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Johnson . . .

George Clayton Johnson was a virtual novice when he first submitted his stories to The Twilight Zone. But, as a member of the Southern California School of Writers, he had some influential friends—among them, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury. It was through their conversation that Johnson first came to Rod Serling’s attention, and he recalled their first-ever working experience, via the story “The Four of Us Are Dying,” for an August 1981 interview for The Twilight Zone Magazine.

It was a tale that began with the search for an agent. “I found several who would let me use their names, though few cared to sign a contract with me. One of these men, Jay Richards—at the time head of the television department of the Famous Artists Agency . . . agreed to read something. I showed [him] ‘All of Us Are Dying.’ After reading it, he crossed out the title with a ballpoint pen and wrote in ‘Rubber Face!’ Then he sent it to Rod Serling, who had a new series that season called The Twilight Zone.”

Serling was interested, and while he offered Johnson no more than a credit for the original three-page idea (Serling himself would pen the teleplay), Johnson was in doubt as to the prestige the acceptance conferred on him, a hitherto unknown who now had his name up in lights.

Johnson’s original story would remain unpublished until it finally appeared in the May 1982 issue of The Twilight Zone Magazine, alongside Serling’s teleplay. They are, indeed, two very different creatures, but the story at its heart remains the same, and we are treated, too, to an almost line-for-line examination of how Serling’s own storytelling mind worked; how, many times he was not buying a story per se, but an idea . . . a kernel of creativity around which he would build his own fantasy.

“The Four of Us Are Dying” (First broadcast: January 1, 1960)

Serling’s opening words, as always, set the scene. Thirty-six-year-old Arch Hammer is a jack of all trades, and none of them especially salubrious. He’s been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie and a part-time bartender. But he also has a remarkable talent. “He can make his face change. He can twitch a muscle, move a jaw, concentrate on the cast of his eyes, and he can change his face. He can change it into anything he wants.”

Anyone with such a talent . . . the ability to flawlessly imitate anyone . . . could scarcely avoid a degree of temptation, and Arch Hammer, as the introduction revealed, is scarcely the kind of man to try.

Checking into a cheap motel room, we join him as he sits plowing through the obituary columns in the paper. His scheme, we quickly see, is simple. He finds a dead person, and then he finds a way to profit from impersonating him.

With one face, he seduces the girlfriend of the recently deceased musician, Johnny Foster. With another, he appears as the vengeful spirit of the recently deceased gangster Virgil Sterig, and makes off with a heap of cash. Then, chased by the braver of the dead man’s associates, he pops on another face, the late Andy Marshak, and convinces them that they’re chasing the wrong guy.

It is all so easy.

But what if he should be wearing a face that somebody else wants to do away with? What if Marshak, too, had murderous enemies? Then he’s in trouble. Or, as Serling’s concluding voice-over explains, he was Hammer, he was Foster, he was Sterig, he was Marshak, “and all four of them are dying.”

And for obvious reasons, with four very different faces required by the script, four actors of similar build and style were selected to play Arch Hammer . . . Harry Townes, Phillip Pine, Ross Martin and Don Gordon.

“Execution” (First broadcast: April 1, 1960)

The first of the ten new episodes commissioned to complete the first season, “Execution” was also one of the darkest. It opens with Serling himself sounding as though he found the proceedings distasteful, welcoming us to a “commonplace, if somewhat grim, unsocial event known as a necktie party. The guest of dishonor—a cowboy named Joe Caswell, just a moment away from a rope, a short dance several feet off the ground, and then . . . the dark eternity of all evil men.”

Developed from another short story proposal by George Clayton Johnson, “Execution” opened in the past but quickly leaped forward eighty years, where the murderer Caswell awoke to find himself in present-day New York City—the unwitting subject of a scientist’s experiments in time travel.

Now, of course, the scientist was having second thoughts, realizing that the man he had brought into the modern age was a Victorian killer who should promptly be sent back. Caswell, however, had other thoughts, resisting the scientist’s idea so strenuously that he murdered the man and then ran for it.

