Sharon Tate: A Life by Ed Sanders

Author:Ed Sanders [Sanders, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-306-82240-7
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The Summer of 1969

Jay Sebring met her plane in Los Angeles when she arrived on July 20, 1969. Apparently she had been too gravid to fly transoceanic, but not too gravid for a cross-US flight. Sharon and Jay arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive in time to view the epochal Moon Landing. In June the Tate family—Doris, Patti, and Debra—had moved from San Francisco to the Los Angeles area, to a home on Monero Drive in Palos Verdes. Colonel Tate remained stationed at Fort Baker (which borders Sausalito in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco). The afternoon of the Moon Landing her parents had traveled from San Francisco to San Pedro to work on their house in Palos Verdes, then they drove to Cielo Drive to watch history being made. Sharon, Paul, Doris, Jay, Wojtek, and Abigail all viewed the marvel of Neil Armstrong’s first descent onto the dusty surface. Mother Doris brought a wooden rocking chair as a gift—the very one in which she had rocked and nursed her three daughters, Sharon, Patti, and Debra.

Sebring would see Sharon often during the ensuing days. Kirk Douglas, in his autobiography, repeats the gossip: “Jay went with Sharon Tate before Roman Polanski did. There was talk that their romance still continued, even that the baby might have been Jay’s. I knew Sharon Tate. Beautiful, naive young girl.”

Joanna Pettet also recalls the intimacy between Jay and Sharon: “I knew Jay very, very well. I met Jay through my ex-husband Alex Cord. Jay was a great guy, and he was always in love with Sharon. They stayed friends even after Sharon married Roman. Jay would have done anything in the world for Sharon, he loved her so much. And Roman was not bothered by it, because I think he was secure with his relationship with Sharon.”

Polanski watched the Moon Landing at his house on West Eaton Place Mews. The rest of his week was spent in “continual script meetings” with Michael Braun, who was contributing to the script, and set designer Richard Sylbert.

(Out at the Spahn Ranch, just at that moment, young Manson follower Snake Lake and a few others gathered in the building called the bunkhouse to listen to “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” on Straight Satan biker Danny DeCarlo’s radio.)

In the news that weekend was the tragedy at Chappaquiddick Island. Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy flew the afternoon of July 18 from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard and took a ferry to Chappaquiddick Island, a spit of sand five hundred feet across from Edgartown, Massachusetts, for a quiet party that night for former campaign workers for Robert Kennedy. Later that night, he crashed his Oldsmobile off a bridge returning to the ferry, into a pond. He managed to rescue himself, but a young former campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne, also a passenger, drowned. It was in all the papers, including the Los Angeles Times, and on television. Sharon Tate must have watched or read of it.

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