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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Over time, Chayefsky’s eccentric if entertaining fussiness gave way to a reputation for being impossible to satisfy. A television series he planned to produce about the American Psychiatric Association fell apart in 1958 when he refused to cede any control to the networks interested in it. “Once they got control, it would be so dehydrated that it wouldn’t be worth doing,” he said. “They would try to make the subject matter more palatable, and it can’t be done that way; it can only be done as art.”

  On a monthlong visit to the Soviet Union in 1959 with Alfred Kazin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Atlantic Monthly editor Edward Weeks, Chayefsky insisted that the group set aside its planned itinerary so he could visit his mother’s birthplace in Velikiye Bubny, a small village five hours from Kiev. “They did everything possible to divert our attention from the request,” Weeks recalled. “Then Paddy said to them, ‘All right, you’ve lied to me consistently. I’m pulling out of the conference and going home.’” In the end, Chayefsky got his visit to Velikiye Bubny.

  Before the 1950s were out, Chayefsky vowed he was quitting television for film, where he could have more control over his work and earn more money. When movies such as The Goddess and Middle of the Night did not nearly match the triumph of Marty, he turned to the stage, earning Tony Award nominations for his plays The Tenth Man and Gideon. By 1962 he had concluded that he was “sick of” Broadway due to “economic futility.” But his suffering was not yet through.

  Chayefsky’s 1964 directorial debut, The Passion of Josef D., his stage drama about the Russian Revolution starring Peter Falk as the young Stalin, elicited some of the most brutal reviews of his career (“an almost unbroken and seriously unlucky succession of wrong choices”—Walter Kerr) and closed after eleven days. Months later Chayefsky would sheepishly admit, “I should never have tried to direct it, too.”

  After writing the screenplay that same year for The Americanization of Emily, adapted from William Bradford Huie’s novel about a scheming navy officer thrust into the middle of the D-day invasion, Chayefsky returned to the theater in 1968 for one last play. For this stage satire, called The Latent Heterosexual, starring Zero Mostel as a gay man who marries a woman to escape an exorbitant tax bill, Chayefsky brought the production to the Dallas Theater Center, hoping it would avoid the glare of the powerful national and New York–based critics. He was wrong, and while some reviews were merely mixed, Chayefsky was most infuriated by the notices that praised Mostel’s performance above his own writing. The actor “was so rich, deep, comic and pitiable,” Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times. “Not particularly the play, which is more interesting than totally successful.”

  A planned national tour was called off, and Chayefsky, the fading former sage of the Grand Concourse, was left contemplating a return to TV, “the best platform to express meaningful drama.” But having renounced every artistic avenue available to him, he had to wonder where he truly belonged and which, if any of them, might still take him back.

  * * *

  There were no perfect matches for Paddy Chayefsky, but Howard Gottfried was as close as they came. The New York–born and –bred Gottfried, a former lawyer, had made his reputation as a producer of Off-Broadway theater in the 1950s and ’60s. For a few years he decamped to Los Angeles for a job at United Artists Television, the studio behind shows such as Gilligan’s Island and The Fugitive, but he decided that West Coast living wasn’t his style and returned to New York to develop television projects for Ed Sullivan Productions. Gottfried set up shop at 1650 Broadway, near the Winter Garden Theater, and was soon introduced to Chayefsky by Noel Behn, another writer who kept his office on the illustrious eleventh floor of 850 Seventh Avenue. The lean and dapper Gottfried enjoyed dressing up for his work, and his personal manner was genial and accommodating. He could fight the battles Chayefsky wasn’t equipped for and put out the fires his partner started; he encouraged his ideas and abided his temper.

  Chayefsky’s writing process was solitary and largely opaque to Gottfried, but their brainstorming sessions were cooperative and relaxed. Together, the two men would walk the streets of Manhattan, up Seventh Avenue and along the perimeter of Central Park, talking about whatever came to mind—news, sports, women. Over conversation, ideas would take shape, often from source material culled from day-to-day experiences. They were still laughing over their recent lunch with Mel Brooks when they struck a deal with CBS in July 1969 for Chayefsky to create the pilot script for a weekly series of “socially satiric” dramas.

