Introduction:

First Goodbyes

Jack Nicholson, a boy, could never forget sitting at the bar with John
J. Nicholson, Jack’s namesake and maybe even his father, a soft
little dapper Irishman in glasses. He kept neatly combed what was
left of his red hair and had long ago separated from Jack’s mother,
their high school romance gone the way of any available drink.
They told Jack that John had once been a great ballplayer and that he
decorated store windows, all five Steinbachs in Asbury Park,
though the only place Jack ever saw this man was in the bar, day-
drinking apricot brandy and Hennessy, shot after shot, quietly
waiting for the mercy to kick in. Jack’s mother, Ethel May, told
him he started drinking only when Prohibition ended, but
somehow Jack got the notion that she drove him to it.

Robert Evans, a boy, in the family apartment at 110 Riverside Drive,

on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, could never forget watching his
father, Archie, a dentist, dutifully committed to work and family, sit
down at the Steinway in the living room after a ten-hour day of
pulling teeth up in Harlem and come alive. His father could be at
Carnegie Hall, the boy thought; he could be Gershwin or
Rachmaninoff, but he was, instead, a friendless husband, a father of
three, caught in the unending cycle of earn and provide for his
children, his wife, his mother, and his three sisters. But living in him
was the Blue Danube. “That wouldn’t be me,” Evans promised
himself. “I’ll live.”

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 2 THE BIG G O O D B YE

Robert Towne, a boy, left San Pedro. His father, Lou, moved his
fam- ily from the little port town, bright and silent, and left, for
good, Mrs. Walker’s hamburger stand and the proud fleets of tuna
boats pushing out to sea. More than just the gardenias and jasmine
winds and great tidal waves of pink bougainvillea cascading to the
dust, Robert could never forget that time before the war when one
story spoke for everyone—the boy, his parents, Mrs. Walker and
her cus- tomers, the people of San Pedro, America, sitting together
at those sun-cooked redwood tables, cooling themselves with fresh-
squeezed orange juice, all breathing the same salt air.

There was the day, many raids later—a hot, sunny day—when
Roman Polanski found the streets of Kraków deserted. It was the
silence that day that he could never forget, the two SS guards
calmly patrolling the barbed-wire fence. This was a new feeling, a
new kind of alone. In terror, he ran to his grandmother’s apartment in
search of his father. The room was empty of everything save the
remnants of a recent chaos, and he fled. Outside on the street, a
stranger said, “If you know what’s good for you, get lost.”

When these four boys grew up, they made a movie together called
Chinatown.
Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind. Not
just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a condition of total
aware- ness almost indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming
you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark—that’s Chinatown.
Thinking you’ve got it figured out and realizing you’re dead—
that’s China- town. This is a book about Chinatowns: Roman
Polanski’s, Robert Towne’s, Robert Evans’s, Jack Nicholson’s, the
ones they made and the ones they inherited, their guilt and their
innocence, what they did right, what they did wrong—and what
they could do nothing to stop.

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