Sharon Tate: A Life
Page 1
Sharon Tate
Sharon Tate
A Life
Ed Sanders
Illustrations by Rick Veitch
Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 2015 by Ed Sanders
Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Rick Veitch
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sanders, Ed.
Sharon Tate: a life / Ed Sanders; Illustrations by Rick Veitch.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-306-82240-7 (e-book) 1. Tate, Sharon, 1943-1969. 2. Actors—United States—Biography. 3. Models (Persons)—United States—Biography. 4. Murder victims—California—Los Angeles—Biography. I. Veitch, Rick, illustrator. II. Title.
PN2287.T168S36 2016
791.4302’8092—dc23
[B]
2015034145
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com
Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.
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Contents
Thanks
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1 Early Years
Chapter 2 Discovered by a Producer
Chapter 3 Early Films: Eye of the Devil, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Don’t Make Waves
Chapter 4 1967: The Year of Love, Dolls, Rosemary
Chapter 5 1968: Marriage and Rising in Hollywood
Chapter 6 1969: Cielo Drive and Pregnancy
Chapter 7 Sharon’s Final Film
Chapter 8 The Summer of 1969
Chapter 9 A Cult at the Spahn Ranch Kills
Chapter 10 Sharon Tate’s Final Few Days
Chapter 11 Death on Cielo Drive
Chapter 12 Night and Morning
Chapter 13 August 9–10: More Carnage and Grief
Chapter 14 Aftermath and Investigation
Chapter 15 The Manson Group Keeps Killing and Moves to the High Desert Near Death Valley
Chapter 16 The Breaking of the Case
Afterword
Index
“The idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection.”
—Walter Benjamin
On the Concept of History, 1940
Thanks
The author would like to thank Paul Whiteley, Charles Guenther, Miriam Sanders, Evans Frankenheimer, Joanne Pettet, Sheilah Wells, Greg King, Shahrokh Hatami, Sharmagne Leland-St. John-Sylbert, Kristine Larsen, Michael McGovern, William Federici, Judith Hansen, Jim Fitzgerald, Paul Dostie, Ben Schafer, and others for providing help and information useful to this book.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the memory of Larry Larsen, investigator extraordinaire, good friend, and exemplary person.
Larry Larsen and I had a long history together, beginning in 1970 and 1971 when he helped research my book, The Family, and then continuing through the 1970s and beyond. He was doing good work in 2009–2010 on the life of Sharon Tate when suddenly he was diagnosed with leukemia. Larry struggled mightily, with the help of his wife, Toni, and went into remission, after which Larry continued to help with research, but then it came back and he passed away in December of 2010. His daughter Kristine, also a private investigator, brought her skills and expertise helping with research while I completed this book, but then she too was struck with illness.
Larry Larsen was raised in Nebraska, he met his high school sweetheart, Toni, in Omaha in 1954, and they were married in 1958. He graduated from the University of Omaha in 1965. Then they moved to California, driving along Route 66 hauling a small trailer. “I wanted to go to theology school,” he told me. He attended Claremont College in 1967–1968. At the same time as studying theology, he began working as a private investigator. He was a devout Christian. He was probably the only private investigator in the history of Western civilization to have been a fan of the writing of Søren Kierkegaard. It may have been the either/orness of the private investigator world. He and Toni had two daughters, Lynda and Kristine, both of whom became private investigators.
He was a brilliant investigator—firm, with a never-give-up technique, yet liberal and forgiving in his world outlook. Larry had the uncanny ability to hang out for hours and hours with crusty homicide detectives or even intelligence officers to pick up information no one else could have acquired. He was just plain amazing—he could generate literally entire bankers boxes full of useful data for the many cases he took on.
I knew he had strong feelings and didn’t like to be rejected. As a private eye, he had many a door shut in his face, and many people were even rude in refusing to talk with him, yet he carried out his work always with a smile on his face. He told me once, “a no is always a qualified yes.” His utter calmness under the most trying of circumstances during those years investigating the Manson group showed his profound sense of right and wrong.
Throughout his life Larry donated much time to working for a better world, for a more ethical and humane social structure. For instance, in the early 1970s Larry was one of the four founders of a nonprofit group, Community Information Project, to do pro bono public research to help good causes. Larry said, “One of the many concrete things we did was to write a city lobbyist registration and regulation municipal ordinance for the City of Los Angeles.”
