Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Most Night Gallery episodes were nowhere near as chilling, and the series was canceled after limping along in one form or another for three labored years. It was Serling's last star turn.

"On his fortieth birthday," Naha says, "Serling made his first parachute jump since World War II." Serling's reason? "I did it," he said, "to prove that I wasn't old." But he looked old; a comparison of his early Twilight Zone publicity photos and those taken on the Night Gallery set before those mostly idiotic paintings shows a change which is nearly shocking. Serling's face had become lined, his neck wattled; it is the face of a man who has been partially dissolved in television's vitriol. In 7972 he received an interviewer in his study, which was lined with framed reviews of Requiem, Patterns , and other teleplays from the early days.

"Sometimes I come in here just to look," he said. "I haven't had reviews like that in years.

Now I know why people keep scrapbooks-just to prove to themselves it really happened.” The man who jumped from a plane on his fortieth birthday to prove to himself that he wasn't old refers to himself constantly as old in the Linda Brevelle interview some nine years later; she characterizes him as "vibrant and alive" during their meeting at La Taverna, Serling's favorite L.A. watering hole, but again and again those disquieting phrases crop up; at one point he says, "I'm not an old man yet, but I'm not a young man, either"; at another he says he is an old man. Why didn't he get out of the creative demo derby? At the end of Requiem for a Heavyweight , Jack Palance says he must go back into the ring-even though the whole thing is fixed-because the ring is all he knows. It's as good an answer as any.

Serling, a fierce workaholic who sometimes smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, suffered a crippling heart attack in 1975 and died following open-heart surgery. His legacy consisted of a few fine early plays and The Twilight Zone , a series which has become one of those peculiar TV legends, like The Fugitive and Wanted: Dead or Alive . What are we to make of this program which is so revered (by people who were mostly children when they originally viewed it) ? "I guess a third of the shows were pretty damned good," Serling told an interviewer.

"Another third would have been passable. Another third are dogs.” The fact is that Serling himself wrote sixty-two of the first ninety-two Twilight Zones typing them, dictating them to a secretary, talking them into a dictaphone-and, of course, smoking nonstop.