Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

by Greg King

  Paul Tate was adamantly opposed to Sharon’s involvement in this world, but Doris conspired with her daughter to further her opportunities. While she did not necessarily push Sharon against her wishes, Doris Tate had always viewed her daughter’s exceptional looks as a means to an end, whether as a beauty contestant or an actress.

  Art Schultz vividly recalls just how determined Doris Tate seemed when it came to furthering Sharon’s potential career. He, along with two other friends, had made arrangements to spend a Friday night in Verona with Sharon. But, when they arrived at the Tate house, Schultz and his friends found Sharon already on the doorstep, purse in hand. She explained that Jack Palance had rung and asked if she would join him for dinner. Schultz was visibly angry at the interruption of their plans, but Doris stepped forward, saying, “Now, Art, don’t be upset. This is an opportunity for Sharon.”32

  Within a few minutes, and while Schultz and the others still stood at the front door, Palance pulled up. He apologized for being late, saying that he had just had a 45 RPM record player installed in his car. “Palance was absolutely taken with Sharon,” remembers Schultz, “and we couldn’t help but believe that he had had this unheard-of device put in his car simply to impress her.”33

  Doris Tate seems not to have questioned the propriety of allowing her eighteen-year-old daughter to date a rather wordly actor nearly twice her age. Her encouragement seems less mercenary than innocently opportunistic. All that came of the evening was further encouragement to consider an acting career, prodding which, by now, Sharon was also receiving from her mother. The encouragement of Palance, Beymer and others was all the convincing Sharon needed.

  Sharon had continued to see Beymer while production work on his film continued. Finally he returned to Hollywood, and Sharon was desperate to follow him, to both continue the relationship and to pursue an acting career. Knowing that her father was opposed to such a move, Sharon told them that she wished to return to California to investigate colleges. Reluctantly, Paul and Doris agreed, and Sharon left Italy for America.

  She soon joined Beymer in Hollywood, and began to fill her letters to her parents with talk of a movie career, much to her father’s despair. Doris Tate, who had focused so much of her attention on Sharon, found the separation too much to bear, and suffered a nervous breakdown. She believed that Sharon was unsafe, and urged her daughter to return to Italy. After much coercion Sharon agreed to return.

  She was biding her time, knowing that sooner or later her father would be transferred back to America. After nearly two years in Italy, Paul Tate was promoted to the rank of Major and transferred again, this time to Fort McArthur, in California. “I always had Hollywood in my mind,” Sharon would later say. “I was so happy when my father was transferred to San Francisco, which is within such easy distance of Hollywood.”34

  Chapter 2

  California Girls

  In February of 1962, the Tate family booked passage on the USS Independence and left Italy for America. Because it was winter, the ship was half-empty, and Sharon quickly befriended actress Joey Heatherton, who also was on board. The two young women spent the next twelve days turning the heads of the passengers and crew, enjoying the admiring looks cast in their direction. On landing in America, the Tate family minus Sharon went to visit relatives in Houston. Sharon headed directly to Los Angeles, where she quickly resumed her friendship with Richard Beymer.

  The America to which Sharon and her family returned seemed a far different country than the one which they had left a few years earlier. The staid conservatism of the Eisenhower presidency had been replaced with the glamour and energy of the Kennedy administration. Having narrowly-avoided a nuclear confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the threat of an all-out war seemed distant, despite the increasingly bad relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. There was an optimism fueled by John Glenn’s orbit round the earth and talk of a test ban treaty. It was a country whose cultural life was consumed with youth. From the glamorous Kennedys in the White House to the giddy sense of fun driving popular music and accompanying dances like the Twist and the Watusi, everything, in the words of authors Jane and Michael Stern, seemed “so modern, so capable.”1

  California was the dream of nearly every American teenager, its sun, sand, and surf recently popularized in the lyrics of songs by the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and soon to be immortalized in a series of beach party movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. It seemed a golden land, filled with the promise of opportunity, especially to an impressionable young woman of nineteen. Filled with aspirations, Sharon eagerly flung herself into the unknown world of Hollywood.

