Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  Rod Serling, the program's creator, came to prominence in what has been referred to as television's "golden age"--although those who have termed it so because they remember fondly such anthology programs as Studio One, Playhouse 90, and Climax have somehow managed to forget such chestnuts as Mr. Arsenic, Hands of Mystery, Doorway to Danger, and Doodles Weaver--programs which ran during the same period, and which by comparison make such current TV programs as Vegas and That's Incredible! look like great American theater. Television never really has had a golden age; only successive seasons of sounding brass which vary slightly as to the trueness of the tone.

  Nevertheless, television has produced isolated spasms of quality, and three of Serling's early teleplays--Patterns, The Comedian, and Requiem for a Heavyweight--form a large part of what television viewers mean when they speak of a "golden age". . . although Serling was by no means alone. There were others, including Paddy Chayefsky (Marty) and Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men) who contributed to that illusion of gold.

  Serling was the son of a Binghamton, New York, butcher, a Golden Gloves champ (at approximately five feet four, Serling's class was fly-weight), and a paratrooper during World War II. He began to write (unsuccessfully) in college and went on to write (unsuccessfully) for a radio station in Cincinnati. "That experience proved frustrating," Ed Naha related in his fond reprise of Serling's career. "His introspective characters came under attack by . . . executives who wanted their 'people to get their teeth into the soil'! Serling recalled the period years later: 'What those guys wanted wasn't a writer, but a plow.' "7

  Serling quit radio and began to freelance. His first success came in 1955 (Patterns, starring Richard Kiley and Everett Sloane--and later, in the film version, Van Heflin and Everett Sloane, the story of a dirty corporate power play and the resulting moral squeeze on one executive--the teleplay won Serling his first Emmy), and he never looked back . . . but he somehow never really moved on, either. He wrote a number of feature films--Assault on a Queen was maybe the worst of them; Planet of the Apes and Seven Days in May were two of the good ones--but television was his home, and Serling never really outgrew it, as did Chayefsky (Hospital, Network). Television was his home, where he lived most comfortably, and after a five-year hiatus following the cancelation of The Twilight Zone, he turned up on the tube again, this time as the host of Night Gallery. Serling himself expressed feelings of doubt and depression about his deep involvement in this mediocre medium. "But God knows," he said in his last interview, "when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important."8

  Serling apparently saw The Twilight Zone as a way of going underground and keeping his ideals alive in television following the cancelation of the prestige drama programs in the late fifties and early sixties. And to an extent, I suppose he succeeded. Under the comforting guise of "it's only make-believe," The Twilight Zone was able to deal with questions of fascism ("He Lives," starring Dennis Hopper as a young neo-Nazi guided by the shadowy figure of Adolf Hitler), ugly mass hysteria ("The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"), and even Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness--rarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light as that used in "The Shelter," in which a number of suburban neighbors along Your Street, U.S.A., are reduced to animals squabbling over a fallout shelter during a nuclear crisis.

  Other episodes generated a kind of existential weirdness that no other series has been able to match. There was, for instance, "Time Enough at Last," starring Burgess Meredith9 as a myopic bank clerk who can never find time enough to read. He survives an H-bomb attack, in fact, because he is reading in the vault when the bombs fall. Meredith is delighted with the holocaust; he finally has all the time to read that a man could want. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses shortly after reaching the library. One of the guiding moral precepts of The Twilight Zone seems to have been that a little irony is good for your blood.

  If The Twilight Zone had bowed on TV as we have found it in the period 1976-1980, it would have undoubtedly disappeared after an initial run of six to nine episodes. Its ratings were low to begin with . . . like in the cellar. It was up against a fairly popular Robert Taylor cops 'n' robbers meller, The Detectives, on ABC, and the immensely popular Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on NBC--this was the show that invited you to put your feet up and watch such fighters as Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson get their faces changed.

