Jonathan Yardley on 'Polanski'

The complex life of a longtime exile from Hollywood.

POLANSKI

By Christopher Sandford

Palgrave. 387 pp. $29.95

Now in his mid-70s, Roman Polanski seems finally to have slowed down a bit. He lives in France with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, to whom he apparently is devoted. According to Christopher Sandford, who has also written several biographies of rock musicians, people who know him "insist that Polanski is 'almost ludicrously mild-mannered,' 'nearly teetotal' and even an 'occasional churchgoer.' " The "top moment" of his day, he has said, comes when he drops his children off at school: "It's the best. It's great to see them walking away into this school. It's a moving moment."

As if to underscore his autumnal mood, three years ago Polanski released his 17th film, an adaptation of Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist" that is surprisingly mellow, even sentimental, perhaps because he is believed to have made it for his children. It was released only three years after "The Pianist," one of the three films of his that rank among postwar classics -- the others being "Knife in the Water" (1962) and "Chinatown" (1974) -- and the one that brought him, at last, an Academy Award, and, with it, something approximating the acceptance and forgiveness of his peers.

Nobody who pays even the slightest attention to the headlines needs to be told that the past decade or so of Polanski's life stands in stark, even startling, contrast to much of the rest of it. As a youth he discovered that he was catnip to the ladies and set out on a lifetime of serial seduction, often with girls far younger than he. In London during the Swinging '60s, Sandford writes, his "preferred props were a joint and a succession of pneumatic young women." In August 1969 his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered in Los Angeles by the Charles Manson "family" while he was out of the country. Then, in 1977, at the age of 43, he had sex with a 13-year-old girl in California, rendering him, in Sandford's words, "complicit in his own downfall." Faced with the possibility of a long prison sentence, Polanski left the United States in 1978 and has never returned.

Those are the most notorious scenes from a life that has had many. Born in Paris in August 1933 to Jewish émigré parents from Poland, Polanski survived World War II under the most brutal circumstances -- it is widely believed that his fellow Pole Jerzy Kosinski's harrowing novel The Painted Bird (1965) is "a thinly disguised account of Polanski's life" -- and against staggering odds. His mother was killed at Auschwitz, and he was separated from his father for most of the war, left to roam the countryside and forage for survival. It is certain that this experience informed "The Pianist," the story of a Jew who survives in the Warsaw ghetto by going into hiding, yet Polanski has always insisted that his childhood was "cool," that "kids accept life as it is because they don't know anything else," that "the hardships I went through seemed quite normal to me."

The war certainly hardened him. Diminutive in size but physically strong and mentally tough, he was determined to succeed and went about it with single-minded purposefulness. As a boy he had fallen in love with movies; as a young man he set about learning how to make them. Accepted at Poland's National Film School in Lodz in 1953, he was able to study films by master Western filmmakers that the communist regime banned in public. He learned his lessons well. "Knife in the Water," released when he was not yet 30 years old, established him immediately as a leading director of his generation -- a still from the movie was published on the cover of Time magazine -- and as a director whose "great artistic virtue," Sandford writes, is "ruthlessness."

I remember sitting nearly alone in one of Manhattan's art-film houses sometime in the fall of 1962, watching in astonishment as Polanski's "thriller about two men and a woman isolated on a yacht" meticulously unfolded. Polanski has said that the movie "uses a holiday atmosphere tinged with a generous amount of irony." As Sandford says: "In practice, that meant propelling a young hitch-hiker into the path of a car taking the middle-aged Andrzej and his wife Krystyna to a weekend cruise. Andrzej throws down the gauntlet, not only giving the stranger a lift but inviting him to join them on the boat. Polanski then sees to it that the three engage in various progressively more kinky power games," at the end of which the one certainty is that no one has won. The mood of the film is intensely sexual, and the black-and-white photography perfectly suits it.

"Knife in the Water" set Polanski off on one of the most varied, unpredictable film careers of the past half-century. "As well as two satanic-cult pictures," Sandford writes, "his canon includes psychological thrillers, faithful adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens, a costume melodrama, matinee swashbuckling, Hitchcockian suspense, Thirties noir, excursions in absurdism and soft porn, sometimes concurrently, and a deranged Dracula spoof in which a Jewish vampire hunter, played by Polanski himself, repeatedly peers through a keyhole at a naked woman who happens to be Sharon Tate." The most famous satanic-cult movie is of course "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), which made Polanski a force in Hollywood but also inspired the press to speculate a year later, in one of its less responsible moments, about the possibility of some connection between the movie and the Manson cult.

For me as for many others, the high achievement of Polanski's career came six years later, with "Chinatown." Though Sandford calls "The Pianist" Polanski's "masterpiece," for me that accolade must be bestowed upon this story of greed, corruption and betrayal in Los Angeles in the 1930s. It fell into Polanski's lap during a period in which his career had stalled, and he made the most of it.

The filming of "Chinatown" seems to have been rocky, at best, with frequent screaming matches between Polanski and Faye Dunaway, at the end of one of which Polanski said: "You can fight with me, Faye, but I can never be wrong. I am the director." Indeed. On the set he often lapsed into what one actor in "Macbeth" (1971) called "petulance" and "frequent evacuation [of] toys from his pram," yet another participant in that film said: "Roman was a stickler for rehearsal. We went on and on in the rain, getting the actors fit enough to simultaneously wield their swords, charge their horses and recite lines from Shakespeare. . . . It was like training for the decathlon. But Roman himself was always the first on set in the morning and the last to leave at night. I must say I liked and admired the man. . . ."

What sort of man does this leave us with? Hard, perhaps impossible, to say. Kosinski, with whom Polanski had what "a mutual associate describes . . . as 'the ultimate love-hate relationship' of both men's lives," "left the best description of this 'rare bird': he was a 'different man at different times. . . . I knew at least four or five Polanskis.' " Sandford speculates that "growing up smart yet horribly persecuted seems to have nurtured his sense of ego, as well as his lifelong fatalism" and notes that his scripts are haunted by "betrayal, and, by extension, death -- of compelling significance for the man whose mother, wife and unborn son were all murdered." The actor Donald Pleasance, who worked with Polanski on "Cul-de-Sac" (1966), had decidedly mixed feelings about him: "So, on balance, Roman wasn't nice. He was an average, Hollywood-type megalomaniac, an unsentimental, restless young man. He was also about twenty IQ points brighter than most directors. You were always conscious of being in the hands of an absolute master of his trade."

That, it seems to me, in the end is the only judgment that really matters. Polanski has lived for his work, and it is by his work that he must be judged. It is a pity that there are so many stains on his record, but there are few stains on his films. In this fine biography, Sandford gives those films the praise they deserve, and he is fair as well to Polanski the man. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.