When I started interviews for my Premiere piece, in April 1999, much of what you’ve just read was unknown to me. I’d gotten through Helter Skelter, and I knew the murders had left a mark on Hollywood, but that was about all. In a few years I’d develop a deep obsession with the case; I’d have the trial transcript at my fingertips and binders full of press clippings at my disposal. But in the beginning, I was flummoxed.
Helter Skelter had captured the story definitively. Its author had ensured that Manson was locked away. How could a magazine feature top that? Leslie, my editor, had given me leeway in finding an angle. But her first suggestion—how did the crimes change Hollywood?—wasn’t enough for me, and I suspected it wouldn’t be enough for her, either.
My earliest weeks of interviews pulled me in wildly different directions. At first, I was compelled by the way the murders had sundered friendships in Hollywood, revealing strong opinions about the era’s morality, or lack thereof. As I cycled through Hollywood cliques, I found that I was reigniting thirty-year-old rumors and rivalries. Everyone, over time, assigned the blame for the crimes a little differently. I was dealing in memories that had survived decades of erosion. Even my most reliable sources were shaky on the details. As for the unreliable sources, I kept reminding myself that many of them were washed-up Hollywood personalities, often in their dotage. Their memories had warped to accommodate their bruised egos, their ulterior motives, and, above all, their sense that they were at the center of any story worth telling.
A lot of the contradictions I heard centered on the house at Cielo Drive, and the decadent scene there in the months before the murders. That house still signified a lot in Hollywood. For some, the death of Sharon Tate and her friends aroused as much fear as it did grief.
After the murders, the media had blamed Hollywood’s “unreality and hedonism,” as the New York Times’s Stephen Roberts put it, for having fostered an atmosphere where mass homicide was all but guaranteed. Roberts, then Los Angeles bureau chief of the Times, talked to a lot of Hollywood people in those first weeks. Bugliosi quoted him in Helter Skelter: “All the stories had a common thread: That somehow the victims had brought the murders on themselves… The attitude was summed up in the epigram: ‘Live freaky, die freaky.’”
The problem was, thirty years later, no one could agree on who had brought the “freakiness” into the home, and why. I had to wonder if there was a conspiracy of silence in Hollywood. It had taken months for the LAPD to crack the case. In that time, Manson and the Family had almost certainly killed others. If Hollywood hadn’t circled the wagons, it seemed there was a good chance the investigation could have ended sooner. So many of the people I spoke to had strong ideas about why these murders had happened—and yet none of them had spoken to the police, and many remained unwilling to go on the record with me.
The one thing everyone seemed to agree on—everyone outside of the DA’s office, that is—is that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter motive didn’t add up. It had worn thin with police and Hollywood insiders, and it was wearing thin with me, too. I tried to unpack this idea that Manson chose the Cielo house to “instill fear” in Terry Melcher, the record producer whose rejection had apparently so enraged Manson that he activated a race war.
One problem was that Melcher, by all accounts, had no idea that this was why the Family attacked his former home. They never told him that they wanted him to be afraid—they didn’t follow the murders with any kind of communication to him. According to Bugliosi, Melcher never realized the crimes had anything to do with him until months later, when the police got in touch with him. How was this motive supposed to work if Melcher was never apprised of it?
The grander scheme underlying Helter Skelter—to start a massive race war by making it look as if Black Panthers were behind the murders—didn’t land, either. Although Manson was clearly a racist, and while he had a wild, eschatological philosophy, no one believed even for a second that black militants were behind these killings, as he’d hoped it would seem.
So was the Family just too dumb, or too drugged, to pull it off? Or was there another reason for the murders that had nothing to do with race wars and scaring Melcher? It seemed to me that the Manson murders had garnered much of their infamy—and Bugliosi much of his fame—from the Helter Skelter motive. A hippie race war spawned by an acid-drenched, brainwashing ex-con: it was such a fantastical conceit that the murders lived on in pop culture. With a more commonplace explanation—a drug burn, say, or Hollywood infighting—they would’ve faded into history after a few years, and Bugliosi would never have written the most popular true-crime book of all time.
With an eye on other possible motives, I focused on three questions in my first weeks of reporting. First: Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the killers?
Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities?
Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny?
Here, as neatly as I can tell it, is what I learned in the early, frantic weeks of my reporting. Just as important is what I didn’t learn—which goes a long way toward explaining how a simple three-month magazine assignment turned into a twenty-year obsession.
Julian Wasser, a photographer for Life magazine, was my first interview. Almost right away, I felt the kind of cognitive dissonance that followed me through my reporting. I’d meet my sources at a fancy restaurant of their choice—in this case, Le Petit Four, a sunny sidewalk café in West Hollywood—and, within minutes, as the conversation turned toward violence, the plush setting would feel totally incongruous. Such was the case with Wasser, who told me over a tuna niçoise salad about one of the saddest days of his life.
Days after the murders, as part of an editorial for Life, Wasser had accompanied Roman Polanski on his first return visit to the house on Cielo Drive. One of Wasser’s pictures from that day is a study in grief. Polanski, in a white T-shirt, sits slumped and devastated on the front porch of his home, his eyes carefully averted from the faded word “Pig” written in his wife’s blood on the front door.
“It was too soon,” Wasser told me. He’d shadowed Polanski as he moved through the bloodstained rooms. It wasn’t a home anymore; it was evidence. “There was fingerprint-dusting powder all over the bedroom and the phones, and there was blood in the carpet. It was thick like Jell-O.” And there was so much of it that it hadn’t even dried yet, Wasser said. “You could still smell it… Salty, carnal.” The odor reminded him of a slaughterhouse.
Right away, Wasser regretted the assignment. But Polanski wanted him there, even at his most vulnerable moment. It wasn’t an exercise in vanity, at least not entirely. Hoping to help solve the murders, Polanski had invited along a psychic, Peter Hurkos, whose alleged clairvoyance had made him a minor celebrity. Wasser was enlisted to provide duplicates of his photos to Hurkos, who could glean “psychic vibrations” from them.
Polanski led them to the nursery, which Tate had carefully furnished and decorated in anticipation of the baby. “Roman went over to the bassinet and just started crying. I said, ‘This is such a private moment, I shouldn’t be here,’ and he said, ‘Please, don’t take any more pictures right now.’ It was just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve never seen anything, in my mind, so intrusive, even though he had invited me… The enormity of it,” Wasser added, “going into this pregnant woman’s bedroom and seeing her intimate area covered with fingerprint powder and realizing what happened there.”
Hurkos, it turned out, didn’t share Wasser’s sense of solemnity. A week before the Life story ran, pirated reproductions of Wasser’s photos appeared on the front page of the tabloid the Hollywood Citizen News. The psychic had sold his copies, vibrations and all.
Wasser described the “great fear” that descended on Los Angeles after the murders. “I lived in Beverly Hills. If you went to someone’s house they wouldn’t let you in. The normal selfishness and paranoia was magnified a hundredfold. It was another reason for not answering your door.”
I heard a lot of that in my first interviews. Sales of burglar alarms and security systems had apparently soared after the murders, and people were quick to ditch their drug stashes. There’s a famous, anonymous line from Life, from the very article featuring Wasser’s pictures, actually: “Toilets are flushing all over Beverly Hills; the entire Los Angeles sewer system is stoned.”
Others took more drastic precautions. At the funerals of his friends Tate and Sebring, Steve McQueen carried a pistol in his belt, his publicist Warren Cowan told me. The actor was in the throes of an anxiety that pervaded Hollywood, where everyone suspected that the killer might be among them. Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair journalist known for his reporting on the entertainment industry, told me, “Hollywood did change… The dancing was different. The drugs were different. The fucking was different.” He and his wife were so frightened that they sent their kids to stay with their grandmother in northern California.
Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, said that her father had hired a security guard. “He was there from sundown to sunrise for months,” she explained. “Mom fed him to death, I think. He was uniformed with a gun and he sat in the kitchen all night. I can remember the whole tone of this city afterward… it defined fear.”
