by Greg King
Ransohoff’s hold on Sharon was powerful. He felt that she was still too inexperienced to handle a major role. However, he could not put off her requests forever. In the summer of 1965, Ransohoff signed to produce a new horror film with MGM. There was a role for a pretty young actress, and Ransohoff agreed to cast Sharon. In the fall of 1965, Sharon flew off to London to begin Eye of the Devil.
Chapter 5
Eye of the Devil
Sharon arrived in London accompanied by Jay Sebring. For the next few months, she commuted between the MGM Studios at Borehamwood outside London and the medieval Chateau d’Hautefort at Brives les Gaillards in the Perigord in France, where location filming took place. “The area was kind of mythical, kind of foggy and smoky, and it put me in a great mood for my part,” Sharon later recalled.1 Eye of the Devil, although completed by the middle of 1966, was not released until 1967, ironically after another of Sharon’s films.
Eye of the Devil, or Thirteen as it was also referred to in its British release, was based upon a novel by Philip Loraine, Day of the Arrow, and adapted for the screen by Robin Estridge and Dennis Murphy. It was a strange, low-key thriller concerning a rural pagan cult. Philippe de Montfaucon, Marquis de Bellac—the film’s principal character—is the victim of the cult’s practice of sacrificing a human life to ensure a successful grape harvest. As the film opens, Philippe, who lives in Paris with his wife Catherine and children Jacques and Antoinette, is approached by a representative of his native village of Bellenac and informed of another impending poor harvest—the third in a row. He dutifully returns to the family chateau, soon followed by his wife and children, who have come against his wishes. There, Catherine witnesses a number of bizarre scenes: hooded figures wander through shadowy rooms, animals are sacrificed, and a threatening brother and sister, Christian and Odile d’Carey, hover ominously around the chateau. Gradually, Catherine learns of the existence of the cult, which believes it must sacrifice her husband, as lord of the manor, to guarantee the harvest. Throughout the film, the Marquis de Bellac is aware of the ultimate fate awaiting him, but, convinced by the village priest—himself a member of the cult—that he is powerless to avoid his destiny, he does nothing to prevent the impending tragedy. When he joins the twelve members of the cult in the woods below the chateau, the evil circle is complete, and the Marquis is killed by an arrow shot by Christian d’Carey. As the film ends, and his grieving family leaves the chateau, Philippe’s young son Jacques has already been initiated into the cult and to his own eventual fate as lord of Bellenac.
Ransohoff produced the film, along with John Calley, and J. Lee Thompson directed. David Niven starred as the Marquis de Bellac, with Deborah Kerr as Catherine and Donald Pleasance as the village priest, Father Dominick. Originally, Kim Novak had taken the role of Catherine, but, well into filming, she injured her back and was replaced with Kerr. A third of the film had already been shot.
“Calley and I urged Marty to take the insurance money and run after Novak’s accident,” recalls Mike Mindlin. “But he decided to stick it out.”2 Sharon played Odile d’Carey, while her brother Christian was played by British actor David Hemmings, soon to be cast in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s successful Blow Up. Robert Duncan and Suky Appleby were cast in the roles of the two de Montfaucon children, Jacques and Antoinette. Sharon’s character, Odile, is a witch. Her principal role was to look beautiful and mesmerizing, which she did, thanks in large part to the atmospheric black and white cinematography of Erwin Hallier. Dressed throughout in black, blonde hair exquisitely framing high cheekbones and heavily-shadowed and underlined eyes, Sharon managed to be stunning and malevolent at the same time. Although she only appeared in a dozen scenes, she was listed seventh in the opening credits, and her screen presence was considerable.
Following two silent appearances, Sharon’s first lines came in a scene filmed with the two de Montfaucon children, Jacques and Antoinette. Playing in the Chateau garden, they cautiously approach the mysterious Odile, whom they find sitting at the edge of a reflecting pool. Fingering an amulet which glimmers against the black background of her top, Odile, in a clipped, rather impressive British accent, asks, “Do you believe in magic? Do you Jacques?” She shines the light from the amulet in the young boy’s eyes, and directs his attention to a toad perched on a lily pad. “Well, shall we turn that toad into a dove?” In an instant, the toad has transformed. At that moment, the children’s mother Catherine arrives and hurries Jacques and Antoinette back to the Chateau.
