Chapter 9 of Gordon F. Sander’s 1992 book Serling: “The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man”
Hollywood is a place of ritual, a place where the secrets of power are of magical significance, a place where superstition, sex, and money mingle, where human values are distorted and sometimes lost. It is, in short, a part of that modern cultural continent we all inhabit, a place where in exaggerated form we can see our own communities.
-Hortense Powdermaker!
Rod Serling was on the coast-to-coast NBC tubes on Sunday, and his interview with Martin Agronsky was refreshing and revealing. The former Binghamtonian, whose Hollywood contract is for a quarter of a million dollars, got his start in the WIN studios knocking out scripts for the "Dr. Christian" radio series. Sitting in lush Hollywood surroundings, beside his swimming pool, Mr. Serling appeared young, handsome, nervous, and rich. "This," he said, pointing to the luxury around him, “is just the gravy of what I'm doing."
“Serling Proves Money Is Great,” Binghamton Press, March 18, 1958
A week before the 1958 Emmy Awards presentation, Rod Serling told a reporter, "A guy who wins one Emmy has defied the law of averages. When he wins a second one, he has beaten the law of averages. Winning a third one means that he has proven that the law of averages doesn't exist." The following week, Serling indeed proved that the law of averages didn't exist, by collecting his third consecutive Emmy for Outstanding Dramatic Writing, this time for "The Comedian." But he wasn't smiling--in fact, he had to limp to the stage this time as a result of having a car door close on his leg. To be sure, the Rod Serling who received his third Emmy in March 1958 was not the same man whom the National Academy of Television vision Arts and Sciences audience had seen the year before, still aglow with "Requiem" accolades. Serling's mother, Esther, had died only two weeks before. She had been suffering from high blood pressure for months. When the end came, on March 5, Rod was as much relieved as grieved. She was buried on a cold, miserable day in Syracuse.
His mother's death seemed to trigger new self-doubts, which winning a record third Emmy couldn't quell. In his own estimation, he remained an incomplete writer. Among Serling's many insecurities regarding his chosen profession, he was particularly bothered by his inability to write for women. “I remember that Rod had a great tendency to underwrite his women's roles," said Kim Hunter. "I called him on it and he admitted it. I thoroughly enjoyed doing all his work, really, but I did say to him, “It's all very well you having great women's parts, but it'd be better if you could write them as well, too!” He said to me, 'That's why I love you in my shows, because you fill in all of the things I can't write.”
"I don't think he understood women," said his former secretary, Virginia Cox. “I think he was locked into a male vision. I just don't think women interested him that much. I think he loved them, I think he liked them, I think he got along well with them. I just don't think the female experience interested him. That wasn't the genesis of his creativity. He could not write a love scene. It was part of his limitation, he resented it, he was frustrated by it, he wanted to transcend it, and he could not.”
"What he was best at," said Cox, "were combat scenes. I think the real source of his writing was somewhat limited to his war experience, that was the thing he felt most deeply about, and the thing he wrote best about. When he got away from that, he was less sure. He wanted to be a Paddy Chayefsky, he wanted to deal with complex moral issues, and he did not feel capable of that.
He would say things to me like, “Ginny, why can't I write a love scene?' Cox remembered. "And he couldn't, it was true."
Ethel Wynant, the former casting director for CBS, who cast many of Serling's shows (including, later, The Twilight Zone), agreed: "He didn't write very well for women. He wasn't much interested in women. I think he had some interesting women's parts, but they were only facilitators to move the story along.”
Wynant also noted the importance of the war experience in Serling's work. "If Rod had written “Marty, " she speculated, "that's what it would have been about. He would have had a scene with Joe Mantell (the actor who played Marty's companion) where he would have said, “Goddam it, give me a break. I don't want to sit around here each Saturday night, I wanna get laid. And the only way I'm gonna get laid is if I take Nancy Marchand out, cause nobody wants to lay her. And that's better than not getting laid.' Paddy didn't write that way. And it might have still been a very good play if Rod had written it. It would have been a lot more intense. There wouldn't have been a lot of What do you wanna do tonight, Marty?"
Director John Frankenheimer, once a close friend of Serling's, also recalled Serling's self-doubts. "Yes, I remember him saying, John, why can't I write a love scene? He never believed in himself as a writer. He always had doubts, and he could never solve that demon in himself. He could never accept that he was a very talented man."
