Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  True or meadow muffins?

  Manson wrote that the amount was $2,000. Manson claimed that Hinman sought to examine the alleged poisoned mescaline, then refused to give over the $2,000. Manson stated he requested Hinman give him enough mescaline to earn back the $2,000. “Can’t do that,” Hinman supposedly said. “I’m getting things together so that I can go overseas for a few weeks. Besides, you guys still owe me some on the last stuff you got.”

  Ace Manson disciple Bruce Davis drove Bobby, Sadie, and Mary to Hinman’s house in the same beat-up Ford that would soon be driven to the murder of Sharon Tate and the others.

  Mary Brunner was silent as the grim trio mounted the steep steps to Hinman’s house. “Bobby seemed nervous but his natural arrogance compensated for it, and he was as cocky and confident as ever. I thought of his competitiveness, especially with Charlie. He was gripped with the need to prove that he could do anything Charlie could do. He seemed to need to prove it to himself, to Charlie, and to all of us.”

  Gary Hinman had gone down that afternoon to Los Angeles to apply for a passport; he intended to go on a religious pilgrimage to Japan in two weeks. He returned from Los Angeles, stopping to visit with a friend who owned a music school where Hinman taught piano, bagpipes, trombone, and the drums. Hinman stayed there until about 7:10 p.m., when he said he was going to a meeting somewhere.

  Hinman delivered a warm and friendly “Hi!” as he welcomed Sadie, Mary, and Bobby. Friendliness ceased to exist, though, after he was asked for money and his autos, and he told them to leave.

  Beausoleil had brought a 9-millimeter Radon pistol. After the trio spoke with Hinman for several hours with no result, Beausoleil drew the gun on Hinman and informed him that the situation was serious. Bobby then punched Gary, who spat out a piece of tooth. Bobby fired the pistol, then handed it to Sadie, whereupon he and Hinman fought furiously, rolling on the floor. When Sadie placed the pistol on a table, Gary Hinman grabbed it, then held it on Mary, Bobby, and Sadie.

  Instead of calling the Malibu sheriff’s office, the nonviolent musician did something that probably cost him his life. Sadie Glutz recalled, “With tears in his eyes, he handed the gun back to Bobby. ‘I just don’t believe in violence,’ he said. ‘Here, you take the gun. I don’t want it. Why don’t you just go? Just leave me alone.’”

  Hinman then went into the living room, and lay on the couch while Beausoleil continued to try to talk Gary out of the money.

  They called Manson at the ranch and told Charlie there had been a fight, and gunfire, and Hinman wouldn’t give in. Around midnight, Bruce Davis and Manson, waving his sword, arrived at Hinman’s. Right away an angry Charlie said that he wanted “to talk about that money.” Hinman started to shout, ordering him to get out and take the others with him, at which Manson raised up his sword and whacked Hinman’s ear, leaving a five-inch wound deep into the jawbone and extending up through the ear.

  After this, Manson and Davis split, with M telling Hinman he’d better fork over the money or else. The trio left behind tied Hinman up and placed him on the rug on the living room floor, where he lay, cursing Manson and vowing vengeance. They agreed to guard him all night to prevent his escape. They gave him a drink of wine or beer, and Sadie went down to the Topanga store to purchase bandages and some dental floss with which to sew up his gaping wound. Bobby and Mary turned Hinman’s house upside down, even tearing open a cash box, but failed to locate any cash.

  For several days, Hinman refused to tell them where the pink slips for his two autos were. When Beausoleil fell asleep, Hinman tried to escape and was beaten. Finally he signed over the VW microbus and the souped-up Fiat.

  On July 26, two friends of Hinman, associates of the Manson Family, tried to contact Gary while he was held by the trio. One called Hinman’s house in the afternoon, supposedly to ask Gary to rent him the lower apartment in his house. A girl answered the phone, apparently Sadie Glutz, who spoke with an English accent. The English voice announced Gary was in Colorado, where his parents had been involved in an automobile accident. Another person from Santa Barbara named Dave showed up at Hinman’s house in person. A woman, not one of the Family according to Dave, answered the door and refused him entrance.

