“I insure life, health, and happiness.”
As part of my in-depth review of every Twilight Zone episode, I finally got my hands on an old copy of the short story “What You Need” by Lewis Padgett. Interestingly enough, the name “Lewis Padgett” was actually a joint nom de plume used by science fiction authors and spouses Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) and C. L. Moore (1911-1987), both foundational Golden Age speculative fiction authors. They had several connections to people involved with The Twilight Zone. For example, Kuttner was friends with prolific Twilight Zone writer Richard Matheson (who dedicated his famous 1954 novel I Am Legend to Kuttner) and Kuttner also helped Ray Bradbury (Twilight Zone contributor and early friend of Rod Serling) write his first horror story entitled “The Candle” (which was published in Weird Tales magazine in November 1942). Bradbury later referred to Kuttner as an under-appreciated master and helped compile a collection of Kuttner’s short works in 1975. However, despite these unique connections to The Twilight Zone, the story “What You Need” still only happened to be selected for the series by producer Buck Houghton via the ordinary process within the story department.
The edition of “What You Need” I read was in featured a wonderfully preserved 1954 collection of short stories by “Lewis Padgett” entitled Line to Tomorrow and other Fantasy and Science-Fiction. In The Twilight Zone episode “What You Need” we meet a kindly old man named Pedott who possesses the supernatural power of clairvoyance, and he uses this power to in a benevolent manner. He offers people things they will unexpectedly need (presumably to improve their lives).
However, the original short story “What You Need” is quite different from the episode. The protagonist is Tim Carmichael, a journalist who works for a trade paper that specializes in stories about economics by “selling sensational and untrue and untrue articles to the tabloids.” One day, he stumbles upon a strange shop on Park Avenue with a backwards sign reading: “DEEN UOY TAHW EVAH EW” (or “WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED”). Thinking this might be a scam or a front for corruption, Carmichael enters the shop and meets an odd fellow named Peter Talley who runs the shop.
As Carmichael tries to get to the bottom of this unusual business, he learns Carmichael operates mainly on credit and he maintains only a select clientele. Carmichael observes a few clients shuffle into the shop and claim mysterious parcels containing oddball things like newspaper clippings, diamonds, a revolver, eggs, sunglasses, gloves, and so on. He continues to believe this shop is up to something suspicious.
When he asks Talley if he can become a client, Talley seems resistant at first, but after he steps into the back of the shop and places his eyes onto a binocular plate and moves a calibrated dial over a scanner. Talley says he can offer something Carmichael will “need” provided he will never again return to the shop. The cost is five dollars in exchange for what he needs (the bill is only due after the client is satisfied with the product). Then Talley’s errand boy pops out of the back of the store with a special parcel for Carmichael.
Carmichael heads out to a bar and opens the parcel to find a box containing a pair of shears. He places the shears in his pocket and proceeds to drink a considerable amount of alcohol, frustrated that his co-worker Betsy Hoag has canceled their date night. Then another co-worker named Jerry Worth shows up and chides Carmichael for not finishing a report on Trans-Steel before the paper heads to the printer. Angry and drunk, Carmichael heads back to the office and then to the printer but his amidst all the printing machines, Carmichael’s scarf gets suddenly caught in one of the machines and it slowly threatens to kill him while Jerry Worth watches on in horror. At the last moment, Carmichael remembers the shears in his pocket which he uses to cut off his scarf and save his life.
Despite his agreement never to return, Carmichael returns to the shop and confronts Peter Talley, asking about his machine that can apparently foretell the future, and wondering why he doesn’t use this extraordinary power to enrich himself with stock picks and so on. As Carmichael reflects: “There are innumerable possible variants to the future. Different lines of probability. All depending on the outcome of various crises as they arise. I happen to be skilled in certain branches of electronics. Some years ago, almost by accident, I stumbled on the principle of seeing the future” (54).
Carmichael insists on being one of Talley’s regular customers, so Talley takes a look once again into his machine and his errand boy pops out again with another parcel for Carmichael, this time it contains a pair of plastic-soled shoes. Talley instructs Carmichael to wear these shoes whenever he goes out in public.
