Chapter 11
The Twilight Zone is about people, about human beings involved in extraordinary circumstances, in strange problems of their own or of fate’s making.
—ROD SERLING
IT TAKES A LOT of perseverance to get The Twilight Zone off the ground. The first pilot my dad submits, “The Time Element,” is an expansion of a half-hour script he had written and sold shortly after graduating from Antioch. Although CBS buys the script, it is shelved for two years until it is picked up by Bill Granet, producer of Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. Desilu, the production company owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, wielded significant power in the world of 1950s television owing to the phenomenal success of I Love Lucy.
Despite strong opposition from the ad agency representing Westinghouse and network executives, Desi Arnaz backs Granet and they convince CBS to air the show as part of their 1958-1959 season.
In his book The Twilight Zone Companion, Marc Zicree will later write, “ ‘The Time Element’ received more mail than any other episode of Desilu Playhouse that year, and the newspaper reviews were universally good.”
New York Times reviewer Jack Gould wrote:
Serling once again came up with an absorbing and unusual drama . . . “The Time Element” is a story about a man visiting a psychiatrist. The patient complains of recurrent dreams in which he imagines he is living in Hawaii just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In a series of flashbacks the man is shown living with his knowledge of what has happened in the seventeen years since. He bets on sure winners in sports events, for example. But more particularly he seeks to warn a newly-married couple, newspaper editors and anyone else who will listen that they will be attacked by the Japanese. But everyone is either too interested in a good time or too determinedly patriotic to give heed; the man only gets punched on the jaw. In a highly tricky ending the psychiatrist is left looking at a blank couch and to steady his own nerves he goes to a bar to get a drink. There he learns his patient was killed at Pearl Harbor.
Marc Zicree states, “The reviews were enough to convince CBS that it had made a mistake in shelving Serling’s script. It was decided that a pilot of The Twilight Zone would be made.”
Buoyed by a second chance (but with some trepidation) my father begins writing “Where Is Everybody?” the story of a man who finds himself inexplicably alone in a strange, completely vacant town. It turns out he is an astronaut preparing for the loneliness of deep space flight and the entire experience has been a hallucination. The story is bought, and after the episode has been produced, he travels to New York City and with CBS presents it to potential sponsors. William Self, a CBS executive, recalls, “It was the fastest sale that I have ever been involved with. In fact, the pilot sold just six hours after the screening.”
It was The Twilight Zone that made my dad famous, transforming him from a well-respected television writer into a celebrity and a public personality. But that was almost accidental. As Self explained to Marc Zicree in The Twilight Zone Companion, “It was from the outset decided that there would be a narrator, someone who would set the stage or wrap it up. The first person we used was Westbrook Van Voorhis, who had done The March of Time and had that kind of big voice. But when we listened to it we decided it was a little too pompous-sounding.”
Everyone at the network, the sponsors, their ad agency, and the talent agency representing my dad, want Orson Welles, who, they think, would add just the right note of drama, flair, and prestige to the show. But Welles’s quoted fee is higher than the sponsors want to pay. They all scramble to come up with other names.
“Finally,” Self continues, “Rod himself made the suggestion that maybe he should do it. It was received with skepticism. None of us knew Rod except as a writer. But he did a terrific job.”
For the first season, viewers hear “the Voice” near the beginning and at the end of each episode. It is not until the second season that he appears on camera. Within months, he is the most recognizable writer in the short history of television.
My dad started and owned the production company (Cayuga Productions) that produced all of the TZs and was completely committed to this show. He would get up very early and dictate scripts for hours. And then, around noon, he would drive over to the MGM studios, where the shows were recorded. Marc Zicree quotes Edward Denault, the assistant director: “Rod was instrumental in the development of the scripts and in the rewrites, was in on the post-production, always looked at the dailies. If we got in a jam and something had to be rewritten in an effort to get the show finished on time, or if we were short of minutes, he was always ready and could knock off a scene very quickly. He was very, very much involved.”
Marc Zicree writes, “For all his involvement Serling also knew his own limitations and although he was credited as executive producer, he had no pretensions of being a producer.” Buck Houghton, the producer, said my dad, despite his involvement “knew his limitations.” He went on to say:
You see Rod had a very short span of attention. He was a very intense guy and he worked very hard and drove himself very hard and he was very short of patience. He was not impatient; patience was not something he had. A ten minute story conference with him was the limit, then he’d go out and get an ice cream soda or shoe shine. So, as far as sitting through a dubbing session or going through the casting lists or sitting and cueing the music . . . that sort of thing: no thanks. And that’s not to derogate the title of executive producer; he did have the final say.
When The Twilight Zone premieres on October 2, 1959, I am four years old and still oblivious to what my father is doing when he is not playing with us, showing us how to blow on a blade of grass and make it whistle, or chasing us around the yard.
