The beautiful and the damned: the cinematic afterlife of Sharon Tate

The life and premature death of Sharon Tate has often been cited as a cautionary tale of the New Hollywood of the 1960s. From the late golden-era epics Barabbas (1961) and Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), in which she appeared as an extra as a teenager, to the softcore adaptation of The Story of O she was rumoured to be considering at the end of her life, Tate’s career spanned a volatile decade.

Fifty years after Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ murdered her and at least eight others, she has again become the object of Hollywood’s fascination. Alongside Quentin Tarantino’s Once upon a Time… in Hollywood, portrayals of the late actor and the events leading up to her death in the summer of 1969 are the focus of Daniel Farrands’s The Haunting of Sharon Tate, Mary Harron’s Charlie Says, and Tate, a forthcoming biopic starring Kate Bosworth.

Despite the ghost of Tate haunting Hollywood’s history, her filmography has largely remained an afterthought. The list is remarkably short: only five credited film roles between 1967 and 1969, with a posthumous release in 1970. Of those, only Valley of the Dolls (1967) was a commercial success – albeit a critical disaster. Her appearances in American sitcoms The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-71) and Mister Ed (1961-66), and in television ads, introduced her face to wider audiences, but it was the endless sequence of pictorials and tabloid coverage, both before and after her death, that sold her disarming physical beauty and modern style to the mainstream public, most of whom had never seen her on screen.

Tate’s first credited pictures Eye of the Devil (1966) and Don’t Make Waves (1967) illustrate not only the eclectic range of her initial roles but the trends popular with youth culture of the era – the occult and Californian bohemianism. Eye of the Devil is a bleakly gothic tale set in the French Périgord. Tate portrays Odile de Caray, a witch conspiring to sacrifice the visiting Marquis du Montfaucon (David Niven). Cameraman Erwin Hillier, who had worked with Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, uses a stark black-and-white palette to capture Tate’s laconic ice queen, whose only betrayal of pleasure comes when she is whipped with the marquis’s riding crop. Eye of the Devil is an imperfect but inventive entry in the horror genre, and very much of its time – its disturbing narrative of secret cults and devil worship anticipates the more popular Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973), while the casting of Tate and David Hemmings, who would shortly appear in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), imbues it with a stylish Youthquake sensibility.

Don’t Make Waves is best remembered as one of the last of the California ‘beach party’ films, a genre which had made stars of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in 1963. Tate plays the appropriately named Malibu, a skydiver and surfer who frolics in the sun and sea of California’s Muscle Beach. Malibu is torn between Carlo (a fortysomething Tony Curtis) and lunkheaded body-builder Harry (Dave Draper) – just one of the film’s many, intentionally silly, love triangles. As in Eye of the Devil, Tate appears (mostly bikini-clad) in only a handful of scenes, but her screen presence and striking beauty provide the film’s most indelible moments, including a dreamy trampoline sequence. Many critics pronounced her the sole redeeming player in the middling production, with Andrew Sarris writing that the film’s star “Claudia [Cardinale]’s troubles are compounded by the fact that she is out va-va-voomed by Sharon Tate”.

Although neither film proved a hit with audiences, they would attain a cult fan base in later decades because of Tate, who would achieve another, related legacy for reportedly inspiring the 1971 Malibu Barbie doll.

Such consolation prizes were often the result of Tate’s mentorship under Filmways executive Martin Ransohoff, who had designs on exploiting her good looks and figure as a Marilyn Monroe-like sex symbol. In Greg King’s authoritative biography Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders (2000), many agents and producers recall Tate to be the most beautiful face of her era. But the former beauty queen was unconfident and even embarrassed by her attractiveness, an anxiety that had followed her from childhood in Texas to Hollywood. She would mockingly refer to herself as “sexy little me” and despair at the token roles Ransohoff had meted out to her, some of which he summarily rescinded.

Her professional and personal life would take a crucial turn for the better when she was cast, at Ransohoff’s insistence, in her first leading role, in Roman Polanski’s horror spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Polanski had already found success with his Oscar-nominated debut Knife in the Water (1962); and Repulsion (1965), starring Catherine Deneuve. According to King’s biography, Tate despised the laconic Polish director during their first encounters in London, and refused to speak to him after a night they spent together on LSD. His strict direction on the Italian set of the film initially proved just as contentious, with Polanski doubling duties as Tate’s on-camera suitor Alfred. Polanski and Tate would eventually become lovers during the shoot.

