Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  A young Englishman, Michael Sarne, the director of the motion pictures Joanna and Myra Breckinridge, was going to stay in the Polanski residence, but just prior to Roman Polanski’s departure for Rio, he decided to rent a Malibu beach house instead.

  Wojtek Frykowski volunteered then to stay at the Polanski residence for the spring and summer. Polanski agreed that Wojtek could move in, provided that Ms. Folger stay there also.

  Rudy Altobelli, the owner of the Polanski residence, planned to spend the summer in Europe. Among Altobelli’s clients had been Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, and in 1969 he managed Christopher Lee and Christopher Jones, among others. One day Altobelli picked up an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker from Lancaster, Ohio, named William Garretson. Altobelli hired Garretson to serve as caretaker for the property while he was away in Europe. Garretson was given the “guest house” or caretaker’s house on the property as his residence during employment. He was paid a whopping thirty-five dollars a week.

  Garretson’s duties included taking care of Terry Melcher’s twenty-six cats, which Melcher evidently left behind for a while at the house. He also took care of Saperstein (Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier) and, later, Abigail Folger’s Dalmatian, plus Rudy Altobelli’s hostile Weimaraner, Christopher, a dog that loved to bark and even to bite. Also on the care list was Altobelli’s green singing finch. He was to keep an eye on the property, but not to fraternize, and he was to man the phone at the guest house.

  Another Version of Roman Learning Sharon Was Pregnant

  One biography of Sharon Tate claims Sharon kept the news about her pregnancy to herself for around three months. When she arrived in London on March 24, she was set to start on The Thirteen Chairs in April, working in both Italy and England. She settled in with Roman at their Eaton Place Mews house. That very week, John and Michelle Phillips flew in from the United States, and the two couples were invited by Alfred ‘Cubby’ Broccoli to stay with him at his country estate. Broccoli was the ultrasuccessful producer of a sequence of James Bond Films, beginning with From Russia with Love (1963) to Goldfinger (1964) and You Only Live Twice (1967) and the then forthcoming On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

  Sharon’s James Bond spy-spoof, The Wrecking Crew, had just opened. According to Michelle Phillips, on Saturday evening, March 28, when Roman and John Phillips were talking, Sharon asked Michelle to accompany her into a bathroom, where she puffed a cigarette. “Roman hated her smoking, and was always trying to get her to quit,” said Michelle. “She used to sneak cigarettes behind his back.” In the bathroom, Sharon announced that she was pregnant. “She said that she hadn’t yet told Roman, and began to laugh about it. She seemed very happy, very giddy.”

  According to Michelle’s memory, her pregnancy was so advanced Sharon could no longer hold off telling Polanski. She may have been fearful that he would try to get her to have an abortion. Anyway, she told him.

  According to what Sharon’s friend photographer Walter Chappell told the author, Roman had learned about the pregnancy while they were still in Los Angeles, and wanted her to go to Brazil for an abortion. Shahrokh Hatami, as the reader will recall, claims that Sharon told him a similar story.

  Sometime around the weekend with Alfred Broccoli, Roman had a dalliance in London with Michelle Phillips. John Phillips subsequently learned about it and waxed jealous, as recounted in Phillips’s autobiography. The soreness would surface in Polanski’s personal investigation of his wife’s murder later that fall. It will be recalled that Michelle and Warren Beatty also got after it in London in the same time period, and as he recalled in his autobiography, (p. 304), John Phillips, upon learning, called up Mr. Beatty to complain.

  Chapter 7

  Sharon’s Final Film

  For Sharon Tate, The Thirteen Chairs had a month of rehearsals, then the picture had a six-week shooting schedule in Rome, followed by a month of postproduction in London. The production ended in late May. Sharon was by then visibly pregnant.

  The comedy The Thirteen Chairs (original title: 12 + 1) is based on The Twelve Chairs, a 1928 satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov. It was directed by Nicolas Gessner and Luciano Lucignani, and starred, besides Sharon Tate, Vittorio Gassman, Orson Welles, Vittorio De Sica, and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Most of it was filmed in Italy.

