How Sharon Tate transfixed Hollywood
Tarantino’s new film returns 1960s actress to public consciousness
In death, Sharon Tate was born into myth, an “it” girl with a canyon house, a famous director husband and a beauty Hollywood craved as its mirror in an age of acid trips and biker gangs, a time when the U.S. was unmoored and the studio system was giving way to young independent filmmakers.
Tate lived at a moment when the counterculture barged in on the martini set and tore up the rules. She was that flicker between eras, wholesome daughter, libertine wife. Her murder in 1969 came as if a horror show had hijacked a pot-scented parade. Hollywood ran scared and Tate, who was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed 16 times by followers of Charles Manson, became a patron saint to the inexpressible.
She was 26. Her role as a suicidal soft-porn actress in the
Valley of the Dolls, a tale of barbiturates and reckonings, did not win the reviews that crystallize a career. But her end, as with those of James Dean and Bobby Kennedy, was tragically American, a promise forsaken, a dream denied. She became inextricably linked to the crime that took her, and what’s left is a stunning, ageless face, an alluring portrait upon which to hang our what-ifs and insatiable fascinations.
Tate flashes as if a recurring candlelight in Quentin Tarantino’s new Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Played with trippy guilelessness by Margot Robbie, Tate, married to real-life Polish director Roman Polanski, shines in snippets through a gritty, nostalgic, musical joyride into 1960s Hollywood and the lives of washed-up fictional TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman confessor Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).
The film is as much homage to Tate as it is to an era of halter tops, draft dodgers, Joe Namath and Easy Rider. She dances at the Playboy Mansion and races in a convertible with Polanski, whose Rosemary’s Baby had made him a heralded auteur. In miniskirt and white go-go boots, Tate slips into a movie theatre to watch her part as a secret agent in The Wrecking Crew. The scene reveals unadorned wonder that she, a Catholic-raised army officer’s daughter, is on the marquee with Dean Martin and Elke Sommer.
Robbie has few lines, but her resonance carries a lasting, eerie enchantment. She embodies an actress who personified a time at the instant that time changed. “I always look at the character and what the character is supposed to serve to the story,” said Robbie when the film premiered at Cannes. “The moment I got onscreen gave an opportunity to honour Sharon … I think the tragedy ultimately was the loss of innocence. To really show those wonderful sides of her, I think, could be adequately done without speaking.”
Tate’s magic was that she was a fleeting ingenue, her face everywhere, as if on a pinwheel spinning through pop culture. A sex symbol — she appeared in a Playboy spread shot by Polanski — Tate also wore scarves, went barefoot and read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which a decade later Polanski would adapt for a movie. Their house on Cielo Dr. echoed with the parties of a new Hollywood, a set of filmmakers, artists, musicians and narcoticinduced wanderers changing the city, the country and the culture.
It wasn’t all glamour and discovered privilege. The real-life Tate had her problems. Polanski, whom Tate had first met at a party in London, was domineering and often on the road with a film, frequenting clubs and, according to several accounts, orchestrating trysts. Nine years after Tate’s death, he would flee the U.S. after being arrested on sex abuse charges, never to return.
In his 2015 biography, Sharon Tate: A Life, Ed Sanders writes of a woman conflicted over wanting to be either an American version of Catherine Deneuve or a stay-at-home-mom. Feminism was chipping at tradition and women such as Tate were balancing personal desires and family expectations.
“Roman was the star in that relationship and Sharon was the beautiful actress wife. You didn’t walk into a room and think this is Meryl Streep,” said Toni Basil, choreographer on Tarantino’s film, who knew Polanski and Tate and once dined with them in France. “Sharon was dear, sweet and aware of her sexuality, but not competitive with other women.”
Born in Dallas two years before the end of the Second World War, Tate was an army brat, living in Texas, Washington state and Italy before moving to Los Angeles. A homecoming dance queen and cheerleader, she had an uncredited role in Barabbas (1961), a biblical epic starring Anthony Quinn. Tate went on to appear in popular TV shows, including Mister Ed and The Beverly Hillbillies. She starred alongside Patty Duke and Barbara Parkins in Valley of the Dolls. Based on the novel by Jacqueline Susann, Valley cast Tate as a beautiful, doomed showgirl.
The movie was released the same year as three films that epitomized Hollywood’s fresh sense of social realism: The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and In the Heat of the Night. Valley was, by comparison, melodrama. The New York Times called it “unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish.”
Tate told Look magazine in 1967 that when people look at her, “all they see is a sexy thing … people are very critical on me. It makes me tense. Even when I lay down, I’m tense. I’ve got an enormous imagination. I imagine all kinds of things. Like that I’m all washed up, I’m finished. I think sometimes that people don’t want me around. I don’t like being alone, though. When I’m alone, my imagination gets all creepy.”
Less than a month after man first walked on the moon, in a year when the Beatles gave their final performance and Jimi Hendrix played The StarSpangled Banner at Woodstock, a man nicknamed “Tex” and Manson “family” members Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel walked up to 10050 Cielo Dr. and slaughtered Tate and four others, including her hairdresser and former lover Jay Sebring.
Manson, who died in a Bakersfield hospital in 2017 while serving a life sentence, had ordered the killings to ignite a race war, using the phrase “Helter Skelter,” the title of a Beatles song, and a reference to his apocalyptic vision of scripture. Tate was left lying beside a sofa, a rope looped around her neck. The killers wrote “PIG” with her blood on the front door. Polanski was in Europe. When Los Angeles woke up, a fantasy had ended and the world was not the same as before.
Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood imagines a day in Tate’s life. She’s out and about, walking past the marquee for The Wrecking Crew, which brought good reviews for her comedic gifts. She is upbeat and free on a cloudless day. She goes into a bookstore and buys a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. She’s excited to give it to Polanski. She wants to teach him something new.
“Sharon was dear, sweet and aware of her sexuality, but not competitive with other women” TONI BASIL CHOREOGRAPHER, ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD