The Howling Man

by Beaumont, Charles

  CHARLES BEAUMONT: SELECTED STORIES edited by Roger Anker

  CHARLES BEAUMONT: SELECTED STORIES copyright 1988 by Roger Anker

  Illustrations copyright 1988 by Peter Scanlan

  All Rights Reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  Dark Harvest / P.O. Box 941 / Arlington Heights, IL / 60006

  Limited Edition: ISBN-0-913165-22-0

  The Publishers would like to express their gratitude to the following people. Thank you: Dawn Austin, Kathy Jo Camacho, Tony Camacho, Stanley Mikol, Phyllis Mikol, Wayne Sommers, Dr. Stan Gurnick PhD, Tony Hodes, Bertha Curl, Kurt Scharrer, Ken Morris, Luis Trevino, Raymond, Teresa and Mark Stadalsky, Ken and Linda Fotos, Tom Pas, and Ann Cameron Williams.

  Thanks are due to the following for their help in bringing this book to publication:

  Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Howard Browne, Roger Corman, Saul David, Harlan Ellison, Charles E. Fritch, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, Chad Oliver, Frank M. Robinson, Ray Russell, Jerry Sohl and John Tomerlin.

  For friendship, advice and support:

  Cathy, Elizabeth and Gregory Beaumont, Larry Anker, Bill Farley, Edward Gorman, Dean R. Koontz, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert R. McCammon, Dave McDonnell, Paul Mikol, Scot Stadalsky, William Relling Jr., Darrell, Donna and Jason Rossi, Peter Straub, Robert Vaillancourt, Stanley Wiater and Douglas E. Winter.

  And a very special thanks to the following for the endless hours of driving, interviewing, conversing, all-night coffee shops and encouragement:

  Christopher Beaumont, Richard Christian Matheson, William F. Nolan and Dennis Etchison. In memory of

  Nick and Ria Anker

  and of

  Chuck and Helen Beaumont

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION by Roger Anker

  * * *

  Though best remembered for his short fiction and nostalgic essays in Playboy, teleplays for The Twilight Zone; and his screenplay adaptation, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, Charles Beaumont's creative talents have been evidenced in such diverse fields as science fiction, horror, whimsy, crime-suspense, and film criticism.

  His prolific output also reflects his many interests and hobbies, including motor racing, music, hi-fidelity equipment, cartooning, and travel.

  Tall, lean and bespectacled, Beaumont was always full of a thousand ideas and a thousand projects, and approached them all with what was fantastic energy. In a career which spanned a brief thirteen years, he'd written and sold ten books, seventyfour short stories, thirteen screenplays (nine of which were produced), two dozen articles and profiles, forty comic stories, fourteen columns, and over seventy teleplays.

  Some of his books were inspired by his adventurous personal experiences. Omnibus of Speed and When Engines Roar (both co-edited with William F. Nolan) are about auto racing; The Intruder, a novel concerning Southern integration in the early sixties, was drawn from his extensive research on the subject.

  Beaumont could never write fast enough to keep up with his ideas. A selfeducated man, learning for him was never confined to a classroom; life had much to teach.

  He was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago on January 2, 1929, and grew up on that city's North side.

  Of his early childhood, he wrote, "Football, baseball and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world, to the exclusion of Aesop, the brothers Grimm, Dr. Doolittle and even Bullfinch. The installation by my parents of 'library wallpaper' in the house ("A room-full of books for only 70~ a yard!") convinced me that literature was on the way out anyway, so I lived in illiterate contentment until laid low by spinal meningitis. This forced me to less strenous forms of entertainment. I discovered Oz; then Burroughs; then Poe--and the jig was up. Have been reading ever since, feeling no pain."

  The only child of Charles H. and Letty Nutt, young Charlie Nutt was "fairly outgoing," yet very sensitive about his name. He once expressed to boyhood acquaintance Frank M. Robinson (co-author of The Glass Inferno and The Gold Crew) his hatred for the continuous name teasing he'd endured: ". . . the kids in school would call him 'Ches' or 'Wall' or would ask 'Is your father some kind of a nut?" He later changed his name to Charles McNutt, but when that didn't satisfy the situation, he changed it finally, legally, to Beaumont.