From around 1975 to 1981, Larry served as a Los Angeles County deputy supervisor, with responsibilities for the investigation of public corruption. One of his duties was to help his boss, Supervisor Baxter Ward, conduct a lengthy investigation into the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. Larry was active in alternate energy in the early 1980s as president of a company called Pacific Solar and Wind, and oversaw construction of a wind farm on a mountain ridge near Tehachapi, located in Kern County, California.
Later he wrote a series of articles for my and my wife’s newspaper, The Woodstock Journal, on hydrogen fuel cells. Throughout the thirty years we knew one another, Larry hungered to write a book. Together we collaborated on a number of book proposals. Among them were proposals for books on computer crime, on the Unabomber, and one on possible ballot fraud in the 2004 federal election.
Here’s a poem I wrote in 1974 for Larry Larsen, in the midst of our early investigations:
Homage to Data
The incoming data-torrent
bejewels the Investigation Lotus
and only one addicted to
clusters of information fresh
will know the thrill
to hear the doorbell buzz
at 7:30 A.M.,
on a chilly winter morning
& the postman proffer
a 7 pound special delivery package
teeming with data:
of tapes
, of court transcripts, of xerox’d secret files
from secret filing cabinets, and hard-won photos,
from Larry Larsen, Private Eye
in the course of a tortuous
path of investigation,
looking far and near
upon a ruthless Secret Society,
say, or now a killer,
now a kill-cult, now assassination, th’
minutiae building in
the manila binders:
o fill up the files
o river of Data!
Larry Larsen was a beacon of integrity and he always brought a spirit of fun and good vibes to his work. Ahh Larry, we miss you.
—Ed Sanders
Foreword
In early September of 1969 I flew to Los Angeles from New York City to turn in my solo album, Sanders’ Truckstop, to Reprise Records, and to take photos for the album cover. I saw my usual friends in California, including Phil Ochs, Janis Joplin, and Reprise executive Andy Wickham. People were talking about the murders the previous month of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojtek Frykowski, and a young man named Steven Parent at Sharon’s house high in Benedict Canyon.
The filmmaker/actor Dennis Hopper, I was told, was spreading strange tales about the putative murderers, and Andy Wickham also had heard some of the same stories. These rumors made an impression on me as I returned to New York to work on the liner notes for my album.
Then, in early December, the police announced that the case had been solved with the arrests and indictments of a group of communally-living young people led by a singer/songwriter named Charles Manson. Remembering the rumors I had heard back in September, I started clipping articles about the case.
An assignment to write an article on the arrests for Esquire magazine fell through, but by then I had several file folders of information gathered, and my curiosity thoroughly piqued. I decided to write a book on the Manson group. I obtained a book contract, closed up my Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side, and abandoned putting a band together to promote Sanders Truckstop. This led to The Family, which came out in 1971, and has been since published in a number of updated editions.
Thus the chance trip to California in 1969 changed my life profoundly, so profoundly that it has led to this book tracing the life of Sharon Tate over forty years later. I was assisted in researching The Family by Los Angeles–based private investigator Larry Larsen. Larry and I stayed in touch over the years, and when in 2009 I decided to write a biography of Sharon Tate, Larsen agreed to assist once again in the research, utilizing his extensive connections with law enforcement sources in California, some of them once associated with the strands of investigation into the Manson group and what came to be known as the Tate-LaBianca murders. However, after just a few weeks work on researching the life of Sharon Tate, Larsen tragically developed severe leukemia, and naturally gave up the project in his intense struggle to beat back the disease, which proved fatal about a year later.
Without Larsen’s crucial help, I was faced with considerable problems. Not only had a good number of those involved in the case passed away, but memories of long-ago events had faded. For instance, when I spoke with Martin Ransohoff, Sharon Tate’s original Hollywood sponsor, he could not recall many of the events of that association.
As for tracing Sharon Tate’s exact life-path, while there may be thousands of photos of her, and though her father reported that she kept a large number of mementos of her life and career, there’s not that much detailed day-to-day information, such as diaries. Sharon Tate apparently did not keep a written and annotated trail of her life. Therefore, there are gaps and lacunae in all parts of her life—early, middle, and late.
I have sequenced her history, comparing various sources, as a tapestry of America during the twenty-six years she was given, which concluded with the marvelous and bumpity turbulence of the late 1960s. I reached out to a number of people who knew her, always trying to avoid “the cruel inquisitiveness of biographers,” to quote writer William Gaunt in his book on the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Sometimes it was difficult to discern actual reality, given disparate versions provided by various sources of the same time-tracks, but I have stitched together the sequence that seems most accurate.
