Polanski meeting ‘scalded’ on Farrow’s mind

ACTRESS Mia Farrow told a British court yesterday of Roman Polanski’s “utter sense of loss” at his wife’s brutal murder.

The 60-year-old star recalled a meeting with the film director at Elaine's restaurant in New York at the end of August 1969 the month 26-year-old Sharon Tate and her unborn child were slaughtered by Charles Manson's 'Family' .

It was "scalded" on her mind, she told London's High Court.

Polanski, aged 71, is suing Conde Nast, which denies libel, over a July 2002 Vanity Fair story which said that just after her death, he made sexual advances to a "Swedish beauty" in Elaine's, "inundating her with his Polish charm".

It recounted an onlooker, Lewis Lapham, as saying: "I watched as he slid his hand inside her thigh and began a long honeyed spiel which ended with the promise, 'I will make another Sharon Tate out of you.'"

Giving evidence on behalf of Polanski, Ms Farrow, who starred in his 1968 film Rosemary's Baby, said they met for dinner.

"We were waiting for a table and I remember there were two women who seemed to be trying to flirt with him. I remember because I remember thinking how inappropriate it was. Then we sat at our table."

She added: "He paid no attention because we hadn't seen each other since Sharon's murder and that was so huge."

She said: "He started telling me about events in California, what he had gone through and he got very, very upset and we had ordered our dinner, but we just left the restaurant. He was that upset and I too.

"We just started walking around and around the block and he told me about visiting the house where Sharon had been killed and the others and a little kitten Sharon had and the kitten was there in the blood."

She remembered coming back to the restaurant and, at some point, her then partner Andre Previn showed up and "to the best of my recollection" they took Polanski to his hotel.

Polanski's QC, John Kelsey-Fry, asked her: "During that meeting in Elaine's did you see him behave inappropriately in any way with anybody?"

Ms Farrow replied: "No."

Mr Kelsey-Fry asked if they had discussed anything other than the murders.

She replied: "He was unable to talk about anything else and ... he just kept saying 'Why?' and 'Who would have done this?'... it was the time before we knew who had done this and it was just not conceivable. We couldn't figure it out at all."

Cross-examined by Tom Shields QC, for Conde Nast, Ms Farrow said: "Of this I can be sure of his frame of mind when we there, of what we talked about, of his utter sense of loss, of despair and bewilderment and shock and love a love he had lost.

"Of this I can be sure. I would not have left him in Elaine's unattended without trusted friends."

Asked if she had read about Polanski having casual sex with other women within a month of his wife's death, Ms Farrow said: "I don't see that as a disrespect of Sharon.

"If he says he did, I don't doubt it, but it would in no way detract from his feelings for Sharon. I would swear that on a stack of bibles."