Second in a series of six previously unpublished profiles.
The life and career of Charles Beaumont (1929-67) blazed, briefly but brightly, like a comet crossing the sky; he has been called the hub of the Southern California School of Writers (aka The Group), with such celebrated “spokes” as Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Ray Russell, Jerry Sohl, and John Tomerlin. All of these paid tribute to Beaumont in his posthumously published Selected Stories (reissued as The Howling Man), which—like The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont, Volume One—was edited by Roger Anker, according to whom he produced ten books, almost a hundred short stories, thirteen screenplays (nine of them produced), more than seventy teleplays, forty comic-book stories, and dozens of articles, profiles, and columns. This was in thirteen short years, before Beaumont was rendered unable to work by the incurable degenerative disorder (either Alzheimer’s Disease or Pick’s Disease) that in 1965 consigned him to the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, where he died at the age of thirty-eight, prematurely aged and senile.
Especially close to Beaumont, both personally and professionally, Matheson said he was “my best friend for many years. We wrote together for a period of time when we first went into television (until we decided that we would do better each going solo) and acted as ‘spurs’ to each other creatively. I had sold my first collection of short stories [Born of Man and Woman] before Chuck, which spurred him on to get his first collection [The Hunger and Other Stories]. We both wrote ‘mainstream’ novels about the same time [The Beardless Warriors and The Intruder, respectively]. We both went into TV at the same time. We both wrote films in the same period of time. There was competition but only of the friendliest sort….He was tremendously magnetic. I am a quiet person—although there is an antic spirit underneath the surface which some people see, most normally my family. Chuck was a meteoric type of person. His sense of humor was devastating. He was a very funny, very witty person. He had interests in so many things and pursued them all fully,” as he recounted to Marc Scott Zicree in The Twilight Zone Companion.
Born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, Beaumont was raised by five widowed aunts in a Washington State rooming house, and before selling “The Devil, You Say?” to Amazing Stories in 1950 he held a variety of jobs ranging from actor to comic-book editor. The year 1954 marked both the breakthrough appearance of “Black Country” in his best-known fiction outlet, Playboy, and his first screen credit on “Masquerade,” an episode of Four Star Playhouse; unfortunately, neither cast nor crew of Queen of Outer Space (1958) realized that his script was written as a spoof, but he fared better in the burgeoning medium of television. “When we joined this agency [Adams, Ray, and Rosenberg] together, it was such a strange new world out there that we decided to work together,” Matheson told this writer. “We collaborated on a lot of different shows….We knew each other, our families knew each other, our kids knew each other.” Each had four children of similar ages, and when Beaumont’s wife, Helen, died of cancer just four years after him, the Mathesons acted as the foster parents for the orphaned Beaumont brood, the youngest of whom was only seven.
Beaumont and Matheson shared story or script credits on episodes of the detective series The D.A.’s Man (“Iron Mike Benedict”), Markham (“The Marble Face,” originally titled “Spirit Unwilling”), and Philip Marlowe (episode title[s] unknown), and the Westerns Buckskin (“Act of Faith”), Wanted: Dead or Alive (“The Healing Woman”), and Have Gun—Will Travel (“The Lady on the Wall”). While obviously prolific, Beaumont frequently found himself overextended with commitments to the producers he was so famously adept at schmoozing, and sometimes split his fees with friends who would provide a first draft or an original story—often uncredited—which continued as his health declined and his medical bills increased. This resulted most notably in Twilight Zone scripts ghost-written by Sohl (“The New Exhibit,” “Living Doll,” “Queen of the Nile”) and Tomerlin (“Number Twelve Looks Just Like You,” based on Beaumont’s story “The Beautiful People”), but credited to Beaumont; he and Matheson had seen no need to collaborate on the show because of their already solid literary credentials in the SF, fantasy and horror genre.
Beaumont based many Twilight Zone scripts on his own stories: “Perchance to Dream,” “Elegy,” “The Howling Man,” “The Jungle,” “The Fugitive,” “Person or Persons Unknown,” “In His Image” (from “The Man Who Made Himself”), “Printer’s Devil” (from “The Devil, You Say?”), and “Passage on the Lady Anne” (from “Song for a Lady”). Matheson told this writer that they “were both already well established in the magazine field, we knew how to write that kind of story, and we were very adaptable. We could fit the Twilight Zone pattern almost instantly…The pattern is: a teaser that gets your interest, and then Rod [Serling] making a comment, and then your first act with a cliffhanger, and then to your ending, which hopefully has a surprise.” Beaumont also wrote the original teleplays “Long Live Walter Jameson,” “A Nice Place to Visit,” “Shadow Play,” “Valley of the Shadow,” and “Miniature,” and based “Static” and “The Prime Mover” on then-unpublished stories by Ocee Ritch (who later ghosted “Dead Man’s Shoes”) and Johnson, respectively, while “Long Distance Call” was a joint effort with another friend, William Idelson.
