May 1 – Roman Polanski’s films are macabre, heavy with themes of isolation, rage, guilt and humiliation. “He seems to have been born with fixed and pessimistic conclusions about the human condition,” says a Polanski compatriot and journalist.

His life, unfolding like a script that only he could have written, has been brushed by the worst excesses of the century, including Nazi genocide and the brutal murders of his wife and friends. His life is shadowed by gossip and tragedy.

There is now new turmoil. Polanski, 43, has been charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl at the Mulholland Drive home of a friend, actor Jack Nicholson. The six felony counts include unlawful intercourse, rape by use of drugs, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, perversion and sodomy.

Polanski has pleaded not guilty to the charges and said, “I can’t wait to be vindicated.”

Polanski survived a brutal childhood running from the Nazis in occupied Poland. Roaming the countryside alone for six years, he scrounged for food and shelter in peasant villages until the war ended.

In 1963, with a motion picture called “Knife in the Water,” he was heralded as perhaps Poland’s finest film-maker. However, events began to track Polanski again. In the space of a few years, a group of his closest friends from home, among the cream of Poland’s artistic community, died.

Polanski extraordinary talent brought him to America in 1967 to direct the financially and artistically acclaimed “Rosemary’s Baby,” broadening his reputation as a craftsman. Then, on Aug. 9, 1969, members of the Charles Manson gang intruded on his Bel-Air home and killed his wife, actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent.

Through it all, Polanski has survived and close friends refer to him as warm, sensitive, caring and incessantly loyal.

On advice from his lawyers, Polanski would not be interviewed. Some Hollywood friends, in what they felt was a protective move, also remained silent. However, others who have known or have been close to him for years did communicate. From them and from articles, interviews and books, and from his films, a portrait emerges.

He was born in Paris Aug. 18, 1933, the only child of Polish-Jewish parents. When he was 3, his father, a doctor, moved the family back to Poland. As the Germans sealed off Cracow’s Jewish ghetto, Polanski and his parents were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp where his mother later died. Polanski, however, escaped: “My father cut the wires,” Polanski recalled later, “and I was off.”

He drifted from village to village, taken in for periods of time by poor Catholic peasants. Often he would join them next to the railroad tracks that cut through the villages to watch the huge freight trains gorged with Jews on their way to the ovens.

“You have to remember,” said David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Best and the Brightest” and a former New York Times correspondent in Poland, “what it was like to be Jewish in Poland during the embers of World War II It was a dreadful time – 3 million Jews in Poland before the war and 30,000 after. Polish anti-Semitism was worse than in Germany. All these are powerful forces in the internal twistings and warpings of Roman Polanski.”

Polanski has written of a childhood inundated with terror. Picking berries one day in a field, he was spotted by a group of German soldiers. For fun, they used the scampering boy as target practice, missing him by inches. Another time, playing in an empty bomb shelter, he was ambushed and almost murdered by a Polish thug. The beating has left Polanski with a steel plate in his head.

Often he would escape to the movies: “I just enjoyed going to the cinema,” Polanski has said. “My parents were taken away and I didn’t go to school much. The cinema gave me more than school could at that time. The cinema was very cheap because most of it was German propaganda. There were slogans up like ‘Only Pigs Go to the Movies.’ I didn’t care if I was a pig as long as it moved.”

After the war, Polanski was reunited with his father, who survived the camps. The nightmares of those years linger still. Said Richard Sylbert, production designer for “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” and a close friend, “We stood in an airport together somewhere in the world not long ago. Roman overheard a group of people speaking German. ‘It is on painful for me to hear that,’ he said. ‘It reminds me of the night my father told me to run.’”

His father enrolled him in a technical school to become an electrician, but the son was soon bored. At age 12, he turned to acting, finding roles in radio and theater and becoming one of Poland’s leading child performers.

