Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies Read online

  All told, Chayefsky wrote ten plays for The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, an NBC anthology drama that alternated between those two title sponsors. The era, in which some twenty-six million households possessed TV sets, was dominated by comedies: first Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater on NBC, and then I Love Lucy on CBS. Dramas, modeled on the legitimate theater, provided a more traditional if less flashy foothold for emerging talents, with The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse offering a proving ground for actors such as Grace Kelly, Steve McQueen, Joanne Woodward, and Walter Matthau and writers such as Gore Vidal and Horton Foote.

  Chayefsky’s installments in the series, shown between 1952 and 1955, were visually unsophisticated by contemporary standards: broadcast live from NBC’s Rockefeller Center headquarters, they were transmitted in black and white, as shaky cameras captured sweaty performances under hot studio lights, in limited locations and minimalist settings. With words such as videotape and rerun not yet standard parlance, these programs were crudely preserved for future airings, if they were expected to be shown again at all. You watched them in real time on Sunday night—and about seven million to nine million viewers did each week—or you listened forlornly as your friends talked about them on Monday morning.

  The format was too young to have established rules, and the harder Chayefsky pushed on its boundaries and with a writing talent that had not yet found its upper limits, the more his recognition grew. His teleplays were socially conscious if politically prudent narratives whose heroes were underappreciated and unseen strivers who sometimes won and sometimes lost, while their day-to-day struggles were elevated to the level of the cosmic. Whether they prevailed or were vanquished, these protagonists were always allowed their moments in the spotlight to rail passionately and persuasively against the hopeless, demoralizing complexities of modern life.

  As Mr. Healy, the old, obsolete employee of a drab Manhattan printer’s shop, laments to a young apprentice in a Chayefsky teleplay called “Printer’s Measure,” “Are people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines.… We’ve gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it’s sure we’re losing the very juice of living.” The play culminates with his smashing a linotype machine with a sledgehammer.

  Three installments on The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, broadcast in 1952 and 1953, had made Chayefsky a writer whom audiences could identify by name. His fourth drama, called “Marty,” was shown on May 24, 1953, and it made him a star.

  During preparations at the Abbey Hotel earlier that year for a teleplay called “The Reluctant Citizen,” Chayefsky wandered away from rehearsals and encountered a leftover sign from a dance event held by a local lonely hearts club. Lettered by hand, it read, GIRLS, DANCE WITH THE MAN WHO ASKS YOU. REMEMBER, MEN HAVE FEELINGS, TOO. He contemplated the poster and returned to pitch his director, Delbert Mann, and producer, Fred Coe, on an idea for a play about a young woman—no, wait, a young man—who attends one such event.

  With their encouragement, Chayefsky crafted the story of a thirty-six-year-old butcher from the Bronx named Marty Pilletti, whose social life is summed up by the sad refrain he ritualistically exchanges with his only friend, Angie: “What do you feel like doing tonight?” Embarrassed to be the last unmarried member of his family, Marty is persuaded by his mother to attend a dance at the Waverly Ballroom, where he meets a girl who is as isolated and vulnerable as he is. Marty brings her back to the home he shares with his mother, and he and the girl engage in an awkward romantic dalliance. Over the objections of his overprotective mother and the envious Angie, Marty resolves to call the girl again some night.

  That is the entire action of “Marty,” but then “Marty” is not really a work of action. Behind the deceptively inert and half-mumbled performance of Rod Steiger, who portrayed the title character in the Goodyear Television Playhouse production, lurks the classic formulation of the Chayefsky hero, who has been held back for too long and who explodes with emotion when pushed to his breaking point. Urged by his mother to prepare for what he can only anticipate will be “a big night of heartache,” Marty responds with a barrage of self-loathing. “Sooner or later,” he declares, “there comes a point in a man’s life when he gotta face some facts, and one fact I gotta face is that whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it. I chased enough girls in my life. I went to enough dances. I got hurt enough. I don’t wanna get hurt no more.”

  In the scenes that follow his first meeting with the mistreated, unnamed girl (played by Nancy Marchand in her television debut), Marty hears her mocked once too often by people who are supposed to care about him. These provocations set loose his verbalized anger, which he aims at anyone who dismisses his feelings for her. As he tells off Angie in a concluding speech, whose stage directions call for it to be delivered in “a low, intense voice”:

  You don’t like her. My mother don’t like her. She’s a dog and I’m a fat, ugly little man. All I know is I had a good time last night. I’m gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I’m going down on my knees and beg that girl to marry me. If we make a party again this New Year’s, I gotta date for the party. You don’t like her, that’s too bad.

  Marty wins his freedom by casting Angie aside with the line that every disapproving housewife and busybody had previously used to humiliate him: “You oughtta be ashamed of yourself.”

  Of all the plays he wrote for Philco-Goodyear, “Marty” was not Chayefsky’s personal favorite, and the praise and admiration it received took him by surprise, although he suspected it somehow resulted from the play’s expression of feelings that viewers were not used to seeing on television. As he told TV Guide in 1955,

  I think it was because it tried to show love to be a very real emotion which very real people enjoy and experience in their normal lives, instead of the gauche, contrived and intensely immature thing that the movies and current fiction have made of it. Love is a very common business, really; it does not require special settings or extreme circumstances or any particular face or body or income tax bracket. I think most people liked “Marty” because it tried to tell them that they have as deep and tender and gentle and passionate a soul as Tony Curtis.

  Steiger may have come closer to identifying the reason for its emotional resonance when he surmised that his character and the play itself were somehow surrogates for its author. “We thought that ‘Marty’ was based upon, a lot, on Paddy Chayefsky,” he later said. “Of course we didn’t go up and ask him because since it was about such a lonely man, and such a man hungry for love, it would have been a rather embarrassing situation for all of us.” Even audiences with no access to Chayefsky and only a vague sense of him as an individual felt certain they were seeing the honest unfurling of a real life, and all the undignified truths that came with it.

  * * *

  Sidney Aaron Chayefsky was born on January 29, 1923, in the Bronx home of his parents, Harry and Gussie Chayefsky, one block away from the Grand Concourse. His father, a dairyman, and his mother, a housewife, were Russian-born Jews who met on the beaches of Coney Island, where, family legend had it, Harry rescued Gussie from nearly drowning. Sidney, the youngest and smallest of three brothers, was raised primarily in Bronx tenements—the family had to sell a comparatively spacious house in Mount Vernon when the Great Depression hit—but he did not consider himself underprivileged. As an adult he would say he grew up in “the rich Bronx—in the Riverdale section—not the Odets Bronx. But I guess there’s not too much difference.”

  His bar mitzvah was held at a storefront synagogue on West 234th Street, and his youth was filled with visits to the Yiddish theaters around New York City. Known at DeWitt Clinton High School by the nickname Chy, he preferred to add an affected middle initial when giving his full name, Sidney Q. Chayefsky, as on the masthead of the student literary publication, The Magpie, which he edited his senior year. Though he stood only five foot
six, his barrel-chested build suggested the raw material of a potential athlete. But aside from a short stint at age seventeen as an offensive lineman on a semiprofessional football team, his ambitions, he knew, were on a more cerebral playing field, even if he could not quite say why. Asked years later where his writing talents came from, Chayefsky could only shrug. “You got me,” he said. “In an ordinary Jewish middle-class home there’s a great prestige to being a writer. My parents weren’t writers but they were great readers. I read everything I could put my hands on.”

  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 Pal
me 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.