Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  Martin Ransohoff wanted Sharon Tate for the part of Sarah Shagal, the daughter of the innkeeper in the film. Polanski had in mind his recent girlfriend Jill St. John. Filmways kept urging Polanski to test Sharon for the role, so he arranged a screen test at MGM’s London studio. Polanski, Jack MacGowran, and Sharon filmed some test footage in costume. When Polanski got her to wear a red wig, covering her ash blonde hair, “She suddenly looked the part,” as he later wrote.

  Polanski spoke about the Filmways deal in an interview in early 1966 with Philippe Haudiquet:

  Q: You’ve just signed a contract with the American producer Martin Ransohoff. What film will you be making with him?

  RP: The Fearless Vampire Killers, a period comedy set in Transylvania and starring Jack MacGowran. I wrote the scenario with Gérard Brach. I just spent two days in Hollywood talking the film over with Ransohoff, and I’ve already found the locations on the Austro-Italian border in the Dolomites. We start filming in February.

  Sharon Tate played a young beauty transformed into a vampire during the film. On the set of The Fearless Vampire Killers, she posed for publicity pictures, flashing her vampire incisors, shiny and fanglike. Tate was the main female character, who attracts the love of both the bloodsucking count in a Transylvanian castle (played by Ferdy Mayne) and a young and rather blank-minded vampire hunter, played by Polanski. As we have noted, the filmmaker had Tate wear a red wig to cover her Prom Queen all-American appearance. As one reporter later described it: Sharon was cast as the luscious woman “with the bitable neck.”

  The shooting was a challenge for Tate, because Polanski was a notorious taskmaster and strove for perfect takes from the fairly inexperienced actress. But Tate worked hard, eventually pleasing her director. Polanski said: “Though devoid of the natural performer’s self-confidence, she burned to do well—to prove to herself that she could accomplish something in her own right. Giving her the necessary reassurance wasn’t easy. Vampire Killers was behind schedule, but my tendency on such occasions is to become more exacting rather than less. I started doing more and more takes with Sharon—on one occasion as many as seventy.”

  Gene Gutowksi and Hans Möllinger had scouted locations, and located Valgardena, located high in the Dolomites near an Italian ski resort called Ortisei, where there was an extended period of filming. Ortisei was an hour’s drive up through the mountains from Sharon’s high school turf in Verona.

  It was filmed during the snowy and tourist season. Locals and tourists alike were treated to the spectacle of numerous coffins for vampires which Polanski ordered constructed for the film, not to mention the two wolves brought from the Rome zoo, eighteen thousand bulbs of garlic, and twenty gallons of imitation blood made according to an undisclosed Polanski recipe.

  “It was at Ortisei that my relationship with Sharon progressed beyond the casual stage,” Polanski noted in his autobiography. “We hadn’t made love since that one first night in London, and there were butterflies in my stomach when she joined us on location. We dined together soon after shooting had begun. Then I walked her back to her hotel. When I asked, rather haltingly, if she wanted me to come upstairs with her, she gave me one of her uniquely dazzling smiles and said yes. That marked the real beginning of our love affair.”

  It was a complicated production, with castles, snowy chases, a formal dance of ballroom-attired vampires, lots of scenes on castle parapets, tens of thousands of decisions for the director, both at Ortisei in the Italian mountains and on the sets constructed at the MGM studios in London.

  In the course of writing this book, I watched a DVD of Fearless Vampire Killers (the Polanski version). The film is largely a visual spectacle, with a number of scenes of voyeurism—Polanski and his cowriter Gérard Brach did not write any riveting lines for anyone, including Polanski, to say, although there were a few memorable instances of humorous dialogue. The film stars Tom Jones alumnus Jack MacGowran as Professor Abronsius, Polanski as his assistant, Alfred, Alfie Bass as Shagal, an innkeeper, Sharon Tate as his daughter, ex-boxer Terry Downes as Koukol the lurching hunchback, Ferdy Mayne as the head vampire, Count von Krolock, and Iain Quarrier as the count’s gay son, Herbert von Krolock.

