by Ed Sanders
Some Sharon Tate chronologies have her working as an extra that spring of 1963 both in Filmways’s The Wheeler Dealers and The Americanization of Emily, a satiric anti-war comedy written by Paddy Chayevsky and starring Julie Andrews. It was Andrews’s first movie after her Broadway run in Camelot; this was also the era in which Andrews made The Sound of Music.
Controversial upon its original release, The Americanization of Emily is a vanguard anti-war film, poking fun at mindless patriotism years before such films were fashionable or popularly accepted. Yet the film proved a commercial success, and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Musical Score.
As for The Wheeler Dealers, it is a comedy film starring James Garner and Lee Remick and featuring Chill Wills and Jim Backus. In a fairly complicated and convoluted story line, stockbroker Lee Remick is assigned a task by an overbearing sexist boss (Jim Backus) so as to deliberately get her to fail and thus for her boss to be able to fire her. Along comes a “Texas millionaire” (really an Ivy League–educated easterner in disguise, played by James Garner) to her assistance. A romance ensues, bouncing along up and down between Remick and Garner, with a more or less happy ending through comedic plot twists.
There is no evidence of Sharon Tate anywhere in The Wheeler Dealers or in The Americanization of Emily, although it’s possible that footage of her may have ultimately nested upon the cutting-room floor.
Nevertheless, all of these Ransohoff films made an impression on the newly-acquired Sharon Tate—they gave her the impetus to obey her new mentor, study hard, work out, take voice lessons, and Wait for Her Day in the Sun.
Meanwhile, that summer of 1963, Sharon met a young actor from Paris named Philippe Forquet, born on September 27, 1940. He, as she, was stunningly attractive. They met while Sharon was having lunch with her agent Hal Gefsky. A person from Twentieth Century Fox approached the table with the tall, handsome Forquet. Sharon and Forquet talked avidly, and agreed to meet later for dinner.
Now known as Philippe Forquet Viscount de Dorne, back in 1962, when he was a student in Paris, he was discovered by American director Robert Parrish, who gave him a role in the film In the French Style (released in 1963). Forquet took on the role of the gorgeously handsome younger boyfriend of Jean Seberg, known throughout the world for her work in the Otto Preminger film Saint Joan (1957).
His mother, Countess Forquet de Dorne, stoutly protested when her son left French Classical Academy to star in the hit movie Take Her, She’s Mine (1963), also starring James Stewart and Sandra Dee, a huge teen star of the era (married to singer Bobby Darin). Producers at Twentieth Century Fox thought Mr. Forquet would join the stream of French movie stars in Hollywood, such as Maurice Chevalier and Yves Montand, so he was brought to Los Angeles and prepared to be transformed into the new Louis Jourdan or Alain Delon.
In this “generation gap” creation of 1963, Sandra Dee stars as teenage rebel Mollie Michaelson, fascinated with long-haired proto-hippies and radical anti-nuclear political causes. Her involvement makes her ultraconservative father Frank (James Stewart) very upset. Frank’s wife is played by Audrey Meadows. Frank’s anguish broadens when Mollie is sent to Paris on an art scholarship. Back in the United States, Frank spots the cover of a magazine on which his daughter has posed for a radical artist, Henri Bonnet (played by Philippe Forquet). Dad flies over the ocean to save his daughter from further disgrace, but he ends up in a café in Paris just as it is raided by police. They arrest him on false charges, and he spends a bunch of 35 mm footage to prove that he’s not guilty.
Such was the movie in which Philippe Forquet was involved when he met Sharon Tate. One account of the young Forquet reads: “His dark good looks and Gallic charm caused quite a flurry among the ladies. He received thousands of fan letters a week.”
Sharon’s relationship with Forquet blossomed forth.
On October 13, 1963, Tate had her first walk-on appearance in a Filmways production, an episode of Mister Ed, the saga of a palomino who could talk with his owner. The same week, she had her first speaking role in a Filmways production, a role in The Beverly Hillbillies TV show.
Beginning in the fall of 1963, Sharon Tate had roles in a sequence of episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, including “Elly Starts to School,” “Jethro’s First Love,” “Chickadee Returns,” “The Clampetts Are Overdrawn,” “The Clampetts Go Hollywood,” “The Garden Party,” “Elly Needs a Maw,” and finally, “The Clampetts Get Culture.” In most of these episodes Tate took on the role of secretary Janet Trego.
