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[0:14] Robert Bannon: Well, welcome to the round table, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon, and you're listening to us on Broadway World or over here on the Broadway Podcast Network. And I'm excited. You know, everyone, it's iconic. Like the second you hear dunno, dun, every time you go on an ocean, somebody's gonna say, and I remember being terrified as a kid, terrified as a kid of Jaws. But you know, when we talk about the amazing cast of Jaws, and of course you can't talk about Jaws without talking about Robert Shaw. Um, he was a celebrated actor in many ways, more than just the movie Jaws, and a man that had tons of work on stage and screen for many, many years. And we have a brand new book that's coming out that we need to talk all about it.

Robert Shaw, an actor's life on the set of Jaws and Beyond, comes out May 27th. It's gonna be available wherever books are sold, so you're gonna make sure you pre-order a copy or grab a copy and send it to yourself or someone who loves movies and acting and journeys of biography autobiographies, biographies, people that are writing about people you love and care about. And uh, who better to write about Robert Shaw than his nephew? Christopher Shaw Myers and Christopher Shaw Myers just so happens to be here. Chris, welcome to the round table.

[1:24] Christopher Shaw Myers: What an introduction. Thank you, Robert.

[1:27] Robert Bannon: Thank you for being here and congratulations.

[1:30] Christopher Shaw Myers: Well, thank you. Yes, exactly. It's my first book, and uh I've always aspired to write something. I never realized how hard it is to do. Uh, but it's been a labor of love. Uh, but uh boy, I have even more respect for writers, especially the ones that can crank them out. I I don't know how people do it.

[1:48] Robert Bannon: I'm amazed at people who are able to write uh books, and I'm you did it. You have a book and it's coming out, and people can order it and grab it. So kudos to you, congratulations.

[1:56] Christopher Shaw Myers: No, thank you, thank you. When did you decide that there was a story here about your uncle that hasn't been told that you took this undertaking on?

[2:06] Christopher Shaw Myers: So, yeah, it's it's a good question. I um first of all, I come from a family of academics, right? Uh, you know, my mother was a professor of English. Um, and uh, and my uncle Robert was an actor, right? And a writer. Uh and the other members of their family, there were five children, uh, they were all academics of one kind or another. So I I always I I came from that kind of a background. And Robert and my mother were brother and sister. Uh, he was the oldest of five children, and she was two years younger, the third child, uh, and they were best friends in life. And and one of the things that they did that sort of defined their lives was, and and this is way back when they were seven and five years old and living in Orkney off the northern coast of Scotland.

Uh, they started going to the library together once a week and getting the same books out and reading them together. And my mother was like, Well, Robert, why would we do this? And he said, Joey, uh, my mother's name is Joanna Shaw, but uh he called her Joey. Uh, I want someone, I want someone that I can talk to about the books. So, you know, reading was a huge part of their lives. Um, they continued it all through their teenage years, reading all the classics. Uh, Robert, like if there was a book that had a dreary opening, like Moby Dick or books like that that are great novels, but you might stop after a few chapters because the the beginnings are very Robert would always say to my mother, just skip the first five or ten chapters and jump into it.

Um so reading was a huge part of of their lives, and Robert was a writer as well as an actor and a prolific writer. He wrote five novels and three plays, won awards, had a play that ran on Broadway for a year, The Man of the Glass Booth. Um writing was something I always aspired to. It's kind of the I would say, uh and I remember Robert saying this to me at one point, vague memory as a kid, but uh, that writing is different from any other of the arts because you're not just putting a painting on a canvas or a you know a song, you're creating a character from scratch with all of the complications that people have. And and here's the odd thing about people, right? A person you can think you know that person, and then somebody else enters the room, and they go from confident to not confident, or bully to the person being bullied, or you know, this or that, love, you know, whatever, and then a third person enters the room, and it changes all over again. Now you've got group dynamics, and you've got it. So writing is something that's just it's very interesting, something I always aspire to, but it's really hard. So I never did it. I never did it.

[5:05] Robert Bannon: Yeah. And so now, how long have you been working on the book?

