Charles Beaumont - Life and Work

Life and Work

Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, to Charles H. and Letty Nutt. His mother is known to have dressed him 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 he found solace as a teenager in science fiction. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade to join the army. He also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, disc jockey, usher and dishwasher before selling his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950.

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

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.

His cautionary fables include "The Beautiful People" (1952), a futuristic short story about a rebellious adolescent girl who lives in a largely conformist society in which people obligatorily alter their physical appearance (adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone: "Number 12 Looks Just Like You"), and "Free Dirt" (1955), about a frugally gluttonous man who gorges on his entire vegetable harvest, but instead dies from having consumed the magical soil he used to grow it.

His short story "The Crooked Man" (also published by Playboy, in 1955) presented a dystopian future scenario wherein heterosexuality is stigmatized in the same way that homosexuality then was, and depicts heterosexuals living as furtively as pre-Stonewall gays and lesbians. In the story, a man meets the woman he loves in a gay orgy bar. They try to make love in a curtained booth (she dressed in male drag), and are caught.

Beaumont wrote many scripts for the Twilight Zone, including an adaptation of his own short story, "The Howling Man", starring John Carradine, and the hour-long "The Valley of the Shadow," in which a newspaper reporter stumbles upon a cloistered technological Utopia, disguised as an ordinary small town in the middle of nowhere, which refuses to allow its startlingly-advanced science discoveries to be given to the outside world, citing humanity's previous misuse of another scientific formula E=mc2 as their cautious rationale. Beaumont famously 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 did pen one episode of Steve Canyon; "Operation B-52"; a story where Canyon and his crew attempt to set a new around the world non-stop speed record in a B-52 with a newsman aboard who hates Air Force pilots. The newsman later learns that flyboys aren't so bad after all.

Beaumont was much admired by the well-known colleagues who outlived him (Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Roger Corman), and his work is currently in the process of being rediscovered. Many of his stories have been re-released in 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), is now available. In 2004, Gauntlet Press released the first of what is to be two volumes collecting Beaumont's Twilight Zone scripts.