“We went into the bathroom before,” Samantha would tell the court, “and he took this little yellow thing. I don’t know what it was. It was some kind of container. And he had—he walked in before me. When I walked in he had the container. And he had a pill broken into three parts.” She took off her dress.
“Is this a Quaalude?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she answered. She had seen Quaaludes before. She’d even taken a piece of one once.
“Oh, do you think I will be able to drive if I take it?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I guess I will.” He swallowed a piece. “Do you want part?”
“No,” she said, then changed her mind. “Okay.” She swallowed a piece.
Outside, nearing the Jacuzzi, he asked her to take off her underwear. She did.
Naked, holding a glass of champagne, she stepped into the bubbling water.
Polanski took a few shots of Samantha in the Jacuzzi before giving up—it was too dark, he said—removing his clothes and getting in too.
“Come here,” she remembers he said.
“No. No, I got to get out.”
“No, come down here.”
Lying, she told him she had asthma and that she had to get out.
“Just come down here a second,” she remembered him saying.
Later that night, when Anjelica Huston, returning for her things, found them back inside the house, Polanski had performed cunnilingus on Gailey, had sex with her, and sodomized her.
* * *
Anjelica was back at Jack’s the following night. Startled by what seemed like flashlight beams lashing through the garden below, she looked down from a high window and got a clearer look at the fracas—a group of men, Roman among them, approaching the downstairs porch.
“What is it?” she asked, opening the door.
“It’s nothing,” Roman said. “Just some confusion about last night. These gentlemen”—three or four plainclothes detectives—“want to have a look around, if that’s okay.”
She held the door for them, and without explanation, they pushed around her and spread through the house.
The police, Polanski scrambled to reassure her, had a warrant, though he didn’t say what for. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s not about drugs or anything.”
But a detective soon shone his light on a pack of rolling papers left in an ashtray. “You better show me the drugs,” he commanded Anjelica. “Otherwise we’ll take this place apart.”
She led him upstairs. It didn’t occur to her to ask what they were doing there, what Roman was, once again, doing there, who the girl from last night was or what had happened between them or if Jack was in any way involved. Anjelica was too scared to do anything but cooperate. She took them to the grass she kept in a drawer in a bedroom and turned over her handbag for their inspection. They found in it a gram of cocaine.
She rushed downstairs. “They’ve got it,” she whispered to Polanski.
“What?”
She didn’t have time to explain. Neither, for that matter, did he. Both were placed under arrest, read their Miranda rights, and led to separate police vehicles.
Hours later, on a bench in the West L.A. precinct on Purdue Avenue, Anjelica lifted her head as Polanski, escorted, was walked past her.
“I’m sorry for this, Anjelica,” he said.
* * *
Polanski was indicted on six counts: “unlawful sexual intercourse,” “furnishing a controlled substance to a minor,” “raping a child he had allegedly drugged,” committing a “lewd and lascivious act upon and with the body and certain parts and members thereof [of] a 13-year-old girl,” “perversion,” and “sodomy.” A plea bargain was reached: Polanski pled guilty to a single count of statutory rape. Acting on behalf of the victim, the prosecution held that a single felony plea and a conviction would protect her from having to go to trial and testify in court. This Samantha did not want. She did not want further publicity. She wanted it over.
Polanski and his team complied. In their classified report on the case, the prosecution cited: “The fact that the family believes that Roman Raymond Polanski’s admission of guilt is a satisfactory solution and [other] points indicate that the offered plea constitutes a fair resolution of the case of The People v. Polanski and gives appropriate public protection.” An understanding was reached. “We all understood that avoiding a trial meant Polanski would get off with a minor punishment for his major crime but we were clear where our priorities were,” Samantha Geimer would write. Because the crime was unlawful sexual intercourse, she and her family knew there would be probation but no jail time. All parties agreed.
The deal as presented to the court on August 6, 1977, called for court-appointed psychiatrists to examine Polanski to determine if he was a mentally disturbed sex offender but did “not in any way involve a sentence commitment.”
The following day, two days before the eighth anniversary of Sharon Tate’s murder, Polanski knelt at her grave at Holy Cross Cemetery to place flowers beside her name when a man leaped out from behind the bushes, snapping pictures of Polanski in grief. “Fucking Nazi!” he screamed to the bushes. “Fucking Nazis! Fuck off! All of you!”
A day later, Polanski, in court, formally made his plea: “I had sexual intercourse with a female person not my wife, under the age of eighteen.”
In September, Judge Laurence J. Rittenband ordered Polanski to undergo further evaluation at the California Institute for Men at Chino; it would be a ninety-day diagnostic study. In addition, Rittenband granted Polanski’s request to delay his Chino probation for three months so that he could complete preproduction work in Polynesia for his next film, The Hurricane. Once again, all parties agreed, and Polanski left town.
On his way to the Hillcrest Country Club for the annual Columbus Day Ball, Judge Rittenband glimpsed a photograph of Polanski printed in the Santa Monica Evening Outlook—a shot of the director clearly not engaged in preproduction work but seemingly enjoying himself, in Munich, in fact, not Polynesia, puffing on a cigar in the company of a young-looking girl. They were at Oktoberfest. Rittenband was humiliated. Publicly criticized for going soft on Polanski, the judge ordered him to return to Santa Monica immediately for a hearing on the exact nature of his preproduction practice and set his Chino evaluation date for December 19.
As ordered, Polanski returned to Los Angeles.
Jack Nicholson presided over a farewell dinner for Polanski the night before he was to begin his sentence at Chino. Nicholson, by now cleared of any involvement in the scandal, would remain unfailingly committed to Polanski without arguing for his innocence. Nicholson’s loyalty to Polanski was briefly complicated by Anjelica’s interests; it was said in the press that she was prepared to testify “against” Polanski—in effect, to offer damning evidence to buy her way clear of charges of cocaine possession, which had been dropped. Ever the peacekeeper, Jack would clear the air: “She’s been very wronged,” he said. “The district attorney sent Anjelica a letter saying they’d been unethical, because in reality, Anjelica could not say anything because she didn’t know that much about it.”