Why should Dominick have all the fun? On a London morning in mid-July, a week and a half after the transit bombings, I found myself in Courtroom No. 13 of the Royal Courts of Justice as Vanity Fair defended itself in a libel action brought by the film director Roman Polanski, a fugitive from American justice who has been living in France for the past 27 years. That an American magazine could be brought to trial in an English court by a man who resides in France is one of the many vagaries of the British legal system. But more of that later.
Sadly, there are lots of things I can't say in this column without upsetting the courts. I will say this about the British courts: in rig and finery, they do not disappoint. Court No. 13 was a beautiful Victorian paneled room, decorated to the hilt with wigs, flowing robes, barristers, solicitors, and lots of "If it pleases m'Lord" this and "Yes, m'Lord" that. Very Witness for the Prosecution, except, blessedly, with air-conditioning.
In the British court system, you have two kinds of lawyers for each side: the solicitor, who gathers the facts of the case, and the barrister, who delivers the argument. During the actual trial, the solicitors sit in the front row, and the barristers sit behind them, standing when addressing the judge or the jury. Unlike American courts, where many statements are interrupted with an "Objection," followed by an "Objection sustained" or an "Objection overruled" from the judge, English courts, or at least the one I attended, are much more mannered. Barristers for both sides delivered their cases and completed their cross-examinations calmly and virtually without interruption from the other camp. It probably does not play out as well on television, but up close it's more relaxed. Unless you are the plaintiff. Or the defendant.
Where British libel law differs from American law is in the area of burden of proof. In the U.S. it lies with the plaintiff; in the U.K., with the defendant. American law requires that the plaintiff prove not only that written statements are incorrect but also, in the case of a public figure, that the publication knew this when it printed them and thus did so with malice. British law requires the defendant to prove that what was printed was correct.
Our case hinged on a few sentences buried within a 17-page story on Elaine's, the famed New York literary restaurant which celebrated its 40th anniversary two years ago. The story, which appeared in our July 2002 issue, was written by A. E. Hotchner, the distinguished journalist and author who had been Ernest Hemingway's pal and had written a memoir of their friendship. Deep into the V.F. article was an anecdote told by Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's magazine and an Elaine's regular. He said that the only time he remembered the place being hushed was when Roman Polanski had walked in not long after the brutal murder of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, in August 1969. According to Lapham, the director had stopped in New York while on his way from London to Los Angeles, where his wife's funeral was to be held. Lapham went on to relate how Polanski joined his table and seated himself between Lapham and a Scandinavian model who was there with Lapham's friend Edward Perlberg. Lapham claimed that he saw Polanski make a pass at the model, invoking the name of his wife as he did so. Polanski denied that the incident ever took place, and sued the magazine in England for libel for the edition published there.
I first met Polanski a dozen or so years ago in Paris and have certainly admired his work as a director. We have friends in common, such as Robert Evans, who produced Polanski's film Chinatown and was head of production at Paramount when Polanski made Rosemary's Baby for the studio. At dinner one night in Los Angeles, a year or so after the suit was filed, Warren Beatty, another of Polanski's chums, urged me to consider settling the case, arguing forcefully that Polanski truly believed the magazine had wronged him. And a year and a half ago, at a dinner for Diane von Furstenberg in Paris, I talked with Polanski at length about the suit. We were still in the process of gathering our information, and I thought there might be a way of resolving it outside of court. There are some cases that are important to fight, but I didn't really think this was one of them. Except for the fact that, once our evidence had been collected, I believed that the gist of our story was true, and I wasn't going to say otherwise.
I was buoyed by the fact that our chief witness would be Lapham himself, a patrician throwback to old-school editing values of intellect, curiosity, smoking, and drinking. He is a man of the utmost integrity.
