Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (8 page)

Flush with success, Manson refined his new persona by practicing and perfecting a series of verbal outbursts and veiled threats, polishing the act until it was almost surrealistic.

Prior to Manson’s 1967 release from Terminal Island, a counselor noted that “he has developed a casual glibness with words and certain techniques for dealing with people.” They hadn’t seen anything yet. Actually, Manson’s oratory and self-preservation skills were probably obvious even then. The difference was that he was a nobody, just another dirtbag con going nowhere. At the most, his antics may have merely amused his guards, doctors, and administrators.

After leaving Terminal Island, Manson traveled to San Francisco and fell into the famous Haight-Ashbury flower children set. To Charlie, initially out of place and a decade behind the times, the bold new psychedelic world appeared like a carnival. Everyone dressed funny and people were doing drugs right out in the open! Going with the flow, he dropped his first tab of acid and went to a Grateful Dead concert, joining in with the frenzied dancers and wondering if he’d died and gone to heaven. Best of all, instead of being treated like an outcast because of his lack of roots, he was welcomed. Everybody was homeless in the Haight. Homelessness was hip! When night fell, people crashed wherever they happened to be. Charlie had suddenly become cool!

Using his con’s instincts, he quickly discovered that many of the lost, aimless youth gathered around him were ripe for his antiestablishment, antiparents rap and were desperate for a leader. Listening as well as talking, Manson refined his prison tirades into a more polished and socially acceptable philosophy. Mary Brunner, his first recruit, influenced him greatly. Brunner, a librarian at Berkeley, was an environmentalist who preached the need to save the air, water, trees, earth, and animals. She gave Charlie a place to stay, and later became the mother of his third son. He rewarded the college-educated twenty-three-year-old by bringing in a young lover off the streets and laying down a “nobody belongs to anybody” rap. Brunner accepted it and became point zero in what was destined to be the strange and overflowing Family.

Thanks to Mary B, Charlie’s new sermons went something like this: “The system that corrupted and caged me is corrupting the world. People have given up God to lust for money. Jews, the rich, and those in authority are destroying the planet by polluting the air and water. The black man is growing in power and polluting the races.”

Manson found that Mary’s “green” side, the environmental issues, was especially appealing to the longhaired, colorfully dressed hippies. The prison elements began to fade as the needs of the outside world took a firmer hold on his consciousness. The destruction of the environment was pushed to the forefront.

“It’s not my world, it’s yours,” he lectured. “You let your parents destroy the earth while I was in prison suffering in darkness. Now you must change it. If the world dies, we all die, because we’re all one. I’ve been sent to save you and your planet and to tell you what must be done. If you want to be in my truth and in your own truth, you must do something to stop the pollution. I’m already in trouble. They’re watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake so they can drag me back to prison. But I’ll show you the way and what you must do. I’ll teach you so that you can survive, so that you can kill if you have to when the time comes.”

The time for killing would be years later. In 1967, Manson was mostly about sex, freedom, and more sex. On that end, it was a kindhearted preacher who started Manson on his way. The reverend picked up the scruffy hitchhiker, brought him home to dinner, and when he learned of Manson’s interest in music, generously gave him an old piano. Manson traded the piano for a Volkswagen van and hit the road, collecting young women like a snowball rolling down a hill. Squeaky was next, scooped off a street in Venice. Patricia Krenwinkel was rescued from a drug house in Manhattan Beach. Bruce Davis was the first male, swallowed up in the Pacific Northwest. The infamous Susan Atkins breezed in from the Haight in a haze of marijuana smoke.

Squeaky detailed her historic first encounter with Charlie in one of her numerous fanciful writings, offering a penetrating insight into both Charlie’s style and the immediate effect he had on his potential recruits.

