Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  Desperate parents gave all their money, when they could, to non-Jewish families to take care of their children. Taking in a Jewish child was punishable by death, but a good number of Poles went ahead and sheltered such children. Young Roman wound up in the care of a Catholic family in Krakow who, in the spring of 1943, sent him to a farm whose Catholic owners apparently did not realize he was Jewish. He slept in the loft of a barn and spent his days in farm work.

  When Sharon was three months old, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, lasting from April 19 till May 16. Since 1940, a half-million Jews had been living walled up in the Warsaw ghetto. In July of 1942, three hundred thousand were taken away, most of them to the Treblinka concentration camp, so that by early 1943 there were maybe sixty thousand left. The Nazis wanted the ghetto cleared of Jews as a gift for Hitler’s birthday on April 20, so two thousand marched against the ghetto on April 19 to destroy it. Jewish resistance groups, including the heroic Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) fought for the ghetto’s every inch with pistols, molotov cocktails, grenades, some rifles, and a couple of machine guns. By May 8 the uprising headquarters was overwhelmed. Tens of thousands of Jews perished, and maybe seventy escaped. A few were helped by Polish sympathizers. By May 16, everything was rubble, and the Nazis dynamited the Tlomacki synagogue so that the ghetto ceased to exist.

  Meanwhile, in the summer of 1943, some photos of the six-month-old Sharon Marie Tate were entered into a beauty contest for babies in Dallas. In one memoir Sharon’s mother, Doris, recalls that it was Paul’s mother, Nannie Tate, who submitted pictures of Sharon to the toddler contest, which Sharon won, picking up a $50 savings bond and the title Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas. It’s not known whether mother Doris harbored for herself a yearning for the modeling, performance, or acting which she cultivated in her daughter. Whoever submitted the photos to the Tiny Tot contest, Doris, as the young wife of a frequently absent military officer husband, used her excess time to promote her beautiful daughter first in beauty contests, then as an actress in bit parts in Italy, and finally with a full career in Los Angeles.

  Sharon Marie Tate proved during her twenty-six years on earth to be supremely photogenic. Was there ever anyone who from six months to age twenty-six had so many hundreds and thousands of posed pictures tracing her prettiness? The Internet alone has thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of photos of Sharon.

  The same summer that Sharon was selected Miss Tiny Tot, on a farm about one hundred miles from his home city of Krakow, Poland, a young boy, not quite ten years old, was living under an assumed name. That summer the nine-year-old was pressed into vigorous religious practice, including praying each day, services each week at a Catholic church, and nighttime sessions a few times a week at a Catholic school. According to one biography, he was given the name Raimund Borocowska. According to another, “for most of the occupation, Raymond Polanski was known as Roman Wilk.” Also Romek Wilk. His full name, given him when he was born in Paris on August 18, 1933, according to another biography, was Rajmund Roman Thierry Polanski. He answered through adolescence to the diminutive Romek.

  The past is often like a quicksand bog, with fragments protruding upward here and there. This we know for certain, his later name: Roman Polanski. 1943 saw the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s long exposition of existentialism, Being and Nothingness, just in time for the secret work of the Manhattan Project, and the first use of the bazooka, napalm, and then flamethrowers against Japanese soldiers in caves in the war.

  An opportunity arose in the spring of 1944 to bomb enough of the Auschwitz concentration camp to keep it from further operating. Hitler was losing the war, and the United Press reported in May that thirty thousand Jews were being railroaded to Auschwitz. The American war secretary had an assistant secretary named John McCloy who turned down a request to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. He also turned down a request to bomb the camps themselves so that in the “confusion” at least some of the camp inmates could flee. McCloy once again answered with a no, writing that the camps were “beyond the maximum range” of Allied planes in the United Kingdom, Italy, and France. A terrible lie. Long-range American bombers had flown from Italy over Auschwitz looking for a nearby IG Farben petrochemical plant. And so, on August 20, 1944, over one hundred Flying Fortresses with one hundred Mustang fighters escorting tossed down 1,336 five-hundred-pound bombs to the east of Auschwitz less than five miles away!

  It would likely have been too late for Roman’s mother, Bula, who was killed in Auschwitz.