Which brought us all to Courtroom No. 13, presided over that week by the Honorable Mr. Justice Eady, resplendent in his wig and silk robe with a sash and magnificent mauve cuffs. Our team comprised our solicitor, David Hooper, whom I have worked with for more than a decade, and our barrister, Tom Shields, Q.C.—or Queen's Counsel. Shields is the son of the former managing director of Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail. He has a posh accent, and I was told that he owns his own cricket pitch—in American terms, his own baseball diamond. Polanski was represented by John Kelsey-Fry, also a Q.C. He is a barrister with a background in criminal law who once prosecuted one of the Kray brothers. I liked that. I also liked the fact that he smoked. He looked a bit like Anthony Newley. And he looked like a man who wanted to win.
The jury selection produced what would be one of many disappointments for us. British courts don't feature the sort of jury-interview process we have in America. Rather, the names of potential jurors are put on pieces of paper. They are then crudely shuffled by the court clerk, and the first 12 names are called out. Hoping for a female majority, we got instead three women and nine men. Most of the men were young.
Prior to the trial, Polanski had gotten around a major obstacle. If he sued in the U.S. and showed up in person, he would likely be arrested for a crime committed more than a quarter of a century before. If he sued in the U.K. and showed up in person, he would run the risk of extradition back to the United States. Polanski's lawyers argued that for him to get a fair hearing he should be allowed to fight his case in the U.K. from the safety of France. The House of Lords, in a landmark decision, by a majority of three to two, overruled the Court of Appeal, which had unanimously ruled against Polanski's being allowed to give his evidence from France.
A video link between Paris and London, by which Polanski could both be interviewed and watch the proceedings, was set up. For my part, I felt this put us at a disadvantage, in that the jury could not see him except when he was testifying. They could not watch his face, or his mannerisms, as the case unfolded.
Polanski, still handsome and animated at 71, was a superb witness. During his first day of testimony, he stood for a while and then politely asked the court's permission to sit down. Ever the director, by the second day he was already seated when the testimony began, and the camera had seemingly been moved in closer, so that he appeared larger on the screen. On the witness stand, Polanski denied that he had tried to seduce the Scandinavian model, calling the anecdote "an abominable lie" which showed "callous indifference" to his wife's murder. He admitted under cross-examination, however, that a month after his wife's murder he had begun having sex again, on a casual basis. He also admitted that he had been in Elaine's "around that period," in August 1969, but said that the only time he had gone there he had been with Mia Farrow.
Farrow came to give testimony on his behalf, and her arrival caused a commotion both outside the courthouse and within Court No. 13. She is still child-like at 60 and came across as slightly dazed and waifish. Farrow, who in 1968 had starred in Rosemary's Baby, recalled meeting Polanski at Elaine's after Tate's death. She testified that he was a wreck when she saw him. Asked if she had remained with him the whole night, Farrow said that she wasn't sure, but that she thought her then boyfriend, the conductor André Previn, had picked them up. According to her original statement, she thought they might have dropped Polanski off at his hotel, the Essex House, on Central Park South, before driving to the airport for a flight to Martha's Vineyard. As most New Yorkers know, going from Elaine's, on Second Avenue and 88th Street, to Central Park South and then out to La Guardia in time for a dusk flight to the Vineyard would have meant that her dinner with Polanski would probably have had to end in the early evening. (Note to midwestern readers: This would seem unlikely, as Elaine's doesn't start hopping until 9 or 10.)
I felt that both Lapham and Perlberg proved to be solid, thoughtful witnesses. Lapham recounted the evening at Elaine's in terms similar to those which had appeared in the article. Confronted with the fact that Polanski had flown directly from London to Los Angeles after hearing of his wife's murder, Lapham admitted that it was impossible for the incident to have occurred before the burial of Sharon Tate, that it must have happened on Polanski's way back to London. Perlberg, a friend of Lapham's, is now a retired Wall Street executive. The London tabloids referred to him as a "financier." He recalled the evening as well. He testified that he did not see or hear Polanski's reported advances on his date. But Perlberg said that he did recall Polanski's sitting beside her and that she stood up suddenly and asked to leave.
Polanski said that he could barely recall a thing about his time in New York during that period. (Indeed, in his earlier letters of complaint, he said he had no memory of having been in New York at the time.) He was dependent on Farrow's recollections. Our two witnesses spoke with confidence about what they saw and heard that night, but they were rigorously cross-examined on the details of the evening.
