(Excerpts from Roman by Polanski)
London - Late 1965/Early 1966
“With the great British filmmaking boom at its height, independent Hollywood producers were visiting London in droves during the mid-sixties. Among them was a producer named Martin Ransohoff, who ran a production company called Filmways. I’d often talked of writing a vampire spoof with Gerard Brach. Whenever we went to horror movies, audiences were reduced to laughter. Why not make a film they could laugh with, rather than at it? When Filmways expressed interest in our vampire spoof idea, we started making plans. …I myself proposed to play Alfred and had earmarked Jill St. John for the part of Sarah, the innkeeper’s succulent daughter but Filmways had other ideas. A name kept cropping up whenever the project was discussed: Charontais, or was Charontait? That's how I mentally spelled it at first, French fashion, and that's how little I knew about her. I eventually discovered that Filmways had under a multifilm contract an actress named Sharon Tate. She was currently costarring with David Niven and Deborah Kerr in Thirteen, later retitled Eye of the Devil because its distributors were afraid that an unlucky number would jinx the box-office receipts. Everyone said she was very beautiful - a girl to watch."
"When Marty Ransohoff visited London with his partner, Filmways threw a party for him at the Dorchester to celebrate his arrival. It was there I was introduced to Sharon Tate. We shook hands, made polite conversation, and exchanged phone numbers before going in our separate ways. I remember thinking her an exceptionally good-looking girl, but London was full of good-looking girls. More to the point, she was very much the all-American beauty-not what I had in mind for Vampire Killers. (...)
I was, however, sufficiently impressed at least to call her when Filmways stressed how eager they were to use an actress already under contract. Although Sharon’s sun-kissed, milk-fed southern looks hardly fitted the role of a Jewish innkeeper’s daughter; I wanted to accommodate my producers if possible. She came to the studio, and I concealed her ash blond hair beneath a red wig, which altered her appearance considerably. She suddenly looked the part…"
"...It was in Ortisei (on location) that my relationship with Sharon progressed beyond the casual stage. That marked the real beginning of our love affair. We returned to London and the man-made snows on the MGM lot. Although Sharon stayed on at her rented Eaton Place apartment, we spent more and more time together."
..."Sharon moved in with me shortly after Easter. It was a gradual process. Little by little her clothes began to accumulate in my bedroom closet. Then she suggested making it semipermanent. 'Don't worry,' she told me, 'I won't swallow you up like some ladies do.' Knowing my fear of possessive women, she made it clear in all sorts of ways that she understood my life-style and had no intention of cramping it. I'd never received such an assurance from anyone else."
"The vast majority of my friends were delighted that Sharon had moved with me. The only person who advertised his disapproval was Marty Ransohoff. He himself may have had designs on Sharon, though that possibility didn't occur to me till later."
"Sharon displayed no hang-ups when Filmways wanted her to appear nude in a Vampire Killers layout for Playboy, especially when it was suggested that I handle the photography myself. Personally, I wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea, but there was no doubting its publicity value."
"...I was growing rather wary of MGM. I was also growing suspicious of Ransohoff, particularly when I found that Sharon's agent was his agent, too, and had helped renegotiate her contract downward. Ransohoff summoned her to Los Angeles to play opposite Tony Curtis in a comedy - Don't Make Waves - at a paltry $750 a week." (...)
Noted from the webmaster: When Sharon completed Don’t Make Waves in late 1966 in California, she returned to London and to Polanski, who shortly after that went to the States to show Fearless to the producers. Before going back to England he got a call from Robert Evans, Paramount’s vice-president, who wanted him to direct Rosemary’s Baby.
"The producer on Rosemary's Baby was Bill Castle, a red-faced giant of a man with a thatch of closed-cropped white hair and a cigar permanently clamped between his teeth. Castle was a veteran director and producer of cheap horror movies who had rushed out and bought the film rights of Rosemary's Baby with his own money, then resold them at a tidy profit to Paramount, with which he had an exclusive contract. He'd wanted to direct the picture himself, but Bob Evans had put his foot down, insisting it was a director's film and Bill wasn't quite up to it. I flew back to London and started on the script."
Roman, Sharon and William Castle (right)
“The
solitude of my intensive work on the script was relieved by daily calls from
Sharon, who was house hunting in L.A.
Before long she told me she’d found a marvelous place – a bit
expensive, she said, but could she go ahead and sign the lease?
It was one of those old Santa Monica mansions on Ocean Front, just off
the Pacific Coast Highway, with a walled, tree-shaded garden, an ornamental
pond, and a swimming pool. It had cavernous closets, masses of Audubon and
Victorian flower prints, an enormous curving staircase down which Gloria Swanson
might have made an entrance at any moment, and a somewhat masculine master
bedroom lined with acres of somber paneling. The place had reputedly been built
for Cary Grant, and the fact that it now belonged to Brian Aherne lent it an
additional cachet. Like many of the Hollywood houses I came to know so well, it
closely resembled a Hollywood film set of the thirties. This was no coincidence;
when old-time stars and directors had had homes built, they had commissioned
their art directors to design them. Although my per diem was substantial, the
rent was a wild extravagance. I didn’t really need such a large house, nor was
it really my style. I’d have much preferred something more modern, but at
least this caricature of a Hollywood mansion was good for a laugh among friends.
Besides, Sharon’s delight in it was all that mattered with me.”
..."Sharon, at this time, was cast for a part in Valley of the Dolls. Although it was an important break, she didn't think much of either the book or the movie. She dismissed it as an exploitation picture and felt she wasn't doing anything artistically worthwhile.
