Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (6 page)

Route 66
earned a reputation as a “dark” show — this was before “edgy” became an adjective and well before it became a cliché — not just because of the personal changes its creators were undergoing, but because of those that were pounding away at the country. The 1950s were dead; the 1960s brought Camelot, assassinations, the blossoming of the Civil Rights struggle, and the emergence of an unholy war in Vietnam. America was maturing. Confirmed Silliphant, “We [dealt] with ideas which were out there on the cutting edge at the time and, with few exceptions, we never had a moment’s problem with CBS. With two notable exceptions: ‘The Newborn,’ which I wrote, and ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ (aired as “To Walk with a Serpent”) an episode written by Leonard Freeman, who was producing for us that season. Leonard’s story savaged the John Birch Society and it turned out that somebody high up in the General Motors hierarchy (Chevrolet bought half the show for the entire four years) must have been a Bircher, because all hell broke loose. Jim Aubrey (head of CBS) flew out to meet with Bert and me and demanded we withdraw the episode, but Bert pulled the contract, which CBS had signed, granting us total creative freedom, the network’s power [being] only that of not exhibiting the episode, but having to pay for it whether they approved it or not. So we won that one. Other than these two incidents — and one more beef about the violence in an LA street gang story I wrote (‘Most Vanquished, Most Victorious’) — and we won that one too — we sailed through the seasons.”

Ultimately, the series was a catharsis for Silliphant as well as a crash course in writing, something that came easily to him — perhaps too easily for him to respect his own talent. That changed when he looked back in his later years.

“I have always felt that the most original — and, if I may be permitted the conceit, the most effective in the sense of touching the feelings of many, many other people — writing I have down in the filmed media was done in the period 1960 to 1964 when I wrote the majority of the one-hour
Route 66
filmed-on-location shows for CBS. These shows caught the American psyche of that period about as accurately as it could be caught. I wrote all of them out of an intense personal motivation, each was a work of passion and conviction. It was actually (if truth be known) a dramatization of my personal four-year psychiatric exhumation of all the shit that was bubbling inside me, and it’s hard to assign that one to another writer. There were few of the stories I wrote for
Route 66
during those four years which did not spring out of my own life.”

A painful case in point was the 100th episode called “The Stone Guest,” which starred Jo Van Fleet as a single woman whose ill-chosen affair with a married man, Lee Phillips, is exposed when they are trapped in a mine cave-in. The episode, which aired on November 7, 1963, “with its bitter attitude toward marriage, is another example,” Silliphant said. “My marriage [to Ednamarie Patella] at that time was a battle zone, so I wrote ‘The Stone Guest’ out of quiet fury.” 
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Because the episode holds so much significance, it bears examination. Its inspiration was a fair-sized shouting match the Silliphants were having and, in the middle of it, Silliphant went for his typewriter, saying, “Wait a minute, I’ve got to get this down.” The marriage lasted nine more months. In the story, Tod and Linc get jobs in a Colorado mining town: Linc in the mine and Tod, atypically, working stage crew for the local opera company’s production of
Don Giovanni.
When a mine cave-in traps a spinster, Hazel Quine (Jo Van Fleet) with the town’s Lothario, Ben Belden (Lee Philips), the mismatched pair is forced to confront their pasts while hoping rescue workers can save them. At the same time, Belden’s neglected wife, Nora (Marion Ross), is giving birth to their daughter alone; his school-aged son, David, has fought to uphold his father’s unwarranted honor in a playground brawl; and Hazel is strangely liberated by the desperation.

