by Ed Sanders
In the early portions of the film, Tate is attired demurely, even unstylishly, in glasses, close-drawn hair; and a blue dress with orange sleeves, but toward the end of the film, as she helps to save Matt Helm/Martin’s life, there are romantic sparks between the two. That is, Helm becomes impressed with Carlson/Tate’s skills as an intelligence agent.
Dean and Sharon embrace and kiss after she wades into a too-deep creek and emerges enticingly wet. They construct the portable helicopter in which they escape, the parts having been stored in the trunk of Dean’s automobile. It’s the last possible minute to save the international monetary system, and Helm/Martin and Carlson/Tate appear above the gold-bearing chateau in the helicopter. Martin fires a machine gun to try to stop the gold transfer into a train headed for Luxembourg. After Dean and Sharon land the chopper on top of the train, they subdue the guards and make for the head of the train, where the gold-stealing count triggers the opening of a trapdoor leading down to the tracks. Tate is thrown down dangerously into the opening, but manages to keep hold enough to prevent falling to the tracks, as Dean subdues the count.
“Mr. Helm, is my hair a mess?” she asks after the count himself is tossed down onto the train tracks and crushed. At the end, Tate appears in a nightgown, “Hey, think we can have our little talk, now?” Carlson/Tate and Helm/Martin make out on a red bed, which Helm/Martin was able to cause to sink down into place in the diesel locomotive. The gold crisis is averted, after one hour, forty-four minutes of film.
The Hollywood Reporter weighed in with this assessment: “Sharon Tate reveals a pleasant affinity to scatterbrain comedy and comes as close to walking away with the picture as she did in a radically different role in Valley of the Dolls.” In his New York Times review of the film, Vincent Canby noted “The only nice thing is Sharon Tate, a tall, really great-looking girl who, for most of the movie, wanders around wearing glasses, which, of course means that no one, including Martin . . . notices that she is beautiful.” Sharon’s father, Colonel Paul Tate, saw The Wrecking Crew in the cinema at his army base in San Francisco. He liked it very much.
Roman and Sharon at Their Apex
Polanski was rolling in the glory of success that summer of 1968, and Sharon was triumphant in light comedy. They were at their apex while dwelling in their rented house at 1600 Summit Ridge Drive.
Sharon wore a black lace, strapless Christian Dior gown to the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby on June 12, 1968.
“Rosemary’s Baby was the smash hit of the summer [of 1968],” noted Robert Evans in his autobiography. It was both a big hit at the box office and also with the critics, and, in the minds of critics, brought the modern-day horror film a new distance from the era of Alfred Hitchcock. Polanski earned his second Academy Award nomination, this one for Best Adapted Screenplay.
After moving to Summit Ridge Drive, Roman and Sharon began hanging out with both Peter Sellers and Mia Farrow, who soon became a couple of sorts. Peter was in Los Angeles filming I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. His current wife, Britt Ekland, was not in town, and Roman had introduced Peter to Mia during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby.
Mia and Sellers shared an interest in what they called New Age spirituality. Joining the Beatles, Mia was one of the best-known followers, at least for a while, of Transcendental Meditation. Polanski described it: “It was through us that [Peter Sellers] met Mia Farrow—a true soulmate if ever there was one. Like her, Peter was heavily into the whole range of crackpot folklore that flourished in the 1960s, from UFOs through astrology to extrasensory perception. They both liked dressing up as rich hippies, complete with beads, chunky costume jewelry, and Indian cotton caftans.”
Polanski wrote how Peter would walk off a movie set if anyone should show up wearing the “unlucky” color of purple, or how he would precipitously depart a restaurant if he detected any “bad vibes” in the establishment. Peter would mutter, “Ro, I can’t stand it . . . bad vibes in here . . . let’s go somewhere else.”
Roman described a weekend the two couples—he and Sharon and Peter and Mia—spent at Joshua Tree, a famous area near Palm Springs, known for UFO sightings and superstitious vibes. “After smoking some grass one evening, Mia and Peter wandered off into the desert, hand in hand. I picked up a stick and tiptoed after them. They were deeply engrossed in a mystical dialogue about the stars, the infinite, and the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. I decided to enrich their experience and threw my stick high in the air so it landed at their feet—a real-life manifestation of the inexplicable.
