Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

May 1, 2000
Veteran celebrity biographer King (The Duchess of Windsor, etc.) gives us a thorough account of Sharon Tate's brief life, her star-crossed career and her tragic death at the hands of Charles Manson's Family. King counters the grisly familiarity of the Tate-LaBianca murders by approaching the oft-told story from the perspective of Tate's innocent Hollywood ambitions, presenting her as representative of the 1960s-era woman in pursuit of L.A. stardom and liberation. He recounts her youth as a soldier's daughter in Italy, her struggles in films like Valley of the Dolls (which presented her as a nascent sex kitten) and her ominous relationship with the volatile, philandering Roman Polanski. King portrays Tate as an essentially simple, generous-hearted person who possessed an unfortunate na vet regarding the hidden social storms she traversed. But King's narrative gets less interesting as he begins to reconstruct the Family's development, its descent into the mad butchery of Tate, Leno LaBianca and others, and the arrests. Although King coherently re-creates the stale hippie dreams, criminal tensions and drug-tainted glamour of the cultural milieu in which Manson operated, he breaks little new ground, rehashing what is already known from prosecutor Bugliosi's seminal Helter Skelter. Albeit capably researched and written, this account in the end occupies that uneasy perch between veneration and exploitation.