Big business smelled blood in the water. Kinney National Company swallowed Warner Bros., Transamerica merged with United Artists, Gulf & Western engulfed Paramount. “Not since the start of the talkies nearly four decades ago,” wrote the New York Times reporter Peter Bart, “has the movie industry gone through a total overhaul like this—new policies, new faces, new corporate control.” Hollywood was in a semipanic: on the one hand, relieved to be rescued; on the other, dubious of its rescuers. What did these mega-corporate CEOs know about running movie studios? What did Charles Bluhdorn, the obstreperous, impulsive chairman of Gulf & Western, who started a coffee-import house at the age of twenty-three and later parlayed an investment in the Michigan Bumper Company into a great fortune, know about filmmaking? Did he even like movies?
It was the old Los Angeles story, gold, bandits, fool’s gold, fools. “The greatest talents from all fields—as much artistic or scientific or literary—have passed through Los Angeles,” Polanski would say. “At the same time it’s a place where there aren’t any new developments—either intellectual or cultural.” It was a kind of dreamer’s physics: For every California promise, there was an L.A. disappointment. The sun set over the ocean; night emptied the streets; the Beverly Drive estates that once delighted, isolated. The moon rose. It got quiet. Where’d everyone go? “It’s like an immense suburb,” Polanski complained, “where you rarely, if ever, see other people. There’s no communication—people live as gentleman farmers, and this might explain why some people there are no longer actually creating anything.”
At least in the studio days, when contracted film artists had an actual home on a lot, a sense of a community workplace—the commissaries, the soundstages, the writers’ offices—facilitated an atmosphere of social and creative synergy, mitigating the city sprawl. As the studios cleared and the streetcars disappeared and Los Angeles grew too big for its local roads alone, new freeways—the 101 in 1960, the 405 in 1961—strained the small-town ambience that once characterized driving-optional neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. This was Polanski’s city of no communication, Joan Didion’s car megalopolis: By the middle of the 1960s it gave native Angelenos good reason to ask themselves, Do I still live in Los Angeles? Just as Roman Polanski asked himself—for his dreams depended on it—Is Hollywood still Hollywood?
Grieving the destruction of his film and a future that once seemed assured, Polanski told Sharon he was leaving town for a short skiing vacation in Vermont—when a call came from Paramount’s new, and incredibly young (thirty-six), head of production, Robert J. Evans.
Evans’s phone voice was as snug and sultry as bourbon and a fireplace, and he maneuvered it into and around Polanski’s ear with the ease of the ace radio actor he had been in New York a few lifetimes ago. “You’re a genius,” the voice gushed; it sounded like movie talk, but Evans meant it. He had seen and loved Roman’s work, and—news travels fast—he offered Roman condolences for Ransohoff’s slashings—whatever Ransohoff liked, Evans proudly hated—and invited him to come in for a meeting at Paramount. The voice said he had Polanski in mind to direct Downhill Racer, a skiing picture (Evans had done his homework) starring Robert Redford. Polanski replied: I’ll ski myself first.
Returning from Vermont, Polanski met Robert Evans in his office at Paramount and took a quick look around. Evans, Polanski understood immediately, was, despite his love for imperial Hollywood, not the typical Hollywood executive, let alone head of production. Foremost, Evans was great looking. He looked relaxed, satiated, sexy, like someone who was still enjoying the movie business, or what was left of it. In fact, he looked so good it almost played against him. His black velvet hair and pressed collars belied how impossibly hard he worked, and wrongly assured many, at first glance, that they had been right to dismiss him as a pretty playboy loafer riding high and lucky on the expense account of a lifetime. After all, there was reason for suspicion: Evans’s appointment didn’t quite make sense. With virtually no producer’s credentials, Robert Evans had been hand-selected, by CEO Charlie Bluhdorn, to run what many still argued was (once) the greatest movie studio in the world. The job came with a superabundance of power, money, glamour, prestige, the whole enviable avalanche of the American dream, which is what shone so clemently on Robert Evans’s beautiful face—he had had his dream and eaten it too—and why so many in Hollywood were quick—with both good reason and jealousy—to ask, This guy? Why him?
As soon as Polanski walked into Evans’s office, he began an investigation of Evans’s bookshelves, his ashtrays, his professional bric-a-brac, sizing up the producer (and liking what he saw), all the while entertaining him with hilarious anecdotes about Ransohoff and about his ski adventures that had Evans laughing throughout.
When they settled down to really talk, Evans leveled with him: “Downhill Racer was just a pretext to get you here. Would you read this?”
He pushed a bound galley—a copy of prepublished manuscript—across the desk.
Rosemary’s Baby, a novel by Ira Levin. Roman flipped a couple of pages. “This isn’t about skiing.”
“Read it. If you don’t like it, your next ski trip is on me.”
That night, back at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Polanski read the book in one sitting. The plotting amazed him; the pages turned; this story of a young woman impregnated by the devil sped along like a perfect thriller. The only thing that rankled him about the book was the presence of the devil himself. Polanski did not believe in God, and therefore he did not believe in Satan. (Reality was sinister enough.) Going supernatural, Polanski felt, Levin had compromised the potential for actual terror. In his adaptation, Polanski would change that. “I thought that I can get around it by creating a film in which the idea of the devil could be conceived as Rosemary’s folly. We never see anything supernatural in it and everything that occurred that has any kind of supernatural look occurs in a dream … it could have been all question of her paranoia, of her suspicions during the pregnancy and postpartum craze.”
The next morning Polanski called Evans and told him he loved the book.
In April 1967, Sharon, then filming Valley of the Dolls, rented them a mansion at the southernmost beginnings of the Pacific Coast Highway, on the Santa Monica beach. The place, they were told, had once been the home of Cary Grant, and to Polanski’s eyes, it even resembled a lavish old studio movie with its laughably large closets and centerpiece stairway that recalled Norma Desmond’s last luscious descent. Sharon and Roman, antique lovers both, reveled in the anachronisms. By day, hunting for the mansion’s secrets lent an air of mischief to their idyll, and, come twilight, when playtime ended, the view of the darkening ocean hushed and humbled them to bed. When the moon rose spectacularly over the water, or when anything at all looked beautiful, Roman’s eyes saw Sharon’s, and he felt the slow, too-tender joy of knowing this was it, these were the happiest moments he had ever lived. He was terrified. “This cannot possibly last,” he told himself. “It’s impossible to last.”
But happiness kept coming. They couldn’t stop it. It poured out of Los Angeles in great green waves of sage and sycamore. It raced up with them to visit Sharon’s friends on top of Topanga Canyon. Roman couldn’t stop it from filling their home, their dinner parties, their candle-lighting, their kissing. On top of Topanga, they flew up together on an old tire swing, “and I shall never forget,” Polanski recalled, “the thrill of soaring higher and higher through the branches, over the cliff, glimpsing the extraordinary view, hearing the wind whistle around us.”