Chapter 10
We had tilted at the same dragons for seven or eight years and, when the smoke cleared, the dragons had won. Live television was history. So the summons came, and the writers moved west.
—ROD SERLING
THE TELEVISION INDUSTRY IS booming, and prerecorded broadcasts are becoming the norm. In 1958 we move to Pacific Palisades, California. I am three years old, standing, for the first time, in the Tudor-style house on Monaco Drive, our new home. My mother, holding my hand, shows me the room that will be mine—the one closest to theirs, and Jodi’s just a little farther than mine.
Men in white are painting, their ladders leaning against the banister, and they smile when we walk past.
This is my first memory, this house whose doors, even today, decades later, I reenter in dreams. The sounds and colors are just as vivid—the abundance of sunlight throughout, the blue of my parents’ room, the darker blue of Jodi’s, the flowered wallpaper of mine, and the tree that brushed against the window when the wind blew. It is always the same in this recurring dream. I am calling my father, looking for him in vacant rooms where beds have been stripped bare, furniture moved, closets emptied. No one is home; no one lives there anymore. Beyond the emptiness and the silence, there is unfamiliarity. As if walls have been rearranged, structures changed, leaving behind a maze of altered routes, a kind of house of mirrors. I always wake with a start and with an attendant, lingering sadness. It takes a while to shake away this imaginary house and recall the one of my childhood. In those first moments of wakening, I make a conscious effort. In my mind I go back, I turn the handle, push open the front door, and I begin again.
The revisiting is not unlike a Wizard of Oz moment. I open the door to a profusion of color and light and see us standing there, the people we were, my family that passed in and out, in and out, countless times through that heavy wooden front door. Invariably, inevitably, time distorts memories, lightening some, diffusing others, and although the telephoto lens that roams through my recollections tends to obscure things, this is what is there; this is what remains when I go back: We have a red guest room, and sometimes I hear my father there, in the middle of the night, and when I am older I know he is there because he is again having trouble sleeping. He is probably suffering through more war nightmares.
In the living room, the couch and the carpet are white. This room is used only for company, but for some reason this is also the favored spot for the setters—Michael and Maggie—to relieve themselves; they always pee on that carpet. My dad will say, “God damn it,” and he or my mother or my sister or I will clean it up, time after time.
I don’t recall celebrities frequently in our house, but one night Betty White visits my parents. Although I have seen her on television, I am most impressed by the fact that she loves our dogs and bends down to pet them. My parents lead her into the living room. I follow and sit on the couch, staring up at her, while she tells me all about her animals. She holds our setters’ faces in her hands and talks to them inches away. “Hello big beautiful fella.” I fall instantly in love with this kind, gracious lady.
Our kitchen is green and long like a hall. I see my sister and me sitting there, our younger selves, ages six and three, playing the “Milk Game,” which is my father’s way to get Jodi and me to drink our milk. He pretends to be the monster that doesn’t want the milk touched. “Don’t drink that!” he growls, and then looks away, and we take large swallows before he turns around again to find our half-empty glasses. “Who drank my milk!” he says in a ferocious, growling voice. This goes on until the milk is gone, my sister and I giggling convulsively until we can barely breathe.
On weekends my parents often go out. My mother sometimes wears a green silk dress—my favorite. She promises to save it for me. I love peering at her from around the doorway—watching her get ready to go, putting her makeup on, combing her dark brown hair. I study her closely, thinking how beautiful she is.
Eventually she shoos me away, and I go downstairs to my father. When I am older, he and I sit in the family room waiting for the babysitter Mrs. West to arrive. Mrs. West is an enormous woman, likely about forty, but to Jodi and me she seems ancient.
At the round table beneath the white light, my dad and I play “Crazy Eights” or “Go Fish,” calling for twos, fours, announcing our matching cards, waiting for my mother to descend the stairs and announce that she is ready. We leave our cards exactly as they are, to return to later, and my father stands, pushes back his chair, and helps my mother with her coat. They say good-bye to Jodi and me and tell Mrs. West, now there, that they won’t be too late.
As they open the front door, a few faded, fall leaves blow in, and I rush to the window to watch them go.
