Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (27 page)

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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 appeared 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
.

Chayefsky, dressed in square-framed glasses, a tuxedo he wore like a cloak, and a drooping bow tie, started his speech with a nod to Mailer’s off-color anecdote: “In the name of all us perverts,” he said as he received his trophy. In an earlier draft of the remarks he planned to make, should the occasion befall him, Chayefsky was going to confess his dislike of “modest acceptance speeches in which the acceptor thanks a host of other people for his own achievement” and then go on to give such a speech, one that thanked Lumet, Gottfried, Roizman, and Heim by name, and the film’s “practically flawless cast,” and conclude with an apology “for this—believe me—uncharacteristic display of sincerity.”

Instead, Chayefsky deviated from this plan, and the man who wrote some of the most incensed and rancorous dialogue ever recited on a movie screen shared what was, for him, a tender and difficult sentiment. “I don’t as a rule—in fact, I don’t ever before remember making public acknowledgment of private and very personal feelings,” Chayefsky said, “but I think it’s time that I acknowledge two people whom I can never really thank properly or enough. I would like to thank my wife, Sue, and my son, Dan, for their indestructible support and enthusiasm, for their ideas, their discussions, their stimulation, and for their very presence. My gratitude and my love. Thank you.”

Dunaway made her own attempt at graciousness when, a short while later, she received the Oscar for best actress that nearly everyone anticipated she would win. “Well,” Dunaway said, “I didn’t expect this to happen quite yet, but I do thank you very much and I’m very grateful.” Between audible and excited breaths, she continued: “I would like especially to thank Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky, Howard Gottfried, Danny Melnick, and the great generosity of a rare group of actors—company of actors—in particular William Holden, Robert Duvall, and Peter Finch.” She concluded with a special thank-you to her “friends in the back room,” Susan Germaine, who had been her hair stylist on
Network
, and her makeup artist, Lee Harman.

The backdrop behind presenter Liv Ullmann dimmed to a dark blue as she announced the five nominees for best actor, observing that such a performer may be measured by “his willingness not to conceal himself, but to show himself in all his humanity, and to expose both the light and the darker sides of his nature, openly and truly.” The live audience seemed to applaud just a shade more enthusiastically for Peter Finch than for the other nominees. William Holden, shown on a split screen just beneath a photograph of his deceased costar, could be seen sighing in relief as Ullmann opened her envelope and read Finch’s name. Over a triumphant orchestra fanfare, an announcer stated, “Accepting the award for the late Peter Finch, Mr. Paddy Chayefsky.”

Chayefsky rushed out from the stage-left wing and kissed Ullmann’s extended hand as he approached the Oscar already waiting on the lectern, preparing to give what most expected would be the formal acceptance speech for Finch’s award. But he delivered a different set of remarks, his voice growing more resolute as his true intentions became clear. “For some obscure reason I’m up here accepting an award for Peter Finch, or Finchy, as everybody who knew him called him,” Chayefsky said. “There’s no reason for me to be here—there’s only one person who should be up here accepting this award, and that’s the person who Finch wanted up here accepting his award: Mrs. Peter Finch. Are you in the house, Eletha? Come up and get your award.”

It took a few moments for the cameras to find Eletha Finch, making her way through the rows of applauding industry peers with Krost lending her a guiding hand. (“She was panic-struck,” Krost would later recall. “I saw her to the end of the row, just to help her get onstage.”) Clutching her fur coat to her dress with one hand and, with the other, struggling mightily to hold on to her purse and corsage, Eletha Finch received a kiss from Chayefsky and another from Ullmann. With tentative steps, she approached the microphones and attempted to recite to the 250 million people watching the ceremony around the world a version of the speech she had heard her husband give so many times before.

“I want to say thanks to members of the Academy,” she said amid tears, her trembling voice a mixture of her gentle Caribbean lilt and her late spouse’s regal enunciation. “And my husband, I wish he was here tonight, to be with us all. But since he isn’t here, I’ll always cherish this for him. And before he died he said to me, ‘Darling, if I win I want to say thanks to my fellow actors who have given me encouragement over the years.’ And thanks to Paddy Chayefsky, who have given him the part. And thanks to Barry, who have tell us to come from Jamaica, to come and do this part. And he says, ‘Most of all, thanks to you, darling, for sending the right vibes the right way.’ And thanks, the members of the Academy Award. Thank you all.” With her husband’s Oscar in hand and Ullmann’s arm around her shoulder, Eletha Finch exited the stage.

