Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  One version of how Roman at last met Sharon’s father, Paul Tate, goes as follows. Sharon called her dad’s sudden unannounced visits “surprise attacks.” One such surprise occurred in September of 1967 at the Cary Grant house in Pacific Palisades. The colonel sat chatting on the deck of the house with Sharon. Roman was not yet home—the two had not yet met.

  Then Roman arrived from work. Paul Tate remained on the deck, while Sharon greeted Roman, announcing that her father was outside. Her father could hear the conversation. Roman, according to the father, was not that eager to meet Sharon’s dad, complaining that it had been a difficult day on the set, and that he just wanted a hot bath and then an opportunity to relax.

  Sharon told Roman that the colonel was only remaining through dinner. “You need to get to know him.” Roman then, for some reason asked if there was any “bu” in the house.

  “Please don’t do this,” was Sharon’s reply.

  Roman then surrendered to the event, and, holding hands with Sharon, went out to the deck to meet Paul Tate, “nice to meet you.”

  The phone rang, and Roman urged Sharon to answer it. Then, with Sharon gone, Roman realized that the colonel was upset that he and Sharon were living together.

  “You know,” said Roman, “She’s too nice. I’ve been trying to toughen her up, but she won’t fight back.”

  “I wouldn’t try too hard,” the Colonel replied. “She doesn’t get mad very often, but when she does, oh, son, you better watch out. And when she’s done with you, then you’ve got me to reckon with.”

  Roman then said, “I’d better go see who’s on the phone.”

  Here’s another version of how Polanski met Sharon’s parents, from the quicksand of the past. It seems that Roman was a bit nervous for this first meeting. The colonel was back from war duty, working on the Vietnam War while at the same time being stationed in Korea. The parents showed up one day unannounced. Uh oh. But all went well. They no doubt were impressed with the opulence of the mansion on Palisades Beach Road and the obvious money being earned by the high-flying director who chatted with them in halting English. The thread goes back to 1964, and Sharon’s enforced breakup with actor Philippe Forquet, who recalled in a later interview that Doris was much concerned about the loss of money if Sharon should give up an acting career for marriage.

  Roman later wrote that “any qualms I may have felt about this first meeting with them were soon dispelled by their warm and friendly acceptance of my relationship with their daughter.” The Tates brought a Yorkshire terrier as a present, which Roman named Dr. Saperstein, after the character in Rosemary’s Baby.

  The photographer/filmmaker Shahrokh Hatami was hired to film a documentary on Mia Farrow and the making of Rosemary’s Baby. As we have noted, Hatami had enjoyed an extensive career in photojournalism. He had already taken numerous photos of Sharon Tate for Life magazine back in 1965, and subsequently became a confidant of hers, as we shall see.

  In the midst of Rosemary’s Baby came conflict. In the early fall of 1967, with filming days behind schedule, Frank Sinatra was on the phone. He wanted to speak with Paramount Pictures head Bob Evans.

  “I’m pulling Mia off the fuckin’ film, Evans, if it ain’t finished by November 14. She’s starting my picture [The Detective] on the seventeenth.”

  “Sorry, Frank. She won’t be finished with Rosemary’s Baby until mid-January.”

  “Then she’s quitting.”

  Mia came to Evans’s office. “I’m going to have to quit. I love him.”

  “Screen Actors Guild will enjoin you from doing his picture, too, Mia.” said Evans. He screened for her about an hour of Rosemary’s Baby. He claimed in his autobiography he assured her she was a shoo-in for an Academy Award. “Suddenly, she didn’t take a hike,” recounted Evans. “Just as suddenly, Frank served her with divorce papers, right on the set, delivered by Mickey Rudin, his attorney.”

  In another interview Evans remembered: “She wanted to leave to be with Frank. She was madly in love with Frank, and I took her in and I showed her an hour of cut footage, and I said, ‘You’re going to win the Academy Award for this. . . . Suddenly she didn’t want to get on the plane to leave.”

  Peter Sellers and Roman Polanski met in an Italian restaurant near the Paramount lot during filming of Rosemary’s Baby. “My first impression of him was of a sad, shy man who hid his essential melancholy behind a fixed smile that revealed his rather prominent teeth,” noted Polanski in his autobiography. Sellers’s “manner conveyed profound depression,” wrote Ed Sikov in his book on Sellers, Mr. Strangelove (p. 272).

