CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Christopher Sandford
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Chapter 1 Director’s Cut
Chapter 2 Hitler
Chapter 3 Stalin
Chapter 4 ‘Bolshevism’s Boy Wonder’
Chapter 5 Manson
Chapter 6 Shakespeare, Sex and Surrealism
Chapter 7 The Trial
Chapter 8 Frantic
Chapter 9 Roman Holiday
Chapter 10 Oscar
Picture Section
Filmography
Bibliography
Sources and Chapter Notes
Index
Copyright
Exactly fifty years ago, a young director named Roman Polanski made his first completed film – a two-minute student exercise which he called Murder. In the half-century since, Polanski has become an iconic figure, widely admired for his mordant, sexually charged films and yet derided as – in his own words – ‘an evil, profligate dwarf’. In January 1978, facing a possible fifty-year sentence for ‘unlawful sexual intercourse’ with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski fled to the United States and flew to France, where he was a naturalized citizen. Thirty years later, he remains in exile: the much revered eminence grise of filmmakers and a criminal fugitive ‘never, for a single day’,the US Justice Department has said, free of the ‘dread of arrest’.
Others have told pieces of this story, but Christopher Sandford brings it all together in one lucid, gripping account, beginning with Polanski’s horrific experience in the Holocaust and ending with his current life in Paris, where he provides a ‘living symbol of Franco-American misunderstanding.’ The book draws on dozens of interviews with actors, writers and other Polanski collaborators, previously sealed transcripts of his criminal hearings, testimony before the California grand jury and the graphic evidence of former lovers and friends. There is a wealth of unpublished material, too, on what Polanski has called the ‘central tragedy’ of his life – the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate and others by members of the so-called Manson Family – an event which, for sheer savagery, rivals anything in modern criminal history.
Amidst the personal tragedy, the focus is also on the professional triumph. Polanski’s films are seen here anew, with behind-the-scenes stories on everything from 1962’s Knife in the Water to 2005’s Oliver Twist. We follow the director through the backstage feuds of Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, his unflinching version of Macbeth, described by one critic as a ‘film exorcism’ in the wake of the Manson murders, and his Holocaust masterpiece The Pianist, which won Polanski his first and only Oscar. The generally downbeat themes – betrayal, corruption, satanic worship – are vintage Polanski, but there is also a lighter, knockabout side: this is the man who gave us The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in My Neck. Fascinating, flawed, wildly creative, the ‘world’s most notorious artist’ is seen here in full.
Christopher Sandford has reviewed and written about film and music for over twenty years. A regular contributor to titles on both sides of the Atlantic, himself profiled in Rolling Stone magazine, he’s published acclaimed biographies of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, David Bowie, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney and Steve McQueen. His bestselling life of Kurt Cobain is currently in development as a feature film. His biography of Imran Kahn will appear in 2009. A dual national, Christopher Sandford divides his time between Seattle, Surrey and Lord’s cricket ground. He’s married, with one son.
Feasting With Panthers
Arcadian
We Don’t Do Dogs
The Cornhill Centenary Test
Godfrey Evans
Tom Graveney
Mick Jagger
Eric Clapton
Kurt Cobain
David Bowie
Sting
Bruce Springsteen
Steve McQueen
Keith Richards
Paul McCartney
To KDS and NSS
Rue Saint-Hubert, Paris (© Valya Page)
Krakow Wawel Castle (© S.E. Sandford)
A group of refugees flee Krakow (© Getty Images)
A young Polanski (© PA Photos)
The cover for Time Magazine (© Getty Images)
Polanski dancing with Françoise Dorléac (© Getty Images)
Polanski’s London home (© S.E. Sandford)
Polanski’s wedding to Sharon Tate (© Getty Images)
Polanski and Sharon Tate’s wedding certificate (© S.E. Sandford)
Newly weds at the 1968 Cannes film festival (© Getty Images)
A heavily pregnant Sharon Tate (© Getty Images)
Charles Manson (© Getty Images)
Manson ‘family’ (© Getty Images)
Polanski at the murder scene (© Getty Images)
Polanski and Hugh Hefner (© Getty Images)
Polanski filming Macbeth (© Getty Images)
Polanski and Princess Anne (© Getty Images)
Polanski knifes Jack Nicholson in Chinatown (© Getty Images)
Polanski in court (© Corbis)
43 Avenue Montaigne (© S.E. Sandford)
Letter from the Chambers of The Superior Court (© S.E. Sandford)
Polanski and Nastassia Kinski (© Getty Images)
Polanski playing Mozart (© Getty Images)
On the set of Pirates (© Damien Thomas)
The galleon Neptune (© Damien Thomas)
Emmanuelle Seigner (© Corbis)
A scene from Bitter Moon (© Corbis)
Press conference for The Ninth Gate (© Corbis)
Polanski lays a wreath at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial (© Corbis)
Polanski on location of The Pianist (© Paul Bradley)
Polanski and Harrison Ford (© Getty Images)
Polanski adjusting his wife’s dress (© Corbis)
Polanski, still in the saddle (© Getty Images)
First, a confession. When I started this book, I rather fondly thought that it might go some small way to helping rescue Roman Polanski from his detractors – particularly those, still quite vociferous thirty years on, for whom he’ll always be tainted by the events of 1977–8. While in no way excusing his crime, it seemed that the time might have come for all parties to move on, a view shared by Polanski’s now middle-aged victim in the case, Samantha Geimer. It soon became clear that this alleged rehabilitation would have to proceed without the director’s help. Polanski himself declined to meet, and several of his friends I approached for interviews told me that, ‘after checking’, they’d prefer not to talk. At one point I was told that Polanski (I stress this is hearsay) apparently considered me a ‘nosy fellow’, enough to give pause to anyone who happens to recall him using that same phrase to Jack Nicholson immediately prior to slicing open the actor’s nose, although not, I hope, ultimately prejudicial to the research. This, then, is an ‘unauthorised’ biography, so I’m particularly grateful to the 270 people who did speak either by phone or email, or in various restaurants where Polanski was discussed, usually fondly, over a meal – which is how these things should be.
