Charles Beaumont in The Twilight Zone
The first episode of The Twilight Zone not to spring from the pen of Rod Serling was the work of writer Charles Beaumont. “Perchance to Dream” was based on his own short story “Twelve O’Clock Moon,” as published in the October 1958 issue of Playboy—one of a number of excellent fictions that he published in the magazine, in the days when people really did “only read it for the articles.”
It was also, of course, just one of almost two dozen stories that he would either write, cowrite, or be credited with across the life span of The Twilight Zone; few of which are frequent residents of the fan-based “best of” The Twilight Zone polls, but neither are they routinely overlooked. In fact, if there was such a thing as a “typical” Twilight Zone contributor, and with the ubiquitous Richard Matheson excised from the equation, the thirty-year-old Beaumont fits all the requirements.
Beaumont passed away in 1967 from a degenerative disease. Not yet forty, he was said to resemble a ninety-five-year-old by the time of his death. Prior to that, throughout the sunset years of his life, The Twilight Zone was very much his primary source of income; it was also, however, one of his primary sources of joy.
“I remember my father referring to The Twilight Zone as a gift,” Beaumont’s son Chris told rodserling.com.
“I think he knew how fortunate he, and Rod, and Rich Matheson were to have found a place that so suited their style of writing. Those years were quite magical around our house. I remember the excitement that built each week, whether it was one of dad’s or Rich’s, or whomever. I think they all felt a part of something wonderful. . . . Rod had quite a bit of power to protect his writers . . . and my memory . . . is that all the writers were pretty pleased with what they saw on the screen.”
Beaumont’s relationship with Serling did not always run smoothly, however. Several times, he felt moved to point out the similarities between, for example, his short stories “Marionettes Inc.,” “Hair of the Dog” and “In His Image,” with, respectively, Serling’s “The Lonely,” “Escape Clause” and “The Lateness of the Hour.” Ray Bradbury was cited as a clear influence on the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance”; W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” as the basis behind “The Man in the Bottle”; and so on.
Beaumont stopped short of accusing Serling of deliberately lifting other authors’ ideas. But he would suggest, somewhat arrogantly, that Serling first run his ideas past Beaumont himself, or some other writer well versed in the sci-fi/fantasy field—a notion that Serling would reject as soundly as he dismissed Beaumont’s other claims.
Ray Bradbury, too, was apparently very vocal in his outrage at Serling’s alleged light-fingeredness when it came to other authors’ intellectual property, to which Serling responded with delicious acidity, expressing surprise that a community he had always viewed as open to so many ideas would then spend its time scouring the writings of any newcomer, in search of ideas that might not be wholly original. An inquisition that it did not extend to its own members.
He even claimed, in that same letter, to have resigned from CBS and The Twilight Zone as a direct consequence of such accusations, although in this instance, he and Bradbury were able to iron out their differences, as he eventually did with Charles Beaumont.
Lesser names and voices would continue to complain that Serling has read one of their stories and transformed it into one of his own, often basing their accusations on the flimsiest similarities—but that, of course, is a fact of life for many creative artists, writers, musicians, even painters.
There is always someone who thinks they have a prior claim on one idea or another, and maybe they do, for there are only so many stories, so many tunes and so many images that man’s mind can fashion.
But plagiarism is not (or should not be) simply the accidental act of having the same idea as somebody else. It is the deliberate lifting of that idea and claiming it for your own. And in this respect, it is apparent to all that Rod Serling was infinitely more sinned against than sinning.
“Perchance to Dream” (First broadcast: November 27, 1959)
In the light of Beaumont’s own eventual fate, stricken by what can only be described as a grotesquely escalated aging process, there is a certain irony to the plot of his first contribution to its annals. “Perchance to Dream” was the tale of a man, draftsman Edward Hall, who was himself suffering from a mysterious affliction. He had been diagnosed with a rheumatic heart and must thus avoid any kind of shock.
So why was it that every night, when he fell asleep, he found himself back in the same place, a wild amusement park where the being known as Maya the Cat Girl (the exquisite Suzanne Lloyd) awaited, tempting him to take the rides that, in his waking life, would probably have killed him. And why, in the last dream before he determined to simply stay awake forever, did Maya start screaming for him to jump as they rode a roller coaster to its uppermost point?
The psychiatrist with whom he consults cannot offer any suggestions—but, of course, Edward would be more than welcome to return for further sessions. Ka-ching. But as the bereft, and exhausted, man prepared to leave the office, he glanced over to the psychiatrist’s receptionist, only to see Maya the Cat Woman sitting there.
Terrified, as well he might be, he hurled himself across the room, through the window and was dashed to his doom on the pavement, thirteen floors below. While upstairs in the office he just left, the psychiatrist was contemplating Edward’s dead body, and how the poor man simply lay down and died.
Only his final words were at all noteworthy—a ghastly scream, as though he were still trapped in his nightmare.
Beaumont discussed his introduction to the world of The Twilight Zone in the Christmas 1959 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“My Playboy story, ‘Perchance to Dream,’ was selected for production a few months ago. Serling told me to dramatize it but to make no changes. He advised me to forget everything I had learned about television taboos. They didn’t exist on [The] Twilight Zone. I should do the script the way I saw it.” He did so, and to his “amazement, it was happily accepted. Nothing was changed. Not one line. Not one word. Not even the wild technical directions.”
The story, he marveled, was filmed exactly as he had written it; as though it were the most extravagant major movie feature. The director Robert Florey, unearthed symbolism and meaning that he had never been aware of; the set was fabulous, the cast spellbinding.
And all the while, Beaumont looked on, “unable to believe that any of this was truly happening. An author was seeing his work treated with respect.”
“Elegy” (First broadcast: February 19, 1960)
Charles Beaumont based his second episode of The Twilight Zone on the short story, also titled “Elegy,” that he spun for readers of Imagination back in early 1953.
