The Howling Man (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

By 1958, Beaumont had firmly established himself in television, scripting episodes for shows as
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
,
One Step Beyond
,
Naked City
,
Thriller
and
Wanted Dead or Alive
. Recalls Jerry Sohl, author of numerous scripts and novels, and with whom Beaumont had collaborated on several screen projects, including an unproduced version of
The Dunwich Horror
, "Chuck was the kind of person who could go in [to a producer's office] and absolutely flabbergast you. He'd do what you'd call 'Blue Sky'--he'd pitch this story and no one would say that's no good, because they'd be so fascinated with Chuck. He had this ability to absolutely overpower you with what it was that he was doing. The trouble with most writers is that they may be good writers, but they can't sell themselves in television. Chuck Beaumont was able to do both; plus he could deliver the goods when the chips were down." In 1958, Beaumont also saw the film release of his first produced screenplay,
Queen of Outer Space
. (Two earlier screenplays,
Confession of a Teen-Ager
and
Invaders from 7000 A.D.
, both written in 1956-7, went unproduced). Of the film, Beaumont says: "[The] studio called me in to do what I'd thought was to be a serious study of a group of men who take a space ship to Venus. But how serious can a picture be when the part of the world's biochemist is played by Zsa Zsa Gabor? The picture [is] about these men who land on Venus and find a planet inhabited entirely by beautiful women.

"Naturally, I wrote the thing as a big spoof. Only trouble was the director and some of the cast didn't realize it."

When Rod Serling's
Twilight Zone
made it's network debut in 1959, Beaumont became one of the show's principal writers, scripting 22 of its 156 episodes. Richard Matheson explains his and Beaumont's involvement with the celebrated series. "The show was just getting started and Chuck and I had just joined this agency which was quite good at the time (we'd never had a good film agency before this), so they immediately started getting us appointments. There was a lot of work going on in television--half-hour television--and
Twilight Zone
was about to screen their pilot episode. So Chuck and I went to pitch some ideas to Rod [Serling] and [producer] Buck Houghton." Beaumont and Matheson went on to become second and third, respectively, in production of
Twilight Zone
scripts behind Serling, and were largely responsible for some of the series' classic episodes.

Beaumont was also responsible for bringing a young, untried talent to
Twilight Zone's
core of principal writers. While George Clayton Johnson's story output was relatively minor (four stories and four teleplays), when compared to that of Serling, Beaumont and Matheson, it was the
quality
of his work which soon placed him on a level with the other three.

By now a close-knit "brotherhood" had formed between Beaumont and his friends--many of whom considered him the cornerstone or "electric center" of the group. "Chuck was like the hub of the wheel," explains Nolan, "And you had all these different spokes going out: Richard Matheson, John Tomerlin, George Clayton Johnson, OCee Ritch, Chad Oliver, Ray Russell, Rod Serling, Frank Robinson, Charles Fritch, myself. Spokes. All connected to Beaumont. He energized us. Fired us. Made us stretch our creative and writing muscles. He was always encouraging us to do better. It was a very stimulating period in our lives."

The summer of 1961 found Beaumont involved in an explosively-controversial project: the first motion picture to deal with the volatile problem of Southern school integration, based on his novel
The Intruder
.

The factual springboard for both novel and film was an article on rabble-rousing John Kasper in
Look
magazine, printed in 1957 as "Intruder in the South," which described a power-hungry Kasper's efforts to sabotage school integration in Clinton, Tennessee. Adam Cramer, the central figure in Beaumont's story (protrayed by actor William Shatner), is on a similiar mission and also uses integration as a ready lever in an attempt to gain personal power. He fails, as Kasper failed, but not before mob violence has taken its ugly toll, as it actually did in Clinton; by the time Kasper left, a week after his arrival, bombings, acts of terror, and attacks on integrationists had become common in the small community.

Intrigued by Kasper, Beaumont packed a suitcase and flew to Clinton to interview him.

A year and a half later his novel was finished, and Beaumont was subsequently hired to do the screenplay adaptation for director Roger Corman.

When Corman, whose forte had long been science fiction-horror, was unable to obtain studio backing, he financed
The Intruder
on an independent basis. Filmed on location in and near Charleston, Missouri, on a shoestring budget of $100,000, and utilizing some 300 local townspeople in its cast, Beaumont went along to oversee his script and to essay the cameo role of school principal Harley Paton.

The film was never successful in general release due to complications over its controversial nature, but it was later exploited under the misnomer,
I Hate Your Guts
, and, later,
Shame
.

The early Sixties also saw the production of seven other Beaumont screenplays:
The Premature Burial
(written in collaboration with Ray Russell);
Burn, Witch, Burn
(with Richard Matheson);
The Wonderful World of the Brother Grimm
(with David P. Harmon and William Roberts);
The Haunted Palace
;
The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao
;
The Masque of the Red Death
(with R. Wright Campbell); and Mr. Moses (with Monja Danischevsky). In 1959, Beaumont also worked with Otto Preminger on
Bunny Lake is Missing
; however, Beaumont's script was never used and he remained uncredited on the film.

