6

PRIMAL FORCES AND PHANTASMAGORIA

By the time 1976 drew to a close, American movie theaters had offered eager audiences countless forms of paranoia and despair to choose from. A cinematic calendar of futility, confrontation, and retribution had opened in the winter with the release of Taxi Driver and Travis Bickle’s vow that “someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” By the spring, this message came clad in a more polished wardrobe, with All the President’s Men and its stylized, Redford-eyed treatment of the Washington Post’s investigations into Watergate; and it spent the summer dressed in the genre garb of Westerns such as The Outlaw Josey Wales and horror movies such as The Omen. The cycle reached its zenith in the fall, when screens were spattered with the blood and sweat of Marathon Man and Carrie, and the air was choked with the expended lead and urban decay of King Kong, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Enforcer, the latest trigger-pulling escapade of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” Callahan. You want inspiration and uplift? Go watch Rocky Balboa beat up a side of beef.

The “cheapjack cynicism” that Network satirized, Vincent Canby wrote in a New York Times essay proclaiming the arrival of the new “cynical cinema,” “is now almost the entire point of what virtually amounts to a whole new subcategory of contemporary suspense melodrama—the film that deals with a dread, unnamed and unnameable conspiracy that the film’s hero-victim goes through the picture like someone who has awakened to find himself in a public place without his pants. It’s a bad dream but it’s all true.”

Network, which began its wide release in December, fit perfectly into this motion picture landscape of helplessness and mistrust. Attuned to a national mood that seemed to be turning increasingly hostile, the movie put forward a wide array of institutions and organizations to vilify, and a unique prescription to this plague of frustration. It said the answer to your problems wasn’t in government or in the media, in dogged newspaper reporters or rogue cops, but in you, the viewer. You didn’t need to raise a fist or draw a gun to subdue your enemies; you just had to get mad. The teachings of Network resounded not in bullet wounds or spent shell casings but in the loud and articulate language of its characters. The film was hardly bloodless, but with the exception of a couple of key scenes, at least it kept its vital fluids on the insides of its characters.

Network was also a financial success, on its way to grossing more than $20 million in its original theatrical release and becoming one of the most lucrative movies of the year. Paddy Chayefsky’s film was a widely mentioned candidate for Academy Awards and other end-of-the-year honors, but securing its nominations and victories meant keeping the movie and its stars in the public eye, and that in turn meant more promotion.

Barely one month after the movie’s premiere in New York, the number of key players who could be counted on to support Network in the press had dwindled. Chayefsky himself would rise to service whenever he was called upon, but one never knew what he was going to say or whom he was going to offend. So, too, would William Holden, but his interviews yielded similarly mixed results: one reporter might catch him reminiscing about “nights when the networks came through with footage showing the tragedy of Danang, with the blood of civilians flowing in the streets,” while another observed him as he “rambles authoritatively,” ending on the “ever so slight a suggestion of a harrumph” that signals “he’s decided any possible answer he could provide is going to be more interesting than any question likely to be brought up.”

Sidney Lumet moved on to his next film, Equus, and Faye Dunaway was rarely much help to Network. Among the few appearances she deigned to make for the film’s release was a joint interview with Holden in the upscale pages of W magazine, accompanied by photographs of the costars on a carefree autumn walk through Central Park. In that article, Dunaway embraced her industry nickname, Runaway Dunaway, and noted that she had seen eight different psychoanalysts in the decade since Bonnie and Clyde was released. (“In each case I was looking for some compassion behind the professional detachment,” she said. “For the most part I found them wanting.”) With a smile on her face, she attempted to pass off Holden as the source of difficulty on their love scene (“Whenever we got into bed Bill couldn’t stop laughing,” she claimed), and he gladly took the fall. “I just feel there are certain things that require privacy,” Holden said. “We don’t just urinate on the streets.”

Supporting players such as Ned Beatty and Beatrice Straight pitched in on publicity duties, too, with Straight telling the Sunday News that her work in the film was too brief to merit rewards or trophies. “If you blink, you miss it, but it is a lucky break,” she said. “It’s just a contrast in the film.” But more firepower was going to be needed from the bigger guns of Network, and Peter Finch was happy to supply the artillery.