For recollections, input or advice I should thank, institutionally: Abacus, ABC News, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Amazon.com, Atlantic Monthly, Bookcase, Bookends, Borders, the British Library, British Newspaper Library, California Vital Records, Chronicles, the Cinema Store, Columbia Pictures, Companies House, Creative Artists, the Daily Mail, the David Lawrence Show, Directors Guild, Family Records Centre, FBI, Focus Fine Arts, General Register Office, Golem, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, IMDbPro.com, Inca, Kamera, Krakow@wp.pl, LipService, Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, the Margaret Herrick Library, the New York Times, Orbis, Pages of Fun, Playboy Enterprises International, Producers Guild, Public Record Office, Renton Library, Roman Polanski Productions, Readings, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Public Library, Second Hand Books, Slate, the Smoking Gun, Spotlight, The Times, United Talent Agency, Vanity Fair, Variety.com.
Professionally: Isabelle Adjani, Polly Andrews, Tim Andrews, Terence Bayler, Tony Bill, Jacqueline Bisset, Mark Booth, Paul Bradley, Paul Brooke, Curtis Brown, Joan Brown, Vincent Bugliosi, Timothy Burrill Productions, the late William Burroughs, Jean Cazes, Charles Champlin, Michael Cimino, Gemma Cox, Bud Crowe, Valerie Cutko, Paul Darlow, Christian Darvin, Ariel Dorfman, Richard Dysart, Jozef Ebert, Roger Ebert, Hilly Elkins, the late Michael Elphick, ‘Doc’ Erickson, Jo Evans, Juliet Ewers, Peter Falk, Mike Fargo, Irene Fawkes, Mike Fenton, Judy Flanders, Adam Fleming, Kathryn Fleming, Tom Fleming, Jamie Foreman, Emilia Fox, John Fraser, Hugh Futcher, Toni Gahl, Corinne Garcia, John Gavin, Jim Geller, Sandi Gibbons, William Goldman, Don Gordon, Pytor Gorsky, Herman Graf, James Graham, Chris Green, Jeff Gross, Stefan Hansen, Alain Haultcoeur, Alan Hazen, Michael Heath, William Hobbs, Jim Hoven, Emily Hunt, Ernst Jaenecke, Roy Jenson, Norman Jewison, Iain Johnstone, Dean Jones, David Kelly, John M. Kelso, Frank Knox, the late Ronald Lacey, Leigh Lawson, Christopher Lee, Barbara Leigh, Barbara Levy, Daniel Metcalfe, Don Murray, Barry Norman, Sven Nykvist, Carole O’Shea, Josef Oziecka, Max Paley, Lucia Pallaris, James Robert Parish, John Pavlik, Michele Pay, Richard Pearson, Bruce Perret, Valli Pfohl, the late Donald Pleasence, Jennifer Prather, the late Anthony Quayle, Katharina Rae, Neil Rand, Marian Reid, Robert Relyea, Sol Rizzo, Jenny Romero, Suzanna Ruiz, James Russo, Mariella Ryecart, Andrei Sbytov, Denny Sevier, Paul Shelley, Tad Slowacki, Ed Strauss, Marshall Terrill, Damien Thomas, Sharon Thomas, John Thurley, Victor Tomei, the late Delli Colli Tonino, Louisa Towne, Robert Towne, the late Kenneth Tynan, Julia Tyrell, Eli Wallach, Ken Wilson, the late Shelley Winters, the late Robert Wise, Józef Wolski, Dora Yanni, Tony Yeo, Burt Young.
