Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

End of 1967: Getting Out of Her Contract with Martin Ranshohoff

  Not long after the Princess Italia docked in Los Angeles, Sharon went to Martin Ransohoff, stating that she wanted out of the remaining three years of her contract in order to retire from filmmaking and become a full-time wife. She told Ransohoff she wanted to start a family with Polanski.

  Mr. Ransohoff agreed, as he later recounted, “conditioned on her intention to retire.” One apparent provision of the let-out was that she turn over twenty-five percent of her earnings the next four years. Sharon agreed to those terms. That way, she’d be Free Free Free to seek out roles that would offer her the best chance to show her true abilities for comedy and acting.

  Another account has it occurring around the time of the release of Valley of the Dolls. “Around that time,” Ransohoff recalled in an interview, Sharon asked to be freed from her contract. “She told me she really wanted to have kids and didn’t want to continue her movie career,” he said. Ransohoff must have realized that it was a fib, because Sharon soon continued her film career.

  Sharon was featured in a pictorial spread in the December 1967 issue of Esquire magazine, along with quotations from Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung. The spread bore the title, “A Beginner’s Guide to Mao Tse-tung.” It began: “The little red book which contains highlights from The Thought of Mao Tse-tung is the most influential volume in the world today. It is also extremely dull and entirely unmemorable. To resolve this paradox, we, a handful of editors in authority who follow the capitalist road, thought it useful to illustrate certain key passages in such a way that they are more likely to stick in the mind. The visual aid is Sharon Tate and, to give credit where credit, God knows, is due, she will soon be seen in the Twentieth Century-Fox motion picture, Valley of the Dolls.

  1. Every communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ ‘Problems of War and Strategy’ (November 6, 1938). [This caption was accompanied by a photo of Sharon on one knee, flashing a lot of bare chest, her right hand grasping the top of a rifle, and her left hand grasping a pointed pistol.]

  2. Our fundamental task is to adjust the use of labor power in an organized way and to encourage women to do farm work. ‘Our Economic Policy’ (January 23, 1934) [This was accompanied by a shot of curvy Sharon curled atop a bale of straw.]

  3. How is Marxist-Leninist theory to be linked with the practice of the Chinese revolution? To use a common expression, it is by ‘shooting the arrow at the target.’ As the arrow is to the target, so is Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese revolution. Some comrades, however, are ‘shooting without a target,’ shooting at random, and such people are liable to harm the revolution. ‘Rectify the Party’s Style of Work’ (February 1, 1942). [With this was a shot of Sharon in a wet T-shirt, holding a bow.]

  4. The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you. The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you. Talk at a meeting with Chinese students and trainees in Moscow (November 17, 1957).

  5. The flattery of the bourgeoisie may conquer the weak-willed in our ranks. There may be some Communists, who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand sugar-coated bullets. We must guard against such a situation. ‘Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’ (March 5, 1949). [This was adorned with a photo of bare-chested Sharon, whose bosom tip is covered by a dangling bandoleer packed with bullets.]

  6. Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. . . . If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. ‘On Practice’ (July, 1937). [This had a shot of Sharon, in a very open blouse, holding a bitten-into pear.]”

  All in all, this Esquire spread combined a satiric putdown of Maoism with the gun-toting open-bosomed eroticism of a rising actress, befitting the daughter of an Army Intelligence officer serving in Korea during the Vietnam War.

  Meanwhile, the reviews for Valley of the Dolls must not have been pleasant to read for the movie’s key players, including Sharon. Bosley Crowther, for instance, in the New York Times, began his review: “Bad as Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls is as a book, the movie Mark Robson has made from it is that bad or worse. It’s an unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish mish-mash of back stage plots and “Peyton Place” adumbrations in which five women are involved with their assorted egotistical aspirations, love affairs and Seconal pills. It’s every bit as phony and old-fashioned as anything Lana Turner ever did, and all a fairly respectful admirer of movies can do is laugh at it and turn away.”

