Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies

by Dave Itzkoff

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  “I think of Faye Dunaway as an enchanted panther in a poem,” a person identified only as “an actor who admires her” told People magazine at the end of 1974. “She’s tawny and elegant, and her eyes are like big mysterious emeralds. I want to stroke her but I want bars between us when I do. She looks hungry and dangerous. Whatever there is to want, she wants it all.” Protected by a cloak of mystery, this unnamed enthusiast identified the essentially feline nature of the actress: Dunaway was alluring and graceful, with sharp features that, before she even expressed herself, could make her seem exotic or aloof. Underneath that simultaneously tantalizing and intimidating exterior lurked a curious intellect, boundless passion, and a mercurial mood. No one could question Dunaway’s talent or her devotion to her art. But as the anonymous author of this appraisal surely knew—why ask for anonymity otherwise?—when she felt she was cornered, she could pounce.

  In a decade’s worth of motion pictures, Dunaway had won international fame, lost it, and then recaptured it. Bonnie and Clyde, the New Wave–inspired Arthur Penn drama that paired her and Warren Beatty as the doomed Depression-era bank robbers, had been a showcase for Dunaway, from her nearly naked but discreetly framed frolic at the start of the film to its bullet-riddled finale. Released in 1967, it was only her third movie role; it made her a sensation (along with her slightly anachronistic beret and midi-skirt look, created by the costume designer Theadora Van Runkle) and earned her the first Academy Award nomination of her career.

  The next year, in The Thomas Crown Affair, Dunaway faced off against Steve McQueen in the sexiest chess scene ever committed to celluloid. But by 1970, gossipy newspaper columns and their readers were already asking, “Where Did Faye Fade To?”—the answer being that she had been working on challenging if not always widely seen films such as Little Big Man and Puzzle of a Downfall Child.

  Then, just as abruptly, Dunaway was generating talk of a comeback for her performance as the enigmatic Evelyn Mulwray in the 1974 crime noir Chinatown, where her vintage looks made her a perfect fit for Roman Polanski’s vision of Southern California in the 1930s. Dunaway was once again called upon to shed her clothes, for a postcoital scene with costar Jack Nicholson, and she received her second Oscar nomination. (A People magazine profile from that year offered a poetically apt summation of the actress, calling her “a gossamer grenade.”) But in the process, she was also saddled with the most withering criticism of her career. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Polanski described an incident on the Chinatown set where Dunaway called filming to a halt so she could air her grievances to the director. Of the actress, he said, “You have, I guarantee, never seen such certifiable proof of craziness. Working with Faye, I might eventually have actually questioned my own methods had I not known that she has had the same confrontations with all her directors, and gained the reputation as a gigantic pain-in-the-ass.”

  Years later, Dunaway responded to Polanski’s charges by suggesting that the world did not permit women to pursue perfection in their work in the same way that men were allowed to. “The fact is a man can be difficult and people applaud him for trying to do a superior job,” Dunaway said in a memoir called Looking for Gatsby. “People say, ‘Well, gosh, he’s got a lot of guts. He’s a real man.’ And a woman can try to get it right and she’s ‘a pain in the ass.’ It’s in my nature to do really good jobs, and I would never have been successful if I hadn’t.”

  Dorothy Faye Dunaway was born in 1941 in a one-room frame house on the Florida farm where her father worked as a hand, located between the Panhandle community of Two Egg and the town of Bascom. She was raised primarily by her mother and extended family while her father worked odd jobs and was drafted into the army. He reenlisted after World War II and brought his wife and children with him to Germany, where in 1952 he disappeared from his base on a bender. Dunaway’s father was listed as AWOL, then found the next day and court-martialed. He would be convicted on charges of drunken driving and resisting arrest and sentenced to six months in a stockade, but before his trial his eleven-year-old daughter made herself a fateful promise to become a self-sufficient adult, requiring no one else’s help. “I determined that no matter what I did,” Dunaway vowed, “I would never allow myself to be in the position of needing financial support from a man.”

