Saved by Small Wonders

This child was reportedly lost at a convention, and knew where to turn for help.

Two barely articulate toddlers sat in the cart ahead of mine at the store.

The little girl proudly showed me her arm sticker. “Wonder Woman,” I said.

Her brother showed me his. “Oh, that’s the Flash,” I said.

He agreed by pantomiming running very, very fast.

Maybe there’s hope for the future after all.

For Your Eyes Only -- RIP, Roger

Everybody loves a great anecdote. Below, Roger Moore in "The Spy Who Loved Me."

Robert Lincoln: Saved by the Hand of Fate

Robert Lincoln, son of the 16th president

Robert Lincoln nearly died on a train platform in Jersey City, New Jersey, in late 1864 or early 1865.

He described the strange synchronicity of events in a 1909 letter to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine:

“The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car. The platform was about the height of the car floor, and there was of course a narrow space between the platform and the car body. There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform.

“Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.”

The famed Shakespearean actor did not learn until some months later than the man whose life he’d saved was the son of the president whom his brother would assassinate.

How to Succeed at Debating an Agnostic

In 1876, during a train journey, a former general and failed attorney named Lew Wallace was humiliated.

While debating religion with the famed agnostic author Robert G. Ingersoll, Wallace realized that he knew next to nothing about his own Christian faith.

Wallace devoted three years to studying the Bible and researching Christianity, and the result was an adventure novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which eventually outsold every book in the United States except the Bible.

I was fascinated to learn that the first dramatic adaptation of the story was not the silent film version, but a six-act, three-and-a-half-hour 1899 Broadway play which boasted spectacular lighting, large onstage crowds and, as biographer Andre Soares noted, “…two horse-drawn chariots darting at full speed on parallel treadmills, with a Circus Maximus backdrop revolving behind them.” Half a million people saw the play on Broadway, and more than 20 million saw it on tour throughout the world.

Dining with Charles Laughton on the Train

Charles Laughton

Charles Laughton’s widow, actress Elsa Lanchester, recalled that he had a couple of telling experiences on cross-country trains.

“Once, when Charles was traveling across the United States on the Super Chief in the late thirties, he sat in the dining car opposite a couple,” she wrote. “They were a nice, middle-aged, middle-class husband and wife, and Charles got into a conversation with them. The husband explained that he was in the wholesale dolls-underwear business.

“‘And you’re a famous actor, aren’t you?’ he asked.

“’Yes.’

His wife piped up, ‘But what do you do in real life, Mr. Laughton?’”

Lanchester wrote, “Charles was a moral man who was shocked by himself, so that he suffered the painful guilts of a highly moral individual. He could laugh at moral contradictions in others, but he couldn’t laugh at the paradoxes in himself. But he could roar with laughter when he told this story:

“On another of his trips across the country, talking to a couple in the dining car, Charles asked if they went to the theatre much in New York.

“ ‘No, we don’t go to plays nowadays,’ the husband answered. ‘We don’t approve of the immoral language.’

“Charles inquired, ‘May I ask, what is your work, your profession?’

“ ‘Oh,’ answered his wife, ‘my husband is in atomic research.’”

Where No Actor Had Gone Before

Researching his book Star Trek Memories, William Shatner asked Leonard Nimoy how playing Mr. Spock had affected him.

“I was, in a way, in deep isolation, and having a tough time,” Nimoy replied. “The character isolated me, and I think that during the course of a day on the set, I probably projected a certain kind of indifference, intolerance, frigidity, whatever.

Leonard Nimoy

“I remember one day we were all sitting around waiting for a set to be lit, and I was sitting there totally stone-faced and out of it. One of our actresses said, ‘Oh-oh, Leonard’s in his Spock bag.’ I was even told one time that one of our producers said, ‘Watch out for Nimoy, he’s a cold, calculating fucker.’

“But this was almost to be expected in that nature abhors a vacuum. When a person shows a personality that seems to be devoid of any clear signal of what he or she is thinking, people project into that whatever they perceive. To some people, I was probably threatening, remote and distant, all of that, I’m sure.

“I actually took great pride in being the only one who was not laughing when a great joke was being told. It just served to confirm that I was successfully staying in character. You know, to make me laugh would have been to suggest that I’m like everybody else. I’m not like everybody else.

