Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (13 page)

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Since the spring, Chayefsky and Gottfried had made it their highest priority to find an actor for the role of Howard Beale. Now it was autumn, and they were no closer to completing their search. They had exhausted their pie-in-the-sky candidates, their long shots, and their dark horses to find that, no matter how much polite praise the
Network
screenplay received, it was not easy to convince any of Hollywood’s leading men to play a part so iconoclastic, so morbid, and so vulgar. But while they had been knocking on every door in the business, someone else had been knocking on theirs just as persistently.

As the screenplay for
Network
circulated among agents and talent handlers, it eventually reached the desk of a Hollywood manager named Barry Krost. A bushy-haired man with a cherubic build and a gregarious manner, the London-born Krost represented an eclectic roster of British artists, including Angela Lansbury, Cat Stevens, and the playwright John Osborne, and he believed the role of Howard Beale was perfect for one of his lesser-known clients. For some time, Krost had been trying to persuade Gottfried to consider an actor named Peter Finch, but Gottfried wasn’t interested in seeing anyone who spoke with an accent, and Krost was fearful of pushing the producer too hard. “I think I was so in awe of Lumet and Chayefsky, I kept a distance,” Krost later recalled. But “being relentless,” he added, “the office would call every couple of weeks to Howard, and he got, I think, frankly, a little bored of the calls. But that’s my job, to irritate and bore people at times.”

Finally, Krost was notified that the
Network
filmmakers were willing to meet with him and Finch in New York. He left word for his client, who had already been sent a copy of the script, and sometime later, Krost got a phone call from Finch in return.

“I’m all excited he returns my call,” Krost said, “and to tell him there’s a meeting. And he says, ‘You mean they want me to
audition
? Tell them to go fuck themselves.’ Really pissed, and he put the phone down. So I was a bit stunned and I didn’t know what to do.” Krost waited a few minutes that, to him, seemed like hours. When his phone rang again, he answered it and was offered an apology: “The voice at the other end said, ‘Krosty’—that’s what he called me—‘Finchy here.’ He said, ‘Sorry, darling, I forgot I was an actor.’” He would take the meeting after all, as soon as he could get himself to Manhattan from his home in Jamaica.

By now the fifty-nine-year-old Finch was used to a nomadic and picaresque existence. Born Frederick George Peter Ingle-Finch in London in 1916, he was raised as the son of George Ingle-Finch, an Australian chemist who accompanied George Mallory on a 1922 expedition to Mount Everest, and Alicia Gladys Fisher, a young woman who met George Finch at an officers’ dance during World War I. The Finches’ marriage dissolved quickly, and at the age of six young Peter was sent to Paris to live with his paternal grandmother, a spiritual bohemian who three years later moved to the International Headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Madras, India, and put him in the care of Buddhist monks. As their initiate, Peter had his head shaved and was dressed in yellow silk robes, an experience he would later describe as an adventure, “sometimes in thinking and learning, but mostly in being spoiled by the monks, who were too good to me.” But he was quickly pulled out of the apprenticeship—he recalled officers telling his grandmother, “You can’t do this; it would destroy the British Empire”—and was sent off again to live with more responsible relatives in Australia.

By the late 1930s, Finch had worked as a cub reporter at the
Sydney Sun
, as a “jackeroo” at a sheep farm, and as an itinerant “swagman” in the Australian bush, sleeping outdoors while traveling from job to job by hitching rides or stowing away on trains. During World War II, he served as an anti-aircraft gunner and organized concert parties and revues that he wrote, directed, and starred in, known as “Finch’s Follies.” After his discharge, he worked with a traveling theater company that performed at canteens, snack bars, and factories, and it was on one such tour, during a lunch-hour production of Molière’s
The Imaginary Invalid
at a glass-blowing shop, that Finch was noticed by two illustrious visitors, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who suggested he come to England and pursue an acting career there.

After moving to London in 1948, Finch quickly made his name as an actor on the stage of the Old Vic theater, where Olivier was on its board of directors, and in films such as
Elephant Walk
(with Elizabeth Taylor and Dana Andrews),
The Nun’s Story
(with Audrey Hepburn), Walt Disney’s adaptation of
Kidnapped
, and
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
, playing the title character. At Taylor’s request, he was also slated to play Julius Caesar in
Cleopatra
, but he withdrew amid the film’s legendarily lengthy delays.

