Fearing press criticism, Rittenband was changing course once again. The forty-two days were not enough. He decided instead he was going to give Polanski an indeterminate sentence. That means exactly what it sounds like: the duration of the sentence is not spelled out. It could be a week. It could be fifty years.
Seeing the incredulous looks on the attorneys’ faces, Rittenband hastened to reassure them: “Don’t be concerned about that,” he said. “I want people to think I’m a tough sentencer. So we’ll do this, and when the attention is off the case, you”—indicating Dalton—“petition for a change of sentence and I will sentence him to time served. I’ll put this forth tomorrow.”
They were stunned. Polanski had glowing probation reports. Rittenband had already agreed to time served. Then, with a little media heat and the tut-tutting of one reporter, the judge was changing his mind.
These days, anyone convicted of “unlawful sexual intercourse” could serve a maximum of four years (not that those convicted served nearly that much, even then; the sentence was generally six months or less). But back in 1978, a sentence of fifty years was theoretically possible. If the parties agreed to an indeterminate sentence, Roman Polanski could, at the judge’s whim, end up in jail for the rest of his life.
Dalton, Gunson, and Larry walked numbly to the courthouse coffee shop and ordered coffee. After a long silence, Dalton turned to Gunson and asked, “Should I trust him?” Gunson shot him a look. “Oh, I don’t see why not,” he said, dryly. “You trusted him before.”
Dalton looked tired. “I have a client who is sitting in my office waiting for me to let him know what happened. I better tell him.” He walked to the pay phone. He talked to his client.
As Polanski told the story later, there was one seat left on that afternoon’s British Airways flight to Heathrow. He bought it.
PART THREE
* * *
CHAPTER 14
POLANSKI FLEES TO PARIS
Jacksonville (Ill.) Courier
February 2, 1978
LONDON (AP): The London Evening News reported it located film director Roman Polanski at his Paris home following his flight from California to escape sentencing for having sexual relations with a 13-year-old girl. His extradition to the United States appears unlikely.
The Evening News said a manservant at Polanski’s residence in the French capital told its reporter: “Yes, Mr. Polanski arrived here this morning. He is very tired and is resting quietly. He’s not ill, just tired.”
The 44-year-old director of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport Wednesday morning on a British airliner from Los Angeles, but reporters were unable to locate him afterward.
Scotland Yard said it was not looking for him.
“He has committed no crime in Britain, and as far as I know we have not received any message from America about him,” a spokesman for the Yard said.
Polanski is a French citizen, reportedly with homes in both London and Paris, and the prosecutor handling his case in California suggested he was headed for France, where he would be safe from extradition. Friends in Paris indicated they had talked with him in London but said they did not know what his plans were. French citizens cannot be extradited from France on any charge.
Polanski failed to appear for sentencing in Santa Monica, CA Wednesday. His lawyer, Douglas Dalton, announced in the packed courtroom: “I received a call from Mr. Polanski this morning advising me he would not be here. . . . I do not believe he is in the United States.”
Superior Court Judge Laurence J. Rittenband issued a bench warrant for the director’s arrest and granted Dalton’s request for time to try to persuade him to return. The judge scheduled another hearing February 14 where he could sentence Polanski in absentia.
Dalton said he would “use every effort” to have his client return by then. . . .
On February 1, 1978—the day Polanski was supposed to appear in court and the judge was supposed to accept the plea bargain—there was a flurry of activity. Someone told Larry, “He isn’t here. He took off.” Larry went to Dalton and asked what was going on and Dalton, true to form, ignored him. Then Larry asked Gunson, who said, “Polanski skipped.” Larry asked what would happen. Gunson replied, “I don’t know.”
In court, Dalton said he’d received a call from Polanski advising him he wouldn’t be there that day. Rittenband asked, “What did he tell you?” and Dalton invoked attorney/client privilege. “Did you tell [Polanski] to return and appear for sentencing?” Rittenband asked. Dalton replied, “Your Honor, I have fulfilled all my obligations.”