Then the narrative makes a unique switch into Talley’s perspective: when he looked into his machine, he saw a vision ten years in the future in which Carmichael can be seen pulling out a gun and shoots Talley in the head. He realizes their business relationship is doomed. And so the shoes he has given to Carmichael spell his own doom. While standing out on a subway platform a nearby crowd surges and Carmichael slips off the platform in front of the oncoming train, killing him and taking the machine for himself.
“What dangers, what terrible potentialities, lay in that Eye that could see through the veil of tomorrow?” (59).
As it turns out, Peter Talley has been using his machine to carefully craft the future, shaping the events to come in favor of the men who build and create important things for humanity, while quietly causing the demise of evil men like Tim Carmichael. Peter Talley gives the world what it needs, and in Carmichael’s case, the world needed death.
The story ends as Talley opens the Bible and reads a passage from Matthew 16:18-19 “And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter… And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven…” (60).
The interesting thing about this short story is that Tim Carmichael isn’t exactly a bad guy, he’s just a cynic and a skeptic. Yet we are supposed to trust Peter Talley’s future-seeing machine in that Tim Carmichael will eventually be subsumed with greed to the point that he will murder Talley. There is a sense that karmic justice will prevail.
The first television adaptation of this story was produced on the 1950s science fiction anthology show Tales of Tomorrow (an episode entitled “What You Need” starring William Redfield as “Tom Carmichael” instead of Tim Carmichael, and Edgar Stehli as Peter Talley). It was sponsored by Masland Beauty Blend Broadlooms, a carpeting and rug company. I very much enjoyed tracking down this episode and watching it freely on the internet. I’m happy to report it is a wonderful half hour of 1950s television. In the episode, the shop is called “Peter Talley Curios” and there is a hanging sign outside that reads “I Have What You Need – Peter Talley.” Peter Talley is also flanked by his doting wife, a character who is wholly absent in the short story. The rest of the episode more closely follows the plot of the short story than The Twilight Zone episode, although in Tales of Tomorrow Carmichael meets up with a loudmouth girlfriend instead of his co-worker, he argues with his editor inside the printery before his near-lethal scarf incident, and after receiving the shoes from Talley, he dies by getting hit by a car not a subway train (something which is later used in The Twilight Zone). Talley is wracked with emotional guilt over Carmichael’s death but he knows that in two weeks (not ten years) Carmichael was going to kill Talley in order to steal the machine. In the end of the episode, Talley destroys the machine, declaring that this technology “is not for man” while his wife cries. There is quite a bit of Christian language and imagery in this closing scene (in keeping with the biblical quote at the conclusion of the original short story).
In The Twilight Zone episode, the futuristic foretelling machine is replaced simply by an old trinkets man named Pedott who has a unique supernatural gift for clairvoyance he uses for benevolent purposes. However, like Talley in the short story, Pedott also encounters an avaricious man (Fred Renard) who tries to exploit him and thereby earns himself a cosmic death sentence. Instead of getting a scarf caught in a printing machine, Fred Renard gets his scarf caught in an elevator that very nearly strangles him to death before he uses the shears. And instead of being given shoes that will slip in front of a subway train, Renard’s slippery shoes slide in front of an oncoming car. Both endings pack a gut punch. Lastly, whereas the short story leans more toward science fiction with the use of science fiction machinery, The Twilight Zone episode leans more heavily into urban fantasy and folklore by giving Pedott an unexplained supernatural power. Both the story and the episode are unique and excellent in their own right but I’m glad I took the time to read the short story “What You Need.” It’s a tragic shame that writer Henry Kuttner suddenly died in his sleep in 1958 at the age of 42, one year before The Twilight Zone would air its episode “What You Need.”
Padgett, Lewis. Line to Tomorrow and other Fantasy and Science-Fiction. Bantam Books, New York, New York, August 1954.
Click here for my review of The Twilight Zone episode “What You Need.”