by Ed Sanders
What meetings? Or, meetings of what? A religious cult with members from the LA music and movie scene?
A Slice of London Life in June
After filming The Thirteen Chairs, Tate returned to her husband in London. She posed in their apartment for photographer Terry O’Neill in casual domestic scenes such as opening baby gifts, and also completed a series of glamour photographs for the British magazine Queen.
Sharon Tate was twenty-six years old, and seemed likely, in her film career, to escape her early trek through movies involving human sacrifice, vampirism, Malibu Barbieism, Valley of the Dolls suicide, and spy-spoofery. Her husband Roman Polanski was thirty-five and luxuriating in what many filmmakers desire, a fully funded Hollywood film which allowed him to spend well beyond the limitations of what his fee for Rosemary’s Baby had allowed. With that kind of money, a jittery nouveau riche lifestyle could be conducted with a just-before-middle-age breeziness. It was a time of fame, largess, big money from United Artists, and the purchasing of fancy automobiles with the ease that Midwesterners purchased cherry phosphates after Sunday School.
Sharon meanwhile was enjoying her birthday present Rolls. In an article published on June 7, columnist Sheilah Graham wrote, “Sharon Tate, blonde, beautiful and pregnant, was at Margaret Gardner’s party in London’s Mayfair section.” After the party they went away in Sharon’s cream Rolls Royce, dropping Sheilah Graham off.
“It was Roman’s birthday present to me,” said Sharon. “We’re taking it back to Hollywood to be with our 17 cats, three dogs and the new baby. I can’t wait to get back to start on the nursery.”
Sharon ran an ad in the London Times for an English nanny to come to Los Angeles and interviewed dozens of candidates, selecting one named Marie Lee.
Not everything was perfect. The normally randy Mr. Polanski, with his wife’s increasing pregnancy, found that he had become impotent, at least with her. A biography of Roman by Thomas Kiernan paints how imperfect and uncertain it was: “‘The summer did nothing to improve their relationship,’ recalls a friend who was on the scene. ‘God knows, Sharon tried, she tried almost too much. But he was bored with her being pregnant. He treated her like she was a piece of excess baggage. He was even pointedly cruel to her in front of others at times, calling her a dumb hag and criticizing her whenever she expressed an opinion.’”
However eager Sharon was to get back to Cielo Drive, as Robert Evans wrote in his autobiography, Polanski wanted to stay on in London and work on re-editing A Day at the Beach. More importantly, Polanski was having trouble finishing the script for The Day of the Dolphin. He decided that he had to remain in London to try to get it done. Sharon was too pregnant to fly, at least trans-oceanically, so she booked a room on the Queen Elizabeth 2.
Writer Peter Evans later wrote of a dinner with Sharon and Roman the evening before Sharon left to return to the United States to have the baby: “I had had dinner with him and Tate at Mario and Franco’s Tiberio restaurant in London. The following day Tate was to sail to Los Angeles, where she was to have the baby, while Polanski headed for Paris to discuss a new movie. They were the Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford of their time. Cool, nomadic, talented and nicely shocking. I had written a profile of them for Goodbye Baby & Amen, the book I had written on London in the Sixties, with pictures by David Bailey.”
Sharon was eager to read what Evans had written about them. She was told she’d have to wait till the book came out. David Bailey had photographed them for the book, embracing, with both naked to the waist. Evans wrote that the photo was Polanski’s idea. “‘Anyone who is interested in the history of the Sixties and the permissive society must consider the Polanskis,’ I had written. ‘They knew very well the excitement, the miseries, the happiness and the fear of the times.’
“They helped to demolish the Hollywood image of what movie stardom was about. They had pursued the panaceas of the era from marijuana to LSD and knew the score. Polanski took three trips, two of them bad. Tate said that it had ‘opened the world to me. I was like a very tight knot, too embarrassed to dance, to speak even. But I could never touch it again. Now I think it would destroy me.’
“There was an honesty that was almost naive about them,” Evans wrote. “Together they believed they were challenging the citadels of censorship and cant. From Poland—his mother had died in Auschwitz—Polanski was especially sensitive about a person’s right to freedom. Tate wanted to be like him. ‘I wish I had the tolerance to let everybody have complete freedom,’ she said. ‘To be able to take a man home and make love and enjoy it without some lurking puritanical guilt interrupting the pleasure. . . . Mentally it’s what I want, but emotionally it is more difficult to take.’”
