On the morning of March 11, 1977, Detective Philip Vannatter, of the Los Angeles Police Department, arrived at his desk in the West L.A. division to find a report that had been placed there a few hours earlier. The document recounted how patrol officers had gone to the home of Samantha Gailey, a thirteen-year-old girl who lived in the San Fernando Valley, after her mother called police to say that Samantha had been raped by Roman Polanski, the movie director, who was forty-four at the time.
“In those days, I was too busy raising kids and paying bills to go to many movies,” Vannatter recalled recently. “But of course I knew who Polanski was, because of Sharon Tate.” Seven and a half years earlier, Tate, who was married to Polanski, and four other people were killed at the couple’s home, in Benedict Canyon, by members of Charles Manson’s “family.”
Vannatter read the file and went to interview Gailey and her mother, reported on his findings to prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, and then took the girl and the mother to speak to the lawyers themselves. According to Vannatter, “The prosecutor decided that we should go to the hotel where Polanski was staying and execute a search warrant”—to find, among other things, photographs of Gailey that she said Polanski had taken and quaalude pills like the one she said the director had given her. “The head of the D.A.’s office there told me to do the search but not to arrest him,” Vannatter recalled. “They said they didn’t want to do an arrest, but to do the case more slowly, through a grand-jury investigation. I was very unhappy when I heard about that. I thought we had plenty of evidence to arrest him, and that’s what I thought we should do.”
So, in the early evening, Vannatter and his partner went to the Beverly Wilshire hotel, in Beverly Hills, where Polanski was staying. “As we were walking through the lobby, I saw Polanski getting out of the elevator,” Vannatter said. “I walked up to him and placed him under arrest. I thought, The heck with this. I wasn’t going to let those D.A.s tell me how to do my job. Why not arrest the guy? Any other person would have been arrested. So I said I’m going to do what is right.
“After I read him his rights, I asked him to take me upstairs to his room, so I could do the search,” Vannatter went on. “I noticed that he had something in his hand, and he was just about to drop it. So I put my hand under his and said, ‘Why don’t you drop it into my hand instead of on the floor?’ ” Polanski placed a single quaalude in Vannatter’s palm.
In Suite 200, Polanski was jittery but coöperative. “As we say on the farm, he was nervous as a hen on a hot rock. He kept asking me for the quaalude back, so he could take it and calm down,” Vannatter said. “By the time we got back to the station house, he told me he had had sex with her.” (The question of exactly when Polanski first admitted having sex with Gailey is a matter of dispute.)
But the case did not end there, and, almost thirty-three years later, it’s still not over. On March 24, 1977, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Polanski on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. On August 8, 1977, pursuant to a plea bargain, Polanski pleaded guilty to the least serious of the charges against him, having unlawful sex with a minor—statutory rape. On the eve of his sentencing hearing, which was scheduled for February 1, 1978, Polanski fled to Europe, and he has not returned.
Earlier this year, on September 26th, he was detained in Switzerland after American authorities made a provisional request for his arrest. Last week, Polanski’s lawyers provided the deed to his apartment in Paris, the final piece of security to raise $4.5 million for a bail package that had been approved by the local courts. Under the terms of the arrangement, Polanski was then released to house arrest at his chalet, known as Milky Way, in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, having spent sixty-seven days in a Zurich detention center. The large amount of bail, and a requirement for him to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, might seem extreme for a seventy-six-year-old man; but, considering that Polanski is one of the most famous fugitives from American justice in the world, his release from prison under any terms at all may seem like a generous deal for him.
The question of whether Polanski’s celebrity has helped or hurt him hovers over his lengthy legal battle. For Vannatter, the lesson in Polanski’s long flight from justice is that celebrities enjoy special privileges in the legal system—a subject on which he possesses a unique vantage point. Seventeen years after arresting Polanski, Vannatter, with his partner Tom Lange, led the investigation of the murder of O. J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (Simpson was acquitted.) “I just think that celebrities get a sweetheart deal, more than the average guy does,” Vannatter, who retired from the L.A.P.D. in 1996 and moved, part-time, to a farm he bought in Indiana, said. “I never believed in that.”
It is easy to see why Vannatter and many others find such a moral in Polanski’s story. Polanski has enjoyed a comfortable exile in Europe, where until this year he not only avoided prison but continued to make films. For decades, his conviction for a felony sex crime existed mostly as a footnote in a long and eventful life. But the Polanski story suggests an alternative view, too. Over the years, there have also been times when he has been penalized for his celebrity status. Mostly, celebrity warps the criminal process, and not always in a predictable direction. In Polanski’s case, the effect of his celebrity was doubly, and inconsistently, pernicious; it obscured both how badly Polanski treated his young victim and how badly the legal system treated him.
Polanski’s period of house arrest will mark a return to an alpine village that has long been a favorite escape for him. Friends of Polanski brought him to Gstaad to help him recover from his grief over the murder of Sharon Tate. On that visit, in the late sixties, Polanski discovered that Gstaad was, he wrote in an autobiography, “the finishing school capital of the world [with] hundreds of fresh-faced, nubile young girls of all nationalities.” At the time, “Kathy, Madeleine, Sylvia and others whose names I forget played a fleeting but therapeutic role in my life. They were all between sixteen and nineteen years old. . . . They took to visiting my chalet, not necessarily to make love—though some of them did—but to listen to rock music and sit around the fire and talk.” He described sitting in his car outside the schools at night, waiting for his “date” to climb out over the balcony after roll call. At this age, Polanski wrote, the girls “were more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they ever would be again.” The autobiography, “Roman, by Polanski,” was published in 1984, seven years after his guilty plea, and suggests a lack of contrition about his actions. While exile and tragedy have been persistent themes in Polanski’s life, so, too, has a sexual obsession with very young women. He started dating the actress Nastassja Kinski when he was in his mid-forties and she was in her mid-teens. He has been together with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, since he was fifty-one and she was eighteen.
And then, of course, there is the criminal case involving thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey. In his autobiography, he wrote of the day that Vannatter arrested him, “I was incredulous; I couldn’t equate what had happened that day with rape in any form.” In an interview two years after the crime, with Martin Amis, Polanski spoke in even blunter terms: “When I was being driven to the police station from the hotel, the car radio was already talking about it. . . . I couldn’t believe. . . . I thought, you know, I was going to wake up from it. I realize, if I have killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But . . . 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!”
