Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  The Sound of Music was the last collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein, and became a most beloved musical around the world. It tells the story of a nun who does not fit in with the quietistic life of a nunnery, and so she is sent to work as a governess for the seven children (including Liesl) of a widowed naval Captain.

  The Captain (played by Christopher Plummer) is raising his children with excessive and dour strictness, and Maria the governess (played by Julie Andrews) wins over the children with her good spirit and pleasing vibes. Gradually she and the Captain fall in love, then, shudder shudder, they return from their honeymoon to Austria to discover it has been taken over by the Nazis, and a telegram informs the Captain that he must join the Nazi navy. The von Trapps’ thrilling escape up and over the mountains to Switzerland just before World War II began added to the film’s great popularity around the world.

  Had Sharon Tate won a high-profile part in The Sound of Music, her career would have changed. She probably would not have met Roman Polanski and would not have embarked on an early cultic sequence of films—Eye of the Devil and The Fearless Vampire Killers.

  Makeup-free Sharon Tate in the summer of 1964 during her time in Big Sur, which she always loved

  Meanwhile, Martin Ransohoff produced a movie in 1964, The Sandpiper, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, which was filmed at Big Sur. The eminent photographer Walter Chappell was hired as a still photographer on the set, and around August of 1964 Chappell took pictures of Sharon. Tate, then twenty-one, had an uncredited bit part, and Ransohoff wanted Chappell to shoot a publicity portfolio of her. She took off her clothes for one or more of the photos. It’s unknown whether Chappell, a well-known nudist, also took off his. Ransohoff demanded the negatives, but Chappell refused to turn them over.

  When she headed back to Los Angeles in her new Triumph sports car, at night, she had a rollover accident, turning over four times down a hillside. Sharon was relatively unscathed, but with a totaled Triumph, and two little scars by her left eye as the only reminder of the wreck. She worried aplenty about how Ransohoff might be angry because of her screw-up.

  (In Chappell’s archive is a letter Tate wrote in November 1964 asking for some prints, and his response, which ended, “I hope you are lovelier than ever, as you have every possibility always to be.”)

  During the filming of The Sandpiper, Sharon fell in love with the beautiful coastline. According to one account, “In the years following, Tate would regularly escape to Big Sur. . . . Whenever she wanted to get away from Hollywood, she fled there. Scrubbed of makeup, she would check into rustic Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, often alone, sometimes with girlfriends, and walk the trails, sun at the beach, and blend in with the regulars at Nepenthe. Many did not know, until after her death, that she was an actress.”

  “The name is Sharon Tate,” said Steve McQueen in an article dated December 19, 1964. “You’ve never heard of her, but you will. She has everything she needs for success, including two qualities that do not often go together—a wonderfully pure simplicity and very great beauty.”

  The article goes on: “Producer Martin Ransohoff, now shooting ‘The Sandpiper’ with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—discovered Sharon. As soon as Steve met her, he wanted her to play opposite him in ‘The Cincinnati Kid,’ which he is soon to make for Ransohoff.

  “But Sharon’s lack of experience cost her the part. Steve said: ‘I even did the screen test with her.’ A rare occurrence for a star. ‘I was proud to do it. That girl looks really good. I’m sure she could have done the part, but of course I don’t have the final say.’”

  McQueen developed an affection for her. In an interview not long before his own death, he said, “Sharon Tate was a girlfriend of mine. I dated Sharon for a while.” Colonel Tate later recalled how he kept a stern eye on McQueen during this period.

  McQueen had taken a year off from acting, and by January of 1965, was, in his own words, “back in harness,” signing with Ransohoff’s Filmways for the title role in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)’s The Cincinnati Kid. The film was set in New Orleans, and it traces the story of Eric “The Kid” Stoner, a young Depression-era poker player, as he seeks to establish his reputation as the best. This quest leads him to challenge Lancey “The Man” Howard, an older player widely considered to be the best (played by Edward G. Robinson), culminating in a climactic final poker hand between the two.

  Producer Martin Ransohoff had been green-lighted by MGM to proceed. Paddy Chayefsky penned the initial screenplay, which was turned down by Ransohoff. The project was then turned over to Ring Lardner Jr., who worked with Terry Southern to finish the final draft. (This pickiness on the part of Mr. Ransohoff did not bode well for his relationship with Roman Polanski just a little more than a year ahead.)

