What did William Shatner make of his successor being bald?

What went through Bill Shatner's mind the day he learned that the new captain of the USS Enterprise was to be a bald man? "Why did I bother?" "I never thought an audience would accept a bald starship captain."- I guess we'll never know... And then the next guy, Avery Brooks from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a full head of hair but chose to shave it off! 1. Bald but covered it up 2. Openly bald. 3. Shaved his head to look bald. Maybe the hair factor is crucial to Star Trek!

Why did the "Jim Kirk" toupee look die as soon as Star Trek ended?

Shatner in The Intruder (1962) - an outstanding film.

By the time Star Trek entered his life, Bill Shatner had settled in on a particular style of toupee. Let's call it the "Jim Kirk" look. It is a style that had served him well for almost a decade as his hair grew increasingly thin. So why did that look die as soon as Star Trek ended in 1969?

Shatner in 1969 - soon after the cancellation of Star Trek. The quality lace has been replaced with a cheap-looking personal "rug".

Here is a recollection from film journalist Steve Vertlieb (pictured left in above picture) that helps shed some light:

"During the summer months of 1969, while NBC Television was airing the final reruns of the original Star Trek series on Thursday nights, William Shatner took to the road in order to do a succession of stage appearances in Summer Stock around the country. One of these appearances was scheduled for the now defunct Playhouse in the Park in Philadelphia. I suggested a possible interview with Jim Kirk to the editors of England’s L’Incroyable Cinema Magazine, and they jumped at the possibility. I telephoned the local press representation for the theatre in the round, and they arranged for an interview. Shatner was going through a bad period at this stage of his career. By his own admission, it was the worst period of his life.

Star Trek had ended with few new offers on the horizon. He feared being permanently type cast in science fiction, and his wife had begun divorce proceedings. He was literally living out of his van, and traveling cross country with his two pet Doberman Pinschers. He seemed wary of strangers as the interview began, but quickly warmed up to us."

By late 1969, the days of expensive studio toupees, like the one Shatner is wearing in this picture, seemed a distant memory.

Shatner himself has alluded to this awful time in his books. He was suddenly no longer a major television star. In fact, he was barely scraping by at all. He was sad, lonely and out of money. Mostly he worked in the theater, and occasionally he would land a TV role.

William Shatner in the TV movie Sole Survivor (1970)

So the simple answer to the toupee question is that Shatner could probably no longer afford to wear the expensive lace that he had worn throughout Star Trek and before. There isn't really much of a distinction between Shatner's personal usage and his on-screen toups during this phase. Many of these low-budget productions evidently didn't have much money to be spending on expensive hairpieces for one of their actors.

Shatner in the acclaimed 1970 television production of The Andersonville Trial

Bill Shatner may have kept his expensive Trek-era studio toups, but they required considerable maintenance and were prone to wear and tear. And therein lies a simpler explanation: The "studio laces" were tricky to apply, needing to be glued to the front of the forehead. Whereas some laces glue right under the hairline, Shatner, because he had a little hair on his own head that he didn't want to tear out, had worn a lace that had a "skin" that extended slightly forward onto the forehead. On the set, this required constant attention from a make-up artist in order not to show (yet it is still visible in higher resolution copies of Star Trek). So rather than go through this terribly finicky procedure, he gave up on having a "convincing" frontal hairline altogether and instead wore a much simpler "rug".

Thus, during the lean years of TV gameshows and so forth, the rugs Shatner wore were very bad indeed as we have explored here before. But the upside was that they required very little effort to apply.

Captain Kirk could no longer afford his quality hairpiece. Here Bill Shatner is with his Star Trek cast-mates for a 1973 publicity photo for the short-lived Star Trek animated series.

Another issue with regards to the expensive lace is underlined in the above picture. During the lean years, Shatner in fact became less-than-lean himself. And as we all know, Shatner's handsome features seemed to evaporate with every additional pound that he was overweight. Thus, the old-style lace might have looked quite terrible on an out-of-shape Shats.

And then, when money and success started to return, the curly look was born (as we explored in our previous post)...