Roman Polanski has led the kind of life that has already called forth multiple biographies. He was born in Paris in 1933, and his survival into adulthood must count as something close to a miracle. His father, a Jewish émigré from Poland whom Polanski described as a “struggling entrepreneur,” made the extraordinarily unwise decision to return his family to Kraków in 1936. After Hitler’s invasion, the family was confined to the city’s ghetto. His mother, four months pregnant, was taken to Auschwitz and gassed; his father was carried off, too, but somehow survived. On March 14, 1943, the Germans completed the liquidation of the ghetto.
“He has a world view which has been informed by terrible events, unspeakable events, that have never soured him as a person. There is no bitterness, no anger, though there is memory,” Jeff Berg, his longtime agent, who spoke to Polanski while he was jailed, told me. “Roman is not defeated by anything,” Peter Gethers, who edited his autobiography and wrote two screenplays with him, said. “He doesn’t regret the things that happen to him, because he understands that things just happen. He is neither in denial nor apologetic about his life. He wouldn’t use the word, but it’s a very existential approach to life.”
Polanski’s early life seems to have instilled in him a voraciousness for experience—intellectual, physical, sexual. Amid the deprivations of postwar Poland, the young Polanski became an accomplished actor, skier, bicycle racer, fencer, mimic, and artist. Summer camp changed his life. “I became Troop 22’s head of entertainment,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Organizing, directing, and starring in all our Boy Scout shows. I had discovered my vocation.”
In the early fifties, Polanski joined the threadbare Polish film community in Lodz. He made a handful of experimental shorts. His first full-length feature was “Knife in the Water,” a dark, atmospheric drama about a married couple who pick up a young stranger on the way to an excursion on their boat. It earned Polanski an Academy Award nomination in 1963 for Best Foreign Language Film. “I flew into L.A. first class and was met by a huge limousine sporting a Polish flag on the fender,” he wrote. (He lost to Federico Fellini, for “8½.”)
Polanski landed in Hollywood at a propitious moment. “It was a great time in the movie business,” Peter Bart, then the vice-president for production at Paramount and later the editor of Variety, said. “It was possible to be a great artist and make pictures that made money, too.” Shortly after Polanski’s Oscar nomination, Paramount acquired the rights to Ira Levin’s book “Rosemary’s Baby,” a satanic thriller. After Polanski rejected Bart’s initial requests that he direct the movie version, Bart asked his boss at Paramount, Robert Evans, to intervene. “Bob called up Roman and said, ‘What have you got to lose? If you come to L.A., the worst thing that can happen is that you are going to have the best sex of your life.’ Roman said, ‘I’ll be there.’ ”
“Rosemary’s Baby” became a huge success, and Polanski found himself a member of a celebrated generation of young actors and directors, including Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma. “For the first time, we were making money,” Bart said. “Roman started to like this community. He loved the fast life. He became a real star. He got good tables in restaurants. That had not been part of his life. You could see him change, to a degree. The unthinkable happened to Roman—he was actually happy.”
Polanski even found a woman he loved, a young actress named Sharon Tate, and they married on January 20, 1968. When Tate was pregnant with their first child, she and Polanski rented a house on the quiet and remote Cielo Drive.
It was shortly before dinner on August 9, 1969, when Polanski, who was in London, received the phone call. His maid had found the bodies: Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant; Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hair stylist; Wojtek Frykowski, a friend of Polanski’s from Poland; and Abigail Folger, Frykowski’s girlfriend and an heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. (Steven Parent, who had been visiting the estate’s caretaker, was shot outside.) Tate had been stabbed sixteen times, Folger twenty-eight, and Frykowski fifty-one (and shot twice). The word “PIG” was written in Tate’s blood on the front door.
For months, the crime was unsolved, and it became the subject of a torrent of speculation, with some insinuations directed at Polanski. Time noted that “Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world’s more offbeat crowds.” The innuendo wounded Polanski, who assisted the police, and offered a reward for leads. Finally, on December 1st, the police announced that the case had been solved. Most of the Manson “family” members who had conducted the attacks were already in custody. Manson had no connection to Polanski, or to any of the victims.
“Sharon’s death is the only watershed in my life that really matters,” Polanski wrote. “Afterward, whenever conscious of enjoying myself, I felt guilty.” After months of wandering, and much skiing, and eventually running out of money, Polanski directed a movie version of “Macbeth,” which was a critical and commercial debacle. A little later, his friend Robert Evans asked him to direct a script, by Robert Towne, about the murky origins of modern Los Angeles. Polanski was reluctant, but Evans courted him by hosting a Passover Seder, with Kirk Douglas presiding and Sidney Korshak, the mob fixer, arranging the catering. Polanski agreed to direct “Chinatown.” That film, which came out in 1974 and features a victim of incest trying to protect her daughter from the same fate, earned Polanski his next Academy Award nomination. (He lost to Coppola, for “The Godfather, Part II.”)
In the years after Tate’s death, Polanski lived a gilded itinerancy, mostly in Europe. He shot “The Tenant,” a thriller in which he also starred, in Paris, and directed “Rigoletto” at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich. In his autobiography, Polanski recounted an evening in Munich in late 1976 when he and a journalist friend went on a double date. At Polanski’s hotel suite, the journalist stayed with his date, whom Polanski knew only as “Nasty,” and “I took the other girl, a stunning blonde, to bed. By the time I surfaced the journalist had gone. Nasty was half-asleep in an armchair in the sitting room. Taking her by the hand, I led her back into the bedroom. We never repeated this threesome, though I saw a lot of both girls thereafter.” Nasty was Nastassja Kinski, an aspiring German actress. Kinski spoke little English, and Polanski spoke no German. She was, according to Polanski, fifteen years old.
