Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (2 page)

At this particular session, he was joined by Howard Gottfried, a producer with whom he had been working to figure out a new project ever since Alan Jay Lerner fired Chayefsky as the scriptwriter of his musical Western
Paint Your Wagon
. (The songs, Chayefsky had told the celebrated lyricist of
Camelot
and
My Fair Lady
, were no good, and anyway his stars Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood couldn’t “sing for shit,” and that was the end of that assignment.) Their companion was Mel Brooks, who had lately withstood some tough reviews for his directorial debut, a polarizing film satire about two shysters peddling a Broadway musical about Adolf Hitler, only to have the last laugh by winning an Oscar for his screenplay of
The Producers
. They were three Jewish show business veterans kibitzing around a table, and naturally there was some commiserating about which industry they had worked in was the worst of the bunch. It didn’t take long for television to rise to the top of the heap.

Television, Chayefsky argued, offered the least creative control for writers and the lowest return on their investment. Where was its dignity? Where did it draw the line, and what wouldn’t it do for a rating?

Surely it wasn’t all bad, said Gottfried, the conciliatory industry professional. What about that first-rate production of
Death of a Salesman
with Lee J. Cobb that CBS ran a few years ago?

Irrelevant, Chayefsky countered. Television was a parvenu industry, constantly conscious of its image as a cultural wasteland. A passion for prestige trembles through the business, and suddenly all the networks race out to do meaningful programming.
Death of a Salesman
had been just a seasonal attack of respectability, like hay fever.

“What’s next?” wondered Brooks, reaching for the darkest and least appetizing idea he could think of, one rife with murder, rape, and depravity. “A television show based on
The Threepenny Opera
?”

Were the rights still available? Gottfried wondered.

What difference would it make to a programming executive? Chayefsky said. He wouldn’t know if
The Threepenny Opera
was written by Bertolt Brecht or Hy the plumber. He probably wouldn’t know that Bertolt Brecht had been dead for seventeen years.

“Leave it to me,” said Brooks, his eyes agleam as he stood up from his seat. “I’ll call one of the networks.”

“Now, don’t pile it on,” Chayefsky warned his friend while offering him a dime. “Remember, you’re not Doctor Krankheit,” he said, citing an old vaudeville sketch.

“Are you trying to tell me how to play this?” Brooks protested. He made his way to a phone booth and a few minutes later came back with the following report.

Having dialed up NBC, where both he and Chayefsky had long-standing relationships, he was connected to the programming department and asked for a certain executive there.

“Hello dere,” Brooks had said, slipping into an old stage accent. “Dis here is Be
rrrrr
tolt B
rrrr
echt. I vanted to talk about der TV rights to my musical mit Ku
rrrr
t Weill, der
Thrrrreepenny Operrrra
.”

“One moment, please,” said the secretary who had taken the call. “Let me see if he’s available.” The receiver was placed down, but a conversation was still audible from within the office.

First, the secretary: “There’s a Bertolt Brecht calling for you. Something about
The Threepenny Opera
?”

Then the executive: “What are you talking about? Bertolt Brecht is dead!”

And then the secretary again: “How can Bertolt Brecht be dead? He’s on the phone for you right now!”

“Oh, well, that’s different—put him on!”

And that was what Paddy Chayefsky thought of television.

*   *   *

There had been a time when Chayefsky could convince himself that television would sustain him for his entire career. In his foreword to a hardcover collection of his television dramas that was published in 1955, he affectionately observed that “television has been a kind medium” to him. Though it was his intention at some point to resume creating works for the stage, Chayefsky said then, “I have never written a script in television of which I was not at least partially proud. I hope to continue writing for the medium as long as I can.”

Yet Chayefsky was unambiguously displeased by the restrictions he said TV imposed on his creative freedom, and in that same foreword he bluntly registered his annoyance. “In television,” he said, “the writer is treated with a peculiar mixture of mock deference and outright contempt. He is rarely consulted about casting, his scripts are frequently mangled without his knowing about it, and he is certainly the most poorly paid person in the production.”

