A girl showed me how it should be done, you know taking a deep, deep breath and look ecstatic."Įventually she passed out from too many puffs. That very first day he sent me to the cigarette commercial job. I only had just enough money to get by and I hitchhiked a ride on a truck to the office of an agent whose name I had. "You must remember," she told interviewer Robert Musel a few years later, "that I was shy and bashful when I reached Hollywood. She beat her parents to Southern California by a few months to get a head start on her aspirations. In the summer of 1961, Tate's father was assigned to San Pedro, Calif. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper also linked a 19-year-old Tate to Richard Beymer, who had just filmed the role of Tony in West Side Story and was shooting Adventures of a Young Man in Verona.
Her mother allowed one of the film's stars, Jack Palance, to take her out on a dinner date. Knowing already that she wanted to be an actress, she would seek out the sets of film shoots in the area, and she ended up an extra in the swords-and-sandals epic Barabbas. According to a jarring mention in Ed Sanders' 2016 biography Sharon Tate: A Life, Tate told Roman Polanski on their first date that she was raped by a soldier in Italy when she was 17, but as Polanski put it, she said the attack "'hadn't left her emotionally scarred.'" She went to an American high school, where she was a cheerleader and prom queen in 1961. She moved to Verona, Italy, with her parents and sisters Debra and Patricia in 1960. At 16, she was Miss Richland, Washington, then Queen of the Autorama at a car show. Paul Tate and Doris Tate's three daughters, Sharon was born in Texas-at 6 months old she was crowned Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas after her grandma submitted photos of her-but the family moved around frequently as dictated by Paul's Army career. 10, 1969-which came to be referred to in homicide parlance as the Tate-LaBianca murders-effectively muted whatever rosy glow left over from the "Summer of Love" may still have been lingering the 1960s. For Sharon Tate, it had been the decade in which everything had happened, and everything ended. The events of the early morning hours of Aug. "That said, I always felt it was very unfair for her life to be remembered primarily for its final moments. "In 1969 my sister was involved in an event that changed the country in ways that still resonate," her sister Debra Tate wrote in the introduction to the 2014 book Sharon Tate Recollection, featuring dozens of photos of the late star. But at least there's room in this sprawling storytelling landscape of ours to remember the lives that actually deserve remembering. No true crime renaissance was needed to bring the interest in that back. The focus on bad people and the terrible things they've done has yet to go out of fashion. Meanwhile, there has been no cease in the telling and retelling of Manson's story, how the diminutive career criminal from Ohio got people to kill for him and how he held sway over countless others. I was never really exposed to the parts of her life when she was alive." On Today last year, Robbie noted that, before she played Tate, "whenever I heard her name I really only thought about her death. More than 50 years later, Tate remains frozen in time, the unwitting star of one of the most gripping, gruesome and parsed-over crime dramas to worm its way into the fabric of our culture. Her story has often been a footnote to Manson's, however, her life a casualty all over again when weighed against the insane details of what he and his followers did.
SHARON TATE AUTOPSY HAS NO MENTION OF PREGNANCY TV
The actress had a handful of B-movies, the most memorable being Valley of the Dolls, and some TV guest spots to her name when, at 26 years old and 8 1/2 months pregnant, she was one of seven people murdered by members of Charles Manson's so-called "family" over the course of two nights of carnage that shook Hollywood. Three years later, she became more famous than anyone's wildest ambitions-or worst nightmares-could have imagined. "I feel, at least in my estimation, that every person, if they want to be an actress or they want to stay in the acting world-which is a pretty tough world-before you even make an appearance, it's very necessary to learn your craft first, and take as much time, and do as much as you can."Īt the time, she was a stunning up-and-comer who moved to Hollywood with big dreams, which she hoped were on the verge of panning out. "I don't like that word starlet at all, because there's no such thing, actually," Sharon Tate said in 1966.