I stayed overnight, devouring material from her massive files. For Mae, although the ultimate mystery would remain forever inconceivable, assassination research had become her spiritual quest for truth. Conspiracy became her Zen grid for perceiving political reality, drawing her deeper and deeper into a separate reality that Carlos Castaneda never dreamed of. (The mysterious author of the New Age bestseller, A Separate Reality, was, of course, one of the three tramps arrested at the grassy knoll.)
I had originally intended to write a satirical article on the Manson case, but now I had stumbled upon an American version of the Reichstag fire. The next morning, my head was still swirling in the afterglow of a fresh conversion. On the bus, I pondered a theological question Mae had posed:
“How many coincidences does it take to make a plot?”
Voytek Frykowski’s father had financed Roman Polanski’s first film. He and Abigail Folger, were staying at the Polanski residence. She was paying the rent and supplying him with the money for their daily drug supplies. In July 1969, Billy Doyle promised Frykowski a new synthetic drug, MDA, made in Canada. I had tried MDA a few times—it felt like a combination of mescaline and amphetamine, acting as an extraordinary energizer and, if you were with the right person, a powerful aphrodisiac. The plan was for Frykowski to become the American distributor of MDA. He was hoping to sell a screenplay, but it’s always nice to have something to fall back on.
In 1971, I flew to Kansas City to participate in a symposium at the University of Missouri with Ken Kesey and Ed Sanders. We ate in the cafeteria. Sanders ordered a full vegetarian meal and then couldn’t eat any of it. I had never seen him so shaken. Ed was such a devout pacifist that he wouldn’t even eat chicken soup because a chicken was killed to make it, and yet he had borrowed a pistol for a single night when staking out a possible cult animal sacrifice potentially connected with Manson. Now he was planning another book about the Manson case, titled The Motive.
“What was the motive?” I asked.
Ed seemed nervous. “Ask Peter Folger,” he muttered through tight lips.
Folger was the coffee tycoon whose daughter, Abigail, had been one of the victims. She supported Tom Bradley as the first black candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, despite the objection of her father, who had a reputation as a fierce racist. While Ed Sanders was researching his Manson book, he received a Mafia kiss from a lawyer for Peter Folger. When Sanders advised me to “ask Peter Folger,” I assumed he was referring to the fact that Folger had conducted his own investigation.
But then, in my paranoid fantasies, I began to believe that he meant Folger was responsible for the massacre; that he had actually arranged to have his own daughter brutally slain because she had violated family tradition by supporting a black mayor and living with a man who was going to distribute MDA, a drug that could provide tremendous competition for coffee. What once might have been a satirical premise had now become a serious possibility in the warped regions of my mind.
I even checked into the history of Folger’s Coffee. A deal had been made with the FTC about their merger with Procter & Gamble. It was so suspicious that Advertising Age ran a front-page editorial. I watched Folger’s Coffee commercials carefully. One took place in a supermarket, showing two white housewives standing in an aisle discussing the virtues of coffee when, almost subliminally, a black woman elbowed her way between them. In another commercial, the locale was a political convention hall, again with two whites and a black almost subliminally elbowing between them. Commercials were produced frame by precise frame, and I became convinced that Peter Folger was deliberately trying to program TV viewers with racism in his coffee commercials.
It was as though I were psychically playing the part of both characters in Roman Polanski’s first film, The Fat and the Lean, where a wealthy landowner shoots an arrow into the air, and then his servant runs across the lawn carrying a target so that his master is assured of scoring a bull’s-eye every time.
Within a week after the killings, there was a dawn raid on the Spahn Ranch, with a grand-theft-auto search warrant. The Manson group had been stealing Volkswagens and turning them into dune buggies. Manson and four family members—Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie van Houten—were arrested, then released in three days. But, while they were in confinement, Atkins told her cellmate about the murders, and when the cellmate was released, she informed the Los Angeles police.
By this time, Manson and the others had moved to another ranch in Death Valley, where they were arrested again. Mae Brussell put me in contact with Preston Guillory, a former deputy sheriff at the Malibu Sheriff’s Department, which aided the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in the original raid of the Spahn Ranch. Guillory had participated in that raid, and I interviewed him at an apartment in San Francisco. He stated:We had been briefed for a few weeks prior to the actual raiding of Spahn Ranch. We had a sheaf of memos on Manson, that they had automatic weapons at the ranch, that citizens had complained about hearing machine-guns fired at night, that firemen from the local fire station had been accosted by armed members of Manson’s band and told to get out of the area, all sorts of complaints like this.