Serling once again used his combat experience as the basis for his next Playhouse 90 telepic, "Bomber's Moon." Directed by Fran-kenheimer, starring Robert Cummings, Martin Balsam, and Rip Torn, the play purported to tell "of the minute tragedies of a few who stand in the backwash of battle."
"Bomber's Moon" is the name of a pub in World War II England where American servicemen hang out between bombing raids on Germany. Colonel Culver (Cummings) is a hardened veteran who calls bereavement "wasteful" and finds cowardice appalling. Young Lieutenant Harrison (Torn) is grounded by Culver for his past cowardice, even though the fun-loving Captain Rierden (Balsam) believes that his friend Culver is being too harsh.
On the next mission, Rierden is killed taking Harrison's place, and an infuriated Culver tells the guilt-stricken Harrison that he should kill himself in shame. Later, he gets a better idea: Harrison should be the one to attempt a dangerous, one-man mission to prove his mettle. The lieutenant reluctantly agrees and succeeds in his mission- but is killed. Culver breaks down: "I killed Harrison... I thought if I could kill Harrison, I could kill that dirty part of myself." Before he is sent home, his superior explains that guilt and grief are a necessary facet of combat and leadership, "an ache we carry in our gut that no medic can cure." The reviews of "Bomber's Moon" (which took its title from a phrase in one of Edward R. Murrow's wartime broadcasts-"It's a bomber's moon tonight") were sufficiently positive to allay some of Serling's insecurities. "There's nothing wrong with TV theater that quality writing can't cure," wrote UPI television critic William Ewald on May 23, 1958. "The astonishing thing about 'Bomber's Moon' was that it managed to sock its way home despite the familiarity of its material.
“I’d heard the story before... but Serling's writing pinched it all alive. He is the kind of writer who is not afraid to linger over a moment that will twitch life into a character — a wise-guy pilot admiring himself at length in a mirror; a lieutenant holding a salute ten seconds, fifteen seconds, until his C.O. [Commanding Officer] sees fit to return it; a silly joke about Anthony Eden injected during a serious moment in a bomb shelter."
One week later, CBS offered its star playwright another one-year exclusive contract, which called for him to write a minimum of three television plays for Playhouse 90 at a rate of ten thousand dollars per script. The network also offered him 40 percent ownership in a science fiction series that it was considering doing with Serling called The Twilight Zone.
Then Serling ran into another censorship storm on his next Playhouse 90 script, "A Town Has Turned to Dust," in which he once again tried to meet the subject of racial prejudice head-on. "By the time the censors had gotten to it, my script had turned to dust," Serling lamented afterward.
The reviews for "A Town Has Turned to Dust" were generally good. Nevertheless, its censoring left Serling angrier than ever at his network and agency handlers. "We're developing a new citizenry," the writer told the Cincinnati Post, "one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.”
They [the network and agencies] wanted to sell products," observed Don Freeman," and Rod wanted to sell ideas.”
There was an increasingly cynical tone to Serling's pronouncements about television after "A Town Has Turned to Dust." Serling was wearying of the "Angry Man of television" role. He was also wearying of television, which seemed to be given over entirely to Westerns and quiz shows.
“A final note to any aspiring television writers," Serling declared in another article. "Do westerns and make your horses gray and if you have any burning desire to write of anything that has two sides to it, do a magazine piece on window cleaning."
Writing is a frustrating, nerve-racking, lonely business," Serling told Cosmopolitan. "I figure the creative active life of a writer can't be measured in terms of whole generations. Perhaps in six or seven years I'll be burned out.”
Serling's prediction would prove uncannily accurate.
To be sure, within the CBS hierarchy were some who still loved him. Serling was briefly cheered by a laudatory article about television by CBS Vice-President for Programs Hubbell Robinson, one of the few remaining champions of "serious television" at network headquarters in New York, that appeared in the July 1958 issue of Esquire. In his piece, Robinson included Serling in a short list of "those who have given television its greatest moments." He also put "Requiem for a Heavyweight" at the top of his list of the medium's twenty-five masterworks.
Robinson himself was doomed, soon to be replaced by incoming CBS president James Aubrey (also known as "The Smiling Cobra"), whose programming credo was, “The more interesting the programming content of a television show is, the more it interferes with the commercial message.”
"Success is a terrible attack on your sense of values," the jaded playwright told Time.
