Polanski, the camera hovering over his shoulder, leaned over Nicholson’s face. “Don’t look,” he said. “Close your eyes.”
Studying the results—Jake’s head haloed in bits of bark and leaves—Polanski cleared the brush from around Jack and reexamined the picture—Jake’s head framed against the empty brown dirt—and reconsidered yet again. Polanski selected a green walnut off the ground and placed it beside, but not too close to, his actor’s head. He then added a brown walnut to the composition. He moved the green walnut two or three inches to the side and Jack opened his—
“Close your eyes.”
He moved the walnut back. He then let an ant crawl onto his finger and lowered it onto Jack’s face.
“Roll camera, please.…” Polanski backed out of frame. “Jack, eyes closed.…”
The ant crawled over Jack’s nose, along the bridge, up to the forehead.…
Polanski to the operator: “Did you get it?”
“Didn’t get it.”
“We’ll do it again.”
Polanski crouched beside Jack, scouring the dirt for another ant. “Eyes closed.…”
“Jesus.” Jack chuckled.
Roman found his ant and edged it onto Nicholson’s face. “Roll camera,” he said, backing out.
“Rolling.”
From out of frame, Polanski watched the ant seem to climb up Nicholson’s cheek, change its mind, and climb down off his face.
“Cut.”
Polanski ducked back into the frame to adjust the ant.
“So,” Jack drawled, “let me get this straight—”
“Eyes closed.”
“When the ant gets it right, we’ve got a take?”
“That’s correct.”
Jack smiled too big. “How long are you gonna hold on this shot, Roman?”
“A second. Maybe two. Roll camera, please.”
Polanski stepped out, and all eyes were on the insect, the costliest ant in human history.
It went on for forty minutes. Then Polanski, satisfied, thanked the crew. He had gotten what he wanted.
* * *
Evans had watched the whole time. This kind of care, this patience for creative suggestion and experiment, was what he wanted for Chinatown and each successive Robert Evans Production. It would be up to him to draw the line, but this ant wasn’t it; he knew exactly what it would cost to produce a Polanski-Nicholson-Sylbert production, and as pissed as Frank Yablans might be with these dailies, Evans would stand and fall with his filmmakers. He didn’t always have to understand them—in fact, in the case of Chinatown, he didn’t understand much—but he also didn’t try to. Why should he tell Polanski how to use his talent? Evans had hired an artist to make those decisions himself, that’s what he was paying for, and he would do everything he could to keep the Mountain behind him, behind them. That he also happened to be half the Mountain didn’t hurt.
There was a low thunder of hooves. Heads turned.
From out of the farthest trees approached a tall rider on a white horse. It was a startling sight—what appeared to be a long, lean old man under a wide white hat, heedlessly approaching the film set as if it were his own. The crew, who had stopped working to behold the stranger, heard him haw-hawing in the distance, bellowing in happy Spanish to the orchard hands as he passed by. They watched him, drawing near, gallantly doff his hat to a few grips he seemed to recognize or who seemed to recognize him.
“God,” someone said. “John Huston.”
He was the guest of honor at a long redwood table, set for lunch, under the kind orchard shade. Polanski, host and conductor, took the head; Huston and Nicholson were opposite, and on the bench beside Jack, Anjelica sat quietly. She was never one for set visits, with good reason: They left her feeling extraneous, like she was interrupting an intimate exchange, but her father had asked her to come to Chinatown. And of course there was Jack.
* * *
He was her dream well before they ever met. In 1969, as the most hopeful and, she thought, most beautiful decade faded out, she saw him in Easy Rider, and went back a second time to see him again. In his ease and humor and exuberance and his princely smile, spanning the screen like a victory flag, she saw a man she could love, and—in a way, like the rest of the world, already did.
She saw him again, for the first time, in April 1973. Her stepmother, Cici, brought her along to a party at Jack’s. It was his birthday. He was thirty-six.
“Good evening, ladies,” he said, opening the door, the evening sun singing in around him. “I’m Jack, and I’m glad you could make it.”
She had dressed as she always did, con amor, with discretion, allure, and commanding good taste, in a long black evening dress, open down the back. So much back.
As soon as he saw her, he saw class. He was New Jersey. She was a princess, nobly descended from a Hollywood king, John Huston, himself the son of Walter Huston. Royalty did not impress Jack, but there was no turning his eyes from the aura of quality, aristocratic in merit, that at twenty-one already shone from her formidable grace and bones, her valiant nose, long and fine, like a beautiful bayonet or a cherished family tradition.
That night they danced for hours in a small moon of candles, and he asked her to stay the night. Cici went home alone.
The next morning Anjelica passed Robert Towne on her way out. Jack didn’t drive her home. He didn’t call her that day or the day after, but days later, to invite her for dinner, a date he later called to cancel for, he claimed, a previous obligation.
“Does that make me a secondary one?” she asked.
“Don’t say that. It’s not witty enough, and it’s derogatory to both of us.”
That night, out with friends, she saw him at a restaurant with Michelle Phillips, an ex-girlfriend.
This was the Jack dance. Come back, go away. Come back.
In those years she followed him everywhere.
In New York, a night before she was to leave for London, they spoke frankly of old loves; unraveled his slipknot of infidelities, Michelle Phillips; his need for so-called freedom; her mother, the plangently beautiful Enrica Soma, called “Ricki”; and she told him she loved him. Holding her, he told her he loved her too. When she arrived in London, she learned that the night she left New York he had slept with another woman, and though he had never promised to be faithful, saying he loved her must have been his promise of something. She confronted him. “Oh, Toots,” he answered, “it was just a mercy fuck.” Weeks later they wandered the green around the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park—he had to fly to The Passenger the next morning—and when he told her he hated to leave her, it thrilled her. She tried to imagine marriage, as she had as a girl at St. Clerans, her family’s estate in Ireland, covering her eyes with a veil and dream-walking the grounds as a fairy-girl bride, but she quickly came to: There was always present the vortex of a darker past, what had been done to her and Jack as children, what they had done to each other as adults, and would probably, even against their will, do to each other again. In Barcelona they met again. They talked of Regina Le Clery, his friend who had just died in a plane crash at Orly Airport, and again of her mother, killed in a car crash in 1969, who managed her father’s many transgressions ably, like a deposed queen burying a broken heart; and they talked of ghosts, memories that lace the eye; and he fell asleep fingering the pearls, once her mother’s, she wore that night to bed; and following him to France, she discovered he had slept with another woman.