Connecting Rod Serling’s favorite episode, John Cheever’s greatest short story, and the zeitgeist-iest cult film of The Sixties

By Arlen Schumer

2024 was a significant anniversary for three major American pop culture treasures: it was not only the 65th Anniversary of the immortal television series The Twilight Zone on October 2, but also the centennial of its famed creator and head writer Rod Serling (born on Christmas); and it was the 60th Anniversary of the great chronicler of American suburbia’s dark underbelly John Cheever’s most famous short story, “The Swimmer,” published in the July 18th issue of The New Yorker.

A bit belatedly, the Triad Theater, a cabaret-sized upstairs theater on West 72nd street will be honoring all three anniversaries with a double-screening of one of Serling’s most classic Twilight Zone episodes, 1960’s “A Stop at Willoughby,” paired with the cinematic adaptation of Cheever’s mini-masterpiece, itself one of the most enigmatic cult films of The Sixties, ‘68’s The Swimmer (starring Burt Lancaster), on Thursday, January 30th. How are the two connected?

About a decade ago Grindhouse video released The Swimmer in a deluxe Blu-ray package stuffed with the usual extras, behind-the-scenes docs, and a CD of the young Marvin Hamlisch’s first film score, as lush and romantically tragic as anything he ever did. But most intriguing was Grindhouse’s promo copy on the back of the slipcase, describing The Swimmer as “a feature-length Twilight Zone episode by way of The New Yorker”!

As a fan and scholar of Serling’s legendary science fiction/fantasy/horror anthology series, I can only add, “…but of course!”

I remember seeing The Swimmer for the first time as a teenager on late-night TV in the early ‘70s, and feeling the same way about its Twilight Zone-ness, since some of my earliest and most indelible childhood memories were of seeing Serling’s series in reruns on the 27” Zenith black and white TV set I grew up watching. My most favorite episodes were those involving men in their thirties—Serling’s doppelgängers—who find themselves teetering on the edge of reality, and their own sanity: an ad exec goes back in time and meets himself as a child (“Walking Distance”); an actor in a Hollywood film believes he is actually the part he’s playing once the director yells “Cut!” (“A World of Difference”); a banker wakes up one morning to discover no one, including his wife and co-workers, knows who he is (“Person or Persons Unknown”).

So I always thought the slightly surreal and peculiar premise of “The Swimmer”—a middle-aged man “swims” across a wealthy suburban northeast-coast county (Cheever hints that his story’s set in New York’s tony Westchester county, but the film was shot mostly in swanky Westport, Connecticut) via a string of his neighbors’ variable-sized backyard pools—was also ur-Twilight Zone. And if the film of The Swimmer—and by corollary, Cheever’s story— is like “a feature-length Twilight Zone episode,” just which of the series’ 156 episodes does it most resemble?

Of course, it’s Serling’s “A Stop at Willoughby,” which originally aired May 6, 1960, near the end of The Twilight Zone’s first season. Why this particular episode? In “Willoughby,” New York City ad agency account exec Gart Williams (actor James Daly, actress Tyne’s father), bullied by his boss’ repeated harangue—“This is a push business! A push-push-push business! Push and drive! All the way! All the time! Right on down the line!”—seeks refuge in “Willoughby,” a turn-of-the century summer idyll he dreams of when he dozes off during his daily commute between the city and yes, Westport (during the episode, you can hear the conductor announcing the familiar New Haven line stops of Westport, Saugatuck, and Stamford). Williams attempts to get off the train in his dream, but waits too long, the train begins to move, and he’s jolted awake.

At home, Williams confides his Willoughby fantasia to his ultra-materialist shrew of a wife, who bluntly belittles it, along with his lack of competitive drive and ambition. He responds with what would become, in a few years, a familiar rebuke of The Establishment by The Counterculture: “Some people aren’t built for competition. Or big pretentious houses they can’t afford. Or rich communities they don’t feel comfortable in. Or country clubs they wear around their neck like a badge of status.”

At the end of the episode, after he’s quit his high-stress job and his high-maintenance wife quits on him, a desperate Williams, in his next Willoughby dream, finally walks off the train, after leaving his briefcase—symbol of his prior life—behind, to go fishing in Willoughby with a pair of young Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer-types. But in reality, he stepped off the moving train and fell to his death under the trestle below. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” indeed.