  At an early age, he'd often "haunt" the editorial offices of the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company--publishers of Amazing Stories and other pulp magazines--and, from an outer office, would gaze at the group of employees typing busily. To young Charlie Nutt, these people were giants, editing manuscripts, and building a small empire, at that time, in Chicago. "I used to stand there and watch them slamming out 10,000 words a day," he once wrote. "They were Gods to me . . ." Ironically, his first professional sale, "The Devil, You Say?", would appear in the January, 1951 issue of Amazing Stories.

  At age twelve, mid-way through his two year bout with meningitis, Beaumont's parents sent him to what they considered to be a better climate. In July, 1960, he told the San Diego Union, "I lived with five widowed aunts who ran a rooming house near a train depot in the state of Washington. Each night we had the ritual of gathering around the stove and there I'd hear stories about the strange death of each of their husbands."

  During this period in Everett, he published his own fan magazine, Utopia, and soon became an avid fan of science fiction, writing letters to almost every magazine of this genre. By the time he was thirteen he had broken into print 25 times in almost as many magazines with these resumes and editorial criticisms.

  His interests then shifted from typewriter to drawing board and his illustrations began to appear in a number of pulp magazines under the brush name E.T. Beaumont. His first cartoon, done in collaboration with his friend and fellow artist, Ronald Clyne, appeared in Fantastic Adventures in October, 1943.

  In the early months of 1944, Charlie McNutt turned to drama and radio work, beginning as a featured actor on "Drama Workshop," a West coast show, and soon moved on to write and direct his own spot, "Hollywood Hi-Lights," a 15 minute show of movieland chatter and shop talk. His formal education was sparse, of which, he wrote, "[I] barely nosed through the elementary grades and gained a certain notoriety in high school as a wastrel, dreamer, could-do-the-work-if-he'd-only-tryer and general lunkhead." He left high school a year short of graduation for a four month period of Army service (Infantry) before he was medically discharged for a bad back. This led to his enrollment into the Bliss-Hayden Acting School in California under the GI Bill. After starring in a local version of the Hecht-MacArthur play, Broadway, he was signed by Universal Studio as an actor, and was scheduled for a co-starring role in a Universal-International film. But despite much "hullabaloo in film magazines and newspapers," this never materializied, and Beaumont reluctantly gave up a theatrical career for one in commercial art. Soon he was sketching cartoons for MGM's animation studio and working as a part-time illustrator for FPCI (Fantasy Publishing Company) in Los Angeles. Beaumont later wrote, "[I] worked hard, managed to crack most of the pulp magazines with illustrations, graduated to book jackets and slick magazine cartoons. But [was] forced, finally, to admit total lack of any real talent in the field."

  When this failed, Beaumont turned to writing.

  It was in the summer of 1946, that he met twenty-six-year-old Ray Bradbury (author of numerous screenplays, teleplays, essays, poems, and works of fiction, including Farenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles) in Fowler Brothers Book Store in downtown Los Angeles, and began talking about his comic collection. Remembers Bradbury: "He said he had a lot of Steve Canyon, and I told him I had a lot of Prince Valiants and some Hannes Bok photographs; so we decided to get together.

  "Out of that beginning, of our mutual interest in comic strips, a friendship blossomed."
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  Bradbury began to read Beaumont's short fiction and quickly became a major influence in Beaumont's life--a mentor. "When I read the first one, I said: 'Yes. Very definitely. You are a writer," recalls Bradbury. "It showed immediately. It's not like so many people who come to you with stories and you say, 'Well, they're okay,' You know, if they keep working they'll make it. Chuck's talent was obvious from that very first story."

  For reasons of economic survival, Beaumont moved to Mobile, Alabama in 1948, where his father had obtained employment for him as a clerk for the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad. It was there that he met Helen Broun, and wrote in a notebook: "She's incredible. Intelligent and beautiful. This is the girl I'm going to marry!" A year later, they were married and moved to California. Their son, Christopher, was born in December of 1950; they would later parent three more children: Catherine, Elizabeth, and Gregory.

  As Beaumont's early writing brought him little more than rejection slips, he worked at a number of jobs, including that of a piano player ("Studied piano for six years, decided [I] couldn't squeak by owing to immensely talented right hand and nowhere left") and, in 1949, a tracing clerk for California Motor Express, where he met John Tomerlin. When the two discovered they shared a passion for words (as well as a skill for "geting out of work"), they quickly cultivated what was to become a lifelong friendship.