When his father remarried, the boy moved out, supporting himself with acting and occasional money from home. He enrolled in art school and graduated at 20, but his spirit already was taken with film. Encouraged by a professor, Polanski underwent the grueling 10-day examination required for applicants to the Polish National Film Academy in Lodz, described by some as the Cal-tech of the world’s cinema schools. He passed and for five years immersed himself in a curriculum that covered every aspect of movie making from music to developing film. To this day, he amazes colleagues with his grasp of the technical aspects of motion pictures, maintaining an ability to tear down and rebuild the most sophisticated cameras.

His work at the school, influenced by liberal access to Western cinema, began winning international prizes and already a theme had been carved. Of “Two Men and a Wardrobe,” an early Polanski short, he said, “I wanted to show a society that rejects the nonconformist or anyone who is in its eyes afflicted with a moral or physical burden.”

“Knife in the Water,” his first feature-length movie, was made as a graduation project and gained Polanski international prominence. The film concerned the effect a young man has on a husband and wife during a yachting excursion. It was the first Polish feature widely distributed in the United States and won, among other honors, the Venice Film Critics Award and a 1963 Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

Polanski had become “the great Polanski,” a term he used brashly for years. Riding the crest, he married the beautiful Polish actress Barbara Kwiatkowska (whose stage name was Barbara Lass). The union lasted only a short time and remains, according to friends, one of Polanski’s deepest scars.

Meanwhile, he had moved to the core of Poland’s flourishing artistic community. For days at a time, the young film-makers would gather at a club in Warsaw called Spatif and discuss Bunuel and Hitchcock. And invariably leading the discussion was Polanski, an independent spirit in the postwar Poland of regimented Stalinist orthodoxy.

But then in a major policy speech, Wladyslaw Gomulka, head of Poland’s Communist Party, attacked Polanski for spreading corrupt Western attitudes. With a successful debut film to his credit, he suddenly became a political liability. No one would sign him for another production, except for a short film made with funds raised by Voytek Frykowski, the son of a black-market king. Frykowski later died with Sharon Tate.

In the next years, a group of Polanski’s closest friends from Spatif all died: Zbigniew Cybulski, a famed Polish actor, was killed when he stumbled and fell under the wheels of a train that he had been running for; Krystof Komeda, called by some “the Quincy Jones of Poland,” a doctor and gifted jazz musician who scored a number of Polanski films (“Knife in the Water,” “Cul-de-Sac,” “Rosemary’s Baby”), was killed in an auto accident; Andrzej Munk, a highly respected director, was also killed in an auto accident, and March Hlasko, a great Polish novelist who wrote perhaps the most important book of the postwar era, “The Eighth Day of the Week,” was found dead of a drug overdose.

“It’s almost a kind of thematic thing,” said Halberstam, who married a Polish woman and friend of Polanski’s. “People being highly self-destructive, pushing their luck, almost daredevils.”

When Polanski came to the United States for the first time to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, he was met at the airport by Bronislau Kaper, now 75, an Oscar-winning composer (“Lili”), a native of Poland long transplanted here.

“I remember the Academy gave us a car with a Polish flag flying on the aerial,” recalled Kaper during a conversation in his Beverly Hills home. “Roman loved that.” Polanski spoke little English then and he and Kaper would converse in rapid Polish about films, music and Hollywood.

On the first night of Polanski’s visit there was a party hosted by the Academy for the foreign directors whose films had been nominated. “There was this touching meeting with Roman and King Vidor,” said Kaper. “Vidor had seen ‘Knife in the Water’ and asked Roman how he got the lighting a certain way. Roman was overwhelmed. It was like Beethoven asking me how I wrote a song.”

When Polanski began to make films in America, Kaper remained a patriarchal figure offering professional and personal guidance, introducing the young director to a cross-section of Los Angeles society and artistic communities.

“Roman is a man of many contrasts,” said Kaper, “a combination of very mature intellect and an almost naive curiosity for any aspect of life.”

There is a degree of awe at Polanski’s intellectual abilities: “Roman will suddenly burst facts upon you,” said Kaper. “He told me how the blue jays that visit my house see. He drew the optics for me. He has enormous respect for music. Once he brought over two recordings of a Dvorak Quartet and discussed the difference. He directed the opera ‘Rigoletto’ in Munich. Roman also knows and can sing by heart all the Beatles songs.”