In 1999, apparently, that fear was still alive and well, at least among Hollywood’s A-list, many of whom declined to speak to me, even though thirty years had passed. I was rebuffed by the intimates of Tate, Polanski, and Sebring—sometimes with vehemence, sometimes with tersely worded emails or phone calls. “No interest.” “Doesn’t want to be involved.” Or just the one word: “No.” Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda said no. Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, both reputedly close to Tate and Polanski: no, no. Candice Bergen, Terry Melcher’s girlfriend at the time of the murders, said no, too—as did David Geffen, Mia Farrow, and Anjelica Huston, among others.
As the rejections piled up, I had my own bout of paranoia. Had some memo gone out? My request had asked simply if they’d like to discuss the aftereffects of the murders on their community; it didn’t feel like I was prying. And Premiere, since it was dedicated entirely to the movie business, usually garnered some enthusiasm from this crowd. Bruce Dern: no. Kirk Douglas: no. Paul Newman: no. Elliott Gould, Ann-Margret, Hugh Hefner: no, no, no. All told, more than three dozen people turned me down. Some were household names, but plenty of the decidedly nonfamous found reasons to decline, too. It was looking like I’d have a story about Hollywood with no one from Hollywood in it.
Hoping for something more revelatory, I went to less well-known names. Peter Bart, the longtime editor in chief of Variety, had been close to Polanski, and what he told me gave me some semblance of a lead.
“I must confess that that crowd was a little scary,” Bart said, referring to Polanski and Tate’s circle. “There was an aura of danger around them… there was an instinctive feeling that everyone was pushing it and things were getting out of control. My wife and I still talk about it,” he said. “Anybody who underestimates the impact of the event is full of shit.”
This was my first taste of the “live freaky, die freaky” view: the idea that Polanski’s circle, with its bacchanalian parties and flexible morals, had brought about their own murders. I thought there might be something here. After all, the murders had been solved and the victims had done seemingly nothing to instigate them—but Bart, and others I’d soon speak to, still claimed that their lifestyles were to blame.
I had to get closer to those who’d known Sharon and Roman, anyone who’d attended these supposedly lurid parties. But the rejections kept coming. I’d been in touch with Diane Ladd’s manager, having heard that Ladd, who’d been married to Bruce Dern at the time of the murders, ran in some of the same circles as Tate and Polanski. Her manager promised to set up an interview. The next day she called back, saying that Ladd had had an “emotional, visceral reaction.” The manager said, “I don’t know what happened with Diane back in the sixties, but she adamantly refused to have anything to do with the piece. She even told me that if her name was in it, she was going to contact her attorney.”
Peter Fonda gave me yet another no. Not long afterward, I came across him at a gas station in the middle of the Mojave Desert, of all places, some five hours outside L.A. True to form, he was in leathers and on a Harley. I approached him with my business card and tried to explain the story as succinctly as possible. He seemed receptive. But later, when I followed up again, the answer was still: no.
I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”
There was one major player who agreed to talk to me: Vincent Bugliosi. Not only did he sign on for an interview, he invited me to his new home in Pasadena, the same one where, years later, he would threaten to “hurt [me] like [I’d] never been hurt before” if I published my findings.
There was no sign of that animosity during our first meeting. On a sunny spring day, Bugliosi gave me six hours of his time, driving me around to show me various landmarks related to the crime and enjoying a long lunch with me in one of his favorite restaurants. I was flattered to have captured his attention—here was the man who’d put away one of the monsters of the twentieth century. Later I would question the motive behind all his generosity.
A prosecutor makes a lot of enemies over the course of his career, and Bugliosi, I’d learn, made more than most, both in and out of the DA’s office. But considering that he’d once fielded death threats from Manson himself, he lived in a surprisingly unprotected home, quintessentially suburban. He and Gail, his wife of forty-three years, were still moving in when I visited that April of 1999; Bugliosi, white haired, lean, and blue eyed, greeted me with a firm handshake and a litany of apologies for the unpacked boxes. In the living room, flowers of all kinds, dried, artificial, and real, burst from pots and vases.
Their kitchen, adorned with Gail’s chicken and rooster tchotchkes, could’ve been right out of a fifties sitcom. Bugliosi picked up a hairless cat that brushed against his leg—a rare Siamese breed, he told me. The cat’s name was Sherlock, “because he snoops everywhere.” Gail put out a plate of cookies and a pair of iced teas for us.
Bugliosi was a fast talker. He sent a tsunami of words in my direction, sometimes jumping out of his chair for no apparent reason. Gail, an island of repose by comparison, busied herself at the kitchen counter. I caught her rolling her eyes as her husband told me that the movie version of Helter Skelter, from 1976, “was number one that year” and “had the biggest ratings in TV history, prior to Roots.” He’d essentially been on a thirty-year victory lap, and he had his talking points down cold. It was hard to get him off script. As he drove me around that day, he was still reliving his encounters with Manson in the courtroom. Sometimes it seemed he was quoting almost verbatim from Helter Skelter. On the surface, he seemed chatty and forthcoming, but everything he said—for hours—was canned.
Still hoping for a good angle, I tried to probe, however gently, at the holes I’d noticed in Helter Skelter. For one, how had the cops missed so many clues in the case—why hadn’t they solved it much sooner? As he did in his book, Bugliosi blamed sloppy police work. They never would’ve cracked the case without him, he told me.
I wanted his take on the Cielo house’s caretaker, William Garretson, who’d been the only one on the property to survive that night. Garretson lived in the modest guesthouse separated from the main home. His story was so unlikely that, at first, he’d been the LAPD’s number one suspect. He swore that his stereo had been playing loud enough to drown out the murders. He’d heard no part of the brutal slaughter, even though the screaming and the gunshots had occurred only sixty feet from his bedroom window. And Bugliosi concurred, albeit reluctantly. The police, he reminded me, had conducted sound tests that supported Garretson.
I moved on to Terry Melcher. If Manson had wanted to teach him a lesson, why did he order the killings of people who had no real connection to him, other than that they’d lived at the same address at different times? Melcher didn’t know any of the victims at the Tate house. I couldn’t even find evidence that he’d met any of them. Plus, by Bugliosi’s own account, Manson sent his followers to the Cielo house knowing full well that Melcher didn’t live there anymore.
Bugliosi dodged those questions, instead reiterating the terror that Melcher felt during the trial and for years afterward—fearing that Manson or someone from the Family still wanted him dead. Could he put me in touch with Melcher? The mere fact that I’d asked seemed to unnerve him a bit. He said I’d have a hard time getting him to talk. Later, when I did manage to track down Melcher, I’d find out why.
As the sun was setting after many hours of talk, I asked Bugliosi if he could share anything with me about the case that had never been reported before—the journalist’s Hail Mary. I could see by the furrow of his brow that he was really thinking about it. I pulled a book from my bag: Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, a history of L.A.’s music industry. I’d been reading it for research—what with all the rejections I’d gotten, I had a little more free time on my hands than I’d expected—and I wanted Bugliosi to look at a passage I’d highlighted. Hoskyns alleged that a few S&M movies had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied up and flogged against his will at a party there. Other sources, including Ed Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.
Bugliosi seemed to be in the midst of some kind of internal debate. After what felt like a long silence, he told me to turn off my recorder. “This can never be attributed to me,” he began. “Just say it’s from a very reliable source.” (I’ll explain later in the book why I’m treating this as an on-the-record response.)
When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.”
It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,” Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”
The more I thought about it, the more startled I was that the footage was so sordid. It gave yet more weight to the “live freaky, die freaky” motto. And soon after, it occurred to me: if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was telling the truth—and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged—the tape seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect, and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.
I hoped that I could verify Bugliosi’s story. It was the first piece of new information I’d found so far. In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the house.
In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bugliosi to authorize search warrants. If he’d learned about the tape from the detectives back in August—if he’d been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return to the house—then something in the police investigation had necessitated his involvement much earlier than he’d ever acknowledged. Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know, because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.
Helter Skelter opens with a famous sentence: “It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes down the canyon.” The first half of the book, concerning the police investigation, traffics in the dread of that sentence. Given Bugliosi’s revelation to me, it was the first place I started looking for a break. If he had changed one detail about the case, could he have changed others? That question would recur throughout my entire investigation.
The LAPD had assigned two separate teams of detectives to the cases, one for the Tate murders and one for the LaBiancas. Despite the similarities in the crimes, the LAPD had concluded, as mentioned earlier, that the LaBiancas were the victims of a copycat crime. After all, there was seemingly little common ground between the luxe Beverly Hills set at Cielo and the suburban couple in Los Feliz.
The police fanned out in what would become the largest murder investigation in Los Angeles history. The LaBianca team operated in relative anonymity; the press couldn’t muster much interest in their case, at least not when Sharon Tate’s killer was on the lam. On the other side of town, by contrast, the Cielo crime scene was like a carnival. The LAPD had assigned twenty-one men to the case. Helicopters hovered over the hilltop property. Guards stood watch around the clock at the entry gate.
Detectives moved to lock down their initial suspect right away. William Garretson, the lone survivor of the night’s massacre, was dragged out of the guesthouse sleepy-eyed, shirtless, and barefoot, shoved into a patrol car, and driven straight to headquarters, where he was read his rights and charged with five murders. Garretson, only nineteen, couldn’t explain why he hadn’t heard anything that night, except to say it might have been because he had the stereo on. For three days, he was on front pages around the world as he languished behind bars. Finally, police concluded he was just a slow kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In those same first twenty-four hours, the Tate detectives got a tip. A friend of the victims had been telling people that he knew who the murderers were; convinced that his knowledge would get him killed, the friend had gone into hiding. He was Witold Kaczanowski, an artist and Polish émigré who’d known the Tate crowd through his countryman Voytek Frykowski. Police tracked him down through Roman Polanski’s manager. Lured by the promise of twenty-four-hour police protection, Kaczanowksi finally consented to be interviewed.
He believed that Frykowski had been involved in the drug trade with a host of career criminals and other unsavory characters. One of these was a man named Harris “Pic” Dawson, who had, at a recent party, threatened to kill Frykowski. Remember how Susan Atkins wrote the word “Pig” on the front door of Cielo Drive, in Sharon Tate’s blood? Kaczanowski thought that word was “Pic,” as in Pic Dawson.
The police found him credible, especially because they’d learned about another altercation at the Cielo house that past spring, when Tate and Polanski had thrown a going-away party. (Although the couple had moved in only on February 15, by the end of March they had to leave for separate film jobs in Europe, where they’d remain for most of the summer.) At their farewell party, attended by more than a hundred guests, three gate-crashers had behaved so aggressively that Polanski had them kicked out. They were Billy Doyle, Tom Harrigan, and Pic Dawson.
Hoping to ask Polanski about these three, police anxiously awaited his return from London, scheduled for the evening of August 10, the day after the bodies had been discovered. Polanski flew back to L.A. under heavy sedation, with his longtime producer Gene Gutowski and two friends, Warren Beatty and Victor Lownes. At the airport, he was spirited through a side exit to a waiting car while Gutowski read a statement to the throngs of press.
The chairman of Paramount Pictures had arranged a suite for Polanski on the studio lot—a place where he could avoid the prying eyes of the press, and the killers, too, if they were out to get him. But before he arrived at Paramount, Polanski had his car stop at a Denny’s parking lot for a hushed conversation with Kaczanowski. Bugliosi never reported this in Helter Skelter. The media never knew about it. To me, it was something to explore.
After they chatted at Denny’s, Kaczanowski got in the car and headed to Paramount with the director; they talked all the way to the lot. When the LAPD arrived at the studio that evening, they were barred from entering Polanski’s suite until he’d finished the debriefing. Bugliosi didn’t find that worth mentioning; he only wrote that “Polanski was taken to an apartment inside the Paramount lot, where he remained in seclusion under a doctor’s care. The police talked to him briefly that night, but he was, at that time, unable to suggest anyone with a motive for the murders.”
Polanski’s friends Lownes and Gutowski confirmed the secret Denny’s meeting in interviews with me. Both defended it as a simple exchange of information between two longtime friends. And yet Polanski, in a polygraph exam with the LAPD, had denied knowing Kaczanowski at all.
Sensing there was more to the story, I sought out Kaczanowski, who, like so many others connected to the victims, had never spoken to reporters about the murders. Over the phone, somewhat to my surprise, he promptly agreed to discuss the case with me. Yes, he said, the Denny’s meeting had happened, but, despite its seeming urgency, there was nothing so furtive about it. He’d only answered some of Polanski’s questions about Frykowski’s possible drug dealing. Kaczanowski emphasized that his suspicion—that Pic Dawson had targeted Frykowski—sent the police on a months-long chase that amounted to nothing.
And yet it was easy to see how Frykowski may have gotten in over his head in those months before the murders. It was a turbulent time at the Cielo house, I learned—much more fraught than Bugliosi had reported. When Tate and Polanski left, they gave Frykowski and Abigail Folger the run of the place, and things got weird. The couple threw parties all the time. The door was open to anyone and everyone. The crowds grew rowdier, the drugs harder—not just pot and hash, but an abundance of cocaine, mescaline, LSD, and MDA, which was then a new and fairly unheard-of synthetic. Frykowski was especially enamored of it.
Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan, the same trio who’d been booted from the party in mid-March, were now regular guests at the house, sometimes staying for days at a time. They also supplied most of the drugs. By July, the three men, all international smugglers, had cornered the market on MDA, which was manufactured in Doyle and Harrigan’s hometown, Toronto. Frykowski wanted in. Although he didn’t have much cash—Folger, his heiress girlfriend, kept him on a tight leash financially—he negotiated a deal with his new friends, making himself a middleman between them and Hollywood.
Soon after we spoke on the phone, Kaczanowski visited Los Angeles. I met him in the backyard of his friend’s home in West Hollywood. A handsome man with a craggy face, thick black hair, and robust blue eyes, he spoke with a heavy accent and a reserved, contemplative air. Though it was maybe three in the afternoon, he opened a bottle of red wine and poured us each a generous glass.
He’d been the last of Frykowski’s friends to see him alive. The two had gotten together at his gallery just hours before the murders; he’d intended to visit the Tate house that night, but he was too tired. Frykowski had called him around midnight, likely just minutes before the killers arrived, to try to talk him into coming over.
Now he showed me a large manila envelope full of old ephemera, including Frykowski’s airline ticket to the United States, dated May 16, 1967, and a reference letter Polanski had written for him on Paramount stationery. These artifacts seemed to transport Kaczanowski. The sixties, he said, were often on his mind.
“I can close my eyes and I feel that it’s still 1969. I hear people’s voices, I see their faces,” Kaczanowski said. He was amazed at how the usual indicators of class and status had disappeared in Hollywood at the time, where “the most extreme ugliness with total purity was mixed up.” This blurriness was the inevitable outcome of the open-door policy they’d all subscribed to at the end of the decade. “Totally primitive, uneducated people” could dress and act like visionary artists. “And you couldn’t know absolutely who was who. You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet and it was impossible to make a distinction.”
Accordingly, Kaczanowski remembered “so many strange people” coming and going from the house on Cielo Drive, where he would sometimes stay with Frykowski for days at a stretch. “I didn’t trust them,” he said of the guests. “They walked so freely through the place.” He would ask Frykowski who these people were, and the answer always came with degrees of removal—they were friends of this guy, or friends of friends of so-and-so. That was why, after the murders, he felt he’d gotten a bead on who the killers were: the same set of drug dealers that Bugliosi mentions passingly in Helter Skelter.
“I remember Voytek telling me that they threw Pic Dawson out of a party,” he said, taking a sip of wine. “They told Pic Dawson to take his backpack and fuck off.” Kaczanowski remembered another party, a few weeks before the murders, where he’d had to kick out two very drunk guys. At the gate, “they were standing on the other side, looking at Voytek and me, and they said, ‘You sons of bitches, we will be back, and we will kill you.’”