Mrs. West always watches television downstairs, programs Jodi and I don’t like, like Jackie Gleason, so we are pretty much on our own and sometimes, I run to my parents’ room and slip into one of my mother’s dresses and pointed shoes dyed to match and, twirling before the mirror, pretend for an instant to be her. I must have been a ridiculous sight—this small, chubby girl staring back.
My bedroom overlooks the driveway. At night, if I am still awake when they come home, I see the headlights shine through the curtain and hear the car doors close. I hear my parents’ voices wafting up to my window and their footsteps as they walk to the front door. I can count the seconds, almost exactly, until they check on me. If I am in their room sneaking television and hear the car, I race back to my bed where I hear Mrs. West saying good night and driving away, and I know how long it takes for my parents to hang up their coats, climb the stairs, and walk down the hall. (Sixty-five seconds.) I lie waiting, finally seeing my parents there, silhouetted at my door by the yellow hall light. My mother leans over me, her perfume filling my room like flowers. She kisses my cheek, and then I feel my father’s cool hand on my forehead and hear him start our whispered routine, “Who’s your best friend, Pops?” And eyes still closed, I’ll whisper back, “You are,” and he’ll pull my blanket up and walk quietly to the door.
On nights when I feel scared, and only my dad can help, I call out to him, “Dad? Daddy? Dad?” And down the hall he will come, his voice soft in my ear, telling me all the reasons I should not fear the dark.
When we all go out together, my father dutifully checks under my bed upon our return and assures me there is nothing there. This inspection takes a while. I am convinced these creatures are not just hiding on the floor behind the bed skirts. My monsters are clever. They hang from the box spring where they cannot be seen with a cursory glance. “Daddy! Look again! You’re not looking carefully!” I tell him, and he does but too hurriedly. “Dad, that’s too quick. You have to look again.” He mutters under his breath, “God damn it, Pops, there’s nothing there!” but he double checks. There is never a doubt in my mind that my father can contend with anything that might be lurking there.
A decade later, I will watch him sleep at Strong Memorial in a hospital gown, frailer than we could have known, and I’ll remember him, all those years before, invincible on his knees, on the orange and yellow carpet of my bedroom, peering beneath my bed, checking, assuring me there is nothing there, nothing hiding in the dark. And these contrasting images will forever do battle in my mind, and in my heart.
In my father’s original study at the lake, a small, red wooden outbuilding that later becomes the dog house, there is a high shelf filled with model airplanes. My dad sits at a wooden table and, although not very mechanically minded, assembles these tiny warplanes, gluing and painting them. This is a favorite hobby of his and clearly relaxes him. I remember countless times watching him there, shirtless and tan, his strong arms flying the completed model planes through the air and then retiring them to the high shelf.
Putting together other things—toys, shelves, bicycles, tables—is not his strong suit, but rather my mother’s. She will patiently stand back with a slight smile as my dad, directions spread before him, attempts to assemble something. Often I will hear, under his breath, “Shit,” right before he gives up and throws over the booklet. “Rod, let me do it,” my mother says, picking it up and reading the directions. She is the one who can follow the directions, put things together, read the maps, light the fires. She is the organizer, the coordinator, the pragmatic, practical one. She is the one who tries to persuade him that the sign that reads, DEER CROSSING NEXT TEN MILES means beware of deer for the next ten miles, not after the next ten miles. I remember sitting in the backseat, hearing this same argument over and over. I am fairly certain she never convinces him.
Once, when my sister is about sixteen, some older boys, looking dirty and unshaven, come to visit her. They tear down the cottage road on loud motorcycles, our dogs jumping out of the way, and my dad, furious, shakes his finger, unable to utter a single word. It is my mother who calmly and articulately states, “What my husband is trying to say is that you’re not welcome here.” My dad, laughing, tells this story for years.
My mother is cast in the role of disciplinarian and keeper of order and, as such, she is the one who makes certain our beds are made and our rooms cleaned. She is the one who drills us on our multiplication and checks to make sure no homework is left undone. She does, though, have a silly side. She’ll make up words like “heak” and say it in a squeaky voice that makes my sister and me laugh.
