Sharon Tate’s sister: It could happen again
As Tarantino’s film about her sister’s killing is released, Debra Tate tells Helen Chandler-Wilde why she still fears Manson’s disciples
Debra Tate grew up Catholic, which means she has somehow forgiven the people who strung up her heavily pregnant sister, stabbed her 16 times and daubed foul messages with her blood on the walls.
But that does not mean she has forgotten. The 66-year-old has devoted most of her adult life to campaigning to keep Charles Manson’s acolytes — who butchered Sharon Tate, her unborn child and four others on August 9, 1969 — behind bars.
The slayings have inspired countless column inches, books and films; now another, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Debra was 16 at the time, but her memories are vivid. Sharon, 26, phoned on the day she died.
“It was a blisteringly hot day,” Debra recalls. “I was supposed to go to Sharon’s, then she called and said, ‘I don’t feel like moving, it’s so hot’.” That was the last time they talked.
Instead, Sharon dined out with friends Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger that night, the group returning about 10pm to the luxury rented home on Cielo Drive, just north of Beverly Hills, that she shared with husband Roman Polanski.
Hours later, four Manson Family members cut the phone line and shot
an 18-year-old boy who had been visiting the groundsman, before murdering everyone in the house.
The so-called Tate murders, and those of husband and wife Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the next night, were seen as marking the definitive end of 60s optimism. Prosecutors said Manson ordered the gruesome killings to trigger a race war, intending to frame black Americans.
Debra was in the shower the next day when “the door was flung open and there I am in all my nakedness with a neighbour and my mother in the bathroom . . . Mum was having a breakdown”.
Sharon had been weeks away from becoming a mother and the Tate family spent years trying to get over the tragedy. Debra says her mother, Doris, was “dysfunctional” for the next decade. “I’d describe it as the lights were on but nobody was home.”
Debra was initially worried about Tarantino’s handling of the murder, given his gory back catalogue.
“You put Quentin Tarantino together with the Manson story and of course your imagination goes crazy,” she says. But her fears were assuaged when he approached her.
“He came to me and showed me the script that he had written, we took three days to discuss things.”
The finished product, which she saw at its Hollywood premiere in July, was so good she “didn’t want it to stop”.
Margot Robbie, who plays Sharon, also visited Debra to find out what her sister was like. “She really did do her homework, she came to me with lots of knowledge six weeks prior to [the film] being made,” Debra says. “I gave her a bottle of Sharon’s perfume and I lent her Sharon’s jewellery to actually wear during a few of the scenes: earrings and rings.”
Though Manson terrified the world, he cut a cowardly figure in the flesh. Debra remembers him hiding when she attended one of his parole meetings.
“The guard was undoing one of the two contraptions restraining him and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ The guard said, ‘That’s Sharon’s sister’. He said, ‘Put my leg irons back on and take me back to my cell’, and he never came back into another hearing.”
Manson died, aged 83, in 2017, but Debra believes the five living killers still in jail (another, Steve Grogan, was released in 1985) are as dangerous as ever, having never shown remorse.
“Nothing has changed: they have all of the bells and whistles of being narcissistic and psychopathic,” she says.