All the months of partying with Frykowski had a cumulative effect. He met so many threatening characters that, when his friend turned up dead, he was convinced one or more of them was to blame. He’d wondered if Frykowski, or even Polanski or Sebring, had ever encountered Manson or his followers. His concern and uncertainty still felt raw. Here was someone who’d been so close to the victims that he’d held on to their possessions for all these years—and he still couldn’t rule out the possibility of a revenge motive. As I sat across from him, the elaborate puffery of the Helter Skelter motive, and all the panicked headlines that came with it, seemed to recede into the afternoon smog.
If Frykowski were alive, I ventured, and Kaczanowski could ask him one question, what would it be? Looking down into his wine, he said quietly, “Did you ever meet anybody from the group of people who came to kill you?”
Having finished what would be her final film, The Thirteen Chairs (also known as 12 + 1), Sharon Tate came back to the Cielo house in July 1969, more than seven months pregnant. She wanted to have her baby in the house she loved. But Polanski, who was supposed to have returned by then, deferred his homecoming. He needed to continue scouting locations for his next film. Assuring her that he’d be back in time for the baby’s arrival, he asked his old friend Frykowski to stick around with Folger and keep Tate company.
That, at least, is the version Bugliosi provides. Once I’d heard from him about Polanski’s tape and the seedier side of Cielo, I started pushing harder in my interviews, and diverging stories developed. Polanski’s intimates said that Tate was grateful for the company. She didn’t want to be alone in the secluded estate, especially at the end of her pregnancy. As for Polanski himself, his friends described him as careful, conservative, even square, and deeply in love with his wife. If he said he had to stay on in London for work, then that’s what he was doing.
Others remembered it differently. Tate had been horrified at the scene that greeted her upon her return to Los Angeles. She was leery of Folger and especially of Frykowski, whom she suspected of drug dealing—she wanted the couple, and the crowd attached to them, out of her house. As I won the confidence of some of her closest friends, they came out with intensely disturbing stories. Her marriage was in shambles, they said, and many of them didn’t want her to fix it—they wanted her to leave it.
Polanski had established a pattern of abuse, emotional and physical. The Sharon Tate they knew, warm and vivacious, was diminished in his presence. “The difference in Sharon was incredible,” said Elke Sommer, the German actress who appeared with her in The Wrecking Crew. She “just wasn’t herself when she was with him. She was in awe, or frightened; he had an awesome charisma.”
That meant that Polanski could walk all over her. One friend, who called him “one of the most evil people I ever met,” said that he had smashed Tate’s face into a mirror, and, on another occasion, forced her to watch a recording of him having sex with another woman. He cheated on her constantly, and he made sure she knew about it. Another friend remembered an incident in which Polanski had asked his wife to wear the same dress that one of his other lovers had worn; when she appeared in her own dress instead, he threw her into the pool in front of their friends. Others said that Polanski hosted orgies at the house without his wife’s knowledge or consent.
Dominick Dunne, who’d been close to Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, was confident on that point. “I never went to their orgies, but I know they existed, and I think Jay was in on it, too,” he said to me. The director James Toback—who would himself be disgraced, nearly twenty years later, by more than two hundred allegations of sexual assault—was even more certain. One night, Warren Beatty had invited him to a party at the Tate house. Toback brought Jim Brown, a football all-star who’d become an action-film hero. At the party, people began to whisper about an orgy. “I was going to be included because I was with Jim,” Toback told me, “and I was certainly up for it, but Jim declined.”
And yet: “James Toback is full of shit and always has been,” Paul Sylbert, a production designer and a friend of Polanski, told me. “Nothing crazy went on up there. There were no orgies, not that I ever have been to, and I was up there frequently.” He conceded that Polanski was “peculiar,” but “whatever his kinkiness was, it was on a small scale and quite private. He might’ve been hinting at orgies, but there were never any.”
Orgies or no, at a certain point Tate felt that she’d suffered enough. As the humiliations accumulated, she approached Elke Sommer for her advice. Sommer remembered telling her, “I’d take the next heavy object, whether it’s an iron or a frying pan or a spade out in the yard, and I’d just brain him.”
Tate wasn’t about to do that, but she did, on a few occasions, warm to the idea of leaving Polanski. Sommer thought she was always too much in her husband’s thrall to follow through. “There was a tremendous sickness when I worked with Sharon,” Sommer said, “a horrendous sickness surrounding her relationship. She was quite lost.”
A number of Tate’s friends were quick to mention the undesirable company she kept—with Frykowski and Folger at the top of the list.
Tate “couldn’t stand them,” said Joanna Pettet, another actress who’d become close to her. The two had had lunch together at the house on the day of the murders. Pettet was surprised to see Frykowski and Folger, whom she’d never met before, walking around like they owned the place. “I asked, who are these people? Why are they here? She said, ‘Roman didn’t want me to be alone.’” Tate tolerated the pair only because her husband insisted on it. On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too much chaos. But Polanski refused to turn them out. She asked constantly when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip. Moreover, she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her—he didn’t want her there.
I’d gone to great lengths to track down Pettet, who had quit the movie business in the nineties. She lived in the high desert beyond Palm Springs, where she was something of a recluse, with no phone. It had dawned on me that I might be able to reach her through the Screen Actors Guild—they would have her address on file, since they were responsible for mailing her residual checks. Through them, I sent her a long letter, and she agreed to meet me for lunch at a strip mall near her house. She was slightly apprehensive when she first arrived. Then fifty-seven, she cut a striking figure, dressed head to toe in denim, with dark glasses that obscured her piercing eyes, until she felt comfortable enough to remove them.
“I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she said. “I had to be hospitalized and missed the funeral.” She made no attempt to conceal her contempt for Polanski. “I hated him,” she said flatly. As others had, Pettet described a marriage in which he exuded an almost casual cruelty toward his wife. For four months in the summer of ’67, Pettet had stayed with the couple at a rented beach house, and she began to notice how often Polanski bossed Tate around. He had a malicious streak; sometimes it reached Pettet herself. “He would throw a brick in the pool and watch my dog dive for it and try to retrieve it. He stood there laughing. The dog wouldn’t give up.”
After Sharon’s funeral, Polanski called Pettet. “On the phone he was strange with me, cold as ice. There was no despair. And I was sobbing.” He wanted to know what she’d told the police. It made her wonder what was behind her friend’s murder. “At the time I suspected it was maybe friends of his who did it. All I know is, he never came [when she asked him to come back], and she was here.”
Figuring that Polanski’s confidants would want to tell a different story, I coaxed Bill Tennant, his manager, into talking to me. Tennant had never given an interview about the murders, in part because the events of 1969 had sent his life into a tailspin. He’d had the somber task of identifying the bodies at the Tate house. A 1993 piece in Variety (by Peter Bart, as coincidence would have it) described Tennant’s fall from grace. Through the sixties and seventies, he’d found great success in Hollywood, discovering the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agenting Peter Fonda’s deal for Easy Rider. But Bart had found him, “a gaunt, battered figure,” “sleeping in a doorway on Ventura Boulevard.” A cocaine addiction had done away with his marriage and his money, leading him to trade “even the gold inlays in his teeth for a fix.” In Bart’s assessment, “the shock of the Manson murders began unraveling him.”
I tracked down Tennant in London, where he was sober, remarried, and managing Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance. He’d become a born-again Christian, but he displayed little compassion or forgiveness for Polanski, his onetime client and friend. “Roman is a shit,” he said. Echoing what I’d heard from other friends of the couple, Tennant said there were two versions of their story. “Which one do you want to tell?”
On one hand, Polanski had fallen into dissolution in London, where he was working on a movie and sleeping around while, back in California, his pregnant wife was putting together a home. Tate “wound up getting murdered because he was fucking around in London,” he said. But that was just one side of it.