It’s a busy script but all of its plotlines converge in the need to face Truth (in the existential sense). Did Silliphant model the philandering, cost-cutting, belligerent Belden on himself? Did he use Ednamarie as a template for the lonely, desperate, self-sacrificing Hazel? Or is Beldon’s abandoned wife closer to his sense of her (Nora confesses to having babies as a way to hold onto her husband)? In their time trapped, Belden comes to see Hazel as a redeemer for his misspent life, but what will he come back to on the surface? Did Silliphant regard forced confinement as the only way to reconcile the events that were destroying his marriage? The mine collapse is the result of Belden’s shoddy construction; was Silliphant accepting blame for his shoddy marriage (that nevertheless produced two children)? Tod’s explanation to David of the plot of
Don Giovanni
is a way of explaining (though not excusing) the character of David’s father; was Silliphant trying to reconcile with his own children? In the end, Belden sets off a huge dynamite charge in an attempt to free himself and Hazel, although “free” can be taken both as enabling them to leave the mine as well as to end their haunted lives. It turns out to be the latter.

On August 13, 1964, Ednamarie (40) sued Silliphant (45) for divorce, claiming that, since 1960, he had spent “over $100,000” on “a dozen” women with whom he was having extramarital affairs. 
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The divorce was granted on September 30, 1964, but the details of the settlement would drag on for years. Even after the decree, Ednamarie harbored resentment not only for Silliphant but for their daughter. The tension grew to the point where, according to sources, she once attempted suicide by cutting her wrists, not in her own bathtub, as might be expected, but in their daughter, Dayle’s.

As usual, Silliphant worked out this conflict on the page. “This is the truest thing I will ever tell you,” he said of his
Route 66
episode, “Kiss the Maiden, All Forlorn.” “Why did I write it? Because my sixteen-year-old daughter announced one morning she was going to become a Catholic nun — the order of BVM — Blessed Virgin Mary — in Peoria. 
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Gulp! And she did. I had to deal with this. It was not easy. So I researched the subject. Until that moment I had never, never talked to a nun. I wouldn’t have known what to say to one. The outfits intimidated me. But by going to several orders and
learning,
I found that the Church is not out hustling prospective sisters. You really have to have a calling to arrive at the decision my daughter had arrived at. This gave me new understanding and gave a credibility to the script, which had I written it from the outside, rather than out of my own anguish at having to surrender a daughter to an institution I had always regarded with distrust, still bearing in mind the screams of those who died during the Inquisition, of all the hundreds of thousands of Jews who went to their deaths, unprotected by Rome, would have not had the power this finished episode had.” 
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Midway through the third season, George Maharis left the series. Various statements at the time attributed his departure to displeasure with the grueling production schedule, relentless travel, and health issues. 
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Although his replacement, Glenn Corbett, was also attractive and competent, there was no way he could slip into the backstory that Maharis and Milner enjoyed, and the series was canceled after its fourth season.

Suddenly it was over. Not just
Route 66,
but the way in which television was produced. The networks had long bristled at putting up the money for the shows they ran only to have the producers, and not them, control the content. And if not the producers, the sponsors. Beginning with FCC Commissioner Newton B. Minow’s 1961 observation that television was a “vast wasteland” of sub-level programming, both critics and politicians went on the attack — critics for quality, and politicians, as they are wont to do, for publicity.

“[Television] changed,” Silliphant noted,” because Senator Dodd 
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brought those ridiculous accusations against the networks back in the sixties that we were corrupting the youth of America and we were doing all kinds of naughty things and making people violent and inspiring crime by our comic strip stuff. The networks, instead of fighting that, kissed ass. They let it happen for a very good reason: they wanted control of the programming.” 
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And they got it. Before long, network executives whose hands-on experience had been limited to changing the channel were demanding to approve not just finished teleplays but story ideas, casting, locations, production crew, and even the costumes and wallpaper. Instead of deciding in one pitch meeting what script to write, the process began to take weeks. Focus groups replaced intuition and experience. Inspiration and diversity suffered. Today, despite having 500+ channels, television content is controlled and engineered by six huge communications conglomerates, none of which, thanks to FCC deregulation, has any responsibility to serve the public.

As popular as it was,
Route 66
had to end somewhere, which it did with a two-parter called “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” on March 6 and 13, 1964. Tod and Linc wind up in Tampa, Florida among an eccentric family (including Chill Wills, Nina Foch, Patrick O’Neal, and Barbara Eden) fighting over an estate. Having toured the country for four years, the pair head off to Houston, but independently, their odyssey completed and they, themselves, presumably now fit to face the world.

