Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (5 page)

Stirling Silliphant and Bert Leonard had more in common than a hunger for stories about New York City. Both were sons of salesman fathers, although Bert’s was a ne’er-do-well and Stirling’s was industrious; both traveled the country when young; both were keen observers of human nature; and both could weave tales with the seductiveness of Scheherazade. When Leonard proposed the idea to Silliphant for
Route 66,
he said it came out of the relaxed odyssey that he and his brother, Roger, had taken around the country and into Mexico after the world war. For his part, Silliphant referred to the series as a “
Pilgrim’s Progress,
1962,” 
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alluding to John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory in which a man abandons his family to seek the Celestial City. Leonard’s earthy synopsis perfectly complemented Silliphant’s literary allusion, and the public agreed, because the series ran for 116 episodes between October 7, 1960, and March 13, 1964. 
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Silliphant wrote seventy of the shows himself. It was produced by Lancer-Edling Productions, Lancer being Leonard’s company and Edling being Silliphant’s. 
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In a September 20, 1961 joint agreement, Silliphant put up $160 for sixeen percent of the proceeds and Leonard put up $840 for eighty-four percent. Each would also receive a producion fee. Leonard also hired his then-wife, Willetta, as Assistant to the Producer (himself).

Route 66
combined two genres: the road picture and the anthology drama. 
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The former was both simple and elastic: two young men — Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) and Buz Murdock (George Maharis 
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) — tool around the country in a red (actually brown) 1960 Corvette and become involved in dramatic conflicts at every stop. 
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Buz was a fighter from Hell’s Kitchen, Tod a Yale-educated scion of a ruined businessman whose only legacy is the car his father willed him. The two were opposites who attracted not only trouble but an audience. Halfway through the third season, Maharis departed, and his place was taken by Glenn Corbett playing Lincoln “Linc” Case, a former Army Ranger who had completed a tour of duty in Vietnam. His backstory was not only a manifestation of Silliphant’s growing concern over American involvement in Southeast Asia, it is believed to be the first continuing character in a U.S. network TV show who reflected the emerging Vietnam experience.

At the same time, the people with whom Stiles, Murdock, and Case become involved at each detour have their own stories, which the travelers may or may not help resolve. This made each episode something of a stand-alone drama. The concept is Zen-like: are Tod, Buz, and Linc characters other people’s stories? Or are other people characters in Tod’s, Buz’s, and Linc’s story? The blend was a clever way to broaden the protagonists’ characters by throwing them into conflict with a constantly changing array of guest stars.