  Sometime in the next few weeks, Sellers became involved with Mia Farrow.

  There was a brief article on Sharon in the Los Angeles Times on October 24, 1967. It was published in the run-up to the release of Valley of the Dolls. “Men are attracted to women who seem to have solved their problems, who face life with self-assurance,” Sharon told the reporter, Lydia Lane. When asked about the beautiful attire she wore in the upcoming Valley of the Dolls, Sharon commented: “I go to the Paris collections often, but I do not make mistakes since I’ve learned not to be hypnotized by a name. The enthusiasm for a creation is one thing. What the dress will do for you, how well it suits your needs is another. When I buy I try to picture the whole outfit. You must co-ordinate, if you want to look your best. Some clothes are designed to be sex symbols, but the girls who wear them have to have other things going to find success with men.”

  Topanga Canyon and the Spiral Staircase: The Fall of 1967

  Topanga Canyon, an enticing and beautiful place in the counterculture sixties, twists up from Topanga Beach for a few miles to a summit overlooking the San Fernando Valley. The canyon was easily accessible to Hollywood along roadways across the San Fernando Valley.

  There is a creek that runs its pleasant boulder-strewn and cabin-sited way down Topanga Canyon into the Pacific. Following along the creek is Topanga Boulevard, which runs from the ocean up over the top of Topanga and down into the San Fernando Valley and then north a few miles in a straight line to Santa Susanna Pass Road, near the location of the Spahn Ranch, the future home of a roaming band of young people led by a charismatic singer and guitar player.

  Woody Guthrie once lived in the canyon, and his cabin still stands. In spite of the mutant sprawl of Los Angeles, the canyon maintained a form of rustic beauty and its inhabitants were among the most experimental in lifestyles to be encountered anywhere.

  While Roman was busy shooting his movie about a satanic coven, Sharon introduced him to the joys of Topanga Canyon. He described it in his autobiography: “Our life together was a sheer delight. Sharon introduced me to the America she knew: not only junk food, drive-ins, and popcorn at the movies but the California coast, Big Sur, and Topanga Canyon. Some friends of hers lived in Topanga, and we used to spend whole afternoons there. In their garden, which overlooked a cliff, they had a crude swing—a tire at the end of a long rope—and I shall never forget the thrill of soaring higher and higher through the branches, over the cliff, glimpsing the extraordinary view, hearing the wind whistle around us.”

  That fall of 1967 a converted school bus painted black, with the words “Holywood [sic] Productions,” arrived in Topanga Canyon. It held a roaming group of young people led by a man named Charles Manson. Manson was determined to record his songs and to become famous.

  Manson’s target was a man named Gary Stromberg, who was employed at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Stromberg was a friend of Phil Kaufman, whom Manson had befriended earlier in the 1960s in prison. Through Kaufman, it was set up that Manson would record a couple of sessions for Universal Records, with Universal to pay for the recording costs.

  When Manson and the group first arrived, they lived at a secluded house at the mouth of Topanga Canyon near the Pacific Coast Highway. The house was called the Spiral Staircase, after a spiral staircase at its entrance, and it had slid off its foundation and rested askew. Apparently its first floor had a creek flowing t
hrough it. The place was located behind the Raft Restaurant on Topanga Canyon Lane, and according to Manson there were windows that opened out onto the hill in back and some doors opening on a twenty-five-foot drop straight down into the creek. The Spiral Staircase has since been torn down, but in 1967 it was a citadel of dope, fucking, and worship of devilish deities.

  It was at the Spiral Staircase that Manson, by his own admission, had his first meeting with the So-Cal variety of devil worshippers and Satanists. Manson met the owner of the Spiral Staircase in San Francisco. “She was a trippy broad, about forty-five years old,” Manson describes her, “who experimented with everything. When I met her, she was pumped up about devil worship and satanic activities.”

  He says she gave him complete crash privileges. For a few months, the Spiral Staircase became a scrounge-lounge for the Family. They parked the bus there between peregrinations and were exposed, according to Manson, to all sorts of blood-drinkers and ritualists. Of course, many other types of people congregated at the spiral house, including an occasional starlet driving a Rolls-Royce.

