Chapter 32

SHORTLY AFTER IT GOES off the air, The Twilight Zone begins its seemingly eternal life in syndication. My father sees what syndication does to each episode and says in a newspaper interview, “You wouldn’t recognize what series it was. Full scenes were deleted. It looked like a long, protracted commercial separated by fragmentary moments of indistinct drama.”

It is tremendously frustrating for him to watch the dissection of his stories, and it is equally disturbing for him to see some of his other ideas hijacked.

One afternoon, Rochelle and I are again watching television with him at the lake. It’s a movie where an atomic bomb or another catastrophe has wiped out the human race. Throughout the entire movie, my dad is grumbling and making comments. “They stole my God damn script!”

In one of the final scenes, a man stumbles out of the debris and the camera pans to a horse standing near a dust-covered car. The man is clearly trying to find a way out of this apocalypse. The camera pans back and forth from the man to the horse to the car.

Finally, my dad has had enough and can no longer contain himself. Unselfconsciously he yells, “Oh, just shove the battery up the horse’s ass!”

Suddenly remembering his audience—my friend—he immediately apologizes. But Rochelle is rolling on the floor, laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks.

 

 

That spring, on a warm evening in late April 1975, my dad gives a speech at Elmira College, where I am a student. I have never heard him speak in public before. I am excited and enormously proud. He is not feeling well, though, and has to sit down in a room off the auditorium while people are filing in. Someone brings him a cup of water. He accepts it graciously. My mother and I are thinking he must be getting a cold. Or the flu. We are all in denial. Even though my sister told us that when he visited her the night before she was concerned; he looked ashen she’d said.

After a few minutes, his color starts to look a little better, and he announces he is fine. I hug him and tell him, “See ya soon, baboon.”

The auditorium is packed. Every seat is full and there are people standing in the back. Rochelle and I and some friends are told we can sit on the floor in the front.

The 1970s are not an easy time for an adult to connect with young people. Many students are angry about the Vietnam War, the Watergate cover-up, and the general state of world affairs, so they are distrustful of adults. The “Generation Gap” is in full bloom. But in that hour or so my father captivates the audience. He nails it. They love him. The clapping and the laughter are deafening. I am so filled with pride, just watching him, that I am not even following his words.

At one point he comments, “My daughter is out there, somewhere, where are you, honey?” I see him scanning the audience, but I know he’ll never find me. Just in case, though, I shadow the person in front of me. I will not let him embarrass me in front of all of these people. He finishes his speech, walks from the lectern, crosses the stage, and exits to thunderous applause.

 

 

It is not until many months later, when I look at the photographs taken of him around this time, that I see it. I look at a series of black-and-white prints: in one my dad is looking up from his desk, a script in his hand. Another shows him sitting outside in a lawn chair. Others capture him standing by the grill, by the lake, on the dock, by the porch. There is something alarming in my father’s eyes. It is the unmistakable weariness that we have all, unwittingly, failed to see.

It isn’t difficult, though, to understand how we could overlook these signs. As Rochelle remembers:

I had become a great fan of Rod’s at-home humor. This particular summer he had come east to their lake house a couple of days ahead of Carol. (She arrived a few days before his speech at the college.) Rather than spend time alone at the lake, he had convinced Anne to come home from her nearby college to spend the night, and I gladly joined them. The following morning, for no particular reason, he launched into a reenactment of a favorite scene from, of all things, “Gone with the Wind.” He played several parts, male, female, it really did not matter. Each one was more hilarious than the last, and each brilliant, I might add. The dialogue was flawless and props and costumes were whatever happened to be handy, from housecoats to bandanas, anything he could snatch. The whole performance could not have lasted more than two minutes, but years later, the mere thought of it can still transport Anne and me into fits of hysterical laughter all over again. I later learned that he had been known to stage this little vignette for other appreciative audiences; I was flattered to join their ranks.