“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Well, that’s pretty much what we’re told to do in Chinatown, is nothing. Because with the different tongs, the language and everything else, we can’t tell whether we’re helping somebody commit a crime or prevent one.…”
Gittes would be lost in Chinatown, Towne decided. There are only two rules, two limits, he has: “Look out for your client and don’t get tough”—Towne crossed out “tough” and wrote “lost in Chinatown.”
He wrote: “The dream that died. The whole country had failed to put out. Why should L.A. be any different. End of a dream—”
Something must have happened to Gittes in Chinatown, something horrible. What was it?
Don’t Get Lost in Chinatown. Was that a title? On April 19 Towne added a few others to the list: Lost in the Sun, Deal Me Out, Last Chance, Jake’s Limit—the last three told of the gambler in Gittes.
Was Towne a gambler?
“Today his idea of gambling is gin at twenty-five cents a point,” Towne began one outline. “Now that can add up, but thirty-five years ago when he had less to lose, Jake Gittes gambled for a lot more.”
On June 21 he dreamed up a cast. “Gittes,” Nicholson. Instead of Howland, “Julian Cross,” George C. Scott. His older daughter, now “Anita Cross,” Jane Fonda.
Towne changed “Anita” to “Katherine.” For her married name Towne chose the name “Mulwray.” He liked the sound. Katherine Mulwray. It had languor and romance. And Howland had become Julian Cross. J.C. (“He must be a Christ-like figure,” Towne noted, to hide the truth of Cross’s evil.) That left her daughter, formerly known as Marian Wells. “Someone is going to want to exploit Marian Wells,” Towne scribbled on a yellow pad. “Owens Valley farmers, or their relatives. Marian Wells has got to be a key figure in the whole attempt to hush it up.”
Towne noted: “Gittes must come up against a conspiracy of sorts.”
“Create the impression that corruption is everywhere,” he scribbled. “‘What’s the point?’” some character might say, “‘You guys spend half your time convicting each other.’”
On June 28 Towne noted: “Water must be a factor—either a dam or an aqueduct—getting water to an area and speculating on the land.” They’re emptying the reservoirs at night to force a bond issue worth millions. Whoever finds out would be in serious danger. Is it Marian Wells?
Maybe not. “Perhaps the action takes place in the heat of summer—a drought—no water in the goddam city. A continuing annoyance as they go about the case.
“The water commissioner found dead in the harbor—man was looking for water anywhere he could find it.
“How to tie in Marian with the water supply—
“There’s a drought & tempers are short.… Marian Wells must provide the key.
“She’s the illegitimate daughter of the architect of the plan.”
To himself Towne wrote, “My interest is in the kinds of crimes that society punishes—[the mother] will be punished, even crooked cops, but the business community will enjoy freedom from persecution.”
“Julian Cross, The Sun King,” Towne added to another pad.
The Sun King. Was it a title? The Third Coming? The Julian Spoils?
“If Marian is his illegitimate daughter,” he wrote down. “He sleeps with her & it drives him—”
Then: “Julian Cross is an eminent criminal.”
He’s sinned against the city. He steals the water. And going by McWilliams’s account of the Owens Valley scandal, the land speculators forced a drought. It was perverse. They destroyed their own land.
So would Julian Cross be perverse—twice. He rapes his land, and he rapes his child.
Then: “Katherine—must be upset about it. What if it’s her sister, & she knows it.”
She knows she’s Marian’s sister and her daughter.
Katherine, Cross’s daughter, is protecting their child.
But what happens in the end? Does Katherine succeed in protecting her child? Does any mother?
Did his?
* * *
Helen and Lou Towne lived at 450 South Bristol Drive at the corner of Bristol and San Vicente in Brentwood, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Most days he took his lunch at the country club across San Vicente; she played cards and tended the dogs. An acknowledged beauty, Helen dressed in a prepossessing manner befitting her class, and Lou, since coming up in the world, in the finest handmade shirts and sweetest cologne. Lou—a big man in size and stature, a John Huston type—had made his money with Towne Homes, subdividing Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, and though he had finally arrived, his striving for rank persisted. He was, some said, obsessed with notoriety, his and others’. His sons, Robert and Roger, screenwriters both, had not made names for themselves, and Julie, despite her Hollywood pedigree, had no fame—that wasn’t good enough for Lou. Determined to surround himself with the “right people,” he furnished his billfold and on one occasion palmed a reduced Joe Louis to appear at his housewarming party on Bristol Drive.
Lou and Helen’s home, Julie couldn’t ignore, was eerily free of books. But what for another couple might have been a gaffe of decor was for the parents of not one but two writers a telling omission. “They had no sense of Robert’s work,” Payne said, “and almost no curiosity about his passion.” They even went so far as to encourage him to see a therapist, Dr. Martin Grotjahn, to summarily address the problem. Towne wrote, “A writer was either a playwright, a poet, or a novelist—a screenwriter was a pimp.” The criticism went both ways. “Robert always [implied] his father was a crooked developer,” Payne recalled, and was at one time a bagman for L.A. mayor Sam Yorty. Preoccupied with winning, Lou on more than one occasion attempted to wrest control of Towne and Payne’s personal investments. He was so relentlessly intrusive and, at times, so brazenly nasty, that Towne and Payne’s actual financial manager was compelled to remark, “Lou Towne? Too mean to die.” Dr. Grotjahn gifted Towne a copy of his book, Psychoanalysis and the Family Neurosis.
When Robert was a child his mother wrote poetry, he remembered, and read to him at night, but Bristol Drive was every inch his father’s home, and Helen in every respect his father’s wife. She had to ask his permission to buy herself a dress. “Lou Towne’s outlook on women,” Payne recalled, “was more appalling than anyone I ever met in Hollywood. He was emotionally sadistic to Helen.” She was constantly apologizing for his drinking, “a bottle of vodka,” Payne said, “before nine every morning.” By lunch he was flattened. He would drink out the day in his segregated club, making passes, bullying waiters. Then he would pass out in the afternoon—a “nap,” it was called.
Lou openly conducted an affair with his secretary and boasted to Robert about cheating on his mother. It was said he once slept with a Vegas hooker and the same night came home and slept with his wife. “He gave her guilt jewelry,” Payne observed, and Helen would demurely insist that everything was “fine.” She had a girlish giggle and apparently no memory.