Chapter 12

The Imperfect Couple

Throughout 1967, Sharon’s thoughts increasingly turned toward her personal life, and her relationship with Roman. In an interview given to the New York Sunday News, Sharon indicated both her devotion to Roman and her growing dissatisfaction with the direction in which her career seemed to be headed. “We have a wonderful relationship,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll marry him. He hasn’t asked me.”¹

Sharon was absolutely convinced of her feelings for Roman. “My definition of love is being full,” she explained. “Complete. It makes everything lighter. I love Roman, but I can’t honestly say that right now, today, I want to marry him. I think marriage should have a true meaning behind it. I would never do it just to be quote, respectable. I feel sorry for girls who go to bed with men without any emotion. Even if you have an affair that doesn’t end in marriage, it’s still important to experience the feeling.”²

Roman, however, was somewhat more reluctant to commit. “In the beginning of our relationship, I was afraid of getting too deeply involved and losing my freedom,” he told Playboy Magazine in a 1971 interview. “But she was extremely understanding, tactful and clever. Being around me, she still made me feel absolutely free. She did not make demands, and she made it clear that she was not going to engulf me. I remember once her words, ‘I am not one of those ladies who swallow a man.…’”³

To stay with Sharon, and feel comfortable, Roman declared that he had to have complete freedom, to come and go as he wished, and to see whomever he wished. Although this ran counter to Sharon’s ideas about relationships and commitment, she was so in love with Roman that she agreed to give him all that he wanted. Their understanding, however, was completely in Roman’s favor. While Sharon accepted that there might be other women, and times when Roman failed to return home, Polanski obviously did not hold the same viewpoint. He could be extremely jealous of Sharon but, luckily for him, this fit her need to be dominated.

Sharon knew that Roman was unfaithful. “And it doesn’t bother me,” she declared. “I think that in the beginning, it did, a little bit. But again, you come to this European thing, where it’s done very openly … very naturally. And soon you realize that this type of behavior is just part of ‘The Man.’ Now I’ve begun to think there’s something wrong with a man who doesn’t have the drive to want to go out and see another girl. Even after he’s married—oh, yes! Any man who lets his wife tie him down or take him to task for following his natural instincts is a very meek man. He wouldn’t be the man for me.… Just because a man is married doesn’t mean he should stop operating like a man. I would want my husband to hold down the other front as well. It’s the only honest way.”⁴

Such pronouncements, at least, seemed to indicate that Sharon had come to terms with Roman’s behavior. But they speak more of her ability to parrot Polanski’s own views than of any acceptance on her part of his style of life. For Roman and the press, she would evince a complete understanding; but secretly, she continued to hope that Polanski would come round to her own ideas of commitment.

Such acceptance was necessary, as Roman was not terribly discreet. “Roman didn’t go to a lot of trouble to hide his affairs,” says Victor Lownes.⁵ On one occasion, when Sharon and Judy Gutowski went away for the weekend, Roman slept with a model he had previously met. Polanski apparently bragged of his latest conquest to Gene Gutowski, who, in turn, informed his wife. At the time, the Gutowskis were in the midst of their own marital difficulties, and Judy, who despised both Roman and her husband, saw a way to strike back. “It must be nice,” she said to Sharon one day, “living the way you and Roman do—I mean, allowing each other such complete freedom. Like when you and I went off to Big Sur and Roman screwed that girl and you didn’t mind in the least!”⁶

Hurt though she was, Sharon never mentioned the incident to Roman. It was simply one in a string of affairs, and she had realized that there was little she could do to stop such behavior. “No matter what happens,” she told a friend, “I always know that Roman will come home to me at night.”⁷

When the lease expired on their Santa Monica mansion in the middle of 1967, Sharon and Roman spent several months living a semi-nomadic existence. First, they took temporary rooms at the Sunset Marquis, a prestigious apartment complex in the center of Hollywood. The stay, however, was cut short by Sharon, who disliked the atmosphere. Instead, she talked Roman into renting a fourth-floor apartment in the famous Chateau Marmont overlooking Sunset Boulevard, a big Victorian building complete with turrets and oddly-shaped rooms. Sharon loved the place, with its fashionable dwellers including actors and rock stars, but Roman thought it was all too much. Walking through the hallways, he later recalled, the smell of pot hung heavily in the air, and ambulances often raced the latest suicides and drug overdoses off to the UCLA Medical Center.⁸

It was a time of seemingly endless parties, and Sharon and Roman had a steady stream of friends, business associates and acquaintances who filtered through their apartment. Inevitably, their glimpses were brief, impressionistic. Sharmagne Leland-St. John, former Playboy bunny and an occasional guest, recalled: “Sharon was the sweetest creature I had ever met, very smart, but very stupid, too. Once, she was sitting on a chair, and watering this plant. She would empty a pitcher, and go for some more water, and do it again as we sat there wondering when it would occur to her that the water was going straight through the pot down onto the carpet.”⁹

After a few months at the Chateau Marmont, Sharon and Roman decided to find a house together. Polanski’s contract with Paramount Studios ensured that he would be required in Hollywood for several years. After looking, however, they could find nothing suitable, and Patty Duke suggested that they rent her house above Benedict Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Located at 1600 Summit Ridge Drive, the house was a rambling Colonial-style retreat with an enclosed garden filled with old trees and flowering vines.