That show drew a roster of the finest established and up-and-coming talent of the era: Edward Asner (“Welcome to the Wedding,” “Shoulder the Sky, My Lad,” “The Mud Nest,” “The Opponent,” “The Man on the Monkey Board”), Beulah Bondi (“Burning for Burning”), James Caan (“And the Cat Jumped Over the Moon”), Joan Crawford (“Same Picture, Different Frame”), Robert Duvall (“Birdcage on My Foot,” “The Newborn,” “Suppose I Said I Was the Queen of Spain”), Barbara Eden (“Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way,” Parts 1 and 2), Anne Francis (“A Month of Sundays,” “Play It Glissando”), Tammy Grimes (“Where are the Sounds of Celli Brahms?”), Joey Heatherton (“Three Sides”), David Janssen (“One Tiger to a Hill”), Ben Johnson (“A Long Piece of Mischief,” “Like a Motherless Child”), Boris Karloff (“Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing”), Buster Keaton (“Journey to Nineveh”), DeForest Kelley (“1800 Days to Justice,” “The Clover Throne”), George Kennedy (“Black November”), Cloris Leachman (“Love is a Skinny Kid”), Jack Lord (“Play It Glissando”), Tina Louise (“I’m Here to Kill a King”), Dorothy Malone (“Fly Away Home,” Parts 1 and 2), E.G. Marshall (“Three Sides”), Lee Marvin (“Mon Petit Chou,” “Sheba”), Walter Matthau (“Eleven, the Hard Way”), Darren McGavin (“The Opponent”), Lois Nettleton (“Suppose I Said I Was the Queen of Spain,” “Some of the People, Some of the Time,” “The Opponent”), Julie Newmar (“Give the Old Cat a Tender Mouse,” “How Much a Pound is Albatross“), Dan O’Herlihy (“To Walk with the Serpent”), Susan Oliver (“Fifty Miles From Home,” “Hello and Goodbye,” “Welcome to Amity”), Suzanne Pleshette (“Blue Murder,” “The Strengthening Angels”), Robert Redford (“First Class Mouliak”), Michael Rennie (“Fly Away Home,” Parts 1 and 2), Burt Reynolds (“Love is a Skinny Kid”), Janice Rule (“But What Do You Do in March?,” “Once to Every Man,” “A Lance of Straw”), William Shatner (“Build Your Houses with Their Backs to the Sea”), Martin Sheen (“...and the Cat Jumped Over the Moon”), Sylvia Sidney (“Child of a Night,” “Like a Motherless Child”), Lois Smith (“Who In His Right Mind Needs a Nice Girl?,” “Only By Cunning Glimpses,” “Go Read the River,” “Incident on a Bridge”), Rod Steiger (“Welcome to the Wedding”), Ethel Waters (“Goodnight, Sweet Blues”), and Tuesday Weld (“Love is a Skinny Kid”) among dozens more.

“The series did attract some of the best actors from both New York and Hollywood,” Silliphant agreed. “I remember Joan Crawford called us personally and asked if she could appear in an episode. I wrote a show just for her: ‘Same Picture, Different Frame.’ But we must remember that we had one of the most brilliant casting talents in the business working on the show: Marion Dougherty. And she was working out of New York where her judgment was based on performance, not fan mail.”

The casting and production (see the next chapter) were helped immeasurably by two things. First: CBS gave Leonard and Silliphant an order for twenty-six one-hour episodes at a single time, allowing them to plan ahead and amortize budgets; second: then they left them alone. Neither happens any more.

“Bert… and I had creative control in our contracts,” Silliphant told fellow writer William Froug. “We had right of approval. The networks didn’t. This was the last time that ever happened… . We were able to force the networks to put our work on the air. Now that gave us a sense of exhilaration and freedom, and responsibility. In those four years I think I really learned my craft because there were no rules. There was nothing I couldn’t do. Nothing I couldn’t experiment with, and it was such a heady thing, and such an inspirational thing, that I look at some of those scripts today with wonder.” 
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Even though the network couldn’t control content, they held the on/off switch over broadcast, and this occasionally brought them into conflict with Silliphant’s experimentation and Leonard’s protectiveness. The most bizarre instance involved the May 5, 1961, episode called “The Newborn.” Said Silliphant, “I wanted to see how George and Marty could help an Indian girl about to have a child in the desert of New Mexico. How do you help a woman bear her child when you’re miles from medical facilities and have nothing but the Corvette? The problem centered around the umbilical cord: how do you sever it without a knife (shoelaces, obviously) and what do you do about the placenta, etc. etc.? Well, the network went
ape
when I devoted about six minutes of prime time to this area. They insisted we cut all that
stuff
out. We refused, once more waved our contract, and I fired off a memo accusing CBS types of having been born without navels, hence their sensitivity to that little hollow above their balls. We almost won that one.
We
didn’t cut anything out and they put the episode on — but
they
cut out the footage and we had to run end titles for about four minutes.” 
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Not only did Silliphant write
Route 66
from his heart, he wrote it on the road, traveling to locations just ahead of the production caravan. He would scope out interesting filming sites, meet local residents, hear their tales, and then sequester himself in a motel room to churn out the pages that Leonard and company would shoot when they caught up with him, by which time he was gone. Life was a succession of motel rooms, and he was not always alone in them. “Remember, this was a time when the orgies were going on,” said Tiana Alexandra-Silliphant, whom he married in 1974. “He was in a different city every two weeks. He was casting, and his producer was screwing around too. It’s a fun life. You get fans. Every day your ego is going to be massaged. If you’re a writer, you may not have the money like directors, but women think you can write them a part. Little do they know, don’t fuck the writer!” 
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Each fifty-two-minute script took an average of nine days to write while, at the same time, he did rewrites and polishes on previous pages, and discussed new stories with Leonard. The leapfrogging went on for the entire run.