Of course, he had no idea what he would discover outside the professor’s quiet laboratory, a maze of streets, a babel of sound, roads roaring with steel and the stench of exhaust. Lights that flash, inexplicable machines. Panic-stricken, confused and scared, Caswell destroyed a jukebox (playing Eric Cook’s “Turkish Delight”), executed a television and took out a motorist before returning to the laboratory—where he was interrupted by a modern-day burglar, as brutal and murderous as Castle himself.

And so the Victorian, who seemed to have cheated the rope, met his end . . . strangled with a curtain cord. But the burglar would not escape. Thinking he had discovered how to operate the wall safe, he instead activated the time machine, and was whirled back to the precise time and place that Caswell left. To a skeletal scaffold, with a rope around his neck.

“This is November . . . 1880,” Serling intoned. “The aftermath of a necktie party. The victim’s name, Paul Johnson, a minor-league criminal and the taker of another human life. No comment on his death save this . . . justice can span years; retribution is not subject to a calendar. Tonight’s case in point . . . in the Twilight Zone.”

Interviewed by Filmfax magazine, actor Russell Johnson recalled,

I did two terrific episodes of [The] Twilight Zone, [and] as far as my TV favorites are concerned . . . it’s [The] Twilight Zone. [Rod Serling] would come down on the set each day just to see how things were going and to chat. . . . Rod would come down for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning and then go back to his office and pound at the typewriter. Then, he’d show up again at some point in the afternoon after they’d seen the daily rushes. I had no long contact with him, but he was certainly an agreeable, dedicated, and driven man.

“A Penny for Your Thoughts” (First broadcast: February 3, 1961)

George Clayton Johnson authored, and future Bewitched star Dick York appeared in, a tale that remains one of The Twilight Zone’s most mystifying. Having introduced us to the story’s protagonist, Hector B. Poole, Serling’s opening monologue then makes a most peculiar observation.

“Flip a coin and keep flipping it. What are the odds? Half the time it will come up heads, half the time tails. But in one freakish chance in a million, it’ll land on its edge. . . .”

That one in a million occurs when Poole purchases a newspaper on his way into work and flips a coin into the cashbox. It does indeed land on its edge, and suddenly Poole realizes that he can overhear what people are thinking. Their every thought is as clear as day—and though most of them are as mundane as you’d expect, a few are somewhat more interesting. The fact that one of his coworkers, Helen Turner, has a soft spot for him, for example. And some are positively actionable—Mr. Smithers over there, sitting and planning to rob the very bank they work in.

Of course, Poole conveys his information to the bank president, and the boss is taking no chances. Smithers is interviewed, his briefcase is searched. The man has nothing to hide. It is Poole who is dismissed, for spreading false information—and Poole who quickly learns a valuable lesson, that there is a vast and (in those days, at least) unimpeachable difference between dreaming of committing a crime, which is how Mr. Smithers whiled away his idle moments, and actually intending to do so.

Miss Turner to the rescue. With her on his side, Poole is able to make his way back into the president’s good graces, and he is reinstated in his job. And, as he walks home and buys an evening paper (yes, Virginia . . . once upon a pre-Internet time, there was such a thing, and very popular they were as well), he tosses a coin into the box and knocks his first one over. The voices in his head cease immediately.

It’s a mystifying story, and on so many levels. We could wonder why a coin that lands on its edge should grant its previous owner such a remarkable power? But even more puzzling; how, through the course of an entire business day, did Poole’s original coin remain standing on edge, when it was so easily dislodged by his second payment? Even Serling’s closing monologue acknowledges that much. “One time in a million, a coin will land on its edge, but all it takes to knock it over is a vagrant breeze, a vibration or a slight blow.”

Presumably, it was not a very well-frequented newsstand. Which might well be why there was no mention whatsoever of tossing coins in Johnson’s original script—Mr. Poole’s clairvoyance was originally to be the result of an auto accident.

Dick York, who made such a great impression as Mr. Poole and in that earlier trip to The Twilight Zone “The Purple Testament” remained a strong supporter of the show, even after it left the screens. In the 1968 episode of Bewitched, “Samantha Goes South for a Spell” (in which a rival witch dispatches his spouse back to nineteenth-century New Orleans), he even declares, with frustrated resignation, “Oh, this is just great. I come home from work and find out my wife is in The Twilight Zone.”

