Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

by Greg King

  While she had been in Italy, Roman had purchased a belated birthday gift for his wife: a vintage Rolls Royce Silver Dawn, which he drove up to the mews house one day to surprise her.6 Sharon loved it, and happily posed before it while Roman snapped a few pictures. The car then disappeared, to be shipped, along with Roman’s Ferrari, back to Los Angeles.

  One day, while Sharon was out, Roman received a telephone call from his friend Voyteck Frykowski, who, along with Abigail Folger, had been living at 10050 Cielo Drive during the Polanskis’ absence abroad. Voyteck, while backing out of the driveway, had accidentally run over Sharon’s pet Yorkshire terrier, Dr. Saperstein. “A terrible thing happened today,” he explained. “I killed Saperstein. I heard a squeak under the wheels and he ran under the bushes. I ran after him and found him and took him to the vet, but it was too late. The only thing I ever got from you was goodness, and now I feel very bad.”7

  Knowing that his wife would be heartbroken, Roman immediately bought another Yorkshire puppy and gave it to Sharon, who named the dog Prudence. He told her that Voyteck could not find Dr. Saperstein and that he had probably run away. She never knew the truth.8

  In her final days in London, Sharon did a photo shoot for the British fashion magazine Queen. She was slated to appear on the cover of an upcoming issue, in connection with the future release of Thirteen Chairs. She finished reading Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which she left for Roman to look at, explaining that she thought it would make an excellent motion picture.9

  Sharon was eight months pregnant when she left London—too far along for any of the commercial airlines to fly her. Instead, Roman booked her into a stateroom on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2. At first, Sharon wanted to wait the week or so Roman said he needed to finish up his script, and accompany him back to America. It appears that initially they were both slated to travel together on board the ocean liner but, at the last minute, Roman changed his mind. Sharon was angry, but there was nothing she could do.10

  On their last night together in London, Sharon and Roman went to a party at a restaurant overlooking the Thames. The following morning, they drove to Southampton, where they wandered over the vessel before last call was sounded.11

  “Okay, go now,” Sharon told Roman, wiping tears from her eyes. As he later recalled, Roman began to cry, and held his pregnant wife tightly. He was overcome with the feeling that something tragic was about to happen. Finally, he walked down the gangway and climbed into his borrowed Alfa Romeo for the drive back to London. With his pregnant wife safely on her way home, however, Roman quickly returned to London where, he later admitted, he decided to “call Victor Lownes, have a ball, see some girls.”12 It was the last time Roman ever saw Sharon.

  Chapter 25

  Voytech and Gibby

  On the day before his thirty-sixth birthday, Sunday, August 17, 1969, a shattered Roman Polanski wandered through the blood-stained rooms of his house at 10050 Cielo Drive, just a week after the murders of his wife, his unborn child and his friends. He had asked Voyteck Frykowski to remain at the Cielo Drive house until he returned, to look after Sharon. Now, as he entered the corner bedroom which Voyteck and Abigail Folger had shared, he commented bitterly, “I should have thrown him out when he ran over Sharon’s dog!” A reporter at his side asked how long Frykowski had been staying at 10050 Cielo Drive. “Too long, I guess,” was Polanski’s sad reply.1

  Since coming to America, Roman had taken an intense interest in a growing circle of friends, all former Poles like himself, now expatriates trying to find fame and fortune. “Roman became sort of a Polish Y.M.C.A. in America,” a friend later declared. “He loaned them money, he even borrowed money to loan them money, he read their scripts and got them jobs, and it didn’t matter if some of them had no talent and no promise. What was important was that they were Polish. There was this incredible bond.”2

  Jerzy Kosinski was one of these arrivals. The author made an immediate and favorable impression on American audiences with his highly successful works The Painted Bird and Steps.3 Another, less successful and not always welcome, addition to the Polanski circle was Voyteck Frykowski, who tried his hand at several ventures, but with no marked achievement.

  The tall, handsome Frykowski had made something of a career in following Polanski round the globe, from Poland to Paris, London to Hollywood. According to Zofia Komeda, Roman “wasn’t very pleased,” at his friend’s continual pursuit.4 In the process, Frykowski married and divorced twice, leaving his young son Bartek in Poland when he eventually left his homeland in 1967. Determined to fit into American society, Frykowski spent long hours studying English, and kept large notebooks filled with his observations on culture and customs. He tried his hand at poetry, hoping to become a writer, an aspiration encouraged by his friend Jerzy Kosinski.