So “Willoughby” was Serling’s simile for suicide, an escape from the overwhelming pressures of “push-push business” that Serling must have observed in the men he was commuting to and from New York City with in the mid-‘50s, when Serling was actually living in Westport while commuting into the city to work on those 90-minute live TV productions that won him the three Emmys in a row in ’56-8 (for Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Comedian) that would give him the creative clout to relo to Hollywood to do The Twilight Zone in ’59. Serling must’ve seen men silently suffering with the stresses that lead to suicide, or produce the same deadly ulcer that Serling intimated Williams was afflicted with throughout the episode, one that remains one of the bestremembered and most-loved of The Twilight Zone’s entire run. Especially by Serling himself, who called “A Stop at Willoughby” his favorite.

Given its angsty suburban characters, settings, and themes, “Willoughby” might’ve been John Cheever’s favorite episode too—assuming he watched The Twilight Zone. But I have no doubt that Cheever, like many writers, artists, and creative types of all kinds in the early ‘60s, was watching, and loving, Serling’s brainchild. Though The Twilight Zone had perpetually low ratings throughout its network run, and was always on the verge of cancellation (it actually was cancelled for six months, between its third and fourth seasons), the series was nevertheless a critic’s darling, winning three Emmys, two for Serling’s writing (and one for the series’ noirish Director of Photography, George T. Clemens, a descendant of Samuel T.).

And whoever was watching The Twilight Zone during its five-season network run—a lot of geeky-but-creative teenagers like Steven Spielberg and Stephen King—was profoundly affected by what have proven to be Serling and Company’s timeless television stories. King wrote about their impact in his 1983 non-fiction overview of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields, Danse Macabre, “Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different,” and of Serling, “who finally answered H.P. Lovecraft, who showed a new direction. For me and those of my generation, the answer was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities.” Add to King’s and Spielberg’s generation everyone from George Lucas to David Lynch, Jim Cameron to J.J. Abrams, Chris (The X-Files) Carter to Charlie (Black Mirror) Brooker, and all their contemporaries and descendants, all Serling’s metaphorical children, all of whom owe a debt to Serling and his dark masterpiece The Twilight Zone for lighting the imaginative sparks that ignited their greatest works.

While Cheever was obviously not of the Baby Boom generation (he was 52 when “The Swimmer” was published), being firmly from The Establishment, but writing about it from the inside out, he probably shared some of their TV viewing habits, especially Friday nights on CBS at 10:00pm, when The Twilight Zone aired. He probably saw “A Stop at Willoughby” when it first aired in ’60, and saw in Serling’s script the same jaundiced eye cast on the surface, social trappings of post-War suburban American culture, both its fantasies and harsh realities, in the business world and at home, themes that stuck with Cheever in the back of his mind, themes that might have been brought to the front burner when he first conceived “The Swimmer” not long after “Willoughby” was first broadcast.

Cheever’s original conception for the story was to be a novel, a straight-on take on the Greek myth of Narcissus, the man who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. He recalled in an interview with The New Yorker years later, “I started with the image of that boy looking into the water. Then I thought…it’s absurd to limit him to a tight mythological plot—being trapped in his own image, in a single pool. This man loves swimming! So in my first version I let him out, and he swam in an immense number of pools—thirty of them! But then I began to narrow it down, and narrow it down, and something began happening…”

What happened was after amassing over 150 pages of notes for the novel, Cheever realized the conceit of protagonist Ned Merrill swimming across that many pools was too much for the length of a novel. And that’s when he brilliantly pared “The Swimmer” down to its final, perfect short story length. But perhaps when he made that decision, Cheever saw in Serling’s story a kindred spirit to ad man Merrill in Serling’s ad man Williams, who also couldn’t hack the Madison Avenue rat race. But Cheever, in an inspired change, switched Williams’ sensitive, gentle personality with that of his “ultra-materialist shrew of a wife,” and made Merrill the shallow egotist in his story, who only cared for money and status and privilege.

