The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

by Samantha Geimer

  I told him about the photo shoot on the hill, and the shots at Jacqueline Bisset’s home, and the shots drinking champagne, and the shots by the lamp at Nicholson’s, and the shots in the Jacuzzi.

  Did Mr. Polanski give you the champagne? Did he give you drugs? Do you understand what sex is? Did Mr. Polanski have sex with you?

  I don’t think Detective Vannatter asked me if I had been forced to have sex. This point, I gathered, did not interest him much. He asked the questions calmly and did not rush me. He had a thin, kind smile. This time I wasn’t bothered that Mom and Bob had been directed to stay in the waiting area while I had been called away. For the first time all night no one was staring at me curiously, and I felt calm and safe.

  I don’t recall Detective Vannatter taking notes, but he must have been. He surely had some kind of system, because in the same steady voice he repeated the questions, in the same tone, nodding thoughtfully again, like we were reshooting the scene.

  I wasn’t undone by the repetition. I didn’t think he was trying to trap me. It was clear he just wanted my answers to be accurate. And since I was telling the truth, I felt no pressure to perform.

  Still, there was this powerful sense that the train had left the station, and I was on the wrong goddamn train.

  · · ·

  We slept little that night. In the morning, Mom, Bob, and I drove to Santa Monica, a beach town near where we’d lived in Pacific Palisades. We entered the Superior Court of California, a sprawling building rimmed by palm trees. They told me I had to talk to the district attorney. The whole thing had an air of secrecy about it. We didn’t even park out front; we had to drive to some underground garage. Maybe there was some perfectly logical reason, but it felt like the whole situation was hush-hush.

  Soon we found ourselves in the office of Deputy District Attorney Michael J. Montagna, and staring at drab tiles that reminded me of the floors at school. Tired and just wanting to be cared for, I was acting like a baby. I sat on Mom’s lap for a time, then Bob’s. I was escorted alone to an office. There were at least two men standing, and a woman sat behind me.

  I was seated in a wooden chair across the desk from the district attorney, an older man with dark hair who seemed distinctly unhappy, yet relished his authority over everyone in the room. Everyone else in the room seemed to stay as far away from him as possible.

  He looked at me intensely and said he wanted truthful answers. While I had immediately sensed Detective Vannatter believed me, I immediately sensed this man did not. I tensed, partly because of the woman sitting directly behind me. It had been explained to me that because I was female there needed to be a woman in the room, but it made me uneasy that I could not see her but sensed her presence. If she was there to provide me with a sense of comfort, well, it wasn’t working out.

  At least with Detective Vannatter, it was one-on-one. Our talk seemed private. But here I was surrounded. The other men, whose names I did not know, looked at me deadpan. Even their occasional polite smiles were flat. Again I faced questions about whether I had ever had sex before meeting Mr. Polanski, and other questions about body parts and what Mr. Polanski had done to me and what I had done in response.

  Why did you take off your clothes and get into the Jacuzzi?

  Where did Mr. Polanski touch you?

  Again, did he put it inside you?

  Have you ever had sex before? And then: Have you ever had sex with Bob?

  With Bob?

  Now I was furious. I sat rigid with my arms folded, and spit out the answers. I don’t think I made a good impression, but then I didn’t see why I had to. I was the one who had been raped. Why was everyone asking me about what I’d done with my boyfriend, what I’d done with my mother’s boyfriend?

  I was relieved when it was over, but before I could leave, they had to take my fingerprints. They were investigating the crime scene, and they needed to be able to distinguish all the fingerprints at the home. I was angry—what did I do to be treated this way?—but I was also a kid who’d seen her share of cop shows, so there was something kind of cool about being treated like a criminal. Having seen this kind of thing on TV made it more real.

  Throughout the night and morning, I had been asked about Mr. Polanski: What did he say? What did he do? And what sort of relationship did we have?

