Tragic Hollywood, Beautiful, Glamorous And Dead

by Jackie Ganiy

  She tried out to play one of the sexy daughters on the television show, Petticoat Junction, but her lack of experience got her rejected. The show’s producer, however, contacted the head of Filmways Pictures, babbling away about the dewy neophyte beauty who had just walked on his set. She signed a seven-year contract with Filmways, just like that,and must have been one of the last actresses to sign a bonafide studio contract before that system went the way of the dinosaurs. She got the full studio treatment: acting lessons, paid rent at a place called The Studio Club—run by the YWCA—and charm lessons on how to walk, how to dress, and how do her hair and makeup. According to Gefsky, her first female roommate at The Studio Club put the moves on her, forcing her to switch rooms. Well, it was the YWCA. Even women couldn’t resist her.

  It didn’t take long for the girl with the Midas touch to ditch her shabby digs, and move into a swanky apartment off the Sunset Strip, within walking distance of the famed nightclub: The Whisky A Go Go. It was at a party there that Sharon met Jay Sebring–hairstylist to the stars–and Warren Beatty, star of the hit film, Splendor in the Grass. Sebring—a notorious philanderer—plied his wares up and down the strip, and was that rare breed: a genuine heterosexual male stylist that his bluehaired, well-heeled clientele had a hard time resisting. He was impossibly good looking, and could have been an actor himself, if he had showed the slightest interest, which he didn’t. He and Sharon became seriously involved, and she eventually moved into his spooky house on Easton Drive in Benedict Canyon, the former home of Paul Bern and his wife, another blonde babe: Jean Harlow.

  Everyone knew the story that Bern, despondent over not being able to consummate his marriage to Harlow, blew his brains out in the upstairs bedroom way back in the early '30s. Sharon spent long hours alone in the German cottage-style home, and claimed to have met the ghost of Bern himself one night. Sharon had always carried a fascination with the paranormal, and also told friends that the ghost of Valentino haunted the home she lived next to on Cielo Drive, Falcon’s Lair.

  Sharon’s film career was in limbo. Filmways had her doing a small reoccurring role on The Beverly Hillbillies, where she had to wear a black wig. She wasn’t credited and was barely recognizable. They tried to cast her in a small role on the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton film, The Sandpiper, but Liz was entering her fat years, and didn’t want to share even a second of screen time with the hypnotic Sharon. She had to travel to England to get a decent part, in the witch story, Eye of the Devil. Sharon took this role seriously, even meeting the High Priest and Priestess of Wicca, Alexander and Maxine Sanders. As fate would have it, Filmways President Martin Ransohoff introduced Sharon to his good friend, hot new director Roman Polanski, in hopes that Polanski could put her in his new film, The Fearless Vampire Killers. Roman was reluctant at first, fearing she wasn’t experienced enough. Her charisma was too much for him, though, and she got the part. Following in the tradition of all good actresses, Sharon fell in love with her director, and by the time the film was over, the two were inseparable.

  Photos of the couple striding down fashionable London streets during the swinging '60s show a carefree Sharon, stunning, radiating happiness and looking the epitome of the mod princess in her giant bellbottoms and miniskirts. Jay got word that his girlfriend was keeping company with another guy, and flew to London to win Sharon back. He ended up meeting, and liking, Roman and the three of them became best friends. I think this scenario could only have happened in the '60s. Polanski later said that despite his popularity with the jet set (is that still a term?), Sebring was in truth very lonely, and thought of he and Sharon as his family. He kept wearing Sharon’s college ring around his neck for the rest of his short life.

  Sharon and Roman set up house together in LA, and while he got busy directing the film that would define horror for years to come, Rosemary’s Baby, she was cast in the film version of one of the most successful novels of all time, Jacqueline Susanne’s Valley of the Dolls. The book depicted, with scathing realism, the deviant, shallow existence of those who choose show business as their way of life. It was shocking for its time, though it seems fairly tame today. Shades of Grey need not worry. Not a critically acclaimed novel, Valley was even less acclaimed on film. Sharon played the role of Jennifer North: a struggling Broadway actress who has little talent and is admired only for her beauty. Wow, that sounds familiar.

