As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling

FOR WEEKS FOLLOWING ROBERT Kennedy’s assassination, coming as it does practically on the heels of Martin Luther King’s, my father seems quiet, preoccupied. I think perhaps he is particularly glad to be leaving LA this June and looking forward to another summer spent thousands of miles away, back at our old red cottage, sitting by the water.

Jodi and I are away at camp for several weeks through these summers in the sixties, and at first I am often homesick. I save the letters from home in my camp cabin, in a shoebox under my cot, beside my copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Sometimes I wonder what made me keep them. Was it the years of hearing the screen door close at the cottage and watching my dad carry his own collection of letters to the chair across the yard, all of the words he held on to from his past? Was it seeing his eyes well up and knowing, on some prophetic level, that I, too, might need these someday; that like him, I’d have to go backward to find him, too?

His letters to me are often reflective of what is going on in the world at the time. Sometimes they are typed, sometimes handwritten. Sometimes they are brief, often funny; always, even now, they make me feel better.

My Dear Miss Grumple,

There’s really not much newsworthy quality to write to you. We’re all well—Mom, Jodi, the dogs, cats and me—We really miss you, Popsy. It just occurs to me in less than three weeks we’ll be picking you up. We’ll take a leisurely drive back—museum, ferry boat, etc. I’ve decided not to do the sequel of “Planet of the Apes.” They wanted the script much too soon for me to handle it. I’ve got too much to do anyway.

He closes with, “Not much else. Please forgive this brief—too brief letter. Nixon got nominated last night and that’s depressed me all by itself . . .”

After camp that summer, my friend I met there—another Jency—Jency Pelley, visits me for a few days at the cottage from her home in Ridgewood, New Jersey. She remembers: “Your parents took us out on the boat overnight, you and I were in the front berth. Late that night, we overheard them talking about you, so you went to press your ear against the door, which one of them opened suddenly and you literally fell into their room, or whatever you call it on a boat. Anyway, it was hilarious. Just like a cartoon in real life.” She can’t remember, nor can I, whether it was my dad or my mother who opened the door, but she does recall “what a sweet, goofy-funny, loveable man” my dad was and that he and I teased each other a lot.

In November of that same year, three months after Charles Manson inspires two nights of unbelievable carnage not too far from us, information leaks into the news about a target list, a hit list that he and his followers maintain. Seeing these shaven-headed, smiling, dancing monsters on the news, and knowing what they have done and that they have been in the Pacific Palisades near where we live is frightening. For some reason my California friend Jencie and I, in one of our whispered sleepover conversations, share our panic that our dads might be on the list, and for a long while our conversations revolve around that fear, exacerbated by our escalating imaginations.

I don’t remember if we voice this to our fathers, but it seems, for a long while, we pedal our bikes a little faster. Each shadow a potential peril, every sound a stranger with outstretched hands.

My dad, though, does not seem fazed by what keeps Jencie and me up late at night. He is certainly not looking over his shoulder.

The cancellation of The Twilight Zone has not slowed him at all. Producer Aaron Spelling wants him to write a pilot for a series called The New People (the show, some think, is the inspiration for J.J. Abrams’s Lost). The story is about a group of college students who are returning from a goodwill tour to South East Asia. Their plane crashes near a deserted island, and they are forced to create their own society in order to survive. My dad sends over his script but later comments that while its “sub-Lord of the Flies theme” may work for television, it doesn’t work for him.

In June of 1969, my dad shifts gears to host a game show called Liar’s Club, in which celebrity guests are given esoteric objects and have to produce plausible explanations of what the object is or what it is used for. Only one of the celebrities knows the actual use, and my dad, as host, is not told so that his reactions are spontaneous and genuine. Regulars like Betty White and Jonathan Harris—who had appeared in two Twilight Zone episodes and became well-known for his role in Lost in Space—then bet on which celebrity guest is telling the truth. My dad lets me go on the show on my fourteenth birthday. The format has changed a little, and again, as it was in the other show a decade before, the panel has to guess who I am.

Although I begged for this opportunity, I am stricken with severe stage fright, and standing there in my new orange dress, I shift from one foot to the other, play with my hair, the hem of my dress, and probably look right at him throughout the entire show. I truly don’t remember the outcome, but I suspect everyone guessed me right away.

Though at the time I don’t question anything professional that my dad does, I’ve since wondered why he agreed to do a show like this that had so little to do with his image as a serious television writer or his goals for the medium in general. I have heard some suggest that he did it for the obvious reason—easy money—just as he agreed to do commercials. But from what I now understand, he was paid relatively little, even by the standards of the time.

Although it was a silly game show, I think he did it because, despite his reputation as the “Angry Young (and not so young)” man, he did have a strong silly streak. He would let me draw striped socks on his ankles with bright red and yellow markers. On one occasion, he forgot, and went to have a suit tailored, only to return laughing so hard he could barely tell the story.

He was the greatest (as well as only) gorilla impersonator I have ever encountered. He was addicted to practical jokes and genuinely loved to laugh. I think, quite simply, he did Liar’s Club because he thought it would be fun, a change of pace. And it was.