Charles Beaumont
Beaumont c. late 1950s
Beaumont c. late 1950s
BornCharles Leroy Nutt
(1929-01-02)January 2, 1929
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
DiedFebruary 21, 1967(1967-02-21) (aged 38)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Period1950–1967
Genre
Notable worksThe Twilight Zone (various episodes)
Children4

Charles Beaumont (born Charles Leroy Nutt; January 2, 1929 – February 21, 1967) was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres.[1] He is remembered as a writer of classic Twilight Zone episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Static", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, such as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, and The Masque of the Red Death.

Novelist Dean Koontz said "Charles Beaumont was one of the seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre." Beaumont is also the subject of the documentary Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man by Jason V. Brock.

Life and work

Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago,[2] on January 2, 1929,[3] the only child of Charles Hiram Nutt (an auditor of freight accounts for the Chicago & Alton Railroad) and Violet "Letty" (Phillips) Nutt, a homemaker who had been a scenarist at Essanay Studios.[2] His father was 56 when Charles was born; Letty, his mother, was 22 years her husband's junior. Letty is known to have dressed young Charles in girls' clothes, and once threatened to kill his dog to punish him. These early experiences inspired the celebrated short story "Miss Gentilbelle", but according to Beaumont, "Football, baseball, and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world".

School did not hold his attention, and his last name exposed him to ridicule, so Charles Nutt found solace as a teenager in science fiction. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade to join the Army in the final years of World War II.[2] He also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, disc jockey, usher, and dishwasher before selling his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. During his time as an illustrator, he briefly used the pseudonyms Charles McNutt[2] (circa 1947/48) and E.T. Beaumont[2] (inspired by a female artist named "Miss Beaumont" with whom he had collaborated in Everett, Washington), before settling on the name Charles Beaumont. He soon adopted this name legally and used it both personally and professionally for the rest of his life.

In 1954, Playboy magazine selected his story "Black Country" to be the first work of short fiction to appear in its pages. It was at this time that Beaumont started writing for television and film.[1]

Beaumont was energetic and spontaneous, and was known to take trips (sometimes out of the country) at a moment's notice. An avid racing fan, he often enjoyed participating in or watching area speedway races, with other authors tagging along. Beaumont and several friends built their own SCCA H Modified racecar dubbed the "Monzetta", consisting of Panhard mechanicals and a Devin body and chassis, which was raced at many Southern California tracks including Paramount Ranch Racetrack.[4][5]

His cautionary fables include "The Beautiful People" (1952), about a rebellious adolescent girl in a future conformist society in which people are obligated to alter their physical appearance (adapted with friend and frequent writing partner John Tomerlin as an episode of Twilight Zone, "Number 12 Looks Just Like You"), and "Free Dirt" (1955), about a man who gorges on his entire vegetable harvest and dies from having consumed the magical soil he used to grow it.[1]

His short story "The Crooked Man" (also published by Playboy in 1955) presents a dystopian future wherein heterosexuality is stigmatized in the same way that homosexuality then was, with heterosexual people living furtively like pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian people.[6] In the story, a heterosexual man meets his lover in a gay orgy bar; they try to have sex in a curtained booth (she dressed in male drag) and are caught.

Beaumont wrote several scripts for The Twilight Zone, including an adaptation of his own short story, "The Howling Man", about a prisoner who might be the Devil, and the hour-long "Valley of the Shadow", about a cloistered Utopia that refuses to share its startlingly advanced technology with the outside world.

Beaumont scripted the film Queen of Outer Space from an outline by Ben Hecht, deliberately writing the screenplay as a parody. According to Beaumont, the directorial style is not informed by his satiric intent. He penned one episode of the TV show Steve Canyon, titled "Operation B-52", in which Canyon and his crew attempt to set a speed record in a B-52 accompanied by a newsman who hates Air Force pilots.

Beaumont was much admired by his colleagues (Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Roger Corman). Many of his stories have been re-released in the posthumous volumes Best of Beaumont (Bantam, 1982) and The Howling Man (Tom Doherty, 1992), and a set of previously unpublished tales, A Touch of the Creature (Subterranean Press, 1999). In 2004, Gauntlet Press released the first of two volumes collecting Beaumont's Twilight Zone scripts.

