Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination

By Nicholas Parisi and Anne Serling

Long before anyone had heard of alien cookbooks, gremlins on the wings of airplanes, or places where pig-faced people are considered beautiful, Rod Serling was the most prestigious writer in American television. As creator, host, and primary writer for The Twilight Zone, Serling became something more: an American icon. When Serling died in 1975, at the age of fifty, he was the most honored, most outspoken, most recognizable, and likely the most prolific writer in television history.

Though best known for The Twilight Zone, Serling wrote over 250 scripts for film and television and won an unmatched six Emmy Awards for dramatic writing for four different series. His filmography includes the acclaimed political thriller Seven Days in May and cowriting the original Planet of the Apes.

In great detail and including never-published insights drawn directly from Serling’s personal correspondence, unpublished writings, speeches, and unproduced scripts, Nicholas Parisi explores Serling’s entire, massive body of work. With a foreword by Serling’s daughter, Anne Serling, Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination is part biography, part videography, and part critical analysis. It is a painstakingly researched look at all of Serling’s work—in and out of The Twilight Zone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496819437

Nicholas Parisi

Nicholas Parisi serves as president of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to preserving and promoting Rod Serling’s legacy. He is a former staff writer and editor for Good Times magazine in Long Island. He has appeared on several television series, radio shows, and podcasts, including CBS’s Inside Edition, Coast to Coast AM, and Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast. He is also an accomplished musician and vocalist, having performed on stage hundreds of times. In 2010, his former band, Arioch, released a CD with the Serling-inspired title Between Light and Shadow on Retrospect Records.

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Introduction

On September 13, 1950, a short-lived television series, Stars over Hollywood, aired a forgettable episode, Grady Everett for the People. It starred Bert Freed as a politician whose ambitions are derailed after the media discover a skeleton in his closet. The teleplay for this half-hour melodrama was credited to Oliver Crawford, who went on to write for dozens of television series, including The Fugitive, Star Trek, and The Outer Limits. More notably, story credit went to a twenty-five-year-old World War II combat veteran named Rod Serling. It was Serling’s first sale to a national television program.

Over the next twenty-five years, more than 250 of Serling’s teleplays and screenplays were produced, and he won an unmatched six Emmy Awards for outstanding dramatic writing for four different series. The plays that earned him the first two of these awards, Kraft Theatre’s Patterns and Playhouse 90’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, stand as landmarks in television’s evolution, and both were later produced as feature films. The mantle in Serling’s Pacific Palisades office eventually became crowded with Writers Guild Awards, Christopher Awards, Sylvania Awards, and the first ever Peabody Award given to a television writer. While earning these accolades, Serling also earned a reputation as a fighter thanks to several well-publicized battles with skittish sponsors and timid network executives over the issue of censorship in television.

The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience, Serling once said. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.¹ When he attempted to fulfill this role by dramatizing virtually any socially relevant issue, the powers that be interfered. When they interfered, Serling fought back. The sponsors and network executives always won these battles, but Serling always went down fighting. In the process, he earned a nickname: Television’s Angry Young Man. When Rod Serling died on June 28, 1975, at the age of fifty, he was television’s most honored, most recognizable, most outspoken, and likely most prolific writer.

And in the middle of his extraordinary career, he created one of the most influential series in television history.

Asked for his thoughts on Serling’s legacy, writer Richard Matheson once said, "Well, it’s a shame if it’s The Twilight Zone."² Though it may overstate the case, Matheson’s point is valid: The Twilight Zone could be overshadowed by the rest of Serling’s career almost as easily as vice versa. This fact alone makes Serling’s career unusual if not unique. Few other writers—and certainly no other television writer—produced a body of work that can be weighed in quite the way that Serling’s can. Few other writers can place on one side of a scale a creation as weighty as The Twilight Zone and place on the other side of that scale a body of work as significant as the rest of Serling’s output.

The fact that Serling is identified almost solely in relation to The Twilight Zone testifies to the gigantic imprint the series has made on the pop culture landscape. The Twilight Zone aired its final original episode on June 19, 1964. Over the next five decades, the series spawned a feature film, two revival television series, novels, short story collections, multiple comic book series, a long-running magazine, and several lengthy scholarly analyses. Offering superlatives to describe The Twilight Zone would be superfluous. Serling created and hosted the series, served as its executive producer, wrote a seemingly impossible 92 of the series’s 156 episodes, and won two of his six Emmy Awards for his work on the show. If The Twilight Zone were the only thing Serling accomplished in his career, his legacy would be a brilliant one.

As monumental as The Twilight Zone is, however, one reason it has dominated Serling’s oeuvre is merely a fluke of timing, a by-product of television’s ephemeral nature during the era in which Serling did much of his best work. This era is commonly known as the Golden Age of Live Television.

To write for television during this Golden Age was often like writing in sand at the shoreline before the tide rushes in. During the early 1950s, when Serling was a regular contributor to dramatic anthologies such as Studio One, Kraft Theatre, and Playhouse 90, live broadcasts were seldom preserved. And if a live performance were preserved by the kinescope process (by filming a video monitor during the performance), this kinescope was often discarded after it had served its purpose. One Serling contemporary, writer Paddy Chayefsky, called the teleplay the most perishable item known to man.³ By this definition, it is almost certain that no man’s work perished more than Rod Serling’s. Many of the shows produced from Serling’s scripts no longer exist on film.

Dozens of Serling’s lesser-known shows do exist, but most are available only as viewing copies at broadcasting museums and film archives. Outside of The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and a handful of feature films (including the original Planet of the Apes), relatively little of Serling’s work has been released commercially, and most has rarely, if ever, aired on television since the initial broadcasts. For even the most devoted fan, at least half of Serling’s work is either unseen or impossible to see. To expect these shows to compete for attention with a television series that airs in twenty-four-hour marathons every New Year’s Eve and Fourth of July would be unfair.