“So I prepared to go on stage by getting into character long before it was time to make my entrance. I didn’t believe it was possible to be ‘Person A’ offstage and ‘Person B’ as soon as you got within the sightlines of the camera. I just didn’t believe it was possible. What I did believe in was thorough preparation and maintaining the condition of the character during the lighting, during the scene shifting, during the makeup touch-ups and so forth.

“So I probably was sending off signals of hostility and of being unfeeling, perhaps superior, but that was my intention. And I did all of that because I thought there was a wonderful springboard here, a great opportunity because Bill, as Kirk, was always so energetic in the work, so forthcoming, so definite, even defiant. ‘I’m going to DO THIS! I’ve made up my mind!’ That energy allowed me tremendous opportunities to play reflective. Y’know, McCoy could play the angry quibbling argumentative hand-wringer, ‘Jim, are you CRAZY?!’ and that was great for him. With all that in place, I could play, ‘Hmmm, isn’t that interesting?’ and the relationships worked together wonderfully.’”

Spock didn’t work as well at home, however. Nimoy said he had trouble shedding his Vulcan detachment even on weekends, and probably seemed distant to his wife and kids.

You Can Go Holm Again

My newspaper interview with Celeste Holm, which appeared in the Charleston Times-Courier on Oct. 3, 1982.

How to Become an Agent

To say that Jonathan Clowes had an unlikely background for a literary agent would be an understatement.

“He was born in 1930, left school at 15, became a Communist and was thrice imprisoned for refusing to do compulsory military service (with spells in Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth and Brixton prisons, where he read avidly, as he’d done in school),” wrote Zachary Leader in The Life of Kingsley Amis.

Clowes in 1970 (photo by Diane Cilento)

An autodidact, Clowes also spent two years homeless. “Clowes was wholly self-taught as an agent, which he became by accident, while working as a painter and decorator. A man on his crew, Henry Chapman, had written a play and Clowes managed to get it to (theatrical director) Joan Littlewood, whom he admired but had never met. Littlewood loved it and agreed to put it on, after which Clowes got another friend’s first novel published by Faber and Faber. He then found a third client, a graphic artist named Len Deighton, whose first novel, The Ipcress File, made them both a fortune.”

A 1970 profile in The Guardian noted, “When he began in 1960 with books by two friends of his — Fred Ball’s A Breath of Fresh Air and a play by Henry Chapman — Clowes had never seen a contract in his life, bluffed his way through every situation by staying silent and getting others to do all the talking, and had only heard of one publisher ‘which explains why Fabers took all my first books,’ he says.”

“It was with The Ipcress File that Clowes negotiated his first film deal,” Leader wrote. “The producer Harry Saltzman sent him an enormous, largely incomprehensible contract. Clowes sent it back three times, each time with the message: ‘this is totally unacceptable.’ By taking careful note of how the contract improved with each rejection, a process which took a year, Clowes learned how to negotiate a film deal.”

“Clowes stuck out for a good deal and got it, but the struggle became so intense during the year of negotiations that both parties fell ill,” the newspaper noted.

“I know I am alarming,” Clowes told the newspaper. “People never know what I’m thinking, but that is a distinct advantage.”

Clowes went on to become the agent for the novelists Kingsley Amis and his wife Jane Howard. When American publishers proved skittish about publishing Amis’ 1984 novel Stanley and the Women, which was perceived as “anti-woman,” Clowes turned an obstacle into a stepping stone. He contacted the New York Times and passed along news of the novel’s rejection as “a form of censorship.” The controversy not only got the novel published, but increased its sales.

“The qualities that make a good agent are a good business sense combined with an ability to help a writer aesthetically,” Clowes told the newspaper. “A lot of agents have one without the other.”  “Very few people know what an agent does,” Clowes once said. “I’ve had lots of people asking what I do and when I answer, ‘Sell the rights of books,’ they say, ‘Is that a full-time job?’”

Robert Shaw: That Certain Teacher

 “I had one schoolmaster who got me to read all sorts of things — pretty well everything, including all the classic novels. He was just one of those bits of luck in one’s life. His name was Cyril Wilkes, and I still see him from time to time.

Actor Robert Shaw

“He must have been lonely, and that that was his life — teaching boys and helping them. He used to take three or four of us to see plays in London. The first real play I ever saw, in the autumn of 1944, was Hamlet, with John Gielgud, in a repertory production put on at the Haymarket. Mr. Wilkes took some of us to London during a school holiday. We saw Gielgud’s Hamlet at a matinee. That evening, we saw Margaret Leighton and Ralph Richardson in Peer Gynt, and the next day we saw Laurence Olivier in Richard III at a matinee, and Alastair Sim in the James Birdie play It Depends What You Mean that evening. The third day, we saw Laurence Olivier in the film Henry V in the morning, and in the evening we saw John Gielgud again, in Love for Love.

