Chapter 9
ON JUNE 24, 1950, Antioch College is completing last-minute details for its ninety-fifth graduation. It is to begin any moment. There, waiting, sitting in chairs on the lawn, are my father’s mother, brother, and my mother’s grandparents, all watching as my young parents and their classmates walk across an outdoor stage and graduate to thunderous applause.
My parents move to Cincinnati, about an hour’s drive southwest, where my dad works as a staff writer with radio station WLW. It was the job Earl Hamner had just resigned from. He told me, “I took time off to write a novel. Rod stepped into the job I vacated. Years later, when we would run into each other at Hollywood events, your dad would introduce me as ‘the man who gave him his first job.’ ”
Part of his job, as my dad describes it, is to write “folksy” dialogue for two “hayseed” entertainers: “One was a girl yodeler whose falsetto could break a beer bottle at 20 paces.” He also writes phony testimonials for a patent-medicine remedy. “It had about twelve percent alcohol by volume and, if the testimonials were to be believed, could cure everything from arthritis to a fractured pelvis.”
This experience with patent miracle cures will one day find its way into a Twilight Zone script, a western titled “Mr. Denton on Doomsday.”
Another part of his job is to write scripts honoring small towns. “In most cases,” he said, “the towns I was assigned to honor had little to distinguish them save antiquity. Any dramatization beyond the fact that they existed physically, usually had one major industry, a population, and a founding date, was more fabrication than documentation.”
All of this begins to wear on my dad. He tosses and turns at night, gets out of bed, lights a cigarette, goes to the window, pulls away the curtain, and looks at the blackened world outside. Night after night he walks the same path across the cold floor. He grows increasingly frustrated, knowing unequivocally what he wants to do. The drudgery at the radio station is not his destiny. He wants to write something serious, something of substance. And so he begins to work two jobs. His days are spent creating copy at the station, and his nights are devoted to script writing.
In retrospect, he will say:
I used to come home at seven o’clock in the evening, gulp down a dinner and set up my antique portable typewriter on the kitchen table. The first hour would then be spent closing all the mental gates and blacking out all the impressions of a previous eight hours of writing. You have to have a pretty selective brain for this sort of operation. There has to be the innate ability to single track the creative processes. And after a year or so of this kind of problem, you have rent receipts, fuel for the furnace and a record of regular eating; but you have also denied yourself, as I did, a basic “must” for every writer. And this is simple solitude—physical and mental. It was during this double-shift period that I collected forty rejection slips in a row. Nobody but a beginning writer can realize just how crushing this is to the ego.
In his final interview, decades later, he sums it up like this: “In the old days, you were rejected, and not only was a piece of your flesh cut to pieces, your pocketbook was destroyed. You know—you don’t have bread for rent.”
Things begin to change when he sells two radio scripts to the series “Grand Central Station” and, in 1950, a script to Stars Over Hollywood, an NBC film series. The script is called “Grady Everett for the People.” He doesn’t remember too much about the story but does distinctly recall that he sells it, along with all television rights, for one hundred dollars. Years later, with his typical self-deprecating manner, he says, “As of this writing the show has aired at least twenty-four times at odd hours and on odd channels. I will claim immodestly that it surpassed wrestling; beyond that I’ll make no value judgment whatsoever.”
My dad is now even more certain he wants to quit WLW and take the leap to freelancing. One night, he and my mother go to dinner and discuss his career. This is a pivotal moment, one that he will summarize in his book Patterns and that my mother will tell me was exactly as he wrote it.
I sat that night with my wife, Carol, at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and after a few false starts—“You know, honey, a man could make a lot of money freelancing”—I talked out my hope. Freelance writing would no longer be a kind of errant hope to augment our economy, to be done around the midnight hour on a kitchen table. Freelance writing would now be our bread, our butter, and the now-or-never of our whole existence. My wife was twenty-one, three months pregnant, and a most adept reader of the score. She knew all about freelance writing. She’d lived with it with me through college and the two years afterward. She knew that in my best year I had netted exactly $790. She was well aware that it was a hit-or-miss profession where the lush days are followed by the lean. She knew it was seasonal, and there was no definition of the seasons. She knew that it was a frustrating, insecure, bleeding business at best, and the guy she was married to could get his pride, his composure and his confidence eaten away with the acid of disappointment. All this she knew sitting at a table in Howard Johnson’s in 1951. And as it turned out, this was a scene with no dialogue at all. All she did was to take my hand. Then she winked at me and picked up a menu and studied it. And at that given moment, the vision of medicine bottles, girl yodelers, and guitar-strumming M. C.s faded away into happy obscurity. For lush or lean, good or bad, Sardi’s or malnutrition, I’d launched a career.
I’ll grant you the perhaps inordinate amount of sentiment attached to all the above, but if this were a novel, patent medicines, Howard Johnson’s, and my wife, Carol, would all be part of an obligatory first chapter.
In the early fifties, television was evolving into a major medium. To say my dad “was at the right place at the right time” could not be truer. He sells scripts to three of the major dramatic anthology series: Kraft Television Theater, Studio One, and Lux Video Theater.
