HE IS LEGEND:
AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD MATHESON
 

By Joshua Jabcuga

They don't make 'em like Richard Matheson anymore.  Born in New Jersey in 1926, Matheson is the writer's writer, having conquered all media. With the advent of television he wrote for shows like Have Gun, Will Travel and was a key creative force on The Twilight Zone. With novels like I Am Legend, Hell House, Stir of Echoes and What Dreams May Come Matheson has provided over five decades of intriguing and thought-provoking horror, suspense, and fantasy stories. Stephen King once sited him as “the author who influenced me most as a writer.”

     It appears that Richard Matheson has not mellowed with age.  His most recent novel, Woman, published by Gauntlet Press, examines the battle of the sexes with no attempt to shy away from any controversial content.  In fact, as Matheson told Penny Blood in the following interview, he's half expecting women and men to object to some, if not all, of what is at the core of Woman.

     Coincidentally, Matheson's first piece of fiction to be sold was a short story titled “Born of Man and Woman,” which appeared in 1950.  Since that time, Matheson has been the recipient of such prestigious awards as the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement, the Hugo Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Writer's Guild Award.

PENNY BLOOD: Can you explain the origin of the book Woman?  What prompted you to write about the battle of the sexes at this point in your career?

MATHESON: Well that’s an interesting question because I’ve been asked that and I have no memory of when the idea first occurred to me. Obviously I’ve been reading about the whole feminism movement through the years and obviously I did a lot of research on it, because I quote from various books that I’ve read.  It’s something that I’m extrapolating, speaking to my wife and women of older years, when you ask them if they feel that women have really progressed tremendously. And woman certainly have progressed to a degree.  There are obviously women in politics, women in business, women in medicine. But when you add it all up and compare it to the amount of influence and control that men have, it’s really not that much and I think that women, if they would admit the truth, will agree to that.  I think that women, there are so many women, who in order to succeed in a man’s world, especially the business world, have to take on the attributes of men and they unfortunately have to live with the drawbacks.

PENNY BLOOD: So they’re assimilating?

MATHESON: Yeah.  I mean, they’ll have ulcers and they’ll have high blood pressure, they’ll be under stress all the time, have headaches, migraines. So they pay a heavy price for succeeding in a man’s world.  A young woman read the book and didn’t agree with it, which I expect of course, a lot of disagreement, but she has succeeded in the man’s world and she felt that she was doing fine.  Therefore she did not agree with the premise that women, in the overall sense, have not progressed to the point where you can really say that they’re helping to find their own place in the world.

PENNY BLOOD: Did she see it as a man’s world?

MATHESON: Well, I guess she agreed that it was a man’s world, but she felt she was successful in business and she had entered the man’s world and she was doing fine.  And she was not suffering at all.  And obviously there are going to be women who will feel that way but too many of them I’ve read about, they almost take on a male quality.  They have to do that in order to succeed.

PENNY BLOOD: There’s a very profound statement in the book, where you say, or, really, to be accurate, a character states:  “What women need right now is their own personal Lincoln.”

MATHESON: Yeah, that was my phrase.

PENNY BLOOD: I don’t want to spoil any of the plot twists but essentially what we’re saying here is that the feminist movement is failing and the solution is not in progress but more in a return to roots for women before the men defined…

MATHESON: The basis, the premise is that the protagonist thinks that what is necessary is a sort of a revolution lead by something, someone like a Lincoln and finally comes to realize that that isn’t going to work, and since it’s not, evolution is stepping in.  It’s becoming an evolution process.

PENNY BLOOD: My take on it, I mean, I think the book is decidedly pro feminist.

MATHESON: Oh sure.

PENNY BLOOD: There’s going to be critics from both sides.  There’s going to be the male readers who are going to say they were sort of betrayed by you.

MATHESON: I know.

PENNY BLOOD: There’s going to be the women who say that, you know, you have…

MATHESON: The younger women who have become successful in various ways will be critical of it too.

PENNY BLOOD: Or they may say you have good intentions but ultimately you’re a male author.  How do you approach that criticism and address it?

