Chapter 25
MY DAD’S OFFICE PHONE is also our home phone, but there are two lines, so if one is busy, the incoming call rings through to the other. A few months before the premier of his show Night Gallery on NBC, the phone is ringing constantly, in his office and throughout our house.
The pilot for Night Gallery includes three stories, two that he wrote for a collection of three novellas called The Season to Be Wary, published by Little, Brown in 1967. He dedicated the book to Sammy Davis Jr., who he says, came up with the idea for one of the stories when they were having a beer together. He and Sammy had considered doing a fantasy film for television consisting of three separate stories. The one by Sammy Davis involved a Southern racist who gets his comeuppance in a highly appropriate fashion when he is transformed into a black man and dies at the hands of a fanatical mob. When the film project fell through, my dad redirected the ideas into the book. Then, in a roundabout way, two of the three stories made it back to television for the Night Gallery pilot.
Though my dad is known for his scriptwriting, Season to be Wary was not his first foray into narrative fiction. In 1960, Bantam Books published Stories from the Twilight Zone, which includes six of my dad’s scripts that he had turned into short stories, including “Walking Distance,” “Where is Everybody?” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” It sold well, went through multiple printings, which led to the publication of More Stories from the Twilight Zone in 1961 and New Stories from the Twilight Zone in 1962. In that same year, he rewrote “Requiem for a Heavyweight” into a short novel published by Bantam to tie in to the release of the movie version, starring Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason, and Mickey Rooney. So that by the time he began writing Season to Be Wary, he was ready to stretch his wings by writing novels. He intended this collection as the lead-up to this new phase of his career.
The lead story in Seasons, “The Escape Route,” returns thematically to “Death’s-Head Revisited”:
“Gruppenfuehrer Joseph Strobe, former deputy assistant commander of Auschwitz, former confidant of one Heinrich Himmler, former wearer of black shiny boots, crisply pressed black uniforms; and former frequent maker of love in the back seat of his personal, chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz”. . . is now relegated to a sweat-logged rat hole of a flat in Buenos Aires, reminiscing about the good times back in Germany. But when Adolf Eichmann is captured by Israeli agents, Strobe’s tawdry existence is in jeopardy. While evading the agents, he escapes into an art museum where he realizes he has the uncanny ability to lose himself in a tranquil painting of a fisherman on a lake. He develops this power until he can actually will himself in and out of the painting.
With the Israelis in hot pursuit, Strobe rushes into the art museum and up to the painting. He wills himself back into the painting, not realizing that the fisherman canvas has been loaned out. In its place is a painting of a concentration camp, its central image a cross on which now hangs Joseph Strobe.
It is clear to me that among my father’s moral and philosophical outrages are the Holocaust and the American civil rights struggle, so it is not surprising that he deals with both in his first serious go at fiction.
This is the origin of his next attempt at series television. The premise of Night Gallery, similar to the one my dad developed in his proposal for Rod Serling’s Wax Museum, has him in a dark and eerie sort of art gallery, where he uses a creepy-looking painting to introduce each episode. The pilot begins with my dad walking into the gallery, and as he approaches one of the paintings, he says:
Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collector’s item in its own way—not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.
Our initial offering: a small gothic item in blacks and grays. A piece of the past known as the family crypt. This one we call simply “The Cemetery.” Offered to you now, six feet of earth and all that it contains. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Night Gallery.
One of the pilot’s stories, “Eyes,” stars movie legend Joan Crawford in one of her final performances. She plays a ruthless, wealthy blind woman who will do anything to have her sight restored, including buying the eyes of a healthy, sighted person who desperately needs money. At the time, I know Strait-Jacket, but I know nothing about her earlier career, so my perception of her is of a scary old woman in a rather chilling film.
Ms. Crawford, apparently a perfectionist, calls my dad incessantly, which accounts for many of the pre-premier phone calls. Perhaps she was like this on every project she was involved in, but eventually it begins to wear on my dad, and often, when the phone rings and he is in the house, not his office, he will hesitate a moment and say something under his breath before picking it up.
Nevertheless, her performance, which is directed by a then unknown young Steven Spielberg, pays off, and Night Gallery is the highest rated show that night.
