The Howling Man

Though best remembered for his short fiction and nostalgic essays in
Playboy
, teleplays for
The Twilight Zone
; and his screenplay adaptation,
The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao
, Charles Beaumont's creative talents have been evidenced in such diverse fields as science fiction, horror, whimsy, crime-suspense, and film criticism.

His prolific output also reflects his many interests and hobbies, including motor racing, music, hi-fidelity equipment, cartooning, and travel.

Tall, lean and bespectacled, Beaumont was always full of a thousand ideas and a thousand projects, and approached them all with what was fantastic energy. In a career which spanned a brief thirteen years, he'd written and sold ten books, seventyfour short stories, thirteen screenplays (nine of which were produced), two dozen articles and profiles, forty comic stories, fourteen columns, and over seventy teleplays.

Some of his books were inspired by his adventurous personal experiences.
Omnibus of Speed
and
When Engines Roar
(both co-edited with William F. Nolan) are about auto racing;
The Intruder
, a novel concerning Southern integration in the early sixties, was drawn from his extensive research on the subject.

Beaumont could never write fast enough to keep up with his ideas. A selfeducated man, learning for him was never confined to a classroom; life had much to teach.

He was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago on January 2, 1929, and grew up on that city's North side.

Of his early childhood, he wrote, "Football, baseball and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world, to the exclusion of Aesop, the brothers Grimm, Dr. Doolittle and even Bullfinch. The installation by my parents of 'library wallpaper' in the house ("A room-full of books for only 70~ a yard!") convinced me that literature was on the way out anyway, so I lived in illiterate contentment until laid low by spinal meningitis. This forced me to less strenous forms of entertainment. I discovered Oz; then Burroughs; then Poe--and the jig was up. Have been reading ever since, feeling no pain."

The only child of Charles H. and Letty Nutt, young Charlie Nutt was "fairly outgoing," yet very sensitive about his name. He once expressed to boyhood acquaintance Frank M. Robinson (co-author of
The Glass Inferno
and
The Gold Crew
) his hatred for the continuous name teasing he'd endured: ". . . the kids in school would call him 'Ches' or 'Wall' or would ask 'Is your father some kind of a nut?" He later changed his name to Charles McNutt, but when that didn't satisfy the situation, he changed it finally, legally, to Beaumont.

At an early age, he'd often "haunt" the editorial offices of the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company--publishers of
Amazing Stories
and other pulp magazines--and, from an outer office, would gaze at the group of employees typing busily. To young Charlie Nutt, these people were giants, editing manuscripts, and building a small empire, at that time, in Chicago. "I used to stand there and watch them slamming out 10,000 words a day," he once wrote. "They were Gods to me . . ." Ironically, his first professional sale, "The Devil, You Say?", would appear in the January, 1951 issue of
Amazing Stories
.

At age twelve, mid-way through his two year bout with meningitis, Beaumont's parents sent him to what they considered to be a better climate. In July, 1960, he told the
San Diego Union
, "I lived with five widowed aunts who ran a rooming house near a train depot in the state of Washington. Each night we had the ritual of gathering around the stove and there I'd hear stories about the strange death of each of their husbands."

During this period in Everett, he published his own fan magazine,
Utopia
, and soon became an avid fan of science fiction, writing letters to almost every magazine of this genre. By the time he was thirteen he had broken into print 25 times in almost as many magazines with these resumes and editorial criticisms.

His interests then shifted from typewriter to drawing board and his illustrations began to appear in a number of pulp magazines under the brush name E.T. Beaumont. His first cartoon, done in collaboration with his friend and fellow artist, Ronald Clyne, appeared in
Fantastic Adventures
in October, 1943.

