Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (31 page)

“If the scene is not shot the way it is written and the way I have reaffirmed it to be shot in this letter,” Chayefsky added, “I will insist on having the scene re-shot until I am satisfied it is not a violation of the script.”

When it became clear even to Chayefsky that his instructions were not going to be followed, he leaned on Gottfried one last time to have Russell dismissed. As Gottfried later recalled, “Paddy said to me, ‘Howard, I can’t work with him. You’ve got to fire him. Get rid of him.’ I said, ‘Paddy, I don’t know if I can get rid of him at this point. We’ve already dismissed Arthur Penn. We are heavily into production. I would have to have somebody else in mind who could come in and take over the movie. And I honestly don’t know who that would be.’”

Torn between personal loyalty and professional responsibility, Gottfried saw just one desperate resolution to both problems. “The only way I could do that and get away with it,” he said to Chayefsky, “is if I tell them that
you’ll
take over the direction of the movie. There’s nobody else we could get. I will go up to them and say, ‘Paddy really thinks he’s the guy to take over the direction of the movie. Consequently, we want to get rid of Ken Russell.’ Otherwise, I don’t see how I could do that.”

But past experience had taught Chayefsky that he was not a director. “He didn’t think he should,” Gottfried said. “He didn’t think he could. And I understand that, he never directed a movie. But at least I could try to sell that. Nobody understood the movie better. Anyhow, he said, ‘Well, I can’t do that. I won’t do that. And if you’re not going to do that, I’m going to have to leave the movie.’”

Chayefsky never returned to the set of
Altered States
, and he and Gottfried never worked together again.

*   *   *

One day after what would have been Peter Finch’s sixty-third birthday, on September 29, 1979, his widow, Eletha Finch, now forty-one, married Paul Holliman, a twenty-one-year-old actor, in a small ceremony at the Beverly Hills home of Peter’s former manager, Barry Krost. “Although the marriage took Hollywood by surprise,”
Jet
magazine observed, “the disparity in ages of the newlyweds hardly raised an eyebrow or comment because of the increasing trend of older women who are now taking younger men for marriage mates or live-in lovers.” Amid rumblings that her immigration status in the United States was once again in jeopardy, a lawyer for Eletha Finch told reporters that this was no marriage of convenience: “It was the real thing, and since Holliman is an American citizen, there is no longer any danger of Eletha’s deportation.”

The aspiring actress, now known as Eletha Finch Holliman, acknowledged that she had struggled personally in the two years since Peter Finch’s death and that she had even considered suicide. “I started drinking, escaping from reality, ignoring my two kids,” she said. “But eventually I fought my way back. If I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned how to survive.”

The following summer, Chayefsky attempted to send a check for $200 to the Gordonstoun school, a private academy in Britain, indicating that he wanted the amount designated for Christopher Finch, Eletha’s son, who was a student there. “I would appreciate your getting this money into the Finch boy’s fund as soon as possible,” Chayefsky wrote. Within days the check was returned to him, with a letter from an administrator saying that the school could not “accept gifts which are earmarked to a particular individual.” “I am sorry about this ‘Red Tape’ as we would like to help,” the letter said, “but we have to be very careful to abide by I.R.S. regulations.”

*   *   *

For years William Holden had told the world that, despite the harder-drinking days of his youth, the life he led now was one of quiet and uninteresting sobriety. But as he and those closest to him knew, this was not the truth; in fact, the actor kept an apartment in Malibu, separate from his Palm Springs manor, that he used for his private benders. On a visit to that apartment in November 1981, the actor became so overwhelmed by uncontrollable shakes that he called his personal masseur for help, and when a rubdown failed to calm him, Holden sent the masseur away and began drinking vodka and beer. While intoxicated, he slipped on an antique rug in his bedroom and hit his head on a nightstand with such force that it severed the artery in his forehead. His body was found on November 16, and though some accounts would claim it took several agonizing hours for him to die, his girlfriend, Stefanie Powers, said the coroner told her that Holden had bled out in twenty minutes.