Larry said you could almost see the steam coming out of Rittenband’s ears.
At any rate, about a week later Dalton called Larry and told him he was going to file a motion to have Rittenband disqualified and asked him if he would read it and tell him if he thought the declaration was accurate. He had already asked Gunson to do the same. They both had agreed to review and respond to the draft. Rittenband’s lack of professionalism was the one thing all sides could agree on.
Rittenband filed an answer to the motion, in which he disputed the conclusions and insisted he could continue to act fairly. While he didn’t concede any wrongdoing, he nevertheless resigned from the case. He saved himself from being disqualified, but the effect was the same, and that was what mattered: he was off the case. For the rest of his life he never got over his fury, never acknowledged there was anything untoward about his judicial behavior. More than a decade later, when asked about Polanski’s flight, the judge referenced Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, where the Lord High Executioner keeps “a little list” of prospects for beheadings, quoting, “I’ve got him on my list. I’ve got him on my list.” Rittenband unfailingly scoffed at the allegations until the time of his death in 1993.
Thirty years would pass before Polanski would be charged with jumping bail or not appearing in court—and that was at the time of his arrest and attempted extradition in 2009. Roger Gunson continued to work at the DA’s office until then, and he made it clear that he would not charge Polanski with those crimes.
My family was never aware of any problems with the plea deal, so it came as a surprise to my mother when Larry told her that Polanski had left the country. But after he explained what had happened, she certainly understood why. She was relieved and pleased. She thought that I had gotten what I had wanted. Once, when I was pressured to say what I thought should happen to him, I answered that I thought he should leave the country. I didn’t really want anything to happen to him; it was just the only answer I could think of. When my mom told me he was gone—well, I won’t call it one of the happiest days of our lives, but certainly it was the one filled with the greatest relief. The air was just a little easier to breathe. I never thought to question what had happened. All I could think was: FREEEEEEEDOMMMMMM. No more telling my story. No more seeing myself called “sex victim girl” in the paper. At the same time, I think I knew in my heart that someday, somehow I would have to deal with this all again. But I had about as much sense of the future as a beagle: I lived in the present, and maybe five seconds in the past and five seconds in the future. So, fine, there would be problems eventually, but for now I could get on with my life.
But what exactly was that life? It certainly wouldn’t be acting or modeling. I could see the headlines: “Sex Victim Girl Gets Part on Sitcom.” Oh well, I thought to myself. Oh well, and that was all. My life had been in a holding pattern for a year; the last thing I wanted to do was keep worrying about the future.
This was the year of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop”:
If your life was bad to you,
Just think what tomorrow will do.
The summer after tenth grade I returned to York, taking Crystal, my friend from the gymnastics team, with me. With all the excellent common sense of a stoner-in-training, I decided this was my time to let loose. Looking back, this is when my life started to unravel. Whatever drugs I could find, well, I’d do the
m. Whatever boys I could find, I’d do them, too. Boston came out with their anthem to moving on, “Don’t Look Back.” I didn’t intend to.
I was out of control. Dad was understandably worried about the bad example I had become for my younger stepbrothers, and Jan (now officially my stepmother) was sick of cleaning up the mess of beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays she would find stashed in my room. I still had my boyfriend John (and sometimes Jimmy if John wasn’t around), but it was my friend Joey who got me home when I was so drunk I couldn’t stand: he carried me to the porch, rang the doorbell, and fled, just in time to miss the sight of my Dad opening the door to me vomiting on his shoes. Dad wasn’t happy. They were nice shoes.
My father and I had adored each other, but our relationship was never the same after Polanski. It wasn’t that he blamed me in any way for the rape—he was nothing but supportive, compassionate, and, well, fatherly. But I’d gone from Daddy’s little girl to this belligerent, sullen, rebel-without-a-cause, and even though he tended to blame my mother for my recklessness, I was a gigantic pain in his ass. I resented his attempts to rein me in, and he was impatient with how my unruly behavior was upsetting his happy home. He just didn’t want to put up with my shit. Who would?