This is not to imply that Serling’s non–Twilight Zone work was uniformly brilliant—the truth is far from that. But reading or viewing all of the available Serling biographical material might create the equally unjustified perception that Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight are the only worthwhile shows Serling wrote outside of The Twilight Zone. Patterns, Serling’s still-relevant portrait of cutthroat corporate America, made him a star in 1955. The following year, Requiem, the heartrending story of a broken-down fighter struggling to maintain his dignity at the end of his boxing career, confirmed Serling’s lofty status. Both of these shows are justifiably acclaimed. But just as The Twilight Zone overshadows the rest of Serling’s career, these two shows have come to disproportionately dominate any discussion of Serling’s non–Twilight Zone output.

Given the number of lost episodes and the relative scarcity of Serling-scripted productions that have been commercially released, the picture of Rod Serling’s career has been unavoidably incomplete. But it has also been more incomplete than necessary. This volume is presented as remedy.

Button designed by the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. Sketch by B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart.

CHAPTER 1

From Binghamton to the Battlefield and Back

All writing is, in part, perhaps unconsciously or subconsciously, a reflection of a writer’s personality. It’s certainly a reflection of his views as to human values. God knows it’s a reflection of his political thinking, for the most part.

—ROD SERLING, 1971

Anyone who has paid attention to even a portion of Rod Serling’s work will likely have noticed that there are settings Serling frequently visited, character types he repeatedly examined, plot devices he often utilized, and themes that recurred. The battlefield and the boxing ring are the two most common settings in Serling’s body of work. The athlete (often but not always a boxer) who must face the fact that he is past his prime was a favorite character type for Serling to dramatize. If an athlete were inappropriate for the type of story Serling wished to tell, he might substitute a burned-out business executive. Time travel was a favorite plot device, especially if it could provide the burned-out executive a second chance at a less stressful and more fulfilling life. Recurring Serling-esque themes include age versus youth, sensitivity versus insensitivity, individual morality versus mob mentality, and the destructive effects of prejudice. Connecting fictional elements to a writer’s biography can be risky, but in Serling’s case, doing so is relatively straightforward. As director John Frankenheimer once said, There was a lot of Rod in everything he ever wrote.¹ Identifying these biographical touchstones requires starting literally at the beginning.

Rodman Edward Serling was a Christmas baby, born on December 25, 1924, in Syracuse, New York, to Sam and Esther Serling, who already had one son, Robert. Though the Serlings were a Reform Jewish family, they celebrated Christmas, and Serling maintained a childlike enthusiasm for the holiday throughout his life. This fondness for Christmas often manifested in his work, from one of his earliest teleplays, Christmas for Sweeney; to a classic Twilight Zone episode, The Night of the Meek; to Night Gallery’s The Messiah on Mott Street. In each, Serling proclaims in unabashedly sentimental terms that Christmas can be a time of magic. And for Serling, the most effective way of illustrating this magic was to set it amid harsh, Dickensian reality.

Serling’s boyhood home, 67 Bennett Avenue, Binghamton, New York. Photo by the author.

In Christmas for Sweeney, Serling presents a cynical reporter, Mike Sweeney, who has lost faith in the spirit of Christmas as a result of desperate stories he has covered in his impoverished neighborhood, including one involving an old man who was found starved to death on Christmas Eve. In The Night of the Meek, Art Carney plays Henry Corwin, an alcoholic department store Santa Claus who drinks to dull the heartache of living in a dirty rooming house on a street filled with hungry kids and shabby people where the only thing that comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve is more poverty. In The Messiah on Mott Street, Serling offers a rare combination of a Christmas and Chanukah fable about an old Jewish man’s belief that the Messiah will visit the squalor of Mott Street before he dies. In each, Serling asks us to consider people whom Corwin would describe in The Night of the Meek as the hopeless ones and the dreamless ones. For these people, Serling’s idea of Christmas (or Chanukah) magic can come in the form of simple goodwill from friends, which restores Mike Sweeney’s faith; a magical bag delivered from The Twilight Zone that transforms Henry Corwin into a real-life Santa Claus; or a visit from the Messiah with a message that sometimes God remembers the tenements. In each, Serling indulges his wish that the meek truly will inherit the earth.

When Serling was not yet two years old, his family relocated to Binghamton, seventy miles south of Syracuse. Battlefields and boxing rings may be Serling’s two most common physical settings, but in a Serling script, Binghamton literally or figuratively is nearly always in the dramatic mix on some level.

Everybody has to have a hometown, Serling wrote. Binghamton’s mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that’s familiar because that’s where you grew up. When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that’s one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I’ve still got a hometown. This, nobody’s gonna take away from me.² Serling’s widow, Carol, admitted, I think sometimes he had a not-so-totally realistic memory of his childhood in Binghamton. But his memories were idyllic!³

His memories may have been idyllic, but when dramatizing these memories, Serling never overlooked one element in the definition of nostalgia: pain. In literal terms, one cannot feel nostalgic without pain. The memory of an idyllic past is inseparable from a painful, irreconcilable yearning for that past. This theme of severe homesickness, perhaps more than any other, pervades Serling’s body of work.

Every writer has certain special loves, certain special hang-ups, certain special preoccupations and predilections, he said. In my case, it’s a hunger to be young again. A desperate hunger to go back to where it all began.⁴ Serling’s protagonists gave voice to this hunger repeatedly throughout his career, perhaps most famously in Walking Distance, a first-season episode of The Twilight Zone. Walking Distance starred Gig Young as Martin Sloan, Serling’s archetypal, overstressed New York City executive, who visits his hometown and discovers that he has traveled backward in time. He meets himself as a young boy and implores the younger version of himself to cherish his childhood while it lasts. There won’t be any more band concerts, he tells his former self. No more cotton candy. Though drenched in melancholy, the episode ends on a somewhat optimistic note, with Martin’s father suggesting that there are band concerts and cotton candy in Martin’s future if he stops living in the past long enough to look for them.

Six years before Walking Distance, however, James Dean was the cipher for Serling’s desire to return to Binghamton in an episode of Kraft Television Theatre, A Long Time till Dawn. In it, Dean plays Joe Harris, a mentally unstable young man whose volatile temper tends to get him into trouble, especially when he’s in the big city, away from his quiet hometown of Flemingsburg, New Jersey. Harris has so idealized Flemingsburg that he calls it another name for heaven. After his release from prison, he wants nothing more than to return there and own a gas station with his wife. Have you ever been hungry to come to a place? he asks. So hungry that when you took a breath it hurts you inside? Well, that’s the way I feel about this place. Serling’s longing for his hometown was often accompanied by a more generic subtext pitting the wholesomeness of small towns against the corrupting influence of big cities.