‘Did you hear that?’ I heard Peter whisper in awe.
‘What was it?’ Mia whispered back.
‘I don’t know, but it was fantastic. Fantastic!’
‘We’ve got to tell Roman and Sharon,’ Peter said. ‘They’ll never believe this.’” Polanski stealth-trotted through the darkness and back to the motel, where he filled in Sharon about his ploy, so that, as he later wrote, “when they arrived, panting, at our door, we both expressed suitable wonder.”
Mia, in the video Sharon Tate, Murdered Innocence, recalled how eager Sharon was to please her mate: “I remember we were in Mexico, and Roman had complimented her on her dress, and she took it to a dressmaker, and she had nine of those dresses made in different colors. She wanted so hard to please him, and adored him, and clearly he adored her too.”
In the words of one biography of Sellers: “Peter kept running with the fast-living Polanski crowd, which, in addition to Roman and Sharon and Warren and Julie, included Yul Brynner, Peter Lawford, Gene Gutowski, the playboy Jay Sebring, and the screenwriter James Coe.”
A Short Film, Featuring Sharon, at Jay Sebring’s House
Sharon and Jay’s friend, the photographer Shahrokh Hatami, made a four-minute, forty-three-second home movie of Sharon, Sheilah Wells, Sheilah’s husband Fred Beir, and others at a party at Jay Sebring’s house on Easton Lane. The time was sometime in late 1968, because Sheilah Wells recalls being pregnant.
During an interview, Wells urged me to view the video of “that party at Jay’s, have you ever seen that? It was at Jay’s. We were laughing a lot. I had this headband on. I was pregnant at the time.”
So, I located it on the Internet, and indeed among the eight or nine young people gathered mainly out of doors in a patio area, there was a lot of jollity, laughing, and merriment, especially on the part of Sharon Tate and Sheilah Wells.
Sharon is attired in white pants, dark blue sweater, and a hooded, striped mid-thigh jacket, talking and at one time passing a joint to someone on a porch swing, by a table with a bowl of punch on a red-checked tablecloth. She looks very happy, lifting her head back as she laughs, and appears to be wearing a wedding ring. Sheilah Wells is in a porch swing. Sharon is sitting in front of her, sometimes grasping the arms of Wells as they rock in laughter.
Wells: “We were always laughing, in those days.” Since Wells gave birth in March of 1969, the film would have to have been shot in, say, the fall of 1968. “Yeah, because you could kind of tell I was pregnant. Roman wasn’t there. There’s a shot of Fred, Amanda’s father, and he’s on a swing.” (Fred was her husband at the time.)
Wells told me she thought Shahrokh Hatami shot the film. I contacted Mr. Hatami, and he confirmed he and Jay Sebring were good friends, and that in fact he was continually shooting footage following his documentary on Mia Farrow and Rosemary’s Baby, including this brief film at Jay’s house on Easton Lane.
Sammy Davis Jr. Has an Experience Involving Jay Sebring
The extraordinarily popular singer and show-biz personality, Sammy Davis Jr., was a strong supporter of the candidacy of Robert Kennedy for president. In the spring of 1968 Davis was performing in Chicago at a theater, and in his free time he spoke at rallies and fundraisers for Kennedy. Davis did these events during the Indiana and Illinois primaries and was in telephone contact with the candidate.
For the upcoming California Democratic primaries, Davis had to be in London for a production of the musical Golden Boy, based on a
play by Clifford Odets, which he had starred in on Broadway back in 1964. Davis was in London when Peter Lawford telephoned him that Robert Kennedy had been shot. Not long thereafter, still in shock over RFK, Davis had returned to Los Angeles, where he had a home. It was during that time when Davis had an experience involving Jay Sebring. In his Why Me? The Sammy Davis, Jr. Story he describes how he drove to the disco called The Factory, “that I had a piece of. I ran into a bunch of young actors I knew. One of them said to me, ‘Hey, man, there’s a party, you wanta go?’ Each of them had one fingernail painted red, an inside thing among Satanists to identify themselves to each other. I was curious. Evil fascinated me. I felt it lying in wait for me. And I wanted to taste it. I was ready to accept the wildness, the rolling in the gutter, and having to get up the next morning and wash myself clean. . . . The party was in a large, old house up in the hills and they were all wearing hoods or masks. They had a naked girl stretched out and chained to a red-velvet-covered altar.
