As a Hollywood blonde on the verge of superstardom, Sharon Tate captured the public imagination with her delicate beauty and wide brown eyes. In 1969, the model and actress from Texas had just broken into the big time. She was married to Roman Polanski (then one of Tinseltown's biggest directors), having embarked on a romance with him after she was cast in his film The Fearless Vampire Killers. But no matter what her achievement in life, Tate's enduring legend was secured as a result of the brutal and shocking circumstances of her death. The star of Valley of the Dolls was just 26, and eight months pregnant with Polanski's child, when she met her end at the hands of the Manson Family murderers, in an event that still leaves a visible scar across memories of Sixties America.
The group included a straight-A student, a homecoming princess and an aspirant nun. 'They could have been the kid next door,' said the prosecutor of the youngsters who carried out some of the most savage slaughters of the 20th Century. The Californian carnage was masterminded by Charles Manson who directed his disciples to butcher, among others, Roman Polanski's heavily pregnant wife Sharon Tate. As Tate's engagement ring is auctioned, Julia Molony recalls the day the Sixties died
It's more than 40 years since the Manson Family murders took place, and in that time the legend has not faded but grown.
Earlier this month, an American auction house advertised the sale of a notorious new piece: an opal ring, surrounded by garnets. It was the engagement ring given to Tate by Polanski. The seller has labelled the ring as a “great item of Hollywood collectibles”, and speculation circulated that the ring “was on Sharon Tate's finger at the time of death”.
Though Tate's sister has commented that it was unlikely Sharon was wearing it when she died, verifiable facts are feeble in the face of a story that became one of the most talked about in a generation. Part of the explicit value of this piece is that it can provide the new owner with a macabre memento of what was one of of the most notorious murder cases of modern history.
As a gory death relic, the ring is soaked in controversy. Exactly how it fell into the hands of the Gotta Have It! auction house is unknown, but internet rumours abound about its provenance.
The story of the Manson Murders is one of Hollywood's best known. As with Jack the Ripper, the figure of Charles Manson's is more than just notorious, he has become the wellspring of a miniature industry.
Countless books, articles and television programmes have been made. In Beverly Hills, it's now possible to take a Manson Family guided tour which takes crowds to 10050 Cielo Drive, the house Tate and Polanski shared, and other landmarks connected to the murders. There were even, at one point, wax models of key protagonists in the case on display at Madame Tussauds, complete with the shaved heads they displayed at their trial, and the freshly cut Xs carved into their foreheads at Manson's bidding.
It's not hard to understand the enduring fascination with the case. As with the suicides in Jonestown, this story is one that explores the very darkest limits of human behaviour. It tracks the destructive powers of one man who orchestrated violent chaos through the cult of his personality. It also marks a cultural watershed, representing the moment when the great wave of optimism and revolutionary zeal expressed in the countercultural movement of the Sixties turned irrevocably sour.
As the jury in this case heard more than 40 years ago, Manson's life was marked by crime almost from the start. His mother was 16 when he was born, and she was serving time for armed robbery by the time he was five. Manson grew up mostly in institutions and began a career in crime at just 13. Only one of the long roll-call of early felonies provided a preview of the extreme sadism for which he would later become known; in 1952, he sexually abused a young boy.
Soon after his release in 1967, he had found his way to the epicentre of counter- cultural California, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It was there that he began to recruit the rag-tag collection of hippies and lost souls that would make up “The Family”.
The group developed into a strange secular cult, with Manson as charismatic leader, orchestrating orgies and granting or refusing sanction for particular sexual couplings.
In 1969, The Family moved into Spahn Ranch, a deserted film lot north-west of Los Angeles. Their tenancy was negotiated with the owner by Manson who, it is rumoured, offered him sexual access to female members of the group in return. There, while bingeing on LSD, the family developed their own anarchic reality, formulated and defined by Manson. At night, they engaged in missions known as “creepy crawlies” in which, high on acid, they would break into people's homes to steal things, or simply move around the furniture and observe them while they slept, as if testing out their power.
Leslie van Houten, the homecoming-queen-turned murderess still in jail for her part in the case, describes her experience at Spahn Ranch thus: “I became saturated in acid and had no sense of where those who were not part of the psychedelic reality came from. I had no perspective or sense that I was no longer in control of my mind.”
That Manson, the Lucifer-like figure at the centre of this story, did not carry out a single murder himself, but rather successfully brainwashed his acolytes into acting out his plans, remains one of the most bewildering and fascinating facts of contemporary history.
“They could have been the kid next door,” said the prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi, during the Manson trials. “Tex Watson was a straight-A student, a track star. Patricia Krenwinkel wanted to be a nun and sang in a church choir. Leslie Van Houten was homecoming princess at Monrovia High School.”
How could one man hold susceptible young minds in such thrall that they would kill for him? That his charisma was partly sexual was confirmed first by Susan Atkins, the woman convicted of killing Sharon Tate. She told the court during her trial that she was “in love with the reflection of Charles Manson”.
