Read My Lips (16 page)

Now my neighbors and I had to put up with the occasional ruckus in the parking lot below our building when it emptied after business hours. One night, when things got too loud, I strode out in my nightgown, having been awakened by crashing bottles and somebody threatening to cut somebody else. I’d had it. I stood up at the top of the wall that overlooked the lot, yelling, “Excuse me! But you’re on somebody else’s property and you’re breaking bottles. You roared in here on your motorcycles, looking like Hell’s Angels—and maybe you are! Now you’re screaming
your heads off threatening to cut somebody? I mean, who do you think you are? Some of us need to sleep!”

All of a sudden, the tough guys got quiet. “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” someone said. “We’ll pick it up right away.” They immediately started cleaning up.

I had already called the cops, but when they arrived, I told them I’d solved the problem. Then I went back to bed.

It was a far cry from a dangerous neighborhood. Still, it was growing unfamiliar—more impersonal and less neighborly than the West Hollywood small town I had inhabited for a decade or so. Our enclave was coming to resemble a strange new America that we barely recognized. Early that summer of 1969 I had sprawled out on the bed of my friend Mark Rydell, who had directed me in
Slattery’s People.
I joined him and his former wife Joanne Linville to watch in awe as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Talk about brave new worlds!

The times were turbulent. We’d lost JFK in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated just a few months after King, at our own Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Vietnam was always in our thoughts. The war and the assassinations affected us greatly, and I think we all struggled to make sense of those horrors, feeling a loss of innocence and a troubling certainty that our world would never be the same.

But nothing could have prepared me for August 9, 1969, when horror struck closer to home.

I
GOT THE CALL EARLY THAT
S
ATURDAY MORNING
. I
WAS ALREADY
awake when the phone rang. The voice on the line—a friend, I can’t remember who it was—sounded panicked, asking, “Is it true? Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I said.

“Is it true that Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring and everybody up at Rudi’s were stabbed and hung?”

“Of course not!” I yelled. “What’s wrong with you? Why would you even say something like that?!”

I hung up, feeling sick, and immediately called my friend Anjanette Comer. She confirmed the ghastly news: five people—Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steve Parent—had been murdered at the home of Stuart Cohen’s partner, my friend Rudi Altobelli. The housekeeper had found the bodies that morning. Anjanette came over to be with me, and we spent what seemed like the entire day huddled together, shivering and shaking and trying to grasp what had happened.

Rudi Altobelli and Stuart Cohen made a great management team. I was lucky to have them in my life. Stuart had the business head, and Rudi had the aesthetic sense, not to mention that he was endlessly fun and hospitable. He loved his dogs, loved having people over, and was a fantastic cook. Jack Nicholson always called him “Rudi the Rank” because of Rudi’s on-the-nose sarcasm.

Back in the early 1960s Stuart and Rudi had bought an expansive property in Benedict Canyon, overlooking all of Beverly Hills. Rudi lived in and ran the house. The place was somewhat secluded, shrouded by trees and shrubs. For years we’d all spent time hanging out there—me, Stuart, sometimes Luana, and occasionally Jack, who would come up to play cards along with Rudi’s many friends. The property included a main house and a detached guesthouse; it was beautiful but not overly fussy. Homey. It was the kind of place where you could put your bare feet up and relax.

The guesthouse was where we spent most of our time. It had a high, beamed ceiling and a large open living room, with a ladder that led up to a small loft. A large stone fireplace and a big dining room table anchored the living room. That was where Rudi would serve up his big pots of spaghetti to whoever had come around.

Walkways connected the separate areas of the property, bordered by split-rail fences and blooming plants. The property’s smallish pool sat between the main house and guesthouse. It had
smooth curves and was hugged on all sides by rock and stone landscaping, softened with greenery. So inviting, so mellow.

We would go over and just sit around by the pool, maybe smoke some grass, then eat some spaghetti when the munchies kicked in. That made Stuart crazy—he hated when we smoked pot. He would get in a huff and storm off like he was leaving. We’d chase after him, pretending that we believed he was really stomping out, and we would beg him to stay, though we knew he always would.

Sun, food, friends, good times—that’s what the haven at 10050 Cielo Drive had meant to us. Rudi would routinely rent out one or the other of the buildings on the property. Henry Fonda had lived in the guesthouse. Record producer Terry Melcher and his then-girlfriend Candice Bergen had lived in the main house. A strange musician named Charles Manson, who had been in touch with Terry about some recordings, had once come up to the house looking for him. But Terry and Candy weren’t staying there at the moment. Actress Sharon Tate and her friends were, while Sharon’s husband, the director Roman Polanski, was in London making a movie.

I didn’t know Roman and Sharon well, but I had gone to their wedding reception. Sharon was lovely, both in her look and her demeanor—very warm and sweet, approachable and kind. She was only twenty-six years old, due to deliver a baby two weeks from the night that Charles Manson’s followers invaded Rudi’s home.

Rudi, meanwhile, was working in Italy and hadn’t yet been informed of the tragedy. Stuart was also overseas, in Ireland with Chris Jones, an actor I’d introduced to him who had starred in the TV series
The Legend of Jesse James.
Someone had to break the news to Rudy. The task fell to me.