  My mother kept muttering about the son of a bitch who did this to her daughter. But I cannot tell you that over the hours I thought of him even once. I mean, really thought about him. I was not angry at him. I did not feel sorry for him. Nothing. He had quickly become unreal, a man who existed only on paper or film.

  Later, though, I wondered: Where was he? What was he thinking? Was he feeling angry with me? Sorry? Was he feeling anything at all?

  A day or two later I opened the paper.

  There we were.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  POLANSKI ARRESTED FOR RAPE

  March 12

  LOS ANGELES (AP): Film producer Roman Polanski has been arrested and booked on a charge of raping a 13 year old girl. Polanski was arrested Friday night, a day after the rape allegedly occurred at the West Los Angeles home of actor Jack Nicholson. He was released on $2,500 bail.

  Police also arrested 26-year-old Anjelica Huston, the daughter of movie director John Huston, on a charge of possessing cocaine. She was booked and released on $1,500 bail.

  Police and district attorney investigators took the 43-year-old Polanski into custody at 8 p.m. Friday at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, a police spokesman said.

  The complaint against Polanski was reportedly filed by the girl’s mother.

  Miss Huston was arrested by officers Friday when they went to Nicholson’s home on Mulholland Drive to search for evidence in the rape case.

  Police spokesman Lt. Dan Cooke said Polanski and the young girl reportedly were alone in the house at the time of the alleged rape. It was not known immediately where Nicholson was.

  Police officials refused to release other details in the case.

  Polanski’s wife was Sharon Tate. She and four others were murdered in Polanski’s Hollywood home by Charles Manson and his followers in 1969 while Polanski was in London.

  Roman Polanski was arrested Friday night, March 11, about twenty-four hours after we left Jack Nicholson’s. No one called to tell us it had happened. Mom and Bob read it in the newspaper. It was unsettling, thinking that some of what I had told the police officers and Detective Vannatter and the deputy district attorney was now showing up in print for the world to see. That first wire service article said that Polanski had lured a thirteen-year-old girl to Jack Nicholson’s house on the pretext of photographing her, then drugged and raped her. He also was suspected of sodomy, child molestation, and furnishing dangerous drugs to a minor.

  I’m thinking, This seems like a big pile of Awful for something that took only a few minutes.

  Subsequent articles said that my mother and Polanski met to plan the photo shoots, and that my mother was angered after seeing the topless pictures. The implications were obvious: gold digger parents, hot kid as payoff. Several years later, in 1984, Polanski would write an autobiography, Roman. He would say that at the time of the first meeting at our house, my mother had asked him to recommend a good agent to her, and that Bob had asked him to pass along an interview request to Jack Nicholson on behalf of his magazine, Marijuana Monthly, because Nicholson had been known to support the legalization of soft drugs like pot.

  My mother did ask for an agent recommendation. Bob did ask for Polanski to pass along the interview request. Did that imply there was some sort of quid pro quo for professional courtesies that included nookie with the thirteen-year-old? (Neither the agent nor the Nicholson interview came through.)

  We also soon learned that during one of the searches of Nicholson’s house, Anjelica Huston, Nicholson’s longtime girlfriend, had been arrested on charges of cocaine possession. The dark-haired woman at the house who’d kn
ocked on the door during the rape—that was Huston; she wasn’t supposed to be in the house that evening, because she and Nicholson had recently broken up. But now I’d gotten her in trouble, too. It might occur to you that making enemies of Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Houston was not a recipe for Hollywood success.

  (Incidentally, some of the articles also suggested I had been the one to bring cocaine and Quaaludes to the house. A few pegged me as a drug dealer.)

  Later still, we heard more details. After raping me at Nicholson’s and dropping me at home, Polanski returned to business as usual. He had a meeting that evening with Robert De Niro to discuss the making of a movie based on a William Goldman novel, Magic. (The movie was eventually directed by Richard Attenborough and starred not De Niro but Anthony Hopkins.)