Late in the fall of 1976, French Vogue asked Polanski to guest-edit its Christmas edition. He took Kinski to the Seychelles and used photographs taken of her there in the issue. He then secured an assignment from Vogue Hommes, also based in Paris, to shoot a feature on adolescent girls, to “show girls as they really were these days—sexy, pert, and thoroughly human,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Polanski headed to Los Angeles, where he was preparing to direct an adaptation of “The First Deadly Sin,” a novel by Lawrence Sanders, concerning a serial killer. He mentioned the Vogue assignment to a friend, Henri Sera, who suggested that the younger sister of a woman he was dating might make a good subject. This tip led Polanski to make an appointment to meet Samantha Gailey and her mother at their home in the suburb of Woodland Hills, on February 13, 1977. During the visit, Susan Gailey, a divorced actress who had played small roles in “Police Woman” and “Starsky and Hutch,” did most of the talking. Also at the meeting was Susan Gailey’s boyfriend, who was an editor at Marijuana Monthly. As Gailey later testified before the grand jury, Polanski showed her the Vogue Christmas issue and explained that his current project was to feature “young girls seen through his eyes and possibly an interview.” Gailey recalled telling Polanski that her daughter was thirteen, “because I thought maybe she was too old. I thought he might want younger girls.”
Although the legal case involving Polanski remains controversial and unresolved, the underlying facts are largely undisputed. Except for a few specific details, what happened between Polanski and Samantha Gailey is pretty clear.
At that first encounter with Samantha, at her home, Polanski claims to have been “disappointed” because she was “a good-looking girl but nothing sensational.” Still, Polanski arranged to return a week later to take some photographs of Samantha. He arrived at about 4 P.M. on February 20th; Susan had laid out a selection of clothes that the girl might wear. Polanski said at first that he wanted to shoot in Benedict Canyon, but, concerned with the fading light in the late afternoon, he agreed with Susan’s suggestion that he go to some scrubby hills just behind the Gailey home. Susan asked to go along—so that she could take her own pictures—but, she testified, “He said, No, that he would rather be alone with her because she will respond more naturally.”
Polanski selected some clothes and drove Samantha to a hillside near her home. They walked and Polanski started taking pictures. He took a number of shots of her in different shirts and then, according to Samantha’s grand-jury testimony, “He said, ‘Here, take off your top now.’ ” She did, and they finished the session at about six-thirty in the evening, after Polanski had shot about two rolls of film. “She had nice breasts,” Polanski wrote. “I took pictures of her changing and topless.” Samantha did not tell her mother about the topless photos. When they returned to the house, Susan’s boyfriend gave Polanski several issues of Marijuana Monthly to give to Jack Nicholson, in the hope of obtaining an interview with him.
Polanski then flew to New York to do research on police procedures for “The First Deadly Sin.” When he returned to L.A., he made an appointment to see Samantha on March 10th. Polanski again arrived in the late afternoon, greeted her mother, and drove off with Samantha. They went first to the home of a friend, the actress Jacqueline Bisset, who lived on Mulholland Drive, in the Hollywood Hills. They took about fifty pictures, but the light was fading, and there were several guests on the premises. So Polanski called Jack Nicholson’s house, on the other side of Mulholland. He reached Helena Kallianiotes, a professional belly dancer who worked as a caretaker for Nicholson as well as for Marlon Brando, who owned the compound. She told Polanski to come over.
Kallianiotes let Polanski and Samantha in, then chatted with them in the kitchen. Samantha said she was thirsty. Polanski poured glasses of Cristal champagne for the three of them. Kallianiotes left, and Polanski began taking pictures of Samantha sipping the champagne. “I just kept drinking it for pictures,” she testified. Polanski again asked her to pose topless, which she did. “We weren’t saying much now, and I could sense a certain erotic tension between us,” Polanski wrote. Samantha dialled her mother, at Polanski’s request, and he told Susan that they would be later than expected. Susan also spoke to Samantha, who told her that she was fine.
After the phone call, Polanski asked Samantha to pose in Nicholson’s outdoor Jacuzzi. Polanski produced a yellow pill container with a quaalude broken into three parts. When he offered Samantha part of the pill, she hesitantly accepted. “I think I must have been pretty drunk or else I wouldn’t have,” she testified. (Polanski does not mention the pill in his book.)
Samantha removed all her clothes, except for her underwear, before entering the Jacuzzi. “I was ready to get in and he said, ‘Take off your underwear.’ So I did and then I got in,” she testified. Polanski took more photographs of her, then removed his clothes and joined her in the Jacuzzi. When Polanski moved toward her, Samantha said she wanted to get out because her asthma was acting up. (This was not true; she’d never had asthma.) “I had to get out because of the warm air and the cold air or something like that,” Samantha testified that she had said. She also said that she wanted to go home. Polanski wrote that “she said she’d stupidly left her medication at home.” He encouraged her to join him in Nicholson’s swimming pool instead, which she did. After a few moments, she left the pool and went inside to the bathroom.
At this point, Gailey’s story and Polanski’s diverge somewhat. She told the grand jury that he approached her in the bathroom “and told me to go in the other room and lie down.” She went into the room, then asked again to go home. He said he would take her home later. He began kissing her, and then began performing oral sex on her. “I was ready to cry. I was kind of—I was going, ‘No. Come on. Stop it.’ ” In light of the champagne and the quaalude, Samantha said, “I was kind of dizzy, you know, like things were kind of blurry sometimes. . . . I was mostly just on and off saying, ‘No, stop.’ ”
Polanski began having intercourse with her and asked whether she was on the pill (she said no) and when her last period was (she couldn’t remember). Polanski said, “ ‘Oh, I won’t come inside of you then,’ . . . then he lifted up my legs farther and he went in through my anus,” despite her saying that she didn’t want him to. Samantha said she did not fight back physically, “because I was afraid of him,” though she continued to ask him to stop.
In his book, Polanski described the sexual encounter this way: “We dried ourselves and each other. She said she was feeling better. Then, very gently, I began to kiss and caress her. After this had gone on for some time, I led her over to the couch. There was no doubt about her experience and lack of inhibition. She spread herself and I entered her. She wasn’t unresponsive.”
While Polanski and Gailey were in the bedroom, Anjelica Huston, Nicholson’s girlfriend, arrived at the house. Soon after, Polanski and Gailey made an awkward departure—“I didn’t mention making love in the TV room, though that must have been pretty obvious,” he wrote. Samantha had hurried out before he did. “I was sitting in the car and I was crying,” Gailey testified. According to Polanski, Samantha “talked a lot during the drive home” and mentioned that she was studying “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in school. “I tried not to wince when she started spouting Shakespeare in a strong Valley accent.” Before they reached the Gailey home, she testified, he said to her, “Don’t tell your mother about this, and don’t tell your boyfriend either. . . . This is our secret.”