During his years at Binghamton High School, the totality of Serling’s literary experience consisted of editing the school’s newspaper and yearbook (both called The Panorama) and publishing an occasional editorial in their pages. Serling was active in drama clubs, a passionate speaker, and an award-winning member of the debate team. Many of his friends and associates (including his first mentor, Helen Foley, who taught him public speaking in junior high school and remained a lifelong friend) believed that if he ever became famous, it would be as an actor or a stand-up comedian. But any aspirations he had toward stardom or anything else were delayed. Though Serling had been accepted at his brother’s alma mater, Ohio’s Antioch College, World War II intervened. He enlisted in the US Army the day after graduating from Binghamton Central High School. He was five feet, four inches tall and weighed 119 pounds. He was barely eighteen years old.

Serling had published editorials in The Panorama extolling the US war effort and encouraging his fellow students to buy war bonds, and he had considered dropping out of school to enlist in the army until a teacher talked him out of the idea. He listed US Army Air Corps as his future plans in the 1941 Binghamton Central High School yearbook. He was enthusiastic about the opportunity to serve and set the lofty goal of joining the recently formed 11th Airborne Division. Robert Serling was not surprised by his brother’s determination to become a paratrooper. As he recalled in 1978, There was some kind of compulsion in him to do something that the ordinary kid wouldn’t do.… If he didn’t go into the paratroops he probably would have joined the navy and gone into the submarine service. Whatever branch of service was the most dangerous, Rod would pick.⁵

Though his short stature was a significant obstacle, Serling ultimately got his wish and was assigned to the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne. While the danger in parachuting out of an airplane may have compelled him, the infantry part of his unit’s designation should have repelled him. In the role of a traditional infantry, the men of the 511th saw major combat in the Philippines, first during the fierce battle to retake the island of Leyte, which the Japanese had conquered in 1942.

Private Rodman E. Serling. Courtesy of Anne Serling; photo by Julie Golden.

By September 1944, Japan was losing the war, and an Allied victory in the Philippines would prove a crucial, perhaps decisive blow. The 11th Airborne underwent nearly six months of training in New Guinea in intense preparation for the kind of jungle warfare they would soon face. Beginning October 17, 1944, American troops swarmed the island. By November 2, US forces, with the aid of Filipino guerrillas fighting for their independence, had taken control of the valleys of Leyte’s coastlines and forced the Japanese to withdraw to the rugged Mahonag Mountains at the island’s center. The 11th Airborne Division landed on Leyte on November 18, 1944. One week later, the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, a little more than two thousand men, began a trek across this mountain range, a journey that Serling and every other surviving member of the 511th forever remembered as thirty days of hell.

Down here there are no Ten Commandments

And a man can raise a thirst

Here live the outcasts of Civilization

Life’s victims at their worst.

We have but one consolation,

And that to you I shall tell,

When we die we’ll all go to heaven,

Because we’ve done our hitch in hell.

—From New Guinea Nightmare,

written by Rod Serling while in the US Army

The 511th’s mission was to gain control of the trails and passes that led through the western range of the mountains, to destroy all enemy forces encountered, and ultimately to join up with American forces from the 7th Division, which was advancing toward the Ormoc Valley on the island’s northwest coast. As an infantry unit, the 511th normally traveled light, but the treacherous terrain and the sometimes dangerously narrow mountain paths meant that the unit was traveling even lighter than usual. Rations and supplies were kept to a bare minimum. Food was constantly scarce; for one ten-day stretch, they had none at all. Contending with incessant rain, which seemed to transform the entire world to mud, the men of the 511th fought their way across the mountains, finally emerging in Ormoc on Christmas Day 1944. Serling published his account of the experience in 1963, somewhat incongruously in Good Housekeeping Magazine:

The 511th got baptized in a ceremony that took one month of daily battle and desperate and constant hunger, until—on the twenty-fourth of December—it had finally defeated its brave and desperate enemy to push on past the last block and survey Ormoc Bay on the other side of the mountain.

A long line of men rested along the sides of the jungle trail.… We lay there with a resignation to the wet, to fatigue, and to a neutral awareness that we breathed and could walk and that ten miles down the mountain there would be sleep and food. A nineteen-year-old Second Looie got up to his feet and spoke through the first beard he’d ever worn.

All right—on your feet. Let’s move out.

We rose—the packs, the ammo belts, the weaponry, all fused to us like extensions of our bodies, the weight so constant that it was all part of us—and we started to plod slowly through the ankle-deep mud … a long line of dirty, bearded sameness.

Rod Serling on …

CHRISTMAS

Christmas is about more than barging up and down department store aisles and pushing people out of the way. Christmas is another thing, finer than that. Richer, finer, truer. And it should come with patience and love, charity, compassion.

A word to the wise, whether their concern be pediatrics or geriatrics, whether they crawl on hands and knees and wear diapers or walk with a cane and comb their beards. There is a wondrous magic to Christmas, and there is a special power reserved for little people. In short, there is nothing mightier than the meek.

—The Night of the Meek, The Twilight Zone

Rod Serling’s Christmas-themed shows:

Christmas for Sweeney, Stars over Hollywood

Law Nine Concerning Christmas, The Storm

They Call Them the Meek, Chrysler Medallion Theatre

The Happy Headline, Campbell Soundstage

The Night of the Meek, The Twilight Zone

Five Characters in Search of an Exit, The Twilight Zone

Changing of the Guard, The Twilight Zone

Carol for Another Christmas (television movie)

The Messiah on Mott Street, Night Gallery

And then somebody far up the line stopped dead, and there was a whispered message that went down past the ranks. Each man froze and held his breath because any whisper passed down from up front meant a machine gun or a pocket of Japanese or a mined trail or any one of a dozen other reminders that there was a war here and we were a part of it. But this particular message was nothing less than an incredible jar to memory—a reminder of a different sort. The whispered voice of the man in front of me said, It’s Christmas.⁶

Rod Serling now had one more reason to regard Christmas as sacred. This one was also his twentieth birthday.