For a while, his office is in the downstairs of our California house in a room off the living room. He has a secretary named Pat, who has beautiful red hair. Sometimes when Pat leaves at the end of the day, Jodi leans out of the living room window, singing, “Pat loves Daddy.” But beyond that, I don’t remember her nearly as well as his subsequent secretary, Margie, who I initially thought was still Pat, because she, too, had red hair. Margie has a son, Rich, who is older than my sister and I. Years later, Rich makes my dad countless tapes of comedians doing Jewish jokes. My dad listens to them at the cottage while he lies out in the sun in the hammock, chuckling away. He loves them.
In the spring of 1959, he has an office built in the backyard of our home in California. You have to walk about one hundred feet in order to get there, either across the backyard or along a stone sidewalk. The sidewalk is bordered by two gardens where my mother has planted snapdragons, roses, pansies, chrysanthemums, and her grandfather’s favorite, bleeding hearts. I see her out there in her green and white garden gloves, kneeling; digging in the dirt, wiping her brow, surrounded by a profusion of color. My father clearly appreciates these gardens. Sometimes he stops for several moments on his way to the office and looks at them. Later, he often comments about them to my mother or to my sister and me.
Often my mother takes me with her when she goes to the nursery. I cherish these trips; I love skipping through the gardens and returning home with armfuls of flowers. She gives me my own little space, and we work out there together digging and talking and then standing back to examine our work.
We have birthday parties in the yard near our gardens that are all captured on home movies. Scavenger hunts and circle games, relay races, and frenetic games of musical chairs—always a flurry of children in pastel-colored dresses rushing for a vacant seat and quick shots of my mother or my father dragging one more chair away.
My mother is the one who organizes these parties, while my father comes in and out of his office to see what we are doing. He bends down, his hands on his knees, and talks to us. Sometimes he’ll even play, pretending to look for us when we’re hiding in plain sight. My friends adore him. He is always there when they are leaving, holding on to their colored balloons trailing in the sky behind them. He is always there to wave good-bye.
There is a general understanding that when my dad is in his office, he is off-limits to us. When he is not working, the office is usually locked, but I happen to know that a key is hidden in a large planter just outside his door. So whenever we can, we sneak in and grab a brownie or cookie or a piece of candy. All the “good” food is in my dad’s office; all of the treats my mother wants to limit. My father loves sweets, so there is always an abundance. He loves chocolate pies and often brings them home from a shop called The House of Pies. For some reason my sister calls him “Y from the House of Pies.”
Entering the office through Margie’s door leads to her long desk, a wall of cupboards, and file drawers. In one, my father keeps copies of all of the searing or supportive letters he has written. He writes strong political statements but also other, more mundane letters, one to the See’s candy manufacturer because he loves their product. Another to a Mercury car dealership, explaining why he no longer uses their service department after having brought the car in several times for the same problem: “The engine would still race upon being started to a point where my wife would have won the Grand Prix without ever putting her foot on the accelerator.”
On Margie’s wall are some framed caricatures of my dad. Past her desk are a bathroom and then another door leading into my dad’s area.
His is a large room with sliding glass doors. One entire wall is made up of bookshelves with an attached ladder. At the top is a small loft. Pictures of his parents and of us are on one of the shelves. There is a stone fireplace with a curved stone seating area and fitted, off-white cushions. My dad’s Emmys are on the mantel.
Behind an accordion door is a tiny kitchen with a small sink and refrigerator. A coffeepot sits on the counter beside containers of the coveted junk food.
My father’s built-in desk, large enough to crawl beneath, is in front of a picture window. On it is a Dictaphone. Although he is a whiz on the typewriter, his two fingers tapping away in rapid flight, he primarily uses the Dictaphone to write. I’ve heard him practicing different voices on it. Sometimes I think it’s funny the way he can alter his voice. He says it allows him to hear his characters. His friend Mark Olshaker recalls my dad playing one of his recordings for him. Mark was impressed that he even dramatized the punctuation. In an interview, my dad repeats an expression, “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
Mark also remembers that my dad had his own Xerox machine, which, at the time, impressed him tremendously.
I later realize that the Dictaphone is not confined to the office or producing my dad’s scripts. Practical joker that he is, he sometimes hides it near the dinner table and records whatever happens during the meal. He then takes great delight in playing it back for us—laughter, arguments, all of us planning the next day’s activities, Jodi and I bickering or my mother struggling to get us to talk about something important.
Years later, the first time I bring my fiancé Doug out to California, not long before my mother sells the house, I play him one of the recordings that somehow has been saved. We both laugh at the silliness of the whole thing, but hearing my dad’s non-television voice without the dramatic intonation and his laughter again produces a wistfulness in me that is almost overpowering.
Next to my dad’s desk is a student’s old-fashioned wooden desk where Margie takes shorthand before retiring to her office to transcribe the Dictaphone tapes—the script ones, not the dinner ones.
When I am older, I remember my father occasionally struggling with dialogue for his female characters. Margie, who my father nicknamed “Parge,” tells him one day that a certain scene isn’t working. “Rod, Jane’s conversation is stilted; it needs something more.”