  Sharon fit the image of the idealized, typical California girl perfectly. She was not tall, standing only five-foot-five, but her long legs and thin figure gave her the impression of added height. Her long, honey-blonde hair fell loosely about her shoulders, framing a face defined by high cheekbones and wide, hazel eyes that Sharon accentuated with dark eyeliner and thick, false lashes. It was a look very much in demand at the time in the studios scattered across the Los Angeles basin, and Sharon, aware of her power to charm and attract, determined that she would capitalize on the trend of the day and test the acting waters.

  “I was very shy and bashful, because my parents were very strict with me,” Sharon later recalled. “But they agreed to let me go, after all sorts of warnings. They could afford to give me only enough money to get by, and I just about made it to Hollywood. I had to hitchhike a ride in a truck.”2

  Her first move was a bold one, in view of her lack of any substantial acting experience or screen credits. On the day after she arrived in California, Sharon pulled out the card that Richard Beymer gave her a year earlier in Verona. She dialed the telephone number and made an appointment with his agent, Harold Gefsky, for the following day.

  Gefsky, a quiet, thoughtful man, was vice-president of the Agency for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. He had been an agent in L.A. for many years. Like Sharon, he was that rarity in the world of motion pictures—a member of the Hollywood establishment of whom no one ever spoke an unkind word. Actor Skip Ward, who was one of his clients, found Gefsky “the most honorable and trustworthy man in the business. He is a true gentleman, and he always looked after the true best interests of his actors.”3

  Ordinarily, Gefsky would have refused what was a fairly typical telephone call from an unknown woman seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood. But, as a favor to Beymer, he agreed to meet with this latest hopeful. Skip Ward happened to be in Gefsky’s office that afternoon when the telephone call came. “Hal hung up the phone and explained that Dick Beymer had met this beautiful young woman and asked that Gefsky give her an interview. Neither of us had any idea what to expect.”4

  Given the go-ahead, Sharon quickly hopped a city bus and rode into Hollywood, walking the short distance from the stop at Doheny and Sunset to Gefsky’s office. Curious, Skip Ward had lingered, and happened to be with Gefsky when Sharon walked through the door that day. “She was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,” he recalls. “She was sweet, pleasant and maybe a bit naive. But, even so, there was an extraordinary eroticism about her.”5

  Gefsky was not prone to sudden, lyrical outbursts. Nevertheless, when Sharon first walked in to his office just off the famous Sunset Strip, the agent was stunned. “She was so young and beautiful that I didn’t know what to do with her,” he later told an interviewer for the Saturday Evening Post.6

  The agent took Sharon out to dinner where he watched in amazement as she repeatedly turned the heads of their fellow diners. To the numerous inquiries, Gefsky hastily replied that Sharon was a young Italian actress, just arrived in America, and Sharon helped maintain the charade by speaking to him only in the Italian she had learned in Verona.7 Gefsky was struck by her innocent, almost childlike quality. It was somehow fitting that the entertainment in the restaurant that evening was a puppet show.8

  “When she first walked into my office, I couldn’t believ
e my eyes,” Gefsky later declared. “She was almost too pretty for Hollywood. She was a wonderful person, too.”9 Gefsky’s reaction proved typical. Throughout her career, Sharon was surrounded with producers, directors, agents, and fellow actors—by reputation, at least, not a very generous or thoughtful lot—who all went out of their ways to guide her and guard her against unpleasantries. Sharon’s seeming vulnerability fit in perfectly with the mood of the country—a mood which Hollywood was beginning to echo—and Gefsky quickly jumped at the opportunity which had walked through his agency’s door.

  “Sharon was a bit naive, perhaps,” Gefsky says, “but she was completely honest about her desire to succeed as an actress. She never argued, never fought with me, never protested any suggestion. It was rare to have such an agreeable client.”10

  Gefsky set up a photo shoot. He sent the resulting portfolio to casting directors and modeling agencies. Gefsky also arranged for Sharon to meet a number of motion picture studio and television representatives in an attempt to win her an audition.

