Twilight Zone Companion (11 page)

Charles Beaumont was second only to Serling in production of Twilight Zone scripts and was responsible for some of the series most memorable episodes, including Long Live Walter Jameson and The Howling Man. In his brief, fourteen-year career, he wrote and sold ten books, seventy-three short stories, twenty-two articles and profiles, fourteen columns, thirteen screenplays and sixty-eight teleplays. Five men would not be writers today if not for Beaumont and at least that many consider him the best friend they ever hadand the single most powerful influence on their lives.

He was tremendously magnetic, says Richard Matheson. I am a quiet personalthough there is an antic spirit underneath the surface which some people see, most normally my family. Chuck was a meteoric type of person. His sense of humor was devastating. He was a very funny, very witty person. He had interests in so many things and pursued them all fully. So there was, I suppose, some aspect in which I enjoyed all these things and was exposed to them through him; lived them vicariously through him.

Who was this remarkable man?

Charles Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt on January 2, 1929, on Chicagos North Side. In 1954, he wrote of his childhood, 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 roomfull of books for only seventy cents 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 strenuous forms of entertainment. I discovered Oz; then Burroughs; then Poeand the jig was up.

The light tone of this statement belies the truth of Beaumonts childhood, however. In reality, it was almost certainly one of oppressive peculiarity and morbidity (Beaumont once described it as being one big Charles Addams cartoon). On one occasion, Beaumont confided to William F. Nolan that his classic short story, Miss Gentillbellein which a deranged woman dresses her eight-year-old boy as a little girl and sadistically murders all his petswas more than mere fancy: his mother had dressed him as a little girl and, at least once, had killed one of his pets as a punishment.

His mother was totally crazy, Beaumonts son, Chris, remembers. I only met her once, when she came out to California to visit. I was five or six, so I dont remember much, but from what little I remember and from what my father told me about her, I know she was very unstable. She didnt have a very firm foundation in reality and was not terribly responsible as a mother.

Because of his mothers instability, Beaumont was put in the care of his aunts. In 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 a ritual of gathering around the stove and there Id hear stories about the strange death of each of their husbands.

This is not to say that Beaumonts childhood was all death and deprivation. In the rooming house, he had one relative, either a grandmother or an aunt (memories differ on this point) of whom he was very fond and from whom he inherited his diabolical sense of humor, as he related in an unpublished story:

Her sense of humor ran slightly to the macabre … [Once] I accidentally broke off the blade of the bread knife. We managed to make it stand up on her chest so that the knife appeared to be imbedded almost to the hilt in her. Then I was commanded to rip her clothes a bit and empty a whole bottle of ketchup over her and the linoleum. Then she lay down and I ran screaming, Somebody come quick! Somebody come quick! It was gratifying that Aunt Dora fainted away completely, though the others saw through the joke at once.

In his teens, Beaumont was an avid fan of science fiction, publishing his own fanzine, Utopia, and writing endless letters to pulp magazines. Predictably, school did little to capture his interest or his energies. [I] barely nosed through the elementary grades and gained a certain notoriety in high school as a wastrel, dreamer, could-do-the-work-if-hed-only-tryer and general lunkhead. Accordingly, he dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and joined the Infantry. I served valorously for three months, he later wrote, before they eased me out. It should be noted that his discharge was medicalback troublerather than dishonorable.

After a short-lived stage career in California, Beaumont tried his hand at commercial illustration. Although only a mediocre artist, he met with some degree of success, selling illustrations to a number of pulp magazines and the first edition of Out of the Unknown, a collection of short stories by husband-and-wife team A. E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull. As Charles Leroy Nutt was not a terribly suitable name for an artist (and even less so for a writerHey, you seen that Nutts story in Amazing?), he changed it to Charles AfcNutt, then later, when collaborating with another artist, to E. T. Beaumont (possibly from Beaumont, Texas, he later said), and finally, legally, to Charles Beaumont.