Polanski has been known to recite pages of Potemkin’s “Eugene Onegin” in Russian and later, by recollection, deliver the Polish translation. “He has an abnormal memory,” said Kaper.

Polanski is in remarkable physical shape. A passionate skier, ardent bicyclist, racer of fast cars, airplane pilot, he also studied karate with the late Bruce Lee. Kaper, an expert fencer, has himself taken karate for 15 years and spars sometimes with Polanski. “Everybody who goes through persecution,” said Kaper, “has a built-in desire for self-defense.”

Another reason for self-defense might be Polanski’s size. He is 5 foot 4 and sensitive about it: “If you look at Roman and the enormous chest development and shoulders on that tiny body,” said a Polanski watcher, “you know he is compensating for his lack of stature.”

Bronislau Kaper sat back and thought about the way Polanski’s life has progressed: “Things happen to everybody,” he said. “The impression that Roman is ill-fated is medieval. I think he has tremendous resistance. We are all in a way ill-fated. The day I received the Academy Award, I called my mother in the East to tell her. She instead told me that my sister that day was crossing the street and had been killed by a car.”

Polanski likes to have people around. He is, his friends say, a riveting conversationalist, a graceful host and possessor of a keen talent to charm. He loves parties.

“He is very seldom, if ever, alone,” said Jerzy Kosinski, a close friend and countryman whose own terror as a child in Poland was described in his book, “The Painted Bird.” “Roman has a preoccupation with human interaction and how it manifests itself. It was exactly the same in school. Wherever Roman was, there was always a group of people. And there was always a telephone — he likes to be in contact with the rest of the world. I think his need to be friendly with everyone comes from the restrictions he’s had in his life.”

Among his close friends are Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, whom he directed in “Chinatown,” Hugh Hefner, Mike Nichols, Paramount executive Robert. Evans, Adam Holender, a New York cinematographer who grew up with Polanski in Poland, and Richard Sylbert, at whose house Polanski stayed after the Tate murders.

A Polanski party, according to some of those who attend, is not as raucous as one might expect. “Once a week he’d have a gathering,” said a friend. “We’d drink a little wine and Roman would play the Beatles. He was a perfect host, usually in the kitchen making hamburgers, steaks or lamb chaps. There were always nice people at his house.”

Said Mia Farrow, the star of “Rosemary’s Baby,” a close friend of Sharon Tate’s and a frequent guest at Polanski parties, “Roman is at his best when there are people he likes around. He’s especially witty, extremely well informed and impossible to win an argument with, defending his position to the end. He is a great raconteur.”

Polanski maintains a house in London and an apartment in France. He has become a French citizen, partly because of a disenchantment with the United States after the Tate murders, he has said. When in Los Angeles, he often stays at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

A few weeks ago, Polanski returned from an emotional visit to Poland, his first time back in 15 years. Said Kaper, “It was though he had never been away. He remembered the smallest details, waitresses, friends. He visited with his father and uncles and gave a long interview to the newspaper. He is still attached to Poland,”

These days Polanski is maintaining high visibility. He attended the Westwood press screening of “Black Sunday,” a film produced by friend Evans, and has shown up at gallery openings, parties and such Hollywood-favorite restaurants as Ma Maison. At a showing of the epic Polish film “Nights and Days,” Polanski sat through its four-and-one-half hours and “cried like a baby,” a friend reported.

“It is important,” said Kaper, “he doesn’t hide.”

Polanski, at a recent court appearance, was asked how the current troubles would affect his life. “I’m used to grief,” he said. “This is a trifle.”

William Tennant, Polanski’s farmer theatrical agent and business manager and now a production executive at Columbia Pictures, was the one who had to inform the director that his wife and friends had been murdered. The police had summoned Tennant from a tennis court to identify the bodies. The overseas telephone call — Tennant here, Polanski in London — was described by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry in their book, “Helter Skelter”:

On reaching home, William Tennant made what was, for him, the most difficult call. He was not only Polanski’s business manager but a close friend. Tennant checked his watch, automatically adding nine hours to get London time. Though it would be late in the evening, he guessed that Polanski might still be working, trying to tie up his various film projects before returning home the following Tuesday, and he tried the number of his townhouse. He guessed right. Polanski and several associates were going over a scene in the script of “The Day of the Dolphin” when the telephone rang.

