The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

Sharon Tate looked like California.

In his safari jacket—cribbed from Clark Gable—spotted neckerchief, pressed khakis, and loafers, he conveyed the crisp New England aplomb of an English professor who just got laid, and, filling his Dunhill pipe, pulling up to Cyrano’s in his little Mustang in herringbone and tweed, he promised the smart good taste he was well respected for.

whereas San Francisco, a tuxedo town, retained a social structure that recalled Europe and the East, it was Los Angeles, to borrow a line from Walt Whitman, that offered “the new society at last, proportionate to Nature.”

Discoursing on subjects Sophoclean or cinematic, cigar smoke drawing curlicues around his eyes, he was perhaps the only screenwriter in history ever to look relaxed, not to mention successful, respected.

Payne and Towne were having dinner with Buck Henry the night after the murders. The mystery altogether possessed the two writers. Into the night they pontificated on likely suspects, possible motives, rearranging the jigsaw of fact and rumor to no results,

the police did nothing. Plus ça change: after the murders, the police didn’t know where to begin. They hardly knew what questions to ask. To Payne, they confessed they didn’t know how to get in touch with anyone in Hollywood.

“Bob would love to work for money on rewrites on which he got no credit,” he said, “and would do it quickly. Over three weeks, he’d have a whole new script ready. But something that had his name on it would become all involved in the neurosis of completion and failure, and take forever.”

A city was its crimes, Towne read in West. In New York, money was the motive. In Los Angeles, where people lived far from their neighbors and loneliness dried the landscape, criminals were sicker, their crimes more personal and perverse.

“Well, that’s pretty much what we’re told to do in Chinatown, is nothing. Because with the different tongs, the language and everything else, we can’t tell whether we’re helping somebody commit a crime or prevent one. So, we just … we do nothing.”

“We had similar ambitions,” Towne said. “The good-looking girls in our acting class would not go out with us because they were going out with guys who were older who could take them to the Crescendo or the Mocambo.

“I like a conservative atmosphere, a sense of past,” Raymond Chandler protested against the changing city one year later.

In the thirties Los Angeles led not just in the number of bankruptcies but also in total net losses due to bankruptcy. Into the forties the divorce and suicide rates of Los Angeles were more than double the national average. It was a good place to be Philip Marlowe.

As the Great Depression eclipsed the city sun, and the latent criminality of a country emerging from Prohibition started to manifest, detective fiction took hold of Los Angeles.

These authors, each compromised by his tenure writing for Hollywood, its own microcosm of the capitalist antimyth, used hardboiled fiction as an emotional exhaust valve.

Be they dreamers or detectives, the original heroes and antiheroes of L.A. crime were palpably screenwriters in disguise, losers of varying degrees of honor as far from their big score or big bust as were screenwriters, divested of their creative ownership, from their dream, their writing.

adaptation of the novel The Last Detail—about a group of sailors escorting a maligned convict to jail—was proceeding at a healthy clip. In the script, Towne decided, his sailors would swear like actual sailors. The draft he turned into Columbia had as many as forty “motherfuckers,” Towne explained, “because it was actually an expression of their impotence. All one [could] do in the face of the injustice in there was swear.” Columbia wouldn’t have it. In a letter disseminated to the principals, executive Peter Guber presented the studio’s demands in no uncertain terms: In the fight on the train, excise “fucking asshole” and “you fucking move.” After the fight, Buddusky says, “He’s a fucking mess.” In front of the café, Buddusky says, “Fuck the crowd,” and Mule says, “We’ll miss the fucking train.” Inside the bar scene, take out the third “mother fucker.” Etc. In light of the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, the drugs in Easy Rider, the sex in Carnal Knowledge, in light of “this newfound freedom we suddenly had,” Towne said, it was flat-out regressive to stall a project in 1971 for profanity. The toppling of the Production Code, Hollywood’s cobwebbed bureau of self-censorship, had yielded an extraordinary wave of freer filmmaking that may have raised conservative eyebrows, but, as its strong box office indicated, was at long last luring Americans away from their televisions. For the first time since its inception, Hollywood was a young business again. But Columbia’s David Begel...

Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. “Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils,” he would say, smiling. Towne’s detective would have a little of that vanity.

Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slowly, one short inch at a time.

They apprehended Charles Manson, but what did that change? Polanski could not return to Los Angeles. The canyons, the watercolor estates, the ruby red carpet into the Beverly Hills Hotel, the bending banana fronds—they all assailed his brain with Sharon, their swinging over the Topanga cliffs, pasta dinners on the beach, the scorched-poppy sunsets, drive-ins, cotton candy, Cracker Jacks, potted plants, baby books (the books in her hands, her hands turning pages, her fingers, her fingernails). Unlike Sharon, Los Angeles was still there. But his eyes couldn’t see it. Where others saw crimson sunsets fade to pink, he could not stop her bleeding flesh from rotting to darkness, and though, in Los Angeles, there would be women and compassionate associates and the fondest friends, he would hear only what they wouldn’t say: the pity, the admiration of his forbearance, their bracing attempts at wisdom. That alone would be too much. “For the world,” he said, “it was an event. But what about me?

The flower children, no longer children, no longer lined the Whisky a Go Go in their rainbow beads and tie-dye. They no longer fought proudly and smiled sunward; now, like Jack Nicholson, they raged and grinned and, come midnight, hid their eyes behind dark shades.

In the morning, partied-out lapsed hippies woke up slumped against the Whisky wall in their ice-cold sequins and disco glitter, the nihilistic badges of Fuck-It-All America. What did the Bee Gees stand for? It didn’t matter. Richard Nixon was president.

Memory was a despot that lived in his house and banged his pots and pans. It followed him to bed and sat on his head and shouted if he slept. It locked the door and cuffed his wrists and watched him try to run.

In satin shoes and cravat, cocaine doffed its hat and stepped into Hollywood, and promised, for a moment (and then another), a fraudulent dream in the heat of a cold sun.

“See, I was never a star-fucker,” Evans said. “I always writer-fucked. And people always star-fucked. I didn’t believe in that. If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t going to be on the screen.”

“What would happen,” Bart schemed to Evans, “if we brought in really interesting and accessible novels and plays and brought in bright young people to make them? Instead of dealing with grumpy old people like Henry Hathaway and Howard Hawks.”

Jack savored clothing. His vintage Hawaiian shirts, the spectator shoes with eyelet-worked brown leather, gleefully mismatched in the heedless California style, were charged with memories. Top to bottom, he dressed himself in loyalties: This piece a gift from his lady, Anjelica; that one from his great pal, Harry Dean Stanton; a stalwart bomber jacket, picked up on location, thrown over a Lakers T-shirt; “a black porkpie hat that I’d gotten from the freeway in a motor accident that involved a priest”; those spectator shoes, the trademark image of one of his father figures from back in New Jersey: Shorty, as Jack called him, married to Jack’s much older sister, Lorraine. “A very dapper dresser,” Nicholson said, “he participated in all the Asbury Park Easter parades on the boardwalk.”

In sandy feet, he romped around the Jersey Shore with the guys, talking the big talk of little men, pranking, clowning, dreaming those long summer days of the sweet rumor of Manhattan, the big breast of the East. Then a little basketball, maybe shoot some pool to the music of a beatnik soliloquy from Jack, who just discovered the undying combination of black Ray-Bans and Camus.

“Hit Jack on the head with the crutch,” he said. “Hit him hard and don’t hold back.” “Hear that, Jack?” Vint turned to Nicholson. “Roman said it. Not me.” “Don’t worry about it, Vint. Do what the boss tells ya.”

Anjelica’s eyes were as deep as the richest black oil; they told of legacy, the ages of subterranean refinement preceding her actual birth, and the long dinners at St. Clerans 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.

The Santa Anas were blowing the last days of October 1973, swathing the city in lethargy and an unright argument of fog and sun certain tense Angelenos inherited from the sky.

