Chapter 19
SPRING, 1964. I am knocking on the glass doors of my father’s study. He spins around in his desk chair, motioning for me to come in. He is on the phone.
I slide the door open and he holds up his hand again, signaling for me to wait while he finishes his call.
It is pouring rain and the water has pooled by the door. I sit down by his fireplace and notice I have left wet footprints across the flagstone-tiled floor. My dad won’t mind.
Above me, on the fireplace mantel there are six Emmys, including one that he recently won in the category, Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama, for his adaptation of a John O’Hara short story called “It’s Mental Work,” for the Chrysler Theatre. But I do not know these details then; I know only that where there were once five Emmys, there are now six.
Our dog, Michael, has been missing for two and a half weeks, and every afternoon at this time I come out to talk to my dad to see if he’s heard anything.
He finishes his call and shakes his head. “Still no news, honey.” It isn’t unusual for our dog to wander, but until now he has always come back.
I have heard my parents talking, their voices low murmurs in the hall. Sitting on the stairs, my elbows on my knees, I listen. My father says, “I don’t think we’ll find him,” and I hear my mother quietly agree. But I don’t think my dad truly believes that, because he will frequently open the front door, step out, look left then right, call for the dog, and then close the door behind him. Often he walks down the road, searching. In the ensuing weeks he will do this a lot, and I go with him. We take turns cupping our hands around our mouths to project our voices. The streets are fairly quiet in the neighborhood in the evening. Not many sounds; an occasional car, a bouncing ball, someone yelling “dinner’s ready,” and our two voices, alternating calls of “Michael!” echoing down the darkening road.
Michael is gone for almost three months. Finally some stranger calls and our dog is returned, very sickly and thin. We never learn the details of his absence, but there is speculation that he was sold and perhaps sold again and somehow, finally, an honest person has read his dog tag and called us to return him. My dad picks him up and we are all at the door waiting when we hear his car. “Michael!” “Michael!” we shout, running out to greet him. We cover him with hugs and kisses and tears. “Mikey, you’re home! You’re home! We’re so glad to see you!” At first we are shocked when we see how sickly and bone thin he is, wagging his tail feebly when he sees us. But we are all so relieved that at last he is home. My parents are hugging him, too, all of us calling him by his puppy name, “Mikey, Mikey.” After a few weeks Michael is better, stronger, and we all give him constant attention and my sister and I sneak him food under the table and take turns letting him sleep in our beds.
The end of that year, 1964, brings with it an incident, I will one day learn, that rivals “Noon on Doomsday” for its vehemence against my father and his “liberalism.”
At the time, the United Nations, approaching its twenty-fifth anniversary, is attacked by right-wing organizations. The John Birch Society, prominent among them, accuses the organization of being a front for the spread of Communism or an instrument for creating a single worldwide government. The previous year, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson was roughed up in Dallas by protesters objecting to the United States’ membership in the UN. Appalled, Paul Hoffman, managing director of the UN Special Fund, approaches a public relations specialist he knows named Edgar Rosenberg (who a little more than a year later would marry comedienne Joan Rivers). Rosenberg comes up with the idea of a series of six special television dramas, preferably commercial-free, that will commemorate the anniversary, provoke thought, and highlight the real mission, values, and goals of the UN. All talent will agree to work for scale minimum, so no one will get rich off the project. Joseph Mankiewicz, the distinguished producer who worked for Paramount, MGM, and Twentieth Century-Fox during the golden years of the Hollywood studio system, signs on. Rosenberg gets Xerox, a company with a reputation for having a strong social conscience and a forward-thinking corporate culture, to underwrite the series, without commercials, except for a mention of their name at the beginning. When several conservative stockholders complain about the $4,000,000 price tag, Xerox CEO Joseph Wilson bravely declares, “You can sell your stock or try to throw us out, but we are not going to change.”
CBS and NBC decline to air the UN specials in prime time but third-place ABC agrees.
My dad is hired to write the first of these programs, scheduled to be broadcast on December 28. In keeping with the season, the script is called “Carol for Another Christmas.” Patterned after Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, it tells the story of Daniel (Benjamin in my dad’s original script) Grudge, played by Sterling Hayden, a powerful but misanthropic industrialist who is still mourning the loss of his son Marley in World War II, fighting in the Philippines, just as my dad had. In part as a result of his beloved son’s loss, Grudge becomes a confirmed isolationist, opposed to anything that smacks of international cooperation or sacrifice on behalf of another people.