“Suddenly, an elfish, dirty-looking creature in a little cap hopped over the low wall grinning, saying, ‘What’s the problem?’ He was either old, or very young, I couldn’t tell. He had a two-day beard and reminded me of a fancy bum, rather elegant, but my fear was up. ‘How did you know?’ I started to say, and he smiled really bright, and I had the strangest feeling that he knew my thoughts. ‘Up in the Haight, I’m called the gardener,’ he said. ‘I tend to all the flower children.… It’s all right,’ he told me, and I could feel in his voice that it was. He had the most delicate, quick motion, like magic, as if he glided along by air, and a smile that went from warm daddy to twinkly devil. I couldn’t tell what he was. I was enchanted and afraid all at once, and I put my head down and wished he would go away, and when I looked up, really he was gone! And I turned my head, wanting to talk to him now with urgency. And as soon as I turned back around, there he was again, sitting on the wall, grinning at me. I had only conceived of such things in fairy tales. ‘So your father kicked you out,’ he said with certainty, and once again my mind went with the wind, and I laughed and relaxed.… We talked and I felt very good with him and freer, much freer. ‘The way out of a room is not through the door,’ he said, laughing. ‘Just don’t want out and you’re free.’ Then he unfolded a tale of the 20 years he’d spent behind bars, of the struggle and the giving up and the loving of himself.

“We came back to the fact that I didn’t have any place to go. He told me that he was on his way to the woods up north and that I could come with him if I wished. I declined, having obligations to fulfill, having three weeks of my first college semester left. Then I looked at him, wanting to get up, crunching up my face in thought. ‘Well,’ he said, moving down the walk. ‘I can’t make up your mind for you.’ He smiled a soft feeling and was on his way. I grabbed my books, running to catch up with him. I didn’t know why. I didn’t care—and I’ve never left.”

Charlie got hot in a Nevada cardroom and won enough money to trade his beloved van for a black school bus, giving Squeaky and the traveling gang more space—and more room to grow. He returned to the preacher’s house and rewarded the man who made it all happen by seducing his fourteen-year-old virgin daughter, Ruth Ann Morehouse. If that wasn’t bad enough, a few weeks later, he carried Ruth Ann away on the fun bus. (Manson would later admit that Ruth Ann was the only person he ever snatched from a parent. All the others had left home, or run away, on their own.) When the raging reverend came after him in Los Angeles, Charlie slipped the guy some LSD and reversed the tables, preaching good parenting to the confused, and considerably mellowed, father. Ruth Ann stayed.

Diane Lake, another fourteen-year-old, escaped her parents’ hog farm and joined the harem shortly thereafter, giving Ruth Ann a playmate. Bobby Beausoleil, a handsome Hollywood hustler, hopped aboard and brought four others, Catherine “Gypsy” Share, Leslie Van Houten, Gary Hinman, and Kitty Lutesinger.

The bus kept rolling, attracting kids like a magnet. Nancy Pitman, Paul Watkins, Sandra Good, Steve Grogan, Charles “Tex” Watson, Linda Kasabian, and Stephanie Schram followed. Manson made love to nearly all of the women and some of the men, alternating on a daily basis.

With a bus overflowing with mostly young, nubile, and sexually liberated girls, Charlie was welcomed at every party, home, and gathering from San Diego to Oregon. Even the Hollywood movie and music set was intrigued. For a while, Manson and his love bus were well known among the thrill-seeking movers and shakers who ruled a select number of motion picture and music studios. Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys, hung with the Family for nearly a year, enjoying the girls so much that he opened his sprawling mansion to the whole gang. Wilson collaborated with Charlie on some Beach Boys songs, and even allowed his new best buddy to record some of his own tunes in his brother Brian Wilson’s private home studio. (The skittish Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ troubled creative force, was so appalled by Manson and his clan’s “bad vibes” he hid in his bedroom the whole time they were there.)

Manson wheedled his way into Hollywood to such an extent that it was whispered, and Manson later confirmed, that he was the dominant homosexual lover of a major film superstar. To Manson’s credit, he has never identified this man—although he later wrote that he somehow had the run of Cary Grant’s spacious office and parking spot at one of the big film studios, and was propositioned by other familiar names. The bigger mystery surrounding his unnamed secret lover might be how the thirty-something Manson had the energy for such a physically demanding extracurricular activity. He already had a busload of fifteen women who demanded regular servicing.

One answer might be the drugs that fueled the good times. On LSD, Manson saw himself as an omnipotent being who possessed the ability to communicate psychically with his girls when he wasn’t fornicating physically with them. He claimed to have the power to issue unspoken mental commands which they would immediately obey. He once described himself as having X-ray eyes, looking through the clothes and flesh of Mary Brunner, clearly seeing the darting form of the five-month-old male fetus he had planted inside her. Another trip took him back to his youth, to a dark period at one of his reform schools when he saw the face of Jesus reflecting back at him through a pane of window glass. Only the LSD flashback version painted the scene differently. The face was no longer Jesus’, but a full-figured, godlike man in a white robe. Speaking in a commanding voice, the ghostly apparition placed the girls in Charlie’s care and gave him responsibility for them. When the robed being left, Charlie found himself suspended in air, wearing his own white robe. He had become a god!