“You get teed off because the heater of your swimming pool doesn't work.”
Serling decided to put some of his mordant thoughts about Hollywood and television into a teleplay that summer. He called it "The Velvet Alley." Beware the "velvet alley' of video success- like all Hollywood success, it could also corrode a writer's original values.
"The Velvet Alley" was telecast on Playhouse 90 on February 2, 1959, and told the story of Ernie Pandish (played by Art Carney), who, at forty-two, is trying to eke out a living as a television dramatist. His supportive agent, Max (Jack Klugman), finally hits paydirt and sells one of Ernie's scripts to a prestigious show that originates from Hollywood. Ernie is enamored of the glamour and attention he receives in California. After his show makes him instantly "hot," he decides to stay, in spite of Max's warnings that he should return home.
Months pass, and successful plays continue. Ernie becomes rich and famous, but finds himself more and more irritable, and more and more caught up in the business, unable to give any attention to his wife, Pat. Desperate for guidance, he is sweet-talked into dropping Max and signing with a large, flashy agency. Crushed, Max returns to New York. Equally disillusioned with her husband, Pat follows him.
Later, on the day Ernie wins an Emmy, Max dies of a heart attack. Shocked, Ernie returns to New York and begs his father to come back to California with him he is the only family he has left. Steve Pandish refuses and berates his son for throwing away the things that were really valuable to him. The end of the play finds Ernie Pandish as "successful" as he could ever have dreamed of but weeping, shattered, and totally alone.
"It's all so true," said Saul Marmer, although Serling would publicly insist otherwise. "Just what he would write about in “The Velvet Alley” is what he became. Carol saw it coming. She kept him even in Cincinnati, she kept him on an even keel in Connecticut, but she couldn't in California. She did threaten to leave him. “
"I remember him telling me he took a lot of those argument scenes from his own domestic life," said Don Freeman. "There's a line in there, It's all Disneyland out here.” And Rod said, “You know, Carol actually said that to me.”
Nevertheless, Serling insisted that any resemblance between him and Pandish was coincidental. "One of the basic problems in this industry is that it never trains people for success," he said in a statement issued by CBS. “Suddenly everything's all whipped cream and marshmallows and mink coats and swimming pools. You can't throw this down a gut and expect ready digestion. But to Ernie Pandish, identity became equated with money, and I don't think I'm that way. He traded off certain values: I haven't.”
The play made Serling distinctly unpopular with many of his television colleagues. Californians, Serling found, had very thin skins indeed.
“I won't argue the show's relative merits as a piece of drama and the antiquity of its theme makes it indefensible in the area of originality," the embattled writer wrote in his defense in the monthly bulletin of the Writers Guild of America.
But as to the honesty of its theme and the legitimacy of its people — this I will defend. The chorus of disapproval elicited in these climes after the show made me observe what is a rather odd phenomenon in Los Angeles and particularly in the movie industry.
It suggests a kind of clinical defensiveness and hypersensitivity not known in the East. You can knock New York in front of New Yorkers and they'll yawn at you. You can bitch volubly to the residents of Chicago-and they'll grin at you.
But have the temerity to suggest that Hollywood, California, and its environs and industries have special problems--and this conjures up a chorus of professional knockers whose critical judgment seems to be based more on geographical pride than any analytical and established criteria of good theater.
All television writers don't lose agents and divorce wives and wind up over-fed kooks full of neuroses. But to criticize a piece because a certain protagonist does wind up this way is like criticizing Death of a Salesman because all salesmen don't commit suicide.
Serling also won praise and criticism, especially for his subject-in 1959 for his acidic portrait of union racketeerism in "The Rank and File." Years later, World-Telegram TV critic Harriet Van Horne would remember the play as one of Serling's most powerful. “I remember a Serling play called Rank and File on that greatly missed series, CBS Playhouse 90," Van Horne wrote in 1975. Van Heflin played the lead.
The story detailed the grubby rise of one Kilcoyne, a Depression-scarred factory worker.
We watched him change from a hungry, beaten man to absolute czar of an international brotherhood, a Hoffa-style union. Along the way, Kilcoyne has paused at many a moral crossroads. Ultimately, gross ambition devours the gentle ide-alist. We see it all in searing flashbacks.
The first scene… is still vivid in memory. Here was a shabby, shuffling picket line on a cold, rainy day in the 30s. Now and then the men put down their signs to warm ungloved hands over a fire in a refuse can.