“I was quite dazzled. Gielgud made an extraordinary impression on me. I can see him now as he looked in Hamlet — that long, angular body in the black costume. That first night, I went back to the hotel room, picked up Hamlet, and read it from beginning to end.

“Me. Wilkes taught French and directed all the school plays. He always had time to talk to the boys. We used to sit in his room until two or three in the morning talking about books and politics. Mr. Wilkes was one of those English liberal of the thirties — a member of the Left Book Club, who probably thought about going to fight fascism in Spain but then hadn’t done it. He was that kind of teacher.

“He directed me in the school plays, but told me not to try to become a professional actor. He said that I had the wrong temperament for it — that I was too rebellious and wanted my own way too much. Later on, I found out that it was his policy to say that to everybody, on the theory that if you’re set on doing a thing, you’ll go ahead and do it anyway.” —  Robert Shaw, The Player: Profile of An Art

Bad Meal at Black Rock

The Ground Floor restaurant

In 1965, the new Eero Saarinen-designed building on 52nd Street at Sixth Avenue — swiftly dubbed “Black Rock” — was CBS President Frank Stanton’s baby.

“Consistent with his own taste in art, the furnishings and fixtures reflected a sleek, modern look,” wrote Lewis J. Paper in his book Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS. “Glass, chrome and modern paintings dominated the interior space. Even the location and quantity of plants received careful consideration.

“The only exception to the master plan was (CBS Chairman of the Board Bill) Paley’s office. It continued to reflect his own (and very different) tastes. The French gaming table remained as his desk, rich paneling still adorned the walls, comfortable couches were placed strategically, exquisite paintings hung on the walls, and various artifacts — an old CBS microphone, the cigar-store Indian and later a photograph of Edward R. Murrow — all helped to provide a warmth that seemed even more pronounced because of its stark contrast with the rest of the building.”

But the urbane and sophisticated gourmet Paley had his own baby —a haute cuisine restaurant on the ground floor, eventually to be called The Ground Floor.

“The notion of owning a restaurant had always appealed to Paley, especially as the years went by,” Paper said. “Decades of culinary experience had only added to his knowledge and heightened his interest in planning a restaurant. It would, of course, have to feature the best in everything — from its design to the food to the service. Friends noticed the considerable energy he put into the restaurant — picking a name, shaping the décor and planning the menu.”

The interior design reflected the exterior of Black Rock, but the restaurant’s manager, Jerry Brody, thought that was a mistake. “He felt the building was too cold and stark for a restaurant,” Paper said. “Then there was the cost of the fixtures. Bill Paley wanted the best, but the cost made it that much more difficult for the restaurant to show a profit. All of which might have been overcome if the restaurant became popular, but Bill Paley’s zest for food was not matched by his success as a restaurateur.”

Brody suggested a northern European steakhouse, but Paley said no. It must be French cuisine.

Paley in his apartment foyer with his Picasso, "Boy Leading a Horse"

“He went to France almost every year, knew the food and it would draw the right kind of customers — sophisticated people, those who appreciated the finer things. But all these plans and hopes and expectations could not guarantee results. No matter how much time Paley spent in the kitchen tasting the soups and other fare (which he did almost every day), The Ground Floor did not produce the business that Bill Paley wanted, that he felt he deserved.”

In 1968, restaurant critic Gael Greene described the chilly ambience. “The Ground Floor is a perfect room to end an affair in,” she wrote. “The tables are far enough apart to announce the break in a firm voice, and the ambiance is stern enough to discourage sloppy emotionalism.”

“But Boss Paley mingles with everyday folk in the dining room. Leonard Lyons moves through the grill, antennae clicking off the celebrities du jour – Donald Pleasence, Sloan Simpson, an author or two drinking breakfast. And good grief! Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman tieless, unjacketed, grizzled gray locks to the shoulder, Ben Franklin specs … the oldest hippie in the world. Mostly, though, the grill is lined with youngish executives expense-accounting each other. Restrained, subdued: That is not a bar to get sloppy drunk in … not a room to unlax in.”

“It was a never-ending source of frustration,” Paper wrote. “He knew food, he knew New York City and yet he could not make the kind of mystical connection to customers that he had made with his programming. And those who confronted him with the obvious truth proceeded at their peril.