“The medium had progressed somewhat past the primitive stage,” he recalled in the commentary in Patterns.
There was still a sense of bewilderment on the part of everyone connected with the shows. And it was still more the rule than the exception to find the opening camera shot of almost every television play trained on the behind of one of the cameramen.
The television writer’s claim to the title “playwright” had been made, but as yet was not universally accepted. The TV play, once called by Paddy Chayefsky “the most perishable item known to man,” enjoyed no longevity through the good offices of the legitimate stage and the motion pictures. The motion-picture industry looked down at its newborn cousin somewhat as the president of a gourmet club might examine an aborigine gnawing a slab of meat.
Between 1951 and 1954 my dad flies from Ohio to New York City to participate in story conferences and rehearsals of his shows. Despite his gregarious and outgoing personality, he is a young writer trying to establish himself, the proverbial kid from a small town, and still new at the game. He says, “Every time I walked into the network or agency office I had the strange and persistent feeling that I was wearing overalls and Li’l Abner shoes.”
One incident he recalls involves a rewrite on a script for Lux Video Theater titled “You Be the Bad Guy.” My dad says:
The script editor asked if I’d like to meet the star of the show. I was ushered into a small office and was introduced to MacDonald Carey, an extremely pleasant, affable guy who stood up and shook my hand and complimented me on the script. I remember standing in the center of the room wondering what the hell I could do next, and deciding that I had outworn my welcome and my purpose and should at this time beat a retreat. I looked busily and professionally at my watch, nodded tersely to all assembled, mumbled something about it being a pleasure to see them all but I had to catch a plane going west, and then turned and crashed into the wall, missing the door by two feet. Then I ran into an oncoming secretary and dropped my briefcase, exposing not only scripts and writing material, but a couple of pairs of socks, some handkerchiefs and some underwear. I traveled light in those days.
It is the end of the year 1952. November. An endless stretch of gray, rain-soaked days. My dad sits before his typewriter, the wastebasket on the floor beside him overflowing with balled-up papers, each one indistinguishable from the next. He is experiencing every writer’s nightmare—a dry period. He writes, “My diet consisted chiefly of black coffee and fingernails. I’d written six half-hour television plays and each one had been rejected at least five times . . . what this kind of thing does to the family budget is obvious; and what it does to the personality of the writer is even worse.”
He says he used to stare at his typewriter “like it was a black monster that came up with the mortgage. I had to throttle that panicky fear that rises up in your throat when you get a frantic feeling that you’ve lost what grip you had—and should have gone into insurance or chicken farming.”
He is eager for any opportunity and writes to Raymond Crossett, a story editor at Universal Pictures in Los Angeles, “I’d appreciate the opportunity of meeting you and perhaps querying you on film writing. If the industry is actually looking for new blood—I’d be most appreciative of giving some of mine.”
He continues to persevere, and his luck changes. Lux Theater buys eleven of his twelve scripts. If there was a glimmer of hope before, this, he says, is the turning point. “You announce your name at the reception desk and the girl nods knowingly and doesn’t ask you to repeat it or query you as to its spelling.”
As he noted in Patterns, the form itself had begun to change:
The major advance in the television play was a thematic one. The medium began to show a cognizance of its own particular fortes. It had the immediacy of the living theater, some of the flexibility of the motion picture, and the coverage of radio. It utilized all three in developing and improving what was actually a new art form . . . One could see that the television play was beginning to show depth and a preoccupation with character. Its plots and its people were becoming meaningful. Its stories had something to say.
My father and mother and two-year-old Jodi move from Cincinnati to Westport, Connecticut. It is the fall of 1954. Outside the window, just past my dad’s desk, there is an explosion of fall colors, and in a nearby room my sister plays on the floor, talking to her stuffed animals. My dad begins his seventy-second television script, typing Patterns on the title page.
Four months later, he has completed and sold his script. He describes it as:
A story of ambition and the price tag that hangs on success. If it professes actually to have a message, it is simply that every human being has a minimum set of ethics from which he operates. This minimum set of ethics often injects itself into a man’s own journey upward against competition. When he refuses to compromise those ethics, his career must suffer; when he does compromise them, his conscience does the suffering. There are tragic overtones to this because our society is a competitive one. For every man who goes up, someone has to leave. And when the departure of the aged is neither philosophical nor graceful, there is a kind of aching poignancy in this changing of the guard.
In an interview in The Toledo Blade my dad says he is not a writer who can imagine characters. “They have to be people I’ve known. I’ve never known any businessmen very well, but I had a captain during the war who had the same kind of viciousness as the executive in Patterns played by Everett Sloane. In the script, I simply put him into a business suit.”
He and my mother, now four months pregnant with me, are taking an overnight trip to Ithaca. My dad holds their suitcase and opens the door. A fresh coat of snow blankets the drive but not enough that he’ll have to shovel. They hug Jodi good-bye and tell the babysitter, “We just moved here, don’t worry, no one will call us.”
Kraft Television Theater airs the show (which also stars Richard Kiley, Ed Begley, and Elizabeth Montgomery) while they are in Ithaca. It is Wednesday, January 12, 1955.
