Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  “The characters came out of the writing — the casting then came out of the character. For example, I wrote an episode called ‘Kiss the Maiden All Forlorn’ which required a debonair actor of clearly established class — and Marion signed Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. for the part. Bert Leonard flew him from London to the location in Texas. In the case of the two-parter, ‘Fly Away Home,’ [63] directed by Arthur Hiller in Phoenix, we were so far behind in getting scripts ready that I told the plotline to some of the stars we had decided we wanted in it — in this case thinking of them almost simultaneously with the story. We wanted Dorothy Malone and Michael Rennie and a couple of other fine New York stage actors, so I called each of them on the phone and ‘talked’ the story — and such was their confidence in the show that all of them accepted without having seen the script. Actually, when they arrived on location in Phoenix, they only had the first hour (of two) in hand. I was still writing the second hour in a hotel room in Phoenix and feeding pages out to the location.”

  Silliphant admitted to giving his guest stars the juiciest parts, “as witness Anne Francis in ‘A Month of Sundays’ or Julie Newmar in ‘How Much a Pound is Albatross’ or Tuesday Weld in ‘Love is a Skinny Kid’ or Bob Duvall in ‘Bird Cage on My Foot.’ But look also at George Maharis’s cry of anguish when, at the end of ‘A Month of Sundays,’ Anne Francis whispers, ‘I was alive, wasn’t I? I lived.’ And she dies and George screams — over the honky-tonk carnival sounds behind him. No! Without George and the impact of Anne’s death upon him the story would not have been as affecting.”

  With such stunning guest stars, wasn’t there a risk in taking the series leads for granted? Not at all. “I never felt impeded by or burdened with our two main characters,” Silliphant stated, “and, yes, we could have done many of the stories without them — as witness the fact that for almost two seasons I had to write without having George Maharis with us any longer. But the stories, somehow, worked better with Marty and George involved. In a sense, they were the viewer — bringing the viewer into a new town, meeting new people, becoming involved, having the involvement either affect or not affect their own search for identity. Rather than feel they were a drag on the stories, I can tell you clearly that I would have been lost without them and their reactions and interplay.”

  Tales of Silliphant’s efficiency were legendary. In one, Route 66’s production manager, Sam Manners, asked if he had a spare script that they could shoot in the same city where they were because a company move to another location would cost $75,000. Silliphant didn’t have anything to send, so he wrote an original one-hour show in three days. [64] Likewise, Silliphant and Leonard were not averse to saving money in other ways. Depending on how the budget looked for any given week, Silliphant could be paid as little as $902 or as much as $3,340 for a script, plus customary residuals. [65] (Ownership of the series would become a contention in future years.)

  The show attracted its share of fans quite apart from the beefcake appeal of its stars. One such aficionado was David Morell, then in high school, who sent Silliphant a handwritten letter at Screen Gems asking how to do what he does. “One week later,” Morell said, “I received an answer from him — two densely typed pages that began with an apology for taking so long to get back to me. ‘I’d have written to you sooner,’ he said, ‘but when your letter arrived, I was out at sea in a boat.’ He revealed no secrets and refused to look at anything I had written, but he did tell me this: The way to be a writer is to write, and write, and keep writing.” Morrell did just that, and, to date, has published over thirty-five books, among them First Blood (1972), which became the basis of the Rambo movies. Morrell and Silliphant became friends and, “All these years and millions of words later,” he says, “I’m still writing.” [66]

  “For me and my friends,” wrote another admirer, journalist Michael Ventura, “Route 66 was not a television show, it was a promise. A weekly training film. A way out and through and over. [Tod and Buz were] looking not for adventure, but — and they were quite explicit about this — for meaning. Remember that this was 1962, when pundits were saying that rebellion was done in America, that dissent was over, and that kids were interested in nothing but conformity and money. So imagine how it sounded when, in an episode called ‘Go Read the River,’ an engineer, John Larch, said: ‘Somewhere, somehow, a simple beautiful thing, a single morality, a single set of standards was smashed like an atom into 10 million separate pieces. Now, what’s right for a man can be wrong for his business. And what’s right for his business can be wrong for his country. And what’s right for his country can be wrong for the world.’” [67]