As uncertain as their futures might have been, the fate of
Route 66
became even more vague. After a summer of reruns, it faded from network schedules and went into syndication on local stations. Through a succession of sales, swaps, and licenses that would make a Gordian knot look frayed, Bert Leonard, as best as can be determined, sold off various aspects of the show — rerun, foreign, remake, feature film, home video — whenever he needed money. Likewise, Silliphant may or may not have sold Leonard his ownership shares (but not his residual rights as co-creator and writer); the paperwork seems to have vanished along with a clear chain of title.

The location of the original negatives, so essential to preservation, has also been hard to pin down. For years, tapes of episodes were at a premium; many circulated on Betamax and VHS among fans who recorded the show on rerun and syndication. Even Silliphant, who presumably had access to pristine courtesy copies, had a hard time prying them from CBS, and his correspondence includes letters reminding friends who’d borrowed them to be sure to bring them back. 
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His collection includes off-air dubs like anyone else. Exhaustive research by television historian Stephen Bowie 
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reveals that, toward the end of his life, Leonard transferred his copyrights to former attorney James Tierney in settlements of debts totaling $1.5 million. The video rights to
Route 66
were carved out to the distribution company Shout! Factory, after an earlier gambit with CBS Home Video, and
Naked City
went to Image Entertainment. The TV remake rights to
Route 66
were licensed by Columbia Pictures Television, which produced a reboot in 1993 that aired on NBC. The new series starred James Wilder (“Nick Lewis”) who, like Tod Stiles, inherits his father’s Corvette and picks up a drifter, Dan Cortese (“Arthur Clark”), and together they have adventures. More precisely, they had four adventures, because NBC pulled the series when it didn’t immediately catch on. Since then, the rights have been in flux. 
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Sony claimed TV distribution rights under license from CBS; for a while they were under lien by Leonard’s attorney James B. Tierney; 
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in 2007 they were acquired by Kirk Hallam of Roxbury Entertainment; 
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and in 2011 Hallam disclosed that he was in partnership with the show’s video distributor, Shout! Factory, on a TV remake and possibly a feature film. 
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He also had acquired the finegrain dupe negatives (“They’re in vaults all up and down the east coast”) but decided against using the original negatives that were still in Sony’s vaults, a choice that created controversy within fandom when he issued the first DVD sets through Shout!.  
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Bert Leonard fell on hard times in his later years but he never gave up; like
Route 66,
the life was an open road full of promise. He produced a number of TV movies and feature films. One of his pet projects was
River of Gold,
a Rin-Tin-Tin story that parked briefly at Disney before the budget scared the studio off. By the 1990s, at financial odds and in declining health, he lived for a while with stunt coordinator-director Max Kleven, then his daughter Victoria, then his daughter Gina. Soon the cancer that had taken his larynx returned and ate away at the rest of his body, but not his spirit. He died on October 14, 2006 at the age of 84.

Route 66
remains the iconic television series of the 1960s. Its strength is that, like the highway itself, one does not need to follow the series from the start in order to enjoy its drama. Each episode is a separate experience, and the sum of them is a portrait of a nation in transition, aimless perhaps, but always headed into the future with a seductive blend of optimism and pragmatism — not to mention a golden era when gasoline was 29¢ a gallon.

On Stirling Silliphant’s pilot script dated October 27, 1959, appears the title
The Searchers.
While there has been speculation that he later changed it to avoid confusion with John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece, he and Bert Leonard might just as accurately have called it
The Seekers
if that’s where their minds were headed. But Interstate 66, which had opened in 1926 and ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, was called variously the Mother Road, Will Rogers Highway, and the Main Street of America. Route 66 was a ribbon of both commerce and romance, the lifeline of a nation. Even when the show veered away from its namesake and into other cities, its mission stayed intact. Travelers drove it to the beat of Bobby Troup’s 1946 hit song “(Get Your Kicks) On Route 66,” first recorded by Nat “King” Cole. But it was Nelson Riddle’s jazzy piano and string version, orchestrated by Gil Grau, that glided into television history.

