Danse Macabre (40 page)

"On his fortieth birthday," Naha says, "Serling made his first parachute jump since World War II." Serling's reason? "I did it," he said, "to prove that I wasn't old." But he looked old; a comparison of his early
Twilight Zone
publicity photos and those taken on the
Night Gallery
set before those mostly idiotic paintings shows a change which is nearly shocking. Serling's face had become lined, his neck wattled; it is the face of a man who has been partially dissolved in television's vitriol. In 7972 he received an interviewer in his study, which was lined with framed reviews of
Requiem, Patterns
, and other teleplays from the early days.

"Sometimes I come in here just to look," he said. "I haven't had reviews like that in years. Now I know why people keep scrapbooks—just to prove to themselves it really happened." The man who jumped from a plane on his fortieth birthday to prove to himself that he wasn't old refers to himself constantly as old in the Linda Brevelle interview some nine years later; she characterizes him as "vibrant and alive" during their meeting at La Taverna, Serling's favorite L.A. watering hole, but again and again those disquieting phrases crop up; at one point he says, "I'm not an old man yet, but I'm not a young man, either"; at another he says he
is
an old man. Why didn't he get out of the creative demo derby? At the end of
Requiem for a
Heavyweight
, Jack Palance says he must go back into the ring—even though the whole thing is fixed—because the ring is all he knows. It's as good an answer as any. Serling, a fierce workaholic who sometimes smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, suffered a crippling heart attack in 1975 and died following open-heart surgery. His legacy consisted of a few fine early plays and
The Twilight Zone
, a series which has become one of those peculiar TV legends, like
The Fugitive
and
Wanted: Dead or Alive
. What are we to make of this program which is so revered (by people who were mostly children when they originally viewed it) ? "I guess a third of the shows were pretty damned good," Serling told an interviewer.

"Another third would have been passable. Another third are dogs." The fact is that Serling himself wrote sixty-two of the first ninety-two
Twilight Zones
typing them, dictating them to a secretary, talking them into a dictaphone—and, of course, smoking nonstop. Fantasy fans will recognize the names of almost all the other writers, those who contributed the other thirty episodes: Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Earl Hamner, Jr., Robert Presnell, E. Jack Neuman, Montgomery Pittman, and Ray Bradbury.* The simple fact is that most of the bow-wows which escaped the kennel had Serling's name on them. They include "Mr. Denton on Doomsday," "The SixteenMillimeter Shrine," "Judgment Night," "The Big Tall Wish" (a shameless tear-jerker about a kid who helps a broken-down pug win his last match), and too many others for me to want to mention. Even the recollection most people seem to have of
The Twilight Zone
has always bothered me; it is the concluding "twists" that most people seem to remember, but the show's actual success seemed to be based on more solid concepts, concepts which form a vital link between the old pulp fiction predating the fifties (or those
Thriller
programs which used the pulps as the basis of their best stories) and the "new" literature of horror and fantasy. Week after week,
The
Twilight Zone
presented ordinary people in extraordinary situations, people who had somehow turned sideways and slipped through a crack in reality . . . and thus

*Bradbury adapted his own short story, "I Sing the Body Electric," for the program. It is, to the best of my knowledge, Bradbury's only screen credit following an odd but rather magnificent adaptation of Melville's
Moby
Dick
for the John Huston film.

