Sanders is a historical figure himself, and a unicorn: a living library of 20th century counterculture-little brother of the beats, older brother to the hippies-who is not also a relic. And the matter of why Tate was murdered seems less interesting than the question of who she was.
Rumors abound, of satanist cult orgies, about the rape and torture of a drug dealer at Mama Cass’s house. Sanders wrote Sharon Tate “mainly because of the mystery that still surrounds the close of her life,” but it raises more questions than it answers: The murders might have been Manson’s attempt to spark a race war, or it might have been a contract killing, Sharon Tate having “heard too much” about something, possibly the R.F.K. But it tells us more about Sanders’s preoccupations than hers, and makes sense by his logic, which is compelling elsewhere. The book refuses to sensationalize Tate’s death, and avoids scavenging her memory for symbolism. The book is a set of coordinates, some crucial, others of mysterious relevance, arranged as flatly as documents on a harvest table: A paragraph on Tate’s pregnancy segues into several on husband Roman Polanski’s film trajectory a note on Tate’s marketability after Valley of the Dolls becomes a 14-page diatribe on the Robert F. There’s a lot to say, and likely plenty he can’t. Since the 1970s, Sanders has amassed scores of Manson archival matter, which he keeps in a barn on his property in Woodstock, NY.
Without detailed diaries to draw from, or detailed recollections from many of her intimates, he has “sequenced her history, comparing various sources, as a tapestry of America during the twenty-six years she was given.” In other words, he worked with what he had: arranging her in negative, stacking details around the short path of her life. In his new biography, Sharon Tate: A Life, the poet, archivist, and musician Ed Sanders notes that “while there may be thousands of photos of her… Sharon Tate apparently did not keep a written and annotated trail of her life.” He avoids speculation. Meanwhile, her death has been packed with symbolism: the demise of the ‘60s, the loss of innocence, the suffering of women. (Any person-Tate died along with her friends Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojtek Frykowski, as well as 18-year-old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the property.) But Tate left little more to the public than her image, and her impressions on famous friends she’d been featured in only six films. It feels cruel and unjust that a person could be reduced to a detail in the lurid story of their killers. “That’s what saved my sanity and that’s what gave me strength, because I do believe in life after death.” ‘Mother, that’s not me,’” Doris Tate told an interviewer. As her mother bent to kiss the closed casket, “I heard her say as plain as if she was standing beside me. Reports of the autopsy noted that her unborn child-she had been eight months pregnant-“had been perfectly formed,” partly to stave off any speculation stemming from her husband’s film Rosemary’s Baby. Her funeral was held four days later, and by then the papers were speculating about the “ritualistic” Manson family murders at 10050 Cielo Drive and the “sex-drug” cult that might have committed them. Sharon Tate was murdered in the early hours of August 9, 1969.
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