And yet: “James Toback is full of shit and always has been,” Paul Sylbert, a production designer and a friend of Polanski, told me. “Nothing crazy went on up there. There were no orgies, not that I ever have been to, and I was up there frequently.” He conceded that Polanski was “peculiar,” but “whatever his kinkiness was, it was on a small scale and quite private. He might’ve been hinting at orgies, but there were never any.”
Orgies or no, at a certain point Tate felt that she’d suffered enough. As the humiliations accumulated, she approached Elke Sommer for her advice. Sommer remembered telling her, “I’d take the next heavy object, whether it’s an iron or a frying pan or a spade out in the yard, and I’d just brain him.”
Tate wasn’t about to do that, but she did, on a few occasions, warm to the idea of leaving Polanski. Sommer thought she was always too much in her husband’s thrall to follow through. “There was a tremendous sickness when I worked with Sharon,” Sommer said, “a horrendous sickness surrounding her relationship. She was quite lost.”
A number of Tate’s friends were quick to mention the undesirable company she kept—with Frykowski and Folger at the top of the list.
Tate “couldn’t stand them,” said Joanna Pettet, another actress who’d become close to her. The two had had lunch together at the house on the day of the murders. Pettet was surprised to see Frykowski and Folger, whom she’d never met before, walking around like they owned the place. “I asked, who are these people? Why are they here? She said, ‘Roman didn’t want me to be alone.’” Tate tolerated the pair only because her husband insisted on it. On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too much chaos. But Polanski refused to turn them out. She asked constantly when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip. Moreover, she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her—he didn’t want her there.
I’d gone to great lengths to track down Pettet, who had quit the movie business in the nineties. She lived in the high desert beyond Palm Springs, where she was something of a recluse, with no phone. It had dawned on me that I might be able to reach her through the Screen Actors Guild—they would have her address on file, since they were responsible for mailing her residual checks. Through them, I sent her a long letter, and she agreed to meet me for lunch at a strip mall near her house. She was slightly apprehensive when she first arrived. Then fifty-seven, she cut a striking figure, dressed head to toe in denim, with dark glasses that obscured her piercing eyes, until she felt comfortable enough to remove them.
“I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she said. “I had to be hospitalized and missed the funeral.” She made no attempt to conceal her contempt for Polanski. “I hated him,” she said flatly. As others had, Pettet described a marriage in which he exuded an almost casual cruelty toward his wife. For four months in the summer of ’67, Pettet had stayed with the couple at a rented beach house, and she began to notice how often Polanski bossed Tate around. He had a malicious streak; sometimes it reached Pettet herself. “He would throw a brick in the pool and watch my dog dive for it and try to retrieve it. He stood there laughing. The dog wouldn’t give up.”
After Sharon’s funeral, Polanski called Pettet. “On the phone he was strange with me, cold as ice. There was no despair. And I was sobbing.” He wanted to know what she’d told the police. It made her wonder what was behind her friend’s murder. “At the time I suspected it was maybe friends of his who did it. All I know is, he never came [when she asked him to come back], and she was here.”
Figuring that Polanski’s confidants would want to tell a different story, I coaxed Bill Tennant, his manager, into talking to me. Tennant had never given an interview about the murders, in part because the events of 1969 had sent his life into a tailspin. He’d had the somber task of identifying the bodies at the Tate house. A 1993 piece in Variety (by Peter Bart, as coincidence would have it) described Tennant’s fall from grace. Through the sixties and seventies, he’d found great success in Hollywood, discovering the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agenting Peter Fonda’s deal for Easy Rider. But Bart had found him, “a gaunt, battered figure,” “sleeping in a doorway on Ventura Boulevard.” A cocaine addiction had done away with his marriage and his money, leading him to trade “even the gold inlays in his teeth for a fix.” In Bart’s assessment, “the shock of the Manson murders began unraveling him.”
I tracked down Tennant in London, where he was sober, remarried, and managing Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance. He’d become a born-again Christian, but he displayed little compassion or forgiveness for Polanski, his onetime client and friend. “Roman is a shit,” he said. Echoing what I’d heard from other friends of the couple, Tennant said there were two versions of their story. “Which one do you want to tell?”
On one hand, Polanski had fallen into dissolution in London, where he was working on a movie and sleeping around while, back in California, his pregnant wife was putting together a home. Tate “wound up getting murdered because he was fucking around in London,” he said. But that was just one side of it.
“The other story is sitting in the Bel Air Hotel with Roman after the funerals and having to address his financial situation, which was not very good,” Tennant said, “and Roman looking across the table at me and saying, I wish I had spent more. I wish I had bought more dresses. I wish I had given more gifts. So what story do you want to tell? The one about this little prick who left his wife alone… with Jay Sebring and Gibby [Folger] and Voytek, these wankers, these four tragic losers, or do you want to talk about a poor kid, Roman Polanski?”
