died in 1968. While he was growing up, the thing that you did if you were successful was you brought meat home to the house and everybody ate meat. And if you were Jewish, you brought gribenes. You know what I'm talking about when I say gribenes?

SR: I'm not sure about gribenes, no.

WS: It's chicken fat, fried.

SR: Oh, schmaltz.

WS: Schmaltz, but pieces of it. And you fry that. And the schmaltz goes on the potatoes, and you have kreplach, and then you have fried varenikis [dumplings]. And my father was a heavy smoker because people smoked and ate and sat around. So what your parents died of has no bearing whatsoever on your possibilities. They knew nothing. People died then of a stroke. Exercise? A Jew doesn't exercise.

SR: You were born in a city that fascinates me: Montreal.

WS: Great city. Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.

SR: Your parents were immigrants?

WS: My mother was born in the city, my dad was an immigrant. Probably from Germany. Could have been Austria, could have been Poland. The borders were changing. My dad brought over a large family of Shatners when he was very young. Scraped together the money, got 11 brothers and sisters a passage on the boat. There's a lot of Shatners in Montreal.

SR: You went to McGill. Was it always presumed you were going to go to college instead of going into the garment industry like your father?

WS: I tell the story in my one-man show of the presumption that I was going to do men's clothing. It never occurred to me that I was going to do it until one day he said to me, "You know, it'll be great working together." Excuse me, but I want to be an actor. I knew from the age of six. My dad acceded to it. He said, "I can't afford to help you, but there will always be a place for you here." And so I left; I went on my way.

SR: You were bar mitzvahed?

WS: Mmm-hmm.

SR: Remember your haftarah?

WS: No, I don't. But I do remember the Four Questions: Ma nishtana, halaylah hazeh ... But then I die around then. I remember the Hebrew teacher with the ruler hitting me.

SR: That was old-school. Literally.

WS: Yah, you boychick.

SR: Have you ever experimented with drugs like LSD?

WS: I've smoked some grass and exalted in the way it makes you feel. But you can't make precise decisions on it. And acting is a precise thing. You've got to be exactly on it, or, if you're off it, you're not as good as you would be if you were on it. Lizzy and I went to Amsterdam —

SR: Crazy town.

WS: Crazy town. We were walking around Amsterdam in the wintertime saying, "Yeah, let's get some drugs, see what that's like." So we buy some mushrooms and we take the mushrooms in a coffee shop. And we're walking around the Red Light District and the stuff is beginning to take effect, and Elizabeth's having visions of love. But I'm getting paranoid. I think that Elizabeth and I are fish in the barrel, that we're the prey. We're what everybody else is going to get. I'm seeing a demon coming out of the wall, and she's seeing the love of the universe. We spent 24 hours in Amsterdam in two exactly different ways. Then we got on a plane and got out of there — fast.

SR: Do you believe in an afterlife?

WS: [Long pause.]

SR: Should I rescind the question?

WS: Rescinding is bad. That means you frightened yourself. I'm giving it some thought. What do you mean by an afterlife?

SR: Some alternative to oblivion.

WS: Yes, there's an alternative to oblivion. But I don't think it's conscious. We're all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we're ashes, we go back to the fire. I like that image. There has to be a unifying theory. I think there is a continuity of some kind, that my love for my wife will go on past the death of my body. Nature is perfect.

SR: You seem so open to new ideas.

WS: I've formulated a theory: You have to continuously fail. You fail at something, then you get over it, then you fail some more. And after you fail, there's always something new there. And that something new can be really interesting. Maybe I'm not quite sure what I'm after.

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Click here to listen to a clip from the recorded interview in which William Shatner demonstrates his whale sounds.

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