“I played it cool. ‘Hey, what is this?’
‘We’re Satanists.’
‘Oh, this is a coven . . . ’
‘Right. The chick’s going to be sacrificed.’
“I’d read enough about it to know that they weren’t Satanists, they were bullshit artists and they’d found an exotic way they could ball each other and have an orgy.
“And get stoned. It was all fun and games and dungeons and dragons and debauchery and as long as the chick was happy and wasn’t really going to get any anything sharper than a dildo stuck into her, I wasn’t going to walk away from it.
“One of the leaders of the group tilted his hood back to show me his face. It was a good friend of mine, Jay Sebring, my barber, who’d become famous in Hollywood. I’d always known Jay was a little weird. He had a dungeon in his house and he’d say, ‘You’ve got to come over, man, see what I got downstairs. I’ve got some real antique pieces.’ . . . I never went there, but we were friends and often went to the same parties.”
Rosemary’s Baby Opens in France, October 17, 1968
On November 9, 1968, Paris Match featured a photo of Sharon Tate in a leg cast, with the description: “Sharon, the anti Brigitte, has a plaster cast on her beautiful leg, now broken after an accident, and on which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer placed a high bid last year. Sharon Tate, whom the Americans released against Brigitte Bardot, wife of the best-paid director in the world, fell down the stairs of her Paris hotel, where she came to for the preview of her husband’s movie Rosemary’s Baby.”
Gene Gutowski recalled the Rosemary’s Baby Paris premiere: “There was a fabulous happening, the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby in Paris. Peter (Sellers) was very much in attendance. We took over a whole hotel—the little place where Oscar Wilde had lived and died. It had become a showpiece, boutique-type hotel. We had a magnificent three-day party, the whole place reeking of, uh, substances, controlled or uncontrolled, mostly un-. Peter liked to indulge.” (Gene Gutowski’s recollections from Ed Sikov’s biography of Sellers, Mr. Strangelove, p. 286.)
The singer Regine threw a dinner party for Mia Farrow during the Paris festivities, as noted in Paris Match on November 9, 1968: “When the haunting film Rosemary’s Baby made its Paris premiere Regine, French singing star, decided to throw an appropriate party. Among the celebrated guests at her party were the guest of honor Mia Farrow, who stars in Baby, Roman Polanski who did the film for her, Peter Sellers, and some of the most celebrated members of Europe’s pop society. Regine decided that oysters and spaghetti would be the ideal main course. The guests seem to have enjoyed.” There’s a photo showing Roman signing Sharon’s big white leg cast at the Regine party.
It had a dreamworld quality, all this rush of success, of triumph (however fleeting), all these expensive meals, limousines, fresh flowers in hotel suites, quick showers before assignations, shopping in expensive stores. Would it ever end? Never!
That December, Jay Sebring opened a hair salon in San Francisco, and rented a houseboat there to entertain clients. Colonel Tate took the opportunity to visit the boat every weekend to fish. “After a day of cold beers and watching the lure dip and swell,” he later wrote. “I dropped my trash at the dumpsters. Each time, among the rubbish, I saw dozens of emptied bottles of rubbing alcohol, a necessary ingredient for making LSD.” (This apparently became a clue he pursued during his personal investigation into the murders the next year.)
Sharon and Roman at the Paris premiere of Rosemary’s Baby, October 1968—her left trouser leg covering the cast where she had broken her foot
Christmas at Cortina
Sharon, Roman, Peter Sellers, Roman’s doctor friend, Tony Greenburgh, and others, including Joanna Pettet and her husband, Alex Cord, planned a group skiing vacation in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Dolomite Alps in northern Italy. Before Sharon, Peter, and Roman left Los Angeles, composer Krzysztof Komeda was walking with a friend in the Hollywood Hills, and somehow fell and injured his head (there are varying accounts). Komeda couldn’t travel with his friends to London, and then to Cortina. He became increasingly ill, until a brain injury was diagnosed, and he went into the hospital in Los Angeles.
