Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (5 page)

Dan could sense “a tremendous amount of combustion” at home, created by the tense dynamics of the stubborn Chayefsky family, and felt that even though his father loved him, Paddy was never completely satisfied with him, either. “He had a very, very strong agenda of what he wanted to see his child grow up to be,” Dan said, “and I never fulfilled that for him. It was very, very hard for him and it was very, very hard for me, failing, and him being disappointed.”

In his late teens and early twenties, Dan began to exhibit self-destructive tendencies that were at times so fierce that his parents could not be around him. At one point, the family even attempted a trial separation of sorts: for about three months, Dan remained by himself in the family apartment, while Paddy and Susan moved into a room at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South. On other occasions, Dan was sent to a rehabilitation facility to be monitored and to undergo treatment, which required him to drop out of college while his father told friends that his son had gone to live on a commune. “I was just very self-destructive and very lost,” Dan explained. “It was considered advisable that I would get residential treatment at the time. So I was there for a couple of years.”

Paddy Chayefsky was attracted to many forms of chaos, but not the kind he encountered on his own doorstep; he found it sufficiently difficult to work from home when it was calm, and as his family life became more volatile, he turned increasingly to his office and to his writing for sanctuary. “It’s almost like he took what was not working in the world around him and he brought this bonfire to his office, and he made something out of it creatively,” Dan said. “And the only time he was really happy was when he wrote. Even my mom said she had to get used to the fact that he loved writing more than his marriage.”

In his personal politics, Paddy Chayefsky rarely aligned himself with particular causes or parties for very long, and resisted efforts to apply simplistic labels to him. He was simultaneously a veteran of World War II and the screenwriter of
The Americanization of Emily
, which did not present the U.S. military in an entirely star-spangled light. And when he had strong feelings about affairs of state, he took his complaints to the top of the chain of command. In drafts of a letter to President Richard M. Nixon in 1971, Chayefsky wrote that he was not some “new-Mobe militant or placard carrier,” but rather “a careful man who keeps his own counsel and has almost a horror of making a public issue of my principles or my conscience.” He went on to say, “I have had and do not have now any simplistic feelings about the war in Vietnam. I have been against it for years because I thought it was a stupid and utterly unnecessary war whose principal victim would be the United States.” Even so, Chayefsky said he had to speak out about horrors such as the My Lai massacre because, as he wrote, “We are becoming a nation of good Germans, and if we don’t watch out we’re going to become a nation of bad Germans.”

At the same time, a growing fixation on the affairs of Israel was becoming increasingly apparent in his public remarks. Themes of Jewish culture and history had recurred throughout his work, but Chayefsky, who had traveled to Israel in 1960 and again in 1968, for Dan’s bar mitzvah, possessed a more aggressive and admittedly paranoid streak. He revealed this side of himself in a long, discursive interview with
Women’s Wear Daily
in 1971. In it, he said he believed all Jews around the world were in danger of imminent genocide. “Six million went up with a snap of the finger last time, and there is little reason to assume anybody’s going to protect the other 12 million still extant,” he said, adding that the risk was especially great in the United States: “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism in America, real gutter Munich stuff. You hear it in the New Left: ‘Kill the kosher pigs.’”

“Somebody wrote it—a Jew is a man with one bag packed in the hall closet at all times,” Chayefsky went on. And, he said, “Israel is that place you go when you have to grab the bag.”

During this period, Chayefsky changed the title of his personal company from Sidney Productions, reflecting his given name, to Simcha Productions, in honor of its Hebrew equivalent. On a visit to Washington to see a performance by the stand-up comedian David Steinberg, Chayefsky heard someone in the audience call Steinberg a “mocky,” an obscure Jewish slur. At the end of the night, Chayefsky and Steinberg found themselves in an elevator with the man who Chayefsky presumed was the heckler.

“I don’t know that it’s that guy,” Steinberg would later recall, “and Paddy recognizes the guy immediately. And he says to him, ‘Are you the guy that was heckling him?’ This is a big guy, and he starts stammering. Paddy goes, ‘You call him a mocky, you call all of us a mocky.’ And he didn’t put him up against the wall like you do in the movies, but he had his finger right in this guy’s chest.