  He mentions, without praise, “Sharon Tate as a no-talent showgirl who gives up when she has to have a breast removed.” Even with poor reviews, however, the movie did very well at the box office. As columnist Joyce Haber noted, on January 29, 1968, “Dolls, which has to be among the worst movies of all times, is somehow breaking box office records across the country. If it continues at this pace, it bids to be among the top grossers in movie history. Dolls is exceptional, a bad movie gone berserk. Bad reviews and worse word-of-mouth seem only to enhance its appeal for audiences. And this, with a cast headed by Sharon Tate, Patty Duke, and Barbara Parkins!”

  Chapter 5

  1968: Marriage and Rising in Hollywood

  Sharon and Roman were married on January 20, 1968. Polanski later wrote this about the decision to get married: “Sharon made no secret of her strong desire to have a child. Although she never mentioned marriage, and despite her liberated California life-style, I knew that her Catholic upbringing made marriage important to her . . . I proposed off the cuff, over dinner in a restaurant. . . . We decided to get married in London; that was my real home and the place where most of our friends lived.”

  Off the cuff in London meant that her mother, Doris, and father, Paul, could not attend. Telegrams were sent out to friends. The wedding was at 11 a.m. at the Chelsea Registry Office on Kings Road. There was a civil ceremony followed by several celebrations. Sharon’s costar in Valley of the Dolls, Barbara Parkins, was her maid of honor. Roman’s business partner, Gene Gutowski, was the best man. There was a crowd of reporters and gawkers.

  It was a mod wedding, and Sharon and Roman were dressed in the height of fashion for the time, rich hippie. Roman was attired in a green Teddyboy jacket he had purchased at a Hollywood boutique. Sharon, with the spirit of her mother’s home economics skills in the fore, had designed her own wedding dress, a cream-hued taffeta ultra minidress. “It’s Renaissance until you get below the knees,” as Sharon humorously described her design to the press.

  On again/off again Sebring girlfriend Sharmagne Leland-St. John flew over to London for the wedding. She was on hand working on an album by actor Richard Harris. “Sharon was especially beautiful,” recalls Leland-St. John. “Carrie White did her hair, Carrie and I were on the plane together flying over. She had sprinkled little flowers throughout Sharon’s curls. Sharon wore a puff-sleeved mini wedding gown.”

  It was just before her twenty-fifth birthday.

  “Sharon and I are very happy,” Polanski proclaimed. To which Sharon added “I’m so happy I can’t believe it!”

  Press from London and around the world covered the wedding. The marriage brought the couple vast oodles of ink and attention, for few events are more adored by show business than an unusual and even improbable marriage of hot young stars. This filled the bill, and filled it to overflowing. Peter Sellers was there for the wedding and the several celebrations. One was held at the Playboy Club. Among the attendees were Brian Jones, Sean Connery, Rudolf Nureyev, Princess Radziwill, Leslie Caron, Candy Bergen, Joan Collins, Michael Caine, and m
any others.

  The author of Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann, also attended one of the wedding parties, at a doctor’s house (probably Polanski’s neighbor Dr. Greenburgh). She recalled it later: “It was quite a thing. She was very happy, but she was completely under Roman’s domination. He doesn’t look it, but he must be a dominating man. Many little men, Billy Rose, Napoleon for example, were dominating with women.

  “At the reception, there were people like Warren Beatty, Leslie Caron, some of Warren’s ex-girlfriends, Tony Curtis’s ex-wife, the German one, came floating in. And Sharon came in a black chiffon dress, a 1930s thing she had bought in a thrift shop. It was a kind of maxi-dress. Roman took one look and he didn’t like it. He told her so, and she went back to where they were staying and changed to a miniskirt.” And this: “She was a very vulnerable girl, and she wanted to do whatever Roman wanted.”

  Roman fed Sharon part of a piece of the wedding cake, and given all the up-beat ebullience, the future seemed as brightly illuminated as ever a wedding could have predicted. Their honeymoon was spent skiing in the Swiss Alps.