The next morning Jack Gould writes in the New York Times:
Nothing in months has excited the television industry as much as the Kraft Television Theater’s production of Patterns—an original play by Rod Serling. The enthusiasm is justified. In writing, acting and direction, Patterns will stand as one of the high points in the TV medium’s evolution. For sheer power of narrative, forcefulness of characterization and brilliant climax, Mr. Serling’s work is a creative triumph that can stand on its own.
As my dad said, “One minute after the show went off the air, my phone started to ring and it’s been ringing ever since.”
In a commentary about writing for television, my dad writes:
There are two ways for a writer to achieve success. One is the long haul, the establishing of a record of consistent quality in his work. The other way is the so-called overnight success, charged and generated by a single piece of writing that captures the imagination and the fancy of the public and the critics. Patterns was that kind of piece. It came on the air unheralded, but pushed me into the limelight with a fabled kind of entry.
Two weeks after its initial production, in an unprecedented move, Patterns was again performed live by popular demand. My dad writes about the anatomy of success:
In two weeks after Patterns’ initial production, the following happened to me:
I received 23 firm offers for television writing assignments.
I received three motion picture offers for screenplay assignments.
I had fourteen requests for interviews from leading magazines and newspapers.
I had offers of lunch from Broadway producers.
I had two offers to discuss novels with publishers.
He has also learned much about his craft. In an article in The San Diego Union in October, he comments,
The movies can stress the physical, the horizontal. But TV learned from the start that in this medium you have to emphasize the vertical aspects, the story itself and faces in closeup. Something else that TV writers learned right off is that the little screen needs human beings—it won’t take stark villainy or lily-white heroism. You had to deal in all the greys that make up character and try to get at the truth.
The following year, Patterns wins my dad his first Emmy. The category is Best Teleplay Writing. He accepts the fact that writers are always considered among the least important participants of the show, and in that moment, when he hears his name called and walks up to accept his award, in a tux he can now afford, there is no one on the stage to present the Emmy. Ed Sullivan, who is supposed to be the presenter, has been called away by photographers. A nervous laughter begins to erupt in the audience. My dad stands there, “lonelier than I shall ever again be, wondering what the hell I should do next.” Recognizing the screw-up, someone from Price Waterhouse—in what my dad calls “a perfect spasm of compassion”—grabs an Emmy, meets my dad on stage, and hands it to him.
Despite this inauspicious moment on stage, my dad says, “No matter how you slice it, the little bronze statuette is recognition. It’s identity. It’s a reward and a compliment and a culmination that comes after a lot of years after banging a typewriter.”
My dad is now known as “the guy who wrote Patterns.” He writes of his overnight fame:
All of a sudden, with no preparation and no expectations, I had a velvet mantel draped over my shoulders. I treaded my way through a brand new world of dollar sign mobiles hanging from the sky, shaking hands with my right hand, depositing checks with my left, watching my bank account grow, reading my name in the papers and magazines, listening to myself being complimented undeservedly and extravagantly.
He finds that he can sell everything, and he does. Years later he will say he shouldn’t have been so impetuous; he should have kept many of the old teleplays in the trunk.
Yet with humility that I later know to be typical of him, he does not consider himself at the top of the television-writing heap. “In a given year I might have two successes with other plays in between that weren’t so good,” he tells J.P. Shanley of The New York Times. “Of all the television playwrights I know, Paddy Chayefsky seems to be the only one who has escaped that. He has a fine record of consistency.”
Several years later he confirms his admiration for the creator of the New York–bred “Marty” and “The Tenth Man.” “Paddy Chayefsky is my idol. He has the gift of melting significance and meaning and humor into one play, often into a single situation. He gave stature to television.”
My dad sells six new scripts in a row and some others that are never released. One of them, “The Rack,” is produced on The United States Steel Hour. It is about the after-effects of mental torture on American prisoners of war in Korea. With compassion and realism, he shows that there are no easy answers to the profound moral questions posed by war. He made that point in a different context the year before on Studio One with “The Strike,” in which an army major is forced to call a bombing strike on his own platoon.
Paul Newman stars in the film version of “The Rack.” My dad thinks it is better than Patterns. He feels it was one of the most honest things he has ever written. But Patterns, he says, seems to obscure everything he’s done, and he is desperate to change that. A year later, turning back to prizefighting, his script “Requiem for a Heavyweight” does just that. He is quoted in The Pittsburgh Press: “All writers grab on to what represents them qualitatively, and ‘Requiem’ represents me.”
“Requiem” is the story of a once successful boxer, played by Jack Palance, who is on his way down. My dad says:
I had one basic idea . . . I wanted to analyze a human being who fought for a living but who was nonetheless a human being. I wanted a guy who would act, react, feel and think without sounding like the stereotyped, cauliflower-eared, punchy human wreck who has now become so familiar that he’s funny. I wanted the dull, slow, painfully halting speech to elicit sympathy and understanding, but not a laugh . . . Requiem’s basic premise is that every man can and must search for his own dignity.
The producer, Martin Manulis, says, “After the live broadcast, CBS chairman William Paley called the control room and told the crew, ‘That show has advanced TV by ten years.’ ”
My dad is truly on his way.