My dad’s anger can be formidable if he’s had a particularly long day or if he is stressed, but we know it is transitory; whereas my mother can maintain hers and her disappointment for days. And so, for the most part, it is her anger we fear. If my dad is out of town, and she threatens us with the proverbial “Wait until your father gets home,” her statement is met with little trepidation by my sister or me. We know that if he is irritated, the reaction will dissipate almost immediately.
The two exceptions to this are when we are teenagers and make long distance phone calls or leave lights on in an empty room. My dad has no patience for excessively long conversations with our friends back east or for the waste of electricity. These ignite his impatience and his quick, explosive temper, but I know it will be short-lived. He will stand in my bedroom, furious, yell, and then disappear, only to return within moments, peek his head in, with that black, wavy hair, and quietly ask, “Have you seen my twin brother anywhere?” Sometimes he will reappear in a costume or with my lampshade on his head or some goofy expression on his face.
My mother, left with the harder job of keeping the household running, makes my dad seem the fun parent, the warm parent, the one whose love is, without exception, unconditional.
It is my mother, though, who is the more hands-on parent, the one who knows our day-to-day lives and balances her own work in between. For years she volunteers at the Santa Monica Hospital gift shop, where she is in charge of purchasing all of the toys and children’s books. She also volunteers as a clinical worker at a suicide prevention center. At the time this means little to me, but now, in retrospect, I think these choices indicate how both my parents were never swallowed up by the Hollywood scene and never lost touch with reality. Why our trips to the cottage grounded us, all of us, and why, perhaps my sister and I would settle on the East Coast, preferring that peace over the insanity of Los Angeles.
My dad “teaches” me to drive when I am four. I sit on his lap, holding the steering wheel, and he pushes the gas. For years we drive that white Lincoln down Monaco Drive, D’Este Drive, and Capri Drive. Just as the streetlights begin to come on, there we are, swerving through our neighborhood, singing at the top of our lungs.
In a 1959 interview on the ABC television program, Mike Wallace Interview, Wallace mentions that my father works twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I never feel, though, that his attention is in short supply or that he is unavailable. Perhaps because when you are in his presence, you are very much center stage, and he is continually entertaining you. Whether it is pulling quarters out of my ear, or appearing, suddenly, in the doorway wearing a poncho, playing endless games of “Go Fish,” or walking with my sister and me through the ravine searching for salamanders—to be with my father is, almost always, exhilarating. And because he has an uncanny talent for impersonation and a seemingly endless number of different voices and dialects, funny expressions, and jokes, it is like having a different playmate every day. He also has an incredible ability to separate work from family. While he is playing with me in the little dog house/playhouse, sitting in the tiny chairs and drinking the imaginary coffee I have set before him, he is under tremendous pressure with his writing and battling against the network censorship of many of his works. But I don’t have the remotest idea that this is happening, and, in fact, I won’t know this for years.
In one of the scripts he writes, the sponsors object because an office window scene shows the Chrysler Building in the New York skyline. It has to be blacked out because the show’s sponsor is Ford. In another, his quote from Hamlet, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” has to be cut because the sponsor is a savings and loan association.
His exasperation continues with a story he writes for The United States Steel Hour called “Noon on Doomsday.” It is inspired by the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American child from Chicago who was killed by two white men while visiting his cousins in the Mississippi delta in 1955. His killers, who later proudly boasted of their actions, were exonerated by an all-white jury. The case, and Till’s mother’s amazingly brave and resolute insistence on having an open casket at his public funeral to display his beaten and tortured body to all, galvanized the civil rights struggle and made a lasting impression on tens of millions of people. My dad was haunted by the case and the Till family’s suffering, and knew he had to write about it.
But even though the case became a historic example of the despicable consequences of racism, American television could not handle it in anything other than masked parable form. So my dad engaged in what he later called “ritual track covering,” changing the locale to the North and the victim to an elderly Jew, hoping the point of the ugliness of all prejudice would still come through. He said:
The righteous and continuing wrath of the Northern press opened no eyes and touched no consciences in the little town in Mississippi where the two men were tried. It was like a cold wind that made them huddle together for protection against an outside force which they could equate with an adversary. It struck me at the time that the trial and its aftermath was simply, “They’re bastards, but they’re our bastards.” So I wrote a play in which my antagonist was not just a killer but a regional idea. It was the story of a little town banding together to protect its own against outside condemnation. At no point in the conception of my story was there a black-white issue. The victim was an old Jew who ran a pawn shop and the killer was a neurotic malcontent . . . I felt that I was on sound ground. I felt that I was dealing with a sociological phenomenon—the need of human beings to have a scapegoat to rationalize their own shortcomings . . .
