You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (21 page)

TOM CRUISE:
You made me look stupid! I’m gonna sue you too!

STAN:
Well fine! Go ahead and sue me!

TOM CRUISE:
I will! I’ll sue you … in England!

SOUTH PARK
,
‘
TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET
’ (2005)

The threat of sexual violence hangs over
Chinatown
, the last film Roman Polanski was to make in Hollywood. Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private detective who thinks he has seen it all. In the best
noir
tradition, a beautiful and mysterious woman comes to his office. Evelyn Mulwray says she wants to hire him to follow her husband, an official with the local water company. She suspects he is having an affair, and Gittes thinks he has a simple case. He realises that he does not when the real Evelyn Mulwray appears and tells him that the first woman was an impostor engaged by her husband’s enemies – rich men, led by the monstrous Noah Cross, who are creating a desert in the mountain valleys east of LA by diverting the water supply. They intend to buy out the parched farmers cheaply, then turn on the sluices and enjoy possession of valuable real estate. They sent a fake Evelyn to the detective’s office because they need to find and silence Mulwray, who knows too much about their plot.

Greed is not the only sin on display. Noah Cross is Evelyn Mulwray’s father. She tells Gittes he raped her when she was fifteen, and left her pregnant. He now wants to find his daughter/granddaughter, and rape her too. In the dismal finale, despairing even by the standards of the post-Vietnam ‘new Hollywood’ of 1974, Gittes fails to expose the criminals or to save Evelyn’s daughter. Cross seizes the child with the assistance of police officers, who shoot Evelyn Mulwray dead, and tell the powerless Gittes to forget what he has seen.

The film ends with a string of quotes that anticipate Polanski’s later career, and the careers of men richer and nastier than Polanski. ‘I don’t blame myself,’ Cross tells Gittes, as he admits to incest. ‘You see, Mr Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of
anything
.’

Gittes plays with that thought. ‘He’s rich!’ he says, as he begins to make sense of the corruption he is witnessing. ‘Do you understand? He thinks he can get away with
anything
.’

Sex and money were pertinent themes in Polanski’s life. Dandyish and talented, he enjoyed the Swinging Sixties. His marriage in 1968 to the beautiful actress Sharon Tate – star of his daft but appealing caper movie
The Fearless Vampire Killers
– was one of the great parties of the fashionable London of the day. If one had to fix a moment when the swinging stopped and the sixties turned rancid, the night of 9 August 1969, when Charles Manson’s ‘family’ went berserk in Polanski’s Hollywood home, could be it. Manson was a petty criminal who moved into Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco’s bohemian quarter. He found that babbling about the joys of drugs and free love attracted a large following of counter-cultural drifters and that perennial type of middle-class girl whose revolt against parental authority consists of a search for more domineering masters than her parents had ever been. As well as worshipping big daddy and agreeing to subject themselves to his sexual demands, ‘family’ members ticked the boxes on the checklist of late-sixties radical chic. ‘The Karma is turning, it’s blackie’s turn to be on top,’ Manson told his followers. ‘The cities are going to be mass hysteria, and the piggies won’t know what to do, and the system will fall and the black man will take over.’ Black power would be short-lived, however, because Manson, the true ruler of the world, would emerge from the chaos and ‘scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and kick him in the butt, and tell him to go pick cotton. It would be our world then. There would be no one else, except us and our black servants.’

As a prelude to Armageddon, Manson’s followers went to Polanski’s isolated mansion, cut the telephone lines and slaughtered everyone inside for no reason at all. The heavily pregnant Sharon Tate’s last words were, ‘Please, I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby. I want to have my baby.’ Her killers showed her no mercy, and inscribed ‘PIG’ in her blood on the front door.

For conservatives, the Manson murders were an overdue comeuppance for everything they loathed about their permissive age. The police regarded Polanski as a suspect. The press treated him abysmally. Reporters asked him whether his wife was having an affair, and one suggested that he might have arranged her murder to ingratiate himself with occult friends. One newspaper ran the headline ‘Live Freaky, Die Freaky’. The dead were not the victims of a psychopathic cult leader and his followers, but of their and Polanski’s promiscuity.

