Fading Fame in The Twilight Zone
In late 1957, shortly after Serling parted company with agent Blanche Gaines and threw in his lot with the Ashley-Steiner Agency in Los Angeles, the entire family made the move west—together with most every other New York author with an eye for the future.
Hollywood fascinated Serling; of course it did. Like sport, like boxing, and exactly as he had shown in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” the movie business built up its stars and then knocked them down again. It is no surprise whatsoever that Serling would return to that same basic premise again and again, once he got his teeth into The Twilight Zone. He witnessed it in action, after all, every day.
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (First broadcast: October 23, 1959)
One of the most effective of all the earliest episodes of The Twilight Zone was also a very cunning update of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but replacing the dull old portrait in the attic with the opportunity for a faded but irredeemably bitter old Hollywood star to step again onto the silver screen she once dominated.
In between times, however, from the moment we meet her until the story’s glorious denouement, we are offered, also, a sobering glimpse into how hard the once-mighty can fall, and how difficult it is for them to pick themselves back up and rebuild a new life.
Barbara Jean Trenton was indeed a star, once upon a time. But a quarter of a century has elapsed since then, a span she has spent in a darkened room, fortified only by liquor, a movie projector, and a seething hatred for rock ’n’ roll, jukeboxes and all the trappings of the modern world. So she spends her time forever watching and rewatching her former self.
Everything about the production feels flawless. MGM orchestrator Leonid Raab provided the score, his first and only contribution to The Twilight Zone, and effortlessly he recreated the sound of vintage Hollywood. Likewise, actress Ida Lupino, breathtakingly convincing in the role of Barbara Jean; heartbreakingly magnificent in the scenes that define her fate.
Desperate to reawaken her interest in the modern world, her agent Danny arranges a meeting at one of her former studios to discuss the possibility of a fresh movie role. The moment Barbara Jean learns that the part is that of a mother, she storms out of the room.
On another occasion, he arranges for her to meet up with one of her former leading men, Jerry Hearndon—only for the reunion to turn into a disaster when it becomes apparent that Herndon has absolutely nothing to say about his past with Barbara Jean. He owns a chain of grocery stores now; Hollywood was another world, another life. Prematurely old, preposterously normal.
“A string of supermarkets outside Chicago?” snarls Barbara Jean. “That’s nice.”
She orders him out of the house and returns to her room.
Hours pass. Finally her housekeeper, Sally, arrives to bring her coffee. But though the movie projector is still running, the room is empty. Only when Sally looks up at the images still flickering on the wall does she see Barbara Jean . . . back on the screen, immortalized in celluloid, growing old in the only place she ever loved. And as she walks off the screen, blowing a kiss to the world she is leaving behind, the movie ends, never to be played again. Just one relic remains. The scarf that she tossed as she made her farewell.
It is a magnificent story, magnificently performed. But there was more, perhaps, to “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” than a simple reflection on the past; Serling may also have been commenting, albeit unwittingly, on possible futures too—reminding even the day’s biggest stars of the fickle nature of their fame.
Three years after the initial broadcast of “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” in August 1962, actress Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her Brentwood bedroom, a probable suicide. Her birth name, as every fan was aware, was Norma Jean Mortenson, a name that really wasn’t so far removed from Barbara Jean Trenton.
It was a coincidence that does not seem to have escaped Serling. He later admitted he wished he’d never had the idea in the first place.
Further piquancy is added to his regret by the knowledge that just a year before Monroe’s death, in June 1961, she and Serling came close to working together. Monroe had been offered the role of the prostitute Sadie Thompson in Serling’s projected adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain, and the pair met up in New York to discuss the project.
Sadly, the project fizzled out—officially because Monroe preferred an earlier adaptation of Rain (from 1923, by John Colton and Clemence Randolph) to Serling’s treatment; but unofficially, because Monroe’s escalating ill health and emotional problems were already impacting on her ability to work. Serling himself described her as a beautiful woman, warm and friendly. But ultimately, odd.
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” can also be seen as a cousin of sorts to the movie Sunset Boulevard (1950), with its own treatment of a fallen star, desperate to escape the reality of her decline. Indeed, the recruitment of Franz Waxman to the episode’s score only amplifies the comparison—the Polish-born musician fulfilled an identical role in that earlier movie.