Barely one month later, the 511th was transported to Mindoro Island and made its first combat jump on Tagaytay Ridge, Luzon. The jump was mishandled and could have been disastrous. One of the jumpmasters jumped his men prematurely, causing his men to miss their landing zone and setting off a chain of premature jumps and missed targets. Several troops were injured, but there were no fatalities.⁷

From the muddy jungles of Leyte, the 511th now found itself fighting through city streets, house to house, building to building. In Luzon, Serling killed a Japanese soldier standing near third base on a baseball diamond and came close to getting killed. As a Japanese soldier took aim at Serling, who was close enough to see the rifle and think that his life was over, another American soldier shot and killed the enemy.

In September 1945, after the Japanese surrender but before Serling was sent home and discharged, he received devastating news from the Red Cross: his father, Sam, had died of a heart attack at age fifty-two. Serling requested but was denied permission to attend his father’s funeral.

After three years of service, Private Serling returned to Binghamton with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds sustained to his wrist and knee (which left him with a slight limp), and very likely what would now be called posttraumatic stress disorder. He suffered the disorder’s most common symptoms—flashbacks, nightmares, and bouts of insomnia—for the rest of his life. Serling later recalled, I was traumatized into writing by war events, by going through a war in a combat situation and feeling the desperate sense of the terrible need for some sort of therapy.⁸ The battlefield inspired several of his most powerful scripts, including Studio One’s The Strike, Playhouse 90’s Bomber’s Moon, and The Twilight Zone’s The Purple Testament. His war experiences also intensified his yearning for the lost innocence of Binghamton.

I think where he got the great love of [Binghamton] was in the army, Robert Serling said. Everything he had taken for granted as a child became suddenly so precious, so dear to him because he thought he’d never see it again.⁹ In his final professional interview, just a few months before his death, Rod Serling echoed this observation, saying simply, I was convinced I wasn’t going to come back. His time in combat, he acknowledged, was his lowest emotional point.¹⁰

While in the army, Serling did some writing, including a bit of poetry. He mailed some to his brother (also later a successful writer), who wisely replied, You weren’t meant to be a poet, Rod.¹¹ More significantly, he also wrote a short radio skit that was used in conjunction with a visit from comedian Bob Hope.

When Serling returned from the war in January 1946, he had no firm plan to become a writer. For a few months, he had no plan to do anything at all. He eventually decided to reapply to Antioch. In his application essay, Serling explained his difficult transition to civilian life: When my mother would mention schooling, I’d say ‘I’ve been to school.’ When my family would discuss my choice of career, I’d answer ‘I don’t want one.’ The war all but eliminated any desire to better myself.¹²

I was pathological about my experiences, he continued, ashamed of and obsessed by my barely perceptible limp, bound and determined to unequivocally reject any and all former friends…. Exactly what the process was that carried me through this period of readjustment, I’m not quite sure. Time, as is its custom, dulled the edges of distasteful memories.¹³

Serling enrolled at Antioch with the financial help of the GI Bill. The famously progressive college, which boasted educational reformer Horace Mann as its first president, nurtured not only Serling’s creative talents but also his liberal political views. What initially attracted him to Antioch, however, was the school’s unusual co-op system. Unlike most schools, where students might work as part-time interns during their junior year while attending full-time classes, Antioch students alternated periods of study with periods of full-time work beginning in the freshman year. As a nearly twenty-two-year-old freshman, Serling wanted to get real-world experience as quickly as possible.

Serling had not yet settled on a profession, however, and he initially majored in physical education. He had a vague notion that he might like to work with children, and so one of his earliest co-op internships was as a counselor at a swimming camp. Another was as an attendant in a hospital for rheumatic children. He soon realized that the most therapeutic way to deal with his military trauma was to get it out of my gut—write it down.¹⁴ He switched his major to Language and Literature and he began to write it down.

COLLEGE WRITINGS

During the earliest part of his college career, Serling wrote prose as well as radio scripts under the guidance of two mentors. One, Pearl Bentel, was a radio scriptwriter whom Serling met while she was visiting her daughter at Antioch.¹⁵ She agreed to help him edit his radio scripts and ended up paying him two dollars per page for anything she could use on Happiness Ahead, a series that aired on WCAE in Pittsburgh. Serling’s other influence during this time was Antioch’s writer in residence, Nolan Miller. The two men remained friends and frequent correspondents for several years, and their relationship eventually developed a student has become the teacher dynamic after Miller began writing teleplays and Serling suggested that his agent take on Miller. Serling and Bentel later literally switched roles when Bentel enrolled in Drama in the Mass Media, a writing course Serling taught at Antioch from November 1962 to January 1963.

One of the earliest prose efforts that Serling submitted to Miller was a thirty-eight-page story, First Squad, First Platoon. Broken into five chapters plus an epilogue/conclusion, First Squad reads as barely fictionalized autobiography, particularly because Serling used his war buddies’ real names for most of his characters. This was clearly therapeutic writing, and it likely would have been less therapeutic had Serling further fictionalized the events. Written in the third person (with Private Serling appearing as a character), each chapter of First Squad memorializes the death of a member of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

Chapter 1 recounts one of Serling’s most traumatic wartime experiences, witnessing the senseless death of his close friend, Melvin Levy.

In the mountains of Leyte, surrounded by jungle and Japanese, under a constant downpour, the platoon members are out of food, low on ammunition, and gradually losing hope that supply planes will be able to spot them through the rain and fog.

Corporal Levy had been the humorist of the squad—the wag, the wit, the guy who lived for laughs…. But in this particular situation Corporal Levy had somehow lost track of his fabulous sense of humor. Trapped on a clearing, starving, wet, miserable and losing hourly their last vestiges of hope, Corporal Levy had joined entities with all the others. He’d become merely a frightened, hungry young man.