  It was Lardner’s first major studio work since his 1947 blacklisting as one of the Hollywood Ten. The Cinncinati Kid was directed by Norman Jewison, who replaced original director Sam Peckinpah just after principal photography commenced.

  One version of the firing: “Sam Peckinpah was the original director, who for reasons only known to him decided to film The Cincinnati Kid in black and white. Peckinpah’s deviation from the script, coupled with his drinking and marital problems, led to his eventual firing after only four days.”

  Another version: “Producer Martin Ransohoff felt compelled to fire Peckinpah after the beginning of principal shooting on The Cincinnati Kid due to disagreements over the conception of the film. The incident led to a physical altercation between the two. In the early 1970s, remarking on their fight, Peckinpah claimed Ransohoff got the worst of it: ‘I stripped him as naked as one of his badly told lies.’”

  A further rumor, contained in an internal memo at Time magazine (in the author’s possession), has Ransohoff encountering Peckinpah getting too friendly with Tate on The Cincinnati Kid set as the cause of the firing.

  The past is like quicksand.

  Additional stars of The Cincinnati Kid were Ann-Margret, Karl Malden, Joan Blondell, Rip Torn, Jack Weston, and Cab Calloway; it was a combination Filmways/Solar Productions (Steve McQueen’s company) production, distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a release date of October 15, 1965.

  Sharon was not cast in the role that was taken by Tuesday Weld. Both Sam Peckinpah and Martin Ransohoff agreed that her unsureness and inexperience would cause her to fail in such a demanding part. Instead, Ransohoff continued to burnish her experience with small roles in television shows.

  Sharon Meets Jay Sebring: November 1964

  There are two main versions of how Sharon met premier hairstylist-to-the-stars Jay Sebring in November of 1964. Sebring was one of Hollywood’s most popular hair stylists and later the inspiration for the Warren Beatty film Shampoo.

  The first, usually given greater credence, is that Sharon and Jay met on Thanksgiving evening, 1964, at a party given by the owner of the Whisky a Go Go, Elmer Valentine. During the 1960s, the Whisky featured important and rising acts such as The Doors, The Byrds, The Who, Buffalo Springfield, and The Kinks.

  Writer Joe Hyams’s autobiography, Mislaid in Hollywood (1973), depicts another version of how Jay Sebring met Sharon. Hyams, the former West Coast bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune, was married to the actress Elke Sommer. He also wrote for various magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the like, plus biographies of Humphrey Bogart and a later one about James Dean.

  Sebring had spotted Sharon at a Paramount screening, and the next day, while cutting Hyams’s hair, asked, “Do you know a girl named Sharon?” He didn’t know her last name but badly wanted to meet her. Mr. Hyams then used Sebring’s phone to call a publicist contact at Paramount who informed Hyams that Martin Ransohoff had a girl named Sharon Tate under contract. “She lives with a French actor, I think,” the publicist added.

  Two days later, according to Hyams’s account, he arranged to have lunch with Tate at Frascati Restaurant, ostensibly to interview her. As prearranged,
toward the end of the luncheon, Jay Sebring showed up. “I left them chatting happily together,” Hyams wrote.

  Quicksand of the past.

  However they met, Sharon and Jay quickly became closely attached, so that Sharon moved out of the apartment she shared with Sheilah Wells on North Clark Street, and in with Sebring. “We lived together in 1964,” but even after Sharon moved out, Wells noted, “she always kept her clothes here, and I was dating someone else—it was kind of a stops place, just in case things didn’t work out, we always had our place on Clark.” She chuckled.

  Thomas John Kummer was born on October 10, 1933 in Birmingham, Alabama. His parents were Bernard Kummer, an accountant, and Margarette Kummer. He grew up with one brother and two sisters in a middle-class lifestyle in Southfield, Michigan. He graduated from high school in 1951, then served in the Navy for four years, apparently spending time in Korea.

  When he moved to Los Angeles, becoming active in the hairstyling business, he changed his name to Jay Sebring: Jay, after the first initial of his middle name, and Sebring after the famous twelve-hour endurance race in Sebring, Florida.

