Chapter 20
IT WOULD PROBABLY BE accurate to say that my dad had a love/hate relationship with Hollywood and writing for television. In 1959’s “The Velvet Alley,” one of the last scripts he did for Playhouse 90, he describes a television writer from New York, played by Art Carney, who one night “wallops a literary homerun on a network television show” and moves to Hollywood. My dad wrote, “I left strips of flesh and blood all over the studio. The externals of the play are definitely autobiographical—the pressures involved, the assault on values, the blandishments that run in competition to a man’s work and creativity, a preoccupation with status, with the symbols of status . . .”
He also repeats the quote, “Hollywood’s a great place to live . . . if you’re a grapefruit.” He does love the weather, though; he is an avid sun worshipper. On Saturdays, in the late morning, I often join him after his paddle tennis game. We have some of our best conversations when we are lying on the blue lawn chairs behind our sun reflectors. My dad has written “Rod’s” on his reflector. Apparently I, or Jodi, have “borrowed” it a few too many times.
Frequently my dad talks about his father, sentences trailing off, always punctuated with “If only you had known your grandfather.” Often he grows quiet then, pensive, transported back into a world I cannot enter; yet this momentary departure, this particular passage of my dad’s, I know well and I understand. I also know that within moments he will be back, launching into some joke.
I remember him asking me once, “What does a cow sound like when it goes to the bathroom?” I tell him I don’t know. He positions his hands over his mouth and makes some grotesque sound, and we both laugh. Sometimes, taking a large sip of soda, he’ll belch—louder than anyone I know.
He’ll always follow one with, “Who stepped on that frog?” which never fails to send us both into another fit of giggles. (My mother is always telling me not to laugh at him. “It just encourages him,” she will say. But I know he often gets the best of her, and I sometimes hear her calling him by his nickname “Elyan” and then see them hugging on the stairs, much to my sister’s and my embarrassment.)
My dad and I lean back, quiet for a while, in our sun-warmed chairs, petting the dogs beside us.
Unfortunately, this ideal climate does not come without peril, nor does paradise come without a dose of reality, and California residents frequently have to contend with wildfires. Every year in the early fall these fires come dangerously close to the hills where we live, and my parents tell my sister and me to pack one bag containing whatever is most important to us. Always, without fail, we choose our collection of plastic horses. Over the years there are several times the car is packed and we are ready to flee. We watch the television updates that report on the location of the fires. We can see the smoke and hear the sirens in the distance, but we never actually have to leave.
In the late 1960s, though, it is not the raging fires that almost send us packing. The country is being torn apart by social and racial tension, and the one who comes to represent all of this to my dad is George Wallace. The governor of Alabama, who vehemently opposes the Civil Rights Movement, is running for president. He is quoted as saying, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
My father is outraged. He tells us that if “that racist son-ofa-bitch” prevails, we are moving out of the country. (He felt the same about Goldwater.) In a speech at the newly opened Moorpark College just north of us, near Simi Valley, California, my dad refers to Wallace as, “that political stalwart who made a public quote that he would never be out-niggered again. This from the man running for the highest office in the land.”
When I tell this story to Mark Olshaker, he plays for me a recording from near the beginning of the speech my dad gave at the Library of Congress in 1968:
In the immortal words of Groucho Marx, it’s really not such a phenomenon in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, California, that we do have a former song and dance man [George Murphy] as our United States junior senator, and a kind of an actor-type fella [Ronald Reagan] serving as our governor. Groucho goes on to say that, indeed, this is uniquely a part of the American phenomenon. In New York State, ostensibly the financial capital of the world, you have a millionaire—a multimillionaire—serving as governor. In the State of Michigan you have a former automobile executive [George Romney] serving as governor. And in the State of Alabama, world-renowned for its very meaty and sizable pecans, you have a nut!
The speech is just an example of my dad’s many outbursts against bigotry. In 1966, Playboy magazine runs a lengthy interview with George Lincoln Rockwell, founder and “Commander” of the American Nazi Party, at his headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The interviewer is Alex Haley, the writer who had just finished collaborating with Malcolm X on his autobiography and who would go on to author the blockbuster, Roots. The interview, ignited by the fact that Rockwell did not know ahead of time that Haley was African American, is full of hate, Holocaust denying, and diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and anyone else who does not meet the commander’s standards. He goes so far as to suggest that the well-documented bodies of concentration camp victims were actually casualties of the Allied bombing of Dresden. As soon as the interview is published, Playboy receives a firestorm of protest and complaint over giving this thuggish hatemonger a public forum.