  Under the headline, “Mini Skirt Brawl for Roman and Sharon,” the Daily Mirror of London on February 9, almost three weeks after the wedding, reported: “Film Director Roman Polanski came back from his honeymoon recently with an arm bandaged and three stitches on his lip. And the cause of the injuries, it seems was a mini skirt worn by his bride of eleven days—actress Sharon Tate, who is pictured with him at Heathrow Airport, London. Sharon, 24, and Polanski were walking to see a film in Paris when her eye-catching suede mini proved too much for a passerby. The man looked . . . and looked again . . . and then made a grab for Sharon. Polanski, 34, took a swing at the man, a Spaniard. The Spaniard punched back. ‘It was quite a fight, all over the pavement,’ Polanski said at the airport, after flying in from Paris. ‘I got a few kicks as well as punches. But I gave him something to remember.’ Finally, the stranger ran away. Polanski who married Sharon at Chelsea Register Office, London, went to the hospital to have his badly cut lip stitched. Sharon is star of the recently released film Valley of the Dolls.”

  When Sharon and Roman went back to Los Angeles from their honeymoon, there was another party given by friend Steve Brandt on February 18, 1968. Attendees included Patty Duke, columnist Rona Barrett, actress Lynn Loring and her husband, Roy Thinnes, actor and singer Michael Crawford, Noel Harrison, and apparently also Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould. Sharon was on the rise.

  A Brazilian magazine, Capricho, ran an article in its March 1968 issue titled “Hollywood Is Hell’s Gate.” It commenced with an all-caps breathlessness: “SHARON TATE, ONE OF THE MOST PROMISING AMERICAN STARS OF THE NEW GENERATION, ACCUSES HOLLYWOOD OF BEING FALSELY MORALIST AND SAYS THAT THE OLD CINEMA MECCA IS VERY DEPRAVED. SHE RESISTED A LOT OF PRESSURE TO GET HER STARDOM AND ENDURED ALL KINDS OF THREATS, EVEN FROM THE PRODUCER WHO DISCOVERED HER, JUST BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T WANT TO BREAK UP OR BETRAY HER GREAT LOVE.”

  Then it quotes Sharon at length: “I’m completely psychedelic. And not in Julie Christie’s way, please! I know there are people who think that I imitate her! Can you believe that? I want much more freedom than she has. Julie became a slave of her ambition. I think she’s frustrated. Now she says she’s neurotic. I’m not inhibited at all. I just do what I want. If I feel like it, I flirt with a cab driver. I like new things, try new sensations. Why not?”

  It also describes Sharon’s troubles with her handler Martin Ransohoff when she fell in love with Roman: “I never promised Martin I would give up the right to live my own life the way I want. And then, it’s funny when one falls in love. It happens suddenly. Contracts, plans, everything changes at that moment. The notion I was in love with Roman overwhelmed me. Nothing else mattered. It’s wonderful and horrible at the same time. I stayed in London with Roman. I made Fearless Vampire Killers for him. Martin wouldn’t accept it. He even threatened me. I told him to go to hell. And what annoyed him the most was that I was living with Roman. ‘At least, get married,’ he would shout. It’s funny; Hollywood is a very depraved place, the hell’s door, but knows how to be Victorian when it’s about beginners like me. The pressure was such that Roman understood. He married me. He’s an angel. He realized it was necessary. Hollywood offered me something wonderful through Martin Ransohoff: the role of Jennifer, in Valley of the Dolls, America’s number one best seller. The depraved and pill addicted vamp was coveted by people such as Candice Bergen, Anna Karina, Anouk Aimee, Anne Bancroft. They wanted to give me the role if I married Roman. And that happened. The worst, now, is that Martin doesn’t know that when I love I don’t give a damn to career and fame. When I love and get married, I want children, a home, a quiet life. He says Valley of the Dolls put Hollywood at my feet. And so what? Women who can handle marriage and career are very rare. When you want both things tragedy happens: the husband is jealous of his wife’s success, the wife gets tired of the husband’s jealousy, just because she wants the husband as much as her career. And what’s more important? A magazine cover to look at for one whole day, or the love of a husband to have your whole life?” We’re assuming the quote above is more or less accurate.

  Roman in Early 1968

  A filmmaker is always sketching new projects. And working maybe on a few scripts at the same time, even while completing a complicated creation such as Rosemary’s Baby. Even before realizing that Rosemary would be a hit, Paramount started putting the brakes on Polanski’s two additional Cadre-Paramount projects. They outright rejected the treatment of a “Western spoof” by Gérard Brach and started putting road-blocks into the Redford film, Downhill Racer.

