by Ed Sanders
The set featured a lot of mud, as the article, “Mud Not a Lark for Film Stars,” by Philip Scheuer in the Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1966, traces: “A more miserable, bedraggled bunch of glamorous people you never saw. All in the name of art or if not art then box office, they have been sloshing their way through mud for some three weeks—the real thing on location in Malibu and the homemade kind on a sound stage at MGM, this for Filmways’ production in color of Don’t Make Waves.” The article noted how the stars were trapped in slime, with the house trapped in the mudslide built in triplicate, two times on Stage 30 at MGM, and one at the foot of a cliff in Malibu, on the remains of a real mudslide that had occurred several years in the past. The first house on the stage was fairly right side up, and mounted on the old Mutiny on the Bounty rocker, so that it was capable of being tipped 18 degrees. The second house built at the MGM soundstage was scary indeed, resting on its flat roof, with the floor above at an extreme angle.
For Don’t Make Waves Sharon rented a house in Los Angeles “from a friend,” as Roman described it. Sharon suffered during the filming of Don’t Make Waves, in good part because she missed Roman, who was deep into postproduction work on The Fearless Vampire Killers, and because she was disappointed with her career-path as determined by Martin Ransohoff. She and Roman kept in touch by phone. Polanski later saw fit to report that it was at that time, alone in Los Angeles, that Sharon acquired her first vibrator, urged to it by a woman friend. Many publicity stills of Sharon in a bikini were released during the film’s promotion. There were life-sized cardboard lobby displays of Sharon as Malibu. She also became the spokeswoman for Coppertone suntan lotion, posing for an ad in a bikini lying on a surfboard held by several young men, and a radio ad with Variety columnist Army Archerd. Her shapeliness would later serve as the inspiration for Mattel’s popular “Malibu Barbie” doll.
Sharon’s wondrous physique was featured early in the film, with a shot of her hauling Tony Curtis across the beach, in her role as the lifeguard Malibu, flashing her pretty bikinied derriere.
Though Tate had already shot two films, Waves was the first to be released into theaters, and reviews were largely negative.
While Sharon was filming Don’t Make Waves, Roman flew to Los Angeles for a week in order to show John Calley and Martin Ransohoff the rough cut of The Fearless Vampire Killers. In his memoir, Roman reported much love making with Sharon during his visit to Los Angeles, rekindling their strong feelings toward one another. Ransohoff didn’t dig the rough cut of Vampire Killers.
Polanski then had to rush back to London to mix onto the film’s track the music composed by Krzysztof Komeda, and to complete the film. After Don’t Make Waves was finished, Sharon returned to London. Then Roman flew to New York City in October 1966 to show The Fearless Vampire Killers to MGM executives. The film had cost more than $2 million—around $300,000 beyond the budget. Mr. Polanski had difficulty finding suitable MGM executives to watch it, as he later noted: “The company was in . . . a complicated proxy fight when I got there, and the energies of its top executives were directed elsewhere. . . . No one had time to see my film.” Finally a vice-president of MGM took a gander, though he received a sequence of phone calls during the screening, and excused himself for around ten minutes while the reel was rolling. Polanski called Martin Ransohoff in Los Angeles to get a release date for the film, but Ransohoff said it was too long, and needed work.
In parallel with Polanski’s rush to complete the film, Ransohoff ordered around twenty minutes of Polanski’s version excised which were, in Polanski’s words, “replaced by an interminable cartoon trailer,” in actuality an animated prologue which had to be added to explicate some jokes because Ransohoff’s recut had made the jokes incomprehensible. The voices of the actors were dubbed to make them sound “more American,” and Ransohoff gave the picture a new title, changing from Dance of the Vampires to The Fearless Vampire Killers. He replaced Polanski’s voice with actor David Spencer’s. And Polanski also complained that he had moved the music around.
Roman Polanski may have been ravingly angry, but he was powerless, since Filmways had the right to cut the film in the western hemisphere. After viewing Ransohoff’s reworking, Polanski spoke out to Variety, “What I made was a funny, spooky fairy tale, and Ransohoff turned it into a kind of Transylvanian Beverly Hillbillies.”
