The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski
Page 14
And here’s the thing. As immature as my thinking was at the time (Hey, I know what will be easier than working—a baby!), having Jes really did save my life. My life began to have responsibility and purpose. At the same time, my friends were beginning to use harder drugs. Free-basing was the latest thing, and that had consequences. Consequences like arrest, addiction. There are some things no girl should have to do to fund a habit. I knew people who did those things.
Having a baby was not really compatible with that lifestyle, so I stopped everything but the occasional joint or beer. After Rex and I split, I lived at home with Mom but more or less spent every night with Craig, whom I’d gotten back together with and who only lived a mile away. Jes was like everyone’s new toy; he was a sweet and easy baby, and people wanted to be with him. I was with him during the day, and went to sleep at Craig’s at night.
Rex spent two or three nights a week with Jes; he may have still been a kid himself, but he wanted this child and was not at all happy I’d wanted to get a divorce. But I thought—I knew—Jes was better off with Rex or my mom than Craig and me. Craig didn’t really want to be a father, so even if I was addicted to him, my rational self knew in the long run this relationship was a bad idea (not that I wouldn’t have some even worse ideas later . . .). Craig and I couldn’t even agree on how to raise a puppy, never mind a child. It was better Jes didn’t become attached to him. I knew our relationship wouldn’t last forever.
For the next few years, I alternated between living with Mom and Jes and living with Craig, and doing whatever job I managed not to quit. Life didn’t have an interesting trajectory, but I had my son and my boyfriend and my weed and my beer, and I was okay. When Jes was old enough to go to school, I decided I’d join him, sort of, by going back to college to become a legal secretary. I wasn’t particularly interested in being a secretary, but I felt that between being raised by a criminal defense attorney and being immersed in the details of my own legal case since the time of Polanski’s arrest, I was practically a lawyer myself.
I was itching for change, and 1985 and 1986 gave me plenty to want to change from. First, life off and on with Craig was becoming increasingly insane. And then Nana, who had come to live with us a few years earlier, was often off her meds. For Mom, bringing anyone to visit was dicey. Nana would sit there, smoking and drinking her Chablis, flirting with Bob’s friends. That behavior might be adorable when it’s a snappy Betty White in an episode of Hot in Cleveland, but Mom found it cringe-inducing in real life. She was impossible to live with. Mom finally moved her to an apartment a few blocks away, but she’d still come to hang out every day. Her mind became more and more detached from the rest of her until it abandoned her entirely, and I came home to find her body lying on my bedroom floor. By the time I got home, the ambulance, recognizing she could not be resuscitated, had already left, and Mom was kneeling next to her, and had started chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum,” urging her to Go Toward The Light. I think she was pretty much at the light at that point, so I told Mom I thought she could stop now. It was not a good moment. The paramedics had declared Nana dead and called for the coroner, and we had to wait over four hours. I was like, “How busy is the coroner? Did the entire population of Woodland Hills keel over today?” I’d never seen a dead person before. Nana was only sixty-two. Forty years of sedation and psychotropic drugs had taken their toll. But this woman had been an anchor in my life, always at the house to help with Jes, berating Craig if he treated me badly. I loved her. Mom was in shock for days. I learned soon what it was like to pick out a casket, trudge through a muddy cemetery in the pouring rain—things my mother could barely bring herself to do. This was the first time I ever had to care for my mother—which is not a bad thing to learn how to do.
There was something about the boring legal secretary school, the dead-end relationship, and the death of the crazy woman who, nevertheless, cared for me throughout my childhood, that combined to make me ever more volatile and self-destructive. After a few drinks, Craig and I would start in on each other, and I found it increasingly difficult to make up later. Some nights would end up with black eyes or broken glass. I have to say, I was always the one who threw the first punch. When we finally broke up for good, it was not exactly amicable. He chucked a box of my stuff into my front yard. I was happy to see my rifle, but he kept our motorcycle and our dog, the only things I really cared about. It’s not like I didn’t get anything out of the relationship—because of Craig and the number of holes we both put in the wall, I got very good at spackling.
