Part 1 (1/2)

CHARLES BEAUMONT: SELECTED STORIES.

edited by Roger Anker.

Thanks are due to the following for their help in bringing this book to publication: Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Howard Browne, Roger Corman, Saul David, Harlan Ellison, Charles E.

Fritch, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, Chad Oliver, Frank M. Robinson, Ray Russell, Jerry Sohl and John Tomerlin.

For friends.h.i.+p, advice and support: Cathy, Elizabeth and Gregory Beaumont, Larry Anker, Bill Farley, Edward Gorman, Dean R. Koontz, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert R. McCammon, Dave McDonnell, Paul Mikol, Scot Stadalsky, William Relling Jr., Darrell, Donna and Jason Rossi, Peter Straub, Robert Vaillancourt, Stanley Wiater and Douglas E.

Winter.

And a very special thanks to the following for the endless hours of driving, interviewing, conversing, all-night coffee shops and encouragement: Christopher Beaumont, Richard Christian Matheson, William F. Nolan and Dennis Etchison.

In memory of Nick and Ria Anker and of Chuck and Helen Beaumont---------------------

INTRODUCTION.

by Roger Anker ---------------------.

Though best remembered for his short fiction and nostalgic essays in _Playboy_, teleplays for _The Twilight Zone_; and his screenplay adaptation, _The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao_, Charles Beaumont's creative talents have been evidenced in such diverse fields as science fiction, horror, whimsy, crime-suspense, and film criticism.

His prolific output also reflects his many interests and hobbies, including motor racing, music, hi-fidelity equipment, cartooning, and travel.

Tall, lean and bespectacled, Beaumont was always full of a thousand ideas and a thousand projects, and approached them all with what was fantastic energy. In a career which spanned a brief thirteen years, he'd written and sold ten books, seventyfour short stories, thirteen screenplays (nine of which were produced), two dozen articles and profiles, forty comic stories, fourteen columns, and over seventy teleplays.

Some of his books were inspired by his adventurous personal experiences. _Omnibus of Speed_ and _When Engines Roar_ (both co-edited with William F. Nolan) are about auto racing; _The Intruder_, a novel concerning Southern integration in the early sixties, was drawn from his extensive research on the subject.

Beaumont could never write fast enough to keep up with his ideas. A selfeducated man, learning for him was never confined to a cla.s.sroom; life had much to teach.

He was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago on January 2, 1929, and grew up on that city's North side.

Of his early childhood, he wrote, ”Football, baseball and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world, to the exclusion of Aesop, the brothers Grimm, Dr. Doolittle and even Bullfinch. The installation by my parents of 'library wallpaper' in the house (”A room-full of books for only 70~ a yard!”) convinced me that literature was on the way out anyway, so I lived in illiterate contentment until laid low by spinal meningitis. This forced me to less strenous forms of entertainment. I discovered Oz; then Burroughs; then Poe--and the jig was up. Have been reading ever since, feeling no pain.”

The only child of Charles H. and Letty Nutt, young Charlie Nutt was ”fairly outgoing,” yet very sensitive about his name. He once expressed to boyhood acquaintance Frank M. Robinson (co-author of _The Gla.s.s Inferno_ and _The Gold Crew_) his hatred for the continuous name teasing he'd endured: ”. .

. the kids in school would call him 'Ches' or 'Wall' or would ask 'Is your father some kind of a nut?” He later changed his name to Charles Mc.n.u.tt, but when that didn't satisfy the situation, he changed it finally, legally, to Beaumont.

At an early age, he'd often ”haunt” the editorial offices of the Ziff-Davis Publis.h.i.+ng Company--publishers of _Amazing Stories_ and other pulp magazines--and, from an outer office, would gaze at the group of employees typing busily. To young Charlie Nutt, these people were giants, editing ma.n.u.scripts, and building a small empire, at that time, in Chicago. ”I used to stand there and watch them slamming out 10,000 words a day,” he once wrote. ”They were G.o.ds to me . . .” Ironically, his first professional sale, ”The Devil, You Say?”, would appear in the January, 1951 issue of _Amazing Stories_.

