“It was the ending,” Towne would say. “There were so many, but that was the end of the Sixties. The door closed, the curtain dropped, and nothing and no one was ever the same.”
Towne would meet with Warren Beatty at the Aware Inn, at 8828 Sunset, a hippie stronghold in a darkening city, to discuss Shampoo. The Aware Inn, arguably the first gourmet organic restaurant in the country, introduced fresh, naturally sweetened juices and dandelion root coffee to a city religiously committed to the exotic salad. The food and shaggy ambience of both it and its sister restaurant the Source were hip enough to keep older executives away, but younger ones would use the come-as-you-are vibe as a pretext to pull up a chair next to Beatty and Towne—a maneuver not native to the stratified Naugahyde establishments of Beverly Hills. “It was that kind of town, that kind of business then,” said Paul Mazursky. “We didn’t speak on the phone as much as we saw each other at parties and at places like the Source. It made everything more fun and friendly and fast. ‘You wanna make this movie?’ ‘Let’s do it.’”
Beatty considered setting Shampoo, his lissome ode to sex and politics in late-sixties Los Angeles, against the backdrop of the murders. “The original version of Shampoo was strongly influenced by the killings,” he would explain. “The story was stretched out over a period of months, got into drug running, and was headed towards an apocalyptic ending.” Towne’s ideas, in Beatty’s view, were slow and unformed. He said, “Robert had written a script that was very good in atmosphere, and in dialogue, but very weak in story, and each day the story would go in whatever direction the wind was blowing. He would just never finish.” The producer Gerald Ayres regarded Towne’s freeze as kind of stage fright. “Bob would love to work for money on rewrites on which he got no credit,” he said, “and would do it quickly. Over three weeks, he’d have a whole new script ready. But something that had his name on it would become all involved in the neurosis of completion and failure, and take forever.”
At the Aware Inn, Beatty gave Towne a deadline of December 31: “If you don’t do it,” Beatty warned, “let’s forget it.”
Towne stalled on Shampoo.
* * *
Nostalgia, in the wake of the murders, redolent of a greener, guileless city, paled Towne’s vision. Thick with memory, he discovered, in a pile of West magazines Julie had collected, “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.,” a photo essay alive with his own childhood. There, in ringing color, was the green Plymouth convertible. There was J. W. Robinson’s department store. The lazy gush of banana leaves. An imperious, piercingly white Pasadena mansion, with its porte cochere, towering over the palms like Shangri-La. Their colors threw Towne into the past. “The best time to see Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles,” he read in West, “is in the grey mists of the early morning, or better still, in the very late afternoon, when streets are in shadow broken only by golden yellow sunshine; times when your eye can be tricked into ignoring the long lines of franchise eateries and gas stations, each with its own plastic sign in one or another primary color; times when you don’t notice the cheapjack apartment buildings glittering their anodized metal geegaws at you; times when your eye can pick up the Los Angeles which existed prior to 1942.” Towne had been eight in 1942. “That is not an arbitrary choice of years,” the essay continued, “for after 1942 the swarm of defense workers, the maddened construction of factories, homes, apartments, the industrial and automotive smog, all irrevocably altered the physical face of Los Angeles.”
Change.
It was a city inclined to growth, inclined to loss. “So great is the rate of change,” wrote Richard G. Lillard in Eden in Jeopardy, “and so rapid is the increase in land values, that the life of many structures is from fifteen to thirty years, and it is a rare landmark building that can survive the crane.” “Planned or unplanned,” Lillard wrote, “the Southern California cities gave way to the motor vehicle. Men tore down buildings to make way for parking lots or service stations. Men chopped down trees lining streets, broke up curbs, scraped up lawns, and widened streets to the front steps of houses.” Elsewhere the freeways were developed to tie cities together, but in Los Angeles, freeways were developed to solve congestion inside the city itself, ironically creating more congestion: More roads led to more traffic, more traffic to more roads, “which smash,” Michael Davie wrote, “the city to pieces.”
Towne could remember another Los Angeles. He was born in San Pedro, a sandy port town twenty miles south of downtown L.A. The 1930s, the 1940s: he remembered more sky, fewer impediments to the sun. The trees were not so tall in those days, and the stucco fronts of Pedro reflected light onto the brick buildings of the waterfront. Los Angeles, in Towne’s memory, was then a haven of pastel and desert moods softly dusted in hues of Spanish rust, “a light wash of colors,” he observed, “that had the delicacy of a gouache.” Even the sunsets whispered their pinks and golds. “Only the bougainvillea blinded you,” Towne recalled. “I remember the first time I saw some—an ecstasy of San Diego reds, tumbling along and over a white wall, across a trellis, then smothering a garage with its crimson wildness.”
Towne had never read Raymond Chandler before—his old roommate, Edward Taylor, was the big mystery reader—it was the loss that got him. Chandler’s detective novels preserved prewar L.A. in a hard-boiled poetry equal parts disgusted and in love, for while Chandler detested urban corruption, the dreaming half of his heart starved for goodness. Poised midway, the city held his uncertainty; Philip Marlowe, his detective, bore its losses. “I used to like this town,” Marlowe confessed in The Little Sister in 1949. “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hill and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”
“In reading these words and looking at these pictures,” Towne said, “I realized that I had in common with Chandler that I loved L.A. and missed the L.A. that I loved. It was gone, basically, but so much of it was left; the ruins of it, the residue, were left. They were so pervasive that you could still shoot them and create the L.A. that had been lost.”
A city was its crimes, Towne read in West. In New York, money was the motive. In Los Angeles, where people lived far from their neighbors and loneliness dried the landscape, criminals were sicker, their crimes more personal and perverse. “One thinks of a woman incinerating her husband so that she may live with her lover,” Towne read, “of a man gnawing at himself until he is certain that his wife must be seeing someone else, and then methodically beating her half to death; of, in general, individuals so trapped within themselves that they can only contemplate slaughtering whoever is closest to them.” Who had killed Sharon Tate?
“I want a gun,” Julie Payne declared.