In satin shoes and cravat, cocaine doffed its hat and stepped into Hollywood, and promised, for a moment (and then another), a fraudulent dream in the heat of a cold sun. Among its first casualties was the one who had called Polanski that night in London, the first to identify Sharon’s body, Polanski’s agent at Ziegler, Bill Tennant. Without even emptying his desk drawers, Tennant had simply walked out of his office, walked out on his wife, Sandy, and driven off, whereabouts unknown. It was devastating, to Polanski, to Tennant’s clients, to the agency he left behind. “It broke Zieg’s heart,” Julie Payne said. “He was grooming Bill to be his successor.”
Up on Mulholland, Nicholson welcomed Polanski, into his home. The place was pure Jack. Shelved with Sartre and Wilhelm Reich and Kerouac, his gods of death and sex and free living, ringed with artworks famous and unknown, and a killer view of the city, the house carried Nicholson’s Beat loyalties into the seventies, and said that chez Jack, the proverbial fridge was always full and the good times were on the house. On the coffee table there was a bowl of cash to take from—to remind his many friends and lovers that he was still, despite his earnings, very much the Weaver of Pupi’s. There was also an opulent cocaine pyramid, pointing skyward in a help-yourself bowl in the foyer. For Polanski, this was a welcome change from the Lotus Apartments. At Nicholson’s, the ghosts were slower to find him. But when night came and the living room dimmed, city lights stalked the windows, and the mood moved down and away, to Sharon and to Chinatown. Polanski saw why he had come back: It was because he had never left.
From Mulholland, Robert Evans drove Polanski to see “a sexy house,” white as powder, on Sierra Mar. Perched high above the city at the mountain fringe—“there’s no more beautiful city in the world,” Polanski said, “provided it’s seen by night and from a distance”—its pool seemed to spill into the city Polanski regarded as a forgone joy, and its garden waterfall, when the house windows opened, could be heard from the downstairs office. There Polanski and Towne could work just steps from the pool. How appropriate that the house’s owner, George Montgomery, had played Philip Marlowe in The Brasher Doubloon and that the house itself, a courtly Spanish sprawl, could have starred alongside him. Polanski rented it.
In an awkward jest, he presented Towne a book on the basics of screenwriting and inscribed it: “To my partner, with hope.”
* * *
The heat was tremendous that summer of 1973.
Every day, beginning at eight in the morning, Towne would come to the little poolside office on Sierra Mar, his dog, Hira, in tow. Ventilation was scant, but Towne kept lighting cigars. Irritated and uncomfortable, Polanski hated the smell of tobacco and the giant hairy dog that made itself a bed on his feet. For three days he endured. Little was accomplished.
Procrastination.
Chitchat.
Silent resentments.
“That’s enough of that dog!” Polanski announced after another distracted day. Hira never came back.
But without the dog, they were out of excuses.
* * *
Rather than force Chinatown’s existing pieces together, the thing to do, they agreed, was to clear the table of all preconceptions and rebuild the story from scratch. That way they would see what was absolutely essential. The rest they would scrap.
They began by one-lining the script, writing single-sentence descriptions of foundational story points at the top of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch pages and posting them, in order, on the back of the office door. This alone was an undertaking. Not only was the pursuit of narrative economy intellectually taxing, but condensing the story forced Towne, at every turn, to sacrifice creative darlings he had nurtured for years. Removing them from his script at this point would be removing parts of himself.
Was that what Polanski was trying to do? Make Chinatown his? Well, yes. It was pointless to argue the line between ego and art, but at the same time, it would be impossible, with so much invested—two careers, two memories, two passionate visions of reality—to keep personal and aesthetic needs perfectly segregated. Mutual insult was inevitable. As the writer, Towne had to dream out a script; as the director, Polanski had to wake him up. It didn’t matter how Towne felt or what a scene meant to him; the best revision would care nothing for his heart’s Chinatown, for all the thistle and eucalyptus he had once forgotten and written to reclaim. Those days were over—again.
So goodbye to his endless supporting characters, goodbye to the love story of Byron Samples and Ida Samples; goodbye to Evelyn’s affair with a mystery man and Gittes’s looming jealousy, “which I felt would have been more interesting,” Towne said; goodbye to Gittes’s and Evelyn’s protracted and suspicious courtship, her violent outbursts, his many faraway mentions of Chinatown; goodbye to Julian Cross’s drug addiction; Julie’s favorite scene, containing Cross’s eerie aria to the sweet smell of horseshit; goodbye to the betrayal of Gittes by his partners, Duffy and Walsh, and his extended consultation with his lawyer, Bressler; goodbye to Escobar’s jagged history with the Cross family; goodbye to Gittes’s passion, Towne’s passion really, for Seabiscuit, intended to contain Gittes’s uptown ambitions; goodbye to Chinatown’s multiple points of view: “You [should] never show things that happen in [Gittes’s] absence,” Polanski said; goodbye to the slowly encroaching paranoia, the hurricane of subplots that swirled around Gittes; goodbye to everything that wasn’t water. Everything, Polanski decreed, had to move the water mystery forward; if they could cut it, they should cut it. But when it came to certain elements—namely, the love story (Towne wanted more scenes; Polanski, certain a good sex scene would suffice, fewer) and of course the ending—Towne and Polanski had two opposing definitions of “could.” They fought. Their arguments were painful. Each was smart enough to see the virtues in the other’s strategy; both were correct. Polanski explained he wanted Gittes and Evelyn to have satisfying sex because “it changes the rapport between them for the second part of the picture. Something serious starts between them.” But, Towne countered, if she represents Chinatown, she can’t satisfy Gittes. She’s unknowable, impossible, a mystery.
Instead Towne had written a scene that brings them close—“There’s something black in the green part of your eye,” Gittes says; “Oh that … it’s a flaw in the iris”—but the scene following shows them after their clearly unfulfilling sexual encounter. “I hope it’s something I said,” Gittes says. Polanski’s urge was to gratify Evelyn, Towne pathologized; it helped him to argue his case: “I think perhaps, [Polanski] preferred identifying with the character when the woman praised him for making love well,” he said. But if they don’t have meaningful sex, Polanski returned, how could their relationship matter that much to Gittes, and therefore, to the audience? Good sex, which portends love, would give Gittes more to lose, a line of reasoning that reinforced Polanski’s vision of a darker ending. And here Polanski used the same argument on Towne that Towne had leveled against Polanski’s proposed rewrite of the sex scene: How Chinatown would Chinatown be if it ended, as Towne had written it, with Evelyn killing her father and their daughter escaping? It would be Chinatown enough, Towne maintained, to end, pulling back onto a wide shot of Los Angeles, to show the legacy of the water scandal corrupting the city into the present day. Having spent three years on these questions, he was indeed the expert, and having failed many times over, he knew what did and didn’t work, but Polanski, the newcomer, was an expert audience, coolly objective to Towne’s heated subjectivity; and each, armed with a mastery of story sense, could argue his case so compellingly that the glut of good sense led both writers astray.