Polanski’s first comedy proved to be his most mordant and whimsical film, deftly weaving a Victorian vampire story with generous amounts of silent-era slapstick and Jewish folklore. Tate plays Sarah Shagal, a village peasant’s daughter who is abducted by a clan of vampires and secreted away for sacrifice. At once guileless damsel and final-act bloodsucker, Sarah is Polanski’s classically haunted heroine, much like Deneuve’s Carol Ledoux or Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse. Tate sports a flowing red wig and a dusting of freckles to accentuate her child-like character, yet she is confined to the bathtub as a bawdy sight gag for much of the film. When Sarah bears her fangs to bite an unwitting Alfred in the closing moments, Tate’s transformation is positively ghoulish. It is this balance between innocence and eroticism that makes her performance a centrepiece of the film.

By the spring of 1967, Tate was poised for major celebrity. “This is how Hollywood turns a pretty Texas girl into Sharon Tate, the star,” began a Saturday Evening Post article, while Playboy proclaimed: “This is the year that Sharon Tate happens.” Accompanying the Playboy feature were photos of a semi-nude Tate taken by Polanski on the set of The Fearless Vampire Killers. Esquire, meanwhile, published Tate’s only political pictorial – a series of photos in which she impishly acted out excerpts from Mao Zedong’s ‘Little Red Book’ in various stages of undress while brandishing rifle and pistol. Equally as provocative at the time were her opinions on sex and nudity in her films. “Why should I be ashamed?” she said in an interview. “You see people murdering each other every day on TV, but you never see them making love – and love is certainly more beautiful.”

She also posed for photographers David Bailey in British Vogue and Richard Avedon for the photo-essay ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Women’ – which followed on from his groundbreaking issue of Harper’s Bazaar with cover-model Jean Shrimpton. Like Shrimpton and other model-actresses Twiggy and Jane Birkin, Tate’s multiplying images in Mary Quant or Pucci minidresses confirmed her role as a muse and centrefold of the counterculture, but it also unfairly muddied perceptions of her acting talents, particularly in America.

This was most evident with her casting as benighted actor Jennifer North in the adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s novel Valley of the Dolls. Jennifer is a voluptuous but pitifully untalented chorus girl who trades on her ravishing figure – first on Broadway, then in European skin films – before an abortion and bout of breast cancer prompts her suicide by overdose. “Let’s face it,” Jennifer confesses, “all I know how to do is take off my clothes.”

Jennifer’s tragic character was reputed to be a composite of Marilyn Monroe and Carole Landis, both of whom had died of barbiturate poisoning. However, according to King, Tate’s dramatic portrayal was perceived too literally by some reporters and critics, who read into the ditsy dialogue (“I feel a little top-heavy”) and risible scenes of cleavage-firming the traits of the actor herself. Reviews of the film were scathing, with a Newsweek article notoriously claiming that it had “no more sense of its own ludicrousness than a village idiot stumbling in manure”. It was a testament to Tate’s talent that she alone received accolades, including a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Most Promising Female Newcomer’ and ‘Star of Tomorrow’ runner-up from the Motion Picture Herald. In a 1968 interview, she voiced frustration with her public image: “Beauty is only a look. It has nothing to do with what I’m like inside… I won’t play any more dumb blondes.” But Valley of the Dolls’ reappraisal as a camp ‘masterpiece’ in recent years has diminished Tate’s subtle performance to a set piece of roman-à-clef gossip and psychedelic Travilla gowns.

Tate’s final films – the Dean Martin spy spoof The Wrecking Crew (1968) and sex farce The Thirteen Chairs (aka 12 + 1, 1969) – have probably aged worst among her movies due to their cringe-worthy sexual politics. Regardless, they include some of her most entertaining performances. Shot following her marriage to Polanski in January 1968, and the dissolution of her contract with Martin Ransohoff, the low-budget films represented a new tack toward adventure/comedy. In both, she portrays a wily (and glamorous) sidekick who often bests her male lover by a mix of feminine charm and klutzy tenacity à la Carole Lombard.

Tate’s Wrecking Crew bombshell Freya Carlson also proved her most physically demanding role. Disguised in clunky glasses and demure mini-dresses, she shifts from giddy pratfalls to kung fu fights to stripteases, outfighting and outperforming the wizened Martin. Hints of her performance would be seen in a mix of future characters, such as Felicity Shagwell in the Austin Powers films and Kill Bill’s The Bride. Likewise, in The Thirteen Chairs, Tate’s antiques hustler Pat playfully trades in physical gags and screwball dialogue with legends Terry-Thomas and Vittorio De Sica. In the film’s surprisingly feminist conclusion, lovers Pat and Mario part as friends at a shipyard after she has seemingly taken up with the wealthy commendatore, played by De Sica. In a final coup for Tate, she received top billing for the film, the first of her career – although sadly, by the time of its US release in May 1970, she was dead and her recent celebrity had been eclipsed by that of her murderers.