[5:09] Christopher Shaw Myers: Well, I'll tell you, it's been a journey, right? I this started 10 years ago, and it didn't start with Robert Shaw. You know, when I was growing up, Robert was not the quint guy, right? He wasn't even really that famous. You know, he was just, you know, an actor who had done some stuff, writer had written a book or two. And he was not that person that he's known as today. He was just my uncle. He was my crazy uncle because he was laugh out loud, funny. You know, when he started talking, you know, you just got sucked in. Kind of like you see Richard Dreyfus in Jaws when he does the Indianapolis speech, and you see Richard Dreyfus just like, are you kidding me? And it was like that anytime he started talking, you know, at a party or in a living room or in a hotel room.

Something about the, you know, the cadence of his voice, the passion, the intelligence. Uh, and frankly, my mother was like that too. And all of the people in that family were like it. They they got it from their parents. Um, but it didn't start out. I didn't start out writing about Robert. He was just my crazy uncle. Uh, when my mother was in her 80s, she's 95 now and still still alive. Yeah, I know. Um, but when she was in her 80s, you know, about 10 years ago, I said to her, hey, mom, all these stories you've always told me about, I think we should put them down on paper and capture this. It's so interesting. And uh she said, no. She said, no, not, you know, nobody will be interested. And I said, maybe.

But so then I wrote her a two page synopsis of her life, and to sort of spark interest in, you know, going into the detail. And the two-page synopsis went something like this. So you were raised in the Orkney Islands and then Cornwall. You had an alcoholic father who killed himself. So, right, so that's that's a you know traumatic start to a life. You uh you were plunged into poverty. You became paupers when your father was lowered into a pauper's grave. And by the way, World War II had just begun, and Germany was about to drop 20 million pounds or tons or whatever of explosives all around you. But you survived that. You went to Cambridge University, uh, one of the very few women to attend Cambridge back in that era, late late 40s, early 50s. You then went to South Africa to fight apartheid, spent two years doing that, met with Nelson Mandela, gave him your views on what they needed to do.

Didn't work. Nelson Mandela was thrown into prison shortly after that, but eventually they did overcome a part-time. But she was a crusader for women's rights, minority rights. Uh, she raised seven children in the United States, taught for 30 years, excuse me, and when her youngest children uh were around, she would have her students babysit them while she was delivering a lecture. Um, and then after 30 years of teaching, she um discovered that the college was paying the men more than the women, a lot more, and so she sued them uh for you know gender pay discrimination, went through a grueling four-year lawsuit and won her case. So I said, and oh, by the way, mom, in addition to all of that, your brother is a pretty famous, you know, actor writer, and you were on the set of jaws for a week and you saw what happened behind the scenes.

Wouldn't that make a great story? And she agreed. Uh, and so I started to spend uh I must have spent hundreds of hours with her, by the way, which is a treat all by itself for a grown son to spend that kind of you know quality time with his mother, talking about her life and seeing the world through her eyes. And none of us think of our parents that way. You know, when we're born, our parents are already pretty much into middle age, the stresses of, you know, all the stresses of career and family and and stuff. Uh, and I just I saw I saw her life from a sort of a child's and then a teenager's and then the young adult's perspective. And but along the way, I learned so much about Robert Shaw. And, you know, nobody knew him any, you know, better than my mother, you know, his other siblings perhaps, but he was really, really close to my mother.

You know, they were, you know, as close as any brother and sister could be. And as it progressed, I realized actually this could be of interest to other people. And so it's uh it's a book about Robert Shaw and about his family, including my mother, but the Shaw's were an extraordinary family, and so it's no accident that Robert Shaw is an extraordinary actor and and writer in person. It's a long answer to a short question.

[10:11] Robert Bannon: I love it. I I love it so much. Um iconic photo, an iconic time, a movie, and all of that. That is iconic. Your mom, your mom, oh hi, mom, uh, is is uh is a great resource for you to get information, obviously, about your uncle and her brother because she was there for it all. But I'm assuming um there you had to do some pretty solid research to get a lot of the facts and things done. So, how did you find besides your family and that first hand account? How did you get some of the specifics and and to to shape this into the story that this book is telling?

