Today, August 9 2023, marks 54 years since actress, model, and beauty icon Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the Manson Family cult in her own home.
Sharon, aged only 26 at the time of her murder (along with three of her friends, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Abigail Folger, at the Polanski home in Los Angeles), was 8 and a half months pregnant by her husband Roman Polanski. She was ready and excited to be a mother – though unsatisfied with Polanski’s incurable infidelity, a nevralgic point which Polanski – forebodingly – dismissed as „Sharon’s big hang-up”).
„Many people I know in Los Angeles believe the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969”, wrote Joan Didion in one of her famous essay collections, The White Album. „Ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled”.
The 1960s represented a remarkably dramatic period of US history: beginning with the Vietnam War, from the sudden public Murder of John F. Kennedy to the „Summer of Love” which went out with a darkening bang in the wake of the horrific Manson murders.
The incident remains a legend of horror to this very day: Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, pays a homage to the machinations of Hollywood, as well as providing a wishful alternative for Sharon. It seems to echo Didion’s musings in The White Album: „We tell ourselves stories in order to live”.
At this point in time, Hollywood itself was undergoing a counterculture transformation: and Tate’s murder ushered it in fully, springing the doors of a new zeitgeist with a chilly burst of wind, as she and Polanski were themselves proponents of a style strikingly different from the cookie cutter happy endings promoted by Hollywood: see their joint work on The Fearless Vampire Killers, which now to us seems reflective of contemporary cinema.
Why is it that Sharon Tate represents the icon of the 1960s, the spirit of the age? Probably because her angelic beauty, combined with the fact that she was heavily pregnant, made the shocking all the more shocking. But the human aspect of a personality tends to dissolve under the glided weight of such fame. Though charismatic and magnetic, Sharon was shy, self-doubting; she had a special interest for psychiatry. She was ambitious about film and ironically called herself „sexy little me”, knowing herself to be more than a pretty face and capable of and willing to playing serious roles well.
To this day, photos of Sharon Tate continue to sweep through the internet like lost flyers, and homages abound every August 9th. I’m writing this piece at age 26, the same age Sharon Tate was when she was killed, and reflecting on what an intense and dramatic life she lived, going out with a deafening bang. Comparing her to Natalie Wood – another icon of glamour who met a nefarious end too early – I wonder what it is in the collective consciousness that creates a reverberative aftermath around a particular type of feminine legacy. Despite Polanski’s entirely condemnable behaviour, his 1979 drama, Tess, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, compassionately tells the story of an innocent young woman who is condemned by a cruel world. As the film begins with the girl’s silhouette walking through the mist of an early English morning, a dedication to Sharon floats across the screen. Parallels impossible to ignore – and in fact it was Sharon herself who gave Roman the book, telling him, the last time they saw each other, that she would like to play Tess one day.
How are the mighty fallen…passing the love of women.
