Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  At first Sharon remained at her apartment on Eaton Place, with additional filming on The Fearless Vampire Killers at various MGM studios in London, till it was concluded. In April of 1966 Jay Sebring complained to friends that he’d been bird-dogged by Roman Polanski. Sharon moved in with Roman shortly after Easter 1966, when filming was halted for a few days. He wanted to take her to St. Tropez, but his passport problems prevented it. They went instead to the south coast English resort, Eastbourne. It didn’t work out, so they spent the rest of the brief vacation at his Mews house. She showed herself a fine cook and homemaker, well-schooled by her mother, Doris.

  “She began to make a tremendous difference in my life,” he later wrote. “We took to spending more evenings at home and entertaining more people, some of them Hollywood friends like Warren Beatty, Dick Sylbert, and Yul Brynner, others ‘locals’ like Victor Lownes, Andy Braunsberg, Simon Hesera, Larry Harvey, and Michael Sarne, who had just finished directing his first feature, Joanna.”

  “When she was out in public with Roman, she never felt adequate enough to open her mouth. She could only talk to him alone. Her problem was that she had always been beautiful, and people were forever losing themselves in fantasy over her—electing her a beauty queen, imagining her as a wife, dreaming of a caress. Most people had fantasies. But a few people, like Polanski, took charge,” or so John Bowers wrote, in The Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1967, in an article titled “SEXY LITTLE ME—This is how Hollywood turns a pretty Texas girl into Sharon Tate, the star.”

  Took charge indeed. Polanski exerted great control over Sharon Tate, as her friend Joanna Pettet described in an interview with the author: “I just knew that he did control Sharon. He told her how to dress; he told her what makeup he liked, what he didn’t like. He preferred her with nothing, no makeup. And she was exquisite with no makeup. But he ruled her entire life from the time she met him.”

  Sheilah Wells recalls that Sharon “actually had written me a beautiful letter that she had just met this wonderful man, and said ‘I hate to hurt Jay.’ My boyfriend was Ron Roth. He was a young producer at Universal, with Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater (which ran on NBC from 1963 through 1967.) Sharon was very fond of him and wanted to know how we were doing. And then she went into ‘I just met someone, a fascinating man by the name of Roman Polanski, and I think it’s serious,’ and that she didn’t want to do anything to hurt Jay, and she was really concerned about that, how she was going to handle it. It was just a simple, sweet letter. She was a very caring, sweet, sweet girl. People say, ‘Oh, she’s so nice, she’s so sweet,’ but Sharon truly truly was.”

  After Sharon and Roman began living together, Jay Sebring flew to London, apparently aware of the new situation. Sharon wanted the three to have lunch. It was at a place called Alvaro, just around the corner from Roman’s Mews house. Jay accepted that it was pffft for him and Sharon. Even so, Roman and Jay got along, and even became friends, though Sebring still loved the delicate beauty whose class ring he wore on a chain around his neck for all the years left to him.

  Not long after her breakup with Sebring, Sharon was interviewed by a writer for a French magazine. The writer said, “I’m pretty sure you were engaged to someone the last time I saw you.” “With Jay Sebring,” was Sharon’s answer. “Now it is finished. He was trying to dominate me too much. When I was filming a nude scene in The Vampire Killers, he telephoned me and tried to dispute it.” (Translation from the French.)

  “However, we have stayed friends. I called him the other day to find out how he was doing. He told me that now he was going out with a fifteen-year-old girl. I found that totally immature.

  “I told Jay he should be ashamed—a fifteen-year-old! When I was fifteen, I was still looking for red and white striped flannel nightgowns. I was dead scared of men. Jay told me, ‘But she’s very much advanced for her age. She knows just about everything.’”

  “I’m dating Roman Polanski now,” Sharon continued. “I have to admit that I never thought that one day I would date someone so intelligent. He is teaching me a lot of things and shares confidences with me.”

  The article mentions that she was biting her nails, then suddenly stopped. “I should stop doing that. It’s edginess or something like that. I have a mass of energy inside me that I’m not using.”

  The reporter asked, “Do you feel you have gained some maturity in dating Polanski?” “Oh yes, absolutely.” Sharon answered. “When I arrived in London last year I was terribly shy. Leslie Caron invited me to a party and I was thinking: What can I say to people that would be interesting?”

  The fifteen-year-old friend of Sebring was Catherine James, an emancipated young woman who had a varied career as an upper echelon rock-and-roll fan, and who later wrote of her life in an autobiography entitled Dandelion.