MATHESON: It’s just, you know, a novel.  It has a premise. I don’t have to defend the premise of a novel. I think it’s an interesting premise and I think there’s a lot of validity to it.  I don’t think it’s gonna happen, by any means, but I think it’s an interesting possibility.

PENNY BLOOD: The other thing I wanted to touch upon, David, the radio show psychologist says, “The widespread increase in bisexuality and lesbianism could be the forefront of a coming insurgence.  Women turning away from men in every way, tired of living on men’s terms.”  How, then, would you explain men who become homosexual in nature?

MATHESON: Well, I mean, there are a number of explanations for that.  And statistically it’s true.

PENNY BLOOD: What’s that?

MATHESON: That the increase of homosexuality is very noticeable.  And the increase in lesbianism is very noticeable.  Women are tiring of the basic attraction between male and female.  In order to partake of that attraction and endure whatever unhappy situations they have to in order to stay within that possibility.  They would just as soon skip the whole thing.  I mean, they can find physical satisfaction with other women.  And as I say, this is all statistically true.  I didn’t make that up.  And I think men are turning to other men simply because they are angered by the insurgence of women.

PENNY BLOOD: Meaning…?

MATHESON: Meaning that, you know, the fact that there are women in politics, there are women in business.  Women are becoming stronger.  They’re stating their opinions.  Even housewives, so-called housewives are becoming more opinionated.  They’ve got their own take on what things are.  Whereas in the old days the wife was home, the husband came home and it was, “Yes, dear.  How are you?  Did you have a nice day at the office?  Let me make you a drink.”  That’s not true [anymore], and they don’t like authority to be taken from them.  Men have [been in control] from the time that they displaced women as the authorities in the world, which was the case many, many eons ago. They don’t like to lose that authority.

PENNY BLOOD: So you’re saying that with gay men, in particular, it’s not that they’re embracing their feminine side, it’s more that they’re resisting women by…

MATHESON: I think to a large degree, yeah, that’s true.  I mean, I’m sure there are other reasons that men are gay.  You could go into astrological reasons, you could go into psychological reasons, you know…

PENNY BLOOD: That’s a whole different book.  [Laughs]

MATHESON: Yeah, and [it] has been written over and over.

PENNY BLOOD: If women are superior, and clearly the book makes that case…

MATHESON: Well it’s always been established that they’re superior physically, I think. They get over or resist illness much better.  And resist stress much better.

PENNY BLOOD: And they’re certainly a lot better looking than men.

MATHESON: [laughs]

PENNY BLOOD: My question would be, following the premise of your novel, how have men dominated for so long if women are essentially superior?

MATHESON: Because they got away with it.

PENNY BLOOD: The men got away with it?

MATHESON: Yeah, they were brutes in the beginning.  You know, go back to the Middle Ages and way back beyond that.  It was just an established thing.  I think women always had some sort of control over men through sex.  That’s always been established too, the secret authority was women because they had the sexual power over men.  I think it just became an assumption that men were the strong ones, the superior ones.  They never questioned it and the women did not question it with enough power.  They had no power back then.  The guys went off to war and put chastity belts on their wives.

PENNY BLOOD: The cover of the book says, “Men and Women Can No Longer Co-Exist.”

MATHESON: Yeah, that’s the phrase that I figure’s gonna get a little attention right off the bat.

PENNY BLOOD: The battle of the sexes, it’s one of those topics where…

MATHESON: The very fact that it’s a battle still is an indication of what I’m talking about.

PENNY BLOOD: And I think it’s one of those topics that, for whatever reason, whether it’s political or sexual, is always current, but sometimes not in vogue.  Sometimes it’s on the backburner.

MATHESON: You mean the battle between male and female?

PENNY BLOOD: Yes.

MATHESON: It’s always there.

PENNY BLOOD: It’s always there but I think sometimes people push it aside.

MATHESON: Yeah, well, they’re trying now to push the idea of Hilary Clinton running for president.  It’s obviously a very strong feminist movement and I hope she doesn’t because I don’t think the electorate in this country is anywhere near the point where they would put a woman in the White House.

PENNY BLOOD: Would you disagree with the idea of putting a woman in the White House?