  Dunaway graduated from a Tallahassee high school, and a teaching scholarship led her to Florida State University and some of her earliest stage roles, including Olivia in Twelfth Night and the title character in Medea; she then transferred to Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, portraying Hypatia in Shaw’s Misalliance for the Harvard Summer Players and Elizabeth Proctor in Miller’s The Crucible. In 1962 she passed up a Fulbright Scholarship to join the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, newly formed by Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead, and two days after graduating college she signed a one-year contract to replace Olga Bellin in the role of Margaret More in Whitehead’s Broadway production of A Man for All Seasons.

  To each of her screen characters Dunaway sought to bring careful reflection and confident choices, sometimes to the befuddlement of filmmakers who expected their instructions to be followed without question. In her eyes, Bonnie Parker was “a creature who wanted freedom, and a bra just didn’t fit”; Vicki Anderson, in The Thomas Crown Affair, was the archetype of “a woman pushing the envelope.” “These were women who found out who they were,” Dunaway said, “who expressed who they were, and who were able to function as complete human beings, the way men do in the world.” She also paid a financial price to get the recognition she felt she deserved: to share the over-the-title billing that Warren Beatty enjoyed in Bonnie and Clyde, she had to give back $25,000 of her $60,000 salary.

  When J. J. Gittes gazes upon Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown, he notices a tiny flaw in her eye. But when Dunaway looked at herself as closely, she saw a mass of imperfections. After watching herself in daily film footage from Bonnie and Clyde, she wrote, “I couldn’t stand how I was—my manners, my gestures.… This was the first time I had seen myself on this big screen, with its millions of silver dots, and I just thought I was sadly lacking.”

  In her off-camera life, Dunaway had romantic affairs with Lenny Bruce; Jerry Schatzberg, the photographer turned director who oversaw her on Puzzle of a Downfall Child; and the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. “I used men as buffers against the world,” she would later explain. “I never walked away bleeding from a relationship, because I allowed them to continue long after they were over so I could prepare myself for the moving on. My bleeding took place while they were ending … But I couldn’t let go. I was so afraid of being alone.”

  Mastroianni, the libidinous star of La Dolce Vita and 8½, shared Dunaway’s aptitude for cutting analysis. In an essay published in McCall’s magazine after the two had parted ways, Mastroianni said of her, in remarks he apparently considered to be affectionate:

  She wasn’t beautiful. Or she was beautiful because she wasn’t perfect. She was full of imperfections, edges, mistakes. She had the hands of an old woman. The first time I saw those hands, I thought: “What a pity, those bony hands! I like soft hands with tapering fingers.” … She had the knees of a Christ, sharp and lean and strong. And her nose was squashed, broken on the septum—even her face had something wrong. Yet it was so shining, pale and shining, lunar.

  These imperfections notwithstanding, Dunaway married Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the Boston-based rock group the J. Geils Band, in the summer of 1974. She wrapped film roles in The Towering Inferno and Three Days of the Condor, performed in stage revivals of After the Fall and A Streetcar Named Desire, and then began a hiatus from acting that would last nearly a year.

  Dunaway, who knew and respected Chayefsky’s writing, was excited by his screenplay for Network and eager to play the character of Diana, recognizing her as a woman who “was driven, more driven in her career than I was in mine, but I knew what fueled that sort of ambition.” She pursued the role over the objections of her
new husband and of confidants such as the playwright William Alfred, who regarded Diana as too heartless, and were concerned, Dunaway said, “that people would think badly of me, would confuse the character and the actor, and come to believe I was like that.”

  Among those who encouraged Dunaway to sign on for Network was her agent, Sue Mengers, a powerful Hollywood player who also represented Barbra Streisand, Ali MacGraw, and Cybill Shepherd, and who said she persuaded the actress despite Dunaway’s insistence that she didn’t feel like working at the time. “I sat her down and told her I could no longer represent her if she didn’t do this film,” Mengers would later say. Dunaway herself said that she believed Diana was “one of the most important female roles to come along in years.” “If you wanted to succeed as a woman in a man’s world, you had to beat them at their own game,” she later wrote. “Diana, I knew, would end up right in the middle of that debate.”