At age twelve, mid-way through his two year bout with meningitis, Beaumont's parents sent him to what they considered to be a better climate. In July, 1960, he told the _San Diego Union_, ”I lived with five widowed aunts who ran a rooming house near a train depot in the state of Was.h.i.+ngton. Each night we had the ritual of gathering around the stove and there I'd hear stories about the strange death ofeach of their husbands.”

During this period in Everett, he published his own fan magazine, _Utopia_, and soon became an avid fan of science fiction, writing letters to almost every magazine of this genre. By the time he was thirteen he had broken into print 25 times in almost as many magazines with these resumes and editorial criticisms.

His interests then s.h.i.+fted from typewriter to drawing board and his ill.u.s.trations began to appear in a number of pulp magazines under the brush name E.T. Beaumont. His first cartoon, done in collaboration with his friend and fellow artist, Ronald Clyne, appeared in _Fantastic Adventures_ in October, 1943.

In the early months of 1944, Charlie Mc.n.u.tt turned to drama and radio work, beginning as a featured actor on ”Drama Workshop,” a West coast show, and soon moved on to write and direct his own spot, ”Hollywood Hi-Lights,” a 15 minute show of movieland chatter and shop talk. His formal education was spa.r.s.e, of which, he wrote, ”[I] barely nosed through the elementary grades and gained a certain notoriety in high school as a wastrel, dreamer, could-do-the-work-if-he'd-only-tryer and general lunkhead.” He left high school a year short of graduation for a four month period of Army service (Infantry) before he was medically discharged for a bad back. This led to his enrollment into the Bliss-Hayden Acting School in California under the GI Bill. After starring in a local version of the Hecht-MacArthur play, _Broadway_, he was signed by Universal Studio as an actor, and was scheduled for a co-starring role in a Universal-International film. But despite much ”hullabaloo in film magazines and newspapers,” this never materializied, and Beaumont reluctantly gave up a theatrical career for one in commercial art. Soon he was sketching cartoons for MGM's animation studio and working as a part-time ill.u.s.trator for FPCI (Fantasy Publis.h.i.+ng Company) in Los Angeles. Beaumont later wrote, ”[I] worked hard, managed to crack most of the pulp magazines with ill.u.s.trations, graduated to book jackets and slick magazine cartoons. But [was] forced, finally, to admit total lack of any real talent in the field.”

When this failed, Beaumont turned to writing.

It was in the summer of 1946, that he met twenty-six-year-old Ray Bradbury (author of numerous screenplays, teleplays, essays, poems, and works of fiction, including _Farenheit 451_ and _The Martian Chronicles_) in Fowler Brothers Book Store in downtown Los Angeles, and began talking about his comic collection. Remembers Bradbury: ”He said he had a lot of _Steve Canyon_, and I told him I had a lot of _Prince Valiants_ and some Hannes Bok photographs; so we decided to get together.

”Out of that beginning, of our mutual interest in comic strips, a friends.h.i.+p blossomed.”

Bradbury began to read Beaumont's short fiction and quickly became a major influence in Beaumont's life--a mentor. ”When I read the first one, I said: 'Yes. Very definitely. You are a writer,”

recalls Bradbury. ”It showed immediately. It's not like so many people who come to you with stories and you say, 'Well, they're okay,' You know, if they keep working they'll make it. Chuck's talent was obvious from that very first story.”

For reasons of economic survival, Beaumont moved to Mobile, Alabama in 1948, where his father had obtained employment for him as a clerk for the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad. It was there that he met Helen Broun, and wrote in a notebook: ”She's incredible. Intelligent _and_ beautiful. This is the girl I'm going to marry!” A year later, they were married and moved to California. Their son, Christopher, was born in December of 1950; they would later parent three more children: Catherine, Elizabeth, and Gregory.

As Beaumont's early writing brought him little more than rejection slips, he worked at a number of jobs, including that of a piano player (”Studied piano for six years, decided [I] couldn't squeak by owing to immensely talented right hand and nowhere left”) and, in 1949, a tracing clerk for California Motor Express, where he met John Tomerlin. When the two discovered they shared a pa.s.sion for words (as well as a skill for ”geting out of work”), they quickly cultivated what was to become a lifelong friends.h.i.+p.