  Also hanging out at Sebring’s Easton Drive place was another young woman, Sharmagne Leland-St. John. “I honestly cannot remember exactly when I moved in,” she e-mailed me. “First of all a few weeks after I met Jay my parents had me committed to Camarillo because I had sort of ‘co-hosted’ a sweet 16 party for his then girlfriend Catherine James. My former boyfriend had driven us to the Sebring house because for some reason Catherine’s mother and boyfriend were late. Neither one of us had a car. (This was when he loaned me Sharon’s car.) Anyway we walked in the door at Jay’s and were offered punch which had acid in it. We drank the punch, were having a great time, and my former boyfriend got jealous that I was hanging out in the kitchen with George Hamilton and told me to get my purse because we were leaving. I didn’t really want to go.

  “He told me, ‘You came with me, you are leaving with me!’ So I said, ‘NO! You chauffeured me, I’m staying!’ It got ugly and I didn’t want to spoil Cathy’s party so I went to say goodnight to Jay. . . . He asked me why I was leaving so soon, and I said my ex boyfriend is demanding that I leave. ‘Do you want to?’ ‘Well, no!’ So he told me to go lock myself in the upstairs bathroom . . . and he would take care of Myron. Apparently a group of guys threw him out bodily. There was a fist fight and everything. So at 3 a.m., he went to my parents’ home, got them out of bed, and told them that I was on drugs at a Hollywood orgy! Catherine’s mother was there at the party! It was hardly an orgy. That was probably May 31, 1966. So I dated him steadily, and then they had me committed, and I spent over a month incarcerated in a mental institution. I escaped in July of 1966. Jay found me a safe house . . . way out in Tujunga or Sun Valley because he knew if I went to Easton they’d look for me there.” St. John recalls she finally moved into Sebring’s house on Easton Drive in late August of 1966. Jay loaned her Sharon’s automobile, which was still parked there while Sharon was in England.

  The quicksand of the past.

  Actress Joanna Pettet Recalls Meeting Sharon

  “I can tell you exactly the very moment I met her. I was bowled over by her beauty. My partner at the time was Victor Lownes, who was part of the Playboy conglomerate; he ran the Playboy Club in London. I was with Victor, and Roman Polanski was a very good friend of Victor. One afternoon Sharon and Roman came in and I came downstairs, and Sharon was watching Roman and Victor play backgammon. And she had absolutely no makeup on, and I was just astounded; I had never seen anyone more beautiful. And we became very good friends.

  “It was while I was doing Casino Royale. I think it was probably 1966. Then, we stayed friends. I was working, she was working, so it came in and out.”

  Pettet recalls how Victor and Roman would watch pornographic movies at Lownes’s place in London, but that she and Sharon would leave the room when that type of movie was shown. “I was very young,” Pettet recounted during an interview in 2010, “and I had never been exposed to that, and I just wouldn’t watch them, and whether or not Sharon just played along with me, and then when she was with Roman it was different, I don’t know. But, she knew how I felt about that.”

  Sharon on The Merv Griffin Show

  Merv Griffin, the star of the popular American
TV talk show, took a walk with Sharon Tate on a “tour of swinging London’s Carnaby Street” on August 5, 1966. This walk was filmed and shown on The Merv Griffin Show. The footage shows Sharon and Merv strolling side by side, Sharon gesticulating with her sunglasses in her right hand, first along Carnaby Street, then down Kings Road, where the most “in” fashions were on display in stores. Sharon then sat in chairs with Griffin and was asked about this part of London. Sharon’s spontaneous reply was interesting: “Actually, Chelsea is—you can’t say it’s like our Greenwich Village—but it’s where the artists and painters and a lot of actors live. Actually, this is one of the best areas to live in, because it’s kind of kooky, and the houses are unusual, you know. Saturday down here,” she told Griffin, “is the time to come to Kings Road.”

  Griffin asked, “What happens on Saturday?”

  Tate: “You see all the strange people in all the strange clothes.”

  Griffin: “Tell me about you. We have yet to see you in motion pictures in America, but from what we hear, you’re going to be a smash. And now, you have a monster movie.”

  Tate: “Not really.”

  Griffin: “What’s it called?”

  Tate: “The Vampire Killers. It sounds terrible, but it’s a satire on horror films. It’s like a live Walt Disney film. Roman Polanski.”

  Griffin: “It’s funny, we all thought you were an English girl, and most everybody does here, but you were born in?”