Suddenly the guards order Kilcoyne to take his hands off the factory fence. He refuses. Before your eyes, his fingers are brutally smashed. He still refuses to remove his hands. 'In that moment, I tell you he was a giant,' we hear the union lawyer remark in the next scene. Then, slowly, the giant disintegrates before our eyes.
But Serling's time for speaking truth to power—at least via TV—was running out. There wasn't much market in television for plays like "Patterns" and "Rank and File as the fifties came to an end. The live television anthologies that Serling had once thrived on had all but disappeared; eight of the top-ten-rated shows of the 58-59 season were Westerns, one was a detective show, and one was a comedy-variety show.
In the meantime, the television quiz show scandal had struck, and everyone from President Eisenhower to the National PTA was wringing his hands over the subject of network programming. Who controlled it? How could it be improved?
In 1960, the Federal Communications Commission, prodded into action after a decade of leaving the television industry to its own devices, decided to hold hearings on the subject, and as TV's most prominent writer and critic, Serling was invited to testify.
Serling furnished numerous examples of *ludicrous and timorous interference with his work for the commissioners, like the time when an insurance company objected to a suicide in one of his scripts, and the notorious instance, during the rehearsals for "Requiem, when one of the sponsors, the Ronson Lighter Company, asked Serling to change the line "Got a match?" to "Got a light?" And, Serling added, "The food people don't want anything which might reduce the appetite."
For his part, Peter Allport, vice-president of the Association of National Advertisers, criticized The TV writer for advocating the magazine concept' of divorcing advertisers from any control over program content and restricting their activity" and stated that advertisers had not only provided the financial support possible, but had also contributed significantly to much of the program director.
"If the sponsor chooses the play as a kind of piggyback on which he wants to use his commercial, then he has to respect the form he has chosen," Serling replied.
Allport fired back in The New York Times: "Serling has produced some wonderful shows, [but] the situations he describes are not as serious as [he] claim[s]. The advertiser is a pretty good judge of what he wants his name attached to."
In truth, Serling was assailing the wrong enemy. By 1959, the program control pendulum had swung back to the networks, partly because of the advent of multiple sponsorship, and partly because the networks had become more jealous of the product they were putting out. But sponsors still made a better target. Television Age identified Serling as the chief industry critic and called for an industry counteroffensive against the complaints of television critics and writers.
Serling was encouraged in his attack on the increasing commercialism by his angry counterpart in CBS News, Edward R. Murrow.
In 1958, shortly after his program See It Now was canceled, Murrow delivered a blistering speech to a group of his broadcasting peers. "There is no suggestion here," Murrow cried, "that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies. But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse…I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the nation... I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers… Let us have a little competition. Not only in selling soap, cigarettes, and automobiles, but in informing a troubled, apprehensive, but receptive public.”
The days when CBS— or the television industry—would tolerate an Edward R. Murrow or a Rod Serling were obviously numbered. Serling may have wanted to be the Norman Corwin of television, said Loring Mandel, but, Mandel pointed out:
Rod had something that Corwin didn't have, which was the layer of bureaucracy that grew continually, that separated him from people like Paley. In the time that I wrote, I never got as high as Paley or Stanton. You just didn't get up that far, and they didn't get down that far. The people that you were dealing with were functioning, and you could have a certain amount of contempt for them. . .. We were able to play one another's bureaucrat off against another. Corwin never could, cause there weren't any bureaucrats then.
I'll give you one example of bureaucracy.
In 1956, CBS initiated a writer's development program that lasted one year. I believe that Rod was in it, I believe that Reggie [Rose] was in it, and I was the junior of something like eleven writers. We were given guaranteed annual salaries, and in exchange we were to produce nine outlines for one-hour shows. And CBS could ask us to write four or five of those scripts should they be picked up by any of the shows on the air. We never saw a creative person. The only person we dealt with at CBS was a man named Gilbert Ralston, and he was in business affairs.
We would give this material to Gilbert Ralston, and he would put it in the CBS mail distribution system, so when it got to the shows, it came in like something unsolicited from the mail, and almost none of that material was ever done. It was almost a total waste of time as far as CBS was concerned, because they never made the connection between the program and the creative people they needed. It was all done through business affairs.
Fortunately for Serling, a creative escape presently appeared in the form of The Twilight Zone.