Though his goal was quite simply bloodshed and chaos, Manson did have a rough manifesto and a plan. Believing that the Beatles White Album was a directive addressed to him, he began to formulate and preach to “The Family” his plan for a new world order. The basis of this was a kind of twisted karmic retribution on behalf of black people in America. By initiating a series of murders, Manson believed he would spark a wave of violence, through which black people would rise up against their historical oppressors causing the country to descend into revolution. He dubbed this apocalypse Helter Skelter. During this time, Manson and the family would hide out, living a lawless feral existence in the California desert until the country's blood purge was over.
It was August 8, 1969, that Manson chose as the date on which the new world order would begin. He dispatched three female Family members, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian, along with one man Charles “Tex” Watson, to Tate's home, telling them “to leave a sign ... You girls know what I
mean, something witchy”. Only Tex knew the full details of the plan, sparking events by cutting the phone line and then reaching into the open car window of 18-year-old Stephen Parent, who happened to arrive at the house at the wrong moment, shooting him at point-blank range. From there, the girls picked up the bloody baton with apparent relish.
With Polanski filming in London, Sharon Tate was being kept company in her mansion by three friends; coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her partner Voytek Frykowski and hair stylist Jay Sebring. The four victims received 102 stab wounds between them. Tate was the last of the four to be killed, stabbed to death by Susan Atkins.
Her pleas for mercy for herself and her baby were ignored. “She asked me to spare her,” said Atkins. “I told her I didn't have any mercy for her.” Once Tate was dead, Atkins took some of the actress's blood and used it to write the word “pig” on the porch wall.
There was a senseless, orgiastic quality to the violence, which was repeated the next night on a subsequent mission, when Manson once again assembled the team, with the addition of Van Houton and Steve “Clem” Grogan, and instructed them to go to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, a wealthy couple who lived in Beverly hills. Both were savagely murdered, stabbed repeatedly with knives and, in Leno's case, a carving fork. The word “war” was carved on to his stomach.
For several months, the murders remained unsolved. The LAPD - prompted by suspicions that the group had automatic weapons, as well as Manson's past record - eventually raided the remote ranch near Death Valley National Monument where the Family were hiding out. They were arrested initially for arson and grand theft. however it wasn't long before rumours and reports started to link them to the murders.
In jail, Atkins made a startling confession to her cellmate, which seemed to implicate her in the crime. Meanwhile, a member of a biker gang gave evidence to police that linked Manson to the murders. He claimed that Manson had bragged to him about “knocking off” five people.
The pitch of melodrama in this trial had no limits. The spectacle was intense from the very beginning. During opening statements, Manson entered court having cut an X into his own forehead, a move that was later copied by the rest of the defendants.
Coverage of the trial matched the pitch of emotion that the events inspired. On. Indeed one headline in the Los Angeles Times, “Manson guilty, Nixon declares”, nearly derailed the whole process, after Manson himself held the paper up in court while his lawyer demanded a dismissal on the grounds of mis-trial.
“I don't try to judge nobody,” Manson told the court during his testimony, offering scant justification for such senseless destruction. “I know that the only person I can judge is me .... But I know this: that in your hearts and your own souls, you are as much responsible for the Vietnam war as I am for killing these people...”
Prosecutor Bugliosi's summation was equally theatrical. In it, he cast Manson as “the Mephistophelean guru ... sent out from the fires of hell at Spahn Ranch three heartless, bloodthirsty robots and - unfortunately for him- one human being, the little hippie girl Linda Kasabian”. By all accounts Kasabian had not participated in the killings. Bugliosi ended his summation with “a roll call of the dead”. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Sharon Tate... Abigail Folger...Voytek Frykowski... Jay Sebring... Steven Parent... Leno LaBianca... Rosemary LaBianca... are not here with us in this courtroom, but from their graves they cry out for justice.”
The trial was a landmark event, its nine-and-a-half month length and $1m cost unprecedented in American judicial history. During it, Ronald Hughes, the defence attorney for Van Houten, went missing during a camping trip and was eventually found dead - presumed murdered at Manson's behest.
In the end, convictions for all defendants were secured. But this was far from the end of the cult of Manson's personality. Now 77, Manson himself remains unrepentant, though those of his followers who are still alive have all expressed remorse, and contrition. Yet so far all appeals for parole have been denied.
The film director John Waters has since become close friends with Van Houten. “Leslie, who looked then ... very much like actress Hilary Swank,” he has said of his first meeting with her “explained that she had no interest in being (interviewed) in Rolling Stone because of what she had done.
“She was ashamed of it, not proud, and hoped that one day the terrible notoriety would fade. Little did either of us know that this wretched infamy would not only never fade away, it would become stronger through the years as Manson became the great American tabloid bogeyman.” - Sunday Independent