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A Writer Writes, a Script Writer Waits

The Search for a First Big Break

Discharged in 1946, Private Serling received the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star and the Philippine Liberation Medal for his services, and initially found work at the rehabilitation hospital where he was recovering from his injuries. Disability payments and educational benefits included in the G.I. Bill then allowed him finally to take up the place at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, that he’d been offered back in his high school days. He initially enrolled in the physical education program, but soon moved into theater, and then into broadcasting, while changing his major to literature.

College offered Serling the radio station experience he had so vaguely dreamed of back in Binghamton, while he put in further valuable time as a volunteer at WNYC in New York during the summer of 1946. The following year, the same station took him on as a paid intern, at a rate of forty-five dollars a week, for his college work study program, while term time saw him working at, and eventually managing, Antioch Broadcasting System’s radio workshop. Much of his work as a writer, director and actor was then broadcast on WJEL, Springfield, and WMRN, Marion.

Serling supplemented his income even further by working as a part-time parachute tester for the USAAF—fifty bucks per conventional jump, with higher paydays for riskier assignments (ejector seats and the like), paid on a half-now, half-after basis. The military didn’t want to give him the entire fee upfront, in case he didn’t survive!

He needed the extra money. On July 31, 1948, Serling married his fellow student Carol (short for Carolyn) Louise Kramer—having first converted from his family’s Judaism to Unitarianism. They would remain together for the rest of Serling’s life and would have two daughters, Jodi and Anne.

So far, Serling was little more than a rising local star. In May 1949, however, he took his first steps onto a national stage.

First broadcast in 1937, and successful enough that it even spawned a series of seven movies between 1939 and 1941, Dr. Christian was one of those old-time radio shows for which Sunday afternoons were made.

Dr. Christian’s Casebook

A self-styled “absorbing, heart-warming drama” set in River’s End, a quintessence of small-town America, it was focused on the practice of Dr. Christian (actor Jean Hersholt) and the day-to-day bumps, scrapes and upsets that characterize our image of such a community. “Young Fellow Who Stole an Auto” is one of the more gripping episode titles; “Man with the Paralyzed Arm” and “Man Who Changed His Mind” rank among the others, although it should also be pointed out that Dr. Christian was never averse to a spot of fantasy, either. One story even involved a mermaid!

It all sounds awfully quaint today, and probably did so at the time, as well. But it was wildly popular. It even staged an annual scriptwriting competition, inviting proven and unproven writers alike to try their hand at writing for the show. Literally thousands of entries were received every year, allowing Dr. Christian to snag another accolade for itself, “the only show in radio where the audience writes the script.”

According to Newsweek, an astonishing 7,697 hopeful scripts were received in 1947; the influx for 1948 and 1949 was even greater. So when America settled down for the special broadcast that would follow the usual episode of Dr. Christian on May 18, 1949, it was in the knowledge that the eight competition winners whose names were about to be announced were truly the crème de la crème of aspiring radio playwrights: Russell F. Johnson, for his script “Stolen Glory”; Lillian Kerr for “Angel with a Black Eye”; Earl Hamner Jr. for “All Things Come Home.” Further winning entries were provided by Maree Dow Gagne, Mrs. Aida Cromwell, Miss Terry McCoog and Mrs. Halle Truitt Yenni, and, finally, Rod Serling, for his story “To Live a Dream.”

All eight were interviewed by actor Jean Hersholt, who called Serling’s effort “a fine job of writing” and complimented the writer on his choice of wife as well; of course, Carol accompanied him to the broadcast, and Hersholt raised a genuine round of applause when he declared, “You ex-G.I.s certainly specialize in beautiful brides.”

It was time for Serling to reveal his future ambitions to the listening public: “A large house, in the suburb of a large city . . . [to] raise a family, a lot of dogs . . . and write!” “And I certainly hope you realize such a fine American ambition,” replied Hersholt. “Maybe this check for five hundred dollars will go toward part of the down payment on that dream.”

Maybe it would, but not yet. Serling’s success with Dr. Christian did not, sadly, shove open any of the doors he was knocking against. He was mailing scripts, and script ideas, to every show he thought he could write for, but the rejection slips piled up remorselessly. Several times he considered giving up; he despaired of ever gaining recognition, or even earning a cent. But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

Pursuing one of his own private interests, several of Serling’s scripts involved boxing . . . the Dr. Christian effort among them. Another was sent to the light drama Grand Central Station, so named because the variety and number of stories it aired was likened to the passenger concourse of the busiest railroad terminal in the country. Sadly, however, Serling’s script wasn’t to be among the lucky passengers. His story was gently rejected with the suggestion it might be better applied to a television program. And preferably one that did not have a primarily female audience.