  The next day Detective Vannatter and an assistant DA named Jim Grodin went to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Polanski was staying. He was with friends in the lobby, preparing to go out as the two investigators were coming in. They asked to speak with him, and as he separated himself from his group, he asked if whatever they wanted would take more than a few minutes. He was impatient to get on with his night on the town.

  He seemed to have absolutely no clue he had done anything wrong—though he did try to inconspicuously drop the Quaalude he happened to be holding; the arresting officer caught him and seized the pill. That fact alone is odd, since Polanski had a prescription for Quaaludes for sleep problems. One can only speculate that maybe at that moment, it seemed too obvious he wasn’t using the pills for sleep.

  Vannatter and Grodin showed him a search warrant, and once inside his hotel suite they found (but ignored) the little yellow case that held the pills. They also found a photo stub from Sav-On Drugs, where Roman had taken film to be developed. The film included the shots of me in Nicholson’s Jacuzzi, naked to the waist.

  Lurid tidbits began to leak, slowly but surely, as the press attempted to sensationalize what was already sensational. The Quaalude I’d been given was described as the same drug the actor Freddie Prinze had taken before shooting himself in the head. Anjelica Huston’s testimony provided great fodder, too. In exchange for immunity on her cocaine possession charge, she agreed to testify for the prosecution. But her statement seemed to follow the narrative the defense was trying to create. This is how she described me: “[The girl] didn’t appear to be distressed . . . she was breathing high in her throat when she came out. She seemed sullen, which I thought was a little rude. . . . She appeared to be kind of one of those little chicks between—could be any age up to 25 . . . you know, she did not look like a little scared thing. . . .” About Polanski himself, she said, “I have seen him as a man with compassion, not someone who would forcibly hurt another person. . . . I don’t think he’s a bad man. I think he’s an unhappy man.”

  Articles always referred to Roman as the “Polish film director and the widower of murdered actress Sharon Tate.” Polanski was not only at the top of his game, he was also something of a tragic figure in Hollywood. There was a subtext to the early articles: Who was this slutty little girl trying to entrap one of the greatest film directors of all time? Hasn’t poor Roman suffered enough?

  The next two weeks were a blur. Polanski posted bail, and there were TV reports showing him being hustled through crowds of cameras and microphones, with a tall, glowering man with bushy sideburns by his side. This was his lawyer, Douglas Dalton. The lawyer shook his head vigorously when questions were shouted at him. I began to notice the channel was often changed as I walked into the living room.

  When asked why the photographs seemed so amateurish, Polanski explained to friends that they were intentionally blurred, as though taken on the fly. He was inspired, he said, by the British-born photographer David Hamilton, whose dreamy, grainy, often-nude photos of prepubescent girls—ten, eleven years old—were at that time all the rage. While the British newspaper the Guardian has noted that Hamilton’s photography was “at the forefront of the ‘Is it art or pornography?’ ” debate, that debate was mostly in England and the United States. His work was not at all controversial in France, his home for decades. “It’s like the donkey chasing the carrot all his life,” Hamilton said of his work in an interview. “Girls girls girls. That’s what it’s about. Better than playing football or cricket, I guess.” That morally ambiguous observation might have just as well come from Polanski himself.

  Mom was panicking that my name would appear in the news, a concern that was hardly unfounded. While the American press generally resisted printing the names of rape victims, the European press had a different attitude about such things. There, where Roman Polanski was considered a genius and a cultural hero, I was nothing more than a nuisance and an apostate with no rights.

  In his autobiography, Polanski would write how the accusation immediately made him the butt of jokes (“Heard the title of Polanski’s next picture? Close Encounters with the Third Grade”), and box office poison in the United States. “I was a pariah,” he wrote. “ ‘We can’t have a rapist in our agency,’ ” he quoted his former agent Sue Mengers saying. Polanski went on, “Although she later revised this judgment—swung to the other extreme, in fact—her initial attitude was shared by most of Hollywood.”

