by Nat Segaloff
The odd aspect of this episode is that is really doesn’t need Tod or Buz. It’s one of a number of stories (see also “One Tiger to a Hill”) in which a central character hides his sensitivity behind a veneer of violence. Marvin is commanding in a complex role, and Bert Remsen, as his friend and chauffeur, Higgy, is equally skillful. It’s directed by Sam Peckinpah with none of the touches for which he would become known, although the Ryan-Tod slugfest on a narrow balcony is carried off in a space so cramped it’s a wonder there was room for the cameras. Publicity releases at the time pointed out that Milner broke Marvin’s nose in Peckinpah’s search for realism.
“Some of the People, Some of the Time” (airdate: December 1, 1961): Maximilian Coyne (Keenan Wynn) is a scam artist who runs fake Hollywood talent pageants, but his past catches up with him in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania once he hires Buz and Tod to be his advance men.
Directed by Robert Altman (who, like Peckinpah, had not yet blossomed), this twist on Meredith Willson’s The Music Man starts off going in one direction but winds up unexpectedly but satisfyingly in another. [85] The main story has Coyne using his wiles to sidestep fate, but while that is entertainingly going on, Buz tries to rig a Cinderella contest so a plain-looking young waitress he likes, Jahala (Lois Nettleton), wins. When she does, she reveals that she was one of Coyne’s ringers, but this is the first time she actually has been made to feel special. The skill of the writing is that, even though the guest stars completely con the series stars, everyone emerges with his and her integrity intact. So maybe it is a Robert Altman film after all.
“Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” (airdates: March 6 and 13, 1964): The two-part series finale was written as “Don’t Kill Us, We’ll Kill You” in teleplays dated January 17 and 21, 1964. Set in Tampa, Florida, the contrivance is that a millionaire has died and willed his $4 million estate to his surviving relatives on the provision that his daughter, Margo (Barbara Eden) marry Tod. The multi-plotted story also includes Russian spies, greedy kin, and Linc and Tod donning a succession of disguises in order to foil everyone’s dastardly schemes.
Silliphant was not known as a comedy writer, and these two episodes, directed by Alvin Gazer (who worked with Leo McCarey and Preston Sturges before switching to TV) are loopy at best. Considered one of the first TV series to produce a definitive ending, Route 66 thus concludes with a married Tod driving to Houston with Margo in the Corvette, and Linc heading there on his own to reunite with his estranged family. Linc’s long walk down a driveway after one last caress to the ‘Vette was scripted as a melancholy wrap to 116 episodes, an effect somewhat diminished by being immediately followed by a promo for the first re-run. While not one of the series’ best, it can safely be said that there was no shark-jumping associated with the final fade-out.
Even today, Route 66 remains a breakthrough series. Considering that America in the early 1960s was nowhere near as permissive as it would become in the late ‘60s, here was a popular network show that pushed the boundaries of broadcast standards with episodes on heroin addiction (“Birdcage on My Foot”), survivalist zealots (“A Fury Slinging Flame”), Fundamentalists (“Aren’t You Surprised to See Me?”), mercy killing (“A Bunch of Lonely Pagliaccis”), LSD (“The Thin White Line”), terrorist hate groups (“To Walk with the Serpent”), and an almost all-black cast (“Good Night Sweet Blues”). It was the power, the taste, and the tenacity of Silliphant and Leonard that goaded the series, no matter who the writers were, into the fast lane of social observation.
Route 66, the road, was officially removed from the United States Highway System on June 17, 1985. Route 66, the series, drives on.
Ethel May Noaker, Stirling’s mother.
As a child, Stirling traveled with his parents on his father’s sales calls.
Entering Gardner public school. Even then he had a fondness for sailing.
As a young cadet at the San Diego Army and Navy Military Academy.
Stirling and his younger brother Leigh as cadets.
Graduation photo from Glendale’s Hoover High School
A lettered student at the University of Southern California.
Stirling and his mother while he was at USC.
Iris Garff.
At Yellowstone the summer after graduating from USC in 1937.