  Patricia Krenwinkel in a later interview told how it was at the Spiral Staircase that she’d first met members of an English-based satanic group that had migrated to the United States, led, as she termed it, by a “blond-haired Englishman.”

  In one report written by an officer with the LA County sheriff’s office, he describes a conversation with a fellow officer stationed in the Topanga Canyon area in 1970. The officer “stated that he had knowledge of a purported Englishwoman living at ‘The Castle’ in Topanga Canyon.” He then listed the name of the woman, one of the founders of the English satanic cult. The officer stated that he had never met the cult-woman, “but that he has met a tall male Negro with an English accent at The Castle.” The officer further “said he could not recall the male Negro’s name since this incident occurred approximately two years ago but that he thinks it was Roberts or Robertson.”

  The officer also “said he understands from his informants in the Canyon that Roberts or Robertson is the personal representative” of the English cult-woman’s group “which does witchcraft and that the woman is the money behind the operation.” The officer said “that to the best of his knowledge ‘The Castle’ is owned by the (English) woman and that a large tree in the front of the location was preserved for the purpose of some type of witchcraft rites.”

  “Light shows” were a feature of the late-sixties counterculture, utilizing projections of films, photos, pulsing lights, and blobby images from colors mixed in petri dishes and projected on screens and walls to the music of guitars, drums and other instruments. At one such “light show party” held at the Spiral Staircase, a twenty-year-old actor/musician from Santa Barbara named Robert Beausoleil arrived sporting a pointed beard and smoking a hand-carved skull pipe. The man known as Charlie and his female followers were singing together, so he joined in and began playing along. Beausoleil later told me that a few days later, Charlie came to see Beausoleil, wearing an old tweed jacket, a tweed cap and a walking stick. Beausoleil was staying at the home in Topanga Canyon of a music teacher named Gary Hinman, whom Beausoleil would murder in the summer of 1969. (In an interview with the author in prison Beausoleil told me that the Manson group had met the English Satanists at the Spiral Staircase that 1967 fall.)

  Sharon as Matchmaker

  Sharon’s good friend Joanna Pettet was having an affair with Terence Stamp, her costar in the Paramount picture Blue, when she was staying at the Cary Grant house rented by Sharon and Roman. After final work on the film was completed, Pettet flew home to New York City, where Sharon Tate’s skill as a matchmaker bore fruit. Joanna Pettet described how she met her future husband, the actor Alex Cord, in New York City in October of 1967: “Alex,” she said, “had dated Sharon long before she married Roman. I remember Sharon and I talking in London, and she said to me, ‘If there is one man I could see you really falling for, it would be Alex Cord.’ I didn’t know who he was at the time. Then I met him in New York. I believe she was in London. And I called her, when I was sitting with Alex, and I said, ‘You’ll never believe who I am with.’ I said Alex Cord. And she was just amazed.”

  Meanwhile, the chopped and channeled The Fearless Vampire Killers was released in the United States in November. Time and Newsweek both panned it. Polanski carried on a public feud with Ransohoff for “butchering” his creation, plus it was not profitable. Tate’s performance was largely ignored in reviews, and when she was mentioned, it was usually in relation to her nude scenes.

  “Ransohoff is a perfect example of a hypocrite,” Polanski stated in an interview with Michel Ciment, Michel Perez, and Roger Tailleur in 1969. “He’s a philistine who dresses himself up as an artist.”

  Eye of the Devil was released shortly after, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (and Filmways) attempted to build interest in Tate with its press release describing her as “one of the screen’s most exciting new personalities.” The film failed to make its mark among the ticket-purchasing public, although the New York Times wrote in its review that Tate’s “chillingly beautiful but expressionless” performance is a high point of the film.

  Premiere of Valley of the Dolls on the Cruise Liner Princess Italia: November 1967

  Valley of the Dolls had its world premiere aboard a docked cruise liner, Princess Italia, on November 14, 1967, in Venice, Italy. The cruise liner was filled with the international press to see one of the most anticipated films in history. Patty Duke, Barbara Parkins, and Sharon Tate at last got to view the completed film—oi oi oi. Somehow the production had inadvertently become a comedy.

