Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  Smith prepared a report in October of 1974, in which he stated that information provided by the LA County sheriff’s office stated that Sirhan Sirhan “was contacted by” the satanic English organization “and had attended some parties given by television personalities in behalf of the organization, where rites took place usually dealing with sexual deviations and heavy drug use. One of these parties took place at Sharon Tate’s home.”

  The only two possibilities for such a party at Sharon Tate’s home, during this time frame, would be either the mansion she and Roman had rented at 1038 Palisades Beach Road during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby (which they had moved out of in early 1968), or the Chateau Marmont, where they dwelled during the winter and spring of 1968. (See the afterword to this book for further information.)

  Mia to India with the Beatles

  As for the star, Mia Farrow, just a few weeks after giving birth to the devil child in Rosemary’s Baby, she set out in February of 1968 for a three-month retreat in what was called Transcendental Meditation led by a spiritual leader named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and held in northern India, near the Ganges.

  It was a very famous gathering, mainly because the Beatles along with their wives and mates joined the retreat, as did others, such as the folk singer Donovan, Beach Boy Mike Love, jazz musician Paul Horn, Mia’s sister and her brother John, and maybe thirty others.

  Soon there was discontent in the retreat. For instance, the Maharishi wanted the Beatles to tithe from 15 to 25 percent of their annual incomes to his Swiss bank account. Also the sacred leader made sexual advances to a California woman on hand, allegedly rubbing her crotch during private sessions of therapy aimed at promoting cosmic awareness therapy.

  At last, John Lennon told the Maharishi he was leaving, and when he was asked why, Lennon replied, “You’re the cosmic one, you should know.”

  The experience with the Maharishi led John Lennon in a few months to write the song that became “Sexy Sadie” on the White Album. It was a tune Charles Manson and his family felt was directly aimed at Susan Atkins (aka Sadie Glutz) under her Manson Family nickname, Sexy Sadie.

  Perhaps it’s too bad Manson couldn’t have gone along on the spiritual journey to the Ganges. Perhaps he could have calmed down his turbulent psyche in the vibes of northern India. Or maybe he too, as Lennon, would have sniffed something lacking and scamful in the Maharishi’s act.

  Meanwhile, just a couple of weeks after the Beatles and Mia were hanging out with the Maharishi, there was a very upbeat article in Newsweek titled “The New American Beauties,” with text such as: “Astoundingly photogenic, infinitely curvaceous, Sharon Tate is one of the most smashing young things to hit Hollywood in a long time. She began as the invention of wheeler-dealer Martin Ransohoff and in her five years on the Hollywood treadmill, she has, surprisingly, made progress. In fact, in her last film, Valley of the Dolls, she managed to be the only living doll. Now married to the brilliant and volatile Polish director Roman Polanski, perhaps she will begin to fulfill her tremendous potential.

  “Remembering her husband’s Repulsion, she dreams: ‘I’d like to be an American Catherine Deneuve. She plays beautiful, sensitive, deep parts with a little bit of intelligence behind them.’ [Newsweek borrowed the above two lines from the 1966 promo documentary, All Eyes on Sharon Tate.] And then about her past, ‘They see me as a dolly on a trampoline.’ Her gorgeous hazel eyes open wide at the thought of Faye Dunaway. ‘Dunaway!’ she sighs. ‘Oooooooohhhh! She’s a woman. She’s there, you know it, and there’s no way around it.’ But Sharon Tate is still looking for Sharon Tate.

  “‘Sometimes,’ she sighs, ‘I think it would be better to be a sex symbol, because at least I would know where I was. But,’ she adds quickly, ‘I’d lose my mind.’”

  Also in March of 1968, columnist Sheilah Graham wrote: “It’s a little bit awkward between Sharon Tate and her discoverer Marty Ransohoff, since her marriage to Roman Polanski. Roman and Ransohoff are in a bitter feud. Sharon is still under contract to Marty, but I’ll bet that if she asked in a nice way for her release, she’d get it. The producer spent two years building Sharon to the point where she could act. One of the provisos was that she would not marry for several years. You can fight everyone except Cupid!”