Evans pointed out that if Sharon “was under her husband’s spell, it was where she wanted to be. It was also plain that Polanski was totally in love with his wife. . . . Yet it was a happy marriage. ‘We have a good arrangement,’ Tate once told me solemnly. ‘Roman lies to me and I pretend to believe him.’”
Just before returning to America, Sharon had read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which she left in their bedroom in London and told her husband would make a wonderful movie. Perhaps she was suggesting a path away from filmic weirdness, although the novel was a tragedy where the heroine, Tess, is captured at Stonehenge by the police after murdering a man who had tormented her, and Tess is hanged at novel’s close. One account said Sharon’s friend Julie Christie gave Sharon a copy of Thomas Hardy’s novel, with the inscription, “For my Hardy heroine.” (Julie had recently become a Hardy heroine in 1967’s Far from the Madding Crowd.) When Polanski later made the film Tess (1979) he dedicated it “For Sharon.”
Polanski’s Version of Saying Goodbye on the Ocean Liner
He’d already shipped his Ferrari back to the States, and so borrowed Simon Hesera’s Alfa Romeo to drive Sharon to the QE2 where they had lunch aboard. Then it was time to part, and both, according to Polanski’s account in his autobiography, had tears in their eyes. She accompanied him to the downward walkway, and pressed her round stomach firmly against him, “as if to remind me of the baby,” he wrote. “As I held and kissed her, a grotesque thought flashed through my mind: you’ll never see her again. . . . While walking off the ship and back to the car, I told myself to snap out of it—forget I’d ever had such a morbid feeling, call Victor Lownes, have a ball, see some girls.”
Polanski’s partner in Cadre Films, Gene Gutowski, has spoken of a fancy baby carriage he gave Sharon that she took with her on the QE2. Her Rolls Royce was shipped by separate vessel, and seems to have arrived in Los Angeles in August, right after the murders.
Chapter 8
The Summer of 1969
Jay Sebring met her plane in Los Angeles when she arrived on July 20, 1969. Apparently she had been too gravid to fly transoceanic, but not too gravid for a cross-US flight. Sharon and Jay arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive in time to view the epochal Moon Landing. In June the Tate family—Doris, Patti, and Debra—had moved from San Francisco to the Los Angeles area, to a home on Monero Drive in Palos Verdes. Colonel Tate remained stationed at Fort Baker (which borders Sausalito in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco). The afternoon of the Moon Landing her parents had traveled from San Francisco to San Pedro to work on their house in Palos Verdes, then they drove to Cielo Drive to watch history being made. Sharon, Paul, Doris, Jay, Wojtek, and Abigail all viewed the marvel of Neil Armstrong’s first descent onto the dusty surface. Mother Doris brought a wooden rocking chair as a gift—the very one in which she had rocked and nursed her three daughters, Sharon, Patti, and Debra.
Sebring would see Sharon often during the ensuing days. Kirk Douglas, in his autobiography, repeats the gossip: “Jay went with Sharon Tate before Roman Polanski did. There was talk that their romance still continued, even that the baby might have been Jay’s. I knew Sharon Tate. Beautiful, naive young girl.”
Joanna Pettet also recalls the intimacy between Jay and Sharon
: “I knew Jay very, very well. I met Jay through my ex-husband Alex Cord. Jay was a great guy, and he was always in love with Sharon. They stayed friends even after Sharon married Roman. Jay would have done anything in the world for Sharon, he loved her so much. And Roman was not bothered by it, because I think he was secure with his relationship with Sharon.”
Polanski watched the Moon Landing at his house on West Eaton Place Mews. The rest of his week was spent in “continual script meetings” with Michael Braun, who was contributing to the script, and set designer Richard Sylbert.
(Out at the Spahn Ranch, just at that moment, young Manson follower Snake Lake and a few others gathered in the building called the bunkhouse to listen to “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” on Straight Satan biker Danny DeCarlo’s radio.)
