Had he missed something?
The mystery of loss, the unceasing consequence analysis of history. Did what happened have to happen? Rational deduction was leading him nowhere, so Polanski pressed his mind to think irrationally. He tried to think sideways. To think backward. Would they kill him next? What-ifs lured him through endless nightmare scenarios, conspiracy theories, false hopes, and he lost, slowly, incrementally, bits of his mind. “All of a sudden,” he said, “you realize that the remote light at the end of the tunnel is the train going in the opposite direction.” He melted. “Shove off.”
His mother, her lacquered hair and cherry lips, the songs she used to sing to him. She was pregnant when they came for her.
PART TWO
Eucalyptus
Julie Payne always had stories. She soaked up words, books, facts from newspapers, pictures in magazines. She soaked up memories. When prompted, complete family histories, the contents of civic archives, nuanced accountings of entire events, the provenance of this or that vintage fabric or lampshade rose from her mind’s reservoirs in rich and instantaneous detail. Where others saw trivia, she saw pieces. Everything begins somewhere; Julie Payne asked why. Was there a beginning before it began? She understood context, that every context had a context, and that no truth—if such a concept even existed—could ever be grasped in isolation.
Her mother was actress Anne Shirley, who had, after retiring from movies at twenty-six, retired to her bedroom for good. Her stepfather was Shirley’s third husband, screenwriter Charles Lederer. Mother and daughter had moved into Lederer’s home on Bedford Drive in 1950, where Julie, at ten years old, was sent up to the attic.
“These are yours,” her mother said, indicating, coldly, the toys left on the attic floor.
Julie played. “I was a dreamer,” she said. “I had to be.” In the attic, she played with wooden blocks and a large Renaissance-style Punch and Judy show, “The Christoper Welles Puppet Theater” painted over the proscenium, a hand-me-down from uncle Orson to his friend Charlie.
Downstairs, the grown-up house was unadulterated Beverly Hills Tudor, locked neatly in smooth oak wainscoting, rose-print drapes around diamond-shaped windows, cherry-red carpeting, ceiling friezes, and closed doors. Charlie’s closed office door was right off the foyer, by the closed front door. As a girl, Julie was told to tiptoe by so as not to disturb him. She obeyed. “We all did,” she said. “It was the fifties.”
When she was young, she tiptoed past, but as she got older, she tiptoed up—and pressed an ear to the door.
“Marion … My poor … darling Marion…”
These were pieces of a story, she realized. Marion was Marion Davies, Charlie’s beloved aunt, the perfect love of a powerful man named William Randolph Hearst. Julie knew better than to ask questions, so she would find more pieces herself. She found pictures of a blue-eyed angel—paintings and scrapbook photographs of Marion—“a real fairy princess come to life,” she would say, “and from what I overheard I made up stories about her and her king who lived in a castle on a hill and who protected her.”
Julie’s father, actor John Payne, she saw on weekends.
Charlie, when he was writing, popped prescription methedrine and Demerol paid for with a chocolate Bentley convertible he gifted to his doctor. As Marion deteriorated, dying of a cancerous tumor on her jawbone, his addiction worsened. Julie, still too young to understand the wherefores of either condition, would remember Marion’s last appearance on Bedford Drive and the mask she used to cover the lower part of her face.
“Why is Miss Davies wearing a mask?” Julie asked her mother.
She did not answer.
“No one in my family told the truth,” Payne would explain. “Not about death.”
Isolation made her a detective.
There were books. She could look in books. She started with fairy tales and the stories sent to her by her godmother, Phyllis Cerf, Mrs. Random House (Bennett Cerf, the publisher, was her husband) and head of its children’s department. Then came The Yearling, Black Beauty, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Then, a girl of ten at her stepfather’s prodigious bookcase, she discovered the weird: Heinlein, Saki. Her pastoral period ended. Suddenly she grew up. She read of murders terrible and mundane, men who murdered their children, children who murdered their mothers, women who murdered their men. While the rest of Beverly Hills went to bed early, Julie stayed up with Los Angeles Murders, and read of Madalynne Obenchain, who, with one lover, murdered five others; of Winnie Ruth Judd, who locked her bodies in luggage; and of Dotty Wallburger—her favorite—who hid her boyfriend in an attic for eleven years. “Reading this book,” she said, “left me with some of these murders in my mind all my life.” She was still too young to know that murders were her metaphors, salacious replays of the wrongs that had already been done to her. But by whom? When?
The present was the crime. The past was the clue.
Julie tried to understand. Her girlfriends on Crescent and Roxbury and Beverly Drive lived differently; they had dinner with their families. Julie had been there; she had seen it; they all sat at the table together. The mothers and fathers went to their children’s school plays. Julie’s mother never went to one of her plays. The pieces, how did they go together?
“Why don’t we live like other people do?” Julie asked her mother.
“Oh,” her mother said to her needlepoint, “everyone’s house is like this.”
“My friends don’t live like this.”
“You think we’re crazy?” She pointed to the house across the street, where Lana Turner’s daughter murdered Johnny Stompanato. “Do you?”
Julie ate dinner alone.
When she noticed, in her own eye, a blemish, a dark spot in the iris, she turned to her mother.
“That?” her mother scoffed. “That’s just a beauty mark.”
There were more maids than there were people living in the house. There was one maid for ironing alone.
There were no family photos on the shelves. Her mother kept scrapbooks, but she filled them only with pictures of her famous friends—Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, Bogie, Judy Garland. “I never left Beverly Hills,” Payne said. “I thought the poor people lived south of Santa Monica Boulevard.” Weekdays she rode her bike to school (“People didn’t drive kids in those days”). On Saturdays she went to the movies. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, she was enrolled in cotillion with Maureen Reagan and Lynne Wasserman, daughter of Lew. Her mother, “a delicate person,” wouldn’t take Julie shopping, so she enlisted her friends’ mothers to go with her. It was clear to Julie that they disdained Hollywood.
“What do your parents … do?” they would ask knowingly.
“Movies.”
“Movies?”—a snicker—“Julie, movies aren’t a business.”
In those days, when movie people and their product were valued as morally and fiscally dubious, Los Angeles was two towns, one for the normal people, one for Hollywood. In Beverly Hills, far west of business life downtown, Hollywood tried to set itself apart from the older-money holdouts of Hancock Park and Pasadena, but the city kept growing west, toward the ocean, and a certain degree of overlap west of Doheny, though irksome, was unavoidable. The camps sidestepped each other around Beverly Hills. Movie people ate at Chasen’s and Romanoff’s; normals ate everywhere else.