by Ed Sanders
He walked onto the stage with Dolores Huerta (cofounder with Cesar Chavez of the National Farm Workers Association) and escorted by Olympic decathlon champ Rafer Johnson and pro football star Roosevelt Grier, plus of course Ethel and some of their children.
The applause and excitement were enormous. There were jubilant young men in Kennedy straw hats and women in white blouses, red Kennedy sashes, and blue skirts. It was very, very hot in the ballroom. At first, there was trouble with the microphones on stage, but after about 20–30 seconds it was taken care of, and wow was the stage crowded! It was a time of playful joy. The winner first congratulated Don Drysdale of the Dodgers who’d just won a three-hit shutout. “He pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight, and I hope we have as good fortune in our campaign.”
He thanked those who’d helped him, beginning a speech which would run around twelve and a half minutes.
A Plan to Talk with Pencil Press, Fred Dutton Interrupts and Changes RFK’s Stage Exit Plan
Uno Timanson, Ambassador vice president, was personally prepared, after the senator had completed his victory speech in the Embassy Room, to lead the senator down to the Ambassador Ballroom through the enclosed stairway. Just before the senator’s speech was completed, Fred Dutton, one of the senator’s aides, asked Timanson if there were television sets in the Ambassador Ballroom, and Timanson told him there were. It was then decided that the senator would visit the Press Room to make a press statement. Therefore, while Kennedy was standing at the dais to speak Dutton informed Uno Timanson that Kennedy would not be going down to the Ambassador Ballroom one floor beneath the Embassy where the overflow was watching RFK on television monitors. “The Senator will go to the Colonial Room,” Fred Dutton told Timanson, “to have a session with the pencil press.” Timanson escorted the senator and his party through the hallway behind the Embassy Room and into the pantry area, which was just a few feet away from the press.
Kennedy’s security guys, nevertheless, were prepared to take him to the pencils by side steps off the stage. Thus, the Fates decided that Kennedy would be unguarded in his post-speech trip through the pantry.
Official with Suit and Clipboard Sends Sirhan and Polka Dot from an Anteroom by the Stage to the Kitchen
Dr. Daniel Brown described in his 2011 court filing Sirhan’s account of what happened during Kennedy’s speech: “The woman in the polkadot dress then took Sirhan by the hand and led him to the anteroom behind the stage where Senator Kennedy was speaking.” There they found some coffee, at which point, Sirhan begins to feel attracted to her (“It was my job to woo her”) when all of a sudden, according to Brown, “they are interrupted by an official with a suit and clip board. This official tells them that they cannot stay in the anteroom for security reasons, and the official then tells the girl in the polka dot dress to go to the kitchen.”
Sirhan: “All of a sudden they tell us, we have to move. This guy comes by wearing a suit . . . darkish hair . . . a big full face . . . seems like he was in charge . . . he wasn’t wearing any uniform . . . wearing a suit . . . she acknowledges his instruction . . . he motions towards the pantry. The man said, ‘you guys can go back in this room.’ I followed her. She led . . . I was a little like a puppy after her. I wanted to go back to the mariache band . . . but she went straight to the pantry area . . . with my being so attracted to her I was just glued to her.”
Completing His Final Speech
The crowd was up to maybe 1,800 in the Embassy Room, way above fire code, and it was very very warm. There was jubilation in the packed throng. The overflow went down one floor to the Ambassador Ballroom.
After adjusting the microphones and going through the fairly lengthy list of those he thanked for their help, Kennedy spoke for approximately ten minutes. After congratulating pitcher Don Drysdale for his sixth straight no-hit shutout, the winner of California’s 178 delegates congratulated his opponent Eugene McCarthy.
He pointed out, to great applause, that the “country wants to move in a different direction, we want to deal with our own problems within our country, and we want peace in Vietnam.” He was looking forward to “a dialogue, or a debate,” with Hubert Humphrey “on what direction we want to go in; what we are going to do in the rural areas of our country, what we are going to do with those who still suffer within the United States from hunger. . . . and whether we’re going to continue the policies that have been so unsuccessful in Vietnam.”
