Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  His main shop had a stained glass window and an Egyptian ankh sign on the door. “They shampooed,” an employee later recalled. “No one had ever shampooed men before. The problem was how to dry the hair. You couldn’t put men under those helmets. Heat lamps were slow. Then someone heard about a hand-held plastic contraption from Europe. They began blow-drying hair, and selling the dryers to clients at cost.’’

  Sebring was not cheap; when many barbers charged around $1.50 for a haircut, Sebring charged $25.00. “Henry Fonda would be there when I went in,” wrote his friend Joe Hyams. “There’d be starlets shampooing hair. It was the hottest place in Hollywood in the afternoon. There was gossip, coffee, pretty girls and the haircuts were damned good.”

  When Sharon started dating Jay Sebring, Martin Ransohoff threw up obstacles. “You shouldn’t be dating a barber,” he reportedly said.

  In mid 1965, urged on by Sebring and her friend Steve McQueen, Sharon changed agents, signing with Stanley A. Kamen, Steve McQueen’s agent, who was with the William Morris Agency. Kamen, one of Hollywood’s best-known and most successful talent agents, was executive vice president and member of the board of directors of the agency, and was renowned for making a leading man out of McQueen. Over the years, he also represented Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Walter Matthau, Joan Collins, and Gregory Peck.

  Sharon was hesitant to leave Hal Gefsky, and she insisted that Gefsky keep on getting his 10 percent agent’s fee, while also paying Kamen a percentage. Thus she was double-paying. This emphasizes something good about her character.

  She was anxious to get going. To make her move. To start the Triumph. But it was more secretary Janet Trego on The Beverly Hillbillies. . . .

  Meanwhile, Roman Polanski’s movie Repulsion opened in London on June 10, 1965. The audience stood when Polanski appeared in his box, and then they chanted his name at the end. It had the ambience of a rock-and-roll concert, with exclusive T-shirts and other accessories on sale in the lobby.

  Polanski had been approached by Twentieth Century Fox with a hot idea: direct a remake of Knife in the Water, but this time it would star Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Warren Beatty. Polanski turned it down. Instead, his partner Gene Gutowski had found a soft-core porn company called the Compton Group whose two owners had been eager to make a film with Polanski, but they’d wanted it to be a horror movie. Gérard Brach and Polanski then created the script for Repulsion in seventeen days.

  It was a trajectory of triumph for the young director, just three years past turning out a Polish-state-sponsored film. The Compton Group approved a £120,000 budget for his follow-up movie, titled Cul-de-Sac, with a director’s fee of £10,000.

  Principal photography for Cul-de-Sac began in August of 1965, off the northeast coast of England in a tiny place called Holy Island. Cul-de-Sac was released in Britain in February of 1966, and in the United States nine months later.

  Chapter 3

  Early Films: Eye of the Devil, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Don’t Make Waves

  Instead of Tarzan and the Valley of Gold or The Sound of Music, Sharon Tate’s first big role was in a movie about human sacrifice titled Eye of the Devil. The film was originally known as 13, with a screenplay by Dennis Murphy and Terry Southern. Tate and Sebring traveled to London to prepare for filming, which commenced on September 13, 1965, at locations in France.

  Many, if not most, of the film’s scenes had been shot, when one of the stars, Kim Novak, fell from a horse and was injured, and couldn’t continue. Filmways considered cashing in its insurance policy for the flick, but in the end, even with 85 percent of the filming completed, Ransohoff decided to redo the project and hired writers to rewrite the script. He cut back on Novak’s part, and made Sharon’s role more featured.

  Forty-four-year-old Deborah Kerr, famous for her beach-romping with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, and for such films as The King and I, and Tea and Sympathy, was hired to take over the role of Catherine de Montfaucon, and every scene that had shown Miss Novak had to be reshot. Filming rebegan in November 1965 with a new cast and director. (The movie progressed through three directors—Sidney Furie, Arthur Hiller, and Michael Anderson—before J. Lee Thompson was chosen by Martin Ransohoff.) During the winter of 1965–1966, there was filming at the Chateau d’Hauteford in France, and the newly revised project was completed.

