The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

He had his name removed from the picture. Forfeiting the recognition and residuals that came with screen credit, Towne revealed a measure of integrity that wouldn’t fill the bank account but reaffirmed Payne’s devotion. She respected him. “Robert was not working for money,” she said. It was a relief. Having grown up in Hollywood, Payne had seen her share of disconsolate compromise, especially in screenwriters—their ideals, careers, and even marriages corrupted by misguided ambition and its ancillaries self-denial, artistic failure, addiction. Her stepfather, the screenwriter Charles Lederer, was then caving to methedrine and Demerol, nodding off in his yellow chair in his book-piled office on Bedford Drive, his mind lost to the empty vials at his toes. “Twelve bloody babies…,” he droned to Payne and Towne, clawing at his arms. There were big bugs under his skin, he insisted between weeping jags, crying out for his aunt, Marion Davies, ten years in her grave. Grief and memory collided in chemicals, and all that he lost Lederer gurgled back in broken haikus that Payne, fluent in the family psychosis, pieced together for Towne: “Twelve bloody babies,” she explained to him, “means the twelve months of the year.”