So “The Swimmer” is what could have, would have happened to Serling’s Williams had he not jumped off that train, had he lived to experience the loss of his job’s lucrative income, the divorce of his wife, and the loss of his stately home. Williams probably would have cracked up and wound up in a mental institution (Westport was home to, among the many stately homes and properties that served as the film’s locations, Hall-Brooke, a state of the art mental institution), from where Merrill probably escaped from (in his swimming trunks) to wind up pool-crashing at the beginning of both Cheever’s story and the film adaptation.

The film version of “The Swimmer” should be studied as a primer on the art of turning a difficult short story into a cinematic masterwork—even as the behind-the-scenes production of The Swimmer was somewhat of a train wreck, with the original director, Frank Perry, getting fired three-quarters of the way through the film, and the second female lead and many other supporting character roles replaced at the eleventh hour. The subsequent, significant reshoots, shot in California and directed by a young Sydney Pollack, could’ve had him credited as co-director, but he kept his name off the film. As did the heavyweight Hollywood producer Sam (On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia) Spiegel (though he retained his independent production company’s name on the film). In normal circumstances, the severity of those types of setbacks should have sunk The Swimmer. But in the same way David Lynch rescued 2001’s Mulholland Drive from the ashes of a failed television pilot and rejiggered it into what was recently named in a BBC poll the greatest film of the 21st Century, so too was The Swimmer somehow reassembled like Frankenstein’s monster into the cohesive classic it’s considered today.

Adapting the subtly surreal “The Swimmer” into the screenplay of The Swimmer fell to writer Eleanor Perry (nee Rosenfeld), who had already published novels, plays and articles (and was a true proto-feminist of the ‘60s, advocating for women’s rights and recognition of screenwriters) before she married director Frank Perry in 1958 and began collaborating with him. Their first film, the independent, black and white David and Lisa in 1962, about two mental patients who fall in love (one of them young Keir Dullea), got both Perrys Oscar nominations. Their second collab was a ‘63 docudrama, Ladybug Ladybug, about the psychological effects of the Cold War on a group of teachers and elementary school students after the sounding of a nuclear attack warning (Serling wrote the somewhat similar Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter” two years earlier), and ends with the bombs about to drop.

(After The Swimmer, the creative couple would go on to collaborate on some great films, like 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, before divorcing in ’71; Frank Perry would later direct Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in the notoriously campish, cultish Mommie Dearest in ’81.)

The Perrys take Cheever’s short story and greatly expand it, adding whole new scenes and characters (like the female lead, Merrill’s former baby sitter now twenty years old, the May to Lancaster’s December) that fill out Cheever’s original through line, while staying true to its import, a scathing indictment of everything the Baby Boomer counterculture rebelled against in The Sixties, the rampant materialism of the status-seeking “squares” of The Establishment, their parents’ generation, in thrall to their alcohol-fueled base desires. The Swimmer comes across like an East Coast mirror of 1967’s The Graduate, but this time, Mr. Robinson is the star, with all his drinking and (presumed) philandering, a Ned Merrill living the ‘60s California lifestyle to the hilt, surrounded by swimming pools owned by people who are, to quote from that iconic scene in director Mike Nichol’s perfect film, “plastic.”

Perry’s screenplay spells it out like “The Swimmer” didn’t: in The Swimmer, it’s subtly revealed that Merrill was an ad agency creative who was usurped by a younger “firecracker”; one of Merrill’s fellow admen that he meets poolside knows that’s why he was let go, and gives him a lead about a smaller “shop” (industry lingo for “ad agency”) run by “guys who are really creative.” In “Willoughby,” our protagonist was also undercut by a younger ad man who took Williams’ “three million dollar car account” to another agency, just one of Serling’s recurring themes throughout his career: aging, obsolete men dealing with the loss, and challenge, of youth, from Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, to multiple Twilight Zone episodes, to his early ‘70s TV series Night Gallery’s most celebrated episode, “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar.”