In the months after he finished shooting Network, Finch, now sixty, had recommitted himself to his craft and to the possibility of having an acting career in Hollywood. He gave up his self-imposed semi-exile in Jamaica and relocated with Eletha and their children to Los Angeles, where they lived in an apartment on West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip while renovations were made to a house he had purchased in Beverly Hills. The move, he said, was partly to escape political turmoil in the Caribbean and partly to enhance his career. “This is the place where all the deals are made,” he said of his new habitat. “When you get to be my age, producers are never sure what you’re going to look like. If you’re not here for them to see they may be afraid you’ve suddenly gone over the hill.” In that spirit, he had also cut out the copious drinking he was famous for when he still caroused with the likes of Errol Flynn and Trevor Howard. Since then, Finch said cheerfully, “Death has gotten one of us and our livers got the rest of us.”

The work was starting to come steadily again: he was filming a lead role as Yitzhak Rabin in NBC’s TV film Raid on Entebbe, and he had been cast in Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s film version of Heaven Can Wait. For the first time in several years, Finch hired a personal publicist to help manage the many requests he was receiving for interviews and personal appearances, and he wholeheartedly embraced the increased demands on his time—wanting as much to ensure that Network was seen as to make certain he was nominated alongside Holden as a leading actor and not relegated to the category of supporting actor. “We’re all so dreadfully egocentric in this business,” he told Women’s Wear Daily. “The nomination lets people know you’re there—for a moment at least.”

Having been a long-shot Oscar nominee in 1972 for Sunday Bloody Sunday, Finch sought to ensure that this time he would go all the way. “Peter wanted to win that Oscar,” Finch’s personal publicist, Michael Maslansky, later said. “It was an obsession with him.” In the months following Network’s release, Maslansky estimated, “Peter must have done three hundred interviews with foreign and domestic media—radio, television, the works. Nobody, but nobody was missed. And there was no one Peter refused to talk to.”

While his campaign was under way, it became Finch’s custom each morning to practice reciting an Academy Award acceptance speech he had been preparing, performing it to himself in his bathroom mirror or to Eletha as she brushed her teeth. As his daughter Diana would later recall, “He would turn to my mom and he would say, ‘If I should win, darling, this is a huge, huge honor. I want to thank my peers…’ Every actor, in their lifetime, whether you’re a starting actor or you’ve had a career for many, many years, you always have an Oscar speech, regardless of whether you win or not, you always have that. Because you never know.”

Then Finch, who did not hold an American driver’s license and preferred to walk four or five miles a day, would stroll over to the Beverly Hills Hotel and its Polo Lounge, which had become the sort of haunt where he could show up without a cent in his pocket. “He always knew somebody—because he was Peter Finch—would buy him breakfast,” said his manager, Barry Krost. From whichever table he had affixed himself to, he would conduct his day’s press assignments, whether praising the underlying message of Network to the Christian Science Monitor (“The problems and the potential power of TV exist everywhere in the world”) while decrying its liberal use of four-letter words (“I’m a little sad we put so many in”); or musing to the Advocate about the many hours he and Chayefsky spent talking through the psychology of the Howard Beale character. “There had to be a suggestion that he was eminently sane underneath the madness and that he did, in fact, have a kind of revelation,” Finch said. “That’s a very thin edge to play.” He had lately been reflecting on his vagabond upbringing, the many people it had taken to raise him, and places where he had come of age, and he was thinking of writing a book about his experiences, which he planned to call Chutzpah. As Finch explained, “There is a lot of phantasmagoria in my life.”

*   *   *

On the last day of the year, Sidney Lumet shared an anecdote with the New York Times about Paddy Chayefsky and the screenwriter’s trusted companions Herb Gardner and Bob Fosse. As Lumet told the story, Chayefsky (whom Lumet described as a “Jewish Shaw” who’s “always funny but he’s always serious”) and Gardner had gone to the hospital to visit Fosse, who was slated to have heart surgery the next day. Fearing the worst, Fosse had drawn up a will that he asked his friends to witness, and Gardner signed it right away. Chayefsky, however, explained that he never signed anything without reading it and reviewed the document slowly, in silence, page by page. Upon reaching the end, he angrily looked up and said to Fosse, “You didn’t leave anything for me in it.”

“Bob was pretty upset,” Lumet said, “and he began to explain that he had to take care of his family, didn’t have that much money, and so on.”

The possibility that death might soon claim someone so close to him did not inhibit Chayefsky’s morbid sense of humor. He threw the will at Fosse in his hospital bed and said, “Damn you, live.”