A 1976 issue of the magazine Crawdaddy

Australian satirist makes common Shatner toup mistake.

The noted Australian satirist and commentator Clive James makes a common mistake in a 2005 article for the UK's The Independent newspaper. Here's what he writes on the subject of William Shatner's hair:


"To finish with the hair theme for the moment, take the case of that great actor William Shatner. In real life, William Shatner is a smart, funny and delightfully ironic man. But his real life is not his public life. The public William Shatner, after he left Star Trek, found that the hair on his head was growing thin. Instead of sensibly concluding that his abundance of testosterone was eating into his thatch, he must have decided that it was being eroded for another reason, perhaps because the stimulating effect of warp engine radiation had been switched off. Whatever his reasoning, when he came back to the screen as TJ Hooker he was wearing on top of his head what is known in America as a "piece".

"Three times as big as any natural hairstyle he had ever had, the piece looked as if a live dog had been nailed to his skull. You could have thrown chunks of raw meat to that thing. Yet somewhere underneath that ludicrous construction, he still had the same sharp brain. He must have known that he looked like a man crushed by a falling fox terrier. But he also knew that he was in America, where it is sufficient to make the claim in order to fulfil [sic] the expectation. Even unto death, an abundant head of hair is a requirement, along with a set of perfect teeth. If the hair is taken from an animal, even if it is the whole animal, and if the perfect teeth are blatantly a set of caps that jar with the tucked face like two roses of white plastic tombstones in the graveyard of a ruined church, still the requirements have been met. They are the requirements of celebrity, and to that extent millions of anonymous Americans behave as if they were famous. We must not let this happen to us." (Emphasis ours)

It should be mentioned that James and Shatner know each other - at least a little. Bill Shatner appeared on an episode of James' comedy/talk-show Saturday Night Clive in 1991. And if anyone has a screengrab of that interview, it would be well worth seeing because in that appearance, Shatner actually wears a toup that strongly resembles his straight and strawberry-blonde Star Trek: TOS lace. That is quite unusual in itself.

But anyway, firstly the point that James makes about when Shatner decided to wear a toup is one that is heard quite often: Shatner only started to wear a piece in later years - that "live dog" nailed to his skull. Not only will most Shatner fans tell you that that is wrong, but it kind of assumes that Shats completely disappeared between the end of Star Trek: TOS and the first Trek feature-film - maybe for many people he did. In fact, as we know, the pieces he wore in-between those two dates, in the lean years, are among the most noteworthy for their sheer awfulness.


Even so, ignoring the lean years, is it fair to say that the Trek movie-era toups are far worse or more obvious than Shatner's Trek: TOS toup? It would seem that there are those for whom the old toup was so convincing as to be unnoticeable. But is the curly toup really so much more noticeably bad? The latter toup for the most part concealed the lace line, wasn't prone to losing its structure at the slightest disturbance be it a fight scene or wind, didn't have that classic toup back-comb over the crown area and wasn't mismatched in terms of color. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" we even saw it exposed to a lot of wind and it even went underwater! And if Shats hadn't gone bald, then it is likely that the movie-era look is the one that most closely resembles what his own hair would have looked like.

The new curly post-old-style lace and post-very-bad hairpiece era - aka "the Trek movie look". Did it begin with Shatner's 1976 appearance in Columbo?

Personally, this author finds the Trek movie-era toup far less distracting to the eye, at least until Generations, where the hairline looks very artificial all the way down to the ears. But what do you think? Maybe it will be our next poll...

William Shatner makes another oblique toupee inference.

The 2008 autobiography Up Till Now - written by William Shatner with David Fisher.

There was an incident during the run of the original Star Trek that caused some friction between William Shatner and co-star Leonard Nimoy. The pair quickly made up and have since become very close friends, but back in 1967, William Shatner took exception to a makeup room photoshoot in which the application of the Spock makeup would be made public. The incident has been dealt with in several Trek-related books and Bill Shatner has previously conceded that his own jealousy of Nimoy's popularity (who is the star of this show?) was at the root of his angry reaction. It is something, he says, that he had to struggle to come to terms with in the early days of Star Trek.

