Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [100]
After the film opened, sales of green Mustangs jumped tenfold.
WITH THE REIVERS’s scheduled Christmas 1969 release still seven months away, Steve decided to take it easy before he plunged back into making his long-awaited Le Mans. He continued to run around L.A. with Sebring or shoot out to Palm Springs, where a new crop of eager blondes was always waiting for him. As the summer approached, and the planning got more intense for his racing film, so did his penchant for women, not caring whether or not Neile found out about them. While the family was visiting Palm Springs for Easter, an electrician asked her when she had dyed her hair dark.
ON THE afternoon of Thursday, August 7, Sebring went to Steve’s house to give him a trim. Afterward, they went for some Mexican food at El Coyote in Hollywood. While they ate, Sebring told him there was a little soiree planned for the next night at Sharon Tate’s rented house up at Cielo Drive and that Steve should come. Tate had since married filmmaker Roman Polanski but kept Jay and others from her single days close at hand. Polanski didn’t seem to mind; he wasn’t a very jealous man and believed that he and Sharon were so in love that nobody could possibly pose a threat. Nonetheless, everyone who knew Sebring and Tate believed they were still in love and still carrying on.
Tate’s acting career was moving along nicely. Polanski had used her in 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers and married her a year later, and her career as a magazine model was equally hot until her pregnancy began to show. She was in her eighth month, which kept her more housebound than she would have liked. While Polanski was off in England scouting locations for what he thought would be his next movie, Day of the Dolphin (which Mike Nichols would eventually take over), with his friends Warren Beatty and production designer Richard Sylbert and the woman Polanski was having an affair with, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, Tate held regular soirees at her home. The next one was scheduled for that Friday night.
Steve told Sebring he’d be there. The next day Steve happened to run into Robert Vaughn. The two chatted for a while and Steve invited him to come along that night, to Tate’s place up on Cielo Drive. Vaughn politely declined; he had other business he needed to take care of.
Still later, Steve received a call from a young and beautiful blonde he had been seeing. He invited her as well, but she told him she had a better idea for just the two of them.
EARLY SATURDAY morning inside the house the mutilated bodies of Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Jay Sebring were discovered by the housekeeper. Sebring had been stabbed seven times and shot in the head.
The news spread through Los Angeles like a firestorm. When Steve heard about it, he immediately arranged to have someone go to Sebring’s house and clean out all the drugs, sexual paraphernalia, and anything else he knew his friend would not have wanted anyone to find (or that could possibly tie Steve to Sebring’s lifestyle). Sebring was known as something of an S&M freak around town, and Steve did not want any of that turned into fodder for the gossipmongers; it was bad enough that coke and pot had already been found in Sebring’s Porsche by the police at Cielo Drive that morning.
Two months later the Manson gang was arrested and charged with the Tate murders and others that had taken place during their spree. Part of the evidence the police found was a “hit list”