Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  Sharon and Jay, loyal friends all the way

  Novelist Jerzy Kosinski told me that he and his wife were set to fly to Los Angeles on August 7 to visit at the Polanski residence and wait for Roman to return for his birthday on August 18. The Kosinskis’ luggage was misplaced on the way to New York from Europe so, instead of traveling immediately to Los Angeles, they waited in New York for the luggage. This may have saved their lives, because they were not able to arrive in Los Angeles by August 8th.

  Over in London that morning, the four Beatles walked across Abbey Road while a policeman held up traffic as a photographer (Iain MacMillan) on a stepladder took a few pictures. Not long later Paul McCartney made some sketches for the design of the album called Abbey Road, an album a bit more peaceful than the White Album, but too late to impact the locusts of the Spahn Ranch.

  That same morning, August 8, 1969, the housekeeper, Winifred Chapman, arrived at the Polanski residence at 8 a.m. At around 8:30 a.m., a Mr. Guerrero arrived to paint the nursery. He worked until midafternoon, completing the first coat. He was scheduled to return on Monday to finish the second coat of paint. Before lunch, Winifred washed down the front Dutch door because the dogs had dirtied it. “PIG” and a fingerprint would dirty it later.

  Mrs. Chapman testified that on Tuesday, August 4, she had washed the French doors in Sharon’s bedroom, where Friday midnight would find a murderer’s fingerprint. Wednesday and Thursday were Mrs. Chapman’s days off.

  At about 11 a.m. Roman Polanski called from London. Mrs. Chapman answered the phone. Then Sharon talked. Sharon hinted she might throw a birthday party for him on August 18, when he returned. There was a heavy heat wave in Los Angeles, and there was an edge to the conversation. She was anxious for him to arrive soon, so that he might attend a course for expectant fathers. Mrs. Polanski planned to have natural childbirth. She told her husband that a little kitten had wandered onto the property, and she was feeding it with an eyedropper. She was edgy. She didn’t want houseguests any longer. She was due in two to three weeks. One of the prime reasons for her edginess was obvious—she wanted her husband, and the father of her child, home.

  Polanski was having trouble finishing the script and planning the production of The Day of the Dolphin, so he had hired an American writer named Michael Braun to help him with the final sequences and had postponed returning to Los Angeles a number of times. “It dawned on me, as we talked,” he recalls in his autobiography, “that I was getting nowhere with the ending . . . and that the sequence I’d been working on could probably be cut altogether. ‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘I’m coming. I’ll finish the script over there. I’ll leave tomorrow.’ I couldn’t hop a plane the next day, a Saturday, because I needed a US visa and the consulate was closed, but I made up my mind to do so the following Monday or Tuesday (August 11 or 12), as soon as the visa was granted.”

  In the afternoon, the gardeners and groundskeepers of the estate, Joe Vargas and Dave Martinez, arrived.

  Lunch on a Hot Friday Afternoon

  Joanna Pettet and her friend from London, Barbara Lewis, arrived about 12:30 for lunch. Pettet recalls “We went together. I think I called Barbara, and said ‘I’m going over to Sharon’s,’ and we went together.” Abigail and Wojtek showed up, too, after which Mrs. Chapman served a late lunch for Pettet, Lewis, Sharon, Abigail, Wojtek, and herself.

  Joanna Pettet was twenty-six when she had lunch with Sharon. She got her big break appearing in a film based on Mary McCarthy’s novel, The Group, in 1966. That triumph triggered appearances in Night of the Generals, the James Bond spoof Casino Royale, and Peter Yates’s Robbery with Sir Stanley Baker, all three of which opened in 1967. There was a nude layout of Pettet in Playboy in 1968. She’d married actor Alex Cord in 1968, the same year she gave birth to their son, Damien. She starred in the movie Blue, which opened in May of 1968. Blue was a Western set in the Texas-Mexico border country of 1850, and starring Terence Stamp and Karl Malden, in addition to Pettet. The Best House in London, described as a “Victorian period comedy,” was also released in June of 1969. Pettet went on to a successful acting career into the 1990s.

  Joanna Pettet recalls the luncheon that hot August day: “I saw Sharon all the time. That very last day I went up to the house with my friend Barbara Lewis.” Barbara Lewis had been in a low-budget horror movie, The Ghosts of Hanley House, the previous year under the name Barbara Chase, and later had a part in the well-received film Nine to Five. Lewis, under her birth name, Blum, was later married to psychedelic writer and teacher Timothy Leary from 1978 to 1992.