  Sometime early on July 27, they called the Spahn Ranch. Manson told them to kill Hinman. “He knows too much,” biker Danny De Carlo claimed Charlie said.

  Another scenario has Manson saying that they were all set to take Hinman out to the ranch to let him heal his wounds but that Beausoleil panicked, evidently when Hinman started screaming out the window. Gary Hinman was stabbed twice in the chest by Beausoleil, with one of the thrusts cutting the pericardial sac and causing death by bleeding.

  While Hinman passed away, they placed him on the floor of the living room. Above him they created a makeshift Buddhist shrine. They gave him his prayer beads and he chanted “Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo—Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo,” until he lapsed into thanatos.

  Mary and Sadie took away the bloody bandages from Hinman’s thread-sewn face, and the bloody towels and clothing, for disposal outside. There was somebody’s bloody black cape that was also brought out of Hinman’s house.

  They laid a green bedspread over him. On the wall just above Hinman’s head, someone scrawled, in Hinman’s blood, “Political Piggy,” next to which someone fingerpainted in blood the paw of a cat, intended to be a panther. Using a narrow brush, he or she painted the claws of the paw, hoping the police, and the press, would think that black militants had committed the murder.

  They wiped the house down for fingerprints and burnt some documents, evidently those linking the Family with Hinman, in the living room fireplace. They locked all the doors and crawled out the side window. As they were leaving, they began to hear Hinman making a lot of heavy rasping sounds, so Beausoleil climbed in the rear window and went over to Hinman’s body and started smothering him, and Sadie came in and grabbed a pillow and put it over his face until he lay still. Mary pulled Hinman’s wallet out and removed twenty dollars, then thrust the wallet halfway into his back pocket.

  Then they tripped down the steep, wooden staircase to the street, where they hot-wired Hinman’s VW van painted with a thunderbird. They were hungry, so they drove over to the restaurant at the Topanga shopping center and had some cherry cake and coffee. They then headed for the ranch where, when Hinman’s microbus was spotted and others of the Family joined them, some of the girls noticed that there were paints in the back, which they used to paint some pictures. Then Mary Brunner, Linda Kasabian, and Kitty Lutesinger used Hinman’s Fiat to go on a garbage run for preparing the evening meal.

  Troubled Times

  In the afternoon of July 30, someone at the Polanski residence called the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. Three days later Charles Manson visited the Institute. That same day, Robert Beausoleil went back to the Hinman house, now full of flies, to wipe down the place more thoroughly for fingerprints. Beausoleil failed to wipe away a fingerprint from the kitchen door with twenty-six points of identification, helping send him to death.

  While Bobby was at Hinman’s house, his girlfriend, the pregnant Kitty Lutesinger, took that moment to flee.

  Frank Retz, the agent for the Transcontinental Development Corporation (which was attempting to purchase the Spahn Ranch), was visiting a property near the Spahn Ranch at the very moment that Kitty made her escape. She fled along the underbrush to find a stretch of road away from the main ranch complex where she might hitchhike safely away.

  Just minutes previous, Retz had stormed in on the Spahn Ranch’s so-called “back ranch,” which lay on the property line, and insisted that Manson and the others leave the premises. When Mr. Retz returned to his car, Lutesinger dashed from the brush and asked for protection from Manson.

  Retz took Kitty Lutesinger to a police station, and then she was brought by police officers to her parents’ horse ranch in the San Fernando Valley. This served to dissolve Helter Skelter even before the murders were committed. The sheriff�
��s office began visiting her home to acquire insight into the Spahn Ranch, which they by now considered an illegal haven for runaways and an assembly line for converting stolen vehicles into dune buggies.

  A Dire Warning from Psychic Maria Graciette: Did This Actually Happen?

  Ordinarily one wouldn’t pay much attention to articles in the National Enquirer, but nevertheless there was an article “Psychic Warned Sharon Tate & Three Others of Bloody Tragedy—Just Before They Were Slain by Manson Clan.”

