Watch Me: A Memoir (9 page)

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On March 9, Roman Polanski called and asked if I’d like to go to the movies. I was flattered. I had always found him extremely charismatic, with a quicksilver intelligence. I met up with him at Nate ’n Al’s delicatessen, on Beverly Drive, had chicken matzo ball soup, and then got into his car to go see Lina Wertmüller’s film
Seven Beauties.
Afterward, when Roman dropped me off in the parking lot behind the restaurant, I wondered, as his taillights receded down Beverly Drive, if it was true that everything in Roman’s life turned to tragedy.

I had been around the set occasionally on
Chinatown.
Roman was restless, opinionated, urbane, brilliant, impatient, and mercurial. I felt that perhaps he was always on the verge of being bored or irritated. You had to work to keep up with him. His passage had been marked in so many ways, it was hard to imagine surviving what he had endured in life—his family’s tragic decision to move from France to Poland just before the German invasion and the beginning of World War II; the imprisonment of his father and the death of his mother at the hands of the Nazis; the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson “family” in 1969 in Los Angeles.

In the afternoon of the following day I went to Jack’s house to pack up some boxes. I entered through the kitchen and saw, on a banquette, some cameras and a denim jacket that I vaguely recognized as the one Roman had worn to the movies the night before. I walked into the dining area and around the corner to the living room. The open layout afforded me a view of the outdoors and the pool. The living room was empty. The house was quiet. I called out, “Is anyone here?” I made a phone call to a friend and then walked toward the back of the house. The Jacuzzi was outside a downstairs bedroom suite, and farther up the hall was the television room. The door opened a fraction.

A voice I recognized as Roman’s called back, “We’ll be right out!” I returned to the living room. A short while later, Roman and a girl came around the corner; he introduced me to her and said they had been taking pictures. Big Boy was sitting on the carpet and got up to greet the girl, wagging his tail. She asked whether he was a male or a female. She was wearing platform heels and appeared to be quite tall. Roman collected his jacket and cameras, and they left together. I thought no more of it.

The next night I was again upstairs at the house on Mulholland, alone with Big Boy. My attention was suddenly focused on what seemed to be flashlights below the window, in the garden. Jack had installed a big gate in recent months, replete with cameras and barbed wire, so it was odd that there were people on the property. As I moved to a long window at the top of the stairs, I got a clear view of a group of men below, standing under the porch light. Roman was among them. I heard him knocking at the door, ringing the bell. Concerned, I descended and opened the door. “What is it?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” Roman said. “Just some confusion about last night—these gentlemen want to have a look around, if that’s okay.” I was surprised and didn’t think to ask if they had a search warrant.

I held the door open, and three or four of them came in. They were plainclothes detectives. One, a sandy-haired cop, was more aggressive than the others. Another was younger and seemingly more sympathetic. They spread around the downstairs rooms, shining their flashlights, and then the sandy-haired one shone his on a pack of rolling papers in an ashtray. “You better show me the drugs,” he said to me. “Otherwise we’ll take this place apart.” They followed me upstairs, and I showed them some grass in a drawer. At that point, they started to go through my handbag, where they found a gram of cocaine. That seemed to be enough evidence for them. Roman and I were bundled into the back of two separate police cars. We were under arrest.

Although it was March, I had put on a lynx coat that Jack had given me, because my blood was running cold. As the arresting officers walked me down the corridor of the West L.A. precinct, there were some interested glances from the
cops going off duty. It was about 10:30
P.M.
and I couldn’t believe my circumstances. Up on the hill at Jack’s house, they may have read me my Miranda rights, but I was scared and believed that if I were truthful and cooperative with them, they might let me go. When my arresting officer asked who was my next of kin, I said Dad and Allegra. The worst was having to drag Dad and Allegra into this. The seriousness of the situation hit me hard—that they would have to suffer for my sake. That I had shamed our family name.