  Pettet further remembered the lunch: “We had a great day. The most memorable moment of that day—after this horrible thing happened, I kept replaying this in my mind—we were at the swimming pool and all of us were out there—there was Wojtek, Abigail Folger, Sharon, myself, Barbara Lewis, and my son.

  “Wojtek was in the pool teaching my son to swim, who was ten months old. And Sharon was absolutely gorgeous. She had no top on, but just the bottoms with her beautiful baby belly. She was just so happy.

  “The housekeeper made us lunch. And Sharon said, ‘I’m not eating the rest of my sandwich.’ She only ate half of her sandwich. And this is the main thing I remember, that she only ate half of her sandwich, because she was watching her weight. Pettet commented on how lean and svelte Sharon’s figure was, even though she was about to give birth. “You wouldn’t even know she was pregnant if you took the belly off.”

  I asked if Sharon was going to continue her career after the baby, and Pettet replied, “She was. She intended to work.” I asked also about Sharon appearing in The Story of O. Pettet: “The Story of O, if she did mention it, I don’t remember.” Regarding that, Pettet commented, “Sharon would never have done anything that Roman said not to do. She was completely under his spell.”

  Sharon Very Much Had Wanted to Have Her Baby in London

  “Sharon did not want to come back to the United States alone,” Pettet told the author. “She was really lonely. She did not want to come back here to have her baby, and he just filled that house with friends, basically friends of his, not friends of Sharon’s, because he didn’t want her to be lonely, but he wanted her here. He must have tremendous guilt, because she wanted to have her baby in London.”

  Sharon Tate, August 8, 1969

  At the luncheon, Sharon brought up her suspicion that Roman had sent her back to the United States because he was having an affair. “That’s what she thought,” said Pettet.

  I mentioned I had read that during this final luncheon Sharon mentioned that she had found out recently about a fling that Roman had had with Michelle Phillips. Joanna replied, “That’s true. She actually didn’t tell me that it was Michelle, but she did mention she had heard that Roman was having a fling with someone. I tried to reassure her, ‘No, no, don’t be silly.’

  “She wasn’t devastated—she had just said she had heard that he was fooling around, she wasn’t surprised about it—you know, Roman and Sharon they had, not an open relationship, but I know it was a very, uh, 1960s marriage, where you could maybe fool around with somebody and it wasn’t going to be the end of the world. But, she was not happy about the report she had heard. She didn’t mention Michelle.”

  Joanna Pettet and Barbara Lewis departed at 3:30 p.m. At around 3:45, Dave Martinez, one of the gardeners, left the property. He asked Bill Garretson to be sure to water the grounds during the weekend.

  Jay Sebring called at 3:45, and Wojtek left at 4 p.m. in Sharon’s rented yellow Camaro. At 4:30, Abigail Folger went to her usual daily appointment with her psychiatrist.

  Frykowski drove to Sebring’s house on Easton Drive and picked up a woman named Susan, with whom Sebring, according to a police report, had spent the previous night. Frykowski drove with Susan to artist Witold K.’s gallery-boutique at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to get the keys to Wojtek and Abigail’s house on Woodstock Road (where Witold K. was staying.) Mr. K. did not have the keys to the house because they were over at Mr
. K.’s girlfriend’s house. Mr. Frykowski finally located the keys and then went with the woman to the Woodstock Road house. There they spent time listening to records.

  At 4:30 a gardener at Cielo signed for Roman’s two steamer trunks, just arrived from London. He didn’t want to awaken Sharon, who was napping in her room.

  As it was extremely hot, Sharon had asked Winifred Chapman if she wanted to stay over. Chapman had declined. At around 4:45, the gardener left, giving the housekeeper a ride down to the bus stop. When they departed, Sharon was alone in the house, asleep.

  At around 5:30 p.m., Sebring was seen on Easton Drive by a neighbor, zooming past in his black Porsche, followed closely by another sports car.

  Between 6:30 and 7 p.m., a lightweight bicycle was delivered to the residence. Abigail Folger had purchased it that afternoon. Jay Sebring answered the door, wine bottle in hand.