Komeda had composed scores for all of the major Polanski films up to then: Rosemary’s Baby, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Knife in the Water, and Cul-de-Sac. He was a prominent jazz pianist, issuing an important European jazz album in 1965, Astigmatic.
Sharon was particularly distraught, and after she returned from vacation in early January 1969 she visited Komeda daily in the hospital. Eventually Komeda was flown back to his native Poland by his wife (because of the free health care available there), where he passed away on April 23, 1969. Sharon was grief-stricken by this, one of her first personal encounters with the death of a friend.
Chapter 6
1969: Cielo Drive and Pregnancy
In January of 1969, Sharon Tate was featured along with other celebrities in Eye magazine, a Hearst publication, responding to the question, “Who would you like to be in your next life?” Sharon’s answer, “I’d like to be a fairy princess—a little golden doll with gossamer wings, in a voile dress, adorned with bright, shiny things. I see that as something totally pure and beautiful. Everything that’s realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent. I’m very sensitive to ugly situations. I’m quick to read people, and I pick up if someone’s reacting to me as just a sexy blonde. At times like that, I freeze. I can be very alone at a party, on the set, or in general, if I’m not in harmony with things around me.”
As for Roman Polanski early in the year, “for want of anything better to do,” as he later wrote in his autobiography, he began writing a screenplay based on a short story by Heere Heresma, a Dutch writer. It was another theme of defeat and disaster of the sort to which Mr. Polanski seemed drawn. The plot involved an alcoholic father who takes his daughter to a town on the sea, with a drunken binge ensuing and then, disaster. Peter Sellers agreed to take a part in the film, and Paramount’s Robert Evans agreed to invest modestly, $600,000, in the low-budget project. Polanski’s friend Simon Hesera would direct.
Meanwhile, on January 6, 1969, the trial of Sirhan Sirhan for the murder of Robert Kennedy opened in Los Angeles. There were a group of Sirhan’s notebooks found in his room, which contained writing calling for the death of Senator Kennedy. Some have claimed the handwriting is at variance to Sirhan’s. (In recent years, under hypnosis, Sirhan has alleged that the portions of his diaries about killing Kennedy were written during programming sessions conducted with a programmer over shortwave radio—Sirhan was a ham radio buff.) The prosecutor used them to show premeditated murder. Sirhan testified he didn’t recall shooting RFK and didn’t recall writing the notebooks, with hand-jotted entries such as “Kennedy must die/Kennedy must fall.”
News About Sharon’s Pregnancy
The doctor told Sharon she had conceived around December 15. Delivery date for the baby would therefore
be sometime between late September to the first week of October. It has been asserted that Sharon secretly put a hole in her diaphragm; but her husband has written that it was an accident, since she used an IUD.
Sharon and Roman planed to London in January for the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby. He’d had trouble with British censors. The longtime Hollywood reporter, Army Archerd (who had narrated the promotional film made of the pleasure liner trip from Italy to Los Angeles for Valley of the Dolls), wrote in Variety, January 15, 1969: “Roman Polanski, on the longhorn from London where Rosemary’s Baby was scissored, sadly told us, ‘This is the first country where I had a censor problem.’ (They cut the dream sequence where Mia Farrow’s legs are tied to the bed—and also snipped dialogue preceding) . . . Polanski said he’ll show the original version at the London premiere, January 23, but afterwards ‘What can I do besides protest?’ . . . He said censor John Trevelyan also objected to black magic in the film. ‘I was very upset,’ Roman lamented. ‘I didn’t contemplate any problem like this in England. We’ve had none in Italy or even in South America. I told them I didn’t see anything pornographic (as claimed) in the film.’ . . . Polanski and wife Sharon Tate remain in England until the furor subsides then return here (to L.A) to prep Donner Pass.”
In London, Sharon wondered whether or not to tell Roman. She called Jay from London to ask his advice. Jay’s advice was to wait a month before letting him know, till it was too late to have an abortion.
Sharon returned alone in a few days to California, for more dubbing on The Wrecking Crew, and because they had given up Patty Duke’s house, she stayed at the Chateau Marmont.