  It was Kosinski, in fact, who, during a party in New York City, first introduced Voyteck to Abigail Folger. At the time, the pretty, twenty-five-year-old heiress to the coffee fortune was working at the Gotham Book Store, a large art house on Forty-Seventh Street.5 Frykowski could barely manage in English, but he found that Folger spoke fluent French, a language in which he was also proficient, and Abigail agreed to show Voyteck round the city. During their days together, she tutored him in English; soon, Voyteck was calling her “Lady Folger.”6 According to Roman, Abigail Folger “was very good for him.”7

  Born in 1943, Abigail Anne Folger, known to friends and family as Gibby, was the product of a privileged, cloistered upbringing. Her father Peter was Chairman of the Folger Coffee Company, the multi-million dollar corporation which had made the family very wealthy. After her parents’ divorce, she had been closest to her mother Inez, inheriting her sense of noblesse oblige. Abigail grew up in the rarified atmosphere of San Francisco society, educated at the exclusive Catholic School for Girls in Carmel, California. Her debutante ball, held in the ballroom of San Francisco’s elegant St. Francis Hotel a few days before Christmas, was one of the social highlights of 1961. After graduating from Radcliffe College, she took a job as publicity director for the University of California Art Museum at Berkeley, before doing graduate work at Harvard University, where she was awarded a degree in art history.

  Abigail was a wealthy woman. After her death, investigators would report that her estate was worth some $500,000.8 Frykowski, although he had a genuine affection for her, also shrewdly realized that Abigail’s vast riches and powerful network of social contacts could open many important doors, doors which even Polanski could not enter. After several months of living together in New York City, Voyteck and Abigail moved to Los Angeles. In August 1968, they rented a car and drove across the country, from the east coast to the west. Rather than settling in her native San Francisco, the pair instead took a house in Hollywood, at 2774 Woodstock Road, just off Mulholland Drive. Their close neighbor was Cass Elliot.

  When Frykowski first arrived in Los Angeles, he expected Polanski to get him a job. “I resented him in a way,” Roman later admitted. “He was a loser in a way. Whatever he started, he would fuck it up. He was always writing me letters … asking me for a job.”9 But Roman had few illusions as to his friend’s abilities, and managed only to locate a position as a set constructor at Paramount. This apparently lasted for only a few days. “Fryko,” recalled Zofia Komeda, “told them he wasn’t going to spend his life knocking nails in the fucking floor and quit.”10

  In Los Angeles, Abigail threw herself into social work. She registered as a volunteer for the Los Angeles County Welfare Department, a position which she kept until the day before she and Voyteck took up residence at 10050 Cielo Drive, on April 1, 1969. She reported to her department at dawn each morning, then drove to the ghettos of Watts and Pacoima to work.11 Although she entered into the work with great enthusiasm, soon enough, Abigail fell victim to depression. “A lot of social workers go home at night, take a bath and wash their day off,” she told a friend. “I can’t. The suffering gets under your skin.”12

  Sh
e was generous with her fortune. Abigail contributed large sums of money to the unsuccessful election campaign of Thomas Bradley against opponent Samuel Yorty, and volunteered her time as well. She also worked closely with the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco. The clinic was nearly always short of funds, and liberal San Francisco society had taken the cause, promoting a rock concert at the Carousel Ballroom featuring Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Abigail’s mother Inez Folger was instrumental in helping the Free Clinic to receive a grant from a charitable trust, along with some $25,000 from another corporate group, and herself volunteered her time to aid in drug counseling. She gave several fundraising parties for the clinic’s benefit, with Abigail, as well as Sharon’s parents Paul and Doris, in attendance.

