My name is Charles Beaumont.
You may never have heard of me, but I have had a huge influence over things you find fascinating, and people you hold dear.
I was born in Chicago as Charles Leroy Nutt to a mother who frequently dressed me in girls' clothes and once killed one of my pets as punishment. I found solace in science fiction in my teens, dropping out of high school in tenth grade to join the Army. I was raised by some aunts in Everett, WA. I was frequently ill as a child, and was a sufferer of spinal meningitis.
I also worked as an illustrator, disc jockey, actor, usher and dishwasher before selling my first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. I am an author of speculative and horror stories. In 1954, I sold my first story to Playboy magazine and also started writing for television. Forrest J Ackerman (Uncle Forry of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and friend to Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen) was my first agent.
I am an outgoing, spontaneous person, prone to taking trips out of the country at a moment's notice. An avid racing fan, I often enjoy participating in or watching area speedway races with other authors tagging along.
I am close friends with many of the most brilliant fantasists and creators in the 20th century: William F. Nolan (Logan's Run, Burnt Offerings), John Tomerlin (The Magnificent Jalopy), Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond), George Clayton Johnson (Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Kung Fu, Ocean's Eleven, Logan's Run), Roger Corman(The Intruder, The Trip, The Fall of the House of Usher and lots more) , Jerry Sohl (Twilight Zone), Harlan Ellison (Deathbird Stories and others), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and more), Rod Serling (Twilight Zone creator, Night Gallery, Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight), Frank M. Robinson (The Glass Tower, The Power), Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, Duel, Somewhere in Time, What Dreams May Come, more) and several other luminaries that you may have heard of. I wrote for the original Twilight Zone TV series, and films (such as The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Masque of the Red Death and The Intruder, from my novel of the same name) in addition to fiction and articles.
I wrote the scripts for some of the Twilight Zone series' most memorable episodes, including an adaptation of my own short story, "The Howling Man", which starred John Carradine. Playboy published my short story, "The Crooked Man", which was an early (1955) portrayal of homosexuality in speculative fiction. I famously scripted The Queen of Outer Space from an outline by Ben Hecht, deliberately writing the screenplay as a parody.
My work has been rediscovered in recent years with three collections of short stories: Best of Beaumont (Bantam, 1982), Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories by edited Roger Anker (Dark Harvest, 1988) and A Touch of the Creature (Subterranean Press, 1999). In 2004, Gauntlet Press released the first of what will be two volumes collecting my Twilight Zone scripts.
When I was 34, and overwhelmed by numerous writing commitments, I began to suffer the effects of a mysterious brain disease. My speech began to get slower; I seemed to age much faster than normal and my ability to concentrate and be creative quickly disappeared. While perhaps a form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease or maybe Pick's disease, as commonly assumed, the illness may have been related to the meningitis I'd had as a child.
"He was never well," my friend and colleague William F. Nolan recalled in The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree. "He was always thin. He almost always had a headache. He used Bromo-Seltzer like somebody would use water."
Many of my friends and fellow writers, including Nolan and Jerry Sohl, took to ghostwriting for me so that I could fulfill my many writing commissions, despite the ailment. I insisted on splitting my fees with those authors who wrote the pieces for me.
I died in Woodland Hills, CA at the age of 38, survived by my wife, Helen, and my beloved children.
JaSunni Productions will be releasing a film about my life (which was almost like The Twilight Zone) later this year. GO SEE IT.