“The other story is sitting in the Bel Air Hotel with Roman after the funerals and having to address his financial situation, which was not very good,” Tennant said, “and Roman looking across the table at me and saying, I wish I had spent more. I wish I had bought more dresses. I wish I had given more gifts. So what story do you want to tell? The one about this little prick who left his wife alone… with Jay Sebring and Gibby [Folger] and Voytek, these wankers, these four tragic losers, or do you want to talk about a poor kid, Roman Polanski?”
Tennant resisted the idea that the murders represented a loss of innocence for Hollywood. “There was nothing innocent about it,” he said. “It was retribution.” The big value in Los Angeles when he was there, Tennant said, was this: “He who dies with the most toys wins. I think it’s pretty self-serving to call that period, and what was going on, innocent… What’s innocent about drugs? What’s innocent about promiscuous sex?… You tell me where the innocence was.” Within a week of the murders, Polanski was “partying it up” with Warren Beatty, he added. The brutal reality was that “nobody cared or gave a shit about Sharon Tate. Not because they weren’t nice but because she was expendable. As expendable as an actor whose option comes up and gets dropped.”
After his wife’s murder, Polanski stayed on the Paramount studios lot as much as he could. It was the only place he felt safe. And not just from the killers or the media—from the LAPD. “You found the police surveillance units and you found that the police in Los Angeles knew everything about everybody,” Tennant said: “that there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of the Los Angeles Police Department, and that they knew everything there was to know.”
Although he had no way of knowing it in 1969, Tennant wasn’t being paranoid when he wondered how the LAPD knew so much about his friends. Many law enforcement agencies, including the LAPD, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI, had maintained units to surveil and even infiltrate groups that they considered subversive or threatening. At this stage, I wasn’t inclined to view law enforcement with anything approaching suspicion. Even so, I was beginning to see the official version of the case with a jaundiced eye.
I found it difficult to sort through the stories coming out of the house on Cielo Drive. Picture a spiderweb so dense with connections and tendrils that it looks like a solid sheet of fabric. That’s what I felt I was working with. The Hollywood cliques that had seemed, at the start, so discrete and isolated were all mixed up with one another, much more than Bugliosi had made it appear. Plus, then and now, people weren’t always willing to be up-front about who they hung out with.
Tate was right to be wary of Frykowski, assuming she had been. He’d fallen in with a dangerous crowd. Many of the “primitive” people that Kaczanowski met had extensive rap sheets, and their names kept coming up when people mentioned the gravest excesses of Cielo Drive. Pic Dawson, who’d threatened Frykowski’s life and been thrown out of Polanski’s party, had been the subject of Interpol surveillance for drug smuggling as early as 1965. The young son of a diplomat, he’d gained entrée in the Polanski crowd through his friendship with Cass Elliot, one of the singers in the popular sixties group the Mamas and the Papas. Like most of the men in the troubled singer’s life, he’d used her for her money and connections. Elliot’s biographers would later write that her infamous 1966 London arrest—she’d been caught stealing hotel towels and keys—was actually a ruse to force her to share information about Dawson’s drug-smuggling operations. Dawson’s colleagues in the drug business, Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan, also wormed their way into Polanski’s circle through Mama Cass.
According to police reports, Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan—all twenty-seven, and all romantically involved with Elliot—were joined by a fourth partner, “Uncle” Charles Tacot, a New Yorker who was more than a decade older. A former marine, the six-foot-six strongman was renowned for his prowess with knives; he was rumored to have maintained ties to military intelligence, and he’d been selling drugs in Los Angeles since his arrival in the mid-1950s. Curiously, despite their many years of drug peddling and several drug arrests among them, only Doyle had ever been convicted of any crime—and his conviction was later overturned and changed to an acquittal on his record. Like Charles Manson, the four men seemed to have little fear of law enforcement.
Helter Skelter paid only passing attention to these guys. They were among the few figures in the book who were given pseudonyms. Although Bugliosi noted Pic Dawson’s death threat against Frykowski, he omitted an even more disturbing incident, one that makes a revenge motive much more plausible—and that reveals the extent to which the victims were mixed up in the seamier side of the counterculture.
As the story goes, at some point in the months before the murders, the residents of Cielo threw one of their endless parties, with Frykowski and Sebring leading the charge. Billy Doyle showed up and, in the spirit of the times, drank, smoked, and snorted himself to unconsciousness. Frykowski and Sebring, and maybe Witold Kaczanowski, too, wanted to get even with Doyle for something. Some say he’d sold them bad drugs. So, before a crowd of onlookers, they lowered Doyle’s pants, flogged him, and anally raped him.
This has become the kind of apocrypha that Manson conspiracy theorists can’t get enough of. It’s the same incident referenced in Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, the book I showed Bugliosi that day after our lunch. The story feels almost mythological, in its ugliness and in the extent to which its most basic details—who, what, when, where, why—are in flux. Candice Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD a few weeks after the murders, said that it was a rape, most likely at Sebring’s place or at his friend John Phillips’s (also of the Mamas and the Papas); Dennis Hopper told the Los Angeles Free Press that it was at the Cielo house. He described it as “a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.” Ed Sanders, in The Family, reports that Doyle was “whipped and video-buggered,” and the location varies depending on which edition of the book you’re looking at.
So what really happened? I hesitated to report on this in 1999; it felt like another lurid departure from Manson, and it’s not as if my deadline afforded me time to explore every strange byway. But it bothered me that Bugliosi had left this out, and that so many people close to the victims regarded it as a flashpoint in the case. It was another instance of the resilience of the “live freaky, die freaky” mind-set. Plus, even if Pic Dawson, Billy Doyle, and the other dealers hadn’t murdered anyone, they could still be behind the crimes, or adjacent to them. If I could connect them to Manson, for instance—couldn’t they have contracted him for the murders? And if they were selling a lot of drugs to anyone who’d died at the Tate household, might there have been some kind of cover-up at work?
So, down I went.
Thanks to Kaczanowski and a few others who spoke with the LAPD, detectives were quickly suspicious of Doyle and his companions after the murders. And Doyle himself was getting around quite a bit at the time. He was back and forth between Los Angeles, Jamaica, and his native Toronto. It was in this last city that police caught up to him in late August. I wouldn’t get a transcript of the LAPD’s interview until many years into my investigation, but it’s worth including here because it gives his side of the story. And Doyle is quotable—there’s something almost farcically hard-boiled about him.
In short, he told the LAPD’s Lieutenant Earl Deemer that he didn’t remember being raped, but he couldn’t be sure; it might’ve happened anyway. He recalled going over to see Frykowski at the Cielo house on the night in question, sometime in early July. Frykowski, thinking it would be a funny prank, slipped some mescaline in his champagne. Folger and Kaczanowski were there, too. “It was out at the swimming pool,” Doyle told Deemer, “and there was two cases of champagne by the pool… And apparently [Frykowski] put some in my drink, and I said, Jesus… I am high… I am really out of my bird.”
He wanted something to bring him down, and Frykowski was happy to oblige, producing some pills that he said belonged to Sharon Tate. Doyle swallowed “about eight of them,” and soon enough, as Frykowski started to laugh at him, he realized that the pills were something else entirely, and that he was dealing with some wild people:
They were crazier than hell. I didn’t realize they were so crazy. I am using the word ‘crazy,’ I mean drug-induced crazy… in California, everybody has a tan. Now, if people don’t have a tan, they look a little different. You can see things in their face[s] that a tan covers up… They were all tan and looked healthy. They looked very straight to me when I first got there. And, uh… I don’t remember much more than that.
His observation about California, where “everybody has a tan,” reminded me of Kaczanowski’s remark: it was impossible, back then, to separate geniuses from charlatans. Everyone blended in.
Of course, by most reckonings, Doyle himself would count as one of the charlatans. He admitted that he was a naturally paranoid person. In recent months he’d developed a coke habit, which only exacerbated the paranoia. Convinced that someone, somewhere, was out to get him, he started carrying a gun. It didn’t help that he often bragged about how much cocaine he had, especially when there were women around. “They all wanted to get laid,” he said to Deemer, “and the price of admission was a nose full of coke, and I learned that.” He would show up at parties with a silver coke spoon and tell everyone he had “pounds of it.” His good friend Charles Tacot said, “‘For Chrissakes, Billy, what do you tell people that kind of stuff for?’ And I said, ‘I want to get laid, Charles.’”