And, of course, she was. Elizabeth Montgomery would also have an episode under her belt, the season three opener “Two,” and so would her on-screen mother, Agnes Moorehead. . . .

“A Game of Pool” (First broadcast: October 13, 1961)

Inspired in part by Walter Tevis’s novel The Hustler, George Clayton Johnson tells the story of pool shark Jesse Cardiff—the best, it is said, on Randolph Street. But being the best on Randolph Street, it seems, is not enough for Jesse. He wants to be the best there ever was, but is thwarted in his desires by the fact that the true owner of that tag, James Howard “Fats” Brown, is dead.

Or at least he is until Jesse swears that he would give absolutely anything for one chance to play against the legend. Inevitably Fatso’s ghost cannot resist the challenge. He appears and proposes a wager. One game, first to three hundred points. If Jesse wins, he claims Fatso’s title. If Fatso wins, he claims Jesse’s life.

And that is what happens. Although Johnson’s original script called for Fatso’s wager to be merely a bluff, Serling had other thoughts. Jesse is a great pool player. But even in the afterlife, Fatso is better. However, there is a silver lining to what should otherwise be a very black cloud indeed. Years later, Fatso is forgotten. Jesse is now the legend, and one day another pool shark comes along who wants to claim his status for himself. And Jesse cannot resist the challenge.

Despite the brevity of its premise, “A Game of Pool” became a firm favorite amid the third season’s offerings, and was among those tales that CBS chose to revisit (despite its author’s objections) during The Twilight Zone’s late 1980s resurrection.

Jonathan Winters and Jack Klugman enjoy “A Game of Pool” in season 3.

CBS/Photofest

“Nothing in the Dark” (First broadcast: January 5, 1962)

Originally scheduled for broadcast at the end of season two, George Clayton Johnson’s penultimate contribution to The Twilight Zone was instead held over to season three, to become the first story broadcast in 1962. A gritty tale of urban violence, it tells of the last remaining resident of an otherwise abandoned tenement building, an old woman who becomes the only witness to the shooting of a police officer (a young Robert Redford), right outside her door.

She pulls him inside, tending his wounds and feeding him tea, but she has no telephone with which to call for help, and she can’t step outside either. For she knows that Mr. Death waits there, desperate to get his hands on her, but she has spent so many years fighting him off, in whatever guise he chooses to present himself, that she has no intention of allowing him victory today.

But he’s a trickster, and a master of disguise. He could be anybody. Yes, even a seriously wounded police officer. You can guess where this is going, can’t you? And the only consolation for the old lady is that Death’s embrace is warm, gentle, even consoling. She has no further need to run.

“Kick the Can” (First broadcast: February 9, 1962)

Having been warned off portraying a world in which the aged are exterminated back when The Twilight Zone was still in the planning stages, Rod Serling had no hesitation in commissioning a George Clayton Johnson script that looked at what society deemed an appropriate alternative—dumping the poor old beggars off in rest homes, to fade themselves to death on their own. And the lengths to which that same society might go to ensure that they did exactly that.

Charles Whitley has had just about all he can take of the Sunnyvale Rest Home, with its comfortable chairs and mugs of hot cocoa, and its solicitous staff saying, “There, there” a lot. His body may be old, but he feels no different from how he did as a youth—and so he decides to behave like one, recalling all the games that he used to play, and playing them. Much, of course, to the disquiet of many of the other residents.

The word goes around that the poor old fellow has finally given in to senility, but Whitley will not be crushed. In fact, he continues working to convince the others that they, too, can recapture the excitement of childhood, by taking them outside for a game of kick the can.

Of course, one spoilsport hangs behind to alert the home’s manager as to what is occurring, and he races outside to call a halt to the foolishness. He arrives just in time to see a crowd of children, led by a youngster who looks exactly like Charles Whitley must have, tearing off into the nearby forest.

Always a very highly rated story, “Kick the Can” was one of three original episodes (along with “It’s a Good Life” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) to be selected for broadcast in a two-hour special on July 27, 1983, promoting the upcoming Twilight Zone: The Movie. Carol Serling, Rod’s widow, provided commentary.