Completely dunned relentlessly.
Regardless of how bad it is.
When he heard about the gross, Warner Brothers executive Dick Lederer walked into executive Barry Beckerman’s office and threw the Exorcist numbers down in front of him. “Kid, the fun is over,” Lederer announced. “There are guys in New York looking at these figures, saying, ‘This is the kind of money you can make in the movie business?’ We’ve been having a good time out here and been very successful, but it’s gonna get real serious after this.”
* * *
Nicholson and Polanski toasted the end of principal photography on January 18 with a glass of champagne upstairs at the the Rainbow, a dark rock and roll bar next to the Roxy nightclub, which had opened only months earlier. Co-owner of both ventures, Jack’s friend Lou Adler would provide Nicholson with his own especially darkened corner of each, where he could inhale coke and cigarettes in semi-seclusion, a one-man holdout against the next chapter in American youth culture, disco slick, silver and black, the sweaty crush of limbs and hard light and platform shoes stomping to dust the petals of revolution and love.
It rained in Los Angeles that weekend.
They finally found Bill Tennant, strung out on coke, living in a dugout somewhere, or sleeping in Griffith Park.
* * *
That January it rained for fifteen days, twice the monthly average.
Polanski knew now he could abide the city when he was too busy working, but with the end of production upon him, and the dreaded first viewing of the rough cut still two weeks away, he would get out of town as soon as possible. On Saturday he would have dinner with Jack, Warren, Mike Nichols, and the British director Tony Richardson; on Monday he would appear at the Speakeasy on Santa Monica Boulevard for the wrap party; the next day he would leave. But he would come back. He would have to.
* * *
The Erythroxylum coca yields small star-shaped flowers, five wan-colored petals to every corolla, and thin oval leaves, which, when chewed, give one at first a feeling of warmth, according to neurologist and researcher Paolo Mantegazza, writing about coca in 1859: “Sometimes one experiences a very soft buzzing in the ears. At other times one needs space and would like to run forward as if searching for a wider horizon. Little by little, one starts to feel that the nervous powers are increasing; life is becoming more active and intense; and one feels stronger, more agile, and readier for any kind of work.” Just over an ounce gave Mantegazza “pleasure by far superior to all other physical sensations known to me.”
It had taken Europeans until the nineteenth century to discover coca. Only after cocaine, the principal alkaloid of the coca plant, was extracted from the leaf—a later development—could the substance be made to travel. But it wasn’t until the 1880s that coca started turning up in syrups, pills, and medical elixirs, the miracle cure of the new century. Coca-Cola was first poured in 1886: “The words tonic and refreshment had an inevitable appeal for a generation living in a culture of rapid economic, technological, and social change,” writes the British cultural theorist Sadie Plant, “change that made Americans ‘the most nervous people in the world,’ as an early advertisement for the drink declared.” The beauty of cocaine, at least for Freud, was in how gently the high enhanced being, as if independent of any drug at all. One felt magical magically.
Just as it soothed the strains of Industrial Revolution Americans, coke suited the hardworking young—and suddenly very rich—Hollywood of the mid-seventies. “You can write, you can direct, you can act,” Dick Sylbert said of coke. “A couple of toots, there’s nothing you can’t do.” And in a town that traded, as Didion observed, on action, it gave the sparkle of success.
Jack Nicholson surmised that coke made its way to Hollywood from the music scene around 1972. It was about that time, Peter Bart sensed, that Evans met coke, his marriage to Ali MacGraw in collapse and the stresses of The Godfather mounting exponentially. But coke was then only an open secret, a game played among friends. In the white-hot blaze of The Exorcist, the game became a race to the top. “That was it,” the producer Harry Ufland would reflect. “Addiction to box office and addiction to coke. Everything changed after that.” When Bart saw Ted Ashley, family man and Warner Bros. CEO, begin to show up at parties brazenly coked out, bimbos in tow, he sensed “a new, almost defiant openness” about coke in Hollywood. It portended ill.
It was around then that Evans and Bart’s drives from Woodland to Canon ended, and so did Bart’s trust in Robert Evans’s ability to function reliably. “I was surprised Evans suddenly discovered [cocaine],” Bart reflected, “since he was not a druggie.” But he was now changed, brittle, loopy, remote, on his own schedule. The shift was quiet but steady. There was no acrimony, no outbursts, but under the surface the marriage cracked, and the first tremors of erosion quivered the studio floor.
* * *
After some time away, Polanski returned to Paramount to see Sam O’Steen’s rough cut.
“What does it look like?” Polanski asked, leaning on O’Steen’s shoulder.
“Great. You won’t recognize it.”
Funny, but not. Encountering his rough cuts always depressed Polanski. He knew that. But anticipating the depression didn’t curb the unavoidable terror of facing, for the first time, the brutal facts of a film no longer dreamed but real, slogging, holed, unwieldy, the magic of the dailies gone. Were they deluded ever to have had confidence? Did it even make sense? Among all his rough cuts, Polanski’s encounter with Chinatown’s was particularly distressing for him; none of his previous films relied on the thrill of plot concealed and revealed as a mystery does. But knowing in advance the surprise turns of the story would make it difficult for Polanski to gauge whether the surprises were working, whether the imagined audience was ahead of the picture, behind it, or precisely where he needed them to be. How to forget all he knew about Chinatown and watch it with their eyes?
This was why he had stayed away, O’Steen reminded him. This was why Ralph Dawson, O’Steen’s mentor, had told him a film, after its cut, needed time to heal. It had been cut, after all. Let it recover. He said: “If you pick at a sore it’ll never heal, but if you put it aside for a couple of weeks, you’d be surprised how objective you’ll be.”
Having O’Steen at his proverbial bedside was a comfort to Polanski. He would never forget how deftly O’Steen had rescued Rosemary’s Baby, at the last minute, from an editor Polanski deemed incompetent, slimming a four-plus-hour rough cut down to two; it earned O’Steen Polanski’s lifelong trust. “[Polanski’s] film tells me where to cut, really speaks loud to me,” O’Steen explained, “whereas with the others, it whispers to me.”
They had a knack for each other. O’Steen would sit with Polanski at the Moviola, helping him lose, with argumentative good cheer, those pieces of Chinatown Polanski loved but, for good reason, hurt the picture. “Sam taught me to sacrifice,” Polanski said. O’Steen was strong, smart, and funny enough to debate Polanski, frame by frame, and patient when necessary, able to unfasten Polanski’s grip with a joke—a good editor can tell a joke, O’Steen said, because “the timing is right and he tells just enough”—or a compassionate nod and wait for his director to run out of explanations, excuses, denials, whatever stood between O’Steen and the inevitable killing of a darling.