From Gordon F. Sander’s 1992 book "Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man”
10 P.M. September 1965.
1490 Monaco Drive, Los Angeles.
FADE IN on a MEDIUM SHOT - the Script for this psychodrama would say of ROD SERLING, TV writer-host, sitting in the poolside office of his handsome Pacific Palisades estate, purchased in 1958 from former movie star Virginia Bruce, desultorily dictating into his trusty whirring Dictaphone machine. Serling his dark features recognizable to millions of Americans from his long-running and recently canceled CBS television series The Twilight Zone, and from frequent appearances on lesser vehicles like Match Game and Budweiser commercials is half-seated, half-slouching in his favorite working chair, a tall Naugahyde model, with one foot up against the edge of his cluttered wraparound desk. In his right hand is a microphone, which he clicks on and off, and in the left, a sputtering Viceroy, his sixtieth cigarette of the day. Serling is dressed in his usual Hollywood casual-macho style: polo shirt, chino pants, and short leather boots, with lifts to add to his five-foot-four-and-a-half-inch height and, of course, a tan. On his right wrist is his cherished, triangle-shaped Ventura watch, which had been all the rage in 1957 when Serling bought it after winning his second Emmy. On the left is a silver bracelet with the stenciled parachute-and-wings insignia of his old army unit, the 11th Airborne Division.
At the moment, Serling, now in the second year of his presidency of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, is practicing the short speech he is to make the following night when he co-hosts the 1965 Emmy Awards telecast with comedian Danny Kave. His words are spoken in quick, smoke-entangled bursts, with Kapunervation spelled out for the benefit of his longtime secretary and confidante Marjorie Langsford. Serling, who is about to depart the NATAS after a stormy and depressing tenure as its titular head, has decided to use the occasion to fire off a brief parting statement on the parlous state of the television medium.
Serling pauses, inhales deeply from his Viceroy, and sadly gazes around the cozy, poolside lanai, which he had specially built for himself after purchasing the rambling two-acre estate upon moving to California from Connecticut in 1957, and which he now uses as office, den, occasional pied-à-terre.
On his giant desk, as we share his POINT OF VIEW, are the assorted accoutrements of the busy modern scenarist, and Serling is nothing, if not busy. In addition to Dictaphone and Dictatapes, there is a call directory telephone with buttons for his wife, Carol, his secretary, Langsford, and his agent at Ashley-Steiner, Alden Schwimmer; a portable twelve-inch Sony television set (which, lately, Serling has come to abhor); and a dozen or so thumb-eared scripts from television and film projects either in development or in production, including several upcoming episodes of the writer's new iconoclastic Western series, The Loner, Serling's first venture into continuing character television, and the final shooting script of Assault on a Queen, a feature film about the hijacking of a cruise liner, which he is writing on order for Frank Sinatra. There is also one conspicuous piece of personal memorabilia, an oak frame containing the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster, which Serling was awarded after receiving two wounds during the bitter and bloody battle to retake the Japanese-held city of Manila at the close of World War Il.
Next Serling's wistful gaze takes in the six gleaming Emmy statuettes he has received over the past decade, arrayed on the wall before him. There is the first, which Serling, then thirty, won for "Patterns," the vitriolic portrait of the carpet-lined corporate jungle, which he wrote for the dramatic anthology show Kraft Television Theatre, and which made Serling a media hero after it was broadcast in January 1955. Next to that, Emmy is the one that Serling won for "Requiem for a Heavyweight," his acclaimed, searing ringside drama, which confirmed Serling's status as the television writer to watch, and which the author, a former amateur boxer himself, considers his finest writing for the medium. Then there is the next back-to-back Emmy, the one Serling got in 1958 for his wrenching adaptation of Ernest Lehman's story "The Comedian," about a megalomaniacal comedian, which also made a star of its director, John Frankenheimer, when it was shown on Playhouse 90. And on the shelf below, the Emmys, from 1960 and 1961, for The Twilight Zone; and finally, the sixth and most recent, earned for Serling's pungent adaptation of John 'Hara's classic short story about the weary art of bartending, "It's Mental Work", broadcast in April 1964 on Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, a filmed anthology show and one of the last shows of its kind on the air.