When William Froug took over as the producer of The Twilight Zone during the fifth and final season, he cancelled a number of teleplays written by Group members, including “Gentlemen, Be Seated” (published in The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont, Volume One) and Matheson’s “The Doll.” Matheson said Froug “didn’t like my writing. As a matter of fact, when I was collaborating with Chuck…I made the mistake of saying, because I didn’t like to go out, ‘I’ll do the first drafts, and you go out and do the office meetings.’ So because of that, everybody got the impression that I was like the retarded country cousin he was supporting out in the sticks. And Froug, the producer who we did Philip Marlowe for, was totally convinced of that.” Credited on Sohl’s scripts for Naked City and Route 66, Beaumont also contributed to Suspense, One Step Beyond (“The Captain’s Guest,” “Brainwave”), Thriller (“Girl With a Secret,” “Guillotine”), The Outer Limits (“The Guests,” based on his teleplay “An Ordinary Town”), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (“Backward, Turn Backward”), and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (“The Long Silence”).
When producer-director Roger Corman filmed The Intruder in 1961, with William Shatner playing the titular racist instigator, Beaumont adapted his own novel, as well as joining Johnson and Nolan in supporting roles, and continued their relationship on the Edgar Allan Poe series that Corman had initiated with Matheson at American International Pictures (AIP). He wrote The Premature Burial (1962) with Russell, based The Haunted Palace (1963)—which took its title from a poem by Poe—on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and scripted The Masque of the Red Death (1964), which incorporated Poe’s “Hop-Frog,” and was rewritten by R. Wright Campbell. Beaumont also worked for producer-director George Pal on The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), with an all-star cast dramatizing the story of the brothers and enacting three of their fairy tales, and the Oscar-winning 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), which he adapted from Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao; Tony Randall starred as the chameleonic Lao, who brings self-awareness to small-town citizens with various fantastic guises.
Matheson and Beaumont adapted their only feature-film collaboration, Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn, 1962), from Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Conjure Wife. Matheson told this writer, “We just went to a bar one night, we were chatting, and we decided, ‘Let’s write a movie together.’ We both loved Conjure Wife, and we knew that it had already been filmed, so we just ignored the fact and did it anyway. We were both working for American International at the time, and they liked the script very much, but since they had to buy the rights from Universal, who had made Weird Woman [1944], the one with Lon Chaney, Jr., I think we split $10,000 between us for the script, that’s all we ever made….Actually, it doesn’t seem like it when you read our short stories, but when it came to scripts we wrote pretty similarly.” Directed in England by Sidney Hayers, it starred Peter Wyngarde as skeptical college professor Norman Taylor, who destroys the supernatural paraphernalia with which his wife Tansy (Janet Blair)—a literal witch—protects him and furthers his career, leaving him vulnerable to attack by another witch among the faculty.
Beaumont’s work continued to reach the screen after his death; as early as the following year, his stories were being adapted into “The New People” and “Miss Belle” (based on “Miss Gentilbelle”) for Journey to the Unknown, the short-lived anthology series produced by 20th Century-Fox and England’s Hammer films, with many of the latter’s personnel participating. The mid-1980s Twilight Zone revival essayed remakes of two Beaumont episodes, one of them with a change in gender (“Dead Woman’s Shoes” and “Shadow Play”), while writer-director Adam Simon resurrected his unfilmed 1963 screenplay Paranoia as Brain Dead (1990), which was made for Corman’s company, Concorde, and deals with an experimental treatment referred to as “the kindler, gentler lobotomy.” But true immortality has come through the enduring popularity of his books and films, and especially of The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote more scripts than anyone but its creator, Rod Serling, as well as through the work of the writers whom he inspired or instructed, guaranteeing that the Group’s influence will outlive all of its members.
Beaumont’s short stories in the collection THE HOWLING MAN are some of greatest short stories I have ever read, particular the title tale and “Last Rites.” A true talent.
The interstitial material sprinkled throughout the anthology (essays and remembrances from Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison) is invaluable.
And the help that Matheson and other friends provided to Beaumont and his family during Beaumont’s degenerative phase (and after) is a poignant anecdote well worth remembering.
Well said. That close-knit network of personal and professional relationships among the members is the main thing that has always fascinated me about The Group, as much as the accomplishments of the individual members.
We just completed a documentary about Charles Beaumont which will premiere at The Egyptian in Hollywood on March 27th. There are details at our website.
Very exciting news, thanks–especially about the Matheson interview! Hope I get a chance to see it, and that you will keep me posted.
Roger Corman was interviewed today on THE DENNIS MILLER SHOW to promote DINOSHARK and made mention of Charles Beaumont and THE INTRUDER.
I’m embarrassed to say I still have neither read nor seen it. Just not enough hours in the day. Nice to see Corman at the Oscars, though, especially since he directed more of Matheson’s features than anyone else.
I have to make a point of seeing this Beaumont documentary someday. Till then, glad to hear of it — recognition due is recognition due. Can a Matheson documentary be far behind? I know just the book they can use as source material…
Hah! From your mouth, so forth. (Actually, at this point, “books” might be more appropriate.) Just hope the Beaumont doc becomes available to the general public somehow.