At the age of nineteen, while working as a railroad clerk in Mobile, Alabama, Beaumont met Helen Broun, an intelligent, sensitive, and attractive twenty-year-old. A year later, they were married and moved to California. Little more than a year after that, Christopher was born, the first of four children. Beaumont now had a family to support. Toward that end, he worked as a piano player (with an immensely talented right hand and a nowhere left), an animator at MGM, a disc jockey, an usher, a dishwasher, an editor at a comic book company (helping to guide the destinies of such influential literary figures as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Andy Panda), and a mimeograph operator.

During this entire time, Beaumont was writing feverishly, but meeting with little success. His agent at the time, Forrest J. Ackerman (later editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine), was unable to sell any of his first seventy-two short stories. Says Ackerman, I consider it more a criticism of short-sighted editors that they passed by most of those seventy-two stories, because eventually I think he sold about every word he ever wrote. But in the beginning I couldnt give them away.

Finally, in 1950, Beaumont sold his first short story, The Devil, You Say? (appearing in the January, 1951, issue of Amazing Stories, and adapted in 1962 into the Twilight Zone episode Printers Devil.)

In September, 1954, Beaumonts short story, Black Country, appeared in Playboy. A tour de force about a terminally ill jazz musician, it was a turning point in his career. His stories began to appear regularly in the most widely read and best-paying magazines in the nation. Playboy put him on a five-hundred-dollar monthly retainer for first refusal rights to his manuscripts, and listed him as a contributing editor. In April, 1958, G. P. Putnams Sons published his first collection, The Hunger and Other Stories, to good reviews. Beaumont had arrived.

By 1958, Beaumont had also managed to gain a considerable foothold in film and television. Over the previous four years, he had sold a number of scripts to such shows as Suspense, Have Gun Will Travel, Wanted, Dead or Alive, and One Step Beyond, among others, and had had one film script produced, The Queen of Outer Space, an atrocious movie about which he said, I wrote the thing as a big spoof. Only trouble was the director and some of the cast didnt realize it.

Rod Serling first met Beaumont at a party around this time. This was right after Velvet Alley, he recalled in 1963, and Chuck Beaumont, whom I didnt even know, in a very tasteful waynothing offensive in the way he did ithe said, Quite honestly, I must tell you to your face, its the worst piece of writing Ive ever seen. I didnt rebel at this at all, but to this day I lay claim that Chuck is absolutely wrong … Anyway, it put Chuck and me on a very good basis, because I feel now not only the right but the obligation to speak to Chuck honestly.

Buck Houghton found Beaumont thoroughly impressive, too. He was very sure of himself, he says. He talked a story as though he had it licked and maybe he did in his mind, maybe he didnt at that pointI dont know. But Ill tell you this: if there hadnt been a writing profession hed have been busy at something else. He was really a goer and a doer and a shaker and a mover.

PERCHANCE TO DREAM (11/27/59)

Written by Charles Beaumont

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Robert Florey

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: Van Cleave

Cast:

Edward Hall: Richard Conte Dr. Rathmann: John Larch Maya/Miss Thomas: Suzanne Lloyd Girlie Barker: Eddie Marr Rifle Range Barker: Russell Trent Stranger: Ted Stanhope

Twelve o’clock noon. An ordinary scene, an ordinary city. Lunchtime for thousands of ordinary people. To most of them, this hour will be a rest, a pleasant break in the days routine. To most, but not all. To Edward Hall, time is an enemy, and the hour to come is a matter of life and death.

Hall, a man with a cardiac condition, has sought out the aid of Dr. Rathmann, a psychiatrist. He explains that hes been dreaming in chapters, as if in a movie serial. In his dream Maya, a carnival dancer, lures him into a funhouse and onto a roller coaster with the express intention of scaring him to death. If he goes to sleep, he knows hell return to the dream and will have a fatal heart attack. On the other hand, if he stays awake much longer, the strain will be too much for his heart. Realizing that Rathmann cant help him, he starts to go, but stops when he realizes that the doctors receptionist is a dead ringer for the girl in his dream. Terrified, he runs back into Rathmanns office and jumps out the window to his death. The doctor calls his receptionist into his officewhere Hall lies on the couch, his eyes closed. Rathmann tells the receptionist that Hall came in, lay down, immediately fell asleepand then a few moments later, let out a scream and died.