  When Sharon Tate arrived in Rome for filming near the end of March 1969, she was about three months pregnant and beginning to show. Because the script called for several seminude scenes, the director arranged to film those scenes first. As evidence of her pregnancy increased, the director hid Tate’s stomach with large purses and scarves.

  In The Thirteen Chairs, Sharon played the part of Pat (no last name given), who works in an English antique shop. Vittorio Gassman, in the role of Mario Beretti, an American barber, flies to England to gather up an inheritance from an aunt. He has vast money on his mind, but discovers an empty and derelict old house and his inheritance: twelve old chairs. In order to pay for his travel expenses, he sells them to the local antiques dealer and Sharon Tate. This is a comedy, so Sharon conducts her part accordingly. Her first scene involves her selling a chamber pot to some American tourists, to whom she asserts the pot might have belonged to Queen Victoria, thus elevating the asking price.

  Gassman peddles the chairs to Sharon’s antique shop, only to discover his aunt has secreted a vast amount of valuable jewels in one of the chairs. But, by the time he rushes back to the store, the chairs have already been sold, and are on their way to London. Sharon assists Gassman in a journey to locate the chairs. She has the name of the purchaser on a strip of paper. In a hotel in London, Gassman grabs at Sharon, trying to seize the paper, which she eats. Struggling, he rips off her shirt, and bare-breasted she races through the corridors of the hotel to her room.

  Sharon and Gassman track the chairs to Paris and then to Rome. They run into an assortment of unusual characters, among them a driver of a furniture moving van named Albert (Terry-Thomas), a prostitute named Judy (Mylène Demongeot), the head of a roaming theater company that stages a strange version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Orson Welles), the Italian entrepreneur Carlo Di Seta (Vittorio De Sica), and his curvy daughter Stefanella (Ottavia Piccolo.)

  The chase for the jewels concludes in Rome, where the chair containing the treasure finds its way into a truck, and is collected by nuns who auction it off for charity. With nothing much left to do as a result of the failure in his quest, Mario travels back to New York City by ship, as Pat/Sharon sees him off and waves goodbye to him.

  Mario retreats to his barber shop, where he makes a discovery—not long before his departure for Europe, he had invented a way to make hair regrow miraculously. He now discovers that it works, and as the film ends, he laughs uproariously.

  During the filming, Sharon continually called Roman, asking him over and over to join her in Rome, but he told her he was too busy in London.

  Sharon Had an Affair in Rome?

  Actor Christopher Jones was represented by Rudy Altobelli, owner of Cielo Drive, who had flown to Rome with Sharon Tate in March. Jones later claimed that he and Sharon had an affair in Rome that month while Jones was filming the movie Brief Season with his then lover, actress Pia Degermark.

  “Sharon arrived in Rome with my manager,” says Jones, “and so we all arranged to go out to dinner that night. We were on the patio, waiting for Sharon, when suddenly she appeared. She looked amazing. We sat next to each other and she was very nervous, almost like a deer, but she had this beautiful, perfect face. She had this little scar on the left of her face against all this perfection, and when I reached over to touch it, I could feel her react.

  “She kept talking about off-the-wall spiritual things—she talked about reincarnation and how in a previous life she had died in a fire aged nine. The second she said that, the doors to the restaurant blew open even though there wasn’t any wind, and she looked really shocked.”

  Did he put the make on her? Jones said he wasn’t planning on trying, because “I kn
ew she was married to Roman.” Later that same evening, in any case, Christopher Jones said that he was in Sharon Tate’s room: “We were sitting on the couch talking when I finally asked her where Roman was. She said he was stuck in London having trouble with his passport. We were talking and getting closer, and although her skirt was riding right up, she wasn’t bothering to pull it down. . . . One minute she was looking at me and the next thing I knew, she was pulling me on top of her on to the bed.

  “I hadn’t even taken my clothes off but after we’d made love I told her I was going upstairs to sleep. She asked me to stay, but when I looked out the window I couldn’t see a fire escape and my first thought then was: ‘What if Polanski comes back?’ I wasn’t afraid of him, just worried about the repercussions, but she stopped asking me to stay and I left.

