“I have no regrets,” he would write, “about having missed that semi-fabled epoch when men were men, women women, and writers rogues, but I increasingly feel—I suspect we all do—that the history of life on earth is not one of evolution so much as devolution. With each succeeding generation we get weaker and smaller; the Titans are always in the past.”
Remembering the reactions to Sergeant York, he found himself longing not just for the shared American feeling of right and wrong, but for the way of making movies that came from such crisply dramatic distinctions. “It’s a lot more efficient,” he reflected, “and a lot easier to tell a story when everybody has shared values.” Those days, those values, the belief that an individual’s actions actually counted for something, those kinds of stories of agency and faith abdicated American minds and American movies at precisely the same moment.
Something had changed. A golden age had ended. When?
Why?
* * *
For weeks, for months, he swam in feeling. He remembered. He sat warm in the sun and walked cool on the shore. He hiked long, elevated mountain trails. He bristled at Columbia Pictures, still steamrolling his good intentions on The Last Detail. He raged soundlessly against the half-dozen D9s screeching and grinding outside his window. Hira at his side, he shut the office door behind him to better hoard lost causes, and cigar-smoked his concentration into the purer past. This is what he was now, surly and ecstatic, giant and decreased, less a man than an idea lost on a dreaming sea. Evenings, night, always found him alone, a light turned on above his head, walled in high cliffs of paper. Behind the paper sat a boy and his tide pool.
He read. To separate feeling from fact, his childhood romance from the Los Angeles that really existed, he read the histories Julie bought from used bookshops throughout the city, Long Beach to Hollywood. “I needed to find a library of the time,” Payne said. “I needed [to find] the architecture. I needed what the L.A. crazies were preaching at the time, the politics. I needed everything on all those subjects, every one of them.” He read Morrow Mayo’s account of the Owens Valley water wars and Mary Austin’s 1917 fictionalization, The Ford. He read the Department of Water and Power’s official accounts of the crime. He read about the Tuna Club of Avalon, a members-only, big-money power club on Catalina Island—a book on the subject was the only book he bought for research; a rare find at Aldine’s bookshop, it cost more money than he had to spend. Of course he read Chandler: The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. He read The Day of the Locust and Double Indemnity, and though they gave pictures to his memories, the quotidian evaded them. Towne was hunting for real-life details. “Everything seemed trite and untrue,” he explained, “what you would call ‘a Hollywood movie.’” These characters sounded like Bogart; Bogart sounded like a weary screenwriter; Towne wanted to know what people, real people, really sounded like in the thirties. What were their words? Their idioms? What was their humor? What wouldn’t they discuss? He read Ask the Dust by John Fante—an L.A. novel he had never heard of—which his assistant got from the public library downtown—and finally found what he was looking for: “I just knew that was the way those kids talked to each other—the rhythms, cadences, racism.” Ask the Dust, John Fante’s hymn to the vanished Bunker Hill and the dreams of rookie writers, put the city in his ear. He said, “If there’s a better piece of fiction written about L.A., I don’t know about it.”
There. He had the sights, the smells, the sounds. Per Hollywood and the D9s, he had a war to fight. From futility he simmered a lush lather of spite of longing, something to protest, a place to write from. He had the Owens Valley, a premise. He had his genre, the detective story, that had first attracted him in the pages of West. He had his time and place: Los Angeles between the wars, a time of innocence. Before Hitler. “World War II hadn’t happened,” Towne would explain. “And that kind of evil was not something that he [the detective character] would be used to dealing with. And I wanted to have that.” And he had Jack.
* * *
Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones’s when Towne first proposed the idea.
“Look,” Towne said. “We can’t get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It’ll be L.A. in the thirties.”
“Sure. Sounds great. What’s it about?”
“I don’t know.” Then: “Water.”
Jack would be Towne’s detective. That right there gave him a clue to the character. Nicholson, Towne knew, was a popinjay, a clotheshorse. He loved his shoes, his vintage Hawaiian shirts, and leather jackets. Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. “Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils,” he would say, smiling. Towne’s detective would have a little of that vanity. He would mind his hair, his fresh-pressed suits, his Venetian blinds. He would be class conscious, maybe a little Hollywood, and if those qualities opposed traditional concepts of a movie detective—gruff, high-minded, ascetic—all the better. This detective would be different. Towne said, “[In] most detective movies I have ever seen—[and] in Chandler and even Hammett—all the detectives are too gentlemanly to do divorce work. ‘If you want someone for that go down the block.’ But I knew in fact that that’s mostly what they did.” For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Towne’s hero would do it for the money. That would give the character someplace to go, emotionally; it would give Towne the beginnings of a character arc. “I thought that taking someone like that,” Towne said, “maybe venal and crude and used to petty crime and people cheating on each other, and then getting him involved in a crime which was really evil and allowing him to see the larger implications and then to draw the distinctions would be interesting.” He decided, wherever possible, to counter movie myth with real life. “So I decided to do a movie about crimes as they really were,” he said, “because the way they really were is the way they really are. I didn’t want to do a movie about a black bird or anything. A real crime, with a real detective.”
Philip Marlowe always understood the corrupt workings of the world around him. He was cynical to the point of immutability, a quality that allowed Chandler to serialize the character; readers would always get the same Marlowe almost exactly as they remembered him. Towne’s detective, by contrast, would change over the course of the story. His detective would only think he knows the world. By the end of the story, his apparent immutability would capitulate to a new and terrible awareness of corruption his former self could never have imagined, and all his venality, his air of self-possession, would come crashing down. How could the fate of real-life ideals—he considered the D9s, The Last Detail—be anything else?
Of course, there would have to be a blonde. In these stories there were always blondes, all the same, each in their own way. But in this story, flipping the paradigm once again, Towne would introduce the blonde as a femme fatale, then reveal, by the end of the picture, her actual goodness and innocence, not the other way around. That would be his twist on the convention. And in keeping with the fate of real-life ideals she, too, would have to be sacrificed. She wouldn’t kill—as in detective movies of the forties—but be killed. The detective would lose the case, the woman, himself. He would lose, Towne came to realize, everything.