[10:44] Christopher Shaw Myers: Yeah. Well, uh, let me I'll start uh by saying that I I would say this is not your typical biography. And to just to let you in on uh a secret, uh I'm not a fan of biographies in general. Okay. And here I am, I've written one. Um, but you know, so so many biographies are like so and so was born here, and this was their fifth grade teacher, and you know, these were their you know, friends or whatever. And this is not that type of a biography. Um, as an example, the opening, I'll give you the opening line of the first chapter. Mrs. Shaw, did you murder your husband? So that's not the typical beginning to a biography. But when uh when my grandmother's husband, my grandfather, uh killed himself, there, you know, they had to go through an investigation, and she got in front of a judge, and that was what that was the first question.

Um so I've this is a um a biography that focuses more on family stories and tries to bring out who the people are rather than all of the minutia of what happened to them in in life. Um, but yes, uh you know, my uh after you know, my mother started to open up, she went into one of her, you know, uh the closet in her house, pulled out a couple of boxes, and then was like, oh my god, you've got all these scrapbooks, all these letters. Uh uh, you know, there was uh tapes or or uh yeah, there were tapes of my grandmother talking about Robert's first acting experience back in Orkney when it was eight years old. Um my mother was a very, my grandmother, I mean, was a very tough woman. She was critical of everything.

So the way she put it, I I haven't, I've taken what she said, but I've put it into sort of, you know, my view, which is not, you know, Robert was an awful actor, and I can't believe he did this, and actors are, you know, just it's rubbish. Uh, but she did describe what he went through and uh and why he became hooked on acting. And there were just so many different things like that. Um he was a great friend of Thornton Wilder, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, and there was you know information in there about the two of them and and some of the interactions they had. Um then I I spoke uh at to some length with Carl Gottlieb, uh, who was the screenwriter for Jaws, and a really interesting, brilliant man.

And he shared some stories behind the stories, uh behind the scenes stories of what happened on the set of jaws. And he said, Hey, what was your uncle, you know, and then he started asking me about Robert, uh, because Robert had a big personality, and the people on the set of jaws, and for that matter, anybody that he came into contact with, you know, on any movie set or you know, Broadway theater, uh, they were always intrigued by him.

[13:50] Christopher Shaw Myers: You know, Robert had the kind of personality that was people either loved him or they hated him. And, you know, if you ever bump into somebody that knew him personally, and you say, "What did you think of Robert Shaw?" What you don't get is, huh? Well, he was okay. You don't get any sort of in the middle. It's like, oh, I love that guy. He was so much fun, or I hated him. And I think the reason for that is that he had this big, big personality. He walked into a room, he took it over, and he was funny, and he was very competitive, ultra, you know, uber competitive. And this may be a little bit of prejudice on my part, I'm not sure. But you know, my sense is that the people who really liked him were very confident in their own skin.

And so, you know, they could dish it out as much as they took it. And the people who didn't like him, I'm guessing, and this is more hearsay, were people that were sort of intimidated by him and they backed away. Um, so well in the movies, and we watch him in movies, he's larger than life. So I can only imagine that that translates into your family and people who knew him personally, etc. You know, aside from Jaws, you talked about Broadway and a lot of the things that he had done starting in London and then moving over to Broadway, and then he was nominated for an Oscar, and you know, the James Bonds, From Russia with Love and all of that stuff, the scene and all of the films he made and all the work that he did, which is iconic, a litany of work.

Yeah, and Jaws will forever live on for the history of eternity. I mean, it is one of the biggest movies of his in history. Was there a moment you realized your uncle was famous? Was there a moment you realized, like, oh, he's a movie star?

[15:49] Christopher Shaw Myers: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, well, again, you know, I think I would think that every family must have a Robert Shaw in their family. Because I did, right? So no big deal. Um, you know, just that actor. Even when Jaws came out, I still thought that way because it was sort of in my DNA, because I'd grown up with, you know, with he's just my uncle, my crazy uncle, my fascinating crazy uncle. Um, I'll tell you a story actually. Uh, and this goes back maybe 20 or more years. Uh, and Jaws had been out for 25 years by that point. Robert, by the way, he died shortly after Jaws came out, right? So, um, you know, my personal memories of him are almost all as a kid. But I was um I was at a party once in Westport, Connecticut.