MATHESON: No, I wouldn’t, but I think that there is still that huge undercurrent, it’s not really an undercurrent, of men who feel they’re the strong ones.  “By God let’s not put a woman in the White House.  They’ll walk all over her.  The other countries will stomp on her and she’ll ruin the country.  She won’t have any power.”

PENNY BLOOD: As a writer you’re an icon.

MATHESON: [Laughs] An aging icon.

PENNY BLOOD: But definitely a lasting icon.  How do you approach certain subjects like this where you know you’re definitely putting yourself out there on a limb?

MATHESON: Well I never did before.  I wrote a book about life after death, and I’m sure there were a lot of people who just sort of snickered and said, “Well that’s nonsense.”  But it wasn’t something that really struck a nerve.  This is nerve-striking stuff.  And I sensed it right from the start and I felt it very strongly.  I thought it was a very valuable premise to just say, “All right, women are tired.  They’re so tired that nature itself is going to take a foothold and see to it that women are the only ones in power.”

PENNY BLOOD: I’ve heard you write your manuscripts by hand.  Is that true?

MATHESON: Yeah.

PENNY BLOOD: Obviously, you’re a legend. I look up to you as a writer, and so many people do.  I was speaking to a friend the other day and told him that I would be having the opportunity to interview you, and he started quoting verbatim…

MATHESON: Really?

PENNY BLOOD: From I Am Legend.

MATHESON: Yeah, that seems to be the one book that has endured the longest.

PENNY BLOOD: You think so?

MATHESON: Not in films.  I mean, they screwed it up twice.

PENNY BLOOD: Is that book one of your favorites?

MATHESON: No. Personally, I think that Somewhere in Time is the best written of my novels and I think What Dreams May Come is probably the most, up to this one, the most effective.  You know, that’s the one about life after death?

PENNY BLOOD: Yes.

MATHESON: I got letters from people like nothing I had ever received before: “My mother was dying.  She was so frightened.  I gave her your book to read and now she feels very much at peace with the whole concept.”  When I get something like that, I think, that’s it boy. You don’t do any better than that.  No writer does any better than that.  So that’s why I feel it’s the most [effective] to date. I don’t know what’s gonna happen with Woman.  Either men will come after me with a rope and a pitch fork or you know, maybe nobody will even notice it.

PENNY BLOOD: What did you think of the film adaptation of Stir of Echoes?

MATHESON: Wonderful.  David Koepp did a wonderful job.

PENNY BLOOD: Do you have any involvement once it gets turned over to Hollywood?

MATHESON: Yeah.  Sure.  I mean, when I can I do the screenplay.  David, he’s a perfectly skilled screenwriter and a good director and I had no doubts about anything.  And he actually followed the book very closely.  He modernized it.  My book took place in the 60s.  He had to put it up in the 90s, therefore there were certain changes he had to make but the fundamental parts of the book and the feelings of the book, even scenes from the book are in there.  Yeah, I thought it was a wonderful work.

PENNY BLOOD: I think unfortunately it’s one of those overlooked gems because it was released around the same time as The Sixth Sense.

MATHESON: Oh, yeah, right.

PENNY BLOOD: I think the timing of it…

MATHESON: Or if Bruce Willis had been in Stir of Echoes [laughs] and Kevin Bacon had been in The Sixth Sense.  That has a lot to do with it.

PENNY BLOOD: Just because of the name value?

MATHESON: Yeah, he’s a draw.

PENNY BLOOD: When you write knowing you’re “Richard Matheson,” are you able to be critical? Are you able to say, “Okay, maybe this passage I just wrote isn’t that great.”  Do you have an internal editing…

MATHESON: No, I never think about that.

PENNY BLOOD: You just let it flow?

MATHESON: I have no particular regard for my ability.  Sometimes I’ll pick up something, like I just read twenty-five pages from Somewhere in Time the other day and I thought, Gee, this is really good writing.  But I don’t often do that.

PENNY BLOOD: Are you able to see improvements in your own writing from when you started to now?

MATHESON: Ah, I don’t know whether there’s been an improvement in my writing.  Actually, I may have written better sentence for sentence back then.  What there is an improvement in is what I write about and how I say it.

PENNY BLOOD: Why did you start in the first place?

MATHESON: Why did I start what…writing?

PENNY BLOOD: Yeah.