Grudge tells his nephew Fred, a teacher, played by Ben Gazzara:
I am not in the mood for the Brotherhood of Man. Do you mind? I’ve heard that speech. And heard it. Oh, I’ve had it with you, Fred, with all of you. Up to here, I’ve had it. With crusades—with one-worldism, foreign and domestic—with this mania for involvement, for meddling with the problems and concerns of strange people and strange countries—this compulsion to trespass on the private thoughts and private likes and dislikes of other people! Mind your own business—and let everybody else mind theirs! Your responsibility is your classroom, not those of Cracow, Poland—Butte, Montana—or Johannesburg, South Africa! And do you insist upon making it a better world—won’t you die happy until you do? Do you insist upon helping the needy and oppressed—is that an itch you can’t stop scratching? Then tell them to help themselves!
Before long, Grudge, lonely and embittered, receives a visit from Marley’s Ghost, accompanied by spirits representing the past, the present, and the future. The ghost tells him, “Tonight, Father, you will be shown what you call the rest of the world.” An American soldier (played by Steve Lawrence) takes him back in time to Hiroshima. Pat Hingle represents the selfishness of the current times, and Robert Shaw takes Grudge to a post-apocalyptic future where a self-styled dictator (played by Peter Sellers) preaches the gospel of individuality at the expense of society.
At the end of ninety commercial-free minutes, Grudge wakes up on Christmas morning and proclaims, “It seems the conclusion is inevitable that—there must be involvement. That every man’s death does diminish me.”
My dad is sometimes criticized for being “preachy,” but he’s also lauded for being one of the few always willing to take a stand.
A firestorm of protest breaks out as soon as the show ends. ABC and Xerox are both flooded with telegrams and letters insisting that they and my father are furthering the Communist conspiracy and naively ignoring the true purpose of the United Nations in establishing a single world government to which the United States would be forced to cede its sovereignty. The boycott threats from the “Noon on Doomsday” response return with equal vehemence.
Shocked by the response but not willing to give up the fight, my dad answers many of the hate-filled letters with long, thoughtful observations, trying to get through to these people. From one example to an irate woman:
I note in a letter forwarded to me by the Famous Writers School that I have “aided the Communist conspiracy.” If this is indeed true, and I mean this with sincerity and respect, I should turn myself in to any local F.B.I. office. It was not my intention to aid and conspire, when I wrote the TV script, “Carol for Another Christmas,” nor was I remotely interested in propagandizing for the United Nations or for any organization. I was deeply interested in conveying what is a deeply felt conviction of my own. This is simply to suggest that human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity’s sake.
While allowing for genuine political differences, he goes on to say, “Philosophically we stand at opposite ends of the pole, because you choose to believe that anyone who disagrees with you must, of necessity, be subversive,” and “But because I’m an American, I suggest this is your right. I suppose the major difference in our philosophies is that I recognize your right. The unfortunate thing is that you don’t recognize mine.”
Eventually, he concludes that his letter-writing effort is futile and confides to a friend that he is tempted to send back a form letter stating:
Dear Friend,
I just thought you ought to know that someone is sending out crank mail under your name.
Years later, my dad will give a speech in the Library of Congress auditorium. He will declare: “From experience, I can tell you that drama, at least in television, must walk tiptoe and in agony lest it offend some cereal buyer from a given state below the Mason-Dixon.”
By the fall of 1965, life is back to normal and my father is writing a series called The Loner, starring Lloyd Bridges. Tony Albarella, the editor of As Timeless As Infinity, the book series that compiles my dad’s Twilight Zone scripts, analyzes how The Loner revisits many of the themes prevalent in my dad’s earlier writing: “. . . the horrors of war, moral ambiguity, bigotry, and the pressures of command and responsibility.”
The Loner opens with the following narration:
In the aftermath of the bloodletting called the Civil War, thousands of rootless, restless, searching men traveled west. Such a man was William Colton. Like the others, he carried a blanket roll, a proficient gun, and a dedication to a new chapter in American history . . . the opening of the West.