That day, higher and higher on drugs that he couldn’t even name, Doyle became convinced that Frykowski meant to harm him. So he pulled out his gun and pointed it at the Pole, threatening to kill him. Frykowski, the bigger man—and the more sober, too, if only by a hair—wrested the gun from him.
Here Doyle’s memory got hazy; he apparently lapsed into unconsciousness, and Voytek called up Charlie Tacot, asking him to come collect his deranged friend. It was possible, Doyle conceded, that Frykowski or Kaczanowski had raped him after that. He admitted that he might’ve told his friend Mama Cass something to that effect. “I was unconscious,” he told Deemer. “I wasn’t sore the next day… not there. But I was sore everywhere else.”
In another LAPD officer’s account of that interview, Doyle puts it even more frankly: “I was so freaked out on drugs I wouldn’t know if they’d fucked me or not!”
It took a lot of asking around, but eventually I tracked down both Billy Doyle and Charles Tacot. (As for the other two: I’d learned Dawson had died of a drug overdose in 1986, and Harrigan was nowhere to be found.) Neither had given an interview before, and though they could be cagey, they were also eager to relive their underworld glories. Both were old men now, but they were still operators who acted as if they were at the height of their criminal powers. Impressively foulmouthed, both of them threatened to have me killed at various points in our interviews, although I didn’t take either seriously.
In our first phone call, Tacot filled in some of the blanks from Doyle’s story. He remembered driving over to pick up Doyle, who was passed out somewhere on the Cielo Drive property. His belt had been split, apparently with a knife. A friend who’d come along for the errand said, “I think Voytek fucked him.”
They took Doyle, still unconscious, to Mama Cass’s place in the Hollywood Hills. Tacot remembered thinking, “If we don’t take care of him, he’s going to go back there and have a beef. I carried him out, laid him by a tree, went back to my car and got about twenty feet of welded link chain, which I had in there for somebody else, originally. I put it around his ankle and a tree with a good padlock and snapped it all together—so I know he’s not going anywhere. Cass was in the hospital at the time. She said, ‘Get the Polaroid! Get the Polaroid!’”
Doyle came to a few hours later, still very high, and simmering with rage. “‘I’m going to shoot that motherfucker,’” Tacot remembered him saying. “And I said, ‘No, no, we’re leaving town. We’re going to Jamaica… but first you’re going to get sober and you’re going to be on this fucking tree until you are.’”
I asked Tacot: “Do you think Voytek did fuck Billy?”
“Yeah, that’s why Billy was so pissed at him,” Tacot said. “Voytek would have been killed if I hadn’t intervened.”
“Would Billy have hired killers?” I asked, thinking of Manson.
“No. He would’ve taken all the pleasure himself.”
In his interview with the police, Doyle had allowed that he was furious at Frykowski and his set. “When I was chained to the tree,” he said, “they were the object of my rage. Which was an unreasonable and unnatural rage.” To calm him down, Doyle said, Tacot had “chained a sign to the tree that said ‘You are loved.’” Doyle was stuck there for more than a day.
After that, Tacot told me, the pair headed off to Jamaica, where apparently they were making a movie about marijuana. (No footage from this film has ever surfaced. Others have said the two were involved in a large narcotics deal.) On August 9, while they were away, “Manson goes up and kills those people and everyone’s looking for [Doyle],” Tacot said. He and Doyle were suspects within days. “I picked up the phone one day and the Toronto Star informed me that me and Billy were in the headlines: two wanted for murder.” A couple of days later, back in the United States, “I took a lie-detector test,” Tacot told me. “They knew I had nothing to do with it. Billy, too. He was in Jamaica with me. We were cleared, out of the country. You can’t kill somebody long-distance.”
True enough, but you could arrange for someone else to do the killing. Tacot adamantly denied that he and Billy Doyle knew Manson—they’d never even met the guy. Nor, he said, had they sold drugs to anyone staying at the Tate house.
“We were consultants,” he said. “We’d tell them if it was okay or not.”
“If the drugs were okay?”
“Yeah.” He added, “Billy was fucking a whole bunch of broads up there.”
“Did you ever hear about any orgies?” I asked.
“If you want to consider Billy fucking the broads an orgy.”
Charlie Tacot wasn’t exactly the picture of virtue. I wanted to find other people who’d known him, who could say if he’d known Manson. It wasn’t hard. Seemingly everyone in town had partied with Tacot at some point. Corrine Calvet, a French actress who’d worked in Hollywood since the forties, had one of the most alarming stories of them all. Calvet was as famous for her turbulent life as her film roles. She’d starred opposite James Cagney in What Price Glory? In the fifties, she married Johnny Fontaine, a mobster-turned-actor who’d been a pallbearer at the gangster Mickey Cohen’s funeral. A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo.
I met Calvet at her beach-facing apartment in Santa Monica. Solemn and unsmiling, in heavy makeup, her gray hair swept back, she got right to the point.
“The only thing that I can tell you about this Manson,” she said, her accent inflecting the words with glamour and gravity, “is that Charlie Tacot brought him and the girls to a party at our house. Two hours after they were there, I caught Charlie Manson taking a piss in my pool. I told Charlie Tacot to get them out of here and they left. After the tragedy happened, the FBI came by and told me I was next on their list to be killed.”
When I expressed shock at this, her eyes narrowed. With genuine malice, she said, “Maybe you are new at this. When I tell you something, don’t question it! I don’t say it unless it is true.”
I explained that Tacot had denied ever having met Manson or anyone in the Family. “Maybe he has good reason to say that,” Calvet said, letting her words hang in the air. She was certain: “Charlie knew them.”
I pressed her again. Was she sure that Tacot brought Manson and the girls to her party?
“Well, I would not put my hand in the fire, saying that Charlie brought them over, but Charlie knew them.”
I tried to get more out of Calvet, but the rest of the interview was frosty. When I asked her for specific dates, or even years, she grew exasperated, throwing her hands up in disgust. “I do not know years, do not ask me.” Before long, she’d had it with me altogether. “I want you to leave now,” she said. And I did.
Thinking I could eventually get Tacot to let his guard down, I began to visit him at the Santa Anita Convalescent Center in Temple City. His health was failing, and he had trouble walking. I found him lying in bed naked, a sheet pulled just above his groin; he was bald, with a silver mustache, bony arms, and a gravelly voice. I noticed a fading tattoo on his forearm. On the wall he’d hung a photo of his granddaughter at her senior prom. Later, when he rose to get exercise using a walker, I saw how tall he was: six foot six and rail thin. Although his faculties were waning, he was sharp. He still commanded enough authority to boss around the short orderly who assisted him.
Tacot shared his room with another patient, and he seemed to resent the enfeebling atmosphere of the place—“too much groaning around here,” he said—so I offered to drive him to his favorite restaurant, Coco’s, a California chain known for its pies. Taking him out to lunch was an elaborate procedure. People from the rest home wheeled him out to my car, lifted him in, and put the wheelchair in the trunk. Once we were at Coco’s, however, I had to lift Tacot into the wheelchair myself—an intimate maneuver for two near strangers. Humiliated, he began to threaten me, albeit ineffectually. “Do you realize who you’re dealing with?” he rasped as I attempted to hoist him out of my passenger seat. “I could have you hurt, or killed!”
In Coco’s, with food in front of him, he calmed down a bit, and soon we were having a freewheeling if combative conversation about the murders and Hollywood in the sixties. Tacot had lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1950s, when he moved there from Mexico with his wife. He had two daughters, one of whom, Margot, would later confirm a lot of her father’s story: he was a drug dealer, she said, who operated on the fringes of the music and acting world. Although he would often get arrested, she said, “nothing ever stuck. Someone always took care of it for him.”