In the news that weekend was the tragedy at Chappaquiddick Island. Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy flew the afternoon of July 18 from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard and took a ferry to Chappaquiddick Island, a spit of sand five hundred feet across from Edgartown, Massachusetts, for a quiet party that night for former campaign workers for Robert Kennedy. Later that night, he crashed his Oldsmobile off a bridge returning to the ferry, into a pond. He managed to rescue himself, but a young former campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne, also a passenger, drowned. It was in all the papers, including the Los Angeles Times, and on television. Sharon Tate must have watched or read of it.
Sharon Helping in the Marital Troubles of Sheilah Wells: July 1969
In an interview published in Screenland, November 1969, former roommate Sheilah Wells described how Sharon tried to save Wells’s marriage after she returned that summer from London. Sharon had originally put Wells and her future husband together. Wells: “She had been working on a film called Don’t Make Waves with Robert Webber. They’d had lunch together with an actor friend, Fred Beir. Suddenly Robert and Sharon decided that Fred and I would be perfect for each other. Fred and I fell in love on our first date. We were married in January, 1967. Sharon and Roman were married a year later, in January, 1968. My baby, Amanda Tate, was born March 16, 1969. And five weeks later, Fred and I started to have serious problems.
“Although Sharon was in Europe at the time, she heard about Freddie and me. So when she came home, just three weeks before she died, Sharon called Freddie and invited him to come up to her house. He went over and she talked to him. That was Sharon. She was always going out on a limb for everyone. Everyone but herself.”
In an interview for this book, Sheilah confirmed that Sharon, upset over the possible breakup of Sheilah and Fred, had had lunch with Mr. Beir, and that the marriage was patched up, but only for several weeks. “There was an ethereal quality about her,” Wells said to the author. “She had this thing I sometimes wished I’d had, even though I knew that eventually it might be bad for me. Do you understand? She had this kind of beauty and fragility, and you just knew she was bound to get hurt because of it. But still you couldn’t help but admiring that quality in her. She was just such a special person.”
In the Screenland interview, Wells continued: “I never really stopped to think about it until now, but for the past six years so many good things have happened to me because of my friendship with Sharon. She was always there. When I went to the hospital to have the baby, Sharon was the first person to come see me. She was so thrilled when I asked her to be the godmother and when she knew the baby’s middle name was for her.”
When Sheilah came home from the hospital, Sharon gave her many things for baby Amanda Tate Beir, including a stuffed dog and a tiny yellow-flowered outfit with jingling bells on it that Sharon had purchased in Europe. The same day that Sharon brought Sheilah the yellow-flowered baby outfit, she also carried swatches of fabrics for decorating the nursery on Cielo Drive. She asked Sheilah to check out the colors she had chosen, which Sheilah recalled as red, white, and blue.
In a German publication called Constanze Magazine, Wells commented, not long after the murders: “I remember an evening in July, about three weeks before the murder. I was with Sharon in the bedroom watching television. In the sitting room on the sofa lay Gibby and Frykowski. Sharon pointed at them both and said sighing: ‘These people . . . I do not understand this, they are always stoned.’”
Jay Sebring in June–July of 1969
On again/off again Sebring companion Sharmagne Leland-St. John recalled moving out of Sebring’s house on Easton Drive: “I am not certain of the exact date when I physically moved out of Easton Drive, but I had a burst appendix in early June and I remember attending Brian Morris’s Gone with the Wind Party on June 7th at the Cielo Drive house; I had already moved out of Easton Drive. We had been burgled by a friend of Jay’s. . . . A woman named Carol. Jay was in Vegas (I think cutting Frank’s hair) and I was, with Jay’s permission, out with Steve McQueen, who was Jay’s best male friend. When we returned I found my belongings strewn all up and down the outside stairway. I got spooked and decided to get a place of my own. This woman stole enormous oil paintings, etc. I got one back which flew off the top of her car in Bel Air! I ran an ad in the Free Press and someone, an artist, saw it, luckily when he found the canvas, he re-stretched it. I remember the exact wording of the ad! ‘Lost in the wee small hours of the morning, one original Massimo oil painting. Please return it because I love it. REWARD.’ Peter Yarrow paid the guy the reward. I can’t remember why. I guess because he took me to recover it. I moved out but we continued seeing each other, and I still spent nights at Easton.”
