“Sexy Little Me”

“Sexy Little Me” is Sharon Tate’s self-deprecating name for the sixties-starlet persona that had shaped how films presented her: attractive, alluring, and often denied the chance to be funny. The phrase captures both a familiar screen image and its constraint. In The Wrecking Crew, Sharon was offered a different kind of performance, as the bumbling Freya Carlson; the change was not merely a new part, but a chance to make physical comedy central rather than subordinate to her appearance.

The Starlet Persona

The book introduces the phrase while Sharon is preparing for a television appearance with Roman Polanski. After a party at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, Roman had agreed that they would appear on Playboy After Dark, and Sharon was irritated that he had committed them to consecutive engagements without consulting her. She would have preferred to spend the evening in bed beside him reading Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. Instead, she had to get dressed up again and perform what she called her Sexy Little Me act. The label is pointedly self-deprecating: it presents the persona as something she puts on for an audience, not as a complete account of who she is.

The passage places that public act alongside ordinary, private activity. Sharon listens to a Paul Revere and the Raiders record, dances to its beat, and packs Roman’s suitcase for his departure to London, a small task she has made a habitual kindness. She is also reading a book she likes and would rather remain at home. The contrast makes the persona’s function plain: an evening’s public appearance requires her to become camera-ready, even when her own preferences lie elsewhere. The phrase names the performance expected of her, while the surrounding details show that the expectation does not define her whole life.

Earlier Roles and the Limits of Allure

Sharon’s experience in two earlier comedies helps explain why Freya Carlson represented a departure. In Don’t Make Waves and Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, other performers were allowed to run about, make faces, and perform pratfalls, while Sharon was asked to remain vacant and alluring. Don’t Make Waves used how she looked in a bikini for some comic effect, but did not develop the comic possibilities of her character. The distinction is between making her appearance part of a joke and giving her the comic action itself.

That pattern made the offer of Freya Carlson especially appealing. Sharon initially assumed that a role in a Dean Martin and Matt Helm spy spoof would make her one of the seductive, chic spies played by the film’s other leading women, Elke Sommer, Nancy Kwan, and Tina Louise. Freya was instead Matt Helm’s beautiful but inept, bumbling sidekick. The part required the kind of physical comedy associated with pratfalls, falls into mud puddles, and knocking things over. Sharon embraced the opportunity to play comic relief opposite Dean Martin, but the new demand also made her feel out of her depth: she was being asked to do comedy, not just to supply the starlet image she already knew how to perform.

Freya Carlson’s Entrance

On location in Denmark, Sharon waited to make Freya’s first entrance in a hotel lobby, carrying a collection of objects and preparing to fall backward. The mechanics of the gag had been carefully explained. She was told to tuck her chin as she fell, keep the champagne bottle raised so it would not break, and close her legs after landing because the camera would be pointed up her dress. A pad beneath her outfit would protect her back and backside. These practical instructions did not remove her fear: the most daunting part was performing a major pratfall in front of Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis’s former partner.

Sharon’s apprehension mirrored Freya’s situation without making the two identical. Freya is a novice secret agent beside the celebrated Matt Helm; Sharon is a performer facing an experienced comic partner while attempting a kind of comedy her earlier roles had not let her practice. Both are eager to succeed and worried about failing. The book makes that parallel explicit, turning the entrance into more than a physical gag: it is the point where the starlet image is tested against a performance that depends on awkwardness and comic timing.

A Different Screen Image

Director Phil Karlson told Sharon that the entrance would define Freya for the audience. There had been discussion of presenting her first as a glamorous sexpot like the other women and revealing her clumsiness later. Karlson rejected that approach. He praised Freya as the film’s best character and revised the introduction so that the comic identity, rather than a delayed revelation beneath a glamorous cover, would lead. He also told Sharon that the film did not really begin until Freya entered and that she needed to arrive with impact.

The revised design made the contrast visible. Sharon’s long blond hair was dyed red and tied up; she wore a Danish tourist-board representative’s uniform, oversized comic glasses, and a succession of silly hats during the first half of the film. Rather than being introduced in the stylish fashions associated with Sommer, Kwan, and Louise, Freya entered in a look built around her awkward, comic function. At the Bruin, the scene’s action supplied the promised impact: Sharon ran in with champagne, called out to Mr. Helm, tripped over his camera case, and landed flat on her backside. The moment replaces the poised allure of Sexy Little Me with a conspicuously physical joke—and gives Sharon a role whose comic purpose is not incidental to her appearance but belongs to the character’s actions.