by Dave Itzkoff
“This group,” Carson observed, “is ready to follow you anyplace, Peter. Right into the waters.”
The next guest of the night was Carlin, the irreverent, long-haired comedian, who began his stand-up set by informing the audience, “You know you’re all going to die, aren’t you? All of you.” Once the laughter had subsided, the comic delivered a routine focused entirely on death: its inevitability (“You’ll all die in different ways, different places. Unless you all walk out together in front of the same bus tonight”); its mystery (“My religion believes you go to a coin return in Buffalo”); its finality (“You get really popular when you die. You do, you get more flowers than you ever got when you were alive. They’ll all arrive at once—too late”). Then, invited over to Carson’s desk, Carlin continued to speculate on the subject, hypothesizing that in our final moments we might see a flashback of our lives in the form of a movie.
Using the example of a drowning man, Carlin said, “But okay, you’re out there, and you see the movie of your life, and you get toward the end of it, and that includes arriving at the beach, going in the water, and starting to see the movie again. So according to the movie, we can never die.”
“That’s comforting,” Carson replied.
As Finch was being driven home from the Tonight Show studios in Burbank, his publicist, Michael Maslansky, would later recall, the actor reflected on Carlin’s morbid routine, which he had enjoyed. “Peter talked about death,” said Maslansky, “saying how fitting and funny a subject it could be for a comic monologue because death was, in the ceremonies and incidents surrounding it, ‘a hilarious thing.’ That is what he said. ‘A hilarious thing.’ That’s a direct quote.”
The following morning, as was his routine, Finch walked the mile and a half of twisted, turning, hilly road from his new house (his family had moved in on New Year’s Eve) to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he sat in the lobby and waited for Sidney Lumet to join him for a battery of appearances on the morning talk shows. Just as the director arrived, he saw Finch slump over in his chair. “I was walking down the staircase toward him,” Lumet later said. “Peter was sitting on the banquette, and I saw him go right over. I ran over and started to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” He did not know what had afflicted the actor, “but it was clear he was in deep trouble.” Paramedics were summoned to the scene, and when they could not revive Finch, he was taken unconscious in an ambulance to the intensive care unit of the UCLA Medical Center. There, he was pronounced dead of a heart attack.
Barry Krost, the actor’s manager, was alerted to the news before he was able to leave his house for work that morning. “I had four phone lines at home,” Krost recalled, “and the first phone went, and then all the lines lit up at the same time.” It was now his “strange, difficult” duty to contact Eletha and bring her to the hospital before the information reached her in some other manner. Krost said of a man who had always relied on the kindness of strangers, “I think when he died he had two quarters and a couple of dimes in his pocket. That’s all.”
Once Finch’s wife had been notified, MGM issued a solemn press release that afternoon, confirming the actor’s death. “The sudden and untimely passing of Peter Finch has come as a blow to all of us who knew, respected and loved him,” the studio’s president and chief executive, Frank E. Rosenfelt, said in the statement. “Everyone here at M-G-M who was privileged to know this gifted artist and warm and gentle human being is deeply saddened beyond words by the news. Our sympathy goes out to his wife and children.”
That night the handful of Network collaborators making the promotional rounds in Los Angeles assembled at the Palm restaurant to pay an impromptu tribute to Finch; the group included Chayefsky, Holden, Gottfried, and David Tebet, a longtime NBC talent executive and supporter of Chayefsky’s. As Tebet later described the gathering, the mood was understandably mournful, until Chayefsky declared that Finch would have wanted them to remember him “in merriment rather than sadness.” “And before you knew it,” Tebet said, “our talk turned into a vicious tirade against the film business and how it could kill a man like Finchy. But Paddy Chayefsky said, ‘You can’t blame the business. It’s what we do to ourselves. We’re all impulsive and neurotic.’” In his own spirit of levity, Chayefsky added, “But you know something, in spite of all that, it’s better than threading pipe.”
The loss of Finch, at a moment when his career was in resurgence and at an age when most former leading men would have been consigned to the scrap heap, was a bitter blow to the acting community, particularly in his native Britain. Memorializing Finch in the Guardian, the journalist and broadcaster Russell Davies wrote, “If the film industry told the truth, it would admit that deceased 60-year-old actors are seldom really ‘much-missed,’ for they are too easily replaced from an embarrassment of survivors.” But Finch, he continued, was that rare actor for whom no suitable surrogate existed.
He was aging into a more credible authority than any of his English-speaking contemporaries; the troubles behind his face seemed to become more interesting and deep with every film.… The leathery, hard-drinking Australian maleness which kept the Finch of the 1950s shuttling to and fro between war fields and the Outback might easily have qualified him for a middle age of pipe-smoking paternalism in conservative roles; but his obvious masculinity, coupled with an increasing talent for freezing his face into a marbled facade, covering anything from utter shame to contempt, made him paradoxically available for a new sort of part, the grizzled failure.
An official memorial service for Finch, held in Beverly Hills on January 18, drew more than 220 of his friends and colleagues, including Chayefsky, who eulogized his Network star as being “in that very select circle of great actors. He dignified his parts.”