Iris and Stirling married, June 10, 1938.
Leigh, Stirling, Iris, and her sister Lois at Stirling’s and Iris’s wedding, June 10, 1938.
Stirling in his Navy uniform. He was based in San Francisco but got around.
tirling in his Navy Uniform. He spent the war in public information.
Young Stirling and his father, Stirling, in uniform.
The two Stirlings stateside during World War Two leave.
Father and son relax stateside during the war.
6: Man of Two Worlds
When Route 66 ran out of gas, Silliphant had less work and more to do. Although he had never concentrated exclusively on a single project, being relieved of the obligation to turn in one script every nine days, plus rewrite the old ones, plus plan the new ones, meant that he could make a new play for the movies. That was where the money was and, more than that, the prestige.
Strictly speaking, he had never really left features, although Huk!, Maracaibo, and the other early attempts were not going to put him on Hollywood’s “A” list. As a matter of fact, when Route 66 had been fueling up in 1959, he delivered a stealth science fiction classic that was rushed into production for 1960. Based on John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, the resulting film, directed by Wolf Rilla, was released by MGM as Village of the Damned. It was a major hit, and a major struggle.
The story is profoundly creepy: One afternoon the entire British village of Midwich falls asleep for several hours. Months later every fertile woman in town delivers a blond, hauntingly intelligent child that may have been “fathered” by extraterrestrials who visited earth while everyone was unconscious. Only local scientist George Zellaby (George Sanders) is able to gain the trust of these hybrid progeny who can read and control human thoughts. He learns that other cities around the world had similar visits, and he vows to destroy the tow-headed monsters. Distracting the telepathic children by concentrating on the image of a brick wall, he annihilates them — and himself — with a bomb hidden in a briefcase.
Silliphant was hired by MGM for $5,000 on July 8, 1957, to write a screen treatment (in prose) from the book “of not less than fifty (50) pages.” [86] The screenplay came next. By the time it was released, it was credited to Silliphant, Wolf Rilla (later the author of the widely read text The Writer and the Screen), and George Barclay, who wrote elsewhere under the name Ronald Kinnoch. There’s a story there. Originally bought by MGM on a pitch from Wyndham, who also wrote 1961’s classic The Day of the Triffids, Cuckoos was intended as a production by MGM’s home studio in Culver City to coincide with the book’s publication. Reported Silliphant, “MGM’s New York office was so high on the book that they airmailed me microfilm of each page of the manuscript as the author finished writing it so that I could get a jump-start on the script. My producer was Milo Frank. We offered the script to Ronald Colman, who accepted. Unhappily, this fine gentleman died before we could advance the production. At that point an incredible thing happened. The then-head of MGM, Robert H. O’Brien, who was Catholic, apparently actually read my script and flipped — negatively. The idea of human females being impregnated by ETs and bearing laser-eyed young’uns sent him into a religious cartwheel; what the fuck were we trying to say here? Were we making a mockery of the Virgin Mary? Or something to that effect. Bottom line: Village of the Damned got cancelled so fast Milo didn’t have time to pack his briefcase and leave the lot. As for me, I was so pissed I left features (for a while) and went over to TV. That’s when I went into business with Herbert Leonard and did the first year of Naked City for ABC.
“In any event, the script hung in limbo for months, then suddenly it surfaced in England as an MGM English project
and that’s when Rilla and Barclay were brought in. They did little, if anything, to change my script, but in those days our WGA didn’t have power over English writers and there was nothing we could do about their credit-grab, which, to this day, I regard as a form of larceny on the part of these two British highwaymen. What they did was to make the dialogue more English than my American, which is why some of my dialogue ends up sounding like ersatz Noel Coward. In terms of the mood, I would say the filmmakers can make little claim to adding that. The mood came out of the original novel and I zealously preserved it in my draft. But that entire concept of George Sanders erecting the image of a brick wall in his mind in order to block the thought penetration by his ‘son’ is mine mine mine. I spent a week cerebrating over that one. In short, this is one the Brits got away with because our Guild had not yet extended its arbitration machinery to those precious writers over there. Otherwise — and I speak with the objectivity of decades — I would have been awarded the solo credit I merited.”