The Fearless Vampire Killers, Polanski’s version, was released in Britain in February of 1967, and in the United States, in Ransohoff’s version, in December, over a year after his trip to Los Angeles to screen the rough cut. The uncut Euro version was successful at the box office, but Ransohoff’s cut and redubbed job bombed in America.
Writer John Bowers, in an article in The Saturday Evening Post, sketched a remarkable slice of Sharon’s life in late 1966: “Sharon has a quarter-inch scar under her left eye and one beside the eye, the result of accidents which she keeps having. As Polanski drove with her one night in London, meticulously keeping on the left in the custom of the land, an Englishman with a couple of pints under his belt hit him from the right. The only one hurt was Sharon, whose head bounced off the dashboard, spraying blood on slacks, boots and fur. An angry red wound appeared at the start of her scalp, and it will leave another whitish scar on her head. With blond hair combed down over her forehead to hide it, she skied at St. Moritz. And then she caught a jet for Hollywood because Ransohoff had called.” Sharon had to reshoot a few scenes for Don’t Make Waves. She complained a bit, and discovered that now she could grumble to Ransohoff. She disliked Hollywood and wanted to remain in London with Polanski. Bowers reported that Sharon hated to fly, and that “she had to be drugged to endure it.”
Bowers noted that Sharon was seated beside Mr. Ransohoff at La Scala restaurant in Beverly Hills, wearing an outfit that was “more like a slip than a dress, and her blond head caught glints of movie-star light as she turned this way and that. ‘Oh, there’s David! David Hemmings. David, David!” Hemmings had been the star of Antonioni’s Blow-Up after appearing with Sharon in Eye of the Devil. In the restaurant various celebrities glanced at Tate, but also at one another, and not neglecting quick peeps at the LaScala entranceway, checking what marvelous entity might be entering, and only now and then staring down at their drinks or meals.
The Saturday Evening Post caught an interesting colloquy between Ransohoff and Tate on what he intended to do with The Fearless Vampire Killers: “Ransohoff wore an open-neck sport shirt and shapeless coat, and he talked business. ‘Listen, sweetie, I’m going to have to cut some stuff out of The Vampire Killers. Your spanking scene has got to go.’ ‘Oh, don’t do that. Why would you do that?’ “‘Because it doesn’t move the story. The story has got to move. Bang, bang, bang. No American audience is going to sit still while Polanski indulges himself.’
“‘But Europeans make movies differently than Americans,’ she argued. ‘Blow-Up moved slowly. But wasn’t it a great film!’ ‘I’ll tell you something, baby. I didn’t like it. If I’d have seen it before the reviews, I’d have said it’d never make it. It’s not my kind of picture. I want to be told a story without all that hocus-pocus symbolism going on.’
‘Oh, I want to do a complete nude scene,’ said Sharon. ‘Say you’ll let me!’ ‘OK, OK,’ Ransohoff said, bored, looking toward the door.”
Bowers then described how in an early morning shoot, Tate was filmed on the Malibu beach, redoing a scene for Don’t Make Waves: “In a sequence with an undraped David Draper, ‘Mr. Universe.’ Sharon stuck out her backside and shot out her front. Magically, a button or two came undone on her polka-dot blouse, and after close examination of camera angle, director Sandy Mackendrick decided to leave it that way. He gave Sharon guidance in rubbing mineral oil over Draper’s bare back, as the scene called for. ‘Treat him like a horse,’ he said. ‘Pat him just as you would an animal. That’s the way.’”
Sharon Tate rubbed the mineral oil upon Mr. Draper’s well-formed back, but when the camera stopped, she said, “Ugh.” Then i
n her rather small dressing room in a trailer on the set, she smoked a cigarette, and said, “I’m happier when I’m working. I don’t have time to think too much that way.”
Bowers described a visit to Doris and Paul Tate’s house in Palos Verdes Estates, about an hour from the film location. Paul Tate was stationed at the time in Korea. Doris was taking care of Sharon’s two sisters: “Her mother—a pleasant, plump, dark-haired woman—turned Sharon’s face this way and that. ‘Have you had your blood count recently, honey? You look so pale to me.’ What did she think of Sharon’s becoming a movie star? What did she think of Roman Polanski? ‘You know,’ she said, in the voice of every middle-class American mother, ‘I don’t care—just as long as she’s happy.’”