In the early months of 1944, Charlie McNutt turned to drama and radio work, beginning as a featured actor on "Drama Workshop," a West coast show, and soon moved on to write and direct his own spot, "Hollywood Hi-Lights," a 15 minute show of movieland chatter and shop talk. His formal education was sparse, of which, he wrote, "[I] barely nosed through the elementary grades and gained a certain notoriety in high school as a wastrel, dreamer, could-do-the-work-if-he'd-only-tryer and general lunkhead." He left high school a year short of graduation for a four month period of Army service (Infantry) before he was medically discharged for a bad back. This led to his enrollment into the Bliss-Hayden Acting School in California under the GI Bill. After starring in a local version of the Hecht-MacArthur play,
Broadway
, he was signed by Universal Studio as an actor, and was scheduled for a co-starring role in a Universal-International film. But despite much "hullabaloo in film magazines and newspapers," this never materializied, and Beaumont reluctantly gave up a theatrical career for one in commercial art. Soon he was sketching cartoons for MGM's animation studio and working as a part-time illustrator for FPCI (Fantasy Publishing Company) in Los Angeles. Beaumont later wrote, "[I] worked hard, managed to crack most of the pulp magazines with illustrations, graduated to book jackets and slick magazine cartoons. But [was] forced, finally, to admit total lack of any real talent in the field."

When this failed, Beaumont turned to writing.

It was in the summer of 1946, that he met twenty-six-year-old Ray Bradbury (author of numerous screenplays, teleplays, essays, poems, and works of fiction, including
Farenheit 451
and
The Martian Chronicles
) in Fowler Brothers Book Store in downtown Los Angeles, and began talking about his comic collection. Remembers Bradbury: "He said he had a lot of
Steve Canyon
, and I told him I had a lot of
Prince Valiants
and some Hannes Bok photographs; so we decided to get together.

"Out of that beginning, of our mutual interest in comic strips, a friendship blossomed."

Bradbury began to read Beaumont's short fiction and quickly became a major influence in Beaumont's life--a mentor. "When I read the first one, I said: 'Yes. Very definitely. You are a writer," recalls Bradbury. "It showed immediately. It's not like so many people who come to you with stories and you say, 'Well, they're okay,' You know, if they keep working they'll make it. Chuck's talent was obvious from that very first story."

For reasons of economic survival, Beaumont moved to Mobile, Alabama in 1948, where his father had obtained employment for him as a clerk for the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad. It was there that he met Helen Broun, and wrote in a notebook: "She's incredible. Intelligent
and
beautiful. This is the girl I'm going to marry!" A year later, they were married and moved to California. Their son, Christopher, was born in December of 1950; they would later parent three more children: Catherine, Elizabeth, and Gregory.

As Beaumont's early writing brought him little more than rejection slips, he worked at a number of jobs, including that of a piano player ("Studied piano for six years, decided [I] couldn't squeak by owing to immensely talented right hand and nowhere left") and, in 1949, a tracing clerk for California Motor Express, where he met John Tomerlin. When the two discovered they shared a passion for words (as well as a skill for "geting out of work"), they quickly cultivated what was to become a lifelong friendship.

In mid-1951, another special friendship was made when Beaumont met a young, struggling writer by the name of Richard Matheson (who, in addition to many screenplays, teleplays and short stories, is known for works such as
I Am Legend
and
The Shrinking Man
). As their families became very close, there soon developed between Beaumont and Matheson a constant interchange of ideas, out of which a number of varied and imaginative stories would emerge. Says writer Dennis Etchison (
Darkside
and
Cutting Edge
), who'd attended Beaumont's UCLA writing class in 1963, "It's pretty difficult to consider Beaumont and Matheson separately because as short story writers they came out at the same time; they worked together, they both came out of an influence from Bradbury, and they both had such a close friendship. I think there are great similarities, tradeoffs, and variations between their stories. They were just two of a kind that came up at one time."

As their careers grew, Beaumont and Matheson acted as "spurs" to one another. "He and I, in a very nice way, of course, were very competitive," says Matheson. "At first, I was a little ahead of him in sales. I'd call him on the phone and say, 'I just sold a collection of short stories to Bantam,' and he'd say, 'Thanks a lot, thanks a lot,' and hang up. [laughs] He wasn't serious about it though. But he caught up to me. My first collection of stories [
Born of Man and Woman
, 1954] spurred him on to his first collection [
The Hunger and Other Stories
, 1957]. Then we both did a so-called 'straight' novel just about the same time [Beaumont's
The Intruder
, 1959 and Matheson's
The Beardless Warriors
, 1960]."

