As the biopic comes back into fashion — think Kinsey, think A Beautiful Mind — somebody might consider the life of Roman Polanski as perfect big-screen material. Its component elements are the stuff of box-office dreams. Holocaust survival, dodgy sex, motiveless murder, a liberal sprinkling of celebrity, plenty of photogenic locations — the Oscar-winning script is in the bag. Its star, as Christopher Sandford’s biography suggests, boasts unfathomable reserves of chutzpah, and his recent epiphany at the Venice Film Festival was a reminder of how much life the old dog still has left in him.
Polanski’s resilience was tested early, with the dispatch of his Jewish parents to Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Slipping out of Nazi-occupied Krakow, nine-year-old Roman fled to a village in the Tatra mountains, where he slept in a cowshed and lived off rat pie and boiled tree-bark. The postwar communist culture of relentless agitprop and uplift, in which Warsaw theatres staged plays with titles like The Workers’ Hearts Sing Out Like the Locomotive Whistle, made further demands on his survival skills. While still a student at film school in Lodz, he began plotting to ‘get the f*** out of Poland, grow a beard and become a writer’, but not before he had made his earliest screen masterpiece, Knife in the Water (1962). At least some of the bite in this tautly constructed three-hander, one of movie history’s most enduringly influential works, derives from its director’s irrepressible truculence. There was nothing he enjoyed more than tweaking the noses of humourless censors demanding more socially committed dialogue and less revealing swimsuits.
While Knife in the Water was garnering international plaudits, Polanski’s first wife, the actress Basia Kwiatkowska, walked out on their marriage. Amateur psychology detects a sustained revenge for this humiliation at the hands of ‘Poland’s Sophia Loren’ running through his oeuvre. Sandford, while acknowledging hints of misogyny in Polanski’s relentless bullying of his leading ladies on set, underlines his sympathetic handling of the characters they play, from diabolical concubine Rosemary, pregnant with the devil’s baby, to dewy-eyed Tess Durbeyfield. Among the stars themselves the jury is still out. ‘What he did to me throughout the film bordered on sexual harassment,’ cries Faye Dunaway, rueing the day she agreed to appear in Chinatown. Emmanuelle Seigner, on the other hand, loved the experience of Frantic enough to become the third Mrs Polanski, for the sake, apparently, of ‘Roman’s beautiful soul’.
Zigzagging between London, Paris and Hollywood during the Sixties as everyone’s favourite studio bad boy, the libertine cinéaste was hardly going to settle for a life of blameless domesticity. His second wife, Dance of the Vampires star Sharon Tate, remained wrily phlegmatic on the subject of his serial infidelities. ‘We have a good arrangement: Roman lies to me and I pretend to believe him.’ The pair had been together for barely three years before the fatal night when Charles Manson’s ‘family’ checked out their villa in the Hollywood hills. Purely recreational and carried out largely by young women, the ensuing murder of the heavily pregnant Tate and her friends became one of 20th-century America’s iconic crimes. Christopher Sandford’s account reads more chillingly when, at the close of his chapter, he measures the killing-spree’s brutal actuality against the wilder fantasies of contemporary reportage.
Having somehow managed to make Tate’s death the fault of her absent husband, the media had a field day when, a decade later, Polanski was charged with ‘a lewd and lascivious act upon and with the body’ of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey. ‘Pole on Perv Charge Faces 50 Years,’ crowed one headline, ‘Polanski the Predator’, screamed another. Was he a malign Svengali, ‘an evil tosser’ as one former friend opined, or, as others believed, an easy target for Republican moralists fitting him up for deportation?
‘Maybe Roman’s judgment was off on this occasion,’ observed Mia Farrow in a delphic understatement. Where his films themselves are concerned, apart from the over-derivative Harrison Ford vehicle Frantic or The Pirates, whose awfulness has turned it into a cult movie, Polanski’s judgment has seldom if ever been off. Some of Sandford’s best pages are devoted to the making of individual pictures. Sensibly he underplays Mansonian echoes in the 1971 Macbeth, complete with a nude sleepwalking scene and industrial quantities of blood, but always visually compelling. The long nightmare of Tess’s filming is presented as the prelude to a masterpiece of understated eloquence, while The Pianist draws much of its power from Polanski’s perennial gift for inspiring a diehard loyalty in those who work with him.
Biographies of living figures are generally embarrassing. This one, unauthorised, critically admiring, expertly put together, is an exception, a notable tribute to a rascal genius with an unending capacity for surprise.
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