With years of creative output still ahead of him, Chayefsky observed with foreboding awareness that his fellow writers were the sort of people who live “in a restrained terror of being unable to think up their next idea.” “Television,” he wrote, “is an endless, almost monstrous drain. How many ideas does a writer have? How many insights can he make? How deep can he probe into himself, how much energy can he activate?”

To readers of that slim volume, which contains six of Chayefsky’s hour-long scripts for
The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse
, it must have seemed like an astonishing introductory statement from a man who, at just thirty-two years old, had come to epitomize this unfamiliar but exciting new occupation of professional television writer. His words are surprising in their candor and precocious bitterness, reflecting not only the self-assurance Chayefsky felt at that age, but also the authority he possessed in his field and the rapidness with which he had accrued it.

All told, Chayefsky wrote ten plays for
The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse
, an NBC anthology drama that alternated between those two title sponsors. The era, in which some twenty-six million households possessed TV sets, was dominated by comedies: first Milton Berle’s
Texaco Star Theater
on NBC, and then
I Love Lucy
on CBS. Dramas, modeled on the legitimate theater, provided a more traditional if less flashy foothold for emerging talents, with
The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse
offering a proving ground for actors such as Grace Kelly, Steve McQueen, Joanne Woodward, and Walter Matthau and writers such as Gore Vidal and Horton Foote.

Chayefsky’s installments in the series, shown between 1952 and 1955, were visually unsophisticated by contemporary standards: broadcast live from NBC’s Rockefeller Center headquarters, they were transmitted in black and white, as shaky cameras captured sweaty performances under hot studio lights, in limited locations and minimalist settings. With words such as
videotape
and
rerun
not yet standard parlance, these programs were crudely preserved for future airings, if they were expected to be shown again at all. You watched them in real time on Sunday night—and about seven million to nine million viewers did each week—or you listened forlornly as your friends talked about them on Monday morning.

The format was too young to have established rules, and the harder Chayefsky pushed on its boundaries and with a writing talent that had not yet found its upper limits, the more his recognition grew. His teleplays were socially conscious if politically prudent narratives whose heroes were underappreciated and unseen strivers who sometimes won and sometimes lost, while their day-to-day struggles were elevated to the level of the cosmic. Whether they prevailed or were vanquished, these protagonists were always allowed their moments in the spotlight to rail passionately and persuasively against the hopeless, demoralizing complexities of modern life.

As Mr. Healy, the old, obsolete employee of a drab Manhattan printer’s shop, laments to a young apprentice in a Chayefsky teleplay called “Printer’s Measure,” “Are people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines.… We’ve gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it’s sure we’re losing the very juice of living.” The play culminates with his smashing a linotype machine with a sledgehammer.

Three installments on
The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse
, broadcast in 1952 and 1953, had made Chayefsky a writer whom audiences could identify by name. His fourth drama, called “Marty,” was shown on May 24, 1953, and it made him a star.

During preparations at the Abbey Hotel earlier that year for a teleplay called “The Reluctant Citizen,” Chayefsky wandered away from rehearsals and encountered a leftover sign from a dance event held by a local lonely hearts club. Lettered by hand, it read,
GIRLS, DANCE WITH THE MAN WHO ASKS YOU. REMEMBER, MEN HAVE FEELINGS, TOO
. He contemplated the poster and returned to pitch his director, Delbert Mann, and producer, Fred Coe, on an idea for a play about a young woman—no, wait, a young man—who attends one such event.

With their encouragement, Chayefsky crafted the story of a thirty-six-year-old butcher from the Bronx named Marty Pilletti, whose social life is summed up by the sad refrain he ritualistically exchanges with his only friend, Angie: “What do you feel like doing tonight?” Embarrassed to be the last unmarried member of his family, Marty is persuaded by his mother to attend a dance at the Waverly Ballroom, where he meets a girl who is as isolated and vulnerable as he is. Marty brings her back to the home he shares with his mother, and he and the girl engage in an awkward romantic dalliance. Over the objections of his overprotective mother and the envious Angie, Marty resolves to call the girl again some night.

