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

by Dave Itzkoff

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  For years William Holden had told the world that, despite the harder-drinking days of his youth, the life he led now was one of quiet and uninteresting sobriety. But as he and those closest to him knew, this was not the truth; in fact, the actor kept an apartment in Malibu, separate from his Palm Springs manor, that he used for his private benders. On a visit to that apartment in November 1981, the actor became so overwhelmed by uncontrollable shakes that he called his personal masseur for help, and when a rubdown failed to calm him, Holden sent the masseur away and began drinking vodka and beer. While intoxicated, he slipped on an antique rug in his bedroom and hit his head on a nightstand with such force that it severed the artery in his forehead. His body was found on November 16, and though some accounts would claim it took several agonizing hours for him to die, his girlfriend, Stefanie Powers, said the coroner told her that Holden had bled out in twenty minutes.

  “Bill did more in his life, on and off the screen, than most people do in three lifetimes, and he did it with style and talent,” Powers would later say. “That is his legacy, not his flaws. Given his lifetime consumption of alcohol, it is almost superhuman that he could have accomplished all he did.”

  * * *

  It was with a certain unconcealed joy that the entertainment-industrial complex dutifully reported on the many failures that had befallen Faye Dunaway since she won her Academy Award for Network. In the summer of 1979 the New York Post’s brutally forthright Page Six gossip column declared, “Faye Dunaway is doing the ‘I want to be alone’ bit. (Of course, given her latest movies, The Champ and Laura Mars, leaving her alone may be just what Hollywood plans.) Faye has no projects set and even her agents wonder if she’ll work again.” A few weeks later, the Post said that the actress had been dropped from an upcoming cover of Los Angeles magazine because, according to an anonymous “magazine official,” she had “simply become too fat to appear on the cover.” By the fall, the tabloids were licking their chops at the closure of a troubled clothing store and antiques emporium that Dunaway and her boyfriend Terry O’Neill had opened in Venice, California. The actress, said the Post, was in a “deep depression because most of the merchandise is growing old on the shelves instead of selling like the hot cakes she’d hoped.”

  In June 1980, Dunaway gave birth to a son, Liam Dunaway O’Neill, and after playing Eva Perón in a 1981 NBC TV movie, she made her official return to motion pictures that September playing Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. The film, adapted from Christina Crawford’s memoir about the traumatic upbringing she suffered at the hands of her notoriously abusive, compulsive, wire-hanger-wielding mother, had been a passion project for Dunaway. Terry O’Neill was named one of the film’s producers, working alongside the former Paramount Pictures president Frank Yablans, who also served as one of its four credited screenwriters. “She’s incredibly demanding,” Yablans said of Dunaway, “but I’ll take her any day over someone who doesn’t care. I would work with her tomorrow and forever.” Dunaway, who interviewed such golden-age Hollywood greats as Myrna Loy and George Cukor to prepare for the role, was unapologetic about her assertiveness on the production. “I really like things to be done right,” she said. “I’m like Joan in that way.”

  Variety concisely summed up the public’s estimation of Mommie Dearest. “Dunaway does not chew scenery,” the trade publication wrote. “Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, costars and all. Prior to her death, Crawford once commented that Dunaway was among the best of up-and-coming young actresses. Too bad Crawford isn’t around to comment now. Too bad Crawford isn’t around to comment on the whole endeavor.”

  Dunaway was apparently more preoccupied with exorcising other ghosts from her past. In 1982 her lawyers sent an ominous letter to MGM and United Artists, charging that a television broadcast of Network shown on ITV in Britain “contains footage in which Ms. Dunaway’s breasts are exposed” and therefore violates the long-ago agreement she had made to preclude “the use of nudity or semi-nudity and the inclusion of any scene in which Ms. Dunaway’s character has a sexual climax or engages in sexual acts without Ms. Dunaway’s express written consent.” The studios responded that they “have no obligation to make any changes in the film at this time nor are we willing to do so.… These scenes have been in the finished motion picture since it was released in the fall of 1976 and shown throughout the world. We have been advised that the version being shown by ITV on television in the United Kingdom is the theatrical version and ITV has added no material to the version delivered to them. Ms. Dunaway has been aware of these scenes since 1976 and has never objected to them.”

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  Speaking to an interviewer at his New York office some months after he quit Altered States, Chayefsky said, “I feel almost totally alienated from what’s going on today,” adding that he now lived “kind of a reclusive life almost. I went to dinner last night and the night before, but I can’t tell you how unusual that was. I mean, if I go out to dinner once in five months it’s a big deal. I’m dead tired today, the two days of dining out are more than I can handle.” In that sense, Chayefsky said he felt like he was “coming back to contact with the American people. I think perhaps they feel like I do, they really feel unable to cope. Life is just too much. I take it the American people are becoming as alienated as I am.”

  Asked what he thought it was that people were alienated from, Chayefsky explained that it was essentially everything—“the business of living.” “The problems that face us are beyond any of our conception,” he said. “I mean, what are you going to do about nuclear—what are you going to do about the boat people, what are you going to do about anything? There’s nothing you can do.”

