by Greg King
“Just about the only really happily married couple I knew in Hollywood,” recalled Robert Evans, “were Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.”1 The first months of their marriage were idyllic enough, with Roman fawning and Sharon happily playing the role of wife at their rented house on Summit Ridge Drive. But, soon after returning to Hollywood at the beginning of June 1968, the temptations of fame and fortune apparently became too much for Roman to resist. According to Zofia Komeda, “He changed when he went to America.”2
Sharon had always known of Roman’s amorous exploits in the two years prior to their marriage. During the early years in London, Roman, according to one biographer, “started playing around again on the side, mostly with old girlfriends, whenever Sharon went back to Hollywood for a part in a picture. Then, when they returned to Hollywood for Rosemary’s Baby, Roman found a whole new field of girls that interested him. Sharon soon learned that he was playing around.”3
Roman was quite content to carry on exactly as he had been before the marriage. To him, his numerous dalliances meant nothing, and certainly did not diminish his love for his wife. Roman was, and had always been, a womanizer, and he saw no reason to relinquish his old habits merely because he had signed a piece of paper in a London registry office.
“I am pretty sure that Sharon knew what was going on,” says Victor Lownes. “Roman had always screwed around, and I don’t think he made any effort to change when he married Sharon. He had always been the quintessential playboy. There wasn’t a lot she could really do about it.”4
Naively, however, Roman apparently believed that word of his extramarital affairs would not reach Sharon. But Hollywood gossip was notorious, and it did not take long before she knew what he had been up to on the evenings when he claimed to be at business dinners or meetings with studio executives. Kenneth Tynan tells of one incident in Hollywood. Polanski, who was off driving round the city, pulled up behind a beautiful girl and shouted that she had a “beautiful arse.” The woman who turned round was Sharon.5
The uncomfortable reality of the situation began to sink in by the fall of 1968. While Sharon was prepared to devote herself to Roman and give up her career, it quickly became apparent that he had no wish to feel tied down to a happy domestic scene presided over by an attentive wife. At their wedding, he had declared as much to a reporter from The Times of London. These differing expectations of what their marriage would bring soon began to tear at the already fragile threads which held the union together.
Sharon and Roman had been married less than a year, and already she knew of several of his extramarital affairs. The revelation of one of these was apparently very shocking indeed. Roman had purchased a Sony videocassette camera and recorder, then very much a novelty. During one romantic encounter, he had left it running while he and Sharon made love.
One day, when Roman was away, Sharon and some friends discovered a stash of videotapes without labels. “We put them on the machine,” a friend recalled, “and they turned out to be of Roman making love to someone else on their bed. Sharon turned white, and then got madder than hell. The marriage almost ended there.”6
There is no doubt that Roman loved Sharon, but his idea of a committed relationship ran counter to hers, and there were bound to be problems. For Sharon, the whole idea of marriage was one of commitment, a lifetime partnership and trust, built around loyalty between husband and wife. Because so much of her childhood and teenage years had been spent moving from home to home, with her father frequently absent on overseas postings, Sharon longed to have the kind of stable family life which she had never really known. She had thought that in marrying Roman she would finally tame him, but the reality was difficult. “She’d call me in tears,” a friend remembered, “and say, ‘I know he’s with so-and-so.’ and I’d say, ‘Well, you know where the door is. Walk out.’ She didn’t, of course, because I think she realized that it was just the way he was, it didn’t have anything to do with her, and that he really was nuts about her.”7
Judy Gutowski, who by this time had separated from her husband Gene, later recalled, “This was when I really began to dislike Roman.… She’d cry on my shoulder, ‘Why must he be this way, he’s humiliating me, why can’t he be faithful, I’ve done everything he’s wanted me to do?’ Then I’d talk to Roman, bawl him out, and he’d pretend to be just as unhappy. ‘Oh, Judy,’ he’d say, ‘I can’t change what I am. She knew what she was getting. If I could change, I really would.’”8
“I wish I had the tolerance to let everybody have complete freedom,” Sharon once confided. “To be able to take a man home and make love and enjoy it without some lurking puritanical guilt interrupting the pleasure.… I get frightened, I get really frightened; mentally it’s what I want, but emotionally its more difficult to take.”9
In private, Sharon repeatedly confronted Roman over his infidelities. He later recalled that his affairs were “Sharon’s big hang-up.” But, as quickly as she would raise the issue, he rejected it, saying, “Remember, you said you don’t want to change me.”10 She had agreed to Roman’s style of life with reluctance, hoping that he would change. But Roman, in no hurry to abandon his pleasures, happily took her at her word, continuing his affairs, with “an indiscretion bordering on arrogance,” as one of Sharon’s friends later said.11
Sharon worried she would drive Roman away if she insisted he put a stop to his extramarital affairs. She played along, sweetness and light on the surface, but terribly hurt on the inside. Roman had his work, his friends, his priorities and his affairs. Aside from her family and own circle of friends, Sharon had nothing except Roman and her career.