Inside the house, Susan Gailey thought that her daughter was “weird looking.” Samantha told her, out of Polanski’s earshot, that she had invented a case of asthma, and then hastily retreated to her bedroom. Polanski showed Samantha’s mother and her sister, Kim, the photographs from the first session, on the hillside. When they saw Samantha topless, the atmosphere in the room turned tense. According to Susan’s testimony, “Kim stepped back. And I kind of stepped back. And the dog peed on the floor and Kim went for the dog and threw her out. And she doesn’t do that. It must have been some kind of energy thing happening.” (After the dog’s accident, Kim testified, “Roman gave me a big speech on how to take care of dogs.”)
Samantha’s boyfriend came over later that night, and she told him what had happened. Kim overheard them, and informed Susan. Enraged at the news, Susan Gailey called the police. The police arrived after 11 P.M. and took a statement from Samantha, and then took her to a hospital, where she was examined. By the following evening, Vannatter had placed Polanski under arrest.
On the night of Polanski’s arrest, his entertainment lawyer helped arrange his release on bail of twenty-five hundred dollars. The lawyer then quickly hired Douglas Dalton to take the criminal case. Dalton’s representation of Polanski is now well into its fourth decade.
Once one of the most prominent lawyers in Los Angeles, Dalton has not practiced for years. “I turn eighty this year, and I’ve been retired for ten years,” Dalton told me, as we sat in front of the fireplace in his Tudor-style mansion, near Hancock Park. “But I’ve kept my law license active for this one case, just because I feel what happened to Roman was so wrong. The system was totally out of control.”
Polanski’s arrest, on March 11, 1977, set off what was usually described as a media frenzy, even if the press reaction seems almost quaint when judged by the standards of the cable-news and Internet era. Crowds of photographers greeted Polanski at his court appearances, and Johnny Carson made jokes about him (“Close Encounters with the Third Grade”). But, by and large, Dalton was free to build his best defense—and, at least initially, to use Polanski’s celebrity to his advantage. “We investigated this case and expected it to go to trial,” Dalton told me.
The early signs were not promising for Polanski. Samantha Gailey’s grand-jury testimony, which she gave on March 24, 1977, laid out a damaging case against him. On the issues of drugs and coercion, Vannatter’s investigation established important points of corroboration. Undeveloped photos in Polanski’s camera showed Gailey in Nicholson’s Jacuzzi, and her drinking champagne. A pill bottle found in Polanski’s hotel room featured a prescription for quaaludes. Gailey’s concoction of the asthma attack, which Polanski acknowledged, suggested that she was trying to escape from him. Anjelica Huston also agreed to testify for the prosecution.
But the Polanski defense had options, particularly at a time when rape cases were treated in different ways than they are now. In her grand-jury testimony, Gailey acknowledged that she was not a virgin (she had had sex twice with her boyfriend, who was seventeen) and that she had once accidentally taken a quaalude. California had a rape shield law, which would have limited what Gailey could be questioned about on the stand, but it wouldn’t have protected her entirely from public scrutiny. That process had begun. Dalton told the press, “The facts indicate that before the alleged act in this case, this girl had engaged in sexual activity. . . . We want to know about it, we want to know who was involved, when. We want to know why these other people were not prosecuted. And this is a thing we want to fully develop.” Likewise, the character and behavior of Susan Gailey might have come into play in a trial. Susan could have been portrayed as a neglectful parent who, in essence, offered up her daughter in order to ingratiate herself with a famous director. In the climate of the time, it mattered little that attacks on Samantha and her mother might not have been relevant (or true); rape defendants had been acquitted with less.
Samantha’s father, who was a lawyer, lived in another state, and he arranged for her to be represented by a Los Angeles attorney named Lawrence Silver. (Silver, who is still her lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.) He allowed Gailey to give testimony before the grand jury (which is a closed proceeding), but, mindful of the fate that often awaited rape victims, he did not want her to have to appear in a public trial. Dalton artfully leveraged Silver’s concern for Gailey into a critical advantage for Polanski.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1977, Dalton and the prosecutors skirmished over access to evidence (Gailey’s underwear was cut in half, so that both sides could test it) and other procedural issues. Any notion of a plea bargain stalled when the government insisted that, according to the policy of the district attorney’s office, Polanski be allowed to plea only to the most serious count against him—in this case, rape with the use of drugs, which carried a sentence of at least three years. Dalton wanted a misdemeanor plea or, at most, a plea to the least serious count, statutory rape, which would likely incur a shorter sentence. Silver wrote a letter saying that Gailey did not want to testify, and her family did not want her to, either:
A reporter had told him that this “promised to be one of the most sensational Hollywood trials,” Silver wrote. “This is not the place for a recovering young girl.”
This was perhaps the clearest example of Polanski’s celebrity helping him: the attention drove the victim to try to withdraw from the case. And so the D.A.’s office agreed to allow Polanski to plea to felony statutory rape, the least serious count in the indictment, which he did, on August 8, 1977.
At the insistence of the prosecution, Polanski received what’s known as an “open plea”—that is, a plea where his sentence was left to the discretion of the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband. At the hearing, Polanski said he knew that the maximum sentence for his crime was “one to fifteen-twenty years in state prison.” The prosecutor, Roger Gunson, asked Polanski, “Who do you believe will decide what your sentence will be in this matter?”
“The Judge,” Polanski said.
“Who do you think will decide whether or not you will get probation?”
“The Judge.”
Silver read his letter in open court. Midway through, Rittenband interrupted him. “I think some of the reporters are taking notes,” he said. “You might read a little slower, so that they will be able to get this.”
The plea bargain is the moment when the case pivoted from the story of what Polanski did to Samantha Gailey to the story of what the system did to him. Polanski’s detractors focus on the first, his supporters on the second, but the two are intertwined, and both were shaped by the influence of Polanski’s celebrity.
