September 9, 2003

CALIFORNIA SORCERERS

Remembering the West Coast Writer's Group

by Christopher Conlon

The stories are magical.

...A fireman rebels against a society which expects him not to put out fires, but to start them—by burning books.

...A traveller stops at a strange, remote castle one night and must decide whether the man imprisoned there is an innocent victim—or the Devil himself.

...A couple desperately struggles to survive in a youth-obsessed world in which people are automatically euthanized when they grow old—21 years old.

They have the power of fables: simple, direct, allegorical, they pull you in and hold you—but they teach you something too. They're the kind of stories SF master Theodore Sturgeon called "wisdom fiction." And while these particular tales are the work of completely different writers—Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Charles Beaumont (The Howling Man), William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (Logan's Run)—they almost seem as if they might all have been hatched from a single brilliant, fantastically inventive imagination.

This is no accident. For these men were, from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, part of a close-knit brotherhood of writers centered in the Los Angeles area that came to dominate not only printed SF and fantasy, but movies and TV as well—scripting between them many of the period's best-known films (including most of the Roger Corman / Edgar Allan Poe movies), along with classic segments of Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, and virtually every episode of The Twilight Zone. At its peak this association of creative artists also included, among others, Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Jerry Sohl, Ray Russell, and Harlan Ellison. These outstandingly gifted men were collectively referred to by several names, including "The Southern California School of Writers" and "The Green Hand" (after the Mafia's "The Black Hand"). But they were most commonly called, simply, "The Group."

"It's an astonishing story," says Marc Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion. "Many of these writers would not have been nearly as creative without each other. It was genuinely a gestalt that made these people deeper, better—made them stretch to places they never would have gotten to without each other." Group member William F. Nolan, whose film credits include Burnt Offerings and Trilogy of Terror, explains: "We'd talk plot, read stories we'd finished for opinions, talk about markets and what was selling and who was buying, discuss character development and structure, and, yes, we'd argue, but in a constructive way. We all helped each other...and inter-connected on projects."

"Sometimes, of an evening," Ray Bradbury has written, "Richard Matheson would toss up there merest dustfleck of a notion, which would bounce off William F. Nolan, knock against George Clayton Johnson, glance off me, and land in [Charles Beaumont's] lap. ..Sometimes we all loved an idea so much we had to assign it to the writer present who showed the widest grin, the brightest cheeks, the most fiery eyes."

Direct collaborations between Group members were common. And no wonder. In those early days, most of them—particularly the "inner circle" of Nolan, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, and novelist John Tomerlin—were men in their twenties who were just beginning their careers. They found strength, encouragement, and a sense of solidarity in the company of other struggling young writers. Because of the Group, says Nolan, "We were not alone; we had each other to fire us creatively, to bounce ideas around, to solve plot problems. It was the best kind of writing class that could ever be imagined."

But the closeness of the Group members went beyond the writing. According to Johnson (scriptwriter for Twilight Zone and Star Trek): "We knew each others' wives, we went to each others' houses, we shared holidays together, we went to movies and other things together...[We] would go out on the town and zoom around from place to place, stay out all damned hours. We'd just do anything you can think of. We'd go to strip joints to watch the strippers strip and be embarrassed to be there, but nonetheless whistling and whooping it up and trying to act like college kids...We'd go to nice restaurants like Musso and Frank's or we'd end up at Barney's Beanery. Or someplace along the beach. It hardly mattered." The central members were as open to a carnival as they were to an art-house film. More than any particular activity, the joy was in each others' company.

And, most especially, the joy was in the company of one man—a lanky, charismatic young author of screenplays (The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao) and teleplays (The Twilight Zone) as well as essays, short stories, and novels, who is described by Nolan as having been "the hub of the wheel," the Group's "electric center": the vibrant, brilliant, and tragic Charles Beaumont.

I. Gatherings

The genesis of the Group dates back to the summer of 1946, when a 26-year-old professional writer happened to bump into a hyper-energetic 17-year-old in a Los Angeles book store. As the older man was later to write, the teenager "began babbling about his Terry and the Pirates comic collection, plus Tarzan, plus Prince Valiant, plus who-can-remember-now how many other truly amazing and life-enhancing subjects. It could only follow, out of such a passionate encounter, that a friendship developed." It was a friendship that was to last the rest of the young boy's life, some twenty more years. The professional writer's name was Ray Bradbury. The teenager called himself Charles Beaumont.

Bradbury was by that time already a well-known name in the field of fantasy and horror. His stories, written at the feverish clip of one or more per week, had been selling for the past several years to the pulp magazines of the time—especially Weird Tales, to which he was a regular contributor. Within a year of meeting the young Beaumont, Bradbury would publish his first book (Dark Carnival, 1947) and sell several of his stories to William Spier, then the producer of an immensely popular radio series called Suspense, whose adaptations would help catapult Bradbury's name onto the national stage. Soon thereafter Bradbury would find himself able to place his bizarre, poetic fictions not just in pulp magazines but also in prestigious national publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. Movie work (It Came From Outer Space) and such powerhouse literary classics as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 would soon follow. But on that summer day in 1946, Bradbury was still making only thirty or forty dollars a week selling short stories to the pulps.