  The plot consisted of a rather humdrum human sacrifice (for the good of the crops) narrative, revealing how, uh oh, the grape crop was suffering another bad season, the third in a row, so that the owner of the vineyard at the castle Bellenac, one marquis Philippe de Montfaucon (played by David Niven) had to be summoned from his home in London back to the castle in the countryside. It becomes evident that the ritual sacrifice of Mr. Niven has to occur in order to bring back the health and vigor of the vineyard. He very much wants to spare his wife and children the spectacle of his ritual demise, and asks them to remain in London, but nevertheless they still trail after him. But, uh oh, his wife Catherine de Montfaucon soon learns that not only is her husband, the marquis, acting in a weirdo mode, but that the castle staff is utilizing ancient pagan rituals that portend a knife job for hubbie, to save the grape.

  Catherine (Deborah Kerr) is treated rather menacingly by castle residents, among them Christian de Caray (played by David Hemmings) and his eerily chilly sister, Odile de Caray, played by Sharon Tate. Her husband, the marquis, she is told, has gone to a nearby town.

  As Odile de Caray, Sharon proved quite effective, with her presence on the screen described by one critic as “effortlessly mesmerizing.” She is attired in black tights, with high boots and a witchy stone medallion around her neck. Her cultic, hypnotic movements are followed closely by the camera, although at least one account states that Sharon Tate’s voice was dubbed.

  Catherine, wandering around the chateau, views Philippe (Mr. Niven) with twelve other men taking part in some sort of ceremonial ritual, and shortly thereafter she is further frightened by twelve hooded men in the nearby woods. She learns that Philippe’s/Niven’s father, believed previously to be dead, is living in a turret in the house. The father informs Catherine/Kerr that whenever the vines are barren for three years, the head of the family must be sacrificed to improve the quality and quantity of the grapes.

  Catherine hurriedly splits from the castle to raise an alarm, but a local priest (uh oh, another cult member) prevents her. Christian/Hemmings shoots an arrow through the heart of Philippe/Niven in the fulfillment of the sacrifice.

  The next day Catherine and her children leave the chateau, unaware of the attention the priest is giving her young son Jacques. He is the next Marquis de Bellenac, and the film makes clear that he is aware of his sacrificial fate, should the crops fail again for three straight years.

  Even though she did not have as many lines as the other actors—just over a dozen spoken—Tate came through as crucial to the film, setting an otherworldly, cultic ambience. Niven described her as a “great discovery,” and Kerr said that with “a reasonable amount of luck,” Tate would be a great success. In interviews, Tate mentioned her good fortune in working with such professionals in her first film, and said that she had learned a lot about acting by watching Deborah Kerr in front of the camera. The New York Times, when the film was released finally after two years, wrote of Sharon’s “chillingly beautiful but expressionless” acting.

  While filming took place in France, Sebring returned to Los Angeles to see to his business obligations.

  When parts of Eye of the Devil were being filmed in London, the company hired an English magician called Alex Saunders, the so-called “King of the Witches,” as technical advisor. Alex Saunders, aka the High Priest Verbius, claims that Aleister Crowley tattooed him as a tenth birthday present, and further claims to have initiated and trained people in two hundred covens of witches in the British Isles. He also claimed that he became a friend of Sharon Tate on the set of the Eye of the Devil. Before filming ended, Saunders claims he initiated Miss
Tate into witchcraft. He has photos purporting to show Miss Tate standing within a consecrated magic circle.

  “Do you fuck?” Sharon is reputed to have asked Mr. Saunders at their time of meeting, thinking perhaps his witchcraft practices involved celibacy.

  Life magazine gave the photographer Shahrokh Hatami an assignment to cover Sharon Tate at around the time of the filming of Eye of the Devil. Hatami has pictures in his archive from snapping Kim Novak, David Niven, and Tate. Hatami was already a well-known photographer, having covered, for instance, the overthrow by the CIA of the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and for Paris Match he had taken some famous early photos of the Beatles in the dressing room of the Cavern Club in Liverpool. His portfolio would include shots from the sets of films such as Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong, and Woody Allen’s What’s New Pussycat?

  Around the time Eye of the Devil was completed, Hatami flew with Sharon from London to Los Angeles. And then Paul Newman provided his plane for a trip with Jay Sebring, Sharon, and Hatami to Las Vegas. Good times for all, and the beginning of a friendship between Hatami and Sharon Tate that was to last the rest of her life.

