Demanding the same right to produce as Evans had, Yablans even insisted that Bluhdorn give him a percentage of Chinatown. When Bluhdorn, the peacemaker, consented, Yablans called Evans to renege. Taking his name off the picture, Yablans said, was the right thing to do—a ploy, Evans thought, to get him to do the same. “Are you out of your mind?” Evans returned. “I’m not taking my name off this picture. I’m gonna be a producer. I’m gonna produce this movie.”
Retaliating, Yablans backed John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust, a 1930s Los Angeles–set production, shot at the same time at the same studio as Chinatown, that he hoped would give Evans’s film a run for its money. Literally moments after Yablans attached first assistant director Howard Koch Jr. to battle-plan his intricate production, Koch, bounding through Paramount’s Canon office, heard Evans call his name from down the hall. “Howard! Get in here!” Inside Koch discovered Evans and Polanski, weary from rewriting with Towne, sitting on Evans’s couch. They had all worked together, happily, on Rosemary’s Baby. “Howard,” Evans continued, “I’m taking you off Locust and putting you on Chinatown. I want you on my picture.” The round went to Evans.
When Yablans learned that Time magazine was planning a cover story on Evans, he demanded that Evans convince Time to share the cover with him: “If you don’t deliver the cover,” Yablans insisted, unsuccessfully, “I will make every hour of every day of your life so miserable you’ll wish you were dead.” Evans brushed him aside. He was Paramount’s chosen one, and he had a picture to make.
Jack Nicholson was making late-night calls to Faye Dunaway’s hotel room in Madrid, where she was shooting The Three Musketeers, imploring her to keep her schedule open; he wanted her for Chinatown. She was interested, but she said she needed an offer from the studio first. Assuring her the official offer was imminent, Nicholson kept calling, tantalizing her with choice morsels of Evelyn’s mystery and glamour. Days later the offer still hadn’t come in. And still he kept calling. Keep waiting, he said.
“Jack,” she protested. “Why should I wait for something that might not be real?”
“Dunaway, it’s real, and it’s worth waiting for.”
Back in Hollywood the hustle was on. “Bobbeeeeee”—it was Creative Management Associates’ star agent, Sue Mengers, on the phone with Evans—“I need an offer for Faye by the end of business Friday. Otherwise she’s going to Arthur Penn for Night Moves.”
“I gotta talk to Roman first. Let me get back to you tomorrow.”
It was unquestionably a high bar, but in the six years since Bonnie and Clyde, Dunaway’s breakthrough, she had yet to approach the same level of success. Was it bad luck? She had been underserved in Kazan’s The Arrangement, miscast in Penn’s Little Big Man. Perhaps she was not so easy to cast. In the days of Jane Fonda, Dunaway’s hard and perfect porcelain face, her almost alien beauty, belonged better to Hollywood’s more aestheticized past; she was born (too late) for Sternberg. But Chinatown, being a period film and touching the kind of high style that seventies Hollywood rarely ventured, seemed potentially a good fit.
Evans called Polanski. “We’re gonna lose Faye if we don’t move. What’s going on with Fonda?”
He laughed. “She doesn’t understand the script.”
“Who does?”
The next morning Evans called Mengers. “Bluhdorn wants to go with Jane,” he said, lying. “But you know me. I want Faye.”
“Of course you do, honey.”
“What can I do? It’s Bluhdorn’s money.”
“It’s Robert Evans Productions, isn’t it? Tell the studio to take a flying fuck.”
Evans loved Sue Mengers, “Mengela” he called her—a half Yiddish endearment, half Nazi salute. Though they played on opposite ends of the table—he the buyer, she the seller—their affection for each other and for the game itself superseded the bruises sustained over seven years of high-stakes negotiations.
“Can’t do it.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, honey.”
Evans laughed. He lived for this. “I love you, Mengela.”
A regular presence at Woodland, she loved him too. Though he knew she’d never say so.
“Talk Jack into Faye,” Mengers persisted. “Then tell Bluhdorn Jack wants her. He’ll go for it.”
“Bluhdorn would go for it—for fifty thousand.”
She slammed down the phone and called back later. “Bobbeee, if I tell Faye that number, she’ll drop me and I won’t blame her.”
“Mengela, it’s Faye we’re talking about, okay? She’s not easy.”
“She’s a great actress.”
“Great, but not easy.”
“Bonnie and Clyde—”
“Was seven years ago.… There’s no money in the budget for it. Got it?”
“Got it, prick.”
She slammed down the phone and called back later. “Bobbee?”
“Yes, Mengela.”
“We’ll take it.”
“Could be too late,” Evans purred. “I think we’re moving forward with Fonda.”
“You son of a—”
She slammed down the phone again, and Evans called her the next morning: “Was up all night with Jack and Roman”—it was true. “They’re all worried Faye’s gonna be difficult. But she’s got the part.”
“Deal closed?”
“Closed.”
“Bobbee?”
“Yes, Mengela?”
A giggle. “There was nothing for Faye in Night Moves.”
“Mengela?”
“Yes, Bobbeee?”
“Fonda passed.”
“You son of a bitch!” She was laughing as she hung up.
* * *
That month Evans read the revision of Chinatown with relief. It was shorter, streamlined, and it moved. “There are lots and lots of people and they all know that Roman structured the screenplay,” Julie Payne would say. “Draft one is Robert’s; draft two is Roman’s. But it was not Roman’s way to ask for credit.” Polanski said, “I could have arbitrated [Towne’s credit], of course I could have. I didn’t want to go to that fight with Bob [Towne] and the Writers Guild. Not my style. But indeed if you look at the first two drafts, you will see.” He explained, “When I was young I didn’t attach much importance to the credits. I didn’t even credit myself as an actor in Vampire Killers. I didn’t think much about money at that time. I needed as much money as I needed. I think we were all less materialistic in those days.”
The new “Polanski” draft was focused on its inalienable essence: Jake Gittes. He was in every scene. True to convention, the audience would never know any more or any less than their screen detective but would uncover the mystery as he did, clue by clue. Additionally Polanski had tossed out Evelyn and Escobar’s affair along with their tangential subplot; he cut many of Gittes’s lowlife vulgarisms and class consciousness, reviving in their place certain hard-boiled characteristics common to the genre; he removed scenes with Cross’s goons and long expositional dialogues between Evelyn and Gittes—strewn confusingly with red herrings and dense conspiratorial fogs right out of The Big Sleep. Where once the character of Byron Samples—also cut completely from the new draft—accompanied Gittes on his investigation of the retirement home, now Evelyn goes with Gittes; the change enhances their complicity, their love story, and leads nicely to bed.