“Bill did more in his life, on and off the screen, than most people do in three lifetimes, and he did it with style and talent,” Powers would later say. “
That
is his legacy, not his flaws. Given his lifetime consumption of alcohol, it is almost superhuman that he could have accomplished all he did.”

*   *   *

It was with a certain unconcealed joy that the entertainment-industrial complex dutifully reported on the many failures that had befallen Faye Dunaway since she won her Academy Award for
Network
. In the summer of 1979 the
New York Post
’s brutally forthright Page Six gossip column declared, “Faye Dunaway is doing the ‘I want to be alone’ bit. (Of course, given her latest movies,
The Champ
and
Laura Mars
, leaving her alone may be just what Hollywood plans.) Faye has no projects set and even her agents wonder if she’ll work again.” A few weeks later, the
Post
said that the actress had been dropped from an upcoming cover of
Los Angeles
magazine because, according to an anonymous “magazine official,” she had “simply become too fat to appear on the cover.” By the fall, the tabloids were licking their chops at the closure of a troubled clothing store and antiques emporium that Dunaway and her boyfriend Terry O’Neill had opened in Venice, California. The actress, said the
Post
, was in a “deep depression because most of the merchandise is growing old on the shelves instead of selling like the hot cakes she’d hoped.”

In June 1980, Dunaway gave birth to a son, Liam Dunaway O’Neill, and after playing Eva Perón in a 1981 NBC TV movie, she made her official return to motion pictures that September playing Joan Crawford in
Mommie Dearest
. The film, adapted from Christina Crawford’s memoir about the traumatic upbringing she suffered at the hands of her notoriously abusive, compulsive, wire-hanger-wielding mother, had been a passion project for Dunaway. Terry O’Neill was named one of the film’s producers, working alongside the former Paramount Pictures president Frank Yablans, who also served as one of its four credited screenwriters. “She’s incredibly demanding,” Yablans said of Dunaway, “but I’ll take her any day over someone who doesn’t care. I would work with her tomorrow and forever.” Dunaway, who interviewed such golden-age Hollywood greats as Myrna Loy and George Cukor to prepare for the role, was unapologetic about her assertiveness on the production. “I really like things to be done right,” she said. “I’m like Joan in that way.”

Variety
concisely summed up the public’s estimation of
Mommie Dearest
. “Dunaway does not chew scenery,” the trade publication wrote. “Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, costars and all. Prior to her death, Crawford once commented that Dunaway was among the best of up-and-coming young actresses. Too bad Crawford isn’t around to comment now. Too bad Crawford isn’t around to comment on the whole endeavor.”

Dunaway was apparently more preoccupied with exorcising other ghosts from her past. In 1982 her lawyers sent an ominous letter to MGM and United Artists, charging that a television broadcast of
Network
shown on ITV in Britain “contains footage in which Ms. Dunaway’s breasts are exposed” and therefore violates the long-ago agreement she had made to preclude “the use of nudity or semi-nudity and the inclusion of any scene in which Ms. Dunaway’s character has a sexual climax or engages in sexual acts without Ms. Dunaway’s express written consent.” The studios responded that they “have no obligation to make any changes in the film at this time nor are we willing to do so.… These scenes have been in the finished motion picture since it was released in the fall of 1976 and shown throughout the world. We have been advised that the version being shown by ITV on television in the United Kingdom is the theatrical version and ITV has added no material to the version delivered to them. Ms. Dunaway has been aware of these scenes since 1976 and has never objected to them.”

*   *   *

Speaking to an interviewer at his New York office some months after he quit
Altered States
, Chayefsky said, “I feel almost totally alienated from what’s going on today,” adding that he now lived “kind of a reclusive life almost. I went to dinner last night and the night before, but I can’t tell you how unusual that was. I mean, if I go out to dinner once in five months it’s a big deal. I’m dead tired today, the two days of dining out are more than I can handle.” In that sense, Chayefsky said he felt like he was “coming back to contact with the American people. I think perhaps they feel like I do, they really feel unable to cope. Life is just too much. I take it the American people are becoming as alienated as I am.”