Fosse did as he was instructed, and as 1977 commenced, the prospects for Network seemed to brighten considerably. On January 4 the New York Film Critics Circle named Chayefsky the author of the year’s best screenplay. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association also chose Network as best screenplay and cited Lumet as best director, and the film tied with Rocky for best picture. When nominations for the Golden Globes were announced, Network found itself vying for five major awards: best dramatic film; best director, for Lumet; best screenplay, for Chayefsky; best actress in a drama, for Faye Dunaway; and, in the category of best actor in a drama, Peter Finch.

With new wind in his sails, Finch was booked to appear on The Tonight Show on January 13, returning to Johnny Carson’s couch after an absence of nearly a decade. If the fact that Finch was scheduled as the first guest of the night—ahead of George Carlin, Joanie Sommers, and Ruth Gordon—was not sufficient indication of the esteem Carson had for the actor and his performance in Network, the host lavished him with praise almost from the moment he sat down next to Carson’s desk. “Paddy Chayefsky, when he gets his dander up on something, he really goes at it,” Carson said with equal parts glee and envy. “It’s really an outrageous, crazy look at the corporate structure of the networks without naming the networks—and they offended pretty much all the networks, I guess.”

Finch, dressed in a gray suit that could have come right from Howard Beale’s wardrobe and speaking naturally in his London-by-way-of-Sydney accent, proudly defended the film’s satirical sensibility. He observed that what Chayefsky was really attacking was “the diminishing liberty in our individual lives. And every one of us feel, even subconsciously, that computers and bureaucracy and numbers are encroaching on our lives. And my character rails against it suddenly, and says, ‘Beware, look out, what’s happening to us?’”

Carson was particularly taken with Finch’s performance of the “Mad as hell” monologue, misquoting its crucial line as “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to put up with this anymore,” but declaring with confidence that it was “going to become a standard, probably, from motion pictures.”

“There are certain lines from motion pictures that you always remember,” Carson told him. “That’s the one.”

“Well, I’m—I’m very lucky, I suppose,” Finch started to answer, “because people go around quoting it. And if an actor’s associated with one of those lines, it gives you a lot of—”

Before he could finish the thought, Carson interrupted: “And everybody feels like that once in a while,” he said. “They say, ‘I don’t want to put up with it anymore.’”

A pair of clips from Network were shown, including a portion of the “Mad as hell” scene, after which Carson and Finch led the Tonight Show audience in an exuberant (and, this time, correctly quoted) chorus of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

“This group,” Carson observed, “is ready to follow you anyplace, Peter. Right into the waters.”

The next guest of the night was Carlin, the irreverent, long-haired comedian, who began his stand-up set by informing the audience, “You know you’re all going to die, aren’t you? All of you.” Once the laughter had subsided, the comic delivered a routine focused entirely on death: its inevitability (“You’ll all die in different ways, different places. Unless you all walk out together in front of the same bus tonight”); its mystery (“My religion believes you go to a coin return in Buffalo”); its finality (“You get really popular when you die. You do, you get more flowers than you ever got when you were alive. They’ll all arrive at once—too late”). Then, invited over to Carson’s desk, Carlin continued to speculate on the subject, hypothesizing that in our final moments we might see a flashback of our lives in the form of a movie.

Using the example of a drowning man, Carlin said, “But okay, you’re out there, and you see the movie of your life, and you get toward the end of it, and that includes arriving at the beach, going in the water, and starting to see the movie again. So according to the movie, we can never die.”

“That’s comforting,” Carson replied.

As Finch was being driven home from the Tonight Show studios in Burbank, his publicist, Michael Maslansky, would later recall, the actor reflected on Carlin’s morbid routine, which he had enjoyed. “Peter talked about death,” said Maslansky, “saying how fitting and funny a subject it could be for a comic monologue because death was, in the ceremonies and incidents surrounding it, ‘a hilarious thing.’ That is what he said. ‘A hilarious thing.’ That’s a direct quote.”

The following morning, as was his routine, Finch walked the mile and a half of twisted, turning, hilly road from his new house (his family had moved in on New Year’s Eve) to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he sat in the lobby and waited for Sidney Lumet to join him for a battery of appearances on the morning talk shows. Just as the director arrived, he saw Finch slump over in his chair. “I was walking down the staircase toward him,” Lumet later said. “Peter was sitting on the banquette, and I saw him go right over. I ran over and started to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” He did not know what had afflicted the actor, “but it was clear he was in deep trouble.” Paramedics were summoned to the scene, and when they could not revive Finch, he was taken unconscious in an ambulance to the intensive care unit of the UCLA Medical Center. There, he was pronounced dead of a heart attack.