into Serling's "zone." It is a powerful concept, and surely the clearest road into the land of fantasy for viewers and readers who do not ordinarily care to visit that land. But the concept was by no means original with Serling; Ray Bradbury had begun putting the ordinary and the horrible cheek-by-jowl in the forties, and when he began to move on into more arcane lands and to use the language in more and more novel ways, Jack Finney came upon the scene and began refining the same extraordinary-in-the-ordinary themes. In a benchmark collection of short stories called
The Third Level
, the literary equivalent of those startling Magritte paintings where railroad trains are roaring out of fireplaces or those Dali paintings where clocks are lying limply over the branches of trees, Finney actually defined the boundaries of Serling's
Twilight
Zone
. In the lead story, Finney tells of a man who finds a mythical third level to Grand Central Station (which only has two concourse levels, for those of you who aren't familiar with that neat old building). The third level is a kind of way station in time, giving egress on a happier, simpler time (those same late 1800's which so many put-upon
Twilight Zone
heroes escaped into, and essentially the same period Finney himself returns to in his celebrated novel,
Time and Again
). In many ways, Finney's third level satisfies all the definitions of Serling's
Twilight Zone
, and in many ways it was Finney's concept that made Serling's concept possible. One of Finney's great abilities as a writer has been his talent for allowing his stories to slip unobtrusively, almost casually, across the line and into another world . . . as when a character, picking through his change, happens upon a dime which bears not the likeness of FDR but of Woodrow Wilson, or when another Finney character begins on a journey to the idyllic planet Verna as a passenger aboard a rickety old charter bus that is eventually parked in a tumbledown country barn ("Of Missing Persons"). Finney's most important accomplishment, which the best episodes of
The Twilight Zone
echo (and which the best of the post-
Zone
writers of fantasy have also echoed), is that Daliesque ability to create the fantasy . . .
and then
not apologize for it or explain it
. It simply hangs there, fascinating and a little sickening, a mirage too real to dismiss: a brick floating over a refrigerator, a man eating a TV dinner full of eyeballs, kids on a toylittered floor playing with their pet dinosaur. If the fantasy seems real enough, Finney insisted, and Serling after him, we don't need any wires or mirrors. It was, in a large part, Finney and Serling who finally answered H. P. Lovecraft, who showed a new direction. For me and those of my generation, the answer was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities.

And yet Finney, who perhaps understood Serling's concept of "that middle ground between light and shadow" better than anyone else, was never represented on
The Twilight Zone
—not as a scriptwriter, not as a source. Serling later adapted
Assault on a Queen
(1966) , a work which can most humanely be characterized as unfortunate. It contains all the preachy, talking-heads stuff that brought so many of his
Twilight Zone
scripts low. It's one of the minor tragedies of the field that what might have been an inspired meeting of two like minds should have turned out so poorly. But if you feel disappointed with my analysis of The Twilight Zone (and some, I suspect, may feel that I have spat on an icon), I urge you to find a copy of Finney's
The Third Level
, which will show you what
The Twilight Zone
could have been. And still, the program left us with a number of powerful memories, and Serling's analysis that a third of the shows were pretty damn good may not have been far from the mark. Anyone who watched the show regularly can remember William Shatner, held in thrall by a penny fortune-telling machine in a cheesy restaurant located in a one-stoplight town ("Nick of Time"); Everett Sloane succumbing to gambling mania in "The Fever," and the hoarse, metallic cry of the coins ("Fraa-aaanklin!") calling him back to do battle with the diabolical slot-machine; the beautiful woman who is reviled for her ugliness in a world of piglike humanoids (Donna Douglas of
The Beverly Hillbillies
in "Eye of the Beholder"). And, of course, those two classics by Richard Matheson, "The Invaders" (starring a grimly brilliant Agnes Moorhead as a country woman fighting off tiny invaders from space, a story which foreshadows Matheson's later treatment of a similar subject in "Prey") and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which William Shatner plays a newly recovered mental patient who sees an evil-looking gremlin pulling at the housing of an airliner's motor.

The Twilight Zone
also showcased a wide range of performers (Ed Wynn, Kennan Wynn, Buster Keaton, Jack Klugman, Franchot Tone, Art Carney, Pippa Scott, Robert Redford, and Cloris Leachman among others), writers, and directors (Buzz Kulik, Stuart Rosenberg, and Ted Post, to name a few). It frequently featured startling and exciting music by the late Bernard Herrmann; the best special effects were done by William Tuttle, probably only second to Dick Smith (or the new makeup genius, Tom Savini) in wizardry.

It was a pretty good show, the way the most fondly remembered TV series are pretty good shows . . . but ultimately, no better. TV is the endless gobbler of talent, something new and poisonous under the sun, and if
Zone
is ultimately weaker than our fond memories of it would like to allow, the fault lies not with Serling but with TV itself—the hungry maw, the bottomless pit of shit. Serling wrote a total of eighty-four episodes, something like 2,200 pages of script according to the screenwriter's rule of thumb that one page of script equals one minute of video. This is a staggering pile of work, and it really isn't surprising that the all-too-occasional clunker like "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" got through. Rod Serling was only able to do so much in the name of Kimberly-Clark and Chesterfield Kings. Then television ate him up. 