I am babysitting on the evening it airs. I know my dad hopes that Night Gallery will be successful, but he is also apprehensive that it may appear as an attempt to replicate The Twilight Zone. I feel very protective of him and concerned about the show. When the kids I am babysitting go to bed, after a few moments of deliberation, I pick up the phone, dial a random number, pretend I am someone from the Nielsen Ratings, and when a woman answers, I say, “Good evening. We are taking a survey and wondered if you or a member of your family watched the Night Gallery this evening?” If they say they did, I get excited and my voice rises, sounding younger and less professional. I slam the phone down when the woman asks, “Who is this?”
Prank calls like this are nothing new in my family. I call my dad all the time from the home phone, pretending I am his agent Roberta Pryor or someone he knows. “Rod?” I’ll begin. “How are you?” I must be fairly good as he always replies, followed by a hesitation, recognition, and then “God damn it, honey!” He cannot get angry though. After all, I’d learned from the best!
It seems at the start that Night Gallery may be successful. My dad wins an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and Night Gallery is given a one-hour time slot on NBC. Within that time frame, stories can be any length and so the number of stories varies. Not having a time limit is supposed to open up my dad’s and the other writers’ creative possibilities, as if they were writing for the stage or the movies.
The fundamental difference between Twilight Zone and Night Gallery is that my dad does not have creative control of Night Gallery. He soon recognizes this to be a grave error, and that his assumption that he would still be included on some level in any production discussion is false. Despite the fact that the show is presented as his, my dad explains, “It is not mine at all. It’s another species of a formula series drama.”
Jack Laird is the producer of the show. His name is frequently mentioned in our house—through my father’s gritted teeth. In a letter my dad subsequently writes to Universal Studios, he says, “I wanted a series with distinction, with episodes that said something; I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but totally uncom-mentative on anything.”
Years later, my dad is asked in an interview with Linda Brevelle for Writer’s Digest magazine if he ever removed his name from the credits because of changes to a script that he didn’t approve of. He said he hadn’t; there were a few times he wanted to, but he found out too late. One of those shows, he said, was Night Gallery.
In that same interview, though, when asked which of his scripts he has special feelings for, he mentions “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and an episode of Night Gallery called “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” for which he received an Emmy nomination.
“Tim Riley” is similar to The Twilight Zone’s “Walking Distance.” Both truly represent my father’s writing at its absolute best, and both evoke the theme of going backward and going home again.
Randolph Lane, the main character in the story, lives on Bennett Avenue, just like my dad. Lane was also a paratrooper in World War II. And, like my dad, he has a preoccupation with the past and a particular sense of nostalgia and infinite longing.
Although I would never characterize my dad as a dark person, he is glaringly aware of his own mortality due to a genetic predisposition that, given his own health habits, could conceivably lead to an early death. Because of this biological time bomb, he never forgets where he is chronologically in relation to his own father and how little time may be left. He doesn’t say this to me in so many words, but he sometimes talks about feeling old. In the opening narration of “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” he describes this foreboding as: “the quiet desperation of men over 40 who keep hearing heavy footsteps behind them and are torn between a fear and compulsion to look over their shoulders.”
In the story, Randolph Lane is forty-six years old, like my dad. “I’m six years younger,” Lane tells a policeman, “than my father was when he died. And I keep getting beckoned to by ghosts. Every now and then it’s 1945 . . . and if you think that sounds nuts—try this one. I wish to God those ghosts would stick around.”
In the introduction to their 1999 book, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour, Scott Skelton and Jim Benson write:
In a fresh examination of the series, we have also noted some past inaccurate impressions from some of Serling’s earlier biographers, the primary myth being that Serling’s dramatic skills had waned in his last creative years. An overwhelming number of his scripts for Night Gallery show a high degree of quality, on a par with his earlier work and often better.
Certainly, one of these scripts is “The Messiah on Mott Street,” which aired December 15, 1971, as part of the second season and a year later was printed by Bantam Books.
The story takes place on Christmas Eve in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and takes my dad back to his immigrant Jewish roots more directly than anything else he has written.
In the show, Edward G. Robinson, nearing the end of his illustrious career, plays Abraham Goldman, a sick old man who refuses to go to a hospital for fear of losing his orphaned nine-year-old grandson Mikey. Though Goldman senses the presence of the Angel of Death, he is also hopeful of the appearance of the long-awaited Messiah, who will deliver both of them from their troubles.