  Echoing the words that he had once commanded Howard Beale to speak, he added:

  I think the great distrust of the American people led them to become, “Look, just leave me alone, let me just have my little T.V. and let me take care of my little family and that’s all I want to do.” In that sense, I almost feel like they do. But I always wrote what I was. That was the one smart thing I did. I never tried to be what was out there, I always wrote the way I thought it was. So I maintained at least a working relation with reality.

  After dismissing much of his career as a television and stage author, as a hapless screenwriter for hire and a dramatist who could not exert his will even when he had “every contractual control that you can legally obtain,” Chayefsky said the work of his that pleased him most was Network. The day its editing was completed, he recalled, “Sidney Lumet turned to me and to the producer and to the head cutter, and said, ‘I don’t know how this is going to be received, but I think it’s a goddam good movie.’ And that’s exactly how we all felt. You never know. After all it’s a picture full of ideas, it didn’t have much chance, I thought. And we might get by on it, we might get a little hit out of it. And we did.”

  On Christmas Day 1980, Altered States was finally released to a largely positive reception from critics, many of whom felt the film had faithfully executed Chayefsky’s intentions. Time, in a rave review, said, “This one has everything: sex, violence, comedy, thrills, tenderness. It’s an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies: Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Nutty Professor, 2001, Alien, Love Story. It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring—into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit.” The New York Times noted that it was “easy to guess why” Chayefsky and Russell “didn’t see eye to eye” on the film: “The direction, without being mocking or campy, treats outlandish material so matter-of-factly that it often has a facetious ring. The screenplay, on the other hand, cries out to be taken seriously, as it addresses, with no particular sagacity, the death of God and the origins of man.” But if Altered States was not “wholly visionary at every juncture,” the review observed, “it is at least dependably—even exhilaratingly—bizarre. Its strangeness, w
hich borders cheerfully on the ridiculous, is its most enjoyable feature.”

  These plaudits were all lost on Chayefsky, who had refused his screenplay credit for the movie and instead attributed the script to a pseudonym: Sidney Aaron, his given first and middle names. The cumbersome attribution, as rendered in the film, reads, “Written for the Screen by Sidney Aaron / From the Novel Altered States by Paddy Chayefsky.” At a party to celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday in January 1981, his friend Bob Fosse surprised Chayefsky with two cakes: one bearing the name Paddy Chayefsky, the other made out to Sidney Aaron.

  Chayefsky had in the preceding months begun exploring a new project he hoped would mark his return to the theater: a historical drama about Alger Hiss, the accused Soviet spy and convicted perjurer, and a fictional young lawyer who fabricates evidence in an attempt to see Hiss vindicated. But that winter, Chayefsky developed a bad cough that worsened into pleurisy, an inflammation of the linings of the lungs and chest. When the ailment returned in February, he went to the hospital for testing and was diagnosed with cancer, the precise nature of which he did not tell even his wife or son. He declined surgery, believing it would surely kill him, but underwent chemotherapy that left him looking gaunt and turned his hair a shocking bone white. (Some friends said this was not his natural hair but a wig that he wore after his chemotherapy began.)

  On July 4 he was admitted for treatment at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. From his hospital bed, he told his family he was “having visions of great beauty.” “They weren’t delusional or hallucinatory,” his son, Dan, recalled. “I thought they were very inspired.” But as his condition worsened, he required an emergency tracheotomy to remove fluid that was building up in his lungs, and the surgery robbed him of the ability to speak. Chayefsky’s great, angry, unyielding voice, which no occasion or adversary had ever been able to suppress, had been silenced at last.

  Before he died at 11:45 A.M. on August 1, 1981, he wrote his last words on a pad to his wife, Susan. They read, “I tried. I really tried.”

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  With the same prescient accuracy that informed so much of his writing, Paddy Chayefsky seemed to sense that he was not destined for old age. As Dan Chayefsky would later recall, “I once read his palm when I was young, and I said, ‘You have a long life,’” which was of course not correct, because he died at fifty-eight. And he said, ‘Oh, shit.’” As his father neared the end of his life, Dan said, “He almost willed himself to go. There was a lot of pressure on him, that he took on. I think if he had a choice to stay or go, he would go.”

  The author had seriously contemplated the likelihood of his own demise in the months after his 1977 heart attack, and at that time had drafted a set of instructions for his funeral, as precise and exacting as any script he had written, yet more forgiving and informal than any production he had previously overseen. He wanted the service “to be as easy on those attending as possible,” and not to cause his family “unnecessary distress.” A eulogy would be nice, the instructions continued, but not from “a rabbi who never met me in his life.” “Since I don’t know any rabbis that well,” Chayefsky added, “I guess that leaves out rabbinical eulogies.”

  Furthermore, Chayefsky wrote in these directions, “Our family has never taken death all that seriously, and I don’t want my death taken all that seriously either. Say what prayers have to be said to maintain my Jewishness; a few kind words about me from people who mean it would be appreciated; as brief and as painless a burial service at the cemetery as possible; and then back to the comfort of somebody’s home where I honestly wish everybody a good time.”