  Sharon was supposed to stay overnight with Sheilah Wells at Wells’s house. Something, probably the heat and tiredness, caused her to change her mind. (According to an LAPD interrogation report, Wells lived at 7419 Woodrow Wilson Drive, not far from Cass Elliot’s place at 7708.)

  Joanna Pettet, along with her husband and their baby, went to Sheilah’s house that night. Pettet remembers it well: “I said, ‘Where’s Sharon?’ and Sheilah said, ‘I just called, she’s not coming. Jay’s coming over.’ It was just a couple of hours after I left Cielo.”

  I asked Sheilah Wells during a conversation while researching this book, “She was going to come over?” Wells replied, “Yes, she was, and then I phoned her back, and I said don’t park in this certain driveway, because the other neighbors had been complaining about it, that people were parking in their part of the driveway. And then she said, ‘You know, Sheilah, Jay is going to come over,’—and it was really hot, August 8—and she said, ‘I don’t know, maybe we’ll just go for a hamburger, or do something, I just don’t feel . . . ’ I knew how she felt, because of just having had a baby, and being hot and all of that. And I didn’t push it, and that stayed with me for a long time. I should have just pushed it, and acted that I was hurt by it, because I had other people coming over.”

  Something to think about during the next flow of decades.

  In an interview in the November 1969 issue of Screenland, Wells spoke of Sharon’s final evening: “Early on the night she was murdered, my phone rang. It was Sharon. She asked me to come over. I told her I couldn’t, that I was having a few people in for dinner. Then she said, ‘Can I come over to your house?’ I said, sure, of course, come on over. But a little while later she called and said she wasn’t coming. She was too tired, she said. She’d decided just to go over to a local drive-in and get a hamburger. I told her that was silly. In the time it took her to drive to the restaurant she could come over to my place. And I asked her to spend the night. But Sharon said no. She had to do her hair. She thought she’d better stay home. She was so lonely, she said, she missed Roman and she was so tired. She decided not to come.”

  During Jay Sebring’s Final Day

  Sebring’s friend Sharmagne Leland-St. John described that final day: “I had spoken to Jay that afternoon; I invited him to join me at a Peter, Paul and Mary concert. Peter [Yarrow] was my first serious boyfriend and Jay used to cut his hair. Peter had given me a front row center box for the concert at the Hollywood Bowl. At the last possible moment Alex Cord and Joanna Pettet Cord cancelled on me as did one other person. I was trying to fill the box. Jay said he was tired from traveling. [He had come in from San Francisco a day or so earlier.] He said he was just going to hang loose, and suggested I call him after the concert and maybe come hang out. He also invited me to come for a swim the next day either at Easton Drive or at Sharon’s. ( I had moved out of his house prior to the murders.)”

  According to a Mrs. McCaffrey, a receptionist at Sebring’s hair shop, her boyfriend Joel Rostau delivered cocaine and mescaline to the house on Cielo the night of the murders. She said that Frykowski and Sebring wanted more, but Rostau, unable to score, didn’t return. (Rostau was discovered in a car trunk in New York a few months later.)

  Frykowski called his friend the artist Witold K. in the evening sometime and invited him over, but Witold K. was busy laying down a rug in his new art gallery at 9406 Wilshire Boulevard.

  The photographer Shahrokh Hatami told me that he also had been invited to Sharon’s house that night. Hatami was residing at the Chateau Marmont. He said that he was then living with Ann Ford, an aspiring 22-year old actress from Texas. Hatami: “Ann Ford was living with me. And that night Sharon told me, ‘Come to dinner, but not with Stevie.’ Stevie was the [five-year-old then rambunctious] son of Ann Ford, who was living with us. We couldn’t find a babysitter for Stevie, and I was not driving, and my driver was Ann Ford, to take me to the villa (on Cielo Drive). So we couldn’t find a babysitter. I called Sharon, and said ‘Sorry, darling, I can’t make it tonight. I’ll see you later, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ I was there always. And the boy always said to me later, ‘I saved your life, I saved your life.’ Then I went to a motion picture festival, of Orson Welles. Bobby Lipton also joined us, and said after the movie was finished, ‘Let’s go to Sharon’s place.’ I said, ‘It’s too late.’”

  Hatami also recalled that, as she had for a number of her friends (such as Joanna Pettet and Sheilah Wells), Sharon had given him relationship advice, telling him that Ann Ford “is not the girl for you.”