It was during this same period that Chayefsky made a private visit to Finch’s widow and children at the house on San Ysidro Drive they had moved into hardly two weeks earlier. To the bereaved Finches, Chayefsky was a tremendously admired figure—the author of the part that had reconnected Peter to his talents and returned him to the limelight—and his condolence call was a gesture the family received with great pride. Finch himself had held Chayefsky in such high regard that he had painted a portrait of the screenwriter and placed it on the mantel of his new Beverly Hills home. As the actor’s daughter Diana later described the painting, “I remember it to this day: it was in a little black frame, a black-and-white painting with pen and ink, of this man that had glasses and this intense, serious look on his face. My dad didn’t really paint portraits of people. So that will tell you how much of an impact Paddy had on him.”
When Chayefsky came to pay his respect to the Finches, Eletha and the seven-year-old Diana were excited to show the portrait to its subject, and to point out the venerated position it had been given in their household. “We took him over and we revealed this painting to him,” Diana Finch-Braley said, “and we said, look, Paddy, look at this painting. It looks just like you. I remember this look that he had. He was such a serious person. At least, this is what I perceived as a child. He didn’t break out into this huge smile. He was just really, really serious. And then he cracked just a little, tiny, almost—you couldn’t even notice that it was a smile—and he nodded his head. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t overcome with emotion because I don’t think he was that kind of person.”
* * *
On January 29, Network won four of the five Golden Globe Awards it had been nominated for, with trophies going to Chayefsky, Dunaway, Lumet, and, posthumously, to Finch. Its lone defeat came in the category of best dramatic film, which it lost to Rocky.
Two weeks later, on February 10, Network received ten Academy Award nominations, tying with Rocky for the most received by any film of the preceding year. Network was nominated for best picture, Chayefsky for best original screenplay, Lumet for best director, Owen Roizman for best cinematography, and Alan Heim for best editing. Dunaway, never in doubt as a contender for best actress, received a nomination; so
, too, did Ned Beatty, for best supporting actor, and Beatrice Straight, for best supporting actress. And in the category of best actor, Network received two nominations: one for William Holden and one for Peter Finch.
Once the initial wave of elation wore off, the creators of Network and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Oscars, were presented with an unusual and sensitive situation. If Finch were named the winner of his award, who would accept it for him? Such a possibility had last occurred in an acting category in 1968, when Spencer Tracy, who died shortly after the filming of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, earned a best actor nomination for that film. The award that year went to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night, and no precedent was established, as no actor had ever won an Academy Award posthumously.
As preparations began in March for the Academy Awards, Gottfried was contacted by William Friedkin, the no-nonsense director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, who was producing the Oscars ceremony. As Gottfried recalled, “Bill Friedkin called me and said, ‘Look, Howard, I’m not going to put up on this show with any high jinks.’” Friedkin was referring to two recent incidents in Oscars history that had turned the presentation of the best actor prize into something of a circus: one in 1971, when George C. Scott declined his award for Patton and refused to attend the ceremony, writing off the “offensive, barbarous and innately corrupt” proceedings as “a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons”; and the other in 1973, when Marlon Brando sent the Apache actress Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his trophy for The Godfather, citing “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”
The directive Gottfried said he received from Friedkin was “I don’t want any nonsense on my show. If you haven’t decided who’s going to accept, I want it to be either Paddy or Bill Holden.” (“Even though Bill was a nominee in his own right,” Gottfried added, “he thought Bill could accept for Peter—or Paddy, of course, who would be logical.”) To which Gottfried suggested, “How about Peter’s wife? She was very, very, very concerned about his career, all his life.” To which Friedkin answered, “Absolutely not.”
When Gottfried delivered this news to Chayefsky, he said the screenwriter’s response was “Where does he get off telling us who?”
The resistance to Eletha Finch could have been a simple issue of propriety: she was not formally involved with Network, and allowing her to accept the award over someone who worked on the film could, in future instances, open the door to all kinds of unsuitable proxies. Eletha was also known for her outspoken nature, and there was some question as to whether, if put before an audience, she would stick to a script. As Gottfried described her, “She was one piece of work, let me tell you. Don’t you dare mess with Peter Finch while she’s around. And then of course, if you’re a woman, watch out.”
The standoff between Friedkin and the Network team spilled over into the tabloids and gossip columns. Liz Smith later reported that the source of Friedkin’s opposition was a dislike of “sentimentality,” and that he told colleagues in pre-Oscar planning meetings, “It’s not going to be that kind of TV show.” In response, Chayefsky said he thought sentimentality and emotion were the basis of the movie business, pointing to moments such as Louise Fletcher’s use of sign language to thank her deaf parents when she won her Academy Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the preceding year. “If sentimentality is inappropriate,” he asked, “how does one account for the fact that the greatest moment in A Star Is Born is when Esther Blodgett says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mrs. Norman Maine!’”
Friedkin, for his part, would later say that the decision about who would receive the Oscar was not his to make. “It was made by the board of governors of the Academy,” he said. “As the producer of the show, you have nothing to say about who accepts the award.”