They say a dream takes only a second or so, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime. He can suffer and die, and whos to say which is the greater reality: the one we know or the one in dreams, between heaven, the sky, the earth … in the Twilight Zone.

With Perchance to Dream, Beaumont entered The Twilight Zone at full throttle. The show is adapted from his short story of the same name, which originally appeared in the November, 1958, issue of Playboy, and can be found in two of his collections (both, unfortunately, out of print): Night Ride and Other Journeys (Bantam, 1960), and The Magic Man (Fawcett, 1965).

Directed by Robert Florey (director of the movie The Beast With Five Fingers and the first Marx Brothers film, The Cocoanuts, co-director of Monsieur Verdoux, and co-scripter of Frankenstein) and starring Richard Conte (The Godfather, Call Northside 777), the episode hurls forward with incredible velocity. The feeling of inevitable and inexorable momentum is built layer by layer, beginning with Beaumonts tightly-conceived script, intensified by Floreys taut direction and Contes intense performance, framed by George Clemenss claustrophobic and disorienting camera work, and capped off by Van Cleaves shrill, twitchy, deliberate and disturbing score. Contes appearance in Perchance to Dream represents a perfect job of casting. His breathless, staccato delivery was one ideally suited to the role, giving the character an agitated, urgent quality that lends credence to the story.

In Perchance to Dream, the dominant image is that of the seductive and frightening nightmare world of the amusement park, an image that was more than an expedient construct to its creator. For Charles Beaumont, both dreams and amusement parks had potent personal meaning. He shared with the lead character of Perchance the trait of dreaming in chapters. He was always frightened of dreams, William F. Nolan observes. He always felt that dreams and reality impinged on each other, and this is just another version of his own fear. He was also terrified of roller coasters. He would ride a roller coaster but he would be terrified while he was doing it and he would always say afterwards that it was the last time hed ever ride one.

Nolan recalls an incident that occurred several years prior to the writing of Perchance to Dream that well illustrates the mixture of attraction and horror that amusement parks held for Beaumont.

We went down to Pacific Ocean Park to go through the funhouse, he explains. We both loved amusement parks as kids so we thought, look, we were in our twenties, we havent gone through a fun house for years, lets just go through the old fun house. Well, the guy at the fun house gate was a young punk kid wearing a leather jacket and cleaning his fingernails with a switchblade knife, and he kind of gave us a look.

About ten minutes later, we were in the middle of the fun house, groping our way along one of these corridors, and Chuck said, T think that kids in here with us. I said, What are you talking about? What kid, Chuck? The kid with the knife, he said, I just think hes in here with us. Ive got a feeling that that leather-jacketed son-of-a-bitch with the knife is in here with us. I said, Oh, come on, Chuck. Hes out there. Hes got to take the tickets. He said, Who knows the fun house better than that kid? Hes been here by day and by night, hes been here when the lights were on. He could kill us so quick in the dark. How many bodies have been washed under the pier?We were on the pier and we could hear the water lappingHow many trapdoors have opened and how many people have gone in one end of this fun house and never come out the other? I said, I guess that kid could be in here all right. Did you see the look he gave me? He didnt like me, he said. Hed put me away like thatV And he had me convinced that that kid was in there with the knife, and by the time he had finished talking we were running through the fun house to try to get out before the kid could get us. And I said, Here, this way, Chuck, this way! And hed say, Over here! Over here! And when we got out, we ran out and the kid was still there at the ticket stand and he was still picking his nails. And I looked at him, and Chuck looked at me and he said, Well, I could be wrong.

THE SIXTEEN-MILLIMETER SHRINE (10/23/59)