  Route 66 earned a reputation as a “dark” show — this was before “edgy” became an adjective and well before it became a cliché — not just because of the personal changes its creators were undergoing, but because of those that were pounding away at the country. The 1950s were dead; the 1960s brought Camelot, assassinations, the blossoming of the Civil Rights struggle, and the emergence of an unholy war in Vietnam. America was maturing. Confirmed Silliphant, “We [dealt] with ideas which were out there on the cutting edge at the time and, with few exceptions, we never had a moment’s problem with CBS. With two notable exceptions: ‘The Newborn,’ which I wrote, and ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ (aired as “To Walk with a Serpent”) an episode written by Leonard Freeman, who was producing for us that season. Leonard’s story savaged the John Birch Society and it turned out that somebody high up in the General Motors hierarchy (Chevrolet bought half the show for the entire four years) must have been a Bircher, because all hell broke loose. Jim Aubrey (head of CBS) flew out to meet with Bert and me and demanded we withdraw the episode, but Bert pulled the contract, which CBS had signed, granting us total creative freedom, the network’s power [being] only that of not exhibiting the episode, but having to pay for it whether they approved it or not. So we won that one. Other than these two incidents — and one more beef about the violence in an LA street gang story I wrote (‘Most Vanquished, Most Victorious’) — and we won that one too — we sailed through the seasons.”

  Ultimately, the series was a catharsis for Silliphant as well as a crash course in writing, something that came easily to him — perhaps too easily for him to respect his own talent. That changed when he looked back in his later years.

  “I have always felt that the most original — and, if I may be permitted the conceit, the most effective in the sense of touching the feelings of many, many other people — writing I have down in the filmed media was done in the period 1960 to 1964 when I wrote the majority of the one-hour Route 66 filmed-on-location shows for CBS. These shows caught the American psyche of that period about as accurately as it could be caught. I wrote all of them out of an intense personal motivation, each was a work of passion and conviction. It was actually (if truth be known) a dramatization of my personal four-year psychiatric exhumation of all the shit that was bubbling inside me, and it’s hard to assign that one to another writer. There were few of the stories I wrote for Route 66 during those four years which did not spring out of my own life.”

  A painful case in point was the 100th episode called “The Stone Guest,” which starred Jo Van Fleet as a single woman whose ill-chosen affair with a married man, Lee Phillips, is exposed when they are trapped in a mine cave-in. The episode, which aired on November 7, 1963, “with its bitter attitude toward marriage, is another example,” Silliphant said. “My marriage [to Ednamarie Patella] at that time was a battle zone, so I wrote ‘The Stone Guest’ out of quiet fury.” [68]

  Because the episode holds so much significance, it bears examination. Its inspiration was a fair-sized shouting match the Silliphants were having and, in the middle of it, Silliphant went for his typewriter, saying, “Wait a minute, I’ve got to get this down.” The marriage lasted nine more months. In the story, Tod and Linc get jobs in a Colorado mining town: Linc in the mine and Tod, atypically, working stage crew for the local opera company’s production of Don Giovanni. When a mine cave-i
n traps a spinster, Hazel Quine (Jo Van Fleet) with the town’s Lothario, Ben Belden (Lee Philips), the mismatched pair is forced to confront their pasts while hoping rescue workers can save them. At the same time, Belden’s neglected wife, Nora (Marion Ross), is giving birth to their daughter alone; his school-aged son, David, has fought to uphold his father’s unwarranted honor in a playground brawl; and Hazel is strangely liberated by the desperation.