Her longest sequence was shot on the roof of the Chateau. Catherine, who has been visiting the town of Bellenac spread below the ramparts, swings her car up the drive only to see her two children, watched over by Odile, playing atop the steep roof and along the cornices. She runs up the stairs, sends her children below, and confronts Odile.
“How could you let Jacques do that?” she demands. “How could you? He might have been killed! You know as well as they do that they are not allowed to play up here.”
“Christian and I were playing on the roof together here when we were far younger than they are,” Odile answers coldly.
“I don’t want you seeing my children any more,” Catherine tells her. She demands to know if her husband has not spoken with Odile and warned both her and her brother to keep their distance.
“Did he say he would,” Odile asks, “did he lie to you? Oh, but you must be used to that by now. Men always lie. Personally, I have no use for them, except for Christian.”
While speaking, she deliberately twists the amulet round her neck, causing the reflected sunlight to shine in Catherine’s eyes. As she speaks to Catherine, her voice is flat, hypnotic.
“Catherine, what’s the matter? Is the sun bothering you? Are you alright? Would you like to go in? You’re getting very tired.… Would you like to go in? … You’re eyes are heavy … very heavy … you must go to sleep … you must go to sleep Catherine … sleep. Careful, Catherine, you might fall.… Take my hand.”
Catherine is mesmerized, blinded by the light from the amulet, following Odile’s voice as the young woman directs her to the edge of the roof. “Odile, help me!” she pleads.
“I am helping you, Catherine,” Odile says softly, “I am helping you.… Just a few more steps, then you can rest, then you can hold my hand. Take it, Catherine, take it!” As she approaches the edge of the roof, Catherine reaches for the hand, which Odile has held out before the void. On the cornice, Catherine’s shoe falls from her foot, spiraling to the courtyard below. Just at that moment, Odile’s brother Christian, poised atop a neighboring turret, blows a hunting horn, and the loud noise pierces the spell, saving Catherine from a fall to her death.
After this incident, Odile is confronted by Philippe de Montfaucon, who beats her viciously with a whip. But she ends the scene with a strangely satisfied look on her face, uttering, “You’re mad, quite, quite mad,” as David Niven retreats.
J. Lee Thompson recalled that Sharon remained the question mark: “She was faced with doing a very big and important part. Could she do it? That was in all our minds. We even agreed that if after the first two weeks Sharon was not quite making it, that we would put her back in cold storage. We started work. Very soon, we all realized that here was a girl who is tremendously exciting. She has that thing that you can’t really explain—star projection.”3
Sharon found the experience a daunting one. “You would think that in three years of studying you would know it all,” Sharon told an interviewer, “but the first thing you find out is that you don’t. It’s almost like going back to school again except that I have the groundwork so when I’m told something now I know how to apply it. And the rest of the cast have been marvelous and helpful.”4
She was in awe of her co-stars. “Deborah Kerr,” Sharon said, “is my idea of an actress, and a woman, and a person, and I learned so much from her … just little things. You know, it takes a long time, and plus, a lot of her things in acting, if you watch, are so smooth, so professional, it’s fa
ntastic, really fantastic.”5 Kerr herself declared that, “given the right breaks, and a reasonable amount of luck,” she thought Sharon would be a great success.6
Niven helped ease her nerves on the set. “When I was younger,” Sharon recalled, “I thought, This is the man that I am going to marry, so when he came up, I told him, Well, you know, I had plans on marrying you for many years. He’s so suave, and so elegant, and so handsome and witty, and the funny thing about it is I did my first film with him.”7
For his part, Niven was equally impressed. “Sharon,” he declared, “is a great discovery. First of all, she’s a fabulously good-looking bird. And she’s got all the fun and spark and go. She’s a marvelous girl. She’s up on cloud nine, Sharon is, and I think she’s a very, very good actress, and I think she’s obviously going to make a big hit in this picture.”8
Despite her lack of experience, according to Thompson, she took direction “beautifully. Very soon, she began to realize that the camera was her friend.”9 She seemed at ease, and worked well with the cast. Between takes, she disappeared for promotional photo shoots, or quietly slipped behind the cameras to sneak a cigarette and cup of coffee.
