Payne agreed about the score. “The score assaulted my senses,” she would say. She asked Towne if it would be appropriate to tell Evans. Towne told her it was. Moreover, he told her she should; there was only a short time for the lab to finish the film and a release date had been set, but it was not too late to be changed.
Polanski, keeping his physical distance from Towne, remained somewhat in Lambro’s corner.
Payne, meanwhile, found the right moment to approach her host. “Evans,” she said, “the score is a piece of shit.”
“The composer is right behind me.”
She whispered, “It’s no good, Bob.”
“We’re in trouble,” he said.
A moment later, Towne and Polanski collided, tussled, and grumbled off to opposite ends of Woodland. Dinner was eaten, smiles forced, guests cleared. Finally, Evans asked Lambro to join him and Nicholson in the living room. It was time to talk.
“Listen,” Jack began. “You don’t have to defend Roman to us. We know what he is, and we know what you are. So you just don’t worry about Roman. I’m telling you that Chinatown needs more of your music.”
“Okay, I’ll do whatever you people decide.”
“Wouldn’t you like an Oscar, Phillip?” Evans asked.
* * *
The phone rang in the cutting room, and Lambro picked it up.
It was a girl’s voice.
“You have the wrong extension,” Lambro told her. “There’s no Paul here.”
“That’s for me,” Polanski said, reaching for the phone.
Lambro had earlier browsed an adult newspaper left in the cutting room, glancing a personal ad, circled, fifteen-year-old girl, “confidential, likes relationship with European man in forties.”
* * *
The first audience preview of Chinatown, scheduled for May 3, 1974, in San Francisco, was changed at the last moment, when it was decided that news of a recent Bay Area murder, feared to be the return of the Zodiac Killer, would disincline the local mood to the film. In haste the screening was moved south to a theater in San Luis Obispo. Towne, Sylbert, Evans, O’Steen, and Polanski attended; Lambro remained at Paramount, composing—now with Polanski’s approval—additional music for the picture to be recorded as soon as Polanski returned to Los Angeles.
The screening was a disaster.
Many audience response cards blamed the music—shrill, clamorous, brazenly strange—and Polanski’s crew, which included his guest, legendary film composer Bronislau Kaper, was in complete agreement. The story was challenging enough without the added trouble of an avant-garde score.
“I’m going to fight,” Polanski told Lambro by phone, “but I think it’s no use.… I’m so tired. I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Polanski was tired. Contracted to direct his opera in Spoleto, he wouldn’t be in town to oversee Chinatown’s final mix, let alone the future of its score.
“Aren’t you in control anymore?” Lambro asked.
“I’ve lost all judgment. I’m so tired, Phillip. What can I say? They’ve canceled your recording sessions. Look, I’m going to try and fight them and I’ll let you know what I can do.”
“Who’s them?”
“The Paramount executives.”
“Which executives?”
“What the fuck difference does it make?”
* * *
Early one morning, Jerry Goldsmith answered a knock on his front door.
It was Evans. “I need you to save my life.”
Goldsmith was one of the most esteemed film composers of Evans’s generation. He had already been Oscar nominated six times, most recently for Papillon. Evans barely knew him. But he knew where he lived.
“Jerry, you’ve gotta help me. I need your music.”
Goldsmith was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, and vaguely remembered the music of the thirties, sounds Evans still felt from the Harlem nightclubs he remembered around his father’s practice. Lambro had written too modern a score, Evans told Goldsmith. He wanted now to go back—back to the period.
“Bob,” Goldsmith replied. “I don’t think so. You see that on the screen. Why should I do that in the underscore?”
Evans paused. He didn’t have the language to bring his musical inclinations to reason or justify a creative impulse. He spoke only in moods and feeling and gut instincts about the dreams of women and men. Since Susanna Moore had mentioned to him “I Can’t Get Started,” which Bunny Berigan made a hit in 1937, the year in which Chinatown was set, Sylbert had endorsed the recording to Evans. It had been on jukebox rotation at Dominick’s—where Evans and Towne first discussed Chinatown—and Sylbert, a restaurant regular, played it often. Evans didn’t hesitate. He pounced on the song, playing it over and over. “Sylbert was more than a great art director,” he would say. “He was man of great, great taste. [He had] the heart of a true artist.” They were swells of New York, born two years apart.
The sweet lonely sound of Berigan’s trumpet clung to Evans’s ear, and he suggested in his only note to Goldsmith that he have a listen to the recording and riff from there.
“What do you hear in the orchestra?” Evans asked Goldsmith.
“What do I hear?” He laughed. “I don’t hear anything. I’ve got to sit down and—” He didn’t know why he said it: “I hear four pianos, four harps, strings, solo trumpet, and two percussion.”
“Oh, I like that!”
“I’m glad you do. I haven’t the foggiest idea what it’s going to sound like.”
He had only ten days.
Evans ran the picture for Goldsmith. Its evocation of lost Los Angeles simply amazed him, the aridity, the empty silences of the city before traffic, a soundscape so still and void you could hear, as Goldsmith heard again on screen, even the buzzing of a fly. He remembered a golden age. “In the 1940s,” he recalled, “L.A. was a haven for all the European intellectuals who came here to escape the war.” Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman, Miklós Rózsa—the greatest film composers of their day, all émigrés, complaining under the sun about the crass commercialism of the Hollywood studios, and by extension the city that housed it. But not fellow émigré, twelve-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg: “I have come to a country where I am allowed to go on my feet,” he lectured a gathering of UCLA students, “where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness dominate and where to live is a joy, where to be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God.” They were as much a part of Goldsmith’s aural education—literally in the case of Miklós Rózsa, his professor at USC—as the city itself. That fly, for instance: Goldsmith would score around it. It was, he knew, a player in the urban orchestra.
Early in June, Goldsmith and his musicians, crowned by Uan Rasey and his King Silver Flair trumpet, took over Paramount’s Scoring Stage M, and recorded the score to Chinatown in two days. Evans, Nicholson, and Towne (Polanski had already left for Spoleto) listened from the booth, floored by Goldsmith’s title theme, “a period piece,” Goldsmith called it, “with more updated harmonies,” but the jazziness was all Rasey’s. Universally regarded the best trumpeter in Hollywood, Rasey was sixteen when he came to Los Angeles in 1937. By then he was already a horn player. Polio brought him to it. “There was a limit to what I could do,” he said. “I couldn’t run out and play football, so I played trumpet.” For the price of an instrument, a mouthpiece, a mute, and a self-teaching book he bought from Montgomery Ward—nine dollars total—he practiced his way to a steady gig, in a wheelchair, on crutches, out in the L.A. suburb of Monterey Park for five much-needed 1937 dollars a night. “We could live on that,” he said. “Our furnished house was twelve dollars a month. Both my sisters slept in my mom’s bedroom; I slept on the davenport. We had a refrigerator and a stove, so we were home free.” A year later he was playing with trumpeter Frankie Zinzer and Larry Sullivan, the first trumpeter at Warner Bros. (“I could play higher than he could, and read just as fast”). They’d get together in Bronson Canyon and improvise Saturday mornings—a bunch of old-timers and one kid, hitting impossible high Cs over the quiet of the park. At twenty-eight, Rasey became MGM’s first-chair trumpeter; at thirty, he played the blowsy wail of An American in Paris; Chinatown was easy. “It was nothing to play, really,” he said.