  The article stated that “only days” before August 8, 1969, “At a public reading in a chapel near her Hollywood home, Maria Graciette (age 37) was handed a scarf and a set of questions by Sharon Tate.” With Sharon were Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojtek Frykowski, or so the article alleges. Her scarf was to give the psychic some connection with the questioner’s personality. “‘I closed my eyes and concentrated. Then it was horrible. Everything in front of my eyes went red, red like blood. I saw pain, suffering. I saw a lot of blood, people screaming, people running. . . .

  “‘I dropped the scarf and yelled out: ‘This is terrible, horrible. I can’t go on with the reading. Run, run—you must go away.’”

  What’s most interesting to the author is that the article states that later Graciette was questioned under hypnosis by a Los Angeles doctor long connected with CIA mind control experiments named William Kroger. “Maria’s examination under hypnosis was conducted by psychiatrist William S. Kroger, MD, and psychologist Ernest Rossi, PhD. Dr. Kroger, an authority on hypnosis for 50 years, said: ‘I would say that she is telling the truth about that night.’” (Dr. Rossi was a board member of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. In addition, Dr. William Kroger, with a practice in Los Angeles, was thought to be a high official in the CIA’s brainwashing program, including the programming of former model Candy Jones, which extended into 1968 and 1969.) “In addition,” the article contended, “Maria’s statements were analyzed by Charles McQuiston, co-developer of the Psychological Stress Evaluator . . . and he confirmed that ‘there is no trace of deception.’”

  Of course, Maria Graciette was wrong on some of her prognostications. Apparently she years later predicted that the largest earthquake ever recorded would strike the sea bed near New York City, sending in a tidal wave that would flood Manhattan.

  Chapter 10

  Sharon Tate’s Final Few Days

  As was previously noted, on Wednesday, July 30, 1969, at 3:07 in the afternoon, someone at 10050 Cielo Drive, using a number listed to Roman Polanski, telephoned the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Esalen was a popular place to visit, with the stupendous beauty of that part of the coastline, the hot springs and steam baths at the Institute, and its many workshops and therapy conferences in the field of humanistic psychology.

  On Friday, August 1, according to an interview I conducted in 1970, a hairstylist named Carol Solomon and a girl named Linda, a Beverly Hills doctor’s daughter, attended a small party thrown by Wojtek Frykowski at 10050 Cielo Drive. Chicken and champagne were served at the pool. Sharon Tate and Abigail Folger were not there. Linda was Wojtek’s date and was known to have “hung out” at the home during the summer. It was a nonboisterous gathering of about ten people, some of whom spent time in the bedroom watching TV. The two girls, according to Solomon, were invited over again for the following weekend.

  (Sharon’s friend the photographer Hatami told me that he was living with an actress named Ann Ford in August of 1969, and that for her twenty-second birthday, August 1, there was a party for her at 10050 Cielo Drive.)

  According to the vice president of Sebring International, Jay Sebring had visited the Polanski residence on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday during the week before the murders.

  The foggy veils and vales of the past.

  In early August, Sharon and her younger sister Patti had gotten into Sharon’s red Ferrari to go to the market. Sharon backed by accident into her mother’s Corvair, so that Sharon’s car was taken to a garage to be repaired. (This incident caused Doris Tate to be carless the morning of August 9, and thus she couldn’t rush to Cielo Drive.) On Monday, August 4, 1969, Sharon rented a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro from Airways Rent-a-Car “to be leased from August 4, 1969 till August 8, 1969,” as the contract reads.

  On August 4, Wojtek’s actor friend Mark Fine called and reminded him that Frykowski had a meeting with a movie producer on the sixth regarding the sale of a story. Frykowski told Fine that on August 6 he would have to pick up some friends at the airport coming in from Canada.

  Sometime during that week, perhaps Tuesday or Wednesday, a dope dealer from Canada, according to an LA homicide officer who helped break the Manson case, was whipped and video-buggered, apparently not at 10050 Cielo Drive, but at Cass Elliot’s house on Woodrow Wilson Drive. In the days before his death, Sebring had complained to a receptionist at his hair shop that someone had burned him for $2,000 worth of cocaine, and he wanted vengeance. The dealer from Canada was involved in a large-scale dope-import operation involving private planes from Jamaica. There seem to have been a good many dope-burns, perhaps like the falling of a line of dominoes, during the days around the Tate-LaBianca murders.