To celebrate, Sharon and Roman gave a party at the Summit Ridge house. According to several sources, there was a curious incident which had ominous overtones in view of the later murders. The couple had agreed to look after Patty Duke’s English sheepdog, and during the gathering it somehow managed to escape from the house, wandering down Summit Ridge Drive. Roman apparently chased the dog down the hill, only to encounter a vicious pack of Alsatian dogs belonging to members of an English cult called The Process living nearby. The dogs chased Roman into a garage, where he became trapped until he managed to break a rear window and escape up the hillside, away from the Satanists’ howling dogs, to the safety of his house nearby.¹⁰

Sharon and Roman frequently entertained at their new house. Roman regularly brought friends back unannounced, but Sharon never seemed to mind. She enjoyed filling the role of housewife. She was a good cook, with her specialties including Virginia ham and upside-down cake, learned from her mother Doris. Sharon relished the domestic atmosphere; it was as close as she could come to getting a commitment out of Roman.¹¹ She kept Patty Duke’s fifty-four-year-old maid Winifred Chapman, at a salary of $200 a week.¹² She would later follow the couple when they moved to the house on Cielo Drive.

“This was a happy, blameless period,” Roman would later recall. “There were lots of parties at people’s houses, on the beach or in the mountains, and often Sharon would make dinner, and there was this magnificent group of friends who would come to our house, and we would sit outside where it was warm, with the sky full of stars, and listen to music or talk for hours—films, sex, politics or whatever.”¹³

In the months following work on Rosemary’s Baby and Valley of the Dolls, Sharon and Roman jetted between London and Los Angeles, dividing their time between the Eaton Mews flat and their house on Summit Ridge. They soon became among the most famous of celebrity couples in Hollywood. Photo journalist Peter Evans called them “The imperfect couple. They were the Douglas Fairbanks/Mary Pickford of our time.… Cool, nomadic, talented and nicely shocking. Their Pickfair (Sharome?) was a movable mansion, a roomy rebellion. Curious, unafraid, they helped demolish the ancient Hollywood image of what movie stardom was all about. They became part of the anti-Establishment Establishment. They became rich but never regal.”¹⁴

Polanski’s influence over Sharon continued to grow, and not everyone welcomed the changes. Although Sharon seemed to be happy, there was a wilder streak in her which did not go unnoticed. Once, Hal Gefsky and Herb Browar were dining at a restaurant in Hollywood when they happened to spot Polanski across the room. Gefsky waved him over, and asked how Sharon was doing. “Oh, Hal,” Roman answered, “I’ve completely corrupted her!”¹⁵

Indeed, their circle of friends largely encompassed those who fell somewhat beyond Hollywood’s older, more established society. Jay Sebring was an intimate friend, along with such notables as Steve McQueen; Warren Beatty; Jane and Peter Fonda; Dennis Hopper; Candice Bergen and her boyfriend, record producer Terry Melcher; Jim Morrison of the rock group The Doors; Janis Joplin; and the four members of the rock group The Mamas and the Papas—John and Michelle Phillips, Cass Eliott and Denny Doherty.

Perhaps their closest friends during this period were Mia Farrow and Peter Sellers. Since her separation from Frank Sinatra, Mia had grown closer to Sharon, and often spent weekends with her and Roman. It was Roman who first introduced Mia to Sellers, whom he had met during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski had taken an instant liking to the rather quiet and thoughtful man who, in private, was so different from his jovial public personality. Roman later remembered both Mia and Peter as being intoxicated with the late 1960s counterculture and all that went with it—Indian clothing, beaded chains and necklaces, meditation and astrology.¹⁶

One weekend, Sharon and Roman and Mia and Peter went off to camp in the desert at Joshua Tree National Park near Palm Springs. They spent the weekend sitting around a fire, getting stoned and watching for UFOs in the night sky. Sharon and Roman, well aware of their friends’ susceptibility, taunted Mia and Peter by throwing rocks and stones into the vast desert behind their backs, then declaring that the noise must be a paranormal experience.¹⁷

Recognizing Sellers’ loneliness, Sharon and Roman asked him to join them on a skiing holiday for Christmas, 1967. The group traveled to Cortina, where they spent their days on the slopes and their evenings huddled round a roaring fire in the lodge. For the holiday, Sellers insisted on dressing as Santa Claus. Sharon lent him one of her long, fox fur coats, which he coupled with a red ski cap worn atop his head and a white one tied round his chin as a fake beard. Thus attired, he handed round the presents.¹⁸

The year ended with important career decisions by both Roman and Sharon. In Hollywood, Roman managed to buy himself out of Cadre Films’ three-picture contract with Martin Ransohoff’s Filmways, Inc., and instead signed up with the Ziegler Ross Agency. His new business manager and agent, William Tennant, quickly became a close friend, and he and his young wife Sandy frequently entertained Sharon and Roman at all of the fashionable Los Angeles nightspots.

Under Polanski’s influence, Sharon had come to despise Ransohoff’s control, believing that he was deliberately stalling when it came to her career. The debacle over The Fearless Vampire Killers had proved the last straw. To please Roman, she was willing to sever her connection with Filmways. Despite the evidence to the contrary, as well as the massive amount of money he had poured into her success, Sharon felt her association with Ransohoff was responsible for her lack of success.

With her career increasingly in question, she turned her thoughts to Roman, and to the idea of marriage. To this end, she apparently decided to quit the business. During a meeting with Ransohoff, Sharon told him that she wished to start a family with Polanski, and asked that she be let out of her contract’s remaining three years. Ransohoff agreed, conditioned on her intention to retire. The sacrifice of her career was a high price to pay, but, at last, Sharon was free to pursue her life as she wished.