That summer was pretty much a harbinger of eleventh grade. By the middle of the school year, my ritual went like this: Mom would drop me off at the back door of school; I’d walk straight out the front door with Crystal; we’d take the bus to her house; we would hang out and smoke pot all day.
There were plenty of harder drugs around, too: cocaine, Quaaludes, and LSD were easy to find and I was happy to use whatever I could get my hands on. There was a lot of speed available in the Ralphs grocery store parking lot and my mother and gymnastics coach were pleased to see me lose that weight I had put on. (I was still showing up for practice, even when I wasn’t showing up for classes.) Having the body image issues of any teenage girl, I wondered if they would really mind that I was on speed. Wasn’t looking good and performing well more important? Eventually, I only went by school to buy drugs. By the time the administration called Mom in June to tell her I hadn’t been in school since March, I had taken my equivalency test on the sly and managed to pass even though I had been up till 2:00 AM doing acid the night before. I had effectively graduated. She was disappointed, but what could she do? She knew how much I hated it, and there was no way in hell I was going back. Looking on the bright side, I had gotten moved up a grade when I started kindergarten and now I’d graduated early. I feigned interest in community college to smooth things over.
None of my friends were really bona fide drug dealers: we used most of what we bought and sold the rest to keep ourselves going. (Okay, maybe we were drug dealers, but not very good ones.) I smoked a lot, tripped occasionally, did a lot of speed, and moved on to cocaine and Quaaludes. I thought all of this was a hell of a good time, and so did the people I hung around with. Maybe I was trying to cope with what happened to me the year before. Or maybe not. Maybe I just liked getting high. One shouldn’t overanalyze the whims of a teenage girl on drugs.
I managed to keep my life as a truant drug user hidden from my mother. To please her, and perhaps to make it appear I was fully functioning, I went on a call for a Kool-Aid commercial. I didn’t feel like doing it—I just wanted to hang out with my boyfriend and party—but we’d had photos done for a new head shot and I had promised Mom I’d keep the appointment. I did a line before I went and I got the part, which taught me this oh-so-valuable lesson: people like you when you’re high!
I hung out with my tight group of friends—Crystal, Brett, Craig, and Ron and a few others. We did everything together. In retrospect, I suppose it’s obvious I was hiding my pain beneath a veneer of cool. Drugs were an escape, of course, but often no amount of smoking dope or cranking up Aerosmith was doing it for me.
· · ·
One afternoon at Taft (my high school), my friend Ron was supposed to give me a ride home, but his friend Craig found me a ride instead. The car had more teenagers in it than seats. So my solution was to sit on Craig’s lap. And thus began a relationship that would last, on and off, for the next eight years. Craig was, to put it bluntly, beautiful. He had scraggly dirty-blond hair, long sideburns, and cornflower-blue eyes. He was a perfect 1970s bad boy, kind of a sixteen-year-old Burt Reynolds. He had broken both legs in a dirt bike accident, which meant that he’d spent months in traction, lifting weights to make his upper body buff. He lived a block from me with his mother when we met. I’d heard awful stories about his father before their divorce. He was the kind of man who kept locks on the kitchen cabinets because he felt his kids ate too much. At one point he sold Craig’s dirt bike, supposedly to pay for repairs to a broken door (never fixed). Another time, to teach his son some sort of lesson, he gave away Craig’s dog while Craig was away for the weekend. I don’t think I ever knew the dad’s real name; Craig’s mom just called him “Hitler.”
Craig knew where to get drugs and knew that I wanted them; we got high a lot. At the same time, he was extremely competent mechanically: he could fix any car. He shot guns and rode dirt bikes, and he taught me how to do all those things, too. We would go camping in the desert to ride and shoot. Drinking/drugs/dirt bikes/guns: great combo. Once, after a day at the beach, we stopped in Malibu Canyon so I could pee by the side of the road. I got bitten by a rattlesnake while stumbling through the brush and didn’t even realize it. On the plus side, though, I was with the kind of boyfriend who’d seen a lot in his short life and didn’t easily panic. He got me to the hospital as the paralyzing poison steadily worked its way up my increasingly immobilized body. No problem. However irrational it was, given his taste for danger, I always felt safe with Craig.
