* * *
Respecting the sanctity of the writer’s closed door, how as a girl she was made to tiptoe by her stepfather Charlie Lederer’s office, Payne knew to contain herself until Towne emerged; then she would speak with him. On one urgent occasion, however, he evaded her. She would wait, she would try to speak with him, he would ignore.
Payne continued to wait outside Towne’s office door. For weeks she attempted to approach, asking him when, now or later, would be the moment to have their conversation, and each time he had answered, gruffly, “Not now.”
At night she heard screams and then gunshots echoing through the canyon below Hutton Drive. She ran to the window and, out on the street, saw bloodied young people, their clothes torn, wandering outside a neighbor’s house. They were filming, she saw—Helter Skelter for television.
“Robert,” she finally said to the closed office door, “I need to speak with you about something very important.” She got no answer.
She threw open the door, heaved one of two Selectric II typewriters off his desk, and, knowing there was a backup, smashed it to the ground.
He punched her in the eye.
She fled to a girlfriend’s house.
She would go back to him; he told her he was sorry. He told her it would never happen again.
* * *
In Italy, Polanski directed Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. He partied in great style at his estate on the via Appia Antica in Rome, before moving, at last, to Paris, where he took an apartment on the avenue Montaigne.
He decided he was through with Robert Evans. Once again, Evans had done his savior thing with Chinatown, bragging to one particular journalist (Polanski read) that he had single-handedly rescued the picture, hiring a new composer at the last minute, and that Polanski, a brilliant tyrant, had been properly managed. That was the last straw for Polanski; their talks of another collaboration ended. “It was the memory of that interview that made me say no,” Polanski explained. “I’d considered Bob Evans more than a producer; he was a friend.”
Polanski agreed to meet Barry Diller in London.
Polanski’s new project, Pirates, a cheeky but ambitious romp in the spirit of Vampire Killers, was tailor-made for Nicholson, who had agreed to a star for the price of one million dollars. The fee stunned Polanski. But he knew the studios, eager for a Nicholson-Polanski reteaming, would pay, and with Diller’s interest, decided to move forward at Paramount.
Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, Polanski discerned an unwelcome change in the studio. The people he knew had left. Sylbert was still somewhere upstairs, but a wholly different breed walked the lot. Where Evans would simply write a check at the starting gate, the new regime required Polanski to sign a promissory note for every preproduction dollar Paramount advanced him. It was a kind of blackmail: Now that Paramount had agreed to Pirates and Polanski had gone to the trouble to move his production to Los Angeles, he wasn’t liable to refuse Paramount their new conditions. Nor was he likely to refuse Nicholson his new asking price, despite their original agreement, which now climbed beyond his cool million to $1.5 million. “The minute they paid that money,” Sue Mengers said, “Jack Nicholson said, ‘Wait a minute. If Gene Hackman gets that much money, I should get X.’ And Warren Beatty says, ‘Well, if Nicholson gets that, I should get X.’”
Negotiating at this level would slow down the dealmaking process, bringing many worthy projects to an early death and severely decreasing the productivity of Hollywood as a whole. Those films that did survive the deal would, in many cases, suffer the pressures of ballooned budgets, their artistry cautiously curtailed. The 1975 production of The Missouri Breaks, which tantalizingly paired Nicholson and Brando, came after such a protracted bout of dealmaking—Brando would take a million for five weeks’ work plus gross points, Nicholson would take $1.25 million plus points—that contracts were not signed until six weeks before the scheduled start date, cramping rewrites, preproduction time, and of course production itself, squeezed into a corner to accommodate the stars. On the first day of photography, Brando still found problems in his contract, and Nicholson still took issue with the script. (Towne was called in.)
Accepting his Academy Award for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson made telling reference to Mary Pickford, who earlier that evening had won an honorary Oscar, and “who, incidentally, I believe, was the first actor to get a percentage of her pictures.” Henceforth Jack would want both—up front and back end.
Orson Welles approached Jack to star in The Big Brass Ring, to be written and directed by Welles. But Welles couldn’t meet Jack’s fee, and their talks collapsed. Welles never made the film.
Polanski, however, persisted. Negotiating for Nicholson’s participation in Pirates, Andy Braunsberg, Polanski’s deputy in arms, asked Jack to level with him. Didn’t he realize his financial demands would sink the project? Didn’t he want to make this happen? Raising his fee, exactly what was it he was after? To Braunsberg, Jack answered, “I want more.”
The future, Mr. Gittes. The future …
PART FOUR
Gittes vs. Gittes
Anjelica would travel the earth for Jack. She would follow him to a basketball game in Oregon. She hated to fly, she hated basketball, and after the game, which they lost, he turned on the television in a foul mood. It was The Newlywed Game.
“Oh, little marriage,” he grumbled to the screen. “Little tiny marriage game.”
“If you had any balls,” she said, “you’d marry me.”
“Marry you? Are you kidding?”
Love, like the ground, like the past, can be dug up, put aside, but never removed. Bring in the shovels, the Caterpillar D9s, the analysts, the exorcists, the art—they can all only move the dirt. In piles beside the ditch, it will wait to be moved again.
She was in Jack’s trailer on the set of The Fortune, Mike Nichols’s film “about a time in America when everybody thought everything was possible,” Nichols said, “as opposed to now,” when the telephone rang. A reporter from Time, Jack was told, was researching a cover story on Jack, and had pursued the facts of his parentage. It seemed his sister June was not in fact his sister but his mother. The woman he thought was his mother, Ethel May, was actually his grandmother.
The man who Nicholson believed to be his father, John Joseph Nicholson, husband of Ethel May, father of Lorraine and June, was dead. June and Ethel May were dead. The only call he could make next was to his sister, Lorraine.
Her husband, Shorty Smith, picked up the phone.
“Shorty,” Jack is quoted to have said in Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Nicholson. “This is the most fucked thing I’ve ever heard. A guy calls me on the phone, and says that my father is still alive, and that Ethel May wasn’t really my mother, that June was my mother, and—”
“I’d better give you to Lorraine.”
He passed the phone to his wife.
“Yes,” Lorraine began. “June is your mother. And as far as this man is concerned, I don’t know. June dated him, but she dated a lot of people.”
He didn’t want to know the details. But the new facts were unavoidable: Ethel May was Lorraine’s mother and, suddenly, Nicholson’s grandmother. June, Ethel May’s daughter, whom Nicholson had always thought was his sister, was, suddenly, Nicholson’s mother.