Roman’s path and mine crossed as we were taken to be booked. He said, “I’m sorry for this, Anjelica.” They took me to be photographed, and the cop in the booth gently helped me take off my fur coat before I was fingerprinted. They had allowed me to call Jack’s business manager, Bob Colbert, to ask for bail. They told me he’d better arrive fast, because otherwise they would have to send me downtown to county jail. By then, it was two o’clock in the morning. Mercifully, Bob Colbert showed up with the cash. It had been all but impossible for him to procure thousands of dollars in the middle of the night, but bless him, he had succeeded.

After that there were newspaper articles, photographs, repercussions. Roman was charged with the sexual assault of a thirteen-year-old girl at Jack’s house. It was an awful time. On August 9, the morning newspaper reported an account of the Polanski matter and stated that my anticipated testimony of seeing both Roman and the girl in a bedroom likely would be a crucial factor in bringing about a change of plea in the case. This hurt most of all; I had witnessed nothing untoward and had never seen Roman and the girl in a bedroom. Throughout the proceedings, the district attorney’s office was reported to have suggested that I would be a witness for the prosecution
in exchange for dropping charges of cocaine possession—an unfortunate impression, since it was an illegal search and seizure in the first place. Roman later accepted a plea bargain and my testimony was never required. When Roman learned that he would likely face imprisonment and deportation, he fled to France in February 1978, hours before he was to be formally sentenced.

During all this, I received a letter from Elia Kazan:

Anjelica darling,

I think of you and hope you are all right. I read all the stuff in the papers. I know how painful that kind of thing can be. I hope it wasn’t too bad in your case. You know you have a big hug from me any time you need it.

Yours,

Elia

Jack and I were off and on, and Ryan had a bad temper. It did not serve me to take my troubles to him. I moved to a little studio on a hill behind Cici’s house in the Palisades. It was located directly between Jack’s house on Mulholland and Ryan’s house on the beach, and it gave me the advantage of being close to Cici, who was protective of me and whom I loved, and also the chance to be close to Allegra.

One night Ryan and I went to a party at a Spanish mansion in Beverly Hills. There was a belly dancer in the middle of an open floor and tables all around. I had left Ryan’s side to go to the bathroom. When I reentered the dining area, I could not get to him without crossing the dancer’s path and decided to wait until she stopped. As I looked on, I could see Ryan becoming agitated. Suddenly, he stood up and left the
room, exiting by an outside stairway. I ran after him down to the parking lot. The attendants were bringing him his car. “Ryan!” I called out. “I’m here, it’s okay!”

He turned on me, grabbed me by the hair, and hit me in the forehead with the top of his skull. I saw stars and reeled back. Half blind, I ran away from him, upstairs to a bathroom. Soon there was a knock on the door; his brother, Kevin, had come to talk to me. Another knock—this time it was security, standing behind a red-faced Ryan.

“He wants to speak to you. We saw what happened. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” I replied. “You can let him in.”

No sooner had I complied than Ryan was in the bathroom, batting me about the head with open hands. Then, abruptly, he left. I realized I had no one to turn to. I had given up my friends when I was with Ryan; they were too close to Jack, and I didn’t want them to know what was going on. Lou disapproved; I couldn’t call him, or Phyllis, or Cici. So I asked Kevin to drop me off at Ryan’s. It was by now about two o’clock in the morning, and all the lights were on. When I walked into his bedroom, Ryan was sitting up in bed with an ice pack on his forehead, chuckling ruefully. “I’ve got quite a headache,” he said.

The next morning, with Allegra in the passenger seat of my car, driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, I asked her, sobbing, “What shall I do, Allegra? What can I do?”

She looked over at me coolly. She was thirteen years old. “Leave him,” she replied.

When I ended my affair with Ryan, I returned to Jack but began to look for a house near his, so that we could still be close but I could also be independent. I found a little cottage
on Beverly Glen, close to Mulholland, and painted it pink. Jack bought it for me. It was tiny but perfect, and Jarrett Hedborg took me to Robertson Boulevard to choose fabrics and some pieces of furniture. Jack came over only once. I knew he hated it. It was a liberation for me, yes, but it was also the beginning of a change for us. It was hard to admit that our relationship was no longer hopeful or innocent; I no longer had stars in my eyes. Now there was a wry note, an irony, an irritation. Both of us had crossed a line.