It was not in Sharon’s nature to simply give up, to walk away from the situation when overcome with difficulties; if anything, her positive outlook worked against her, preventing her from grasping the realities of the situation in favor of expending effort and energy in trying to salvage what seemed to everyone else to be a doomed relationship. But her disillusion with married life began to impress itself upon those who knew Sharon best, and, for the first time that any of them could recall, she seemed very unhappy.
Increasingly, Sharon turned more and more to Jay Sebring for comfort and companionship. “Everyone knew Jay was still deeply in love with Sharon,” recalls Patty Faulkner, daughter of Sebring’s business partner John Madden.12 “Jay didn’t make any secret of the fact that he was still beholden to Sharon,” adds friend Skip Ward.13 Jay was careful to position himself in Sharon’s life, at her side to provide friendship and consolation. According to friends, she took Jay into her confidence, telling him the details of her unhappy married life with Roman. “Jay undoubtedly filled a void in Sharon’s life,” a friend says. “He managed to step in where Roman had failed. I mean that emotionally, not sexually. But I know there was an intimacy between them which just wasn’t there with Sharon and Roman. Jay was almost a third partner in that marriage.”14 Roman, if he resented the presence of his wife’s former boyfriend, said nothing. “I don’t think Roman realized how close they were,” says Skip Ward, “and I doubt that he knew, maybe to the end, how serious Jay was about Sharon.”15
On the surface, at least, Sharon and Roman seemed the perfect Hollywood couple, throwing themselves into the social scene with dizzying abandon. They haunted the clubs up and down the Sunset Strip, and the more exclusive parties in the elegant mansions high in the hills above the city.
Their constant companions were John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas. “John and I used to spend a lot of time with Sharon and Roman,” Michelle Phillips recalls. “They were a very popular couple, a very ‘of the moment’ couple. Sharon was the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. She had a sweetness about her that was rare. She just did not have any kind of mean-spiritedness in her. She was very open and genuine, not particularly intellectual, but people just loved her because she was beautiful and because she made an effort to make everyone feel welcome and loved.”16
Often, the two couples dined together at the Polansk
i house on Summit Ridge. “Sharon would make a big bowl of pasta, and we would all sit around the table and eat and laugh and talk for hours,” Michelle Phillips remembers. “She was very social, but in a homebody sort of way. She was happier staying home, cooking, entertaining friends, than she was in going out to clubs or parties. Above everything, I think she just wanted to be a very traditional wife.”17
Sharon frequently confided her frustrations and fears to Michelle Phillips. “She really wanted to be accepted,” Phillips recalls. “She worked very hard at breaking through to people, and it bothered her that she was dismissed so often. Because she was so beautiful, she knew that she was often the butt of jokes, in the same way that attractive women in Hollywood have always been the butt of the joke.”18
The telephone rang nearly every day in the Summit Ridge Drive house, alerting the Polanskis to the latest goings-on. The most frequent caller was Steve Brandt, a publicist with Guy McElwaine and Associates, who had been introduced to Sharon and Roman by the Phillipses. Brandt knew everyone in Hollywood, and liked to boast about his connections with the rich and famous. In reality, however, he was a loner, described by Michelle Phillips as “a rather pathetic guy,” always trying to insinuate himself into the town’s elite circles where he never quite fit on his own.19
If they grew tired of their circle of friends, Sharon and Roman might wander down to the Sunset Strip and club hop. Sharon far preferred to remain at home, cooking for her friends, watching television or reading. But Roman adored Hollywood nightlife, and Sharon faithfully accompanied him on his nightly forays, aware that her presence would at least guard against any temptation he might encounter. The most fashionable clubs—the Hullabaloo at Sunset and Vine, the Red Velvet, the Trip, Gazzari’s, the Whisky A Go-Go and The Daisy—were always filled with the beautiful people of Hollywood, along with a curious mixture of struggling musicians, would-be starlets and unwashed hippies who seemed peculiarly out of place in the posh surroundings.20 In the heat of the long summer nights, the music flowed up and down the Strip until dawn, leading the way to the watering holes and exclusive enclaves reserved for the well-to-do. The smell of marijuana wafted through the open doors of the clubs, but this was only the most prominent of the many offerings inside and down the back alleys lining the Strip.
