I married Sharon in 1968 in London, though we’d already decided to live in California. “Rosemary’s Baby” was an enormous hit. Everything seemed to be working out.
Then came the events of 1969 which made everything that I achieved seem senseless and futile. California became unbearable after that. I returned to London to live and work. Though I threw myself into professional activity with all my energy, my next two pictures, “Macbeth” and “What?” turned out to be failures. In 1973, Robert Evans invited me once more to Hollywood, this time to make the film “Chinatown.”
I was filled with apprehension about coming back to California, but the plain truth is that I needed the money—also, a successful picture, if I were to survive in my profession. Once I started work, everything went well. “Chinatown” was released in 1974 and received eleven nominations for the Academy Awards. . . .
[But a] strange tainted reputation seemed to accompany me, based partly on the subject matter of my films but even more so on the enormous publicity given Sharon’s murder. I was welcomed everywhere as a “jet-setter” and given unending parties. I found it harder and harder to establish meaningful relationships with women. . . .
[Polanski goes on to detail a series of career setbacks.]
That is where I was on March 11th of this year, when once again the circumstances of my life changed completely. The Columbia project was cancelled. My Italian investors in “Pirates” took the well-reported charges against me as a signal that they should bring a huge civil action against me for recovery of their advances, an action which is still pending.
Notwithstanding all these things, the producer Dino De Laurentiis offered me a new project, “The Hurricane,” in late May, which I accepted with gratitude and enthusiasm, and on which I am now working. He was only able to make me this offer at such a time because he is a genuine independent, answerable to no stockholders. In accordance with his trust in me, he has already committed lots of money to many, many people who will work with me on “The Hurricane.”
I hope circumstances don’t prevent me from justifying and repaying that trust.
If you have any further questions, I’ll certainly do my best to answer them.
Sincerely yours,
Roman Polanski
Polanski’s assessment of himself was at least not mawkish or self-pitying. But the probation report of acting probation officer Kenneth F. Faye (and signed by a deputy, Irwin Gold) seemed to be recommending Polanski for the Nobel Peace Prize—or at the very least the Oscars’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
First, the report detailed Polanski’s early suffering and the tragic death of his wife, noting that Polanski never saw a psychiatrist because he worried it “could interfere with the creative process.” He allowed that Polanski exercised “transient poor judgment and loss of normal inhibitions in circumstances of intimacy and collaboration in creative work, with some coincidental alcohol and drug intoxication” (the Quaaludes, he explained with not a trace of skepticism, had been prescribed to him for jet lag). He then went on to describe the “physical maturity and willingness and provocativeness of the victim, and the lack of coercion by the defendant and his solicitude concerning pregnancy.” (An interesting new euphemism for sodomy, apparently.) Despite my age and testimony that I had objected to having sex with Polanski and that I had asked to leave, the report concluded, “There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother.” In other words, the “mother-daughter hooker team,” as Rittenband had labeled us. “Incarceration,” he wrote, “would impose an unusual degree of stress and hardship because of his highly sensitive personality.”
But that wasn’t enough. The probation report included assessments by psychiatrists drawn, it seems, from the Roman Polanski Fan Club. One seemed to fancy himself a film critic. “The defendant has not only survived, he has prevailed . . . and has become one of the leading creative forces of the last two decades. . . . Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in the locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century . . . while they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive lands.”
Don’t blame the man; blame the (foreign) culture.
The New York Times reported:
One psychiatrist who examined Mr. Polanski, Alvin E. Davis, found he was not mentally ill or disordered, and not “a sexual deviate.” “He is of superior intelligence, has good judgment and strong moral and ethical values,” the report said of Dr. Davis’s conclusions.
“He is not a pedophile,” Dr. Davis is quoted as saying. “The offense occurred as an isolated instance of transient poor judgment and loss of normal inhibitions in circumstances of intimacy and collaboration in creative work, and with some coincidental alcohol and drug intoxication.”
The probation report concluded: “It is believed that incalculable emotional damage could result from incarcerating the defendant whose own life has been a seemingly unending series of punishments.”
The letters of support from friends, too, tended to indirectly cast doubt on his thirteen-year-old victim and her motives. You could see the White Male 1970s Guys circling the wagons.
“There is, in fact, very little that is dark or sinister about Roman,” said Gene Gutowski, the producer of many of Polanski’s most acclaimed films. “He has remained amazingly normal and well adjusted . . . generous to a fault, uninterested in material gains of possession, he is a loyal and kind friend, thoughtful, and completely trusting, possibly excessively so. As a result, he has been used from time to time by young and ambitious females who felt that being seen with Roman in public or having their names linked with his in the gossip columns would lead to their advancement or gain them publicity.”
Producer Robert Evans, Paramount Pictures: “I know the suffering that has gone into his life, especially these last ten years, and I feel that [the press] has maligned him terribly. He may make for provocative headlines, but with rare exception, the press has never captured the beauty of Roman’s soul.”
And perhaps most tellingly, director and producer Howard Koch: “I’m sure the situation he finds himself in now is one of those things that could happen to any one of us.”