  In Los Angeles, Abigail came into the Polanskis’ orbit through Voyteck. The two Polish expatriates often left Sharon and Abigail more or less on their own. When together, Roman and Voyteck would speak only Polish, often in a deliberate effort to exclude the women. Abigail, like Sharon, endured this humiliation in relative silence. Although pretty, Abigail knew she was not stunning, and constantly worried that Frykowski would leave her for a more attractive paramour. This, coupled with her sense of guilt over her vast fortune and depression over the situations of those she encountered during her social work, left Abigail increasingly unhappy. With her low self-confidence, she easily let Frykowski take advantage of both her good nature and her wealth.

  Not surprisingly, Sharon and Abigail quickly became friends. According to Jerzy Kosinski, who knew all four of them well, Sharon and Abigail were so close because “they shared impossible conditions, [Polanski and Frykowski being] two egotistical narcissists. Each one contributed knowledge of her difficulty to the other.”13

  “Voyteck,” recalls Michelle Phillips, “had a kind of weird vibe about him, a hustler-like feeling. No one really wanted to be around him that much. I never really got to know Abigail very well. She was considered a sort of ‘little rich girl,’ and, at least among our circle, there was a great snobbery which kept them both at arm’s length.”14

  As members of the Polanski circle, both Abigail and Voyteck soon became friends with Jay Sebring. Jay himself was heavily involved with expanding his business interests. Together with manager and business partner John Madden, he worked out a scheme which would ensure his financial stability for years to come. He kept his original salon at 725 North Fairfax in Los Angeles, but also opened a number of franchise boutiques under the corporate name Sebring International. Abigail had recently become a business partner in the company, having invested $3,500 in Sebring International.15 In the last weeks of his life, Jay had a new will drawn up, leaving everything to Madden; his contact with his own family was infrequent and strained, and Jay wanted to reward his partner. The document was slated to be signed on Monday, 11 August—ironically, two days after Jay was killed.16

  During the four months that Sharon was away, the situation at 10050 Cielo Drive rapidly disintegrated. Voyteck Frykowski and Abigail Folger entertained regularly, and their guests of choice seemed to be drug dealers and the seedier elements of Hollywood society. Voyteck was too new to American culture and society to distinguish between the innocent hangers-on who always surrounded the rich and famous, and the more dangerous fringe elements in Los Angeles. Abigail Folger was just as lost in this milieu, and her dependency on her lover ensured her silent acquiescence.

  During their tenure at 10050 Cielo Drive, Voyteck and Abigail allowed one of his friends and fellow emigrés from Poland, artist Witold Kaczankowski—known as Witold K.—to live in their house on Woodstock Road. With their permission, Kaczankowski invited a friend named Harrison “Pic” Dawson to share their house. Dawson, whose father worked for the United States State Department, occasionally dated Cass Eliott.

  It was through these two men that Frykowski met Ben Carruthers, Tom Harrigan and Billy Doyle. Dawson, Carruthers, Harrigan and Doyle were all apparently heavily involved in the distribution of illegal drugs in Los Angeles, and all four were to become major suspects in the LAPD investigation into the murders at 10050 Cielo Drive.

  Doyle and Harrigan had come to Los Angeles from Toronto in January 1969, bringing with them an estimated two pounds of cocaine. Quickly, they began to seek Hollywood connections, a quest which brought them, through Cass Eliott, into Frykowski’s orbit.17

  The extent of Frykowski’s involvement in the Los Angeles drug scene is not known. Police investigations after the murders disclosed any number of possible suspects in drug rings operating in the city. Voyteck is alleged to have set up a ring outside of a recognized group, a definite breach of drug protocol, and a move which is said to have angered established dealers. He also transgressed accepted standards by becoming a heavy drug user. He seems to have been the one to first introduce Abigail to the illegal drugs which both were soon consuming. Certainly, it was Folger money which bought the endless supply of marijuana, LSD, cocaine, hashish and mescaline throughout the summer of 1969.

  Frykowski took advantage of his tenure at 10050 Cielo Drive to throw lavish parties, designed to impress important members of the motion picture industry. These events seem to have attracted not only people on the fringe of show business but hangers-on, drug dealers and alleged pornography industry contacts. Much of the mythology concerning wild goings-on at 10050 Cielo Drive stems from the Frykowski/Folger residence there. After the murders, rumors of witchcraft, sex orgies and drug dealing proliferated.