  Also fresh in Chayefsky’s mind was a three-part TV Guide series he had been reading that summer about Mike Dann, a forty-seven-year-old senior vice president at CBS who had developed shows such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. As Dann weighed the possibilities of new television projects, canceled others, and fought with Tommy Smothers over a comedy sketch about astrology, the profile presented Dann as principled and thoughtful, but also overextended and arguably overqualified—all in all, a man Chayefsky could get behind.

  Thus inspired, Chayefsky wrote a pilot script for a proposed CBS television series called The Imposters, focused in part on a fictional television executive named Eddie Gresham, who held the title of vice president in charge of program development, East Coast, for an invented network called United Broadcasting System, or UBS. Like his real-life counterpart, Gresham is idealistic and well educated, with a degree from the Yale School of Drama, but he realizes deep down that television is no place for his erudite designs. As Chayefsky’s narrative description for the show puts it, “He knew by now that Eugene O’Neill wins the Nobel Prize but Bonanza draws a thirty-eight share in the ratings.”

  The other protagonist of The Imposters is a comic actor named Charley Peck, “a real katzenjammer kid if there ever was one,” who is introduced to viewers over a lunch with Mel Brooks at the Carnegie Deli, where he “smokes a cigar, which never seemed to burn out.” Informed by Brooks that the ignorant UBS, in trying to keep pace with CBS’s hit broadcast of Death of a Salesman, has been trying to get in touch with the late Bertolt Brecht, Peck calls the network, impersonates the deceased playwright, and leaves his own phone number. Months later, when Gresham decides to create a television series based on The Threepenny Opera (one set in Harlem that will star Harry Belafonte as a modern-day Mack the Knife), he calls that number and arranges a meeting with the ersatz Brecht, but upon encountering him in person, he immediately sees through Peck’s deception.

  Gresham, in spite of it all, is disappointed only in himself and confesses to Peck everything he believes to be wrong with the television industry.

  We’re not in the business of good drama. We’re in the boredom-killing business. That’s what my job is, that’s what I do all day, think up ways of killing the boredom of two hundred million Americans. I concoct game shows and soap operas and schedule professional sports programs. I think up musical entertainments and talk shows for people who have forgotten how to talk to each other. What the hell has happened to us Americans anyway? We seem to have lost whatever identity we ever had. We used to be pioneers, homesteaders, farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, robber barons, bohemians, Whigs, Tories, rail-splitters, immigrants. Now, we’re two hundred million whiter-than-white, softer-than-soft, deodorized, standardized, simonized, plastic and programmed things, totally indistinguishable from each other, any one of us replaceable by just ordering another part from the factory.… Some curious integrity has gone out of Americans that made them curiously American. They don’t want drama, especially good drama. They just want their boredom killed.

  Peck replies to him: “It’s not their integrity that’s at stake; it’s yours.”

  Gresham’s Threepenny Opera idea is dismantled by his colleagues and turned into a show about “a colored junkie rock musician and a young business exec who leaves his wife and kids to go wandering around the country looking for reality.” Then, at a dinner of broadcasting industry executives at the Americana Hotel, Gresham is mistaken for the evening’s keynote speaker, Sena
tor John O. Pastore of Rhode Island, then the powerful chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on communications. Taking the dais, he makes one last pitch for his Belafonte show, now about a Harlem congressman who’s also a preacher; this stunt saves the series but costs Gresham any future in the television business.

  Later, as he and Peck take stock of these improbable events, Gresham wonders if the two of them could make a career of pretending to be people they are not. Posing a classic Chayefskyian question, Gresham asks Peck, “Well, Charley, what do you feel like doing?”

  “I don’t know, Eddie,” he replies. “What do you feel like doing?”

