Sharon Tate: Victim of America
Artwork by Dominic Cellini
In the late afternoon of July 20th, 1969, 600 million people – a sixth of the world’s population at the time – gathered around television sets and radios in preparation for man’s first touchdown on the moon. The monumental event was preceded by John F. Kennedy’s far-fetched goal in 1961 for NASA to safely put a human on the moon before the decade ended. Balloons and streamers filled the air, mothers prepared beef bourguignon and chicken a la king, presented salads encased in jiggling gelatin. Ice clinked against glasses of old-fashioneds in taverns where strangers huddled together in anticipation. News anchors and pundits discussed what would be found once the Apollo 11 made its touchdown – if it did, indeed, safely make a touchdown. Would the lunar surface be covered in diamonds? Would the astronauts simply sink into the soil, unable to move against the unfamiliar, heightened force of gravity? At the time, anything was assumed possible. Nothing was inconceivable.
Sharon Tate was nearing the end of her pregnancy with her first child. She had invited her parents, PJ and Doris Tate, and her beloved younger sisters, Debra and Patricia, to her home that she shared with husband Roman Polanski at 10050 Cielo Drive for the event. They watched as Neil Armstrong emerged from the ship, moving incredibly slowly, uttering his famous words indicating what exactly this moment meant for America, for mankind. The world was covered in a blanket of hope for the future. Sharon must have felt this hope, too. After the night had drawn to an end, as Sharon waved her family goodbye while they backed away from the French-Country style home in Benedict Canyon, no member of the Tate family had an inkling that the sanguine evening near the end of the turbulent decade would be the last time they would see Sharon alive.
Near three weeks later on August 9th, 1969, two weeks before Sharon’s due date, she would be found dead at 10050 Cielo Drive – stabbed 16 times, slashed twice, with a rope looped around her neck, her white bikini dyed red with blood.
As the famous LIFE photograph snapped by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Times Square depicting a sailor kissing a woman at the end of World War II feels distinctly American, so does the crime scene photo of Sharon Tate laid nearly bare on the carpet in front of her couch. I can’t remember the first time I saw either photo, only that both are indelibly engrained in my memory.
In the photograph of Sharon, an American flag appears behind her, draped upside down over the couch she lies in front of. In “Helter Skelter,” written by Vincent Bugliosi – the prosecuting attorney in the Manson case – Bugliosi notes the initial speculation that the flag had been purposefully placed at the scene, indicating a political motive. However, Winifred Chapman, Sharon Tate’s housekeeper who found the bodies, told police that the flag had been in the house for weeks – thus it was revealed to be only happenstance that the stars and stripes made their way into the most gruesome photo of one of America’s most infamous murder cases.
The 1960s was a time when reality was subjective, a Day-Glo colored phantasmagoria that circumvented the conservatism of the 1950s. Published by Tom Wolfe in 1968, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” documents Wolfe’s travels with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a group of counterculture followers that traveled around in a rainbow, kaleidoscope reminiscent painted school bus and engaged in communal LSD trips called Acid Tests. Drinking the Kool-Aid wasn’t just encouraged but necessary in the path to achieving intersubjectivity, or a shared sense of reality – the development of a singular group mind among those that partook. A popular activity in the sixties, it wasn’t considered that perhaps group thinking – as opposed to individual thought – could be dangerous.
While the 1950s placed a high value on the nuclear family and female domestic stewardship, and the beginnings of the Cold War inspired heightened American patriotism, the 1960s brought in rebellion, free love, and escalating anti-war protests that took the shape of a social movement as national public support of the Vietnam War decreased substantially. Early in the decade, second wave feminism broadened the scope of first wave feminism and the women’s suffrage movement to address inequalities in family and work life, and issues pertaining to sexuality and reproductive rights. In 1966, The Black Panther Party was founded as an anti-fascist revolutionary group that armed citizens’ patrols in opposition of increasing police brutality. Silent compliance was no more, and collective defiance teetered on the edge of chaos.
The descent into madness was documented by writers of the time who entangled themselves in subgroups of the counterculture movement. In 1965, Hunter S. Thompson spent a year riding with the Hell’s Angels, whose ransacking, ravaging, and raping was the apex of middle American fear. “I had become so involved with the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them,” Thompson said of his experience. It becomes obvious the assimilation was complete when, at one point in Thompson’s published account, “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga,” he witnesses and takes careful notes on the gang rape of a woman by the bikers without intervening in any way. He writes, “In this downhill half of our twentieth century, [The Hell’s Angels] are not so different from the rest of us as they sometimes seem. They are only more obvious.”
