by Nancy Bacon
Jay cried and began tearing the hood from his head and clawing at the ropes on my wrists and ankles and freeing me, and I was crying and saying,
‘Oh, Jay, Jay—you frightened me.’
And then I was free and he was standing before me and there were tears on his cheeks and he kicked the whip from him and turned his back and wept. I put my hand out to touch him and I moved a step closer. As I looked at the thin stooped shoulders, wracked now with the effort of his sobbing, my eyes fell upon the discarded whip. And next to it, there on the floor, gleaming dully in the dim light, was a long, curved butcher knife! My heart leaped in my breast. My voice was stuck captive in my throat. He leaned his head in his hands am I turned away from him.
I don’t know if he heard me. I didn’t try to be quiet, grabbed my things and fled out of that dark house. I ran gasping for breath, tears blurring the stone steps and my heart beating a wild tattoo against my ribs, and I didn’t look back, don’t remember getting into my car, but suddenly I was turning onto the brightly lit Benedict Canyon and my legs were sticking to the leather seats and the thick, sickly sweet odor of perfume assaulted my nostrils, and I put my head on the steering wheel and cried like a baby.
I saw Jay a number of times after that and I spoke to him often on the telephone. He always asked me back to his home saying one time: ‘You still owe me a couple of hours. You cheated me.’ But I knew I could never go back to that dark house where the chill lived.
I saw him again at a real swinger of a party where all the wild ones showed up. I was practically sucked into the room by the force of the swinging, rollicking crowd and fell into Jimmy Boyd’s arms.
‘Hey, sweetheart, how are you?’ Jimmy had to shout in my ear to be heard above the deafening roar of the acid rock that blasted throughout the darkened room. But then another pair of arms swung me away and Tommy Smothers kissed and hugged me and passed me into the waiting arms of Nicky Blair, and then I was handed into another pair of arms. I made my way across the room in this fashion and found myself on the patio where I sank into a chair and ordered a drink.
Producer Jimmy Harris slumped against the wall, his eyes restless and sober as he surveyed the undulating bodies of the dancers. Nearly naked starlets writhed suggestively against the quivering paunches of sweating movie directors, and married stars whispered promises and propositions into the ears of other married stars. I saw one hero of the silver screen, broad-shouldered, lean-hipped, virile, dancing methodically with his mini-skirted date, but his eyes caught and held those of a limp-wristed young boy-and the boy twitched his hips in acknowledgment. I knew it would be only a matter of minutes before he traded in the mini-skirted chick for the slim-hipped boy. They’re all here tonight, I thought, looking around the patio and into the living room. Hungry-eyed starlets moved restlessly through the crowd looking for somebody—pathetic kids of pathetic movie stars, show girls, models, hookers, hippies and has-beens—a real Hollywood potpourri.
Keely Smith sank into a chair opposite me and I said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s going to be one of those parties.’
‘God—aren’t they all?’ Keely sighed wearily and leaned her elbows on the table. Tommy Smothers appeared with his date, Judy, and the three of them got into a heads-together, back-stroking conversation and I decided to mingle.
I stepped into the dimly lit poolroom and saw Dick Dawson leaning on a cue stick. I wasn’t surprised. He can be found with a pool stick in his hand no matter where he is—the star-studded Factory, Daisy, or Candy Store, or an intimate dinner party—waiting for someone to challenge him to a game. ‘Hey, Dick, how are you?’ I went into his arms for my kiss.
‘ ‘ello, Luv, ‘ow are ya?’ He hugged me tight, then motioned toward the pool table. ‘Shall we ‘ave a go, Ducks?’
‘Why not?’ I took a pool stick and saw Ron Joy slouch by, disappearing into the darkened living room. I wondered if Nancy Sinatra was with him and peered into the black, but all I could see were shadowy silhouettes, moving, grooving, a swaying sea of bodies.
Jack Haley Jr. claimed my pool cue and challenged Dawson to a game.