By now, film and television offers were flooding in. At times Beaumont juggled as many as ten projects simultaneously, and would have to farm the extra work out to fellow writers William F. Nolan, Jerry Sohl, John Tomerlin, Ray Russell and OCee Ritch. "I gather Chuck did too much, didn't he?" observes Bradbury. "He overloaded himself; then had to farm the extra work out to his friends. I think there's a similarity here to Rod Serling--Rod could never resist temptation. In other words, you've been neglected a good part of your life and no one is paying attention to you, and all of a sudden, people
are
paying attention: they're offering you jobs here and there. And the temptation is: Jeez! I never had anything. I better take that because it may not last! And that happens to all of us. So Chuck, I think suffered from 'Serling Syndrome.' Rod, in the last year of his life, did all those commercials, which he didn't have to do. But he couldn't resist, and I gather Chuck couldn't resist all these things; then it got to be a real burden and he had to do something with it. So his friends had to come to his aid."

Although he'd attained a high-level of creative and financial success in film and television, Beaumont had often confided to close friends his desire to return to novel writing, and, in 1963, decided to finish
Where No Man Walks
--a novel he'd begun in mid-1957. John Tomerlin explains, "Once you begin working in Hollywood, unless you enter it through the back door of doing novels and then writing the screenplays and stories that you want to, you end up taking assignments; usually, to a large extent, those assignments are other people's--you're meeting their requirements. Even if the story is original, you must adapt it to their requirements. I think Chuck didn't like doing that, and wanted very much to write books that he had seen himself writing."

But time was running out on Beaumont.

By mid-1963, his concentration began to slip; he was using Bromo Seltzer constantly to cope with ever increasing headaches. Friends remarked he looked notably older than his thirty-four years of age. By 1964, he could no longer write. Meetings with producers turned disastrous. His speech became slower, more deliberate. His concentration worsened. Meanwhile, his family and friends desperately tried to understand and treat his symptoms.

In the summer of 1964, after a battery of tests at UCLA, Beaumont was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's Disease; he faced premature senility, aging, and an early death. "The saving grace to it," says Tomerlin, "if there is one, in a disease like that, is he was not really aware, after the very beginning, that there was anything wrong with him. When he first began to show strong symptoms of it, he would have kind of momentary flashes of great concern, as though he saw something happening and couldn't understand what it was. But it was a fairly gentle process."

Charles Beaumont died February 21, 1967 at the age of thirty-eight, his full potential never realized.

His last hardcover book was
Remember? Remember?
, and as Bill Nolan observes, "there is so
much
to remember about Charles Beaumont: [a] midnight call to California--Chuck calling from Chicago to tell me he planned to spend the day with Ian Fleming and why not join them? . . . the frenzied, nutty nights when we plotted Mickey Mouse adventures for the Disney Magazines. . . the bright, hot, exciting racing weekends at Palm Springs, Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach . . . the whirlwind trips to Paris and Nassau and New York . . . the sessions on the set at
Twilight Zone
when he'd exclaim, 'I write it and they create it in three dimensions. God, but it's
magic!
'... the fast, machine-gun rattle of his typewriter as I talked to Helen in the kitchen while he worked in the den.. . the rush to the newstand for the latest Beaumont story. .

Yet, Beaumont's magic is still with us, evidenced by the four children who survived him, and in the stories which follow. He was a craftsman, the kind of writer who could be relied upon to perform the ultimate function of fiction--entertainment--adding always some ambiance, echoing, indefinable, the reflection of a storyteller who was more than a voice . . .

Roger Anker

Los Angeles, California

January, 1987

Roger Anker has put together a good and varied collection of Beaumont short stories. But he's done something more. He's wrapped each and every story in the loving embrace of a friend. Matheson, Tomerlin, Bradhury, Nolan; all names I grew up with. Each one a distinct and pleasant piece of my memory. A memory that includes the picture of a young boy falling asleep, night after night, to the sound of his father's typewriter, the keys finally becoming a familiar lullaby.

Do not think for a minute that the style and clarity found in these stories was not the result of countless hours spent shaping and reshaping, and then reshaping again, the words.

But somehow, in the midst of his passion for the words, he found time enough, and love enough to be a father. And such is the quality of that love that it sustained his children; Catherine, Elizabeth, Gregory and myself, through the stormy weather that followed his death and the death of our mother.

Not only sustained, but inspired and confirmed our suspicions that certain things never die: a story well told, the steadfast loyalty of a good and true friend, and the memory of a father who somewhere knew that his time was short, and so passionately shared all that he had to share.

And even now, some nights, I vaguely hear the typewriter keys tapping in the other room. The single bell at the end of the carriage. The sound of the roller twisting another lucky page into the works. And then the tapping starts again and I begin to drift to sleep.

Good night, Father.