  At the time, although Sharon was convinced that she could make a go of things, her parents were less certain. Her mother later recalled that, as much as her father opposed Sharon’s acting career, circumstances conspired to push her further and further along the road to Hollywood.11 Sharon herself later remembered: “I used to hitchhike to Los Angeles to all the studios because I couldn’t afford the cab fare. The men were so generous, especially the truckdrivers, they all gave me lifts.… I convinced Daddy that I’d be safe in Hollywood.”12

  For the first few days, Sharon camped out at a friend’s house in Nichols Canyon above Los Angeles.13 She told writer John Bowers in 1967 that her father, “in Calvinistic style, had only given her a few dollars to sink or swim on.”14 Realizing that she would have to be closer to the center of activity, she returned to her parents’ home, gathered up her clothes and belongings and moved into a shared apartment Gefsky had rented for her at the Hollywood Studio Club, a popular lodging place for up-and-coming actresses in central Hollywood.15 Opened in 1926, it had served as a home to many rising actresses, including Kim Novak, Donna Reed, and Marilyn Monroe.16

  Almost immediately, Sharon’s roomate made advances. “She rang me one night,” Gefsky recalls, “and told me that her roommate was trying to rub her neck and back. It made her very uncomfortable.”

  “Oh Hal,” she asked Gefsky, “can I possibly move or get another roommate?”17

  Gefsky attended to the matter at once, and, the following day, Sharon ended up with actress Mary Winters, in a large, double room overlooking a garden courtyard.18 Winters later remembered Sharon as “loving, vulnerable and very disciplined when it came to her career.… Sharon evoked a kind of warmth. Everybody felt very protective towards her.”19

  Gefsky landed her work in television commercials for Chevrolet automobiles and Santa Fe cigarettes. The latter proved an ordeal. “I didn’t smoke or anything,” Sharon recalled. “One of the other girls showed me how to do it: You take a deep puff on the cigarette, and you put a look of ecstasy on your face as you exhale. I watched her puff a couple of times, and then I went off to the audition. They gave me a cigarette. I took a deep puff, swallowed the smoke, and passed out cold on the floor. That ended my career in cigarette commercials.”20

  These television spots were sporadic at best, and, in an attempt to support herself, Sharon took a job with Lipper Productions, dressing up in Irish peasant costume and handed out Kelly-Kalani Wine to Hollywood diners at $25 a day.21 These first few months were lean ones, but, eventually, Sharon scraped together enough money to rent a small Hollywood apartment on Fuller Street in a building managed by Richard Beymer’s mother, Eunice.

  Because they now shared an agent, Sharon and Richard Beymer saw quite a bit of each other in these months. In time, the pair became intimate and Sharon told Filmways’ vice president of advertising Mike Mindlin that Beymer had been her first real lover.22 The relationship was brief, lasting only a few months, but being loved and accepted proved a valuable boost to Sharon’s fragile self-esteem.

  This was Sharon’s first independent step, and she relished the sense of freedom. With her meager savings, she furnished her apartment with thrift-store finds picked up on afternoons spent wandering along Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. “Everywhere Sharon went,” Gefsky recalls, “people seemed to bend over backwards to do things for her, to help her out. As soon as she got her apartment, she went to a store and bought a few gallons of paint. The young men who helped her ended up coming round to her apartment that night and painted it for her.”23

  Hollywood is notoriously blasé about beauty, but Sharon proved a different story. “I’d never seen anyone like her—before or since,” Gefsky later recalled. “She just took your breath away.”24 Everywhere Gefsky took Sharon—to auditions, to lunches in elite restaurants, to grocery stores to help her shop—she drew intense attention. “When Sharon went to a restaurant,” he remembers, “the owner would pay for her meal. It was like that everywhere she went … It was amazing.”25

  Sharon was regularly besieged by those she met. Often they wanted something and flooded her with business cards, offering to photograph her, to obtain film roles. Every week, she handed over the cards, “dozens of them,” to Gefsky to sort through.26

  Eventually, Gefsky became dissatisfied with the work he was getting for Sharon so he called an old friend, Herbert Browar, and suggested that he might be interested in using her in one of his projects. Browar worked as an assistant for Filmways, Inc., which, at the time, was in the process of casting three unknown actresses for a forthcoming CBS-TV production tentatively called Whistle Stop, a spin-off of the popular television show The Beverly Hillbillies.27