In fact, Silliphant’s pilot script is so specific that it calls for just the kind of theme that Riddle would write. An inspection of his teleplays for the series reveals that he was, in essence, directing the show on paper, not just the music, but tone, verisimilitude, and sometimes even the street corner.

“Frequently, when I was writing episodes for
Route 66
at the rate of one every nine days,” he said, “I would shorthand the exposition by telling the director to, for example, ‘give us a three-minute fight here, which makes the fight in
Shane
look like a Girl Scout dance.’” It was clear from the start that he was in charge. At the front of his pilot script, which was subtitled “The Wolf Tree,” (which aired on October 7, 1960, as “Black November”), is a list of “don’ts” that he wanted the series to observe:

1.
No smoking or displays of any type of tobacco product.

2.
No use of matches or mechanical lighters.

3.
No use of beer or alcoholic beverages of any kind.

4.
No drunkenness.

5.
No shaving or display of shaving equipment.

6.
No derogatory treatment of food or food products, household appliances, or automobiles.

7.
When such props are required, no use of identifiable brand features of any food, drug, or appliance products, either on labels or in peculiarity or uniqueness of shape or design.

Although some of these cautions were ultimately ignored, they show the producers’ awareness that the series had to appeal to sponsors as well as viewers, not only during its network run but later in syndication, and they didn’t want to drive away any potential advertisers with conflicts of interest.

One of the most surprising discoveries in the pilot script is that Buz and Tod aren’t driving a Corvette: their wheels are described only as “a sports car.” And although many people recall the car as being red, the series was shot in black and white, so there’s no way to tell it was actually brown.

Running slightly longer, at seventy-eight pages, than usual hour-long teleplays, which usually go between fifty-eight and sixty-four pages, “The Wolf Tree” had the task of not only establishing the main characters but also setting their motivation and milieu. Here Silliphant is clever; only
after
Buz gets into a brawl is it revealed that he has a roughneck heritage (even though Tod is the one who gets battered most of the time), and not until page thirty-two is it noted that Tod’s father gave him his car before he died. The rest is left to considerable development and occasional revelation in succeeding episodes.

Like
Naked City,
Route 66
was filmed on location. Unlike
Naked City,
however,
Route 66
’s locations spanned the contiguous 48 states and Canada. The places and people (many credited at the end of the episodes in which they appear) offered the kind of detail that a writer stuck in LA could never know. For “Child of a Night,” set in Georgia, which aired January 3, 1964, from a teleplay dated two months earlier on November 9, 1963, (which gives some indication of how close to airdate they were shooting), Silliphant includes a page thirty-three note to associate producer Sam Manners, “I found this road out Victory Drive, out toward Bonaventure Cemetery on the way to Fort Pulaski…” In a note on page 55 in “A Cage in Search of a Bird,” involving a flashback sequence in modern-day Denver (written June 3, 1963, and airing on a leisurely November 29, 1963, thanks to summer reruns), he again asks Manners:

Now, Sam, comes the trick of the century. If you can manage to clear this vital traffic area of today’s Denver for one magnificent shot of a 1930 Buick — alone — traveling across the Civic Center — with the Capitol in the b.g. — you deserve an Emmy for Creative Management. If you can’t, then, as soon as Julie says, “… up toward the Capitol,” we cut out of shot, in any event…