When the sound of airplane motors comes closer, Corporal Levy rediscovers his sense of humor: ‘Scorecards!’ he screamed. ‘Can’t tell a Piper Cub from a P-40 without a scorecard.… Chow call boys … ham and eggs by airmail!’ The planes circle the clearing, dropping crates of supplies, lifesaving gifts from the heavens: ‘Make it kosher, boys,’ Levy screamed, tears rolling down his fat cheeks. ‘Make it kosher, even if yuh have to drop a Rabbi.’ The heavy crates smash into the wet earth, so close to the men that they run to take cover. Levy, however, does not move. In mid-joke, one of these supply crates crashes down atop his head, killing him instantly. Serling helped to bury his body.

Chapter 2 (Manila—Deacon Sloane) details the 511th’s initial mission after arriving in Luzon: to retake the Church of Our Blessed Lady, which the Japanese had transformed into a stronghold.

It stood on a little hill overlooking the highway—a picturesque little church with a tiny bell tower and wrought iron railings. As the late afternoon sun shone down upon it, it seemed to throw a shadow of serenity and benediction upon all around it … that is, it might have done so had not the Japanese sent out a hail of machine gun bullets from its tower, and had not the firing from the advancing Americans also smashed its serenity.

The 511th storms the church, lobbing grenades and then crashing through the doors with a barrage of gunfire that appears to wipe out every enemy soldier inside. As the platoon spreads out to secure the location, Private Emery Sloane, somewhat derisively nicknamed Deacon for his ever-present Bible, approaches the altar. He’s drawn by a small statuette of Christ … a beautiful piece of hand carving, remarkably detailed. He lifts it and turns his back to the altar to show the rest of the platoon the treasure he has found.

Two rifle shots. One from behind the altar as the dim shadow of a figure raised up and fired directly into the Deacon, and one from Hibbard that sent the figure toppling over to the side of the little altar.

Deacon Sloane slumped quietly, almost gracefully to the floor.

In his writings, Serling frequently gave his characters names from his past. Some were childhood friends (Grinstead, Kattell, McNulty) or childhood landmarks (Resnick and Pierson, both of which were names of shops in Binghamton). Others were the names of men with whom he had served: Levy, Peterson, and Hibbard. But the name Serling used most often—no fewer than a dozen times—was Sloane (or Sloan).

Chapter 3, Fort McKinley—Horace Regan, recounts the death of carrot-topped, freckle faced, lantern jawed, Horace Red Regan. Though the real Horace Cole Red Riggan survived the war, in Serling’s story, the character dies as a result of friendly fire. While helping to target artillery fire, Regan is wounded by a shell that lands too close to his position. Despite his injuries, he completes his mission, ensuring that the artillery zeroes in on its target before he dies.

Corporal Warren R. Hibbard, who killed the Japanese soldier that had killed Deacon Sloane, is killed in chapter 4.

In Sulac, a tiny village in the wooded mountains of southern Luzon, the platoon is set to endure its one hundredth consecutive day of combat: A hundred days of violence, a hundred days of heat and wetness and exhaustion and discomfort … a hundred days of smelling acrid smoke and stinking cordite and the awful stench of decaying bodies in the hot tropical sun. Hibbard cannot take it anymore and swears that he is going to do something often talked about but rarely accomplished—he will hold up his hand during a firefight until he receives a wound serious enough to get him discharged. I’m gonna come outta this and go home. I seen Levy and Regan and Sloane an’ all of ’em. But not me.

During the attack on the village, Hibbard indeed reaches up and takes a bullet through his right hand. But the wound makes him so delirious that he stands and begins walking away from the battlefield, as if he can now simply walk all the way home. He promptly takes three bullets in the back and drops down dead.

Once again, Serling borrowed the name of one of his fellow soldiers but changed his fate. The real Warren R. Hibbard was killed in Mahonag, Leyte, and never saw Luzon.¹⁶

When chapter 5 begins, Sergeant Edward Etherson and Private Rodman Serling are the only surviving members of the original First Squad. Outside Calamba, Luzon, the two combat veterans greet a truckload of painfully young, fresh-faced reinforcements. Etherson fears that these replacements are not ready for what they will face, but ready or not, the next morning they will attack the city of Calamba: House after house and building after building they attacked—firing at windows, throwing grenades through the doors, or at times running inside and fighting through the rooms.

Etherson leads the platoon into an abandoned warehouse, where he is attacked by a Japanese soldier armed with a bayonet. Etherson knocks the bayonet to the floor, and it clatters across the room and comes to a stop at the feet of one of the young (and unnamed) reinforcements. Excited by the noise, half blinded by the smoke, he grabbed the bayonet and moved toward the two wrestling figures. Then he raised the bayonet and drove it home. To the young soldier’s horror, he sees that home is between Sergeant Etherson’s shoulder blades.

The real Edward J. Etherson Jr. was killed in action in Leyte on January 31, 1945.¹⁷

The conclusion finds Corporal Serling* boarding the Stateside Express in Yokohama Harbor, trying to think of home but haunted by images of big-shouldered Etherson, long-faced, cussing Hibbard, the parrot-like wisecracking of Levy—the slouched quietness of Sloane, the good-hearted simpleness of Regan.

A sailor said, This way soldier—down these steps … what’sa matter—you don’t look happy.

Serling forced a wide grin and said, Happy? Hell, I’m the happiest goddamn guy aboard.

The sailor laughed.

I doubt that …

And as Serling lugged his duffle bag down the narrow steps to the hold, he said under his breath, I doubt it too. And little formless ghosts inside his mind echoed his words, I doubt it … I doubt it too.

First Squad, First Platoon is as raw as an open wound. While it would never be confused with Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse 5, First Squad is, like those novels and many others, told from the viewpoint of a soldier who can relate his nightmarish experiences only through an overload of absurdity and irony. Melvin Levy, voraciously hungry, killed by a crate of food. Deacon Sloane, killed moments after grasping a symbol of his salvation. Model soldier Horace Regan, killed by friendly fire. Warren Hibbard, killed immediately after receiving a wound that would have earned him a trip home. Edward Etherson, a fine leader, killed by one of his own men. And Private Serling, the lone survivor, boarding a ship to go home, feeling haunted and miserable rather than happy to have survived.

First Squad, First Platoon has never been published.