Serling’s opening narration claims “the time is the day after tomorrow.” In fact, it’s several days after tomorrow . . . close to 10,000 in fact. It is 2185, and Kirby, Webber, and Meyers were three astronauts undertaking what they thought to be a routine geological mission.
Suddenly their spacecraft was forced down on a planet drifting 655 million miles from Earth. But it looked, they realized, a lot like Earth. Perhaps as that planet seemed midway through the twentieth century. The only real difference was, instead of living, breathing human beings, all they encountered were frozen figures, seemingly halted in the midst of some mundane activity or action.
Just one man appeared to be alive, a Mr. Jeremy Wickwire, and he was swift to offer an explanation. The entire planet was a cemetery, a vast repository for the human dead, each one preserved as though he were still alive. Just as the three astronauts would be. Too late, the three men realize that the drinks that Wickwire offered them were poison, and too soon, we see, they will have been carried back to their stricken craft, to be positioned as they once were in life.
“They shared a common wish,” said Serling’s final voice-over. “A simple one, really—they wanted to be aboard their ship headed for home. And fate—a laughing fate—a practical jokester with a smile that stretched across the stars, saw to it that they got their wish, with just one reservation: the wish came true, but only in . . . the Twilight Zone.”
“Long Live Walter Jameson” (First broadcast: March 18, 1960)
Charles Beaumont was author of an episode announced, by the omnipresent Rod Serling, as “act one, scene one, of a nightmare.” But one that was not confined “to witching hours and dark, rain-swept nights.”
Imagine if the secret of eternal youth was not the province of vampires and the fiends of superstition, but was an actual attribute of a mild-mannered history professor; one who, under pressure, finally revealed that he was over two thousand years old.
That was the shock that awaited Professor Samuel Kittridge as he investigated his colleague, Professor Jameson’s phenomenal awareness of the most personal details of long-dead history. An awareness that he gained from living through the events themselves.
Instantly Kittridge realized that such immortality was a gift (or a curse, as Jameson insists) that could revolutionize our understanding of history, of the human condition itself. But, it soon transpired, he had discovered Jameson’s secret too late.
For also abroad was an old, old woman who once was the professor’s wife, but was now an embittered, murderous hag who had just discovered that her ex, still as youthful as ever, was about to marry a girl so many times younger than him that your head hurts just from doing the math.
She shot Jameson, and, by the time Kittridge arrived on the scene, all that was left of the man was a heap of clothing, and a pile of two-millennia-old dust.
Two points. First, Jameson’s grasp of history was not as flawless as he liked to think. Either that or the script writers got it wrong. Teaching the events of the Civil War to his class, Jameson insisted that it was the Confederates who were responsible for that fearful torching. Of course, it was the Union, and, needless to say, a lot of viewers wrote a lot of letters, chastising the show for that goof.
Secondly, the scene where Jameson (actor Kevin McCarthy) underwent that final transformation from young man to dust is among the most spectacular in the series’ life span—all the more so since, decades later, movie viewers were still applauding much the same effects.
The seamless scene in the early eighties vampire flick The Hunger, when pop star David Bowie goes from thirty-something to three hundred or more, was as roundly heralded then as when the young Dr. Jekyll became the ancient Mr. Hyde in the movie of the same name almost a quarter of a century earlier. McCarthy’s collapse was no less magnificent, and no less extravagant, either. Indeed, it was phenomenally expensive by the standards of the time.
One final point. This was not to be McCarthy’s sole brush with the corollary of eternal youth. In an episode titled “Curiosity Killed,” within the 1992 Tales from the Crypt anthology series, McCarthy again was aged to dust after his shrewish wife set about poisoning him.
“A Nice Place to Visit” (First broadcast: April 15, 1960)
As season one moved toward its end, Charles Beaumont was back again, this time with a portrait of one Henry Francis Valentine, “Rocky” to his associates, a small-time crook who, as we joined him, was reasonably convinced that his life was at an end. He had escaped a police chase, but was shot for his troubles, and now he lay dying on the street. Or possibly even dead, for that was what he was told by the gentleman who suddenly appeared alongside him, a bearded chap in an expensive suit who went by the decidedly Dickensian name of Mr. Pip. Dead, and now on his way to an afterlife that, quite frankly, sounded just like Heaven. There would be women, there would be gambling, there would be luxuries beyond Rocky’s wildest imaginings.
But, he quickly discovered, there would also be discontent and boredom. Like Walter Bedecker in the episode “Escape Clause,” Rocky soon lost interest in a life of such indolence. There were no challenges, there was no respite from the ceaseless ease.
He could rob a bank, but he wouldn’t get caught, and without that thrill, the entire escapade seemed pointless. He could seduce the most beautiful woman in the world, but if he knew he was going to succeed with her, then where was the challenge? Life, or rather, life after death, was becoming tedious, mindless, hellish.
Which is when Mr. Pip popped up again to ask him what he expected?
Did he really think he was bound for any better place?
Larry Blyden played Rocky (Sebastian Cabot was Mr. Pip), but Charles Beaumont’s original first choice for the role was Mickey Rooney, and his second choice was Serling himself. Both great men declined the honor, but how very close we came (and perhaps, in the twilight zone, it actually happened) to enjoying two sights of Rod Serling, the actor, in one evening. For that same night, on the same network, The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse presented the hour-long drama “The Man in the Funny Suit,” featuring Serling playing himself in a dramatization of the behind-the-scenes creation of his own “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”
Serling found the experience somewhat unsettling, but this extra dose of Serling screen time served another purpose too; it at least went some way toward compensating audiences for The Twilight Zone’s absence from the screens the following week, April 22, 1960—preempted by a special edition of Playhouse 90, titled “Journey to the Day.”
“The Howling Man” (First broadcast: November 4, 1960)
This Charles Beaumont story was broadcast just a year after its initial publication in the November 1959 issue of Rogue magazine, a Chicago-based competitor for the Playboy audience of quality reading matter, attractive models, sexual advice and a lot of jazz coverage.