She also appeared in several Mister Ed episodes, including “Ed Discovers America” and “Love Thy New Neighbor.”
During the autumn, just before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, while she filmed episodes of Mister Ed and The Beverly Hillbillies, Sharon attended classes with drama coach Jeff Corey, taking singing lessons in Pasadena and working out daily at the Beverly Hills Gym. Jeff Corey had been an established character actor, but his career was stymied in the 1950s when he refused to give names, and even ridiculed the House Un-American Activities Committee, and thus was blacklisted for around twelve years, unable to find work in Hollywood. He became a very successful acting teacher. His students included, besides Sharon Tate, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Rita Moreno, Jack Nicholson, Leonard Nimoy, Anthony Perkins, Rob Reiner, Barbra Streisand, and Robin Williams.
Another Tate coach was Charles Conrad, who had been trained as an acting coach under the far-famed Sanford Meisner, head of New York City’s Neighborhood Playhouse, where he coached such famous actors as Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, and Joanne Woodward, as well as counterculture hero Wavy Gravy. By the 1960s he had established the Charles Conrad Studio in Burbank, at which Sharon Tate studied. “Such a beautiful girl,” he later commented. “You would have thought she would have all the confidence in the world. But she had none.”
Right around the time Sharon Tate was performing in Mister Ed, in October of 1963 Roman Polanski’s first feature film, Knife in the Water, opened commercially in New York City. Knife in the Water had been chosen as a Polish entry in the upcoming New York Film Festival. It was distributed by Kanawha Films, Ltd., a company formed by Archer King, the theatrical agent and producer, and Paul Peralta-Ramos, president of the Millicent A. Rogers Foundation.
An article by Eugene Archer in the New York Times on July 14, 1963, noted that “the aim” of Kanawha Films was to show “quality films of modest budget which might be overlooked by blockbuster distributors.” Knife in the Water was described as “a drama about a sports writer, his beautiful wife and a young hitchhiker who joins them on a sinister yachting cruise.”
A blurb in the New York Times on September 8, 1963 read: “September 11, 1963, New York Film Festival, at Lincoln Center, Knife in the Water (Polish Nóz w Wodzie) Critics’ Award winner at last year’s Venice Festival, a squarish couple pick up a beatnik boy, invite him aboard their boat. Soon the underlying tensions explode. First, the difference between generations, the sexual conflicts. A daring film by Roman Polanski.”
On September 26, 1963, art director Richard Sylbert, whose previous art directions included Lilith and The Manchurian Candidate, was named art director of the forthcoming The Pawnbroker, which would start filming in October of 1963. Sylbert would also be the art director of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.
In the New York Times on October 28, 1963: “Today’s new film is Knife in the Water, a Polish-made drama with English subtitles, directed by Roman Polanski, which opens at the Beekman Theater, Second Avenue and 65th Street. The cast of the import, released here by Kanawha Films, Ltd., includes Leon Niemszyk, Jolanta Umecka and Zygmunt Malanowicz.”
Bosley Crowther, New York Times critic, issued an opinion on Knife in the Water on November 3, 1963: “It is a slight and casual contemplation of the hostile behavior of the two men toward one another during the course of a day’s outing, while the woman superciliously looks on. She’s the wife of the older of the
two contenders, the owner of the boat, who is ludicrously ostentatious and bullying toward his guest. So it isn’t particularly surprising that eventually she, in her disgust, gives herself to the less successful show-off and then is spiteful toward both of them.”
Not that many weeks after Polanski’s triumph at the New York Film Festival, Sharon Tate was sent by Mr. Ransohoff to New York to take classes at Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. It was December of 1963. She and Philippe Forquet shared an apartment reportedly on Lexington Avenue and 78th Street. Another account had her living at 42nd Street and Third Avenue.
The truth of the past can be a bit like quicksand.
The teaching was not to Sharon’s taste, so she stayed for just a few weeks studying with Strasberg. Forquet was also taking acting lessons. During dinner one evening, Forquet asked her to marry him, and she said yes.
