Sharon Tate
One of the most beautiful, and by all accounts sweetest, rising stars in Hollywood in the 1960s, Sharon Tate was born in Dallas, Texas, on January 24, 1943. She and her two younger sisters, Patti and Debra, were army brats, the daughters of officer Paul Tate and his wife, Doris. Frequent army moves (six different cities in seven years) affected Sharon in two profound ways: she learned to form friendships quickly and to maintain those friendships long after the Tates had relocated again, and she developed a strong bond with her family that lasted throughout her life.
Her beauty came naturally—she won her first title, “Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas,” at the age of six months. Although her early intention was to become a psychiatrist rather than an actress, she found success in her teens as a beauty pageant contestant and model, and the lure of Hollywood began tempting her. Her first official onscreen appearance happened serendipitously. Eighteen-year-old Sharon was walking down the street, when a choreographer for an upcoming Pat Boone special approached her and asked if she’d be willing to make a brief appearance on the show. She was thrilled, and her parents gave their permission, on the condition that a guard be posted all night outside the door of the hotel room where she’d be staying. The condition was met, and Pat Boone serenaded the young, spectacular Sharon Tate on national television in 1961.
Another promotion and reassignment sent Colonel Tate and his family to Italy in 1962. The film of Ernest Hemingway’s
Adventures of a Young Man, starring Paul Newman and Richard Beymer, happened to be shooting near the Tates’ new home in Verona, and Sharon and some friends went to visit the set. Sharon quickly caught Richard Beymer’s eye, and in the course of the casual dates that resulted, he gave her the business card of his agent, the powerful Hal Gefsky, and encouraged her to get her inevitable show business career off the ground.
The Tate family returned to America, Sharon headed to Hollywood, and Hal Gefsky eagerly signed her, joining forces in carefully developing her skills and grooming her for stardom with Filmways chairman Marty Ransohoff. Finally Gefsky and Ransohoff decided that Sharon was ready for her official debut and cast her for a major role in the 1965 film Eye of the Devil, starring David Niven, Deborah Kerr, and David Hemmings. Sharon had begun a relationship with hairdresser-to-the-stars Jay Sebring in 1964, and the two of them traveled together to England and France, where the film was being shot.
In 1966 Ransohoff was casting and coproducing a film called The Fearless Vampire Killers with Polish director Roman Polanski. Polanski had his heart set on hiring up-and-coming actress Jill St. John for the female lead, but Ransohoff convinced him to hire Sharon instead. Polanski and Sharon were less than enchanted with each other when they first met, but as filming in Italy progressed, their relationship evolved into a serious romance.
Next for Sharon came a mediocre beach comedy called Don’t Make Waves with Tony Curtis, in which her wardrobe consisted primarily of a bikini. She was mortified by the film and began referring to herself sarcastically as “sexy little me.” Compounding her unhappiness was the fact that she was away from Polanski, who was still in Italy doing postproduction work on The Fearless Vampire Killers. But she did appreciate and continue to treasure the one positive aspect of her work on Don’t Make Waves—she and Tony Curtis maintained a close friendship for the rest of her life.
Don’t Make Waves was followed by yet another movie that valued her beauty more than her acting ability, a script based on one of the bestselling books of all time, which she considered “trashy”—Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. Sharon rose to the occasion, gave it her best, and managed to stay out of the war zone the set of the film became. Morale had seriously deteriorated as the cast went from believing they were working on an important, prestigious film to feeling as if they were trapped in a doomed, unsalvageable embarrassment.
The good news and bad news turned out to be that the eagerly anticipated drama known as Valley of the Dolls was greeted as an unintentional laugh riot when it debuted on November 14, 1967. It became a cult classic, and it’s probably the film for which Sharon Tate will always be most remembered. She was featured in Esquire, Playboy, and countless movie magazines around the world, and Playboy officially declared 1967 as “the year Sharon Tate happens.”
While Sharon was filming Valley of the Dolls, Polanski was busy shooting his greatest commercial success, Rosemary’s Baby. They reunited in London when their respective films were finished, and on January 20, 1968, the couple the world press had proclaimed as the epitome of “rich hippies” were married, Sharon in a white minidress and Polanski in what was described as “Edwardian finery.” Sharon’s “big hang-up,” as Polanski called it, was his refusal to promise monogamy, but she was utterly devoted to him and was quoted as saying, “We have a good arrangement. Roman lies to me, and I pretend to believe him.”