Serling found inspiration for his first published story in a much more innocent wartime experience: his time spent fighting in army-sanctioned boxing matches. During basic training, Serling fought as a catchweight (flyweight), winning seventeen bouts before getting pummeled in his eighteenth. His first of many boxing-themed stories was The Good Right Hand, published in the March 1948 issue of The Antiochian, the Antioch student literary journal. In the story, a successful boxing manager is troubled by the memory of a protégé who committed suicide after an injured hand forced him to quit fighting. The story is the first in which Serling used boxing as a literary device, as well as the first in which a Serling character faces the existential question: When I have defined myself by my profession, who am I when I can no longer pursue that profession? Serling saw fighters as the perfect vehicles to explore this question, later reflecting, What seems to give this idea the stature of tragedy is that the business of prizefighting never allows for an alternative preparation for another field of endeavor. To be a fighter you have to live as a fighter. Everything you do … is part of and preparation for the next fight on the schedule. And when your career is finished, the profession discards you.¹⁸ Serling often noted that what many observers consider his finest work, Playhouse 90’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, began as a short story he wrote in college. He was referring to The Good Right Hand. Even so, the only similarities between the two pieces are their settings and the presence of a fighter who can no longer fight. The plots have almost nothing in common.

Serling did not publish another short story for at least twelve years, and The Good Right Hand has never been republished.

Rod Serling’s first published short story appeared in The Antiochian, March 1948.

Serling’s next publication was a radio script, The Air Is Free, that appeared in the October 1948 issue of The Antiochian. The script was co-written by Bill Rega, whom Serling had met the previous summer while interning at WINR Radio in Binghamton, where Rega served as continuity director. The Air Is Free tells the story of Gus Cameron and Joe Dumbrowski, coal miners trapped at the bottom of a mine after an explosion. As the two men worry about whether they will be rescued, Cameron wonders about the fate of their fellow miners. I don’t care about them, Dumbrowski says, I care about me. With their air supply dwindling and the two men growing delirious and panicking, Dumbrowski threatens Cameron, Don’t breathe my air! I’ll kill you before I let you breathe my air! Cameron then begins to obsess about whether there is enough air for both of them. When Dumbrowski falls unconscious, Cameron panics and strangles him. Cameron is indeed rescued—and later charged with and convicted of murder. The story is told in flashback, narrated by Cameron on the eve of his execution.

After Serling changed his field of study from Physical Education to Language and Literature, his work-study periods consisted of internships at several East Coast radio stations, including WMRN in Marion, Ohio; WINR in Binghamton; and WNYC in New York City. Serling wrote and acted in various radio segments during these internships, but the bulk of his radio writing occurred in 1948, while he managed the campus radio station, the Antioch Broadcasting System (ABS). During this time, he created his first weekly dramatic anthology series, which was broadcast on WJEL-AM and WJEM-FM, in Springfield, Ohio, from November 1948 through February 1949. In the first example of what became a career-long pattern of astounding productivity, Serling wrote every script.

One of these scripts earned Serling his first major recognition and his first big payday as a writer. In March 1949, on the heels of completing his series for ABS, Serling received a telegram informing him that one of his scripts, To Live a Dream, had been chosen as one of three runners-up in a contest sponsored by a nationally syndicated radio program, Dr. Christian. The prize was five hundred dollars (worth roughly ten times as much today) and a trip to New York City for him and his wife, Carol, whom he had met at Antioch and married the previous summer. The size of the award says much about radio’s dominance of the media landscape of the time. To Live a Dream was another boxing-related story, this time centered on a former fighter who is battling leukemia while mentoring a young boxer, trying to pass along as much knowledge as he can before he succumbs to his disease. In 1952, Serling won another prize from Dr. Christian—$350 for The Long Black Night.

In late 1949, Serling made his first two formal sales to a national radio program, The Local Is a Very Slow Train (broadcast with the more active title, Hop Off the Express and Grab a Local), and The Welcome Home, both of which aired on the series Grand Central Station. He also scripted The Bad Penny, which was produced on his ABS radio series and later used in his first true television production. The television production featured Arthur and Sarah Lithgow (actor John Lithgow’s parents) as Paul and Janice Andrews, a married couple living in Trailer 6 at Trailer City. While attending Antioch, Rod and Carol Serling lived in Trailer 10 in what the residents called Splinterville or Trailertown.

Serling later described his college radio and television scripts as having been pretty bad stuff.¹⁹ A reading of The Bad Penny fully supports that assessment:

One morning, Janice Andrews steps out to bring the milk delivery inside and she finds what appears to be an 1806 Indian Head penny lying on the ground. She has heard that these pennies can be worth thousands of dollars. She shows it to her husband, but he insists that its date is 1896, not 1806. She calls the office of the local newspaper to see if someone can research the coin for her, but they don’t take her request seriously. Paul is content with their lot and doesn’t understand why his wife has gotten so excited about finding a potentially valuable coin. He convinces her that the date on the penny is 1896 and that she only saw what she wanted to see. She agrees that maybe she has just become desperate to find a way out of their little trailer, and carelessly tosses the penny down the drain of the bathroom sink. Someone from the newspaper then calls back and tells her that Trailer City was built on what was an old Colonial village, and that finding an 1806 penny on those grounds would not be impossible—and an 1806 Indian Head could be worth almost twenty-thousand dollars. Hearing this, Paul admits that the date of the coin was 1806. He grabs a wrench and sprints toward the bathroom.

Rod and Carol Serling at the campus radio station, Antioch College. Courtesy Antiochiana, Antioch College; photo by John Hoke.

In the context of Serling’s career, The Bad Penny is noteworthy in demonstrating that even at this early date, Serling was working with a marital dynamic that he would employ on several other occasions: the conflict between an ambitious wife and a husband who is uncomfortable with and somewhat resistant to material success. A little over five years later, this conflict lay at the heart of Serling’s breakthrough success, Kraft Theatre’s Patterns.

Creatively, the distance from The Bad Penny to Patterns is a million metaphorical miles. In reality, the first leg of the journey was seventy miles due south. On June 24, 1950, Rod and Carol Serling graduated from Antioch, escaped their own trailer, and headed for the big city: Cincinnati.

