The Howling Man Read Free Page B

neglected a good part of your life and no one is paying attention to you, and all of a sudden, people are paying attention: they're offering you jobs here and there. And the temptation is: Jeez! I never had anything. I better take that because it may not last! And that happens to all of us. So Chuck, I think suffered from 'Serling Syndrome.' Rod, in the last year of his life, did all those commercials, which he didn't have to do. But he couldn't resist, and I gather Chuck couldn't resist all these things; then it got to be a real burden and he had to do something with it. So his friends had to come to his aid."
    Although he'd attained a high-level of creative and financial success in film and television, Beaumont had often confided to close friends his desire to return to novel writing, and, in 1963, decided to finish Where No Man Walks --a novel he'd begun in mid-1957. John Tomerlin explains, "Once you begin working in Hollywood, unless you enter it through the back door of doing novels and then writing the screenplays and stories that you want to, you end up taking assignments; usually, to a large extent, those assignments are other people's--you're meeting their requirements. Even if the story is original, you must adapt it to their requirements. I think Chuck didn't like doing that, and wanted very much to write books that he had seen himself writing."
    But time was running out on Beaumont.
    By mid-1963, his concentration began to slip; he was using Bromo Seltzer constantly to cope with ever increasing headaches. Friends remarked he looked notably older than his thirty-four years of age. By 1964, he could no longer write. Meetings with producers turned disastrous. His speech became slower, more deliberate. His concentration worsened. Meanwhile, his family and friends desperately tried to understand and treat his symptoms.
    In the summer of 1964, after a battery of tests at UCLA, Beaumont was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's Disease; he faced premature senility, aging, and an early death. "The saving grace to it," says Tomerlin, "if there is one, in a disease like that, is he was not really aware, after the very beginning, that there was anything wrong with him. When he first began to show strong symptoms of it, he would have kind of momentary flashes of great concern, as though he saw something happening and couldn't understand what it was. But it was a fairly gentle process."
    Charles Beaumont died February 21, 1967 at the age of thirty-eight, his full potential never realized.
    His last hardcover book was Remember? Remember? , and as Bill Nolan observes, "there is so much to remember about Charles Beaumont: [a] midnight call to California--Chuck calling from Chicago to tell me he planned to spend the day with Ian Fleming and why not join them? . . . the frenzied, nutty nights when we plotted Mickey Mouse adventures for the Disney Magazines. . . the bright, hot, exciting racing weekends at Palm Springs, Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach . . . the whirlwind trips to Paris and Nassau and New York . . . the sessions on the set at Twilight Zone when he'd exclaim, 'I write it and they create it in three dimensions. God, but it's magic! '... the fast, machine-gun rattle of his typewriter as I talked to Helen in the kitchen while he worked in the den.. . the rush to the newstand for the latest Beaumont story. .
    Yet, Beaumont's magic is still with us, evidenced by the four children who survived him, and in the stories which follow. He was a craftsman, the kind of writer who could be relied upon to perform the ultimate function of fiction--entertainment--adding always some ambiance, echoing, indefinable, the reflection of a storyteller who was more than a voice . . .
    Roger Anker
    Los Angeles, California
    January, 1987
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PREFACE by Christopher Beaumont
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    Roger Anker has put together a good and varied collection of Beaumont short stories. But he's done something more. He's wrapped each and every story in the loving embrace of a