“When we were doing
Naked City
and
Route 66,
” he explained, “Bert Leonard and I were accountable to no one except ourselves. We would go out to lunch and we would say, ‘We need a story for next week. What are we going to do?’ ‘Well, let’s see; what haven’t we done?’ ‘We haven’t done anything about jury fixing. Why don’t we do something about jury fixing?’ ‘Okay, that’s not a bad idea. Now let’s see. We haven’t done a story for two weeks about a girl. And we’ll get so and so to play the part. Just a minute, I’ll call her and see.’ Now you pick up the phone and call X and say, ‘Stirling wants to write a
Route 66
for you.’ She says ‘Groovy, what’s the story?’ ‘We don’t know, we’re just sitting here kicking it around. But are you going to be free on such-andsuch a date?’ So we’d book the shows this way. We’ve had the best actors and actresses in the business and we got them without scripts. We know who the actor or the actress is, and we’d write for them. That was what made it so great, because I was able to write for specific people. 
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“The characters came out of the writing — the casting then came out of the character. For example, I wrote an episode called ‘Kiss the Maiden All Forlorn’ which required a debonair actor of clearly established class — and Marion signed Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. for the part. Bert Leonard flew him from London to the location in Texas. In the case of the two-parter, ‘Fly Away Home,’ 
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directed by Arthur Hiller in Phoenix, we were so far behind in getting scripts ready that I
told
the plotline to some of the stars we had decided we wanted in it — in this case thinking of them almost simultaneously with the story. We wanted Dorothy Malone and Michael Rennie and a couple of other fine New York stage actors, so I called each of them on the phone and ‘talked’ the story — and such was their confidence in the show that all of them accepted without having seen the script. Actually, when they arrived on location in Phoenix, they only had the first hour (of two) in hand. I was still writing the second hour in a hotel room in Phoenix and feeding pages out to the location.”

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

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

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

The show attracted its share of fans quite apart from the beefcake appeal of its stars. One such aficionado was David Morell, then in high school, who sent Silliphant a handwritten letter at Screen Gems asking how to do what he does. “One week later,” Morell said, “I received an answer from him — two densely typed pages that began with an apology for taking so long to get back to me. ‘I’d have written to you sooner,’ he said, ‘but when your letter arrived, I was out at sea in a boat.’ He revealed no secrets and refused to look at anything I had written, but he did tell me this: The way to be a writer is to write, and write, and keep writing.” Morrell did just that, and, to date, has published over thirty-five books, among them
First Blood
(1972), which became the basis of the
Rambo
movies. Morrell and Silliphant became friends and, “All these years and millions of words later,” he says, “I’m still writing.” 
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“For me and my friends,” wrote another admirer, journalist Michael Ventura, “
Route 66
was not a television show, it was a promise. A weekly training film. A way out and through and over. [Tod and Buz were] looking not for adventure, but — and they were quite explicit about this — for meaning. Remember that this was 1962, when pundits were saying that rebellion was done in America, that dissent was over, and that kids were interested in nothing but conformity and money. So imagine how it sounded when, in an episode called ‘Go Read the River,’ an engineer, John Larch, said: ‘Somewhere, somehow, a simple beautiful thing, a single morality, a single set of standards was smashed like an atom into 10 million separate pieces. Now, what’s right for a man can be wrong for his business. And what’s right for his business can be wrong for his country. And what’s right for his country can be wrong for the world.’” 
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