“There was the time, for example, when Stanton, Fred Friendly and Bill Leonard met with Paley one afternoon shortly after The Ground Floor had opened. Paley asked the three executives if they had eaten at the restaurant. In fact, they had all just eaten there — and thought it was terrible. Neither Stanton nor Friendly dared to speak the truth, though. They mumbled that it was fine, just fine. But Bill Leonard loved food as much as Paley, and the two of them had spent many occasions passing away hours discussing food. Leonard could not compromise the truth on so important a matter, and he blurted out, ‘It was awful. The food was terrible. Fred had a fish dish and got sick. The service was bad and the prices were way out of line.’ As Leonard continued, on and on, the color started to drain from Stanton’s face, and the effect on Paley was obvious. ‘It was as though I had said his mother had been caught with a young man,’ said Leonard. The meeting ended more quickly than anyone had anticipated, and the phone was ringing for Friendly almost as soon as he and Leonard returned to the news offices on West Fifty-seventh Street. Friendly reported that it was Stanton with a message for the deputy news chief. ‘Tell Leonard,’ said Stanton, ‘that he has just set the News Division back 10 years. He’s wrecked everything. All Paley can talk about now is the restaurant.’”

“All he wanted, he told friends in 1965, was a simple place where a secretary could go downstairs and have lunch for seven or eight dollars,” David Halberstam wrote in the Atlantic. “His pleasure was enormous when the restaurant finally opened, and his disappointment equal when it was not a wild success. At one point Paley, puzzled by the lack of its success, turned to the restaurateur running it for him, Jerry Brody, and suggested that they might try a supper club for those who eat around 11 p.m., something that Paley liked to do after an evening of concerts or theater.

“ ‘Bill,’ said Brody, ‘there ain’t no supper business in this town.’

“ ‘No?’ answered Paley, puzzled. ‘Why not?’

“ ‘Because everyone’s home watching the tube.’”

Paley’s restaurant evolved into the Ground Floor Café, the American Charcuterie and then the sixth incarnation of the venerable Rose Restaurant. Today the location offers the haute Asian fusion of the China Grill.

Mame and the Duchess

When Rosalind Russell received the unpublished manuscript of Auntie Mame from author Patrick Dennis, she instantly became absorbed and sat up late reading it.

“(S)ince I was due on a movie set the next morning, Freddie fumed, ‘Put your light out, you’ll have such dark circles the cameraman will kill you,’” Russell recalled in her autobiography, Life Is a Banquet. “But I was bemused. ‘Somebody has written my sister,’ I said. ‘Somebody has written the Duchess.’ I could have played Mame with one hand tied behind me: I’d been living with her all my life.”

Russell was the middle daughter in a large Catholic family seemed to regard her older, beautiful, vivacious sister Clara, whom she always called “the Duchess,” with a mixture of awe, envy and devotion.

The Duchess attracted lots of boys, all of whom she called “Darling” while she “…like an accomplished juggler tossing plates, kept them passing one another in midair and gravitating back toward her fingertips.”

“Even after we were grown and she had become a fashion editor on Town & Country magazine, we’d have idiotic arguments about The Way It Had Been. ‘Dad was always saying, ‘Oh, I envy the man who’s taking you out tonight,’ the Duchess would start, and I would scoff: ‘Dad didn’t talk like that, you imagined it.’”

Russell recalled walking with her sister down Madison Avenue during the 1940s and observing, as people waved at the Duchess, that she owned it.

Clara Russell, a/k/a the Duchess

“The Duchess was going on about my Hollywood hat and my shabby handbag — ‘Is that an old one of mine?’ — when a man came by. She hailed him with great glee. ‘How have you been?’ demanded the Duchess. ‘You don’t need to tell me. I can see just by looking at you, you’re in the best condition of your life. And how’s your mother? Give her my love, she’s one of my favorite people, always has been, always will be. Still going away weekends to the countryside? Well, it’s been wonderful to see you. Goodbye, dear.’

“The man had nodded to me, asked, ‘How are you, Roz?’ We’d shaken hands, and now Clara and I were walking on down the street. ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I know just as well as I know I’m walking here who that man is, but I can’t think. Who is he?’

“I stopped dead and looked her right in the face. She’s not gonna pull both legs, I thought; one at a time is enough. Then I realized she was in earnest.