  In the opening, Polanski and his boss, the obsessed academic MacGowran (in role as Professor Abronsius), are in a horse-drawn sleigh that is being attacked by a wolf. They pull in at a tavern. They rub the professor’s frozen limbs with snow; then there is footage of a large-bosomed woman leaning over, washing or heating their feet in a tub of hot water. Polanski’s eyes bulge with amazement—it’s Sharon Tate. The professor, coming awake, notes the garlic cluster above them, dangling from the ceiling. The professor asks the folk at the inn if there is a castle in the neighborhood. They say no. Obviously they’re both afraid and lying. Polanski/Alfred and the professor are escorted to their room, the only one with a bathroom; they open the door to the bathroom, and there is Sharon Tate taking a bath in a metal tub.

  The door is shut quickly. Then, a minute or so later, sounds of a spanking. Polanski looks through the keyhole, and enjoys the sight of Sharon Tate (as Sarah Shagal) being spanked by her father, who is apparently upset over her compulsion to take baths.

  The dialogue is as follows:

  Shagal, the innkeeper (as he spanks her): I told you, every day you are having baths!

  Sarah Shagal, as she yells and kicks: I won’t!

  Shagal: I told you, no bath! No bath! No bath! No bath!

  Then, night scene, tavern owner Shagal and wife asleep in bedclothes; he awakens. Cut to Polanski putting cups onto the back of the professor. As an interlude; innkeeper Shagal sneaks up into an upper room where a maidservant is mending his nightgown; his wife comes after him, but he hides behind the door. Then a morning scene—innkeeper Shagal tries to nail boards blocking off the bathroom.

  Polanski is making a snowman outside the tavern, while Sharon Tate watches from the pane of an upstairs window. He views her watching, and she slides from view.

  Then children pelt him with snowballs and run away. Next Polanski enters the tavern. The hunchback Koukol arrives from the count’s nearby castle; a woman tavern server cowers in fright beneath the table.

  They pull up a trap door, and give him some bundles of something. He departs, and the professor asks Polanski to follow him. Polanski/Alfred surveils the hunchback while hiding behind the snowman; the hunchback watches Tate viewing him behind the upper window pane; Alfred notices this, and waves her out of the way. The hunchback’s sleigh, pulled by horses, departs, with Alfred grabbing on behind.

  After that there is a scene of the professor in the kitchen, complaining about getting hit on the head in the night. Meanwhile, the hunchback’s sleigh confronts a lone wolf—the hunchback gets out and races up a hill after the wolf. There’s a yowl. The hunchback returns to the sleigh with a bloody mouth and face. The sleigh continues, dragging Alfred behind it.

  Then there is a scene at the tavern. Professor Abronsius is asleep, snoring, at a desk, papers in front of his sleeping face, a single candle lighting the scene. Meanwhile Alfred searches quickly through the professor’s leather valise, finding a crucifix, garlic, and a sharply pointed stick.

  There is a knock on door—it’s Sharon Tate, to whom the script gives the following lines to deliver: “I’m not disturbing you, am I?” And more: “I just don’t know what to do with myself. I get so bored. You can’t imagine how bored I get.” And: “I’m just not used to being locked up the whole time.”

  To this Polanski/Alfred replies, “You mean you’re always locked up?”

  Tate: “At school, we had fun there . . . did all kinds of things. You know what I mean.” Then, “Papa, I don’t know what happened to Papa.” And, “My room, is FULL of garlic. He says it looks pretty.” She drops a sponge she is carrying; Polanski picks it up. She’s preparing for a bath. “Once a day, it’s good for your health. Do you mind if I have a quick one?”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “Thank you, you’re be
ing very nice.” Enters bathroom, turns, “Could you get me some hot water?”

  There is a scene of Dracula (Count von Krolock) and the hunchback on a horse-pulled sleigh on a snowy road. They are headed toward Shagal’s inn. Then a scene of Alfred preparing the hot bath. Then Count von Krolock, the vampire, looks in through an open window. Tate: “Thank you.” Then Alfred departs the bathroom.

  Tate is in the bathroom taking a bath. The count comes down through an open skylight and bites her in the neck. She struggles as he does the neck-suck. Polanski/Alfred views it through the keyhole, then awakens the mad professor—they go into bathroom, but she’s gone. There’s bloody neck-froth in the bubble bath.