Yet, for all its subsequent acclaim, the episode was not especially well received—albeit with even the harshest criticism tempered by an appreciation for the standards that Serling was trying to maintain.
“What the agency feared is happening,” growled Variety. “Rod Serling’s writing is ‘too far out’ for the masses that spell out ratings. No question about them being well done under Serling’s astute stewardship from mill to market. The simplicity that is the mark of westerns has no place here. This is what Serling calls ‘the dimension of imagination’ and makes each issue a think piece. What sets Serling apart . . . is his crisp dialog and well-turned phrases.”
“The Big Tall Wish” (First broadcast: April 8, 1960)
As The Twilight Zone’s maiden season moved into its final weeks, Serling returned to his fascination with boxing, and in particular its fallen heroes, when he introduced his viewership to prizefighter Bolie Jackson, 183 pounds, on the eve of his supposed comeback bout.
He is, even Serling’s sympathetic introduction acknowledges, “an aging, over-the-hill relic of what was . . . a reflection of a man who has left too many pieces of his youth in too many stadiums for too many years before too many screaming people.”
This is no Requiem for a Heavyweight, however, although it is not so distanced either. This tale is old and cynical, bitter and resentful, as bitter as Bolie, tired, beaten down and desperate only to rest.
But he is desperate, too, to go out on a high, financially if not otherwise. He is booked to fight the great Consiglio at the St. Nicholas Arena, and he doesn’t really care whether he wins or loses. Just so long as he gets the cash.
It is there, however, that his life is destined to change. For, among Jackson’s greatest fans is a young boy named Henry—a young boy who, for reasons we presumably do not need to know, is able to grant his own wishes. And what he wishes is for Jackson to win the fight, no matter how little the boxer himself cares about it.
And so he does. Bolie is KO’ed, but Henry’s wish sees him standing again, and it is Consiglio who is being counted out. Which is fine until Bolie meets the boy and learns what Henry made happen.
Of course, Bolie doesn’t believe it. Magic? Nonsense. He doesn’t believe—and so the magic doesn’t work. Because, just like Tinker Bell in Disney’s Peter Pan, such things are only effective if you believe then to be. We didn’t want Tinker Bell to be dead, and so she wasn’t. Bolie doesn’t want to believe that magic won him the fight, and so it doesn’t. The spell is reversed, and Bolie is back on the canvas.
The twist in the tale, however, is not that Bolie will henceforth believe in magic, because he won’t. The twist is that Henry won’t believe in it either. The world, he has just discovered, is far too harsh and bitter a place for anything so wonderful to truly flourish.
But magic was at work, in other ways, and in our own world. The civil rights movement that would become such a force in American culture as the 1960s moved on was still in its infancy in 1960, at least so far as the general public was concerned. But the N.A.A.C.P. (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was already earning headlines with its bitter, and utterly justified, complaint that neither Hollywood nor the TV networks were giving African American actors any kind of respect.
As Edward D. Warren, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., complained to the New York Times in November 1961, “they will show a scene with a baseball crowd and you don’t even see a single Negro. This is ridiculous. You will see city street scenes and not a single Negro. We are not arguing for Negroes on this matter. We want treatment for Mexicans, Jews or any other group.”
This episode of The Twilight Zone was one of the very first major network shows to actually face up to the N.A.A.C.P.’s complaints. Face up to them, and acknowledge their veracity. “The Big Tall Wish” would be shot with an almost exclusive cast of African Americans, and Serling made certain that the audience knew that in advance, circulating both the usual outlets and what was then called the Negro press with details of the show. (The New York Amsterdam News, metropolitan New York’s most influential Negro newspaper, was one of many to devote space to the upcoming broadcast.)
A few weeks later, after being complimented by the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students in New York, and the Committee to Salvage Talent for Negro Actors, Serling donated money to both, and the following year, The Twilight Zone received the Unity Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations”—two years before a CBS directive finally, and perhaps shamefacedly, insisted that all future network productions should feature at least one African American actor.
“A Passage for Trumpet” (First broadcast: May 20, 1960)
“Live fast, die young, leave [at least in terms of an unblemished legend] a beautiful corpse.” It’s one of the greatest maxims of the entertainment business, and has been for as long as there have been beautiful young stars to meet tragic deaths.
Olive Thomas, poisoned in Paris on her second honeymoon. Martha Mansfield, burned to death on a silent movie set. James Dean, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, Eddie Cochran, killed in an auto wreck just a month before this episode was broadcast. A myriad names alongside them, a myriad more since then.