A book-length biography of Beaumont, titled Trapped in the Twilight Zone: The Life and Times of Charles Beaumont, by Roger Anker, is due to be published by Centipede Press in late 2024.

Illness and death

In 1963, when Beaumont was 34 and overwhelmed by numerous writing commitments, he began to suffer the effects of "a mysterious brain disease" which seemed to age him rapidly. His ability to speak, concentrate, and remember became erratic. While some people attributed all of this to Beaumont's heavy drinking, his friend and colleague John Tomerlin disagreed: "I was working closely with Chuck at the time, and we were good enough friends for me to know that alcohol by itself could not possibly account for the odd mental state that he was in."[7][1]

"He was rarely well," his friend and colleague William F. Nolan later recalled.[7] "He was thin, and kept having headaches. He used Bromo-Seltzer like most people use water. He had a big Bromo bottle with him all the time". The disease also affected his work.[7] "He could barely sell stories, much less write. He would go unshaven to meetings with producers, which would end in disaster. [A script writer has] got to be able to think on your feet, which Chuck couldn't do anymore; and so the producers would just go, 'We're sorry, Mr. Beaumont, but we don't like the script'."

The condition might have been related to the spinal meningitis he suffered as a child. His friend and early agent Forrest J. Ackerman has asserted an alternative, that Beaumont suffered simultaneously from Alzheimer's disease and Pick's disease. This claim was supported by the UCLA Medical Staff, who subjected Beaumont to a battery of tests in the summer of 1964 that indicated that it might be either Alzheimer's or Pick's. Nolan recalls that the UCLA doctors sent Beaumont home with a death sentence: "They said 'There's absolutely no treatment for this disease. It's permanent and it's terminal. He'll probably live from six months to three years with it. He'll decline and get to where he can't stand up. He won't feel any pain. In fact, he won't even know this is happening'." In Nolan's own words: "Like his character 'Walter Jameson,' Chuck just dusted away".

Several fellow writers, including Nolan and friend Jerry Sohl, began ghostwriting for Beaumont during 1963–1964, so that he could meet his many writing obligations.[7] Privately, he insisted on splitting these fees. By 1965, however, Beaumont was too ill to even create or sell story ideas. His last on-screen writing credit was for the 1965 film Mister Moses, officially a screenplay written with (but more likely written by) Monja Danischewsky.

On February 21, 1967, Beaumont died in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 38. His son Christopher later said that his father, "[...]looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch".[7]

Bibliography

Twilight Zone credits

The following is a list of episodes Beaumont penned for The Twilight Zone (an asterisk indicates that the episode was credited to Beaumont, but ghostwritten by Jerry Sohl).

Short stories

Short story collections

Collections published during Beaumont's lifetime

Collections published posthumously

Film

Novel

Nonfiction

Comics

Note

Beaumont co-wrote the stories with William F. Nolan.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, "Beaumont, Charles" in David Pringle, ed., St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers. London: St. James Press, 1998. (pp. 37-39). ISBN 1558622063
  2. ^ a b c d e Prosser, Harold Lee (1996). Running from the Hunter: The Life and Works of Charles Beaumont. Wildside Press. pp. 5–6. ISBN 9780893702915.
  3. ^ Presnell, Don; McGee, Marty (2008). A Critical History of Television's The Twilight Zone, 1959-1964. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. p. 204. ISBN 9780786438860.
  4. ^ "The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum", The Indianapolis 500, Red Lightning Books, pp. 40–45, April 1, 2019, doi:10.2307/j.ctvc77n60.13, ISBN 978-1-68435-076-6, S2CID 242791279
  5. ^ Nolan, William F.; Beaumont, Charles (1964). When Engines Roar. Bantam Books.
  6. ^ Dangerfield, Katie (September 28, 2017). "How a controversial sci-fi story put Hugh Hefner on the map for human rights". Global News. Retrieved October 15, 2017.
  7. ^ a b c d e Zicree, Marc Scott (1982). The Twilight Zone Companion. Toronto; New York: Bantam Books. ISBN 0-553-01416-1. OCLC 9022567.

Further reading

External links

Authority control databases
Charles Beaumont
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