Tom O’Neill coaxed Bill Tennant, Polanski’s old manager, into talking to him (for Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):
Tennant had never given an interview about the murders, in part because the events of 1969 had sent his life into a tailspin. He’d had the somber task of identifying the bodies at the Tate house. A 1993 piece in Variety (by Peter Bart, as coincidence would have it) described Tennant’s fall from grace. Through the sixties and seventies, he’d found great success in Hollywood, discovering the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agenting Peter Fonda’s deal for Easy Rider. But Bart had found him, “a gaunt, battered figure,” “sleeping in a doorway on Ventura Boulevard.” A cocaine addiction had done away with his marriage and his money, leading him to trade “even the gold inlays in his teeth for a fix.” In Bart’s assessment, “the shock of the Manson murders began unraveling him.”
I tracked down Tennant in London, where he was sober, remarried, and managing Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance. He’d become a born-again Christian, but he displayed little compassion or forgiveness for Polanski, his onetime client and friend. “Roman is a shit,” he said. Echoing what I’d heard from other friends of the couple, Tennant said there were two versions of their story. “Which one do you want to tell?”
On one hand, Polanski had fallen into dissolution in London, where he was working on a movie and sleeping around while, back in California, his pregnant wife was putting together a home. Tate “wound up getting murdered because he was fucking around in London,” he said. But that was just one side of it.
“The other story is sitting in the Bel Air Hotel with Roman after the funerals and having to address his financial situation, which was not very good,” Tennant said, “and Roman looking across the table at me and saying, I wish I had spent more. I wish I had bought more dresses. I wish I had given more gifts. So what story do you want to tell? The one about this little prick who left his wife alone… with Jay Sebring and Gibby [Folger] and Voytek, these wankers, these four tragic losers, or do you want to talk about a poor kid, Roman Polanski?”
Tennant resisted the idea that the murders represented a loss of innocence for Hollywood. “There was nothing innocent about it,” he said. “It was retribution.” The big value in Los Angeles when he was there, Tennant said, was this: “He who dies with the most toys wins. I think it’s pretty self-serving to call that period, and what was going on, innocent… What’s innocent about drugs? What’s innocent about promiscuous sex?… You tell me where the innocence was.” Within a week of the murders, Polanski was “partying it up” with Warren Beatty, he added. The brutal reality was that “nobody cared or gave a shit about Sharon Tate. Not because they weren’t nice but because she was expendable. As expendable as an actor whose option comes up and gets dropped.”
After his wife’s murder, Polanski stayed on the Paramount studios lot as much as he could. It was the only place he felt safe. And not just from the killers or the media — from the LAPD. “You found the police surveillance units and you found that the police in Los Angeles knew everything about everybody,” Tennant said: “that there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of the Los Angeles Police Department, and that they knew everything there was to know.”
The Manson murders are fundamentally boring and I didn’t come here to be bored.
The Manson murders are just another shuffling intimation at, “The Man Behind the Curtain,” so to speak, which are always fascinating when viewed beyond the mere brute facts of the case and placed in that context.
I suppose one could consider it boring for anyone who’s already pulled the curtain back and taken a gander, but I still appreciate adding to the tally of the sheer number of milestones.
“I didn’t come here to be bored.”
Where do you usually go to be bored? I really want to get bored and I need help finding some really boring sites to visit.