In mid-1951, another special friends.h.i.+p was made when Beaumont met a young, struggling writer by the name of Richard Matheson (who, in addition to many screenplays, teleplays and short stories, is known for works such as _I Am Legend_ and _The Shrinking Man_). As their families became veryclose, there soon developed between Beaumont and Matheson a constant interchange of ideas, out of which a number of varied and imaginative stories would emerge. Says writer Dennis Etchison (_Darkside_ and _Cutting Edge_), who'd attended Beaumont's UCLA writing cla.s.s in 1963, ”It's pretty difficult to consider Beaumont and Matheson separately because as short story writers they came out at the same time; they worked together, they both came out of an influence from Bradbury, and they both had such a close friends.h.i.+p. I think there are great similarities, tradeoffs, and variations between their stories. They were just two of a kind that came up at one time.”

As their careers grew, Beaumont and Matheson acted as ”spurs” to one another. ”He and I, in a very nice way, of course, were very compet.i.tive,” says Matheson. ”At first, I was a little ahead of him in sales. I'd call him on the phone and say, 'I just sold a collection of short stories to Bantam,' and he'd say, 'Thanks a lot, thanks a lot,' and hang up. [laughs] He wasn't serious about it though. But he caught up to me. My first collection of stories [_Born of Man and Woman, 1954] spurred him on to his first collection [_The Hunger and Other Stories_, 1957]. Then we both did a so-called 'straight' novel just about the same time [Beaumont's _The Intruder_, 1959 and Matheson's _The Beardless Warriors_, 1960].”

But the success which was to come their way, was still in the future. For now, Beaumont was working hard to break through. Says Ray Bradbury, ”I was at Universal in 1952 on my very first screen project, _It Came From Outer s.p.a.ce_. And Chuck, coincidentally, was working there in the music department, handling a multilith machine, copying the musical scores. I would see him and have lunch with him there at the studio and encourage him, Those were hard years for him; he didn't want to be in the music department doing all this 'stupid' work. He wanted to _write_.”

During this period, Beaumont was writing feverishly, but meeting with little success. His agent at the time, Forrest J. Ackerman, recalls: ”I made approximately 78 submissions for him, but nothing happened for quite sometime.”

When fired from Universal in June of 1953, Beaumont took the plunge into fulltime writing.

Late 1953 saw the Beaumonts in disastrous financial shape; Chuck's typewriter was in hock and the gas had been shut off in their apartment. Writer William F. Nolan (co-author of _Logan's Run_ and biographer of Das.h.i.+ell Hammett) remembers Beaumont ”breaking the seal and turning it back on; Chris required heat, and d.a.m.n the gas company! Chris got what he needed.”

Nolan had met Beaumont, briefly, in 1952 at Universal, when introduced by Ray Bradbury. ”I recall Chuck's sad face and ink-stained hands. The first Beaumont story had already appeared (in _Amazing Stories_) and within a few more months, when I saw Chuck again, half a dozen others had been sold. Forry Ackerman got us together early in 1953, and our friends.h.i.+p was immediate and lasting.

I found, in Chuck, a warmth, a vitality, an honesty and depth of character which few possess. And, most necessary, a wild, wacky, irreverant sense of humor.”

In February, 1954, Beaumont and Nolan began writing comics for Whitman Publication.

Together they turned out ten stories, after which Beaumont sold another thirty to become employed at Whitman as co-editor, where he helped to ”guide the destinies of such influential literary figures as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Andy Panda.”

Finally, in September of that year, Beaumont's first major sale appeared in _Playboy_. ”Black Country,” a 10,000-word novella about a terminally ill jazzman, is considered by Ray Russell (_Playboy_ editor during the 1950s, and author of many works of fiction, including _Incubus_ and _Sardonicus_), the best story _Playboy_ ever bought. ”Beaumont manages to set up a rhythm and sustain a pitch, a concert pitch--to use a musical term--and sustain that from the very beginning to the very end,” says Russell. ”It almost never relaxes. You're on a beat throughout the entire story until _whhhh_, it's over.

There are very few stories that have that, by Beaumont or anybody else.”

_Playboy_ soon placed Beaumont on a five-hundred-dollar monthly retainer for first refusal right to his ma.n.u.scripts, and later listed him as a contributing editor.

Beaumont had reached the turning point in his career.