  Dennis Hopper, in an interview with the Los Angeles Free Press, said, about the video-bugger and the circumstances there: “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.” (Mr. Hopper was at the time living with Michelle Phillips, singer with the Mamas and the Papas. Phillips, a close friend of Cass Elliot, was apparently also a source for Hopper’s account.)

  Easy Rider had opened July 14, 1969, in New York City. It had cost something like $500,000, but sold $19.1 million in tickets. Hopper was nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Screenplay (with Peter Fonda and Terry Southern). He was hot hot hot. Life magazine named him “Hollywood’s hottest director.”

  As for Michelle Phillips, she had visited Cielo Drive on one of the days preceding the fatal Friday, August 8. Sometime during her final days, Sharon had learned about Michelle’s one-time fling with Roman, which had occurred in London the previous spring, perhaps while Sharon was in Italy filming The Thirteen Chairs.

  On Tuesday or Wednesday, August 5 or 6, according to an interview with someone who said she was there, there was a gathering at Cielo Drive to celebrate French director Roger Vadim’s newly released movie and his imminent return to Europe. Indeed, at the end of July there had been the American premiere of Spirits of the Dead, based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. It was a three-part movie, and Vadim had directed one part, which starred his wife, Jane Fonda, and others. (According to the biography, Jane Fonda, by Fred Lawrence Guiles, Vadim was in Malibu and Jane in France on August 8, 1969.)

  Sharon, Wojtek, and Abigail on August 6 were at Michael Sarne’s house in Malibu for dinner. Sharon was tired and got up to leave shortly after dessert. Her life revolved around the baby. She floated during the day in a rubber ring in her swimming pool—to take the weight off her stomach.

  Sarne was heavily involved at the time directing the film, based on a novel by Gore Vidal, called Myra Breckinridge, which received an X rating when released by Twentieth Century Fox in 1970. It starred such luminaries as Mae West, John Huston, Raquel Welch, Rex Reed, and Farrah Fawcett. Nevertheless, upon its release, Time magazine opined that “Myra Breckinridge is about as funny as a child molester. It is an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye.” The film is also cited in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Since its release, it has achieved something of a cult following, just like Valley of the Dolls.

  John Phillips had been hired to write music for Myra Breckinridge. He had been living in a guesthouse at Sarne’s rented house in Malibu Colony.

  On August 6, 1969, Abigail Folger had an appointment with he
r psychiatrist Dr. Marvin Flicker, as she did each afternoon at 4:30, five days a week. According to what Dr. Flicker told the LAPD, Folger wanted to break off with Frykowski. “She discussed her use of drugs,” the First Homicide Investigation Progress Report (p. 27) reported, “and her disappointment with Frykowski. Doctor Flicker states that he thought she was almost ready to leave Frykowski. She was building up enough nerve in her own mind to go it alone.”

  Sebring Drops Off Film to Be Copied: August 6, 1969

  In the probate records for Jay Sebring in the Superior Court in Los Angeles is a “creditors claim” from General Film Laboratories, 1546 North Argyle Avenue, dated August 6, for the amount of $736.85, for two separate films, one of them a 16-millimeter reel of Kodak film, 3,835 feet in length; and for the same film electroprinting a copy, $65.00. What sort of film or films was Jay Sebring dropping off?

  Prolegomenon on Cielo Drive

  Two or three days prior to his death, Wojtek Frykowski received a new shipment of MDA. One of Wojtek’s dope-dealer friends from Canada later claimed to reporters that Frykowski was in the fifth day of a “ten-day mescaline experiment.” In fact, the dealer claimed that both Jay Sebring and Mr. Frykowski were stoned on mescaline. The dealer spoke to Frykowski about an additional shipment of MDA. The same dealer said he showed up in the afternoon on August 7 and shared a bottle of wine with Frykowski. He met Sharon Tate that day, indicating that he was a recent friend of Frykowski.