Incidentally, the hosannas didn’t come only from men in Hollywood. Fifteen years before she discovered that Woody Allen had nude photographs of her daughter, Mia Farrow also publicly supported Polanski.
As I said, my family and I didn’t care if Polanski was imprisoned. There was no value to be gained in that, and we weren’t vindictive. But to see the empathy that was extended his way, while virtually none was offered to us, was a very sobering thing. The report referred in passing to hate mail he received, but it also cited a letter of support for Polanski that read, “We should all help him get well for we are in his debt due to his artistry. . . . We should not cast him out of our society.”
As for Judge Rittenband, he quickly held a news conference in his chambers to explain the sentencing. In all of Larry’s experience, before or since, he had never heard of a judge so obsessed with his public profile that he actually conducted a question-and-answer session with the press. The case seemed to be moving to another phase, but Judge Rittenband was determined not to relinquish center stage so easily.
So with the sentence to undergo the “diagnostic study” for ninety days in Chino State Prison in place and seemingly press-approved, Judge Rittenband gave Polanski the ninety-day stay to finish preproduction work on a movie for Dino De Laurentiis’s, Hurricane. Polanski’s devil-may-care attitude displayed during this furlough proved to be his undoing.
The director was supposed to be heading to Bora-Bora for preproduction. Instead, he stopped in Germany to try to set up a distribution deal and check on some casting possibilities—including his former lover Nastassja Kinski. (The film eventually starred Mia Farrow, Jason Robards as the maraud
ing white oppressor, and some guy who looked great without a shirt as the Culturally Pure Native. There’s a lot of bad weather. That’s all you need to know.) Polanski happened to be in Munich during Oktoberfest—and he was never one to shun a party.
The Santa Monica Evening Outlook ran a UPI photo of him surrounded by a bevy of young, attractive fräuleins, with the caption, “Film Director Roman Polanski, who was given a stay of a Santa Monica Superior Court order that he undergo a 90 day diagnostic study at a State prison, puffs at a cigar as he enjoys the companionship of some young ladies at the Munich, Germany Oktoberfest.”
While Polanski protested that the photo had been cropped, and in fact all the women surrounding him were also surrounded by their husbands and boyfriends, it was too late. Rittenband was seething. He was being played the fool, he said, and told a reporter from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that “Roman Polanski could be on his way to prison this weekend,” adding, “I didn’t know when I let him go that the movie would be impossible to finish in 90 days. I do feel that I have very possibly been imposed upon.”
Polanski, at Judge Rittenband’s orders, returned, and when he did, the judge gave him the ninety days for that diagnostic study. Predictably, this was all accompanied by another media scramble and more debate about whether Polanski was getting his just rewards or was the victim of persecution. Judge Rittenband angrily let it be known to the lawyers that he alone held Polanski’s fate in his hands, that he still had the power to put him away for fifty years.
On December 16—after a farewell bash attended by Tony Richardson, Jack Nicholson, and Kenneth Tynan, among others—Polanski was escorted through a phalanx of photographers and reporters to the state prison by his entertainment lawyer, Wally Wolf, and Hercules Bellville, his friend and second unit director on several of his films. Polanski believed Judge Rittenband, in a fit of pique, tipped the media off as to the date and time of his arrival.
Years later, in his autobiography, Polanski claimed he actually found a certain contentment in jail, and while various stories leaked into the rags courtesy of other on-the-take inmates (including a story that he’d promised a prisoner’s four-year-old daughter a part in his next movie, with a sinister insinuation of his love for the very young), the time he passed there was relatively trouble-free. “I felt secure and at peace,” he wrote.
CHAPTER 13
At the beginning of tenth grade, everything was wrong. Everything. First and most important, I was back in California, back where I was The Girl, missing my friends and boyfriend back in York. I was in a new high school where I knew virtually no one, since my junior high friends had dispersed to other schools. I wasn’t friends with the popular girls, whom we called the Guccis. (The designer of the moment; you had to have those jeans, plus the gold chains and hoop earrings, or you were nothing.) I cut my hair short and gained some weight; I told myself I wanted a different look—and I did—but I also had some ideas about looking tougher. It had always been easy for me to get good grades, but now the grades meant nothing. I became cozy with the stoners—a low-pressure group of kids who never asked me any questions, partially because they didn’t know about what had happened over the past year, but also because they didn’t care. In some sense we were losing ourselves in drugs, but still finding great solace in each other. My mother was constantly worried about me, but felt powerless to help. As she told me many years later, her attitude toward me at the time was “What can I do for you? Can I give you more? How can I make you happy?” It was total, total, guilt.
I don’t think this escalation of acting out was a conscious choice, but I was angry at the world and, with any thoughts of becoming an actress dashed, I didn’t want to be a cute little child anymore.
Not that I had to worry there. Before we learned there wouldn’t be a trial, my mother was very worried: I had grown and looked a lot older in the course of the year, and she felt that while I looked younger than thirteen at the time of the assault I really could now be mistaken for a teenager who was at least sixteen or seventeen. This would make the press even more hostile and would make it more believable that Polanski assumed I was of age.