Meanwhile, Sebring was ultrabusy running his ever-increasing hair styling mini-empire in June and July, and, when Sharon returned, he saw her regularly till the end.
The past—often like quicksand.
Abigail and Wojtek
Compared to the Spahn Ranch, the lifestyles of those living in the house on Cielo Drive to which Sharon Tate returned in July of 1969 were within the bounds of normality. Nevertheless, John Phillips, the songwriter, told a reporter that there were weirdos hanging out on Cielo Drive that summer of the type he had been studiously avoiding for years.
In April and May of 1969, Abigail Folger took an active part in the Tom Bradley mayoral campaign. According to a coworker, she worked at the youth headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. She also worked for a few months as a volunteer helping children in Watts. During the mayoral campaign, Abigail Folger became interested in a black group called the Street Racers, who evidently served as security forces for the Bradley rallies and offices.
Sometime in June, after Mr. Bradley’s defeat on May 26, Ms. Folger and her mother visited New York City. Abigail also traveled frequently from Los Angeles to San Francisco to see her family.
In the spring and summer of 1969, Mr. Frykowski made lengthy daily entries into notebooks in order to work on his grasp of the English language. He was hoping to become a movie scriptwriter, and as we have noted, he was also helping with research on dolphins for Roman’s movie.
Around July 7 or 8, Frykowski learned that Sharon was coming back around July 20. He and Ms. Folger began to move clothing from Cielo Drive to their own home on Woodstock Road.
A Polish artist named Witold Kaczanowski, aka Witold K., had been brought to the United States through the kindness of Roman Polanski. He naturally came to live in Los Angeles where he cultivated the Polanskis’ circle of friends. He was staying, during the summer of murder, at the Folger/Frykowski Woodstock Road home and was a frequent house guest at 10050 Cielo Drive during the spring and summer of 1969. An actor friend of Wojtek by the name of Mark Fine had also been staying at the Woodstock address but moved out the second week in July, having stayed one week.
Early in July, several friends of Frykowski from Canada promised Wojtek samples of a new drug called methlenedioxyl-amphetamine or MDA, a euphoric stimulant with overtones of aphrodisia that was coming into vogue. According to police reports, Frykowski was being set up to serve as a wholesaler of quantities of MDA manufactured in Toronto. (Both Mr. Frykowski and Ms. Folger w
ere enjoying MDA on the night they died.)
In mid-July, Frykowski’s friends from Canada went to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, allegedly to create some sort of movie about marijuana use there. This Jamaican movie project was a front for a large marijuana import operation involving private planes secretly winging the dope to the United States via Florida and Mexico. Investigation into the operation after the murders resulted in one of the biggest dope busts in Jamaican history.
They were making films on Cielo Drive. One day in July, William Garretson, the caretaker, saw Wojtek Frykowski taking pictures of a nude lady in the swimming pool. A cable-TV repairman named Villela came to the Polanski residence and encountered some sort of a nude love scene going on.
In the middle of July, Wojtek ran over Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier, named after the doctor in Rosemary’s Baby who prescribed weird herbal drinks during her satanic pregnancy. Wojtek called London with the news, and Roman then purchased another Yorkshire terrier, which was named Prudence.
Sometime perhaps in the middle of July, Brian Morris threw a catered party for 150 at the Cielo residence, apparently to round up members for a new private club, Bumbles, which Morris was set to open. Roman had apparently invested around $7,000 in the club. Morris had lived at the same time as Sharon and Roman at the Chateau Marmont in early 1968.
(Actress and Sebring girlfriend Sharmagne Leland-St. John recalls the large party put on by Morris at the Polanski residence as occurring “on or about June 7, 1969.” It had the theme, Gone with the Wind. What did that mean? I asked. “It was a theme party,” she answered. “We all dressed like Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler!” For his part, Shahrokh Hatami recalls the Gone with the Wind party organized by Brian Morris as having occurred on August 1, which was the birthday of his then girlfriend, Ann Ford.)
The past is like quicksand.
Mrs. Polanski asked Abigail Folger and Wojtek Frykowski to stay on at 10050 Cielo Drive until her husband was to return from London.