In addition to its nod to the myth of the virgin birth, Village of the Damned has also been seen as a metaphor for a Communist takeover of the west. Silliphant dismissed that as well. “If anybody ever came up with the theory that this film was a metaphor for pulverizing Communism at whatever cost,” he said, “it would have to be the Brits, since nobody in Culver City would ever have had the imagination to concoct so zany an idea. As the guy who wrote the script, I can tell you my only thought was how to blow away these little bastards with the luminous eyes and their sickeningly blond Dutch haircuts. As a matter of fact, I had a dialogue passage in the script about the Soviets nuking their ET kids. [87] If anything, I wrote this out of simple admiration for the fact that the Sovs seemed always to have a better grasp of the harsh realities of existence than some of our Christian lads — especially heads of studios who are devoted Catholics.”
Village of the Damned (released in the U.S. on December 7, 1960, after a July UK release) was enough of a box office success that it spawned a sequel, Children of the Damned (1964). It was remade in 1995 by John Carpenter with a $22 million budget. The original had cost $200,000.
Silliphant’s first produced script after Route 66 was one that could have been a Naked City episode. Based on a Life magazine article by Shana Alexander about a suicide prevention hotline in Seattle, Washington, The Slender Thread marked the feature directorial debut of Sydney Pollack and was produced by Alexander’s husband, Stephen Alexander. Adapted, if not wholly invented, by Silliphant, the plot has a distraught Anne Bancroft phoning a suicide hotline manned by a lone Sidney Poitier after she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and Poitier’s efforts to keep her on the line while he has the call traced so a detective (Edward Asner) can track down her husband (Stephen Hill) and her shrink (Telly Savalas) to intervene. The title is symbolic of both the phone connection and the line between life and death.
“Actually, The Slender Thread was not the original title,” Silliphant recalled. “I believe my original title was The Willow Plate, which was based on a scene in one draft where Bancroft breaks up the willow plate pattern set of china in her dining room as a futile rebellion against her stifling marriage. But Howard Koch, then head of Paramount, didn’t like my title, so he offered me The Slender Thread, which I rather liked (without mulling its metaphoric significance) and I took it. The studio had bought a novel, which was entitled The Slender Thread, and had shelved the book, but now saw a chance to recycle the title of the un-shot book.” Other names fielded for the project were Voice on the Wind, Call Me Back, and Cross Your Heart and Hope. Elizabeth Ashley was signed when it was called the latter, but the studio insisted on Bancroft, who had recently won the Academy Award® for The Miracle Worker. Silliphant noted that Ashley “was bitter about this and, in a book she wrote subsequently [Actress: Postcards From the Road, 1978], she goes into major detail about the incident, blaming me for playing along with the studio, doing their bidding, and ‘dumping’ her on their orders rather than fighting for her. I got cut up rather badly in her account.” [88]
Ironically, Sidney Poitier’s “Best Actor” Oscar for the previous year’s Lilies of the Field had been presented to him at the 1964 ceremony by Anne Bancroft. The moment was significant because the two actors kissed on national television, marking an interracial milestone for people who mark such things.
“I didn’t see the 1964 Oscars,” Silliphant said, “and therefore did not see Bancroft kissing Poitier, hence this trans-racial contact had nothing whatsoever to do with the casting of these two fine actors. We picked each one because we felt there was no one around who could better portray what I had written for each. Yes, race was totally ignored. That’s what appealed to me, that neither hero nor heroine could see each other — therefore they did not and could not bring to their brief relationship any prejudices or pre-set standards of evaluation. Their mutual humanity is purely that — the relationship of people without the impact of race, religion or societal pressures — people free to relate to each other on the simplest level of humanity: self-preservation. For this reason, at the end, I elected to have Sidney not want to see the woman. Because he knew seeing her would diminish the magic which they had experienced, divorced from each other except for their connection by phone — their linkage heart to heart. The character elects to savor the triumph — to preserve it, unspoiled, in his memory.”