  Polanski wanted to film Downhill Racer: “I put a lot of work into it, developing a script with Jimmy Salter, and experimented with camera equipment and harnesses that could be mounted on skis.” Polanski was eager to film in Europe, at major ski places, but Paramount wanted it done in the United States.

  It was Robert Redford’s project—he had conceived the idea of a movie about Alpine skiing, did research on the European ski tour, had talked Paramount into backing the film, then wound up producing and starring in the picture. Redford originally wanted Roman Polanski to direct the movie.

  The details are lost in the time-mists, but after discussing budgets for several weeks, Paramount grew tired of the negotiations, and decided to hire a new director named Michael Ritchie for the Redford movie.

  Polanski acquired an agent named Bill Tennant, connected with the Ziegler Ross Agency. They became friends. (Tennant, the following August, would be the one who had to make the fateful call to London to inform his client of the horrible events on Cielo Drive.) Tennant suggested that Polanski take some time off before trying to find a new movie to direct. That had important repercussions for Polanski, for had he been able to get a fully-funded big-studio Robert Redford project going, it would have allowed him to escape his past pattern of doing films in the occult/weirdo/violence warp. But such was not to be.

  Polanski, whose film trajectory began with the two-minute film titled Murder, while at film school in Poland, and proceeded through Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, and now Rosemary’s Baby, seemed to be taken aback by the incoming flux of scripts dealing with “horror stories, exclusively concerned with madness and the occult,” as he later described it in his autobiography. And he claimed “they didn’t interest me in the least.” Except that soon he began work on a screenplay featuring the cannibalism of the Donner Party!

  The Chateau Marmont

  Brian Aherne extended the lease on the Rosemary’s Baby–era mansion in Santa Monica, but finally Polanski and Sharon moved. Polanski says they moved to an apartment-hotel called the Sunset Marquis. Their stay at the Marquis was brief, for they then soon rented a fourth floor apartment with a kitchenette at the far-famed Chateau Marmont. (They stayed in Suite 3F at the Chateau.) A bunch of other friends also took rooms at the Chateau, as Polanski noted, where there “evolved a daily routine that began when [Brian] Morris and [Simo
n] Hesera showed up in their bathrobes for Sharon to cook us a communal breakfast.”

  The Cheateau Marmount, from a lobby postcard

  By 1968, the success of Bonnie and Clyde had caused Warren Beatty to become very powerful in the movie industry, and Beatty would visit the scene at the Chateau Marmont. As the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls—How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood describes it, “Beatty used to go to parties at the Chateau Marmont, where Roman Polanski and his girlfriend, Sharon Tate, Dick Sylbert, and Paul, Dick’s identical twin brother, also a production designer, and Paul’s wife, Anthea, all had suites. Polanski, funny and elfin, loved to perform. He told stories that went on and on, twenty, thirty minutes. ‘You couldn’t get a word in edgewise,’ recalls Dick, who designed Rosemary’s Baby, which they had just finished. ‘The guy was like those kids who get up at bar mitzvahs and dance and sing. Drive people crazy. And competitive. You told a joke, he told a joke. But he was a sweet-heart.’”

  Tate and Polanski were one of the hottest of the hottest young couples in Hollywood. The newspapers and magazines paid constant attention to them. Now that money was bountifully inflowing, they could fly at will, or on whim, from London to New York to Paris to Los Angeles to wherever. They were invited to countless nights out with the wealthy and the famous. In the weeks prior to the release of Rosemary’s Baby, while they were residing at the Chateau Marmont, they were completely swathed in renown.

  One disturbing possibility regarding Sharon Tate’s residency at the Chateau Marmont has to do with an investigation, in 1974 (six years later), conducted by an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agent named Richard Smith. (The INS is a branch of the US Department of Justice.) Smith gathered information on the activities of an English occult group that had oozed to the United States in 1967 and 1968. John Phillips reportedly had befriended the group and donated oodles of money to it.