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himself had been growing into a strong-willed teenager, and though he was hardly the “shaggy-haired Maoist” whom Bock decries in The Hospital , his father was finding it increasingly difficult to relate to him. The values of this new generation were a mystery to Paddy Chayefsky, and he was equally enigmatic to the young and vocal son who saw him as a sullen, withdrawn father. “He was a fortress, my dad,” Dan later said of Paddy. “He would occasionally come out and talk to people from the window. And sometimes he’d invite them into the fortress, and then at the end of the day, you’d leave the fortress again.”
    Dan could sense “a tremendous amount of combustion” at home, created by the tense dynamics of the stubborn Chayefsky family, and felt that even though his father loved him, Paddy was never completely satisfied with him, either. “He had a very, very strong agenda of what he wanted to see his child grow up to be,” Dan said, “and I never fulfilled that for him. It was very, very hard for him and it was very, very hard for me, failing, and him being disappointed.”
    In his late teens and early twenties, Dan began to exhibit self-destructive tendencies that were at times so fierce that his parents could not be around him. At one point, the family even attempted a trial separation of sorts: for about three months, Dan remained by himself in the family apartment, while Paddy and Susan moved into a room at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South. On other occasions, Dan was sent to a rehabilitation facility to be monitored and to undergo treatment, which required him to drop out of college while his father told friends that his son had gone to live on a commune. “I was just very self-destructive and very lost,” Dan explained. “It was considered advisable that I would get residential treatment at the time. So I was there for a couple of years.”
    Paddy Chayefsky was attracted to many forms of chaos, but not the kind he encountered on his own doorstep; he found it sufficiently difficult to work from home when it was calm, and as his family life became more volatile, he turned increasingly to his office and to his writing for sanctuary. “It’s almost like he took what was not working in the world around him and he brought this bonfire to his office, and he made something out of it creatively,” Dan said. “And the only time he was really happy was when he wrote. Even my mom said she had to get used to the fact that he loved writing more than his marriage.”
    In his personal politics, Paddy Chayefsky rarely aligned himself with particular causes or parties for very long, and resisted efforts to apply simplistic labels to him. He was simultaneously a veteran of World War II and the screenwriter of The Americanization of Emily , which did not present the U.S. military in an entirely star-spangled light. And when he had strong feelings about affairs of state, he took his complaints to the top of the chain of command. In drafts of a letter to President Richard M. Nixon in 1971, Chayefsky wrote that he was not some “new-Mobe militant or placard carrier,” but rather “a careful man who keeps his own counsel and has almost a horror of making a public issue of my principles or my conscience.” He went on to say, “I have had and do not have now any simplistic feelings about the war in Vietnam. I have been against it for years because I thought it was a stupid and utterly unnecessary war whose principal victim would be the United States.” Even so, Chayefsky said he had to speak out about horrors such as the My Lai massacre because, as he wrote, “We are becoming a nation of good Germans, and if we don’t watch out we’re going to become a nation of bad Germans.”
    At the same time, a growing fixation on the affairs of Israel was becoming increasingly apparent in his public remarks. Themes of Jewish culture and history had recurred throughout his work, but Chayefsky, who had traveled to