Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  Nevertheless, when Leonard sold Naked City to ABC-TV, he set it up at Screen Gems; both companies may have been irritated, but they were not stupid. The half-hour series bowed on ABC on September 30, 1958 with Silliphant’s hostage drama, “Meridian.”

  Naked City holds an unusual place in television history. Along with The Defenders, Coronet Blue, and a small number of other hold-outs, it continued to shoot in New York City when production was relocating to Los Angeles. “I came in at a time when we were going to film,” he told interviewer Elwy Yost. [44] “Way back in those days it was tape versus film, and film was winning. Naked City and The Defenders were the two key shows on in New York in the late ‘50s, which was right at the end of the golden age when everyone went to film. [Reginald] Rose wrote nearly all of [The Defenders]. We were highly competitive… . We didn’t like their show and they didn’t like our show. We felt they were too preachy and we were very sharp, like today.”

  Naked City was set in Manhattan’s fictitious 65th Precinct, which was actually located on West 54th. Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. But the show’s verisimilitude came from its seasoned New York production crew knowing every alley and cul-de-sac in the city’s five boroughs. As with the 1948 feature, The Naked City (the The was dropped after the first season) looked at the procedural aspects of crime fighting as it followed Detectives Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) and Lt. Dan Muldoon (John McIntire) on their dangerous, but often boring, duties.

  “Arriving at the main characters was a joint creative effort between my partner Bert Leonard, who had acquired the rights to Naked City from Mark Hellinger’s estate, and me,” Silliphant said. “It seemed so simple — a gruff precinct boss (now a parody character), a young, idealistic detective, and a street cop partner with flattened ears and a busted nose. When I wrote them, they didn’t seem like stereotypes. Today they simply wouldn’t do.” Silliphant also created meaty roles for guest stars, a device that allowed them to cast New York stage actors in the same way that “golden age” live TV dramas in the 1950s reaped the bounty of Broadway. Continuing the tradition of the producer doing the narration, Bert Leonard performed Hellinger’s voice-over chores.

  Silliphant wrote thirty-two of the first season’s thirty-nine episodes. “It was easier just to write the damn things than it was to waste time interviewing other writers and trying to get them to catch what we were after, then having to rewrite them, something I truly hate,” he said. He was paid $1,500 for a half-hour script and $2,500 when the show bumped up to an hour. He also collected $500 on those occasions when he polished somebody else’s work. [45] Additionally, eight of his teleplays were adapted into prose by Charles Einstein and published in a Dell First Edition paperback with the unusual arrangement of carrying Silliphant’s byline on the cover and Einstein’s byline within. [46]

  Although the show was extremely well received by the critics, at first, audiences did not respond. Moreover, there was discord on the set. Some sources say that McIntire grew tired of location shooting in New York and wanted to live on his Montana ranch. Others say that he was irritated by his costar Franciscus’s egotism. Whichever it was, Silliphant arranged for Muldoon to die in a car crash in “The Bumper” (March 17, 1959) and be replaced by a presumably more malleable Lt. Mike Parker (Horace McMahon). Harry Bellaver was added as Sgt. Frank Arcaro. Emboldened by reviews, Leonard protected his series like a lion guarding its young. He shot himself in the foot, however, for the June 23, 1959, broadcast of “A Wood of Thorne.” In a twohander of steadily increasing tension, Halloran intrudes on Lois Heller (Cara Williams) as she celebrates the impending execution of convicted murderer Philip Hone, even though both she and Halloran know that her boyfriend, Nikki, is the real killer, and only she can make the call to stop Hone’s execution. The electrocution process is described vividly, yet it’s all offscreen, which makes it even more riveting. [47] ABC wanted to pull the episode, but Leonard flashed his contract and forced them to air it. In retaliation, the network canceled the series entirely in June, and only the intervention of the sponsor, tobacco company Brown & Williamson, saved it. [48] On its fall revival in October of 1960, it became an hour-long drama with Bellaver and McMahon returning, but Franciscus jettisoned in favor of Paul Burke as Detective Adam Flint and Nancy Malone as his actress-girlfriend, Libby.