Personally: Adis, Air Canada, Amanuel, the Attic, Pete Barnes, Ray Bates, Benaroya Hall, Lucinda Bredin, Hilary and Robert Bruce, Changelink, Noel Chelberg, Cocina, the late Ernst Cohn, the late Steve Cox (senselessly murdered on 2 December 2006), Ken Crabtrey, the late Cricket Lore, the Cricketers Club of London, Celia Culpan, Deb K. Das, the Davenport, Monty Dennison, the Dowdall family, Milan Drdos, John and Barbara Dungee, Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, Malcolm Galfe, the Gay Hussar, the Gees, Jim Gillespie, Audrey Godwin, Tom and Jackie Graveney, Peter Griffin, Grumbles, Patrice Haultcoeur, Charles Hillman, Alison Hooker, the late Amy Hostetter, Hotel Vancouver, Ivar’s, JCC, Jo Jacobius, Lincoln Kamell, Tom Keylock, Terry Lambert, Jenny Lao, Belinda Lawson, Cindy Link, Todd Linse, Vince Lorimer, Ruth and Angie McCartney, the Macris, Lee Mattson, Jim Meyersahm, Sheila Mohn, the Morgans, John and Colleen Murray, Jonathan Naumann, Chuck Ogmund, the Revd Larry Olsen, Valya Page, Robin Parish, Peter Perchard, Chris Pickrell, George Plumptre, Prins family, Queen Anne Office Supply, Tim Rice, Keith Richards, Malcolm Robinson, the late Comte Flemming de Rosenborg, Ailsa Rushbrooke, Debbie Saks, Delia Sandford, Karen Sandford, my father Sefton Sandford, Sue Sandford, Peter Scaramanga, Seattle CC, the Revd Kempton Segerhammar, Jan Shawe, Fred and Cindy Smith, the Spectator, the Stanleys, Thaddeus Stuart, Subway 3674, Swedish Medical Center, the Travel Team, William Underhill, Roger and Di Villar, Lisbeth Vogl, West London Chemists, Jim Wheal, Katharina Whone, Richard Wigmore, the late Tom Willis Fleming, the Willis Flemings, Tad Wolanski; and a special doffed hat to my son Nicholas.
Thanks, McKelvey law firm.
C. S.
2007
‘We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they’d have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take direction from sound administrative types.’
J. B. Priestley
‘I am the man of the spectacle. I’m playing.’
Roman Polanski
AS THE CUSTOMS officials at the small Sudeten town of Zittau stamped his coveted Polish ‘consular’ passport – allowing the holder, described as an ‘Independent Film-maker’, to live and work abroad – the 28-year-old man in the battered Mercedes convertible might have been struck by the cinematic potential of the scene. He was a trim, youthful figure whose upturned nose and pinched, quizzical expression gave him a vaguely feral air – in one ex-lover’s uncharitable view, like that of an ‘evil mole’. Inside the car, along with the director’s pet black poodle, were virtually his entire worldly possessions: several boxes of German and French books, a Chubby Checker album, two velvet suits, some skis and a print of his first full-length feature, called Knife in the Water. Released on 9 March 1962, it enjoyed a mixed domestic reception, the state party secretary, Wladyslaw Gomulka, expressing his own reservations on the subject by hurling an ashtray at the screen. To compound his problems, the emigrant currently had no cash (his fee having been paid him in unconvertible Polish zloty), few if any prospects and only the vaguest of plans to make a life for himself in the West, more specifically Paris. His wife had recently left him and he was suffering from the after-effects of a fractured skull sustained in a late-night car crash. None of these blows had, however, impaired his legendary self-confidence. According to a retired East German ‘Vopo’ named Josip Sats, who made a note of the incident, he ‘very categorically assured us “I’ll be back,”’ nodding his head towards Poland with a show of distaste, before adding, ‘“Someday, they’ll remember me.”’ Years later, the director would recall how he had actually felt he was ‘leaving one limbo for another’.
Roman Polanski was right. They did remember him, and, after a brief private visit, he returned in triumph nineteen years later to direct and star in a Polish stage version of Amadeus. Some of the same critics who had ignored or panned Knife in the Water now hailed him as ‘a genius’, ‘our prodigal son’ and ‘on a par with Mozart’. ‘Imagine,’ added the party newspaper, in a wrenching editorial, the ‘solitude of such [a] soul exiled in places like Los Angeles.’
There appear to be various mysteries about Polanski, polymath, felon, and reluctant subject of countless PhD theses: the chief one being that he seems to be several different people. The notorious swinger who defied social conventions, slept around, and liked his partners young if not legally underage, or the distinguished artiste engagé, fluent in five languages? (‘He’s extremely intelligent’ and ‘He’s a freak’ are the two phrases that crop up time and again in research.) Because people hold such distinct views of him, the first question a Polanski biographer tends to hear is, ‘Is it a hatchet job?’ It’s a fair point, but not one, perhaps, that would be asked of a similar book on Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, or even Oliver Stone. Thanks to the events of August 1969 and of March 1977-February 1978, millions of people who never go to a film would come to know of Polanski. To many of his friends and admirers he remains a rare example of someone who can entertain as well as challenge his audiences, with a life story even stranger than his fiction. Sharing the mystical aura of the Polish underground, he’d survived the Second World War but lost his mother to the horrors of Auschwitz. In the mid-Sixties his exhilaratingly odd films were part of the general revolution underway against the Hollywood establishment, with its grinding conformity and studio systems largely untouched since the days of Louis B. Mayer. No one seemed to bear more of the hope of young, irreverent talent.
His second wife’s murder was, as Polanski stresses, both his worst and his most prolonged blow. ‘It changed everything,’ he’s said. Even before Sharon Tate and her fellow victims of the Manson cult were buried, and for years afterwards, reporters openly speculated about the Polanskis’ home life, where a wide knowledge of drugs, black magic and unorthodox sexual practices was thought to have somehow contributed to the tragedy. As the press competed to play up some of the couple’s more exotic hobbies, a combination of Hollywood gossip and Roman’s own provocations brought a rash of unflattering articles about what Life dubbed his ‘Olympic ego’. (When you talk to people who knew him at the time, the word ‘humility’ comes up a lot. They say he was extremely sparing with it.) Events nine years later, when Polanski fled the US immediately before sentencing on a child-sex charge, were to prove a gift to the same reporters, one of whom wrote that the award-winning director was ‘someone you’d want to touch only with a pair of tongs’.
