“You little fucking Polack. You better watch what the fuck you’re doing.”
Polanski only smiled.
They got the shot in the first take; the effect worked beautifully.
But Polanski kept going. Koch said, “I think we ended up with about twelve or fourteen takes. I’m not going to say that Roman just loved doing it.”
Watching Polanski play with Jack or attack production problems, Koch saw in his fevers of frustration and excitement “a little kid who was fighting, fighting, fighting for what he believed in. Roman had all this dark stuff that you knew he was always overcoming, but [directing Chinatown] you could see this was his life coming through.” Then something would change. When the shot ended and the lull returned, Polanski would walk off, not far, but away from the chatter. He would fall silent. Alonzo’s daughter Gorgiana, a familiar visitor to the set, would see him “alone, staring off into space.” During these episodes Alonzo would tell her not to approach.
“Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“He has flashbacks.”
* * *
After the day’s work, returning to Sierra Mar Drive, Polanski would turn on the television and watch the Watergate hearings, like everyone else in America.
The hearings transformed Americans into detectives, obsessed by a crime with infinite clues. It was a tawdry and sinister episode and ultimately a coup de grâce for faith. The hegemonic sanctity of all American institutions—with the notable exceptions of Hollywood and the music industry—went down with the president, finishing off, historian Andreas Killen writes, “the greatest prolonged boom in the history of capitalism.” That year, a year Killen called “a genuine low point in U.S. history,” something that had been ending for years was suddenly over. There was the 1973 oil embargo and subsequent depression; the ’73 failure of the Vietnam War, the longest war to date in U.S. history, with more than thirteen hundred MIAs; the January ’73 report in Time that airplane hijackings had reached epidemic proportions, and the disturbing number of passengers aboard those flights who, incredibly, found themselves siding with their captors. So disenchanted were they, Tom Wolfe wrote, with “the endless exfoliations of American power,” that he observed: “It is astonishing how often hostages come away from their ordeal describing the Hostage Taker as ‘nice,’ ‘considerate,’ even ‘likeable.’” (The term “Stockholm syndrome” was coined in 1973, the year the bad guys won. The year we realized the game was rigged and it was better to be hostage-taker than a hostage.)
When he wasn’t watching Watergate, Polanski entertained. He invited cast and crew to the house most Friday nights for themed parties (Mexican, Italian, Chinese) with fitting musical accompaniment (mariachis, etc.), dinner, and dancing. Polanski loved to dance. Dancing, he forgot.
It was not Polanski’s custom to host regular Friday-night parties at the end of a week of filming; he was mostly exhausted, and unlike Nicholson and Evans, Polanski couldn’t count on cocaine for a boost. But the particular intimacy of this group and his lingering antipathy for the city below made Sierra Mar, for those months, a secure retaliation against the past. “He decided he was going to survive,” Anthea said. “And the way he was going to survive [was] through his talent and having fun.” He had both in his friends: “To me,” he said, “this is the most important thing in life. Friends, and loyalty to them, which is almost synonymous. It is this most important thing in my life. I have a few friends who are more important to me than my family ever was.” If any one of them couldn’t make Friday night, Polanski would play offended, and demand attendance. What excuse did they have? Koch always wrapped them on time. Bring your families, bring your friends. Jack was always game, of course. “Nicholson could stay up until six in the morning,” Polanski said, “but he would be [on the set] at eight or nine knowing his lines like nobody else.” (Towne was persona non grata here. He was often with Evans, who liked to stay at home, in his projection room, screening dailies, discussing future projects.) There was night swimming. There were girls. There was a pool table downstairs, more girls, Warren, a little blow, a little forgetting. And all the time Watergate on the radio.
“I was amazed sometimes,” Polanski said, “listening to the news programs, by the parallels between what I was hearing and what I was shooting.” The crew felt the same. “It was bizarre,” Koch remembered. “We were making Chinatown the movie, and America was becoming Chinatown the country.” Corruption was hardly a new concept; it was only that America, dreaming for centuries, Polanski believed, was late to the dark awakening. “You find these things in any country,” he said, “where money and power matter,” where good intentions, as Towne might put it, invariably surrender to futility. To powerlessness and defeat. Polanski was making Chinatown about the price of learning that particular truth, “whether about politics or the relationship between a man and a woman,” or the moment when the wall went up around the ghetto, and the phone rang in London and he learned, for all he thought he knew, that he didn’t know anything.
“Roman,” Bill Tennant’s voice had said, “there was a disaster in the house.”
“Which house?”
“Your house. Sharon is dead.”
And now Bill Tennant was missing.
Nandu Hinds, at Sierra Mar, stepped from the revelry to a quiet corner of the house and saw Polanski, alone, gazing down at a magazine, at a picture of a pregnant woman. He was touching it, rolling his fingers over her face.
“When are you coming home?” Sharon had asked.
“Soon,” he had said. “Soon.”
* * *
On December 4, production returned to Paramount for the scene that had bedeviled Towne for years: the moment when Gittes discovers the truth about Evelyn and her daughter. Towne toyed with the idea of giving the scene to Evelyn’s old doctor, a man in the position to know the truth, and, in one early iteration of the story, Evelyn’s ex-lover, but it was soon apparent that disclosing such a crucial piece of her own long-suppressed history would be anticlimactic if it didn’t come from Evelyn herself. And yet no one, especially a woman of Evelyn’s formality and stature, would simply volunteer a secret they considered so shameful. Were Towne to follow convention, he might have allowed Evelyn, after making love to Gittes, to let down her guard somewhat, but as a personification of Chinatown, as an unknowable, such a reveal would contradict the film’s central theme.
These were strange emotional waters for any man to wade, especially given that no one who read Chinatown could think of a Hollywood precedent for an incest story. Towne dutifully solicited scene ideas from Edward Taylor and, respecting the pathological context for the big twist, his psychologist, Dr. Martin Grotjahn, and there were, consciously or not, ties to the Chase ordeal (“Sister!” “Aunt!”) Towne and Taylor had heard decades earlier. But it was Polanski who finally suggested that Gittes, at last broken by the mystery, the deflections, and the lies, had to lose his cool. “She wouldn’t say it, she wouldn’t tell, she wouldn’t tell,” Polanski explained. “Whatever angle you would take, the only way she would tell it is if you physically force her, beat it out of her.”