  Finally in 1945, when Sharon was two going on three, World War II came to an end, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the birth pangs of the Cold War began. Her father Paul remained in the military, so that the family was subject to quick moves. Little Sharon Tate lived in Pasadena, Texas, and attended St. Pius V Catholic School from kindergarten to the second grade, 1948–1951. Her sister Debra Ann was born in 1953.

  Throughout her preteen and teenage years, Sharon lived the typical roaming existence of an army child, moving from Dallas to Houston, El Paso, Tacoma, Washington, DC, and Verona, Italy. This peripatetic and straitened lifestyle—with new residences all the time on a soldier’s salary (though the government provided affordable housing), might have helped her mother’s resolve to help her very pretty daughter onto a path of Hollywood largess.

  In 1954, Sharon and her family moved to Richland, located in the Tri-Cities area of Washington State where her father was stationed at nearby Camp Hanford.

  Hanford is located at the site of a huge facility along the Columbia River in the southeastern part of the state, featuring a plutonium production complex with nine nuclear reactors, providing explosives for American nuclear weapons. The Fat Man bomb, which destroyed Nagasaki, was made with plutonium from the reactors at the Hanford site.

  Hanford’s plutonium processing, key to the building of nuclear weapons, was protected in the 1950s by batteries of Nike-Hercules missiles. Nike missile systems were put in place to intercept Soviet bombers that might target the plutonium plants. From the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, the army deployed Nike, Ajax, and Hercules missiles here and there in the continental United States to protect major metropolitan areas and important military installations such as Hanford from enemy attack. It is thought that Officer Paul Tate, who worked in army intelligence, was involved in the military personnel protecting the Nike-Hercules missile batteries, which themselves were guarding the plutonium plants at Hanford.

  Doris Tate and her daughter Sharon. In an interview in 1989, Doris told the author she had had a “bad childhood” and had tried to make Sharon’s better than hers had been.

  The huge Hanford plutonium processing site by the Columbia River has left a blighted environmental legacy. Plutonium is one of the most lethal substances—and an extremely small particle can kill a human. To this day, there is large-scale nuclear contamination from large leaking tanks of nuclear waste, ever spreading, years after Hanford was officially closed. However, during Sharon Tate’s residence in Richland during the late 1950s, nothing about contamination ever entered conversations.

  Sharon attended Richland’s Spalding Elementary School in 1954–1955, then Chief Joseph Junior High from 1955 to 1958. Then there was at least a brief stay of the Tate family in Alameda, near San Francisco.

  I have seen a photo showing Paul Tate, handing a suitcase from the trunk of an auto to daughter Sharon, with mother Doris nearby holding one of her sisters, Debra. The caption on this photo reads: “S. Paul J. Tate and family moving into the first home of New Government Leasing Program at 2815 Otis Drive Alameda—13 February 1956—San Francisco—California.”

  Sergeant Tate and Doris’s third daughter, Patricia Gaye, was born in 1957.

  Sharon attended Columbia High School in Richland, Washington, in 1958–1959. The Columbia High athletic teams were called the Bombers, and had as their insignia an atomic mushroom cloud! Sharon showed her prettiness and popularity when she was voted a homecoming princess, and she served a
s a member of the student council.

  Meanwhile in Poland in 1954, when Sharon Tate was eleven, Roman Polanski began to study at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, after much effort to get admitted. Postwar Poland had one of the finest film academies in the world. “Lenin said cinema was the most important art form that existed,” Roman Polanski said in a later interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, “something that gave a lot of prestige to filmmakers. This meant the Communists didn’t dare interfere too much with us.”

  In the spring of 1959, Roman Polanski graduated from the National Film School, thoroughly trained in the formal techniques of filmmaking. He had already filmed some strange short pieces. His first completed brief film, Murderer, lasted two minutes and showed an unknown killer stabbing a sleeping man with a penknife. Another early eight-minute film, Break Up the Dance, starred a group of youths arriving at a dance followed by a bunch of hooligans who climb a fence and begin to break up the festivities, shoving girls to the floor, tossing people into the water, and beating up the celebrants.