  Director Mark Robson was not a pleasant man and according to Patty Duke, who played Neely O’Hara in the film, he directed most of his unpleasantness towards sensitive Sharon, treating her horribly in front of the rest of the cast and crew. Lets face it—Sharon was no great actress. Her delivery was wooden and amateurish. She seemed to be dancing on the surface of her roles, rather than digging deep within herself to become the part. Either she didn’t have that capability, or she hadn’t met the director that could get such a performance out of her yet. If you listen to her in Valley of the Dolls with your eyes closed, her acting is cringe worthy. The New York Times reviewer, Bosely Crowther, wrote of the film, “All a fairly respectable lover of movies can do is laugh at it and turn away.”

  Sensing her limitations, or perhaps lamenting them, Sharon began referring to her roles and her career trajectory as “sexy little me”. Meanwhile, Rosemary’s Baby was almost causing riots around the theaters, and there was Oscar talk for it’s young costar, Mia Farrow. Sharon couldn’t help but resent it. She had hoped Roman would use her as his star, (after all, what’s the point in having a director boyfriend if you can’t get preferential treatment when he’s casting his films!). but Roman felt their personal relationship would make for a professional conflict of interest, and left it up to Paramount to bring up her name. They never did.

  Roman and Sharon’s beach house become party central in the late '60s. Everyone from movie stars to politicians gathered in their living room to drop acid and eat Sharon’s home cooked polish dishes. The more successful Roman became, the more his eye (and other things) wandered. They weren't married, and Sharon pretended to be too liberated to care about it, but when Roman’s tomcatting peaked, she may have had second thoughts. She accompanied him to London for the European premiere of Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, and they tied the knot there. Gotcha!

  The press reel shows her beaming in a very '60s wedding mini-dress, hair caught up in orange blossoms, cutting a huge slice of wedding cake with her new husband. Sadly, wedded bliss was not on the table.

  Roman, not particularly large on oath-keeping, kept sleeping around, and Sharon kept tolerating it, because she didn’t know what else to do. She was still hopelessly in love with this man and his thick, Slavic accent, who had to stand on his tiptoes to kiss her. On top of that, in early 1969, she discovered she was pregnant. Hoping that having the baby would settle Roman down, activating his partnership instincts with his paternal ones in a kind of “wonder twin powers activate!” moment, she searched for a home to rent that had a nursery. The couple had been living in the posh Chateau Marmont Hotel for months, after leaving the Santa Monica beach house they rented. Sharon longed for a home of her own with a proper environment to raise her child. Candice Bergen, her close friend, suggested that she move into the house that she and Terry Melcher had just vacated. Sharon thought the house was perfect. On February 15, 1969, she and Roman moved into 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, a few miles from Sebring’s home on Eastman Drive.

  Terry Melcher, the son of actress Doris Day was a well-known record producer. He had once planned to promote a struggling musician/drifter by the name of Charles Manson. He had even recorded some of Manson’s songs at the behest of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. Wilson befriended Manson, but Manson became unsettlingly violent during an afternoon recording session one day, and Wilson cut all ties with him.

  The month after Sharon and Roman moved into Melcher’s old house, a strange man walked past the gate and up the driveway, eyeing the pretty blonde in the doorway. Photographer Shahrokh Hatami asked him what he wanted. The man said he was looking for
Terry Melcher. Hatami didn’t know Terry, but told him that this was now the Polanski residence, and the man left.

  The last photographs of Sharon, taken over the few months that followed, are heartbreaking. One photo shows her beaming in the backseat of car, holding up her hands with a baby booty on one finger, her lap covered with baby things. In another, her hands cross under her growing belly, looking down wistfully from a staircase. One of the very last photos taken of her shows her in profile in the backyard, her belly peeking out from her loose top, hands shielding her face from the sun. Everything in the photo is in bright sunlight, except her face, which is in deep shadow. It’s as if she’s peering into her future, but there’s nothing there.