One of my friends, Vikki, was paying her way through our legal secretarial school with nude modeling—and with my I’ll-try-anything-once mentality at the time, when a photographer said he thought my pictures would sell to Penthouse, I was happy to oblige. I think it is safe to say they ended up in a magazine that made Penthouse look like the New York Review of Books. I gave it my all, wearing a smile and little else.
On the one hand, it was kind of stupid. On the other . . . well, having now just celebrated my fiftieth birthday, I’m rather glad I have photos of my hot twenty-two-year-old self. Every woman should. (Though admittedly, every woman shouldn’t sell them to a magazine.) I didn’t even want the money; mostly I was looking for adventure. But perhaps there was some small part of my brain that enjoyed reclaiming what was mine. If a guy was going to use me to get off—as Polanski did all those years ago—well, at least now I’d be making the decision, and getting something out of it, too.
At that time I was in the middle of a romance that made me and Craig look like Ozzie and Harriet. Kyle was a handsome younger guy who swore we were meant to be together. He had been in some trouble before and by the time we started dating he had secretly started back down that road to drugs and crime. We loved each other madly, but that wasn’t enough to save him. He was using and stealing and people were noticing.
Even my mother—not the single most observant person in the world—began to notice things went missing when he visited me. Inevitably, he ended up in jail. A normal person at that point might have been relieved. But no: In my delusional state, I took this as a sign that though friends and society wanted to keep us apart, we were meant to be together. It was us against the world. I just knew our situation was entirely unique in the history of modern civilization. So I married him—in the court house, before he was sentenced to some time in prison. All of us prison brides, we’re all playing that song in our heads from “Leader of the Pack”: “They all thought he was bad / But I knew he was sad . . .”
Because carrying on the way I was necessitated time away from my mother, I’d been spending a lot of time with Vikki. She had a next-door neighbor named Dave. The story he tells is that he saw a photo of me at Vikki’s house; we were posing next to our dirt bikes and toting guns, dressed in cowboy boots and bikinis. Reportedly Dave saw the photo, pointed to me, and said, “I’m going to marry that girl.” Vikki just laughed.
And she had good reason. At the time Dave was a twenty-year-old carpenter as well as a drum roadie for an old friend of mine who also lived in the apartment building. He was a professional horndog, with multiple girlfriends; he was spending his nights in Hollywood at the Rainbow, and he looked the part: parachute pants, bandanas on his legs, puka shell necklace with a “69” pendant. He pursued me relentlessly. Once he followed me into the bathroom to plead his case—while an “ex” and a none-too-pleased current girlfriend were sitting in the living room. But somehow it was more funny than obnoxious. We became friends.
Soon I was seeing Dave, too—a sort of a friend-with-benefits situation (not uncommon for women with husbands on the inside). But I couldn’t take him seriously; Dave had such a crazy history. However, Dave had declared his love and was trying to prove it to me by being as devoted as a German shepherd. One day we were sitting in my car talking and I mentioned Kyle for about the four hundredth time and Dave said, “You know what your problem is? You’re just too proud to admit you’re wrong.” He was right. I was making a
n ass of myself. It was my special talent. By this time, Kyle and I knew it was over. So we ended it. We were both tired.
Or so I thought. Apparently I hadn’t had my fill of drama yet. While all this was going on, my mother, who had separated from Bob and started selling real estate in California, began talking about taking her earnings and finding a place to live on the Hawaiian island of Kauai—a place for all of us. It was, I believed, a pipe dream, and I had no intention of moving at that time. But Rex thought I might, and that I’d take our son away with me. That started a custody negotiation.
It was with more than a little relief that I discovered I hadn’t been legally married to Kyle in the first place. I learned this by accident at the time Rex served me with the custody papers. I had no intention of moving then, but once served with papers I characteristically got all “no one’s going to tell me what to do” and served him back. While we were busily tearing into each other, I learned that the quickie divorce we’d gotten a few years back in the Dominican Republic wasn’t recognized in the United States, that in fact Rex and I were still married. So we called a truce, worked out our differences—which included getting a real divorce—and I had the great good fortune of having my marriage to Kyle declared null and void. I was probably the only person in that California courthouse getting a divorce and annulment on the same day. Ah, romance!