Barry Krost, the actor’s manager, was alerted to the news before he was able to leave his house for work that morning. “I had four phone lines at home,” Krost recalled, “and the first phone went, and then all the lines lit up at the same time.” It was now his “strange, difficult” duty to contact Eletha and bring her to the hospital before the information reached her in some other manner. Krost said of a man who had always relied on the kindness of strangers, “I think when he died he had two quarters and a couple of dimes in his pocket. That’s all.”

Once Finch’s wife had been notified, MGM issued a solemn press release that afternoon, confirming the actor’s death. “The sudden and untimely passing of Peter Finch has come as a blow to all of us who knew, respected and loved him,” the studio’s president and chief executive, Frank E. Rosenfelt, said in the statement. “Everyone here at M-G-M who was privileged to know this gifted artist and warm and gentle human being is deeply saddened beyond words by the news. Our sympathy goes out to his wife and children.”

That night the handful of Network collaborators making the promotional rounds in Los Angeles assembled at the Palm restaurant to pay an impromptu tribute to Finch; the group included Chayefsky, Holden, Gottfried, and David Tebet, a longtime NBC talent executive and supporter of Chayefsky’s. As Tebet later described the gathering, the mood was understandably mournful, until Chayefsky declared that Finch would have wanted them to remember him “in merriment rather than sadness.” “And before you knew it,” Tebet said, “our talk turned into a vicious tirade against the film business and how it could kill a man like Finchy. But Paddy Chayefsky said, ‘You can’t blame the business. It’s what we do to ourselves. We’re all impulsive and neurotic.’” In his own spirit of levity, Chayefsky added, “But you know something, in spite of all that, it’s better than threading pipe.”

The loss of Finch, at a moment when his career was in resurgence and at an age when most former leading men would have been consigned to the scrap heap, was a bitter blow to the acting community, particularly in his native Britain. Memorializing Finch in the Guardian, the journalist and broadcaster Russell Davies wrote, “If the film industry told the truth, it would admit that deceased 60-year-old actors are seldom really ‘much-missed,’ for they are too easily replaced from an embarrassment of survivors.” But Finch, he continued, was that rare actor for whom no suitable surrogate existed.

He was aging into a more credible authority than any of his English-speaking contemporaries; the troubles behind his face seemed to become more interesting and deep with every film.… The leathery, hard-drinking Australian maleness which kept the Finch of the 1950s shuttling to and fro between war fields and the Outback might easily have qualified him for a middle age of pipe-smoking paternalism in conservative roles; but his obvious masculinity, coupled with an increasing talent for freezing his face into a marbled facade, covering anything from utter shame to contempt, made him paradoxically available for a new sort of part, the grizzled failure.

An official memorial service for Finch, held in Beverly Hills on January 18, drew more than 220 of his friends and colleagues, including Chayefsky, who eulogized his Network star as being “in that very select circle of great actors. He dignified his parts.”

It was during this same period that Chayefsky made a private visit to Finch’s widow and children at the house on San Ysidro Drive they had moved into hardly two weeks earlier. To the bereaved Finches, Chayefsky was a tremendously admired figure—the author of the part that had reconnected Peter to his talents and returned him to the limelight—and his condolence call was a gesture the family received with great pride. Finch himself had held Chayefsky in such high regard that he had painted a portrait of the screenwriter and placed it on the mantel of his new Beverly Hills home. As the actor’s daughter Diana later described the painting, “I remember it to this day: it was in a little black frame, a black-and-white painting with pen and ink, of this man that had glasses and this intense, serious look on his face. My dad didn’t really paint portraits of people. So that will tell you how much of an impact Paddy had on him.”

When Chayefsky came to pay his respect to the Finches, Eletha and the seven-year-old Diana were excited to show the portrait to its subject, and to point out the venerated position it had been given in their household. “We took him over and we revealed this painting to him,” Diana Finch-Braley said, “and we said, look, Paddy, look at this painting. It looks just like you. I remember this look that he had. He was such a serious person. At least, this is what I perceived as a child. He didn’t break out into this huge smile. He was just really, really serious. And then he cracked just a little, tiny, almost—you couldn’t even notice that it was a smile—and he nodded his head. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t overcome with emotion because I don’t think he was that kind of person.”

*   *   *

On January 29, Network won four of the five Golden Globe Awards it had been nominated for, with trophies going to Chayefsky, Dunaway, Lumet, and, posthumously, to Finch. Its lone defeat came in the category of best dramatic film, which it lost to Rocky.