The name Ray Bradbury was, however, quite well-known to the teenage Charles Beaumont. An avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, he had written letters—many of them published—to nearly every magazine in the field, and ran his own fanzine called Utopia. He had suffered, in Marc Zicree's words, an "odd, dark beginning"; born Charles Nutt in Chicago in 1929, he had stayed with his parents until he was twelve, in a life he would later describe as "one big Charles Addams cartoon." His mother, in particular, caused the young boy grief—dressing him in girl's clothing and at least once killing one of his pets as a punishment. In part to get him away from this unstable woman, young Charles was sent—in the midst of a bout with spinal meningitis—to live with, as he later said, "five widowed aunts who ran a rooming house near a train depot in the state of Washington." But if the hope was that the boy would enjoy a more normal life with his aunts, the experiment was a failure. "Each night," Beaumont said, "we had the ritual of gathering about the stove and there I'd hear the stories about the strange deaths of their husbands."

By 1946, the young man—who had aspirations to be an actor, an artist, a writer—had changed his name to Charles Beaumont, and had surfaced in Los Angeles. His wandering days were not over—he would soon, for instance, find himself in Mobile Alabama, working as a railroad clerk (where he would meet his future wife, Helen Broun). But he would return to California to stay shortly thereafter, taking a succession of jobs (disc jockey, usher, mimeograph operator) as he struggled to break into professional writing. Part of the attraction of Southern California to young Beaumont was the presence of the movie industry—he eventually got a job in the music department at Universal Studios—but another major element was surely the presence of the man who grew to be his professional mentor: Ray Bradbury.

"Chuck showed up at my house one night in the early fifties," Bradbury later wrote, "with his first short story. He handed it over, his face flushed with excitement, and cried, 'It's good! Or—I think it is!'" Bradbury had promised Beaumont that if the young man would come to his house every Wednesday evening with a newly-written story, Bradbury would read it and comment. But though the established writer might have expected his eager apprentice to have some talent, he could not have suspected just how much. "When I read the first one," he later said in an interview, "I said, 'Yes. Very definitely. You are a writer.' It showed immediately. Chuck's talent was obvious from that very first story." Bradbury showed him how to cut, how to make transitions, how to make his stories move faster, but the raw talent was all Beaumont's. With Bradbury acting as "friendly agent" to help place the stories—Forrest Ackerman would later provide more official representation—Beaumont's tales eventually began appearing in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Orbit, and Fantasy and Science Fiction. The young man had begun a career.

In late 1952, over lunch at Universal, Bradbury introduced Beaumont to another young, yet-to-be-published writer friend of his, a native Missourian named William F. Nolan. At that time Nolan was living in San Francisco, writing stories and trying to find a job. But he "hated the cold and fog," he says, and so, a few months after that initial meeting, he moved to the Los Angeles area and re-contacted Beaumont. "We became instant friends," he remembers, in part because their life circumstances were so similar: "We both wanted to be fulltime writers, yet we had to hold down other jobs to pay our bills." Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Nolan—who came to be known among his friends as "The Windmill" because of his tendency to flail his arms wildly in the air when enthused about something (which, according to Bradbury, happened "about two dozen times daily")—secured a position in the credit department of a paper company. But, as with Beaumont, it would be a while before he could sell his writing consistently and easily.

Meanwhile the mercurial Beaumont had been making other friends. During a stint as a tracing clerk for California Motor Express he met John Tomerlin, a future novelist (Challenge the Wind), TV scenarist, race car enthusiast, and writing collaborator. Chad Oliver, called "Big Chad" by his friends (he was 6'3" and weighed 200 pounds), was attending UCLA, working toward a degree in Anthropology while also writing science fiction novels for young adults and short stories for the pulp market. And then there was Richard Matheson, shortly to become one of the best-known fantasy writers in the country with such novels as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man (filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957).

Matheson and Beaumont met in 1951. The two men shared a close relationship for many years, acting as spurs to each other's creativity—which is not surprising, considering the similarities in their work as well as their careers. They broke into professional writing at the same time, working the same markets; they also wrote TV and films simultaneously (and sometimes in collaboration, as in the TV series The D.A.'s Man and the film Burn, Witch, Burn). Predictably, there were feelings of competition; but, Matheson later said, "only of the friendliest sort. We were not jealous of each other but happy for each other's success."

And yet in terms of personality, the men were completely different. Matheson was as quiet, steady, and family-oriented as Beaumont was wild and impulsive. It was a difference that, while not affecting their friendship, would impact upon Matheson's relationship with what was rapidly becoming a recognizable "Group." For by 1954 an "inner core" was beginning to form, consisting of individuals ready to follow Beaumont on whatever new outing he had suddenly decided upon: a seedy night club, perhaps, or an all-night talking jag at a coffee house. "Then there was the evening," says Nolan, "when Chuck phoned to say 'Be at such-and-such hotel in Chicago at noon tomorrow. We're spending the day with Ian Fleming!' So that night I flew to Illinois. And I recall, a year later, when he told me we were going to Europe next weekend to attend the Grand Prix of Monte Carlo. And we did. Plus another whirlwind trip to Nassau in the Bahamas on 24-hours' notice. All great times!" But Richard Matheson was too much the stable family man for such adventuring. While he remained very cordial with all the Group members, who would frequently arrive en masse at his house for talking and laughs (as they would at Bradbury's), he left the restless wanderings to Beaumont and the others.

Thus, with Matheson as an anchoring influence and Bradbury as professional mentor and friend, a Group was born. Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, John Tomerlin, and Chad Oliver were set to conquer the world—or at least the worlds of publishing and filmmaking.

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