In late-sixties Hollywood, the Ziegler-Ross Agency may have been atypically refined, but it did not corner the market on intimacy. Before the age of CAA, which would excel at servicing not the discreet needs of its clients but the omnivorous bottom line of the corporation, boutique talent agencies like Ziegler-Ross proliferated in the movie business, fostering personal relationships and personal projects, many of them tough sells, like Z-R’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? a pitch-black night-of-the-locust drama that eventually won Oscar nominations for director Sydney Pollack and writer James Poe, clients both.
Polanski’s agent at Ziegler was Bill Tennant. “Everyone on his list seemed to be ‘happening,’” wrote Peter Bart, “and Tennant seemed the fulcrum.” With its six or seven agents hand selected for their intelligence, Ziegler-Ross, between phone calls, nurtured a salon environment wholly unthinkable at William Morris or MCA. “Clients would just come by the office,” said Nasatir. “Hollywood was like a small town then.”
* * *
Sharon got pregnant. “Bob,” she cooed to Robert Evans, “the baby’s kicking!”
“How does it feel?”
“It’s the best feeling in the world.”
“I’ll tell Roman.”
“While you’re at it, tell him he’d better be home for his birthday. Remember, it’s the eighteenth.”
“He’ll be here, baby.”
Polanski was in London with Richard Sylbert preparing their next film, Day of the Dolphin, for Sharon and Jack Nicholson, who had only months earlier made a big noise in Easy Rider. Enveloped in love, friends, and film, Polanski tried to accept his incredible good fortune. “I know that on one hand success gives you some kind of satisfaction but it doesn’t give you the bliss,” he reflected. “On the other hand I know that love gives you the happiness but I know that it ends.” In his mind there was always the ghetto. “To get a woman pregnant was a catastrophe [during the war] at [that] time,” he said, “and that’s how I grew up.” But a stronger part of Polanski intervened, reminding him that it was safe now, that everyone around him, in America, was having children, “that I can have a child and we can have a normal life.”
Sharon and Polanski worked up “an astronomical phone bill,” he said, discussing the pregnancy, the baby books she was reading, how she wanted a natural childbirth, how Polanski, when he came back to Los Angeles, would be going with her to Lamaze class. She stopped smoking grass, she said, quit wine, and was drinking whole milk. He wanted a girl; she was convinced it would be a boy. They agreed the baby would be born in the United States.
“When are you coming?”
“Soon,” he would say. “Soon.”
Grocery shopping on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, Sharon ran into Julie Payne, new girlfriend of the screenwriter Robert Towne. They hadn’t seen each other for a few years, since they were neighbors up Benedict Canyon on Yoakum Drive. Roman was coming back in a few days, Sharon told Julie, and they were house shopping.
Payne, a native Angeleno and first-rate house person, had friends who were selling their place up Benedict, not far from Yoakum. It had a fantastic screening setup, an outdoor projector that threw light over the pool against a large wall. Roman would love that. “I know a house that’s going on the market,” Payne told Sharon. “It’s a Byrd house”—so called because of the architect Robert Byrd. “It’s perfect. You could see it next week?”
“Great!”
“Come up for dinner soon?”
Sharon would come for dinner (“She weighed herself in the bathroom,” Payne said, “bra and panties and eight months pregnant”) but would pass on the Byrd streets for a high-up and spacious Benedict Canyon property very close to Robert Towne’s home on Hutton Drive. The day she met real estate agent Elaine Young, “Sharon wore no makeup and was wearing jeans and she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She was so excited and fell in love with the house.” It was her dream house, she confessed to Young as they ambled the grounds, the garden, the astonishing city view below. Roman, Sharon knew, would flip for the view; he loved the burnt rainbow of Los Angeles at dusk, its million lights twinkling like stars on earth. Even Paris, city of his birth, couldn’t argue with Los Angeles’s great ocean of night light, visible, in its tranquil entirety, from the yawning cliff’s-edge lawn of 10050 Cielo Drive.
Sharon took the house and, as was her custom, opened its doors to everyone. “It was the crowd from the Daisy,” Warren Beatty said. All were welcome to stay the night, or even the week.
“When are you coming home?”
“Soon,” Roman would say. “Soon.”
She went to visit him in London. There was a strangeness.
Though her pregnancy only increased his devotion, Polanski found himself unable to make love to Sharon, an equivocation she took for withdrawal, the sure sign, she thought, of infidelity. Of course, she knew Roman had had other women. That had been their agreement. Ashamed of his shortcomings, Polanski assured Sharon she was as beautiful as ever, and he loved her only more for carrying their child. But she worried the change foretold inevitable changes ahead. She knew there was a threshold in every long love where romance cedes to reality, and certain passions, once abundant, begin to appear for the last time. A day would come. The garden gate would lock behind them, and suddenly they would be different forever. Or were they already?
On the day she was to return to America, aboard the QE2, Polanski drove her to the dock at Southampton, and they climbed aboard the ship hand in hand, exploring its nooks and cabins like excited children, the way they had their house on the Santa Monica beach, haunted all the while by the coming goodbye. Sharon couldn’t bear it.
“Okay, go now,” she said.
He held and kissed her and thought, for reasons he couldn’t explain, that he would never see her again.
They continued to speak on the phone every day.
Polanski, caught up in script problems, further postponed his return to Los Angeles, and Sharon grew impatient: He was missing it, the crucial final stretch of the pregnancy. Suddenly the baby was due in two weeks. Couldn’t he finish the script at home in Los Angeles? Would he at least be home for his birthday? Bitterness edged into her voice and they were strange again. The double intrusion of a Southern California heat wave and ill-timed houseguests, Roman’s friend Wojciech Frykowski and his girlfriend, Abigail Folger, only increased her irritation. When was he coming home? She couldn’t ask them to leave, she said, they were her friends.…
“That’s it,” Polanski told her. “I’m coming. I’ll finish the script over there. I’ll leave tomorrow.”
But it didn’t work out that way; it couldn’t. Polanski still needed a U.S. visa, and the consulate was closed on Saturdays.
That day, Friday, August 8, 1969, they spoke again.
She told him she and Wojciech and Abigail had found a kitten in the hills and were feeding it with an eyedropper. They were keeping it in the bathtub.
“I’m coming Monday,” Polanski said, “whether I’m through with the script or not.”
That night Polanski and his friends Andy Braunsberg and Michael Brown were discussing the script. A whiz with story and a first-rate screenwriter, Polanski was pacing the room in thought, gesticulating his ideas into a potential scene, when the phone rang. Braunsberg reached for it.