After school, Julie bicycled home to mix drinks for Charlie and friends like Billy Wilder (martini) and powerful entertainment lawyer Greg Bautzer (Wild Turkey on the rocks). They came to the English Tudor house at 727 Bedford Drive every day at four to play cards, gin or bridge, and they didn’t play for money; they played for time (Bautzer bet with legal counsel, Wilder with script notes). When Charlie’s great friend and collaborator, Ben Hecht, joined the game, Charlie won two additional endings to his script for Mutiny on the Bounty, one from Ben and one from Billy.
The game ended around eight, and Charlie, likely the highest-paid script doctor in Hollywood, and Ben Hecht, Hollywood’s most respected screenwriter, would sit around the oak-paneled living room drinking, dreaming up perfect murders.
“The Oval Office. A body in the Oval Office.”
“In Congress.”
“Hanging in Congress.”
“A woman’s body.”
Their most perfect: in Kiss of Death, pushing an old woman down the stairs.
Hecht and Lederer had written His Girl Friday together. Between the two of them, they had more than two hundred writing credits, and countless uncredited rewrites. But in a town famous for its disaffected writers, both homegrown and Eastern imported, Hecht and Lederer were peaches and cream about their business. Sure, there were the usual agonies—the philistines, the studio politics. But look around: They lived like kings in paradise. “They never had this ‘poor-little-me-screenwriter’ attitude,” Payne said. “Their attitude was, first there was the word, and if you don’t come to us, then you’re not going to have anything.”
She grew up, fell into acting, and appeared here and there in movies. She dated glamorously, married and divorced actor Skip Ward, and opened Haystack, a needlepoint shop in Beverly Hills, with Lynne Wasserman. By 1969 Payne was a fixture at the Daisy, where she ran into Warren Beatty and his friend Robert Towne, roundly regarded the most promising young screenwriter in Hollywood. “I knew him from around town,” she said. He had written for Roger Corman and here and there for television, but the film that made his reputation was a rewrite of a script by Robert Benton and David Newman on which he received the mysterious and tantalizing credit “Special Consultant.” The film was Bonnie and Clyde. Though few at that time were sure what, exactly, Towne’s contribution to the script had been, and none of his previous credits were distinguished enough to color him brilliant, Bonnie and Clyde was such a watershed moment that Towne’s name, overnight, shot to the top of everyone’s list. He was, insiders whispered, Bonnie and Clyde’s secret weapon, a miraculous Mr. Fixit. What he fixed or how almost didn’t matter; the mystery only advanced Towne’s professional standing. He was in demand.
In March 1969, when Towne and Payne danced at the Daisy, he was tall and handsome, with tempting brown eyes and a beard, and spoke slowly, thoughtfully, forever leaning into his deep leather chair, or seeming to, like a rabbi toying with a parable. He took the time to think: Thoughts left his mouth fully formed. Discoursing on subjects Sophoclean or cinematic, cigar smoke drawing curlicues around his eyes, he was perhaps the only screenwriter in history ever to look relaxed, not to mention successful, respected. More than that, Towne looked brisk and healthy, like the native Californian (swimmer, tennis player) he was. He liked the sun. He wrote at night. In fronds of moonlight, when the day ended and the stories set in, Towne was given to pangs of gentle disenchantment, the soft underside, common to artists, of a life lived in the mind. He was a romantic.
Towne and Payne lived in Towne’s rumpled house atop a tiny hill at the end of Hutton Drive in the mountains above Benedict Canyon. The property, with its thirty thousand square feet of live oak, dead oak, foxtails, and weeds, had been completely neglected for the year and a half Towne was away writing Villa Rides in England and Spain, and the interior of the house wasn’t much better. “It looked like Miss Havisham’s,” Payne said. But the terrain still smelled of virgin L.A., and, Southern Californians both, they lived in harmony with the dirt roads and coyote calls and fell in love with the sanctuary of birds and brush that surfaced from their piece of earth, and in love with each other. Julie Payne said, “I understood the care and feeding of screenwriters.”
He was working on a script, Shampoo, with Warren Beatty.
Several months after Payne moved in, Towne, complaining of allergies, went to bed for a month. “My head,” he would groan. “My eyes.” The symptoms and allergies kept changing, Payne came to see, and so did the doctors and the prescriptions. But Towne made progress, slowly—always slowly—on his work. When he worked, he largely kept to a routine, beginning with breakfast at nine. He would write—in a small second bedroom with three windows and a door to the open hillside—till lunchtime, play tennis for an hour at the Beverly Hills Hotel just down the street or the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, and then he would return to the office on Hutton Drive and work until dinner and sometimes after.
They were good days, green and gold. Days of love and good work. Days of dreams.
Los Angeles, 1969.
* * *
Payne and Towne were having dinner with Buck Henry the night after the murders. The mystery altogether possessed the two writers. Into the night they pontificated on likely suspects, possible motives, rearranging the jigsaw of fact and rumor to no results, the way Julie remembered Charlie and Ben Hecht doing, but this time not for a script. When Julie woke up on the couch, Towne and Henry were still at a loss. The whole city was.
“Nobody knew what was happening,” she said. “We were terrified. Nothing like this had ever happened in Beverly Hills before.” Flailing and desperate for leads, the police started calling Payne every week. They knew—maybe, she thought, Warren told them—that she had had dinner with Sharon. “They were so out of it,” Payne said, totally unprepared to handle a murder investigation of this magnitude. She had already learned the LAPD couldn’t be counted on. In July a colleague of Payne’s was raped in Laurel Canyon. Payne reported the name of the rapist to the sheriff’s department. But the police did nothing. Plus ça change: after the murders, the police didn’t know where to begin. They hardly knew what questions to ask. To Payne, they confessed they didn’t know how to get in touch with anyone in Hollywood. “They’re with the guilds!” Payne admonished them on the phone. “Just call the guilds!”
Beatty, Towne’s buddy since Bonnie and Clyde, was spinning, “completely turned inside out,” Payne said, “trying to figure out what the hell was going on, trying to help Roman any way he could.” Ever the friend, Beatty threw Polanski a birthday party upstairs at the Aware Inn, and sat Payne and Towne with Polanski and Bill Tennant and his wife. Two police officers sat beside Polanski. “Roman was trying so hard to talk,” Payne remembered, “but he was in some kind of trauma.” Bill Tennant, who had identified the bodies, got drunk and sobbed through the party.
The night after the murders, Towne and Payne fled the house in Benedict Canyon for her former place, the Villa d’Este, a cluster of courtyard apartments in West Hollywood, where they would hide, they decided, until the case was solved. They were terrified.
“Before Sharon Tate’s murder,” wrote author Jeff Guinn, “Beverly Hills sporting goods stores sold only a few handguns a day. In the two days since her death, one store sold two hundred. Guard dogs were previously for sale for $200; now the price jumped to $1,500.” Murder, of course, was not new to Los Angeles, but the apparent randomness of the killings halted the serene illusion of invulnerability. Overworked locksmiths couldn’t handle the incoming calls. Reckless youth stayed home. Hitchhiking, once a secure means of transport, and, in the context of the era, a gesture of peace and good faith, ended abruptly. After the murders Sharmagne Leland-St. John, a friend of Roman and Sharon’s, would think twice before accepting an invitation, before going out alone, or leaving the house at all. “We lost trust,” she said. “We lost our naïveté. We grew up. We saw there was evil out there and there were evil people.”