  In Los Angeles, Sebring’s style of cutting hair proved popular. His clients included Warren Beatty, Henry Fonda, Steve McQueen, and many other renowned actors. In October 1960, Sebring married a model named Cami, a marriage that was in the process of a divorce by the time he first became fascinated with Sharon Tate.

  By his late twenties, Sebring had already made a name for himself at the apex of hairstyling. For instance, Kirk Douglas in his autobiography praises Sebring for his work for the 1960 production of Spartacus: “I went to see Jay Sebring, a genius with hair. Jay was a charismatic, tiny little fellow. Good-looking. Well built. Quite a ladies’ man. Jay came up with the distinctive look for the slaves—hair cut butch on top, long in back with a tiny ponytail.”

  Around the time that Sharon and Jay met, he purchased a house that was located on a private dirt road at 9810 Easton Drive off Coldwater Canyon and that once had belonged to movie producer and writer Paul Bern, who had married movie star Jean Harlow on July 2, 1932. Two months later Bern was found dead, totally unclothed, with a gunshot wound in the head.

  The death was ruled a suicide, though several later books analyzed it as a murder by Bern’s “mentally deranged” ex–common law wife, Dorothy Millette, who killed herself two days after Bern’s putative suicide. Sebring’s new house was believed to be haunted by the ghost of the suicided or murdered actor.

  Sharon Tate herself referred to it in an interview conducted during the filming of Eye of the Devil in 1965: “At night in the area people swear they see and hear Paul Bern’s ghost. . . . It’s a house where you get scared. . . . The Harlow house is lugubrious but the day I brought over my little sisters they had so much fun. Life was back to normal,” she said as she laughed.

  In early 1965, however, Sharon had a grim, ghostly experience when aroused from sleep one night in her room on Easton Drive. She spotted a “creepy little man” whom she believed to be Paul Bern entering her bedroom apparently looking for something while ignoring her. When she ran from the room, she encountered an entity with its throat slashed, tied with white cord to the stair railing. The next morning she departed back to her own apartment. After her death, columnist Dick Kleiner wrote about the event, supposedly told to him by Sharon early in 1966.

  Did it actually happen?

  Jay Sebring was very well organized, with a rising career, but he had some strange sexual practices. According to the LAPD homicide report after he was killed: “He was considered a ladies’ man and took numerous women to his residence. He would tie the women up with a small sash cord and, if they agreed, would whip them, after which they would have sexual relations.” (A woman who lived with Jay Sebring not long after Jay and Sharon had split up told the author: “Jay liked to tie his lovers up and pretend to whip them. He liked to blindfold them. He liked to do all sorts of dominating things to make you sort of prove your love.”)

  Meanwhile, Sharon sent a steady stream of imprecations and beseechings—telephone calls and letters—to Mr. Ransohoff, demanding more prominent work.

  Late in 1964, a producer named Sy Weintraub wanted Sharon to co-star in Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, the fourteenth Tarzan movie, and it appeared she had agreed to take on the part. On January 2, 1965, the Los Angeles Times featured a photo of Sharon Tate, plus a seven-year-old lion named Major, and co-star Mike Henry, with the following text: “The new Tarzan is Mike Henry, handsome, black-haired twenty-six-year-old linebacker for the Los Angeles Rams and a native of Boyle Heights. Tarzan and principals of Banner Productions, which will film a new Tarzan series, went aboard the SS Theodor Herzl when she docked at Los Angeles Harbor from a run to Acapulco. The company will set sail with the Herzl Sunday to begin shooting in Mexico. Jane will be played by Sharon Tate, 22-year-old blonde, and her name isn’t Jane any more. It’s Sophia.”

  Two days later in the Los Angeles Times, there was a small article by Philip Scheuer, “James Bond Image for Tarzan in 1965”: “The new Tarzan—No.14—will be Mike Henry, ex-Rams footballer, who joked that he’d rather face African Lions than Detroit Lions. The heroine is Sharon Tate. ‘We have a screenplay by Clair Huffaker and we’re giving it the James Bond approach. . . . without the sex! With each film we’ve been bringing Tarzan a little more up to date, making him more literate.’”