  Polanski’s memory is faulty here—or maybe just convenient for breast-beating. From the beginning there was little outrage among prominent Hollywood figures. But however persecuted he may have felt here, in Europe there was no debate: he was an extremely sympathetic figure, and it was easier to see him as a victim—if not of a malicious setup, then at least of America’s obsession with celebrity and the desire of every aspiring pretty girl to make it, however she could. And Americans—so puritanical, so obsessed with sex and sexual shenanigans!

  My mother felt relieved to see him arrested, but I wasn’t so sure, still feeling that I had at least in some way brought all this on myself. If I were clever or if I had put up more of a fight, or if I hadn’t drunk the champagne or taken the Quaalude or . . . and so on, then I could have figured a way out of Nicholson’s house before things got so crazy. Then I wouldn’t be in this situation—and neither would Polanski.

  I knew I hadn’t wanted to have sex with Roman, but did that make it rape? I thought rape had to be violent. When I was told that what he had done was a serious crime because of my age, I was shocked. While I may have been unsure what to call it, I certainly didn’t see it as Polanski himself described it later, in his autobiography: “In all my many premonitions of disaster, one thought had never crossed my mind: that I should be sent to prison, my life and career ruined, for making love.”

  Making love? Really? On what planet could what happened ever be considered “making love”?

  Still, I was not brutalized. I was not dragged into the woods. I never felt in physical danger, and I never felt “poor me.” At least, not because of being raped.

  CHAPTER 7

  At the end of March I had to appear before this thing called a grand jury. I didn’t know much about it, but I knew I was going to have to tell the details of what had happened at Jack Nicholson’s house to twenty-three strangers. This was how the courts determined whether a person could be indicted for a crime, and whether a trial could proceed. Was there enough evidence? Was there any evidence? Would I be believed?

  I tried not to think about it. I returned to school the week after the rape, and even resumed my acrobatics class, mostly to give the appearance that everything was normal. My name was not yet out, and the news of Polanski’s arrest was not a topic of conversation in the average junior high school. Still, I knew it wouldn’t be long before people figured it out. I had told my friends about the modeling work I had done with a famous movie director, and my friend Terri, of course, knew I had gone off with Roman that day. People were going to put it together soon and realize that I was The Girl.

  I wasn’t exactly cut off from the world, but my family made an enormous effort to create a media blackout around me. TVs and radios snapped off, newspape
rs were hidden; there was lots and lots of shushing.

  All that not-thinking-about-it made me nervous. All those concerned, sad eyes pissed me off. I was the surliest everything-is-normal teenager you ever met.

  In all honesty, I think I wanted my mother to suffer. Look at the horrible mess she’d gotten us into. If she’d only kept her mouth shut! I didn’t look at her, and if I responded to her at all it was in monosyllables. It kills me now to realize what she was going through at the time: overcome with self-reproach, the feeling she’d failed at her greatest responsibility—protecting me. She also had more practical concerns. Those Ourisman Chevrolet commercials that she flew back east every six months to shoot had been the mainstay of our income for years. If she brought bad publicity to the company, if she were no longer their spokesmodel, we could kiss this sunny Valley life goodbye.

  No one recalls for sure when my father was notified, though we all assume it was the day after the rape. I think about my dad hearing the news back in York, and his quiet rage is more terrifying than anything my mother’s visible fury could produce. I can imagine him crying, too, the way he did when he sent me off at the airport the summer before. They were hot, silent tears, the kind a man cries when he is furious and powerless.

  • • •

  The morning of grand jury testimony, March 24, 1977, was sunny but unseasonably chilly. Gusts of wind rippled the ocean, which is just a few blocks from the Santa Monica courthouse where the case had been assigned.

  We’d driven through a back entrance into a basement garage to avoid reporters, my mother doing her deep-breathing exercises to calm herself while Bob drove. Our arrival was relatively calm. Polanski, on the other hand, had been swarmed outside several days earlier—not only by the press, but by a party of local high school girls visiting the courthouse. They acted like he was David Cassidy, as they shrieked and clamored for his autograph. There was, I heard later, a scuffle between the reporters and the high school girls, each jockeying for position.