Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

by Greg King

  Sharon expected Roman to arrive at any time. But, after placing a few telephone calls to him, she realized that he had no intention of following her back to Los Angeles. He claimed that he had to be in London to finish working on the script for Day of the Dolphin. To a friend, however, he allegedly admitted, “I can’t stand seeing Sharon blown up the way she is. This pregnancy has made her such an insecure, nagging bitch. If I could, I’d wait until she gives birth. Then maybe I could go back and find Sharon the way she used to be.”3

  His reluctance to return to Los Angeles hurt Sharon deeply. During the last weeks of her pregnancy, at a time when she desperately wanted Roman at her side, he refused to abandon his own plans. Instead, and against Sharon’s wishes, he asked Frykowski to remain at Cielo Drive, to look after his wife. Roman finally told Sharon that it would be another two to three weeks before he could get away. He promised, however, that he would be home before his birthday, August 18, which was, incidentally, the expected date for their baby’s arrival.

  One of the reasons Sharon had been so eager to take on the role of Pat in Thirteen Chairs was the chance it gave her for time away from Roman. Initially, she had wanted to think things through regarding the troubled state of their marriage. She was unhappy enough to seek the advice of many of her friends, who, in turn, encouraged her to hold on; when she found out she was pregnant, the change in her state of mind had been almost immediate. Once Roman began to show enthusiasm for the baby, Sharon hoped that all of the problems between them would become things of the past. This hope was shattered soon after she returned to Los Angeles. Sharon learned that Roman, while in London, had had another affair. To make things worse, it had been with a mutual friend, Michelle Phillips. “It was a stupid thing to do,” Michelle Phillips says. “We were both drunk, it just happened, and I regretted it.”4 Word of it reached back to Hollywood. John Phillips knew of it soon afterward, and Sharon’s friends, belonging to the same circles as the Phillips, alerted her to what had happened.5

  Sharon was crushed by this latest development. She had put up with Roman’s philandering before their marriage and even during their marriage. When she became pregnant, she hoped that he would change. Against her wishes, Sharon found herself in the midst of a crisis. She had no doubt that Roman loved and cared for her, but she could no longer ignore his infidelities, which hurt her deeply. Worse still was his lack of discretion, a selfish determination to live as he wished, without alteration or consideration of Sharon’s feelings. His wife’s pregnancy, she now realized, had not changed Roman at all. The humiliation of facing friends who knew of her husband’s promiscuity was simply too much to bear.

  In London, Roman was apparently continuing his amorous exploits. According to several sources, he regularly picked up girls at either the Playboy Club or in the fashionable night spots he haunted with his friends, taking them back to the house at Eaton Place. Sharon, through mutual friends in London, learned of this.

  Previously, Sharon had taken only minimal steps to confront Roman. Each time, he would remind her that she had once agreed to allow him his freedom. But Sharon had matured in the year of her marriage to Roman. His infidelities had hardened her, made her more resolute, more determined. The pregnancy simply cemented her own growing self-respect. She now realized that, if she was to salvage anything of her future happiness, she would have to make an uncomfortable decision. Roman would never change. Sharon began to seriously consider the idea of divorcing Roman.

  A divorce had long been expected by many of the Polanskis’ mutual friends. Yet this easy solution came hard for Sharon: it was an admission of failure, that those things she most prized—a happy marriage and loving husband—had eluded her. She had always suffered from doubts, seeking approval from powerful and influential men and subjugating her will to theirs. The almost total subversion of her values and wishes to those of Roman had not come easily, but she had been willing to sacrifice her own personal desires in the hope that the marriage would succeed. Now, she realized that no matter what she did, she would never be able to change Roman; she still loved Roman, but was too hurt to remain his wife.

  Sharon seems to have been adamant. She told several friends, and, at least among her intimates, her resolution was well-known.6 “We knew she planned to divorce Roman,” says Patty Faulkner, daughter of Jay Sebring’s business partner John Madden.7 Whether she ever told Roman that she was considering divorce is not known; his autobiography, not surprisingly, is silent on the question. After the fact, he would scarcely have admitted that the marriage had been all but over.