'You're the better half,' she once told me ruefully, speaking about us as a couple, hating the fact that the industry saw her only as a pretty face.
This certainly didn't apply to Mark Robson, her director in Valley of the Dolls, whom I bumped into on Sunset Strip while the film was in production. "That's a great girl you're living with," he said. "Few actresses have her kind of vulnerability. She's got a great future.'"
(...)
“The
overnight success of Rosemary’s Baby turned me into something of a
Hollywood golden boy, deluged with scripts and propositions from studios all
over town. But the Brian Aherne house is what I remember most vividly whenever I
think back on this, my first spell in Hollywood: friends dropping in, Sharon
cooking for us all, and me playing records from Aherne’s vintage collection on
an old-fashioned phonograph of his, which I’d managed to repair. To this day I
can never hear one number-“Baby, It’s cold outside”- without recalling the
radiance of those California evenings, the peace and well being I felt, the joy
of living with Sharon, and the satisfaction that sprang from doing what I most
wanted to do in the film capital of the world.”
“After Rosemary, not only was I unattracted by the work being offered me, but I yearned to relax, read, travel. In Sharon’s company, I discovered that doing nothing could be very agreeable. The months that followed the completion of Rosemary’s Baby were a halcyon period in my life. After extending the lease on his house several times, Brian Aherne reclaimed it for his own use. Accompanied by a hard-core group of cronies-Cristopher Komeda, Simon Hessera, and Brain Morris-we moved to the Sunset Marquis, one of those peculiarly American establishments that are half hotel, half apartment house, superficially flashy but relatively cheap. Our stay there was a brief one. Sharon, who was less enamored of the place than the rest of us, disliked what she termed its “early Jewish” decor and hankered after something with more character.
She
got her way when we made a move to the Chateau Marmont, just off Sunset
Boulevard, Sharon’s favorite hangout in her early Hollywood days. Sharon’s
loved its run down appearance and old-world atmosphere, not to mention the crazy
layout of its shabby rooms; she felt at home among the actors, musicians, and
writers that constituted its regular population. You could sense, simply by
walking down its corridors, that the lace had had its quota of real-life dramas,
of slashed wrists and overdoses, just as you could almost get stoned from
sniffling the haze that seeped through the various keyholes. Our quarters at the
Chateau Marmont were a fourth-floor apartment with a kitchenette.
At the Chateau Marmont
“A recent addition to our crowd was Peter Sellers, whom I’d met near the Paramount studio while filming Rosemary’s Baby. We planned a communal Christmas vacation in Cortina at the end of 1967.
Peter Sellers, now in one of
his most endearingly manic moods, insisted on showering us all with expensive
presents. He distributed them in a makeshift Santa Claus costume: Sharon’s fox
fur coat, a red ski cap on his head, and a white ski cap as a beard. Typically
enough, he was so depressed again by Boxing Day that he left early.”
"Although
se never mentioned marriage, and despite her liberated California life-style, I
knew that her Catholic upbringing made marriage important to her.
I proposed off the cuff, over dinner in a restaurant. The date we settled
on – January 20, 1968 – fell a few days before her twenty-fifth birthday. We
decide to get married in London; that was my real home and the place where most
of our friends lived.
The
wedding ceremony at the Chelsea Registry Office in the King’s Road turned into
a media event, with photographers outnumbering the guests. Much to my delight,
my father and Wanda came over from Krakow for the occasion. Gene Gutowski was my
best man and Barbara Parkins the bridesmaid.
Sharon
wore a cream-colored taffeta minidress, and I sported an olive green Edwardian
jacket-a tribute to some hard selling by Jack Vernon, a Hollywood boutique
owner. We were a grotesque sight. Looking at our wedding pictures now, I’m
struck by the oddness of everyone’s clothes at this, the zenith of the ‘rich
hippie’ era.
"There were several parties afterward. The biggest of them, at the Playboy club, was attended by what seemed like the whole of London and half of Hollywood. Candice Bergen, Joan Collins, Leslie Caron, John Mills, Laurence Harvey, Anthony Newley, Warren Beatty, James Fox, and Mike Sarne also showed up later at a shinding given for us by Tony Greenburgh. Halfway through the festivities Sharon and I bowed out. We couldn’t take any more parties or champagne, so we headed for West Eaton Place Mews and holed up in our house, which was littered with gifts, flowers, and congratulatory telegrams.
“It
was around this time that Peter and Mia started their romance, and the four of
us saw a lot of each other. We spent one weekend at Joshua tree, a spectacular
stretch of desert near Palm Springs.”
“There was a revival - almost a continuation - of the wedding jamboree when Rosemary's Baby opened in Paris shortly afterward. With Peter Sellers and Mia and a crowd of other friends, we took over L’Hotel, the Left Bank hotel that had just opened in St. Germain-des-Prés."
"We were a strange –looking bunch. Sharon, who’d broken her ankle getting out of bed, was limping around in a plaster cast, and I’d acquired a lipful of stitches (photo below) from some Spaniards on the Avenue Wagram. One of them had goosed Sharon while we were on our way to a movie, I’d lashed out at him, and his pals had rallied to his defense." (Note from the webmaster: Roman made a mistake here because that incident with the Spaniards had actually happened earlier that year, in February, and not when they were in Paris to release Rosemary's Baby, in November).
"As for Peter and Mia, they were in
the heyday of their Indian period, all beads and chains and billowing muslin.
Mia, with her inveterate hatred of press photographers, pointedly made faces at
them whenever they followed us around.
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