Duty was her pattern. She was a smiler, an actress.
Sharon signed with Ransohoff at nineteen. Dutifully, she faced Hollywood with professional dedication, taking courses in singing, dancing, and acting, the latter with Jeff Corey in the fall of 1963. “An incredibly beautiful girl,” Corey reflected, “but a fragmented personality.” Self-disclosure was a problem, so Corey one day put a stick in her hand and demanded, “Hit me, do something, show emotion!” Beauty was not enough. And she knew she wouldn’t be beautiful forever.
She was twenty-three.
She was seeing someone, Jay Sebring, a hairstylist to the stars. They’d been together about three years, almost since she had arrived in Los Angeles. He was there in London now, waiting for her to finish this film, Eye of the Devil. He had the most beautiful, the sweetest, home in Benedict Canyon on Easton Drive. It was Jean Harlow’s old house, the one where her husband, producer Paul Bern, shot himself (unless he was murdered) two months after they were married. But it really was the sweetest house, the kind you would discover if you got lost wandering a forest in a fairy tale, like the cottage where Snow White found the Seven Dwarfs. It actually looked like that. To think that someone would be shot, or shoot himself, in a place like that—it didn’t make sense.
Sharon and Roman, party people, could agree that they loved mid-sixties London. The city still bounced to the beat of the Beatles—their sound, their look, the cheeky enthusiasm that remade stuffy old London into the mod capital of the world—and in flooded an international miscellany of the young and creative, decked out in long beads, billowy shirtsleeves, and miniskirts, to enjoy a little of the goofy good time they saw in A Hard Day’s Night. They were musicians, photographers, Warren Beatty, Twiggy, Vidal Sassoon, the debonair production designer Richard Sylbert, fledgling producers like Robert Evans—dispatched by Gulf & Western’s chairman, Charles Bluhdorn, to shake the postwar dust off Paramount’s London office. They all crossed paths at the Ad Lib Club, one of swinging London’s hot spots. Most of them liked a little grass, only a little. But—as Polanski told Sharon—he couldn’t stand the dropouts at the margins of the city, the bleary-eyed, perpetually drugged grass smokers with their pedantry and fogged reasoning.
Sharon smoked grass a little.
Had she ever tried LSD?
Yes. A few times. With Jay.
Roman had done it once or twice. The first time, driving past Harrods, the steering wheel changed shape in his hands, and he and his date got lost on their way to his flat. Once they arrived, the woman marveled at how beautifully green the red stairs were, and in the bedroom, Roman, blinded, draped a shade against the searing glare of night. His hair turned pink and green, and when he tried to vomit, out came a dribble of rainbow circles. Even tripping, he knew why. Observing his own brain—ordinarily as rigorous as a geometric proof—betray its own logic, Polanski fought back, commanding himself to stay rational. He turned to his date and saw that her eyes and mouth were swastikas.
Where was Sharon staying?
Eaton Place.
Around the corner from him. Would she like to try some acid tonight? They could split a tab. It would be an easy trip.
At Roman’s Eaton Place flat they lay down together and split the sugar cube in two. Sharon, biting her fingernails, accepted her half and confessed to feeling guilty for being there. She did love Jay. But not like he loved her. Jay was completely in love with her. But—this confused her—she also knew he had other women; they literally lined the block around his salon. But, she tried to reason with herself, free love was natural and therefore good, and since she had come to London, she had heard so many sophisticates, people like Roman Polanski, denigrate middle-class American hang-ups like fidelity that she had almost come to agree with them herself, at least for tonight.
Roman lit candles as the acid covered them and they talked on for hours, and nearing sunrise, it was obvious to what remained of Roman’s thinking mind that they were going to go to bed together.
She started screaming.
Terrified, he dropped to her side. “Please don’t,” he reassured her. “Please.”
But she wouldn’t stop. She was weeping uncontrollably.
“Please, no, don’t. Please,” he begged. “Everything’s all right.”
* * *
He would stare at Sharon, unbelieving. It was impossible, someone so perfect, and yet, there she was. Wasn’t she?
“She was just fantastic,” Polanski would say. “She was a fucking angel.” Her hair of yellow chaparral, the changing color of her eyes, the unqualified kindness of her face. Did people like this exist? In a world of chaos, was it naive to trust, as a child would, the apparent goodness of things, the feeling of safety he had known and lost before?
If the horrible could happen once, it could happen again. Simply knowing it happened, he was doomed—his mind was doomed—by the possibility of recurrence. Despite even the facts, “could” forever opens the aqueduct of nightmares that eyes don’t see. But no mind, even when the sun is shining, sees everything with its eyes. A broken mind sees instead the black chasm of “could,” waiting, smug as gravity, to ravage every newborn thought. Again it sees only what it saw before.
But there she was, Sharon. They were together, in their hotel room, on location in the Italian Dolomites: Roman, writer, director, and star of Fearless Vampire Killers; Sharon, playing his love interest, Sarah Shagal.
Outside their window there was snow.
She would ask him about his first marriage, to Barbara Lass, a Polish actress, “but I really hate talking about it for some reason,” he would say. “Not because it’s so painful to talk about but because it’s so futile.”
Would he ever lose the loss, or was the best one could hope for to exchange one loss for another? Or could Sharon, like a dam, hold off the flood of losses forever?
The hemorrhaging: It did not begin with Barbara. When Roman was three, his father, Ryszard, for reasons he would quickly regret, forfeited his painter’s life in Paris and moved the family back to Kraków. It was the summer of 1936. Again, an old feeling: Though Roman was too young to understand why, he could feel a certain tension in his mother and father when they spoke the names Hitler and Göring. Uncomprehending, he would listen to the grown-ups discuss the trenches being dug in Planty Park, why the shopwindows were crisscrossed with construction tape, and the anti-Semitic slogans in the local papers. What did they mean? In 1939 Ryszard decided to send Roman, his mother, and his half sister to Warsaw. “They thought Warsaw would be safer,” Roman reflected. “[Because] Warsaw was far east within the Polish territory.” They thought wrong. In Warsaw the piercing air-raid sirens rushed the Polanski family, without Ryszard, along with screaming babies and hysterical strangers, down into a muggy cellar piled with makeshift gas masks. Roman would spend many nights there, in silence, squeezing his mother’s arm in the dark. Why was this happening? The boy didn’t understand what they had done wrong. As the raids increased—they would hide in the shelter sometimes three times a night—the Polanskis ran short of money and food. “Our emergency plan had been a complete miscalculation,” Polanski would write. “Instead of staying put in Kraków, which had seen no fighting at all, we had headed straight for the very epicenter of the war.”