While my dad is sympathetic to the public sentiment, he feels it is misguided, and that the best way to combat hate is to confront it. In response, he writes a letter that Playboy publishes two months later:
There is a breed of lay and social scientist who will forever cling to a concept of “defeating by ignoring.” Hence, when out of the muck of their own neuroses rise these self-proclaimed Fuhrers, there is this well-meaning body who tell us that if we turn both eyes and cheeks, the nutsies will disappear simply by lack of exposure.
My guess is that, in this case, exposure is tantamount to education; and education here, is a most salutary instruction into the mentalities, the motives and the modus operandi of an animal pack that is discounted by the aged maxim that “it can’t happen here.” So might have said the Goethes and the Einsteins of a pre-war Germany, who thought then, as we do now, that civilization by itself protects against a public acceptance of the uncivilized.
What is desperately needed to combat any ism is precisely what “Playboy” has given us—an interview in-depth that shows us the facets of the enemy. Yes, gentlemen, you may be knocked for supposedly lending some kind of credence to a brand of lunacy. But my guess is that you should be given a commendation for a public service of infinite value.
He signs the letter, “Rod Serling, Pacific Palisades, California.”
At the beginning of the 1960s, my dad is a huge supporter of John Kennedy. We have bumper stickers and Kennedy buttons and my parents talk a lot about the Kennedys. My mother, reading that the Kennedy children all brought interesting current events to the dinner table, wants us to do that, too. It doesn’t work out as well as she hoped. Our conversations remain silly.
When President Kennedy is shot, I am eight years old. Like almost everyone old enough to remember, I revisit that Friday, November 22, 1963. I became ill at school and was sent home. I don’t know if there was a correlation between hearing the news on the school’s intercom broadcast into suddenly silent classrooms and then my abrupt illness, but I distinctly remember my mother’s stricken face later that day and that my dad was away in New York on business. I remember, too, the television on, the curtains drawn, and my mother on the couch, silent, watching, or occasionally lingering about the doorway. Even when the room was empty the television remained on, repeating the same shattering footage and the same impossibility: “President John Kennedy has been shot.”
My sister and I even stop arguing for a few days. It is as if our house has lost its inhabitants; the only sounds are the distraught voices of the news commentators’ over a rapid succession of images and the low drone of people weeping.
My dad, still in New York, has to go on another trip in the midst of this national tragedy, before coming home. Jodi and I do not know why. Later, we learn he has been asked, on the Q.T., to go to Washington. Three days later, as we are watching the funeral on television—Jackie Kennedy in a black dress and black veil, holding her two children’s small hands and John-John saluting—my dad is in a hotel room in D.C. He is writing a script for a film commissioned by the United States Information Agency to introduce our new president, Lyndon Johnson, to the world. As he writes, he can hear President Kennedy’s funeral procession passing below his hotel window.
At some point during these terrible days my father also writes something perhaps intended as a letter to a newspaper or magazine editor. It is written on his letterhead and clearly typed by him, not his secretary. I read it for the first time forty-six years after it was written. I can hear my father’s anguish:
More than a man has died. More than a gallant young President has been put to death. More than a high office of a land has been assaulted. What is to be mourned now is an ideal. What has been assassinated is a faith in ourselves. What has been murdered is a belief in our own decency, our capacity to love, our sense of order and logic and civilized decorum . . .
. . . To the Leftists and the Rightists, to the Absolutists, to the men of little faith but strong hate, and to all of us who have helped plant this ugly and loathsome seed that blossomed forth on a street in Dallas on last Friday—this is the only dictum we can heed now. For civilization to survive it must remain civilized. And if there is to be any hope for our children and theirs—we must never again allow violence to offer itself as an excuse for our own insecurities, our weaknesses and our own fears. This is not an arguable doctrine for simply a better life. It is a condition for our continued existence.
My father is outspoken and passionate about his political views. Although I am still young during several pivotal historic events, I readily adopt many of his ideals although I will never be as vocal, articulate, or eloquent.
I have quotes pasted all over my walls from songs by Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joan Baez, Dylan, and Joni Mitchell, and slogans about love. I have peace signs and posters and orange and pink flower stickers. Once, after my dad and I have argued about something that I can’t recall—but do remember that I held my resolve—instead of yelling, he concludes the heated discussion by quietly telling me, “You need to go read the sentiments on your wall about empathy and acceptance.”