Polanski’s fate was now in the hands of Judge Rittenband, who had, by 1977, established himself as an eccentric figure on the Los Angeles legal scene. A New York-born prodigy, Rittenband went straight from high school to New York University Law School; too young to take the bar exam after earning his law degree, Rittenband filled the time by acquiring an undergraduate education at Harvard. Wounded in the Second World War, he moved to California, started practicing law, and won appointment as a judge in 1961. Rittenband presided in the Santa Monica courthouse and could be a querulous, domineering presence on the bench. He snared many of the high-profile cases that tend to occur in that tony region of Los Angeles County—Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s divorce, a child-custody case involving Marlon Brando, a paternity suit against Cary Grant.
Rittenband was a peripheral Hollywood player—a lifelong bachelor who juggled several girlfriends and enjoyed the friendship of movie stars at the Hillcrest Country Club. He also seems to have sought out the news media more than other judges. As Rittenband assumed control of the case, Polanski’s celebrity, heretofore an important advantage for him, became more of a mixed blessing.
Since the nineteen-seventies, in California and elsewhere, criminal sentencing has changed dramatically, particularly with regard to the role of the judge. “California used to have a wide-open system, where the law gave the judge a lot of discretion about how long to sentence someone,” Robert Weisberg, a professor at Stanford Law School, said. That system, which was known as “indeterminate sentencing,” evolved into the current, very different regime, which is known as “determinate sentencing.” Judges now have far less latitude, and discretionary parole has been abolished for most crimes in California. Sentences are more severe. Today, an adult defendant who pleaded guilty to statutory rape in California would likely receive about three years in state prison.
In addition, the sentencing process has become more formalized, with the judges being required to present explicit findings concerning how they reached decisions. Three decades ago, especially in Rittenband’s courtroom, a case would often be resolved with an off-the-record understanding among the lawyers and the judge. Dalton was hoping for a deal that would lead to probation.
After Polanski’s guilty plea, his chances for a light sentence at first seemed good. In the previous year, according to Polanski’s defense team, none of the convictions for statutory rape in Los Angeles County resulted in a sentence to state prison, although many defendants spent time in county jails or lockups. (How many defendants had been allowed to plea down from charges as serious as those against Polanski is another question.) The report in the case by the probation officer, Irwin Gold, read more like the words of a starstruck fan than like those of a law-enforcement officer. After a lengthy summary of Polanski’s tragic past, Gold wrote, “Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half-century. The motion-picture industry has proved [a] magnet to many of them.” As for Polanski’s crime, Gold wrote:
Alvin E. Davis, the psychiatrist Gold cited, seemed equally smitten, writing that incarceration “would impose an unusual degree of stress and hardship because of [Polanski’s] highly sensitive personality and devotion to his work.” Davis saw the rape as the result of the “loss of normal inhibitions in circumstances of intimacy and collaboration in creative work, and with some coincidental alcohol and drug intoxication.” In the report’s twisted recitation, Polanski’s proffer of alcohol and drugs to a child becomes exculpatory; his claim of a “lack of coercion” is accepted as fact.
But on September 16, 1977, three days before Polanski was to be sentenced, Rittenband called the lawyers in the case to an off-the-record private meeting in his chambers—a meeting that remains a crucial point of controversy in the case. According to Dalton, Rittenband said that he had decided to order Polanski to go to the state prison at Chino for a “diagnostic study” of his mental state, which might take as long as ninety days, under a California law that allowed for evaluation of prisoners before sentencing. Assuming that the report from the psychiatrists at Chino would be favorable, Dalton later wrote in a court filing, the Judge told the lawyers that “the diagnostic study at Chino would constitute defendant Polanski’s punishment and that there would be no further incarceration.” At the meeting, the prosecutor and the probation officer told Judge Rittenband that it was inappropriate to use a diagnostic study as a punishment, but the Judge ignored them, and an improvisational sentence was not, in fact, unusual for its time.
Rittenband made another request: he asked for what Dalton, in a 2008 affidavit, called a “charade of arguing our respective positions at the Probation and Sentencing Hearing on September 19.” Dalton told me, “Rittenband said, ‘You both argue. You argue for a prison sentence, and you argue for probation.’ But it was all for show”—he had already made up his mind. (Gunson, the prosecutor, agrees with this version of events.) Three days later, at the public hearing, Gunson and Dalton did as Rittenband instructed. Rittenband also kept to his script and ordered the mental evaluation at Chino.
Dalton expressed no real objection to the diagnostic sentence, because his client appeared to be on a glide path to avoiding real prison time. “All we needed was a good psychiatric report, and Roman would have been free,” Dalton said. But the defense lawyer made what turned out to be a miscalculation. At the September 16th meeting in Rittenband’s chambers, Dalton asked the Judge to stay the order of incarceration until Polanski could complete work on a new directing project. In another example of Polanski’s privileged status, Rittenband said that he would publicly authorize a reprieve of only ninety days, but he told Dalton, off the record, that he would have the option of asking for further stays, until the film was finished. [#unhandled_cartoon]
Polanski’s plan to direct “The First Deadly Sin” had fallen through after his arrest, but he was quickly hired to direct a remake of the 1937 film “The Hurricane,” which was to be produced by Dino de Laurentiis, a major figure in middlebrow seventies cinema. Polanski was happy to get the work, even if it appeared likely to fall below his usual aesthetic standards. (The plot was to include pearl divers getting caught in a giant clam.) “Dino’s faith in me showed I had ceased to be a complete Hollywood outcast,” Polanski wrote. He wanted Kinski to play the female lead. “Although Dino was bowled over by her looks, he doubted if she could acquire a sufficient command of English before shooting began.”
De Laurentiis asked Polanski to go to Europe, to set up a West German distribution deal. While there, Polanski was photographed at an Oktoberfest celebration in Munich, sitting amid a group of attractive young women, and smoking a cigar. The picture went out on the U.P.I. wire, and was printed in the September 29, 1977, edition of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, with a caption stating that Polanski “enjoys the companionship of some young ladies at the Munich, Germany, Oktoberfest.” The photograph infuriated Rittenband, who believed that Polanski was abusing the privilege of the stay of his sentence. Rittenband gave an interview to a gossip columnist (even then an unusual thing for a judge to do in a pending case), Marylin Beck, who reported that “Roman Polanski could be on his way to prison this weekend.” Polanski’s celebrity was turning against him.