It was also a keen supporter of sci-fi and fantasy, although not at the expense of its primary intentions. Beaumont’s story, published under the pseudonym C. B. Lovehill, appeared between covers decorated with a high-kicking blonde and the “College Issue” promise of “the Lush Life of a Miami Co-Ed.”
“The Howling Man” is another story whose elements would howl through the ages, informing productions as disparate as an episode of television’s Doctor Who (“The Satan Pit”) and Mariano Baino’s brilliant (but so underrated) 2006 movie Dark Waters.
Shortly after the end of the First World War, scholar David Ellington was traveling in central Europe and spending a night at a monastery, the home of the mystical Brothers of Truth. There he discovered that the monks were holding a man against in his will . . . a prisoner, in other words, who they claimed to be the Devil himself, but whom Ellington saw as simply an innocent, hapless victim.
The Brothers reminded him that, since the war ended, the world had remained in relative peace and tranquility (a subjective claim, as victims of the Irish Civil War, the Great Flu, the Louisiana Hurricane and soaring inflation might argue); and that it was all down to the fact that they had imprisoned Satan, the cause of all such horror.
But Ellington, like do-gooders everywhere, was skeptical, and, in talking to the prisoner, he became convinced that the monks were mad.
He released the prisoner—and then was horrified to watch as the unchained man transformed back into his natural form, that of the Devil himself. And years later, having sought out the beast and managed, once again, to confine him, Ellington had but one wish. That the servant to whom he entrusted his tale would have a little more faith in the story than Ellington himself had in the words of the Brotherhood.
Somehow, though, we doubt that’s very likely.
“Static” (First broadcast: March 10, 1961)
Charles Beaumont based his script on an unpublished, original story by OCee Rich, a projected radio play called “Tune In Yesterday”—in which we are introduced to “a very special sort of radio.” So special, says Rod Serling’s opening announcement, that “no one ever saw one quite like that. . . .
Ed Lindsay was a dedicated fan of what enthusiasts now call Old Time Radio, the study and preservation of the kind of entertainment that kept America glued to the airwaves for decades before television arose to usurp its genius. Indeed, in Ed’s world, television was tantamount to the devil, a simple-minded box of tricks that did nothing beyond sap the soul of anyone who sat down to stare at it.
Radio, on the other hand, engaged the mind and encouraged it to work; to visualize the imagery that was conjured by the words; to absorb itself in the story and not just be staring at pretty pictures.
Of course, this is not an argument that it is hard to agree with, even if one reflects on the early 1960s as a golden age for the televisual medium. For every episode of The Twilight Zone, after all, there was a host of other shows that history does not recall so fondly, or even remember at all. Which will probably never be boxed up as deluxe DVDs or remade as star-studded modern adaptations. My Little Margie, for instance.
No wonder Ed was so happy when an old radio that he retrieved from the basement of his boardinghouse proved miraculously in tune with the past, broadcasting long-forgotten favorites into his room. FDR’s fireside chats. The Fred Allen Show. All returned in perfect fidelity.
It was a blessing, strangely enough, he could not share with his friends—if there was anyone else in the room, the old radio simply crackled static. Even Ed’s old flame Vinnie thought he’d got a valve loose, and one day when Ed returned from the store, it was to discover that she has sold the radio to the junkman.
Desperately, he raced out to retrieve it—and when he did, and returned it home, the next time he switched it on, it was not simply the radio shows that dated back to 1940, The entire world around him was transported too, and the romance that he and Vinnie once enjoyed, but that they lost, could be kindled afresh.
“The Prime Mover” (First broadcast: March 24, 1961)
A collaboration of sorts between writer Charles Beaumont and George Clayton Johnson, whose initial idea this was, this “portrait of a man who thinks and thereby gets things done” was the story of Mr. Jimbo Cobb, a man who “might be called a prime mover, a talent which has to be seen to be believed.” And, continued Rod Serling’s opening, “in just a moment, he’ll show his friends and you how he keeps both feet on the ground . . . and his head in the Twilight Zone.”
Blessed with the ability to telepathically move and manipulate any object he chooses, Jimbo Cobb teamed up with down-on-his-luck diner owner Ace Larsen, and Ace’s girlfriend Kitty, to fleece the Vegas casinos.
Roulette and dice games saw Ace up $200,000 within just a couple of hours, but as the stakes grew higher, Jimbo tired and Kitty quit. She flew home, disgusted at Ace’s greed; Ace, penniless again after Jimbo ran out of juice, followed her, regretting that he ever behaved so foolishly. The pair reunite, Jimbo recovered his powers . . . it was a happy ending all round.
Not an especially enthralling episode, though.
“Long Distance Call” (First broadcast: March 31, 1961)
Charles Beaumont was back in the writer’s seat the following week, this time in tandem with William “Bill” Idelson—it was he who penned the original “Party Line,” before it was handed to Beaumont for scripting, and he who can take credit for one of the finest tales in the latter months of season two.
Serling’s introduction was unequivocal. Grandma was dead, but she wouldn’t lay down. Or, at least, shut up. “For in a moment, a child will try to cross that bridge which separates light and shadow . . . and of course, he must take the only known route, that indistinct highway through the region we call . . . the Twilight Zone.”
The bridge was provided by a toy telephone, Grandma’s last gift to five-year-old Billy, who dealt with her death as only a child could, by continuing to talk to her on the toy phone.
At first, his parents humored him, but rapidly things grew darker and more sinister. Grandma, apparently, was begging Billy to join her in the afterlife, and the boy seemed determined to do so, throwing himself into the backyard swimming pool and, to all intents and purposes, drowning.
The medics were working on his tiny, sodden frame, but their efforts were to no avail; they were beginning to give up hope. And then the strangest thing happened. Sylvia, his mother, heard the dead grandmother’s voice crackling through the toy phone. Her husband, Granny’s son, raced to pick up the receiver and pleaded with his mother to spare their son’s life. Grandma, mercifully, agreed.
Billy lives.
