They worked ten hours a day, Towne said, “posting [pages] on the door of the room and kept moving around the little slips figuring, you know, one way or another it would work. It was a little like monkeys on a typewriter.”
It got tense. Nicholson swooped in for dinner and brought a TV into the office to lighten the mood. It didn’t work.
Towne, turning away from the fight, would look to the window in time to see girls promenade down to the lip of Polanski’s waterfall and plop prettily into the pool.
They would fight over individual words. Polanski simply would not relent. “People can go crazy sitting with me,” he said, “because I like eliminating every unnecessary word.”
“Bob,” Polanski asked after one dispute, “do you think I’m a schmuck?”
“No,” Towne returned, “You’re a terrific .400 hitter, which means that I think you’re right less than half the time.”
As much as it provoked Towne, Polanski’s stubbornness—or determination—also moved him. The director’s vigor was partly utilitarian—“I have no time to think,” he said, “to conceive and to analyze during the period of shooting. So I have to be sure that I can rely on what is written, and if I just film it the way I anticipated, I won’t go wrong”—but as a man who had survived too much, the force of will he demonstrated in the office conveyed something of the “resilience,” Towne observed, “[that] was rooted in personal history.” For Polanski, an obsessive arguer, there was more than philosophical clarity on the far side of a debate; trouncing his interlocutor offered him a sportsman’s rush and a quick surge of mastery. “Winning an argument,” Susanna Moore said, “he would smile to himself,” and why not? The world was chaos. He had long ago given up on God and the Devil, “divine justice, or any kind of plan in existence. We are born, it means nothing, we die.” Cogent argument lent the nothingness shape, fleetingly.
After the murders the psychiatrist had warned him he would likely suffer four years of disabling grief. Then the pain would deaden and he would begin to function normally again. But the four years had passed, leaving Polanski to wonder at how an expert could be so wrong, and if he, uniquely scourged, was an aberrant case, stained forever.
By night he drew in waves of old friends—Robert Evans, Dick and Anthea Sylbert, Warren Beatty, Nicholson and his new girlfriend, Anjelica Huston—“the whole crowd,” said Polanski’s friend, the actress Nandu Hinds. “Those parties were a mob. Warren would be in the corner in the kitchen hiding from all these women, all these groupies, strange young girls that would come in and out and want to be part of the scene. I don’t know who brought them or how they got there, but they always seemed to be there. They may have been fifteen years old but they looked older. There was drugs and sex of course, but nobody, no one, was hurting anyone. It was innocent.” Friends would lie about the pool table and spill into Polanski’s upstairs bedroom, pile together on the bed and giggle at porno flicks. “Roman loved people,” Hinds said. “He was civilized and had a tremendous curiosity that more people should have. He’d look at people and analyze them always with a cute little wicked smile on his face.” Polanski, for the first time, almost felt glad to be back in Los Angeles. “Once I was there,” he said, “I began living again: parties, friends, girls.…” Towne said, “I don’t think there was a day that we worked that we didn’t go out and play at night. The mood at night was—it was the 1970s. We had a good time.”
The spirit of communal enthusiasm at Polanski’s home on Sierra Mar nourished a half dozen significant movies. At the top of their fields, all were working, and were scheduled to work, on projects they loved—movies that, if they weren’t charged with political fervor, were playfully nostalgic for the genres they, as young moviegoers, had fallen headlong in love with: Nicholson, after Chinatown, would costar with his friend Beatty in their friend Mike Nichols’s film The Fortune, written by Jack’s friend from Jeff Corey’s class, Carole Eastman. Then the Sylberts would join their friends Beatty and Towne’s long-gestating production of Shampoo, directed by Hal Ashby, Towne and Nicholson’s friend from The Last Detail. “This little group,” Anthea Sylbert said. “We were working on each other’s movies even when we weren’t working on each other’s movies.” Where loyalties flourished, competition had no purchase.
Evans—making a rare appearance away from work—confessed that he still didn’t get Chinatown, but frankly he wasn’t worried. He was betting on talent, his friends, the surest bets in Hollywood. Others, however, were less sure of the movie’s prospects. “Nobody I spoke with,” Hinds said, “thought it would be any good.”
“No one understands this script,” Evans was reminded at one party.
“What’s to understand? I got Irish, the Polack, and the greatest scribe in town. And the period,” he added. “Los Angeles in 1937. You know what that is? That’s a classic. That’s romance.”
Privately Evans had his doubts. “Evans knew Towne’s father had tried his hand at being a developer,” Peter Bart observed, “and felt his writing might entail working out some familial neuroses that were clouding the plot.”
In the poolside office, the “working out” was not taking place. Polanski and Towne slogged through what was left of the story, suffering the other’s excesses.
Edward Taylor, his existence unknown to Polanski (and, for that matter, Robert Evans), stayed away.
Polanski would shout. Solutions readily in mind, he rushed Towne to come around; Towne, for his part, procrastinated, deliberated, showed up late, took phone calls. Polanski lost his temper. Towne lost his temper back. “He put up more resistance in those meetings than the Maquis put up against the Germans in the Auvergne,” Dick Sylbert recalled.
Polanski asked his writer: How could a movie called Chinatown not have a scene set in Chinatown?
Chinatown is a state of mind.
You can’t set a scene in a state of mind.
I agree. Then we won’t.
Then we shouldn’t call it Chinatown.
(Dick Sylbert, paying a visit, suggested a compromise: One of the characters should like Chinese food.)
Depleted of patience, strength, conviction, Towne would nod absently and rise from his chair. “I’ve got to go home and take Hira for a walk now.”
One problem they were dealing with: Gittes’s discovery that Evelyn’s daughter is hers by incest lacked the consequence expected of such a climactic moment. The news was simply delivered to Gittes by Escobar (“Do I have to spell it out for you? Maria is Cross’s daughter”) and didn’t include Evelyn. Wouldn’t it be better for her to be a part of the revelation? “Robert tried many ways and were always speeches that smacked of explanation,” Polanski said. Nothing worked.
There was Towne’s old girlfriend, lost to Sweden, Barrie Chase.
“Why don’t you speak to your father?” Towne had asked her twenty years earlier.
One day she had told him. In 1949 Chase’s mother discovered him in bed, “entirely naked,” she said, with her twenty-four-year-old daughter, his stepdaughter. Wire recordings would reveal that Mr. Chase, sleeping with a .45, intended to kill his wife. Fearing for her life, Mrs. Chase made the scandal public, sought a permit to carry her own gun and have her husband’s permit revoked. “If I stand without a gun and he has one, I am dead,” she told the press.