Neither of us was any good at confrontation, and we were living “Life in the Fast Lane,” as our friends in Aspen, the Eagles, put it so succinctly. We were spending our winters at Maroon Creek, but we had developed our own agendas.

CHAPTER 9

I
think when children are without their parents at an early age, they find things to stimulate memories of them, or they look for areas of comfort that remind them of their parents’ presence. A perfume, or a blanket, or a taste, something tactile or sensory that draws them, captures their essence. For my father, the scent I most fondly remember is what eventually killed him, his cigar smoke. I could always tell where he was in any hotel just by following the smell of Monte Cristo through the hallways like a bloodhound—except one didn’t have to be nearly as acute as a bloodhound in order to track him down. He was always surrounded by that smell. He was smoking little brown Mexican cigarillos before he started on cigars. It was when he was working on
The Bible
that he had the first signs of emphysema and saw a doctor. He was starting to lose his oxygen, and the doctor said, “You have to give up smoking. It’s enough now.” So Dad went to Rome and found himself a new doctor, who said, “Yes, you have to give up cigarettes, but you can have a cigar once in a while.” Dad immediately interpreted this as an invitation to chain-smoke them. And they were good cigars, but nevertheless.

I was there for a lot of big, challenging moments in my father’s life—among them, the news that he would need heart-valve-replacement surgery. There was always the
underlying deficit of emphysema, the ever-present threat that the doctors would be unable to get him off the breathing machines that took over this function during the operations for various other problems, such as an effort to salvage a bungled repair of his elbow after
The Man Who Would Be King
(which had been performed with whiskey as anesthesia and a machete somewhere in the Moroccan desert) or surgery to reduce a hernia in his groin. Once he was in the hospital, the problems always seemed to intensify, and former solutions ceased to apply. I remember Dad one morning, terribly thin, lying flat on his back, his face, for the first time ever, looking small and fine-boned on the pillow. I could see his cranium beneath the skin. He had a number of Band-Aids on his forehead and scalp. “Dad, what’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing much, honey,” he said, smiling ruefully. “Just a little skin cancer.”

The most primitive of all tortures were the times when Dad’s oxygen levels were so low that going to sleep actually carried a risk of death. We would have to keep him awake for hours on end, haranguing him to keep his eyes open. When finally he would come out of intensive care after these unbelievable struggles, the experience would have made him afraid to sleep. He’d close his eyes and think immediately that he was dying.

The hours of waiting. Waiting for tests, waiting for the results from the tests, the good news, the bad news. The corridors, the nurses’ stations, the violet phalaenopsis on the bedside table, the Mylar balloons, the smells of Lysol, food, medication, and bodily fluids, the language of hospitals and how to negotiate them. Put on your freshest shirt, your brightest lipstick (just enough to look less gray and anxious
should he be alert), cook up something at home to take to your beloved, try to think of some story to tell him, something to distract him from what is going on in both your minds.

“Will Dad die from this disease?” I asked a nurse one day.

“Our respiratory patients usually come back to the hospital,” she replied. I don’t know why it came as a shock, but it confirmed my greatest fear—that Dad’s emphysema was chronic.

It was terrible to see him so sick. The attack on his system by the disease was relentless. He was wracked with coughing, struggling for breath, incapable of sleeping. I would try to visit him every day when he was in the hospital. I noticed that if I missed a day, his condition would deteriorate. If I took my eyes off him even overnight, he was more prone to fail.

With emphysema, it becomes harder to exhale than to breathe in; it feels like drowning. Later on, as it progressed, there’d be terrible episodes when we’d have to keep Dad up for three days straight in the hospital. We couldn’t let him sleep because the doctors were scared that if he did, his carbon dioxide would rise so high it could damage his heart or his brain. For the last decade of his life, he was in and out of hospitals with respiratory failure. He was in hell with this disease. When his oxygen would get low, he’d suddenly get very acquiescent, tired, and dreamy, and then we’d know—that was our sign that we had to take him in. Generally, this would follow days when he didn’t eat well or sat in a draft. He became very fragile.