  Before Dunaway had fully committed to the film, Lumet visited her at her Manhattan apartment on Central Park West. There, Lumet said, he gave Dunaway an ultimatum on the character of Diana.

  Crossing the floor of her apartment, before I’d even reached her, I said, “I know the first thing you’re going to ask me: Where’s her vulnerability? Don’t ask it. She has none.” Faye looked shocked. “Furthermore, if you try to sneak it in, I’ll get rid of it in the cutting room, so it’ll be wasted effort.” She paused just a second, then burst out laughing. Ten minutes later I was begging her to do the part. She said yes.

  Dunaway, by her own account, was already teeming with ideas for the film and made the case to Lumet that the part of Max Schumacher should be played by Robert Mitchum. But Lumet declined her proposal—he and Chayefsky had their own plans about how they were going to fill the role.

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  On September 24, 1975, MGM and United Artists issued a press release announcing that Dunaway would star in the film the studios referred to as “Paddy Chayefsky’s Network,” noting in the second paragraph that it would be directed by Lumet, who planned to shoot on location in New York and at the MGM Studios in Culver City, California. Recycling a turn of phrase from Chayefsky’s screenplay, the announcement proudly said of Dunaway that “in her starring role, which Chayefsky believes to be one of the most important parts written for a woman in recent years, the actress will play a character described by the writer as tall, willowy, and with the best bottom ever seen on a Vice President in charge of programming.” Not mentioned in the press release was Dunaway’s salary of $200,000, though it noted that she “will be joined by two male stars in Network,” a reference to the not-yet-solidified roles of Howard Beale and Max Schumacher. An item published in Variety that same day added the detail that William Holden was “close to signing” for the project.

  Holden and Dunaway had previously appeared together one year earlier, in The Towering Inferno, the star-studded Irwin Allen disaster picture in which she had played the enticing girlfriend of Paul Newman’s altruistic architect, Doug Roberts, and Holden had played the owner and builder of the 138-story skyscraper turned deathtrap of its title. They shared only a few on-screen exchanges, including one where, as she enters a party clad in a beige barely-there dress, Holden gives her the once-over and remarks, “Find me the architect who designed you, and who needs Doug Roberts?” A mild weariness pervaded this line reading, as it did much of Holden’s delivery in the film, as if he were exacting quiet retribution on the producers who had given him lower billing than leading men such as Newman and Steve McQueen, and who placed his name last of the three on the movie’s poster, at the end of a diagonal and decidedly downward trajectory.

  Once, he had been called “Golden Boy,” and not simply because he made his motion picture breakthrough in the 1939 film adaptation of that Clifford Odets play. In his prime, the ruggedly handsome Holden played the doomed screenwriter of Billy Wilder’s 1950 film noir Sunset Boulevard (the movie for which everyone thought he should have won an Academy Award) and the suspected American turncoat in Wilder’s 1953 prisoner-of-war movie Stalag 17 (the movie for which he in fact received his Oscar). He was the best man of his close friend Ronald Reagan at his 1952 wedding to the actress Nancy Davis and, by his own account, nearly killed himself filming his own stunts on David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, in a scene that required him to swim through rock-strewn rapids in the Indian Ocean and place dynamite charges at the base of the bridge. “I was halfway through when I hit a hidden rock headfirst,” Holden said of the feat gone awry, which he still completed in a single take. “The blow dazed me and I was pulled under by the churning current. Somehow I managed to fight my way to the surface.”

  But as Holden was often reminded, and frequently to his face, he was not in his heyday anymore. A journalist taking stock of the actor in the 1970s commended him for possessing a jawline every bit as strong as it had been four decades prior, but added that “the hairline is receding, the skin has leathered, and basset-hound bags droop under mellow eyes.” Another appraisal from this period described Holden as speaking “in commanding tones and well-enunciated repose, a whisky baritone buried by a coffee-table carton of Carleton cigarettes,” while still another called him “world-weary” and said, as casually as if it were reporting the weather, that his “face started to deteriorate” some years ago and was now “old” and “shopworn.”