There are other glittering prizes nearby: the prestigious Peabody Award from 1956, the first ever given to a writer; the 1959 Look Magazine Annual Television Award; the Golden Globe Award for Best Male Television Star of 1962; the 1956 and 1958 Writers Guild of America Awards.
Beneath these, as we PAN DOWN, is a gallery of still photographs of some of the writer's most prized video moments: the electrifying scene in "The Rack," Serling's 1955 drama about cowardice and men's breaking points, set during the Korean War, in which Wasnik, the defense attorney, played by Keenan Wynn, finally forces out of his client, Captain Hall (Marshall Thompson) - under court-martial for making treasonable statements while a North Korean prisoner of war a choking description of how he "broke"; the famous night scene in "Patterns,” where Fred Staples (Richard Kiley), young executive on the rise at Ramsey and Company, finds Andy Sloane (Ed Begley) alone in their office, after the failing Sloane has taken another pounding from Ramsey, the ruthless, manipulative company president, and tries to persuade Sloan to resign before Ramsey utterly crushes him; the shattering moment in "Requiem" when Jack Palance, playing the battered ex-boxer, Mountain McClintock, looks into the mirror for the first time after his morally bankrupt manager (Keenan Wynn again) has successfully connived to make him a wrestler, and sees himself as a clown.
Finally, our inquiring camera PANS RIGHT to the sliding glass doors leading to the standard Hollywood over-sized, and rarely used, swimming pool, the very same sort of pool that Serling and his friends and fellow video immigrants from the East used to nervously joke about when they "sold out" and left New York for "the land of mink swimming pools" in the late 1950s, and the metaphor that the guiltily successful teledramatist used for spiritual corruption in his autobiographical study of the hazards of Hollywood-style TV writing, "The Velvet Alley." The pool as usual is empty on this night, but its underwater lights cast a strange, slightly surreal glow.
Serling's bittersweet reverie ends. He continues dictating the requiem for the television medium he is to deliver the following evening. Outwardly, one would think, Rod Serling has little to complain about. Clearly, he has the respect and affection of his peers in television—witness his election to the presidency of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the closest thing the television industry has to a governing body, and the first time the post had gone to a writer; the previous president was Walter Cronkite.
Serling, as his cluttered desk indicates, has never had more work. Only one year after CBS's final cancellation of the five-year-old Twilight Zone series a development that the burned-out writer-creator-host had actually welcomed- he is already back on the air, and seemingly back in business, with the promising Loner.
Serling's parallel screenwriting career also appears to be thriving. After years of disappointment in the cinema, the writer had received critical acclaim for his taut screenplay for Seven Days in May, a political thriller directed by his old friend John Frankenheimer, helping to drive his fee per script over the $150,000 mark and bringing him to the attention of Frank Sinatra and other film producers. Besides Sinatra's commission for Assault on a Queen, he has two other original screenplays or adaptations for major producers in the works. The always articulate and increasingly politically active Serling has also been increasingly in demand as a speaker. In the next month of September 1965, alone, Citizen Serling is scheduled to give a dozen speeches on various issues around the country in his capacity as NATAS president.
The outspoken and successful writer has a beautiful wife, Carol, whom he met and married while they were undergraduates at Antioch College, and two pretty daughters, Jody, fourteen, and Nan, nine. They have two dogs: Beau, an Irish setter, currently resting on the couch at the far end of the studio, and George, a dachshund. They have a full household staff, including a maid and a gardener. They have the huge stone-studded house; a country estate on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York; a thirty-six-foot Chris-Craft tri-cabin on which they spend a large part of the summer cruising the Finger Lakes. An old car buff, Serling also possesses a fourteen-thousand-dollar replica of a classic 1936 Auburn Speedster, which his wife--who drives a black Cadillac Eldorado--despises. The writer stops dictating and curses, apologizes to his secretary, turns off the machine, lights another Viceroy, looks at the ceiling, and contemplates the nightmare his life has become.
For Rod Serling is not a happy man.