  Silliphant hadn’t intended to return to television when Screen Gems and Leonard asked him to write the Naked City pilot, but when three of his screenplays [49] were bought but not produced (that kind of waste “destroys your whole reason to work,” he said [50]), he took the assignment and, when it sold, he found the changes the medium had undergone to his liking. “A Case Study of Two Savages” (airdate: February 7, 1962) is emblematic of this rekindled interest. “We had a thing where Rip Torn plays a killer from the south, he shoots everyone up all over New York City, he’s making it with Tuesday Weld, and finally he’s gunned down in Grand Central Station. He’s lying there in a pool of blood and Tuesday Weld is crying, and Paul Burke says to her, ‘Why?’ And she says, ‘For the hell of it.’ That’s pretty advanced back in those days, but we felt that was the justification. I mean, wanting a big speech about his mother left him and father went to jail? They would do all that on The Defenders; we didn’t. We went for the action and the sharp line. It’s hard to get to that point where you can end the film — she looks up — I’ll never forget the shot — tears in her eyes, she screams out, ‘For the hell of it.’ And you know they’d kill twenty more people if he weren’t dead on the floor. We had no compromises on that show. We never pandered to nice people or giving an easy solution. We really showed it the way it was, and the way it is.” [51]

  Other episodes are remarkable for their varied mood and character interplay. Scattered examples are “The Bloodhounds” (airdate: May 25, 1959) in which detectives use a traffic accident victim’s lost dogs to find a missing girl, to “The Canvas Bullet” (airdate: June 16, 1959), in which a prize fighter takes to the ring even though he knows it may cost him his life. Real-life champs Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta appeared in the character drama, which was directed, as were many episodes, by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, 1967). “The Rebirth” (airdate: April 21, 1959) has a scrubwoman, Betty Sinclair, robbing a bank and discovering that money will not relieve her loneliness, so she turns herself in. And “Fire Island” (March 3, 1959) costars a pre-Route 66 George Maharis, along with Henry Hull, Michael Conrad, and Guy Raymond, in a shoot-out between police and off-season bootleggers. There was also the remarkable “Four Sweet Corners” (airdate: April 28, 1959) in which Maharis, as a returning soldier, decides to drive around the country with a service buddy, Robert Morris. It’s a setup that, if it was not a pre-pilot for Route 66, certainly inspired the latter series.

  Naked City ran four seasons and 128 episodes between 1958 and 1963, but Silliphant left, for all intents and purposes, after season one to do Route 66, although he wrote the hour-long reboot, “A Death of Princes,” and three additional hours: two in 1960 and one in 1962. He was replaced by the equally industrious Howard Rodman and Arnold Manoff, the latter working under a pseudonym because he, like the original film’s director, Jules Dassin, was blacklisted. [52]

  Although Naked City helped American television grow up, the country and the medium still had a long way to go. Silliphant and Leonard would give it another boost with a series that remains part of the cultural landscape even as its actual namesake has faded.

  4: Pilgrim’s Progress

  Stirling Silliphant and Bert Leonard had more in common than a hunger for stories about New York City. Both were sons of salesman fathers, although Bert’s was a ne’er-do-well and Stirling’s was industrious; both traveled the country when young; both were keen observers of human nature; and both could weave tales with the seductiveness of Scheherazade. When Leonard proposed the idea to Silliphant for Route 66, he said it came out of the relaxed odyssey that he and his brother, Roger, had taken around the country and into Mexico after the world war. For h
is part, Silliphant referred to the series as a “Pilgrim’s Progress, 1962,” [53] alluding to John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory in which a man abandons his family to seek the Celestial City. Leonard’s earthy synopsis perfectly complemented Silliphant’s literary allusion, and the public agreed, because the series ran for 116 episodes between October 7, 1960, and March 13, 1964. [54] Silliphant wrote seventy of the shows himself. It was produced by Lancer-Edling Productions, Lancer being Leonard’s company and Edling being Silliphant’s. [55] In a September 20, 1961 joint agreement, Silliphant put up $160 for sixeen percent of the proceeds and Leonard put up $840 for eighty-four percent. Each would also receive a producion fee. Leonard also hired his then-wife, Willetta, as Assistant to the Producer (himself).

