Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies Read Online Free Page B

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