When I watch this show, I am struck by how much it captures my dad’s love of the Christmas season, yearning for perfect justice, the power of belief, common cause between races and religions, and the ambiguity of what has actually happened. It reminds me of Twilight Zone’s “Night of the Meek,” and the adoration between an adult and a child of “A Big Tall Wish.”
Because he is contractually obligated, my father stays with Night Gallery until it is canceled in 1973. I am at MacDuffie School, a private girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts. Again, worried about class sizes in the LA schools, my parents and I make the joint decision that I will go away for eleventh and twelfth grade to the same school my mother attended. The first year I am there the headmaster is, astonishingly, the same one she had. For the first months I am desperately homesick, thousands of miles away from home, missing Jencie and Liz and a few other friends, and trying to adjust to the rules. During the second month of school, my friends Joan, Susie, and I are caught smoking cigarettes in the basement. “Have you been smoking, girls?” the dorm mother asks. Although we are sitting in a cloud of smoke, we tell her no. Finally Joan, the most honest one among us, confesses, and Susie and I follow suit. We are suspended for a week. My mother flies from California to get me, and we stay at the cottage. It is unusually warm that week in October, a late Indian summer, and we sit on the dock talking. Despite the circumstances, we actually have a nice time together. I tell her how the headmaster told my friends and me, “I’ll be the first to welcome you girls back.” My mother and I smile about that. Although we may disagree with him, his values are in the right place and he’s nothing if not enormously kind.
The lake is quiet, empty of its summer people that time of year, and we stay there a long time talking. “You know you have to obey the rules” my mother says, “despite how you feel about them.” I remember being incredibly relieved that she understands how archaic they are and that she is not angry. We forge an understanding, a friendship.
And, in fact, a year later, when I graduate and announce to my parents that I have been offered a position as female vocalist in a band that is forming, it is my mother, not my dad, who is more tolerant of this idea, probably suspecting that what would happen did—the band never took flight.
When I return to school, growing friendships and letters from home make the stay bearable. Sometimes my dad visits me on his trips to New York City or arranges for us to meet there. In a letter written just as Night Gallery is renewed for another year, he writes:
January 17, 1972
Dear Miss Grumple,
As promised—this letter. I’ve pondered the possibility of visiting you the week after next but it is simply impossible. I have to record in New York on the 27th, and leave the same night. I even thought of possibly going a day earlier but with Night Gallery being renewed I am going to be deep in the throes of writing the next several weeks. Then, of course, there’s the novel I’m finishing now (and which I think you’ll like).
So here’s a promise. Either in February or March, I’ll go into New York expressly to see you. I think it would even work out better because your semester break will get you out of there and let you recharge batteries and you really won’t need my presence then. Later on I think you’ll be more in need of a distraction (My God, Pops, here I am at forty-seven years of age, and suddenly I’m a “distraction”).
He is not a distraction, of course. We have fun together. For all the times my dad may have indeed been looking in reverse, accompanied by ghosts, he also lives in the present; he knows how to laugh, he knows how to have a good time, and no matter who you are, he knows how to make you shine.
I never did see the novel to which he referred, and I’m not sure what it was about. Mark Olshaker, who visited him at our house in California during his Christmas vacation from college in 1971, remembers my dad showing him a manuscript for a novel version of A Storm in Summer and mentioning that he had an idea for another novel he wanted to write.
Though I have not seen the first manuscript and don’t know what happened to it, and have no idea if the second even got under way, I do know that, as he got older, my dad became more and more interested in seriously pursuing both fiction and playwriting. Both of these would have given him greater freedom and allowed him to be independent and away from the Hollywood scene he was finding increasingly frustrating and empty. Had he lived, I am convinced that this shift in focus would have filled the next phase of his career.
He said as much in one of his college lectures:
The greener grass syndrome is as applicable to writers as to anyone else. The poet wants to write a novel. The novelist yearns to do a screenplay. And very frequently the television playwright has a special vaulting itch for the free and unsullied air of the theater piece. Sometimes it’s simply the obligatory exercise in changing pace. But for the guy who has written under the watchful eyes and ham-fisted stewardship of network executives, ad agencies and television censors, writing and watching the production of his own play in a theater is a little like getting a pardon from a chain gang, along with a train ticket to a happier place.