But was the anger not just about popularity but also about Shatner's toupee?

The photoshoot that caused friction between Shatner and Nimoy. Sourced from www.mystartrekscrapbook.blogspot.com

In his brilliantly entertaining 2008 autobiography Up Till Now William Shatner tells the story with an additional twist he has never alluded to before. There is a secret at play. What might that secret be?:

"Leonard felt that Freddy [Phillips, Star Trek's makeup artist] had prevented Spock from becoming some kind of visual joke. So when a magazine wanted to do a photo story about his makeup process, featuring Freddy, he agreed. But nobody told me about it.

"We began filming every morning at 8 a.m. Leonard reported to makeup at about 6:30, but I got there about forty-five minutes later. One morning I came to work and found the photographer in the makeup room snapping away. I didn't like that at all; I was concerned all of my little makeup secrets were going to be revealed. And no, I can't tell you what they are. That's why they are secrets. So I asked someone, justifiably, I thought, 'What's the photographer doing in the makeup room?' (emphasis ours)

"The photographer quietly left the room. Leonard and Freddy waited for him to return but he never came back. Eventually Leonard was told that at my insistence an assistant director had forced the photographer to leave. Leonard was furious. He immediately came to my trailer to confront me. 'Did you order the photographer out?' he demanded.

'Yes,' I admitted, explaining, 'I didn't want him there.'"


Now what were those secrets? It it very likely that Bill Shatner is referring to the fact that he would come into work bald, sit down next to Leonard Nimoy in the makeup room, and then have his hairpiece applied. He understandably didn't want those secrets (Captain Kirk is bald!) appearing in some magazine.

If we do the simple maths: Bill Shatner arrived at makeup a full forty-five minutes before he was due on set and forty-five minutes after Nimoy arrived to have his latex ears arduously applied. If he just had basic makeup applied, then he could have come in later. But during that forty-five minutes, the intricate process of laying on the rug was also undertaken.

In the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story Desilu head of production Herb Solow recalls the same incident:

"Jimmy Doohan was there too. He recalls that 'Bill's hairpiece was being applied. The top of his head was a lot of skin and a few little odd tufts of hair. The mirrors in the makeup room walls were arranged so that we could all see the laying on of his rug.'" (page 236)

So in summary: Again we see that Bill Shatner is slowly thawing from the days of outright toup denial - instead peppering his recollections with inferences, albeit still oblique ones, to his hairpiece. Perhaps he had read Herb Solow's account of the Nimoy incident and didn't want to lie about or ignore the toupee factor.

Who knows, maybe in a few years he will openly discuss his baldness in an interview without the subject hitting Shatner's raw nerve.

By the way, we haven't read any of the biographies by the "gang of four" (Doohan, Takei, Koenig and Nichols). If anyone out there has and spots a toup reference, please let us know.

1957 article confirms Shatner toupee purchase.

Studio One - The Defender (1957). The first toup appearance? In this production, Shatner is apparently wearing a quality studio-supplied toupee, but he would soon purchase one of his own.

There is a great article here at Google Docs, which is a reprint of an October 1957 Maclean's Magazine profile of the young William Shatner. The article contains the following very interesting paragraph:

"...Mel Balarino, MGM's casting director...looked Shatner over. What he saw was a splendid young bobcat of a male, with a close cap of cinnamon hair, tufted eyebrows and white teeth bared in a grin of undisciplined charm...[Gloria Rand and William Shatner] had both begun watching their diets again: steak, fresh fruit, yogurt. While others in their apartment block lounged by the pool with gin drinks and suntan oil, Shatner would withdraw into a corner and skip an imaginary rope. Then he'd dive into the pool and later, when he'd straightarmed himself out, would report to Gloria, 'Fifteen lengths that time. Best exercise there is.' He had already ordered a toupee to camouflage a thinning spot in the cinnamon hair." (Emphasis ours. The money for this purchase would likely have come from his salary from the movie The Brothers Karamazov which was filmed in 1957.)

Thanks to a reader for alerting us to this! We sincerely appreciate the detective work of all you Shatner toupologists out there!