Sharon introduced him to her America, junk food, pop music, drive-ins, Big Sur. The sheer size of the country moved Polanski, “the wide open spaces,” he said, “and the natural beauty.” He loved the vitality of Americans, their appetite for success. A free people, they were allowed to dream. “When I came to the States,” he said, “I was struck by the fact that the American Dream existed. It all seems when I first got there, it was all about the middle class. It seemed like everybody was well-off. I don’t remember seeing, during those times, any homeless people. It was just a paradise, unthinkable.”
Young Americans particularly impressed Polanski. Their level of discourse, their plans for change, the revolution in their voices. “They seem to be much more intelligent than previous generations,” he said. Demonstrations of democracy—so unimaginable in his boyhood—were astonishing. “It was Utopia,” he said. “Society was moving forward on the hopes of young people.” He went to a Be-In. He ambled the meadow of painted faces and picnicking couples, their denim and tie-dye and goddess gowns, their blithe collapse, their drums and flowers. “This is fantastic!” he exclaimed.
“There are no young people in Hollywood,” Polanski had grumbled in 1964. By 1967, that had changed. Bonnie and Clyde, which opened that year, was a watershed; it ushered into Hollywood an era of hot blood, fresh sex, and violence, and introduced a vision of America—less romantic, more realistic—that would change the game and the players, pervading the movie industry and thus the city of Los Angeles. “The change has come with startling speed,” wrote Peter Bart. “Hollywood, a town traditionally dominated by old men, has been but taken over by ‘young turks.’ The big deal and the big news are being made by men 40 and under.” Even the executives were getting younger. There was Robert Evans, of course, at Paramount; Richard Zanuck, 31, at Fox; David Picker, 35, at United Artists. Something was indeed happening. In an aging industry, the sudden omnipresence of youth was in itself hopeful. “Most top executives here believe that Hollywood now has its greatest opportunity in a generation to emerge again as the world’s filmmaking capital,” Bart wrote. “It has a new infusion of venture capital”—this from the corporations buying up studios—“money for experimenting. It also has an intangible asset: movies suddenly seem to be in again. Young people seem to be caught up by movies, not TV—witness the vast Bogart cult and the emergence of about 4,000 film societies on college campuses.” Bogdanovich, Coppola, Altman, Friedkin, Polanski—the generation that had grown up with the movies was now, at long last, beginning to make them.
They hung out together. Roman and Sharon and the rest of young, hip Hollywood partied at the Daisy, Beverly Hills’ uptown answer to the friskier Whisky a Go Go. But unlike the Whisky, the Daisy was a private nightclub, the first of its kind in a generation, and founded by Jack Hanson, owner of the posh boutique Jax, jammed with the young and famous who bought tight pants at his store. (“There are three important men in America today,” Nancy Sinatra said. “Hugh Hefner, my father and Jack Hanson.”) A year and a half after he opened the place (pool table, Du-par’s pies, dance floor), Hanson wisely declared membership closed, and the most alluring hangout in the city became, officially, the most exclusive. Hitchcock and company still had their chili at Chasen’s, and the older business set preferred the Playboy Club; but here, in the middle of Beverly Hills, still the center of after-hours Hollywood (“Few stars have ever been east of Doheny Drive unless they are going to the studio,” the Los Angeles Times reported, and “south of Wilshire Blvd. only to go to the airport”), grooved the players of the next wave, Roman and Sharon and their friends Warren Beatty, Mike Nichols, and Richard Sylbert. “It sounds absurd to call the scene innocent,” Dominick Dunne recalled, “but it was.” The Daisy was good, happy fun and, after hosting a fund-raiser for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “underscored an interesting change in Hollywood mores,” Peter Bart reported in The New York Times, “namely, that it is becoming stylish in the movie colony to be a liberal thinker,” barely possible in the previous generation, when moguls kept their stars’ public images on a tight leash. But since the end of the Hollywood blacklist shamed those who stayed silent, Bart observed, it was no longer considered gauche in Hollywood to talk politics; it was gauche not to. “We were all enchanted,” wrote Eve Babitz, “under a spell of peace and love and LSD that we thought had changed the world. In those days, people might drop by for one joint, get hung up on some transformational conversation, and wind up staying for the whole day or three weeks and then leaving for different skies, other adventures.”
Hollywood’s golden days were gone, but from his Daisy gang, Polanski cultivated his own kind of studio. He hired Sylbert, whose early work on Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll he loved, to do the production design for Rosemary’s Baby. Sylbert turned Roman on to his sister-in-law, the costume designer Anthea Sylbert, and Mike Nichols’s editor, Sam O’Steen, then cutting The Graduate (also Sylbert’s) at Paramount, and Roman snapped them up. “That was the beginning of this group,” Polanski said. “They all had a good time working together,” said Susanna Moore, then Sylbert’s girlfriend, “because they were all friends. That intimacy made a difference in the work. Oftentimes on movies intimacy is a bit feigned, but in this case it was real, between people who saw each other for dinner sometimes every night. Nobody was really threatened, jealous, secretive or private. The atmosphere was one of a workshop. Their work was a collaboration.”
Richard Sylbert, the oldest and tallest of the group, was still not even forty, but was by far the most experienced. In his safari jacket—cribbed from Clark Gable—spotted neckerchief, pressed khakis, and loafers, he conveyed the crisp New England aplomb of an English professor who just got laid, and, filling his Dunhill pipe, pulling up to Cyrano’s in his little Mustang in herringbone and tweed, he promised the smart good taste he was well respected for. Sylbert was, like his sister-in-law Anthea, a real New Yorker in L.A. She wore her dark hair, dark skirts, and black turtlenecks stringently straight. Mike Nichols called her “the Ant,” but only jokingly; she was a pistol, utterly unafraid to speak truth, no matter how ugly, to anyone, no matter how powerful. “The hardest thing to find in Hollywood is the truth,” Nichols had said. “The Ant will give you the truth. Even if you don’t want to hear it.” Polanski, relying on the reasonable good sense of her imagination, loved her for it. “If I think they’re not doing their jobs right,” the Ant said, “I’ll tell anyone on set.” Both she and brother-in-law Richard were verbal, sophisticated, electrified—so alike, in fact, they were often confused, per their surname, as siblings—“and they were smart enough,” Susanna Moore said, “to realize how integrated their individual work could be, and how that could benefit the film.” What they shared, artistically, perfectly suited them to Roman Polanski: a dogged commitment to realism, and absolute precision. “That’s how we do it,” Anthea Sylbert said. “We do it right. And if we don’t do it right, let’s do another take. But we don’t arrive on the stage not having thought that we had got it right to begin with.”