  Tate: “I was born in Dallas, Texas.

  Griffin: “And lived all your life in America?”

  Tate: “Not really, I lived in Italy for four years.”

  Griffin: “Why was that?”

  Tate: “My dad’s in the army.”

  Griffin: “An army brat made good! Where’s he stationed now?”

  Tate: “Right now he’s in Vietnam.”

  Griffin: “In what capacity?”

  Tate: “Intelligence, between Vietnam and Korea.”

  Griffin: “He’s an officer?”

  Tate: “Yes.”

  Griffin: “Well, they must be proud, or do they know what you’re doing?”

  Tate: “They were a little skeptical at first.”

  Griffin: “They haven’t seen you yet, have they, as an actress?”

  Tate: “No, no, they haven’t seen anything. They’ll laugh, I’m sure, they’ll laugh” (breaks into a laugh herself).

  Around the time Sharon was on The Merv Griffin Show, Filmways and Martin Ransohoff were producing a movie called Don’t Make Waves, based on the Ira Wallach novel, Muscle Beach. It starred Tony Curtis and Claudia Cardinale. Julie Newmar was slated for an important role, but suffered a back injury and had to bow out of the project. PR releases stated that it was because she couldn’t lift leading man Tony Curtis. Ransohoff summoned Sharon Tate from London that August of 1966, to take over Newmar’s part as Malibu, a sky-diving bikini-clad beach-peach who performed her own stunts.

  In American Prince, his 2009 autobiography, Tony Curtis wrote of making Don’t Make Waves: “The plot was utterly ridiculous, but I agreed to appear in the film because I got a percentage of the gross. When Martin Ransohoff asked me to recommend a director, I suggested Alexander Mackendrick, with whom I’d worked on Sweet Smell of Success.” Curtis’s first wife was the actress Janet Leigh, to whom he was married for eleven years, 1951–1962, and with whom he fathered actresses Jamie Lee and Kelly Curtis. Curtis left Leigh in 1962 for Christine Kaufmann, his seventeen-year-old German costar in the film Taras Bulba.

  During Don’t Make Waves, four years into this second marriage, Curtis was having marital troubles with Christine Kaufmann, which Sharon apparently helped him deal with through friendly advice. Sharon and Tony would become friends, but not lovers.

  A famous seducer of costars, Curtis later wrote about the women in Don’t Make Waves: “Claudia Cardinale was gorgeous, but her boyfriend at the time was rumored to be an important politico, so Ransohoff delicately told us, ‘Hands off.’ Sharon Tate was living with Roman Polanski. . . . and I was a good friend of Roman’s. We would meet at parties, after which I would go over to their house and make myself comfortable there.”

  Ransohoff was very hands-on in his relationship with productions. Curtis wrote: “Ransohoff complained that (director) Sandy (Mackendrick) wasn’t working fast enough (i.e., going over budget—as Ransohoff had complained about regarding The Fearless Vampire Killers), and Ransohoff also didn’t like the way the picture was coming out.” (Shades of Ransohoff fiddling with Vampire Killers.)

  “I was growing rather wary of MGM,” writes Polanski in his autobiography. “I was also growing suspicious of Ransohoff, particularly when I found that Sharon’s agent was his agent, too, and had helped renegotiate her contract downward. Ransohoff summoned her to Los Angeles to play opposite Tony Curtis in a comedy—Don’t Make Waves—at a paltry $750 a week.”

  An article in the December 1967 issue of Muscular Development traces the involvement of the muscle-building community in the film: “The new MGM-Filmways production has Tony Curtis and Claudia Cardinale as the top featured performers with Sharon Tate and Dave Draper in the co-starring roles. The $4,000,000 film is based on Ira Wallach’s novel, Muscle Beach. The movie can be described as a ‘sex and flex’ gala spectacular featuring blondes, bikinis and bulging biceps.

  “The big surprise of the movie to Tony Curtis, Claudia Cardinale and the other pros in the cast of Martin Ransohoff’s comedy was the big blond giant, Dave Draper. Dave plays the part of Harry, winning the role from forty-two others who were tested for the part. The film brass at Filmways were so pleased with the terrific job Dave did in the movie that they signed him to an exclusive long-term contract, and have high hopes for his future as an actor. The publicity chief for Filmways Productions, Fred Baum, said, ‘Dave did such a great job he surprised everyone. In fact, he just might steal the picture.’ One of the cast, beautiful Joanna Barnes commented, ‘Honestly, he’s so appealing in the picture you want to hug him.’