It began in March, when the writer was hospitalized for chest pains while making a speech before the Academy's Washington, D.C., chapter. Initial news reports indicated that Serling had suffered a coronary attack; in fact it was "only" exhaustion, but Serling, whose family has a history of heart trouble, believes it is only a matter of time before he has the real thing. He believes he will die within a year or two, so why, he rationalizes, should he slow down? Within days of leaving the hospital, he is tearing around the country again, like the driven, fatally sick protagonist of the concurrent series Run for Your Life, played by Serling's friend Ben Gazzara.By the same skewed logic, the writer rationalizes his suicidal four-pack-a-day smoking habit.
Serling's marriage is also in disrepair. Indeed, although Rod and Carol live on the same grounds, they have become virtual strangers to each other, with the writer essentially moving into the lanai, female visitors and all, while his wife remains in the house a mere 150 feet away.
Prosperous appearances notwithstanding, matters on the business front aren't especially rosy for Serling either. No sooner had he sold CBS the syndication rights to The Twilight Zone, thinking that the show would never make money in syndication than he learned that the network was making a fortune from syndication, a fortune he had signed away -a fortune that would have guaranteed his family's economic security.
In fact, Rod Serling doesn't much like being Rod Serling. He doesn't even like being president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Already his controversial plan to refine the Academy's Emmy Award system has caused considerable internecine warfare within the organization and made enemies of such former friends as Fred Friendly, the president of CBS News, and others within the television industry.
In fact, Rod Serling doesn't like television. It isn't a serious writer's medium anymore, he feels. Just five years before, in 1960, there had been thirteen dramatic anthology shows on the air, including his own landmark series The Twilight Zone. Now, in the fall of 1965, there are none; even Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, Serling's last video proscenium, has been canceled, a victim of ratings. It is the era of the situation comedy. The hottest program of the new fall season is Hogan's Heroes, an inane comedy set in a German prisoner of war camp, a show that Serling, an ethnic Jew, deeply loathes.
Then there is The Loner. Serling was initially excited about the show, starring Lloyd Bridges as Civil War veteran William Colton. A "cerebral Western,” Serling had optimistically called it. CBS, though, thought it was too cerebral. The network, to Serling's dismay, wanted more action, which Serling read as more violence. A bitter feud ensued. Serling, true to his frequent foot-in-the-mouth form, made matters worse by publicizing his dissatisfaction with the network in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer several weeks before.
The Loner is now in limbo, and Serling, as he recently discovered during a visit to CBS headquarters in New York, has succeeded in making himself persona non grata at the very network, CBS, which had originally spawned him during the golden years of the 1950s. Production of the show has been halted pending a resolution of the writer's and the network's "creative differences," as the Hollywood euphemism goes.
To be sure, if Serling had his druthers now, he would quit Hollywood, return to New York, write plays and novels; at least that's what he tells people. But of course, he won't: too expensive. And too scary.
If this isn't the nadir, it is close to it. Indeed, Serling's life, on this warm September evening in the Pacific Palisades, resembles a page from his own "Velvet Alley" script. "You know how they do it, Ernie?" Eddie, the cynical director, brilliantly played by Leslie Niel-sen, had warned in the mordant 1959 Playhouse 90 drama. "They give you $1000 a week and keep giving you $1000 a week until that's what you need to live on. Then . .. you live in a nightmare for fear that they'll take it away from you."
At the moment, Rod Serling is living that very nightmare. Right now, like his video alter ego Ernie Pandish, he is afraid that the powers that be in "Bubbleland," as he disparagingly calls his adopted hometown, are indeed going to take it all away from him, all the money, all the attention, all the access. Lately, like Pandish, he has begun wondering whether he has "optioned his soul," and so have many of his fans. If not, then how to explain Serling's recent crop of game show appearances, not to mention aspirin and floor wax ads? If that isn't selling out, what is? But the hour is late for regrets.
Meanwhile, the Emmy Awards, which Serling is hosting the following evening, must go on. And the vestigial "angry young man" in Serling is determined to say his piece before the monster medium that he helped create swallows him whole.
Sitting up in his Naugahyde chair, ready once again for verbal combat, he clicks on his microphone and continues dictating and cursing into the night.
SLOW FADE TO BLACK.