As ordered, Polanski submitted to Chino. His ninety days, reduced to half, ended on January 29, 1978; the following day Judge Rittenband convened the lawyers, prosecution and defense, in his chambers.
“Forty-two days is not enough time in custody,” Rittenband announced.
“If it’s forty-eight more days you want,” prosecuting attorney Roger Gunson replied, “why don’t you just give him forty-eight days in the county jail? Then you will have accomplished him serving the full ninety days in jail.”
Rittenband explained his concerns quite clearly and without shame: He was getting too much negative press to let Polanski off so easily, Rittenband said. But he had a plan, a way of saving face, and for it to work, it required the collusion of all involved. “I want people to think I’m a tough sentencer,” Samantha Gailey’s lawyer, Larry Silver, remembered Rittenband explaining. “So we’ll do this, and then when the attention is off the case, you”—meaning Douglas Dalton, Polanski’s lawyer—“petition for a change of sentence and I will sentence him to time served.” In the meeting, Rittenband proposed that he would, for the benefit of the press, send Polanski back to Chino and then on to jail for an indeterminate period, but once the sentence had been actuated, he would recall Polanski and covertly release him from prison. It was a ruse, a public relations ploy. “He was flatly admitting,” recalled Silver, “[that] he was weighing public opinion and press opinion in his sentencing decision.” Following Polanski’s release, Dalton was then instructed to argue for probation, Rittenband said, and Gunson, true to his role as prosecuting attorney, was to argue for more time in custody. Then the judge would rule as discussed. That was the plan.
Leaving Rittenband’s chambers that afternoon, Dalton and Gunson reviewed what they had just heard. Comparing notes, sharing their shock at the unabashed corruptibility of the judge, they drew together, no longer a prosecuting lawyer and the defense, but allied witnesses to “a sham,” as Gunson later described it. In solidarity, Gunson vowed to Dalton that he would be “available to disclose this information to anyone at any place at anytime.” But Dalton, considering his next move, was utterly paralyzed: He had to advise Polanski the very next morning. If he was to trust Rittenband, Polanski would, theoretically, be released in time, but at an unspecified date subject to the judge’s (obviously highly variable) whim. But were Dalton to resist Rittenband, who had clearly stated his intention to make an example of Polanski (“He gave as his reason that he was getting too much criticism,” Dalton said), it could lead to a far worse sentence. How bad, there was no telling. Dalton said, “I didn’t know what I was going to do the following day.”
As little as possible …
The next day, January 31, a riot of freak thunderstorms dumped rain on Los Angeles.
Dalton told Polanski everything: “It was my opinion that the sentence would be illegal,” he would explain, “that we could probably obtain relief on appeal but that would involve a long procedure and Polanski would be incarcerated during that period of time. I said that the judge had said that if Roman agreed to waive any deportation hearing and be deported that he would then be released if he also had by then served forty-eight days.”
“Can we trust him?” Polanski asked Dalton.
“No. We can’t trust him. We have no idea what he may do. We’ve all agreed that he can no longer be trusted and what he represents to us is worthless.”
“Shove off,” his father whispered.
Polanski stood. “I’ll see you guys later.”
He walked out into the rain, and the next day he boarded a plane for London. He would never return to America.
* * *
Writing had never come easily to Robert Towne, but the hat trick of The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo would be a difficult run for any writer to best. Instead he rewrote crucial scenes of Marathon Man (Evans gifted him a BMW 3.0CS) and bits and pieces of miscellaneous others (adding, per John Frankenheimer’s request, a line to Black Sunday), and in his credited work careened from false starts and stops to voluminous and thwarted outlines and exploratory outpourings of Greystoke, his cherished Tarzan story, swelling it to hundreds of pages, and, throughout, producing thickets of notes for the Chinatown sequel, originally called The Iron Jew, then renamed The Two Jakes.
Towne and Payne moved into a house out on Malibu Road. For property tax reasons, they decided to marry in November 1977—incognito. “I was extremely private,” Payne explained. Towne’s lawyer, Wally Wolf, and his wife, Carolyn, held a short secret ceremony at their house in the Pacific Palisades.
Payne got pregnant. It was a girl.
“Robert,” she said, “you’re the writer, the giver of names. What should we name her?”
“A classic name. Katherine. Katherine with a K. It’s stronger.”
“No e—a. Katharine.”
Katharine Payne Towne was born on July 17, 1978. Anthea Sylbert, who had let her childbearing window close, was made child’s godmother.
Costume designing F.I.S.T., a picture about the labor movement, a subject close to Anthea Sylbert’s heart, she recognized, as Dick Sylbert had, an unwelcome change in the culture of Hollywood filmmaking. On set, she watched Sylvester Stallone, in the middle of a big strike scene, “walking out with this jacket thrown over his shoulder like he’s walking on the Via Veneto.” Annoyed, she approached director Norman Jewison.
“Norman, you have to tell him he can’t do that. He has to put it on or not wear it at all.”
He said, “I don’t want you to interfere with my actors.”
“Then tell somebody to get me a ticket out of here,” she told Jewison.
It was time, she decided. “I didn’t want to be a designer anymore if this was how it was going to be,” Sylbert decided. Under Calley she began a new career as a vice president at Warner Bros. She would never design another film.
* * *
Perhaps two years after Katharine’s birth, Payne was reminded of Chinatown, that the name of Evelyn’s daughter, born of incest, was Katharine, not with an a maybe, but a Katherine nonetheless. She was disgusted.
“What is wrong with you?” she shouted at Towne. He had picked the name.
“Roman did that!”
“Roman didn’t do that. Robert did that!”
In October 1978, the year Katharine was born, Towne coolly announced to Payne he was going to start using cocaine. “It was deliberate,” she said. “He was going to write. He was going to do it like Freud, and he was going to do it on cocaine.” If he controlled the amount he took, he assured her, it wouldn’t control him. To level out, he drank vodka.
He disappeared emotionally.
“That was it,” Payne said. “That was the end of Robert as I knew him.”
It was the year Betty Ford revealed her dependency on alcohol and painkillers, prompting an inundation of similar announcements from public and private figures—Barry Diller would found a twelve-step program at Paramount—demonstrations of the malaise, long submerged, that had been growing under the American ground, some said, for a decade.
Something—a faith—had been lost. Christopher Lasch, in his 1979 The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, observed: “Since the ‘society’ has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment … to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate ‘transcendental self-attention,’” to become, in short, narcissists, who, bereft of faith, live by a survivalist mentality, “expressed in its crudest form in disaster movies,” seeking escape in fame, sex, power, drugs—any delusion to resist the growing awareness of failure and futility. Drugs, addictions to wealth, celebrity, quick pleasure, and omnipotence—harbingers of Reagan America and eighties Hollywood—were the narcissists’ response to emotional abandonment on the national scale, and, as the ordeal of Evelyn Mulwray attests, took their toll on yet another institutional faith: The family. The children.