Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (3 page)

After his graduation from City College in 1943, the twenty-year-old Sidney was drafted into the army and never came back. Roused one Sunday morning during basic training at Camp Carson, Colorado, the young private told his superior officer he could not perform his KP duty because he had to attend Catholic Mass. “Sure you do, Paddy,” the officer sarcastically replied. This rechristening stuck, and Chayefsky enjoyed the distinctiveness of his new name: as unlikely an appellation as Sidney Chayefsky was, he could feel certain the world would never see another Paddy Chayefsky.

His other fateful encounter, as a machine-gun-wielding infantryman in the army’s 104th Division, was with a land mine he sat on in Aachen. (As the dramatist Garson Kanin, then a captain at a U.S. military hospital in Cirencester, England, later recounted, Chayefsky told him, “We were out on patrol and I had to take a dump.”) Chayefsky was awarded the Purple Heart, and during his convalescence he worked with another soldier, a composer named Jimmy Livingston, to write a bawdy musical send-up of their armed service experiences called
No T.O. for Love.
(A T.O., or table of organization, is a military chart illustrating a chain of command.)

Joshua Logan, already an established Broadway director at the time of the war and the future cowriter of
South Pacific
, was among those who took notice of this formative work, and he became fast friends with Chayefsky, whom he regarded as “a square”—not socially but physically. “Paddy is built like an office safe, one that fits under the counter and is impossible to move,” Logan would later observe. “He is the only man I know who was that way when he was in his late teens and is still that way in full-fledged manhood.”

The musical caught the attention also of Curt Conway, then a Special Services staff sergeant who was producing shows for GIs in London. So, too, did Chayefsky. “I thought I was the sloppiest soldier in the Army,” Conway said. But Chayefsky, he found, outdid him. “Bedraggled is the best description—his shirttail always riding out of his pants and one trouser leg always out of the boot. He was generally unimpressive until you found out he had a charming sense of humor.” Chayefsky struck Conway as shy and socially awkward. “He seemed to know very little about girls,” he said.

Garson Kanin, a noted motion picture director at the time of his enlistment, put Chayefsky to work on Carol Reed’s film
The True Glory
, an account of the Allied victories on the Western front that won the Academy Award for documentary feature in 1945. Returned to civilian life one year later, the two men crossed paths on the streets of Manhattan: Kanin was thriving as the celebrated playwright of the Broadway comedy
Born Yesterday
, while Chayefsky was working in his uncle Abe’s printing shop on West Twenty-Eighth Street, yearning to resume his literary pursuits. Kanin and his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, gave Chayefsky a $500 advance to write a play of his own—a gift, essentially, to get him out of his print shop job. Not knowing how proper dramas were composed, Chayefsky bought a book of plays by Lillian Hellman, sat down at his typewriter, and retyped
The Children’s Hour
. “I copied it out word for word and I studied every line of it,” he said. “I kept asking myself: ‘Why did she write this particular line?’”

His first original play,
Put Them All Together
, about a Jewish family in the Bronx, was not produced, and this was a great disappointment to him. But the narrative treatment he wrote next, called
The Great American Hoax
, was, and this was an even greater disappointment. The treatment, about an older man being forced out of a printing job, earned Chayefsky a $25,000 option from 20th Century–Fox and a $250-a-week job at the Hollywood studio to write the screenplay, which eventually became the Monty Woolley comedy
As Young as You Feel
. But long before that, the young writer (who dubbed the end product “a real stinker”) grew exasperated with the changes sought by Fox, which seemed to respond only to his irritation. “I stormed and ranted,” Chayefsky said, “and the more I raved, the more they ‘respected’ me.” With all the esteem of the studio, he took his substantial paycheck and stormed back to New York.

The year 1949 was doubly momentous for him: February saw the opening of the play
Death of a Salesman
, Arthur Miller’s elegy for the misplaced values of the overlooked American middle class, an event that profoundly reshaped the perspectives of dramatists both established and aspiring. That same month, Chayefsky was married to Susan Sackler, a slight, slender ballet student who, like her new husband, came from a Jewish family in the Bronx. He found steadier employment adapting plays for radio broadcasts, and as television blossomed in the early 1950s, he was one of many writers enlisted by the networks to feed the public’s growing hunger for new programming. But his first produced script, for the CBS suspense anthology
Danger
, directed by a young prodigy named Sidney Lumet, did not mark an auspicious debut. “Nobody called me to tell me what night they were putting it on, so I missed it,” Chayefsky recalled. “Never saw it.”