But I wasn’t quite done with my weakness for bad boys. Before I’d met Dave, he had been arrested for selling a dime bag of weed, and now he had to serve his sentence. The night before he went to the county jail that everyone called Camp Snoopy, we kissed in a way that I knew would make me remember him when he was gone. Dave served two months in jail—oddly, both Kyle and Dave were at Camp Snoopy at the same time. Kyle knew Dave, and hated him, since he began asking me out the minute Kyle was gone. Fortunately, Kyle had no idea Dave was there. Dave knew, but Dave was in minimum security and they never crossed paths.
Dave served two months of his three-month sentence and got out on his twenty-first birthday. We celebrated by going to a bar and getting him his first legal beer.
That going-away kiss and the homecoming beer turned into something serious: after a Labor Day camping trip he moved in with us. Dave wanted a bigger family. Less than a year later, I got pregnant. Things seemed to be settling down. I was still a party girl to some degree, but a party girl with a job—as a secretary at a computer company—and a man I loved. It was early spring 1988.
One day someone called at work and asked to speak to Samantha. Since the receptionist where I worked was also named Samantha, there was some confusion. Wait, they wanted to speak to Samantha because of something having to do with Roman Polanski? Who? What?
But I wasn’t confused. I knew that ten years after Polanski was out of my life forever, he was back.
The next thing I knew, there was a photo of me in the feisty British tabloid the Sunday Mirror, under the headline STAY AWAY, POLANSKI. Photographers must have been hiding right outside my office. Never mind that the entire “interview” was made up; what really upset me was that it was another long “Sex Victim Girl” story, and one that said specifically where I worked and what kind of car I drove and even mentioned that I had a boyfriend.
And worse than that: I had never told Dave. I told him now—and had to explain. Being three years younger than I was, he was only ten when the story was all over the news. He’d heard of it, but it wasn’t a big deal in his world. Until now. When he wasn’t trying to charm a cute girl, Dave was a man of few words. He said little, but I knew he felt a great deal.
The story said:
Sex scandal girl Samantha Gailey has blocked hopes of a return to America for exiled film director Roman Polanski. The controversial film director fled to Paris 11 years ago to escape justice for having under-age sex with the young beauty.
Samantha, shown right in an exclusive Sunday Mirror picture, will never let him forget the drunken, drug-crazed sex session he inflicted on her when she was just 13 years old.
And despite a recent campaign waged by Polanski’s Hollywood superstar friends to bring him back, the long-limbed blonde still says no.
“He’s not coming back,” said Samantha. “Over my dead body. This is my town, not his, and there is no way he is coming home. . . .”
The paper completely fabricated a quote from Larry: “We will oppose his return as long as I live. Can you imagine growing up with what she has had to grow up with?” And then, it concluded: “. . . Samantha still lives with her mother, trying to free herself from the long shadow cast over her by the sordid affair.”
To my surprise, the picture taken of me was quite lovely, but the text told another story. In this piece I was bitter and resentful, an emotional cripple who still lived with my mother. For good measure the other photo in the article was a lingerie shot of Emmanuelle Seigner, the then twenty-one-year-old French model/actress of unsurpassable beauty whom Polanski was due to marry. The article suggested that Polanski thought it was time to “forgive and forget,” and that a new marriage would pave the way for his return to the United States—as if marriage covered rape like paper covering rock.
It was a slap to him and his fiancée, in a way, the idea that he was marrying for PR purposes. Worse to me, however, was the idea that somehow my life was defined by my experience with Polanski. And this was as I felt my life coming together for maybe the first time. I was furious. I was just getting back on my feet; life as I imagined it was just beginning. And again the invasion of privacy, the vomiting up of all the awful memories.