“’Now, Duchess,” I began, but she was nattering on again: “I know him, I know I do — can’t you give me a clue?’

“ ‘That was your first husband,’ I said.

“ ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell anybody. I’m going to stand right here until you promise. Raise your right hand and say, ‘I will not tell anybody this story.’

“ ‘I’m gonna tell everybody this story,’ I said.

“ ‘Now that’s mean,’ she said. ‘They’ll think I’m senile or something.’

“ ‘You’re something,’ I said. “I can tell you that.’

“I’ve heard this same tale with other casts of characters — Truman Capote wrote about Gloria Vanderbilt not recognizing her first husband — but I know it happened to the Duchess. I was there.”

A difficult story to believe, perhaps, but one terrific anecdote.

A Coward Goes West

Noel Coward in the Nevada desert

In 1954, Noel Coward was 19,000 pounds overdrawn, his life insurance pledged against the debt, when the offer came to appear in a place called Las Vegas at $35,000 a week. As the date approached, CBS managed to sweeten things by offering him $450,000 for three television specials.

“All this money, plus Las Vegas, would mean that at last he could have some capital in the bank,” wrote Cole Lesley in his The Life of Noel Coward — money for his old age “…which, as he put it, was due to begin next Tuesday.”

Just before Vegas, crisis — Coward’s accompanist couldn’t get a work permit.

“He interviewed eight people, none of whom were good enough, and then one evening the telephone rang. This time his savior was Marlene (Dietrich), who had been loyally working away on his behalf. She was calling from the airport and her plane for London was already boarding; had he got a pencil, ready, quick, Pete Matz, this is his number, ring him at once and grab him.

“Pete came round next day. He seemed absurdly young, only 26, dark and intelligent, with a great sense of dehydrated humor, and Noel knew in his bones that he was exactly what was needed. When Noel showed him the old arrangements he had been using at the Café, Pete said, not contemptuously but matter-of-factly, ‘You’re not going to use these, are you?’ Noel lied quickly, ‘Of course not, but who can make me new ones in the time?’ Quite calmly Pete said, ‘I will.’

“Noel had no way of knowing as yet how brilliant a musician Pete was. Later we discovered from experience that for instance there was no need for labored conversation at the breakfast table; instead of Agatha Christie, Pete read from a Mozart score propped against the toast rack.”

Pack Up Your Dinosaurs and Leave

Anthony "Buck" Rogers first appeared in pulp story form in August 1928.

“I learned that I was right and everyone else was wrong when I was 9. Buck Rogers arrived on the scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips.

“For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn’t worth living.

“The next thought was: Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; those are my enemies.

“I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space-travel, sideshows or gorillas. When such occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

— Ray Bradbury

An early Buck Rogers newspaper strip from 1929.

The Diamonds in the Sky Are Stars

Elizabeth Taylor with The Ring

Notoriously, Richard Burton bought Elizabeth Taylor a 69.4 carat diamond ring for $1,100,000, outbidding Cartier.

“It turns out that one of my rivals was Ari Onassis but he chickened out at $700,000,” Burton wrote. “But apart from the fact that I am a natural winner, I wanted that diamond because it is incomparably lovely. And it should be on the loveliest woman in the world. I would have had a fit if it went to Jackie Kennedy or Sophia Loren or Mrs. Huntingdon Misfit of Dallas, Texas.”

Biographer Melvyn Bragg wrote, “The New York Times deplored the crowds outside Cartier’s where it was displayed and lambasted the Burtons for vulgarity. Princess Margaret too thought it vulgar: Elizabeth asked if she would like to try it on: yes please. ‘It doesn’t look so vulgar now, does it?’ said E.T.

“Not much later, John Gielgud went to stay and, helping with the washing-up, found it lying on a draining board next to a saucer. It is also surprising — and something of an insight — to learn that Elizabeth Taylor washed up!”

The diamond didn’t derail the couple’s famous rows for long, however. Two weeks after it arrived, Burton noted, “E., the pot, gave this particular kettle, me, a savage mauling. I was coldly accused of virtually every sin under the sun. Drunkenness (true), mendacity (true), being boring (true), infidelity (untrue), killing myself fairly quickly (true), pride envy avarice (all true), being ugly (true), having once been handsome (untrue) and any other vice imaginable except homosexuality and ungenerousness.”

Mayhem and Eggs

Breakfast conversation at Arby's: A developmentally disabled young man and three old farmers are discussing the guns they would use to kill people breaking into their houses. It's apparently something that doesn't happen often enough to satisfy them.

