On August 8, 1969, a week before the Woodstock Music Festival kicked off, Steve McQueen was invited to dine at the home of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in the Hollywood hills.

An unexpected rendezvous with a mystery woman prompted the actor to cancel his appointment -- and inadvertently save his life: In the wake of the Manson Family Tate-LaBianca murders (at, respectively, 10050 Cielo Drive and 3301 Waverly Drive) McQueen was horrified to discover that he had been accorded an unwelcome spot... atop Charles Manson's celebrity death list.

[At McQueen's insistence, he and Paul Newman were given the same number of lines of dialogue in The Towering Inferno.]