  Sharon Winning Beauty Contests

  Early in 1959, the same year that Polanski graduated from film school, Columbia High sophomore Sharon won a beauty contest in Richland, Washington. That is, she had a job as a hostess for the first Tri-City Autorama show where she was made “Queen of the Autorama.” The show was conducted at the hangar at the Pasco, Washington, airport.

  An article six years later in the TriCity Herald, Richland, Washington, September 5, 1965, read, “Sharon is no stranger to spotlights. At the age of 16, while a student at Columbia High, she was chosen both Miss Richland of the 1959 Atomic Frontier Days and Miss Autorama of 1958–59.” The article also noted that in April 1959, as “Queen of the 1959 Tri-City Autorama,” she “greeted crowds at the three-day grand opening event of Farley Chevrolet Co. at 3rd Avenue and Columbia Street.” A home movie was made of pretty Sharon, sporting a tiara and resplendent in a saffron-colored full gown opening the trunk and front door of an automobile. There was a picture of her in the local paper under the headline, “Beautiful Girl, Beautiful Car Queen, Sharon Tate.” The lure of renown was beginning its sparkle.

  She was set to enter the “Miss Washington” pageant in 1960, and then would have competed, as her mother, Doris, later recalled, for the Miss America title, but before she could compete for Miss America, the Fates intervened and her father, Paul, was promoted to Captain and sent to the “G2 Southern European Task Force” at Passelaqua Army Base, near Verona, in northern Italy. Headstrong Sharon announced she was staying in Washington. Arguments ensued, but finally Sharon went with her family to Verona.

  According to an article in the El Paso Times, Sharon spent the fall session of 1959, half of her junior year, at Irvin High School in El Paso, Texas. “Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. P. J. Tate, Miss Tate and two younger sisters, resided at 9303 Roanoke. Tate who was then a captain in the army, was later reassigned to Verona, Italy, and the family moved there in January, 1960. El Pasoans recalled Miss Tate as a very ‘vibrant, happy and beautiful young lady with very strict parents.’” Very strict parents indeed. Her father especially, but her mother? Not so strict, but wary. Sometimes very wary.

  It’s possible that Captain Tate’s work in army intelligence had to do with protecting a new generation of Nike-Hercules surface-to-air missiles, some equipped with nuclear explosives, which were placed in batteries near Verona.

  In the spring of 1960, Sharon starred in a photograph published in the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. The cover pic revealed her in a dark bathing suit wearing a cowboy hat and holding a lariat while sitting astride a long narrow white missile which bore the letters “U.S. Army.”

  It had already made her locally famous before her arrival at the American High School at Vicenza, near Verona. She was instantly popular and developed friendships among young people also from military backgrounds who had, like Sharon, felt alienation from frequent uprootings and being taken to new military locations, new streets, unforeseen houses, and unforeseen classmates.

  The missile astride which the Western-attired, lariat-twirling young woman sat smiling may actually have been a Nike-Hercules missile, of the sort that protected the Hanford plant in the state of Washington, and the US installations near Verona.

  Seventeen-year-old Sharon Tate sits astride a missile.

  Nike-Hercules Missile

  The Vicenza American High School is run by the Department of Defense, and is located in Vicenza, Italy, on Caserma Ederle, an American military base within the US Army Southern European Task Force (SETAF). The Vicenza-Verona area is picturesquely beautiful, and has a long and complicated history leading back to the Renaissance, to Medieval times, then to Roman and Etruscan times. Vicenza was the birthplace of one of Italy’s finest architects, Andrea Di Pietro Palladio, whose works in Vicenza include the city’s museum, the Teatro Olimpico, and the Duomo.

  That March of 1960, as Sharon was just about to settle in to the routines of Vicenza American High School, Roman Polanski set out for Paris (where he had been born.) Roman’s older half-sister Annette had survived Auschwitz, moved to Paris, gotten married, and invited Roman to visit. Polanski was determined to get out of Poland to the West just as young Sharon Tate was soon determined to get to Hollywood.