Drugs became freely available, from marijuana and LSD—undoubtedly the most popular at the time—to cocaine and the newer thrills of mescaline and MDA. Since her days with Jay Sebring, Sharon had used drugs, mainly marijuana and LSD. But she had always done so out of a spirit of adventure and excitement rather than dependency. According to friends, Sharon occasionally continued to use drugs, but, for her, it was a matter of being social. She never became addicted, never lost her head to the temptations that came with fame and money. “Roman, on the other hand,” remembered a friend, “went off the deep end. He was down on Sunset Boulevard almost every night, haunting the strip clubs and picking up girls in his car, often taking them up into the hills, snorting a few pinches of cocaine and then screwing them.”21
Roman was too unused to American life and customs to be very discerning about the people with whom he was surrounding himself. After all, it was the era of the flower children and free love, and many of those men and women who crossed his path clearly fell beyond the bounds of the elite of Hollywood. Sharon, too, was naive in her opinions of people, completely trusting and always willing to believe the best of nearly everyone. Soon enough, with their fame and money, a house where parties were frequently thrown without regard to invitations or guest lists, and a reputation for free drugs, Sharon and Roman began to attract a disagreeable bunch of hangers-on, people on the fringes of society, users only concerned with themselves.
“Sharon and Roman were lax in a way,” recalls Leslie Caron, “and their house was very available. They invited an awful lot of people there, and I always thought that there was something really dangerous about the way they lived.”22 Neither Sharon nor Roman was very aware of the situation which was rapidly developing at the house on Summit Ridge Drive, but along the Strip, it had the growing and unwelcome reputation as a place to go for both connections and drugs. According to one friend, Sharon was living “a wonderful little fantasy,” in which there was never any thought as to abuse or unhappiness. She noticed the presence of unknown people in their house on several occasions, but tended to dismiss them as friends of Roman, or as hippies who had wandered in and were harmless.23 “I love the new generation,” she declared in an interview. “They’re fascinating and they’re fun. I think the hippies are great, they just want to be left alone and they want everybody to be nice and peaceful. That’s my philosophy, to live and let live.”24 In less than a year, Sharon would be dead, killed by the nice, peaceful hippies she found so exciting.
In June of 1968, Rosemary’s Baby was finally released to the general public after months of publicity build-up: “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby” read the copy on the promotional posters. It was an immediate critical and financial success, and guaranteed Polanski’s multi-picture deal with Paramount Studios. But the moral backlash against the film and its subject matter was just as swift. The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures—the former Legion of Decency—rated the film with a dreaded “C” for condemned, based upon both the subject matter and the infamous dream-rape sequence with its brief nudity. A similar reaction waited in England, where the British Board of Film Censors edited out several shots before allowing the film to be released.25 Still, Polanski had been validated as a director of major talent in Hollywood.