Asked what he thought it was that people were alienated from, Chayefsky explained that it was essentially everything—“the business of living.” “The problems that face us are beyond any of our conception,” he said. “I mean, what are you going to do about nuclear—what are you going to do about the boat people, what are you going to do about anything? There’s nothing you can do.”

Echoing the words that he had once commanded Howard Beale to speak, he added:

I think the great distrust of the American people led them to become, “Look, just leave me alone, let me just have my little T.V. and let me take care of my little family and that’s all I want to do.” In that sense, I almost feel like they do. But I always wrote what I was. That was the one smart thing I did. I never tried to be what was out there, I always wrote the way I thought it was. So I maintained at least a working relation with reality.

After dismissing much of his career as a television and stage author, as a hapless screenwriter for hire and a dramatist who could not exert his will even when he had “every contractual control that you can legally obtain,” Chayefsky said the work of his that pleased him most was
Network
. The day its editing was completed, he recalled, “Sidney Lumet turned to me and to the producer and to the head cutter, and said, ‘I don’t know how this is going to be received, but I think it’s a goddam good movie.’ And that’s exactly how we all felt. You never know. After all it’s a picture full of ideas, it didn’t have much chance, I thought. And we might get by on it, we might get a little hit out of it. And we did.”

On Christmas Day 1980,
Altered States
was finally released to a largely positive reception from critics, many of whom felt the film had faithfully executed Chayefsky’s intentions.
Time
, in a rave review, said, “This one has everything: sex, violence, comedy, thrills, tenderness. It’s an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies:
Frankenstein
,
Murders in the Rue Morgue
,
The Nutty Professor
,
2001
,
Alien
,
Love Story
. It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring—into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit.” The
New York Times
noted that it was “easy to guess why” Chayefsky and Russell “didn’t see eye to eye” on the film: “The direction, without being mocking or campy, treats outlandish material so matter-of-factly that it often has a facetious ring. The screenplay, on the other hand, cries out to be taken seriously, as it addresses, with no particular sagacity, the death of God and the origins of man.” But if
Altered States
was not “wholly visionary at every juncture,” the review observed, “it is at least dependably—even exhilaratingly—bizarre. Its strangeness, which borders cheerfully on the ridiculous, is its most enjoyable feature.”

These plaudits were all lost on Chayefsky, who had refused his screenplay credit for the movie and instead attributed the script to a pseudonym: Sidney Aaron, his given first and middle names. The cumbersome attribution, as rendered in the film, reads, “Written for the Screen by Sidney Aaron / From the Novel
Altered States
by Paddy Chayefsky.” At a party to celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday in January 1981, his friend Bob Fosse surprised Chayefsky with two cakes: one bearing the name Paddy Chayefsky, the other made out to Sidney Aaron.

Chayefsky had in the preceding months begun exploring a new project he hoped would mark his return to the theater: a historical drama about Alger Hiss, the accused Soviet spy and convicted perjurer, and a fictional young lawyer who fabricates evidence in an attempt to see Hiss vindicated. But that winter, Chayefsky developed a bad cough that worsened into pleurisy, an inflammation of the linings of the lungs and chest. When the ailment returned in February, he went to the hospital for testing and was diagnosed with cancer, the precise nature of which he did not tell even his wife or son. He declined surgery, believing it would surely kill him, but underwent chemotherapy that left him looking gaunt and turned his hair a shocking bone white. (Some friends said this was not his natural hair but a wig that he wore after his chemotherapy began.)

On July 4 he was admitted for treatment at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. From his hospital bed, he told his family he was “having visions of great beauty.” “They weren’t delusional or hallucinatory,” his son, Dan, recalled. “I thought they were very inspired.” But as his condition worsened, he required an emergency tracheotomy to remove fluid that was building up in his lungs, and the surgery robbed him of the ability to speak. Chayefsky’s great, angry, unyielding voice, which no occasion or adversary had ever been able to suppress, had been silenced at last.