  In the spring of 1968, Mia Farrow had already begun work on a movie in London, A Dandy in Aspic, a spy movie with Laurence Harvey, but Polanski needed to do some last minute dubbing of Farrow, so he flew to London.

  One of Sharon and Roman’s good friends in London was Victor Lownes, head of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in England. It happened to be around the time of Lownes’s birthday, so Sharon, Roman, and Gene Gutowski hatched up an idea for the “perfect gift”—a cock of gold. Sharon was acquainted with a Hollywood jeweler, and called him up. He did not have a life-sized penis of gold, but offered to make one, “if you supply the model.”

  Gene Gutowski created a version of his own, which Roman and Sharon brought to the jeweler. It was made and Roman brought it to London on a flight, stuffing it down his pants to get through Customs. The auric penis did not present any trouble, but Customs held up Mr. Polanski because of his can of film that needed dubbing, till Paramount sent someone to the airport to clear things up.

  A Plane Trip to San Francisco to Show Rosemary

  Living with Jay Sebring at the time, early 1968, was actress Sharmagne Leland-St. John. For this book she consulted her calendar for 1968, and reported: “Friday March the 19th we flew to San Francisco for Rosemary’s Baby, and then under that it says party Sharon Tate and Roman.”

  About the trip, she further stated: “I do remember Jay and I dropping acid and going on a private plane with Roman and Sharon and I think Simon Hesera, Sharon’s Mom and Dad, possibly Mia Farrow, and a few other’s to somewhere up North for a sneak preview of Rosemary’s Baby.” LSD was more casually quaffed in the late 1960s than in any set of years since. It was everywhere.

  There was that spring a further tad of glory for Sharon. The annual poll of the US movie theater owners, as tabulated by the industry trade paper Independent Film Journal, and reported in the Los Angeles Times for April 20, 1968, listed Sharon Tate as one of the best female “New Faces.” She joined Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Katharine Ross, Jean Shrimpton, Lesley Ann Warren, Judy Geeson, and Michele Lee.

  The Beatles, Apple Records, and Terry Melcher

  John Lennon and Paul McCartney flew to New York in May of 1968 to announce the formation of Apple Records. Both appeared on The Tonight Show, watched by twenty-five million people, and urged musicians and songwriters to send demo tapes to Apple for consideration of being offered a record deal. The word rocketed across the world, causing a total flood of tapes, ideas, proposals, and requests. The Beatles, because of the extraordinary success of their albums, Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper among them, plus their movies, were extraordinarily wealthy, and so the promise of Apple Records to provide a pay-off for demo tapes was believable.

  Terry Melcher became a producer associated with Apple that summer, a fact with many karmic knots in the knotty future. Melcher was living at 10050 Cielo Drive with Candice Bergen.

  Liberté Égalité Fraternité

  In the United States the student takeover of Columbia University had just occurred, and then there was the great uprising in France which began in early May, during which the labor unions and students would form a successful coalition that brought about wage increases and nearly toppled the government of Charles De Gaulle.

  The ghosts of 1789 danced into Paris with those three thrilling words, Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité, as they do every few decades—for another great tossing it up for the Goddess of Grabs.

  Back in March there had been attacks on US facilities in Paris over Vietnam. Several were arrested from the university in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, a subsidiary of the Sorbonne. Then students had taken over the administrative building of the faculty.

  Though there’s no movement in world history with more splintery fa
ctions than the French Left, at that moment, March 22, seemingly led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a coalition of Guevarists, Anarchists, and Trotskyites from the Nanterre faculty formed a coalition to occupy the college. This was the movement known as Le 22 Mars. They were driven out of the buildings, and on May 3 they took refuge at the Sorbonne in Paris.

  It was then the ghosts of 1789 began the “Whole World Is Watching” dance of 1968 and the well-organized cadres of various factions went into a rock-throwing, car-burning, poster-pasting, barricade-building war with the bourgeois State. Throughout the month of May there were riots and just about every university in the nation was closed. A million took to the streets in a spontaneous swell. “At last the spark has caught the wick,” wrote artist/activist Jean-Jacques Lebel.

  The radio kept people at barricades informed of what was happening—twenty thousand students occupied the Latin Quarter. Barge traffic was halted, the ports shut down. No trains. No planes. No mail.

