On her way into the swimming pool one afternoon, Barrie heard her mother scream and halted. “Don’t! Don’t go in the water!” The underwater light had been torn out, exposing the electrical current.
On another occasion, as mother and daughter were driving from the house, the brakes went out.
One of the last times Chase spoke to her father he told her they were paranoid. No one was trying to murder anyone. “It’s your mother who’s doing this,” he said.
Barrie Chase, Towne, and Eddie Taylor were in the converted garage, going over the details of the scandal, one evening in 1957. “Eddie and Robert wouldn’t let it go,” Chase said. Confused and fascinated, they had her explain it over and over, the relationships, the sequence of events, the threats:
“She was your stepsister?”
“My half sister.”
“Your mother’s daughter?”
“Yes. But I always referred to her as my sister.”
“How old was she when—?”
“Twenty-four.”
“And how old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“How did she find them, your mother?”
“Detectives. A raid.”
“On her own daughter.… With her husband—”
“Then she found out my sister was pregnant.”
That stopped them.
“Pregnant? By your father?”
Chase nodded.
“Would that make you … the baby’s sister?”
“Or the aunt?”
“Sister,” Towne said. “I think…”
“No,” Taylor countered. “Aunt…”
“Sister.”
“Aunt.”
They took off.
“Sister!”
“Aunt!”
“Sister!”
“Aunt!”
“She’s her sister and her aunt!”
There was maybe something there. But would a woman as coolly withdrawn as Evelyn Mulwray just come out and say it?
* * *
Arguments persisted on all fronts for another two months. “Robert was absolutely resistant to changing anything,” Julie Payne said. Polanski had to fight to subdue, if not eliminate entirely, the disquisitions into Los Angeles politics that were personally and politically crucial to Towne. He was demanding universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics. “Initially,” Towne said, “I was more specific about the story in Chinatown. I wanted what had happened to [Gittes] to be ridiculous—a humiliation—and instead Roman wanted to emphasize the tragedy, but he didn’t want to be specific about it.” But the more detail Towne revealed about Gittes’s first tragedy in Chinatown, Polanski argued, the farther they would stray from metaphor and the harder it would be to emphasize the cyclical nature of Gittes’s tragedy—and it had to be a tragedy, total tragedy. Polanski was still adamant about that. “My own feeling,” Towne said, “is if a scene is relentlessly bleak … it isn’t as powerful as it can be if there’s a little light there to underscore the bleakness. If you show something decent happening, it makes what’s bad almost worse.… In a melodrama, where there are confrontations between good and evil—if the evil is too triumphant, it destroys your ability to identify with it rather than if its victory is only qualified.”
This was not the way the world worked, Polanski maintained. “You have to show violence the way it is,” he said. “If you don’t show it realistically, then that’s immoral and harmful. If you don’t upset people, then that’s obscenity.” Catastrophe happens, Roman would argue. That’s life.
Towne, a romantic, advocated somewhere, for hope. It did exist.
Always? “I suspect that more people are just a mixture of good and bad,” Polanski reasoned. “But then occasionally a serial killer comes along.” He had a dark wealth of personal evidence to support his position, but arguing for unmitigated tragedy, he never invoked for Towne his memories of Warsaw or drifting the blood-scratched rooms of Cielo Drive, let alone the war in Vietnam or other devastations from recent history. In that office by the pool, Polanski never resorted to lecture on man’s apparent delight in war, though he could have. Rather he based his position, privately, on a conviction he found in a memory, a happy one at that:
It was after the war.
He was a boy, no more than fourteen or fifteen.
He went to the movies. It was Of Mice and Men. Leaving the theater, Kraków’s Kino Warszawa, Polanski couldn’t leave the memory of Lenny’s death. Replaying the ending in his mind, he wished, as everyone did, that Lenny could have lived. But, perhaps alone among those leaving the theater that day, it occurred to Polanski that it was unlikely he’d still be thinking about the ending, or that he’d retain the experience at all, if it hadn’t hurt as it had: “… A field,” George had promised Lenny, “of alfalfa.”
Bang!
What made him remember, years later, the film with love was the tragedy.
* * *
Julie Payne, who, as a girl, had been left alone with only books for comfort, went to see a doctor about the eye she had been worried about since she was a child—the same dark spot her mother, brushing Julie aside, had once decreed a beauty mark. The doctor, an eye specialist, told her it was a freckle. His colleague took another look. It was a tumor. “But don’t worry,” he said. It was benign. “You were born with it.” A flaw in the iris.
* * *
Two months after Towne and Polanski first began their revision, their arguments had reached unsustainable heights; they stopped speaking. Evans tried to referee, but the game was over. “I would never work with Roman again,” Towne explained, “nor he with me.”
Polanski had erased Towne’s elegy for Los Angeles. The very character of the city, lovingly rendered in place-names and native personalities and detailed changes in light and ambience, had been razed for an unbeautiful, blackly anonymous setting prostrated by menace and depravity. Towne complained to Evans, but Evans, a producer with a picture to make, had to press forward. Resigned to the natural course of production, Towne understood: There was nothing he could do. Chinatown was Roman Polanski’s now.
PART THREE
The Mountain
Ali didn’t even stop to take her clothes off. Emerging from the living room, she took one look at the pool, set among the gardenias and daisies and red and yellow rosebushes of Woodland, and dived in. She dived like she owned the place, like she had known Evans for years, and they had already courted and married and had a son, Joshua, instead of having just met ten minutes before, when he picked her up down the street, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When she surfaced, smiling his way before diving down again, her eyes did not show the cunning of a beauty greedy for reactions—Evans was fluent in actresses—but satiation, peace. She loved it here. Woodland—Evans’s home, and for a time, hers—was paradise.
Evans and Ali MacGraw divorced four years later, but Woodland’s fountains still arched into the pool, the moon still rose over the projection room, and Evans, a ripping pain from sciatica down his back, still watched from his bed, her ghost diving in, smiling, diving back down. He regarded that night and all their nights to follow with the unforgiving eyes he turned on a film flailing in postproduction, blaming himself for the dream he had in hand but couldn’t hold. There were so many things he should have done, but now there was nothing he could do. It was over. She had gone off with Steve McQueen.