For some, however, it doesn’t work out like that. They might live fast but they don’t die young, and now every day dawns in the knowledge that they’re one step closer to becoming the most addled and dissolute-looking stiff of them all.
Certainly that looks like the lot of Joey Crown. Like the boxers and movie stars of past Serling sagas, Crown was a once great player, now seriously in decline. Perpetually drunk, and unable to find work, he is finally reduced to selling his most precious possession, his trumpet, so that he can afford one more drink. One last drink—for, having sunk it, he walks out into the street and is hit and killed by a car.
But, though his life is over, his existence isn’t. He awakens and finds himself a ghost, unseen by anyone who passes him by, but able to move around the city at will. He returns to a nightclub where he worked in better days and listens to the music that plays there—haunting, beautiful music that causes him to regret all the mistakes he made in life, including his decision to end it. Which is when he meets the player, a man named Gabe . . . short for Gabriel.
Gabe offers Joey the chance to live again, and the redeemed jazzman accepts it gratefully. He purchases back his trumpet, and, that very night, playing the instrument on the roof of his apartment block, he meets the woman with whom he is destined to remain for the rest of what we suspect will be a long and happy life.
A simple tale of redemption, then, casting glances back at so many similar stories, but also unmistakably the work of Serling. Even the character of the dissolute trumpeter seemed familiar—he was much the same as the younger Joey who was a star of Serling’s decade-old contribution to Grand Central Station, “Hop Off the Express and Grab a Local”; and very similar, too, to the honky-tonk pianist, yet another Joey, who was the focus of “The Blues for Joey Menotti,” a Serling story dramatized by the Kraft Television Theater in 1953. Proof that sometimes the old maxim wasn’t so true, after all.
“The Dummy” (First broadcast: May 4, 1962)
Rod Serling based the season three makeweight “The Dummy” on an original story idea by Lee Polk, a Twilight Zone fan who was just one of many, writers and viewers alike, who offered the show a story that seized, in one way or another, on what was still the very popular entertainment of ventriloquism.
Who’s the dummy now? Cliff Robertson and friend in the season 3 episode “The Dummy.”
CBS/Photofest
On stage, on television and even (though modern sensibilities can probably scarcely imagine it) on the radio, ventriloquists enjoyed a buoyant career, and Jerry Etherson, “a voice thrower par excellence,” enthused by Serling’s introduction, was no exception. But ventriloquism was already on its way out, and with it the acts that were sustained by it. None more so than Jerry and his partner, wooden Willy.
The joke that a ventriloquist act could be broken up because one-half or the other of the team wanted to go solo is one that most people had heard—and they laughed, too, especially when it was the dummy that wanted to break away. And so it is here. Willy hankers for the unaccompanied limelight; and Jerry, who had hitherto thought that he was the brains behind the operation, is approaching the end of his tether.
Psychiatrists cannot assist him, neither can friends, neither can alcohol. Not even the most drastic step of all, locking Willy in his case and working with a brand new partner, can rid Jerry of what everybody tells him is a tragic delusion.
It is left to Willy to provide an answer. The partnership should remain intact, the double act can go on. But Willy has had enough of being the dummy. From now on, he’ll be putting words into Jerry’s mouth. Jerry and Willy have been consigned to the history books. From henceforth on, it will be Willy and Jerry.
Rod Serling’s closing narration claimed the act was “generally . . . booked into some of the clubs along the gray night way known . . . as the Twilight Zone.” According to the May 1962 issue of Show magazine, however, it had also been booked into the memory bank, courtesy of the 1945 anthology Dead of Night.
The resemblance of this plot to an episode in [that] old and frequently rerun thriller . . . is striking. A comparison, however, is not flattering to the newer version. Television writer Rod Serling has weakened his good moments with bad dialogue and given his plot one twist too many. That the man who wrote “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” should also turn out “The Dummy” is perhaps partly explained by the fact that more than ninety scripts have now come off the Twilight Zone treadmill. Clearly, even a sturdy talent like Serling’s can be worn to dullness by such a grueling grind.
In other words, boxers, writers and ventriloquists weren’t the only showbiz folk who could fall on creative hard times. But Serling, of course, was not “showbiz folk.” He’d bounced back from hard times before; he would soon bounce back again.