  “There were a lot of parties without any planning,” an acquaintance recalled. “An enormous number of people came and went, and you never saw them again. You felt you were in a very volatile, dangerous world.”18 Los Angeles detectives would note ominously: “During April, May, June and the first part of July, Frykowski and Folger had many impromptu parties. An open invitation policy existed at the house. Drug use was prevalent. They used hashish, marijuana, mescaline, cocaine and the stimulant MDA.”19

  However, William Garretson, the young caretaker hired by Rudi Altobelli to look after the property in his absence, would later recall only one major party given at 10050 Cielo Drive during Sharon’s time in Europe. “There were cars parked all the way down Bella, and they had a band there … and they had ten cases of champagne; they had … three parking lot attendants parking cars, and then about—I don’t know how many people serving drinks and everything.”20 But Garretson was also careful to distinguish between large parties such as this one, and the “usual” gatherings, which could include several dozen people.

  In July, Harrison Dawson, in the midst of a heated argument with Witold Kaczankowski, pulled a gun on the artist. When Frykowski heard of this, he drove over to the house on Woodstock Road and threw Dawson out. In return, Dawson apparently threatened Frykowski’s life. Even with this threat hanging over him, however, Voyteck continued his illicit association with Dawson’s three friends as the summer progressed.

  In early July, Harrigan returned from Toronto with samples of the synthetic drug Methlenedioxyl-amphetamine, or MDA, a euphoria-inducing stimulant new to the Los Angeles market. Harrigan met with Frykowski at 10050 Cielo Drive and offered him the exclusive rights to deal MDA in the Los Angeles drug market. With Frykowski’s agreement, Harrigan flew to Toronto and purchased a fairly large quantity of the drug which, on his return to Los Angeles, he handed over to Voyteck.21

  Just before Sharon returned from Europe, Jay Sebring telephoned Roman in London and asked if he could use the property at Cielo to host a business party. Guests, invited to invest in Sebring International, included Warren Beatty and John Phillips. Two drunken males crashed the party, and quickly became abusive. Frykowski, with the assistance of several friends, managed to eject them, hustling the pair up the driveway. As Frykowski closed the gates behind them, one of the men shouted: “You fucking son of a bitch! We’ll be back and we’ll kill you!”22

  Chapter 26

  Sharon Alone

  After her
liner docked in New York, Sharon returned to Los Angeles, where Jay Sebring picked her up. She was back at Cielo Drive in time to watch the moon landing live on television, on July 20. Her parents and sisters were down from San Francisco for the weekend to work on their house at Palos Verdes, and they joined their daughter, Jay, Abigail and Voyteck as they watched the scenes from the moon that afternoon. With her, Doris had brought a large wooden rocking chair, in which she herself had rocked and nursed her three daughters. Sharon placed it in a corner of the living room until the nursery was finished. It was the last time Paul and Doris Tate would see their daughter alive.

  Sharon selected the maid’s room at the northern corner of the house as the nursery for her baby. Winifred Chapman, the middle-aged lady whom Sharon had brought from Patty Duke’s house on Summit Ridge Drive, did not live-in, and the room had been left empty. “I was at the house a few weeks before the murders,” recalls Michelle Phillips. “Sharon seemed happy, relieved to be home, but tired. We talked about the baby, and her plans. She didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, and so had some trouble picking out a scheme to decorate the nursery. She showed me the fabric she had decided to use, yellow with a pattern of little birds on it. That was the last time I saw her.”1

  Sharon wanted Roman home, not only because she worried about what he might be doing and who he might be seeing in London without her, but also because she disliked the atmosphere she found on her return at 10050 Cielo Drive. Although she personally liked Abigail Folger, she made no secret to Roman that she could barely tolerate the arrogant Frykowski. In addition, Voyteck frequently invited numerous friends to the house for small parties after her return, and they were almost always drunk, or using drugs, or both. Sharon had quit using drugs as soon as she found out she was pregnant. Voyteck and Abigail seemed to be in constant arguments, too, and Sharon became so upset that she worried her own stress might harm her baby. According to Doris Tate, “Whatever was going on at that house prior to her going home bothered her a great deal. She wasn’t so naive that night that she called [me] and said she wanted these people out of the house. Roman couldn’t get home quick enough for her to be settled and have that baby.”2