ROD SERLING:
The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone
By Joel Engel
Contemporary Books
353 pages, $18.95
THE DEMONS that haunted Rod Serling were more devastating than anything roaming "The Twilight Zone." In Joel Engel's biography, Serling is portrayed as a writer plagued by insecurity and self-doubt who compromised his artistic integrity for wealth and fame.
The reason: television -- which consumed Rod Serling and transformed his life. The simple fact about this complex man is that he was unable to live without the celebrity trappings of television stardom.
Serling craved the notoriety and money a successful weekly series brought. He created "The Twilight Zone" in 1959 and soon became the most recognizable writer in the world.
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When the show was canceled in 1964, Serling didn't quite know what to do with the rest of his life.
Long gone was the idealistic young man who wrote his best works, "Requiem for a Heavyweight" and "Patterns," for live television in the early '50s. Back then, Serling was compared to such burgeoning literary giants as Paddy Chayefsky and Arthur Miller.
Twenty years later, Serling was doing voice-overs for toothpaste commercials and hosting a TV quiz show.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Serling died during heart surgery in 1975. He was 50.
This is a brutally honest biography. Engel, however, manages to avoid sensationalism and paints an uncompromising picture of Serling.
It begins in Binghamton, where Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day 1924. He had a happy childhood, and for the rest of his life, Serling wistfully remembered those quiet, innocent days.
"In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive makeup of a human being," Serling later remarked, "there's a need for a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into -- and that's your hometown."
Reality, though, did not quite measure up to the ideal -- even in Binghamton.
During his junior year in high school, Serling was blackballed from a fraternity because he was Jewish. "It was the first time I became aware of religious differences," he said.
Serling graduated from high school in 1943. Then, shortly after his 18th birthday, he enlisted in the Army. His company was sent to the South Pacific, where Serling saw fierce combat against Japanese soldiers.
The experience changed his life forever. "I was convinced I wasn't going to come back," he said. He was discharged in 1946, feeling far older than his 21 years.
Serling then enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, under the GI Bill. He sold a script to CBS and gained national exposure. Eventually, he moved into television.
Serling's breakthrough came in 1955, when "Patterns" was telecast. It was a devasting look at corporate morality and earned rave reviews.
" 'Patterns' is about the price tag that hangs on success," Serling later said. "(The message is that) every human being has a minimum set of ethics from which he operates. When he refuses to compromise these ethics, his career must suffer; when he does compromise them, his conscience does the suffering."
In 1956, with "Requiem for a Heavyweight," Serling further enhanced his reputation. It was a poignant drama about an aging fighter and his manager.
Serling was branching out. He wrote movie scripts, worked on other TV projects and spread himself thin.
"He was getting cynical," said John Bloch, a director and friend of Serling. "He felt he was being sucked into projects that were not personal, that he didn't care that much about -- or not worthy of him."
So why did he do them? Serling once offered this explanation: "There comes a time when caviar becomes a necessity."
He reached personal heights in 1959, when "The Twilight Zone" debuted.
Serling, with his penchant for celebrity, did the on-camera narration for each episode. "The Twilight Zone" tackled controversial subject matter and issues no other program would touch. It was a science fiction show, and that gave it more freedom from the network censors Serling battled.
Serling won awards and basked in the glow of the program's succes. But it was not enough to stem his insecurity.
"Rod was riddled with self-doubt," said Saul David, a friend and associate. "I saw him cry over it. He thought of himself as having failed."
Serling never was satisfied with his accomplishments. After "The Twilight Zone" went off the air, Serling drifted from one project to another.
When the writing offers slowed, Serling did a series of TV commercials and hosted a quiz show called "The Liar's Club."
He tried coming back in the early '70s with a series called "Night Gallery," but it was a cheap imitation of "The Twilight Zone."
By this time, Serling had begun to drink more; he never quit his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. He was seeing a psychiatrist and his marriage to his wife, Carol, was strained.
Serling was unable to straighten out his life. Finally, in June 1975, his heart stopped during bypass surgery in a Rochester hospital.
Engel writes: "Serling's great mistake was to judge himself more by his failures than by his successes. Because his successes came early in his career, he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to that original rush of acceptance, and at the same time fearing he would not.
"Writing under that burden of desperation only served to emphasize to him the disparity between what he later turned out and what he felt capable of writing."
For Rod Serling, it was an ironic and tragic twist of fate -- straight out of "The Twilight Zone."