II. Flowerings"It's fascinating," Marc Zicree remarks, "when you think of these guys driving around night after night, talking about stories, talking about the world. They had that enormous enthusiasm of youth and that sense of 'The sky's the limit.'"
Indeed, 1954 to 1958 were years of testing limits and undergoing transitions within the Group. All of the inner core began selling their writing: Nolan, for instance, saw his first publication in 1954 in If: Worlds of SF, a pulp of the time, while also working in collaboration with Beaumont for the Whitman comic book company, helping "to guide the destinies," as Beaumont later remembered, "of such influential literary figures as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Andy Panda." Oliver and Tomerlin were also selling stories. Predictably, however, it was the meteoric Beaumont who was having the greatest success. His tale about a terminally-ill jazz musician, Black Country was published in a then-new magazine out of Chicago called Playboy, whose fiction editor, Ray Russell (eventually to collaborate with Beaumont of the 1962 Roger Corman film The Premature Burial as well receive screenplay credit on Mr. Sardonicus and X—The Man With the X-Ray Eyes), was to become a welcome presence at Group get-togethers when he visited Los Angeles. Beaumont's writing so impressed Russell that he placed the writer on a $500 monthly retainer for first refusal rights to all his stories. Beaumont had quit his job at Universal in 1953 to become a full-time writer, but it was only now that he truly had enough money to raise a family.
In 1955 the Group lost Big Chad Oliver, who had always been conflicted between his love of writing and his desire to teach Anthropology at the University level. When a job opened in Texas, Oliver's home state, he and his wife packed their bags. He remained close to the other Group members, however, and saw them on visits to California—managing to keep together his dual life of author and professor for many years.
John Tomerlin's Mother, her son, Charles Beaumont, and a trophy winning William F. Nolan in 1957. The inner quartet was now a trio, a situation that would not change until 1958. But the trio was wasting no time. In addition to ever-increasing sales of their writing, all three had become race-car enthusiasts. Nolan remembers, "Tomerlin raced his Porsche and Chuck, who began with an MG-TC, also had bought a Porsche Speedster, while I had a British Austin-Healey. We used to stage illegal races on abandoned roads, but John was actually competing in 'real' race events by then. The sport became a huge passion for [us], and we attended sports car races at various circuits around Southern California." Nolan recalls with particular clarity watching a young movie star named James Dean racing his Porsche a few months before the actor's untimely death in a highway crash.
It was around this time that a new face appeared in the Group, a young man from Wyoming with the sale of a film treatment (Ocean's 11, which became a Sinatra cult classic and was remade in 2001) to his name and little else—he had been writing stories for five years without publication. A few years before, Ray Bradbury had been sought out as a mentor by Charles Beaumont. Now Charles Beaumont would be sought out in his turn by an apprentice writer named George Clayton Johnson.
Johnson had been a design draftsman who worked for companies in the Los Angeles Basin such as U.S. Steel, Lockheed, and Douglas Aircraft. But his real desire was to write. When his grocer informed him that one of his regular customers was a professional writer named Charles Beaumont, Johnson recognized the name from the pulps and obtained his telephone number, carrying it around with him for several days before getting up the nerve to dial. To his surprise, Beaumont suggested a meeting at a local coffee shop, and turned out to be friendly and supportive. Most importantly, says Johnson, "He took me seriously. Which was a compelling reason for me to want to spend as much time with him as he would allow." In due course Johnson also encountered Nolan and Tomerlin, and tried to ingratiate himself with them: "I tried to sort of get in with them, through the help of Chuck Beaumont, who liked me. So when the three of them would get together sometimes I would be there, by invitation or just by happenstance. I'd be sitting with Beaumont in the evening and the other two would show up and then there'd be the four of us."
Johnson was impressed with their personal and professional closeness, which by that point was expressing itself in a number of ways. Beaumont and Tomerlin had collaborated on a novel, Run From the Hunter, published under the pseudonym "Keith Grantland." Beaumont and Nolan were co-editing a large book about auto racing entitled Omnibus of Speed. But it was not all fun and success, Johnson discovered—these men also had deep personal ties which allowed for an uncommon frankness in their lives together.
"What I learned from these guys," Johnson says today, "was honest encounter. Let's call it like it really is and not avoid the target by pretending to agree with each other when we really don't. If we have a dispute, let's have the dispute out, and whoever is right is right. Not who is oldest or who is richest or who is best connected or who is the most powerful and the most threatening. None of that stuff...We would end up encountering each other over things. Maybe even just a story: 'No, I think it's a piece of crap. Who would believe this, this, and this?' We would tangle with each other over story points."
But there was a personal side to these encounters as well.
"I remember once," Johnson says, "on the way back from a road racing trip, Chuck and Helen Beaumont, John and Wilma Tomerlin, Bill Nolan and myself were talking and we got into an analytical mood where we were discussing somebody's flaws. And Helen stopped us and said that it was like being taken to the beach for the purpose of being drowned. After that we started referring to it as 'being taken to the beach.' You'd be warned: 'We're going out. We've all decided to take you to the beach, George.' And I'd say, 'Yeah, okay, fine.' And you'd spend four or five hours driving up and down the beach or through town or wherever, while three guys told you what was wrong with you. But you have to understand, we weren't setting out with an objective to destroy; we were setting out with an objective to heal."
