BRITAIN: Roman Polanski made "tasteless and vulgar" advances on a Scandinavian model shortly after his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the Charles Manson gang, a New York editor told a London court yesterday.
Lewis Lapham, editor of US magazine Harper's, is the source of a passage in the July 2002 edition of Vanity Fair over which film director Roman Polanski is suing the magazine's publishers.
Mr Polanski (71) is fighting the case via video link from Paris, because if he comes to Britain he risks extradition to the US where he is wanted after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. He cannot be extradited from France because he was born there.
The Vanity Fair article alleges that Mr Polanski propositioned a woman at Elaine's restaurant in New York on his way to his wife's burial in Los Angeles. Both sides in the case now agree that Mr Polanski was at Elaine's several weeks later.
"Mr Polanski pulled up a chair between myself and Beatte Telle and began to talk to her in a forward way . . . began to praise her beauty, romance her," Mr Lapham (70) told the court.
"At one point he had his hand on her leg and said to her 'I can put you in the movies. I can make you the next Sharon Tate'. I was impressed by the remark, not only because it was tasteless and vulgar, but also because it was a cliche." Financier Edward Perlberg, Vanity Fair's second witness and the boyfriend of Ms Telle in 1969, said he was also at the restaurant and recounted what she told him after they left.
"He touched me with his hand, and said that I should come to Hollywood and he would get me a screen test and he would make another Sharon Tate of me," Mr Perlberg (66) quoted her as saying. "I though this was generally creepy. I think the words that he was a twerp, or to that effect, were used." Vanity Fair's lawyer, Thomas Shields, confirmed that Ms Telle was still alive. She has not been called as a witness.
Mr Polanski's lawyer, John Kelsey-Fry, questioned details of Mr Lapham's and Mr Perlberg's accounts of what happened at Elaine's, and wondered if Mr Polanski would be capable of "the most astonishing, asinine chat-up line in history".
He also asked whether Mr Lapham would apologise to Mr Polanski after admitting the alleged incident did not happen while the director was on his way to Ms Tate's funeral but weeks later. "Certainly I would apologise for that," he said.
But Mr Lapham stuck by the gist of the story. "My recollection is very vivid of his approach to Beatte. I was astonished by the remark 'I could make another Sharon Tate of you'." Mr Shields opened the third day of the libel case by questioning Mr Polanski's reputation. Details of his private life, including having sex with a woman within a month of Ms Tate's death, have peppered proceedings in an occasionally emotional trial.
"It is the defendant's case that the claimant actually has no reputation to protect in this country at all." Mr Polanski argues that the case is not about his sex life, but the account of a callous approach to a woman so soon after Ms Tate's death and the use of her name to try to seduce her.
Mr Lapham said he did not see Hollywood actress Mia Farrow that evening. She gave testimony on Tuesday that she was with Mr Polanski at Elaine's in late August, that he was distraught and discouraged the advances of two young women there.