  In January 1966, noted columnist Earl Wilson wrote that Sharon “left the London set of 13 to say goodbye to her father in Hollywood; he’s an Army officer off to Viet Nam.”

  After filming was completed, Sharon hung out in London, where she tasted the nightclubs and the fashion world. She invited close friend Wende Wagner, who lived with Robert Mitchum’s son Jimmy, to visit her in London. Wagner had had roles in two episodes of the TV series Flipper in 1965, as well as one episode of Perry Mason the same year. She too came from a military family: her father was a navy commander and her mother was a champion downhill skier. Wagner has been described as “very much a free spirit, . . . more interested in surfing and traveling around the world than a career. She combined both passions when she earned work as an underwater female stunt double for Lloyd Bridges on his hit series Sea Hunt (1958) as well as the TV series The Aquanauts.”

  It was while hanging out with Wende Wagner that she met by Fate her future husband, which very likely wouldn’t have occurred if she had won either the part in The Sound of Music, or that of Tarzan’s love interest in Tarzan and the Valley of Gold.

  As part of Ransohoff’s promotion of Tate, he arranged the production of a short documentary called All Eyes on Sharon Tate, to be released at the same time as Eye of the Devil. It included an interview with director J. Lee Thompson, who expressed his initial doubts about Tate’s potential with the comment “We even agreed that if after the first two weeks Sharon was not quite making it, that we would put her back in cold storage,” but noted that he soon realized Tate was “tremendously exciting.”

  The fourteen-minute film consisted of a number of scenes showing Tate filming Eye of the Devil, dancing in nightclubs and sightseeing around London, and also contained a brief interview with her. Asked about her acting ambitions she replied, “I don’t fool myself. I can’t see myself doing Shakespeare.” She spoke of her ambitions to find a path in comedy, and in other interviews she expressed her desire to become “a light comedienne in the Carole Lombard style.” She mentioned two contemporary actresses that were influencing her—Faye Dunaway and Catherine Deneuve. Of the latter, she said, “I’d like to be an American Catherine Deneuve. She plays beautiful, sensitive, deep parts with a little bit of intelligence behind them.”

  The documentary All Eyes showed David Niven walking with an arm around the back of Sharon, and Sharon with her arm around his back. In a brief piece written for the Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1966, John Scott noted: “David Niven gazed seriously at blonde Sharon Tate in MGM’s movie, 13, and said ‘Every time I look at you, Sharon, it reminds me of a line from The Taming of the Shrew.’ No slouch at quoting the Bard herself, shapely Sharon asked: ‘The one that goes, “twas told me you were rough and coy and sullen”?’ Niven grinned. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘Kiss me, Tate!’”

  Polanski purchased for a putative £40,000 (with a low-interest loan set up by his partner Gene Gutowski), a small, elegant house at 95 West Eaton Place Mews, on a cobbled road close behind Sloane Square. Sharon Tate, as it turned out, was staying around the corner in an apartment rented for her by Filmways. The Fates were soon to bounce them together.

  During this time Polanski and Gérard Brach were working on a script about vampires. It was titled The Fearless Vampire Killers. Polanski: “Our basic aim was to parody the genre in every way possible while making a picture that would, at the same time, be witty, elegant, and visually pleasing.”

  Polanski was doing well—he was pulling £250–£300 a week from his company, Cadre Films. He cut an upbeat swagger. He wore mod attire, had a haircut resembling rocker Mick Jagger’s, drove a souped-up automobile, often placed a lit joint upon his lips, and was obviously propelling himself Up Up Up. Beautiful women abounded at his beck after Knife in the Water, then Repulsion, then Cul-de-Sac saw him strutting in the so-called “youthquake” that hit London and Britain in the mid to late 1960s.

  He could Get It Done! He was a picture-per-year triumph. “While editing Cul-de-Sac,” he later wrote, “I was promoting Repulsion; while promoting Cul-de-Sac, I was preparing The Fearless Vampire Killers. That made me a film-a-year director.”

  Polanski was dating torrid young starlet Jill St. John. According to a St. John timeline, she flew with Polanski to New York in October of 1965 to see the film Bunny Lake Is Missing. The Fates intervened, as columnist Walter Winchell succinctly reported in February of 1966: “Jill St. John, who said ‘This is it!’ about Repulsion director Roman Polanski, decided that it isn’t.”