Rittenband ordered Dalton to bring Polanski back to Santa Monica for a hearing about why the stay should not be revoked. At the hearing, on October 24th, Dalton called witnesses, including de Laurentiis, who established that Polanski had a legitimate business reason for being in Germany. Rittenband was persuaded to leave the stay in effect, but he declined to extend the ninety-day limit. Given the uncertainty of Polanski’s situation, de Laurentiis fired him. (The film, directed by Jan Troell and starring Mia Farrow, was released in 1979, to dismal public response.) Polanski entered the Chino prison shortly before Christmas and was released, when his evaluation was complete, forty-two days later, on January 29, 1978. According to a letter to Rittenband from Chino’s associate superintendent, “Staff are in agreement the granting of probation in this case would be in the best interest of all concerned.”
On January 30th, the day after Polanski was released—and two days before he was to be officially sentenced—Rittenband summoned the lawyers for another private meeting. Rittenband said that he was unhappy with the diagnostic report, which he called a “whitewash.” This was, to be sure, an understandable reaction, given that the Chino report, like the earlier probation report, was extremely deferential toward Polanski. But Rittenband also expressed discomfort with the way his rulings had been received by the public. He had changed his mind again, saying that he had decided to impose an additional prison sentence. The Judge said he was considering limiting the further punishment to forty-eight days—to complete the original ninety days—but only if Polanski then agreed to leave the United States for good. (Polanski did not have a green card; he is a French and Polish citizen.) At a meeting the next day, with Lawrence Silver, Gailey’s lawyer, also present, Rittenband said, according to Dalton, that “there was nothing which could be produced by the defense that would influence him regarding his intended sentence.”
Dalton informed Polanski of the latest dispiriting turn of events. It wasn’t clear what Rittenband was going to do, although it did seem that there would be more prison time in Polanski’s future—perhaps just forty-eight days, or perhaps more. (It was also not clear how Rittenband planned to enforce his deportation plan. State judges have no authority over immigration matters.) Polanski wrote in his autobiography, “Since it was clear that I had served my forty-two days in Chino for nothing, an obvious question arose: what had I to gain by staying? The answer appeared to be: nothing.” In fact, Polanski had the right to appeal any sentence that Rittenband might impose, although prevailing would be a long shot. But Polanski decided that he had trusted the American legal system long enough. That evening, without telling Dalton, he took a British Airways flight to London. By the following morning, when Dalton appeared in front of Rittenband to announce that Polanski had fled, the director had flown on to Paris. At what would have been the sentencing hearing, on February 1st, Rittenband issued a bench warrant for the arrest of Polanski, who was now a fugitive.
Five days later, on February 6th, Rittenband held a press conference in his chambers to denounce Polanski for fleeing and to reveal that he planned to sentence him in absentia. He confirmed that he had wanted Polanski to leave the country after his release. Dalton responded by filing a motion to have Rittenband recused from the case for bias. (Holding a press conference about a pending case was one of the grounds.) Rittenband agreed to be replaced, though he refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing; if Polanski had returned, his case would have been heard by a different judge. In subsequent years, Rittenband nevertheless vowed to sit on the bench until Polanski came back, but he retired in 1989, and died in 1993, at the age of eighty-eight.
Polanski settled into a spacious apartment on the Avenue Montaigne. By August, 1978, seven months after fleeing the States, he was shooting his next film, “Tess,” a movie version of Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” starring Nastassja Kinski, who was still in her teens. (The story features an older man who either seduces or rapes the young Tess.) The film won Polanski his third Academy Award nomination. (He lost to Robert Redford, for “Ordinary People.”)
Thus began Polanski’s fruitful, if somewhat circumscribed, years of exile. “Roman is a superstar in the streets of Paris,” his friend Thom Mount, who produced three of Polanski’s movies, said. “He walks into a restaurant, and the headwaiter faints.” Polanski’s status as a fugitive from American justice has made it difficult, but not impossible, for him to continue to direct major films. “The case was more than just background noise,” Jeff Berg, his agent, said. “It determined what he could do and where he could do it and with whom he could work.” (Berg is the chief executive of International Creative Management, where I am also a client.) The terms of the Franco-American extradition treaty do not compel either country to extradite its own citizens, but Polanski has had to be careful in his travels; the United Kingdom, for example, has been off-limits. It was seven years between “Tess” and “Pirates,” a misbegotten seafaring adventure starring, of all people, Walter Matthau. Two years later, in 1988, Polanski released “Frantic,” a thriller set in Paris, with Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, who was then his girlfriend. It turned out to be his last production with a major American studio. In 1989, he married Seigner, and over the following decade they had two children.
The legal case against Polanski largely faded from view. Every few years, Dalton made an overture to resolve the case, but the prosecutors always insisted that Polanski return to the United States first. Polanski refused to expose himself to that level of uncertainty. In 1997, Dalton came close to brokering a resolution, which would have required no further prison time for Polanski; according to Dalton, the judge assigned to the matter, Larry Fidler, had more or less signed off on the plan but insisted that the final hearing be televised. (Fidler, through a spokesman, denied imposing this condition. Gunson supports Dalton’s recollection.) In any event, Polanski scuttled the plan.
The last turn in the case began, oddly enough, with perhaps the greatest triumph of Polanski’s career. Polanski and his producing partners had pieced together financing to produce an adaptation of a Polish memoir, first published in 1946, called “Death of a City.” The story of a musician who survived the Warsaw ghetto while his entire family perished, the movie was called “The Pianist,” and it was released in 2002; it proved to be a perfect vehicle for the director, who turned seventy the following year. At last, Polanski’s long-sought Oscar seemed within reach.