This is my dad’s second attempt at a Western. In the 1950s he wrote a screenplay called Saddle the Wind. About it he said, “I gave better dialogue to the horses than the actors.”
The reaction of CBS to The Loner is not positive. The studio wants more action and violence and less character study. My dad says, “What CBS bought was a series of 24-minute weekly shows—all legitimate, human, dramatic vignettes—set against a Western background. What they now want is a show with violence and killing attendant on a routine Western.” The show is ultimately canceled halfway through its first season.
We have an album featuring the theme music from The Loner. I love it and for a while I play it in my room constantly. Now I wonder how difficult it must have been for my dad, passing by my room, hearing this music (replete with a full orchestra and the sound of horses’ hooves) wafting out from under my doorway over and over, a constant reminder to him of this unsuccessful show. I am certain, though, that, being the consummate professional who took the bad with the good, he had moved on.
It isn’t long, in fact, before he writes a script that he will regret on a much more fundamental level.
For years, when we fly to our cottage, my mother has my sister and I wear matching outfits. I don’t recall this bothering us, but I know I begged, to no avail, to wear a dress matching my mother’s.
The flights are long, and if Jodi and I are sitting together, sometimes we’ll play, pretending we are our animals and we’ll talk to each other in their “voices.” If we start arguing, and kicking each other, this elicits stern reprimands from both our parents and then separation.
It is the days before ID checks, security lines, and metal detectors. Stewardesses let children pass out candy to the passengers while flights await departure and meals are still served. It is the days before terrorists made airplanes head straight for buildings. It is the days when air travel was fun. It is still, though, a world with its share of blemishes, a world not devoid of hatred and prejudice and people with serious mental illness and distorted agendas.
In 1966, my dad writes a made-for-television screenplay titled The Doomsday Flight. It is based on a real incident: Someone tries to blackmail an airline claiming that he had placed a bomb supposedly keyed to explode when a jetliner already in the air descended below a mile in altitude. In my dad’s script, the bomb is planted by a disgruntled and mentally-ill former plane mechanic (Edmund O’Brien), who knew where to plant the device so that the crew could not disable it in flight. The plane eventually lands safely, and the movie, at first, is deemed a huge success. But on the very night that the show first airs, there is a bomb threat, and airlines around the world receive similar threats for the next eight days. My dad takes this all very seriously and personally. He says, “A writer can’t be responsible for the pathology of idiots,” but he is crushed and tells a reporter, “I wish to Christ I had written a stage coach drama starring John Wayne.”
On each occasion that he is asked about the fallout of this script, he is conciliatory, and as his friend Mark Olshaker told me, “Your dad felt he had paid his penance for all the lunatics out there and his thinking was, ‘let’s keep the whole thing in perspective.’ ”
When Mark asked my dad how he answered the press, Dad told him that after having been inundated with reporters’ questions, he had come up with two stock answers. One he gave, the other he wanted to. “I tell them, ‘I am responsible to the public but not for the public.’ ” Mark replied, “That’s a good answer; what’s your other one?” My father responded, without missing a beat, “I tell them—‘Fuck off.’ ”
After this incident, though, he is cautious and acutely aware of the inferno a few words from his imagination can ignite. Fortunately, in his subsequent years of writing, nothing like this happens again.
By the time he delivers the Library of Congress speech in which he took Hogan’s Heroes to task, he has his perspective back again. It is January 15, 1968, the winter before that terrible spring when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated. He calls his presentation, “The Challenge of the Mass Media to the 20th Century Writer.” He concludes:
Despite everything, despite our controversies and despite what is apparently and tragically a sense of divisiveness that permeates our land, and despite riots and rebellions that go hand-in-hand, mind you, with repression and brutality, one major and fundamental guarantee of protracted freedom is the unfettered right of the man to write as he sees fit, as his conscience indicates, as his mood dictates, as his cause cries out for. The moment you begin to censor the writer—and history bears this out in the ugliest of fashions—so begins a process of decay in the body politic that ultimately leads to disaster. What begins with a blue pencil—for whatever reason—very often ends in a concentration camp.
It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms—all of them—may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.
Mark Olshaker, who was there, remembers loud and sustained applause.