Finch earned a reputation as one of the city’s hardest drinkers, as a member of an informal fraternity of cavorting cronies that included Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, and Errol Flynn. Years later, Finch would recall their antics as a bit of harmless hell-raising “and laughing a bit louder than the other people in restaurants—Errol used to say we were the last ones in London who could draw a sword and cut up a dark alley.” But to others these escapades had a dark and dreadful underbelly. After meeting Finch for the first time, the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien thought she saw something “tormented” in him. “He had a streak of mad anger that one was always fearing would rear up,” she said. “He was made very nervous at any signs of aggression around him and I think this is because, having had a great deal of aggression inside himself, he was nervous of it in others.”

An affair that Finch conducted during the 1950s with Vivien Leigh, the troubled wife of his mentor, Olivier, led to his divorce from his first wife, the ballet dancer Tamara Tchinarova, and in 1965 he divorced his second wife, the actress Yolande Turner. The singer Shirley Bassey was named a corespondent at Finch’s latest divorce trial, and Finch was named a corespondent at Bassey’s—a legalistic way of saying that the two had been romantically intertwined. It was around this time that Finch learned from his mother that he himself had been the product of her adulterous liaison with another man, and that that affair had destroyed his parents’ marriage.

Seeking a new start in 1966, Finch declared that he’d had “a complete clear-out” of all his possessions, save for a couple of sport coats. “Nobody can take away my car or my home or my swimming pool because I haven’t got them,” he said. “And I’ve just enough money so that if I want to stay up in the hills for the rest of my life, doing nothing, I can.” He stated that he was working on a book of poems and had temporarily given up his drinking due to a case of jaundice. Furthermore, he was moving to Jamaica. “You can walk about without shoes there, and I like that,” he explained.

Relocated to an eleven-acre farm of citrus, banana, allspice, and timber trees near a Jamaican settlement called Bamboo, Finch met a young woman named Eletha Barrett—depending on the story, their first encounter was either at a party or at a fence that Finch was climbing to retrieve his morning newspaper—and the two became inseparable. Finch raised her son, Christopher, by a previous relationship, and with her had a daughter, Diana, before he married Eletha in 1973 at a civil ceremony in Rome. To him, it did not matter that they were twenty-four years apart in age, or that he was white and she was black, or that her domestic drive was stronger than his. “All women want to nest a little, it’s a part of the natural process of the species,” he said. “I get frightened when they start picking up refrigerators and carpets in their beak.” She didn’t mind that he slept in the nude, though she did try to buy him pajamas.

But the world that Finch and his young wife inhabited was not nearly as open-minded about their relationship. A letter writer to
Parade
magazine would ask about Finch in a dispatch its editors considered suitable for publication in 1971: “I hear he has a fondness for black girls, keeps several of them simultaneously. Yes?” The magazine’s response in no way challenged the author’s underlying assertion, and simply noted Finch’s relationship with Barrett, “a black hairdresser and telephone operator from Jamaica,” adding that he was previously “enamored of Shirley Bassey, a black singer from Wales.” In a tell-all biography called
Finchy
, his second wife, Yolande Turner, would claim that her ex-husband often expressed to her “his need for the gutter,” and would throw himself into “the wet, wild woods”—his alleged euphemism for the “dark, noisy black clubs” of London—“whenever he felt threatened sexually.”

Finch found himself an unexpected Academy Award nominee for best actor in 1972, for his performance in John Schlesinger’s film
Sunday Bloody Sunday
as a gay doctor in a love affair with a bisexual man. (Finch’s fellow nominees for the Oscar that year included George C. Scott in
The Hospital
, though both men would lose to
French Connection
star Gene Hackman.) But this brush with greatness gained him little in the long run, except perhaps the leading role in a notoriously dreadful 1973 musical remake of
Lost Horizon
.

To Finch’s manager, Howard Beale did not register on the page as the role of a lifetime, but merely a role that his client could perform. “The truth is, you try to get actors jobs,” Barry Krost said. “Sometimes you realize the importance of the job,” but in the case of
Network
, “I can’t say I knew it would be a great movie. No, I’m not that clever. It was a great, fun read, and what a great, fun part.”