  “I feel like going to Paris,” says the invigorated Gresham, “and straightening out the peace talks.”

  The Imposters was bold; it was subversive; it was trying to use the mechanisms of television to criticize television itself—and it never had a prayer of getting made. A few weeks after Chayefsky finished writing the pilot, he and Gottfried went to CBS to meet with Mike Dann, the executive who had inspired the script and who would now decide its fate. As Gottfried recalled, “We’re sitting there, and he looks us in the eye and he starts laughing. And he says, ‘You don’t really think I’m going to do this, do you?’ He meant on the air. Mike said, ‘I’m sorry—we can’t do this.’”

  * * *

  Television had no place for Chayefsky’s next pitch, either, a drama with the simple title The Hospital, which he described in a proposal as “a microcosm of society series”—“That is to say, the hospital represents American society, and all the stories in the series, which will be told through the hospital and its personnel, will nevertheless be satirical comments on the society as a whole.”

  CBS rejected this idea, too. But he and Gottfried were committed to it, and to setting a tone that Chayefsky said was grounded in “the hardness of comedy which is based on total authenticity, and the fact that the institution itself is the star.” They decided they would instead produce it as a film, even though they had never made a movie together—Gottfried had never made a movie at all—and they brought the project to United Artists, where Chayefsky had made Marty and The Bachelor Party, and which was lately finding success with provocative contemporary dramas such as In the Heat of the Night and Midnight Cowboy. In 1970 the studio gave Chayefsky and Gottfried a two-picture deal whose first entry, the collaborators decided, would be this film, which they variously called The Latent Humanitarian and Right Smack into the Wind, though in time they came back to the original title, The Hospital. Their working arrangement with the studio offered them considerable freedom from its supervision and almost total control over their output.

  “They didn’t bother you,” Gottfried said. “Once you got going, you were on your own.”

  There was the usual behind-the-scenes butting of heads. United Artists wanted Walter Matthau to play the lead character, Dr. Herbert Bock, whose asphyxiation-by-bureaucracy at the Manhattan hospital where he is chief of medicine parallels the isolation, depression, and sexual impotence he endures in his personal life; but Chayefsky and Gottfried got their choice: George C. Scott. The filmmakers wanted Arthur Hiller, who had directed The Americanization of Emily and was a hot commodity coming off Love Story, to direct; the studio wanted the less costly and less accomplished Michael Ritchie. United Artists briefly prevailed, until Chayefsky declared that he “just couldn’t work” with Ritchie, and Hiller was in.

  The setting of The Hospital is the interior of the Metropolitan Hospital Center at 1901 First Avenue, a dilapidated labyrinth of green tiles, cream-colored walls, and rusty steel beds that was nearly one hundred years old at the time of the film’s 1971 release. Scott, who offscreen was fighting the collapse of his marriage to Colleen Dewhurst (for the second time, after they had divorced in 1965 and remarried in 1967) and a lifelong battle with alcohol, gives a commanding performance as the supremely disillusioned yet steadfastly resolute Bock; he earned an Academy Award nomination for the performance and might well have won, had he not refused the honor the previous year, when he was named Best Actor for Patton. There is even an uncredited cameo from Chayefsky himself, who, with amused detachment and his avuncular Bronx dialect, narrates the opening story of a freshly arrived hospital patient who in a matter of hours is misdiagnosed to death.

  Still, the star of the film is Chayefsky’s screenplay, a self-sustaining ecosystem of perfect frustration in which each of the three dozen speaking characters—doctors, nurses, administrators, patients, police officers, political radicals, subordinates, and flunkies—possesses a set of desires, vexations, and excuses that thwarts the wishes of someone elsewhere in the chain. This engine boils over in a few eruptive monologues, none more furious than one delivered by Bock on the night of an ominous and fateful rainstorm, just before he beds a free-spirited visitor played by Diana Rigg and explains to her why he has “lost even my desire for work, which is a hell of a lot more primal a passion than sex.”