In this script, as in others, Silliphant establishes location by describing camera moves (“a long tracking shot from high, high up, starting at the golden dome of the State Capitol, then panning over to Broadway, where we pick up the tiny speck, which is the Corvette…”) and even calls for close-ups, two-shots, and angles favoring one character in the frame. This is precisely the thing that modern screenwriting gurus caution their students never to do, but it was the way that
Route 66
kept the visions of its creators intact regardless of how many directors worked on the show. 
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The real trick in writing a series is keeping the main characters interesting enough to hold the audience, deep enough to challenge the actors, and consistent enough to sustain the germ of the show. Revealing too much too soon blows the show’s wad; being too vague makes it frustrating. Silliphant cleverly meets this task by dropping hints about Tod’s, Buz’s, and Linc’s past whenever they meet a new character who inspires a revelation. “It comes to me now that, with all the places I’ve been, I still haven’t found a place where I’d like to wake up every morning for the rest of my life,” confesses Tod in “A Cage in Search of a Bird,” which is a particularly rich show. In “Like This it Means Father...Like This — Bitter...Like This — Tiger” (written November 24, 1963; aired January 17, 1964), it is revealed that Linc spent time in Saigon and learned Chinese. And so on, layer by layer, week by week. The proof of these decisions can be found in the finished shows, and a selection of them reveals the alchemy that made
Route 66
the testament of its times.

It is impossible to comment on all seventy-three episodes that Stirling Silliphant wrote; numerous books and fansites address the series with insight and passion. For now, some of the more notable entries — gleaned from conversations with Silliphant and the pleasure of multiple screenings — include (caution: spoilers):

“Black November” (pilot airdate: October 7, 1960):
Seeking a shortcut back to the main highway, Buz and Tod are stranded with a broken axle in a small Mississippi town. Their presence sets off a melt-down involving Caleb Garth (Everett Sloane), the man who owns everything and everybody; his haunted son, Paul (Keir Dullea); a storeowner, Jim Slade (Whit Bissell); Slade’s terrified daughter, Jenny (Patty McCormack); and various townspeople, all of whom seem to have something to hide. They do: the town’s deadly secret is that, years ago, Garth murdered a German youth as payback for his own son’s death in World War II, and then killed the preacher who tried to protect the German. It all took place under a huge wolf tree whose shade has kept everything beneath it from flourishing. Once the truth is out, the tree is felled, the Corvette gets its axle fixed, and Tod and Buz hit the road again.

Blessed with a superb cast that also includes Malcolm Atterbury and George Kennedy, shot by Ernesto Caparros (who also shot
The Miracle Worker
), and rich with such production values as crane shots and night photography, this episode does a great deal of heavy narrative lifting. Philip Leacock’s controlled direction of Silliphant’s detailed script allows the fine cast to flourish. Casting note: Silliphant and Leonard hired Dullea instead another newcomer named Robert Redford.

“A Month of Sundays” (airdate: September 22, 1961).
Broadway star Arline Simms (Anne Francis) has returned to her hometown of Butte, Montana, to die. At first cold and distant, she slowly warms up as Buz pursues her, yet refuses his marriage proposal without telling him why. When Tod learns of her illness, he urges Arline to marry Buz anyway. She does, but collapses shortly after the ceremony and dies, exhorting, “I was alive! I really was alive!” as Buz cries in anguish.

Francis delivers a solid performance that ranges from bitchy and angry to warm and sensitive, and director Arthur Hiller encourages openness from all the actors. Among dialogue gems is Tod’s advice to Arline, “Only when we lose our fear of death can we defeat it — and we can make every hour of our existence really count.”

“Birdcage on My Foot” (airdate: October 13, 1961):
When Tod and Buz see Arnie (Robert Duvall) trying to steal the Corvette, they want to press charges, but, when they realize that he is a drug addict, they try to intervene in his recovery.

Saying that Robert Duvall is a fearless actor is like saying that water is wet, and in this early role he sidesteps the cliché mannerisms of movie junkies and shows a vulnerability that binds the entire episode together. Elliot Silverstein’s unflinching direction allows Milner and Maharis to step up to Duvall’s level.

“The Newborn” (airdate: May 5, 1961):
Frank Ivy (Albert Dekker) holds a pregnant Indian girl, Kawna (Arline Sax), hostage so she can deliver his dead son’s child on his property, after which he intends to keep her from seeing the baby again. When she escapes Ivy’s grasp, Tod and Buz find themselves her custodian and must deliver her child in the middle of nowhere. Kawna dies, and Tod and Buz turn the baby over to her tribe as Ivy fumes.

Cited (above) by Silliphant as the victim of CBS censorship, “The Newborn” — which also features Robert Duvall as a psychotic ranch hand bent on killing Tod and Buz — not only lacks a coherent childbirth sequence, but Duvall’s accidental death happens as the camera pans away carelessly rather than discretely. Arthur Hiller coaches Dekker into a stern, clenched performance. Contrary to Silliphant’s recollection, the show (seen on Columbia House video) runs to full length.

“And the Cat Jumped Over the Moon” (airdate: December 15, 1961):
Social Worker Chuck Briner (Milt Kamen) dies when he fails off a rooftop trying to fix a “hit” ordered by Packy (Martin Sheen), the scrappy leader of the Missiles street gang. Packy and his boys are bent on killing Johnny (James Caan) because he left the streets to go with Marva (Susan Silo), whom Packy now deems his property. A game of rooftop chicken between Johnny and Packy ends when Packy blinks and the gang breaks up over his cowardice.

Youth gangs had captivated TV and movie audiences since
The Blackboard Jungle
(1955) and
West Side Story
(1961) but Silliphant, adapting a story by Frank L. Moss, adds the twist of making the bad guy a psychopath. Set in Philadelphia, the rooftop scenes are harrowing and authentic-looking. Silliphant unfolds the story indirectly — the viewer has to play close attention to wrest narrative clues from the action — and Elliott Siverstein keeps it edgy. Notable as Sheen’s first TV role, an early role for Caan, and for the presence of Susan Silo, who later became a highly a respected casting agent. Nelson Riddle’s jazz score is particularly effective.

“Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing” (airdate: October 26, 1962):
Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney, Jr. meet at a Chicago motel where Buz and Tod are working. They want to, in Karloff ’s words, “strike out in a new direction: adult horror” for TV, and they test their theory and make-up on unsuspecting women. A Halloween show, this is not just a vehicle for three venerable horror movie stars, it’s a way to take a swipe at television programming executives, and it succeeds at every level.

Journeyman actor-director Robert Gist gets out of the way of the scenery chewing, and Silliphant covers his bases by writing a script note describing a scene in which Chaney, made up as his trademarked werewolf, frightens a group of secretaries: “Milk them, Bob — with individual coverage of Lila, Beth, and the others — spilling drinks, screaming, fainting, etc.” Martita Hunt, more arch than usual, adds a lovely turn. A splendid example of Silliphant’s ability to write for specific actors when they’re booked to do a show, he describes Lorre as “wearing dark glasses and his lightweight trench coat is up around his ears in the murky manner of a Balkan intelligence operative” and creates such dialogue as, “My boss always says a high voice goes with a low income.”

“A Lance of Straw” (airdate: October 14, 1960):
Passing through Grand Isle, Louisiana, Buz and Tod sign aboard a shrimp boat run by budding feminist Charlotte Duval (Janice Rule) whose jealous suitor, Jean Boussard (Nico Minardis), tries to warn them off. The shrimping is good, but a hurricane intervenes and Charlotte manages to save Jean’s boat. Having proven her proficiency in a man’s world, Charlotte at last accepts Jean’s proposal as Tod and Buz drive on to their next adventure.

Directed with an eye toward action by Roger Kay, the second episode in the series stresses fighting and a storm at sea on top of the sexual tension unleashed by sultry Rule. At this point the series had not yet gained its form — it rings heavier on plot than character — but it clearly displays its strength in its location settings. 
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“Across Walnuts and Wine” (airdate: November 2, 1962):
The unexpected arrival of Autumn Ely (Nina Foch) in the Oregon City home of her sister Maggie Carter (Betty Field) and her husband Van (James Dunn) upsets her sullen nephew Mike (Robert Walker, Jr.) who actually owns the house and is in the process of evicting them. Mike is already at odds with the town tough (Dick Theis) for dating Theis’s sister, and it develops that Autumn, who is a teacher as well as a religious zealot, was fired from her job, feels useless, and wants better for Michael.