As soon as I got him on the phone I started to cry, but refused to tell him what was wrong. I asked him to come over. He probably thought this was my usual drama, that I was just trying to get attention from him since he had broken things off with me. Still, he said he would come. He knew I didn’t sound right; he was worried. I waited for him, and when the door opened I expected it to be Steve. But it was Mom. “Why didn’t you tell me about the pictures?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said.
Gently she closed the door and was gone. She didn’t want to make me feel like it was my fault, or I had done something bad. Maybe this wasn’t going be that bad after all, I thought. She seemed calm. But then, that was my mother, always her calmest when the world was collapsing around her.
When Steve finally arrived, I think I skipped the hellos. “Roman made me have sex with him,” I blurted. “He made me do it.”
“What? What are you saying? You’re making that up!”
Yeah, nothing like a clueless seventeen-year-old boy to confide in. Good choice.
“Roman. He made me do it.”
“Do what? He did not.”
“Yes he did! After I modeled. I didn’t know what to do.”
Oh, this was going great. Steve had a stammer when he was nervous—and now, he was very nervous. I was still high, and here was this guy I’d really been crazy about who had been a great friend, and he didn’t believe me.
Later, much later, after everything happened, I thought about my friend Ann. She’d gone through something much worse than this and she’d survived. But she’d been unable to say no, too. When she had a chance to just walk with me away from trouble, I couldn’t get her to move. This time, I couldn’t get myself to walk away. I couldn’t shout, Get off me! or What are you doing, you moron!
But, you know, there’s something about fame. There just is.
I mean, think about the kids who had sleepovers at Michael Jackson’s house and all the accusations that followed. Think about their parents. Were they bad or stupid people? No. They just wanted to believe that being famous made you good.
CHAPTER 5
Much of what happened when I got home was told to me years later; I was too high, and too upset, to remember.
I flew into the house and into my room, but not before my mother got a good look at me. My eyes were glazed and the pupils huge; my hair was damp. Asthma? Why would Sam say she had asthma?
Polanski sauntered in, perfectly relaxed and cordial. He must have been a little high himself, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. After a little small talk, he asked if they wanted to see pictures. They said sure. He went to his car and brought back an envelope of slides, a slide viewer, and a joint. They smoked together.
It’s impossible to tell, in retrospect, if Polanski assumed that because of Bob’s job at Marijuana Monthly we were a permissive family in other ways—more European perhaps? Or maybe he wasn’t thinking about it at all. Maybe, with the arrogance of someone who was lauded as a genius around the world, he just assumed that whatever he did was okay.
As Mom and Bob looked at the photos, they were surprised to find them unprofessional, unfocused, cropped haphazardly, with no regard for lighting. Some caught me prematurely, as if the photographer had snapped too soon. My mother knew test shots, and she was instantly baffled why a man of pictures like Roman Polanski would resort to shots like these. I looked more sullen than sultry, one hand on a hip, a hand slightly behind my head, now in my white lace shirt, unbuttoned. No young Marilyn here. When they saw the topless photos, Mom and Bob froze.
“Motherfucker,” my sister, Kim, mumbled under her breath. Dogs are pretty good at measuring the mood of a room: Our dog Natasha went into a frenzy, spinning in circles before she peed on the living room rug.
“What are you doing?!” Kim screamed at Natasha, smacking her and dragging her out the door, because she had to do something.
After this, Roman turned to her.
“That’s not the way to discipline a dog,” he told my sister. Kim looked at him wild-eyed. My mother felt the blood rising into her neck, choking her, her lips stretched thin.
“Get him out of here,” Mom rasped.
There was a great flurry of activity. The photographs were shoved hurriedly back into the envelope as Roman explained he had to call someone he was seeing that night. Bob, stunned, handed Roman the end of the roach and practically herded him out the door.
Bob was pacing. “How dare he? Oh my God, that fucker had her take her top off. Should we call someone? Maybe we should call someone.” In our house, it was my mother who was in charge. It was her decision.
At first, she tried to soothe herself with the legality of the whole thing. “We didn’t sign a release. He can’t do anything with those pictures,” she said. But it wasn’t enough. “He did that with my daughter? He thought that was okay?”
At that point they knew nothing other than that he had taken topless pictures of me—but that, in itself, was enough of a reason for a freak-out. It wasn’t just the toplessness alone, though there was that. It was the deception. The betrayal of trust. In their minds Vogue meant two things: fashion and clothes. Lots and lots of clothes. The sheer badness of the photos made them realize something was wrong.
Mom and Bob threw out ideas. Call a lawyer. Call Jack. Call Henri and let him know what his friend did. Or, then again: Say nothing. Just keep him away from Sam. They were trying hard to be calm about this, with me in the next room. My mother spoke in a panicked whisper. She went to her bedroom to lie down and think it through. Bob lay next to her and fell asleep. Mom lay there thinking.