  In mid-1951, another special friendship was made when Beaumont met a young, struggling writer by the name of Richard Matheson (who, in addition to many screenplays, teleplays and short stories, is known for works such as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man). As their families became very close, there soon developed between Beaumont and Matheson a constant interchange of ideas, out of which a number of varied and imaginative stories would emerge. Says writer Dennis Etchison (Darkside and Cutting Edge), who'd attended Beaumont's UCLA writing class in 1963, "It's pretty difficult to consider Beaumont and Matheson separately because as short story writers they came out at the same time; they worked together, they both came out of an influence from Bradbury, and they both had such a close friendship. I think there are great similarities, tradeoffs, and variations between their stories. They were just two of a kind that came up at one time."

  As their careers grew, Beaumont and Matheson acted as "spurs" to one another. "He and I, in a very nice way, of course, were very competitive," says Matheson. "At first, I was a little ahead of him in sales. I'd call him on the phone and say, 'I just sold a collection of short stories to Bantam,' and he'd say, 'Thanks a lot, thanks a lot,' and hang up. [laughs] He wasn't serious about it though. But he caught up to me. My first collection of stories [Born of Man and Woman, 1954] spurred him on to his first collection [The Hunger and Other Stories, 1957]. Then we both did a so-called 'straight' novel just about the same time [Beaumont's The Intruder, 1959 and Matheson's The Beardless Warriors, 1960]."

  But the success which was to come their way, was still in the future. For now, Beaumont was working hard to break through. Says Ray Bradbury, "I was at Universal in 1952 on my very first screen project, It Came From Outer Space. And Chuck, coincidentally, was working there in the music department, handling a multilith machine, copying the musical scores. I would see him and have lunch with him there at the studio and encourage him, Those were hard years for him; he didn't want to be in the music department doing all this 'stupid' work. He wanted to write."

  During this period, Beaumont was writing feverishly, but meeting with little success. His agent at the time, Forrest J. Ackerman, recalls: "I made approximately 78 submissions for him, but nothing happened for quite sometime."

  When fired from Universal in June of 1953, Beaumont took the plunge into fulltime writing.

  Late 1953 saw the Beaumonts in disastrous financial shape; Chuck's typewriter was in hock and the gas had been shut off in their apartment. Writer William F. Nolan (co-author of Logan's Run and biographer of Dashiell Hammett) remembers Beaumont "breaking the seal and turning it back on; Chris required heat, and damn the gas company! Chris got what he needed."

  Nolan had met Beaumont, briefly, in 1952 at Universal, when introduced by Ray Bradbury. "I recall Chuck's sad face and ink-stained hands. The first Beaumont story had already appeared (in Amazing Stories) and within a few more months, when I saw Chuck again, half a dozen others had been sold. Forry Ackerman got us together early in 1953, and our friendship was immediate and lasting. I found, in Chuck, a warmth, a vitality, an honesty and depth of character which few possess. And, most necessary, a wild, wacky, irreverant sense of humor."

  In February, 1954, Beaumont and Nolan began writing comics for Whitman Publication. Together they turned out ten stories, after which Beaumont sold another thirty to become employed at Whitman as co-editor, where he helped to "guide the destinies of such influential literary figures as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Andy Panda."

  Finally, in September of that year, Beaumont's first major sale appeared in Playboy. "Black Country," a 10,000-word novella about a terminally ill jazzman, is considered by Ray Russell (Playboy editor during the 1950s, and author of many works of fiction, including Incubus and Sardonicus), the best story Playboy ever bought. "Beaumont manages to set up a rhythm and sustain a pitch, a concert pitch--to use a musical term--and sustain that from the very beginning to the very end," says Russell. "It almost never relaxes. You're on a beat throughout the entire story until whhhh, it's over. There are very few stories that have that, by Beaumont or anybody else."

  Playboy soon placed Beaumont on a five-hundred-dollar monthly retainer for first refusal right to his manuscripts, and later listed him as a contributing editor.

  Beaumont had reached the turning point in his career.