That is the entire action of “Marty,” but then “Marty” is not really a work of action. Behind the deceptively inert and half-mumbled performance of Rod Steiger, who portrayed the title character in the
Goodyear Television Playhouse
production, lurks the classic formulation of the Chayefsky hero, who has been held back for too long and who explodes with emotion when pushed to his breaking point. Urged by his mother to prepare for what he can only anticipate will be “a big night of heartache,” Marty responds with a barrage of self-loathing. “Sooner or later,” he declares, “there comes a point in a man’s life when he gotta face some facts, and one fact I gotta face is that whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it. I chased enough girls in my life. I went to enough dances. I got hurt enough. I don’t wanna get hurt no more.”

In the scenes that follow his first meeting with the mistreated, unnamed girl (played by Nancy Marchand in her television debut), Marty hears her mocked once too often by people who are supposed to care about him. These provocations set loose his verbalized anger, which he aims at anyone who dismisses his feelings for her. As he tells off Angie in a concluding speech, whose stage directions call for it to be delivered in “a low, intense voice”:

You don’t like her. My mother don’t like her. She’s a dog and I’m a fat, ugly little man. All I know is I had a good time last night. I’m gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I’m going down on my knees and beg that girl to marry me. If we make a party again this New Year’s, I gotta date for the party. You don’t like her, that’s too bad.

Marty wins his freedom by casting Angie aside with the line that every disapproving housewife and busybody had previously used to humiliate him: “You oughtta be ashamed of yourself.”

Of all the plays he wrote for
Philco-Goodyear
, “Marty” was not Chayefsky’s personal favorite, and the praise and admiration it received took him by surprise, although he suspected it somehow resulted from the play’s expression of feelings that viewers were not used to seeing on television. As he told
TV Guide
in 1955,

I think it was because it tried to show love to be a very real emotion which very real people enjoy and experience in their normal lives, instead of the gauche, contrived and intensely immature thing that the movies and current fiction have made of it. Love is a very common business, really; it does not require special settings or extreme circumstances or any particular face or body or income tax bracket. I think most people liked “Marty” because it tried to tell them that they have as deep and tender and gentle and passionate a soul as Tony Curtis.

Steiger may have come closer to identifying the reason for its emotional resonance when he surmised that his character and the play itself were somehow surrogates for its author. “We thought that ‘Marty’ was based upon, a lot, on Paddy Chayefsky,” he later said. “Of course we didn’t go up and ask him because since it was about such a lonely man, and such a man hungry for love, it would have been a rather embarrassing situation for all of us.” Even audiences with no access to Chayefsky and only a vague sense of him as an individual felt certain they were seeing the honest unfurling of a real life, and all the undignified truths that came with it.

*   *   *

Sidney Aaron Chayefsky was born on January 29, 1923, in the Bronx home of his parents, Harry and Gussie Chayefsky, one block away from the Grand Concourse. His father, a dairyman, and his mother, a housewife, were Russian-born Jews who met on the beaches of Coney Island, where, family legend had it, Harry rescued Gussie from nearly drowning. Sidney, the youngest and smallest of three brothers, was raised primarily in Bronx tenements—the family had to sell a comparatively spacious house in Mount Vernon when the Great Depression hit—but he did not consider himself underprivileged. As an adult he would say he grew up in “the rich Bronx—in the Riverdale section—not the Odets Bronx. But I guess there’s not too much difference.”

His bar mitzvah was held at a storefront synagogue on West 234th Street, and his youth was filled with visits to the Yiddish theaters around New York City. Known at DeWitt Clinton High School by the nickname Chy, he preferred to add an affected middle initial when giving his full name, Sidney Q. Chayefsky, as on the masthead of the student literary publication,
The Magpie
, which he edited his senior year. Though he stood only five foot six, his barrel-chested build suggested the raw material of a potential athlete. But aside from a short stint at age seventeen as an offensive lineman on a semiprofessional football team, his ambitions, he knew, were on a more cerebral playing field, even if he could not quite say why. Asked years later where his writing talents came from, Chayefsky could only shrug. “You got me,” he said. “In an ordinary Jewish middle-class home there’s a great prestige to being a writer. My parents weren’t writers but they were great readers. I read everything I could put my hands on.”