THE KILLING OF SHARON TATE
by Lawrence Schiller
(New American Library, 126 pp. $1).

The eyes of a terribly frightened girl are on the cover; the title is printed in orange on black. In a slash of yellow across the black we are told this is the exclusive story of Susan Atkins, a confessed participant in the murder of lovely actress Sharon Tate and her swinging Hollywood friends. As an added inducement to buy we are informed there are eight pages of photographs.

Many will buy this packaged version of Lawrence Schiller’s ethically questionable journalistic coup, accomplished in the wake of the arrest and indictment of Charles Manson and his nomadic dropout family.

Schiller did not write the story. An unnamed writer was acquired from New York to do the job after Schiller had arranged a meeting with Miss Atkins through her court appointed attorney with the apparent cooperation of the local sheriff.

Schiller admits there were no obstacles put in his way as he pulled off another deal in his whirlwind career which includes such profitable moves as buying world rights to the sole picture of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and photographing Marilyn Monroe in the nude five months before her death.

The original agreement between Schiller and the parties involved was not to sell the story to U.S. publications and Schiller ran up a $3500 telephone bill selling the piece abroad. But somehow the Los Angeles Times acquired a copy of the story and published it at about the same time it appeared in Europe.

The story Miss Atkins sold for profit appears to be more self-serving than socially significant. In her grim recital of the horrifying events at Sharon Tate’s house, she maintains that whatever violence she committed was purely in self defense and she assumes the incredible posture of being a humanitarian by having concern for Sharon Tate’s unborn child.

Her professed love for Charles Manson and her loyalty to his “family” are hardly served by her confession. A fair trial is made virtually impossible by the publication of her confession of complicity in the bloodletting.

We know the killings did happen and one does not question her recital of the horrifying events and her tale of life with Charlie and his family but parts of her biographical account seem to be a put on. Somewhere in her life she either heard of Freud or maybe even read him because she refers several times to incestuous desires and a father complex. She does, however, arouse compassion for her terrible condition.

A brief history of the hippie movement precedes the interview and Charles Manson’s deplorable life is briefly outlined for us. We know all this already and new chapters of this bizarre tale are added each day for us in the newspapers and on television.

Is it irresponsible to say that members of the silent majority found the solution to the Tate case secretly satisfying?

“As in the horror film battles in which Frankensteins meet the Wolf Men, it was a case of the hippies meeting the Beautiful People. The middle class watched, relieved, happy to be spectators, as two out groups fell one upon the other. Said an English university lecturer: ‘The case is a psychic aphrodisiac for the bourgeoisie.’”

By JOHN F. MAHER