By the time Finch arrived in New York for his meeting in the fall of 1975 with Gottfried, Chayefsky, and Lumet, their greatest concern was whether the actor, with his Australian and British heritage, could pull off a convincing American accent. Their plan was to accompany him from the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where Finch was staying, to a casual script reading at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, across the street. But what little chitchat they conducted in their walk across Fifth Avenue was sufficient to seal the deal. “Before they sat down,” Krost recalled, “Howard said, ‘Bingo’—he’d got the part.”

For Gottfried and his partners, the sudden endorsement reflected their confidence in Finch as much as the urgency with which they needed to fill the role. “He was very persuasive,” Gottfried said of the actor. “Obviously, the reading he did was excellent. And to be perfectly candid, at that time, we were pretty ready to shoot the movie and we didn’t have a leading man that we were happy with, certainly. So we decided to put Peter on.”

Some strange charm seemed to be following Finch on his American sojourn. That same day, he later told his manager, he went for a walk in Central Park, dressed in his blazer and cravat, and a man there bumped into him. Immediately realizing that he was missing his wallet, Finch chased after the stranger.

Describing the encounter as Finch relayed it to him, Krost said, “He runs up to the man and says, ‘Give me the wallet, you—’ f-word, f-word, ‘Give me my bloody wallet or’—and gets the wallet. Goes back to the hotel. Locks the door. Puts the chain on the door. And puts the wallet down on his dresser next to his wallet. He hadn’t taken his wallet at all.”

The tale, Krost acknowledged, was almost certainly apocryphal but, he said, “it’s one of my favorite stories.”

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With the most vital members of the
Network
ensemble in place, the hunt was on to fill its many other parts—more than thirty additional speaking roles—in time for the start of filming in January 1976. To oversee this process the production hired Juliet Taylor, who had only recently graduated from a junior casting associate’s position on films such as
Bananas
to the full-time casting director of movies such as
The Exorcist
and
Taxi Driver
, after taking over the business of her former boss, Marion Dougherty, the Hollywood star maker who had handled these duties on
The Hospital
. Working for Dougherty, Taylor had also helped cast Lumet’s film
The Anderson Tapes
, but for
Network
she was brought in by Gottfried, acting on Chayefsky’s behalf.

“Paddy did run the show,” Taylor said. “He was an adorable man and hilarious, but he was very strong.” In particular, Taylor understood she was to look for actors who could handle the sheer density of material in his
Network
screenplay, and who would respect it enough to read it as written. “Nobody writes screenplays like that, with monologues that are a page long,” she said. “Brilliant monologues, and that not only required wonderful actors, but the word was the thing.”

Some key hirings were made without much deliberation or the need for formal auditions. Robert Duvall, whose portrayal of the Corleone family consigliere in
The Godfather
and
The Godfather Part II
had lifted him into ever-higher echelons of fame and esteem (and earned him an Academy Award nomination), was offered the role of Frank Hackett, the corporate executive with the creatively vulgar vocabulary. He accepted. “He didn’t have any of the Western thing going on at all,” Taylor said of Duvall, the future star of
Tender Mercies
,
Lonesome Dove
, and
Broken Trail
, who was then living in the well-to-do enclave of Tuxedo Park, New York. “He was a totally New York guy back then. He didn’t have a New York accent, but he was a solid New York actor.”

Most of the remaining parts were settled in marathon casting sessions held in Gottfried’s Broadway offices in November and December. Among the roles that had remained obstinately vacant was that of Louise Schumacher, Max’s mistreated wife, described in Chayefsky’s script as “a handsome matron of fifty.” Lumet had had his eye on Candice Bergen, the star of his film
The Group
, who had also been considered to play Diana. But in a single appointment on the morning of November 10, the director and his colleagues were won over by Beatrice Straight. Straight was a granddaughter of William Collins Whitney, the patriarch of that powerful and wealthy New York clan, and a daughter of the progressive philanthropist Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst, who helped found the magazine the
New Republic
. She was also a cousin of Gloria Vanderbilt, the heiress and ex-wife of Sidney Lumet. Straight, now in her fifties, had appeared in only a handful of films (including
The Nun’s Story
, with Peter Finch) but had starred in nearly a dozen Broadway plays over the past forty years. “When she came in to read for the part,” Gottfried said, “she had us weeping.”