But producer Martin Horrell was enthusiastic enough that Serling promptly submitted a second script, a lighthearted piece titled “The Local Is a Very Slow Train,” and this time, he was successful. On September 10, 1949 . . . a month and a half before his Dr. Christian episode was set to air (on November 30), Serling’s story, retitled “Hop Off the Express and Grab a Local,” became his first-ever national broadcast.

A month after Dr. Christian, on New Year’s Eve, Grand Central Station aired a second Serling story, the newspaper drama “The Welcome Home.” With three national broadcasts within a single three-month span, Serling admitted that he thought he had finally made it. Or at least made inroads into his chosen career. But he hadn’t. Day after day, he sighed, he continued to pound at his typewriter, and day after day, the rejection letters piled up.

A Ravenous Freelancer

Serling received his bachelor of arts degree in 1950, and immediately upon graduation, he found full-time employment as a seventy-five-dollars-a-week network continuity writer for WLW radio in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was also selling further scripts, aimed for both radio and television, to the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation, his employer’s parent company.

They in turn sold the scripts to other organizations, and generally Serling would have no further involvement with any of them—although he would rework several of the stories in the future.

But his fortunes would not truly change until he conjured up the idea of Adventure Express—even if he admitted that anybody listening to the finished show might well have been both surprised and perplexed if they had encountered the tale as he initially envisioned it.

In Serling’s original treatment, the two children were dead, killed during the war. Now their ghosts were riding the rails of America, commenting on the day-to-day routine of human life as they traveled across the country.

It was a great idea. But it was also, perhaps, a few years ahead of its time.

Slowly, Serling got his foot through the scriptwriting door. He was still some way from becoming a radio regular, but he had scripts accepted by sufficient shows to justify describing himself as a professional writer. The only problem that he still foresaw was the declining importance of radio, as television rose to challenge its old supremacy—and the manner in which radio actually encouraged its collapse by refusing to rise to the challenge.

With so much experience and history behind it, radio could have fought back. It could have increased the rates it was willing to pay writers and actors, and mounted productions that rivaled anything the still-infant television could devise. It could have promoted itself better. Had it been willing to fight dirty, it could even have seized on the purported health risks of television, whose opponents believed it could foster everything from blindness to radiation poisoning, and pointed out that these were ailments that the radio was far, far removed from.

It did none of these things. Instead, like magazines and newspapers in the face of the Internet, like the music industry when challenged by mp3s, like so many other established technologies when confronted by an upstart rival, it simply threw up its hands and expired. Serling had no intention of joining it on the scrapheap. Even as he scraped a living selling (or attempting to sell) scripts to the dying radio, he was honing his ability to pen a very different kind of script—ones that required both an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue. Television scripting is, by its very nature, an extremely different beast from radio, but Serling not only found it easy, he found it more enjoyable, too.

At last, the scenarios in his head that he had hitherto had to illustrate in the chatter of his characters could be realized by scenery and backdrops. Monsters, were he disposed to write about them, could be seen and not merely described. Deep space could be experienced and not imagined. As television’s appetite for fresh new programming grew ever more voracious, as its market and marketability skyrocketed, Serling instinctively turned his attention toward making his own mark within the upstart new medium.

Interviewed years later by the Los Angeles Times, wife Carol explained, “I think Rod would have been one of the first to say he hit the new industry, television, at exactly the right time. . . . he was really working on television scripts. [I]n 1951 and 1952, the new industry was grabbing up a lot of material and needed it. It was a very propitious time to be graduating from school and getting ready to find a profession.”

Serling agreed. Writing the introduction to the Bantam paperback publication of his television play Patterns in 1957, he explained, “The TV writer is never trained to be a TV writer. There are no courses, however specialized and applied, that will catapult him into the profession. And it was especially true back in the twilight days of radio that coincided with the primitive beginnings of television that the television playwrights evolved—and were never born.” He talked of his early days as a staff writer in radio, a “dreamless occupation characterized by assembly-line writing almost around the clock,” churning out “everything from commercials and fifteen-second public-service announcements to half-hour documentary dramas.” It had a purpose. It taught him discipline and technique.

But it was so frustrating.

Fortune raised its head. Serling had stayed in touch with Earl Hamner Jr., a fellow winner in the Dr. Christian scriptwriting competition of two years previous, and when he heard that Hamner was about to leave his current position as a staff writer at WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, Serling applied for—and landed—his position. In later years, Serling described Hamner as the man who gave him his first break. Hamner demurred, but he accepted the compliment.