  “Hal,” Browar recalls, “rang me one afternoon and asked if I would do him a favor and meet his new client. I nearly fell out of my chair when Sharon walked into my office. After being in the business for a few years, you get to know ‘the look.’ Well, she had it. She was so stunningly beautiful, poised, and elegant. She impressed me tremendously.”28

  Browar decided an audition was unnecessary. Instead, he called Martin Ransohoff, chairman of Filmways, “I have this girl in my office,” he told Ransohoff, “and I think you should see her at once.”29

  Martin Ransohoff, at thirty-two, was the youngest chief executive officer of a major corporation to be listed on the American Stock Exchange.30 One writer would refer to him as “one of the shrewdest and more successful producers in films and telelvison.”31

  Ransohoff was the product of an upper-middle class Connecticut family. After attending Colgate University, he began his career in advertising. Unsatisfied with the direction in which his life was headed, he traveled to Europe married and, in 1952, with two hundred dollars, founded Filmways, Inc., a company he developed to produce television commercials. His success was astounding. The first year of Filmways’ operation, his company did $150,000 worth of business; five years later, the company’s turnover topped $3 million.32

  In Hollywood, Ransohoff quickly merged his ability to successfully create television commercials with the fertile world of television comedy. By 1963, the company was responsible for several television hits, including Mister Ed and The Beverly Hillbillies, Roman Polanski later described Ransohoff as “a smooth, persuasive talker with a slight lisp.…” When he spoke, according to Polanski, he peppered his speech with the “racy language of the unorthodox, new-style Hollywood.”33

  “He looks like something out of Greek or Roman mythology,” one reporter declared, “an infant bacchante. He is round and firm and fully packed, and the almost impish face is topped by a prematurely balding head across which, from some flight of fancy, he sweeps one enormously long thin lock of hair. He wears the lock like a crazy wreath, pushing it back and forth as he talks, and at the end of some particularly riveting conversation, it stands alone, like everything else about him, an exclamation point.”34

  Ransohoff was known for his somewhat abrasive personality. “He
mobilizes people’s anxiety about themselves,” said Filmways associate John Calley. “He makes it impossible to rationalize personal failure as a product of an unbeatable, decadent system, because Marty is a constant reminder to every ‘near-miss’ that the system can be beaten if you’ve got the ability.… He is the most decisive man I ever met. You get immediate decisions from him. And he’s big enough to admit when they’re wrong. He’s absolutely fearless, laughs at catastrophe.”35

  Filmways, Inc.’s success gave Ransohoff pull in Hollywood, the power to change the course of Sharon’s career. Previously, he had negotiated the rise of both Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld. “I have this dream,” he once explained to a reporter, “where I’ll discover a beautiful girl who’s a nobody and turn her into a star everybody wants. I’ll do it like Louis B. Mayer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer used to, only better. But once she’s successful, then I’ll lose interest. That’s how my dream goes.”36

  Now, he turned his attention to Sharon Tate. Even though it was late in the afternoon, Browar took her to the studio, where Ransohoff was supervising a new production. When he first saw her, Ransohoff made an immediate decision. His camera crew had not yet left, and Ransohoff asked her to do an impromptu screen test. It went well, and he asked Sharon to return the following day to view the results; he also asked her to bring her parents.37

  As soon as Sharon left the studio, Ransohoff rang Browar.

  “You’re right about this girl,” he told Browar.

  “Marty,” Browar replied, “if you handle this girl right, you know you can make a star out of her.”38

  The following day, Sharon duly appeared at the studio, accompanied by her mother, who had come from Fort McArthur. Ransohoff took them to a private screening room where the trio watched the dailies of Sharon’s screen test.39

  As soon as the lights went up, Ransohoff was all business. He began by signing Sharon to an exclusive, seven-year contract with Filmways, Inc. Mike Mindlin, Filmways’ Vice President of Advertising, recalls that Sharon was one of the few such actors signed to a contract.40 Having discovered the young woman he was certain he could mold into the next big thing, Ransohoff was determined not to let her go.