Two weeks later, on February 10, Network received ten Academy Award nominations, tying with Rocky for the most received by any film of the preceding year. Network was nominated for best picture, Chayefsky for best original screenplay, Lumet for best director, Owen Roizman for best cinematography, and Alan Heim for best editing. Dunaway, never in doubt as a contender for best actress, received a nomination; so, too, did Ned Beatty, for best supporting actor, and Beatrice Straight, for best supporting actress. And in the category of best actor, Network received two nominations: one for William Holden and one for Peter Finch.

Once the initial wave of elation wore off, the creators of Network and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Oscars, were presented with an unusual and sensitive situation. If Finch were named the winner of his award, who would accept it for him? Such a possibility had last occurred in an acting category in 1968, when Spencer Tracy, who died shortly after the filming of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, earned a best actor nomination for that film. The award that year went to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night, and no precedent was established, as no actor had ever won an Academy Award posthumously.

As preparations began in March for the Academy Awards, Gottfried was contacted by William Friedkin, the no-nonsense director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, who was producing the Oscars ceremony. As Gottfried recalled, “Bill Friedkin called me and said, ‘Look, Howard, I’m not going to put up on this show with any high jinks.’” Friedkin was referring to two recent incidents in Oscars history that had turned the presentation of the best actor prize into something of a circus: one in 1971, when George C. Scott declined his award for Patton and refused to attend the ceremony, writing off the “offensive, barbarous and innately corrupt” proceedings as “a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons”; and the other in 1973, when Marlon Brando sent the Apache actress Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his trophy for The Godfather, citing “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”

The directive Gottfried said he received from Friedkin was “I don’t want any nonsense on my show. If you haven’t decided who’s going to accept, I want it to be either Paddy or Bill Holden.” (“Even though Bill was a nominee in his own right,” Gottfried added, “he thought Bill could accept for Peter—or Paddy, of course, who would be logical.”) To which Gottfried suggested, “How about Peter’s wife? She was very, very, very concerned about his career, all his life.” To which Friedkin answered, “Absolutely not.”

When Gottfried delivered this news to Chayefsky, he said the screenwriter’s response was “Where does he get off telling us who?”

The resistance to Eletha Finch could have been a simple issue of propriety: she was not formally involved with Network, and allowing her to accept the award over someone who worked on the film could, in future instances, open the door to all kinds of unsuitable proxies. Eletha was also known for her outspoken nature, and there was some question as to whether, if put before an audience, she would stick to a script. As Gottfried described her, “She was one piece of work, let me tell you. Don’t you dare mess with Peter Finch while she’s around. And then of course, if you’re a woman, watch out.”

The standoff between Friedkin and the Network team spilled over into the tabloids and gossip columns. Liz Smith later reported that the source of Friedkin’s opposition was a dislike of “sentimentality,” and that he told colleagues in pre-Oscar planning meetings, “It’s not going to be that kind of TV show.” In response, Chayefsky said he thought sentimentality and emotion were the basis of the movie business, pointing to moments such as Louise Fletcher’s use of sign language to thank her deaf parents when she won her Academy Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the preceding year. “If sentimentality is inappropriate,” he asked, “how does one account for the fact that the greatest moment in A Star Is Born is when Esther Blodgett says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mrs. Norman Maine!’”

Friedkin, for his part, would later say that the decision about who would receive the Oscar was not his to make. “It was made by the board of governors of the Academy,” he said. “As the producer of the show, you have nothing to say about who accepts the award.”

But as the issue continued to simmer, some uglier speculation began to rear its head, that the Academy did not want Eletha Finch, a black woman, receiving an Oscar on behalf of Peter Finch, a white man, because home television viewers, or the organization itself, were made uncomfortable by such an image. Such a scene could also be an unwanted reminder that, to date, only three black people had won the Academy Award outright. A more insidious whisper campaign at the time suggested that Eletha, who was Jamaican, had remained in the United States illegally after Peter Finch’s death and should not be allowed to represent her husband because she risked deportation.

Alan Heim, the Network editor, said he would “hate to think” that racism in any way played a role in the Academy’s reluctance to let Eletha Finch participate. “I knew that she had a reputation as a bit of a loose cannon,” he said. “But I never thought she’d do anything strange. I hate to think that there would have been racism at that point. We had already had Sidney Poitier and other people winning the award.”

Still others were not prepared to give the Academy or polite society that much credit. “Back then, they would get upset about the most silly things,” said Marlene Warfield. “And it really doesn’t matter. People were going to change, and they just didn’t know it.”