The success of “The Pianist” raised the question of whether Polanski would return to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards, and the Los Angeles Times ran a story about his long exile. “I saw that article, and it piqued my interest,” Marina Zenovich, a documentary filmmaker, told me. “Then a little while later I saw Samantha Geimer on Larry King.” Over the years, Geimer, née Gailey, had become an increasingly vocal supporter of Polanski’s return. In 1993, Polanski reportedly agreed to pay five hundred thousand dollars to Geimer as a settlement in a civil suit. (It apparently took several years, and more legal wrangling, for the money to be paid.) She never backed down from her grand-jury testimony, but as she moved toward her forties, with a family of her own, Geimer urged the district attorney to allow Polanski to return without having to go to prison. On February 23, 2003, Geimer and her lawyer, Lawrence Silver, appeared on “Larry King Live.” Silver said, “What happened that day, both to Polanski and to some extent the American judicial system—I really think it was a shameful day.” Zenovich recalled, “That didn’t make sense to me. So I decided to investigate the case myself.” A few weeks later, Polanski won the Oscar for Best Director; he remained overseas for the ceremony.
In a previous documentary, Zenovich had become obsessed with her subject, the French businessman, politician, and actor Bernard Tapie; now she focussed the same fanatical level of attention on the long-dormant Polanski legal drama. Zenovich created an especially damning portrait of Judge Rittenband, complete with interviews with his girlfriends. Most important, Zenovich tracked down a player whose role had been unknown to Polanski’s team. David Wells was a deputy district attorney who had worked briefly on the case before Gunson took over, and he told Zenovich that he had spoken secretly with the Judge and pushed him to be tougher. Wells said that he had brought Rittenband the photograph of Polanski at Oktoberfest. “What I told him was . . . ‘Look! He’s giving you the finger. He’s flipping you off,’ ” Wells told Zenovich. “He said, ‘What? What? He’s not getting away with that.’ ” (Wells has recently recanted this part of his interview, telling The Daily Beast, “I lied. . . . I thought it made a better story if I said I’d told the judge what to do.” He declined to speak with me.) Wells’s lobbying of Rittenband raised the spectre of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct and thus possible grounds for a dismissal of the case.
Zenovich’s documentary, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” premièred at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008 and was broadcast on HBO later that year. The force of celebrity had buffeted the case once more. It had helped Polanski by persuading his victim to support a plea deal, and by inspiring a fawning probation report; it hurt him by drawing suspicion to his legitimate travel to Germany and prompting Rittenband’s erratic decisions. Celebrity now helped by drawing Zenovich’s attention, which, in turn, led to new questions about the case against him. His lawyers decided to make yet another attempt to resolve it.
Dalton recruited Chad Hummel, a partner at the Los Angeles firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, to help with the case. Armed with Zenovich’s fresh disclosures, Hummel and Dalton separately met with the prosecutors to whom the Polanski file had been passed. (Gunson had retired in 2002.) Their answer was the same as their predecessors’: no deal until Polanski returned. The question for his lawyers now became whether the misconduct by Wells and Rittenband was so egregious that a judge might dismiss the case even in the face of Polanski’s refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of American courts.
There was a precedent of sorts. In July, 2002, Vanity Fair had run a long article about the restaurant Elaine’s, in New York. The piece included an anecdote from Lewis Lapham, then the editor of Harper’s, who said that Polanski, while in New York on the way to Los Angeles for Sharon Tate’s funeral, had made a pass at a woman at Elaine’s, telling her, “I will make another Sharon Tate out of you.” Polanski denied it, noting that he had not stopped in New York on his way from London, and sued Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast, in British courts. (Condé Nast also owns The New Yorker.)
In light of Polanski’s checkered personal history, his decision to sue for injury to his reputation was presumptuous, to say the least. This was especially true because Polanski was what’s known as a “libel tourist,” who was using Britain’s libel laws, which favor the plaintiff, to sue an American magazine. Even more audaciously, Polanski declined to go to England, fearing extradition in his statutory-rape case. Vanity Fair asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, but in February, 2005, the Law Lords, Britain’s highest court, ruled that Polanski did not have to appear in person in order to pursue the case. (After a trial in which Polanski testified by video link, the jury awarded him about ninety thousand dollars.) The British decision was obviously not binding on an American court, but it suggested that he might be able to win in the United States, too, without showing up.
In December, 2008, the Polanski defense team filed a motion in L.A. County Superior Court, asking that the case be dismissed on the ground that Polanski had been deprived of due process of law. (The lawyers submitted Zenovich’s documentary as an exhibit.) On February 17, 2009, Hummel appeared before Judge Peter Espinoza to argue the case. (The transcript noted, “Defendant Polanski not present in court.”)
The diagnostic session at Chino, Hummel told Judge Espinoza, “was intended to be his entire sentence. . . . So this notion that somehow there was a fleeing from a sentence is not true.” Hummel went on, “In our system, we simply cannot tolerate back-room communications between prosecutors and judges that influence a sentence and that cut out the defendant and his counsel from those communications. . . . That’s at the heart of this request.” Lawrence Silver joined in Polanski’s motion, saying, “The time has come for this case to end, Your Honor.”
The D.A.’s office responded with barely concealed rage. “This case is about a 44-year-old defendant who plied a 13-year-old girl with drugs and alcohol, then against her consent, committed acts of oral copulation, sodomy and sexual intercourse upon her,” the attorneys wrote in a brief. “Petitioner’s flight, whatever his motivations, and his failure to take responsibility for his crimes is at the heart of the extraordinary delays in this case.”
Polanski’s lawyer clearly made an impression on Judge Espinoza, who said that there had been “substantial . . . misconduct that occurred during the pendency of this case.” Ultimately, though, he rejected Polanski’s motion, under what is known as the “fugitive disentitlement doctrine.” Espinoza ruled that Polanski “is not entitled to request any affirmative relief from this Court, as he remains at large.” Polanski’s team asked a three-judge Court of Appeal panel to intervene, and on July 30th that court gave them a surprising victory. In a departure from its usual practice, the court directed Espinoza to show cause why he should not hold “an evidentiary hearing, without requiring [Polanski’s] physical presence, to determine whether the case should be dismissed in furtherance of justice.” The Court of Appeal may have been subtly inviting the trial court to throw out the prosecution. It was perhaps Polanski’s biggest court victory in thirty-two years—and, in the upside-down world of his case, the worst thing that could have happened to him.
Steve Cooley, who was elected in 2000, is the fifth Los Angeles County district attorney to preside over the Polanski prosecution. Cooley first won the job as the law-and-order alternative to his predecessor, Gil Garcetti, who was widely criticized for his handling of several high-profile cases, most notably the O. J. Simpson trial. Notwithstanding the passion of Cooley’s argument, Polanski appeared to be making progress in the courts in the summer of 2009. Cooley had to respond.