A Tale of Two Hamlets

Richard Burton and John Gielgud

The young Richard Burton did credit to himself as Hamlet on the British stage in 1953, being described as a “moody, virile and baleful” prince with “dash, attack and verve.”

Winston Churchill saw it, muttered the lines along with Burton during the performance and then came backstage to Burton’s dressing room to ask, “My Lord Hamlet, may I use your facilities?”

Another celebrated Hamlet, Burton’s friend John Gielgud, also saw the performance, and was drily unimpressed.

Biographer Melvyn Bragg wrote, “After he had seen it, he came around to Richard’s dressing room to take him to dinner and, observing he was beset by visitors, said, ‘Shall I go ahead or wait until you’re better — I mean, ready?’ Burton loved to re-tell that story.”

Little Girl Found in "The Twilight Zone"

Matheson's Twilight Zone episodes include "The Invaders" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

One of the spookiest of the episodes in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was Little Girl Lost by Richard Matheson.

Matheson, the writer who inspired Stephen King, was the creative force behind such novels as The Shrinking Man, I Am Legend and A Stir of Echoes and such films as The Night Stalker, What Dreams May Come and Somewhere in Time.

In Little Girl Lost, suburban parents can hear their small daughter crying, but can’t see her because she has fallen through a dimensional hole in her bedroom. And that hole is closing.

Strangely enough, the 1953 short story on which Matheson based the episode was inspired by a real-life event.

“Our older girl, Tina — the same name as in the story — was crying, and I went into the room,” Matheson recalled in Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. “Actually, the apartment was so small, it was just a wooden army cot that she slept on at that time. I felt around and she wasn’t on the bed, and I thought, ‘Oh, my Lord, the poor kid fell on the floor,’ then I felt on the floor and she wasn’t there. When I felt under the bed I couldn’t find her. She had gone under the bed and rolled all the way to the wall, and that’s where I found her. Then, of course, given the diabolical writer’s mind, you know, after the kid stops crying, you think of a story.”

Robert Sampson, Sarah Marshall and Charles Aidman in "LGL"

The episode, one of more than a dozen Matheson wrote for Twilight Zone, is clearly an uncredited inspiration for the 1983 horror film Poltergeist, in which an identical situation occurs.

Matheson became sadly accustomed to having a greater cultural influence than he was paid for. His novel I Am Legend, about a lone man holding out against a world overrun by vampires, has been filmed three times officially, and once unofficially as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And that film, of course, gave birth to the plague of zombies that haunts us to this very day.

The Sordid Telepathy of Douglas MacArthur

MacArthur with Sutherland in Brisbane during World War II

During the Pacific war, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s chief of staff, Gen. Richard K. Sutherland, had a married mistress. MacArthur, concerned about a scandal in the press, ordered Sutherland to get rid of her.

“MacArthur had told his chief of staff that after Hollandia, the round-heeled Australian captain must return to Brisbane, that under no circumstances could should cross the equator,” wrote biographer William Manchester. Sutherland secretly defied him, building a cottage for the woman on Leyte during MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines.

MacArthur’s other subordinate officers were nervous about breaking the news to him. Telepathy, or perhaps synchronicity, solved their problem. As the woman became increasingly demanding, Dr. Roger Egeberg decided something should be done.

“The doctor crossed Santo Nino Street from the staff headquarters to the Price house and found MacArthur in a rocking chair on the veranda,” Manchester wrote. “Sitting on another chair, Egeberg tried to think how best to broach the subject. He asked perfunctorily about (MacArthur’s wife) Jean and then sat in silence, trying mental telepathy, concentrating on the cottage dweller’s name. Presently the General turned t him and asked, ‘Doc, whatever happened to that woman?’ The doctor spoke her name aloud. ‘That’s the one.’ Egeberg said, ‘She’s 10 mile down the coast. Larry just talked to her.’ The General’s jaw sagged and then set in a grim line. He said: ‘Get Sutherland!’”

The doctor did as he was told, leaving Sutherland in MacArthur’s company. On the way out, he heard MacArthur shout “You goddamned son of a bitch!” and various other choice phrases.

The woman was packed off to Brisbane, but Sutherland apparently couldn’t resist her charms. He pleased toothache as an excuse for joining her there.

“When he returned, the General’s attitude was frigid,” Manchester wrote. “Never again were they on intimate terms.”