“A toy telephone . . . an act of faith . . . a set of improbable circumstances all combine to probe a mystery, to fathom a depth, to send a facet of light into a dark after-region. To be believed or disbelieved depending on your frame of reference. A fact or a fantasy. A substance or a shadow. But all of it very much a part . . . of the Twilight Zone.”
Just as legal complaints were fast becoming very much a part of The Twilight Zone.
By the end of season two, barely an episode was allowed to pass without somebody claiming that The Twilight Zone had ripped off a script that may or may not have been sent to the show; and there was barely an unknown writer, it seemed, who was not sending their story ideas in to the program in the first place.
At least two authors went after this particular story; an Allan Amenta, whose synopsis for a story titled “Dial H for Happiness” was rejected by Serling back in December—and who was unable to pursue his complaint after realizing he no longer had a copy of his own work; and a Maxwell S. Miller, who made a similar claim and engaged an attorney to see it through.
This claim, too, came to naught, but just as Serling had once complained (in that famous letter to Ray Bradbury) that the sci-fi and fantasy world was filled with people who couldn’t stand to see someone else succeed where they, perhaps, had failed, so he now learned that it was also packed with resentful would-be authors who saw blatant theft in the merest coincidence.
“Shadow Play” (First broadcast: May 5, 1961)
Beaumont’s macabre “Shadow Play” was the story of Adam Grant, a convicted murderer awaiting death in the electric chair, but terrified of a fate even more ghastly than that; a labyrinthine nightmare in which Grant had convinced himself that his entire life . . . or, at least, his life since the murder . . . was but a recurring dream that his guiltless, innocent self was dreaming. And if he was put to death in this nightmare, all of the people he had dreamed up around him . . . his lawyer, the DA, the prison guards and governor . . . would simply cease to exist.
Of course they laughed, of course they ignored his warnings. The DA even feared that the man was mentally ill, and he petitioned for a stay of execution until Grant had been fully examined by expert psychologists.
His plea arrived too late, however. In the death cell deep in the bowels of the prison, the prisoner was strapped into Old Sparky, the lever was pulled, the lights started to flicker . . . and then everything went black.
And when the lights came back on, Grant was still in the courtroom, still reeling from his latest visit to his recurring nightmare. But what about all the people around him?
“The Jungle” (First broadcast: December 1, 1961)
For this episode, Charles Beaumont set to work adapting his own short story of the same name, originally published in the December 1954 issue of If magazine. It was a tale of ancient ritual, fearful magic, voodoo. A dreadful curse that had been placed on Richards by an African witch doctor who opposed the hydroelectric dam that engineer Richards’s employers were building on tribal grounds in Africa.
A modern man, Richards could not begin to believe in the curse, but it affected him regardless. When he walked through the city where he lived, he heard not the sounds of a typical American metropolis, but those of a dark African jungle.
Drums pounded, animals roared, insects buzzed and hummed. It was as if he is back in Africa itself, and with every step he took, his surroundings seemed to change. Only when he returned to his apartment did normalcy reassert itself, and as he walked to his bedroom, everything seemed as it ought to be.
Everything, that is, apart from the lion that was waiting on his bed, and that sprang viciously toward him as he entered the room.
“Dead Man’s Shoes” (First broadcast: January 19, 1962)
Charles Beaumont conceived the story that OCee Rich ultimately scripted, returning to The Twilight Zone to introduce us to Nathan Edward Bledsoe, one of those so-called Bowery Bums that once peopled the most hard-bitten tales of down-on-its-luck Americana. Scrambling day-to-day to survive, Bledsoe eked out an existence in what was, in the early 1960s (and for decades on either side of that), one of New York City’s least salubrious neighborhoods, the Bowery tangle of worn-out tenements and even more worn-out human beings.
When he came across a corpse in an alleyway, then, it was something of a red-letter day for the poor man. It was not every day (or even every year) that he got his hands on a new pair of shoes!
But he quickly discovered that he had gotten more than the shoes. The corpse was that of a gangster named Dane, and Dane was not yet ready to leave this life. His spirit took over the old panhandler’s body, directing him back to the gangster’s apartment, where he showered and shaved before heading out to conduct a spot of business—dealing with the dirty rat who murdered Dane in the first place, his old business partner Bernie.
Of course, it did not take long for Bernie to realize that this strange man knew way too much about the business and the matter of Dane’s departure from this planet. And no matter how far-fetched a notion it was, he could not shake the feeling that somehow, Dane’s ghost had returned in another man’s body. He pulled out his gun and fired, and poor Nathan fell to the ground, mortally wounded.
He had the breath for just one final, dire prophecy, Dane’s dread warning, “I’ll be back, Bernie, and I’ll keep coming back, again and again.” Then his body was thrown out with the trash, deposited in a darkened alleyway . . . where another panhandler happened to find it and took a fancy to that same nice, shiny pair of size 9 black-and-gray loafers.
(This same basic story would feature again during the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone, but with its title, and therefore the gender of its protagonist, switched to “Dead Woman’s Shoes.”)
“The Fugitive” (First broadcast: March 9, 1962)
Charles Beaumont’s “The Fugitive” is one of those stories that so blurs the traditional (if so snobbishly upheld) lines between science fiction and fantasy that even Rod Serling’s introduction was forced to remark on the fact. “It’s been said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction, the improbable made possible; fantasy, the impossible made probable.”
But what, he asked, “would you have if you put these two different things together? Well, you’d have an old man named Ben who knows a lot of tricks most people don’t know and a little girl named Jenny who loves him . . . and a journey into the heart of the Twilight Zone.”
It is sad, but probably true, that a story such as this could not be told quite so guilelessly today. An old man living alone and surrounding himself with little children . . . inviting them into his apartment to entertain them with magic tricks; confiding secrets, distributing candies. Within five years of this episode, the young David Bowie would posit a similar scenario in his song “The Little Bombardier,” and end it with the old man being driven out of town with the most unseemly accusations raining down around his head.