Polanski would remember the conversation as follows:

“Roman, there’s been a disaster in a house.”

“Which house?”

“Your house.” Then, in a rush, “Sharon is dead, and Voytek and Gibby and Jay.”

“No, no, no, no!” Surely there was a mistake. Both men now crying, Tennant reiterated that it was true; he had gone to the house himself.

“How?’ Polanski asked. He was thinking, he later said, not of fire but a landslide, a not uncommon thing in the Los Angeles hills, especially after heavy rains; sometimes whole houses were buried, which meant that perhaps they could still be alive. Only then did Tennant tell him that they had been murdered.

Polanski still harbors deep bitterness over how he believes the press portrayed his personal life with Sharon Tate.

“There was a lot of talk about parties in our home,” Polanski told an interviewer soon after the murders. “They are true. There was a constant party. There wasn’t an evening without friends. Even when I was working hard, if she was working hard, there was always someone coming in the evening. There was always Sharon waiting. I’m sorry I must stop for a moment. The last time I talked to her was a few hours before the tragedy occurred. She wanted to know if I wanted a birthday party. I said, ‘Yes, let’s hold one’…

“In my house there were parties where people smoked pot. I was not at a Hollywood party where someone did not smoke pot …

“Suddenly Sharon became responsible for her own death. The press was despicable. They talked about orgies at the house, sadism. They sensationalized something that was already sensational. They were criminal.”

Later he said, “All of you know how beautiful she was. She was one of the most beautiful women — if not the most beautiful woman — in the world. But few of you know how good she was. She was vulnerable. She couldn’t refuse any friendship.”

Polanski had met her at a party hosted by producer Martin Ransohoff. It was the producer who suggested that Miss Tate, whose best-known role had been in “Valley of the Dolls,” might be right for a part in a movie Polanski was making that spoofed horror films. It was to be called “The Fearless Vampire Killers.”

Polanski was, at first, unimpressed with her and rather aloof, At Ransohoff’s insistence, however, he gave the actress a screen test. It worked and she was hired for the part. The film, which featured a memorable Chaplinesque performance by the late Jack MacGowren, also included Miss Tate in a number of bathtub scenes. Acting in the film, as well, was Polanski himself as an impish assistant to MacGowran’s professorial vampire hunter. In the end, Miss Tate gets Polanski right where she wants him — in the neck.

Before the filming was over, the couple had become off-screen lovers as well. Nude stills of Miss Tate from the movie appeared in the March, 1967, Playboy. The photos had been taken by Polanski.

The months that followed have been described by friends as the happiest of Polanski’s life. The couple lived at the beach in Santa Monica prior to moving to the ill-starred house on Cielo Drive in Bel-Air.

“We were all amazed that someone like Roman could have found such peace emotionally,” said Kosinski. “They were extremely comfortable with each other. To her he was a maverick and she had enormous tolerance for him.”

Said Kaper, “Life with Sharon was lovely. She was the loveliest person in the world. She was a real woman. She had this beautiful charm, a girl not trying to be stronger or the aggressor. She was ideal for Roman. They had lots of fun. Their marriage was sunshine and roses.”

Polanski’s attitude toward women and the actresses with whom he has worked often has been criticized. One observer noted that “as far as actresses are concerned, Roman refuses to admit that they’re capable of a logical consecutive action. He can be quite autocratic with actresses.”

Yet he is able to elicit fine performances. Examples are Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby,” Catherine Deneuve in “Repulsion” and Faye Dunaway in “Chinatown.”

Mia Farrow remains intensely loyal to Polanski. “He is certainly one of the most exciting directors,” she said by telephone from her home in England. “It is my fervent wish to work for him again. He was a great help to me. He was particular and exacting about where one
moves and how they act. But within the confines of that certain rigid structure, if one obeyed the rules, there was an enormous freedom. He laid the groundwork but the emotional aspects were still your own. Roman doesn’t fiddle around with your soul as an actor.”