  When workers are well organized, that is, “know the new facts early,” they can respond very quickly when industry tries to lower conditions, and so in France in 1968, farmers on their tractors came to the cities, joining the students while demanding full employment, fair taxation, higher income, and a larger voice in government.

  As a result there was the Grenoble Protocol in which French industrialists had to give 10 percent wage increases in 1968 plus rises in both industrial and agricultural minimum wages, and a reduction of between one to two hours in the workweek. It was a thrill to follow in the newspapers of the spring of 1968. I could feel the ghosts of 1789 back in glory.

  Meanwhile, Roman and Sharon drove down to Cannes on the French Riviera for the twenty-first Cannes Film Festival, scheduled for May 10–24. They pulled up to their hotel on May 12 in Roman’s red Ferrari, with a great amount of luggage, and outfitted with a new-fangled tape deck that was blaring the unreleased Rolling Stones tune “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” They were attired as if they were hot stuff in a cold universe—that is, in matching suede suits from Rodeo Drive, and various beaded necklaces and medallions. Hot stuff. Cold universe.

  Roman Polanski was slated to be a judge, along with Louis Malle, Monica Vitti, and Terence Young, the British director of the early James Bond films. Among the twenty-six films selected for competition were Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime, Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball, Jan Nemec’s A Report on the Party and the Guests, Richard Lester’s Petulia, and Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé.

  Summoned to a meeting about closing the festival, Polanski was applauded, but also booed and hissed, when he spoke against closing. Coming from Communist Poland, Polanski was very suspicious of left movements. “My own views were clear. I thought it utterly absurd to disrupt the festival on the ground that it was an elitist capitalist symbol.”

  Jean-Luc Godard, with whom Polanski had had friction in the past, announced that while he was willing for films to be shown, he wanted the festival totally reorganized, and no prizes awarded. Francois Truffaut, for his part, called for a complete cessation. “Everything that has a shred of dignity and importance is stopping in France,” Truffaut said at the time. “I don’t know how one must do it, but I know that this afternoon or tonight, at least through radio since there are no newspapers, it must be announced that the Cannes festival is stopped or at least substantially reformed.”

  In an interesting article, “Cannes 1968: Fighting on the Beaches,” by Richard T. Kelly, it was noted: “One of the most striking features of newsreel footage of the festival is the onstage dynamic between the leading protesters, especially between Truffaut and Godard. Truffaut does a good job of communicating clearly, informing those assembled why Cannes should be closed down, even if he appears to entertain the possibility of continued screenings. Godard, on the other hand, comes across as grim-faced, hectoring and abusive, his legendary sardonic wit clearly having left the building.” Godard claimed that everyone gathered in the Grande Salle, and the film industry itself, was failing to recognize the current time of revolution. “There’s not a single film,” said Godard, “that shows the problems that workers and students are going through. Not one. Whether made by Forman, by me, by Polanski, or Francois. We’ve missed the boat!’”

  While some in the audience booed, Godard declared, “It’s not a matter of continuing or not continuing to watch films. It’s a matter of cinema showing solidarity with the student movement, and the only practical way of doing this is to stop all the projections immediately.”

  Polanski did reluctantly ultimately vote to close down the festival. One by one members of the Cannes jury started to resign—it began with Louis Malle, followed by Polanski, Italian actress Monica Vitti, and the British Terence Young.

  “I was forced to resign,” Polanski later reasoned. “It was not at all my feeling that we should have resigned. I came from Communist Poland, and I knew moments of elation like this where suddenly you just feel like you’re doing something great, when in fact it’s just an illusion.”

  “By this time the general strike was spreading throughout France,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Train and plane services were grinding to a halt, gas stations running dry. Exhibitors began to pack up and go home and the festival ended in complete disarray.”

  Variety printed that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had chartered a private plane from London to get the stranded Universal Studios contingent out of Cannes. With the festival canceled, Roman drove Sharon to Rome with Michael Sarne following in another car, for an unplanned week of fun.