Kim came in to check on me. She was at my door, about to come in. She paused. By this time, Steve had come over, let himself into the house, and was in my room. She overheard my conversation with him: He went down on me . . .
She turned around, walked to the back of the house, and tapped on Mom’s door. Mom was staring at the ceiling, a hand on her forehead.
“He fucked her, Mom,” Kim said. Bob woke with a start.
Then, Mom was in my room.
“Did he make you have sex with him?”
I was confused, still frightened, high from the Quaaludes but not understanding it, grateful just to be home, and now my mother had found out. She was quivering with rage. It’s just sex, I told myself.
“Did that happen? Tell me the truth.”
“Yeah,” I said.
· · ·
That night my mother sat beside me quietly. Occasionally she hugged me and cried a little. I don’t remember what she said. Probably nothing. She was lost in thought.
The story that would be repeated in the press for years was that my mother had, for lack of a better term, pimped me out—that she had set me up with Roman as a kind of bait, not only for my career but for hers.
In fact, as improbable as it now sounds, it never, ever crossed her mind that he would have sex with me. First, even though there were movies like Taxi Driver and Manhattan, which featured a twelve-year-old prostitute and a forty-year-old man’s relationship with a high school student, no one talked about real-life child sex abuse. The McMartin nursery school case, for example, where nursery school owners were (falsely and hysterically) accused of ritual sexual assaults on children, was still many years in the future. And however “adult” I may have acted . . . I looked like a child.
Then there was Roman’s fame. It protected him, but not just in the way people would assume. We wanted something from him—that would be people’s first thought. We did want something from him, too. But the idea that my mother looked the other way because of his fame—that’s what was false. See, because of his fame, she never for a second thought she would have to look the other way. He’d had Sharon Tate. He’d had Nastassja Kinski. Why, if you could have the most scintillating women in the world, would you have a thirteen-year-old girl whose dream date was Steven Tyler and whose best friend was a bird?
But then, the real answer to “Why me?” is quite simple—like
Sir Edmund Hillary’s answer to “Why climb Mount Everest?”
Because I was there.
Over the years many have said my mother could not have been that naïve; surely she had her own experiences with the casting couch. Well, in fact, she didn’t. She was auditioning mostly for commercials, which was a more straightforward business—you had to please a lot of “suits,” not artists. She did once have the head of a really big studio call her in because “your head shot has been sitting on my desk and I was intrigued and wanted to meet you.” He wanted to know if she had someone to take care of her, and she said, No, she was really fine taking care of herself—and that was that.
But that night, she wasn’t sitting and thinking about this rationally. She was thinking what an idiot she’d been. And what she was going to do next. I heard her saying over and over, “The fucker. The fucker. I’ll kill him.”
After much discussion and back-and-forth, they decided to call Ed. Ed Ehrlich was my mother’s accountant. Exactly why she thought her accountant would be the best man to call in a situation like this is a little murky, but it seems that he was, to her, the levelheaded “fixer,” the one who could be relied upon to make a cool-headed decision divorced from untoward emotion. And maybe he knew a good lawyer.
“Call the police,” he said.
· · ·
Within an hour, two cops in full uniform were standing in Kim’s room—Kim’s, not mine, because mine was in its usual volcanic state. Mom, Kim, and I sat on the edge of the bed. They probably would have sat down if there had been a place to sit, but there wasn’t, so they loomed over us. Police often look kind of bored. These did not. The name Roman Polanski had their attention.
“Tell them everything,” my mother said.
I never would have been so honest if I hadn’t been so high. How I’ve wished, over the years, I’d never told anyone about that poke in the butt.
I felt like I was on an audition. Only I didn’t look at them as they scribbled away. I didn’t really speak to them, either.
Why was Mr. Polanski taking pictures of you?
Did he force you to do this?
At any time did he strike you?
Did he offer you alcohol or drugs?
Did he touch you? What did he do? What did you do?
Do you understand what intercourse is?
“Yes,” I told the officers.
Did Mr. Polanski insert his penis into your vagina?
“Yes.”
Then—did he do anything else?
This took a bit of time. I whispered the answer to Kim. She caught her breath. I think she may have been holding back from crying. She looked at Mom.
“Yes,” Kim said to the officers. “He also put it in her butt.”
Hearing this, my mother fell back on my bed with her arms out over her head, whispering, “Oh my God.” Her reaction really startled me. Was this a terrible thing? Like, worse than the other?
I began the day in homeroom class, and now I was lying on a plastic-covered piece of foam rubber in a curtained-off cubicle in the emergency room at Parkwood Hospital, ten minutes from home. I had been in hospitals before—I’d had chronic bladder infections as a kid—but this time there was a sense of crisis. Police waiting for me in the hallway, two nurses holding clipboards scurrying around silently. And everybody was looking at me—curiously, sympathetically, suspiciously, maybe all three. Nobody talked to me, which was probably just as well since I was sitting there seething.