  In keeping with these wishes, Chayefsky’s funeral service was held on August 4 at Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side, drawing more than five hundred attendees that included family members, friends, and admirers from throughout his career. In a eulogy, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said that the theme of Chayefsky’s life’s work had been “the corrupt and lunatic energies secreted by our great modern organizations … those energies that in time crazily explode through the deceptively rational surface of things.” Despite his unsentimental bent, Schlesinger said, Chayefsky was “sardonic, not cynical.… For all his relish in human folly, he never abandoned hope in humanity.” Nodding to that first sympathetic television drama that had made Chayefsky’s whole career possible, he added that the writer’s gift for satire “sprang from love—from his instinctive, sweet understanding of the inarticulate Martys and Claras of the world, bravely living lives of quiet desperation.”

  Lumet said at the funeral, “Of all the people I worked with, the only one who is irreplaceable is Paddy.” Bob Fosse said, “Paddy and I had a deal: If I died first, he’d tell jokes, and if he died first, I’d do a dance”; he began to perform a tap step but broke down crying. “I’m doing it for you, Paddy,” he said through tears. “I can’t imagine my life without you.” Herb Gardner said in his remarks, “Paddy is dead, and when he finds out he’s going to be mad as hell.”

  In one of the last interviews he gave before his death, Paddy Chayefsky offered his typically modest, emblematically skeptical wishes for how he wanted to be preserved by history. “A writer is what he writes,” he said, “and I would like to be remembered as a good writer. I would like the stuff I write to be done and read for many generations. I just hope the world lasts that long.”

  8

  IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN

  Speaking from his comfortably shabby office at 850 Seventh Avenue in the spring of 1981, Paddy Chayefsky offered his vision for what he expected the network news would look like someday—not as it might be depicted in Network, but as he believed it would appear on actual television sets as watched by people across the country. “There will be soothsayers soon,” he asserted. Network, he said, “wasn’t even a satire. I wrote a realistic drama. The industry satirizes itself.”

  Pointing to the rise of so-called happy news programs on ABC, Chayefsky asked, was this “much different from what I said was going to happen?” Instead of turning its news division over to a made-up figure such as Diana Christensen and her programming department, hadn’t this network instead simply placed it under the direction of her real-life equivalent Roone Arledge, its young and innovative head of sports? “What’s the difference?” Chayefsky grumbled. “It’s all going to happen.”

  It is not hard to imagine readers in 1981 laughing to themselves at Chayefsky’s remarks and the thought of this funny, fussy curmudgeon having fallen down the rabbit hole of his own prophecy. Certainly, Network was a passionate and sometimes wildly visionary movie. But it was just a movie. Even its most ardent admirers knew that it was an outrageous, over-the-top send-up of what could happen to television if all the wrong choices were made, not a step-by-step proposal for its eventual undoing. Anyone who was overly troubled by Network or who received its twisted wisdom with a straight face was a person not to be trusted entirely—even if that person was its own author.

  Paddy Chayefsky lived and died in a world of three monolithic television broadcasters, invincible in their hegemony, transmitting their content to hundreds of millions of American viewers. There was only one way for them to present the news: stoic and serious, and read by a white man; the information offered by each network was generally identical to what the others provided, and its overall accuracy was regarded as unimpeachable. The only widely available means of instantaneous, two-way communication was the telephone, and keyboards were for typewriters, which were used to write letters, or possibly novels or screenplays, if you believed that you inhabited a world of ideas and were strong and single-minded enough to think that your thoughts and feelings could reshape it.

  Yet to look at the American media landscape some three decades later is to see an environment that is unmistakably Chayefskyian. It is a realm where the oligarchy of the three networks has been assailed by a fourth rival and by a fifth, and overwhelmed by a hundred-pronged attack from cable, a metastasizing organism perpetually sub
dividing itself into smaller and narrower niches. Where nationally televised news had been a once-nightly ritual, it has since grown into a twenty-four-hour-a-day habit, available on channels devoted entirely and ceaselessly to its dissemination. The people who dispense these versions of the news seem to take their direction straight from the playbook of Howard Beale: they emote, they inveigh, and they instruct their audiences how to act and how to feel; some of them even cry on camera.

  There is no longer one holistic system of news for audiences of every stripe, size, color, and creed: there is news for early-morning risers and news for late-night insomniacs; news for liberals and news for conservatives; sports news for men and feel-good news for women; news delivered in comedic voices and even, for a time, news for viewers who preferred to receive it from a Spanish-speaking puppet. Information is instantaneous and perilously subjective in an era when every man or woman can potentially be his or her own broadcaster. But when this array of apparently endless choice is untangled, and every cable wire and satellite beam is followed back to its source, what is revealed is a decidedly finite roster of media companies with the power to decide what is said and who is saying it: a college of corporations providing all necessities, tranquilizing all anxieties, amusing all boredoms.

  Such a world may sound like the wildest dream of the Network corporate chief, Arthur Jensen, but it reverberates with the prophetic echoes of Howard Beale, who preached that television was “the ultimate revelation”: “This tube is the most awesome goddam force in the whole godless world! And woe is us if it ever falls in the hands of the wrong people.” And deeper still, one can hear the voice of Paddy Chayefsky, who warned without irony or tongue in cheek, “It’s all going to happen.”