The harder the Academy pushed back against Eletha Finch, the more determined Chayefsky became to see her represent her late husband at the Oscars. In a private meeting among Chayefsky, Gottfried, Eletha Finch, and Barry Krost, the group decided that it would resort to subterfuge. When they were asked whom they were designating to receive a possible award on Peter Finch’s behalf, Gottfried said, “We agreed that I would tell Friedkin and whoever else was involved that Paddy was accepting it.” Krost would attend the ceremony with Eletha Finch as his date, and if Peter Finch were named best actor, Chayefsky would take the stage first and invite up Eletha from there. “This was all done before it happened,” Gottfried explained, “because obviously it only happens when it happens. This was all if it happens.”

As an item in the New York Post quietly reported one week before the Academy Awards: “Peter Finch’s widow, Eletha, will attend Oscar ceremonies in case her late husband wins for ‘Network.’ She and daughter Diana have settled in a Beverly Hills residence. Mrs. Finch has no immigration problems as had been reported.”

*   *   *

On March 28, the evening of the Forty-Ninth Annual Academy Awards, the players took their places at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Chayefsky sat in Box 13, Row F, Seat 46. His wife, Susan, who had been his date on a night very much like this one twenty-one years earlier, when he won his first Oscar, for Marty, and the whole world seemed to open up for him, did not attend this ceremony. He was instead accompanied by his lawyer, Maurice Spanbock.

Leading up to the Oscars, People published a cover story on Dunaway, in which the magazine unsubtly asked, “Faye Dunaway Has a Surging Career Plus an Unusual Marriage—Now Will She Win the Big O?” Portraits taken by the celebrity photographer Terry O’Neill showed the actress in repose with her husband, Peter Wolf, while in the accompanying article she spoke of how their marriage had brought her a new sense of stability and inner strength. “As the feelings well up,” Dunaway explained, “I feel somehow bigger. I want to play bigger people now. Large, vital, mainstream characters who live on a lot of levels at once and are going through dramatic changes, just as I feel I am.”

When Dunaway, an odds-on favorite over Liv Ullmann in the best actress race, was asked if she wanted an Oscar, she answered, “Yes, I’d like to win. It would be a nice present. But my life doesn’t depend on it.”

At the outset of the Oscars show, whose panel of hosts consisted of Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Ellen Burstyn, and Richard Pryor, Network did not look like an immediate winner. In one of the first categories announced, Ned Beatty lost the competition for best supporting actor to Jason Robards, who played Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men. Despite the ferocity of his performance as Network’s Arthur Jensen, Beatty (who also appeared in All the President’s Men, as the investigator Martin Dardis) was gracious about his defeat and the speed with which it had occurred. As he would later joke, “They gave the best supporting actor thing right off the bat, I think before they turned the camera on or anything.”

More than an hour elapsed before Network claimed its startling first prize. Following a playful routine in which Sylvester Stallone and Muhammad Ali swatted each other around the stage, the two pugilists announced that the Oscar for best supporting actress went to Beatrice Straight. The genuinely shocked actress, whose fellow nominees included Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver and Piper Laurie in Carrie, sat open-mouthed in her seat for a moment and ran a hand through her hair before making her way to the podium. “It’s very heavy,” Straight said, picking up her statuette, “and I’m the dark horse.” Adding that her victory was “very unexpected,” she said, “I should have known that when I had someone like Paddy Chayefsky writing and saying things that we all feel but can’t express, and when we have someone like Sidney Lumet, who makes one want to act forever, and a producer like Howard Gottfried, then how can I miss?” Her complete acceptance speech ran one minute and thirty-two seconds, roughly a third as long as her Network showdown with Holden, which ran four minutes and forty-five seconds.

Neither Alan Heim nor Owen Roizman prevailed in their technical categories, and as the author Norman Mailer prepared to announce the screenwriting prizes, he punctuated his remarks with a favorite proverb: “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.” (The line is attributed to Voltaire, who is said to have uttered the phrase by way of explaining that, though he had enjoyed a recent visit to a gay brothel, he would not be returning to the establishment.) Then Mailer opened his first envelope and announced that the Academy Award for best original screenplay would go to Paddy Chayefsky, for Network.

