Black Evening

The Road to Damascus

In my introduction to this collection, I told you about Philip Klass and the influence he had on my fiction. I also mentioned a second writer who made a difference. In fact, if not for him, I would never have become a writer at all. Stirling Silliphant.

A little background. Earlier, I explained that my father died in World War II and that my mother, unable to work and simultaneously look after me, put me in an orphanage when I was around four. Part of me wonders if the woman who finally came to get me was in fact the woman who had left me. But let's assume she was. Still unable to watch me at home while earning a living, she arranged for me to live on a Mennonite farm. There, my confusion about where I belonged intensified. Seasons passed. Every Friday, I was put on a bus into town where my mother waited for me at the terminal. Every Sunday, I got on a bus to go back to the farm. When a child boarding on a different farm was killed by a car as he walked along the highway, my mother decided to keep me with her.

By now, she had remarried – to give me a father, she later said. But I was desperate for the affection of a male authority figure, and her new husband wasn't prepared to fill the role. He looked visibly uncomfortable if I called him "Father." In the years that followed, I thought of him as a stranger. The marriage itself wasn't a success. My mother and my stepfather argued so much that my memories of my youth are mostly about fear. Many nights, the arguments were so loud that I worried about my safety. Imitating scenes in movies, I stuffed pillows under my blankets in my bed, making them look as if I slept there. Then I crawled under my bed and dozed fitfully in what I hoped was a protected space.

We lived above a bar and later a hamburger joint. There wasn't enough money for a television or a phone. For entertainment on a Saturday night, I listened to Gunsmoke and Tarzan on the radio while watching drunks fight in the alley below me. On one occasion, my mother went out to use the pay phone in the alley, only to have a stray bullet shatter the booth's glass.

But as I grew older, I discovered movies. In those days, theatres were palaces, and audiences didn't jabber endlessly. To earn the money to see a film, I would set up pins in bowling alleys. Or if I couldn't get the work, I would stand at a crowded bus stop and pretend that I'd lost my bus fare. Someone was always kind enough to give me the fifteen cents, which I immediately spent getting into a movie theater.

And there I sat, hour after hour, in the silvery darkness, watching film after film (they had double features in those days), sometimes staying to see the movies twice. It didn't matter to me what kind of movies they were, although I confess I wasn't crazy about the ones with a lot of kissing. What did matter was that I was distracted from reality.

In retrospect, it seems logical that I would have wanted to become a storyteller, to distract others from their reality. But at the time, I was too confused to know what I wanted. I ran with a street gang. I treated grade school as an interruption of my spare time. High school was a little better. Our finances improved. We moved to a small house in the suburbs. The family arguments were less. Still, by the time I entered grade eleven, I was going nowhere.

That fall of 1960, with little interest in anything except pool halls and eight hours of television a day, I found myself (like a minor-league Saul on his way to Damascus) struck by a bolt of light that changed my life. Even now, I can be specific about the time and date – 8:30 p.m., Friday, October 7. The light was from my television and the first episode of a series called Route 66.

The show was about two young men who, in Jack Kerouac fashion, drove a Corvette across the United States in search of America and themselves. One of them was Tod, a rich kid from New York whose father had recently died, leaving such massive debts that, when the creditors finished, the only thing left was Tod's sports car. His partner, Buz, was a tough street kid from Hell's Kitchen, who had worked for Tod's father on the New York docks and had become friends with Tod. Because Route 66 was then the principal highway across the United States, its name was perfect as a title for the series. And because the series was as much about America as it was about Tod and Buz, the producers decided to film each episode on the locations that the characters were supposed to be visiting, although many were far from Route 66: Boston, Philadelphia, Biloxi, Santa Fe, Oregon City…

The first episode, "Black November," involved a small Southern town haunted by a grisly secret from years earlier – the ax murder of a German prisoner-of-war and the minister who tried to protect him. I'd never seen a story like it, not merely the mystery, suspense, and action (a scene involving a power saw remains vivid in my mind) but the appeal of the characters and the reality conveyed by the writing. I discovered that I was waiting eagerly for Friday night to come around again – and the next Friday night – and the next. There was something about the way the characters talked, the emotions they expressed, the values they believed in, that affected me deeply and woke my mind.