  I’ve lost my raison d’etre, my purpose, the only thing I ever truly loved. It’s all rubbish anyway. Transplants, antibodies, we manufacture genes, we can produce ectogenically, we can practically clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven’t even been inoculated for polio! We have assembled the most enormous medical establishment ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever! We cure nothing! We heal nothing! The whole goddam wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes!

  When his original screenplay for The Hospital won an Academy Award in April 1972, Chayefsky gave a brief acceptance speech, offering a mere forty-seven words about privilege, gratified feelings, and a spirit of solidarity with Ernest Tidyman, who had just won his own Oscar for the adapted screenplay of The French Connection. (Tidyman, whose mother had told him she wanted to see him victorious that night, said he replied, “Those other four guys, they got mothers, too.”) It would be years before the public again heard Chayefsky express himself in any meaningful way.

  * * *

  With the second Oscar of his career in hand, Chayefsky once again found himself the recipient of Hollywood’s awkward and unwanted advances. Warren Beatty, who had befriended Chayefsky along with his office neighbors Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner, recalled the screenwriter as shying away from schmoozy West Coast gatherings, too retreating or befuddled to accept an invitation to visit the Playboy Mansion and its pajama-clad proprietor, Hugh Hefner. “I remember he told me that someone had asked him to go up to Hefner’s,” Beatty said. “It was not I who asked him to go, he was just telling me someone had asked him to. There was a time at Hefner’s when every political columnist, et cetera, was up there—you know, studying. And he said, ‘Why would I want to go up there, and sit in a Jacuzzi and be pushed away from the wall?’”

  Prior to the months he spent researching the screenplay for The Hospital—surveying scientific journals, interviewing professionals, and reviewing documents to learn the structure and language of such institutions—Chayefsky had gained some personal familiarity with modern medicine. He had been diagnosed with depression and had moved on from traditional psychoanalysis and cognitive therapy to newer and more unconventional treatments, including the drug Elavil, a pill prescribed to treat depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, as well as the occasional attempt at transcendental meditation.

  Like her husband, Susan Chayefsky had tried psychoanalysis in the 1950s, a period when she also enrolled in and withdrew from Columbia University and attempted working as a children’s photographer before giving up the pursuit. This peripatetic pattern became the norm in the years and decades that followed, during which she was unable to settle into a steady vocation, beyond her role providing constant support to Paddy in his own career. “She was very, very talented,” said Dan Chayefsky, the couple’s son, “and remarkably unfulfilled in expressing that talent. And it made her very unhappy. I think it must have been hard for her to be part of that era, of women that didn’t have a voice of their own.”

  As Dan Chayefsky would later recall, his mother had
always been an introverted and reclusive person. “She was a perfectionist, and that made life impossible for her,” he said. “If she wanted to go out with my dad, she had to look perfect. And that makes it too exhausting, after doing that a lot.” But then she started having outright panic attacks, losing control of her body when she became overwhelmed from being out of doors or simply from the fear that she might have to leave her home. In one instance she went into a frenzy inside a public telephone booth; in another, a doctor had to be summoned to the living room of the Chayefskys’ apartment, where he found Susan on the floor writhing in pain from the muscle spasms shooting through her legs. Eventually, she was diagnosed with an adult-onset form of muscular dystrophy—untreatable at that time and most assuredly incurable—and this disease, Dan said, “reflected her fear of people. It almost gave her withdrawal a cause.”

  Dan himself had been growing into a strong-willed teenager, and though he was hardly the “shaggy-haired Maoist” whom Bock decries in The Hospital, his father was finding it increasingly difficult to relate to him. The values of this new generation were a mystery to Paddy Chayefsky, and he was equally enigmatic to the young and vocal son who saw him as a sullen, withdrawn father. “He was a fortress, my dad,” Dan later said of Paddy. “He would occasionally come out and talk to people from the window. And sometimes he’d invite them into the fortress, and then at the end of the day, you’d leave the fortress again.”