  “The next day I ran into actress Nathalie Delon (wife of actor Alain Delon) who was a friend of Sharon’s and whom I had also been seeing, and she said: ‘Chris, what did you do to Sharon? She has never been so in love.’

  Jones later told a newspaper reporter that he knew Sharon was pregnant, and felt guilty. “I’ve thought about this a lot since and the marriage vows say: ‘What God joins together, let no man put asunder.’ Well, God obviously separated them and put me there.”

  Another Jones memory: “One night we went to visit the Trevi Fountain, and I looked at her and had the strongest feeling she was going to die. Another time I was looking over at her and asking her what she was thinking about, and she suddenly came out with: ‘The Devil is beautiful. Most people think he’s ugly, but he’s not.’ I thought it weird at the time but Roman had just done the movie Rosemary’s Baby so I related it to that.

  “I told her she shouldn’t say things like that because it made me nervous.

  “I knew that she and Roman lived in quite an isolated place in LA, so I told her that for her own protection she should have a gun, but she said that she could never shoot anyone even if she had one.”

  Of the last night they spent together in Rome, Jones says: “I told her that we’d get back together when we were in America and she agreed, and when I said: ‘What about Roman?,’ she said: ‘Don’t worry about Roman.’

  “I thought it was love. Whatever brief time we had together, we were very happy. I always expected to see her again.”

  Is it true? Did they really commingle during a busy spring in Rome?

  Jones went from Rome to Dingle, a town in County Kerry in Ireland on the Atlantic coast, to begin shooting on Ryan’s Daughter. (Loosely based on Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, Ryan’s Daughter starred Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones, Leo McKern, Sarah Miles, and others. Christopher Jones plays a shell-shocked World War I veteran engaging in an affair with the married Sarah Miles, in a drama set amidst the 1916 Irish uprising and Irish small-town life.) Filming went on for a number of months, during which his friend Sharon was murdered, and then after filming was concluded, Jones returned to Los Angeles where he lived for a while at the guest cottage owned by his agent Rudy Altobelli located just a few feet from the murder house. Jones was greatly stunned by the death of his friend, and was disturbed when Mr. Altobelli toured guests through the blood-spattered house.

  On Easter weekend, Sharon flew to London from Rome. Roman met her at Heathrow Airport bearing a 1954 Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn, a gift. After the weekend, Sharon returned to the Grand Hotel de la Ville to do the remaining scenes of the movie.

  Polanski on Top of the World in Spring-Summer of 1969

  By April, Polanski at last settled in on The Day of the Dolphin. Gone were the cannibalism epic on the Donner Party, and Paganini’s flirtation with the Devil. As he said goodbye to a composer and Donner Pass, and hello to kill-trained dolphins, Polanski was literally on top of the world in the late spring and early summer of 1969—about to be a father, with a fully funded thriller to create—living in adorable London while still young with a glorious ever-more famous and beautiful wife.

  Happy, content, at his acme, succeeding, triumphant, energetic, creative, Polanski began work on The Day of the Dolphin in his London Mews house in fiscal security. “As usual in the case of a major new Hollywood project,” he later noted, “no one quibbled about research and preproduction costs. Anything I needed I got and I was working with renewed relish.”

  The 1968 Academy Awards were presented April 14, 1969, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles. Ruth Gordon won for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, for her work in Rosemary’s Baby. Roman was nominated for “Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium,” against Vernon Harris for Oliver and Neil Simon for The Odd Couple, but all lost to James Goldman for The Lion in Winter. Roman did not attend, or at least there is no mention of it in any of the scads of books, interviews, Internet searches, and articles the author has studied.

  There are always blizzards of scripts to read and storms of possible projects swirling around a scriptwriter/director, even in the middle of a fully financed project. One example for Polanski came in April when the original screenplay written by Polanski and produced by Cadre Productions titled A Day at the Beach had completed filming in Copenhagen. Adapted from a Dutch novel by Heer Heresma, the film was directed by a Polanski friend, young Moroccan director Simon Hesera. Paramount Pictures had put up $600,000 after Peter Sellers had agreed to appear in the film. But there was trouble. In his autobiography, Paramount Pictures executive Robert Evans tells of not liking the finished product.

