LOS ANGELES, Aug. 22 — To the mother of actress Sharon Tate, life is a fragile, precious commodity to be lived one day at a time.

“There are no tomorrows,” said Doris Tate as the tears she had tried so hard to dam overflowed and slid slowly down her cheeks. “Sharon was alive one day and dead the next. It’s just that simple.”

For 13 years, she has silently wrestled with the horror, pain and anguish of the savage murder of her beautiful daughter, eight months pregnant, in a senseless spree of Helter Skelter slayings by the Charles Manson family.

“I wanted to know why they killed my daughter. They didn’t go in for robbery. Her jewelry and everything was intact. If they had wanted money, she’d have given them anything to save her life…

“These people didn’t know Sharon from Adam. They didn’t know who she was. They just went into this house and they killed everyone who was in it…

“My question really was a stupid question. The police, the district attorney, they can’t give me an answer … The Manson family had no reason to kill her.”

This month, as another anniversary of Tate-LaBianca murders rolled around, Mrs. Tate finally decided to speak out. At last, she had found not only the courage but a reason to end her silence.

By some quirk of a different calendar, this one kept by the California Board of Prison Terms, parole hearings are scheduled this year for all five members of the Manson family convicted of murder and conspiracy in the five deaths one night in Sharon Tate’s rented hilltop home and the murders the next day of wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in their home.

And Mrs. Tate is determined that none of the murderers ever again will have freedom.

“What they did was overkill,” she stated in a flat, emotionless voice. “What kind of a sadistic mind would stab again and again, 16 times (Sharon Tate) and 26 times (coffee heiress Abigail Folger, a houseguest) and then taste the blood?

“There’s something wrong with people who would do that. And they should be turned loose on society? Would you want them on the street?”

The parole hearings took on added urgency when Tate learned from the district attorney’s office that 900 names had been gathered on a petition urging the release of Leslie Van Houten, and there was a possibility the Manson family member would walk out of prison.

“I figured it was time for me to do something,” she said “If they could get 900 signatures, I could probably get 40,000 to 50,000.”

Van Houten, serving three consecutive life sentences, presented her fourth request for parole. It was denied, and the board issued an order declaring her ineligible for another hearing until 1985.

Then, Tate’s petitions — which turned out to contain not 40,000 signatures but 3,500 — were carried to the parole hearing this month of Patricia Krenwinkel. It was Krenwinkel who savaged Folger and who dipped her fingers in the LaBiancas’ blood to scrawl messages on the wall.

The board, calling the members “distorted and demented” and citing a recent psychiatric report stating that Krenwinkel’s “potential for violence remained high,” denied parole and said she could not apply for another hearing for three years.

In September, Susan Atkins will be up for parole. During the trial, Atkins recounted how she held Sharon Tate pinned down and sneered at the pregnant woman’s pleas to let her live to have her baby.

Parole hearings are scheduled in October for Charles “Tex” Watson, who dealt Sharon Tate the blows that killed her and the unborn child, and in November, for Charles Manson, the mastermind who had calculated that random murders would touch off a Helter Skelter race war.

To this day, Mrs. Tate has steadfastly refused to discuss the murders except in the most general terms. She has joined a self-help and advocacy group called Parents of Murdered Children, which is backing her campaign to keep the Manson family in prison, and she has listened as other women plumbed their souls in hopes of assuaging their grief.

A short, stocky, dark-haired woman with traces of her Texas background in her voice, Doris Tate — unlike some parents whose children have been victims of homicides — does not feel she might have done something to protect her daughter or prevent her murder.

Sharon’s love affair with the movie camera began when her father, a career officer assigned to military intelligence, was stationed in Europe and film companies came to the base looking for Americans to appear as extras. Then Col. Paul Tate was transferred to Los Angeles and Sharon, instead of going to college as her mother had envisioned, was put under contract and promoted as a blond starlet.

“Her career was a happening, a very easy happening. It was like it was just meant to be, Mrs. Tate said. “It was too easy.”

Col. Tate retired shortly after the murder. He does not accompany his wife on her round of public appearances nor will he speak to the media.

“He’s still seething,” Mrs. Tate said. “It’s not something I want to talk about … He has a very definite plan.”

Her own reaction in the aftermath varied widely. At one point, she contemplated suicide. At another, she wanted to go to her daughter’s grave “and dig her up with my hands.”

After the Manson family was arrested, she had a discussion with herself. It took the form of good arguing with evil.

“The evil part of me said, ‘You want those people dead, just wish it and it will happen.’ The good side said, ‘What makes you any better than they are if you wish them dead?’

“When something like this happened, I was used to going to my Bible and flipping it open. That day, it opened to Proverbs 18. The heading was revenge and it said — I’ll paraphrase — that when your enemy falls, be not glad lest the Lord see it and lessen his wrath.”

Mrs. Tate maintains she does not want to exact revenge against the Manson family.

Nor, she added, is she angry with Manson and his followers. “As far as I’m concerned, they don’t even exist.”

Nor does she attach any special culpability to Manson himself. “He’s just crazier than the rest of them. But they share an equal responsibility. Where the others fouled up was in obeying what this a – – – – had to say.”

Yet, moments later, she demanded to know, “What right do criminals have to take upon themselves to disrupt God’s plan for an individual? I don’t think any of us has the right to say you’re going to die…

“I don’t think anyone has the right to put anyone through the torture I live through daily. Sharon pregnant. Does anyone have that right to take that life … What should be their punishment?”

Manson and his followers had been sentenced in 1971 to die in the gas chamber. But when the California Supreme Court threw out the state’s death penalty law in 1978, all death sentences in effect automatically were reduced to life imprisonment and these prisoners could apply for parole after having spent seven years in jail.

“Why should they even come up for parole when they received the death penalty in the first place?” Mrs. Tate asked. “What deterrent is it that they should be allowed to come up in seven years?”

Mrs. Tate made it clear she is not asking for the death penalty, which has since been reinstated, to be reinvoked against the Manson family. “I don’t know if I really believe in the death penalty. That’s why I say they should be in jail for life.”

But in the next breath, she said that if the death penalty is “a way to stop horrible murders like Sharon’s, to get rid of this, do it. Whatever it takes for other people not to have to go through this torture, it’s worth it.”

She does not believe the Manson family ever can be rehabilitated. And she is convinced that if they eventually were granted parole, “they would do the same damn thing time after time.”

She said a woman asked her recently if Watson, a born-again Christian who serves as assistant prison chaplain at the California Men’s Colony, should be “turned loose to do God’s work.” She responded, “Don’t you agree he couldn’t be in a better place than in prison?”

Perhaps ironically, Mrs. Tate does not feel that all murderers should be denied parole. Each case, she said, must be looked at individually.

However, there is a growing feeling to which Mrs. Tate subscribes and that was exemplified recently in California by the voters’ approval of a far-ranging victims’ bill of rights — which includes notifying victims’ families of parole hearings — that the criminal justice system has grown too soft on criminals.

“We must be the laughingstock of the world for the way we deal with criminals,” said Mrs. Tate. “How many prisoners have been electrocuted and gassed compared to how many victims killed? There is an imbalance. What are we going to do about it? I don’t know.”

Over the years, confronted by people offering the murmurs of condolence, she has tried to hold back the tears, not always successfully. She lifts her chin and gazes sternly ahead. “You don’t want to be felt sorry for,” she said. “It can happen to anyone.”

By CAROL OPPENHEIM