Jack Nicholson’s pyramid of cocaine. Faye Dunaway’s diva demands. Polanski’s rages. Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye goes behind the scenes of Hollywood classic Chinatown

The Big Goodbye

Sam Wasson                                                                                                 Faber £18.99 

Rating:

The most frequently quoted observation about Hollywood is the simplest, and possibly also the truest. ‘In Hollywood,’ said screenwriter William Goldman, ‘no one knows anything.’

Those six words kept coming into my head as I read this book about the making of the 1974 film Chinatown. Most of the key people involved in it – the producer, the director, the main actors, the screenwriter – didn’t seem to have a clue what they were up to. And yet out of this fog came a film that is well crafted and enjoyable, if not quite the overwhelming masterpiece that the author takes it to be.

The most vivid of the protagonists is undoubtedly the director Roman Polanski, whose own life story is even more bizarre and horrific than his films. He lost his mother in the Holocaust. As his father was led away, he chased after him; to save his son’s life, his father pretended not to know the young Roman, telling him to shove off.

The Big Goodbye tells the story of the making of 1974 film Chinatown, a portrait of Thirties Los Angeles racked by corruption and deceit starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway (above)

The Big Goodbye tells the story of the making of 1974 film Chinatown, a portrait of Thirties Los Angeles racked by corruption and deceit starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway (above)

As an up-and-coming young director in Hollywood, he married the beautiful young actress Sharon Tate. ‘They were golden, their friends were golden, and with so much gold to go around, all were happy at one another’s shine,’ writes Sam Wasson, in his slightly too lyrical style.

Robert Evans, the equally shiny producer of Chinatown, called Polanski and Tate ‘just about the only really happy married couple I knew in Hollywood’, and Wasson seems to go along with this view, even though it emerges that Polanski was serially unfaithful, and would dismiss Tate’s objections, snapping that she was ‘hung up on fidelity’. Furthermore, when she became pregnant, Polanski stopped having sex with her.

Tate and her unborn baby were murdered by the Manson gang. Polanski was in Europe at the time, but this did nothing to stop people telling each other that he was the evil mastermind behind it: after all, hadn’t he made the satanic Rosemary’s Baby?

The police told Polanski – quite wrongly, as it turned out – that it was a revenge killing, and the murderer was likely to be someone he knew. One of the most fascinating passages in The Big Goodbye details the lengths to which Polanski went to find the killer. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses had been found at the scene: over the next few weeks, Polanski engaged all his friends in conversation about their eyesight, and even carried a lens-measuring gauge everywhere. When his friend and martial arts instructor Bruce Lee mentioned that he’d lost his glasses, Polanski suggested they buy a new pair together, and then stealthily examined the details of his prescription. He also bugged friends’ homes and tested their cars for bloodstains with Q-tips and chemicals.

The most vivid of the protagonists in Sam Wasson's book is undoubtedly the director Roman Polanski (above with Jack Nicholson on the Chinatown set)

The most vivid of the protagonists in Sam Wasson's book is undoubtedly the director Roman Polanski (above with Jack Nicholson on the Chinatown set)

After Manson and his gang had been arrested, Polanski moved to Switzerland, where he seems to have gone on a sexual rampage. ‘He courted and slept with young women, some, he confessed, as young as 16,’ writes Wasson, who is curiously forgiving of his behaviour. Four years later, when he was preparing to film Chinatown, Polanski used to go to wild parties thrown by Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson and others. 

An actress remembers ‘strange young girls that would come in and out and want to be part of the scene. I don’t know who brought them or how they got there, but they always seemed to be there. They may have been 15 years old but they looked older. There was drugs and sex, of course, but nobody, no one, was hurting anyone. It was innocent’. Again, this summary passes unquestioned. As we all know, years later Polanski was found guilty of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. Leaping to his defence, Polanski’s friend Gore Vidal described her as a ‘hooker’. Ah, Hollywood! The world of Chinatown seems almost cosy by comparison.

Wasson suggests that the film – a portrait of Thirties Los Angeles racked by corruption and deceit – was informed by all the strange angsts and urges of those involved in its production.

For instance, when filming a scene in which a woman is found dead on a kitchen floor, Polanski seemed to take an undue interest in the positioning of the corpse. ‘Everyone thought Roman was replaying the death of his wife. It was a very scary day,’ recalled the actress Diane Lads.

IT'S A FACT 

Jack Nicholson could have ended up drawing Scooby-Doo for a living. He was offered a job as an animator for Hanna-Barbera but turned it down. 

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But corpses are two a penny in Hollywood films, and the director must make sure they look real. Might Polanski have just been doing his job? More convincing is that, in basing Chinatown around corrupt property dealers, screenwriter Robert Towne was taking revenge on his father, a property developer given to alcoholism, lechery and sadism.

For me, on-set feuds are always the highlight of any book about Hollywood. On the Chinatown set there were tantrums galore. At one point, Jack Nicholson was late for filming because he was watching the end of a basketball game on television. Furious, Polanski stormed into his trailer and tried to smash the TV with a mop. When this didn’t work, he simply lifted it up and threw it on the ground. Later, when Polanski came to film the famous scene in which he himself slits Nicholson’s nostril, he knew Nicholson was frightened of the blade, so went for a dozen takes, even though he knew the first one was fine.

But it was Faye Dunaway for whom Polanski reserved his fullest contempt. She is clearly a very demanding woman: according to one member of the production team, she even refused to flush her own toilet. Her random demands to change this or that word, or for more make-up, then less make-up, soon got on Polanski’s nerves, particularly as he sensed that she was playing for time, as she hadn’t learnt her lines.

Things came to a head when one of her hairs kept slipping out of place. Eventually, Polanski reached over and pulled it out. Dunaway stormed off the set and refused to return, and her agent tried to force Robert Evans to sack Polanski. Later, when they were filming a scene in which Dunaway is repeatedly slapped by Nicholson, Dunaway kept looking at Polanski between takes and spotted ‘a wicked grin on his face’. Her face was burning from all the slaps, and then she would hear Polanski saying: ‘Once more, please, fellows.’

By the end, virtually everyone had fallen out with everyone else, though Nicholson seems to have been a popular figure despite, or perhaps because of, the pyramid of cocaine ‘pointing skyward in a help-yourself bowl’ in the hallway of his house. In the editing suite, the film seemed headed for disaster. At this point, Polanski broke ranks with his screenwriter. ‘You think this piece of s*** story is bad now?’ he asked the editor. ‘I’ll show you the original script. Do you want to see it? It was the biggest pile of c*** you ever saw.’

After a complete change of soundtrack, they somehow managed to pull it all together, and even though a horrified silence greeted its first public screening, Chinatown is now regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a classic.

Wasson tells the story of its making with pace and verve, though his prose can sometimes be portentous. He keeps noting any spot of bad weather – ‘It rained in Los Angeles that weekend’ – as though it were an omen, and he finds it hard to resist a bit of purple prose. 

‘Anjelica’s eyes were as deep as the richest black oil,’ he notes of Jack Nicholson’s then girlfriend, Anjelica Huston. ‘They told of legacy, the ages of subterranean refinement preceding her actual birth and the long dinners… when, too early, her father would drill her for the benefit of his treasured guests, the likes of Sartre and Steinbeck and Pauline de Rothschild.’ Fancy! 

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