Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (29 page)

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For the key players who had once been associated with
Network
, it was a season of transition and tumult. Sidney Lumet was putting the finishing touches on his film adaptation of
Equus
and would soon be moving on to his first musical,
The Wiz
, a modernized, soul music retelling of
The Wizard of Oz
based on a hit Broadway show, for which his all-star cast included Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and the director’s mother-in-law, Lena Horne.

In Los Angeles, Peter Finch’s widow, Eletha, had been struggling since her husband’s death. “I’ve got two children to raise and I need income,” she explained in a gossip item in the
New York Post
that reported that she had started renting out the family’s Beverly Hills home to tenants while she and her children moved to a more modest three-bedroom apartment; she had also lost twenty-five pounds and begun taking acting lessons in preparation for a small on-screen role in an episode of TV’s
Police Woman
, arranged for her by its star, Angie Dickinson. Her summer was spent in court, fighting for her share of the estate of her late husband, who had not written a will since 1965 and had never named Eletha as a beneficiary. The value of that estate, accumulated by an actor who in his lifetime had appeared in more than fifty motion pictures, was placed at $115,000.

Faye Dunaway, whose life had always been treated as an open book by the news media, had split from her husband, Peter Wolf, by that summer. She had begun an affair with Terry O’Neill, the photographer who had shot her
People
cover story as well as her unforgettable post-Oscars portrait, and within months it was a matter of public record. These modest scandals had no measurable impact on Dunaway’s career; the actress was paid a reported $1 million to star in Irvin Kershner’s thriller
Eyes of Laura Mars
, and $750,000 to appear opposite Jon Voight in a remake of the boxing drama
The Champ
. But any goodwill she might have won with her victory on Oscar night seemed to have evaporated in the morning mist rising from the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Dunaway’s relationship with Sue Mengers, the talent agent who helped persuade her to take
Network
and then ensured that she was not fired from it, had deteriorated, and the two were no longer working together. “She just didn’t like me,” Mengers would later say, “and I didn’t like her.” In the press, she was a villainess again, and for every minor misstep or embarrassment—say, a beauty magazine paying $2,000 to retouch the crow’s-feet, laugh lines, and facial puffiness in the portrait of Dunaway that ran on its cover—there was an enthusiastic audience waiting to hear about it.

William Holden, meanwhile, was trying a different tack with his personal life. In an article in the
New York Times
(which described him as once possessing a “smiling, unlined face” that “served as a safe map of American aspirations and triumph,” but now being “58 and, finally, looking it”), he came clean about his relationship with the actress Stefanie Powers, who at thirty-four was about as far apart in age from Holden as Diana Christensen was from Max Schumacher. The off-screen couple had been introduced in 1973 at a celebrity tennis match. “I was fortunate to find a compatible female human being as curious as I am about the world and the effects of progress,” said Holden. “We didn’t gravitate toward each other because we were eager to jump into bed, although we did that too,” said Powers. Now they traveled the world together as Powers assisted Holden in his various projects, such as gathering four hundred pieces of indigenous artwork from the government of Papua New Guinea and selling them at Bloomingdale’s. “I have been an actor for 38 years,” said Holden, shrugging off his Oscar loss to Peter Finch. “I have been a conservationist in Africa for 18. The danger—the danger is being considered a dilettante both as an actor and a conservationist.”

The couple sent Christmas cards to Chayefsky decorated with traditional seasonal imagery and depictions of jungle creatures frolicking underneath rainbows, and inscribed with entreaties to visit them at Holden’s palatial home in Palm Springs. But the author—who since his heart attack had been told to avoid caffeine, tobacco, and salt and to exercise more—did not take them up on their invitation. When Chayefsky was feeling well enough to write again, one of the first places where his name appeared was in a
New York Times
advertisement placed by a group calling itself Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East. Alongside fellow signatories such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Leon Uris, and Elie Wiesel, Chayefsky (who also helped compose the letter) urged readers to remember the fifth anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympics and the eleven Israeli athletes murdered there by a radical Palestinian group. “But we shall not forget,” the letter read, “that the P.L.O. says Israel has no right to exist. Would any state in the world be asked to talk to those who say you must die at the end of the conversation?”

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In the same film season that she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as the title character in
Julia
, the pseudonymous friend and anti-Nazi activist from Lillian Hellman’s memoir
Pentimento
, Vanessa Redgrave produced, narrated, and appeared in a documentary called
The Palestinian
, in which she interviewed Palestinian refugees and leaders and the PLO’s chairman, Yasir Arafat. Theaters that showed the documentary were widely picketed, and the actress faced protests at public appearances where she did not promote or even mention the film. Dore Schary, the honorary chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, called the film “a terrible piece of work” and described it as “very dull, fortunately,” adding that “the only comment you keep hearing is ‘Kill the enemy.’ They keep saying that Israel is intransigent.” Redgrave countered that she had made the documentary “because I believe the Palestinian people have been denied the right to be heard,” adding that she had “consistently championed the rights of the Jewish people.” “No one can challenge the stand I have taken against fascism and anti-Semitism,” she said.

Such remarks did not dissuade members of the Jewish Defense League from turning out at the 1978 Oscars ceremony to demonstrate against Redgrave’s appearance, nor did they keep away supporters of the PLO who came to demonstrate against the JDL. And when, near the start of the broadcast, Redgrave won the Oscar for best supporting actress (for a role that Faye Dunaway had turned down), she could hardly avoid weighing in on the continuing controversy. Thanking her
Julia
costar Jane Fonda and the film’s director, Fred Zinnemann, Redgrave said they had done “the best work of our life” because “we believe in what we were expressing: two out of millions who gave their lives and were prepared to sacrifice everything in the fight against fascist and racist Nazi Germany.