  Route 66 combined two genres: the road picture and the anthology drama. [56] The former was both simple and elastic: two young men — Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) and Buz Murdock (George Maharis [57]) — tool around the country in a red (actually brown) 1960 Corvette and become involved in dramatic conflicts at every stop. [58] Buz was a fighter from Hell’s Kitchen, Tod a Yale-educated scion of a ruined businessman whose only legacy is the car his father willed him. The two were opposites who attracted not only trouble but an audience. Halfway through the third season, Maharis departed, and his place was taken by Glenn Corbett playing Lincoln “Linc” Case, a former Army Ranger who had completed a tour of duty in Vietnam. His backstory was not only a manifestation of Silliphant’s growing concern over American involvement in Southeast Asia, it is believed to be the first continuing character in a U.S. network TV show who reflected the emerging Vietnam experience.

  At the same time, the people with whom Stiles, Murdock, and Case become involved at each detour have their own stories, which the travelers may or may not help resolve. This made each episode something of a stand-alone drama. The concept is Zen-like: are Tod, Buz, and Linc characters other people’s stories? Or are other people characters in Tod’s, Buz’s, and Linc’s story? The blend was a clever way to broaden the protagonists’ characters by throwing them into conflict with a constantly changing array of guest stars.

  That show drew a roster of the finest established and up-and-coming talent of the era: Edward Asner (“Welcome to the Wedding,” “Shoulder the Sky, My Lad,” “The Mud Nest,” “The Opponent,” “The Man on the Monkey Board”), Beulah Bondi (“Burning for Burning”), James Caan (“And the Cat Jumped Over the Moon”), Joan Crawford (“Same Picture, Different Frame”), Robert Duvall (“Birdcage on My Foot,” “The Newborn,” “Suppose I Said I Was the Queen of Spain”), Barbara Eden (“Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way,” Parts 1 and 2), Anne Francis (“A Month of Sundays,” “Play It Glissando”), Tammy Grimes (“Where are the Sounds of Celli Brahms?”), Joey Heatherton (“Three Sides”), David Janssen (“One Tiger to a Hill”), Ben Johnson (“A Long Piece of Mischief,” “Like a Motherless Child”), Boris Karloff (“Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing”), Buster Keaton (“Journey to Nineveh”), DeForest Kelley (“1800 Days to Justice,” “The Clover Throne”), George Kennedy (“Black November”), Cloris Leachman (“Love is a Skinny Kid”), Jack Lord (“Play It Glissando”), Tina Louise (“I’m Here to Kill a King”), Dorothy Malone (“Fly Away Home,” Parts 1 and 2), E.G. Marshall (“Three Sides”), Lee Marvin (“Mon Petit Chou,” “Sheba”), Walter Matthau (“Eleven, the Hard Way”), Darren McGavin (“The Opponent”), Lois Nettleton (“Suppose I Said I Was the Queen of Spain,” “Some of the People, Some of the Time,” “The Opponent”), Julie Newmar (“Give the Old Cat a Tender Mouse,” “How Much a Pound is Albatross“), Dan O’Herlihy (“To Walk with the Serpent”), Susan Oliver (“Fifty Miles From Home,” “Hello and Goodbye,” “Welcome to Amity”), Suzanne Pleshette (“Blue Murder,” “The Strengthening Angels”), Robert Redford (“First Class Mouliak”), Michael Rennie (“Fly Away Home,” Parts 1 and 2), Burt Reynolds (“Love is a Skinny Kid”), Janice Rule (“But What Do You Do in March?,” “Once to Every Man,” “A Lance of Straw”), William Shatner (“Build Your Houses with Their Backs to the Sea”), Martin Sheen (“...and the Cat Jumped Over the Moon”), Sylvia Sidney (“Child of a Night,” “Like a Motherless Child”), Lois Smith (“Who In His Right Mind Needs a Nice Girl?,” “Only By Cunning Glimpses,” “Go Read the River,” “Incident on a Bridge”), Rod Steiger (“Welcome to the Wedding”), Ethel Waters (“Goodnight, Sweet Blues”), and Tuesday Weld (“Love is a Skinny Kid”) among dozens more.