  There must have been some mixed signals between Filmways’s Martin Ransohoff and Sharon’s agent Hal Gefsky. The articles were dated just before the cast was due to sail for Acapulco to begin filming, yet Ransohoff, at the last minute, insisted that Tate pull out of the project. An actress named Nancy Kovack replaced Sharon Tate in her role as Sophia Renault (formerly Jane).

  Accordingly, Sharon was still trapped in 1965 appearing as Janet Trego in a continuing sequence of episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, with titles such as “Dash Riprock, You Cad,” “Double Naught Jethro,” “The Clampetts vs. Automation,” “Possum Day,” and “The Possum Parade.”

  She also was loaned out to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a television series broadcast on NBC from 1964 to 1968. The series follows the shenanigans of two secret agents, played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, who work for a secret international law-enforcement agency called U.N.C.L.E. (the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement). The episode in which Sharon Tate performed was titled “The Girls of Nazarone Affair.”

  Fellow actress Kelly Kersh recalled The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode in which she and Sharon Tate played the two malevolent THRUSH girls. The episode called for Kersh and Tate to beat up Napoleon Solo. “Sharon and I had never done a fight scene before. The stunt people choreographed it,” Kersh told an interviewer much later.

  She and Tate rehearsed the fight scenes with actor Robert Vaughn and the stunt men. “At one point, Sharon was supposed to hold his arms back and I was supposed to punch him in the stomach,” recounted Kelly Kersh. “In the rehearsal I didn’t hit him very hard. I didn’t have a lot of experience doing this so he stopped the scene and said, ‘Now look, you can hit me as hard as you want. Hit me as hard as you can.’ He was holding his stomach in tight. So I hit him and he said, ‘See, you can’t hurt me.’ He was a little annoying the way he carried on and on.

  Sharon Tate and David McCallum in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Sharon also was in The Beverly Hillbillies.

  “Before we actually went before the cameras, I said to Sharon, ‘When you grab his arms from behind rather than just grabbing him—I want you to grab his arms and snap him back. And then quickly stick your knee right in the small of his back. Then I’ll hit him in the stomach.’ Sharon was very athletic and she thought it was a great idea. And that’s what we did. Sharon snapped him back, which he totally did not expect and I punched him good in the tummy. He doubled over. We really didn’t hurt him—that wasn’t the point—it was his pride that was injured. I remember some of the cast and crew turning away so as not to laugh in front of him. After he got up he sai
d something like, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t do it like that.’ Sharon and I had a good laugh about that one.”

  Sharon Wants Bigger Roles, and Becomes Engaged to Sebring

  Sharon confided to Kelly Kersh that she was unhappy with her career to date, and was anxious for her discoverer, Martin Ransohoff, to land her bigger roles. By early 1965, after being shoved from the Tarzan movie by Marty, she was tired of slots in Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. She was sick of not being in any of Filmways’s movie projects, such as The Americanization of Emily, The Sandpiper, and The Cincinnati Kid. She wanted in the Big Game, and reportedly hounded Ransohoff for a feature role, feeling she was more than ready.

  Jay Sebring was in love—very much in love—with Sharon, and when his divorce from his wife Cami became final, he began to press for marriage. He arrived early at Doris and Paul Tate’s house the day before he proposed. He asked them, “May I have your blessing to take your daughter’s hand in marriage?” Colonel Tate gave his assent. The next day Sharon and Jay came to her parents’ house for dinner. While steaks were being grilled on the barbecue, Jay dropped onto a knee and asked Sharon to marry him. She said yes.

  Jay and Sharon spent a week in Hawaii with Steve and Neile McQueen. It did not lead to any agreement on a marriage date, although Sharon gave Jay her high school ring, which he may have been still wearing when they were murdered four and a half years later.

  When he proposed to Sharon, Jay Sebring was a very successful barber to the famous, and an entrepreneur of hairstyling supplies. His shop was eagerly visited by stars for gossip and excellent hair care, which inspired confidence, especially in Hollywood, where the face and hair are vitally important. Almost magically, he kept thinning hair from swirling down the shower drain. And he arrived to help the transition in hairstyles from short to longer modes.