Here, too, Ben seemed to have caught the eye of a suspicious outside world. But not, he confided in little Jenny, because people suspected him of untoward behavior. Well, he didn’t confide that, not in so many words, but he did reveal a strange, dark secret. He wasn’t really an old man. He was an alien from another world; the king of the aliens, in fact, and the men who sought him were members of the same race, come to take him home.
He was not too keen on leaving, however. He had come to love the Earth; and—this is where modern sensibilities will really start to prickle uncomfortably—he had come to love Jenny. So much so that when she pleaded for him to take her with him, he agreed with barely a qualm.
His pursuers, however, were less than enthused by the notion, so Ben did the only thing he could. Among his alien talents was the ability to shape-shift. It was the work of barely a moment for him to transform himself into a replica of Jenny, and his escort now had no alternative but to take the both of them back to their planet. And there they would reign as king and queen.
Just one concession was made to any outraged moralities that might have been watching the show—the discovery that Ben was not, in fact, an old man, but a handsome youngster, a far more fitting consort for little Jenny. And it would never occur to Jenny’s aunt, Mrs. Gann, when she discovered his photograph under the missing girl’s pillow, “that eventually her niece will grow up to be an honest-to-goodness queen . . . somewhere in the Twilight Zone.”
“Person or Persons Unknown” (First broadcast: March 23, 1962)
It was a sign of Rod Serling’s growing disenchantment with The Twilight Zone that he wrote so few of the episodes in the third season. Charles Beaumont was among those that picked up the slack, delivering a creation that still resonates strongly today.
David Gurney, we learn, “has just lost his most valuable possession. He doesn’t know about the loss yet. In fact, he doesn’t even know about the possession. Because, like most people, David Gurney has never really thought about the matter of his identity. But he’s going to be thinking a great deal about it from now on, because that is what he’s lost. And his search for it is going to take him into the darkest corners . . . of the Twilight Zone.”
Of course, this is not identity theft in the manner in which we understand it today, when other people assume the fact of another person’s life for financial or similar gain. Quite simply, David Gurney awoke to discover that he had no identity at all.
He had been married eleven years, but his wife regarded him as she would a stranger. His coworkers didn’t have a clue who he was, and all the forms of identification that he had built up over the years, from his library card to his driver’s license, had simply vanished.
The calamities piled up. First he was arrested for grand theft auto . . . while driving in his own car. Then, when his story was heard, he was transported to an asylum, and we wonder (perhaps with a hint of nostalgia) at how easy it was for people to be handed over to the doctors to be dealt with, rather than left in a cell regardless of their mental state.
The psychiatrist, of course, had no idea what was going on; could merely suggest that Gurney was someone else entirely, who lost his memory the previous evening and now suffered from mistaken identity. An explanation that Gurney found as preposterous as the predicament itself. If he wasn’t David Gurney, then who else could he be?
That, it turned out, was a very good question. For, when he awoke from what was merely a dream, he was reminded, and we now discovered, that the only person who doesn’t know who he is—is himself. He has fallen into what psychology refers to as a fugue state, a complete and absolute loss of both past memories and identity. His dream simply flipped the scenario around.
“In His Image” (First broadcast: January 3, 1963)
A Charles Beaumont thriller ignited season four, based on the short story “The Man Who Made Himself” that he first published in the February 1957 issue of Imagination magazine.
It was a tale that Serling had long hoped to feature on the show; as far back as 1958, when The Twilight Zone was still in a gestative state, he had written his own adaptation of it, abandoning it only when Beaumont joined the Twilight Zone family himself. From that point, it was less a matter of if “In His Image” would be produced, as when—although similarities between this story and Serling’s own season one tale “The Lateness of the Hour” had been pronounced enough to concern even Beaumont.
It’s certainly a grim tale, the story of an apparent madman named Alan Talbot, haunted by noises and voices in his head, and driven to murder when an old woman kept on bothering him on the subway. Desperate to get out of Dodge, Talbot and his girlfriend Jessica leave to visit his aunt in the town where he grew up, but his bizarre behavior only grew worse. Finally Jessica left him, and Alan continued his descent—which was abruptly halted when an injury to his wrist reveals not flesh and blood but wires and plastic.
He was not a man; he was the creation of a scientist, Walter Ryder—whom he visits, and learned the entire story, while being shown around the lab where he, Alan, was “born.”
Nothing that Alan called a memory was real; all was implanted by Ryder. Even Alan’s face was a replica of his maker’s, and all had been going well with the experiment until just a few days before, when Alan attacked his creator and ran away. But, Ryder assured him, all that had happened in the days since that was the result of the short circuit, or whatever it was that sent him mad.
If he would just sit down quietly, Ryder would gently take him apart and repair the fault.
Alan fought back, and the laboratory was destroyed even as Ryder succeeded in partially dismantling his creation—and then he went to visit Jessica, to apologize for his bad behavior. In other words, as Serling’s closing narration has it, “in a way it can be said that Walter Ryder succeeded in his life’s ambition. Even though the man he created was, after all, himself.”
The series’ return after a six-month hiatus was warmly welcomed by the critics, at least at first. “[The] debut of the new hour-long format for Twilight Zone,” the Hollywood Reporter remarked, “incorporated all the plusses . . . that originally had made the half-hour version a prestige fantasy show from the start. . . . Dramatic camera angles, mood lighting, hair-raising, anti-climaxes for suspense builds. . . .”
But, for there is so often a “but” involved, “the second half didn’t measure up to the suspense and excitement of the first half-hour, the explanation of the puzzle.”
An observation that was sadly true. Indeed, for many viewers, the new hour-long Twilight Zone felt a lot like the old half-hour-long one, just with an extra thirty minutes of padding . . . the old comparison of an O. Henry short story awkwardly swollen to become a novel.
