Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan, the same trio who’d been booted from the party in mid-March, were now regular guests at the house, sometimes staying for days at a time. They also supplied most of the drugs. By July, the three men, all international smugglers, had cornered the market on MDA, which was manufactured in Doyle and Harrigan’s hometown, Toronto. Frykowski wanted in. Although he didn’t have much cash — Folger, his heiress girlfriend, kept him on a tight leash financially — he negotiated a deal with his new friends, making himself a middleman between them and Hollywood.
[…]
“I can close my eyes and I feel that it’s still 1969. I hear people’s voices, I see their faces,” Kaczanowski said. He was amazed at how the usual indicators of class and status had disappeared in Hollywood at the time, where “the most extreme ugliness with total purity was mixed up.” This blurriness was the inevitable outcome of the open-door policy they’d all subscribed to at the end of the decade. “Totally primitive, uneducated people” could dress and act like visionary artists. “And you couldn’t know absolutely who was who. You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet and it was impossible to make a distinction.”
[…]
Accordingly, Kaczanowski remembered “so many strange people” coming and going from the house on Cielo Drive, where he would sometimes stay with Frykowski for days at a stretch. “I didn’t trust them,” he said of the guests. “They walked so freely through the place.” He would ask Frykowski who these people were, and the answer always came with degrees of removal — they were friends of this guy, or friends of friends of so-and-so. That was why, after the murders, he felt he’d gotten a bead on who the killers were: the same set of drug dealers that Bugliosi mentions passingly in Helter Skelter.
“I remember Voytek telling me that they threw Pic Dawson out of a party,” he said, taking a sip of wine. “They told Pic Dawson to take his backpack and fuck off.” Kaczanowski remembered another party, a few weeks before the murders, where he’d had to kick out two very drunk guys. At the gate, “they were standing on the other side, looking at Voytek and me, and they said, ‘You sons of bitches, we will be back, and we will kill you.’”
All the months of partying with Frykowski had a cumulative effect. He met so many threatening characters that, when his friend turned up dead, he was convinced one or more of them was to blame.
[…]
Tate had been horrified at the scene that greeted her upon her return to Los Angeles. She was leery of Folger and especially of Frykowski, whom she suspected of drug dealing — she wanted the couple, and the crowd attached to them, out of her house. As I won the confidence of some of her closest friends, they came out with intensely disturbing stories. Her marriage was in shambles, they said, and many of them didn’t want her to fix it — they wanted her to leave it.
Polanski had established a pattern of abuse, emotional and physical. The Sharon Tate they knew, warm and vivacious, was diminished in his presence. “The difference in Sharon was incredible,” said Elke Sommer, the German actress who appeared with her in The Wrecking Crew. She “just wasn’t herself when she was with him. She was in awe, or frightened; he had an awesome charisma.”
That meant that Polanski could walk all over her. One friend, who called him “one of the most evil people I ever met,” said that he had smashed Tate’s face into a mirror, and, on another occasion, forced her to watch a recording of him having sex with another woman. He cheated on her constantly, and he made sure she knew about it. Another friend remembered an incident in which Polanski had asked his wife to wear the same dress that one of his other lovers had worn; when she appeared in her own dress instead, he threw her into the pool in front of their friends. Others said that Polanski hosted orgies at the house without his wife’s knowledge or consent.
Dominick Dunne, who’d been close to Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, was confident on that point. “I never went to their orgies, but I know they existed, and I think Jay was in on it, too,” he said to me. The director James Toback — who would himself be disgraced, nearly twenty years later, by more than two hundred allegations of sexual assault — was even more certain. One night, Warren Beatty had invited him to a party at the Tate house. Toback brought Jim Brown, a football all-star who’d become an action-film hero. At the party, people began to whisper about an orgy. “I was going to be included because I was with Jim,” Toback told me, “and I was certainly up for it, but Jim declined.”
And yet: “James Toback is full of shit and always has been,” Paul Sylbert, a production designer and a friend of Polanski, told me. “Nothing crazy went on up there. There were no orgies, not that I ever have been to, and I was up there frequently.” He conceded that Polanski was “peculiar,” but “whatever his kinkiness was, it was on a small scale and quite private. He might’ve been hinting at orgies, but there were never any.”
Orgies or no, at a certain point Tate felt that she’d suffered enough. As the humiliations accumulated, she approached Elke Sommer for her advice. Sommer remembered telling her, “I’d take the next heavy object, whether it’s an iron or a frying pan or a spade out in the yard, and I’d just brain him.”
Tate wasn’t about to do that, but she did, on a few occasions, warm to the idea of leaving Polanski. Sommer thought she was always too much in her husband’s thrall to follow through. “There was a tremendous sickness when I worked with Sharon,” Sommer said, “a horrendous sickness surrounding her relationship. She was quite lost.”
A number of Tate’s friends were quick to mention the undesirable company she kept — with Frykowski and Folger at the top of the list.
Tate “couldn’t stand them,” said Joanna Pettet, another actress who’d become close to her. The two had had lunch together at the house on the day of the murders. Pettet was surprised to see Frykowski and Folger, whom she’d never met before, walking around like they owned the place. “I asked, who are these people? Why are they here? She said, ‘Roman didn’t want me to be alone.’” Tate tolerated the pair only because her husband insisted on it. On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too much chaos. But Polanski refused to turn them out. She asked constantly when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip. Moreover, she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her — he didn’t want her there.
I’d gone to great lengths to track down Pettet, who had quit the movie business in the nineties. She lived in the high desert beyond Palm Springs, where she was something of a recluse, with no phone. It had dawned on me that I might be able to reach her through the Screen Actors Guild — they would have her address on file, since they were responsible for mailing her residual checks. Through them, I sent her a long letter, and she agreed to meet me for lunch at a strip mall near her house. She was slightly apprehensive when she first arrived. Then fifty-seven, she cut a striking figure, dressed head to toe in denim, with dark glasses that obscured her piercing eyes, until she felt comfortable enough to remove them.
“I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she said. “I had to be hospitalized and missed the funeral.” She made no attempt to conceal her contempt for Polanski. “I hated him,” she said flatly. As others had, Pettet described a marriage in which he exuded an almost casual cruelty toward his wife. For four months in the summer of ’67, Pettet had stayed with the couple at a rented beach house, and she began to notice how often Polanski bossed Tate around. He had a malicious streak; sometimes it reached Pettet herself. “He would throw a brick in the pool and watch my dog dive for it and try to retrieve it. He stood there laughing. The dog wouldn’t give up.”
After Sharon’s funeral, Polanski called Pettet. “On the phone he was strange with me, cold as ice. There was no despair. And I was sobbing.” He wanted to know what she’d told the police. It made her wonder what was behind her friend’s murder. “At the time I suspected it was maybe friends of his who did it. All I know is, he never came [when she asked him to come back], and she was here.”
I’ve been slowly working my way through Tom Clancy’s works in publication order — I commented on Patriot Games and the next few novels a few years ago — and I just got around to listening to the audiobook version of Debt of Honor, which I enjoyed as a period piece from its publication date of 1994, right at the tail end of Japan’s rise to power. I remember reading a paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s similarly themed Rising Sun around this time.