  Sharon was happy about the baby, but Roman was not. He spent his childhood in a Polish Nazi concentration camp, and he did not believe in bringing children into such an evil world. Sharon waited until she was four months pregnant before she told him. Of course, he was furious, and if she thought it would stop his philandering, she was mistaken. Just as a wedding ring hadn’t changed his ways, neither did a pregnant wife.

  Sharon managed to squeak in a French comedy before she began to show, a film called Thirteen Chairs, costarring Orson Wells. Sharon was thrilled to be working with the legendary director/actor, and she did a pretty good job in the limited role she was given. After filming was completed in Italy, she flew to London to be with Roman while he worked on his latest picture, 6. By July, she was seven-and-a-half-months pregnant, and returned to Los Angeles to prepare for the birth while Roman stayed behind to tie up loose ends with his film. She left a copy of the classic novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles on his nightstand, suggesting he might want to consider the story for his next project. Roman would later remark that he had a feeling he would never see her alive again. Maybe he should have asked her to say?

  August in Los Angeles is brutal. It’s hot, sticky and just plain miserable, especially if you’re eight months pregnant. August of 1969 saw a particularly vigorous heat wave hit the city, with temperatures into the high 90s, and even the triple digits in outer suburbs. On the morning of August 8, Sharon woke around 9:30 AM, and spent the morning on the phone with her husband and her mother. Her mother asked if younger sister, Debra, could come over for a swim and a sleepover. Sharon politely declined, saying she was just too hot, tired and miserable, and would be lousy company. She did entertain two actress friends for lunch around the pool, and then had a nap. She was not alone in the house. Roman’s two friends, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger (of Folger’s Coffee) were staying at there, at Roman’s request, until he could return from London for the birth. In the late afternoon, as the cool sea breeze wafted across the valley and up into the hills, Jay Sebring left his home and drove up to Sharon’s to take everyone to El Coyote—Sharon’s favorite Mexican restaurant—for dinner. Everyone had a good time at El Coyote, spending about three hours there before returning home around 10:30 PM. Abigail retired with a book, Frykowski fell asleep on the sofa, and Jay and Sharon spent the next few hours talking in her bedroom. What did they talk about? Did Sharon confess her disappointment with the marriage, and how she wished her husband loved her as much as she loved him, and how she wished he wanted their baby as much as she did? Did Jay sympathize with her—the love of his life— whose high school ring he was still wearing around his neck? Did he confess his undying love, how he wished things had turned out differently? Were regrets shared on both sides? We will never know.

  The next morning, echoes of horrified screams bounced through the hills, the source being one lone housekeeper, Winifred Chapman, who entered the house on Cielo drive to discover a blood bath of epic proportions. Five bodies, brutality stabbed, beaten and shot, were scattered throughout the property. Folger and Frykowski were on the lawn outside. Frykowski had really been through hell. He had been stabbed more than sixty times, pistol-whipped repeatedly, and shot twice. The handle of the gun used to beat him had broken in the process. Inside, Sharon lay covered in her own blood, wearing only a bra and panties, a rope around her neck. She was twenty-six. The other end of the rope was tied around Jay Sebring’s hooded neck. He was just a few feet away, shot in the head twice. The words “Death To Pigs” and “Helter Skelter” were scrawled on the front door and walls, in Sharon’s blood. The sight was so gruesome that seasoned cops were retching on the front lawn. To this day, this scene plays over and again in peoples minds, remaining the most notorious multiple murder in Los Angeles history. In death, Sharon got what she desperately strived for in life: real lasting fame.

  Sharon and Jay’s bodies in the Cielo Drive house living room.

  The next day, two more people would also be found dead in their homes, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. A band of true counter culture hippies led by Charles Manson, and known to local law enforcement as The Family, were rounded up and jailed on unrelated charges a few months later. One of them, Susan Atkins, bragged to her cellmate about how she and four others “killed those people up in the canyon”, and how, when Sharon Tate had begged for her life and that of her baby, she had coldly told her “Look Bitch. You might as well face it. You’re gonna die and I don’t feel a thing.” Then she began stabbing her. She said Sharon kept repeating “Mother” until she stopped talking... forever. What a nice, young, well-raised, middle-class psychopath.