A look at Polanski’s films is a look at Polanski.

“What I like is a realistic situation where things don’t quite fit in,” he has said.

Much of his work examines themes of sexuality — sexual rivalry in “Knife in the Water,” sexual frustration in “Repulsion,” sexual humiliation in “Cul-de-Sac,” sexual hysteria in “Rosemary’s Baby.”

“Polanski’s vision is profoundly pessimistic,” said a student of his films. “Exploring man’s sexuality, he finds humiliation, betrayal, violence and madness.”

Cruelty and violence combine to weave a dark thread through his work. In “Chinatown,” Polanski himself played the little hood who coldly cuts open Jack NichoIson’s nostril like a slice of bologna. In “The Tenant,” he portrays a lonely outcast who rents a Paris apartment and assumes the identity of the previous female occupant. His character ends it all by jumping out the window in drag, bloodily hitting the pavement and then crawling up a staircase again far a second leap from the window.

From the beginning, Polanski received important recognition for his films’ style and expertise: “Two Men and a Wardrobe,” which won five international awards: “Le Gros et Le Maigre,” made in Paris in 1960 with Polanski playing a cringing servant debased by a gross and sadistic master, and described by him as “a parable on man’s survival in a brutal world,” and “Mammals,” a short made in Poland concerning two men who reverse the master-servant relationship as they take turns hauling each other across a frozen landscape.

After the success of “Knife in the Water,” Polanski and Polish-born producer Gene Gutowski moved to London to make “Repulsion.” Some critics compared it to Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and praised it for dazzling aural and visual images. Others called it “shock for its own sake.” Wrote critic Judith Crist, “A voyeur’s wallow in schizophrenia and murder to no point beyond sensation — but no one could deny the creative talent”

Polanski has written that “Cul-de-Sac” is his personal favorite. It is a black and grotesque comedy about a middle-aged transvestite (Donald Pleasence), his nymphomaniacal wife (Francoise Dorleac) and a gangster (Lionel Stander) who uses their 11th-century castle as a hideaway. “I love it,” Polanski has said, “because the words and action are contrary to the expected.” It won the 1966 Golden Bear prize for best entry at the Berlin Film Festival.

Polanski was induced to come to Hollywood 10 years ago by producer William Castle, who wanted him to read the proofs of Ira Levin’s novel “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film, about a young wife in Manhattan who unknowingly becomes involved in a coven, was the first Polanski did that he hadn’t written himself. He also became the first film-maker from an Iron Curtain country to direct a picture in Hollywood.

It was while basking in the triumph of “Rosemary’s Baby” and preparing to start “The Day of the Dolphin” that Sharon Tate was murdered. His friend Nichols took over on “Dolphin.” It took Polanski a year before he was ready to work again. The project he chose was “Macbeth.”

The film was adapted for the screen with the help of British writer Kenneth Tynan. “It’s no wonder Polanski chose ‘Macbeth,'” Tynan told an interviewer at the time. “The world of the play is one to which, from childhood, he has been no stranger — a place of considered cruelty, of ambush and unforeseen loss, of tyranny founded on bloodshed, of bright omens leading to pits of howling despair, of revenge brutally visited not only upon enemies but upon their kin.”

With “Chinatown,” Polanski earned an Academy Award nomination as best director. The film received 11 nominations in all including ones for Nicholson and Miss Dunaway. Screenwriter Robert Towne, however, was the only winner. It was an ironic twist since Polanski and Towne argued vehemently on how the film should end. Polanski had, of course, won out.

“The Tenant,” released last year, brought Polanski back to familiar turf. One critic’s description: “Polanski’s best films have always shown a surrealist influence, and ‘The Tenant’ dramatizes the basic principles of the surrealist credo — the idea that the rational order we try to impose on our lives is merely a flimsy facade masking the chaos beneath the surface.”

Polanski is scheduled to go to trial May 11 in Santa Monica Superior Court.

By LEE GRANT