At about this same time, a court-ordered probation report noted of Polanski, ‘Jail is not being recommended . . . It is believed that incalculable emotional damage could result from incarcerating the defendant, whose very existence has been a seemingly unending series of punishments.’ Asked subsequently by a French reporter how it felt to be a fugitive, Polanski shrugged and said, ‘I’m used to it. I’ve been a fugitive all my life.’
Tempting as it is for a Polanski biographer to ‘explain’ his career in terms of his being a perpetual outsider, I think the precise opposite is the case. A close London friend at the time of his wedding to Sharon Tate, reflecting on the ‘somewhat ad hoc’ planning of the event, recalls ‘Roman remark[ing] that, [despite] familiarity with both Jewish and Catholic ritual, he was personally an agnostic. What he shared with truly religious people was a sense of exile, and this sprang not from his foreign ancestry, but from being a human being. The essential strangeness of life on this planet, particularly in places like Hollywood in the Sixties, would create this sense in anyone but a complete idiot.’
For the past thirty years, the name Polanski has become attached to two kinds of headline: first, a series of shrill variants of the word ‘Monster!’ with which both the Globe and Star greeted his arrest for statutory rape, and subsequent flight; and secondly, some equally rich stuff claiming him to be a victim of the various unsavoury and narrow-minded thugs pulling the levers of the American justice system, quite possibly in cahoots with the CIA, a view that, particularly in recent years, endears itself to many in his adopted home of France. (To get some of the gist of the debate, the reader has only to compare Mia Farrow’s statement describing Polanski as ‘a brave and brilliant man important to all humanity’, and the Los Angeles Facts editorial calling for him to be castrated.) Between the paroxysms of these two groups, the man himself seems to have slipped away. One possible reason fans and critics alike mine his films for the slightest scraps of biographical detritus is that Polanski himself is so private. He rarely gives interviews, has never opened his beautiful home to Hello!, and even when successfully pursuing a libel action in the High Court appeared only via videolink, the first time in British legal history that a claimant has participated solely by TV monitor.
When Polanski sat down to write his life story in 1983, he began with this reflection: ‘For as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred.’ Some of the more enduring myths may have been, like rogue biographies, beyond his control, but others appear to be fully authorised. It would be fair to assume that Polanski’s extraordinary success over the years as both a writer and director has at least something to do with his fertile imagination. The role playing, and attendant mimicry, an eminently practical way to cope with the uniquely appalling facts of his early life, seem to have begun with the war. Polanski speaks of an occasion shortly after the imposition of the Krakow ghetto when he and a friend were able to visit a cinema reserved for members of the Wehrmacht and their families by ‘pretending we were German children’ – only the first of many such ruses, some of them exercises in survival, one or two of which perhaps improved with telling down the years. Subsequent fame and power, coming on top of professional acting experience, enormously magnified and dramatised the way in which he seemed to adapt to the needs of every situation. Shortly before his fiftieth birthday, a colleague of Polanski’s in Paris decided to make a surprise video tribute with which to amuse their mutual friends at a lavish party. The man spent ‘several agonising days’ planning how to go about it, before finally abandoning the idea. ‘The only thing that would have worked would have been to get a chameleon, and then let it walk across the screen,’ he says.
In 1970, at the height of his fame for Rosemary’s Baby and, by association, the slaughter of his wife and friends, Polanski filmed a peculiarly haunting version of Macbeth. As part of the casting process he approached a 41-year-old New Zealand-born actor named Terence Bayler, who had acquitted himself with distinction in Doctor Who and other TV series, but was, as he concedes, ‘no movie star’. Bayler provides an odd and touching example of Polanski’s little-known talent for personal modesty, provided it simultaneously served the interests of the film, when the two of them found themselves sitting on the floor of an office sharing some fruit. ‘I told him I was already under contract to do another job at the same time,’ says Bayler. ‘Roman said, “Well, we can buy you out.” I told him no, that wouldn’t be possible. Roman thought about this and then told me he would reschedule a chunk of Macbeth to accommodate me. I thought that was an extraordinary thing for him to do, whether because he really wanted me or because I’d initially resisted him. In either case, he certainly didn’t need to do it, particularly given his fame.’ Indeed, Bayler seems to have had a clearer notion of Polanski’s status than Polanski himself, who frequently insisted he would be simply ‘one of the gang’ on Macbeth. (He was as good as his word.) In one of the sudden reversals that constitute the basic pattern of his life, the director then went directly from there to a Roman palazzo where he would shoot the woefully self-indulgent What?, an S&M romp that floored the filmgoing public even in the sexually libertine days of the mid-Seventies.
‘Someday they’ll remember me.’ Such was Polanski’s ability to ‘seethe with chutzpah’ as Ken Tynan observed, that one almost forgets how much of his life has been a sort of identity crisis. In 1978, some of the Los Angeles district attorneys’ best minds were forced to work long hours to determine his exact nationality, while other personal details, such as his name, proved equally elusive over the years, even in an industry where skinny ‘Stechetto’ Scicolone could become Sophia Loren and Marion Morrison saddled up as John Wayne. According to the passport he presented that spring morning in 1962, he was born Rajmund Roman Thierry Polañski, his father, apparently as an artistic nom de plume, having changed the original family name from Liebling. As a boy he answered to Romek or Remo Polanski, until the Nazi occupation of Poland converted him into Roman Wilk, a practising Catholic. With the onset of adolescence, he then gloried in the striking alias ‘Puker’ for several months, before a later girlfriend dubbed him ‘The Brat’. California state records list him variously as ‘Rajmund R.’,‘Raymund R.’or ‘R. Thierry’Polanski in 1969 and 1970, while in 1977 he was formally charged as Roman Raymond Polanski, the name which remains on his file today.
