Book Paints a Vivid Portrait of Rod Serling

Many remember him as the host and writer of the acclaimed television series “The Twilight Zone,” while others knew him as a college professor, activist and Palisadian. But to Anne Serling, he was dad.

In her book, “As I Knew Him: My Dad Rod Serling,” Anne records the complexity of a man and her relationship to him. The book is engrossing because the story is told simply and offers letters, remembrances, photos and quotes.

“When I wrote the book, it was also an opportunity to set the record straight.” Anne told the Palisadian-Post from her home in upstate New York. Rod Serling, who lived in the Palisades from 1958 to 1975, died when he was 50 and Anne was 20.

Serling’s stories have been described as fantasy, science fiction, macabre, psychological and even surreal. Anne said this has cause her father to be painted incorrectly by some as a tortured soul. “His writing chronicled the human condition. He dealt with human character,” she said, noting that much of his writing resonates today because it is about “moral and ethical issues that we still deal with today.”

In one “Twilight Zone” episode, “Deaths-Head Revisited,” a former S.S. officer makes a nostalgic post-war visit to the Dachau concentration camp. When he enters the camp he is confronted by a former prisoner whom he had tortured. The officer is put on trial by that prisoner with the help of other ghosts from the camp. When the taxi driver comes back to fetch the officer, he calls police and a doctor, reporting: “I heard him screaming. Such screams. Like a, like a wounded animal.” The driver asks the doctor, “What happened to him? I drove him up here myself not two hours ago. He was all right then. But his screams. Oh, his screams.”

The doctor replies, “I have no idea. All I know is that he screams from pain. More than pain—agony.”

The closing narration went: “The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and remember, not only in ‘The Twilight Zone,’ but wherever men walk God’s earth.”

Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day 1924 in Syracuse, New York to Jewish parents. “I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped,” he joked.

Immediately after graduation from Binghamton High School in January 1943, Serling enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 11^th Airborne Division. His daughter’s book contains letters from the 18-year-old to his parents: “Mom, when you told me about seeing me if possible this summer, it boosted my spirits right up. I’m so damn homesick.”

After training camp, he was shipped to Leyte Island in the Philippines, where some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific took place. He was wounded by an exploding mortar shell that sent shrapnel into his wrist and knee. Years later, he still occasionally lost balance because of the knee injury.

Serling returned home to upstate New York, one of the few who survived from his squad. The theme of morality and the purpose of existence later echoed through many of his stories.

A “Twilight Zone” episode, “The Purple Testament,” is about a lieutenant who, while looking into the faces of the soldiers in his combat platoon, sees a strange light that reveals who among them are about to die.

When the lieutenant looks into a small shaving mirror, he sees the light glow off his own reflection.

“As I watch this episode years later, I understand what my father is saying,” Anne writes in her book. “You can’t experience the deaths of your fellow soldiers without a piece of you dying as well.”

In 1946, Serling entered Antioch College with plans to major in physical education because he was interested in working with kids. Writing became a catharsis for him, a way of dealing with the images of war that he carried with him.  Switching his major to language and literature, he wrote, directed and acted in weekly productions on a local radio station.

While at college, he met Carolyn Kramer and they married in July 1948. After graduating, Serling worked at radio station in Cincinnati, where he wrote “folksy” dialogue for two “hayseed” entertainers. “One was a girl yodeler, whose falsetto could break a beer bottle at 20 paces.” He was also asked to write scripts honoring small towns.

“In most cases,” he said, “the towns I was assigned to honor had little to distinguish them, save antiquity. Any dramatization beyond the fact that they existed physically, usually had one major industry, a population and a founding date, was more fabrication than documentation.”

After working his regular job, Serling would arrive home at 7 p.m. and try to write, but soon realized that a “basic must for every writer is simple solitude—physical and mental.”

At dinner one night, he told his wife Carolyn, who was three months pregnant with their first child, Jodi, that he wanted to quit his job and switch to freelance writing. “She took my hand. Then she winked at me and picked up a menu and studied it,” Serling wrote. “For lush or lean, good or bad, Sardi’s or malnutrition, I’d launched a career.”

His first break came when he was 24 and won second place in a radio contest for his script “To Live a Dream,” about a prizefighter dying of leukemia who wants to help a young fighter succeed. He sold scripts to “Kraft Television Theater,” “Studio One” and “Lux Video Theater.” He won his first Emmy in 1955 for “Patterns” and his second a year later for “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” He eventually won six Emmy’s, two Golden Globes, and also Edgar Allen Poe, Writer’s Guild of America and Hugo awards.

This past June, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions struck a deal with Serling’s estate to develop an event series based on an unproduced screenplay, Serling’s final completed work. According to Variety, “Abrams has long cited ‘Twilight Zone,’ which ran on CBS from 1959-1964, a seminal influence in his career.“

In addition to being a biography, “As I Knew Him” is the tender remembrance of a close father-daughter relationship.

Anne details her father’s humor, his love of his family and also his fight against racism and prejudice.

The family spent summers at Cayuga Lake by Ithaca and the school year in Pacific Palisades living on Monoco. Anne attended Canyon, Paul Revere and Palisades High School (for a year) and still maintains friendships with many in the community. She remembers sitting in a diner [Art Poole’s] with her dad, going to the town’s movie theater [the Bay] and the Brentwood Country Mart.

Rod Serling died during open-heart surgery in Rochester, New York, in 1975. About her father’s death, Anne wrote, “In those first weeks I sat alone in his office chair, reaching for pens he had held, papers he had touched. I looked at his photographs, imagining him talking to me. I panicked when I thought it might be possible I could soon forget the way he smiled, or the sound of his laugh and the way his voice trailed up the stairs calling me Pops or Miss Grumple or Nanny.”

After graduating from Elmira College in 1977, Anne returned to the Palisades and worked at Canyon as a teacher’s assistant before returning to New York to teach. About 10 years ago, she left the classroom to write full-time.

Carolyn, who was married to Serling for 27 years, still lives in the Palisades. Jodi, is married and lives in Ithaca.

Ithaca College has the largest single collection of television scripts and screenplays by Rod Serling, who taught at the college from 1967 to 1975. Every two years, the college holds an interdisciplinary academic conference dedicated to the works of Rod Serling. This year it will be held in Los Angeles November 8 and 9, and Anne is scheduled to read from her book, which is published by Kensington Publishing Company. Visit: Annesearling.com.