To give the film an authentic feel, the producers hired a rather curious man named Alex Saunders, who dubbed himself “King of the Witches.” He was said to be a leading authority on witchcraft and the occult, and advised Calley on several scenes. Later, he would claim that he had initiated Sharon herself as a witch, and that he possessed photographs of her, taken in London at the time, dressed in ritual robes and with occult paraphenalia.10 However, it seems likely that any such pictures were actually publicity stills from the film. Sharon is not known to have ever evinced more than a passing interest in the occult, in spite of later rumors to the contrary.
After location filming in France was completed, Sharon had to remain in London for post-production work at MGM Studios. “The moment that Sharon appeared on screen in her first rushes,” said J. Lee Thompson, “we knew that this wonderful personality was going to make out. I think that this girl is going to be a big, big star.”11
Filmways had rented a flat in fashionable Eaton Place for Sharon, and she shared it with her female voice coach and a small Yorkshire puppy called Guinness.12 She spent her days working out at a local gym, or lying under an artificial sun-lamp, tanning herself.13 In between studio work, she would often disappear to Hyde Park, to watch cricket matches, visit museums or feed the pigeons in Trafalger Square.
Jay Sebring was forced to return to Los Angeles to take care of business concerns. Before he left London, he asked one of his friends, Victor Lownes, to look after Sharon. Lownes, a tall, handsome and charming man in his early thirties, was the head of Playboy Enterprises in the United Kingdom, and had founded the Playboy Club on London’s Park Lane after working closely with Hugh Hefner in the United States.
Roman Polanski later described Victor Lownes as “tough, fast-talking, energetic, self-assertive, outspoken, and—by European standards—brash.… Victor gloried in his affluence and connections; to him, entertaining and having fun were all part of the job. He courted celebrities, less for snobbish reasons than because—as he used to say—they had to be more interesting than nonentities or they wouldn’t have gotten where they were.”14
“I vividly remember the first time I met Sharon,” Lownes recalls. “She was simply stunning. I saw her, and did an immediate double-take. I’ve been around a lot of beautiful women before and since, but nobody ever impacted people the way Sharon did. She was completely natural, not caught up on herself, and very smart, which wasn’t something you might have expected if you just judged her by her looks. She had the best sense of humor, too, which I think surprised a lot of people. She was sharp, and always got the joke.”15
Lownes launched Sharon into the swinging world of 1960s London. Although Sharon was no wide-eyed tourist, she found the atmosphere in London stimulating. Unlike the United States, the British capital seemed poised on the edge of a revolution in music and fashion. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were fresh, and pirate radio stations perched just outside the territorial limits broadcast new and exciting music to counter the staid conservatism of the BBC. Sharon eagerly threw herself into life here, shopping along King’s Road, hunting through used clothing stores in Chelsea and investigating the latest fashions of Mary Quant and other trendy designers who lined both sides of Carnaby Street.
Sharon quickly absorbed London style, dressing herself in leather biker jackets and mini skirts worn with sheer tights and tall go-go boots. She continued to dress for comfort in her private hours, preferring oversized sweaters and sweatshirts worn with sweatpants, but, accompanying Lownes to his stylish parties and the city’s fashionable nightclubs, she dressed to make an impact, and those who came into contact with her rarely forget their impressions.