Tennant resisted the idea that the murders represented a loss of innocence for Hollywood. “There was nothing innocent about it,” he said. “It was retribution.” The big value in Los Angeles when he was there, Tennant said, was this: “He who dies with the most toys wins. I think it’s pretty self-serving to call that period, and what was going on, innocent… What’s innocent about drugs? What’s innocent about promiscuous sex?… You tell me where the innocence was.” Within a week of the murders, Polanski was “partying it up” with Warren Beatty, he added. The brutal reality was that “nobody cared or gave a shit about Sharon Tate. Not because they weren’t nice but because she was expendable. As expendable as an actor whose option comes up and gets dropped.”
After his wife’s murder, Polanski stayed on the Paramount studios lot as much as he could. It was the only place he felt safe. And not just from the killers or the media—from the LAPD. “You found the police surveillance units and you found that the police in Los Angeles knew everything about everybody,” Tennant said: “that there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of the Los Angeles Police Department, and that they knew everything there was to know.”
Although he had no way of knowing it in 1969, Tennant wasn’t being paranoid when he wondered how the LAPD knew so much about his friends. Many law enforcement agencies, including the LAPD, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI, had maintained units to surveil and even infiltrate groups that they considered subversive or threatening. At this stage, I wasn’t inclined to view law enforcement with anything approaching suspicion. Even so, I was beginning to see the official version of the case with a jaundiced eye.
“In California, Everybody Has a Tan”
I found it difficult to sort through the stories coming out of the house on Cielo Drive. Picture a spiderweb so dense with connections and tendrils that it looks like a solid sheet of fabric. That’s what I felt I was working with. The Hollywood cliques that had seemed, at the start, so discrete and isolated were all mixed up with one another, much more than Bugliosi had made it appear. Plus, then and now, people weren’t always willing to be up-front about who they hung out with.
Tate was right to be wary of Frykowski, assuming she had been. He’d fallen in with a dangerous crowd. Many of the “primitive” people that Kaczanowski met had extensive rap s
heets, and their names kept coming up when people mentioned the gravest excesses of Cielo Drive. Pic Dawson, who’d threatened Frykowski’s life and been thrown out of Polanski’s party, had been the subject of Interpol surveillance for drug smuggling as early as 1965. The young son of a diplomat, he’d gained entrée in the Polanski crowd through his friendship with Cass Elliot, one of the singers in the popular sixties group the Mamas and the Papas. Like most of the men in the troubled singer’s life, he’d used her for her money and connections. Elliot’s biographers would later write that her infamous 1966 London arrest—she’d been caught stealing hotel towels and keys—was actually a ruse to force her to share information about Dawson’s drug-smuggling operations. Dawson’s colleagues in the drug business, Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan, also wormed their way into Polanski’s circle through Mama Cass.
According to police reports, Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan—all twenty-seven, and all romantically involved with Elliot—were joined by a fourth partner, “Uncle” Charles Tacot, a New Yorker who was more than a decade older. A former marine, the six-foot-six strongman was renowned for his prowess with knives; he was rumored to have maintained ties to military intelligence, and he’d been selling drugs in Los Angeles since his arrival in the mid-1950s. Curiously, despite their many years of drug peddling and several drug arrests among them, only Doyle had ever been convicted of any crime—and his conviction was later overturned and changed to an acquittal on his record. Like Charles Manson, the four men seemed to have little fear of law enforcement.
Helter Skelter paid only passing attention to these guys. They were among the few figures in the book who were given pseudonyms. Although Bugliosi noted Pic Dawson’s death threat against Frykowski, he omitted an even more disturbing incident, one that makes a revenge motive much more plausible—and that reveals the extent to which the victims were mixed up in the seamier side of the counterculture.
As the story goes, at some point in the months before the murders, the residents of Cielo threw one of their endless parties, with Frykowski and Sebring leading the charge. Billy Doyle showed up and, in the spirit of the times, drank, smoked, and snorted himself to unconsciousness. Frykowski and Sebring, and maybe Witold Kaczanowski, too, wanted to get even with Doyle for something. Some say he’d sold them bad drugs. So, before a crowd of onlookers, they lowered Doyle’s pants, flogged him, and anally raped him.
This has become the kind of apocrypha that Manson conspiracy theorists can’t get enough of. It’s the same incident referenced in Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, the book I showed Bugliosi that day after our lunch. The story feels almost mythological, in its ugliness and in the extent to which its most basic details—who, what, when, where, why—are in flux. Candice Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD a few weeks after the murders, said that it was a rape, most likely at Sebring’s place or at his friend John Phillips’s (also of the Mamas and the Papas); Dennis Hopper told the Los Angeles Free Press that it was at the Cielo house. He described it as “a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.” Ed Sanders, in The Family, reports that Doyle was “whipped and video-buggered,” and the location varies depending on which edition of the book you’re looking at.
So what really happened? I hesitated to report on this in 1999; it felt like another lurid departure from Manson, and it’s not as if my deadline afforded me time to explore every strange byway. But it bothered me that Bugliosi had left this out, and that so many people close to the victims regarded it as a flashpoint in the case. It was another instance of the resilience of the “live freaky, die freaky” mind-set. Plus, even if Pic Dawson, Billy Doyle, and the other dealers hadn’t murdered anyone, they could still be behind the crimes, or adjacent to them. If I could connect them to Manson, for instance—couldn’t they have contracted him for the murders? And if they were selling a lot of drugs to anyone who’d died at the Tate household, might there have been some kind of cover-up at work?