  “The series did attract some of the best actors from both New York and Hollywood,” Silliphant agreed. “I remember Joan Crawford called us personally and asked if she could appear in an episode. I wrote a show just for her: ‘Same Picture, Different Frame.’ But we must remember that we had one of the most brilliant casting talents in the business working on the show: Marion Dougherty. And she was working out of New York where her judgment was based on performance, not fan mail.”

  The casting and production (see the next chapter) were helped immeasurably by two things. First: CBS gave Leonard and Silliphant an order for twenty-six one-hour episodes at a single time, allowing them to plan ahead and amortize budgets; second: then they left them alone. Neither happens any more.

  “Bert… and I had creative control in our contracts,” Silliphant told fellow writer William Froug. “We had right of approval. The networks didn’t. This was the last time that ever happened… . We were able to force the networks to put our work on the air. Now that gave us a sense of exhilaration and freedom, and responsibility. In those four years I think I really learned my craft because there were no rules. There was nothing I couldn’t do. Nothing I couldn’t experiment with, and it was such a heady thing, and such an inspirational thing, that I look at some of those scripts today with wonder.” [59]

  Even though the network couldn’t control content, they held the on/off switch over broadcast, and this occasionally brought them into conflict with Silliphant’s experimentation and Leonard’s protectiveness. The most bizarre instance involved the May 5, 1961, episode called “The Newborn.” Said Silliphant, “I wanted to see how George and Marty could help an Indian girl about to have a child in the desert of New Mexico. How do you help a woman bear her child when you’re miles from medical facilities and have nothing but the Corvette? The problem centered around the umbilical cord: how do you sever it without a knife (shoelaces, obviously) and what do you do about the placenta, etc. etc.? Well, the network went ape when I devoted about six minutes of prime time to this area. They insisted we cut all that stuff out. We refused, once more waved our contract, and I fired off a memo accusing CBS types of having been born without navels, hence their sensitivity to that little hollow above their balls. We almost won that one. We didn’t cut anything out and they put the episode on — but they cut out the footage and we had to run end titles for about four minutes.” [60]

  Not only did Silliphant write Route 66 from his heart, he wrote it on the road, traveling to locations just ahead of the production caravan. He would scope out interesting filming sites, meet local residents, hear their tales, and then sequester himself in a motel room to churn out the pages that Leonard and company would shoot when they caught up with him, by which time he was gone. Life was a succession of motel rooms, and he was not always alone in them. “Remember, this was a time when the orgies were going on,” said Tiana Alexandra-Silliphant, whom he married in 1974. “He was in a different city every two weeks. He was casting, and his producer was screwing around too. It’s a fun life. You get fans. Every day your ego is going to be massaged. If you’re a writer, you may not have the money like directors, but women think you can write them a part. Little do they know, don’t fuck the writer!” [61]

  Each fifty-two-minute script took an average of nine days to write while, at the same time, he did rewrites and polishes on previous pages, and discussed new stories with Leonard. The leapfrogging went on for the entire run.

  “When we were doing Naked City and Route 66,” he explained, “Bert Leonard and I were accountable to no one ex
cept ourselves. We would go out to lunch and we would say, ‘We need a story for next week. What are we going to do?’ ‘Well, let’s see; what haven’t we done?’ ‘We haven’t done anything about jury fixing. Why don’t we do something about jury fixing?’ ‘Okay, that’s not a bad idea. Now let’s see. We haven’t done a story for two weeks about a girl. And we’ll get so and so to play the part. Just a minute, I’ll call her and see.’ Now you pick up the phone and call X and say, ‘Stirling wants to write a Route 66 for you.’ She says ‘Groovy, what’s the story?’ ‘We don’t know, we’re just sitting here kicking it around. But are you going to be free on such-andsuch a date?’ So we’d book the shows this way. We’ve had the best actors and actresses in the business and we got them without scripts. We know who the actor or the actress is, and we’d write for them. That was what made it so great, because I was able to write for specific people. [62]