Hold the feeling, he told his heart. Hold the romance, the purity of Hira, the ideals of lost values. These would be the hidden qualities in his detective.
What to call him?
What about a name that hid those qualities, as he did? A hustler’s name. Towne thought of a friend he and Jack had, Harry Gittes. Just pronouncing the name sounded vaguely insulting: Gittes; it was all in the nose. “Jake is a good name from the time period,” Towne reasoned, “and it is also the name I have always called Nicholson. Jack’s full name is actually John J.—so I took that, too, and it became J. J. Gittes, which seemed like a reasonable name, a real name. I tend to name characters that way, on the basis of their sound.”
This was a detective movie. His femme fatale—not really fatale at all—would be virtuous. Nothing could be more virtuous than a good mother, Towne decided. A mother protecting her child. But from what?
On February 26, 1971, Towne had the idea of opening the movie at Gittes’s office: A woman named Marian shows up. Someone’s been sending her a lot of money, she tells Gittes. Too much money. She shows him the statements—from banks all over Los Angeles. Gittes says he’ll check it out. She leaves.
Later she comes back. She suddenly wants Gittes off the case. Strange.
In time, another client, Dorothy Howland Bixby, appears in Gittes’s office. She’s worried about her ailing father. Once a great man, Mr. Bixby now bribes his caretakers to get him whatever he wants, including morphine, and perhaps even young girls. Will Gittes keep watch? Yes, he will.
On his watch, he sees Mr. Howland with Marian. His mistress?
Later Mr. Howland is killed, and Marian disappears. Police look for her. Gittes looks for her.
Dorothy Bixby suspects Marian’s mother—she had a grudge against her family, presumably for something Mr. Howland had done to her in the past.
Then what?
Jake discovers that Dorothy is actually Marian’s mother as well as her sister, and tries to reach Marian before Dorothy can get to her … because…?
No. Forget it. Towne would have to try again.
What was the mother protecting the daughter from? What did it have to do with the Owens Valley, and what did any of this have to do with Gittes?
By March 6, Towne had latched onto the theme of sexual perversity and a working title: The Picture Business.
It opens in Gittes’s office. Walsh, his partner, tells him a dirty joke. They head to the bathroom and Duffy, the third partner, joins them. He says he’s got the pictures. They all gape. Duffy excuses himself to call his client, David Bixby.
Later, Dorothy Bixby comes to Gittes’s office. She begs him to give her the pictures—they’re of her and another man—and offers to double whatever Gittes’s agency got for the photos. Gittes refuses. Mrs. Bixby pleads with him. Her husband is a homosexual, she says, explaining her infidelity; that accounts for the pictures. The news would kill her father, Mrs. Bixby says. Please. Gittes suggests she hire another agency to take shots of her husband in the act. A sort of Mexican standoff, he says. But she manages to win him over.
Later Gittes goes for a haircut and talks about horse races.
Back at the office, an old man, Mr. Howland, asks Gittes to find his lost dog. Gittes protests. He’s in the divorce business, he says. But Howland offers a big sum, and Gittes takes the job.
Somehow—Towne didn’t know—Howland frames Gittes. The old man makes it look like Gittes has run off with $250,000. Then Howland disappears.
Gittes is arrested and let out on bail. But Howland’s daughter—Mrs. Bixby—believes he’s innocent.
Gittes hunts down Howland and finds him with Marian, his mistress.
But before he can bust Howland, Howland is killed and Marian disappears. Gittes suspects Marian. Others suspect Gittes.
Gittes pledges to Mrs. Bixby he’ll find Marian.
But Marian finds Gittes first. Someone’s trying to kill her, she insists. But did she kill Mr. Howland? No, she couldn’t have killed Howland: He was, she says, her father.…
How to prove it? They seek out the doctor who delivered her—only to discover he’s been murdered. Eventually they get to Mrs. Bixby. She is Marian’s mother, and Howland is her father. Marian is the child of incest. To protect the secret, she wants to kill Gittes …
What did any of this have to do with water?
“[The villain] must be the expert on who’s [sic] opinion the city has come to rely,” Towne wrote on a legal pad. “How to tie in the daughter with the water. Public corruption with private scandal.”
For a while Towne would walk in circles. He couldn’t know who the characters were until he knew who they needed to become, and he couldn’t know who they needed to become until he knew who they were. He wouldn’t start to write scenes until he had a full scene-by-scene outline, and he couldn’t outline until he saw his people in detail, what they thought they wanted and what they really needed. But didn’t he have to have a good story first? Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slowly, one short inch at a time.
He would outline constantly throughout the process, continually hatching new ideas and returning to the drawing board to implement them.
It was overwhelming.
Mistakes were persistent, but they couldn’t always be redacted without difficulty; if abandoned ideas once had narrative value, which they certainly did—otherwise Towne never would have outlined them in the first place—excising them would capsize all that followed.
“I wrote at least twenty different step outlines,” he said, “long, long step outlines.”
New ideas were like discovering a new piece to a puzzle; suddenly the puzzle would have to be disassembled and put back together again, and again and again.
By March 17 he had picked a last name for Marian: “Wells.” There was water in that.
“Notes on Gittes,” Towne typed.
Getting to know J. J. Gittes on paper, Towne would ask himself why—always why—and answer his questions in effusions of narrative prose and inner monologue he released like a free-associative novel: “It wasn’t,” he typed, “that the limits kept you from getting hurt, or killed or even from losing too much. They kept you from getting lost.” Gittes had to know his limits, what he couldn’t do. Time and experience had narrowed those limits, and the same was true of his cohorts, Duffy and Walsh. They were all like the whore who would piss on a john, Towne noted to himself, but would never shit on his chest.
Gittes had an enormous supply of charm, “almost rude quantities of charm,” Towne wrote, and he knew his business and he knew his city but didn’t know the first thing about grace. His years on the job had conditioned him to suspect the worst in people and, Towne noted, he was never proved wrong: “It was a great show, the city of angels. You could whoop and holler and have a hell of a time as long as you remembered that you were just a spectator.” There were limits.
Those limits, Towne thought.
The limits of agency, of justice.
He thought back to Tony Silas, the vice cop who brought him his dog. His limit was Chinatown:
“What do you do there?”
“Nothing.”