Actress Leslie Caron met Sharon during this time, and quickly befriended her. “I was really very fond of her,” she recalls. “She used to come to my house when my children started going to boarding school. She was such a dear, very lovely girl, modest, sincere, with a profound warmth.” Caron was struck not only by Sharon’s “blinding beauty, and irresistible charm,” but also by her reserve and thoughtful nature. “She was very sharp, not a fool, and had a lot of insight into what had happened to her,” she says. “But Sharon suffered from mistreatment. On one occasion, she told me that she suffered so much from being pretty. She received a lot of unsympathetic treatment from both women and men. Women would try to steal her men, and despised her beauty, while men were often afraid and ignored her because they feared that they couldn’t get her. Sharon wasn’t very happy at it.”16
Production work on Eye of the Devil finally wrapped in early 1965. Rather than immediately returning to America, Sharon asked her friend Wende Wagner to join her in London. For a week, Victor Lownes had charge of the pair, escorting them to parties and to exclusive clubs in Knightsbridge and Soho. “They were having a lot of fun,” he remembers, “enjoying the shopping during the day and the party scene at night.”17
One day, Lownes arranged to host a small luncheon for the two women, and invited a dozen of his friends, including Polish film director Roman Polanski. Skip Ward, one of Sharon’s friends from Hollywood, happened to be in England on a break from shooting his latest film, Is Paris Burning?. “I was delayed, and I didn’t arrive at Victor’s until nearly three that afternoon. By then, the party was almost over. When I walked in, I said hello to Wende, and then noticed that Sharon was sitting next to Polanski. They were deep in conversation. I watched them for quite a while, as they talked and laughed. At the time, I made a mental note that Jay wasn’t going to like this.”18
Chapter 6
Roman
Roman Polanski was born on August 18, 1933, in Paris. As much turmoil and intransigence as Sharon had experienced growing up as an army brat, it was nothing compared to the real life-and-death struggle which young Roman Polanski had been forced to wage.
Roman’s father Riczard Polanski worked briefly for a recording studio and then in a factory. He had married a Russian divorcee, Bula Katz, and the pair lived in a shabby apartment in the XIth arrondisement in Paris. In 1936, when the elder Polanski lost his job, he took his wife and three-year old son back to his native Poland, settling in Cracow. It was to prove a fatal mistake.1
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland. Within a week, they had occupied Cracow. As Jews, the Polanskis were quickly confined to a Nazi-patrolled ghetto. Young Roman was often sent away to hunt through the streets and cellars of the ghetto for food. During one of these trips, the Nazis began to round up members of the ghetto community. Roman returned just in time to see his mother being forcibly dragged away in a flatbed truck crammed with dozens of their friends and neighbors. Bula Polanski motioned for her young son to keep quiet as she disappeared into the grim cortege; a few months later, she was dead, a victim of one of Hitler’s concentration camps.
Bula Polanski was rounded up
in 1941; soon after, Riczard made arrangements for some Catholic friends to look after Roman if the situation seemed ready to erupt. A place with a safe family in the countryside was assured. As the pace of the Nazi liquidation of Cracow’s Jews intensified, Riczard Polanski decided that it was time. He took young Roman to the edge of the ghetto, snipped the barbed wire fence with an old pair of pliers, hugged his son and pushed him through the small hole, toward freedom.2 He was just in time; a few hours later, the Polanski apartment was one of many raided, and Riczard was rounded up and sent to Mauthausen Concentration Camp.
Roman spent several years living undisturbed in the Polish countryside under the protection of a Catholic family. He had no news of his father or mother. After the liberation of Poland, he ran away from his host family, trying to make his way back to Cracow. Like many other displaced refugees, Roman survived only through the kindness of the Soviet soldiers, who regularly shared their war rations with the starving Poles. At the end of the war, he was finally reunited with his father, who had amazingly survived his internment at Mauthausen. It was only then that he learned his mother had perished. Distraught, father and son took a small apartment together, trying to recover from the shock of the war and to understand what the other had been through. Riczard Polanski eventually remarried, this time to a Catholic named Wanda Zajaczkowska. The remarriage strained the relationship between father and son, and the younger Polanski made several attempts to escape from under his father’s roof. In 1953 he graduated from school and decided to enroll in the State Film School in Lodz. Roman had always been interested in motion pictures, their imagery and the ability to escape into an artificial, unreal world. In post-war Poland, with Soviet occupation and little hope for the future, a career in film seemed as good as any other to Roman. He experimented with several student films before finally deciding to focus his attention on directing.