  From the moment of her return to the United States, her constant companion had been Jay Sebring. Jay had rushed to meet her in New York, escorted her back to Los Angeles, and remained by her side through the last week of July and into August. Now, she apparently confided her thoughts of divorce to her former boyfriend.8

  Jay’s closest friends knew that he remained in love with Sharon. A succession of casual affairs and beautiful girls had all been a futile attempt on his part to ease Sharon from his mind. But now, having positioned himself as Sharon’s most intimate friend, he cannot have but considered the future, and the possibility that she might return to him. Sharon, who had always valued Jay’s gentle qualities and sincere love and concern, at least knew that she would have his support no matter what happened with Roman.

  Such knowledge only strengthened her resolve. Sharon apparently decided to wait until the baby was born, perhaps to see if fatherhood altered her husband’s extra-marital activities. If there was no change, she would institute divorce proceedings. In anticipation of this she made arrangements to star in the erotic, soft-core pornographic adaptation of The Story of O. Allied Artists was set to produce the film, and Sharon was to begin work several months after the birth of her baby.9 With her newly-found confidence and independence, Sharon would be ready, if necessary, to make a fresh start to her life.

  Jay flew north to San Francisco to attend a cocktail party to publicize the grand opening of his new shop at 629 Commercial Street. Sharon did not feel like traveling with him, but Abigail Folger, who had invested several thousand dollars in Sebring International, was there, as well as Sharon’s parents. Both Paul and Doris Tate remained devoted to Jay. Paul Tate was finishing up his Army career at nearby Fort Barry at the Presidio, before permanently retiring to the house in Palos Verdes Estates which he and Doris had purchased.

  Sharon’s pregnancy, in the last few weeks of her scheduled term, began to tire her easily. She preferred staying home at 10050 Cielo Drive, watching television or escaping from the incessant heat in the cool waters of the kidney-shaped swimming pool. She purchased several rings and floats, so that she could comfortably drift around the pool propped up on her expanding stomach. Nearly every afternoon, she took a short nap; down the middle of the queen-sized bed, she lined up a row of pillows, which she hugged in place of her absent husband. Occasionally, she would telephone friends, or drive down to Dolores’s Drive-In, her favorite haunt, for one of their special hamburgers, which she loved.10

  William Garretson, the young man who lived in the guest house, recalled seeing Sharon occasionally sunning herself on the lawn, or swimming in the pool. “Once, when I was swimming, she came out of the house,” he remembers, “and sat down on the edge of the pool, chatting with me. She was very nice, quiet, and seemed very down to earth. She told me that I could swim in the pool whenever I wanted. After she came back from Europe, I never saw any parties going on at the main house.”11

  During these last weeks of her life, Sharon found herself the center of her sisters’ inquisitive attention. “They were probably the happiest days on earth to our family,” Sharon’s youngest sister Patti later recalled. “We’d finally come together. She was often gone, so those times were very far and few between that we got together, and this was our time. It was a time that she was going to be home for a while now with the child coming, and it was wonderful because we were all united as a family.”12

  Occasi
onally, sixteen-year-old Debra and eleven-year-old Patti would come up to Cielo to stay the night, sleeping in the loft above the living room. “My sister was everything to me,” Patti recalls. “She was so sweet and such a gentle soul. She was a movie star and beautiful, and in my eyes she was just so big. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for her.” The two girls would swim with Sharon, laugh with Abigail Folger, and put their hands on their sister’s stomach to feel the baby kicking inside.13

  On Friday, August 1, Voyteck Frykowski threw a small luncheon party at 10050 Cielo Drive. Both Sharon and Abigail were away from the house at the time. His guests, including several young girls he had reportedly picked up on Sunset Strip, enjoyed a lunch of chicken and champagne served by Mrs. Chapman at the side of the pool. The maid later recalled that the guests spent some time perched on the edge of Sharon’s bed, watching television.14

  Jay Sebring returned from San Francisco late Saturday night, and spent Sunday, August 3, with Sharon at the house on Cielo Drive. That afternoon, she happily posed for him on the front lawn. Dressed in flowered bikini panties and a loose, flowing halter top, she stood before the split-rail fence, holding her Yorkshire terrier Prudence, and perched at the edge of the swimming pool. She also posed with Jay while Voyteck took a number of photographs, leaving a pictorial hint of their feeling for each other. Jay, wearing only a low-cut pair of bikini trunks, smiled broadly at the camera, one arm cradled round Sharon.