Tacot continued to deny ever having known Manson, and he bridled at the insinuation that he had anything to do with the crimes. The Tate murders, he went on, led to “the most fucked-up investigation I’ve ever seen in my life.” He had sued the Los Angeles Times for announcing him as a suspect. Any effort to implicate him, he said, was probably just the LAPD covering up for their bad police work.
As he grew more comfortable, Tacot made an unexpected revelation: at the time of the murders, he worked for an intelligence agency—he wouldn’t say which—and reported to Hank Fine, a veteran of the army’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS). This had been a World War II–era operation so secret that it wasn’t even acknowledged by the federal government until 1972. Fine, a Polish émigré whose true name was Hersh Matias Warzechahe, was “an assassin who shot people for the government,” Tacot claimed.
Thinking the old guy was fantasizing, I barely followed up on the revelation. But he, and later Billy Doyle, would often reference Fine, only to refuse to answer any questions about him. When I looked into him, I learned neither man had been lying. Tacot also described his friend Doyle—they were still close—as “a dangerous man. He’d kill you in a fucking minute. Both of us are second-generation intelligence.
“Don’t write this stuff,” he implored me. “You’ll get killed. These are very dangerous men, they’ll find you and kill you.” (That was a warning I’d hear a lot from various parties over the years.) Tacot reminded me that Bugliosi, when he wrote Helter Skelter, had given pseudonyms to him and his friends, and not just for the sake of politeness. “He was afraid American intelligence would kill him if he exposed us,” Tacot claimed. He added that Bugliosi was “an asshole” who’d never interviewed him or Billy. “Vincent Bugliosi knows to keep his mouth shut. I’d’ve got him killed. I didn’t tell him that—didn’t have to.”
I tried to get Tacot on the subject of Frykowski, who was, to my mind, the victim with the shadiest cast of characters around him. Frykowski was on drugs all the time, Tacot said. Contradicting what he’d told me on the phone, he said that Frykowski had sold MDA, but only to close friends.
I didn’t take Tacot out again, but I kept calling and visiting him. I found him evasive, or senile, or a little of both. And the more I asked around about him, the more he seemed to vanish into the mist of the sixties. Some people told me, with certainty, that Tacot had been an assassin for the CIA, that he was a “gun freak” and an incredible marksman. (In his 2006 autobiography, Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it, the musician David Crosby identified Tacot as a “soldier of fortune” who taught him how to shoot a gun.) Others said that he was an ex-marine who’d served in Korea and used to show off his impressive knife-throwing skills. I heard that he grew pot in Arizona; that he was a child molester; that he was a coke smuggler; that he was an uncredited screenwriter; and that his intelligence ties were all fictitious. And the strange thing was, none of this was entirely implausible. About the only thing everyone could agree on was that Tacot had been involved in a lot of schemes—that he’d been a drug dealer and, even more, a drug user. But then, as one source put it, “Hey, man, aren’t you?”
When I looked into Hank Fine, the MIS guy Tacot had said he’d reported to, I learned that, like everything Tacot said, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Fine, who’d been a movie PR man from the 1940s until his death in 1975, had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the counterintelligence agency that oversaw the MIS and evolved into the CIA after World War II. His work often seemed to combine Hollywood and spycraft. Eddie Albert, the star of the sixties sitcom Green Acres, told me that Fine had sent him on undercover missions to Mexico during the war; from his sailboat, the actor had photographed German landing sites and military training grounds. Though I found no proof, the consensus among Fine’s associates was that he’d continued working in espionage operations through the sixties. His only child, Shayla, told me that his public-relations gig was a cover—and, yes, she said, Tacot had reported to her father. What kind of work were they doing? She never knew, except that it was classified.
Whenever I saw Tacot, I returned to the subject of Fine. “Don’t mention that name anywhere!” he barked, seeming genuinely disturbed. When I asked why not, he said, “None of your fucking business! You’re fucking with the wrong people!”
Or was I fucking with lowlifes who only wanted to present an illusion of importance? I really couldn’t say. And when I finally was able to talk to Billy Doyle, things didn’t get any clearer.
Tacot gave me Doyle’s number. “He’s a retired old man just like me,” he said, “and he may not want to talk too much. Don’t push him if he doesn’t.”
But Doyle liked an audience, just as he had in 1969. I called him often at his home in Toronto, and he talked for hours, sometimes rambling at such length that I would turn off my recorder to save tape. Just when he was trying my patience, he’d say something provocative and I’d have to switch the recorder back on and try to get him to repeat it. He had a short temper, and when he exploded, usually out of nowhere, it could be hard to calm him down. One time, when he didn’t like my line of questioning, he told me, “I was shooting targets at a thousand yards yesterday,” implying that I could soon be one of them. Another time, when I’d tried to get some specifics about Hank Fine, Doyle yelled, “Go in the bathroom, swallow the gun, and pull the trigger!” When he wasn’t angry, he sometimes got a kick out of teasing me: he would make a major revelation and then retract it the next time we spoke. I got the sense that he sometimes trusted me enough to tell the truth, only to realize later that he shouldn’t have done that.
Doyle believed that Polanski and Frykowski were Polish spies, the former subverting American democracy with his decadent films. He was sure that Polanski had something to do with the killings. (It went both ways: I’d heard that Polanski thought Doyle had something to do with the killings.) He denied that he’d ever been a drug dealer. I read him passages from the police report, in which he’d confessed to, even bragged about, having vast amounts of cocaine. But even after that, he denied it to me. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to carry two pounds of coke on a plane, he said. When I asked him about MDA, the drug that he and Voytek had allegedly bought in large quantities, he said he’d never even heard of it. He relented when I read him some quotes from the transcript—okay, fine, he’d taken it.
I brought up his and Tacot’s alibi for the night of the murders: they’d been in Jamaica, you’ll recall, filming “a pot movie.” Doyle admitted that the movie was a ruse. He and Tacot had really been doing intelligence work there, he said, as part of some effort to keep Cuba out of Jamaica.
“Dead white men will pull your tongue out if you tell this shit,” he said. “You have to understand that the government doesn’t want to have any exposure on the Jamaican thing—there never was a Jamaican thing. They don’t want to know about it.” When I asked why, he said, “How the fuck do I know? I’m a Canadian citizen. I went with Charles on an adventure. I thought we were going to do a movie.”
“But that’s not what you were really there for, and you knew it.”
“That’s right.”
It’s an exchange that illustrates how cryptic Doyle could be—and how he reveled in it. I had to ask about the story behind his alleged rape. He said that never happened, either.
“Charles was spreading the rape story to have fun at my expense,” he explained. “Even my mom and dad asked if I was raped.” And yet he betrayed the same uncertainty he’d shown to the cops so many decades ago, telling me that he’d had a friend take photos of him naked so he could examine his rear end.
Similarly, he told me that Corrine Calvet was dead wrong when she said that Tacot had brought Manson to her house. “That’s a lie,” he said, noting that Tacot and Calvet had once dated. “She will say anything to grasp at stardom. Men with badges and guns have raised these questions before,” he added, “not police, FBI, sitting in D.C.” That in itself was astonishing to me; I hadn’t heard that the FBI had investigated the murders, but I would find out later that it was true.
I suggested that I didn’t believe him about Calvet. “You are going to come to a horrible truth,” he said. “Be nervous that you may have discovered the truth and you won’t like it.”
As spurious and slimy as he could be, I found him believable when he repeated that there was more to the murders than had been reported. Later, when I’d interviewed so many people that some of them had started to compare notes, he said something really impenetrable. “The community has looked at this as a settled thing until you started talking to us.”
“What community?” I asked. “Who?”
“The ties that bind.”