Sometime before the airing, a reporter asked him point blank if he based his script on the Till case.
“If the shoe fits . . .” my dad replied.
As soon as Variety reported the remarks and other news outlets picked them up, thousands of outraged letters and phone calls poured in, the vast majority from the South, many of them threatening a boycott. That was all the network and the sponsor needed to hear. U.S. Steel and CBS demanded changes so as not to “offend” viewers.
My dad was incredulous at their reaction and lack of courage:
I asked the agency men at the time how the problem of a boycott applied to the United States Steel company. Did that mean that from then on all that construction from Tennessee on down would be done with aluminum? Their answer was that the concern of the sponsor was not so much an economic boycott as the resultant strain in public relations.
Frankly, he doesn’t see that what he writes is truly controversial at all and gripes about television’s lack of courage. “I wish they’d let us write about the Little Rock [Arkansas school integration] situation. Funny, there were about seven or eight dramatic treatments of the Hungarian uprising but the spectacle of adult whites taunting a couple of defenseless little Negro girls is considered controversial. Wrong? That’s not controversy. If anybody takes the pro side in that particular battle, they’d better change flags.”
These were more instances of how my dad earned the title of “TV’s Angry Young Man.” But the dye for “Noon on Doomsday” was cast.
“That was all it took,” he recalled.
The murdered Jew was changed to suggest an unnamed foreigner, the locale moved from the south to New England . . . and ultimately it became a lukewarm, vitiated, emasculated kind of show. By the time they finished taking Coca-Cola bottles off of the set because the sponsor claimed that this had Southern connotation—suggesting to what depth they went to make this a clean, antiseptically rigidly acceptable show, why it bore no relationship to what we purported to say initially.
Despite the fact that my dad feels the script has been totally stripped of serious meaning, when the show airs it is met with another flood of protest: about 15,000 letters and wires from the White Citizens Council and other, similar groups.
Emmett Till’s fate continues to haunt my dad. Two years later, he writes a script for Playhouse 90 titled “A Town Has Turned to Dust.” When the outline is submitted to CBS it is immediately rejected. An article appears in Time Magazine on June 30, 1955, summing it up like this: “A précis of Serling’s first effort was rejected by all but one of the sponsors; they would not lend their brand names or money to a treatment of racism that might prejudice Southern customers against their products.”
My dad tries again. He sets the story in 1890 and turns it into a Western. Although this time the script is accepted, changes are demanded and my dad says:
By the time A Town Has Turned to Dust went before the cameras my script had turned to dust . . . Emmett Till became a romantic Mexican who loved the storekeeper’s wife, but “only with his eyes.” My sheriff couldn’t commit suicide because one of our sponsors was an insurance firm, and they claimed that suicide often leads to complications in settling policy claims. The lynch victim was called Clemson, but we couldn’t use this ’cause South Carolina had an all-white college by that name. The setting was moved to the Southwest in the 1870’s . . . the phrase “twenty men in hoods” became “twenty men in homemade masks.” They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer.
There were many more ludicrous demands from the sponsors, and my dad is quoted as saying, “I think it is criminal that we are not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils that exist, of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society.”
It is not only the bigots and right-wingers whose ire my father arouses. On May 20, 1960, Playhouse 90 presented its final offering, a teleplay of my dad’s titled, “In the Presence of Mine Enemies.” Starring Charles Laughton, Arthur Kennedy, Susan Kohner, and a young Robert Redford (who, two years later, will star in the Twilight Zone episode “Nothing in the Dark”), the drama takes place during World War II and focuses on a Jewish family in the Warsaw Ghetto, just as the Nazis are about to destroy it. Rabbi Heller (Laughton) a Talmudic man of peace, is at odds with his freedom fighter son (Kennedy), who seeks only violence and revenge. In the midst of this apocalypse, their daughter/sister, who has been raped by a Nazi captain, falls in love with a young German lieutenant (Redford) who, plagued by the conflict between his orders and his conscience, saves the girl.
