Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders - Hardcover

King, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569801576 ISBN 13: 9781569801574

Publisher: UNKNO, 2000

Synopsis

Interviews, correspondance, and trial transcripts present a biography of Sharon Tate from her childhood through her Hollywood stardom, and detail her murder and the trial convicting Charles Manson.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

An oddly timed, incredibly detailed account of the most famous of the Manson Family's victims.Throughout the summer of 1969, America was transfixed by a series of brutal murders in and around Los Angeles. The victims ranged from an anonymous, well-to-do couple to an heiress to the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate. Exhibiting an almost voyeuristic passion for his topic, King (The Duchess of Windsor, 1999) unearths a staggering trove of information on Tate, an actress who died at 26 with barely a handful of films and television appearances to her credit. Beyond limning Tate's short life, King takes readers into the midst of the Manson family, profiling her killers' pasts, the sex and drugs rites of the Manson family, and the career of Manson himself (the criminal and failed pop idol who was convicted of compelling them to murder). Making extensive use of seldom-seen material (including police and detective reports, photographs of the murder scene, Manson family-member parole trial transcripts, and interviews with principal and secondary characters like Tate's mother, Doris, and surviving relatives of other Manson family victims), King unflinchingly recreates the brutality and utter randomness of the events of early August 1969. Beyond the sensational reportage (including a harrowing and grisly, minute-by-minute account of the murders of Tate and the four others at 10050 Cielo Drive), King reveals the condition and whereabouts of Manson family members while including some lucid and trenchant observations on the continuing cult of Manson (e.g., the merchandising of Manson's image). King also details the victims'-rights advocacy work of Tate's mother and sister.Readers might wonder why King's account suddenly surfaces 31 years after the killings, but true-crime fans and Manson fetishists (you know who you are) will find it irresistible. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Veteran celebrity biographer King (The Duchess of Windsor, etc.) gives us a thorough account of Sharon Tate's brief life, her star-crossed career and her tragic death at the hands of Charles Manson's Family. King counters the grisly familiarity of the Tate-LaBianca murders by approaching the oft-told story from the perspective of Tate's innocent Hollywood ambitions, presenting her as representative of the 1960s-era woman in pursuit of L.A. stardom and liberation. He recounts her youth as a soldier's daughter in Italy, her struggles in films like Valley of the Dolls (which presented her as a nascent sex kitten) and her ominous relationship with the volatile, philandering Roman Polanski. King portrays Tate as an essentially simple, generous-hearted person who possessed an unfortunate na?vet? regarding the hidden social storms she traversed. But King's narrative gets less interesting as he begins to reconstruct the Family's development, its descent into the mad butchery of Tate, Leno LaBianca and others, and the arrests. Although King coherently re-creates the stale hippie dreams, criminal tensions and drug-tainted glamour of the cultural milieu in which Manson operated, he breaks little new ground, rehashing what is already known from prosecutor Bugliosi's seminal Helter Skelter. Albeit capably researched and written, this account in the end occupies that uneasy perch between veneration and exploitation.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1569801576
• ISBN 13: 9781569801574
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 351