  “Jill St. John was wary of Ransohoff from the first,” Polanski later claimed in his autobiography. “Bright as well as beautiful, she observed him closely through her long lashes when the three of us had dinner together during one of my exploratory trips to L.A. ‘I think he’s a phony,’ she told me.”

  Polanski naturally was eager to locate funding for the vampire script he was working on with Gérard Brach, and Cadre Films began to troll for funding sources. Polanski met an American producer named Ben Kadish who had moved to London and was connected to Filmways’s Marty Ransohoff and his coproducer John Calley. Polanski had never heard of Ransohoff.

  Right after Repulsion was released, and while Cul-de-Sac was in a rough-edit form, Roman Polanski had a meeting with Calley and Ransohoff at the Dorcester Hotel in London. Ransohoff expressed a desire to view the rough cut. Upon viewing the cut, he was impressed enough to buy American distribution rights. Polanski mentioned to Ransohoff the vampire flick he was then writing. There were additional meetings between Polanski and Mr. Ransohoff. Filmways had a multipicture distribution arrangement with MGM, with the result that the Polanski/Gutowski company, Cadre Films, signed a three-picture deal with Ransohoff’s company.

  Filmways allotted a $1.7 million budget to what was originally titled The Dance of the Vampires. Polanski was so enthralled by the prospect of big money from a fairly big Hollywood deal, that the contract he inked with Ransohoff allowed Ransohoff to edit and change at will the films Polanski would direct for Filmways (and MGM), at least for versions shown in America.

  Sharon Tate Meets Roman Polanski

  The Fates had their say when Sharon decided to stay on in London after Eye of the Devil wrapped. Clack clack, measure measure, snip snip, went the three ancient Greek Fates—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. When Ransohoff and his Filmways partner, John Calley, arrived in London, Filmways threw a welcoming party at the Dorchester Hotel. Polanski was introduced to Sharon Tate. They exchanged phone numbers.

  Sharon was living in an apartment on Eaton Place rented for her by Filmways. Polanski recalls that its walls featured paintings by David Hockney. Also living in the apartment was Sharon’s voice coach, who was a woman, and a Yorkshire puppy named Guinness.

  Polanski’s Mews house was just around the corner from Sharon. On an ev
ening soon after they met, they had dinner together, then headed back to his place. He wrote that Sharon said she felt guilt coming back to his house with him. She was still involved with Jay Sebring. On the way there, as Polanski wrote in his autobiography, he stopped at an actor friend’s to pick up some acid. One cube, he wrote, which he and Sharon split. Sharon had already taken LSD several times, and said it wasn’t “necessarily scary.” He noted that Sharon tended to bite her nails—something, over the years, he would chide her about.

  At dawn they made love. Then he had to fly to Sweden, to speak with students at Lund University. “What had impressed me most about her, quite apart from her exceptional beauty,” he later wrote, “was the sort of radiance that springs from a kind and gentle nature; she had obvious hang-ups yet seemed completely liberated. I had never met anyone like her before.”

  Another version of how Polanski and Tate met is contained in Greg King’s biography of Sharon Tate, pages 39–40. When Sharon decided to hang out in London, and asked her pal Wende Wagner to join her, somehow, the manager of the London Playboy Club, Victor Lownes, took upon himself the overseeing of their fun, taking them to parties and to exclusive night spots in Soho and Knightsbridge. “They were having a lot of fun,” Mr. Lownes later recalled, “enjoying the shopping during the day and the party scene at night.”

  As part of his duties, Lownes hosted a luncheon for Tate and Wagner, and brought to the gathering about a dozen of his friends, including Roman Polanski. Also invited was actor Skip Ward, a friend of Sharon’s, in Europe for the filming of Is Paris Burning? “I was delayed,” Ward later recalled, “and I didn’t arrive at Victor’s until nearly three in the afternoon. By then, the party was almost over. When I walked in, I said hello to Wende, and then noticed that Sharon was sitting next to Polanski. They were deep in conversation. I watched them for quite a while, as they talked and laughed. At the time, I made a mental note that Jay wasn’t going to like this.”