After that, whenever the group staged their elaborate playacting parties, Charlie invariably chose to be Jesus—a selection that had a standingly believable effect on some of his followers. With the LSD helping to intensify the eerie performances, Charlie would later admit that it was difficult to come down and try to be mortal when the trip was over.

Like the choir he preached to, Manson understood loneliness, rejection, and fear of the unknown. He used that to comfort his lost followers and give them the friendship, love, and sense of belonging that they craved. When the bus became overcrowded, they moved out to the old Spahn Movie Ranch in the Simi Hills and transformed into a full-fledged communal family.

Only Manson was the wrong father, a man still poisoned by his years in prison. He’s been widely accused of using his influence to take a band of peaceful flower children, fill their heads with prison paranoia, and turn them into stoned killers. And even then, their subsequent acts of mayhem didn’t serve some greater purpose, as he would later claim. It allegedly began prison style out of simple vengeance.

Manson’s one passion, all along, was music. By now, it’s been well documented that his goal was to achieve success in the music world. Charlie wanted to be a rock star. The prevailing theory is that his failure, and the anger and disillusionment that resulted, led to the murders that would stun the world and make Manson a household name. In short, a record producer named Terry Melcher—actress Doris Day’s son—caught Manson’s act, but wasn’t very impressed. Manson never forgot. On Saturday, August 9, 1969, Manson dispatched a band of brainwashed, drug-crazed killers to the estate Melcher leased at 10050 Cielo Drive in the canyons above Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Only Melcher and his then live-in girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen of
Murphy Brown
fame (people forget), no longer resided there—a fact Manson might or might not have known. (In hindsight, the stories have varied widely.) Instead, director Roman Polanski had rented the place to share with his pregnant twenty-six-year-old wife, actress Sharon Tate. Polanski was out of town, but his home wasn’t deserted. Tate was entertaining a small group of friends and house sitters, including her former boyfriend, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, a hairstylist and close friend of actor Steve McQueen; coffee heiress Abigail Folger, twenty-five; and Folger’s boyfriend, Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, thirty-two, a Polish friend of Polanski. Manson’s killers, undeterred by the different set of residents (if they even noticed), slaughtered them all in bloody, ritualistic fashion. Tate, eight and a half months pregnant with a son to be named Paul Richard, was stabbed sixteen times, her blood used to write “witchy” messages on the walls. Tate’s main attacker, Susan “Sadie” Atkins, was unmoved by the fact that she herself was the mother of a seven-month-old child. She ignored Tate’s pleas and directed her bloody knife into the actress’s back and chest.

Tragically, Tate had penned up her two large watchdogs that evening because she had taken in a stray kitten.

To complicate the bizarre circumstances, the slain included a young man, Steve Parent, eighteen, who showed up briefly to visit the compound’s caretaker, William Garretson. Parent stumbled upon the murderers on his way out. (Garretson didn’t notice Parent’s or any of the other murders. He remained in his guesthouse through it all listening to rock music, and was missed by the killers.) All told, the victims suffered 169 stab wounds and were shot seven times.

The following night, a smaller band, including Charlie himself, set out laughing and singing like a Sunday school class going on a summer retreat. They pulled up to 3301 Waverly Drive—Walt Disney’s former residence—and arbitrarily murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, ostensibly to further Manson’s insane plan of igniting a war between the races, and to provide imprisoned clan member Bobby Beausoleil with a second, look-alike alibi. Beausoleil had been arrested for the July 31 ritualistic murder of musician-drug dealer Gary Hinman, and the Family wanted to make it look like the killers were still on the loose. Manson selected the house, broke in, and tied up the couple, assuring them that they would be okay. He then left, ordering Tate murder veterans Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten to finished the job. Another gruesome slaughter ensued. Leno LaBianca’s body was discovered with an ivory-handled carving fork sticking in his chest, a knife in his neck, and the word “war” cut into his stomach. His body was littered with twenty-six stab and puncture wounds. His wife Rosemary was stabbed forty-one times. The newspaper Leno had been reading was turned to the pages covering the Tate murders from the night before.