There was night swimming. There were girls. There was a pool table downstairs, more girls, Warren, a little blow, a little forgetting. And all the time Watergate on the radio.

“It was bizarre,” Koch remembered. “We were making Chinatown the movie, and America was becoming Chinatown the country.”

When he wasn’t drinking, Huston was, between takes, on the hood of the Packard holding court before a circle of fascinated grips, actors, and assistants too awed to speak, too exultant not to.

“A film sums up the experiences of my life,” Polanski had said. “You absorb the experience, you assimilate it and you make a decision. A film sums up everything—whom I see, what I drink, the amount of ice cream I eat. It is everything. Do you understand? Everything.”

Racing home against the Hollywood Freeway, Polanski sneered at the concrete everywhere, a raised gutter strangling the city, its crime blurred in the low light of daybreak.

If danger was an argument with death, then Polanski kept returning, it seemed, to make his point and win. He had won, so far, every time.

The phone rang in the cutting room, and Lambro picked it up. It was a girl’s voice. “You have the wrong extension,” Lambro told her. “There’s no Paul here.” “That’s for me,” Polanski said, reaching for the phone. Lambro had earlier browsed an adult newspaper left in the cutting room, glancing a personal ad, circled, fifteen-year-old girl, “confidential, likes relationship with European man in forties.”

For Evans it was more than moonlight and ocean winds and Gatsby’s green flare across the bay; it was not fantasy but palpable evidence of a dream becoming true, the rare and shivery threshold of immeasurable pleasure, the promise imagination grants the mundane, and the mountain stream through which beauty and goodness, against all probability and reason, flow down into the world as art. It was, out of the darkness, a faith. Like Polanski’s crane, a lift, redemption, grace. True or false, it didn’t matter; as long as it was felt once, it could be felt again. Hearing that music for the first time, thinking of his father, he cried.

“The American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier,” wrote the philosopher William Barrett in 1962. “His spiritual horizon is still the limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not lived through the crucial experience of human finitude.”

“It is the longest 125 pages I have ever read,” he wrote of Terrence Malick’s script, Days of Heaven. “Actually I don’t know if it is a screenplay; it often seems like a late Victorian novel out of its time, forced to be a screenplay almost against its will.”

Sylbert’s chosen executive assistant, formerly an out-of-work tennis hustler, Don Simpson. “When he’d lose,” said Simpson’s courtmate, actor Peter Cannon, “he’d rush up to the net, drop his pants and piss on the net.

Simpson didn’t believe in the auteur theory; he believed in cocaine.

Hollywood had always been a gambling business, but Jaws demonstrated it could be a big business less gamble. An executive no longer needed a great, or even good, script; he no longer needed an actual story (was Jaws really about anything?), only the requisite thrills—“set pieces” in executive-speak—and the advance approval of the marketing department to assure the bosses he was choosing wisely. The tail would wag the dog: As promotional costs ascended, budgets increased, decreasing the funds once available for script development and preproduction—components “fundamental,” Howard Koch Jr. said, to the aesthetic mastery of Chinatown. Equally dispiriting was Jaws’s—forgive the expression—political toothlessness. “The picture’s only villain, outside of the shark, is the mayor,” author Peter Biskind astutely observed. “An elected official, a politician. But Jaws was a film of the political center: of the three men who take on the shark, Quint, the macho man of the right, is killed, while Hooper, the intellectual Jew of the left, is marginalized, leaving Brody, the everyman cop, the Jerry Ford … to dispatch the shark.” For all its many virtues, Jaws ratified the growing trend in disaster pictures and the end of the Hollywood counterculture.

“Bob Evans,” John Landis said, “is the classic example of everything that does not interest me.”

On the day of the test shoot, Gailey’s mother suggested she should accompany Samantha and Polanski, but Polanski discouraged her—the mother’s presence, he explained, might make her daughter self-conscious in front of the camera—her mother conceded, and off they went.