* Most sources, including Serling’s military records, indicate that he never rose above the rank of private. In First Squad, First Platoon and in application materials submitted to Antioch College, he claimed to have risen to the rank of corporal. This apparent discrepancy results from the fact that Serling’s full rank, technician fifth grade, was at the time the equivalent of corporal. TEC 5s were addressed as corporals and commanded an equal pay grade.

CHAPTER 2

A Storm in Cincinnati

Quite seriously Rod, if you really want to go places with your television writing you ought to live in New York or Hollywood and not stay permanently in Cincinnati. I am pretty sure you realize this yourself, but don’t know what can be done about it at this point.

—LITERARY AGENT BLANCHE GAINES, MARCH 19, 1952

Without Cincinnati you don’t get to the next level of Rod Serling. He took all his experiences—growing up in Binghamton, his war experiences, his college experiences—and worked through them in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is the door that leads to everything else.

—TELEVISION CRITIC MARK DAWIDZIAK

Cincinnati adopted Rod Serling. This proprietary embrace did not happen immediately, of course. First Serling had to endure a year or so of anonymous drudgery, working as a radio staff writer. But eventually, when he began to regularly sell scripts to national radio and television series, he became Cincinnati’s own Rod Serling—local boy makes good. When one of these scripts was scheduled to be produced, the event was usually trumpeted by a piece in the Cincinnati Enquirer or the Post or the Times-Star, usually with Serling’s name in the headline. Cincinnatian Rod Serling was touted as Cincinnati’s one-man script factory, and the Cincinnati-based Writer’s Digest anointed him the Mid-West’s Top TV Scripter.

But first there was WLW.

After graduating from Antioch, Serling was hired by the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation as a continuity writer for WLW radio and later television. Dubbed the Nation’s Station, WLW was one of the bigger employers in radio in the region. According to John Morris, who produced many of the programs on which Serling worked, Serling arrived and proclaimed, My one ambition is to be half as successful as my brother, who was writing for United Press International.¹ He soon began to dream of bigger things, however, and quickly discovered that being a staff writer was a particularly dreamless occupation.²

He wanted to write meaningful drama, but drama, meaningful or otherwise, was simply not part of WLW’s format.*

Serling spent most of his time at WLW writing advertising copy, biographical histories of local towns, and skits for series with titles like Midwestern Hayride and Straw Hat Matinee as well as a fifteen-minute, twice-weekly television sitcom he created, Leave It to Kathy, which was described in its narrated introduction as the trials and tribulations of Kathy and her sidekick, Vera, as the two girls face life (and irate customers) from behind the complaint desk at Goober’s Department Store. After writing all day for WLW, Serling would return home and work late into the night on his own dramatic scripts. In his first book, Patterns, he recalled, I used to come home at seven o’clock in the evening, gulp down a dinner and set up my antique portable typewriter on the kitchen table. The first hour would then be spent closing all the mental gates and blacking out all the impressions of a previous eight hours of writing. You have to have a pretty selective brain for this sort of operation.³

In addition to his selective brain, Serling possessed enough physical and mental energy to churn out an impressive quantity (if questionable quality) of scripts. Jack Gifford, a fellow staff writer at WLW, remembered that whenever the staff gathered socially, Serling would always be the first to leave. He would always say ‘I’ve got something in the typewriter.’ The guy had fantastic energy. He never stopped.⁴

While Serling found the subject matter at WLW unfulfilling, he was also frustrated by the anonymity that was part of being a staff writer. Rod was very upset at the station because he couldn’t get name credit for anything he wrote, Gifford recalled. At least once a week—there were three of us—we would march down to the Program Director’s office and ask for two things: name recognition on our shows and a raise. And the answer was no and no.⁵

To find an outlet for the kind of stories he was desperate to write, Serling needed to approach one of WLW’s competitors. Across town, WKRC-TV had begun broadcasting a weekly dramatic series produced entirely in Cincinnati and using exclusively local talent. The series ultimately dramatized all of what Serling called his special preoccupations and predilections, including his sentimentality regarding Christmas, his nostalgia, his deep-seated feelings about the horror of war, his views on the dehumanizing nature of prizefighting, his disdain for prejudice, even time travel.⁶ The series, which represents the most significant part of Rod Serling’s lost catalog, was called The Storm.

Given how clearly The Storm can be seen as a precursor of The Twilight Zone, it is surprising how rarely and how superficially it has been discussed. Two episodes of the series have explicit connections to The Twilight Zone, The Storm ventured into the realm of science fiction and/or fantasy no fewer than seven times, and it produced several stories that employed the type of ironic twist ending for which Serling became known.

One reason The Storm has rarely been discussed is obvious: few episodes survive. Another reason is that Serling rarely discussed it. In a lengthy 1957 essay about his earliest days in television, Serling wrote about his first network sale in 1950 and acknowledged several people who helped him along the way, including producers Worthington Tony Miner and Dick McDonagh, and his agent, Blanche Gaines, yet never mentioned The Storm or the man who helmed this series, Bob Huber.⁷ Serling and Huber remained friends and collaborated professionally on several occasions, and correspondence between the two men does not suggest any creative or personal conflicts. A bit of dialogue from Serling’s touchstone teleplay, Kraft Theatre’s Patterns, may suggest an explanation for why Huber and The Storm have been virtually erased from Serling’s history, however.

Patterns tells the story of Fred Staples, a young executive from a small Cincinnati firm who is hired to work for the Ramsey Company in New York City. Before reporting for his first day at his new position, he asks his wife, How do I look? She straightens his tie and replies, Not a trace of Cincinnati.