Now is as good a time as any to review why the man whose good name we were accused of besmirching and on whose reputation the jury had to place a value could not be in the courtroom that week. In early 1977, Polanski, then 43, had been hired to photograph some girls for a French fashion magazine. He was directed to one young girl, whom he met with her mother at their home in Woodland Hills, in Los Angeles. The girl was 13. She had a dog and a pet bird. "I was rather disappointed," Polanski wrote in his autobiography. "[She] was about my own height, slim and quite graceful, with an unexpectedly husky voice for her age—a good-looking girl, but nothing sensational."
A week after that first encounter, Polanski drove back to the girl's house in his rented Mercedes, and the pair went for a walk in the hills so that he could take some photographs. According to the girl's subsequent grand-jury testimony, he told her to take off her top, and he shot her breasts. A few weeks later Polanski turned up at the house in Woodland Hills again and said that he was going to take her to see a friend and that he wanted to shoot some more pictures, but that they had to hurry because the afternoon light was fading. The girl wanted to bring along a friend as a chaperone, she recalled in a recent interview, but Polanski talked her out of it. Her mother was unaware that she was alone with Polanski.
He drove her to his friend's house and began photographing her. Polanski poured her a glass of Cristal champagne from a bottle he had found in the fridge and refilled her glass from time to time. Polanski then led her outside to take pictures of her in a Jacuzzi. He produced a yellow vial, and they each took a part of a Quaalude. She said he urged her to remove more and more of her clothes until she was completely naked. According to the girl, Polanski began taking nude photos of her in the hot tub. And then he took his clothes off and joined her. When he attempted to grope her, she said, she rushed out and went inside to dry off. Polanski followed her into a bedroom, kissed her, and began to perform oral sex on her. She said she asked him to stop several times, whereupon he began to have intercourse with her. When he discovered that she was not on the pill, Polanski, ever the gentleman, withdrew, and then proceeded to sodomize the 13-year-old. Afterward, as he drove her home, the girl recalled, Polanski said: "Don't tell your mother about this, and don't tell your boyfriend, either. This is our secret."
The case absolutely floored the American public, even in the sexually libertine days of the late 1970s. Polanski was indicted on six counts—including sodomy and rape by use of drugs. After negotiations, he was allowed to plead guilty to one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and the other charges were dropped. He spent a total of 42 days in jail undergoing psychiatric tests before fleeing the country in fear of a stiff prison sentence.
Under English law, the jury in London was permitted to hear only the outline of the formal conviction and not the background to the offense as testified to by the girl in front of the grand jury. The details I've mentioned could not be published in the U.K. during Polanski's suit against Vanity Fair; after the verdict, the reporting restrictions were lifted.
Thursday was the day for the barristers to wrap up their arguments. Polanski's case essentially boiled down to his insistence that he could not have been so unfeeling as to use his late wife's name in the manner described by Lapham. And that the director had been at Elaine's, but that he had gone to the restaurant after Sharon Tate's funeral and not before it, as our story had said. His lawyers further stated that the incident had not occurred at all and that the defense witnesses should not be believed. Our side agreed that we had gotten the timing on the story wrong, but maintained that the incident happened substantially as stated. Furthermore, Shields argued, Polanski did not have the sort of personal reputation that is capable of being sullied. He elaborated on this by pointing out that, since Polanski was suing in a British court, any damage to his reputation was limited to those readers living in England and Wales, countries Polanski had not visited for 27 years.
When the jury retired to deliberate, both sides repaired to the hallway outside the court, where they gathered in two groups. That morning, a mystery woman had appeared in court. Polanski had been represented by Debra Tate, Sharon's sister, who sat in court for most of the trial, and later by his third wife, the actress Emmanuelle Seigner. But this woman was new. She had hair to her shoulders and bangs. She looked to be in her 40s or 50s and had an ample chest. But she was dressed like a little girl, in a shirt with a Peter Pan collar, buttoned up to the top, and a long skirt. We were interested in finding out who she was.