I live on the East Coast here in Connecticut, and it was a friend of mine was showing a Mike Tyson fight, right? So there was a bunch of guys there, pretty much, because he was putting this fight on the projecting it on the back of his barn. And after the fight, I was introduced to a guy who was an announcer at ESPN, Mike Greenberg. Uh, and he's, you know, one of these sports anchors and hosts, and I'd seen him on TV, so I knew I was in front of a bit of a celebrity. And my friend introduced me to Mike Greenberg. He didn't say this is Christopher Shaw Myers. He said, "Hey Mike, this is Robert Shaw's nephew." And Mike Greenberg, and if you've ever seen him, or if you look at him, you'll see he's a very outgoing.

He you give him a topic to talk about, and you know, he'll start talking about he's just very, very quick on his feet. And without missing a beat, he launched into half a dozen Robert Shaw imitations. He did Quint and Jaws, right? Like a lot of people can do that. I can't. I'm not one of those guys. You're an actor, but I'm not. Yeah. And then he went right from that into Doyle Lonegan, the Chicago gangster in The Sting. And right from there into Red Grant, the Russian assassin in From Russia with Love, and he went bang, bang, bang, bang, each time changing his accent quickly. And I didn't think any of it at the time, but looking back on it, I went, oh, okay. This, you know, this TV personality, pretty, you know, pretty popular, knows Robert and knows doesn't just know him from Jaws, knows him, you know, from quite a bit.

And so that's one thing. But the other thing, I would say the other moment that I learned that he was special in a very different way. I'll tell you what that is in a second. But it was while I was listening to my mother talk about him, and while I started doing research, and I just started thinking of him, not from a personal perspective, but from a professional perspective.

[17:14] Christopher Shaw Myers: And, you know, one of the things that really struck me as I sort of dug into it, and this is all public information, right? But it just never hit me that way. Uh, you know, I mentioned earlier that he was a writer and he wrote five novels, he wrote three plays. And that in and of itself, I don't think there's many people that do that. And he won awards, you know, for his novels. Uh, one of his plays ran on Broadway for a year. You mentioned he was not nominated for an Academy Award for Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, but he was nominated for a Tony Award when The Man in the Glass Booth ran on Broadway for a year. And so now he was nominated for a Tony Award, and plenty of people have won or been nominated for an Oscar and a Tony, but it's always been acting or writing.

He was nominated on the one hand for acting and on the other hand for writing. And then as I sort of looked at it a little bit more, um, and I can't think of many people, by the way, that have done that. Maybe Orson Welles or, you know, people like that. I mean, the Alec Guinnesses and the Lawrence Oliviers, they never did anything like that. And you know, the modern big stars like, I mean, Ryan Gosling, you know, De Niro, you know, they haven't done anything like that. So, but then I looked at the actors who have played a role written by Robert, right? Where he, you know, created it with pen and paper, because that's how you did it in those days. They did, you know, no word processors. Um, and it's a who's who list of actors.

It's Alec Guinness played a role that he created, uh, James Mason, uh, Trevor Howard, uh, Richard Basehart, Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, Jack Warden and Robert Redford. It uh, it's a long list, and I remember reading once that Warren Beatty, and I always thought of Warren Beatty as just an actor. Good-looking actor, made Bonnie and Clyde and some other big, you know, big movies. But then I read that Warren Beatty was a director, and that more than like a dozen actors under his direction were nominated for Academy Awards. And my view of Warren Beatty sort of, you know, expanded. It's like, wow, that is crossing genres. And that's what Robert did as well as a writer and an actor. And so he'll always be remembered as Quint. But you know, personally he was much more than that, but professionally he was much more than that too.

[21:41] Robert Bannon: Absolutely. And while we're talking everybody, the book, An Actor's Life on the Set of Jaws and Beyond Robert Shaw by his nephew, Christopher Shaw Myers is gonna get it where books are sold and all of that. So we can support you and support the story of your uncle and your family by ordering a copy of the book. Um, thank you. Jaws was a very lauded subject that documentaries have been made about it, stories have been written about it, you know. Everyone has talked about what that set was like, was it gonna work? Was it not gonna work? How they got along on the set? All the things are quite movie Hollywood folklore for now. Did you learn anything new while you were researching this or anything that you never heard before? Do people ask you about the set of Jaws when they find out about your uncle and what it all was like often?