  It’s a busy script but all of its plotlines converge in the need to face Truth (in the existential sense). Did Silliphant model the philandering, cost-cutting, belligerent Belden on himself? Did he use Ednamarie as a template for the lonely, desperate, self-sacrificing Hazel? Or is Beldon’s abandoned wife closer to his sense of her (Nora confesses to having babies as a way to hold onto her husband)? In their time trapped, Belden comes to see Hazel as a redeemer for his misspent life, but what will he come back to on the surface? Did Silliphant regard forced confinement as the only way to reconcile the events that were destroying his marriage? The mine collapse is the result of Belden’s shoddy construction; was Silliphant accepting blame for his shoddy marriage (that nevertheless produced two children)? Tod’s explanation to David of the plot of Don Giovanni is a way of explaining (though not excusing) the character of David’s father; was Silliphant trying to reconcile with his own children? In the end, Belden sets off a huge dynamite charge in an attempt to free himself and Hazel, although “free” can be taken both as enabling them to leave the mine as well as to end their haunted lives. It turns out to be the latter.

  On August 13, 1964, Ednamarie (40) sued Silliphant (45) for divorce, claiming that, since 1960, he had spent “over $100,000” on “a dozen” women with whom he was having extramarital affairs. [69] The divorce was granted on September 30, 1964, but the details of the settlement would drag on for years. Even after the decree, Ednamarie harbored resentment not only for Silliphant but for their daughter. The tension grew to the point where, according to sources, she once attempted suicide by cutting her wrists, not in her own bathtub, as might be expected, but in their daughter, Dayle’s.

  As usual, Silliphant worked out this conflict on the page. “This is the truest thing I will ever tell you,” he said of his Route 66 episode, “Kiss the Maiden, All Forlorn.” “Why did I write it? Because my sixteen-year-old daughter announced one morning she was going to become a Catholic nun — the order of BVM — Blessed Virgin Mary — in Peoria. [70] Gulp! And she did. I had to deal with this. It was not easy. So I researched the subject. Until that moment I had never, never talked to a nun. I wouldn’t have known what to say to one. The outfits intimidated me. But by going to several orders and learning, I found that the Church is not out hustling prospective sisters. You really have to have a calling to arrive at the decision my daughter had arrived at. This gave me new understanding and gave a credibility to the script, which had I written it from the outside, rather than out of my own anguish at having to surrender a daughter to an institution I had always regarded with distrust, still bearing in mind the screams of those who died during the Inquisition, of all the hundreds of thousands of Jews who went to their deaths, unprotected by Rome, would have not had the power this finished episode had.” [71]

  Midway through the third season, George Maharis left the series. Various statements at the time attributed his departure to displeasure with the grueling production schedule, relentless travel, and health issues. [72] Although his replacement, Glenn Corbett, was also attractive and competent, there was no way he could slip into the backstory that Maharis and Milner enjoyed, and the series was canceled after its fourth season.

  Suddenly it was over. Not just Route 66, but the way in which television was produced. The networks had long bristled at putting up the money for the shows they ran only to have the producers, and not them, control the content. And if not the producers, the sponsors. Beginning with FCC Commissioner Newton B. Minow’s 1961 observation that television was a “vast wasteland” of sub-level programming, both critics and politicians went on the attack — critics for quality, and politicians, as they are wont to do, for publicity.

  “[Television] changed,” Silliphant noted,” because Senator Dodd [73] brought those ridiculous accusations against the networks back in the sixties that we were corrupting the youth of America and we were doing all kinds of naughty things and making people violent and inspiring crime by our comic strip stuff. The networks, instead of fighting that, kissed ass. They let it happen for a very good reason: they wanted control of the programming.” [74]

  And they got it. Before long, network executives whose hands-on experience had been limited to changing the channel were demanding to approve not just finished teleplays but story ideas, casting, locations, production crew, and even the costumes and wallpaper. Instead of deciding in one pitch meeting what script to write, the process began to take weeks. Focus groups replaced intuition and experience. Inspiration and diversity suffered. Today, despite having 500+ channels, television content is controlled and engineered by six huge communications conglomerates, none of which, thanks to FCC deregulation, has any responsibility to serve the public.

  As popular as it was, Route 66 had to end somewhere, which it did with a two-parter called “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” on March 6 and 13, 1964. Tod and Linc wind up in Tampa, Florida among an eccentric family (including Chill Wills, Nina Foch, Patrick O’Neal, and Barbara Eden) fighting over an estate. Having toured the country for four years, the pair head off to Houston, but independently, their odyssey completed and they, themselves, presumably now fit to face the world.