I hear my dad describe the Vietnam War as “A tragic bleeding mess—dishonest, immoral and self-defeating.” This is what leads him to support the anti-war campaign of Minnesota Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, and actively campaign for him in the 1968 New Hampshire primary.
My dad is neither a pacifist nor a knee-jerk dove. He is proud of his own army service and willing to consider that force must often be met with force. During the early days of the Kennedy administration, he is also willing to accept the argument that counter-insurgency in Vietnam could halt the spread of Communism throughout Asia, but he quickly becomes disillusioned with the war and its unattainable goals.
He thinks we should immediately stop bombing and find “some kind of honorable pullout.” I see the horrific photographs in Life magazine, the children burned and torn apart. In ninth grade, my history teacher has us write down our birth dates on a piece of paper. He uses these to replicate the draft’s lottery system. He talks about how kids barely older than we are will be selected. My number would have sent me to Vietnam almost immediately. This brings the war excruciatingly close to home.
At school one day, in my homeroom class, I refuse to say the “Pledge of Allegiance.” It isn’t an original idea, but I think of it as a statement in protest over our involvement in Vietnam. My homeroom teacher, whom I particularly dislike, stands at the front of the classroom and reprimands me. I vividly recall her red lipstick, red dress, and shoes as she gives me a ridiculous assignment: I am to write one hundred times, “I will say the Pledge of Allegiance.” It must be signed by a parent.
When I get home that afternoon, I take the paper out to my dad in his office. He looks at it, grabs his pen, and immediately signs it. There is little discussion. In the slight shake of his head I know he finds the assignment to be absurd and punitive, and I know how he feels about the war.
When I am sliding his door closed again, he says, “Nanny?”
I look over at him. He smiles at me and then turns back to his work.
What I don’t know that day is the impact my father is having on others, not much older than I am, who are suddenly next in line to be deported into this monstrous war.
Steve Trimm, whose name I will not learn until four decades later, is one of these boys.
Rather than compromise his values and inherent beliefs and be drafted into a war he could not condone, Steve says, “I went underground and became a fugitive for five and a half years.”
In the spring of 1975, Steve learns my dad is in the hospital. He decides: “Writing to Mr. Serling could not be put off. I had a lot I wanted to tell him. To begin with, I wanted to tell him why I was in a church basement in Schenectady, New York writing to him.”
As he says, “I was there to help poor people but I was also there to earn a presidential pardon.”
In a piece posted on the website of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, under the subtitle: Lessons Rod Serling Taught Me, Steve writes:
It was during those fear-filled years that I sometimes thought about Rod Serling . . . His stories, taught important lessons about ethics and taking personal responsibility for humanity’s condition . . . The power of kindness, forgiveness and compassion . . . how each and every one of us, whether religious or irreligious, can triumph over the seeming inevitability of personal moral failure. What it takes is the capacity, despite the seeming omnipotence of the Powers Of Darkness, to keep believing in our own decency. If we can be generous and forgiving to ourselves, if we can hang on to a belief in our essential self-worth and goodness, simple charity will compel us to recognize the worth and goodness of others. This awareness will prevent us from becoming consumed by hatred. Unwilling to hate, we will behave morally. In the chaos of a frightened, angry society, holding tight to such beliefs will save us—and will ultimately save the world.
Mr. Trimm acknowledges other writers who also helped him—Thoreau, Twain, and Vonnegut—but says it was my dad who kept him going. “He taught us to persevere, to look for the hope running beneath the surface of terrible events . . . even when hope seems preposterous, never to give up on ourselves and never to give up on our fellow man . . . I was writing to Rod Serling from that church basement in Schenectady to thank him for helping save my life.”
I don’t think my father ever received Mr. Trimm’s letter. There was much chaos and confusion in those months before he died. But this letter would have touched him deeply, and I know unequivocally that as soon as he read it he would have responded.
There were other Steve Trimms back then, other young kids whose spirits were broken, whose ideals and beliefs were conflicted and doubted and challenged, who felt they were living in a world of madness—a world that seemed to have lost all reason. What my dad never knew, and what I have learned, is that he made an enormous difference in their lives. In some dreadfully dark hours, my father’s words made it through and helped them.