After all that distress and humiliation, Polanski appeared to have known too much suffering. As a child he had survived the Kraków ghetto. He had grown up in the drab dictatorship of communist Poland. He had come to America and seen a jeering press blame him for the murder of his wife and unborn child. He was entitled to a little slack.

The forty-three-year-old Polanski began to pull on the rope when he had an affair with the fifteen-year-old Nastassja Kinski in 1976, and hosted ‘children’s parties’ for his new love. Explaining himself later to Martin Amis, he said, ‘Fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls –
everyone
wants to fuck young girls!’ He tugged harder when he decided to photograph ‘sexy, pert’ thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds for a ‘gentlemen’s magazine’. And he gave himself enough rope to hang himself when he raped a child in 1977.

Polanski met Samantha Gailey’s mother in an LA nightclub, and offered to get her daughter into
Vogue
. When he had secured possession of the thirteen-year-old, he took her to Jack Nicholson’s mansion. He gave her a glass of champagne and told her to take her top off. In her subsequent testimony to a California grand jury, she did not come across as a ‘sexy, pert’ Lolita but a frightened child, miles out of her depth.

Polanski gave her Quaaludes, a relaxant, and told her to go into a nearby bedroom and lie down, she told a grand jury.

‘I was going, “No, I think I better go home,” because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch.’

‘What were you afraid of?’ asked the prosecutor.

‘Him. He sat down beside me and asked me if I was OK.’

‘What did you say, if anything?’

‘No.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He goes, “Well, you’ll be better.” And I go, “No, I won’t. I have to go home.”’

‘What happened then?’

‘He reached over and he kissed me. And I was telling him, “No,” you know, “Keep away.”’

Polanski began to engage in oral sex. ‘I was ready to cry. I was kind of – I was going, “No. Come on. Stop it.” But I was afraid … he goes, “Are you on the pill?” And I went, “No.” And he goes, “When did you last have your period?” And I said, “I don’t know. A week or two. I’m not sure.”’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He goes, “Come on. You have to remember.” And I told him I didn’t.’

Polanski had heard all he needed to know. The girl could not remember when she last had a period, and had told him she was not on the pill. So, she alleged, he decided to sodomise her.

If you happen to know any thirteen-year-old girls, the final scene is the most convincing. Instead of running away and raising the alarm, Samantha obediently returned to Polanski’s car after the assault, and sat and cried while she waited for him to drive her home.

Polanski arrived and said, ‘Don’t tell your mother about this and don’t tell your boyfriend either,’ she told the jury. ‘He said something like, “This is our secret.”

‘And I went, “Yeah.”’

When Samantha’s mother saw the pictures Polanski had taken of her semi-naked daughter, she called the police. A grand jury charged him with giving a drug to a minor, committing a lewd act upon a person less than fourteen, rape of a minor, rape by use of a drug, oral copulation and sodomy. As so often in rape cases, the victim did not want to testify. To spare her a cross-examination, and the coverage of the salivating media, the prosecution allowed Polanski to make a plea bargain. He would admit statutory rape of a minor in return for the state dropping the other five charges. The judge sent Polanski to prison for a psychiatric evaluation before sentencing. Once free, Polanski and his lawyers convinced themselves that the judge was preparing to give him a long sentence to appease a press that was running pictures of him chatting in bars with attractive women.

Christopher Sandford, Polanski’s biographer, could find no evidence that the judge intended to renege on a deal to keep Polanski’s sentence short, but Polanski did not trust the court, and other biographers have said that he had reason to be suspicious. Instead of returning to face his punishment, he fled to France, where he had citizenship. The French would not extra-dite him. If, however, he entered a country with a stiffer extra-dition treaty with the United States, the local police could arrest and deport him to face the wrath of American judges, who are not at their most lenient when they sentence fugitives from justice.