I started toward the bar and someone shoved a joint of marijuana into my mouth. But I didn’t see who my benefactor was, for Kenny Spaulding scooped me up, flung me around, and kissed me. ‘Hey, baby, how the hell are you?’ But he didn’t seem to know who ‘baby’ was nor did he wait to find out. A slinky model-type pulled him away and they were swallowed up into the black room, taking my joint with them. Dino Martin brushed past me headed for the pool room with a couple of just-getting-there actresses trotting adoringly after him.
Suddenly, in the flesh-packed room, I found myself in Jay Sebring’s arms. We kissed and shouted into one another’s ears and I heard him say, ‘Meet me in the bathroom,’ but I was swept away by—Jimmy Boyd again and lost sight of Jay.
The rest of the evening was a giddy haze of debauchery. A beautiful young lesbian stuffed me into a corner and kissed me wildly upon the mouth as she blew marijuana smoke down my throat. The son of a famous star, himself a musician, was necking with the son of a famous actress, and when his wife walked into the room I was hastily shoved in as a replacement necker. I stumbled across two people having intercourse on the floor of the dark, sunken living room and the man reacted angrily, claiming I had trod upon his thing. The air seemed supercharged with an undefined electricity. Even the servants seemed to sense it. They hurried about the room, packing their rented silver trays and left-over lemons and limes. They seemed anxious to leave and let the Beautiful People get on with whatever it is Beautiful People do in private.
After a while the party began breaking up. I was getting my coat when Jay appeared and took my hand and led me to the bathroom off the master bedroom. He produced the little vial and, against my wishes this time, forced me to breathe in the wanton powder.
‘Stick around,’ he said. ‘The squares are leaving and the good things will happen.’
‘Like last time?’ I asked.
‘No—better,’ he said. ‘The whole bit-whips, ropes, and Amies. You dig Amies…’
‘No, Jay,’ I said. ‘It’s too frightening.’
I started out of the room but he held me back. ‘Sharon would like to meet you again,’ he said.
I looked a question. ‘Sharon Tate,’ he said. ‘She’d dig you. She’s back, you know. We have great parties.’
‘Orgies,’ I said. ‘Good night, Jay.’
He looked genuinely rejected as I left.
He called me the very next day. ‘Come on over,’ he said. ‘I’m having a little get-together later with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. It’ll be fun.’
‘Can’t make it,’ I said—but he had another suggestion ready.
‘How about next weekend? It’s Steve Brandt’s birthday and John and Michele Phillips are throwing a party for him.’ He paused. ‘Sharon will be there.’
‘Jay, I really don’t dig that crowd,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m just not interested.’
But he wouldn’t be put down. ‘You’ve got to meet Gibby,’ he said. ‘You know, Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress.’
I had to smile at the name-dropping. ‘Who else?’ I asked, knowing that’s what he wanted me to ask.
‘A very groovy writer, friend of Gibby’s, Wojciech Frykowski,’ Jay said, warming up to the conversation now and speaking very rapidly. ‘And, of course, Mama Cass and Bill Doyle and probably George Hamilton and Herb Alpert, Andy Prine, Joe Namath—’ He was reeling off names faster than I could remember them. Obviously on an upper, I thought Jay didn’t usually speak so quickly. ‘There will be a couple hundred people there. Come on—it’ll be fun.’
I wondered how many would be left for the fun and games after the squares had split for home but I didn’t ask. I finally convinced him that I couldn’t make it and he reluctantly hung up the telephone.
The last time I spoke to Jay was early in August. He called me about eleven at night. ‘Remember what I spoke to you about the last ti
me I saw you?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Sharon,’ he said. ‘She’s got a great pad. Lonely. Safe. Great people. Only small groups and nobody talks. Won’t you come—please. I promised you would.’
I hesitated. It was the small boy asking for the sweet again. I looked toward my kitchen. My maid was cleaning up the dishes. She held a butcher knife high in the air and shook water from it, and the lights flashed brilliant along the curved blade. I shivered with fear, remembering the knife near the ropes at Jay’s house. I hung up the telephone without even saying goodbye.
