The Sunday Telegraph Sunday 11 August 2019 *** 23
sartorially impeccable President
Barack Obama in his socks, while
political writer Sue Cameron has
remembered him arriving at a policy
meeting shoeless and holding a plastic
bag of fruit. “Mr Hilton started
inexpertly peeling an orange,” she
said. “There was juice everywhere, not
least over the crotch of his brushed
cotton shorts. Unabashed, he went off
to his next meeting – with some
military top brass.”
It cannot be far off the impact
Cummings hoped for when he
gathered Whitehall’s (presumably
suited and formal) special advisers fora 7.55am meeting last week, only to tell
them, mafia-style, that they “will be
dead” to him if they dare leak. That
meeting was leaked, naturally, but the
threat must have sounded all the more
menacing, coming as it did from a man
wearing a Joules body warmer.
It is in America where this
deliberately dishevelled brand of
smart-casual was pioneered, of course,
and specifically in Silicon Valley. Mark
Zuckerberg’s uniform of a grey T-shirt
or hoodie is as intentional a business
choice as any other he’s made: the
Facebook founder hopes that investors
and customers see him as a humble
entrepreneur, rather than the big bad
mastermind behind a social media
giant that wants to know everything
about you, and then some.
America has its own slovenly
political weirdos, too. Donald Trump’s
former chief strategist, Steve Bannon,
is a bona fide blackshirt – as in, that’s
the colour of shirt he most often
wears. Like Zuckerberg, Hilton and
Cummings, his philosophy is the
inverse of Carrie Bradshaw’s in Sex
and the City: “I like my money where I
can see it... hanging in my closet.”
Bannon entered the White House in
2016 and stuck out like a boil, pairing
his “radical ideas” with an approach to
dressing that was almost as offensive.
Barbour jackets, combat trousers,
multiple shirts worn at once and
chunky, military-style boots were all
part of the Bannon look. “Only I am
qualified to drain the Washington
swamp,” it said, “because I look like
I’ve been dredged from one.”
Let’s call the approach “disrupter
chic”, because anything more
appropriate would end up in legal
action. Perhaps it’s what the new
Home Secretary, Priti Patel, was
hoping for when she wore a gold,
white-soled trainer/loafer hybrid to
visit the port of Dover this week: no
leopard-print kitten heels now, I have
a new way of doing things, it
screamed.
So to Cummings we return, for a
closer look. A white shirt, the symbol
of the establishment, suddenly
distressed and ruffled. A brown belt
with black trainers, because he’s not
afraid of a violent clash. A sleeveless
jacket, because as long as the body
politic is safe, all is well. And then the
transitional lenses. Why? Because in
Cummings’s world, what matters is not
transparency, but the illusion of
transparency. You can have anything
you want in life if you dress for it.Features
D
ebra Tate grew up
Catholic, which means
that she has somehow
forgiven the people
who strung up her
heavily pregnant sister,
stabbed her 16 times and daubed foul
messages with her blood on the
walls. But that does not mean she has
forgotten.
The 66-year-old has devoted most
of her adult life to campaigning to
keep Charles Manson’s acolytes –
who massacred Sharon Tate, her
unborn child and four others on
August 9 1969 – behind bars. The
events of that night 50 years ago
have inspired countless column
inches, books and films; now
another, Quentin Tarantino’s Once
Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is
released here on Thursday.
Debra was just 16 at the time, but
her memories are vivid. Sharon,
26, had phoned home on the day
she died, and asked to speak to
her little sister. “It was a
blisteringly hot day,” she
recalls. “I was supposed to go
to Sharon’s, then she called
and said ‘I don’t feel like
moving, it’s so hot’.” That
was the last time she
heard her voice.
Instead, Sharon went out
for dinner with friends Jay
Sebring, Wojciech
Frykowski and Abigail
Folger that night, the group
returning at around 10pm to
the luxury rented home on
Cielo Drive, just north of
Beverly Hills, that she shared
with husband Roman Polanski.
A few hours later, four
members of the Manson Family
cult drove to the property, cut
the phone line and shot an
18-year-old boy who had been
visiting the groundsman, beforeAs Tarantino’s film about her sister’s killing
is released, Debra Tate tells Helen Chandler-
Wilde why she still fears Manson’s disciples
‘A murder like
Sharon’s could
happen again’
Dominic Cummings and
the politics of ‘disruptor chic’
E
dith Head, the legendary
American costume designer of
Hollywood’s golden age, had a
mantra: “You can have anything you
want in life if you dress for it.”
She never did meet Dominic
Cummings. And perhaps that’s just as
well, since the new Prime Minister’s
most senior aide appears to have
precisely what he’s always wanted
from life, yet dresses like the
owner-operator of a fairground
arriving for a negligence trial.
Jeans, brown belt, black trainers,
white linen shirt with more creases
than an elephant’s kneecap, a
fleece-lined gilet, Vote Leave tote
bag, and transitional-lens glasses that
are only ever stuck in the most
sinister, middle phase of said
transition... Cummings’s dress sense
since joining Boris Johnson’s team
last month could easily be written off
as accidental. That on any given
morning, the 47-year-old just grabs
whatever is nearest, because as
Benedict Cumberbatch showed
when he played him in Brexit: The
Uncivil War – as just the kind of
blackboard-smacking, socially
bizarre brainbox Cumberbatch
specialises in – he is a genius without
a care for trivial matters such as
ironing.
But is it really an unhappy
accident? Or, as with so much of how
Cummings operates, is there a
carefully chosen, subliminal
message behind it all? After all,
recent politics has seen a clutch of
outsider figures burrow into the
hallways of power, and almost all of
them have dressed as if an airline
lost their luggage years ago.
Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s
blue-sky-thinker-in-chief-but-let’s-
not-use-titles-they’re-so-restricting,
always arrived to work at Downing
Street in the clothes of a particularly
annoying 11-year-old. Among a sea of
navy suits, his creased shorts,
T-shirts (he particularly liked one
that said “Big Society, not Big
Government”) and espadrilles
screamed: “I am a free spirit, a fresh
thinker, unshackled from the bonds
of buttons and zips!”
Famously, Hilton once greeted theRumpled shirt, gilet... the
PM’s adviser is the latest
politico to dress down.
Guy Kelly explains it allDressed for success: Boris’s top aide
Dominic Cummings, above, Below, Steve
Bannon, left, and Steve HiltonGEORGE CRACKNELL WRIGHT/LNPbreaking in and repeatedly stabbing
and shooting everyone inside.
The so-called Tate murders, and
those of husband and wife Leno and
Rosemary LaBianca the next night,
were seen as marking the definitive
end of Sixties optimism, with rumours
of satanic rituals and sex games gone
wrong. In the aftermath, prosecutors
claimed Manson ordered the killings
to trigger a race war, intending to
frame black Americans for the crimes.
As for Debra, she was in the shower
the next morning, when “all of a
sudden the door was flung open and
there I am in all my nakedness with a
neighbour and my mother in the
bathroom. She said, ‘Sharon’s dead’.
“I wrapped a towel around my body,
I didn’t even dry anything. There were
probably little wet footprints going all
the way down the hall to the kitchen.
Mum was having a breakdown.”
The Tate family spent years
trying to get over the tragedy of
losing “lovely, kind” Sharon.
Debra tries not to think about
what her sister might have gone
on to do: she was being
groomed for stardom with
several big roles already
under her belt, and just a
few weeks away from
becoming a mother.
The shock was
particularly hard on the
sisters’ own mother, Doris, who
Debra says was “dysfunctional”
for a decade afterwards. “I’d
describe it as the lights were on
but nobody was home.”
Debra was initially worried
about Tarantino’s handling of her
sister’s murder, given his gory back
catalogue. “You put Quentin
Tarantino together with the
Manson story and of course your
imagination goes crazy,” she says.
But her fears were assuaged
when the director approached her.“He came to me and showed me the
script that he had written, we took
three days to discuss things,” she says.
The finished product, which she saw
at its Hollywood premiere in July, is so
good that she “didn’t want it to stop”.
Margot Robbie, who plays Sharon,
also visited Debra to find out what her
sister was like. “She really did do her
homework, she came to me with lots
of lots of knowledge six weeks prior to
[the film] being made,” Debra says. “I
gave her a bottle of Sharon’s perfume
and I lent her Sharon’s jewellery to
actually wear during a few of the
scenes: earrings and rings.”
Debra was not the only one
concerned about how the murders
would come across on screen:
Polanski, who was filming in London
at the time of the attacks, was worried
too, though she believes that he is
“OK” with how the film turned out.
He and Sharon, who met when he
directed her in 1967’s The Fearless
Vampire Killers, were very much inlove, says Debra. She’s still in touch
with him, despite the fact that he fled
the US in 1978, before he could be
sentenced for pleading guilty to
drugging and raping a 13-year-old.
A dual French and Polish citizen,
Polanski’s behaviour was influenced bythe fact that “in France that’s kind of a
normal thing: older woman, younger
man, older man, younger woman,”
Debra maintains. “He never said he
didn’t do it, unlike Harvey Weinstein.”
As for Manson, though he terrified
the world with his black eyes and wild
hair, he cut a cowardly, isolated figure
in the flesh. She remembers him
hiding from her when she attendedone of his prison parole meetings.
“The guard was undoing one of the
two contraptions restraining him and
he said ‘Who’s that?’. The guard said
‘That’s Sharon’s sister’. He said ‘Put
my leg irons back on and take me
back to my cell’, and he never came
back into another hearing.”
Manson himself died, aged 83, in
2017, but she believes the five living
killers still in jail (another, Steve
Grogan, was released in 1985) are just
as dangerous as ever, having never
shown any remorse. “Nothing has
changed: they have all of the bells
and whistles of being narcissistic and
psychopathic,” she says.
Those inspired by the Manson
myth menace her to this day. On one
occasion, she returned to her gated
property to find “a guy with a truck
on the inside of the fence and he
would not tell me how he got in”.
“He had a clipboard in his hand
and he wanted to lure me closer by
looking at it. He had a box truck with
no windows, so I kept my distance.”
Luckily, she had friends in the back
of her car with her. “I yelled ‘get the
f--- off my property now or I’m going
to call the police’,” she says. “He got
out of there quicker than anything
else, [but] if I had been by myself I
could have been in trouble.”
Even more of a worry to her are the
bubbling racial tensions in America,
which flared up again with horrific
consequences, last weekend, when
20 people were killed in an apparently
racially motivated shooting at a
Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
It seems plausible to Debra that a
group like Manson’s could spring up
again. “There are still racists,” she
says. “It’s not just the Manson Family,
they’re all sharing a common
denominator and that is a hate... It’s
very likely [to happen again].”
Despite the subject matter, Once
Upon a Time in Hollywood has given
her odd moments of hope. At the
premiere, “a little butterfly came and
landed on a lantern right at my
table,” she says. “It stayed there for
the longest time, people were
pointing at it. I don’t know who it
was... most likely Sharon.”Still fighting: Debra Tate, left, has
campaigned to keep the killers in jail;
Sharon and her younger sisters, below‘He came to me and
showed me the script.
We took three days
to discuss things’
AP; GETTY IMAGES; REXAlmost all of them
have dressed as if an
airline lost their
luggage years ago
Remorseless: Sharon Tate in 1965 four
years before her murder; above, Charles
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