  The intimacy suggested by the pictures was no secret in Hollywood. Kirk Douglas later wrote: “There was talk that their romance still continued, even that the baby might have been Jay’s.”15 While there can be no doubt of Jay’s love for Sharon, and, indeed, her deep feelings for him, there is no evidence whatsoever that Sharon’s baby was not Roman’s. That such talk ran high amongst their circle of friends, though, is clearly indicative of the depth of the relationship between Sharon and Jay.

  Jay, in fact, was with Sharon nearly every day that first week of August. On Monday, he drove her to the offices of Airways Rent-a-Car, where Sharon picked up a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, which she leased until the following Saturday, August 9.16 Her Rolls had not yet arrived from London, and she had had a small accident in Roman’s Ferrari, which was to be in the repair shop for the next five days. He saw her again on Tuesday, Thursday, and finally Friday.

  On either Sunday or Monday, Thomas Harrigan visited 10050 Cielo Drive to deliver drugs to Voyteck Frykowski. To friends, Voyteck explained that he was receiving supplies of MDA, and that he was in the middle of a ten-day experiment with the drug. That night, publicist Steve Brandt met Voyteck at a club in Hollywood. He later declared that Frykowski seemed “unfocused, staring.” When he asked if he was taking drugs, Voyteck quickly replied, “Yes, it’s mescaline. Want to buy some?”17

  Voyteck himself, in the last week of his life, appeared at times out of control. One day that week, he showed up unannounced at John Phillips’ house in Beverly Hills, banging on the door and loudly demanding to be let in. “He seemed slightly incoherent and had a bizarre presence about him,” Phillips recalled. “I wouldn’t let him in, but he insisted. I just didn’t feel right about it. He was rumored to have had weird drug connections and was part of the crowd that had been feeding off Cass. I apologized and closed the door in his face.”18

  On Tuesday evening, Sharon threw a party for a few dozen of her friends, in honor of French film director Roger Vadim and his wife Jane Fonda. After the murders, the party became the subject of an immense amount of speculation, the source of a number of bizarre rumors involving nefarious activities taking place at 10050 Cielo Drive.

  A few days earlier, Jay Sebring had complained to one of the receptionists in his salon that he had been burned for $2,000 worth of cocaine. The dealer who perpetrated the burn was Billy Doyle, one of Voyteck’s friends, and a regular source for drugs for both Frykowski and Cass Eliott.19

  When Frykowski heard of this, and of Sebring’s desire for vengeance, he allegedly invited Doyle to the party at 10050 Cielo Drive on Tuesday evening. During the course of the evening, according to the stories, Doyle was tied to a chair, sodomized by both Jay and Voyteck, and then whipped, the whole sordid affair taking place before the invited audience and the event being captured on videotape.20

  Allegations to this effect were first aired by actor Dennis Hopper. In an interview with an underground Los Angeles newspaper, he reported: “They had fallen into sadism and masochism and bestiality—and they recorded it all on videotape, too. The L.A. police told me this. I know that three days before they were killed, twenty-five people were invited to that house to a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.”21

  Years later, Manson Family member and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil told author Truman Capote: “They burned people on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they’d tell you the truth.”22

