Before the day of the shoot, Dunaway and Nicholson had privately discussed the beating she was about to take; Polanski, they knew, wanted his violence real, a point of craft to which Dunaway, a supreme actress, agreed.
“Look,” she said to Jack, “you’re just going to have to hit me. There’s no other way. We’ll never get it perfectly with all those slaps. There will always be one that will be off.”
“You sure, Dread?”
She nodded.
They worked at it for hours. Between the two of them, they had tried separating the slaps—whack!, line, whack!, line—but found, as the intensity built, it made more sense to climax in a succession of slaps, whack!, whack!, whack!
Dunaway loved Nicholson. His solidarity, his creative intelligence. His charisma and sympatico. A true actor, she thought, and a friend. She would complain to him about her struggles with Polanski, his line readings, his sadistic prods. “You think you’ve got problems, Dread?” Nicholson drawled back. “You realize this is the first time I’m playing a leading man, and I’m spending three-quarters of the movie with a bandage covering half my face?” They hung together throughout Chinatown, whether in her trailer between setups or on Sunday nights at El Coyote, sardined into their booth with Anjelica and Carol Kane and Harry Dean, passing the margarita pitcher between them. Dunaway had a big crush, but resisted the urge.
Paramount’s Stage 31 was uniquely fraught the day of their most demanding scene. The set was tense with the promise of rehearsed violence and the still-seething silence between director and star actress, who had kept their communication to a minimum, passing words, when necessary, through third parties.
Nicholson was visibly unsettled, scuffing a corner of the rug. “I don’t like hittin’ women,” he said to the floor.
“This is the place, right here, guys,” Polanski said, bouncing a creaking floorboard.
A carpenter swooped in with hammer and nails to address the repair.
By now no stranger to Dunaway’s insecurities, Alonzo reviewed the particulars with her, explaining how Polanski, careful not to replay the romantic clichés of movies past, was refraining from diffused lighting. For her close-ups, Alonzo told Dunaway he was using a little Obie light with a faint blue gel. Fading down the glow almost imperceptibly, he would turn the light onto her eyes, giving them the slightest kick to reflect, he explained, “in the iris of the eye.”
Halting once more to redress her makeup—murmurs of “Here we go again”—Dunaway extended an affectionate hand to actor James Hong, playing her butler. “I noticed there’s no name for you in the script.”
“No, just the butler.”
“What do you think we should call you?”
He thought. “What about … Hahn?” A name near his own.
“Hahn.” She tried it out. “Hahn. That’s it.”
Polanski had wisely kept his distance, allowing Dunaway to primp as long as he possibly could, until he couldn’t wait anymore.
“May we, Roman?” Koch asked.
Roman gave the okay; the actors took their places, Jack before the camera, Faye behind the draped archway.
“Okay! Very quiet! We’re rolling.”
“Speed.”
“Action.”
There followed an exhilarating hush. Nicholson, awaiting Dunaway’s entrance, adjusted his position.
These moments of preparation the crew gladly allowed Dunaway—to give her all the time, all the space she needed to well up the feelings in her, privately, behind the drapery. Until then Polanski would keep the camera rolling through the silence, waiting.
She lurched through the curtain, sobbing, and dropped to the sofa.
Nicholson followed her. “Who is she?” he demanded.
She looked up and—
“Cut!”
Polanski stood, interrogating the light. It wasn’t what he had in mind. “It’s all different now,” he said to the crew. “I light it and everything and it’s all different now.”
The gaffers tended to the adjustments, Polanski crossed to Nicholson. “You walk in too fast. I think it should be more of a stroll.” He turned over his shoulder to the crew. “Let me see it once more, fellows.”
