How Sharon Tate transfixed Hollywood, 50 years before 'Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood'
In death, Sharon Tate was born into myth, an "it" girl with a canyon house, a famous director husband, and a beauty Hollywood craved as its mirror in an age of acid trips and biker gangs, a time when America was unmoored and the studio system was giving way to brash, young independent filmmakers.
Tate lived at a moment when the counterculture barged in on the martini set and tore up the rules. She was that flicker between eras, wholesome daughter, libertine wife. Her murder in 1969 came as if a horror show had hijacked a pot-scented parade. Hollywood ran scared and Tate, who was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed 16 times by followers of Charles Manson, became a patron saint to the inexpressible.
She was 26. Her role as a suicidal soft-porn actress in the "Valley of the Dolls," a tale of barbiturates and reckonings, did not