In The Swimmer’s last act, Ms. Perry creates one of Merrill’s ex-mistresses, Shirley Abbott, an actress he met in the city, played by an actress with a coincidental Twilight Zone pedigree, Janice Rule (who replaced the originally-cast Barbara Loden, wife of director Elia Kazan, who, according to one of the Grindhouse docs, saw the rushes of her performance and told producer Spiegel to “burn the negatives,” after which Spiegel fired director Perry). Rule had starred in Serling’s season-one TZ episode “Nightmare as a Child,” about a woman who’s repressed her childhood trauma, witnessing her mother’s murder, while in The Swimmer, she’s playing the rejected mistress of a man who’s repressing the truth about his past, being happily married to “that aging Vassar girl“ and “The President of the League of Woman Voters,” Lucinda (Merrill dubs the string of swimming pools leading to his home “the Lucinda River”), whom Abbott derides for not doing “so well at home,” yet who looked down on unmarried, independent women like Abbott.

So of course, Merrill returned to Lucinda, and chose to break up with Abbott in public, at an upper-crust, old-money Manhattan restaurant right out of Truman Capote’s infamous 1975 Esquire article “La Cote Basque, 1965” (the same year Perry wrote the Swimmer screenplay), so she wouldn’t make a scene. Abbott rants to Merrill about the eatery’s chi-chi clientele, “with its mink hats and snobbish waiters and stylish fags” (back when “fags” was obviously an acceptable term for gay men).

The ending of The Swimmer alone is enough to ensure its place in film history. After Citizen Kane’s reveal of “Rosebud,” jump 27 years to 1968 to get three films whose monumental endings stand with Welles’ magnum opus: the shocking Statue of Liberty in ruins on the beach in The Planet of the Apes (whose screenplay was co-written by Serling, the ending inspired by one of his own 1960 Twilight Zone episodes, “I Shot an Arrow into the Air”); Kubrick’s sui generis 2001: A Space Odyssey and its giant star child floating in space, dwarfing the earth itself, to the magnificent, recurring theme of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra; and The Swimmer, with Lancaster’s Merrill banging, banging, banging on the stuccoed door of his dilapidated, barren suburban mansion, as relentless winds swirl around him, downpouring rain buffets him into a fetal position, and peals of thunder boom like the voice of God admonishing Merrill for trying to return home, to his own personal Eden, climaxing with the melancholy gongs of Hamlisch’s surging score.

Like all the best cult films in history, The Swimmer, in its original release, bombed at the box office, but not so much with the critics, as the estimable Roger Ebert hailed it “a strange, stylized work, a brilliant and disturbing one,” while the venerable Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave it a rather contradictory review, calling it “an uneven, patchy kind of movie, occasionally gross and mawkish, and one that I happened to like very much…although literal in style, the film has the shape of an open ended hallucination. It is a grim, disturbing, and sometimes funny view of a very small, very special segment of upper-middle class American life…as do few movies, The Swimmer stays in the memory like an echo that never quite disappears.” That echo is why The Swimmer has been reconsidered decades later as a classic of its time, the zeitgeist-iest film of The Sixties.

And despite Canby unbelievably calling Lancaster “essentially miscast in the title role,” it’s the film the star himself thought was his greatest, containing his greatest performance. And he’s right. Lancaster plays Merrill not as coldly as Cheever paints him, but deeper, as a once-creative, somewhat sensitive soul—evidenced by all those loopy monologues throughout the film that Perry wrote for him, that Lancaster delivers almost deadpan, causing the one and only Joan Rivers, in her standout cameo, to opine in her usual Brooklynese, “I’ve never heard anyone talk like you”—but Merrill sold his soul for the trappings of his (and Lucinda’s) go-go lifestyle, and paid the ultimate price: not with his death, like Serling’s Williams in “Willoughby,” but with his sanity.

Lancaster also posits The Swimmer as a paean to his own fading, middle-aged masculinity (he was 52 when they shot it), vainly racing horses, leaping hurdles (with a woman less than half his age), and baring his naked butt on the lawn of Merrill’s nudist neighbors (the first and only star of his generation to do so), all at that crucial juncture between desperately clinging to illusions of youthful vigor, and grim acceptance—or denial—of aging’s erosion, a theme that runs through Serling’s oeuvre, Cheever’s greatest story, and the remarkable film made from it.

A film that is absolutely “a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone by way of The New Yorker”!

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ARLEN SCHUMER is the author/designer of two books about The Twilight Zone, the coffee table art book Visions from The Twilight Zone (Chronicle Books, 1990), and his new book of episode essays, The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone (Bear Manor Media, 2024).