  Tales of pictures and videotapes allegedly discovered at 10050 Cielo Drive after the murders are legendary. Paul Krassner, editor of the underground journal The Realist, wrote in his memoirs that Warren Hinckle, the editor of Ramparts Magazine, “brought me to the renowned private investigator Hal Lipset, who informed me that not only did the Los Angeles Police Department seize pornographic films and videotapes they found in Sharon Tate’s loft but also that certain members of the LAPD were selling them. Lipset had talked with one police source who told him exactly which porn flicks were available—a total of seven hours’ worth for a quarter-million dollars.… Sharon Tate with a popular singer. There was Sharon with Steve McQueen. There was Sharon with two black bisexual men.”23 Terry Melcher later declared: “I knew they had been making a lot of homemade sadomasochistic-porno movies there with quite a few recognizable Hollywood faces in them. The reason I knew was that I had gone out with a girl named Michelle Phillips, one of the Mamas and Papas, whose ex-husband, John Phillips, was the leader of the group. Michelle told me she and John had had dinner one night, to discuss maybe getting back together, and afterward he had taken her up to visit the Polanskis in my old house. Michelle said that when they arrived there, everyone in the house was busy filming an orgy and that Sharon Tate was part of it.”24

  According to Michelle Phillips, however, the story is apocryphal. “That’s absolutely untrue,” she says. “It’s totally false. It never happened. I never said anything like that to Terry.”25

  In spite of such allegations, it seems that the truth was less sensational. Roman had purchased a Sony videotape machine and camera, for use in his work. Occasionally, the machine was used for other purposes, and one videotape which the police seized did indeed show Sharon and Roman making love. When and why Roman had filmed this event is not known. The only photographs which the police discovered at 10050 Cielo Drive were publicity shots of Sharon.

  In the four months that Sharon and Roman were absent, Voyteck was involved in some questionable activities, which, after the murders, became linked forever to Sharon’s reputation. He is known to have picked up girls from the Sunset Strip in Abigail’s absence and photographed them at 10050 Cielo Drive. It seems likely that this itself was the basis for the many rumours that summer.

  As for the events of Tuesday evening, 5 August, not one single reliable piece of evidence has surfaced to support the allegations of a mass videotaped humiliation and rape at Cielo Drive. The story, in fact, was a confused version of an event which had not even occurred at the Polanski house. “We investigated the incident,” says Mike McGann, one of the police team later assigned to the murders. “It hadn’t taken place at Cielo Drive, but at Cass Eliott’s house, and didn’t involve Sharon Tate.”26

  On Wednesday, August 6, Sharon, Voyteck and Abigail drove over to director Michael Sarne’s beach house in Malibu for a quiet dinner. Halfway through the meal, however, Sharon complained that she was not feeling well. After finishing dessert, she had Voyteck
drive her home.27

  The following afternoon, Tom Harrigan again visited Voyteck at Cielo Drive. He, Voyteck and Abigail shared a bottle of wine, while Harrigan discussed the distribution of MDA. Sharon, Harrigan recalled, was not present.28

  She had, in fact, spent most of the day with Jay. Late that afternoon, Ib Zacko, one of Sebring’s neighbors on Easton Drive, heard a car gunning its engine on the road. The noise was so loud that the windows in his house were rattling. When he went outside to investigate, he found Sharon sitting on the passenger side of Sebring’s Porsche, which was idling loudly.

  “What the hell are you doing sitting there by yourself, Sharon?” he asked.

  She explained that she and Jay had driven up to his gate, but that someone had parked their car in front of it, and that now they couldn’t get through. In a few minutes, Jay returned to the Porsche, climbed in and honked his horn, trying to attract the attention of the unknown owner. Finally, however, after knocking on several doors, he acted on his own initiative: jumping into the abandoned car, he eased the emergency brake off, slipped it into neutral, and rolled the vehicle down the length of Easton and out into the middle of Benedict Canyon Road, where he left it for the owner to claim.29

  That evening, after Jay had returned her to Cielo, Sharon made a rare date to attended a screening at Universal Studios of a new Marcus Welby, MD television episode featuring one of her friends, actor Robert Lipton. “She was so pregnant that I’m sure it tired her just sitting through an hour episode,” he later recalled.30

  In the last week of July, Sharon had given a promotional interview to Italian journalist Enrico di Pompeo in anticipation of the European release of Thirteen Chairs. During the interview, Pompeo asked if Sharon believed in fate. “Certainly,” she told him. “My whole life has been decided by fate. I think something more powerful than we are decides our fates for us. I know one thing—I’ve never planned anything that ever happened to me.”31