Then he finished, “We are a great country, an unselfish country, a compassionate country and I intend to make that my basis for running . . . so my thanks to all of you and now on to Chicago and let’s win there.”
The crowd chanted in a powerful rhythm, “We want Bobby, we want Bobby.” His body guards, Olympic hero Rafer Johnson and huge Los Angeles Rams tackle Roosevelt Grier, started to help clear a path to Kennedy’s left through the crowd and to the pencil press, but an assistant maître d’ named Karl Uecker parted the gold curtain to the rear, “This way Mr. Kennedy,” and reached for Kennedy’s arm to lead him back through the curtain off the platform’s back. Uecker turned Kennedy to his right after passing through the curtain, and then down an incline toward the double door which led to a service pantry and the kitchen. It was hasty.
“Slow down!” someone cried. “You’re getting ahead of everyone!” The bodyguards were not yet caught up. There were just two and one-half minutes between the senator leaving the stage and the arising of screams, shouts, and consternation from the audience in the ballroom, as knowledge of the shooting quickly spread.
Seventy-eight people were in the pantry when RFK came through the door from the hallway behind the stage. There was a sign, THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING taped to the wall near where Kennedy stopped by the ice machine to greet those lined and clustered there.
There were shots. Witnesses gave differing accounts of the number. There was an initial quick popping sound, then a rapid series pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop pop-pop-pop pop-pop-pop, certainly more than the eight in Sirhan’s Iver-Johnson.
According to Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi, who did the autopsy on Robert Kennedy, all three bullets that struck Kennedy entered from the rear, in a bulletpath from down to up, right to left. “Moreover,” he noted, “powder burns around the entry wound indicated that the fatal bullet was fired at less than one inch from the head and no more than two or three inches behind the right ear.”
But Sirhan’s weapon was never less than two to three feet from Kennedy, and certainly not near the back of his head. By the second shot, bystanders had slammed Sirhan’s arm and gun to a table, though he kept on firing wildly, the bullets going nowhere near the senator.
Sirhan and the Woman on the Tray Holder
A man named Thomas Vincent Di Pierro, son of a maitre d’ at the Ambassador, spoke to the FBI very soon after, in the time of fresh memory: “I observed a white male and a white female standing on a tray holder at the opposite end of the ice machine which is approximately 12–15 feet away.
“This white male turned toward the white female and appeared to converse with her very briefly. He then dismounted from the tray holder (and) went into the crowd and I did not observe him until shortly thereafter when I then saw him standing at the heating cabinet behind Mr. Karl Uecker, another hotel employee. I did not see this white female again after this time.
“As Senator Kennedy shook the hand of the hotel cook he then turned to his right in the direction of the heating cabinet and that time I saw the white male who was previously standing on the tray cabinet. I saw this individual reach his right arm around Mr. Uecker and in his hand he had a revolver which was pointed directly at Senator Kennedy’s head.” (Vincent Di Pierro to FBI, June 7, 1968.)
The woman with whom Sirhan talked on the tray table Di Pierro described: white female, twenty-one to twenty-five, wearing a form-fitting scoop neck dress. “The dress appeared to have black or dark violet polka dots.”
Sirhan Claims He Thought He Was Shooting at Targets at a Gun Range
Sirhan recounted: “I am trying to figure out how I’m going to have her. . . . All of a sudden she’s looking over my head toward an area . . . Then she taps me or pinches me. . . . It is startling. . . . It was like when you’re stuck with a pin or pinched . . . a very sharp pinch . . . I thought she did it with her fingernails . . . like a wake-up . . . it snapped me out of my doldrums . . . yet, I’m still sleepy. . . . She points back over my head. . . . She says, ‘Look, look, look.’ I turned around . . . I don’t know what happened after that. . . . She spun me around and turned my body around. . . . She was directing my attention to the rear. . . . Way back. . . . There are people coming back through the doors . . . I am puzzled about what she is directing me to. . . . It didn’t seem relevant to me. . . . Some people started streaming in. . . . She kept motioning toward the back . . . then all of a sudden she gets more animated. . . . She put her arm on my shoulder.