“Valley of the Shadow” (First broadcast: January 17, 1963)
Charles Beaumont wrote the story that inspired Rod Serling to ask us the question that haunted his opening narration. “You’ve seen them. Little towns, tucked away far from the main roads. You’ve seen them, but have you thought about them? What do the people in these places do? Why do they stay?”
Philip Redfield had certainly never thought about it, and even as he approached Peaceful Valley, with its stated population of just 881, he merely thought he was entering one of those wonderfully out-of-the-way places that lurk in backwoods all over the country—or, in this case, off one of the back roads on the way to Albuquerque.
The problem was, having got into town, Redfield was now finding it impossible to get out—his car was wrecked when it crashed into an invisible barrier.
His search for answers, however, only led him to even more perplexing questions. According to the town mayor, the town was sealed off a century ago by an alien who offered the people a technology far in advance of anything else on Earth, guaranteed to ensure peace and harmony for all.
But, because it would be dangerous for the rest of the planet to learn of these devices, the town became a bubble apart from all else, and visitors—like Redfield—were faced with just two alternatives. Either they became residents of Peaceful Valley themselves or they were killed.
Redfield will not give up, however. He befriended Ellen (Suzanne Cupito—the future Morgan Brittany), a citizen for whom all the technology at her disposal was useless, because it could not create the one thing she lacked—love. She seemed to offer him an escape, in the form of the means to get out and the proof that the outside world would require, to prove Peaceful Valley exists.
He grabbed the chance—only to discover that Ellen’s affection was all a ruse to discover whether he was honest or not. And clearly, he had failed, a crime that was usually punishable by death.
The mayor, however, took pity on him and arranged instead simply to have Redfield’s memory wiped, and then set free. Which does make you wonder why they hadn’t just done that in the first place and saved everybody a lot of fuss.
Oh. Because there wouldn’t have been a story if they had.
“Miniature” (First broadcast: February 21, 1963)
The episode that introduced H. R. Pufnstuf . . . voice actor Leonard Weinrib . . . to The Twilight Zone, a supremely creepy Beaumont tale is dedicated to that forever favorite horror trope, the seemingly innocent doll—seated at a piano in a miniature house in the Burton County Museum, apparently lost in her music. Or so it looks to the casual viewer . . . “to the average person,” as Rod Serling puts it, for whom the museum is “a place of knowledge, a place of beauty and truth and wonder. Some people come to study, others to contemplate, others to look for the sheer joy of looking.”
Charley Parkes, however, had his own reasons for visiting the museum. It was to escape the outside world, and to lose himself instead in the company of the woman he loved. That same doll.
Recently unemployed, Parkes spent every available moment at the museum, gazing on the display, with his family’s concerns for his well-being falling on deaf ears. Even when they secured him a new job and introduced him to an eligible woman, Charley could not be enticed away from the museum, and it was clear that his obsession was growing stronger by the day.
Finally, Charley smashed the display case that surrounded the exhibit, in a desperate attempt to reach the doll. He was secured and sent to visit a psychiatrist, who formulated, according to the dictates of his art, a mental state in which stress had sent Charley reeling into a world of make-believe. He was sent for a few weeks’ rest at a sanatorium and then, having been pronounced cured, released back into the community.
Of course, he went straight back to the museum, but when his family went to find him, there was no sign of him at all. Only the security guard had any clue as to his whereabouts; only the security man spotted a second doll, which looked a lot like the missing man, sitting next to the piano player.
This was “Miniature”’s sole airing until 1984, after the story line was the subject of a copyright infringement suit shortly after broadcast. (See chapter eleven for further details.)
“Printer’s Devil” (First broadcast: February 28, 1963)
Charles Beaumont based “Printer’s Devil” on the first of his short stories ever to be published—“The Devil, You Say?” appeared in Amazing Stories in January 1951, at the very dawn of his career as one of America’s foremost science fiction and fantasy writers.
In the world of hot metal publishing, a printer’s devil was the apprentice whose job it was to mix ink, fetch type and generally keep the machinery running. Douglas Winter, on the other hand, was a little too old and experienced to be a printer’s devil. And too embittered, as well. Rather, the editor of the Dansburg Courier had his work cut out for him struggling to keep his newspaper afloat.
Circulation has plummeted, debts have soared and the staff is thinning, a crisis planted firmly at the door of a newly opened rival newspaper, financed from afar and blessed with all the very latest technology. A sharp prediction, of course, of the fate that has now devoured so many local papers, to allow the modern viewer to recall the days before journalism, news and current affairs were subverted by the Buzzfeed Tweeters, soullessly regurgitating the unrecognizable dregs of the misunderstood CliffNotes for Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
Just as Winter is fearing the worst, however, he encounters a genuine printer’s devil, an old man who also bears the name of Smith. Indeed, not only is he the most skilled typesetter Winter has ever encountered, he is also wealthy enough that he could pay off all the Courier’s debts, if only it ensured he could keep his job.
Suddenly, everything starts going right. Circulation booms as the paper reestablishes itself as the only publication that matters in town. Sensational scoops simply fall into its lap, while advertisers fall over themselves to buy space in the paper. Even more amazing is the slowly dawning realization that anything Winter sets in type, predictions in an editorial, for example, has a fascinating habit of then come true.
But, naturally, there is a catch. Smith, of course, is more than printer’s devil. He is the Devil, and having allowed Winter a taste of success, now he makes his pitch. If Winter will only sign over his soul, he could become the most powerful newspaperman in America.
Winter agrees, but as with so many of the Dark Lord’s bargains, there was a heaping helping of caveats to contend with, and while Winter grows more fearful, the Devil becomes increasingly impatient. When Winter’s fiancée walks out on him, the Devil knows his time has come. He prepares to drive the man to suicide.
Winter, however, has one final trick up his sleeve. Utilizing his newfound power with the type, he composes a story in which his arrangement with the Devil is rendered obsolete.
“Exit the infernal machine,” Serling’s closing words assured America, “and with it his satanic majesty, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness. . . . He’s gone, but not for good . . . that wouldn’t be like him. He’s gone for bad. And he might be back, with another ticket . . . to the Twilight Zone.”