  Roman was asked later about this first trip to Paris. He replied: “In those times you couldn’t even dream of leaving Poland. It was like the Wall in Germany. No one was allowed a passport, no one was allowed to leave. I had my sister who went from Auschwitz back to Paris. You know, Paris was really her place. She lived there before. She was older than me. She got married after the war and I learned that she was alive living in Paris. We corresponded and she invited me to come. Then great changes happened in Poland and I finally got my passport. That was my first visit to this town and it was fabulous. You cannot imagine what it means for someone who lived in that gray, drab, communist reality to visit a Western city. Paris above all. But I was still at the film school, so I returned.”

  Roman went home to Poland, and with a complicated youthful enthusiasm, began his drive to make his first feature film, Knife in the Water. In an essay by Polanski in 1963, he described making films at that time in Poland: “There are eight production groups in Poland and I’m a member of the Kamera Group. When I have an idea, I submit it to my group leader. If he likes it, he’ll ask me to develop it into a script that can be presented to the commission. If the commission rejects it, I’m not able to make the film. The commission deals only with feature films—for shorts it’s different because they’re less expensive and fewer people are involved. My teacher was responsible for my work and gave his approval for two or three films I made at the Lodz Film Academy.” The Kamera Group ultimately approved state funding for Knife in the Water, and filming commenced in the summer of 1961.

  Meanwhile, Sharon became fairly fluent in Italian. One disturbing event occurred when she was raped, at age seventeen, apparently by a soldier on a date, about which she told Roman Polanski on their first date (in London in 1966). She confided in her future husband, in Polanski’s words, that “it hadn’t left her emotionally scarred.” Otherwise, she kept quiet about the incident and didn’t tell her mother and father. Perhaps she was afraid it might have gravely upset her father, and if it were spread abroad, might impinge negatively on his military career.

  Her interest in becoming an actress led her, and some friends, to observe and even to participate in several Hollywood films being shot nearby. In 1960, Sharon picked up her first on-screen credit, appearing in an episode dated May 5, for the ABC series, filmed in Venice, of The Pat Boone-Chevy Showroom.

  In 1960, after Sharon was spotted by the talent scout for the Pat Boone’s special, Doris and Sharon went to Venice for a rehearsal. Pat Boone himself promised that he and his wife would be sure no harm came to Doris’s daughter.

  The scene in which Sharon was filmed took place in Venice’s San Marco Square. The wind was severe and sloshed the waters of the canal over the b
oat’s edge, soaking Sharon in her blue satin dress. The experience apparently was the one that hooked her into pursuing a show business career.

  After the appearance on the Pat Boone special, Doris hesitantly allowed Sharon to work as an extra in various films, including Vengeance of the Three Musketeers.

  “Sharon, I remember you so well when we were in Verona,” recalled Vicenza High School friend Linda Franke in a posting on the Sharon Tate family website. “It was so wonderful knowing such a nice, warm person! I especially remember the prom when you doubled with Donna and Don and your summer job at the kiddie area at Lake Garda.” (Lake Garda is the largest lake in Italy, formed by glaciers in the last ice age. It’s located about halfway between Venice and Milano.)

  Sharon was a cheerleader for the Vicenza Cougars football team, and in the fall of 1960 was selected queen of the homecoming dance. In the spring of 1961 she was queen of the prom.

  There was an advertisement in the Vicenza High School newspaper seeking extras for the Anthony Quinn/Jack Palance movie, Barabbass. This Biblical epic starred Anthony Quinn as the thief pardoned in lieu of Jesus, and tracked his troubled life.

  Also starring was Jack Palance as a sadistic gladiator named Torvald. Sharon won the job as an extra in a crowd scene viewing a fight.

  In his autobiography, Just Tell Me When to Cry, director Richard Fleischer writes of shooting the climax of the gladiatorial fight between Anthony Quinn and Jack Palance before an audience of thousands. “Tony is victorious,” notes Fleischer, “and the crowd calls for Palance’s death. Nine thousand people screaming, with their thumbs down! What a shot! On the second day of shooting we were working closer to the crowd and I could scrutinize it. I was looking for good character faces I could feature in various reaction shots. There were some excellent types, but one face truly stood out, that of an eighteen-year-old girl of stunning beauty. She was gorgeous. A knockout. I pointed her out to my assistant and told him I wanted her in every close shot I could possibly use her in. And I asked him to find out who she was and where she came from. It turned out she was the daughter of an officer at the US military base in Vincenza.”