And yet he could be a terror and he was controlling—and I was never someone who liked being controlled, even if it was for my own good. He wasn’t stupid; he would get exasperated with my life goal, which, at that point, was to do as little work as possible. There was a lot of drinking and screaming and hitting—and I gave as good as I got. It had to end, and it did, several times. But we kept coming back to each other. I couldn’t help myself. He was the man to me.
I’m astounded that in the next few years, nothing truly horrible happened. Nobody got arrested, and there were only two car accidents. Well, three, if you count the time I visited my sister, Kim, back in York and set her car on fire. (I’d run out of gas and found some lawn mower gas and poured it into the carburetor to get the car started and—well, all I can say is, don’t do it. But . . . could have happened to anyone, right?)
Was I acting out? I never thought I was. Would I have chosen a more straight-and-narrow path if it weren’t for the Polanski incident? Possibly. My mother and Bob, so riddled with guilt, were only able to say yes to me. I remember one July Fourth in particular, when Bob overheard our plans to drop acid and watch fireworks. He insisted on chaperoning us because he was concerned. (He knew that even if he stopped us that night, we’d just go and do it some other night.) He drove us in the back of his truck up to the hills above the house to watch the fireworks, and made sure we got home safe. Little did he know, we were dropping acid all the time. This just happened to be a particularly festive night to do it.
You could call Mom and Bob enablers, but that’s sort of like calling forest rangers who start a controlled burn before wildfire season “enablers.” No; the rangers want to minimize inevitable damage. So did Mom and Bob. As outrageous as I could be sometimes, I always felt cared for. I think I would have gotten into a lot more trouble without them.
My father had been the only person who cared about my academic performance. But by this point even he had given up on having an academically inclined daughter. “You should go to college to meet a man who’ll take care of you,” he said. I didn’t listen, but he was right. Over the next ten years, if there had been an Olympics for job-quitting, I would have won the gold. I was extremely adept at getting jobs, because I was smart and capable. But then, generally, I
quit before I got fired. Our relationship gradually deteriorated. He could be particularly cold and mean when he was drinking. In an effort to dissuade me from an acting career he once said to me, “There must be a hundred girls within a twenty-mile radius of your house that have more talent and are better-looking than you.”
Craig and I had moved in together in 1980, when I was seventeen. By the following summer I’d had enough. I decided to make a break from California and from Craig. I packed up my stuff in my Camaro, unloaded it back at Mom’s, left a note on my desk at work, and got on a plane back to York. Staying with Dad wasn’t an option at that point, so I went to stay with my sister at her farm, outside of town. It was another summer of partying, getting high, watching the band practice in the abandoned skate park, staying out all night, sleeping all day, and trying to find the odd job to pay for beer and food. I wasn’t making it work, so I finally headed back to California again. After I got back, I did various jobs—bank teller, payroll clerk, clothing retail—and I was bored out of my mind with all of them. During that time I began seeing a ruggedly handsome boy named Rex, who, I decided, was my ticket out of everything. Or more specifically, Rex and the baby I was carrying—because very soon after we began seeing each other I got pregnant. It would be fine, I thought; Rex would take care of me and the baby. I walked down the aisle in my gunnysack dress on May 8, 1982; my dad gave me away. Jes was born that November. Ten months later, after one too many incidents where Rex wasn’t where he said he’d be, we separated. Many years have passed, and Rex has turned out to be a great man and great father. But at the time he was nineteen. He was stuck with a pregnant wife, while the other guys were out having fun. Now that I had a baby, I wanted to stay home, but I had to find a way to take care of Jes and myself. So I did babysitting for neighbors in my home until he was old enough for preschool.
The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski Page 13