In an essay published in the late 1980s, Johnson eloquently remembered the very real terror of these encounters.
"For Chuck they were fun," he wrote, "but for me those confrontations were often nightmares as I defended myself against self-satisfied challengers: John, who figured out how he should feel before becoming emotional, with visions of himself as a no-nonsense executive with a taste for the finer things in life; Bill [Nolan], who would kid his way out, the willing focus of Chuck's jokes who never forgot or misplaced anything, happy when the heat wasn't on him; and Chuck Beaumont, keeping things moving with his aggressive manner and willingness to go first, somehow knowing that he was bulletproof, that he was the master of verbal judo who was living a charmed life."
In particular, the Group forced Johnson to look realistically at his writing career, challenging him to stop talking and begin making sales if he expected them to take his opinions seriously. Fortunately, there was a new television series on the horizon that would ultimately allow him to do just that—a series that, in addition to introducing a famous new member to the Group and becoming a national cultural touchstone, would become perhaps the clearest expression of the Southern California Group's peculiar gestalt: Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone.
Serling had arrived in Hollywood in 1957, as the days of live television (usually broadcast from New York) were waning. He was at that time television's most famous writer, with Emmy Awards for Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Comedian. He was also a controversial figure, constantly battling the sponsors over issues regarding censorship of his often politically-charged teleplays. But as his kind of hard-hitting, passionate drama began to disappear from the airwaves, he decided to head west toward the movies and the world of filmed television. After some failures and false starts, the distinguished Serling announced—seemingly out of the blue—that he would be producing and writing a series of half-hour fantasy stories called The Twilight Zone for CBS.
It was an announcement that sent shock waves through the industry; it was as if Ernest Hemingway had declared he would stop writing novels and instead concentrate on comic books. But of course, Serling had ulterior motives for moving into the world of imagination. He reasoned that if producers and sponsors were too timid to present real-life, contemporary issues of television, he might be able to mask the same concerns behind a veil of fantasy: remembering the troubles he had had with a Studio One presentation dealing with the U.S. Senate, for instance, he said: "I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem...To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited. In retrospect, I probably [should] have made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and people[d] the Senate with robots. This probably would have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive." From this kind of reasoning it was an easy step into The Twilight Zone.
Serling was contractually obligated to provide 80% of the first season's scripts himself. But, as executive producer, it was up to him to see that the remaining 20% would also be of high quality. To that end (after a disastrous open-call for scripts that yielded nothing useful), he invited a number of professional writers to talk, read some of his scripts, and decide if they thought they had what it took to enter The Twilight Zone. Among those who attended were Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury.
"With great misgivings," Beaumont later wrote, "and after a suitable period of grousing about outsiders and why didn't the networks buy our shows, we...agreed to discuss the possibility of joining the program. I don't know what we expected Serling to be like, but we were all surprised to find that he was a nice guy who happened to love good science fiction and fantasy and saw no reason that it shouldn't be brought to the screen." But Beaumont still had his doubts: "Nothing galls a science fiction pro more than to see an 'outsider' bumble into the field, rework a whiskered theme which, in his naiveté, he takes to be supremely original, and make either, or both, a fortune and a critical splash." With these "poisonous thoughts" in his mind, Beaumont took Serling's first nine
The Twilight Zone scripts home with him to read, "determined to hate them." But the quality of Serling's writing won him over. "At midnight," he wrote, "when I'd finished reading the material, I knew that Serling was an 'outsider' only in terms of experience; in terms of instinct, he was a veteran. Bradbury and Matheson read the scripts also, and in very little time we all decided to join The Twilight Zone team."
More than any other single program, film, or book of the time, The Twilight Zone expresses the heart and soul of the Southern California Group. Beaumont and Matheson became major contributors, penning such classic episodes as "The Howling Man" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." George Clayton Johnson broke through into professional writing on the show, first by providing story ideas to Serling (including "Execution" and "The Four of Us Are Dying"); then, in large part because of Beaumont's encouragement, bulling his way into being allowed to write the teleplay for his story "A Penny for Your Thoughts" himself. He went on to several other scripts for the show, including the now-classic "Kick the Can" and "Nothing in the Dark" (the latter starring Robert Redford).
During this period many writers began to float into the Group orbit. They would not belong to the inner core—those most closely tied to Beaumont—but would nevertheless be greeted warmly when they appeared and might participate in the often vigorous debates about stories (sometimes their own). The casual, amorphous nature of the Group allowed in such disparate figures as Frank M. Robinson (editor of Rogue, a men's magazine and important market for the Group) and OCee Ritch (best-known as an automotive writer), as well as Bill Idelson, Charles E. Fritch, and Jerry Sohl—all budding free-lance authors trying, like the others, to break into the TV, movies, and fiction worlds of the time. Several would ultimately work on The Twilight Zone.