  As uncertain as their futures might have been, the fate of Route 66 became even more vague. After a summer of reruns, it faded from network schedules and went into syndication on local stations. Through a succession of sales, swaps, and licenses that would make a Gordian knot look frayed, Bert Leonard, as best as can be determined, sold off various aspects of the show — rerun, foreign, remake, feature film, home video — whenever he needed money. Likewise, Silliphant may or may not have sold Leonard his ownership shares (but not his residual rights as co-creator and writer); the paperwork seems to have vanished along with a clear chain of title.

  The location of the original negatives, so essential to preservation, has also been hard to pin down. For years, tapes of episodes were at a premium; many circulated on Betamax and VHS among fans who recorded the show on rerun and syndication. Even Silliphant, who presumably had access to pristine courtesy copies, had a hard time prying them from CBS, and his correspondence includes letters reminding friends who’d borrowed them to be sure to bring them back. [75] His collection includes off-air dubs like anyone else. Exhaustive research by television historian Stephen Bowie [76] reveals that, toward the end of his life, Leonard transferred his copyrights to former attorney James Tierney in settlements of debts totaling $1.5 million. The video rights to Route 66 were carved out to the distribution company Shout! Factory, after an earlier gambit with CBS Home Video, and Naked City went to Image Entertainment. The TV remake rights to Route 66 were licensed by Columbia Pictures Television, which produced a reboot in 1993 that aired on NBC. The new series starred James Wilder (“Nick Lewis”) who, like Tod Stiles, inherits his father’s Corvette and picks up a drifter, Dan Cortese (“Arthur Clark”), and together they have adventures. More precisely, they had four adventures, because NBC pulled the series when it didn’t immediately catch on. Since then, the rights have been in flux. [77] Sony claimed TV distribution rights under license from CBS; for a while they were under lien by Leonard’s attorney James B. Tierney; [78] in 2007 they were acquired by Kirk Hallam of Roxbury Entertainment; [79] and in 2011 Hallam disclosed that he was in partnership with the show’s video distributor, Shout! Factory, on a TV remake and possibly a feature film. [80] He also had acquired the finegrain dupe negatives (“They’re in vaults all up and down the east coast”) but decided against using the original negatives that were still in Sony’s vaults, a choice that created controversy within fa
ndom when he issued the first DVD sets through Shout!. [81]

  Bert Leonard fell on hard times in his later years but he never gave up; like Route 66, the life was an open road full of promise. He produced a number of TV movies and feature films. One of his pet projects was River of Gold, a Rin-Tin-Tin story that parked briefly at Disney before the budget scared the studio off. By the 1990s, at financial odds and in declining health, he lived for a while with stunt coordinator-director Max Kleven, then his daughter Victoria, then his daughter Gina. Soon the cancer that had taken his larynx returned and ate away at the rest of his body, but not his spirit. He died on October 14, 2006 at the age of 84.

  Route 66 remains the iconic television series of the 1960s. Its strength is that, like the highway itself, one does not need to follow the series from the start in order to enjoy its drama. Each episode is a separate experience, and the sum of them is a portrait of a nation in transition, aimless perhaps, but always headed into the future with a seductive blend of optimism and pragmatism — not to mention a golden era when gasoline was 29¢ a gallon.

  5: Under the Hood

  On Stirling Silliphant’s pilot script dated October 27, 1959, appears the title The Searchers. While there has been speculation that he later changed it to avoid confusion with John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece, he and Bert Leonard might just as accurately have called it The Seekers if that’s where their minds were headed. But Interstate 66, which had opened in 1926 and ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, was called variously the Mother Road, Will Rogers Highway, and the Main Street of America. Route 66 was a ribbon of both commerce and romance, the lifeline of a nation. Even when the show veered away from its namesake and into other cities, its mission stayed intact. Travelers drove it to the beat of Bobby Troup’s 1946 hit song “(Get Your Kicks) On Route 66,” first recorded by Nat “King” Cole. But it was Nelson Riddle’s jazzy piano and string version, orchestrated by Gil Grau, that glided into television history.