For the first time in my life, I began to study credits. Who on earth was responsible for this wonderful experience? One episode would be about shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico, with a plot that paralleled Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Another would be about street gangs in Los Angeles, with poetical dialogue amid the squalor. Still another would be about cropdusting in Phoenix, with tragic overtones of Greek myth. Back then, I didn't know anything about Sartre or existentialism or the philosophy of the Beat generation. But even if I couldn't put a name to what I was experiencing, it made me feel emotionally and intellectually alive. Martin Milner and George Maharis were the stars. Still, despite their considerable acting talents, I felt uncharacteristically attracted to the minds behind the scenes, to the creative forces that invented the dramatic situations and put the words (sometimes spellbinding speeches that lasted five minutes) in the actors' mouths. Herbert B. Leonard was the producer. Sam Manners was the production chief. Okay. But still… Then I realized that one other name appeared prominently in the credits of almost every episode. Stirling Silliphant. Writer. My, my. A new thought.

That grade-eleven student, who formerly had no ambition whatsoever, managed to find the address of Screen Gems, the company listed at the end of the credits. Unable to type, I sent a handwritten letter ("scrawled" would be more accurate) to Stirling Silliphant and asked how I could learn to do the wonderful things that he was doing. One week later (I still recall my amazement), I received an answer from him – two densely typed pages that began with an apology for having taken so long to get back to me. He'd have written to me sooner, he explained, but when my letter arrived, he'd been out at sea in a boat. He revealed no secrets and indeed refused to look at anything I might write (partly because of my inexperience and partly for legal reasons), but he did tell me this. The way to be a writer is to write and write and write and…

Millions of words later, I'm still writing. If not for Stirling, I would never have gone on to college. I wouldn't have gotten a B.A., let alone an M.A. and a Ph.D., wouldn't have met Philip Klass, wouldn't have written First Blood. One of my greatest thrills came on a summer afternoon in 1972 when Stirling phoned to thank me for having sent him a copy of First Blood and to say that he'd liked it, that he was gratified to have been an inspiration. "If I were a cat," he said, "I'd purr."

We stayed in touch but never met until the summer of 1985 when he suggested that I come to Los Angeles and spend the Fourth of July weekend with him. Twenty-five years after I first experienced his work, I finally got to meet him, a stocky, broad-smiled, gentle-featured man with short gray hair and generous good nature. It was like coming face-to-face with the father I'd never known. Finally, in a closing of the circle, he took my novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose, to NBC and suggested that they do a miniseries of it. In 1989, when the series was broadcast after the Superbowl, the most coveted spot in television, I was struck by awe when I watched the credits and again saw the magical words: Executive Producer Stirling Silliphant.

Shortly afterward, Stirling told me that in one of his former lives he had lived in Thailand and that now he was going home. He had a Beverly Hills garage sale, moved to Bangkok, and had the luxury of writing whatever he wanted with no deadlines except his own. We often talked about my coming to visit him, but our various schedules kept conflicting. My only contact with him was via frequent faxes. Regret is a terrible emotion. At a little after 8 a.m. on the morning of April 26, 1996 (as with the debut of Route 66, I can be very specific about this moment), I was eating breakfast, listening to the news on National Public Radio, when the announcer informed me, "Academy-Award-winning screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, died this morning from prostate cancer. He was 78." My Cheerios stuck in my throat. It was two days after my birthday. The man I thought of as my father was gone.

Stirling was as determined a writer as I ever encountered. He once had two wisdom teeth extracted in the morning and was hitting the typewriter keys by noon. He worked almost every day and was religious about meeting deadlines. Legendary for being prolific and fast, he was hesitant to show a complete list of his credits because he was certain that no one would believe that anyone could write that much. I've never been prolific or fast, but at his best, his action-filled scripts were inventive, compelling, and thoughtful: his Oscar-winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night, for example, not to mention his television work for Naked City . I have tried to follow his example.

Thus my first contact with Hollywood was positive. The troubled street kid who became addicted to movies as an antidote to the darkness of his life found that the dreams those movies inspired could, with hard work, be fulfilled. But many who've been exposed to Hollywood have had the opposite experience. Too often, writers are treated with indifference at best and malicious contempt at worst. They're stonewalled, misled, or blatantly lied to. Some producers can't imagine showing courtesy to anyone they don't have to impress. Their inability to relate to others borders on the sociopathic. That never happened to me on any of the projects based on my works, but I certainly came across it in other contexts, enough so that I eventually decided to write about the bottom part of dreams in Hollywood. This is the final story in my trilogy about the paradoxes of ambition and the dark side of success. We began with a paper boy. We moved on to a teenaged football player. We now meet an adult who tells us about the heartbreak of the movie business. I haven't updated the financial figures in this story. After the $200 million price tag of Titanic, I'm amazed to look back at how comparatively cheaply a film once could get made. The following story was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award as the best novella of 1985.