There has always been an element of fantasy attached to Polanski. Among the rumours swirling around the Manson carnage and its aftermath were two to which he took particular exception. In August 1970, the Daily Telegraph alleged that Polanski had declined to appear as a witness in the killers’ trial because the prosecution wouldn’t pay his airfare from London to Los Angeles. Thirty-two years later, Vanity Fair was to rashly claim that the director had stopped in New York while on his way to California, where his wife’s funeral was to be held, and propositioned a ‘Swedish beauty’ with the words, ‘I can put you in movies. I can make you the next Sharon Tate.’ Polanski sued, disproved the stories, and won damages from both publications. By scouring the internet, meanwhile, it’s possible to read such ‘indisputable’ facts as that Polanski once sold his soul to the devil, that he has a hang-up for group sex, among other combinations, and – most startling of all – that he enjoyed his secondary education at Charterhouse School in Surrey.
A faint sense of schizophrenia seems to similarly pervade Polanski’s career, which has rarely been burdened by consistency, let alone sequels, or by a need to pander to what the risk management consultants running most film studios call the ‘great average’. As well as two satanic-cult pictures, his canon includes psychological thrillers, faithful adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens, a costume melodrama, matinee swashbuckling, Hitchcockian suspense, Thirties noir, excursions in absurdism and soft porn, sometimes concurrently, and a deranged Dracula spoof in which a Jewish vampire hunter, played by Polanski himself, repeatedly peers through a keyhole at a naked woman who happens to be Sharon Tate. It’s hard to even imagine the director of Chinatown and The Tenant as the same man. In 1974, Polanski shot his hard-boiled saga of big-city corruption, whose backdrop, ironically, is a vast, often sunny countryside, peopled by Raymond Chandler wiseguys; he followed it by his dark examination of one man (Polanski again) going mad in his Parisian apartment while clad in a wig, suspenders and high-heeled shoes, a film he finished just before it finished him, in 1976.
At the risk of hyperbole, or of sounding like an apologist, it could be said that there’s no such thing as a truly bad Roman Polanski movie: weaker ones, certainly, pictures that, despite some brilliant sequences, are inanely plotted, comedies that aren’t quite funny enough, meandering dramas in need of an editor – but never a really epic flop, one that’s begging to be walked out on. Even the relative duds like What? are redeemed by Polanski’s great artistic virtue: ruthlessness. With the possible exception of 2005’s Oliver Twist, his films are never mawkish, maudlin or ‘escapist’. Anyone looking to them for an emotional pick-me-up is in for a sorry disappointment. (That’s emphatically not to say that they lack humour: even The Pianist has moments of black comedy.) With their flawed heroes, hallucinatory set pieces and unflinching treatment of paranoia, hysteria and violence, Polanski’s movies would seem to offer no easy answers to the human condition; instead, they invite us to take a closer look. Few film-makers have cherished the phrase ‘this may hurt a little’ quite like he does.
Leaving aside Polanski’s private life, the secret of his enduring fame is relatively simple: he deals exclusively in real people; he makes films about men and women who seem to be, at heart, ‘just like us’, even if their home lives are unusually rich, even by contemporary standards, in murders, frauds and sexual perversions; and he’s done this while carrying his art into a high complexity, across a range of genres. As the critic Barry Norman says, ‘In an industry that worships the routine, he never brings the rabbit out of the same hat twice.’
As well as imagination and technique, Polanski, as noted, also had his fair share of ambition. Keenly aware of his status as a foreigner (or, as one French critic put it, a ‘jug-eared runt with a lisp’) he sought ‘power in craft . . . He drove both himself and his casts to the brink,’ said his friend and colleague Carlo Ponti, even if this brought occasional grief along the way. A member of the Chinatown crew still recalls ‘Roman suddenly starting to argue with Faye Dunaway about a bedroom scene’, although the word ‘argue’ is somehow entirely inadequate to describe the peak-decibel abuse that then rocked the set for the next several minutes. After peace had been temporarily restored, Polanski went on to another sequence altogether in which he was to shoot his leading lady meeting Jack Nicholson in a restaurant. After the first take, it was noticed that a small strand of Dunaway’s otherwise perfectly lacquered hair was catching the light. Stylists were summoned, but to no avail. Various personal assistants similarly failed to correct the problem, until Polanski himself, noting dryly that this was costing ‘$200 a minute’, walked over, took hold of the offending hair and extracted it. Dunaway went nuts. ‘I don’t believe it!’ she shrieked. ‘I just don’t believe it! That motherfucker pulled my hair out!’ This was the cue for a lively exchange about the terms under which Dunaway would continue to work on Chinatown, if at all, until Polanski ended the debate by calmly announcing, ‘You can fight with me, Faye, but I can never be wrong. I’m the director.’
