Coppola wanted him to stay on and keep working, but Towne, after three weeks, wanted to get back to Los Angeles, to his detective movie, and left.
* * *
Apprised of Towne’s last-minute save on The Godfather, a Paramount picture, Robert Evans invited the conquering hero to Woodland, his stately, storied home in Beverly Hills, for dinner. More coveted than an invitation to a Woodland screening (comfortable for about a dozen), itself far more selective than an invitation to a Woodland party (whose guest list could number into the hundreds), an invitation to dinner was not only Evans’s most exclusive social proposition (Woodland’s intimate dining room table sat only eight), but coming as it did in the first part of the evening, before the time-honored screening and before the party, a dinner invitation implied a long visit, an offer to come early to Woodland and stay late. It was, for Towne, a sign of great promise. It meant Evans was very interested in his work.
“Do you want to come?” Towne asked Payne.
“No, no,” she said. “You go alone.”
That night at Woodland, Towne would tease Evans with his idea for an original screenplay. Playing hard to get, he would dangle a couple choice details, let Evans inhale a few bouquets. Enough to sting his imagination—then withdraw.
“What is it?” Evans asked. “I want to see it.”
It was not for sale, Towne said.
It was his.
It was him.
* * *
Wanting to maintain control of his unwritten detective movie, Towne wouldn’t sell, but that left him with a problem: He still needed money. So he took a rewrite job on The New Centurions, an LAPD drama, and worked feverishly, believing in it throughout. “It should have been a great movie,” he said. It wasn’t.
He had his name removed from the picture. Forfeiting the recognition and residuals that came with screen credit, Towne revealed a measure of integrity that wouldn’t fill the bank account but reaffirmed Payne’s devotion. She respected him. “Robert was not working for money,” she said. It was a relief. Having grown up in Hollywood, Payne had seen her share of disconsolate compromise, especially in screenwriters—their ideals, careers, and even marriages corrupted by misguided ambition and its ancillaries self-denial, artistic failure, addiction. Her stepfather, the screenwriter Charles Lederer, was then caving to methedrine and Demerol, nodding off in his yellow chair in his book-piled office on Bedford Drive, his mind lost to the empty vials at his toes. “Twelve bloody babies…,” he droned to Payne and Towne, clawing at his arms. There were big bugs under his skin, he insisted between weeping jags, crying out for his aunt, Marion Davies, ten years in her grave. Grief and memory collided in chemicals, and all that he lost Lederer gurgled back in broken haikus that Payne, fluent in the family psychosis, pieced together for Towne: “Twelve bloody babies,” she explained to him, “means the twelve months of the year.”
Too many screenwriters ended this way, in waste. True to himself, Towne wouldn’t; he wouldn’t take a job he didn’t believe in.
Payne earned a little from her shop in Beverly Hills, and while Towne fought Columbia for Last Detail from his home office on Hutton Drive, she did what she could to make their place more habitable, laying new bedroom floor, enclosing the patio in greenhouse glass, and clearing brush “where they had taken out the oak trees, which was illegal because they were California oaks, to make room for new property.” She made dinner. She cleaned up. Inside his office, where Towne sat frozen under an art deco lamp, no keys typing, she installed stained-glass picture windows to brighten the gloom. “There I was,” he said, “thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old and feeling like a failure with nothing produced, other than having a position as sort of a subterranean character who’d done some uncredited work on Bonnie & Clyde and The Godfather.” When the sun crested and the hot air blew down from Mulholland, the windows turned green and purple pinwheels across his blank pages.
* * *
It was the beginning of summer. A Santa Ana had been blowing for three days. Now it settled.
Towne would take Hira for a walk.
He took the dog into the Santa Monica Mountains above Will Rogers Park. He hiked the fire trails up through the Spanish broom and yellow star thistle, the periwinkle and bay laurel. Poised over the Pacific, he paused in the sun. Visibility was perfect. He breathed in the mentholated tang of eucalyptus. There was a breeze. It brought with it billows of sage, scrub oak, pine, pepper trees, mustard, and foxtails. And breathing in, he was a ten-year-old boy again, on the bluffs of Rolling Hills, just outside San Pedro, overlooking Portuguese Bend, investigating the origins of life in cliffside tide pools, reeling from the boom-crash of the waves.
He breathed again and it disappeared. Forget it.
This feeling, such a twisty admixture of euphoria and demise, where did it come from? Maybe it was being a child, living closer to the ground, source of aroma, that had preserved those smells so completely. Maybe it was the city then, before cars and smog and freeways stained the air gray. Maybe it was just Robert Towne, the romance he fused with irrevocable loss. “Memories swell [like a bee sting],” he wrote. “When we first feel them in our skin there’s that breathcatching moment before knowing whether we’ll feel grief or joy.”
Adventure took him over. In search of what remained of the city that made him, he set off, right then, for the harbor town where he was born, San Pedro. “You know, I can’t honestly say that I ever thought, at its best, Los Angeles was a great city,” he said. “I’m not even sure it is a city.” L.A. was impossible to fathom and vital to comprehend. “I always start out saying, ‘I’m just going to show how this place has turned to shit.’ And then I can’t stop myself. My eye keeps going to the things that were beautiful, the things that I remembered as a kid.”
Instead of the freeways, he took Western south to Pedro. The wholesale houses he remembered had ceded to strip malls, shopping centers, parking lots. He missed the agrarian patchwork of animal farms, oil derricks, escaped cows, and roadside burger joints.
Largely untouched by development, San Pedro was as he remembered it. The brick buildings of Beacon Street, Whispering Joe’s and Shanghai Red’s, the tattoo parlors, the ferry to Terminal Island. He stood listening at the waterfront, where as a boy he’d watched the tuna fishermen set off to sea and, as a young man one summer, set off with them. He watched his childhood home on Sixth Street and revisited his earliest memory, sitting in the backyard by the paint-splattered Philco radio, listening to Seabiscuit win yet another race. And then there was his father, Lou, also a race fan, a local shopkeeper—before he made it big in real estate and moved the family to Brentwood—listening to Joe Hernandez call the seventh at Santa Anita.
They lived across the street from the Warner Bros. Theatre, “which dictated my future profession,” Towne said. He remembered back to 1941, the day he saw Sergeant York. He remembered his shock when Gary Cooper, a conscientious objector caught between God and country, finally decides to fight. He remembered the conversation of electrified Americans leaving the theater and the crystal clarity of their convictions. “At the time this movie came out,” he said, “most of the audience that saw this movie believed in God and they believed in country, in one permutation or another.” He remembered feeling part of a community—a group of people with shared values—and that sense of moral unity—“the notion that some things are not for buying and selling”—that seemed to have left America after World War II. Or was it after the Kennedy assassination? Or the murder of Sharon Tate?