Being here was my mother’s fault. My fucking mother! I wasn’t bleeding or bruised. If Mom hadn’t called the police, I could be home in my bed now, sleeping it off, instead of here in a drafty green hospital gown after midnight. And they wouldn’t let her in the room when they examined me. I wanted her there, so she could see how mad I was.
“Where’s my mother? Can she come in?”
“Your mother is right outside, waiting,” the nurses said.
“Where’s my mother and where’s Bob?”
“They’re both outside. You’ll be able to see them soon.”
The doctor came in, and he seemed nice enough, moving through many of the same questions. But I began to get this funny idea that my mother being kept in the waiting area was not the norm and was not an accident. This sense came to me not because the doctor asked me about Mom, but because he didn’t. Sooner or later, adults always ask about your mother or father. That’s the way it worked. Except with this doctor, and with Roman. They wanted me alone.
“How old are you?” the doctor asked. “I’ll explain what I am doing. I won’t hurt you.” I hadn’t thought he would . . . but then again, how would I know? I’d never had a gynecological exam before.
Next thing I know, I had my knees up and out and I was looking at his face in between my thighs, my feet trapped in those damn stirrups. But my muscles were relaxed—too relaxed for someone having an exam like this for the first time. Yet nobody questioned why my body was rubber; if they had, they might have tested for drugs.
The doctor looked inside me, I could feel his fingers through his rubber gloves, not poking but making small circles on the edges before probing deeper, asking me if he was hurting me. He seemed to be looking for something.
“Have you had sex before?”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
Here it was again. The question. I had lied when Roman asked because I thought “once” would sound stupid. I told him twice. If I gave the doctor a different answer, he would find me out somehow, he’d realize I had told Roman one thing and him another, and then I would be the girl who lied.
“Twice,” I said. He frowned.
After he was finished and I got dressed, I was delivered back to the hallway and the officers who had come to the house. I stared at my feet. I had this sudden urge to laugh, and then was mortified that I might. What was wrong with me? This was not funny. But the Quaalude was still in my system, and all of the Quaalude looseness and euphoria as well. The doctor returned with more questions and his own clipboard, which he wrote on while nodding kindly. He spoke to the police and to my parents, not me.
At this point, something shifted. It’s still hard to say how or why. But we weren’t just a distraught family with a kid who’d been raped. If we were accusing some guy down the street, some appalling relative, we might have been more boring, but we’d be believable. In our case, though, we were naming one of the most famous movie directors in the world—and one who, less than ten years after the Tate murders, had a tremendous amount of sympathy in this one-industry town.
“They think we’re lying,” Mom whispered to Bob.
It was cold in the hospital. In the waiting room, my mother reached for me, but I could barely look at her. I clung instead to Bob. This, too, didn’t look good in the eyes of the staff, as I was later to find out.
Eventually, they gave Mom my release papers, and otherwise no definite instructions anyone could recall. Scanning the forms quickly, she caught what she thought was an error.
You have her down as “married,” she told the nurse.
“No, ma’am,” the nurse said, pointing to the line marked vaginal condition. My mother blinked. Vaginal condition: married?
“She’s thirteen. She’s obviously not married.”
The nurse said something about married being the word the hospital was encouraged to use to explain my “situation.” My mother didn’t get it. “But she’s thirteen,” she insisted. They called for the doctor, who repeated what the nurse had said, and my mother repeated what she had said to the nurse, only louder. The word remained.
You might think that someone might have wondered why I was such a zombie; a blood test might have revealed the presence of alcohol and Quaaludes. Nobody took my blood. Maybe they just assumed that of course I’d been drinking and gulping pills. I was just another screwed-up little skank.
· · ·
We left the hospital and drove to the police station in Reseda. I was silent. Bob and Mom were discus
sing the innuendo they heard in the ER.
We sat in the waiting room. Police stations smell like coffee, sweat, and cigarettes, and everyone here seemed tired. I was moved to a small, cluttered office to sit by myself and wait. It had the standard-issue metal desk and two chairs. The door was closed behind me. On the bulletin board next to me was a report about a man who’d been beaten up and raped with a Coke bottle by two women. I read it twice before the detective came in and introduced himself.
Detective Philip Vannatter was tall and solid and had the face of a high school principal: deep-set eyes, large bushy eyebrows, a permanent expression of furrowed concern. He would later become nationally famous as the chief investigator in the O. J. Simpson murder case. But right now, he was just another smart and tough detective in the Los Angeles Police Department. Unlike everyone else we’d met thus far, he appeared not to have made up his mind about me or the circumstances. He was the first person who didn’t treat me like I was lying.
“I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” he said.
I let myself smile.
“When did you first meet Mr. Polanski?” he asked.
“About a month ago,” I said.
“Did he force you to go with him?”
“No.” It would have been hard to explain in an official setting like this how we met, how I wanted to be a model but didn’t really want to be photographed by him.
“What kind of pictures did he take of you?”
The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski Page 5