“I think she had her hand on me. . . . Then I was at the target range . . . a flashback to the shooting range . . . I didn’t know that I had a gun . . . there was this target like a flashback to the target range . . . I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy.” Brown then asked Sirhan to recall his state of mind. “My mental state was like I was drunk and sleepy . . . maybe the girl had something to do with it . . . I was like at the range again.” What did the targets look like? Dr. Brown asked. “Circles. Circles. . . . It was like I was at the range again . . . I think I shot one or two shots. . . . Then I snapped out of it and thought ‘I’m not at the range.’ . . . Then, ‘What is going on?’ Then they started grabbing me . . . I’m thinking, ‘the range, the range, the range.’ Then everything gets blurry . . . after that first or second shot . . . that was the end of it. . . . It was the wrong place for the gun to be there . . . I thought it was the range . . . they broke my finger.” Then Sirhan was asked, “What happens next?” Sirhan: “Next thing I remember I was being choked and man-handled, I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t realize until they got me in a car . . . later when I saw the female judge I knew that Bobby Kennedy was shot and I was the shooter, but it doesn’t come into my memory.”
Another Gun
Dr. Philip Melanson, a very reputable researcher, wrote “One witness asserts a man in a suit fired a weapon” (See The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968–1991, chapter 6, p. 71.) Melanson also “found two witnesses who saw another gun in the pantry,” whose assertions were “not recorded by official investigators.” A bystander named Lisa Urso saw another person (not Sirhan, and not wearing a uniform), with a gun in hand. He was blond and wearing a gray suit. Another, “Martha Raines” (Melanson protected her name) saw a guy with dark wavy hair in a grey suit shoot his gun “once or twice” and run out of the pantry. He was seen with Sirhan earlier in the evening.
A Polish reporter named Stanislaw Pruszynski was covering the primary victory that night for the Montreal Gazette. He happened to have his tape recorder running during the shooting. He later gave the tape to the California State Archives, where it resided unexamined for a number of decades. The recording was not long ago reexamined and digitally remastered, and forensic examiners contend that at least fourteen shots were fired in the kitchen pantry during that burst of pop-pop-pop’s (see recent book, An Open and Shut Case, by forensic scientists Robert Joling and Philip Van Praag.)
Juan Romero Kneels by Robert Kennedy
Working in the kitchen and pantry was young Juan Romero, who had several days before delivered a room service order to RFK in the Presidential Suite, and had shook his hand. Romero wanted once again to shake Kennedy’s hand, and pressed through the packed pantry. Just as Kennedy clasped his hand there was a flash of heat, and suddenly RFK was on the floor.
“He was looking up at the ceiling,” Romero later recalled “and I thought he’d banged his head. I asked, ‘Are you Ok? Can you get up?’ One eye, his left eye, was twitching, and one leg was shaking.’ Romero slid his hand under the back of Kennedy’s head to try to raise him and felt blood trickling through his fingers.
Ethel had rushed to the scene and then pushed Juan away. He asked if he could give Bobby his rosary beads. “I pressed them into his hand but they wouldn’t stay . . . so I tried wrapping them around his thumb. When they were wheeling him away, I saw the rosary beads still hanging off his hand.”
The writer Pete Hamill, who’d written a letter back in January urging RFK to run, was among the horrified seventy-eight people packed into the pantry. He glanced at his watch. It was 12:15 a.m. The senator was soon taken to the hospital, and he lingered till 1:44 a.m. on Thursday, June 6, when he passed from life.
Sharon and Roman on Assassination Night
It’s not known where Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski were or what they did the night of June 4–5 when Robert Kennedy was assassinated just two or three minutes after concluding his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after winning the California Democratic Primary.