Chayefsky, dressed in square-framed glasses, a tuxedo he wore like a cloak, and a drooping bow tie, started his speech with a nod to Mailer’s off-color anecdote: “In the name of all us perverts,” he said as he received his trophy. In an earlier draft of the remarks he planned to make, should the occasion befall him, Chayefsky was going to confess his dislike of “modest acceptance speeches in which the acceptor thanks a host of other people for his own achievement” and then go on to give such a speech, one that thanked Lumet, Gottfried, Roizman, and Heim by name, and the film’s “practically flawless cast,” and conclude with an apology “for this—believe me—uncharacteristic display of sincerity.”

Instead, Chayefsky deviated from this plan, and the man who wrote some of the most incensed and rancorous dialogue ever recited on a movie screen shared what was, for him, a tender and difficult sentiment. “I don’t as a rule—in fact, I don’t ever before remember making public acknowledgment of private and very personal feelings,” Chayefsky said, “but I think it’s time that I acknowledge two people whom I can never really thank properly or enough. I would like to thank my wife, Sue, and my son, Dan, for their indestructible support and enthusiasm, for their ideas, their discussions, their stimulation, and for their very presence. My gratitude and my love. Thank you.”

Dunaway made her own attempt at graciousness when, a short while later, she received the Oscar for best actress that nearly everyone anticipated she would win. “Well,” Dunaway said, “I didn’t expect this to happen quite yet, but I do thank you very much and I’m very grateful.” Between audible and excited breaths, she continued: “I would like especially to thank Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky, Howard Gottfried, Danny Melnick, and the great generosity of a rare group of actors—company of actors—in particular William Holden, Robert Duvall, and Peter Finch.” She concluded with a special thank-you to her “friends in the back room,” Susan Germaine, who had been her hair stylist on Network, and her makeup artist, Lee Harman.

The backdrop behind presenter Liv Ullmann dimmed to a dark blue as she announced the five nominees for best actor, observing that such a performer may be measured by “his willingness not to conceal himself, but to show himself in all his humanity, and to expose both the light and the darker sides of his nature, openly and truly.” The live audience seemed to applaud just a shade more enthusiastically for Peter Finch than for the other nominees. William Holden, shown on a split screen just beneath a photograph of his deceased costar, could be seen sighing in relief as Ullmann opened her envelope and read Finch’s name. Over a triumphant orchestra fanfare, an announcer stated, “Accepting the award for the late Peter Finch, Mr. Paddy Chayefsky.”

Chayefsky rushed out from the stage-left wing and kissed Ullmann’s extended hand as he approached the Oscar already waiting on the lectern, preparing to give what most expected would be the formal acceptance speech for Finch’s award. But he delivered a different set of remarks, his voice growing more resolute as his true intentions became clear. “For some obscure reason I’m up here accepting an award for Peter Finch, or Finchy, as everybody who knew him called him,” Chayefsky said. “There’s no reason for me to be here—there’s only one person who should be up here accepting this award, and that’s the person who Finch wanted up here accepting his award: Mrs. Peter Finch. Are you in the house, Eletha? Come up and get your award.”

It took a few moments for the cameras to find Eletha Finch, making her way through the rows of applauding industry peers with Krost lending her a guiding hand. (“She was panic-struck,” Krost would later recall. “I saw her to the end of the row, just to help her get onstage.”) Clutching her fur coat to her dress with one hand and, with the other, struggling mightily to hold on to her purse and corsage, Eletha Finch received a kiss from Chayefsky and another from Ullmann. With tentative steps, she approached the microphones and attempted to recite to the 250 million people watching the ceremony around the world a version of the speech she had heard her husband give so many times before.

“I want to say thanks to members of the Academy,” she said amid tears, her trembling voice a mixture of her gentle Caribbean lilt and her late spouse’s regal enunciation. “And my husband, I wish he was here tonight, to be with us all. But since he isn’t here, I’ll always cherish this for him. And before he died he said to me, ‘Darling, if I win I want to say thanks to my fellow actors who have given me encouragement over the years.’ And thanks to Paddy Chayefsky, who have given him the part. And thanks to Barry, who have tell us to come from Jamaica, to come and do this part. And he says, ‘Most of all, thanks to you, darling, for sending the right vibes the right way.’ And thanks, the members of the Academy Award. Thank you all.” With her husband’s Oscar in hand and Ullmann’s arm around her shoulder, Eletha Finch exited the stage.