  Roman was, of course, horrified and grief-stricken when he learned of the murders. He returned immediately to a media frenzy. All of LA, and the world, were stunned that such a brutal crime would happen to such a sweet and lovely girl on the cusp of a bit of honest happiness. Many have said that the carefree innocence of the ‘60s died with the Tate/La Bianca murders, and the world was never quite so idealistic again. Sharon was buried in the Grotto at Holy Cross Cemetery, in Culver City. It is widely believed that her unborn son was placed in her arms, and buried with her. The headstone carries his name: Paul Richard Polanski.

  Roman went on to make more amazing movies, including the classic, Chinatown. He didn’t waste much time in replacing Sharon, and was linked with a number of leggy starlets throughout the '70s, until he got himself indicted on child molestation charges, and had to flee the country.

  He had one last gift for Sharon, though. He took her advice and made the film version of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, then bedded its unknown teenage star, seventeen-year-old Nastassja Kinski. Sharon would have been proud, or perhaps not. She’s safe now, from her disloyal husband, from critics, and from soulless madmen and the drooling freaks that follow them.

  You won’t be forgotten, Sharon. Rest in peace.

  The Tate family grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, California

  Jean Harlow

  * * *

  The girl on the screen barely contained her enthusiasm at being slapped by the well-dressed man. “Do it again! I like it! Do it...” Throwing herself on him, she passionately kissed him. Excuse me! That’s not very ladylike, Miss! She didn’t care, and knew that no one else cared either. She was something more than a lady; she was a bombshell: a term invented to describe her when all existing terms proved inadequate. This was Jean Harlow.

  In 1991, a beautiful baby girl was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Her mother, Jean, named her Harlean Harlow Carpenter. Jean was from a wealthy family, and had never been happy in her arranged marriage to Harlean’s father, Mont Clair Carpenter, as she considered him beneath her class. Those who knew Jean said she was one of the most beautiful women they ever saw, even prettier than her daughter one day became.

  Mama Jean doted on her little girl, and for the rest of her life would refer to Harlean as “the baby.” Harlean was a beautiful baby, who grew into an even more beautiful child, with shocking white hair—helped along by a few chemicals courtesy of Mama Jean—and huge green eyes. She lived in splendor and a huge house complete with nannies, chauffeurs and maids. While Mama Jean doted on her, Harlean’s affection for her mother bordered on worship, as demonstrated in this handwritten thank you note Harlean penned to her mother aft
er receiving a bracelet from her for her eighth birthday. “Dearest dearest Mother: Your gift was the sweetest of all. The little bracelet you gave me is to bind our love still tighter than it is, if that is possible. For I love you better than anything that ever its name was heard of. Please know that I love you better than ten lives. Yours forever into eternity, your baby.” Seriously, did an eight-year-old actually write this, and why is an eight-year-old writing a thank you note to her mother anyway?! This note sounds strangely like a love letter.

  When Harlean was eleven, Jean divorced her bourgeois husband, took Harlean, and tried to make a go of it alone in Hollywood. For two years she pounded the pavement, but at thirty-four, Hollywood didn’t bite. Defeated, they returned to Kansas city.

  Harlean’s grandfather felt the level of attachment between his daughter and her daughter was unhealthy, and tried unsuccessfully to separate the two. He sent Harlean to a summer camp that lasted the entire summer, to which she would later refer as the “worse nightmare of my life”. She lost her virginity there, and came down with scarlet fever. Mama Jean to the rescue! Would a little quarantine keep her from her baby? Hell no! She bowled through the protests of the camp director, got into a boat, and rowed herself across the lake to the camp, where she found Harlean in an isolation building far from everyone else. She spent the next three weeks tending Harlean, and would not leave her side. Later, it came to light that the illness triggered a dormant virus that would, in eleven years, lead to kidney disease.