Sharon had declared her intention to give up her career once married. But she had previously signed to do a new film for Columbia Pictures. The Wrecking Crew, the fourth and last in a series of Matt Helm movies, starred Dean Martin as an American special agent, comically modeled on James Bond. The series had come from the Donald Hamilton novels of the same name, with a screenplay by William McGivern and directed by Phil Karlson. The plot was bare: a shipment of gold bullion is stolen from a train in Denmark, and Matt Helm is assigned to discover its whereabouts. It has, in fact, been taken by a Count Massimo Contini (Nigel Green), the greedy villan of the film, who, with the help of his assistants Linka Karensky (Elke Sommer), Lola Medina (Tina Louise) and Yu-Rang (Nancy Kwan), tries to prevent Helm from retrieving it. Along the way, Helm is constantly shadowed by Freya Carlson (Sharon), an agent acting as a tour guide for the visiting American.
While her role as Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls had been a dramatic one, the part of Freya Carlson in The Wrecking Crew once again called for Sharon to use her comedic talents. Freya Carlson ostensibly was a bumbling, nervous—though intelligent—woman, responsible for getting Matt Helm into trouble rather than helping him to avoid it.
In her first scene, Sharon, primly attired in a dress, vest, matching cap and a pair of thick, square-rimmed glasses, knocks into Helm while he is checking in at his hotel desk. Her bumbling behavior sets the tone for what follows: she breaks a bottle of wine intended for him; she rear ends his car; following an altercation at Count Contini’s mansion, she pushes Elke Sommer into the swimming pool; and, in Helm’s hotel suite, interrupts his romantic interlude with Nancy Kwan.
Helm has looked on Freya Carlson as an inconvenience. Then, in the very next scene, she disappears into his hotel suite. As he watches, suddenly a long, shapely leg arches through the air from behind a door, and Sharon, having shed her matronly uniforms and hats, now appears clad in a white mini-dress, her long hair falling about her shoulders. With a cigarette in hand, she dances round the suite, shaking her posterior, much to the enjoyment of a stunned Matt Helm.
Having temporarily escaped from Contini’s agents, Freya directs Helm to take a short-cut through the country; not surprisingly, they find their way blocked by a pond. Freya decides to wade in and test the depth; she suddenly disappears, her hat floating above her. When she struggles out of the pond, she stands before Helm, takes off her wet jacket and smoothes her hair, announcing, “It’s too deep.”
“Too deep, huh?” Helm replies with a smile. “I want to ask you a question: Whose side are you on?”
“Well,” she declares indignantly, “I’m an agent, and I also happen to be a good one … and I’m also a woman!” Frustrated, she storms off, accidentally using one of Helm’s cloth-wrapped grenades to wipe her hair. When she realizes her mistake, she tosses it back to Helm, who in turn drops it on the ground before his car and, with Freya, jumps into a ditch for protection as it blows the vehicle apart. “I wanna talk to you,” she declares, brushing his hair with her fingers.
“I wanna talk to you too,” he answers, “after the job’s finished.”
She ignores this, and rolls onto Helm, kissing him passionately. Then, in the midst of this scene, she suddenly stands up and walks away, leaving a stunned Helm lying in the dirt.
Helm and Carlson return to Contini’s mansion to confront the Count and his gang. While Helm is cornered by male guards, Freya finds herself accidentally trapped in a room with Nancy Kwan. The two women engage in a prolonged karate battle—a demanding scene for which Sharon did nearly all of her own stunts.
The film culminates aboard Contini’s train, packed with the missing gold bullion with which the Count is attempting to flee. While Helm is embroiled in a struggle with several of Contini’s agents, Freya Carlson storms into the locomotive, attempting to stop the train, only to stumble when the Count opens a trap-door in the floor. She lays straddled across the opening as the train races along, screaming for help. Finally, Helm breaks into the engine and, after a struggle, both rescues Carlson and throws Contini out the open floor and onto the tracks below.
“Mr. Helm,” Freya asks coyly, “is my hair a mess?”
“You wanna know the truth?” he asks. “Yes, you’re a mess!” She angrily storms off into the bathroom. While she is gone, Helm accidentally pushes several buttons, which reveal both a fold-down bed and a stereo playing romantic music. In a few minutes, the bathroom door opens, and, in a repeat of her scene in Helm’s hotel suite, one of Sharon’s shapely legs arches and appears round the opening. She has changed into a short pink negligee, and smiles seductively as she sprawls on the bed.