  His stories began to appear in the most prestigious magazines in the nation, including Esquire, Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. 1954 also marked the beginning of his career in television when, in April, his teleplay "Masquerade" aired on Four Star Playhouse. In the years to follow, he would write a number of scripts, many in collaboration with Richard Matheson. "For a year or two, we wrote together on all sorts of projects: we did a couple of Have Gun, Will Travels, and old Western series, Buckskin, and there was Philip Marlowe, and the D.A.'s Man. Real crap, most of it," says Matheson, laughingly. "But it was fun, because we had never done this before . . . But eventually we decided that we really didn't need to collaborate, and chose to go our own ways."

  Beaumont's entry into television, coupled with his success at Playboy, soon enabled him to participate in what was to become a new and exciting hobby--auto racing. In February, 1955, Beaumont and Nolan attended their first sports car race in Palm Springs (an event in which actor James Dean was driving, and with whom Beaumont would later share a maintainance pit). The sport instantly became one of the great fascinations of their lives--a fascination which quickly carried over to John Tomerlin as well. "Chuck was marvelous at talking people into doing things they had not thirty seconds before ever dreamed they wanted to do, and suddenly discovered that it was their lifelong ambition," says Tomerlin. "And the next thing you knew, you'd be off and on your way doing it!"

  The trio could soon be found attending and competing in weekend racing events on the West coast, at an average of one event per month, and writing voluminously for motoring journals such as Road & Track, Autosport, The Motor, Sports Car Illustrated, and Autocar. A favorite hangout became the Grand Prix--a Hollywood restaurant which catered to the sports car enthusiast and professional alike, and featured racing music, racing records, and 8mm racing films, which were shown over the walls by multiple projectors. Of their racing abilities, Nolan says: "We weren't great, by any means, but we were fairly good, fairly fast, and totally crazy--which means we weren't afraid of anything."

  Later this year, Beaumont made a major--as well as difficult--decision to act on his growing concern over the way his fiction was being handled by the Forrest Ackerman agency--an agency which dealt, almost exclusively, in science fiction markets. With increasing regularity, Beaumont had fou
nd himself turning toward "mainstream" storytelling and, in July, signed with Don Congdon, of the Harld Matson agency in New York. The move proved to be a beneficial one, and quickly helped in establishing Beaumont's versatility. As Richard Matheson observes, "Chuck had no genre; he was not a science fiction writer, he was not a fantasy writer--although he did write some wonderful science fiction and fantasy stories--he wrote all kinds of fiction. A lot of the stuff he wrote--for Playboy, what have you--was just flat, goodout fiction. Straight fiction. So there's no category. His mind jumped from place to place."

  Beaumont's first short fiction collection, The Hunger and Other Stories (G.P. Putnam's Sons) was released in April of 1957 to favorable reviews. "The first sixteen tales of the book are interesting as instruments which reveal the scope and proclivities of a highly individual mind," says the New York Herald Tribune. "One is impressed by the creative gymnastics of the author . . . But in 'Black Country,' Beaumont, the author, is forgotten . . . Among all the stories it is this extraordinary work that passionately tears into the heart of jazz which gives Mr. Beaumont undeniable stature as an artist."

  In addition to the previously mentioned periodicals, Beaumont's stories--both fiction and non fiction--were appearing in publications as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fortnight, and Rogue. (In Rogue, due to his Playboy commitment, he appeared as "C.B. Lovehill" and "Michael Philips"). Other collections soon followed--Yonder: Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Bantam, 1958), Night Ride and Other Journeys (Bantam, 1960), and The Fiend in You, a Beaumont-edited anthology (Ballantine Books, 1962). In September of 1957, his first novel was published, Run From the Hunter (written in collaboration with John Tomerlin under the joint pseudonym "Keith Grantland").

  Though he employed many writing styles, the distinct Beaumont "signature" was always in evidence. "His writing was brisk and very terse," says Bradbury. "There's a great similarity to John Collier. Collier rubbed off on him, just as Collier rubbed off on me. And it was all to the good: good, short, to the point, imaginative storytelling. A lot of us are Collier's indirect sons, but you learn as the years pass, to shake the influence. But it's certainly there. I also see carryovers from my work in Chuck. It's inevitable, because we were around each other so much. I told him about Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. I think that also shows. And it's all to the good."