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Sunning in a Bikini. Theories of sex, drug and witchcraft cults spread quickly in Hollywood, fed by the fact that Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world's more offbeat crowds. Says London Celebrity Tailor Douglas Hayward, "They were both enormously popular in a trendy, fashionable, hippie world." They also habitually picked up odd and unsavory people indiscriminately, and invited them home for parties. "Roman and Sharon had as much idea about security as idiots," says Publicist Don Prince. "They lived like gypsies. You were likely to find anyone sleeping there."
How much of a role drugs played in their world is hard to discern. Columnist Steve Brandt says that Sharon gloried in her pregnancy, sunning herself in a bikini while pregnant. When asked if she was taking drugs, she told him, "Steve, I would do nothing to jeopardize the baby." Sharon was described by some friends as a serious actress with a wide range of interests—dance, music, fencing, skiing—and by others as a vacuous bathing beauty who was capitalizing on Polanski's fame.
Polanski, who was in London at the time of the murders, is noted for his macabre movies. He is no stranger to death : his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp. Polanski was spectacularly grief-stricken; five days after his wife's death, he still could not walk without assistance.
There also appeared to be a dark side to the lives of the other victims. "Gibby" Folger had been an aimless heiress since her graduation from Radcliffe, drifting from a Harvard graduate course to a job as a clerk in a New York bookshop to volunteer political work for Robert Kennedy and Thomas Bradley, the Negro Los Angeles mayoral candidate. She had most recently been a welfare worker. Author and Artist Barnaby Conrad, a family friend, described her as "square in the best sense of the word," but others who knew her say that she had changed in the year since she took up with Frokowski.
Frokowski was a free-spending Polish refugee who loved fast cars and women, and was once described as a sort of Hemingway hero. A man who could inspire deep friendship and violent enmity, he had left two former wives behind in Poland. Frokowski was not believed to be a confidant of Polanski's, as he claimed, but rather a hanger-on with sinister connections to which even the tolerant Polanski objected. Both he and Gibby were said to be familiar with at least marijuana, possibly stronger drugs. "You could walk in their house, take a deep breath and get high," said one acquaintance.
Sebring, a diminutive men's hair stylist ($11.50 per haircut), was a health nut with violent convictions (especially anti-Negro). He had a black belt in karate and kept guns in his glove compartment and an assortment of whips handy in his purple and black bedroom. An old girl friend, who said Sebring often asked to tie her up for whippings, reported that he also smoked marijuana. He and Sharon were once engaged, and shared an apartment in London's Eaton Square in 1965.