  But television moved more slowly in those days, and scheduling was less anarchistic. The Twilight Zone's first season consisted of thirty-six half-hour episodes, and by the season's midpoint the ratings had begun to pick up, helped by good word-of-mouth and glowing reviews. The reviews played their part by helping CBS decide that they had that potentially valuable commodity, a "prestige program."10 Nevertheless, problems continued. The program had problems finding a steady sponsor (this was back in the days, you must remember, when dinosaurs walked the earth and TV time was cheap enough to allow a single sponsor to pay for an entire program--hence GE Theater, Alcoa Playhouse, The Voice of Firestone, The Lux Show, Coke Time, and a host of others; to this writer's knowledge, the last program to be wholly sponsored by one company was Bonanza, sponsored by GM), and CBS began to wake up to the fact that Serling had put none of his cudgels away but was now wielding them in the name of fantasy.

  During that first season, The Twilight Zone presented "Perchance to Dream," the late Charles Beaumont's first contribution to the series, and "Third from the Sun," by Richard Matheson. The gimmick of the latter--that the group of protagonists is fleeing not from Earth but to it--is one that has been utterly beaten to death by now (most notably by that deepspace turkey Battlestar Galactica), but most viewers can remember the snap of that ending to this day. It was the episode which marks the point at which many occasional tuners-in became addicts. Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different.

  During its third season, The Twilight Zone was either canceled (Serling's version) or squeezed out by insoluble scheduling problems (the CBS version). In either case, it returned the following year as an hour-long program. In his article "Rod Serling's Dream," Ed Naha says: "The 'something different' the elongated (Twilight Zone) came up with turned out to be boredom. After thirteen publicly shunned episodes, the 60-minute Twilight Zone was canceled."

  It was indeed canceled--only to return for a final, mostly dull, season as a half-hour show again--but because of boredom? In my own view, the hour-long episodes of The Twilight Zone included some of the best of the entire run. There was "The Thirty-Fathom Grave," in which the crew of a Navy destroyer hears ghosts tapping inside a sunken submarine; "Printer's Devil"; "The New Exhibit" (one of The Twilight Zone's few excursions into outright horror, this dealt with a wax museum janitor played by Martin Balsam who discovers that the Murderers' Row exhibit has come to life); and "Miniature," which starred Robert Duvall in a Charles Beaumont script about a man who escapes back into the gay nineties.

  As Naha points out, by its final season "no one at CBS really cared about the series." He goes on to say that ABC, which had had some success with The Outer Limits, extended feelers to Serling about doing a sixth season with them. Serling refused. "I think ABC wanted to make a trip to the graveyard every week," he said.

  For Serling, life was never quite the same. The angry young man who had written Patterns began doing television commercials--that unmistakable voice could be heard huckstering tires and cold remedies in a bizarre turn that recalls the broken fighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight who ends up performing in fixed wrestling matches. And in 1970 he began making that "trip to the graveyard every week," not on ABC but on NBC, as host and sometime writer of Night Gallery. The series was inevitably compared to The Twilight Zone in spite of the fact that Gallery was really a watered-down Thriller with Serling doing the Boris Karloff hosting job.

  Serl
ing had none of the creative control he had enjoyed while doing The Twilight Zone. (He complained at one point that the studio was trying to turn Night Gallery "into Mannix with a shroud.") Nonetheless, Night Gallery produced a number of interesting episodes, including adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" and "Pickman's Model." It also presented an episode which must rate as one of the most frightening ever telecast on TV. "Boomerang," based on a story by Oscar Cook, dealt with a little bug called an earwig. The earwig is placed in the villain's ear and began to--ulp!--chew its way through his brain, leaving the man in an excruciating, sweaty state of agony (the physiological reason for this, since the brain has no pain receptors, is never explained). He is told there's only one chance in a billion that the pesky little beast will actually chew on a straight course across to his other ear and thus find the exit; much more likely is the possibility that it will just continue chewing its way around in there until the fellow goes mad . . . or commits suicide. The viewer is immensely relieved when the near-impossible happens and the earwig actually does come out the other side . . . and then, the kicker comes: the earwig was female. And it laid eggs in there. Millions of them.

  Most Night Gallery episodes were nowhere near as chilling, and the series was canceled after limping along in one form or another for three labored years. It was Serling's last star turn.

  "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 1972 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 Sixteen-Millimeter 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 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 1800s 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 tumble-down 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 toy-littered 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 by 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 analys
is 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-aaa-nklin!") 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, Kenan 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.