Several of Polanski’s films have, unlike Chinatown, enjoyed instant cult status without much commercial success. A classic example is 1965’s Repulsion, another claustrophobic horror tale, in which a young Belgian woman living in London loses it and bludgeons to death her boyfriend, played by John Fraser. Fraser has fond memories of ‘Roman prepar[ing] me for a particular close-up by saying, “John, I want you to do nothing.” So I did nothing. I literally stood there. After the take, Roman shook his head and walked over. I could see that he wasn’t happy. “John, I want you to do absolutely nothing,” he said. I told him I’d done that. Without missing a beat, Roman responded, “But I can see you thinking. You must be blank. Blank, blank, blank.” I tried the shot again, and back came Roman: “Blank, I said.”’ After several more takes, Polanski solved the problem by filming the back of Fraser’s head.
‘That’s the great thing about Roman,’ says a long-time colleague. ‘It’s all a challenge. That’s what makes it fun. If he thinks there’s no chance that you’ll hate him, he’s not interested in doing it.’
Polanski left Poland in virtual anonymity, stinging from reviews like the one calling Knife in the Water ‘irrelevant’ and berating the director for having an ‘international driving licence but no film-school diploma.’ Although his arrival in Paris similarly failed to rouse much excitement, he did meet a frustrated 34-year-old writer with cropped hair and a freshly gashed forehead, named Gérard Brach. Brach himself was so broke that he’d been reduced to sleeping on the floor of a friend’s office and existing on a diet of bread and vinegar. Small and sickly-looking, a TB sufferer, like Polanski he was in the throes of a divorce; the gashed forehead was the result of a blow from a shoe, delivered by his wife. When the two men then sat down to collaborate on a screenplay, the leading female character was, Polanski notes, ‘born out of a slight sense of revenge’.
Their property, which they called If Katelbach Comes, was given to the producer Pierre Roustang, who passed on it. Two other producers and an agent in turn read the script. They also passed. Someone then mentioned that there was a West German film distributor on the top floor of Roustang’s office building. The manager in residence there read If Katelbach Comes and offered Polanski a $2,000 screenwriter’s fee and a director’s fee of $8,000 against a two per cent cut of the notional profits, but the whole deal fell through once budgets came to be discussed. After that, there were no serious takers.
For Polanski, Paris was an education in culture. ‘It didn’t so much define him as refine his eye,’ a local friend recalls. Although destitute, he was able to enjoy long walks up the Champs-Élysées with his poodle Jules, dallying by the shop windows and haunting the galleries and museums where he was to exploit his youthful appearance by requesting a student’s discount. In a strikingly generous arrangement, he was also to enjoy the run of Roustang’s Left Bank home on the weekends when the producer was out of town. Polanski told the girls he invited up to the luxurious apartment that he owned the place. Paris, old and new, the city of his birth, assumed an ‘air of magnificence’, a ‘grand tone’ it was apparently always to have for him in spite of its slums and squalor, and of his own chronic poverty. According to Roustang, Polanski imagined it as a beautiful woman, which suggests that he might have thought of himself as her suitor. What he liked best about Western life, he once remarked, was the challenge. Kenneth Tynan said that his friend the ‘magnetic Pole’ conceived of cities, and Paris in particular, as places to be ‘seduced, conquered [and] possessed’.
Later in the spring, Polanski learnt that another French producer, named Pierre Braunberger, had secured the domestic rights in perpetuity to Knife in the Water, for which he paid $9,700. Like most of the cinema-going public, the 57-year-old Braunberger had never seen the film. His young wife, however, had attended a late-night screening of Knife as part of a Polish arts fair and subsequently raved about its treatment of ‘unbridled sexuality’ – the future, as she insisted – with the result that Braunberger both bought the movie and invited Polanski and Brach to write him another one. A month later they sent him a script loosely based on Snow White, featuring a sexually ambiguous heroine, a gay yodelling choir and a troupe of midget wrestlers to depict the seven dwarfs. Braunberger declined to commission the project. Knife, too, did only modest business in Paris cinemas, selling a mere 12,400 seats in its six-week run there. Polanski endured one ‘gala performance’ where he sat in mounting despair amongst a small but vocally derisive crowd of drunks, the source of a subsequently heated debate with Braunberger over the latter’s promotional efforts.
Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Knife would eventually come to enjoy a midnight-cult status in arts clubs and on university campuses. It owed its American presence to a small import company called Kanawha, who bought the distribution rights and entered the picture in the first New York Film Festival. Polanski was flown in for the event, lodged at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, and spoke, through a translator, to a number of reporters, most of whom took the now 30-year-old director for someone a decade younger. To the New York Post, which described him as ‘cherubic’, Polanski confided, ‘I feel old . . . I’m a combination of an old man and a baby.’ The paper concluded that ‘it [was] entirely possible that Polanski will be an unnaturally brilliant boy for the next thirty years until suddenly he will be decrepit. Meanwhile, what a life!’
Polanski had mixed first impressions of New York. Even though he was reasonably fluent in English, or perhaps because of that, he was acutely conscious of his erratic grammar and thick accent. So he said little, instead walking around among ‘seedy little bars, novelty shops and discount stores [on] streets that were potholed, filthy and narrower than I’d imagined.’ In a town in which several public facilities were still marked ‘White’ and ‘Colored’, there were also to be various cultural shocks. When Kanawha threw a small party in his honour, Polanski asked if he could bring his new girlfriend, a dark-skinned usherette in the cinema where Knife was being shown. His hosts objected, so Polanski sent his own regrets.