I became more easily upset about everything, and spent a great deal of time crying in my bedroom. I didn’t want to be in California, I didn’t want to be in school . . . I just wanted to get off this train to Crazytown.
When my mother told me Polanski was locked up in jail undergoing psychiatric evaluation, I didn’t feel the slightest sense of satisfaction or justice served. To the contrary. I wished no one had ever found out. I continually kept second-guessing myself about that night. Why didn’t I put up more of a fight? Why did I drink? Why did I take the Quaalude? I felt certain I could have made him stop. I know it wasn’t rational but I felt responsible for it all. After months of this I came to see that blaming myself was wrong and useless, so I decided to sort of put these feelings aside, lock them in a box. When Mom told me about Polanski, I nodded and just walked away.
I was determined to get on with life. But it would become a life of “look away.”
· · ·
Polanski was released from Chino State Prison on January 29, 1978, after having served forty-two days. The psychiatric report from Chino was, if anything, even more flattering than the original probation report. I’m sure he was an exemplary prisoner. Yet it’s pretty clear the prison officials were no more immune to the power of celebrity than the average groupie.
Philip S. Wagner, Chino’s chief psychiatrist, portrayed prisoner Polanski as more the victim than the violator. “There was no evidence that the offense was in any way characterized by destructive or insensitive attitude toward the victim,” he wrote. “Polanski’s attitude was undoubtedly seductive, but considerate. The relationship with his victim developed from an attitude of professional, to playful mutual eroticism. . . . Polanski seems to have been unaware at the time that he was involving himself in a criminal offense, an isolated instance of naiveté, unusual in a mature, sophisticated man.”
It’s not that I disagreed with much of that statement . . . but “mutual eroticism”? “Isolated instance of naiveté”? Please.
When officials at Chino released Polanski less than halfway through his ninety-day “sentence” and said the diagnostic study was complete, the press was not happy. And when the press was unhappy, so was Rittenband. He called the lawyers back to his chambers for one more wild ride.
Larry had no formal role in the ensuing negotiations, but he was there, as he would say, to bring a conscience to all the mayhem—to remind them that there was a girl whose entire life could be affected by their decisions. On January 31, 1978, the day before Roman was scheduled to return to Judge Rittenband’s courtroom, the lawyers answered the judge’s summons. As usual, Gunson and Dalton took the two seats in front of Rittenband’s desk, and Larry took his place at the side of the large desk, next to the judge.
Larry recalls that Judge Rittenband began angrily and pompously lecturing them about how he wouldn’t allow Polanski to make a mockery of the courts. When his intercom buzzed, Rittenband growled to his secretary that he had directed her not to interrupt him under any circumstances and now she was interrupting him.
“Sir,” she said, over the intercom, “Bill Farr is on the phone.”
William Farr was a youngish (now deceased) reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and he’d been following the case. Known among fellow journalists for his gutsiness—he had served jail time during the Manson trial for refusing to disclose a source in one of his articles on the family that revealed they were plotting to kill Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra—he was also apparently a confidant of Rittenband. When Farr called, the conversation between the judge and Gunson and Dalton halted. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll take the call.”
Gunson and Dalton whispered to one another so as not to interfere with Rittenband’s phone call. Larry (as he explained to me later) couldn’t take part in their conversation where he was seated, so short of leaving the room or putting h
is fingers in his ears, he couldn’t help but hear the conversation between Farr and Rittenband. It sounded to Larry that they were involved in some kind of high-level decision making—but how could that be? One person on the call was the judge who ruled over the case, and the other person was a reporter.
“No! No! No! I’m going to do what I told you I would, and I’m going to stick to it,” Judge Rittenband said. “No, I haven’t told the lawyers yet!”
Gunson and Dalton, sitting there with nothing to do, shifted awkwardly in their seats. They couldn’t hear what the judge was saying into the phone, and had no idea what was going on. Larry was flabbergasted. Rittenband was getting advice from a reporter? Why? It’s one thing to play to the media; it’s quite another to be played by the media. It was also clear to Larry that Rittenband and Farr were continuing a conversation begun at another time.
Judge Rittenband’s phone session went on for a half hour. The lawyers continued to sit and wait. The judge displayed no self-consciousness over what he was doing. If anything, he seemed to be showing off for the attorneys a little bit: These press guys, they can’t get enough of me! On top of that, he was more concerned about the reporter’s needs than the needs of the lawyers. “I’m not going to take it under advisement,” he said. “I’ll announce it from the bench tomorrow and you can meet your deadline.”
Larry could hear Farr’s voice, but couldn’t make out what he was telling the judge.
Louder now so that Gunson and Dalton could hear, Rittenband went on: “I’m not doing that because if I did that I’d be seriously criticized by everybody and I’m not going to be criticized for helping him.”
The dumbfounded lawyers looked at each other. Was he really having this conversation in front of them?
The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski Page 12