MATHESON: Oh, well, I was born to do it.  I had little stories and poems published when I was seven years old.  There was no doubt.  Although, I’ve also written music.

PENNY BLOOD: Oh really?

MATHESON: I’ve written a lot of songs and I’ve written music and I’ve tried to orchestrate some of it.  And when people have interviewed me, I’ve said, “if I’d grown up in a family of musicians, I probably would have turned to music.  If I had grown up in a family of artists, I’d probably have turned to painting,” because I think what I was born with, what people are born with, is a tendency toward creativity and it can manifest itself in any number of different ways. 

I grew up in the Depression, and I was lucky that my brother and his fiancé got me a small typewriter when I was like fourteen years old or something.  [But] a writer could do his work.  All I need is a pad and a pencil.  I don’t need oils and canvas or easels and I don’t need a grand piano. I would have liked to have tried all those things but I’m satisfied that I opted for writing.

PENNY BLOOD: And you’re happy ultimately?  If you were to say this is my legacy, what would you want to say about your work?

MATHESON: Well I think I’m a skilled storyteller.  There’s a man who had a section in a book about Hollywood writers back in the 50s and 60s, and the title for my section was “Richard Matheson: Storyteller.”  And I think that I have entertained a lot of people and I realized in later years that I did say things, I did have points to make, which I did in short stories and I did in novels and certainly in this one, pretty obviously.

PENNY BLOOD: Okay, I’ve got to ask you this one.  You wrote for The Twilight Zone.

MATHESON: Yeah.

PENNY BLOOD: Certainly some of the best episodes of a truly monumental series.

MATHESON: Yeah.

PENNY BLOOD: What was it like getting that gig and working with Rod Serling?  Did you know that you were on to something special with that whole collaboration?

MATHESON: No, no.  All we knew was that every year we’d probably get cancelled and we hoped maybe we wouldn’t. What they did in those days, they just called in every conceivable writer who might be able to do that stuff and showed them the pilot and then you went in and pitched ideas.  And Chuck Beaumont and I pitched ideas that they liked right off the bat.  And the scripts worked out and it was lovely working because Rod, being a writer, respected writers.  And I can’t recall one of my scripts where any lines were changed, except once in some piece where the actress changed the lines herself.  They never changed them.  I would meet with them and they would make suggestions about the script and I would make changes but when they shot it, it was my script word for word.

PENNY BLOOD: Serling seems like he had a great eye for talent.  He picked you up, Ray Bradbury, even some of the casting choices.

MATHESON: Yeah, well, there weren’t that many of us.  You know, Chuck Beaumont and I already had stories published in that genre so he could tell ahead of time that we knew what we were doing.  And we were adaptable.  We could fit into The Twilight Zone mode right away.  There was a definite formula that you had to follow to do a Twilight Zone and we were able to do it without any trouble and do it well.

PENNY BLOOD: Were they fun times, to be a part of all of that, to look back and say…

MATHESON: Well, I was doing other series at the same time.  I worked for a series called Lawman.  I did six scripts for them and I enjoyed that because the producer on that respected my work and saw to it that none of my scripts were changed.  But I was supporting a wife and four children so I couldn’t sit around saying, “Oh, this is wonderful creatively, I must enjoy this moment.”  [Laughs] I mean, you enjoy doing it, of course, because that’s why we were writing that kind of thing in prose and ended up doing it in television and in films.

PENNY BLOOD: Steven Spielberg’s first film was based on your book Duel.

MATHESON: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.  I’ve got his name on the list, number one.

PENNY BLOOD: It’s incredible.

MATHESON: Yeah, it’s a marvelous piece of work.  And there again, except for editing out some of the voiceovers, which I’m very glad they did, it’s my script. The film that they show has about fifteen minutes more than the television movie which was tight as a drum.  The things that were added, I didn’t care for.

PENNY BLOOD: You didn’t care for the final piece?

MATHESON: Just these sequences. The sequence with the children on the bus I didn’t care for.  And the sequence where the guy’s wife was harassing him on the telephone, I didn’t like.

PENNY BLOOD: I appreciate all your time and good luck with your book.

MATHESON: I hope they don’t attack my house with torches [laughs].