Frustrated but knowing she’s right, my dad leaves her a note later that morning, folded on her desk. “Parge: Jane says to go fuck yourself.”
Until I am six or seven I have no idea what my father does for a living. I know that he writes. I know he is a writer but what that means exactly, I haven’t a clue. I know Margie is his secretary, but I am only vaguely aware of what she does.
This lack of knowledge comes into focus one evening at the lake when I overhear my parents talking on the cottage porch. It is the summer I turn seven. My father is leaning back in the green wicker chair; his feet are up on the railing, and he is blowing smoke rings in the humid night air. Between puffs he tells my mother he misses having a secretary. Standing, unseen, peering through the screen door, I listen. Before he can consider his options, I fly out the door and jumping up and down before him I tell him, “I can help! I will be your secretary for as long as you need me!” My dad looks over and smiles at my mother. I have no idea what the job entails or what the scope of it will be, or what I will need to do, but I have seen his secretary Margie sitting across from him at his desk in California. I have seen her taking notes in a small tanned-covered notebook. Certainly I can do the same and write down what he says, and besides, I am already deciding which skirt of my mother’s and which high heels I will need to borrow for the job. My mother doesn’t dress up much at the lake and so I know my choices will be slim.
I am the first one up the next morning, and I remember teetering in my mother’s shoes, trying to walk on the toes so they won’t clomp-clomp down the cottage hall and wake everyone.
Back then the kitchen is in a separate building off the back porch. I quietly push open the door and tiptoe across the porch and sit down at the small wooden table.
My father’s cough is the first thing I hear and then his feet padding down the hall moments later.
When he sees me at the table, I have the notebook open and ready on my lap. My mother’s dress is folded beneath me touching the floor. My legs are crossed so my dad can see the pretty matching blue shoes and see how grown up and ready for the job I am.
It is in that moment that I recall my father begins to laugh—one of his hysterical laughs where his eyes get all crinkly and for an instant he can’t breathe.
When he finally gets control, he comes over and hugs me, managing, “Thanks, Bunny.” At the time, I am not certain just what, exactly, is so funny, but I am laughing, too.
I am too young to realize how ridiculous I look, but my father’s laugh is so infectious and engaging.
We stay there in that kitchen a long time on that sunny summer morning years and years ago. Me in the long blue dress, and my father beside me, tears rolling down his face.
My dad is an early riser. I am as familiar with his morning sounds as I am with my own. Lying in my bed in California, I listen for him. His footsteps down the stairs, the front door opening as he walks out, shuffling his blue slipper heels to get the paper at the driveway’s end. His footsteps coming back, the door opening again and closing, his chair scraping across the floor as he sits down, his spoon tapping the side of his coffee cup. I know he is reading the paper and talking to our Irish setters, Mike and Maggie.
If I hurry, I know I can see him there before he slides the glass door open, coffee and cigarette in hand, often humming or whistling the songs of Sinatra or Bennett or Dean Martin, as he walks the path to his office.
One day when I am in first or second grade, an older boy on the school playground runs up to me, taps me on the shoulder, close enough that I can see that the freckles on his right cheek form a perfect constellation, and asks, “Where does your dad get all of his ideas? Hanging from the ceiling?” He runs off hooting and laughing, and I stand there perplexed.
Later, while my dad and I are watching The Flintstones and my mother has taken my sister to ride her horse, I mention this boy’s comment. I love that my father likes this show as much as I do. This is a coveted, secret time for us. My mother strictly prohibits watching television during the week. She feels it is a waste of time, that we should be reading or doing something productive. During the commercial I ask, “So why did that boy say that about you?”
My dad stubs out his cigarette in a large green ashtray he has balanced on his chest and explains, “It’s a show I do that’s on every week. There are other writers too. It’s a series called The Twilight Zone. Some of the episodes are too old for you; some are maybe a little scary.” He says more that I don’t hear because the commercial is over and Wilma is saying something important to Fred.
He does take us, though, to the set at MGM where The Twilight Zone is filmed. In one of the family albums there are two black-and-white photographs of my dad, my sister, and me. He is holding our hands and leaning down, pointing at something just outside the camera’s range. In the other we are standing on a stairway. I have a vague recollection of steps that lead nowhere.
A few years later, when we are at the cottage, I see The Twilight Zone for the first time. Sitting in twin wicker chairs pulled up close to the small television, my dad and I watch an episode starring William Shatner called “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Moving the chair closer to my father and looking from the television screen to him, I am stunned that this is what he does, writes these terrifying stories. I later learn that this particular episode “Nightmare” was written by Richard Matheson, but at the time that fact is of little consolation. It is still my father who appears at the beginning and the end of the show.
Although it is initially disturbing to think that my father is connected to this scary stuff, the thought almost immediately vanishes because this is not the dad I know. There is nothing scary about him. And I am excited to see him on television!