But as the issue continued to simmer, some uglier speculation began to rear its head, that the Academy did not want Eletha Finch, a black woman, receiving an Oscar on behalf of Peter Finch, a white man, because home television viewers, or the organization itself, were made uncomfortable by such an image. Such a scene could also be an unwanted reminder that, to date, only three black people had won the Academy Award outright. A more insidious whisper campaign at the time suggested that Eletha, who was Jamaican, had remained in the United States illegally after Peter Finch’s death and should not be allowed to represent her husband because she risked deportation.
Alan Heim, the Network editor, said he would “hate to think” that racism in any way played a role in the Academy’s reluctance to let Eletha Finch participate. “I knew that she had a reputation as a bit of a loose cannon,” he said. “But I never thought she’d do anything strange. I hate to think that there would have been racism at that point. We had already had Sidney Poitier and other people winning the award.”
Still others were not prepared to give the Academy or polite society that much credit. “Back then, they would get upset about the most silly things,” said Marlene Warfield. “And it really doesn’t matter. People were going to change, and they just didn’t know it.”
The harder the Academy pushed back against Eletha Finch, the more determined Chayefsky became to see her represent her late husband at the Oscars. In a private meeting among Chayefsky, Gottfried, Eletha Finch, and Barry Krost, the group decided that it would resort to subterfuge. When they were asked whom they were designating to receive a possible award on Peter Finch’s behalf, Gottfried said, “We agreed that I would tell Friedkin and whoever else was involved that Paddy was accepting it.” Krost would attend the ceremony with Eletha Finch as his date, and if Peter Finch were named best actor, Chayefsky would take the stage first and invite up Eletha from there. “This was all done before it happened,” Gottfried explained, “because obviously it only happens when it happens. This was all if it happens.”
As an item in the New York Post quietly reported one week before the Academy Awards: “Peter Finch’s widow, Eletha, will attend Oscar ceremonies in case her late husband wins for ‘Network.’ She and daughter Diana have settled in a Beverly Hills residence. Mrs. Finch has no immigration problems as had been reported.”
* * *
On March 28, the evening of the Forty-Ninth Annual Academy Awards, the players took their places at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Chayefsky sat in Box 13, Row F, Seat 46. His wife, Susan, who had been his date on a night very much like this one twenty-one years earlier, when he won his first Oscar, for Marty, and the whole world seemed to open up for him, did not attend this ceremony. He was instead accompanied by his lawyer, Maurice Spanbock.
Leading up to the Oscars, People published a cover story on Dunaway, in which the magazine unsubtly asked, “Faye Dunaway Has a Surging Career Plus an Unusual Marriage—Now Will She Win the Big O?” Portraits taken by the celebrity photographer Terry O’Neill showed the actress in repose with her husband, Peter Wolf, while in the accompanying article she spoke of how their marriage had brought her a new sense of stability and inner strength. “As the feelings well up,” Dunaway explained, “I feel somehow bigger. I want to play bigger people now. Large, vital, mainstream characters who live on a lot of levels at once and are going through dramatic changes, just as I feel I am.”
When Dunaway, an odds-on favorite over Liv Ullmann in the best actress race, was asked if she wanted an Oscar, she answered, “Yes, I’d like to win. It would be a nice present. But my life doesn’t depend on it.”
At the outset of the Oscars show, whose panel of hosts consisted of Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Ellen Burstyn, and Richard Pryor, Network did not look like an immediate winner. In one of the first categories announced, Ned Beatty lost the competition for best supporting actor to Jason Robards, who played Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men. Despite the ferocity of his performance as Network’s Arthur Jensen, Beatty (who also appeare
d in All the President’s Men, as the investigator Martin Dardis) was gracious about his defeat and the speed with which it had occurred. As he would later joke, “They gave the best supporting actor thing right off the bat, I think before they turned the camera on or anything.”
More than an hour elapsed before Network claimed its startling first prize. Following a playful routine in which Sylvester Stallone and Muhammad Ali swatted each other around the stage, the two pugilists announced that the Oscar for best supporting actress went to Beatrice Straight. The genuinely shocked actress, whose fellow nominees included Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver and Piper Laurie in Carrie, sat open-mouthed in her seat for a moment and ran a hand through her hair before making her way to the podium. “It’s very heavy,” Straight said, picking up her statuette, “and I’m the dark horse.” Adding that her victory was “very unexpected,” she said, “I should have known that when I had someone like Paddy Chayefsky writing and saying things that we all feel but can’t express, and when we have someone like Sidney Lumet, who makes one want to act forever, and a producer like Howard Gottfried, then how can I miss?” Her complete acceptance speech ran one minute and thirty-two seconds, roughly a third as long as her Network showdown with Holden, which ran four minutes and forty-five seconds.
Neither Alan Heim nor Owen Roizman prevailed in their technical categories, and as the author Norman Mailer prepared to announce the screenwriting prizes, he punctuated his remarks with a favorite proverb: “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.” (The line is attributed to Voltaire, who is said to have uttered the phrase by way of explaining that, though he had enjoyed a recent visit to a gay brothel, he would not be returning to the establishment.) Then Mailer opened his first envelope and announced that the Academy Award for best original screenplay would go to Paddy Chayefsky, for Network.
