Secretly Towne and Taylor had been meeting like this for years. On The Last Detail, “Edward was in the room with Robert every day, seven days a week for five weeks,” Julie Payne said, and whenever Towne pulled the latest draft of Shampoo from its drawer, she added, “Eddie would be there, working with Robert. He was a fixture in the house.” Before that, Towne consulted Taylor, his daughter Sarah Naia Stier recalled, on his Godfather additions, and as far back as the midsixties, on Towne’s television writing for The Outer Limits. To Julie, Towne referred to Taylor as “my editor,” but rarely spoke of his existence to anyone in Hollywood.
As in any partnership, the attribution of creative input remains an inexact science, the postscript of cyclical rounds of thought all parties involved can claim a part in; and considering that most creative partnerships, like Hecht and Lederer’s, are properly credited on screen, there is rarely any need to investigate the question of authorship. It is openly shared. But in the case of Edward Taylor, whose intimate and ongoing involvement in the conceptualization and production of Towne’s screenplays, whose cache of Chinatown notes—stacks of legal pads filled with Taylor’s original scenes, plans for restructuring subsequent drafts, long swaths of dialogue, character sketches, synopses of projected material, and more—and whose in-person and on-phone discussions with Towne on a sometimes daily basis reveal him to be a generative intelligence, invited not merely to respond to the work as an editor would, but to participate in the creation and evolution of a script moment by moment from the project’s inception, reveal Taylor’s influence to be no different from that of any other cocreator—save for one thing: Towne held the veto power. But considering that he and Taylor collaborated (Taylor would say, protectively, “on Robert’s scripts”) for more than forty years, Towne must have said yes to Taylor’s input at least half as much as he said no.
“To say Edward Taylor was Robert’s ‘editor’ was an understatement,” said Mike Koepf, who knew Taylor well and shared credit with him on several screenplays. “They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. [Taylor] didn’t take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you’d have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he’d pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed.”
“They would discuss down to the most minute details, down to the words being used,” recalled their mutual friend and sometime producer Lauren Weissman.
Taylor would propose to a subsequent collaborator that they should work together as Towne and Taylor had, with Taylor making “suggestions, not changes. You can then either accept them,” Taylor wrote to this collaborator, “reject them or incorporate them in some altered form. I’ve been doing that with Robert for years. I don’t get upset if he rejects a suggestion. I don’t even get upset if he accepts a suggestion and then forgets that I was the one who made it.”
“It was a given that Edward wrote the movie with Robert,” said Taylor’s stepdaughter, Katherine Andrusco. “Whatever Robert was working on, Edward was working on. Every day.”
“Robert never wrote on his own,” Payne said, “he never paid Eddie enough, and Eddie never asked for more.”
Many in Taylor’s family were at a loss to understand the terms of his arrangement with Towne, how Taylor could so comfortably consent to anonymity and what the precise nature of his contributions were. When pressed for details, Taylor himself was vague to the point of contradiction. To some, Edward confided he had written full scenes in Towne’s scripts; to others, he said he had only given suggestions. Sometimes Taylor insisted that working with Robert was a blessing; it had given him the means to write without having to interface with the business he hated; sometimes he protested he had no taste for glory and simply wanted to earn his keep, go home, and read; sometimes he complained he wanted to leave L.A. and get away from Robert for good. “So many times I would ask Edward about it,” Lauren Weissman said, “and he would never define it. He was a gentleman to the core.”
“Do you write dialogue?” his daughter, Sarah, asked.
“Robert writes the dialogue. I help with structure.”
“What are you doing?” Andrusco asked her stepfather. “You can’t not get credit. It’s not fair and it’s not accurate.”
“That’s not important. What’s important is my friendship with Robert.”
Taylor’s genuine equanimity led his friends and family to wonder who, or what, he may have been protecting, and why. Taylor’s widow, Virginia Kennerley, wrote that she “did brood for some time on what shameful secret there could be that accounted for Robert’s remarkable and apparently unconditional, almost Svengali-like, hold on Ed.” To Kennerley, Taylor always insisted that Robert “saved my life a couple of times,” but was Edward thinking of the occasion when his appendix burst and Robert rushed him to the hospital? Perhaps he was thinking of some kind of emotional rescue, an occasion when Robert showed himself to be a true and singular friend? There was the case of Taylor’s ex-lover Veigh McElhatton, a schoolteacher still obsessively in love with him. She had sat around Hutton Drive every day during the writing of The Last Detail, “like a lump,” Payne recalled, “horribly, horribly depressed.” She had sprawling red hair, the creamiest white skin, and readily announced: If Edward wouldn’t have her back, she would kill herself. A psychiatrist assured Taylor that she was in no real danger, but when Taylor came home one day he found she had hanged herself in his closet. “And of course the police called him in for questioning,” Kennerley recalled. “Robert was of the opinion that [Taylor] never really got over it, or so Ed told me.” Towne saw his friend through this and other traumas, but would such kindnesses, Kennerley wondered, account for Taylor’s unwavering, even self-denying allegiance? Was it an abortion Towne had arranged, years earlier, for another of Taylor’s lovers? “Robert and Eddie enabled each other,” Andrusco surmised. “They had fun, and they had secrets. And they’d known each other so long, they could be young together forever.”
Taylor and Towne had been roommates at Pomona College. They shared a love of theater, literature, and philosophy and played in student productions of The Crucible and, according to their friend, actor Nicolas Coster, were, from the very beginning, mutually fascinated with the other’s ability. “Edward, freely and without reservation, loved great talent,” Coster said, “and Robert loved the great minds. It was a singularly deep love, those two.” Their professional association began academically, in the form of term papers Towne passed through Taylor’s brain. “Robert always liked people who were reasonably bright to edit his work, even as a college undergraduate,” Coster said, “and Edward, with all his brilliance, was never patronizing.” Even then Taylor was, according to Coster, “stunningly necessary” to Towne.