*   *   *

Neither the title of Network nor the names of any other artists involved with the film were announced as winners for any more Academy Awards that evening. Lumet, vying for best director honors for the third time in his career, would be denied a victory yet again; this time the prize would go to John G. Avildsen, the director of Rocky, who prevailed over contenders Lumet, Alan J. Pakula, Ingmar Bergman, and Lina Wertmüller, the first woman to be nominated in the category. At the conclusion of the ceremony, which ran nearly four hours, Rocky fulfilled its own underdog, out-of-nowhere prophecy by claiming the Oscar for best picture, its feel-good spirit prevailing over less sunny and more psychologically complicated rivals such as Network, Taxi Driver, and All the President’s Men.

A cascade of similarly challenging emotions washed over the Network crew. The film had won four Oscars in total, tying All the President’s Men for the most of any motion picture that night. But one of their comrades had paid the ultimate price for his award, and still other top prizes had eluded the production. Now, even as they celebrated their hard-earned victories, there was a palpable sense that their work together was truly over and that nothing bound them together anymore. Heim and Roizman, who had been unlucky nominees but nominees nonetheless, arrived at the Governors Ball, the star-studded post-Oscars banquet, to find that they had been situated nowhere near their more illustrious Network colleagues.

“We were sitting with a bunch of executives—accountants, really—from MGM,” Heim said. “And we were sitting with these people, and Owen and I were the only ones buying extra wine for the table. And we were so far away.” It was a slight that Heim would chalk up “to Howard Gottfried’s cheapness.” At a later hour, Heim saw Avildsen, the newly decorated director of Rocky, with his Academy Award in tow, and could not help but think of Lumet. “He was not going to let that go for anybody,” Heim said of Avildsen. “And I felt terrible for Sidney. I felt Sidney really deserved it.”

Dunaway spent most of her night with the photographer Terry O’Neill, searching without success for a distinctive location where he could capture her with her Academy Award. During his initial assignment to shoot the actress for People, O’Neill would later recall, he had approached Dunaway with a proposition: “I said to her, ‘I’ve got this idea for a picture that I wanted to do of an Oscar winner, because I’ve seen plenty of Oscar winners, and I can’t stand that picture afterwards—you know, the one where they’re standing there, holding it up smiling and all that.’ I didn’t feel that it told any story. I knew the fact that the next day, they’re sort of stunned. They’ve now won the Oscar and they’re dazed the next day, when they realize that their money’s going to double or triple and they’re going to get offered every top part.”

Finding insufficient inspiration on the after-party circuit, O’Neill sent Dunaway back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she and the rest of the Network team were staying, and told her to meet him at the hotel pool at 6:30 the following morning. There, the photographer documented a weary Dunaway, dressed in her nightgown and a pair of high-heeled sandals, as she leaned back in a beach chair and struck a pensive pose. In the background was the placid, shimmering pool, lit by the rising sun, and rows of unoccupied patio furniture and cabanas; in the foreground was Dunaway’s breakfast table, ornamented with unconsumed food and beverages, a cigarette lighter, and an Oscar statuette that the actress appeared to be contemplating only partially as she gazed into an unseen distance. Strewn on the table and the ground beneath her were various periodicals and newspapers that O’Neill had obtained before the shoot, including a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times, lying at the foot of Dunaway’s chair, whose front-page headline clearly read POSTHUMOUS OSCAR FOR FINCH.

To O’Neill, this indelible image, published a few days later in Time, depicted Dunaway in a “really reflective” moment. “First of all,” he said, “she’s had three hours’ sleep. That was one thing. And also, it was suddenly dawning on her, the enormity of winning the Oscar. That was when it dawned on her, this was going to be a new beginning for her career.” He added, however, that “different people see different meanings in it.” As Dunaway herself described the photograph, “In Terry’s picture, success is a solitary place to be. In my life, it has been the same.… Or as Peggy Lee sang, ‘Is that all there is?’” But others saw it as a moment of supreme apathy—apathy to the enormity of her own accomplishment, and to the sanctity of a place where a colleague and fellow honoree had breathed what might have been his last breaths.

On the morning of March 30, the Beverly Hills Hotel sent a note to the room of Paddy Chayefsky, congratulating him on winning his latest Oscar and thanking him for his stay during the Academy Awards. But the screenwriter had checked out the previous day and was already headed back to New York. Los Angeles did not really suit his temperament; neither did awards ceremonies, nor did fawning attention. While he made the journey home, the latest addition to his trophy case would for the time being stay behind in Hollywood, in the possession of Howard and Mary Lynn Gottfried, who would make arrangements for the pristine memento to be engraved with Chayefsky’s name. Until then, the couple kept it on display in their hotel room, where the occasional bellman or housekeeper would ask to hold it to feel its weight or just to gaze in awe at the unetched and anonymous statuette.