While living in Cincinnati, Serling occasionally flew to New York for script conferences with producers and advertising agencies. He found the experience intimidating: Every time I walked into a network or agency office, I had the strange and persistent feeling that I was wearing overalls and Li’l Abner shoes.⁸ When he first began taking these trips, he hid the fact that he had flown in from Cincinnati, hoping to give the impression that he lived in New York City. In 1954, when Serling relocated to Westport, Connecticut, (the same town where Staples and his wife settle), he wanted to make sure that no traces of Cincinnati remained. As author and television critic Mark Dawidziak put it, It’s like they say about stand-up comedians—they need someplace where they can go and be bad. Someplace off the path, where they can work out their material, find out what works, what doesn’t, and not be afraid to fail. Cincinnati was that place for Serling.⁹

Though the town had embraced him, and Rod and Carol Serling publicly claimed fond memories of their time in Cincinnati, Rod Serling later confessed privately that he viewed the city and his time there as little more than a stepping-stone on his way to bigger and better things.¹⁰ The Storm provided Serling with a testing ground for ideas. He viewed these productions as rough drafts that he could subsequently polish and shop to the networks. Indeed, at least a dozen of Serling’s scripts for The Storm were later produced on national network series.

Although The Storm had a miniscule budget and a substandard performance space, the quality of the show’s productions frequently impressed local critics. On November 15, 1951, Mary Wood of the Cincinnati Post wrote, From several standpoints—production, acting, and scripting—the program consistently holds its own with the network’s [programming]. As a matter of fact, a number of ‘The Storm’ scripts, written by Rod Serling, have the fresh, imaginative approach to television that the early Norman Corwin writing gave radio.¹¹

The series debuted live on May 11, 1951, with Ambassador of Death, an episode written by Edith S. McGinnis, who also authored the next three episodes. McGinnis had submitted these scripts to WKRC-TV unsolicited as a way of pitching the idea that the station try to do an original dramatic television series. On the basis of these episodes, TV Dial Magazine presented the series with an award for Pioneering Drama in Local Television.¹²

Then Serling came along. Or, rather, along came R. Edward Sterling. To avoid conflicts with WLW, Serling’s initial contributions to The Storm were credited to this barely disguised pseudonym. Even after Serling resigned from WLW in September 1951, he continued to use this pseudonym on The Storm while using Rod Serling on scripts that he sold to WLW, thereby avoiding the appearance that the same writer was working for competing stations.¹³

On July 9, 1951, Leave It to Kathy debuted on WLW-TV with a story about gullible Kathy falling for a pretentious and penniless actor while her best friend, Vera, tries to unmask the man as a freeloader. The following night, WKRC aired Serling’s first contribution to The Storm, Keeper of the Chair. Had Serling received both credits under the same name, viewers might have had trouble believing that the two programs had been written by the same person. Keeper of the Chair, like virtually all of Serling’s scripts during this period, was initially written for radio. It was the story of a prison guard who, after ten years of supervising executions on death row, is haunted by the question of whether he has ever executed an innocent man. The first of Serling’s significant dramatic scripts produced on television, Keeper of the Chair also marks the first time in his professional career that he delved into a potentially controversial social issue (in this instance, capital punishment). This story, however, is not a polemic but instead deals with the potential human effect of capital punishment on the person responsible for flipping the switch. Serling believed that some part of the executioner died with each execution.¹⁴ He likely had similar views about those who kill on the battlefield and those who inflict punishment in the boxing ring. Serling’s combat experiences had left him with a deep concern for the effects of violence on the human psyche, and he frequently revisited the idea that the brutalizer and the brutalized can suffer reciprocal forms of dehumanization.

Rod Serling at a script conference with Bob Huber (left), WKRC Studios. Courtesy Cincinnati Enquirer; photo by Lawrence G. Phillips.

With a protagonist whose senses and memories have become unreliable, a one-step-from-reality tone, and a twist ending, Keeper of the Chair could be considered Rod Serling’s first Twilight Zone story produced on television. Another episode of The Storm has more direct ties to Serling’s best-known work, however. In June 1958, as The Twilight Zone was in development, Serling told the Cincinnati Enquirer, Guess where I’m getting my opening story. From a script I wrote for the old ‘Storm’ series that was dramatized in Cincinnati years ago.¹⁵ The story to which he had referred was The Time Element. Initially produced on The Storm on December 11, 1951, The Time Element tells the story of a man who believes he has been traveling back in time to the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Serling expanded this script from a half hour to an hour and submitted it to CBS under the title Twilight Zone—The Time Element. Though it ultimately aired not on The Twilight Zone but on Desilu Playhouse (November 10, 1958), it is now commonly considered The Twilight Zone’s first pilot. Viewers in Cincinnati did not know it, but they had entered The Twilight Zone seven years earlier than the rest of the country.

Another episode of The Storm, The Pitch, became a first-season Twilight Zone episode, One for the Angels, which starred Ed Wynn as a kindhearted peddler of trinkets who receives a visit from Mr. Death. While The Storm’s version of The Time Element closely resembles the Desilu Playhouse version, The Pitch differs significantly from its Twilight Zone counterpart. The Pitch involves an ineffectual sidewalk salesman, Lou, who lives with his father and his younger brother, Vinnie, who works as a bookmaker for organized crime. When Vinnie’s boss discovers that he has been skimming gambling money, Vinnie retreats to the family apartment, convinced that the next time he steps outside, his life will be in danger. Lou convinces his brother that it is safe to leave the building because the street outside is crowded with people and his boss would not risk gunning him down in front of so many witnesses. Where The Twilight Zone’s version called for Lou to perform a pitch mesmerizing enough to distract Mr. Death from his appointment to claim a young girl struck by a car, The Storm’s version requires Lou to attract and hold a crowd of potential witnesses around his brother all day and deep into the night.

The Storm initially aired every other Friday night and was billed as a mystery series. Serling’s first three scripts for the series fit roughly within that genre. Following Keeper of the Chair were a revised version of Serling’s old radio script, The Air Is Free, broadcast on July 31, 1951, and Vertical Deep, which partly dealt with the search for an escaped war criminal (September 25, 1951).

The Storm then began appearing every week, first on Sunday nights, then Tuesday nights, Saturday afternoons, and finally Saturday nights. Although the series had no sponsor, broadcasting an original drama using exclusively local talent was a point of pride for WKRC, so the station was content (at least temporarily) to cover the production costs. Once the series began airing weekly, Serling wrote every script. The first of these was A Phone Call from Louie (September 30, 1951), of which Serling later wrote, It has absolutely nothing to recommend it other than the fact that it’s written in the English language.¹⁶ From this point forward,