Sharon and Philippe were engaged. Forquet left Hollywood for a while, and the relationship with Sharon went pffft.
A few weeks later they returned to Los Angeles. Ransohoff was not happy about the engagement, nor were her parents. (And Forquet’s huffy mother, Countess Forquet de Dorne, also weighed in with a no-no.) Ransohoff demanded Sharon break it off or he would dissolve the Filmways contract with her. Forquet recalled later that Sharon’s mother, Doris, spoke of all the money that Sharon would not earn if she gave up her quest to become a successful actress.
Sharon seemed attracted to dominance. One biography of Roman states it like this: “The men she was attracted to were the dominant type, like her father. Unlike her father, they also tended to be brutal. (Forquet) once beat her up so badly, according to Sharon’s mother, that she had to be rushed to a hospital for emergency treatment.”
This much is true: they lived together, and became engaged. The rumors that he beat her, with Sharon requiring hospitalization, hit the tabloids. But was it true? Vague shadows in a vague timeline. There is indication that the Forquet-Tate romance was the victim of a pretty much made-up negative publicity campaign. Nevertheless, Forquet later claimed that Tate cut him in the chest with a broken wine bottle.
On May 27, 1964, Harrison Carroll, the gossip columnist for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, wrote that Sharon and Forquet had announced their engagement. There was a photo of Sharon and Philippe Forquet from a magazine called Cronaca, dated September 12, 1964. The caption for the photo reads: “Sharon Tate, the new Marilyn of American cinema, offers the symbolic ‘apple of sin’ to a young partner (Philippe Forquet). How many problems arise in youth from ‘flowers’ and ‘fruits’ harvested before the wedding?”
During the summer of 1964, Sharon’s agent Hal Gefsky introduced Sharon in a coffee shop to another of his clients, actress Sheilah Wells, who was under contract to Universal Studios, and they began sharing a one-bedroom apartment together at 1148 North Clark Drive as a money-conserving venture.
In an interview Sheilah Wells described meeting Sharon: “We hit it off immediately. In the conversation, she said ‘I want to move,’ and then I said, ‘Gee, I want to move too,’ and then she said, ‘Maybe we could get a place together.’ And this is only about after thirty minutes of this wonderful conversation, but you know how you know, especially when you’re young, you know, the spark’s there, the fun’s there, and so she said ‘where do you live?’ and I said ‘I live on Clark Street,’ and she said ‘Well, I live on Clark Street.’ And it turned out we lived right next door to one another. And so she came over to my apartment at 1148, and she said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with this place?’ You have to know that I am an interior designer, and that talent has been with me since my very beginning. So, it looked great to Sharon.”
Sharon brought from her previous apartment next door an “ornate settee she had purchased, and a couple of other pieces,” Wells recalled. The apartment had one bedroom, and a kitchen, and was adorned in “early actress,” in Wells’s words. “Sharon had her little dog, Love, and I had my afghan, Shad.”
“It was full of a lot of fun times. We used to walk down to the Hamburger Hamlet, and we’d put our dogs together, and all these people would come up and start petting and talking. They were gentler, nicer times.”
I asked if Sharon had already signed with Ransohoff. “Yes,” she replied. “And I had just been recently put under contract by Universal, so we had a lot in common.”
ES: “And she was through with Philippe Forquet?”
Wells: “That was just breaking up.”
ES: “He was gone by then?”
Wells: “I think he was still around, because I met him, but I think she had asked him to move out, to leave.”
ES: “What about the allegations that he had roughed her up?”
Wells: “I think there was that kind of contact.”
ES: “You were still roommates when she met Jay Sebring?”
Wells: “Oh, absolutely.”
ES: “Did you two go clubbing together?”
Wells: “Not like today. The girls didn’t go out in groups like now. You would have a date.”
The famous club Whisky a Go Go was located on the corner of Clark and Sunset, just down the hill from Wells and Sharon’s apartment on Clark.
When the Beatles came to Los Angeles in late August of 1964, as part of their first triumphal swing through the United States, Paul McCartney announced at a press conference that the Hollywood actress he would most want to meet was Jayne Mansfield. The next day there was an overflowing party at the Whisky a Go Go in honor of the Beatles, with Mansfield on hand. Living just up the hill, Sharon and Sheilah attempted to attend the packed party. Wells recalled: “When the Beatles came, I remember we went down there and it was absolutely ridiculous and crazy, and we turned around and walked back up the hill.”