Jack Gould, reviewing for The New York Times, leads off with
Rod Serling and Playhouse 90, perhaps the most consistently fruitful partnership in television theatre, scored again last night with a drama of searing tragedy and nobility.
In ninety minutes Mr. Serling searched beneath the anguish of the Jews who faced the indescribable torture of living death. But more specifically, in a series of brilliant characterizations, he examined the different courses chosen by victims to preserve their integrity. Whether it took the form of recourse to religion or the gun, the pursuit of honor was an individual decision . . . “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” attests to the continuing growth of Mr. Serling as a playwright.
Despite the fact that the other main German characters are thoroughly despicable, the program sets off an avalanche of protests from Jews and Jewish organizations, taking my dad to task for his sympathetic portrayal of the Redford character. Exodus author Leon Uris writes an open letter to CBS calling the show, “the most disgusting presentation in the history of American TV,” and saying that “Joseph Goebbels himself could not have produced such a piece of Nazi apologetics. I demand that CBS burn the negative and publicly apologize for the scandal.”
My dad responds to Uris, lamenting the fact that the prominent novelist cannot disagree without name-calling and accusations. Charles Beaumont, one of his fellow Twilight Zone writers, calls Uris’s accusations “hysterical, vicious, and wholly irresponsible. As for his demand that CBS burn the film, the author of Exodus would do well to remember that that sort of thing was one of Herr Goebbels’ specialties.”
To a prominent Jewish leader my dad writes:
Neither my Pole nor the German soldier were designed to be representative or symbolic. As a dramatist, I was dealing with individuals—not symbols. As a matter of fact I thought I’d gone to great lengths to make the implication clear that these were exceptions to the rule.
The essence of playwriting is conflict and for me to have shown a Jewish point of view in this case would have been simply a restatement of a horror we are already too familiar with. All I was trying to dramatize was that even in a sea of madness, there can be a moment [involving] just a fragment of faith, hope, decency and humanity. Hence, an orthodox rabbi can put his hand on the quaking shoulder of a young German and offer him forgiveness that he cries out for.
To his friend Julie Golden my dad writes:
Good hearing from you and to know that you liked IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES . . . The show has engendered considerable comment both pro and con. I now stand in the middle between two poles of accusation. Either I’m a great and vicious anti-Semite (according to Leon Uris) or I’m a dirty, Jew-loving bastard (from the Steuben Societies of the United States). But I suppose that is what makes ballgames and church attendance.
It is no secret that my dad will not compromise his goals or his principles. In some ways, the “Presence of Mine Enemies” experience supports the statement he makes in a speech in Washington several years later: “The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.”
And the struggle continues.
Though he has little professional experience in the field, science fiction and fantasy have, for a long time, been very appealing to my dad. Late at night, he reads ghost stories or H.P. Lovecraft. Sometimes Edgar Allan Poe. Eventually it dawns on him that fantasy can provide a natural forum for him to express himself and that networks and advertisers will accept scripts including controversial situations if they exist in another, fictional world or, as he notes, “A Martian can say things that a Republican or a Democrat can’t.”
In fact, he has considered the idea before, though he may not realize it. In the commentary in Patterns: Four Television Plays he writes:
Last year I was faced with such a problem when I wrote a script called “The Arena” which was done on Studio One. In this case, I was dealing with a political story where much of the physical action took place on the floor of the United States Senate.
I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited.
In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.
My dad wants to beat the excessive censorship and still write meaningful and effective scripts. One weekend, while deliberating his next career move, he goes to visit his old friends, Julie Golden, now a copy director for an ad agency, and his wife Rhoda, a clerk for United Merchants and Manufacturers.
“Your dad often stayed in our apartment in Forest Hills when he had business in New York,” Julie explains. “We blocked off part of the L-shaped living room with a screen so that he could have his privacy, but he usually kept us awake with jokes and stories. One night, he told us over the screen that he had an idea for a TV series, and what did we think of the name The Twilight Zone? Well, Rhoda and I liked it.”