  While in Rome, Sharon and Roman took part in a fifty-five-minute documentary made by Gideon Bachmann titled Ciao Federico! Fellini Directs Satyricon, in which the couple made a brief visit to the Cinecittà Studios during the filming of Fellini’s film, Satyricon, set in the first century ad. Slender Sharon was wearing a miniskirt and a long-sleeved white pullover, plus dangling from her shoulders was a small dark purse on long thin straps. She was holding her sunglasses in her hand as they walked around the set. Sharon and Roman’s brief walk-on at Cinecittà features a voice, apparently Polanski’s, apparently inspired by the Roman-era set, urging Fellini to visit Disneyland, describing how on his first visit to Disneyland with Sharon they were high.

  After the fun in Rome, the couple returned to London, then flew to Los Angeles. “Sharon’s film career was progressing far better than mine,” Polanski later wrote. “A funereal atmosphere reigned at Paramount. Expensive failures like Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, and The Molly Maguires had lost a fortune. [Paramount big wig] Bluhdorn responded by stripping Paramount of its saleable assets. He dismantled the studio, fired many of the skilled technicians who’d spent their whole lives on the lot, and transferred Paramount’s headquarters to a small building in Beverly Hills.”

  Polanski arrived at the studio in the midst of this trouble. Even with Rosemary’s Baby about to be a hit, the future looked, underneath the thrill of a success, a bit challenged and even bleak.

  Sharon Tate, on the other hand, signed a deal to star in a Matt Helm spy-spoof with Dean Martin. Her fee was a nifty (for 1969) $125,000. ($1.00 in 1968 had about the same buying power as $6.37 in 2010, according to the website www.dollartimes.com. So that would make Sharon’s fee for starring in the spy-spoof $796,250.) These were the months Tate was honored as a promising newcomer. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as “New Star of the Year—Actress” for her Valley of the Dolls performance, losing to Katharine Ross for The Graduate. She placed fourth behind Mia Farrow, Judy Geeson, and Katharine Houghton for a “Golden Laurel” award as the year’s “Most Promising Newcomer,” with the results published in the Motion Picture Exhibitor magazine. She was also runner-up to Lynn Redgrave in the Motion Picture Herald’s poll for “The Star of Tomorrow,” in which box-office sales power was the main criterion for inclusion on the list. These sort of notices and laurels, while not the kind to get on the front page, combined to speed up her career, so that for her next film, her agent obtained
an ever heftier fee.

  Robert Kennedy’s Campaign

  Meanwhile the heroic and ever-burgeoning campaign of Senator Robert Kennedy (RFK) for the Democratic nomination to be president was blossoming forth. Patty Duke, Sharon’s costar in Valley of the Dolls, was invited during the Oregon primary campaign, in late May, to fly up to speak at a rally for RFK at the University of Oregon.

  According to John Phillips’s autobiography, RFK’s campaign, through Peter Lawford, asked Phillips to “write a Mamas and Papas song for his campaign in California. I never did write one, but we did meet Bobby and rode through L.A. on the back of a flatbed truck, singing songs for his rally that day just before the primary.”

  On the weekend before his final day, Robert Francis Kennedy made himself very tired in the struggle to win California (after losing in Oregon on May 28). Saturday evening, June 1, saw the debate with Eugene McCarthy in San Francisco. RFK prepared for it with briefing sessions at the Fairmont Hotel, and then did fairly well the histories say.

  Sunday, June 2, Kennedy took six of his kids to Disneyland. Monday involved a long and exhausting series of plane rides, motorcades, and rallies up and down the state of California, covering the three main California “TV markets,” till he ended that evening exhausted in San Diego almost unable to finish his speech at the El Cortez Hotel where friends, the singers Rosemary Clooney and Andy Williams, entertained the crowd, after which the entourage flew to Los Angeles.

  During the flight RFK invited Rosemary Clooney to sit with Ethel and him. Then the Kennedys were driven to the house of Evans and John Frankenheimer at 101 Malibu Colony Road, for some privacy. Frankenheimer, the noted director of such films as The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Grand Prix, and Birdman of Alcatraz, had been making a film of RFK and his campaign. Helping in the film project was movie art director Richard Sylbert, who lived in Malibu near the Frankenheimers. Evans and John spent the night somewhere else, giving Robert and Ethel some much-needed rest and privacy.