  The movie is set in a beat-up Danish resort by the sea. It traces a day in the life of Bernie, an alcoholic (played by Mark Burns) who conducts Winnie (Beatie Edney), a young girl with a leg brace, in the rain to the resort. Winnie calls Bernie “uncle” but it is probable he is, in actuality, her father. Peter Sellers has a cameo as a gay shopkeeper who flirts with Bernie. In July, Evans flew to London to view a rough cut, and didn’t like it. Polanski, wrote Evans, “wanted to stay on and reedit it.” The film was not destined for heights, and in fact the movie may never have been released.

  Never mind about the ill-fated A Day at the Beach, Polanski was busy with dolphins. The Day of the Dolphin is a book literary critics call “sprawling,” that is, it covers a wide vista of concerns. It has plenty of Cold War analysis, criticism of the war in Vietnam, a parable on an agency such as the CIA duping a president, as at the Bay of Pigs, into carrying out a project planned by a previous administration, and an ultrasuspenseful plot line starring talking dolphins, which had to be done well, and definitely not in the chanting chipmunk mode, lest audiences think it was a satire and start chuckling. This gave Mr. Polanski plenty of trouble in coming up with a script.

  Sirhan Sentenced to the Gas Chamber

  Twenty-five-year-old Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced on April 23, 1969, to die in the gas chamber. A handwritten letter from Senator Edward Kennedy, asking for leniency, was read in open court. Judge Herbert Walker nevertheless sentenced Sirhan Bishara Sirhan to die. The next day, May 22, Sirhan was taken late at night by helicopter to the Van Nuys airport, where an Air National Guard pilot flew him to Hamilton Air Force Base, and then he traveled by caravan to San Quentin penitentiary north of San Francisco, arriving just at the arms of dawn.

  Sharon Tate was in Rome working on her new movie at the time. Did she read about Sirhan’s sentencing in the Italian newspapers?

  Steve McQueen and the Occult

  Around the spring of 1969, Sharon’s friend Steve McQueen had finished filming his movie The Reivers, based on the novel by William Faulkner, in which he played the role of Boon Hogganbeck.

  According to Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel by Marshall Terrill, evidence of McQueen’s superstitions and belief in occult powers were adduced when, after completing The Reivers, he went for some rest to his Palm Springs home, and then took night walks in the desert. One night walking alone he spotted a campfire, and ventured close. McQueen spotted several young women sitting “Indian-style” while chanting, while nearby on the ground lay “Satanic paraphern
alia.” Apparently thereafter McQueen began to have headaches, and “an image of the devil in my mind.”

  After this event, McQueen reported that “every Friday night I would get these intolerable migraine headaches. My head would hurt so bad, and all the while there would be this image of the devil in my mind.”

  McQueen consulted a psychic. He was told that on Friday nights, “all the witches in England get together and circle” and pray for his death. They wanted it by his own hand. The psychic told him not to race in any auto with the satanic hues of red and black.

  McQueen mentioned the occult in an interview, dated October 21, 1980, with a professor at UCLA named Brugh Joy, not long before McQueen passed away. Mr. Joy asked if at one time McQueen “went into the occult.”

  McQueen replied, “I was on the ring of it. Jay Sebring was my best friend. . . . I was sure taken care of; my name never got drawn into that mess. Jay was having an affair with the girlfriend of a warlock. It may be for the worse, but I was always against it. I was one of the ones who always felt that I was one of the good guys, but boy I tell you, they did a number on me. I’m against that whole thing.”

  The interviewer pointed out, and McQueen agreed “There’s a subconscious area that was attracted into the circle. And it comes out of the power element of it.” McQueen replied that it wasn’t so for him. “It was the women, and the dope, and the running around. That’s all that was.”

  It was pointed out that dope and women and running around were available on many scenes. There was something about the occult that attracted McQueen.

  McQueen answered, “But I didn’t know it was the occult. It’s bullshit is what it is. No, I really didn’t know what it was, and by the time I did, I had never gone to any of the meetings. Never knew anything about it, and was always against it. It was never for me.”