Manning the front desk at the Lincoln Center, a festival organiser named Judy Flanders remembers Polanski appearing one morning ‘down in the dumps about it all . . . As far as I could gather, he had no money and he was relying on the press receptions to get a free meal.’ To compound his misery, a bottle of shampoo had leaked in his suitcase on the flight over and ruined his one good suit. The whole visit seemed to have raised the ‘brilliant boy’s’ hopes only to dash them again. Then, a night or two later, as the festival was coming to a close, Flanders got an urgent phone call to meet up with some friends from Kanawha in Polanski’s hotel room over a bottle of champagne. Knife in the Water was on the cover of Time magazine, and everyone wanted to celebrate.
THERE WERE SEVERAL more occasions over the next forty years when Roman Polanski was to imagine himself as an old man, something like his hero Bertrand Russell, ‘rocking back and forth in [his] chair and musing on the state of the world.’
It’s a curious image for Hollywood’s enfant terrible, but Polanski has always had his reflective side, especially when holding forth with his version of art history – quoting everyone from Democritus to the Rolling Stones – while running off at tangents about politics and terrorism and firing his one-liners at the mainstream film industry, which he calls the ‘kingdom of mediocrity’. Growing up smart yet horribly persecuted seems to have nurtured his sense of ego, as well as his lifelong fatalism. ‘My characters’ destinies [are] the result of apparently meaningless coincidence,’ he once said, which would appear to apply to much of his own career. A still more sombre theme, one rarely far from the surface in Polanski’s scripts, is the subject of betrayal, and, by extension, death – of compelling significance for the man whose mother, wife and unborn son were all murdered – and the inevitable survivor’s guilt. When asked about the violence in his films, muted as it is by today’s standards, Polanski invariably notes that he does no more than show the world around him, and certainly he’s one of the few directors to have experienced quite as many of the twentieth century’s homicidal monsters at first hand. ‘People talk about the autobiographical aspect of Roman’s work,’ said Ken Tynan. ‘But his life’s much more interesting than that. The cliffhangers end with real falls.’
Rajmund Roman Thierry Polañski was born in Paris on Friday night, 18 August 1933. His father, Ryszard, was a Jewish émigré from Krakow who had moved to the West in an ultimately failed bid to become a painter. According to a friend and fellow expatriate named Jan Solski, Ryszard was ‘modestly gifted’ but ‘thoroughly dedicated’ to his art, eventually leaving behind some sixty or seventy ‘huge’ portraits, most charitably described as abstract – red-brown acrylic splotches and semi-figurative works with titles such as Weeping Woman. In this commercially frustrating but personally eventful French exile, Ryszard would shed both his first wife and his family name, Liebling (an ornamental German version of the word ‘darling’), adopting Polañski, or its Westernised form, from early 1932. Six months later, he married a beautiful, divorced Russian half-Jewess named Bula Katz. When their only child was born in the summer of the following year, the family took rooms up three flights of stairs in a draughty apartment house at 5 rue Saint-Hubert, a then cobbled street lit by two sodium lamps, one either end, just west of Père Lachaise cemetery.
Roman Polanski was later impatient with the idea that he was ‘particularly unlucky’ or put-upon as a boy. One can only admire his resilience. As subsequent events were to prove, he was born not only into a world of violent change, but at the worst possible time to be Jewish, or even partly Jewish, in much of Europe. Hitler had become German chancellor on 30 January 1933, and within a month had contrived to suspend the articles of the Weimar constitution guaranteeing personal liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the rights to hold meetings and form associations, while ‘actively review[ing]’ the whole question of disarmament. Rule by bayonet had arrived.
In defiance of an international convention forbidding troop movements in the area, the Polish government would in turn dispatch units to its Westerplatte munitions depot and other strategic points, in recognition of the ‘state of disquiet existing [to] the west’. Soon after these events, Hitler was to adopt a noticeably more conciliatory policy towards Warsaw, apparently realising the advantages to be gained from the worsening of Franco-Polish relations and the disintegration of the French system of alliances. The result was the Declaration of Non-aggression and Understanding, signed on 26 January 1934, whose preamble referred to ‘a hundred years of future co-operation’ between Germany and Poland, but which broke down immediately following Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
The national census of 1933 indicated that there were 3,114,000 Jews or ‘Semitic sub-types’ in Poland. They made up ten per cent of the entire Polish population, by far the largest such percentage of any nation in the world. The 355,000 Jews who lived in Warsaw equalled the number of Jews in all of France. These were not statistics likely to be ignored by the newly elected Reichschancellor, who, as early as September 1919, had written that anti-Semitism should be based not on emotion but on ‘facts’, and would, by the same logic, lead to the ‘systematic removal’ of Jewish rights. ‘Its final aim,’ he concluded, ‘must inevitably be the removal of the Jews altogether.’
