Patterns

The show was memorable not as a play but as a document of the frightened fascination with which some writers regard Hollywood, as if it were a basketful of hypnotizing snakes. In The Velvet Alley, produced on CBS' Playhouse 90, TV Playwright Rod Serling told the story of a struggling 42-year-old TV playwright from Manhattan named Ernie Pandish, who sells a script and overnight becomes rich, famous and an s.o.b. Where once he listened to music while he worked (he apparently owned only one phonograph record, Swan Lake), now the only music heard is the snarling of his ego. He berates his wife (rather justly, it seemed to some viewers) for disliking all those Hollywood parties, and he fires his loyal, loving agent (well played by Jack Klugman) in order to get "representation" by a large agency. Says his wife before she leaves him to stew in his own swimming pool: "You didn't get represented, you got raped."

Though Ernie Pandish was ably played by Art Carney, The Velvet Alley never made clear why a man cannot make $100,000 a year without being a heel, or why, somehow, little old New York is a safer place to be successful than Hollywood. The most intriguing fact about the play was not seen on the TV screen: Author Serling's own partial identification with his hero. Working on the show, said Serling, "I left strips of flesh and blood all over the studio. The externals of the play are definitely autobiographical -the pressures involved, the assault on values, the blandishments that run in competition to a man's work and creativity."

Like Ernie Pandish, Rod Serling, 34, became famous overnight with a TV play (Patterns), four years later went to Hollywood from his home in Westport, Conn., bought a house with a swimming pool, and made big money (more than $10,000 a script). Like Ernie, he fired his old agent, although the separation was more or less amicable. Unlike Ernie, he is still happily married. Perhaps like Ernie, he feels harried by having to live up in every script to his first big success. Says he: "One of the basic problems in this industry is that it never trains people for success. Suddenly everything's all whipped cream and marshmallows and mink coats and swimming pools. You can't throw this down a gut and expect ready digestion. But to Ernie Pandish identity became equated with money, and I don't think I'm that way. He's traded off certain values; Rod Serling hasn't. It's a moot point what will happen to Rod."

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