Less than a week later, Jay Sebring was dead, one of the victims of a senseless orgy of carnage that also left the bodies of Sharon Tate, Gibby Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski. He died near the celebrated people he loved so much, his life’s blood seeping into the thick carpet of a plush mansion while the hawks of death pussyfooted through the house and gardens, chuckling over the gawky, awkward clumps of stiffening flesh they had littered about until the clean fragrance of dawn sent them to some other place.
tripping along in Hollywood
Yeah, I had embraced the inner circle of Hollywood’s jet-swinger-set who were all into one kind of drug or another. The sixties brought drugs right up front where they could be analyzed and experimented with, and the stars were the first to publicly announce that they found drugs to be safer than booze.
Articles appeared in national magazines reporting that this star or that one smoked grass, lived with whomever they pleased, and scorned marriage and the Establishment. These new stars did not bother to drape themselves in diamonds, furs, feather boas, tuxedos, silks, and satins; they turned up for interviews wearing faded blue jeans, sometimes holding a baby on their hips that had been born without benefit of its father’s last name. And these wide-eyed little tykes were not hindered with names like Clark, Debbie, Carole or Jimmy—their handles were Sunshine, Freedom, Earth, and Star. Morals were lax or nonexistent.
Everyone smoked grass, snorted cocaine, gulped tabs of mescaline and LSD and were quick to tell the squares what they were missing. It was, after all, the age of Aquarius, and there was a new world a-comin’—the sixties were the ground floor of tomorrow. Anyone could climb aboard for the trip if their heads were in the right place. And if parents the world over wept when they saw their children taking to the road, what could they do? The young people were following the stars.
I do not mean to give the impression that the then-current crop of movie stars invented or even introduced drugs to Hollywood. Drugs are as old as time. No one ‘discovered’ them or even came up with new ideas of their power. Our culture did that for us. It does not take greatness to come up with an idea; sometimes it’s simply that the idea’s time has come. And so it was with drugs. If a fall-guy must be produced, then let us submit our government of that era.
Vietnam was a dirty word in most cities of the world during the sixties and early seventies, particularly with the younger set. The kids under twenty-five who reveled in permissiveness of all kinds and stumped in the streets or attempted to invade the Pentagon or burgle draft board offices of their files. And, in a way, this was true of Hollywood, where causes are often the only meaningful part of a drab fairy-tale life—playing a cowboy or a spy or a hillbilly hick from dawn to dusk in an endless episodic dream of unreality.
But Vietnam soon became a beautiful word in Hollywood. It came to mean a paradisic location from which came the greatest, headiest, most soul-satisfying grass known to heads—from messenger boys to superstars and producers. When our boys in uniform began returning home they brought with them a new type of potent grass, called ganja. And it came well-advertised with a snappy, fatalistic slogan originated—not by a bright young man on Madison Avenue—but by one of the hordes of smokers who gasped in its numbing, stunning fumes before going out on a patrol from which they might never return. Huddling in a group as they checked their weapons and grenades, a squad leader would flip away his roach (because there’s plenty more where that came from) and shout to his buddies: ‘Let’s go, men! Let’s die high!’
In Hollywood, where patrols were not real anyway, the players don’t want to die-they just want to get high. High enough to get through the day and ease the boredom of the evening ahead. (Like, what do you do after you’ve put your clothes back on?)
So where do we all go from here? The bum, the groper for fame, the business types in their plush front offices, the superstars (and those who write about them), the hookers, and the hippies. You fly along on the prevailing wind, that’s what you do. You don’t unwind after work. You blow your mind. Drugs had gotten out of hand. No longer were folks using it for relaxation—they were abusing it in the worst possible way. Dope seemed to suddenly become a monster, a raging flood, gobbling up everything that stood in its path. The younger set, those in Podunk as well as Hollywood, were grabbing at happiness with both hands and thumbing their noses at the Establishment and the government. They needed pulling up. They got it in one fast lesson. It happened like this.