I decided to call Larry. Surely there was something he could do.
But shortly after the tabloid published the story, two things happened that made me shelve my anger for a little while. First, I discovered that I was pregnant. And then, my mother, who actually had bought a place in Kauai, officially invited us to move with her—and we’d get six months’ free rent.
There was nothing really holding us in California, and for Dave, who was from Van Nuys, moving to Kauai was a dream. I was nervous, but how could I say no? We had no idea what to expect and thought we were moving to the middle of the jungle (which, it turns out, we did, albeit one with a 7-Eleven and a few other stores).
I had been wavering about making such a radical move, but this article clinched it. I would never get away from reminders of what had happened if I stayed in Woodland Hills. It wasn’t just the pervasiveness of physical reminders—the old partying pals who knew my story; the suburban tract house where I’d arrived that night, strung-out and spent; the homes and hills and bars where I’d tried to lose myself. It was Los Angeles itself. There was something about being in a culture where attention-seeking is the norm, where the desire for fame is in the thoughts and aspirations and sweat of just about everyone you meet, that always made me flash back to Polanski.
It was time to take Dave, Jes, and my pregnant self and start over in the beautiful anonymity of Hawaii.
In October 1988 I moved to Kauai, the oldest of the Hawaiian islands and arguably the most beautiful. Over the years dozens of movies, from South Pacific to Jurassic Park to The Descendants, have been filmed there. When I moved there in 1988 it was an unspoiled almost-wilderness, though in more recent years it has become a retreat and sometime second home for many people in the entertainment industry. (That celebrity-friendly vibe is meant to be part of its charm, but not to me; I am still suspicious and uncomfortable around people in the entertainment industry.) But if today it is the kind of place where people like Bette Midler and Sylvester Stallone can go grocery shopping undisturbed, back then it was also the kind of place where I could go undisturbed. Kauai is also a haven for people who want to get off the grid—the perfect, gorgeous country setting where you can have one or two little secrets and nobody knows—or if they know, they don’t care. There is also, as I was soon to learn, a small-town mentality of “we take care of our own.” There are the locals, and there is everyone else. If you live there, your neighbors have your back.
There is also something about island life that seems to slow down time and encourage reflection. With the space to think, I realized that in my life of “look away,” there was one thing I’d avoided above all else. I’m not a vindictive person by any means. I am still friendly with ex-lovers and ex-husbands; I am deeply grateful to and loyal to old friends, and I don’t dwell on past fights or insults. (In fact, I have the very good fortune to have a lousy memory for that stuff.) I knew that Roman had written an autobiography. I was in it. And my family. And I had heard it wasn’t flattering, to put it mildly. I didn’t even want to buy it, so I finally asked Larry to send me the part of the book that pertained to me. I read it.
It’s important to understand this. Back in 1978, after we requested that the most serious charges against Polanski be dropped, my family and I were harshly criticized: Did those people only report his crimes so they could get money through a civil suit? Larry had to state over and over again that there would not be a civil suit. After all, he said, the goal was to protect my anonymity, and a lawsuit would destroy that. So I’d always thought back on that criticism, and always thought that I would not give anyone the satisfaction of thinking that the reporting of the rape was a play for money down the road.
But then, years after Polanski had published his autobiography—and after several other biographies of Polanski had come out, more or less restating his perspective of March 10, 1977—I’d had enough. Whatever hesitation I’d had over the years was gone.
Let me be clear: Much of what was said in Polanski’s book was true. But there were also several terrible lies about me and my family—about my mother being flirtatious, about there being an unspoken erotic frisson between me and Roman, and so forth. You can call them misperceptions all you like; they’re still lies and they hurt. With his autobiography, he was profiting from his misadventures and attempting to rationalize his crimes; there was a certain level of swagger and arrogance in it all. I decided to take control of a situation that had been out of my control for a long time. Still smarting from my appearance in that tabloid and having now read what Roman had put into print about me and my family, I decided to sue him for sexual assault in civil court.