“They called all Jews … we were standing there … suddenly trucks arrived and they started loading children on those trucks. As this was happening, most were parents of those children, they started swaying and waving and moaning and screaming and crying and falling on the ground and tearing the mud from the ground … and the Germans were playing this song.”
Oh, my Papa, to me he was so wonderful,
Deep in my heart I miss him so today.
Gone are the days when he would take me on his knee
And with a smile he’d change my tears to laughter.
Polanski would try to console him. “This can never happen again.”
“Wait fifty years. You’ll see.”
* * *
In England, Polanski made a film of Macbeth.
On the morning of the murder of Lady Macduff’s children, Polanski took one of the children aside and tenderly explained to her the particulars of the scene, where the screams would come, where she would be found dead, and how the blood he was painting on her face was only red paint, makeup, pretend.
“What’s your name?” he asked, touching red onto her lips.
“Sharon.”
* * *
Polanski and Terence Bayler, in the part of Macduff, rehearsed the scene in which Macduff learns of the murders:
Ross: Your castle is surpris’d’: your wife and babes, savagely slaughter’d.
Macduff: Merciful heaven!… My children, too?
Ross: Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.
Macduff: And I must be from thence! My wife kill’d too?… All my pretty ones? Did you say all?
When Bayler differed with Polanski over how exactly to play this scene, they squabbled and Polanski exploded, “No, you’ll do it this way. I know.”
He dammed himself through exercise, working his body tighter against weakness. He built around his mind a wall of brittle knowledge, recalcitrant counterarguments, and cutting ripostes, and when journalists, invaders, came to the gates, he was ready with his responses, most of them antipsychoanalytical one-liners, to fight off the inevitable onslaught of inquiries into his past, the war, the dead mother, the dead wife and child, how they darkened his films. Why did he refuse to be analyzed? It would impede the creative process, he claimed. How to explain his obsession with violence? “The human is a violent animal.” How had he managed to survive? This one was often laced with silent censure: How dare you survive? Why wasn’t he still grieving? How could he be seen with other women? (Why were they so young?) Did he love them? No, he admitted. He couldn’t love anyone. “I doubt if I shall ever again be able to live on a permanent basis with any woman,” he confessed, “no matter how bright, easygoing, good-natured, or attuned to my moods. My attempts to do so have always failed, not least because I start drawing comparisons with Sharon.”
He would not be treated as a science experiment or submit to anyone’s theory of his mind. Theories were easy; the truth was that he was not equivalent to his tragedies but as variable as everyone else, if not more so. Polanski’s mind came amplified by a creative muse so vivid that audiences unable to conceive the power of imagination had taken his films for his reality. Otherwise, why would they hate him so? Perhaps it was safer for them to try to contain the world’s evil by attributing it to a single source—him, a witch in Salem—than allow for what he had learned too well: that chance is infinitely absurd and there is nothing we, with our little lightning-rod theories, can do to tarry the thunderbolts. After all, even sitting here at some stage may be dangerous.
“Shove off.”
Though he was one of the most famous directors in the world, Polanski was then far from the world’s most employable. In the aftermath of the murders, Hollywood kept its distance—“Roman was down for the count,” Nicholson said—and whatever their merits, Macbeth and Polanski’s follow-up, What?, further taxed his commercial and artistic appeal. The Playboy logo that introduced Macbeth (Hugh Hefner was a producer) drew laughs; the movie ran long; and its hyperviolence, some felt, detracted. And then there was What?—a raucous, absurdist sex comedy—whose very title was a blank check to critics.
Polanski needed a job, he needed a hit, but when the subject was broached in Los Angeles, it surfaced he was no one’s first choice to direct Chinatown. “Robert and I couldn’t understand how you could have somebody who was from Poland,” Payne said, “who was a refugee, make a movie about California.” But they had already tried for and lost Arthur Penn, “who didn’t know what he was reading,” Payne said, as well as Beatty, who, typically ambivalent, first showed interest, then joked it off. It was the Weaver who came to Polanski’s rescue. He called his pal in Rome: He had just finished shooting The Last Detail, which Columbia, held to the fire by Nicholson, had at last sanctioned—with a script by Robert Towne, who had just written a new script for Robert Evans at Paramount. Would Roman have a read? They wanted him to direct.
No, Roman replied. He wouldn’t go back to L.A. No.
So Robert Evans called him. “The script’s a fuckin’ mess, Roman. I need you here yesterday.”
“I’ve got to go to Poland, Bob, for Passover.”
“Fuck Passover, Roman. If you don’t get here, we’re never going to get into shape. I’ll have Passover at my house.”
Again Polanski declined. He wasn’t going back. So Evans sent the script to Rome.
* * *
Polanski had always wanted to make a detective film; it was a genre steeped in the Hollywood he had grown up with. “Anyone who loves the cinema,” he said, “wants to make each of the genres.” He had read Chandler in Polish and loved Huston’s film of The Maltese Falcon; there would be something magical in making a detective film for Paramount, like going home. Polanski had a particular fondness for Paramount’s detective pictures, namely The Glass Key and This Gun for Hire, films rich in his sort of fearful atmosphere. He also felt, for Paramount, a supple sense of gemütlichkeit. As far back as the silent period, the studio had been famously and uncommonly welcoming to European filmmakers, a trend that lasted well into the postwar era. A haven within the larger haven of Hollywood, Paramount was home to directors Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Rouben Mamoulian, and Billy Wilder, offering, uniquely, the same degree of artistic freedom that had nurtured them in Europe. “In almost direct opposition to MGM or Warners,” writes film historian Thomas Schatz, “where the higher the stakes the more likely the studio boss and production chief were to be involved, at Paramount the high-cost, high-risk pictures involved the least amount of executive control or front-office interference. Thus Paramount was something of a ‘director’s studio’ where its prestige productions were concerned, and there was much less continuity in terms of style or market appeal between its top features and routine releases.” There would be something right about going back to Paramount, back to work for Evans.
And there was the money—Polanski anticipated a much-needed mainstream success with a detective picture—and there was the love. After the murders, where others abandoned him, Evans and Nicholson showed undying loyalty to Polanski, the branded outcast. They would surely cushion the horror of returning to Los Angeles. There would be safety in Dick Sylbert, Anthea Sylbert, Howard Koch Jr., and Sam O’Steen, leaders of his intrepid Rosemary’s band. And there was Warren.