“I did not say he used coke regularly,” he replied.
David Geffen, producer of Towne’s Personal Best, was deposed.
“Going back to the period of time when [Personal Best] was shut down, which was somewhere around February of ’81, I believe, did you know a man by the name of Peter Peyton at or about that time.”
“Yes,” Geffen replied, “he was a close friend of Robert’s and was the associate producer, I believe, on the movie.”
“Did you know him to be a supplier of coke?”
“I was told that he was a supplier. I didn’t know it from personal experience.”
“Did you ever discuss Peter Peyton with Robert Towne?”
Towne, Geffen reported, denied any involvement with cocaine.
Katherine Andrusco, Taylor’s stepdaughter, who was working as an employee of the Townes, was deposed.
“Did you know about an account at City National Bank here in Westwood?”
“Yes. There were several accounts there.”
“Okay. You’re right. Sorry about that. I’m talking about one account with Robert [Towne], Peter [Peyton] and Edward [Taylor] only on it.”
“Yes.”
“And do you know what that account was used for?”
“It was used for paying monies out that Robert didn’t want Julie to know about.”
Patti Dennis, assistant to the Townes’ financial manager, was deposed.
“Did you talk with [Robert Towne] about the fact that there was a lot of cash going out?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And that therefore—”
“And that I suspected that the cash was going for drugs.”
“You told that to Robert?”
“Uh-huh.”
In her deposition, Andrusco would clarify: “Peter [Peyton] came to me in April or March of ’82, to tell me there was money that I didn’t know about from 1981. And I would have to know about this income for tax purposes. And I said, ‘How much money?’ And he said, ‘Oh, around $90,000.’ And I said, ‘Well, I want to know where the money came from and where the money went. I need a full accounting in order for the taxes to be done.’ He eventually after several months provided me with an accounting only of between 20 or $30,000 worth of this $90,000. There was a $62,000 check that was a Chinatown residual. There was a $6,000 and something check that was a Shampoo residual.… There was a $12,000 to [Towne’s allergist], which was a personal loan.… And I said, ‘Well, I need to have an accounting of all the money, Peter, because it’s a lot of money and you have to—if it’s a business expense then you have to show that to the government.’ And he said, ‘Well, the money went to drug dealers because we’re writing this Tequila Sunrise.’ So that was the only explanation I got.”
Towne’s allergist, whose personal loan, eventually forgiven by Towne, would reach $17,000, would swear in his statement: “I have been [Towne’s] personal physician and allergist for many years. In examining his nasal mucous membranes I can tell you he is not addicted to cocaine. He does snort chromalin [sic] sodium, but that is not cocaine.”
A contemporary source remembers a story meeting with Towne, where he openly snorted from a supply of Merck medicinal cocaine he kept by his typewriter.
Psychologist Barbara Phillips Wright would remember a one-hour session wherein Towne went to the bathroom six times, each time returning more agitated than before.
In later notes left by a subsequent evaluator, Towne would admit to taking anywhere from an average of a quarter of a gram to half a gram of cocaine at his greatest period of use, which he estimated to be between 1980 and 1981, when his daughter was two to three years old.
Towne would be awarded joint custody of Kate.
“Dr. Motto,” Payne pleaded after the decision. “Are you listening to Lou Towne?”
Motto was silent.
Dr. Wright would come to believe there had been collusion against Payne. “She has no power,” Wright said.
It was Lou Towne, Payne felt. Allied with Motto, his next-door neighbor, she sensed he was letting a “drug addict parent his own granddaughter,” Payne said. “Just to keep Robert looking employable. It was all for money and reputation and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t help my daughter. It was like the ending to Chinatown.”
In the summer of 1984, Robert Towne, Robert Evans, and Jack Nicholson gathered at the mahogany table in the projection room at Woodland to discuss the terms of their next association, TEN Productions—named for the initials of its participants. Roman Polanski was unavailable, of course.
By that meeting, each of the TEN trio had stalled. They needed The Two Jakes, each in his own way.
Robert Evans was at an all-time career low. Plagued by the persistent stigma of a 1980 conviction for cocaine possession and a run of unsuccessful pictures (Players, Popeye), he was roundly considered a liability, a loser at the box office and to the new generation of baby moguls an alter kocker before his time. He fell still further with The Cotton Club, whose production, a Chinatown of its own, was beset by bad money, coke dealers, and a murder—investor Roy Radin, found dead, shot through the head, sixty-five miles north of Los Angeles. Unable to make The Cotton Club payroll and, without a studio, on the hook for the picture, Evans was advised to declare bankruptcy. His chance at The Two Jakes was a godsend.
Robert Towne was determined to direct The Two Jakes. It would be his resurrection too. In the ten years since his apex, he had acquired no equally distinguished credits.
And The Two Jakes would be Nicholson’s artistic resurrection as an actor. After his 1975 Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his productivity had declined and the films he chose were largely those that offered him opportunities for flamboyant self-parody (The Shining) and amenable fluff (The Witches of Eastwick). Gone was the impotent outrage he showed in the six years between Easy Rider and Cuckoo’s Nest, when at the peak of his creativity, Nicholson had made an astonishing fourteen films, most of them astonishing in their own right.
The Two Jakes, then, would attempt to turn back the clocks for all, not just by revisiting old story turf, continuing the saga of Jake Gittes, but by returning to a purer ethic of Hollywood film production, more seventies than eighties.
“Let’s not have any agents or lawyers in the room,” Evans requested in advance—they killed the romance. “By the time you start a film, you’re tired out.” At Woodland, glamour restored, “we all put our hands together,” Nicholson said, “and swore no agents or lawyers were going to screw us up.” All were in agreement that TEN Productions, to ensure its independence, would take no money up front, split a percentage of the gross, and share creative control. Waiving his actor’s salary, the old Nicholson reemerged.
Chinatown was set in 1937. Towne was setting The Two Jakes eleven years later—it had been eleven years since they shot Chinatown—in 1948, after World War II. Towne said: “[Gittes] came back much more relaxed, having felt we actually had done something to make the world a safer place to live.” But the crimes of land and oil, the corruption Gittes encounters in The Two Jakes, would unbury the old wounds, Cross and Mulwray, and what happened to him, twice, in Chinatown. It would happen again.