The WKRC gig was not the most distinguished of occupations, but it was demanding. Serling started at the bottom, scripting local comedy teams and penning testimonials for the station’s advertisers—watch or listen to any sponsored broadcast of the age, and remember, somebody had to write the few lines of fluff with which the announcer thanks the paymaster . . . “brought to you by Bum-be-gone’s patent buttock reducing formula. . . .” And remember, too, these were the days before a thirty-second pharmaceutical spot could largely be filled by listing all the side effects and contraindications that any potential imbiber might expect. Advertisements needed to be creative in those days, although it was not a role that writers enjoyed. Interviewed by the magnificently chain-smoking Mike Wallace for CBS in 1959, Serling recalled penning grateful, enthusiastic testimonials for a liquid that claimed to cure everything from fractured bones to arthritis.

However, there was also scope for Serling’s personal writing ambitions. He scripted a live television series called The Storm, and was also occasionally handed episodes in other anthology dramas. Then, back home after a day of work, he would be writing still, penning scripts that he would send out to the wider world. Most met rejection, but he refused to be downhearted. As soon as a story was returned by one production, he would make any necessary adjustments and dispatch it to another.

“Monsters, were he disposed to write about them, could be seen and not merely described.” Serling’s future self certainly took advantage of that, as this man-eating Kanamit proves.

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Indeed, by late summer 1950, this particular process had become so time-consuming that Serling hired an agent, Blanche Gaines, and, as her contacts began to pay off in a way that his own efforts never did, he made the decision to throw himself wholly into freelance writing.

Gaines was certainly well connected; her late husband, Charles, had been vice president of the World Broadcasting System, one of the first independent producers of syndicated radio series, and her client base included Helen Cotton, scriptwriter for such series as Studio One in Hollywood and The United States Steel Hour; future playwright Frank Gilroy, pulp veteran Nelson Bond and the indefatigable Jerome Ross—whose 2011 death at the age of 101 established him, said obituarist Stephen Bowie, as “the first centenarian among the significant Golden Age dramatists, and . . . likely . . . the only one.”

It was not only Gaines’s client base and reputation that appealed to Serling. Her rates of commission, too, were favorably comparable to the remainder of her profession, a 15 percent bite for each of the first ten sales, but thereafter 10 percent. Once a writer was established, she explained, and it took ten sales before that assumption could be made, his or her work became easier to sell. Fewer rejections meant less costs for her, and Serling—who had balked at the 15 percent—was mollified.

His introduction to Gaines coincided with another short burst of broadcasts, each of which Serling had arranged on his own—a happenstance that also played a part in his initial reluctance to sign with her, or any other agent. In August 1950, he had a story broadcast on We’ll Print That; in December, Choose One Gift; September saw the TV series Stars over Hollywood produce his “Grady Everett for the People,” and, in December, the same show ran his “Merry Christmas from Sweeney.”

But Gaines took one look at the deals that he had struck and pointed out that, even allowing for her full agent’s commission, she could have arranged far better terms for him than he ever could on his own. Her point of view gained even greater traction when Serling discovered that, once again, an outbreak of successful scripts did not necessarily pledge a future full of similar triumphs.

He devised an admittedly ingenious footballing series titled Monday Morning Quarterback, but attempts to sell it were left firmly in the end zone. Other ideas fell equally fallow. But then he signed with Gaines, and slowly, things began to improve. Summer 1951 saw Serling commence a run of tales for the WLWT Cincinnati television series Leave It to Kathy; fall introduced him to listeners through the historical series Our America and Builders of Destiny, for whom he offered up biographies of author Zane Grey, General Philip Sheridan, explorers Lewis and Clark and humorist Irvin S. Cobb.

A Learning Experience

None of these shows are especially well remembered or documented today; they were, though the young writer was thrilled by every fresh commission, simply a way of marking time as he searched for something that would truly sustain his ambition.

Of course, it was not all bad. He was gathering experience, an awareness of the demands that the medium made on a writer. To work not to a word count or a page count but according to the requirements of a time slot. How many words could reasonably be spoken in a minute. How to fill in a dead ten seconds with speech. And beyond that, he gained an understanding of the technical side of the business, cameras, lights and microphones. How many people could be fit into a single shot without tripping over one another.

Other awarenesses developed.

And so he could never truly regret his early dedication to scriptwriting, no matter how many brick walls against which it sometimes felt he was banging his head. The future was still unknown; but, once it did arrive, he proved to have little compunction about recycling past script ideas for new stories.

