Lorraine would explain to Vanity Fair: “My mother [Ethel May]’s intimate friends, her card group, knew June was pregnant. One of them told me that they did that thing where they all put their hands on top of each other and swear to secrecy. When Mud [Ethel May] turned up with Jack, they simply called him a change-of-life baby.” When Jack was two months old, June brought him home to New Jersey, got a job, and left. “Mud just grabbed that baby and made him hers,” Lorraine would say. When Jack reached his teenage years, Lorraine proposed to Ethel May and June that they tell him the truth. “But they were both so afraid of losing him,” she said. “They didn’t trust what his reaction would be.”
Thirty-seven years of conspiracy, a secret kept from him—but to protect whom?
Nicholson would never find out.
If family itself had been a conspiracy, what, going forward, wouldn’t be? “After Jack found out the truth,” observed Julie Payne, “it changed his relationships with women.”
On The Missouri Breaks, Anjelica found love notes from a girl saying how much she missed Jack, missed their lovemaking.
She left him for Ryan O’Neal. She came back.
Her father wanted Jack for his daughter, infidelities and all: “I think we should marry this man,” he told her.
In March 1977 she went to Jack’s to pack up some boxes of clothes she was taking to Ryan O’Neal’s and noticed, on a banquette in the kitchen, cameras and a denim jacket Polanski had worn to the movies the night before—she and Roman had gone out, just the two of them, to see Seven Beauties and have a bite at Nate ’n Al’s.
“Is anyone here?” Anjelica called into the house. There was no answer.
She made her way downstairs.
“We’ll be right out!” came Roman’s voice. A moment later he appeared with a girl, quite tall, Anjelica noted, in platform heels. They had been taking pictures, Polanski explained, and swimming. Hastily, he collected his things from the kitchen, and they all left, Anjelica with her boxes, Polanski with the girl.
* * *
The girl’s name was Samantha Gailey. She was thirteen.
She had no memory of her biological father, and her mother, a striving actress (dinner theater, car dealership commercial), was so frequently absent that when she finally did realize her dream of moving out of their little town of York, Pennsyslvania, for New York City, leaving Samantha at home with her stepfather, Samantha didn’t notice much of a change at home.
Mother and daughter reconnected in New York and moved to L.A. in 1975. “Many little girls fantasize about becoming actresses,” Samantha Gailey, now Geimer, would write. “In the early years, I didn’t—but then again, I think my mother dreamed that dream for me.… She tried to get my sister an agent when she was seventeen, and she got me my first modeling job—for those Astroturf daisy doormats—when I was ten.” Despite Samantha’s ambivalence about show business, her mother kept her auditioning in Los Angeles. The girl had a Tatum O’Neal look.
On February 13, 1977, Roman Polanski, a friend of Samantha’s sister’s boyfriend, appeared at their home in the San Fernando Valley. He was doing a photo shoot for Vogue Hommes, he explained, and was interested in taking some test shots with Samantha.
Samantha had heard of him. She knew he was the director of Chinatown, a movie she didn’t really like, but she surely loved the idea of being in a magazine, of being photographed like Polanski’s previous model, the stunning Nastassja Kinski—and Samantha’s mother and her mother’s latest boyfriend, encouraging her, “knew [Polanski] was powerful and famous and could do things for all us.”
On the day of the test shoot, Gailey’s mother suggested she should accompany Samantha and Polanski, but Polanski discouraged her—the mother’s presence, he explained, might make her daughter self-conscious in front of the camera—her mother conceded, and off they went.
Leaving the house, Polanski would recall, “[Samantha] was a different girl—lively, chattering incessantly.” She told him she had a boyfriend with a black belt in karate.
At their test shoot, on a hillside near Samantha’s house, Polanski, snapped pictures, saying “Things like, you know, ‘Sit this way,’ and, you know, ‘Put on this shirt and don’t smile,’ you know,’” she would tell the court. He would remember asking her about a love bite on her neck, which she explained was from her boyfriend (“but it wasn’t karate”), before asking Samantha to take her top off, and she did, uncomfortably. That must be the way this works, she told herself. (Polanski remembers asking Samantha to change into a new outfit. She removed her blouse, he recalls, and wasn’t wearing a bra. Polanski took pictures throughout.)
In March, Polanski decided he wanted Samantha for the magazine. Receiving the offer, Samantha was of two minds; excited to be in a fashion magazine, but at the same time uncomfortable about what had transpired during the test. Gailey’s mother sensed her daughter’s discomfort. And yet her mother was eased, apparently, when Samantha’s best friend, Terri, agreed to accompany Samantha and Polanski on the photo shoot. But at the last minute, Terri realized she couldn’t stay out so late and changed her mind, leaving Samantha and Polanski alone to their work.
This is how Samantha remembered it:
The sun was going down as they left Samantha’s house the evening of March 10, 1977. Polanski, racing against sunset, was in a rush.
To better catch the light, Polanski drove them up to Jacqueline Bisset’s house on Mulholland, but when they arrived, he saw the shadows were stretching and the available light was still too dim. “I’m going to call up Jack Nicholson and see if we can go down to his house,” Polanski said. At that hour, the light on the southwest side of Mulholland, Jack’s side, would still be good.
He made a phone call to Nicholson’s house and they got back in the car.
It was then, she remembers, he asked about a boyfriend. “Do you have a boyfriend?” he inquired.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever had sex?”
She said yes.
“How many times?”
Once, but she said twice. He was a professional, famous, and she wanted to seem grown-up.
At Nicholson’s, Polanski greeted Jack’s friend Helena Kallianiotes and helped himself to a bottle of champagne. “Should I open it?”
“I don’t care,” the girl said.
They drank, and he pointed Samantha toward the patio, where they took pictures. Then they returned inside, to the living room, where he instructed her to pose with the champagne beside a Tiffany lamp and take off her top, which she did. He took pictures of her around the house; she drank the champagne; he kept refilling her glass. She got tipsy. Jack was in Aspen.
She changed into a blue dress and posed for more pictures in the kitchen.
“Let’s take some photos in the Jacuzzi,” he said. He offered for her to call her mother so she wouldn’t worry.
On the phone Samantha’s mother asked her if she was all right. Samantha assured her mother she was fine.
“Do you want me to come pick you up?”
“No.”
Polanski got on the line and explained to Samantha’s mother that they were at Jack Nicholson’s and that he would be bringing her home “kind of late,” Samantha would tell the court, “because it had already gotten dark out.” He told her they were taking pictures in the Jacuzzi. (“I thought, ‘Why a Jacuzzi?’” her mother would later tell a grand jury. “But I didn’t say anything. I just didn’t.”)