  Director Michael Sarne also was considering going to Sharon’s on Friday night. Ditto for Dino Martin Jr. and a host of others, including John Phillips. One popular folk singer, according to Leonard Lyons, claimed that he was supposed to go to the murder house that night to get a haircut from Jay Sebring.

  If the number of people who claim to have been invited to 10050 Cielo Drive the night of August 8 had shown up, perhaps such a large crowd would have scared away the murderers.

  The foursome—Jay, Wojtek, Abigail, and Sharon—had a late dinner at a Spanish restaurant, El Coyote, on Beverly Boulevard, about the same time as the coyote-worshiping Charles Manson was plotting his evil.

  Ms. Folger’s mother called from San Francisco. Ms. Folger was scheduled to fly the 10 a.m. United Airlines shuttle the next morning to Frisco in order to be with her mother for her birthday.

  Around midnight, they were quietly settled. Wojtek was asleep upon the flag-draped living-room sofa. Abigail was in the northeast bedroom reading a book. And Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring were chatting in Sharon’s bedroom when the knife stabbed into the gray screen, slicing an entrance into the empty nursery at the far end of the house.

  Chapter 11

  Death on Cielo Drive

  Beausoleil later testified at his April 1970 trial that after Charlie departed in the bakery truck for parts unknown, he felt that people were watching him as if to prevent his leaving. Throughout the history of the Family, whenever Charlie took a bit of time off, that provided the opportunity for people to escape. Tex Watson and Bruce Davis seemed to be keeping their eyes on him. Bobby waited. “I smiled a lot, tried to be myself. It seemed that they were trusting me, so I left.” He testified that he told the girls to clean up Gary Hinman’s customized Fiat station wagon which “was full of junk.”

  Why did Robert Beausoleil leave for San Francisco driving the car of the very man in whose murder he had participated? Perhaps it was pure arrogance and the inability to think multiple motions ahead that caused Beausoleil, around Tuesday, August 5, to surge forth in Hinman’s grille-less Fiat, with Toyota motor and a radiator set at a 45-degree angle, toward San Francisco, unaware that Hinman’s body had been discovered.

  He passed through Santa Barbara and stopped at a restaurant, where he was told by a policeman to take his Mexican sheath knife off. He put it in the car trunk. He continued driving north, and sometime in the night the Fiat broke down on Highway 101 near San Luis Obispo. At 10:50 a.m. a California Highway Patrol car stopped behind the parked car and, as it halted, Beausoleil raised up in the back from
a sleeping bag. Beausoleil had no driver’s license to show the officer but had identification for Jason Lee Daniels and a credit card plus a business card for the Lutesinger Ranch.

  Officer Humphrey of the Highway Patrol called in Hinman’s license number to the computer and he learned that the car was reported stolen from Los Angeles. He drew his revolver and arrested Beausoleil. When he arrived at the station, there was an LA sheriff’s office “All Points Bulletin” that requested the car be impounded and the occupants be held in regard to Hinman’s death.

  As part of a prearranged scheme, Beausoleil said that he had bought the car in the week previous from a black man. The Fiat was locked up, to preserve fingerprints, and Jim’s Tow Service hauled it into custody in San Luis Obispo.

  That same day at around 8:30 p.m., homicide officers Paul Whiteley and Charles Guenther and a fingerprint expert named Jake Jordan arrived in San Luis Obispo to interrogate Beausoleil. They brought with them the card bearing Beausoleil’s thumbprint lifted from the kitchen door jamb of Hinman’s house. They had the man.

  Beausoleil remained pretty quiet during interrogation, though he finally admitted going to Hinman’s house with two female caucasians. He claimed he did not reveal their names but only said that Hinman was injured when they got there, and that they came to his aid, sewed his face, and so on, and then left. He said that Hinman rewarded them for suturing his face with dental floss by signing over his automobile to them. Hinman, he said, told them he got involved in some political hassle with blacks and that one of them had knifed his face.

  The next day, on August 7, Robert Beausoleil was brought to Los Angeles and booked for homicide. As per California law, he was allowed to call the Spahn Ranch. New Manson follower Linda Kasabian was responsible for incoming calls that day and Beausoleil gave her the bad news but said that everything was okay and that he was staying quiet.