“The New Exhibit” (First broadcast: April 4, 1963)
The idea behind this story was planted in Serling’s mind by a suggestion from a representative of the then newly opened (March 1962) Movieland Wax Museum in Hollywood.
Home at that time to some fifty different movie star effigies (a figure that tripled before the museum finally closed in 2005), it featured waxworks cast in the likenesses of Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Laurel and Hardy and Rudolph Valentino. Surely, he was asked, there was a story to be told about the museum?
Serling was intrigued and took the notion to Charles Beaumont, but Jerry Sohl was the uncredited writer here, basing the tale on merely a few lines of idea supplied by Beaumont. The Twilight Zone stalwart was now in the early stages of what we would now call Alzheimer’s disease (contemporary terminology was less delicate), and was clearly losing all of the faculties that had once driven him toward the peaks of American fantasy writing.
It was a tragic final act of a life well spent, and the decision to credit him for writing a story for which Sohl was wholly responsible was The Twilight Zone’s own way of thanking him for all his effort, on its behalf and that of science fiction in general.
As for the story itself . . . well, it was certainly worthy of Beaumont as his best. “Martin Lombard Senescu. A gentle man. The dedicated curator of ‘Murderer’s Row’ in Ferguson’s Wax Museum. He ponders the reasons why ordinary men are driven to commit mass murder. What Mr. Senescu does not know is that the ground work has already been laid for his own special kind of madness and torment . . . found only in the Twilight Zone.”
In truth, you’d find that groundwork being carried out a lot closer to home than the twilight zone. Every week in America, it seemed, we heard . . . as we still hear . . . of another dedicated employee being let go as part of some newly conceived cost-cutting episode; of another rapacious landlord evicting a long-time tenant because someone else had offered a much higher rent; of another business owner washing his hands of his company for the sake of a profitable buyout.
And so it was here, as the owner of Ferguson’s Wax Museum, Mr. Ferguson himself, announced that the building was to be sold; would be demolished to make way for a supermarket—not so much of a blot on the landscape in 1963 as they have become today, but still a poor substitute in cultural terms for the enterprise it was replacing.
Confident that new premises could be found, and the wax museum reborn, caretaker Martin Senescu offered to store the museum’s collection of wax figures in his own conveniently climate-controlled basement.
Unfortunately, his wife Emma was less happy, particularly once she saw the cost of the air-conditioning required to keep the wax men happy. So she did what any cost-conscious home owner would do. She went down to the basement, intending to switch off the air-conditioning, and that would be the end of her husband’s silly collection.
Or the end of her. The wax figure of Jack the Ripper waited to drop her in her tracks.
Discovering his wife’s body, and knowing the only possible, believable explanation for what happened was that he himself was the murderer, Martin buried the corpse in the basement, and got on with his life. Sadly, he didn’t do it very well. Soon, Martin’s brother Dave was breaking into the basement, convinced that there was something strange going on.
He never reemerged. Albert W. Hicks awaited him—a twentieth-century murderer who was not only the last man ever executed in the United States for the crime of piracy, he also claimed that the three killings with which he was also charged—the skipper and two crewmen who had shanghaied him onto their ship—were just the tip of his murderous iceberg. Out in the California Gold Fields, he had killed ninety-seven others. And why? “Because the devil took possession of me.”
Dave Senescu becomes his 101st victim.
Mr. Ferguson visited the basement to report that he was about to sell the wax figures to another museum. Henri Désiré Landru, the infamous Bluebeard of early twentieth-century Parisian mass murder, put a fatal choke hold on his ambitions. But when Martin confronted the wax figures, demanding to know why they were still slaughtering people, they returned a shock reply.
It was not they who were responsible for all the killings. It was he, and when the wax figures were finally granted a new home in a new museum, Marchands, their numbers had been swollen by the arrival of one more.
Martin Senescu, a mild-mannered museum caretaker who was transformed, overnight, into a brutal triple murderer.
“Passage on the Lady Anne” (First broadcast: May 9, 1963)
Charles Beaumont’s short story “Song for a Lady” was originally published in Bantam Books’ anthology Night Ride and Other Journeys in 1960. It is, as Serling’s introduction explains, a portrait of a honeymoon couple, Alan and Eileen Ransome, getting ready for a journey—with a difference. These newlyweds have been married for six years, and they weren’t taking this honeymoon to start their life, but rather to save it.
Or so Eileen Ransome believed. She didn’t quite know why she insisted they take a ship across the Atlantic Ocean, except that it would give them some time to sort out their problems, and she’d never taken such a voyage before—certainly never aboard a vessel like the Lady Anne.
“The tickets read ‘New York to Southampton’ but this old liner is going somewhere else. Its destination . . . the Twilight Zone.”
Almost from the moment they boarded the Lady Anne, the Ransomes could not help but feel that their fellow passengers—aged and infirm to the last—somehow resented their presence; would rather that the couple disembarked immediately, and left the others to enjoy what was almost certainly (and so it seems, without irony) the last such voyage they would ever take.
But it was some time before the couple discovered just how true those words might be; when, with their differences behind them and their lives together seemingly destined to begin afresh in a whole new glorious phase, the other passengers gathered to tell them the truth behind the journey.
Like the majority of its passengers and crew, the Lady Anne was at the end of its life span; like them, the ship would be little more than so much scrap by the time it returned to her home port. And so it would not be returning. The young, healthy, happy Ransomes were deposited in a lifeboat, from which they would soon be rescued by a nearby cutter, and the Lady Anne continues it voyage, vanishing into the fog, and into the legends of the sea.
“The Lady Anne never reached port,” Serling’s closing narration almost needlessly informs us. “The Ransomes searched the newspapers for news—but there wasn’t any news. The Lady Anne with all her crew and all her passengers vanished . . . without a trace. But the Ransomes knew what had happened. . . . The ship had sailed off to a better port . . . a place called . . . the Twilight Zone.”