Eventually, Doyle became convinced that I was Roman Polanski’s private investigator. It was never clear to me how much he actually believed this, but it was enough to make me back away from him. I sunk a lot of hours into cultivating sources like Tacot, Doyle, and the crowd surrounding them. They’d been so close to the Tate murders that they were suspects, and yet they’d assumed no role in the mythology surrounding the events of August 9. Bugliosi, like the LAPD, had summarily acquitted them of any involvement in the killings—they were his book’s classic red herring. But I still wasn’t convinced. In their sleazy, run-of-the-mill criminality, their motivations seemed much more viable than a lofty idea like Helter Skelter. The more I talked to them, the more I recognized certain inadequacies in Bugliosi’s story, which had curtailed so many explanations in favor of the most outlandish one.
I wanted to keep one eye open to the possibility that Tacot, Doyle, and their associates had some link to the Manson group. After all, in The Family, Ed Sanders had written that it was likely that Mama Cass Elliot knew Manson through her drug connections—it seemed probable that Doyle and Tacot were pivotal there. Plus, Elliot had been friends with Frykowski and Folger; and Elliot’s bandmates were close to Polanski and Tate. In other words, everyone knew everyone else, and nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.
Maybe I could suss out the connections there, but I was less enthusiastic about these supposed ties with intelligence agencies—except that I was about to get another push in that direction. Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair journalist who’d been friends with Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, had given me a tip: get a haircut from a man named Joe Torrenueva.
Nicknamed Little Joe, Torrenueva had been eighteen, fresh out of barber school, when Jay Sebring took him under his wing as an apprentice hairstylist. That was in 1961. Sebring, not yet thirty, was already one of the biggest names in fashion, having revolutionized men’s grooming. He was the first to “style” men’s hair rather than simply cut it. He patented a “Sebring method,” through which “your hair is shaped and conditioned to stay natural between visits,” as promotional materials explained, and he introduced a line of hair-care products. (Sebring wasn’t his given name; he was born Thomas Kummer and renamed himself after a racetrack in Florida he liked.)
Sebring saw his clients in a private room with only one chair. When Torrenueva began working for him, he was charging an unheard-of twenty-five dollars for a haircut—the going rate was a buck fifty. But his customers were happy to pay a premium, and in turn, he catered to their whims. Sebring traveled every few weeks to Las Vegas, where his clients included Frank Sinatra and several casino owners. Torrenueva always went with him, and in those quiet rooms, as the scissors snipped and tufts of hair gathered on the floor, he saw the casual intimacy between Sebring and his clients, who confided in him even when Little Joe was within earshot.
Now, like his mentor, to whom he referred in hushed, almost reverential tones, Little Joe was a “barber to the stars.” He saw his clients in a private, oak-paneled room in Beverly Hills. His price was a hundred bucks. Dunne had told me that if I bided my time and didn’t press him too hard, Joe might open up about the murders. When I showed up, he seemed aware of my ulterior motive. Slight and soft-spoken, he sighed and paused before nearly every sentence.
Joe was convinced that Sebring’s murder had to do with something more than hippies trying to ignite a race war. Sebring, he told me, had been involved with mob guys from Chicago and Las Vegas. He cut their hair, partied with them in Vegas. Then, after the murders, Little Joe got a call from General Charlie Baron, a casino executive and mobster, who told him, “Don’t worry, Little Joe, you’re going to be all right.” He presumed that the murders had been a drug deal gone wrong, and that Jay and Frykowski had been targeted.
That was all I got. I needed more information. I’d have to get another haircut.
I let a month go by, so I really needed one, and soon enough I settled into Little Joe’s leather chair again.
Charlie Baron’s call haunted him to this day. It came “right after” the murders, Torrenueva said, before anyone had any notion of who’d committed them. “You didn’t do anything to anybody,” he said Baron told him. “Nobody’s going to do anything to you.” The implication was that Baron and his associates were well aware of who committed the crimes, and why.
But then Joe was done snipping. So I went back for a third haircut.
“Charlie Baron was very close to Jay,” Joe told me in our third conversation. He added: “Charlie killed people.” When Baron was a young man during Prohibition in Chicago, he “shot two guys who were going to kill him for fixing a fight.” He later went to Havana to run casinos for Meyer Lansky, another mob figure. When he returned to the United States, he was Lansky’s eyes and ears at the new Sands Casino in Vegas.
Baron was hardly an outlier in Sebring’s shop, which was a “nest of mobsters and criminals,” Torrenueva said. But it was Baron who scared Little Joe the most, even before his phone call. Despite Baron’s known mob ties, he had some type of security-intelligence clearance with the federal government. He always packed a gun, and he was close with a cabal of right-wing military intelligence and Hollywood figures, many of whom had been Sebring’s clients. Little Joe alleged that they “did terrible things to black people,” and that “it was Charlie who did the worst things.”
I couldn’t get him to elaborate on that. But I did ask him why, if he was following the Tate murder investigation and knew that the police had no leads, he didn’t tell the cops about his call from Baron. Because he was too close to higher-ups in law enforcement and intelligence, Joe said.
He added yet another intriguing name to the list of Baron’s associates: General Curtis E. LeMay, a legendary fighter pilot who’d implemented the carpet bombing of Japan during World War II. A notorious hawk, LeMay had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d tried to organize a coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he wanted to force the military to flout the president’s orders and bomb the Soviet missile bases they’d found in Cuba.
It was a lot of names to process, and the implications were dizzying. I had one question that Torrenueva was especially reluctant to answer. Why would Sebring—at the time, arguably the best-known men’s hairstylist in the world—involve himself in crime? He had so much to lose, and clearly he was thriving.
But he hadn’t been, Torrenueva was pained to say. “The deals kept falling through. He was a bad businessman.”
“Do you think he sold drugs?” I asked, aware that Frykowski had possibly been doing the same.
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
Sebring’s problems had multiplied throughout the sixties. He’d clash with other barbers who wanted to unionize. In 1963, a group of his stylists had defected, en masse, to start their own business. At other times, he’d had to hire bodyguards because some guys had come into the shop and “roughed up” several employees, Torrenueva said, for reasons that were never shared with him. Sebring carried a gun, and “he shot someone once who came to his house and was giving his father a rough time at the door.”
The bottom line: Sebring, like Frykowski, had a lot more going on at the time of his murder than had ever been revealed. Whatever it was, Little Joe thought it had more to do with his death than any hippie/race-war motive did. Which meant that, in addition to drug dealers and Hollywood’s seedier hangers-on, I had to account for mobsters, ex-military figures, and intelligence agents in my reporting. I was already worried about wandering into the weeds—now I risked veering off the map entirely.
I was writing a story about Charles Manson that had, so far, very little of Manson in it. It was more about the way that events, in all their messy reality, boiled down to canonical fact; the way that a narrative becomes the narrative.
I had to decide if stories like Little Joe’s, Charlie Tacot’s, and Billy Doyle’s were worth looking into, and, as a responsible journalist, if I was justified in dragging my magazine into it. It definitely meant asking for an extension from Premiere and risking, in the final publication, looking like a fool. No matter how you viewed them, these were conspiracy theories. But I was riveted by the stuff I’d turned up that contravened the Manson story as we knew it. For better or worse, it felt like there was something covered up all these years, ripe for exposure. Maybe with the passage of time, people who knew about these things might divulge them at last.
I was starting to figure out that Bugliosi had sifted so many stories out of Helter Skelter—to make his narrative about the conviction of the mad hippie guru and his zombielike followers easier and cleaner. If that were merely an editorial choice, so be it. But if he’d changed things to protect people, or to shore up holes in the investigation, then I felt justified in digging deeper. It seemed impossible that a story like Little Joe’s, heavy with intelligence agencies and organized crime, could coexist alongside the Helter Skelter motive. I knew that, in the late sixties, intelligence agencies regarded dissident youth movements as the greatest threat to the nation’s security, and they’d marshaled their efforts accordingly. Insofar as hippies, musicians, and movie stars played a role in those movements, I could see how the broadest outline of Little Joe’s story could have some truth to it. But even a hardened national-security reporter would have trouble verifying his claims, and that I was not.
These were the concerns I faced by the summer of 1999. The obvious answer would be: keep pushing. The only problem was, my deadline was fast approaching. I owed Premiere five thousand words, and I’d written zero.