* * *
What had Robert Towne lost?
He had lost love.
They were in Jeff Corey’s acting class. In the converted garage off Cheremoya Avenue. Jack and a cluster of eager students, hanging on his every gesture. And now the girl, Barrie Chase. She was a dancer, and she was beautiful.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
She was not the blushing kind. Of all Corey’s students, she was perhaps the most experienced, having worked the chorus of dozens of movie musicals before her ex-boyfriend, Stanley Kubrick, introduced her to Corey. Born into show business, her father, Borden Chase, had written Red River, Winchester ’73, The Far Country. “I grew up having to tiptoe because my father had to work at home,” she said. “Don’t yell when you go outside. No intrusions.” To her shame, he had been a supporter of the blacklist. “My father was a patriot,” she said, “so I know he did what he did out of love of country, but I don’t believe that anyone has the right to take somebody’s life away from him.”
She and Towne went to Norm’s, an all-night diner on La Cienega, for steak and eggs and talked about families. Towne’s father, a powerful real-estate developer, was dubious about his son’s interests. Writing for the movies was not considered a serious occupation. “It was aesthetically slumming,” Towne said, “pandering for big bucks.” Her own father, Chase said, was, despite his success, “ashamed to be in the movie business. He always called himself a sellout.” Chase’s mother, a musician, regarded her Steinway and Bechstein pianos as her children, and addressed Barrie, her daughter, as “kiddo.” Barrie would eye her from the far corner of their cavernous living room: “Don’t you know my name?” she would ask. Years earlier Chase was with her mother at Googie’s, a coffee shop on Sunset, when Gene Shacove, the famous Beverly Hills hairdresser, sidled into their booth, his eyes on the girl. But it was her mother who tried to pick him up. “You know,” Shacove responded, “I want to go out with your daughter.” Chase married and divorced him two months later.
Towne was shocked that she had already been married and divorced, shocked yet again that she had been married to a hairdresser—shocked that anyone would be married to a hairdresser—and shocked further to learn that after their divorce, he still did her hair.
In Corey’s class they watched each other work. Nights they spent at Pupi’s and Norm’s scrounging cheap eats and listening to the Weaver weave. Towne, captivated by Los Angeles, narrated tales of its origins, the stories of its street names, Pico, Wilshire, Mulholland Drive.
Love came.
He introduced her to his mother and father, but she wouldn’t introduce him to hers. “I don’t speak to my father,” she said.
She moved in. They lived off Westmount, near Melrose, with Towne’s roommate, Jack Nicholson, who made a room of the garage. When Jack moved out, Towne’s best friend from college, Edward Taylor, moved in.
One always found Edward at home. A tall, serene presence in love with literature and old jazz, he was quiet and kind, given to long hours of solitary contemplation. While Robert and Jack and Barrie went out, Edward, a Rhodes scholar, stayed in, lit his pipe, and read his books, mysteries above all else. He had amassed a collection thousands deep. “It seemed like he had every mystery ever written,” said Taylor’s daughter, Sarah Naia Stier, “and he knew so much about it. He was obsessed with mystery fiction and L.A. history and he loved the hard-boiled detective. That was just his heaven.” Taylor wanted nothing more than to meet the evening with Agatha Christie and vanish into murder and a bottle of scotch. But sitting there in his tweeds, he could have been Sherlock Holmes, staring down an imponderable. “Edward was stoic,” his friend Mike Koepf wrote. “Humor was his forte, and irony the breath he breathed in a world gone mad with ignorance. He was not a man to rashly storm the barricades, but more a man who ponders whether things are actually better on the other side.”
Taylor and Towne were best friends, even closer than Towne and Nicholson. “They were in love,” said Stier. “I always felt like their primary relationship in the world was with each other. They talked every day, their whole lives.” Eddie would always say Robert had saved his life, having insisted on rushing him to the hospital just in time one horrible night—for stomach pains that revealed a ruptured appendix. Eddie, in turn, would play a vital role in Towne’s creative life, time and again. “Everything Robert wrote, he ran past Eddie,” Barrie Chase said. “They were in constant conversation about whatever Robert was working on.” Despite his passion for and facility with stories and storytelling, Taylor did not share Towne’s professional ambition or ambition of any kind; it was, perhaps, the one thing Taylor and Towne didn’t share. “My father didn’t seem to need to be successful,” Stier said. He worked odd jobs, wrote grants, taught, nothing vocational. “He wanted to make enough money to just be comfortable.” Towne, meanwhile, would not be stopped. “Robert didn’t hardly leave his desk in those days,” Chase recalled. “He would work around the clock.”
“Robert,” she would say, “let’s go for a walk…”
“Not yet.”
“You have to move.”
“I will. Not yet.”
“Soon?”
“Why don’t you speak to your father?”
They fought. Talks of marriage became talks of separation. Chase took a job in Sweden, had a romance. Devastated, Towne pined. He exhumed the full inventory of his failures, and resolved to rescue, at all costs, the perfect future they had allowed to wilt away. When she returned to Los Angeles, he appeared outside her house on Mountcrest up in the Hollywood Hills, heartsick. It was his last chance.
They walked to the top of a hill and, at the edge of a cliff, stopped. Down below, the city streets, whose stories he once told her, kept running.
“You’re going to kill me.…” She sighed.
“I want you to marry me. I want you to have a baby with me. I’ll take care of you. I swear I will.”
She sank. “It’s too late.”
“What do you mean, it’s too late? We’re not dead yet. That’s the only thing that’s too late.”
“I’m going back to Sweden. He asked me to marry him.”
“Honey, please.…” There was nothing he could do. “Please … please … don’t go.”
* * *
Hutton Drive, night. Towne and his typewriter. His cigar and his dog. And his idea.
How to begin?
With the detective?
Begin with drought? A dried-up riverbed?
A murder?
Close by, Towne kept a postcard Julie had found him: Riverside, California, a promenade of pepper trees.
An aerial view of the great green city?
Night wore on.
Under Towne’s desk lay Hira, the giant Komondor, toying with the phone cord he took for a water snake. Man, he thought, I never saw such purity in a living thing. Every walk, the same fire hydrant, the same look of happiness. At the most fundamental level, he thought, that purity is what people fall in love with.
Distraction—this was how it always started. “So much of writing,” he said, “is trying to avoid facing it.”