On the night of August 8, 1969, peace appeared to be residing in Cielo Drive, an off-shoot of Benedict Canyon in the Bel Air section of the sprawling city of Los Angeles. Peace was appropriate, because cielo is Spanish meaning sky or heaven, and L.A. is, after all, the City of the Angels. But—Aparecio coma llovido cielo (He appeared out of a clear sky). A killer came to call, to disturb the peace of paradise.
The next morning five bodies were discovered littered about the vast, sprawling grounds and living quarters of Roman Polanski’s rented mansion. His wife, actress Sharon Tate, her ex-lover and hair stylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Gibby Folger, a Polish dope peddler named Frykowsky, and Steven Parent, an innocent victim of a society gone berserk. Immediately cries were heard: ‘Drugs!’ ‘Sexual permissiveness!’ ‘Black magic!’ ‘Decadence!’
In a one-sided press interview, during which no questions were permitted, the bereaved husband said, a week after the murders, that he was badly shaken by the implications in the press and the speculation in Hollywood that his home had been a scene of a sex and narcotics orgy and that his lovely, dead wife had engaged in odd practices that night and at previous times. And he capped his statement by inviting newsmen to come to a macabre exhibition of the home, still blood-covered, and the room and furnishings that had been intended for the child that had been the sixth victim in its mother’s belly.
The statement, coming with the invitation, was farcical and only lent credence to the observation that somewhere in the whole bizarre atrocity there lay a typical Polanski movie plot with all the grisly touches. It was said of Polanski that, if the murders had not involved his wife and friends, he would have more than likely bought it and filmed it.
Polanski’s bald and bold picture of his home and friends as gentle, ordinary people, bruised in death by reckless wagging tongues, was considered utter nonsense. The home was notorious in underground Hollywood as a palace of illegitimate roistering. Roman Polanski’s reputation as a mad genius director, famous for being able to give a weird twist to a shot of a pair of nuns walking to mass, probably did not help the rumors. Besides, since no one had the least clue as to who had done the grisly deed, Polanski seemed a likely candidate.
When it was finally discovered that Charles Manson and his gang of hippie killers were responsible for the multiple murders, all of America was thrown into shock. In the past, they had carefully avoided believing that such a thing could happen in their society—to their children. They were forced to look back, and, perhaps for the first time, they realized that their children were not following.
The murders, then, became a slap in the face. They were the very encapsulation of truth about violence and revolt in our young people today. With one senseless act, America was shown, quite vividly, that tomorrow is promised to no one. In Hollywood, this was a pretty bitter pill to swallow. Tomorrow means: the release of your latest movie, residuals from that television commercial you did last month, better scripts, more money,
bigger homes, fancier cars. But in less time than it took to read an account of the murders, hate-obsessed Charlie Manson showed these affluent and influential people just how swiftly they could be eliminated. And their drawing power at the box office would not save them, nor would their bank account, beauty, or brilliance.
Hollywood was faced with the task of seeing what it had become. Movies were filled with blatant sex, horrible violence, vomit-inducing shockers that sent the squeamish screaming into the night. There were those who admitted that the depraved younger generation were definitely influenced by these corrupt, degenerate films.
Hollywood looked at itself. And it saw.
the gorgeous and the grotesque
In another part of Hollywood, a tiny fingernail slice of moon slid through a shutter of a huge decaying mansion on a hill and fell across a tiny figure. It was white and bloodless in death, its body stiffened in awkward angles. The neck was thin and scrawny, showing pale blue veins bulging against the pallor of death. The face was ghastly. Yellow eyes protruded from red-rimmed sockets, an expression of horror frozen in the amber depths. Colorless lips were drawn back in a silent protest of rage, the empty mouth slashing a dark cavity in the ashen face. Thin tufts of dead hair matted to the skull in ragged patches—exposing two small dun-colored horns.
It was dressed in swaddling clothes; rough, hand-sewn garments that clung to the thin body and wrapped about the head forming a hood. It lay in a crude coffin, the lid of which had been slid halfway back to expose the little corpse inside. A candle stood on the lid, its dim flame haloing the coffin, somberly illuminating its grotesque occupant.
A sudden gust of wind in the airless room snuffed out the candle and pitched the room into blackness.