By that point, I was not feeling particularly encouraged. But as we headed to lunch, I had a moment's uplift. A nice-looking older fellow who was part of the city's maintenance crew was walking toward us, moving at a brisk pace and talking on a cell phone. Barely looking at me, he said "Love your magazine" as he passed. I turned around and said "Thanks!" He didn't stop or even slow down.
The jury deliberations went into Friday. By lunchtime, we still didn't have a verdict, and so my wife and I slipped out a back entrance and ducked into a pub across the street for a quick bite. The place was called the Seven Stars, named not for its food but for the seven provinces of Denmark. It had been named four centuries ago, long before the courts were built, when a river ran through the area. We walked in and were confronted by the publican, a sturdy, cheerful woman with claret-colored hair.
"Well, if it isn't Mr. Graydon Carter himself," she said, clearly a businesswoman who keeps abreast of the goings-on across the street. "Welcome to the Elaine's of London!"
Her name was Roxy Beaujolais, and she cast her arm out in a gesture meant for me to take in the room. "And over here," she said, "is our literary table." She motioned in the direction of a small, circular table where two female office workers were polishing off lunch.
"Now, a gentleman such as yourself will, I expect, be wanting a table."
I indicated that this was indeed the case.
"Fine, then, let me show you to one of our terrace tables." We walked out onto the street, where on the narrowest of sidewalks was the narrowest of tables. We sat down. The table wobbled. As Roxy was running through the specials, a cab pulled up, and through the window I could see the passenger. It was the mystery woman from the day before. She got out and Roxy rushed over to give her a hug and a kiss. She introduced us.
"Mr. and Mrs. Graydon Carter, I'd like you to meet Marilyn Lownes." We all said hello, and the mystery lady, now dressed much more provocatively than the day before, went into the pub. "You know who she is, don't you?" Roxy asked. "No," I replied. She said Marilyn was the wife of Victor Lownes, part owner and manager way back when of the London Playboy Club, and a friend and consort of Polanski's. Victor Lownes was ill and could not attend the trial in support of his old chum, and so his wife came in his stead.
Roxy indicated that Mrs. Lownes was a public figure in her own right. "You know why, don't you?" I said I didn't. "Why, she's the first Playboy Playmate to go full-frontal. You know, the tits, the bush, the whole thing!" Roxy is a woman of rare candor and social observation.
The verdict was less entertaining than lunch. The jury found for Polanski and asked for damages of around $100,000—a quarter of the maximum the judge said was possible to award for very serious cases. The trial over, Lapham, Perlberg, and I left the Royal Courts of Justice. Ahead of us was the wall of reporters and photographers who had been there all week. Other days I had tried to walk straight ahead and not look too dopey. This time, I had to stop and give a comment. I said this: "I find it amazing that a man who lives in France can sue a magazine that is published in America in a British courtroom. As a father of four children—one of whom is a 12-year-old daughter—I find it equally outrageous that this story is considered defamatory, given the fact that Mr. Polanski can't be here because he slept with a 13-year-old girl a quarter of a century ago. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the wheels of British justice move. I wish Mr. Polanski well. Now, if you'll excuse me, we have a magazine to put out."
The final word on the case belonged to Samantha Geimer, the woman who said Polanski had raped and sodomized her those many years ago. Now a married mother of three and living in Hawaii, she had her own opinion of the verdict. "The libel case makes no sense," she told The Mirror. "Surely a man like this hasn't got a reputation to tarnish?"
I was stirred but not shaken by the verdict. Richard Ingram, founder of Private Eye, eventually relinquished the reins to Ian Hislop, a younger man, not because he was tired of editing the magazine, he told me once, but because he was tired of the libel suits. The landmark decision to allow plaintiffs to sue in England from the comfort of their homes elsewhere will turn the country's court system into a souk for those shopping their libel cases. I pray I never wind up in a British libel trial again. If I do, look out, Dominick!
Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair. His books include What We've Lost (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a critique of the Bush administration, and Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties (Knopf).