Hollywood forgave him, and the French loved him. In his first days in France, ‘when he strolled outside on the Champs-Élysées, a large crowd invariably gathered to applaud him. The men signified their approval by clapping. The women by jostling among themselves to touch his hem, and frequently much more.’
Le Matin
said Polanski was a victim of America’s ‘excessively prudish petite bourgeoisie’. Others compared him to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nelson Mandela.

Treated as a star and a victim, Polanski never showed regret for his crime. In 1988, Samantha Gailey sued him. He paid out a large sum, and in return she said that she wanted the case dropped so she could get on with her life. But the law does not allow the private resolution of criminal prosecutions. Polanski remained an exile from Hollywood. Whenever his name came up, he could count on someone saying that his considerable artistic merits notwithstanding, he remained a self-confessed rapist on the run from justice. There seemed to be no way he could escape his past and silence those who wanted to drag up the old unpleasantness in Jack Nicholson’s mansion, until 2002, when
Vanity Fair
ran a long feature on Elaine’s, the favourite restaurant of New York’s artistic old guard. Among the stories regulars told about its good old days was an anecdote from Lewis Lapham, a left-wing essayist. What with its artistic clientèle, Lapham had learned to leave prudishness behind when he went through Elaine’s doors. Still, a scene from 1969 stuck in his mind. Polanski had entered Elaine’s shortly after the murder of Sharon Tate, Lapham remembered. He made a beeline for a ‘Swedish beauty’ sitting next to Lapham.

‘Polanski pulled up a chair and inserted himself between us, immediately focusing his attention on the beauty, inundating her with his Polish charm. Fascinated by his performance, I watched as he slid his hand inside her thigh and began a long, honeyed spiel which ended with the promise, “And I will make another Sharon Tate out of you.”’

Polanski had had enough of the attacks. He announced from France that he would sue
Vanity Fair
for libel.

But how could he? An important objection that I think only writers will grasp was that the magazine had not set out to attack Polanski.
Vanity Fair
buried the anecdote near the end of a long, star-struck piece about a fashionable New York restaurant. Polanski now wanted the legal system to focus on a few sentences – to magnify them as if they were bugs under a microscope – and ignore the likelihood that most readers would have skim-read them, if they had read them at all. Every fact in a work of non-fiction ought to be correct, but proving the veracity of an anecdote from a generation back is formidably hard. All a writer can say is that he or she checked with people who were there at the time.
Vanity Fair
should have checked with Polanski. But he would have denied it, as everyone denies unflattering stories.

A stronger objection was that the story may have been wrong, and Lapham’s memory of the incident may have been false. He was certain that it was not, and another witness remembered the model asking Polanski to leave.
Vanity Fair
later admitted getting the date of the incident wrong – the alleged encounter with the blonde took place after Sharon Tate’s funeral, not before it, as the magazine had said. More than thirty years after the event, the Swedish beauty said that all she could remember was that ‘Roman Polanski came over to the table when I was eating and it was as if he tried to say something but he didn’t … He just stared at me for ages.’

In normal circumstances, falsely saying that a man propositioned a woman just after the murder of his wife would be a cruel slur, even if a journalist made it in a throwaway paragraph. The claimant would have the right to demand compensation for damage to his reputation and a correction. But Polanski later admitted that he had started having casual sex with women within a month of his wife’s murder, so he could not claim that it was libellous to suggest that he would have made a pass at the time. In the end, it was not the alleged pass but the alleged chat-up line that was the sole defamatory issue at stake.

It may be a terrible thing to say of a bereaved husband that he used his dead wife’s name to entice another woman into bed, but why was it such a terrible thing to say about Polanski? Libel law protects men and women of good reputation. How could a man who had pleaded guilty to the statutory rape of a minor, after a thirteen-year-old girl had accused him of getting her alone, giving her drinks and drugs and, after checking the date of her period, anally raping her, maintain that he had a reputation on matters sexual that was worthy of the law’s protection? Any sensible judge would say that he could not possibly give Polanski damages. Even if the offending lines were false, Polanski had no good reputation to lose.

There was a further logistical difficulty.
Vanity Fair
published in New York. But if Polanski had gone to America to sue, the police would have arrested him as a fugitive from justice and sent him to face a vengeful judge in California.