  All that Holden could do was accept these assessments with dignity and self-deprecation. “What am I?” he said. “A crazy-faced middle aged man. I can’t grow younger.” Fortunately for the people who put forth such blunt observations, he said, “they don’t have reruns of their past on TV. They don’t realize that when they see me playing the violin and trying to learn how to box on the Late Show it was 38 years ago and I was 20 years old. But at least I no longer have to sit on the edge of Gloria Swanson’s bed with one foot on the floor and my overcoat on. The movies have grown up, and so have I.”

  By 1960, Holden had appeared in nearly fifty feature films. In 1975 he was regarded as an endearing relic, an old zoo animal to throw peanuts at, a charmingly obsolete vaudevillian who, gracefully or not, just needed to exit the stage. He was fifty-seven years old.

  He was born William Franklin Beedle Jr. in the town of O’Fallon, Illinois, in 1918, to a family that claimed George Washington and Warren G. Harding among its relations. His father, a chemist, soon moved the family to Pasadena, California, where young William studied chemistry at the local junior college and, disliking the subject, joined the Pasadena Workshop Theater’s production of a play about the life of Madame Curie. Playing the role of Curie’s eighty-year-old father-in-law, he was discovered on opening night by a Paramount talent scout who signed him to a fifty-dollar-a-week contract with the studio. When its executives expressed concern that the actor’s surname was too evocative of an insect, William took inspiration from an assistant managing editor at the Los Angeles Times and changed it to Holden.

  Throughout his seemingly perpetual ascent, following from the moment that director Rouben Mamoulian chose him from among some three thousand contenders to star opposite Barbara Stanwyck in Golden Boy, Holden harbored a cynical attitude toward show business and rarely allowed himself to take much pride in his work or his iconic status. “For twenty-two years, I’ve put up with a lot of asinine suggestions made by various studio experts about how to change myself—to fix the shape of my eyebrows, and stuff like that—but I’ve always refused to do it,” he wrote in the New Yorker in 1961. “I may not like the way I look, but I take myself the way I am and do the best I can with it. Being a movie star and seeing myself on the screen don’t make me feel good. In fact, they make me feel kind of sad. But I do the best I can with all that, too.”

  In truth, Holden had done exceedingly well for himself. For his work on The Bridge on the River Kwai alone, he was guaranteed a salary of $250,000 against 10 percent of the film’s gross revenue—a contract that paid him $3 million when the movie’s ticket sales came to $30 million worldwide. By 1960 he had investme
nts in nearly every part of the globe and a home in Switzerland that kept him close to productions such as The World of Suzie Wong and The Counterfeit Traitor, but that also fostered occasional accusations that he was a tax cheat. “I’m living in Switzerland for the same reason a Madison Avenue advertising man gives up his suburban home in Connecticut and moves to Central Park West,” Holden explained at the time. “I just want to be closer to my work.” By the 1970s he could be most often found at his estate in Palm Springs, or at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, the hunting lodge and rare-animal preserve he helped establish on 1,200 acres of ranch land near Nairobi (at a cost of $750,000), where he vacationed and played host to the likes of Bing Crosby and Lyndon B. Johnson.

  For many years, Holden had been portrayed in flattering stories published by compliant Hollywood publicity magazines as sharing a wholesome family life with his wife, the former actress Brenda Marshall, their two sons, and Marshall’s daughter from her previous marriage. But in 1963 the couple announced their separation after twenty-two years of marriage; they briefly reconciled a few years later and finally divorced in 1971.

  In 1966, Holden was involved in a fatal car accident near Pisa, Italy, overturning the other car and killing its driver. Holden, who was not alone in his vehicle—his passengers were two American women in their twenties whom he said he was driving to visit some friends—was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing in the crash. TV Guide wrote that “it was common knowledge” that Holden “had sought some solace in the bottle—too much solace, some said” while he and Marshall worked out their issues. The actor said in the mid-1970s that, after a few years of winnowing himself down to just beer, he had quit drinking altogether and didn’t go out. But at least part of this claim was untrue: though he had yet to acknowledge it publicly, Holden had recently been seeing the actress Stefanie Powers, whom he’d met at a celebrity tennis match in 1973 and who was twenty-four years his junior.