When her life was severed, her Catholic mother Doris began grieving like ancient Demeter, who roamed the world in ancient times looking for her kidnapped daughter Persephone. I became very impressed with her work for victims’ rights. Doris Tate’s path and mine crossed when I visited her home in 1989, plus we were on a television show together. After she learned I was corresponding with Charles Manson and asking him questions, she strongly urged me to ask him for the real story about why her daughter was killed. She was not satisfied with the official time-track—she hungered to know the truth and wanted me to help in that search. Sharon’s sisters also suffered lasting grief. The efforts of Sharon’s family to keep her memory alive are to be found in books, in numerous articles, and on tribute websites.
So, the reader can ask why it was that I decided to write this book. It’s mainly because of the mystery that still surrounds the close of her life, and what I learned from investigators over the years. And because of what the novelist Graham Greene once wrote, in the voice of the intelligence officer in his novel The Third Man—“One’s file, you know, is never quite complete, a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all of the participants are dead.” In addition, I believe that there is a secret index to the past, what the philosopher Walter Benjamin described in On the Concept of History: “The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection.” By resurrection I think Benjamin means its substantially accurate reconstruction. For over forty years I have searched for the secret index to the life of Sharon Tate, and during those decades I have come to admire her and respect her dreams of triumph.
There are a number of mysteries still associated with the murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojtek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent. One of the main ones is why was the house on Cielo Drive and its occupants chosen for this horrible crime? Why why why? It may take a century of sorting out the loose strands, and weaving them into a cogent unity, to discover some of the answers. Or it may never happen.
Meanwhile, here is my tracing of the life and times of an American actress, cut off so cruelly from her husband, child, family, friends, and future films by the so far untraceable mechanisms of Fate and Evil.
—Ed Sanders
Chapter 1
Early Years
The United States was newly at war in early 1942, after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The nation was mobilizing. President Franklin Roosevelt signed a law enacting price controls in January, and directed the auto industry to transform its output to fit the needs of the war.
Sharon Tate’s mother and father knew each other in high school in Houston, Texas, in the early 1940s, but Paul Tate was too shy to ask Doris out. Finally, in late 1941 or early 1942, Paul gathered courage to ask her to dance. The place was the then freshly built Sylvan Beach Pavilion that overlooked Galveston Bay. Young Paul and young Doris danced together on the large, circular hardwood dance floor in the center of a glass-walled octagonal ballroom, with a triangular-shaped wooden deck that jutted out toward the Galveston Bay shoreline. The music at Sylvan Beach, according to an account by Paul Tate, was provided by big bands such as those of Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. Tate has written that “from that first dance with Doris, I was a man smitten.”
Doris Gwendolyn Willett was eighteen when she married nineteen-year-old Paul Tate on January 16, 1942, in Houston. Paul was just commencing a career in the military. Houston was the largest city in Texas, and its economy thrived, beginning in 1942, through shipbuilding to aid the war.
Also in January of 1942, unknown to most Americans, the Nazis held a conference outside Berlin to plan what was called the Endlösung der Judenfrage, “The Final Solution of the Jewish
Question.” The Final Solution entailed the transportation of all Jews to a number of camps, where they were to be killed. This would impact severely the life of an eight-year-old boy in Warsaw who later become a well-known film director.
On January 24, 1943, just over twelve months after getting married, Doris Tate gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Sharon Marie. Though the nation was convulsed with war that year, Bing Crosby had sung Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” in the film Holiday Inn, and bandleader Glenn Miller disbanded his band, after his “Chattanooga Choo Choo” had sold 1.2 million the previous year, and began leading the US Air Force Band. Right around the time Sharon Marie Tate was born, Rogers and Hammerstein’s great musical Oklahoma! was preparing to open on Broadway. Others born in 1943 included fellow Texan Janis Joplin, George Harrison, Robert De Niro, and Catherine Deneuve.
Across Poland Jews were being rounded up and taken away. On February 13, 1943, when Sharon Tate was under a month old, the ghetto residents of Krakow were warned that another German raid was at hand. So, on Valentine’s Day, Bula Polanski took her nine-and-a-half-year-old son Romek (diminutive for Roman) to the home of a family named Wilk, and left him there, with an envelope of money, promising to return for him when the situation improved.
A couple of days later, Roman’s father, Ryszard, came to the Wilk house to retrieve Roman. “They took your mother,” the father told the son. Bula had been removed by German soldiers from Krakow to Auschwitz, where she would perish. His father also was soon taken from the ghetto to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, located in Upper Austria, one of the worst of the concentration camps, intended for the “Incorrigible Political Enemies of the Reich,” where extermination through unbearable labor of the intelligentsia was practiced.