He’s Taking This Trek in a Saddle

You’d know him in a minute if he was at the console of a starship plying the passages of space between galaxies and dodging the evil machinations of dread space villains.

You’d also know him if he was in a police car, the incorruptible Sgt. Hooker, the uncompromising champion of the forces of law and order in a corrupt society.

So, what’s Capt. Kirk doing at the control panel of--a horse? Why in the world is T.J. Hooker in a saddle and not at the wheel of a high-speed squad car tearing through the streets of Los Angeles? Shouldn’t he be in command of the starship Enterprise? Or reading a drug dealer his rights just before he manacles him to a lamppost and goes off in search of Heather Locklear?

William Shatner is the last of a unique breed--the genuine All-American movie star. The hero. The good guy. He wins in the end. He gets the girl. He rescues the child, puts out the fire. He wears the white hat.

William Shatner does not play psychological misfits, wimps, victims. He does not play best friends, weaklings, jokers, inmates, gangsters, psychopaths. He wins all the fights, survives all the struggles, saves the fort. He’s John Wayne, Clark Gable, Paul Newman, Gary Cooper.

He doesn’t play Mr. Hyde. He doesn’t die in the second act. His pictures get released in clusters with Roman numerals after them. He is the ultimate Trekkie. He can go to Europe and stop traffic.

It’s not unusual for film stars to have glamour hobbies, extensions of their make-believe lives. Newman races cars. Don Johnson races powerboats. James Caan ropes rodeo steers. Bogart sailed. Gilbert Roland fought bulls. Ronald Reagan ran for governor and President.

When a film star owns a horse, it’s usually a star in its own right. Probably a direct descendant of Man o’ War. The star wants to win the Kentucky Derby. Have his own silks--a gold star on a dressing room door.

Not actor Shatner. The horses he collects are never going to run for the roses at Louisville in May. In fact, they don’t run at all. They prance.

It all began six years ago when he fell in love. The object of his affections was not some chorine or contest winner but a beauty all the same. It was a great, gorgeous 16-hands stud named Sultan’s Great Day.

“The most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life,” recalls the film star. “I fell in love.”

He fell in love with a whole way of life. The horsy set is not all claimers, allowances, Breeders’ Cups, morning lines, clockers, trifectas.

The American saddlebred is as unique to this country as corn on the cob, pumpkin pie, hot fudge sundaes--or movie stars. It’s possible Paul Revere rode one of them through every Middlesex village and farm. Yankee Doodle Dandy wasn’t riding on a pony, he was on an American saddlebred, most likely. It was the horse that almost won the Civil War for the South. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry mounts were American saddlebreds. So were Jesse James’.

It is the most beautiful and durable of the world’s equines. It was bred for beauty not speed. Its milieu is the show ring, not the finish line. It has neither the fragility of the thoroughbred nor the bulkiness of the draft horse.

It is a legacy of the frontier, having probably come into being when the settlers of the territories of Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana began to experiment with their livestock--the Morgan horses, Arabians, Narragansett pacers--and developed a whole new strain. It was a status symbol. The pioneer wanted a fine horse the way the industrialist today wants a custom Rolls-Royce or a new yacht.

The thoroughbred can be traced back to three foundation sires: the Byerly Turk, Darley Arabian, and Godolphin Barb. The saddlebred can be traced back to Denmark, a descendant of the Byerly Turk, but it is an amalgam of every breed brought to the New World by the conquistadors and allowed to roam the range.

Shatner, restless, like most movie people between films, tried celebrity car racing, sailplaning, even hunting the Kodiak bear with a bow and arrow, before he settled happily on showing horses.

Riding has to be as stylized as the gait in order for a show horse to be successful.

A jockey can scratch all over a horse’s back, hunch over his withers, flog him, scream at him, kick him and, in general, ride as if a swarm of bees were after him. The gentleman rider of the saddlebred has to sit bolt-upright and appear to be a part of the animal. He usually wears funereal black, a frock coat and a felt hat. The whole aspect is vaguely sinister, as if the rider were some kind of dark eminence come to menace the town. It’s great theater.

For a horseman, it is a more aesthetic sight than any stretch run at Kentucky. It is said the horse’s action has to be so fluid he could carry a glass of water on his back without spilling a drop. The horse moves at a three-gait or five-gait pace, a discipline that evolved from the frontiersmen’s boast that their horses could step higher and move smoother than any trained mare of their neighbors’.

L.A. is going to get a rare look at Capt. (now Adm.) Kirk in a new role March 13-17, when the Hollywood Charity Horse Show will be held, for the benefit of the California Special Olympics and the Make-A-Wish foundation, among others, at the L.A. Equestrian Center in Burbank.

It will be a different kind of horsemanship than the $2 bettor is used to but Shatner insists, “If you like horses and you like beauty in competition, you’ll love the horse show.”

It will also help if you liked Star Trek and Capt. Kirk. And, even though the three-gaited horse is about as far as you can get from the war of the worlds, the Trekkies will have no trouble recognizing the guy in the black-on-black garb and the bowler hat and the pocket handkerchief as their beloved leader who kept saving the earth every Thursday night on Channel 4, an inter-galactic Western. This is also in Hollywood’s best traditions: a movie star on horseback.