His original effort for Dr. Christian, the prize-winning “To Live a Dream,” was reborn as another episode in that venerable series, January 1952’s “The Long Black Night.”

A 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, “Dust,” effectively merged a rejected Dr. Christian script called “The Dust by Any Other Name” and an episode of Playhouse 90 that had aired just two years previous, “A Town Has Turned to Dust.”

Neither was he recycling hitherto overlooked material. “A Town Has Turned to Dust” was described by the New York Times as “a raw, tough and at the same time deeply moving outcry against prejudice. . . . Mr. Serling incorporated his protest against prejudice in vivid dialogue and sound situations. He made his point that hate for a fellow being leads only to the ultimate self-destruction of the bigoted. It was a theme that hardly can be restated amply enough and last night Mr. Serling expressed it with inspiration and fine determination.”

Other Twilight Zone scripts, too, borrowed ideas from a pair of scripts he wrote during his time at WLWT; while the very concept of The Twilight Zone was borrowed not only from so many other past anthology thrillers, but also from It Happens to You, a series he devised (again for WLWT) in which listeners would be transported to . . . not the twilight zone precisely. But certainly to other planes and possibilities.

Some fascinating titles and, indeed, stories were conjured within this particular pipe dream: a naval adventure called “The Gallant Breed of Men”; “And Then Came Jones,” about a man who had papers to prove he owned all the land within a six-and-a-half-mile radius of Times Square; and “Law Nine Concerning Christmas,” which would be revisited in The Twilight Zone as “The Obsolete Man.”

Two more of the proposed scripts, “Mr. Finchley Versus the Bomb” and “You Be the Bad Guy,” would be reprised as installments in the Lux Video Theatre, once Serling got his scripting feet beneath the table at that show.

Blanche Gaines, meanwhile, had established herself as an utterly indispensable part of his life. She landed him a berth writing for the weekly anthology series The Lux Video Theatre, the television offspring of the long-running Lux Radio Theatre. No less than five of the show’s episodes during 1952 were Rod Serling creations: “Mr. Finchley Versus the Bomb” (broadcast on January 7, 1952) dealt with one man’s refusal to leave his house after the military decreed his hometown the ideal site for its atom bomb tests; “Welcome Home, Lefty” (June 23, 1952) and “The Face of Autumn” (November 3, 1952) were further installments in Serling’s sporting canon, both dealing with life at the tail end of a career; “You Be the Bad Guy” (August 18, 1952) looked at the plight of a cop who was accused of being too soft on criminals; and “The Hill” (November 24, 1952) was played from the point of view of a war correspondent reporting back from the then-still-raging Korean War.

War, and its physical consequences, were the theme too for “The Sergeant,” a hospital drama Serling wrote for Armstrong Circle Theatre. The Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcast a tense political scandal–whipped “The Carlson Problem”; and “I Lift My Lamp” reflected on the dilemma felt by a young Czech girl, living in the United States but homesick for her friends and family back in Communist-held Czechoslovakia.

Not all of Gaines’s pitches on behalf of Serling were successful. In August 1951, ABC launched Tales of Tomorrow, a science fiction anthology series that immediately caught Serling’s eye. Tales like “Blunder,” in which scientists desperately but increasingly fruitlessly try to warn a colleague that his latest experiment might bring about the end of the world; “The Crystal Egg,” in which a trinket in an antique store turns out to offer a real-time portrait of life on Mars; and “Sneak Attack,” in which those dastardly Communists land aircraft filled with nuclear weapons at twenty-five American airports, and threaten their simultaneous detonation . . . these were the kind of stories that Serling could only dream of being permitted to write.

He submitted two scripts to Tales of Tomorrow’s producer, Mort Abrahams. “The Oath” returned Serling’s attentions to beleaguered Czechoslovakia—whose absorption into the world behind the Iron Curtain, it should be pointed out, represented the West’s most recent lesson in the greedy expansion of the Soviet Union; while “A Gift for a Metal Monster” could easily have slipped into The Twilight Zone anytime it liked. In fact, on more than one occasion (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “Black Leather Jackets”), it all but did.

The story concerns an alien race who police the universe by sending robots to every planet, to report back on whether or not that particular world merits further attention, subjugation or even destruction.

The Earth, the robot decides, falls into the latter category, and it is preparing to return to its home planet when it encounters a little girl, the daughter of the scientist to whom the robot confided its mission. Utterly unafraid of the metal man, she wishes it a Merry Christmas (that being the time of year), and plants a kiss on its metal face—melting the robot’s heart with the unexpected discovery of human kindness and love, and winning the planet a reprieve.

Both scripts were rejected. But the latter, at least, would live again.