Wells also recalled Sharon’s amazing kindness: “The scene that was always so touching to me and to my mother, is when my mom would come down from Northern California, and when I was working, Sharon would take my mother out to the studios, and bring my mother on set, and take my mother to lunch, and she was so kind, and so sweet, and my mother never ever forgot that, how darling she was to her. And Sharon would ask ‘are you okay for tomorrow, Mrs. Wells, what are you going to do?’ Those kind of sweet kindnesses, when I think of her, that’s exactly what I think about. Always there, and always, ‘You okay?’”
Sheilah Wells remained Sharon’s friend to the end—Sharon’s mother thought that her daughter was staying over at Sheilah’s the final night in the summer of 1969.
In 1964, Sharon acted in at least two episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, as Janet Trego, the secretary: “The Giant Jackrabbit,” and “Back to Marineland.”
Meanwhile, while his future wife Sharon Tate was filming several episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, a script Roman Polanski had written about a cult of cannibals was being filmed. Writing from Paris in the New York Times on March 22, 1964, Cynthia Grenier covered the seventeen films then being currently made in Paris and nearby: “One of the few of this batch to promise somewhat more international appeal is Aimez-vous les Femmes? (Do you Like Women?), written by Roman Polanski, director of Knife in the Water. The youthful Polanski, who has become something of an international commuter between his native capital of Warsaw and Paris, his adopted home, is noted for his prankish, ‘black’ humor, as both his short and feature films have born witness. In Do You Like Women? Polanski gives full play to his dark imagination, producing an occult society in Paris that meets once a month to dine on the freshly roasted flesh of a beautiful young woman. Gleefully, Polanski has even gone so far as to work out the recipe for anyone interested in preparing such a dish for his own table.
“Sophie Daumer, a talented young comic actress who bears a marked resemblance to both Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau, plays a double role as the girl who gets eaten and one who escapes that fate.”
Polanski’s screenplay was based on a novel by Georges Bardiwill. This tome traces the activities of a cult of cannibals who collect at a vegetarian restaurant. This re
staurant is a cover for the occult group that, as part of its full moon celebration, serves a gourmet-cooked beautiful young woman. It also features a romantic subplot about identical twin sisters, one of whom is the hero’s girlfriend and the other, lunch.
Around this time a producer living in England named Gene Gutowski contacted Polanski. Born in Poland in 1925, Gutowski emigrated to the West after World War II. He was a fashion illustrator for a few years in New York, then became a television and film producer with a few productions to his credit, including the TV series I Spy. He moved to London in 1960 to produce a film titled Station Six-Sahara (starring Carroll Baker), and remained in London through the early 1960s.
Gutowski was ten years Polanski’s senior and, of course, spoke fluent Polish. He proposed that he and Polanski become a producing-directing team. Gutowski would use his experience and contacts to put together American and English deals for films that Polanski would write and direct. Thus began Cadre Films, Ltd., the two-man company that would establish Polanski as a Western filmmaker and open the doors of big-money Hollywood to him. Gutowski took Roman around to meet film executives and threw a party for him in Los Angeles.
The 1963 Academy Awards were presented April 13, 1964, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Roman Polanski attended when his Knife in the Water was nominated as Best Foreign Film, but Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 won the prize. After that Polanski and his new partner went to New York to garner more publicity, and then in May 1964 they attended the Cannes Film Festival.
It was around this timeframe in Sharon Tate’s life that she auditioned for the role of Liesl in The Sound of Music. Their paths—Roman’s and Sharon’s—were still far apart. Director Robert Wise and his casting consultants conducted more than two hundred auditions for the roles of the von Trapp children in the film. The winners were selected not only for singing and acting abilities but for personality and stage presence. In addition to Sharon, the role of Liesl von Trapp saw auditions by Mia Farrow, Lesley Ann Warren, Teri Garr, Shelly Fabares, and Patty Duke. Sharon was barely twenty-one, and the winner, Charmian Carr, was twenty-two—for the role of the sixteen-year-old Liesl.