They might have gone to The Factory discotheque to await the celebration that night at which Sammy Davis Jr. was scheduled to perform. According to Evans Frankenheimer, both Sharon and Roman were on the invitation list. Tate and her husband were very likely at that time spending a few days at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard just prior to moving to Patty Duke’s house at 1600 Summit Ridge Drive.
Renting Patty Duke’s House
Patty Duke traveled to New York City by the summer of 1968 to star in a film called Me, Natalie. Her husband, Harry Falk, remained behind to rent out their house. As she described the house in her autobiography, “It was a colonial mansion off Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, jutting out on its own precipice at the top of the mountain with a twelve-car parking lot, a four car garage and a 360-degree view of Los Angeles.
“Its nine rooms were big, bright and airy, with bay windows and fireplaces everywhere. Everyone who sees the house loves it; Sharon Tate later rented it for a while when she first got pregnant; and she and Roman Polanski wanted to buy it.”
By the week after RFK’s assassination, Sharon and Roman had rented the house. Winifred Chapman had been the housekeeper and cook for Patty Duke, and stayed on for Sharon and Roman.
In celebration of their new house at 1600 Summit Ridge Drive, Roman and Sharon threw a party. Part of the rental deal was they would take care of Patty Duke’s sheepdog, which escaped during the party and ran down the hill, where it encountered a vicious pack of Alsatian dogs owned by an English satanic cult called The Process Church of the Final Judgement. The dogs were housed at the Barrymore mansion located at 1301 Summit Ridge Drive, which featured a group of heated kennels. The dogs chased Polanski into a garage, where he was trapped till he broke a rear window and got back up the hill to the party at Patty Duke’s house. Oo-ee-oo.
Filming The Wrecking Crew
Sharon’s mother had trained her daughter well in what used to be called “Home Economics,” in her case, southern-style cooking. Roman recalled it with relish: “After working all day on the set [of The Wrecking
Crew] Sharon would return to our . . . house on Summit Ridge Drive and insist on cooking for me and the whole gang. Her repertoire included Virginia ham, upside-down cake, and all the great southern dishes she’d learned from her mother.”
Polanski also noted with approval in his autobiography her attentiveness to his personal needs: “She was also a born housewife. Aside from cooking like a dream, she used to cut my hair—a skill acquired from Jay Sebring. She liked to pack my bag whenever I had to make a trip. She always knew exactly what to put in.”
She was a kung fu expert in the film, and Bruce Lee was hired to be her instructor. The twenty-seven-year-old martial arts icon was several years away from the famous martial arts films that made him an international celebrity. Lee lived nearby and became a friend of the couple. Sharon invited him over to 1600 Summit Ridge, where he demonstrated his skills. Roman described how “before long we rigged up a training area on Patty Duke’s driveway, and he was giving me lessons in—among other things—the celebrated Bruce Lee side kick.” Lee was always urging Polanski to sneak-attack him. Once Polanski tried it, but Bruce quickly extended his guard-hand, and Polanski was tossed upside down on Patty Duke’s lawn.
Distributed by Columbia Pictures, The Wrecking Crew was the fourth and final film in a series of American comedy-spy-fi theatrical releases featuring Dean Martin as secret agent Matt Helm. As with the previous three movies (The Silencers, Murderers’ Row, and The Ambushers), the film was created as a spoof of the James Bond films.
Sharon Tate was given star billing, along with Dean Martin and Elke Sommer. Also appearing in the film were Nancy Kwan as Yu-Rang, Tina Louise as Lola Medina, and Nigel Green as the villainous Count Contini, who was trying to wreak havoc on the world economy through stealing oodles of gold aboard a train. It was a tad reminiscent of the James Bond film Goldfinger. Sharon appeared as Freya Carlson, a bungling British Intelligence agent who assisted playboy/skirtchasing/secret agent Dean Martin, working for a secret agency called ICE. She was Martin’s sole support working to stop a team of gold hijackers. Tate of course was the romantic interest for Martin. As in the 1966 Don’t Make Waves, she performed her own stunts.