So, down I went.
Thanks to Kaczanowski and a few others who spoke with the LAPD, detectives were quickly suspicious of Doyle and his companions after the murders. And Doyle himself was getting around quite a bit at the time. He was back and forth between Los Angeles, Jamaica, and his native Toronto. It was in this last city that police caught up to him in late August. I wouldn’t get a transcript of the LAPD’s interview until many years into my investigation, but it’s worth including here because it gives his side of the story. And Doyle is quotable—there’s something almost farcically hard-boiled about him.
In short, he told the LAPD’s Lieutenant Earl Deemer that he didn’t remember being raped, but he couldn’t be sure; it might’ve happened anyway. He recalled going over to see Frykowski at the Cielo house on the night in question, sometime in early July. Frykowski, thinking it would be a funny prank, slipped some mescaline in his champagne. Folger and Kaczanowski were there, too. “It was out at the swimming pool,” Doyle told Deemer, “and there was two cases of champagne by the pool… And apparently [Frykowski] put some in my drink, and I said, Jesus… I am high… I am really out of my bird.”
He wanted something to bring him down, and Frykowski was happy to oblige, producing some pills that he said belonged to Sharon Tate. Doyle swallowed “about eight of them,” and soon enough, as Frykowski started to laugh at him, he realized that the pills were something else entirely, and that he was dealing with some wild people:
They were crazier than hell. I didn’t realize they were so crazy. I am using the word ‘crazy,’ I mean drug-induced crazy… in California, everybody has a tan. Now, if people don’t have a tan, they look a little different. You can see things in their face[s] that a tan covers up… They were all tan and looked healthy. They looked very straight to me when I first got there. And, uh… I don’t remember much more than that.
His observation about California, where “everybody has a tan,” reminded me of Kaczanowski’s remark: it was impossible, back then, to separate geniuses from charlatans. Everyone blended in.
Of course, by most reckonings, Doyle himself would count as one of the charlatans. He admitted that he was a naturally paranoid person. In recent months he’d developed a coke habit, which only exacerbated the paranoia. Convinced that someone, somewhere, was out to get him, he started carrying a gun. It didn’t help that he often bragged about how much cocaine he had, especially when there were women around. “They all wanted to get laid,” he said to Deemer, “and the price of admission was a nose full of coke, and I learned that.” He would show up at parties with a silver coke spoon and tell everyone he had “pounds of it.” His good friend Charles Tacot said, “‘For Chrissakes, Billy, what do you tell people that kind of stuff for?’ And I said, ‘I want to get laid, Charles.’”
That day, higher and higher on drugs that he couldn’t even name, Doyle became convinced that Frykowski meant to harm him. So he pulled out his gun and pointed it at the Pole, threatening to kill him. Frykowski, the bigger man—and the more sober, too, if only by a hair—wrested the gun from him.
Here Doyle’s memory got hazy; he apparently lapsed into unconsciousness, and Voytek called up Charlie Tacot, asking him to come collect his deranged friend. It was possible, Doyle conceded, that Frykowski or Kaczanowski had raped him after that. He admitted that he might’ve told his friend Mama Cass something to that effect. “I was unconscious,” he told Deemer. “I wasn’t sore the next day… not there. But I was sore everywhere else.”
In another LAPD officer’s account of that interview, Doyle puts it even more frankly: “I was so freaked out on drugs I wouldn’t know if they’d fucked me or not!”
It took a lot of asking around, but eventually I tracked down both Billy Doyle and Charles Tacot. (As for the other two: I’d learned Dawson had died of a drug overdose in 1986, and Harrigan was nowhere to be found.) Neither had given an interview before, and though they could be cagey, they were also eager to relive their underworld glories. Both were old men now, but they were still operato
rs who acted as if they were at the height of their criminal powers. Impressively foulmouthed, both of them threatened to have me killed at various points in our interviews, although I didn’t take either seriously.
In our first phone call, Tacot filled in some of the blanks from Doyle’s story. He remembered driving over to pick up Doyle, who was passed out somewhere on the Cielo Drive property. His belt had been split, apparently with a knife. A friend who’d come along for the errand said, “I think Voytek fucked him.”
They took Doyle, still unconscious, to Mama Cass’s place in the Hollywood Hills. Tacot remembered thinking, “If we don’t take care of him, he’s going to go back there and have a beef. I carried him out, laid him by a tree, went back to my car and got about twenty feet of welded link chain, which I had in there for somebody else, originally. I put it around his ankle and a tree with a good padlock and snapped it all together—so I know he’s not going anywhere. Cass was in the hospital at the time. She said, ‘Get the Polaroid! Get the Polaroid!’”
Doyle came to a few hours later, still very high, and simmering with rage. “‘I’m going to shoot that motherfucker,’” Tacot remembered him saying. “And I said, ‘No, no, we’re leaving town. We’re going to Jamaica… but first you’re going to get sober and you’re going to be on this fucking tree until you are.’”
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 7
