Once Upon a Time In Hollywood: Brad Pitt stars in trailer
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Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is on TV screens tonight. Quentin Tarantino’s film with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio presents a rewritten version of the horrific 1969 slaughter of young actress Sharon Tate (played on screen by Margot Robbie), her friends and her unborn child at their house on Cielo Drive. The blood-soaked reality might have been very different if Doris Day had not saved her son and his girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen, although Terry, tragically, was the twisted ‘reason’ why the gruesome murders took place.
Terry was a Hollywood music producer and, in June 1969, went with a colleague to see an aspiring rock star at an isolated ranch in the northern outskirts of LA. It was leased by Terry’s friend, Beach Boy Brian Wilson.
They found a wild commune, run by the then-unknown Charles Manson, who dreamed of music stardom as well as violently bringing down society. Wilson had been intrigued, initially, by the charismatic Manson and offered him the house for free. No doubt, also persuaded by the drugs and group sex that pervaded the Manson ‘Family’.
Wilson had introduced Terry and Manson months before and Manson had tried to visit Terry at home at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon on March 23, but he wasn’t in. Months later, that house would witness one of the most horrifying nights in Hollywood history.
The June meeting went badly. The cult leader beat someone who interrupted them and then Terry’s friend was slipped LSD and had a terrible adverse reaction to the drug.
Terry quickly left but the deluded and egomaniac Manson had already told his followers the producer would sign him to a major record deal. Manson’s complete power over his followers could not permit any sign of weakness. When it eventually became clear no deal would happen, the notorious and blood-soaked chain of events was set in motion.
Extraordinarily, only Day’s intervention saved her son from a terrible death.
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Manson (and his brainwashed followers) believed a series of violent murders, which he would pin on Black activists, would precipitate a major race war that would leave the city in ruins.
He would then be able to build a new ideal society from the ashes with himself, of course, as its leader.
Furious and potentially embarrassed by Terry’s lack of interest in helping his record career, Manson had the perfect target and told his followers that the producer had betrayed him and deserved to die.
On August 8, he sent some of his most devoted and fervid followers – Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Charles (“Tex”) Watson – to that same address at 10050 Cielo Drive, to kill the residents as brutally and attention-grabbingly as possible.
The three of them did not know or care who lived there, nor did they balk at brutally killing the eight-moths pregnant Tate.
Terry owed his life to his mother that night. Day herself was the principal reason he was not still at the address.
Wilson’s Beach Boys bandmate Brian Love said: “The move was no accident. Terry, Doris’ only child, was extremely close to his mom. He had told her about Manson – and about some of his scary antics, his brandishing of knives, his zombie followers – and that Manson had been to the house on Cielo and she insisted he move out.”
The next night, the same killers plus Manson, Leslie Van Houten and Clem Grogan headed to 2201 Waverly Drive and killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
Chillingly, it was later revealed that Manson himself already knew Terry was no longer at the house, but he still needed a name and reason to give to his followers – and decided to make an example of whoever lived there anyway.
For months after the news of the slaughter at Day’s son’s former home was splashed across the papers, the police failed to connect a city-wide murder-spree until the killers were caught by accident. But Terry’s nightmare still wasn’t over.
It wasn’t until October 12 that the authorities had a breakthrough when they arrested Manson and some of his followers on unrelated charges of mass car theft. In custody, Atkins began to talk about her involvement in the LaBianca murders to her cellmates who passed on the information and suddenly the investigators began to piece it all together.
The trial started in July 1970. Terry was called in by the state prosecutors and was so distressed he had to be sedated just to be able to give evidence.
Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten were all sentenced to death on January 25, 1971. Watson followed in October. When the California Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in February 1972, all their sentences were commuted to life in prison.
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm
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