  Afterward the good-natured Sharon willingly met for press interviews, while some of her costars attempted to elude the press. There are reports that Jacqueline Susann hid herself in her suite aboard the Princess Italia in disgust. Nevertheless, she remained aboard during the voyage.

  The studio hired writer Army Archerd, and his associate Bill Burrud, to narrate a documentary tracing the multiweek world premiere trek. Sharon Tate is shown in the film answering questions; she apparently stayed aboard for the total voyage from Venice to the Canary Islands to Miami Beach, then to Nassau in the Bahamas, thence to Cartagena, Colombia, then through the Panama Canal to another premiere in Acapulco. The twenty-eight-day journey ended December 10 in Los Angeles, where the ship was greeted by a mariachi band.

  Archerd interviewed Sharon for the documentary. She looked, as usual, very well turned out, in a black dress showing a lot of bare shoulder, long dangling earrings, and her hair pulled back, with a center part, into a bun in back.

  Army Archerd asked, “The part calls for someone who is beautiful as well as talented. . . . Can you tell us how one gets in the mood to do something as daring as the disrobing you do in the film?”

  Sharon replied, “Well, I don’t think there’s any mood. I think if you try to prepare yourself, you fall flat on your face. Actually it’s very good, you know, it’s something so difficult to do, and I found that if you FORGET more what you’re doing, you know, and try not to be so self-conscious about things that are so normal, people don’t notice you as much, as if you’re trying to be so shy about everything.”

  One anecdote, told by Sharmagne Leland-St. John, involves the husband of one of the stars of Valley of the Dolls, with whom Leland-St. John later briefly lived. Sharon Tate, the story goes, asked the husband, who accompanied his wife on one leg of the cruise liner voyage, whether she should get married to Polanski. The husband advised against it, and Sharon purportedly thanked him profusely, saying something like, “Thank you, I really appreciate it, you saved my life, I’m not going to throw my life away.” It has to be said that the husband has denied giving any such advice.

  While Sharon was on the SS Princess Italia for the Valley of the Dolls promotional voyage, Roman was busy concluding work on Rosemary’s Baby.

  Once back in Los Angeles, Sharon and Judy Gutowski, wife of Cadre Films co-owner, Gene, took a mini-vacation to Big Sur, during which t
ime Roman balled a young model at the Santa Monica beachfront mansion. When they returned, Mrs. Gutowski learned about the balling and told Sharon.

  The poet Czeslaw Milosz and his wife were among the torrents of Polanski pals who enjoyed the mansion. He warned Polanski, according to Roman’s autobiography, “If I were you, I would get them out of here. They’re trying to turn Sharon against you.” The former Polish diplomat, Milosz, who had broken with the Communist government, was then fifty-six, and would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

  Another version of the mini-vacation in Big Sur, according to another biography of Polanski, says this: “Tate’s indulgence had already been put to a severe test in the period, some weeks before their wedding, when she and Polanski were living together in Santa Monica. During a weekend when Tate was away relaxing at a spa some 300 miles up the coast in Big Sur, the director had invited a young Balinese model over for the night. Gene Gutowski and his wife Judy also happened to be staying at the house for several weeks. Polanski had apparently thought nothing of it—the girl was gone again by Sunday evening, in good time for him to welcome Sharon back at the airport. . . . Judy told Sharon about the model as soon as she got back.”

  About two weeks before Christmas, 1967, Polanski, Mia Farrow, the producer William Castle, cameraman William Fraker, and the crew returned for final filming of exteriors in Christmas-shopper-dappled New York City. Polanski refilmed the opening shot from the ledge of the rooftop of the building across from the Dakota. It had been the first thing filmed the previous summer, but the director, always a perfectionist, didn’t dig the results, so had it redone. After that, it was back to Los Angeles for final work. Shooting for Rosemary’s Baby at Paramount Studios was not finished until after Christmas.

  Not afraid to shoot and reshoot and reshoot certain scenes, Polanski saw Rosemary’s Baby go $400,000 over its $1.9 million budget, just as The Fearless Vampire Killers had gone over by $300, 000.