  Her father arrives, looks up to the open skylight, shouts “Your excellency! Give me back my daughter. Give her back to me!” as he hangs/dangles from the skylight. Then he falls back down into the full bathtub, all wet and weeping. His wife shows up—both are weeping.

  In the next scene, Polanski and the professor are in the kitchen. The innkeeper’s lifeless body, frozen, pocked with vampire suck-marks, is brought into the kitchen from outside. His wife is howling. The townspeople blame it on a wolf. The professor protests. “Open your eyes! You know perfectly well who has been at work!” Shagal the innkeeper of course is now a vampire; the professor hands a very sharp stake to Mrs. Shagal, saying that she can save her husband’s soul by sticking it in his heart. She refuses.

  Then there is a scene with Polanski/Alfred attempting to hammer a stake into Shagal, with the professor holding it in place. It fails when Alfred smacks the professor in the hand. Big ouch. They return to finish the job, but the fresh vampire Mr. Shagal runs off, after first biting the neck of the sleeping chamber maid.

  The young woman tries to fend off Shagal with a cross, but Polanski and his cowriter Gérard Brach have created the first Jewish vampire, who says “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire.”

  Next MacGowran/the professor and Polanski take off on skis across the snowy vastness following the freshly vampired tavern keeper. They arrive at a substantial stone mansion, with a graveyard, which they explore. First they are locked up in a subterranean room; then they are brought into the castle to the rooms of the head vampire, Count Von Krolock. The professor hands the count his biz card, “Professor Abronsius.”

  The count asks Professor Abronsius to sign one of his books, The Bat, which he owns. The two visitors jive the count with the story that they were following a bat through the winter landscape, which is why they arrived at his castle. A very big bat.

  A cock crows; the count conducts Alfred and the professor to his musty library. “It’s at your disposal.” Professor Abronsius is very excited by the many books. The hunchback arrives—“Your beds are prepared”—and he conducts them to their bedroom. On the way, out of a door comes a young man. Count Krolock introduces: “Herbert, my son.” Herbert shakes Polanski/Alfred’s hand. The professor and Alfred are given separate rooms. A cock crows again. “Good night, gentlemen.” The count heads for zzzz in his coffin.

  There is a scene of Koukol the hunchback coffining up the count and his son. Shagal tries to drag his box into the same place, but, in a show of class delineation, the hunchback carries Shagal’s coffin out to the stable. Then sunlight.

  The professor and Polanski/Alfred awaken, and the hunchback brings in bread and a drink. Polanski thinks he has heard Sarah, Shagal’s daughter, during the night. He dresses the professor, who stands up on the bedstead then jumps down into his trouser legs in one swoop. They go forth and peep into a room where the hunchback is making a coffin. Uh oh.

  Then they are heading toward the count’s crypt room when the hunchback, with a big broad axe, crouches to stop them, and they turn back. Polanski and the professor go up to the roof, then work their way around across snow-crusted parapets, to a small entrance to the coffin room, which they slide down into. But the professor gets stuck in the entry hole, his legs dangling from the window down the castle wall, so he charges Polanski/Alfred with the task of driving the stakes into the hearts by himself.

  The professor orders him to open the count’s coffin. Polanski/Alfred raises the hammer in one hand, and places the stake, sharp end down, upon the sleeping count’s heart, but quails and cannot go through with it. Then the professor orders Alfred to go around to the outside and pull him out.

  Alfred then wanders through the castle, and encounters Tate/Sarah taking a bath. “Sarah!” “Hugh!” she replies. He kisses her, “I’m going to save you. We’ll go away together.”

  “Where do you want us to go?” “I don’t know.” “To your parents, perhaps.” “Papa will be coming to see me, soon.” “They said that?” “Yes.” She asks him if he’d seen the beautiful dress (on the bed). Yes. “They gave it to me for the ball tonight.” It begins at midnight. “They’ll all be there.”

  “Sarah,” Alfred says, “You must follow me.” She gets out of the tub, asks him to turn away. He draws a heart in the frosty window pane, spotting the professor’s legs wiggling, protruding from the tight hole in which he is stuck on the side of the castle, which reminds him to get back to work. He races forth to pull out the professor.