But the success which was to come their way, was still in the future. For now, Beaumont was working hard to break through. Says Ray Bradbury, "I was at Universal in 1952 on my very first screen project,
It Came From Outer Space
. And Chuck, coincidentally, was working there in the music department, handling a multilith machine, copying the musical scores. I would see him and have lunch with him there at the studio and encourage him, Those were hard years for him; he didn't want to be in the music department doing all this 'stupid' work. He wanted to
write
."

During this period, Beaumont was writing feverishly, but meeting with little success. His agent at the time, Forrest J. Ackerman, recalls: "I made approximately 78 submissions for him, but nothing happened for quite sometime."

When fired from Universal in June of 1953, Beaumont took the plunge into fulltime writing.

Late 1953 saw the Beaumonts in disastrous financial shape; Chuck's typewriter was in hock and the gas had been shut off in their apartment. Writer William F. Nolan (co-author of
Logan's Run
and biographer of Dashiell Hammett) remembers Beaumont "breaking the seal and turning it back on; Chris required heat, and damn the gas company! Chris got what he needed."

Nolan had met Beaumont, briefly, in 1952 at Universal, when introduced by Ray Bradbury. "I recall Chuck's sad face and ink-stained hands. The first Beaumont story had already appeared (in
Amazing Stories
) and within a few more months, when I saw Chuck again, half a dozen others had been sold. Forry Ackerman got us together early in 1953, and our friendship was immediate and lasting. I found, in Chuck, a warmth, a vitality, an honesty and depth of character which few possess. And, most necessary, a wild, wacky, irreverant sense of humor."

In February, 1954, Beaumont and Nolan began writing comics for Whitman Publication. Together they turned out ten stories, after which Beaumont sold another thirty to become employed at Whitman as co-editor, where he helped to "guide the destinies of such influential literary figures as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Andy Panda."

Finally, in September of that year, Beaumont's first major sale appeared in
Playboy
. "Black Country," a 10,000-word novella about a terminally ill jazzman, is considered by Ray Russell (
Playboy
editor during the 1950s, and author of many works of fiction, including
Incubus
and
Sardonicus
), the best story
Playboy
ever bought. "Beaumont manages to set up a rhythm and sustain a pitch, a concert pitch--to use a musical term--and sustain that from the very beginning to the very end," says Russell. "It almost never relaxes. You're on a beat throughout the entire story until
whhhh
, it's over. There are very few stories that have that, by Beaumont or anybody else."

Playboy
soon placed Beaumont on a five-hundred-dollar monthly retainer for first refusal right to his manuscripts, and later listed him as a contributing editor.

Beaumont had reached the turning point in his career.

His stories began to appear in the most prestigious magazines in the nation, including
Esquire
,
Collier's
and
The Saturday Evening Post
. 1954 also marked the beginning of his career in television when, in April, his teleplay "Masquerade" aired on
Four Star Playhouse
. In the years to follow, he would write a number of scripts, many in collaboration with Richard Matheson. "For a year or two, we wrote together on all sorts of projects: we did a couple of
Have Gun, Will Travels
, and old Western series,
Buckskin
, and there was
Philip Marlowe
, and the
D.A.'s Man
. Real crap, most of it," says Matheson, laughingly. "But it was fun, because we had never done this before . . . But eventually we decided that we really didn't need to collaborate, and chose to go our own ways."

Beaumont's entry into television, coupled with his success at
Playboy
, soon enabled him to participate in what was to become a new and exciting hobby--auto racing. In February, 1955, Beaumont and Nolan attended their first sports car race in Palm Springs (an event in which actor James Dean was driving, and with whom Beaumont would later share a maintainance pit). The sport instantly became one of the great fascinations of their lives--a fascination which quickly carried over to John Tomerlin as well. "Chuck was marvelous at talking people into doing things they had not thirty seconds before ever dreamed they wanted to do, and suddenly discovered that it was their lifelong ambition," says Tomerlin. "And the next thing you knew, you'd be off and on your way doing it!"