“Hello?” Braunsberg could hear something was wrong. “What is it?” Suddenly overcome, he passed the phone to Polanski.
“What is it?” Polanski lowered himself into a chair.
“Roman.” It was Bill Tennant, his agent. “There was a disaster in the house.”
“Which house?”
“Your house.”
Had the hillside collapsed?
Roman held the phone to his ear. “Sharon is dead,” Tennant said. “And [Wojciech] and Jay and Abigail.”
“No…,” he said. “No, no, no.…”
A landslide. It was a landslide. They had been crushed.
“How?”
“I don’t know,” returned Tennant. “I don’t know…”
When they cleared the rubble, Sharon would be rescued.
“This is insane…,” Polanski pleaded. “This is insane.…” He kept saying it.
Finally Tennant said, “Roman, they were murdered.”
“Shove off,” his father had said. “Shove off.” The phone slipped from Polanski’s hand. He was crying, banging his head against the wall. He did not understand. They had just spoken. He heard the words, but he did not understand, because the words were not true. They had just spoken. She found a cat.
* * *
Joan Didion and her brother-in-law, Dominick Dunne, were poolside, sitting out the Southern California heat wave at Dunne’s soon-to-be ex-wife’s when the call came—from Natalie Wood. She was petrified. Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring and their friends had been murdered, viciously murdered, at the house on Cielo Drive. Details were scant, but more calls came: the reports were grotesque, confusing, and contradictory, but soon the facts emerged: One body was found outside the Cielo Drive house, stabbed dozens of times; another, a woman, was stabbed to death in her nightgown; in the living room, Sharon’s pregnant body, caked in blood, was found in the fetal position, a nylon rope tied twice around her neck and thrown over a rafter. The other end of the rope was tied to Jay Sebring’s neck a few feet away; a bloody towel covered his face. Another body—that of a young man—was found shot to death in a car. There were no motives, no suspects.
The bizarre depravity of the crime scene, the number of victims, the pedigrees of the dead—a movie star, a celebrity stylist, an heiress—would make the Cielo Drive slayings, next to the Kennedy assassination, the most publicized murder case in history. The apparent meaninglessness of the massacre was intolerable to logical minds; no one, not least the detectives, knew what to think about the little they knew. To fill in the gaps, crackpot theories, perpetuated by a grasping press, ruled all conversation. These were sex crimes, gossip said; these were drug crimes; these were Hollywood killings; the killers were Klansmen, satanists; Polanski, conveniently out of town, was the evil mastermind; it was a ritual slaying, a Rosemary’s Baby murder. Polanski even looked evil. Didn’t he? Well, he certainly knew evil. Only a man capable of such a sinister film—a film Robert Windeler in The New York Times wrote was “conceived by the devil himself”—could commit such an inconceivably psychopathic act. And Polanski had survived the Nazis. That had to mean something. Didn’t it? He was such a party animal too; he must know those sorts of people, the type who stalk the Whisky a Go Go at two in the morning looking for a ride or a toke or a girl. Personal grudges on the grand scale—against hippies, against liberals and conservatives, against the young, against the rich and beautiful, against Hollywood, against the 1960s—legitimized all hypotheses. “The murders seemed the consequence of everything all of us had done,” wrote Dore Schary’s daughter, Hollywood scion Jill Robinson: “We had gone too far, done all of the things our parents warned against—and more.” The whole of Los Angeles was implicated.
The following evening, August 10, 1969, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were found murdered, stabbed to death, in their home in Los Feliz. The word “War” was carved into his stomach. She had been gagged with a lamp cord and stabbed forty-one times. On the walls, “Death to pigs” and “Rise” were written in blood. “Helter Skelter,” in blood, dripped down the refrigerator door.
Los Angeles panicked. “Everybody was thinking, ‘we’re next,’” Andy Braunsberg said. “We were all running around with guns in our purses,” said Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, a friend of Roman and Sharon’s. “We all suspected each other.” The police, with no leads, suspected everyone. They even targeted Phillips’s husband, John, whose “outward calm,” Polanski would write, “concealed a capacity for deep, burning anger.” They came to her house, asking, “Would your husband have any reason to have any animosity toward anyone in that house?” Marcia Nasatir’s phone at Ziegler-Ross rang around the clock with phony well-wishers digging for dirt. “I kept saying to these people, ‘She was a mother,’” Nasatir said. “‘She was eight months pregnant.’” Dominick Dunne sent his children to his mother-in-law’s in San Diego. Sharon’s sister, Debra Ann, said, “Everybody was off frantically trying to make some kind of sense of this horrific tale that was forced upon us. But there was no sense to be found.”
Joan Didion, though horrified, was not surprised. No one, she would think, was that surprised. After all, this was Los Angeles: “This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in.” She kept a record of license plate numbers in her dressing-room drawer.
* * *
Hotels wouldn’t take Polanski. As soon as he landed, Robert Evans moved him into a dressing room at Paramount. A guard held watch. A doctor kept him sedated. Most of his meals, he ate with Evans.
Friends surrounded him. Sylbert, Beatty, Evans. Work, work, everyone said. That’s the best medicine. Work.
“I’m sure everybody tells you to work,” Stanley Kubrick said to Polanski by phone.
“That’s right.”
“I know you can’t work.”
He met with a psychiatrist. It would take Polanski at least four years, he was told, to recover.
He went to the wake Warren Beatty held at the top of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
He went to Sharon’s funeral. He watched her coffin, dazed.
He made a decision. He would stay in L.A. If he found the murderer himself, Polanski reasoned, it would ease his grief.
He was brought in for questioning. Barely lucid, he murmured: “The whole crime seems so illogical to me. I’m looking for something which doesn’t fit your habitual standard in which you are used to working as the police. I would look for something much more far out and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m devoted now to this and I’m going to do it. Maybe it was somebody who hated me. It’s difficult for me to imagine that somebody hated me to this point.”
He offered a $20,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the killers.
He went to Cielo Drive, determined to find something, anything, that made sense. His mind was fogged in grief, but he would force himself to think.