A small, taciturn, cynically humorous man, Ryszard – augmenting his few art commissions by taking poorly paid work in a record-pressing factory – came to regret his departure from Poland. In 1933 he wrote to his youngest brother Stefan that, after several years of living in the French capital, he still felt like a ‘complete stranger’. We know that Ryszard was well dressed, irrepressibly proud of his looks, responsible and honest, but also gruff, bad-tempered and stingy – a ‘clenched fist’ in one account; not a natural parent. Fifty years later, shortly before his father was stricken with cancer, Roman Polanski was to write in his memoirs that ‘he often hurt my feelings in little ways’. He went on to paint a picture of an emotionally vacant man whose one real attachment was to his ancient Underwood typewriter. Ryszard had, it’s agreed, a way with women, a talent Roman would inherit from him. Mostly, though, the son consciously tried to be as unlike his father as possible. Where Ryszard was frugal, Roman prided himself on spending money the second he earned it, and often even earlier. The older man lived long enough to be flown to California as his rich and famous son’s house guest, but would spend much of his time there complaining, not without cause, that Roman’s friends were ‘parasites’.
Polanski’s mother was a more formidable proposition, a tall, elegant brunette who wore the most fashionable pillbox hats and sported a fox fur on all but the warmest days. Forty years later, Bula Polanski would be the physical model for Dunaway’s character in Chinatown, with her exquisitely plucked eyebrows and vivid red lipstick shaped into a cupid’s bow. Bula also took great pride in her housework, employed a maid whenever circumstances allowed, enjoyed a night out and charmed her many friends by ‘turn[ing] a conversation around so that you would talk about yourself’. It was a curious pairing: Ryszard was the pragmatic and proverbially dour working-class Pole who made his wife accountable for every penny and was cool towards children; Bula the stylish and energetic Russian with faint aristocratic connections and a 10-year-old daughter, Annette, from her first marriage.
The father’s disposition and the heavy atmosphere he created in the house cast a deep shadow over Roman’s early childhood. He was acutely aware of Ryszard’s financial struggles, which seem to have had a singular motivational effect: the sense that the world of praca zwyczajowy, or conventional graft, wasn’t for him. Meanwhile, Romek (the diminutive he answered to through adolescence) grew up under the handicap of being small, with extravagant ears, and features that were variously described as ‘gnarled’ or ‘ferrety’. At least one friend suggests that Polanski’s family life, to the extent that he had one, ‘produced the basic anxiety, [the] sense of being adrift in a hostile world.’ Kenneth Tynan would note that ‘things were apparently pretty dark for Roman for seven or eight years, at which stage they turned black.’
At some point in June or early July 1936, in a fatefully ill-timed move, Ryszard would leave Paris and take his family back to Krakow. As he later conceded, with characteristic black humour, it was a ‘truly exquisite’ blunder on his part. That same summer, the gauleiter of Danzig, one Albert Förster, launched an aggressive campaign to expel the League of Nations high commissioner for the so-called ‘free city’, Sean Lester. Receiving no support from the League powers, Lester duly resigned. Förster then made a speech in which he announced that Germany was preparing for war, that Hitler would be entering Danzig within a few months, and that the Poles as well as the League would be ‘eliminated’. Back in Berlin, the propaganda ministry, in a sorry departure from the Declaration of Non-aggression, confirmed that should the German minorities living there suffer the ‘slightest abuse’, the Führer would ensure that not a trace of Poland remained.
The Polanskis settled at 9 Komorowski Street, a three-roomed flat with low ceilings and a malodorous tiled stove, located between a Catholic church and one of Krakow’s numerous open-air markets. There were few pretensions to elegance. The facade of the building was undistinguished, except for an heraldic beast of satanic demeanour, still intact today, carved over the doorway. Ryszard found temporary work as a freelance builder and carpenter before opening his own plastics business, manufacturing and selling ashtrays, dolls and inexpensive religious figurines.
In September 1938, Romek was enrolled at the local kindergarten, but lasted only one day. He was expelled for saying ‘Pocatuj mnie w dupa’ – roughly translated as ‘Kiss my ass’ – to the 5-year-old girl seated next to him. Years later, his head teacher would remark that, even on that brief evidence, Polanski, who looked ‘barely older than a baby’, had been a curious mixture of the precocious and the backward. ‘I couldn’t make him out,’ she admitted. ‘I thought he would either be a cretin or a man of genius.’ Much of Romek’s subsequent education was at the hands of his teenage half-sister, who both encouraged him to draw and took him to the numerous cinemas around Rynek Glówny, the town’s central plaza, whose incredible visual patisserie of medieval towers and squat, redbrick apartment blocks was symbolic of the two Krakows: the ancient city with its baroque castle and churches, the so-called ‘Pearl of Europe’, and its gaudily modern Thirties facelift. The word between the wars was ‘renewal’, the result acres of dead tramway lines and rubble dumped into the green, still hair-oil of the Vistula river. In later years, the Krakow city planners would finish the job by erecting the country’s largest steel mill in the town’s eastern suburbs, bringing with it entire, prefabricated neighbourhoods whose chief physical characteristics were endless one-way systems and mortuaries.
One morning early in 1939, a middle-aged lady knocked on the door of the Polanskis’ apartment. She was a giant of a woman; her bulging figure was swathed in a black crêpe dress and her feet overflowed in red shoes. She had applied a perhaps overgenerous blue rinse, topped off by a floral hat. She carried with her a thick loose-leaf notebook, which she consulted while enquiring about the family’s religious habits. More specifically, was the small 5-year-old boy who gazed up at her with his ‘extremely crafty’ and ‘wizened’ grin a good, baptised Catholic?
Both Ryszard and Bula Polanski were lapsed Jews. Apart from on feast days, they rarely ventured the two miles south into Krakow’s Kazimierz district, where the synagogues were packed together, in