The original home located at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, California, is infamous for being the scene of one of the Manson "family" murders. The house was designed by Robert Byrd in 1944 for French actress Michèle Morgan.^[1]

The French country style structure was located on three acres (12,000 m²) at the end of a cul-de-sac on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, an area west of Hollywood in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooks Beverly Hills and Bel Air. The hillside structure faced east and featured stone fireplaces, beamed ceilings, paned windows, a loft above the living room, a swimming pool and a guest house.^[2]

Past residents included Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon, Henry Fonda, Mark Lindsay, Paul Revere & The Raiders Manager Roger Hart (lease in Hart's name) with roommate Terry Melcher (the son of actress Doris Day) and Melcher's girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen. The couple split in early 1969 with Melcher relocating to Malibu.

In February 1969, Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate rented the home from owner Rudi Altobelli. On August 9, 1969, the home became the scene of the murders of Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent at the hands of the Charles Manson "Family". William Garretson, Altobelli's caretaker and an acquaintance of Parent, lived in the guest house behind the main house and was unaware of the murders until the next morning when he was taken into custody by police officers who had arrived at the scene.

The final resident of the original house was the musician Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Reznor moved into the house in the early 1990s and had a recording studio built inside. This studio, dubbed Pig (sometimes called Le Pig) in a reference to the fact that one of the murderers had written "Pig" in Tate's blood on the front door of the house during the murders, was the site of recording sessions for Nine Inch Nails' 1992 EP Broken and 1994 album The Downward Spiral as well as Marilyn Manson's 1994 Reznor-produced debut album Portrait of an American Family. Reznor moved out of the house in December 1993, later explaining that "there was too much history in that house for me to handle."^[3] He insists that he did not know that the address was site of the Manson murders when he bought the place.

Reznor made a statement about working in the Tate house during a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone:

“

While I was working on Downward Spiral, I was living in the house where Sharon Tate was killed. Then one day I met her sister. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: 'Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?' For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, 'What if it was my sister?' I thought, 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know?[4]

”

Reznor took the front door of the house with him when he moved out, installing it at Nothing Studios, his new recording studio/record label headquarters in New Orleans.^[5] In 1994, the owner demolished the house and replaced it with a new mansion called Villa Bella with a new street address of 10066 Cielo Drive. The current owner of the house is Hollywood producer Jeff Franklin. 

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Coordinates: 34°5′38″N 118°25′57″W / 34.09389°N 118.4325°W / 34.09389; -118.4325

• 10066 Cielo Dr at Flickr.com
• Cielo Drive at charliemanson.com