Back in Hollywood, Bowers noted how Sharon moved among various hotels, and stayed at various friends’ homes. And in the background, as she talked often by phone with Roman, was the fact that “So many things were unresolved, shadowy. Ransohoff was sore at Polanski because Polanski had gone way over the budget on The Vampire Killers. Polanski was mad at Ransohoff because Ransohoff was cutting away at his film and postponing its release in the States.”
One night Sharon, attired in aviator’s leather jacket, slacks, and tinted Ben Franklin glasses, visited the private discotheque in Beverly Hills called The Daisy. Without comment, she quietly viewed young actresses of her generation go through their dance motions. Among the dancers were Suzanne Pleshette and Patty Duke, plus Linda Ann Evans in a miniskirt. Sharon gazed at Evans and commented, “I’ve worn a much shorter mini in London. That’s nothing.”
Sharon was photographed by the renowned Richard Avedon in New York on October 31, reportedly for a magazine spread on “The World’s Most Beautiful Women.”
Chapter 4
1967: The Year of Love, Dolls, Rosemary
Playboy magazine published a photo series in its March 1967 issue called “The Tate Gallery” featuring Sharon with bared bosom, shot by Roman Polanski. The article about her began, “This is the year Sharon Tate happens. A screen newcomer with three films to be released in 1967, Sharon shows best in Roman Polanski’s The Vampire Killers, a slap-stick unreeling of macabre carryings-on. Says director Polanski, who last year shocked moviegoers with Repulsion, ‘What kind of film is The Vampire Killers? It’s funny!’ A man of many talents, Polanski, who co-stars in his new movie, personally photographed Sharon for the pages of PLAYBOY. Depicted here is her sudsy tête-à-Tate with a frightening film ghoul who, like us, finds Sharon a tasty dish, indeed.”
The Playboy text continues: “The Vampire Killers displays Sharon’s formidable form in two tub-thumping scenes. Signed by Martin Ransohoff to a Filmways contract four years ago, she received a half-million-dollar Hollywood non-buildup: continuous courses in everything from diction to dancing to dress—even bodybuilding. Says Miss Tate, ‘Mr. Ransohoff didn’t want the audience to see me till I was ready.’ As Polanski’s photos reveal, Sharon’s ready now.”
The Playmate of the Month for March of 1967 was Fran Gerard, photographed by Mario Casilli and Gen Trindl. The issue also featured an interview of Orson Welles by Kenneth Tynan, and several articles, such as “Executive Salaries” by Vance Packard, and “The New Aristocrats” by Paul Goodman. Plus a pictorial spread on the Bunnies of Missouri.
Meanwhile, in March of 1967, a movie production began for Jacqueline Susann’s controversial book, Valley of the Dolls, which had been on the bestseller lists for sixty-five weeks. Sharon decided to test for the role of the doomed starlet Jennifer North. All actresses, even Academy Award winners such as Patty Duke, had to undergo screen tests. Sharon’s test, shot March 8, 1967, featured the following lines:
“What about your career?”
“Bah, my career. You must be joking. I haven’t got two cents worth of talent. All I’ve got is a body.”
Sharon won the part. In the film, Jennifer works in soft core French “art movies” to pay her husband Tony’s medical bills. Sharon would win praise for her acting of her character’s suicide.
Jacqueline Susann approved of Sharon: “When I was told she had been chosen over several other girls, I leaped. She was exactly what Jennifer should have been . . . She was perfect. Marvelous. Out of the whole picture she was the one girl who was cast as I saw the part.”
Shooting began with location work in New York, plus some interiors, on March 13.
Jacqueline Susann herself described the plot in a promotional documentary: “Valley of the Dolls is actually the story of three girls who come to New York to look for fulfillment of their dreams. Each makes it to the top in her own way, and finds emptiness and loneliness; and the longest and loneliest hours are in the night. A child fears the loneliness of the dark, and clutches at its rag doll. A lonely star also clutches for a doll‚ a little red or yellow doll, a sleeping pill. It happens to so many girls, the mad scramble to reach the top; they never know what is really up there, but the last thing they expect to find is the Valley of the Dolls.”