  Next the count’s gay son, Herbert, tries to vampire Polanski/Alfred in his own room, as a girl draws a bath. He attempts to bite Polanski’s neck, but bites instead into a little book on love that Polanski has filched from the count’s library. Polanski/Alfred races thence with Herbert chasing him. Then the son catches him, and tries to bite his neck, but is unsuccessful.

  Alfred warns the professor, and they escape to the parapets just in time to watch the crypts below, as their lids rise, and the vampires awaken and emerge. Count von Krolock approaches and says Polanski will be, in the centuries to come, a good companion to his “sensitive” son. “It will be extremely difficult for you to get away from here, unless of course you have wings, like a bat.”

  Next the count addresses the throng of vampires gathered in the ballroom. He notes how just a year ago, “we were assembled here. . . . I your pastor, you my flock. With hopefulness in my heart, I told you then, with Lucifer’s aid (flashing a two fingered Devil sign) we might look forward to a more succulent occasion.” Now, a year later, even though travelers rarely arrive, he has a big surprise, regarding neck-slurp, for them.

  Big groan of arousal and expectation from the assembled crowd. He pulls back a curtain and reveals Sharon Tate. And announces “two more humans are in our hands.” Much groaning excitement.

  Then to the roof where the professor and Alfred have rigged the cannon to fire and blast open the locked door (which will enable them to attend the ball of the vampires.) Next is the formal dance scene, for which Polanski has been praised for the “macabre beauty” of its perfectly timed sequences. Sharon is resplendent in a red gown, dancing with the count in front of the others. Polanski/Alfred and the professor sneak into the ballroom, attired in formal bewigged garb, both joining the actual dancing circle—a formal bow and curtsy dance, changing partners, to chamber music. Alfred dances into contact with Sarah. “Life has meaning once more,” he whispers. “We’re going to save you.”

  The professor announces that when he gives a signal they’ll “run for our lives” out the door. Then Polanski/Alfred, Abronsius, and Tate/Sarah attempt to escape. The count shouts to the throng, “Catch the girl!” Alfred and the professor make the sign of the cross together, with each holding a sword in a crisscross cruciform manner, which causes the cross-fearing crowd to draw back in fear. Then they place the two long swords into a cross pattern on the floor by the door, thus blocking the path of the attacking vampires.

  The trio flees down some spiral stone steps, whereafter, to Krzysztof Komeda’s mournful soundtrack they wend through a bat-ceilinged wet-walled “cave.” They locate a trap door leading upward, and the trio scampers off to their horse and sleigh to flee. The count orders Koukol the hunchback to catch them. Koukol takes off down the snowy hill using a coffin as a sled, on the heels of the horse and sleigh,
but he overshoots them and flies in his coffin down a precipice, after which loom sounds of wolves attacking him.

  Then Tate/Sarah is resting in the sleigh, with visible vamp’ twin bite marks on her neck; Polanski/Alfred is sitting next to her and notices how cold her hand is. It was quite shocking to see pretty Sharon Tate wake up and suddenly open wide her perfect mouth, revealing vampire fangs, which bite lasciviously into Polanski’s neck. It surely provided the archetype for all future horror movies in which a beautiful woman chomps into a victim’s neck.

  So, at the close of the film, the obsessed professor vampire hunter has departed the castle of neck-suck, thinking he has thwarted them all, not knowing that two recently infected neo-vampires, played by Polanski and his new lover Sharon Tate, rest in the same coach.

  Sharon as a cuddly vampire

  The film concludes with a narrator declaiming a Polanskian message of Abandon All Hope Against Organized Evil: “That night, fleeing from Transylvania, Professor Abronsius never guessed he was carrying away with him the very evil he had wished to destroy. Thanks to him, this evil would at last be able to spread across the world.”

  Thus passed before my eyes The Fearless Vampire Killers, a fairly good spook or spoof of horror/neck-suck films, with some interesting well-filmed scenes and vignettes (though with rather measly dialogue) done with considerable satiric wit, which would give twenty-three-year old Sharon Tate, raised a Catholic, a one-two opening in the world of films in the form of one movie about a cult that commits human sacrifices, and a second movie about class-based blood-drinking among Transylvanian townspeople and nobility.

  Moving in with Polanski Shortly After Easter of 1966