“What’s with the ending?” Evans asked.
A question mark, in place of an exact location in Chinatown, upset the otherwise perfect call sheet. Evans wanted it resolved.
“Talk to Roman,” the screenwriter said, and left.
This was the job, Towne knew. Paid to fall in and out of love. Paid to lose.
At least he was back on Shampoo, scheduled to begin filming soon, in March 1974. Shampoo was a tender spot for Evans, a project he had let slip away. Beatty, naturally, had taken it to him first and, as predicted, Evans loved it, and would have paid almost anything to be in business with Towne and Beatty, but Columbia, racing to catch up with Paramount and Warners, made Beatty a terrific offer that Evans claimed Frank Yablans refused to let him top. It was a sign of Yablans’s mounting dissatisfaction and Evans’s uneasiness as producer–production head, losing the Mountain a project stacked with some of Paramount’s closest friends.
Thus would Evans, losing ground at the studio and in the Chinatown dailies, pick up the phone and call the lab. He had an idea. A way, he thought, he could improve Chinatown.
* * *
The Santa Anas were blowing the last days of October 1973, swathing the city in lethargy and an unright argument of fog and sun certain tense Angelenos inherited from the sky. It was the Santa Anas, Raymond Chandler had written, that made “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks.” In Malibu, Joan Didion felt the winds change. Sensing a noxious turn to the air, she felt smoke in the far hills, sirens in the canyons, and “woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called ‘earthquake weather.’ My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.” It evoked for her the famous last scene of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, when the burning Gomorrah is dealt, somehow, the fate it deserves—for its sprawling invasion of the land, its Hollywood hedonisms, its repudiation of the American East. The bad winds: the city’s guilty paradise tax. “The city burning,” Didion wrote, “is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.”
The cast and crew of Chinatown sat the winds out in the red Naugahyde booths of the Windsor Restaurant, where they were shooting a scene with Gittes and Evelyn. But in the aura of Faye Dunaway, the winds followed them inside. She was so brittle, some said, out of some kind of Method adherence to her character, Evelyn; others sensed profound insecurity. Whatever the source, she was at this early stage already niggling Polanski to change this or that word, give her more makeup and then less, keeping the crew waiting, then interrupting takes (“Roman, I need to start over”), and even refusing, according to one teamster, to flush her own toilet. No stranger to actress pathology, Polanski tried, at first, to receive her with tendresse, but in no time found he couldn’t win.
The crew finally did turn against Dunaway, and her delusions came true. They hated her. She regarded their every creative impulse with suspicion, and in her paranoia—knowing, perhaps, that Jane Fonda was once Evans’s first choice—seemed to resist on principle.
“Ugh. Here she comes.”
“Fuckin’ Faye.”
“The Dread Dunaway.”
Polanski saw signs of an actress who hadn’t prepared. Evelyn’s nervous pauses and double-backs were Dunaway’s stalls, he suspected, to cover for not having learned her lines. “I think Jack and Roman had great patience with Faye,” Koch said. “They knew she was brilliant in the scenes, but boy, was it hard to work with her.” Styles clashed. Dunaway had expected to discuss Evelyn with Polanski, but claimed they never did. “The word motivation,” she said, “was never mentioned.” Customarily Polanski stayed clear of such discussions, allowing the actor to formulate the character on his or her own and for the camera, but the isolation left Dunaway even more insecure, cut off from answers and feedback, and Polanski’s many technical notes—what she called his “rigid, dictatorial approach”—tested her further. “A director like Polanski wants you to get your adrenalin up,” she explained. “But your adrenalin is already up.”
A few days before, Koch had called Dunaway, out with the flu, to check in.
“Hi, Faye. It’s Howard. How are you doing?”
“I don’t talk to assistant directors.”
“Okay,” he said, and hung up.
Polanski and Cortez set up a shot of Nicholson in a booth, over Dunaway’s shoulder. Beside the camera, Polanski called action. The camera sputtered. A technical error.
“Cut,” Polanski said. “Right away, right away.”
But Dunaway summoned her personal makeup man, Lee Harmon, who came rushing in with Dunaway’s Blistex, applying away. Her hairdresser, Suzie Germaine, appeared with an aerosol can and started spritzing.
“Give me those things,” Polanski yelled, and snatched them away from Harmon. “I’ll do it myself when you need it.”
Polanski reset the camera and went again. A strand of Dunaway’s hair caught the light, he called cut, and summoned her hairdresser to smooth down the strand. But in the next take the hair popped up again and Polanski reached over and plucked it out.
Dunaway’s eyes flashed, and Howard Koch Jr. snapped to attention. “Lunch!”
“I don’t believe it!” she cried. “I just don’t believe it! That motherfucker pulled my hair out!”
Screaming ensued, Dunaway leveled Polanski with obscenities, and Polanski exploded.
“I am the director!” He lectured her on the politics of production, how the film belonged to the filmmaker, not to the actress, that it was his job to know everything and hers to submit to his reason whether she agreed or not.
She blew out of the restaurant and after lunch refused to return. Production shut down.
An emergency meeting was called with Freddie Fields, head of CMA, one of Hollywood’s toniest boutique agencies. In contrast to the giant William Morris Agency and in tandem with their Sunset Boulevard neighbor Evarts Ziegler, Fields and Begelman needed to keep CMA growing, and as such were early to understand they required young agents to lure young talent. As Ziegler had turned to Bill Tennant, Fields and Begelman leaned on Sue Mengers, who would cultivate for CMA a tremendous roster of next-generation filmmakers: Barbra Streisand, Peter Bogdanovich, Ryan O’Neal, and with the blessing of her pal Robert Evans, Ali MacGraw after she’d left him. On the day of the meeting, it was Fields, Dunaway’s early benefactor, who received Robert Evans. Not Mengers.
“Fire Polanski,” Fields pleaded. “You know how he works. He’s crazy. You’ll thank me for it.”
“He’s not crazy. He’s a genius.”
“Faye can’t work with him.”
Evans disdained Fields—a liar and, Peter Bart surmised, sociopath. Not that Sue Mengers was above lying, only that when she did, Bart said, “she did it with a wink.” Agenting was war for Fields; for Mengers it was fun. She thought in relationships; he in deals. And though both strategies proved equally successful, Evans favored hers. It was a decidedly modern, poststudio approach to humanize, as Mengers did, her clients. In the contract days, the agent would be more likely to move talent wholesale and let the studio manage the rest. But since the dissolution of those contracts, as each individual movie became its own negotiation, the agent-client axis acquired deeper intimacy. No longer was it chic to own the talent, parent to child; new agents, in keeping with the antipaternalistic spirit of the day, befriended them. That was one of Mengers’s strengths. “Sue couldn’t read a contract if her life depended on it,” said one agent. Fields, trained in the previous generation, didn’t understand this.