In 1967, Charles Manson, an aspiring musician and transient, was released from a 10-year prison stint at McNeil Island. At age 32, Manson had spent over half of his life incarcerated for various offenses including the rape of a boy at knife point, grand theft auto, violations of the Mann Act – which made the interstate transportation of females for purposes of prostitution a federal crime – and less significant crimes such as check forgery. Once released, Manson began to attract a group of counterculture followers, mostly women who were easily enticed by Manson’s charms, who engaged in communal acid trips reminiscent of the Merry Pranksters, debauchery, and crimes ranging from theft to, eventually, cold blooded murder. It was only two years and some months after Manson’s release from McNeil Island that his followers would kill five adults, and Sharon Tate’s fetus, at 10050 Cielo Drive in addition to multiple other murders – possibly many more than have been conclusively linked to the Manson Family.
In her essay, “The White Album,” Joan Didion describes both her personal mental disarray nearing the end of the 1960s, and the instability of the decade itself. “This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’ – this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it – was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community,” she writes. According to Didion, the sixties ended abruptly on August 9th, 1969, the date of the Tate murders. The center William Butler Yeats spoke of would not hold, Eden fell to transgression – the paranoia felt throughout Los Angeles, and America as a whole, was fulfilled.
America loves a female murder victim, but a beautiful, eight-month pregnant movie star inspires an intensified obsession. However, despite appearing in multiple TV shows and films, including the now cult classic, “Valley of The Dolls,” none of Tate’s films made a substantial impact in the way of critical reception. Even her performance as Jennifer North in “Valley of the Dolls,” the aspiring actress who turns to soft-core porn to pay for her husband’s stay in a sanitarium and later commits suicide in hopeless desperation, was called “the most offensive and appalling vulgarity ever thrown up by any civilization” by Roger Ebert. Though her performances have been reevaluated and lauded today, at the time, they were mocked and disregarded. Arguably, Tate’s strongest ties to critically treasured cinema was in her marriage to Roman Polanski, who, less than 10 years after his wife’s murder, fled the country when he was charged with the drugging and rape of a 13-year-old girl.
As unjust as it is for someone to be remembered predominantly for their final moments on Earth, when most people hear the name Sharon Tate, they first think of Manson’s feral gaze.
In fact, Sharon Tate, or rather her likeness and memory, arguably became more prevalent in pop culture after her death, inspiring multiple books, films, and, to be expected, conspiracy theories. Tate is often re-victimized on the big screen through distasteful, borderline repugnant, portrayals. Notably, her character makes an appearance in the seventh season of “American Horror Story,” and Hilary Duff plays a nearly unwatchable version of her in “The Haunting of Sharon Tate,” a bastardization of the events at Cielo Drive. Margot Robbie’s unexpectedly minor, but still significant, role as Sharon Tate in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” comes across as the most true-to-life and respectful, though Sharon’s charm and hypnotic beauty could never be fully recreated.
Beyond the tacky film renditions of Sharon Tate, the intrigue of her murder is indisputable. The final resident of the original house at 10050 Cielo Drive, before it was later demolished and rebuilt, was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. In 1992, he set up a recording studio in the home where the Nine Inch Nails album “The Downward Spiral” was recorded, with a track-list that included songs titled “Piggy” and “March of the Pigs.” Marilyn Manson also recorded parts of his album “Portrait of an American Family” in the studio.
In 1997, during a Rolling Stones interview four years after he moved out of the house, Reznor expressed his regret in making the home and the murders a central focus of the album.
“… One day I met [Sharon Tate’s] sister. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: ‘Are you exploiting my sister’s death by living in her house?’ For the first time the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face … She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don’t want to support … I don’t want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit. I went home and cried that night.”
Further proving Sharon Tate’s memory is anything but fading, in November of 2018, Julien’s Auctions held an auction in Beverly Hills of clothing and personal belongings formerly owned by the late actress. Of the items for sale was Tate’s wedding dress – which had once been stolen, and later recovered by the police – her used makeup products and false eyelashes, brassieres, and a bottle of Chanel No. 5.
Even today, people want a piece of Sharon Tate – a memento of one of the most tragic moments in American history that shattered the facade of the idyllic Californian life. Some say the sixties ended when The Beatles gave their last performance in January of 1969, when the Apollo 11 landed on the moon, or when, six days after the murders, Woodstock music festival closed out the summer in Bethel, New York. But, like Didion, I tend to sway towards the belief that the sixties ended at the culmination of the increasing unrest of the decade, when at the snap of the fingers, the plunging of the knife, Sharon Tate and her baby were mercilessly killed – revealing that even our most unfathomable fears are never completely improbable.