The 1953 broadcast of “Marty” brought an outpouring of appreciation and recognition for its author. If, as the future
Twilight Zone
creator Rod Serling wrote, Chayefsky regarded television plays as “the most perishable item known to man,” then “Marty” was the exception that gave the form value and longevity. As Serling’s widow, Carol, later said when she spoke of her husband’s esteem for Chayefsky, “He had the gift of melding significance and meaning and humor into one play, often into one single situation. He gave stature to television. And that was really Rod’s feeling.”

“Marty” also attracted renewed interest from the motion picture industry. The original teleplay, which Chayefsky had written in a matter of days and for which he was paid $1,200, was purchased for a film adaptation by Burt Lancaster and his producing partner Harold Hecht, with Chayefsky receiving a $13,000 option and a percentage of its earnings to write the movie script. Wary of another Hollywood fiasco, Chayefsky negotiated that he be allowed to do his work in New York, that advance rehearsals be held prior to filming, and that Delbert Mann, who had directed the television production, also direct the movie.

Though he worked with an agent, Bobby Sanford, at the start of his career, Chayefsky made his later business deals on his own, and his lawyer, Maurice Spanbock, reviewed his contracts. As he would later explain, “My position is nonnegotiable. That’s how much I want and what kind of controls I want. It is up to the other side to figure out how to make it palatable to themselves, because there is plenty of room left for everybody to make all the money they want.” Most crucially with
Marty
, the movie, Chayefsky insisted that he be allowed to participate creatively throughout the filmmaking process. All his demands were accepted, and he was given an additional credit as associate producer.

Marty
, starring an ebullient and eminently likable Ernest Borgnine and featuring a jaunty pop theme song by Harry Warren, is more eager to please and less rough around the edges than its television predecessor. But it was no less a cultural sensation when it was released by United Artists in 1955. In an early review,
Variety
wrote, “If
Marty
is an example of the type of material that can be gleaned, then studio story editors better spend more time at home looking at television.”
Time
praised the film for telling “the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the unattached male,” adding that Chayefsky “can find the vernacular truth and beauty in ordinary lives and feelings. And he can say things about his people that he could never get away with if he were not a member of the family.”

In a marketplace of extravagant, widescreen Technicolor and CinemaScope presentations, the simple, black-and-white
Marty
was a surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in 1956 it won the Academy Award for best picture and Oscars for Borgnine, Mann, and Chayefsky, who, after receiving his statuette and a kiss from Claudette Colbert, declared, “If I hadn’t won, I’d have been disappointed.”

By this time, Chayefsky had seen the birth of his son, Dan, and the TV broadcasts of his last scripts for
The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse
, including “The Bachelor Party,” “Middle of the Night,” and “The Catered Affair.” He was also growing more assured in his abilities and more strident in his criticism of television. In a
New York Herald Tribune
article matter-of-factly headlined
CHAYEFSKY ASSAILS TV AS STUPID AND DOOMED
, he said, “The industry has no pride and no culture. The movies, with all their crassness, can point to something they’ve done with pride during the year.”

Where he had once boasted that he wrote the dialogue in
Marty
“as if it had been wire-tapped,” he now snapped at reporters who dared to ask if the words uttered by his characters came from surreptitious tape recordings. In an essay in the
New York Times
, he wrote that he was “frankly demanding to be relieved of the epithet of ‘stenographic writer’ or ‘slice-of-life’ writer and that my writing be recognized as more than an ability to put down recognizable idiom.”

“Truth is truth,” Chayefsky proclaimed, “and it is not made into poetry by artificial pungency. Life is life. It breathes for itself, and it contains the exaltation of true lyricism just in its being.”