In spite of Tate’s promising film career and trend-setting style, her death in August 1969 ensured that another, more sinister postscript would be attached to her legacy. Hollywood’s exploitation of her murder began almost immediately. The Fearless Vampire Killers and Valley of the Dolls were rereleased in theatres as early as September (reportedly with Tate’s name moved to the top of the marquee); and a cottage industry of B movies, docudramas and horror films appropriating the Family’s crimes would follow in the coming year. For Hollywood, the heinous murders that, in Joan Didion’s words, “traveled like brushfire through the community”, ensured that Tate’s posthumous image would persevere in the darkest corners of genre filmmaking.

Ian Cooper’s comprehensive study The Manson Family on Film and Television traces the impact of the murders through an intricate sub-genre that he terms ‘Mansonsploitation,’ although it might be more appropriately named after Tate. Even before August 1969, the youth and exploitation film markets had turned decidedly darker, with Riot on Sunset Strip (1967), The Trip (1967), Wild in the Streets (1968), Satan’s Sadists (1969) and Easy Rider (1969) envisaging an increasingly apocalyptic future for the counterculture. At the dawn of the new decade, Hollywood’s taste for ultraviolence, gore, satanism and freakouts shed much of its political or documentarian pretension for pure nihilism.

Indeed, Manson and Tate loomed over the era of grindhouse cinema like the masks of Thalia and Melpomene. Notorious X-rated films I Drink Your Blood (1970) and Snuff (1975) are thinly disguised Manson recreations, with ham-fisted depictions of torture, rape, hematophagy and brainwashing, mostly of young women. Sweet Savior (1971), another X-rated sex-romp, with Troy Donahue as a cult guru, and softcore film The Cult (1971), both feature massacres of ‘swinging’ bohemians clearly modelled on Tate and her fellow victims. Other films, like Satan’s Sadists (1969), shot at the Family’s Spahn Ranch hideaway, and The Sadist (1963), were readvertised or renamed to cash in on tenuous Manson/Tate connections. These fictional spin-offs sat alongside a spate of dramatic reconstructions and documentaries beginning with 1971’s The Other Side of Madness (later renamed The Helter Skelter Murders), Manson (1973) and the TV miniseries Helter Skelter (1976), which spotlighted the Manson trial and elevated the Family to the status of outlaw celebrities.

The popularity of ‘Mansonsploitation’ films prompted grindhouse and drive-in operators to pair them on double-bills with more explicit slashers, an emerging genre that was also doubtlessly indebted to the events of August 1969. “It is not hard to see why the Family story has made its most significant mark on the horror genre,” Cooper writes in his book. “[It] is the stuff of screen nightmares.” Horror films from The Return of Count Yorga (1971) to Wes Craven’s rape-revenge Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper’s epic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) borrow liberally from the Family’s cultish rituals and brutality while transplanting Tate’s likeness on to the desirable female casualties and ‘final girls’ who populate their narratives. The widespread success of these films and countless successors would enshrine her legacy as Hollywood’s ultimate horror ingénue and victim.

By the 1980s and 90s the advent of VHS brought many of Tate’s forgotten films into wider circulation. But their popularity was vastly outweighed by Manson’s appearances on the American talk-show circuit, beginning with The Tomorrow Show in 1981. Other high-profile murder investigations of O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake and Phil Spector (all accused of killing former models/actresses) invoked the same media scrutiny as the Manson trial and temporarily propelled Tate back into the public consciousness. The subsequent explosion of ‘trial television’ and ‘true crime’ networks profited on salacious dramatisations of her murder as part of their larger reportage of celebrity scandals. Meanwhile, resemblances to her continued to appear deeply woven into American popular culture, from David Lynch’s murdered prom queen Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks (1990-91; 2017) to Megan Draper in Mad Men (2007-15).

At the heart of the decades-long fascination with Tate was, according to poet and biographer Ed Sanders, a story of “the life and times of an American actress, cut off so cruelly from her husband, child, family, friends, and future films by the so far untraceable mechanisms of Fate and Evil”. Or as critic David Thomson wrote in 1999: “[Tate’s murder] helped bring on the movies’ dire theme of bodily invasion, of knives plunging up and down for ever, of bodies broken, shredded, laid out in fragments […] Our real inheritance is the ravaged icon of the beautiful blonde cut to pieces. She is us, she is ours.” A half-century after her life and career were snuffed out, Tate’s ghost continues to exemplify the lost promises of a revolutionary decade and the dark price of Hollywood stardom.