Three up-and-coming women come together in New York at the inception of their careers. Sharon Tate is the beauteous blonde Jennifer North, who is in the chorus of a Broadway play starring Susan Hayward as famous actress Helen Lawson. (Judy Garland was originally cast in the Lawson part, but behaved excessively temperamentally, refusing to leave her dressing room, for instance, and was sacked about a month into filming.)
Tate was optimistic: Eye of the Devil and The Fearless Vampire Killers were each due for release, and now she had been signed to play a major role in Valley. There was much media hoopla swirling around the production, and while Tate acknowledged that such a prominent role should further her career, she confessed to her lover that she did not dig the script, or the book itself for that matter.
Barbara Parkins, then the star of the TV series Peyton Place, played Anne Wells, who recently arrived in New York and became a famous model (after initially working for a theatrical agency representing the Broadway star Lawson/Hayward). Patty Duke played the aggressive and hyper-emotional Neely O’Hara, who is a rising singing star.
Sharon in one of her most famous roles, Jennifer North in Valley of the Dolls
The three, Duke, Tate, and Parkins, in their respective roles, become friends, and all three find themselves involved with troubled men.
Neely O’Hara/Duke’s career streaks upward; she moves to Los Angeles for a successful film career, but, uh oh, starts taking “Dolls” such as Seconal and Nembutal, plus stimulants also. She begins to act bonkers and erratic, and is sent to a sanatorium.
Jennifer North/Tate also heads to Hollywood. She marries a successful nightclub singer, Tony Polar. Soon she is pregnant, but then opts for an abortion when she learns Tony has Huntington’s chorea, a fatal disease (which in real life afflicted the great Woody Guthrie) that often attacks offspring. Jennifer/Tate begins working in French soft-core porno “art films” to pay for her husband’s ever-increasing medical bills. Then Jennifer/Tate is diagnosed with breast cancer and told she must have a mastectomy. She commits suicide with an overdose of Dolls. Jennifer’s on-screen suicide, as an example of Sharon Tate’s good acting, is one of the shining sequences in the film.
Anne Wells/Parkins, having become a highly successful model, also succumbs to the attractiveness of Dolls to overcome her sad relationship with two-timer Lyon Burke, who has an affair with Neely/Duke.
Neely is released from the sanatorium and given a chance to resurrect her career, but she re-succumbs to the lure of Dolls and alcohol, and she heads into a shrieking decline. Anne gets rid of drugs and her unfaithful lover and returns to New England. Lyon Burke ends his affair with Neely and asks Anne to marry him, but she says no.
And thus it was Curtain Time in the Valley of Seconals, uppers, and mood-depressing downers.
Patty Duke later wrote how it was “miserable working with Mark Robson, the director. . . . He was someone who used humiliation for effect, who could be insulting about your physical appearance and who wouldn’t hesitate to bite your he
ad off in front of everyone . . . Sharon Tate, however, got it even worse than I did. She was a gentle, gentle creature—you could be mean to her and she would never retaliate . . . Robson however, continually treated her like an imbecile, and she was very attuned and sensitive to that treatment. . . . He just picked on her. . . . Finally, after hours of this nonsense, Sharon wound up in tears. . . . We were always making faces at Robson and giving him the evil eye behind his back.”
Polanski later quoted Robson as remarking to him, “That’s a great girl you’re living with. Few actresses have her kind of vulnerability. She’s got a great future.”
An article, “The Dames in the Valley of the Dolls,” which Look magazine ran on September 5, 1967, captured Sharon Tate in a scene: “‘Roll over and over and over,” purrs Dolls director Mark Robson, as the camera rolls behind him. The lady on the bed obliges. She’s Sharon Tate, she’s gorgeous, she doesn’t have any clothes on, and from every indication, she knows how to roll over. ‘Cut!’ belts Robson. Then, one-two-three, smiling madly for no apparent reason, Sharon springs out of bed. (She’s not naked after all. She’s wearing lovely little bikini panties.) Blithely, she reaches into a terry cloth robe, held out by a wardrobe lady, plucks her wiglet off and hands it to a hair lady, and turns to see some scantily clad photographs of herself given to her by a publicity lady. ‘I want none of these to go out. None, none, NONE,’ says Sharon, who tends to repeat words for emphasis. ‘Sharon’s very sensitive,’ explains one of the more serious minded 20th executives.’”