6

And as far as TV is concerned, I guess it's time for everybody to get out of the pool. I don't have enough John Simon in me to really enjoy shooting TV's creative cripples as they crawl and squirm around in the great TV Cancellation Corral. I've even tried to treat
Kolchak: The
Night Stalker
with affection, because I certainly feel a degree of affection for it. Bad as it was, it wasn't any worse than some of the Saturday matinee creature-features that enlivened my life as a kid—
The Black Scorpion
or
The Beast of Hollow Mountain
, for instance. Individual TV programs have produced brilliant or near-brilliant excursions into the supernatural—
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, for instance, gave us adaptations of several Ray Bradbury stories (the best of them was probably "The Jar"), one terrifying William Hope Hodgson story, "The Thing in the Weeds," a nonsupernatural bone-freezer from the pen of John D. MacDonald ("The Morning After"), and fans of the bizarre will remember the episode where the cops ate the murder weapon—a leg of lamb . . . . that one based on a story by Roald Dahl.

There was "They're Coming," the original hour-long pilot for
The Twilight Zone
, and the short French film "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which appeared on American television for the first time as a
Twilight Zone
episode (this adaptation of the Bierce story cannot be seen during syndication runs of
The Twilight Zone
). Another Bierce story, "One of the Missing," ran on PBS in the winter of 1979. And speaking of PBS, there was also an interesting adaptation of
Dracula
done there. Originally telecast in 1977, it featured Louis Jourdan as the legendary Count. This videotaped drama is both moody and romantic; Jourdan gives a more effective performance than Frank Langella in the John Badham film, and the scenes of Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle are marvelous. The Jourdan version also comes closer to the heart of the vampire's sexuality, presenting to us in Lucy, the three weird sisters, and in Dracula himself creatures who possess a loveless sexuality—one which kills. It is more powerful than the hohum romance of the Badham version, in spite of Langella's energetic job in the title role. Jack Palance has also played Dracula on television (in another Matheson screenplay and another Dan Curtis production) and did quite well by the Count . . . although I prefer Jourdan's performance.

Other one-shot TV movies and specials run from the merely forgettable (NBC's ill-advised adaptation of Thomas Tryon's
Harvest Home
, for instance) to some really hideous pieces of work: Cornel Wilde in
Gargoyles
(Bernie Casey plays the head gargoyle as a kind of fivethousand-year-old Ayatollah Khomeini) and Michael Sarrazin is the mistitled—and misbegotten—
Frankenstein: The True Story
. The risk rate is so high that when my own novel
'Salem's Lot
was adapted for television after Warners had tried fruitlessly to get it off the ground as a theatrical film for three years, my feeling at its generally favorable reception was mostly relief. For awhile it seemed that NBC might turn it into a weekly series, and when that rather numbing prospect passed by the boards, I felt relief again.

Most television series have ranged from the ludicrous (
Land of the Giants
) to the utterly inane (
The Munsters, Struck by Lightning
). The anthology series of the last ten years have meant well, by and large, but have been emasculated by pressure groups both without and within; they have been sacrificed on the altar of television's apparent belief that both drama and melodrama are best appreciated while in a semidoze. There was
Journey to the Unknown
, a British import (from the Hammer studios). Some of the stories were engrossing, but ABC made it clear rather quickly that it had no real interest in frightening anyone, and the series died quickly.
Tales of the Unexpected
, produced by Quinn Martin (
The FBI, The Fugitive, The
Invaders, The New Breed
, and God knows how many others), was more interesting, concentrating on psychological horrors (in one episode, reminiscent of Anne Rivers Siddons's
The House Next Door
, a murderer sees his victim rise from the dead on his television set), but low ratings killed the program after a short run . . . a fate that might have been
The Twilight
Zone's
, had not the network stuck by it.