There was a film festival in Taormina she went to. She had looked forward to it for days. I languished in Rome. The week passed slowly. I heard her distant voice — I did not know where Taormina was, exactly — on the telephone. “Oh, darling,” she cried, “it’s so marvelous.” She was going to have the same agent as Monica Vitti, she said excitedly. A director had promised her a part in a James Bond film. She was not staying at the San Domenico Palace, she was at the Excelsior. Tomorrow she would be at the Imperiale — I understood quite well what all that meant — and on Sunday she was going to receive a prize.
“Which prize?”
“I don’t know. Darling, I can’t believe it,” she said.
At last there was a telegram — I had felt I might not see her again—Coming Monday Rapido 5. Afternoon, and signed with her name. It was sent from Ljubljana — Yugoslavia.
I met the train. It was thrilling, almost miraculous, to see her coming along the platform, a porter behind her with her bags. Some things are only good the first time but seeing her was like the first time. I knew she would say “darling.” I knew she would say, “I adore you.”
The exciting days in Sicily, the festival, had left a glow. At a big reception, among scores of faces, she had seen, directed at her, the brilliant unwavering smile of a young man in a silk foulard, a wide smile, “like a killer’s.” She was wearing a white, beaded dress. Her arms were bare. Fifteen or twenty minutes later she saw him again.
The second barrel, as the lawyers say, was fatal. She said only, “Let’s leave.” Without a word he offered her his arm.
He had a beautiful car. The steering wheel was made of gleaming wood. They went somewhere but found it closed. That was enough. “Let’s go to bed,” she said. He said simply, “Yes.”
At the hotel the portiere would not let him go up to her room, “Non, non, signorina,” he said. She began to make a scene. She was going to another hotel, she threatened loudly. Finally the portiere asked, “Where is he?” and allowed them to go up. Thirty minutes later he was ringing the room, to no avail.
I listened with some unhappiness but without anger. They say you should not tell these things to the other person, but in this case it meant little, faithfulness was not what I expected.
“You’ll get to the top,” I told her almost reluctantly, “but you shouldn’t …”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“If I don’t become too much of a whore,” she said.
We drove up to Paris. I remember the hotel and the first evening. We were at the window; I was behind her, standing close. Across the river the lights of the city glittered, as far as one could see.
We had come up through the Rhône valley and many small towns. Past Dijon we were on a back road along a canal and came to a wide dam from which the lines of fishermen dropped forty or fifty feet into clear green water. The dark shapes of fish — I took them to be pike — were coasting lazily about. We watched the biggest ones approach, ignore the bait, and move off to lie motionless. “Like sultans,” she commented. I felt she knew.
—
What I remember is a kind of glamour and sleekness. Travel, the great hotels. James Kennaway, the Scottish writer, coming into a suite at Claridge’s one January in a belted, supple black-leather coat — he had time for just one drink before catching the night train to Edinburgh, not alone, my impression was. He was sharp-nosed, laughing. I knew him only slightly, though I had once gone for a weekend to his house in Gloucestershire. One of the other guests was a lively old woman who had been his father-in-law’s governess and, at the appropriate period of youth, mistress. She remained close to the family. “Traditional,” they assured me.
I remember, in Santa Monica, beneath the palm-lined bluff on the beach, the brief row of houses, one of which — a large, imitation Normandy farmhouse — had been rented by Roman Polanski and his young wife, Sharon Tate.
I had met Polanski through Redford. A call had come from London, in a warm, faintly accented voice — the producer, Gene Gutowski. Could I come there to talk about writing a film, the film about a ski racer? Somewhere in the whirl of London nights — restaurants so in fashion that their telephone numbers were unlisted, headlong drives through parks and narrow streets — Polanski gave me in a single sentence his idea of the movie: It was to be something like High Noon; the sheriff has been killed — in this case the lead racer on the team has broken a leg — and they have to send for a replacement. I was impressed by the succinctness.
Polanski was already famous, in his early thirties, although he appeared younger. He had a small, speedy car with a telephone — innovative then — a large apartment, and an air of freedom from the dullness of being always and only oneself. With pride, but hastily, he showed me photographs of Sharon, to whom he was not yet married. There was something that both drew one to him and cautioned one — his eye seemed to skim over so many things. Beyond the shrewdness and candor, he gave the strange impression of not playing for anything real, as if chips were certain at some point to be redeemed. His banter was filled with confidence. One night in a restaurant we sat with Nureyev, who was eating a dish of magnificent strawberries with his fingers. “See? I told you he ate like a peasant,” Polanski said. Nureyev didn’t bother to smile.
He had passed, as a child, through the terror of massacre and war. He had seen a column of men being taken from the Krakow ghetto, doomed, his father among them, and had run alongside like a calf, wanting to go. His father ignored him and finally muttered threateningly, “Get lost.” The small boy of ten stopped, stung, and watched them leave him behind, to life, as it turned out, although, astonishingly, his father survived also. For such a miraculous escape and the rich life that followed, was there a price to be exacted?
That summer in Santa Monica — it was 1967—at the Mori Fencing Academy, Polanski was a prize pupil. He was also rehearsing an important film he was about to direct. In the enormous cavern of a sound stage, the floor of the apartment which would be in Rosemary’s Baby had been laid out with white tape. Polanski’s instructions to the actors had the same verve and precision he showed with the foil.
At the oversized beach house Sharon wore white pants and a long-sleeved black polo shirt, the buttons open. Her hands stole around me affectionately from behind. Polanski was weary from the long day with actors. We ate in the kitchen, steaks Sharon had thriftily bought at the post exchange in San Francisco — her father was an army officer — and just as Roman had shown pictures of her to me, she showed one of herself in some film magazine to him. An army brat, I was thinking, although I had never seen one like her. The ease and devotion of their life seemed plain.
For reasons not worth going into, Polanski was dropped from the movie I finally wrote, and thus I never lost the admiration I had for his energy and charm, a charm that was not learned but came from some deeper source, as well as his power to command. I could not imagine him being unable to reply to a question or think quickly. He had an instinct for the visceral; in his hands even familiar material could become interesting.
As for Sharon, she remains for me a kind of Hera, the emblem of marriage. If she was not a very good housekeeper, she was pure of heart and her flesh was a poem. One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman, looking at her, talking, touching, as well as other ways.