I reached Rudi at the Hassler Hotel in Rome and delivered the terrible blow. He immediately flew home, and I met him at the airport. From there we went straight to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where we spent the night together in a suite, scared to death, sick and brokenhearted.

Nothing so monstrous and violent had ever happened in our lives and certainly not in our community. The Tate murders and the LaBianca murders, committed a night later by Manson’s family members, were hideous, altering my consciousness and the consciousness of everyone I knew. Our world had come unhinged.

I thought about the way I’d lived at my old apartment on Sweetzer, not far from my current place on Shoreham. Every night I’d leave my door open a crack so that the cat could go in and out. Not just unlocked—open. I still slept like a log every night, without a care in the world. That was a Hollywood that didn’t exist anymore.

The Manson murders not only changed Hollywood but the rest of America as well. The press coverage was horrific. You couldn’t escape those images of bloody footprints and the word “PIG” scrawled in blood on a door. None of us had ever seen such gruesome scenes on the nightly news or in the newspaper. The coverage, bordering on sick fascination, was the beginning of a new level of gore and sensationalism that has become the norm in our modern-day media. Suddenly, we were no longer watching the news but rather a new and twisted form of entertainment, focused almost exclusively on the grisly and the macabre.

I’d argue that it has only gotten worse over the years. Since then Americans have heard about every atrocity, and this does nothing but make us live in constant fear. Some would say we’re immune now to the police tape and the blood and the voyeurism. But we definitely weren’t then. It unnerved us. It made us sick. I think something as heinous as those murders is supposed to make you sick. I never want to be numb to that. Ever.

For those of us in Stuart and Rudi’s circle, there was a sad, aching irony to the tragedy. How could such a senseless act of violence take place in a home that was so beautiful, where we had all felt such happiness and peace?

A
T THIS STAGE
I
WAS STILL PANICKED ABOUT WHERE MY CAREER
was going. I thought I’d given one of my better performances in
M*A*S*H,
but at the time I had no idea how the film would do and what that success could mean for me. So I couldn’t shake the fear that I would never work in the movies again. I flat-out didn’t feel good about myself, and that self-doubt, coupled with my desperate fear, led me to make bad choices.

I had met Larry Hauben at the Actor’s Studio. He was an actor and painter who would later write the screenplay for
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The first night I met Larry I was sobbing to him about my career, and he said that he’d like to shoot a little film of me. I was so desperate that I said okay without asking questions. My friendship with Larry quickly became an affair, though I was still obsessed with David Rayfiel. I guess I needed somewhere to put my energies, so to speak.

So Larry came over to my Shoreham Drive apartment and walked into the narrow little bathroom. The tub was on left, the toilet on the right, and on the far wall was a sink and mirror. Larry put up a piece of tinfoil in the corner of the bathroom above the tub to catch the light, then sat down on the toilet seat. Never one for too much silence, I started talking.

“Save that for when I’m rolling,” he said, cutting me off. “Now roll your hair and then take it down again.”

Well, I tell you, when I saw what he had shot that day, I said to myself, “Tinfoil, baby, cool!” I’d never looked so beautiful in my life. Tinfoil.

At times we’d get together at Larry’s house, which was never my preference because it was far too filthy for me; I’d bring my own sheets just to sit down on his bed. Sometimes we’d smoke some grass first, which helped me relax a little. Occasionally there was also a cameraman present for this film Larry wanted to make. One night we got in such a huge argument that the cameraman fled, clearly afraid for his life. Furious, Larry yelled after him, “Finally something real happens and you run out!”

On one particular evening Larry said, “Let’s take psilocybin”—’shrooms
were a favorite of Timothy Leary. Once we’d gotten high, Larry made a new suggestion for the film. “We’re going to make love, but you’ll only see our legs . . .”

Though I was terrified, I went along with it. Larry assured me that I’d know what we were doing—really doing, not faking—but the audience wouldn’t see it. I had no idea what the film, which would be called
Venus,
was going to be like until I saw it—along with everyone else—when it premiered at a local theater.

In the meantime, thank God I got a real role in
Brewster McCloud,
a new film with Bob Altman that was set in Houston. At that point it felt good to get out of town for a while. The movie starred me and Bud Cort, the slight, unusual fellow I fell in love with the moment I saw him standing in the chow line for
M*A*S*H.
Bob had asked me if I thought Bud would be good in the role of Brewster, an oddball loner living in a fallout shelter in the Houston Astrodome who wants to build wings that will allow him to fly.

A bizarre recluse who wants to fly in the Astrodome? Who else could Bob possibly cast? Bud was perfect.

Bud and I had become fast friends, just as I’d predicted. Luckily for me, he was a good listener, because all I talked about in those days were my affairs and work. Bud was a nice Catholic boy from New York, and I hope he found my stories riveting, for his sake. I taught him to drive, and we loved tooling around town together. Driving down Sunset, I would window shop from the front seat of my car. Because there was no traffic, we could slow to a crawl as I leaned out the window to see what my favorite boutiques had on display. I can still do that today while I’m stalled in traffic. You can always look on the bright side.