  “Co-starring as Draper’s girlfriend is the very lovely Sharon Tate, one of the most beautiful girls these eyes have ever seen!”

  Dave Draper, who plays Malibu’s boyfriend Harry, was the 1965 Mr. America and the 1966 Mr. Universe.

  One of the film’s highlights was The Byrds’ pleasing title track, composed by Chris Hillman and Jim McGuinn:

  If you’re looking to get a good thing going for yourself

  House and pool, a new Rolls Royce and some degree of wealth

  Don’t make waves, don’t make waves, don’t make waves

  Take a ride out West to find that freedom that you crave

  Kick that nine to five, don’t let them make you a slave

  Don’t make waves, don’t make waves, don’t makes waves

  As we have noted, Sharon Tate was the buzz story of the movie, as the always-bikinied skydiver, Malibu. Here’s the plot: When impulsive and reckless Laura Califatti (Claudia Cardinale) totally wrecks a sports car belonging to tourist Carlo Cofield (Tony Curtis), she invites the unhappy young man to spend the night on the couch of her Malibu Beach apartment. But he is thrown out by Laura’s “lover,” Rod Prescott (Robert Webber), a self-important businessman who operates a swimming pool company owned by his wife (played by Joanna Barnes). After sleeping on the beach, Carlo goes for a swim, nearly drowns, and is saved by a beauteous skydiver-surfer Malibu (Sharon Tate), who gives him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Captivated by the girl, Carlo decides to settle down in the area. Since he has failed to get any compensation for his sports car, he plies his knowing of Rod’s affair with Laura to con for himself a well-paying gig as a pool salesman.

  To enhance Carlo/Curtis’s romance with Malibu/Tate, Carlo bribes an astrologist, Madame Lavinia, into telling Malibu’s bodybuilder boyfriend, Harry, that sex is bad for his body. Rod’s wife, Diane, declares that she is suing for divorce, naming Laura/Cardinale as correspondent.

  Eventually, all six become trapped in Carlo’s cliffside house during a rainstorm
. As it tips over and slides down the incline to the muddy beach below, Malibu/Tate is rejoined with the ultramuscular Harry/David Draper, Diane agrees to drop her divorce proceedings against Rod, and Laura/Cardinale and Carlo/Curtis unite in permanent love.

  The Long Beach, California, Independent Press Telegram, on August 21, 1966, published an article titled “Just a Pretty Girl in San Pedro—Now Look!” by Margaret McKean. The article provides a slice of time for Sharon Tate as she began filming Don’t Make Waves: “A few weeks ago Sharon’s mother got a phone call from the studio, ‘Sharon wants you to meet her plane and we’ll go from there to the Beverly Wilshire.’”

  Doris Tate thought a meeting would give her a chance to catch up on Sharon’s recent life. “But stardom,” the article continued, “does not have much time for girl talk. After arriving, Sharon fell into bed to get a few hours’ sleep before a 9 a.m. wardrobe call. Since then she’s been on the set of Don’t Make Waves with Tony Curtis in Malibu. A stage mother Doris Tate is not. ‘This is the life Sharon wants, she can have it. She was always kind of pretty and I’ll have to admit that she’s worked hard. She’ll be 24 next January and it would seem she’s behaved herself and come through all this glamour pretty well.’

  “There are no raptures or glowing gushiness from the star’s mother or kid sisters, Debbie, 13 and Patti, 9. Her father is now stationed in Korea and tape recordings of the family exchanges center on such important things as ‘how mother and dad can take another long separation’ and ‘is the yard work getting done?’ ‘We’ve got a new house in Palos Verdes and Sharon hasn’t even had a chance to come see it yet,’” her mother commented.

  “‘In some ways, Sharon is disillusioned—‘She hates what studio beauticians do to her hair and recombs every set.’ She recently wrote her dad, ‘I finally own a Christian Dior and now I don’t like it. Mother dressed me better from her sewing machine at home.’”

  Writer Norma Lee Browning described visiting the set of Waves: “The last scene I watched at Malibu involved Sharon and Tony Curtis doing a dangerous sky diving scene into the swimming pool. Sharon insisted on doing the stunt herself instead of a stunt girl. There was one take when something went amiss; Sharon got trapped under water and almost didn’t come up. There was slight panic on the set. First aid was summoned. Sharon was fished out. She was okay, and she still insisted on doing the rest of the takes herself instead of using a stunt girl. I remember thinking then, Wow! That girl’s got guts!”