Over the years, the district attorney’s efforts to bring Polanski back to the United States seem to have been halfhearted. According to a chronology released by the D.A.’s office, prosecutors have made only a handful of significant gestures to international authorities, and there have been long gaps in even this effort. (The chronology lists nothing, for example, during the periods 1982 to 1985, 1989 to 1993, and 1995 to 2004.) The first time a provisional request for Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland was actually prepared was on September 22, 2009. E-mails obtained by the Associated Press show that prosecutors in Los Angeles tracked Polanski as he moved between Austria and Switzerland in late September and weighed which country had a better extradition arrangement with the United States. “I don’t have experience with any Austrian extraditions so I don’t know how ‘friendly’ they would be to extradition on such a case,” Diana Carbajal, a deputy district attorney, wrote in one message. This sudden rush of interest ended with Polanski’s arrest on the night of September 26th, as he arrived at the Zurich airport, to attend a ceremony in his honor at that city’s film festival.
The timing clearly suggests that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office moved to arrest Polanski because he seemed to have a real possibility of winning in the courts. Cooley has said, “It’s about completing justice. Justice is not complete when someone leaves the jurisdiction of the court.” Polanski’s lawyers thus have to wonder whether, by bringing the motion to dismiss the case, they effectively prompted their client’s arrest. Did Polanski’s motion, meritorious though it might be, backfire? “There was prosecutorial misconduct and we felt we had to bring it to the court’s attention,” Dalton told me. “We had to do it.”
After Polanski’s arrest, the value of his celebrity went through its most precipitate rise and fall. Polanski’s friends, many of them also celebrities, swept in with public, fervent support. The S.A.C.D., the French dramatic writers’ guild, sponsored a petition, which said that Polanski had been arrested “in a case of morals.” It went on, “Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.” Signers included Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, and eventually several hundred others from around the world. Bernard-Henri Lévy organized another petition, drawing support from Steven Soderbergh, Neil Jordan, Sam Mendes, Diane von Furstenberg, and Mike Nichols as well as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. This one said, “We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, called Polanski’s arrest “not a good administration of justice.” The producer Harvey Weinstein wrote about Polanski’s “so-called crime.”
With equal rapidity, an anti-Polanski backlash swept in. The petitions made no reference to the facts of the case, no acknowledgment of the seriousness of his crime, and no recognition that sex with a child—the rape of a child—was worthy of condemnation. Columnists across the political spectrum, from feminists on the left to conservatives on the right, found common cause in revulsion at both Polanski and his famous friends. Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, “It’s enraging that literary superstars who go on and on about human dignity, and human rights, and even women’s rights (at least when the women are Muslim) either don’t see what Polanski did as rape, or don’t care, because he is, after all, Polanski—an artist like themselves.” The Wall Street Journal’s drama critic wrote, “Anyone who lives in a tightly sealed echo chamber of self-congratulation, surrounded by yes-men who are dedicated to doing what he wants, is bound to lose touch with reality.” Polanski’s public supporters, from Sarkozy to Weinstein, decided to discuss the matter no further. In the court of public opinion, the backlash won. The legalities were left to the Swiss courts.
As in the United States, the advantage in the legal battle in Switzerland shifted, over time, to Polanski. He was initially denied bail—understandably, as there was a “risk of flight”—and incarcerated in a small prison, built around a stone-paved courtyard. He could see the tops of a few trees and a bit of the sky from the barred window of his cell, and was allowed an hour of exercise per day. On October 2nd, Dalton, Hummel, and Reid Weingarten, a Washington lawyer, met with Justice Department officials to ask them not to make a formal extradition request. The lawyers did not succeed, but the official demand for extradition did not go to the Swiss until three weeks later. Polanski’s lawyers put together a package of guarantees that included electronic monitoring and most of his personal financial assets, and that persuaded an appellate court to release him to his chalet. His legal challenges to the extradition order have only just begun, and probably will not be resolved until next spring.
Still, it appears likely that at some point Polanski will be returned to California, and there he will face a legal situation of daunting complexity. So much time has passed that it is difficult to know for sure how a court today would apply the rules in effect in 1977. Some sort of settlement—an agreement on a short prison term, perhaps—remains a theoretical possibility, but according to one member of Polanski’s camp, “We have basically given up on making any sort of deal with Cooley. He won’t talk to us.” On December 10th, the Court of Appeal will hear arguments on the question of whether an evidentiary hearing can be held in Polanski’s absence. If the court grants such a hearing, Polanski will be able to call prosecutors to the witness stand, including perhaps Cooley himself. The prospect of a hearing about government misconduct may bring the district attorney’s office to the bargaining table at last.
If Polanski were to lose his case in the Court of Appeal, the advantage would shift to Cooley. A trial may be complicated, or perhaps even impossible, because the original file in the case went missing, and had to be re-created years later. It appears that Polanski will face some time in a California state prison upon his return: the extradition request stipulates, “The maximum time that Mr. Polanski could be sentenced to prison . . . is two years.” Meanwhile, the director, who is wealthy but not nearly as rich as such near-contemporaries as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, has had lawyers in Paris, Zurich, Washington, Los Angeles, and Dallas, where Dalton’s son works on the case.
Polanski will await the next turn in his own story in the elegant confines of Milky Way, which has a spectacular view of the Alps. Shortly before his arrest, Polanski had nearly finished editing his latest film, “The Ghost,” a political thriller starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, and Kim Cattrall. The story concerns a former Prime Minister of Great Britain, whose troubled tenure leads him to settle in the United States to write his memoirs. According to the trailer, the protagonist’s flight into exile came about because of “one decision I made . . . which wasn’t in the interests of the U.S.A.” It is Polanski’s first film since “Chinatown” to be set primarily in the United States, but, given his legal difficulties, he had to use locations in Germany as substitutes for the New England setting. Through intermediaries, Polanski worked on the post-production process from his prison cell, and he will complete the project from the more congenial surroundings of his vacation home. Given the vertiginous shifts in fortune that he has endured throughout his life, Polanski is well suited to live with the current uncertainties, and the movie will be released, on schedule, early next year. ♦