“This guy was bigger than Paddy,” Steinberg added, “and [Paddy] just was at him.”

Privately, Chayefsky channeled his fervor into uncredited advertisements for the Anti-Defamation League, such as an announcement published at the height of the 1973 oil crisis that warned, “These Arabs would like you to believe that if we give in to their blackmail and change our Mid-East policy everything will be just like it used to be.” After an earlier trip to Israel in 1971, he had started writing a screenplay set in the West Bank about a pair of police officers, one Israeli and one Arab, whose amicable partnership collapses as they investigate a murder case. Then he dropped this idea and started over with a different scenario.

For the screenplay he called
The Habakkuk Conspiracy
, Chayefsky opened his story in the autumn of 1947, during the final, anarchic days of the British Mandate in Palestine. A prologue introduces a young scholar named Yakov Amiel, a Palestinian Jew who is traveling to Jerusalem in possession of three ancient leather scrolls. He is harangued on a bus (“There is a Jew dog here! Jew dog! Jew dog! I shall slice his Jew head off!” screams one excitable merchant), is beaten by Arab men, and finally has his throat slit “from ear to ear” by an assassin who makes off with his priceless artifacts: these turn out to be no less than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The action then shifts to two other characters. One is Yakov’s younger brother, Micha, a nineteen-year-old militant who is hungry to avenge the murder and reclaim the stolen treasures. The other is Yakov’s widow, Elizabeth, a twenty-five-year-old British woman torn between her loyalty to her dead husband and her desire to escape the Middle East entirely. She is gradually won over to the Jewish cause by violent circumstances and the passions of Micha, who argues like a man more than twice his age. In a speech he delivers as “his ascetic passion explodes,” he tells Elizabeth:

I’ll tell you about your civilized world! For two thousand years, we Jews have depended on the civilized world for our survival. And for two thousand years, Jews have been crucified, burnt at the stake, thrown to the lions, to the ovens, to the gas chambers, crushed into ghettoes, forcibly converted, exiled, deported, slaughtered by Cossacks and peasants, Turks, Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen, anybody and everybody, popes and Protestants and every mad minister from Haman to Hitler—and I’m tired of it! There’s just a couple million of us left, goddamit! We’re an endangered species! So we don’t trust the civilized world any more! We’ll take care of our own survival! Don’t come to me with your bloody Christian hands and scold me about killing. We don’t kill for conquest and empire, for profit and power! All we want is our home, the land of our forefathers, a patch of desert and swamp smaller than the state of Connecticut you’re going to live in. Where a Jew can walk in his own streets and not tremble before every gutter politician and street mob! We kill to survive! We kill so that we and our descendants shall live! When you’re stripped to survival, maybe you’ll understand that!

The film ends with Elizabeth striking “the figure of the fighting guerrilla, committed, triumphant,” as she shoots dead the last of a squad of British police officers pursuing her; and then a scene showing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Jewish birthright, safely on display in the present day at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Chayefsky and Gottfried made one more trip to Israel in 1973, to scout locations for
The Habakkuk Conspiracy
, which they planned to make as the fulfillment of their two-movie agreement with United Artists. But the project was halted before work could go any further. For one thing, the studio had an arrangement with Otto Preminger to make his suspense film
Rosebud
, which similarly featured undercover Israelis and Middle Eastern terrorists and dealt with issues of Zionism in its story of a hostage crisis on a luxury yacht. Additionally, Chayefsky and Gottfried had become uncomfortable with the United Artists deal, whose terms required them to apply their profits from
The Hospital
to the production of their follow-up film. “Now, one might say it was in the contract,” Gottfried said. “But at that time, we wanted to make
The Hospital
. And I was unknown, so to speak.”

Maurice Spanbock, Chayefsky’s lawyer, said that rapid modernization in the Middle East had made it all but impossible for Israel to stand in for its pre-independence self. “They could have made it elsewhere,” Spanbock recalled, “but they said they couldn’t make it in Jerusalem because there were television antennae all over the place.” And the volatile nature of the script was also a strike against it. “One could read into it the fact that it wasn’t done,” said Spanbock. “You knew it obviously was coming up in a political world. But I never heard that articulated. You could make whatever surmise you elected to.”

The outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October of that year ensured that
The Habakkuk Conspiracy
would not be filmed soon, though United Artists retained ownership of the screenplay and regarded its deal with Chayefsky as completed. With nothing going forward at the studio, he and Gottfried began to question why United Artists was selling the television broadcast rights for
The Hospital
in a package with other less successful (or unsuccessful) features, a common industry practice that they said cheapened the value of their film. “Each of the movies in that package would get a sum of money,” Gottfried explained. “But the result of the bundling was that they broke up the fee for the whole bundle, and the bundle usually consisted of maybe one or two hit films, and some of their bum films that were not worth a nickel. They certainly weren’t worth what
The Hospital
was worth.” He and Chayefsky threatened legal action, putting a chill on their relationship with United Artists.

Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service had begun tightening its rules about commercially failed independent films and set its sights on Chayefsky’s 1958 movie
The Goddess
. The film, which stars Kim Stanley as a distraught screen idol not unlike Marilyn Monroe, had lost more than $700,000 when it was released by Columbia Pictures. Chayefsky produced it through an independent company using money from Columbia, and then spent the next decade and a half writing off the loss on his taxes as if it were a conventional loan from the studio. But now the IRS said
The Goddess
was Columbia’s property and thus Chayefsky, who had stood to receive half the film’s profits if it made any, had nothing to depreciate. When a court ruled against him in February 1973, Chayefsky was stuck with a tax bill of $86,770, plus a $5,248 penalty for late filing.

With his back to the wall, Chayefsky resumed pitching television projects, but a set of ideas he presented to NBC in 1974 were dispiritingly conventional and rang with the desperate echo of a man who was writing for his life. They included
The Rabbi Mystery Show
, which he described as “an hour mystery show in which the main character is a revered and retired old rabbi, a scholar and a mystic, one of whose sons happens to be an officer in Homicide Manhattan South or North. (Or Queens or the Bronx or whatever),” and
The Stage Mother
, “a half-hour sitcom about a woman with two daughters, one of whom is a model and the other (a teenager) is being hustled by her mother for commercials and movie bits.”

The concept that came closest to the airwaves was a situation comedy that would have starred James Coco as a newly divorced man adjusting to the unfamiliar singles scene in New York City. The project, which was essentially Chayefsky’s attempt at re-creating
Marty
twenty years after the fact, was originally titled
Starting Over
, and then, in a familiar mouthful,
So What Do You Feel Like Doing Tonight?
, and finally,
Your Place or Mine
. It was produced as a pilot for NBC in March 1974 and directed by Delbert Mann, who had handled both the television and film versions of
Marty
. But somehow, Chayefsky’s heart was not in the material. “He said he could not master it,” Dan Chayefsky recalled. “He was very involved in it, and then, after a certain amount of time, he didn’t see it—he couldn’t bring it to fruition.” Nor could NBC, which chose not to commission a series from it.

Paddy Chayefsky wasn’t welcome at home, he wasn’t wanted for the only work he knew how to do, and he wasn’t certain there would be a future for the world in which he lived. He was running out of options, and something, somewhere, had to give.

2

STRANGELOVE-Y AS HELL

As the president of the news department of the NBC network, Richard Wald was a man entitled to some respect. He ran one of only three operations in the country with the privilege, the duty, and the means of gathering the events of the day and transmitting them to the television sets of some fifty million viewers in homes across the country. As such, he held a share of the power of deciding what was worth communicating to America and what was not. The division he oversaw commanded an annual operating budget of $100 million and employed a thousand people in roughly thirty domestic and foreign bureaus. It was his custom, as it was for many of his peers, to arrive for work each day at 9:00
A.M.
sharp, attired in a neatly pressed suit, shirt, and tie, and polished shoes. He would enter his corner office on the fifth floor of NBC’s art deco headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, take off his jacket, roll up his sleeves, loosen his tie, and begin to read the morning’s newspapers in preparation for the day.