So intent was Dunaway on maintaining emotional momentum that between takes, when she had to use the restroom, she would bypass her trailer to stand by a houseplant in the kitchen, and closing the doors—a signal to the crew—cage her attention to Evelyn’s world, rather than venture outside into 1973. She would emerge jittery and withdrawn—“I’m ready. No, wait”—seemingly skinless and prone, stalling again for more makeup. “It would take hours,” Nandu Hinds said. “It was a nightmare”—as if by layering on the powder, eyeliner, lipstick, Blistex, rouge, she could erase herself.
That day a weirder mood than usual haunted the stage. Released from the past, something’s ghost heavied the waiting with bad comings, wrongs, and the vertiginous air of summer thunder.
Nicholson really hit her.
Watching from a distance, James Hong was amazed by the work Dunaway turned out that day. “She prepared intensely before every take,” he said, “mumbling to herself, fussing with her hair. Her concentration was so intense you wouldn’t want to talk to her.” Alone among the cast and crew, Hong was compassionate to her process; it seemed to him she was doing the work of a Method actress, immersing herself in unhappy emotion, the rageful awareness of one who would so deeply despise her father, even her director, a father figure, and perhaps more. “I used to love my father very much,” she said in 1967. “But as the years went on and he and my mother grew apart, I guess we did too. Now they’ve both remarried, and I don’t see my father anymore. But I still have this desperate desire to be loved, to excel in everything, to win admiration and respect, especially from men.” Money and success had brought her little comfort. “Deep down,” she said, “I’m always running hard because I’m running scared. The children of the poor, the children of the divorced are not the most secure people in the world.”
Between takes she would look over to her director, “a wicked grin on his face.” She thought, He’s enjoying this moment far too much.
It was because he was short. The young girls, she thought, his sarcasm and needless cruelty, directing movies. It was about power for him. All of it.
Her face burned where Jack’s slaps had landed. From the blows across her right check, her neck ached.
“Once more please, fellows,” her director said. “Once more…”
* * *
Howard Koch stepped outside Stage 31 and had a good look around him. The Mountain was teeming, and to Koch, the son of Howard Koch Sr., Paramount’s production head before Evans, all of it was familiar—the jolly bustle of crew folk, secretaries strolling two by two, sound guys soaking in the sun for the first time in days, PAs, teamsters, harried writers fumbling for car keys, editors out for a quick smoke, costume trolleys, passing truckloads of set decor, lifelong Paramount police officer Fritz, A. C. Lyles, the studio’s professional friendly face (“Hiya, Howie. How’s the old man?”), the pilgrim tourists come to see with their own eyes the warehouse grandeur of Stage 31, where Astaire and Rogers danced Top Hat only forty years earlier—the signs of a happy home, which is what a studio was, not just real estate but a haven, a complete creative nation dignified, in the case of Paramount, by sixty years of achievement. For many like Koch, who at ten rode a horse with Clark Gable, it was only a culture, a tradition, a way of life, as Hollywood son Darcy O’Brien wrote, like any other. Sure, it had its downsides. The studio was, like any institution, susceptible to pressures of bottom lines and the usual exploitations of power. “Universal made shit,” Polanski rightly observed, Fox and Columbia stumbled under unimaginative leadership, and MGM’s James Aubrey, failing to produce films of merit, resorted to auctioning off Metro’s heirlooms to the highest bidder. But Warner Bros. had John Calley, and Paramount, in the hands of Robert Evans, kept climbing the rungs of popular art. Outside Stage 31 Evans’s influence was everywhere apparent to Koch. He was awed: “We were shooting the my sister/my daughter scene,” Koch said, “and next door on the next stage [John] Schlesinger was shooting the premiere scene from Day of the Locust. And right across the street, Coppola and Al [Pacino] were shooting the Senate hearing room for Godfather II, and we all broke for lunch at the same time. And I remember, you know, like in Sunset Blvd. where you see all the extras walking down the street. Well, it was Jack and Faye and Al and Schlesinger and Coppola and Polanski walking down the street to the old Paramount commissary. And I thought, wow, I’m in Hollywood.”