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polio! We have assembled the most enormous medical establishment ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever! We cure nothing! We heal nothing! The whole goddam wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes!
    When his original screenplay for The Hospital won an Academy Award in April 1972, Chayefsky gave a brief acceptance speech, offering a mere forty-seven words about privilege, gratified feelings, and a spirit of solidarity with Ernest Tidyman, who had just won his own Oscar for the adapted screenplay of The French Connection . (Tidyman, whose mother had told him she wanted to see him victorious that night, said he replied, “Those other four guys, they got mothers, too.”) It would be years before the public again heard Chayefsky express himself in any meaningful way.
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    With the second Oscar of his career in hand, Chayefsky once again found himself the recipient of Hollywood’s awkward and unwanted advances. Warren Beatty, who had befriended Chayefsky along with his office neighbors Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner, recalled the screenwriter as shying away from schmoozy West Coast gatherings, too retreating or befuddled to accept an invitation to visit the Playboy Mansion and its pajama-clad proprietor, Hugh Hefner. “I remember he told me that someone had asked him to go up to Hefner’s,” Beatty said. “It was not I who asked him to go, he was just telling me someone had asked him to. There was a time at Hefner’s when every political columnist, et cetera, was up there—you know, studying. And he said, ‘Why would I want to go up there, and sit in a Jacuzzi and be pushed away from the wall?’”
    Prior to the months he spent researching the screenplay for The Hospital —surveying scientific journals, interviewing professionals, and reviewing documents to learn the structure and language of such institutions—Chayefsky had gained some personal familiarity with modern medicine. He had been diagnosed with depression and had moved on from traditional psychoanalysis and cognitive therapy to newer and more unconventional treatments, including the drug Elavil, a pill prescribed to treat depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, as well as the occasional attempt at transcendental meditation.
    Like her husband, Susan Chayefsky had tried psychoanalysis in the 1950s, a period when she also enrolled in and withdrew from Columbia University and attempted working as a children’s photographer before giving up the pursuit. This peripatetic pattern became the norm in the years and decades that followed, during which she was unable to settle into a steady vocation, beyond her role providing constant support to Paddy in his own career. “She was very, very talented,” said Dan Chayefsky, the couple’s son, “and remarkably unfulfilled in expressing that talent. And it made her very unhappy. I think it must have been hard for her to be part of that era, of women that didn’t have a voice of their own.”
    As Dan Chayefsky would later recall, his mother had always been an introverted and reclusive person. “She was a perfectionist, and that made life impossible for her,” he said. “If she wanted to go out with my dad, she had to look perfect. And that makes it too exhausting, after doing that a lot.” But then she started having outright panic attacks, losing control of her body when she became overwhelmed from being out of doors or simply from the fear that she might have to leave her home. In one instance she went into a frenzy inside a public telephone booth; in another, a doctor had to be summoned to the living room of the Chayefskys’ apartment, where he found Susan on the floor writhing in pain from the muscle spasms shooting through her legs. Eventually, she was diagnosed with an adult-onset form of muscular dystrophy—untreatable at that time and most assuredly incurable—and this disease, Dan said, “reflected her fear of people. It almost gave her withdrawal a cause.”
    Dan