By 1979, Towne had so transformed, Payne remembered, Katharine didn’t recognize him. Once she mistook Edward Taylor for her father.
* * *
Meanwhile, as ever, people came to Hollywood seeking glory. If acting was a billion-to-one shot and directing required specialized access to film equipment, screenwriting was most of America’s best way in. All you needed was paper, pen, and a copy of Syd Field’s bestselling 1979 Screenplay, a book that ably separated the art of screenwriting from the very teachable craft. In his classic, Field presented the dos and don’ts of traditional story structure with arresting simplicity, and if, in the wake of his insights, Hollywood screenwriters, in greater numbers than ever before, willfully eschewed the innovative for the formulaic, they weren’t entirely to blame; writers had to sell, and Field, unintentionally, had written a buying manual for nervous executives looking to cover their asses.
Field wrote that Robert Towne’s Chinatown was the “best American screenplay written during the 1970s.” He successfully argued that the script was a work of exemplary craftsmanship, systematically checking the boxes beside his paradigmatic talking points; though why—when any number of great screenplays of the seventies check as many boxes—Field deemed Chinatown the single best he never fully clarified. “What makes it so good,” he wrote, unsatisfactorily, “is that it works on all levels—story, structure, characterization, visuals—yet everything we need to know is set up within the first ten pages.”
Field’s preference for the script caught on. His acolytes, growing in number with each reprint, with each new film school, spread the good word, and Field’s assertion of the Chinatown script’s primacy—much like those about Hollywood’s “best” film, Citizen Kane or Hollywood’s “best” year, 1939—became so widely accepted it was (and still is) practically taken for fact. The guru of screenwriting had deemed it so.
Money, formerly peripheral to Towne, became central. He began complaining that his agent, Evarts Ziegler, who had once loaned him ten thousand dollars to support him through the writing of Chinatown, was unable to secure him a million-dollar payday for Greystoke. In December 1978 Towne fired Ziegler and signed with Michael Ovitz of CAA.
Payne and Towne separated.
He moved into a hotel in Westwood. She started drinking herself to sleep.
She would check herself into the CDC at St. John’s Hospital for alcohol dependence. When she gave her name to Roxie at the front desk, she asked Payne if she was related to Lou Towne.
“Yes,” Payne said.
“He was the worst patient we ever had.”
Edward Taylor’s stepdaughter Katherine Andrusco drove Kate —also known as Skip—to the CDC every afternoon to have Jell-O with her mother in the cafeteria. “Robert,” Andrusco wrote, “was completely unsupportive of any effort to have Skip visit and refused to take her to the hospital himself.” He had become, since working on Personal Best, “unspeakably cruel and mean-hearted,” Andrusco wrote, telling his daughter, the day Julie was released from the hospital, that her mother was crazy and drunk. In front of Kate, he called her—the child—a cunt.
“Don’t call her that!” Andrusco shouted. “What are you saying, Robert!”
“She has to get used to it, you know, because she’ll hear it.”
After Payne was discharged, at a July 4 celebration in Malibu, Kate, playing in the water, was knocked over by a gentle wave, “at which point,” recalled a family friend, “Bob Towne scooped her up in a blanket, charged into the house, and in front of about fifty people berated Julie, calling her unfit to be a mother, etc. His behavior was extremely erratic and bizarre, ranting and raving from subject to subject, none of which was in any way related.”
In January 1983, Payne served Towne divorce papers. In June custody proceedings began. Dr. Rocco Motto was appointed as the psychiatrist tasked with recommending custody arrangements.
Towne’s long-term cocaine abuse, Payne alleged, rendered him unfit for custody of any kind. In court documents, Towne called her allegations “slanderous. If allowed to continue they will impair not only my employment but my ability to negotiate successfully with the producers and/or studios for whom I write scripts.”
“Mommy says you take cocaine,” Kate said to Towne one night.
“This remark greatly disturbed me,” he would report in his declaration of August 2, 1983, “not only because it came from my five year old daughter, but also because it can adversely affect my professional reputation.”
Payne implored Motto to interview any number of witnesses who could testify to Towne’s alleged drug abuse, but Motto, Payne would say, “flagrantly ignored them,” one after the next. “Warren Beatty called me several weeks ago regarding Julie, Skip and Robert,” wrote psychologist Barbara Phillips Wright to Motto. “In fact, he telephoned four or five times in one day. His concern is for Skip. At that time he said, ‘Well, Julie is sober and Robert is not.’ I could not agree more.” Towne, in a sworn testimony, claimed Beatty “angrily denied” making the statement and threatened to sue for libel.
“He was gaslighting me,” Payne would say later.
“In the 7 sessions with Robert,” Motto observed in his evaluation, “he admitted to his periodic use of cocaine, but he denied that he was or had ever used it excessively. He offered as proof or as a refutation, a number of individuals who have known his work over a 5-10 year period or longer. When I interviewed all of them, I was consistently told, ‘Robert is producing more work and of a higher quality than before. We see no evidence of a fall off in quantity or quality.’ All his comments re his daughter revealed an intense concern and wish to be in contact and involved in her growth and development.”
In Motto’s report, Payne was described as “non-attentive” mother as well as “over-solicitous,” “harsh and bitter.” It cited her period of “very bad” alcohol abuse. Towne, by contrast, was characterized as a “very loving and very gentle” father, “very tolerant and very, very patient with [Kate],” and “extremely devoted.” Glancing at Motto’s letterhead, Payne noticed Motto’s address—440 South Bristol Drive—he was her father- and mother-in-law Lou and Helen Towne’s next-door neighbor in Brentwood. “They were covering for an abusive drug addict,” she said. “And they were going to make sure to take my daughter away from me.”
* * *
Edward Taylor, pulled away from his work on Towne’s script, Tequila Sunrise, a film about an honorable cocaine dealer trying to get straight, was deposed, June 18, 1984.
“What is your present occupation?”
“I’m a writer, an editor, and I do some producing-type work,” he replied.
“By whom are you employed at the present time?”
“Robert Towne.”
“And how many hours a day or week do you work for him?”
“It varies on the nature of the project, but usually it’s full time.”
“And what is your salary with him?”
“It is set at the moment at $1200 a week.”
Taylor was asked, “Did you tell Dr. Motto that Robert used coke regularly?”