The press, meanwhile, found him a reliable sparring partner, latching on to his ostentations and mocking his physical shortcomings. Profiles of Chayefsky customarily tagged him as “chubby,” “stocky,” and “smallish,” sometimes in concert, as in “a short, stocky and heavy-shouldered chap who’ll never be a serious threat to Gregory Peck.” In
Vogue
he was presented as “a squarish, hefty young playwright,” and in the
New York Post
he was rendered “a chunky, Bronx-born, reformed éclair addict.” When he swore to the
Herald Tribune
that he would eat his hat if the film version of
Middle of the Night
were not a hit, the writer retorted, “On the way from the movie studio in a near-by Italian restaurant where he devoured a huge hero sandwich, Mr. Chayefsky did not wear a hat. Perhaps he had eaten it because he had lost some other bet.” The same article trumpeted in its headline that Chayefsky had recently grown a beard, while mentioning only in passing his admission that he had been in psychoanalysis for the past three years.

Over time, Chayefsky’s eccentric if entertaining fussiness gave way to a reputation for being impossible to satisfy. A television series he planned to produce about the American Psychiatric Association fell apart in 1958 when he refused to cede any control to the networks interested in it. “Once they got control, it would be so dehydrated that it wouldn’t be worth doing,” he said. “They would try to make the subject matter more palatable, and it can’t be done that way; it can only be done as art.”

On a monthlong visit to the Soviet Union in 1959 with Alfred Kazin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and
Atlantic Monthly
editor Edward Weeks, Chayefsky insisted that the group set aside its planned itinerary so he could visit his mother’s birthplace in Velikiye Bubny, a small village five hours from Kiev. “They did everything possible to divert our attention from the request,” Weeks recalled. “Then Paddy said to them, ‘All right, you’ve lied to me consistently. I’m pulling out of the conference and going home.’” In the end, Chayefsky got his visit to Velikiye Bubny.

Before the 1950s were out, Chayefsky vowed he was quitting television for film, where he could have more control over his work and earn more money. When movies such as
The Goddess
and
Middle of the Night
did not nearly match the triumph of
Marty
, he turned to the stage, earning Tony Award nominations for his plays
The Tenth Man
and
Gideon
. By 1962 he had concluded that he was “sick of” Broadway due to “economic futility.” But his suffering was not yet through.

Chayefsky’s 1964 directorial debut,
The Passion of Josef D.
, his stage drama about the Russian Revolution starring Peter Falk as the young Stalin, elicited some of the most brutal reviews of his career (“an almost unbroken and seriously unlucky succession of wrong choices”—Walter Kerr) and closed after eleven days. Months later Chayefsky would sheepishly admit, “I should never have tried to direct it, too.”

After writing the screenplay that same year for
The Americanization of Emily
, adapted from William Bradford Huie’s novel about a scheming navy officer thrust into the middle of the D-day invasion, Chayefsky returned to the theater in 1968 for one last play. For this stage satire, called
The Latent Heterosexual
, starring Zero Mostel as a gay man who marries a woman to escape an exorbitant tax bill, Chayefsky brought the production to the Dallas Theater Center, hoping it would avoid the glare of the powerful national and New York–based critics. He was wrong, and while some reviews were merely mixed, Chayefsky was most infuriated by the notices that praised Mostel’s performance above his own writing. The actor “was so rich, deep, comic and pitiable,” Clive Barnes wrote in the
New York Times
. “Not particularly the play, which is more interesting than totally successful.”

A planned national tour was called off, and Chayefsky, the fading former sage of the Grand Concourse, was left contemplating a return to TV, “the best platform to express meaningful drama.” But having renounced every artistic avenue available to him, he had to wonder where he truly belonged and which, if any of them, might still take him back.

*   *   *

There were no perfect matches for Paddy Chayefsky, but Howard Gottfried was as close as they came. The New York–born and –bred Gottfried, a former lawyer, had made his reputation as a producer of Off-Broadway theater in the 1950s and ’60s. For a few years he decamped to Los Angeles for a job at United Artists Television, the studio behind shows such as
Gilligan’s Island
and
The Fugitive
, but he decided that West Coast living wasn’t his style and returned to New York to develop television projects for Ed Sullivan Productions. Gottfried set up shop at 1650 Broadway, near the Winter Garden Theater, and was soon introduced to Chayefsky by Noel Behn, another writer who kept his office on the illustrious eleventh floor of 850 Seventh Avenue. The lean and dapper Gottfried enjoyed dressing up for his work, and his personal manner was genial and accommodating. He could fight the battles Chayefsky wasn’t equipped for and put out the fires his partner started; he encouraged his ideas and abided his temper.