Back in Los Angeles, Mr. and Mrs. Roman Polanski were celebrated and embraced by a crowd that was diverse, dazzling, and without a doubt the cream of the crop in Hollywood. Sharon in particular loved that their leased house in Beverly Hills was invariably filled with friends, and friends of friends, and everyone felt comfortable, casual, and welcome there.
She went back to work in the summer of 1968 on a Dean Martin film called The Wrecking Crew, was nominated for a Golden Globe Best Newcomer Award, and was deeply appreciative that her career finally seemed to be on the rise. In late 1968 she was ecstatic to learn that she was pregnant, as a result of which, on February 15, 1969, she and Polanski moved into a home Sharon called her “love house,” a place she admired every time she visited her friends Terry Melcher and Candice Bergen there—a private gated property above Beverly Hills in Benedict Canyon at 10050 Cielo Drive.
In March 1969, despite Polanski’s concerns about Sharon traveling during her pregnancy, she left for Italy to film a comedy with the legendary Orson Welles called The Thirteen Chairs, while Polanski headed to London to direct The Day of the Dolphin. In their absence, friends Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger house-sat on Cielo Drive. Sharon visited Polanski in London when she finished work on The Thirteen Chairs, but returned to Los Angeles alone on July 20, 1969. Polanski promised to come home on August 12, in time for the birth of their baby, and asked Frykowski and Folger to stay at the Cielo Drive house with Sharon until then.
On the evening of August 8, 1969, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski went to dinner at the popular El Coyote Restaurant, arriving home at around 10:30 p.m. Their bodies were discovered the next morning by Sharon’s housekeeper, all of them slaughtered in what would become one of the most notorious and horrific crimes of the twentieth century. Charles Manson and his “family” were ultimately tried and convicted of the insanely senseless murders and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison. And to add to the long list of resulting tragedies, the crimes and those who committed them were so sensational and endlessly publicized that the exquisite Sharon Tate became more famous for the way she died than for the kind, sweet, generous, and gifted way she lived. She was buried on August 13 at the Holy Cross Cemetery near Los Angeles, holding her infant son in her arms.
From Francine
Sharon was met on the Other Side by a very short older woman with gray-blonde hair, who I believe is her grandmother, and by throngs from Home and from her twelve past lives. She is as cherished here as she was on earth for being an especially gifted, thoughtful friend, and there was widespread relief at how much at peace Sharon was despite such an obscene end to what she says will be her last incarnation. Her Spirit Guide, Amelia, escorted her to the Scanning Machine, from which she walked away filled with light and understanding about her life and death.
She charted herself to be beautiful and talented enough to acquire fame and the respect of her peers, and to be a substantial enough person to make friends easily and make a strong impact on those who knew her, which served her intended purpose—Sharon Tate is an excellent example of a spirit who never intended to live a long life and who knew that her death would somehow serve a greater good. If she had been less famous and less adored, her death would have been far less widely publicized, determination to solve the murders would not have been so intense, and dozens more lives would have been needlessly taken by the Manson family if Sharon hadn’t been among the victims.
She’s adamant about the fact that if her lifetime had continued, she would have left Roman Polanski. Her prolonged times away from him made her realize that, because she couldn’t trust him as a husband, she could never rely on him to be the kind of father she believed every baby should have. She also realized that as a result of her having been slightly in awe of him, she tended to feel inferior when she was with him, and she was a stronger, healthier, happier woman when they were apart.
Sharon lives with a small group of friends in a green two-story house surrounded by a stand of tall pines. She spends most of her time in the Waiting Room in the Towers, caring for the babies who are about to enter a fetus on earth. She has a calming, reassuring way with them and would have been a wonderful mother. She visits a friend in your dimension named Shirley or Sheila as well as her sister Debbie, and she wants Debbie to know how proud she is of her for carrying on their mother’s work as a victim’s advocate.
She was the first to greet her parents and her sister Patti when they came Home, and the four of them are rarely seen apart, as devoted to each other here as they were during their lifetimes.
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