The screenplay’s sleight-of-hand has been overlooked, but it is worth mentioning that Bancroft’s story is told from Poitier’s point of view. “It shouldn’t work,” Silliphant agreed, “and, in some instances in the film, I’m not sure it did. But it worked well enough in total to validate the attempt to try something different.”
In his autobiography, Sidney Poitier credits his agent, Martin Baum, with discovering and nurturing the property. “He read the script and found a part he thought I could play, although again the part was not designated for a black actor. Through a determined effort, Marty sold the producer [Stephen Alexander], who in turn sold the film company [Paramount], who in turn gave permission for Sydney Pollack to hire me to play that part opposite Anne Bancroft, Steven Hill, and Telly Savalas. The Slender Thread experience gave me great satisfaction. Anne Bancroft was simply fantastic, and Telly, of course, is an infinitely better actor than Kojak allowed us to see.” [89]
The Slender Thread holds up today, but, at the time, it nearly stalled the career of everyone involved with it. “In TV I was a comet, blazing across the heavens,” Silliphant appraised. “In features, who he? So the film was vital to me; it had to make its mark — or else. But it didn’t, in one sense. And in another, it did. We previewed in Encino [a valley community north of Hollywood] and, as I watched the film and ‘felt’ the audience, I knew I had failed. The picture was not giving off sparks. I felt it drag and drag. The subject seemed depressing, and the audiences palpably depressed. End titles up, lights on, the audience virtually limped out, nobody jazzed up, nobody talking. Christ, I thought I’m still in TV, that’s for goddamned sure. This ain’t no comeback, baby! I remember sitting alone in the theater while the Paramount execs, including the always ebullient and affable Howard Koch, were out in the lobby trying to strongarm the rapidly fleeing patrons into filling out reaction cards. A fella with a big smile and red hair suddenly appeared in my row as though he had materialized from the ceiling. He sat down next to me. ‘A bomb, huh?’ he suggested. ‘Yep,’ I agreed. ‘A fucking bomb. From start to finish. I doubt that any single person in America will ever bother to buy a ticket to this flick.’ ‘You have to get another screenplay assignment before the word gets out,’ he counseled. ‘Yeh?’ I asked. ‘And how do I do that?’ ‘I’m Martin Baum,’ he said. ‘I represent Sidney Poitier.’
“I knew Marty Baum represented Sidney along with a lot of other top actors, writers, et al and that he was one of Hollywood’s most prestigious agents. ‘So you’re Marty?’ I asked. ‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘And I want you to know something: Sidney doesn’t blame you for this picture.’ ‘Maybe S
idney doesn’t,’ I said, ‘But I do. I wrote the thing.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I find that refreshing, that somebody in this town can admit he blew it. Look, I’m going to get you a job — fast. It has to be fast — because the minute word gets out about this turkey — forget it.’
“Then he disappeared. Still heavy-hearted, not believing a word of what I had been told, I forced myself to go out to the lobby where I discovered the studio execs congratulating themselves on having a hit. They showed me a half dozen cards marked ‘excellent.’ What they didn’t show me, but what I saw, were the piles of cards they’d thrown away: ‘stinks’ was the average comment. There were a few kindly ‘boring’s. But it was downhill all the way.”
Silliphant is being unduly harsh on the picture, which, though it set no box-office records, confirmed Sydney Pollack’s transition from television to features. He followed it with This Property is Condemned (1965), marking his first movie with Robert Redford and beginning one of the most enduring and productive collaborations in cinema.
Personally, Silliphant was adrift. On October 1, 1965 — a year after his divorce from Ednamarie and two months before The Slender Thread opened — he married Margot Ruth Gohlke. Although the divorce from Ednamarie was finalized, the settlement dragged on for another four years and tied up Silliphant’s funds to the extent that he had to seek bridging loans from the City National Bank in Beverly Hills. This, despite pulling in $20,000 a month. Ever the optimist and self-assured as a writer, he needed work, and the Baum/Poitier connection was promising. Still, in Hollywood, you can die of encouragement. So he waited.