“And I salute you,” Redgrave continued, “and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you’ve stood firm, and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior”—she paused to let pass the boos and cries that were drowning out her speech—“whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.” With a concluding expression of gratitude to Hollywood for having dealt “a final blow against that period when Nixon and McCarthy launched a worldwide witch hunt against those who tried to express in their lives and their work,” Redgrave hoisted her trophy and pledged to “continue to fight against anti-Semitism and fascism.”

Redgrave’s comments were followed by a commercial break, and when the Oscars show resumed, neither its host, Bob Hope, nor any of its presenters made further mention of them. But backstage at the ceremony, expectations ran high that a response was imminent, and that it would be coming from Paddy Chayefsky. “Paddy just went nuts after her speech,” recalled Mike Medavoy, one of the United Artists executives who had worked with him on
Network
. “He was furious. I remember going to the bathroom and encountering Paddy railing on her outside the restroom.” Sherry Lansing, then a junior executive at MGM, said later that “everybody ran to Paddy and wanted to say something.” A huddle of people formed around the screenwriter, all of them asking, “What are you going to say, Paddy?” In due time they had their answer.

When his turn to speak came later that night, Chayefsky approached the lectern with a speedy gait and his head bowed slightly, and began: “Before I get onto the writing awards, there’s a little matter I’d like to tidy up, at least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning. I would like to say, personal opinion of course, that I’m sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda.” The theater rang with applause and cheering, though a television camera that panned across fretful faces and folded hands in the audience showed that not everyone was supportive of his rebuttal.

Undaunted, Chayefsky continued: “I would like to suggest to Ms. Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.” As another wave of applause subsided, Chayefsky gave a quick nod, wiped his lips, and attempted to change the subject. “And now, on to much more important matters,” he said, picking up an envelope and then letting it slip from his hands as he realized he still had his official presenter’s speech to give.

Without any discernible difficulty, Chayefsky shifted his tone from one of quiet condemnation to another that was tender and humbled. “Screenplay writing,” he said, “is a much-misunderstood form of writing.”

In the old days, the image of the screenwriter was that of the great novelist who had gone derelict in the corrupt tropics of Hollywood and nowadays I think they think of the screenwriter frequently as somebody who helps out the director with lines of dialogue. But in point of fact, screenwriting is a very special, highly refined discipline. It requires all the standard storytelling talents and it also requires a visual eye as well, because the screenwriter frequently has to tell a story without words, which are, after all, the primary tools of the writer’s craft. When it works, a good screenplay is a thing of beauty, a model of precision and clarity and imagery and concept [so saying, he extended his hands as if he were putting them around a woman’s waist] and mobility, wit, passion. It is something to celebrate and something to honor, so, let’s honor them.

Then he picked up the envelope he had earlier dropped on the lectern and started to tear it open, as audience members who had held their tongues throughout the proceedings started shouting at him.

“Oh!” Chayefsky exclaimed. “I forgot to read the nominees.” Falling back on his Borscht Belt ways, he jokingly adjusted his glasses, quickly removing them from and returning them to his face, and said to the laughing crowd, “I’m that eager to know, I must say. Every one of these fellas are friends of mine.” Then, finally, he read the nominees for best original screenplay.

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Chayefsky’s oration was instantaneously sensational and instantaneously divisive, even before he was led off the Oscars stage by Alvin Sargent, who won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for
Julia
. (In his own acceptance speech, Sargent said he believed his trophy stood for “the free expression of all our good thoughts and feelings and loves, no matter who we are or what we have to say.”) While Chayefsky was still speaking, a camera had caught Shirley MacLaine, a best actress nominee for
The Turning Point
, sitting next to its screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, as he clapped appreciatively and she did not. Their disagreement over the incident and whose side they supported was so vehement, MacLaine later recalled, that after the Oscars, “Arthur didn’t speak to me for five years. He just thought that it was terrible that she had said those things about the Jews, and I was saying she had every right to say it, and he was mad at me.”

When he returned home to New York, Chayefsky was greeted by numerous appreciative letters and correspondence that applauded him for his rebuke of Redgrave, with supportive messages coming from William F. Buckley Jr. (
YOU ARE MY NEW HERO
, the
National Review
founder wrote in a telegram,
SORRY ABOUT THAT BUT YOU EARNED IT REGARDS
), Carol Burnett and Joe Hamilton, Marlo Thomas, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, and even Eletha Finch, who in a handwritten note to Chayefsky said, “You were great on the night of Oscar. My husband would be proud of you, you are a ‘great man.’” Chayefsky also received a note of praise from the director Frank Capra, who wrote, “You damned near made me cry with your gutsy but courteous put-down of Vanessa Redgrave.” Chayefsky replied, “I have to tell you that the response I got after the Academy Awards occasion was larger than the response I have ever received for all of the work that I have ever done put together. It will please you to know that my mail was overwhelmingly disapproving of Miss Redgrave.”

This approbation, however, was hardly unanimous. Sean Mitchell, the theater critic for the
Dallas Times Herald
, took the unorthodox step of writing directly to Chayefsky to tell the screenwriter he could not find it within himself to “reconcile my longstanding admiration for your work with your churlish performance” at the Academy Awards show. “How can the same man who wrote ‘Marty’ and ‘Network,’” Mitchell asked, “who clearly understands the indomitable human spirit, so recklessly impugn that spirit as displayed by a colleague? Contrary to your remarks, Miss Redgrave’s acceptance speech did not appear as a grandstand play at all, rather, as proof that some actors actually have the convictions of their work.… Your soliloquy, on the other hand, seemingly sprang from no irony except that some of Hollywood’s best minds habitually soften in the spotlights of this annual pep rally for the industry.”