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Neither the title of
Network
nor the names of any other artists involved with the film were announced as winners for any more Academy Awards that evening. Lumet, vying for best director honors for the third time in his career, would be denied a victory yet again; this time the prize would go to John G. Avildsen, the director of
Rocky
, who prevailed over contenders Lumet, Alan J. Pakula, Ingmar Bergman, and Lina Wertmüller, the first woman to be nominated in the category. At the conclusion of the ceremony, which ran nearly four hours,
Rocky
fulfilled its own underdog, out-of-nowhere prophecy by claiming the Oscar for best picture, its feel-good spirit prevailing over less sunny and more psychologically complicated rivals such as
Network
,
Taxi Driver
, and
All the President’s Men
.

A cascade of similarly challenging emotions washed over the
Network
crew. The film had won four Oscars in total, tying
All the President’s Men
for the most of any motion picture that night. But one of their comrades had paid the ultimate price for his award, and still other top prizes had eluded the production. Now, even as they celebrated their hard-earned victories, there was a palpable sense that their work together was truly over and that nothing bound them together anymore. Heim and Roizman, who had been unlucky nominees but nominees nonetheless, arrived at the Governors Ball, the star-studded post-Oscars banquet, to find that they had been situated nowhere near their more illustrious
Network
colleagues.

“We were sitting with a bunch of executives—accountants, really—from MGM,” Heim said. “And we were sitting with these people, and Owen and I were the only ones buying extra wine for the table. And we were so far away.” It was a slight that Heim would chalk up “to Howard Gottfried’s cheapness.” At a later hour, Heim saw Avildsen, the newly decorated director of
Rocky
, with his Academy Award in tow, and could not help but think of Lumet. “He was not going to let that go for anybody,” Heim said of Avildsen. “And I felt terrible for Sidney. I felt Sidney really deserved it.”

Dunaway spent most of her night with the photographer Terry O’Neill, searching without success for a distinctive location where he could capture her with her Academy Award. During his initial assignment to shoot the actress for
People
, O’Neill would later recall, he had approached Dunaway with a proposition: “I said to her, ‘I’ve got this idea for a picture that I wanted to do of an Oscar winner, because I’ve seen plenty of Oscar winners, and I can’t stand that picture afterwards—you know, the one where they’re standing there, holding it up smiling and all that.’ I didn’t feel that it told any story. I knew the fact that the next day, they’re sort of stunned. They’ve now won the Oscar and they’re dazed the next day, when they realize that their money’s going to double or triple and they’re going to get offered every top part.”

Finding insufficient inspiration on the after-party circuit, O’Neill sent Dunaway back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she and the rest of the
Network
team were staying, and told her to meet him at the hotel pool at 6:30 the following morning. There, the photographer documented a weary Dunaway, dressed in her nightgown and a pair of high-heeled sandals, as she leaned back in a beach chair and struck a pensive pose. In the background was the placid, shimmering pool, lit by the rising sun, and rows of unoccupied patio furniture and cabanas; in the foreground was Dunaway’s breakfast table, ornamented with unconsumed food and beverages, a cigarette lighter, and an Oscar statuette that the actress appeared to be contemplating only partially as she gazed into an unseen distance. Strewn on the table and the ground beneath her were various periodicals and newspapers that O’Neill had obtained before the shoot, including a copy of that morning’s
Los Angeles Times
, lying at the foot of Dunaway’s chair, whose front-page headline clearly read
POSTHUMOUS OSCAR FOR FINCH.

To O’Neill, this indelible image, published a few days later in
Time
, depicted Dunaway in a “really reflective” moment. “First of all,” he said, “she’s had three hours’ sleep. That was one thing. And also, it was suddenly dawning on her, the enormity of winning the Oscar. That was when it dawned on her, this was going to be a new beginning for her career.” He added, however, that “different people see different meanings in it.” As Dunaway herself described the photograph, “In Terry’s picture, success is a solitary place to be. In my life, it has been the same.… Or as Peggy Lee sang, ‘Is that all there is?’” But others saw it as a moment of supreme apathy—apathy to the enormity of her own accomplishment, and to the sanctity of a place where a colleague and fellow honoree had breathed what might have been his last breaths.

On the morning of March 30, the Beverly Hills Hotel sent a note to the room of Paddy Chayefsky, congratulating him on winning his latest Oscar and thanking him for his stay during the Academy Awards. But the screenwriter had checked out the previous day and was already headed back to New York. Los Angeles did not really suit his temperament; neither did awards ceremonies, nor did fawning attention. While he made the journey home, the latest addition to his trophy case would for the time being stay behind in Hollywood, in the possession of Howard and Mary Lynn Gottfried, who would make arrangements for the pristine memento to be engraved with Chayefsky’s name. Until then, the couple kept it on display in their hotel room, where the occasional bellman or housekeeper would ask to hold it to feel its weight or just to gaze in awe at the unetched and anonymous statuette.