“Living Doll” (First broadcast: November 1, 1963)
Jerry Sohl based “Living Doll” on an original story idea by Charles Beaumont, which itself was probably inspired by the talking dolls that were such a hit among the children of the era.
Talking dolls were first marketed in the late nineteenth century, to take advantage of the latest phonograph technology with the simplest of barely audible phrases. They swiftly developed from there, though, and by the late 1930s, Effanbee’s Talking Touselhead Lovums had a library of nursery rhymes that they could sing. It would be the late 1950s before Mattel came up with the pull-cord mechanism that did away with the machinery of old, and soon the shelves were alive with the chattering of Chatty Cathy, Sister Small Talk, the Talking Barbie and so forth.
Still a far cry from the interactive beasts of today, their vocabularies remained limited to a mere handful of phrases. But their owners adored them regardless, even if certain parents swiftly learned to rue the day they ever allowed Talky Tina into their household.
Erich Streator (wonderfully played by Telly Savalas) certainly did.
Manufactured between 1959 and the early 1960s, the Vogue Doll Company’s Brikette, the doll used in this episode, was not a talker. She was, however, a looker—twenty-two inches tall, a striking redhead with flirtatious green eyes and a swiveling waist that allowed her to adopt manifold positions. Suitably adapted for The Twilight Zone’s purposes, she was also a perfect candidate to haunt Erich Streator. (Talky Tina’s voice was provided by June Foray, best remembered as the voice of flying squirrel Rocky on The Bullwinkle Show, but also known for the tones of the real-life Chatty Cathy.)
She walks, she talks, she pushes people down the stairs. A modern-day Talky Tina doll.
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Trapped, as he saw it, in a childless marriage, he took his frustrations out on Christie, his wife Annabelle’s daughter by her first husband. What he didn’t expect, when he found the doll sitting around one day, was that the feeling might be mutual; or that even Talky Tina would hate him with a passion.
At first, he thought the doll’s invective was the result of a trick being played on him by his wife and stepdaughter, and when his attempts to destroy the foul little creature proved fruitless, he threw it away. The resultant argument with Annabelle, however, saw her pack up her and Christie’s belongings and prepare to leave him . . . a crisis that was averted only when he returned the doll to Christie, and with peace restored for at least the time being, the family retired to bed.
It was late when Erich awoke to hear the sound of a windup toy in the hallway. He got out of bed, went outside to investigate—and tripped over Talky Tina, plunging down the stairs to his death. The doll was still lying alongside him when Annabelle discovered his body, but any thought she may have entertained that it was all just a terrible tragic accident was swiftly brushed away by Talky Tina.
Staring out at her, the doll warned Annabelle that she had better be nice to Christie . . . or else.
“Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (First broadcast: January 24, 1964)
As Charles Beaumont’s health continued to decline, Rod Serling turned to other writers to bring his writing to the screen. John Tomerlin based this episode on Beaumont’s short story “The Beautiful People,” first published in the September 1952 issue of If; and while that original title would itself be adapted as a catchphrase for the hippie generation of a few years later in the decade, the story looked even further ahead, to the year 2000 and a society that had grown so vain that not one imperfection could be allowed to stain the face of its inhabitants.
Cosmetic surgery wasn’t merely the “in thing”; it was all but compulsory, but in a world where corporate branding had been allowed to establish all of society’s parameters, the compulsion was not merely to look beautiful. At age nineteen, every child was taken away for surgery and would be returned looking exactly like one or other of the models whom “society” had decided represented the apex of loveliness.
Eighteen-year-old Marilyn, on the other hand, didn’t want to be lovely; didn’t want to look like everybody else. She wanted to remain herself, beautiful or ugly or whatever she might be—an almost heinous act of teenage rebellion in a world that believed it had more or less quashed that emotion. But Marilyn would learn.
She reached the age of nineteen, and off she went for surgery. Surgery with which she was delighted. Proof . . . as if the last century’s worth of politics have not already taught us as much . . . that even the highest-flung ideals are sometimes even more skin-deep than beauty.
One remarkable aspect of this production was the sheer versatility of actress Suzy Parker, playing not one, not two, but seven different parts—a feat that prompted TV Guide to devote a two-page spread to the different costumes she would be wearing. “I am enchanted,” she told the magazine. “When I played in [an episode of] Burke’s Law, I didn’t get to see many of my costars. Here I see them all.” Suzy Parker was once referred to as “the first supermodel.”
“Queen of the Nile” (First broadcast: March 6, 1964)
For his final namecheck in The Twilight Zone, another Charles Beaumont idea was brought to fruition by the loyal Jerry Sohl. “Queen of the Nile” was the story of an actress, the sensationally lovely Pamela Morris (so convincingly played by Ann Blyth), and the newspaper columnist, Jordan Herrick, who astonished even himself by falling head over heels in love with her.
A natural cynic, seldom seduced by the airbrush-wielding publicity mavens that lay behind every celebrity, he intended writing her biography in his column, but the more he researched her background, the stranger the story became.
A career that Miss Morris claimed began in 1940 could actually be dated back twenty years earlier. The old woman whom she claimed to be her mother was, in fact, her daughter. And so on, until finally Herrick confronted her, and learned that she possesses the secret of eternal youth—an ancient Egyptian scarab dating back to the time of the pharaohs, possessed of the power to drain the life from whomsoever it bit, and transfer it to Morris. And her next victim just happened to be Jordan Herrick.
Show magazine rightfully praised the episode highly. “Serling’s forte is the tale with a twist, and his talent, the ability to get the very best writers on the air. ‘The Queen of the Nile’ illustrates both precepts nicely. In typical Sunset Boulevard fashion, the vamp lures a young writer into her lair. The lair, in this case, is furnished by early Cleopatra, and the reason for the décor is the heart of the script. Miss Blyth, it seems, has been around long enough to know a Cleopatra period piece from a movie prop, and the ensuing developments, if not horrendous, are twisty indeed.”