[22:27] Christopher Shaw Myers: Um, you know, I never uh I have a lot of uh friends and uh, you know, colleagues or ex-colleagues with people in my sphere, um, that have when they've learned about that I'm coming out with this book, the reaction was, really? You're related to Robert Shaw? I never really, you know, talked about him. So no, I never really got questions like that. And I wasn't on the set, but my mother was, and she went into great detail, so I do sort of feel like I was on the set. Um, yeah, I'll tell you, I mean, you know, Jaws now is such sort of lore, right? It's passed into lore that there's so many stories that are well known. And you know, I've heard about them just by reading about them. Um, but I'll share a couple of things that I learned that I bet people don't know.

And one of them was so, uh, one of the scenes that my mother watched in person was Robert's death scene. So she was there, you know, sort of 50 feet or so away on another boat anchored near the Orca as it tilted up and Robert, you know, slid down the deck into the shark's mouth. And it was, you know, my mother described it, it was horrifying to see the blood coming out of his mouth, you know, because he bit down, you know, on a whatever it was, ketchup or must not be ketchup, I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's real blood.

[23:57] Christopher Shaw Myers: No, those are capsules, yes. Yeah, so you know, to see that was kind of horrifying to her. Um, but so that night, right? So they shoot, you know, they film during the day out on the ocean, they come back to the dock, they have dinner, and my mom and Robert are walking on the beach together, and she says to him very casually, "Wow, that was really interesting. Your screams sounded so real." And Robert said, and she said, "Great acting, Robert." And he said, "Actually, Joey, that wasn't acting. I was terrified." And she said, "Terrified, why?" And he said, "Think about it. I was being dragged into the ocean by a mechanical contraption that had not worked from day one. And all I had to rescue me, if something went wrong, and I went underwater, were two scuba divers with an extra set of oxygen."

So he was, you know, he said it anyway. Again, larger than life figure. I'm never quite sure, you know, how much he's pushing things. But he said he was terrified. And I, you know, I do believe him in this case. That had to be scary.

[25:14] Robert Bannon: I do too. Well, these stories and all of these stories are the stories that you're gonna get when you get the book. What is the best way for us to get the book? How can we get the book? Should we just go? Is it an Amazon thing? Should we go to a website? Should we find you? What are we supposed to do, Chris?

[25:28] Christopher Shaw Myers: It is, it's available for pre-order on all of the main book sites Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart, wherever you good reads, wherever you buy books, there's a pre-order, you know, but it doesn't ship until May 27th. So it's a pre-order at this point. Or I'm sorry, this is coming out that week. So yes, this week you even if it's if it's the day before or two days before, or it's May 27th itself, you can get it shipped to your house, you'll be in your, you know, Amazon, and or these they'll be you wake up and it's magically on your doorstep, and you can get to reading. It's the perfect look. When you go to the beach this summer, and you're gonna sit out there. This is the perfect read for all the movie fans and people who want to hear a great story about family and the rise of somebody and how the lore of a Hollywood legend for short.

An Actor's Life on the Set of Jaws and Beyond, Robert Shaw is out. You can order it, you can get a copy and send it to somebody who loves movies and Jaws, etc. theater, anything, family lore, all of it. Uh, this is for you. I had so much fun listening to you. Your stories are good. I can't wait to read the book.

[26:34] Christopher Shaw Myers: Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Um, and we're ready for the next now. You gotta get your mom to let you write the next one and tell the whole story.

[26:43] Christopher Shaw Myers: That's right. There'll be a sequel.

[26:46] Robert Bannon: Like any good movie. It's like Jaws. Then there may be more than one sequel.

[26:49] Christopher Shaw Myers: There may be a couple.

[26:51] Robert Bannon: Um, exactly. Thank you for being here. Congratulations.

[26:53] Christopher Shaw Myers: Thank you, Robert. I appreciate it. It was so a pleasure.