We had been advised to put anything relating to Manson on a memo submitted to the station, because they were supposedly gathering information for the raid we were going to make. Deputies at the station of course started asking, “Why aren’t we going to make the raid sooner?” I mean, Manson’s a parole violator, machine-guns have been heard, we know there’s narcotics, and we know there’s booze. He’s living at the Spahn Ranch with a bunch of minor girls in complete violation of his parole.
Deputies at the station quite frankly became very annoyed that no action was being taken about Manson. My contention is this—the reason Manson was left on the street was because our department thought that he was going to attack the Black Panthers. We were getting intelligence briefings that Manson was anti-black and he had supposedly killed a Black Panther, the body of which could not be found, and the department thought that he was going to launch an attack on the Black Panthers.
Manson was a very ready tool, apparently, because he did have some racial hatred and he wanted to vent it. But they hadn’t anticipated him attacking someone other than the Panthers, which he did. Manson changed his score. Changed the program at the last moment and attacked the Tates and then went over to the LaBiancas and killed them. And here was the Sheriff’s Department suddenly wondering, “Jesus Christ, what are we gonna do about this? We can’t cover this up. Well, maybe we can.”
I bet those memos are no longer in existence. The memos about what Manson was doing. Citizens’ complaints. All those things I’m sure have disappeared by now. It shows the police were conscious of the fact that he had these weapons in violation of his parole. You’ve got at least involvement here on the part of Manson’s parole officer, on the part of the Sheriff’s Department, probably the sheriff himself, and whoever gave him his orders. Manson should have been [imprisoned] long before the killings, because he was on parole, period. He was living at the Spahn Ranch with an outlaw motorcycle gang. I feel that, to say the least, the sheriff of Los Angeles County is an accessory to murder.
The raid was a week after the Sharon Tate thing, and the intelligence information was coming in for about three weeks prior to the raid. They just didn’t want any arrests made. It was obvious they wanted the intelligence information we were gathering for some other reason. Three days after they were arrested, seventy-two hours later, they were all released—lack of evidence—after this mammoth raid. This raid involved two helicopters, 102 deputies, and about twenty-five radio cars, and all the charges were dropped against everyone.
It appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought. It was like a scenario that we were going through. There was some kind of a grand plan that we were participating in, but I never had the feeling the raid was necessary or that it required so many personnel. Now, if you were a police official and you were planning a raid o
n the Spahn Ranch, utilizing 102 deputies and helicopters and all that, one would think that with all the information coming out a month prior to the raid, wouldn’t you have them under fairly close surveillance? If you did have them under fairly close surveillance, wouldn’t you see them leave the Spahn Ranch to go over and kill seven people and then come back?
So the hypothesis I put forward is, either we didn’t have them under surveillance for grand-theft-auto because it was a big farce, or else they were under surveillance by somebody much higher than the Sheriff’s Department, and they did go through this scenario of killing at the Tate house and then come back, and then we went through the motions to do our raid. Either they were under surveillance at the time, which means somebody must have seen them go to the Tate house and commit the killings, or else they weren’t under surveillance.
You have to remember that Charlie was on federal parole all this time from ’67 to ’69. Do you realize all the shit he was getting away with while he was on parole? Now here’s the kicker. Before the Tate killings, he had been arrested at Malibu twice for statutory rape. Never got [imprisoned for parole violation]. During the Tate killings and the Spahn Ranch raid, Manson’s parole officer was on vacation, so he had no knowledge of Manson being incarcerated, so naturally Manson was released, but why wasn’t a parole hold put on him?
It’s like Manson had God on his side when all these things are going down, or else somebody was watching every move he made, somebody was controlling from behind the scenes. Somebody saw that no parole hold was placed. Manson liked to ball young girls, so he just did his thing and he was released and they didn’t put any hold on him. But somebody very high up was controlling everything that was going on and was seeing to it that we didn’t bust Manson.
Prior to the Spahn Ranch raid, there was a memo—it was verbal, I would have loved to Xerox some things but there wasn’t anything to Xerox—that we weren’t to arrest Manson or any of his followers prior to the raid. It was intimated to us that we were going to make a raid on the Spahn Ranch, but the captain came out briefly and said, “No action is to be taken on anybody at the Spahn Ranch. I want memos submitted directly to me with a cover sheet so nobody else can read them.” So deputies were submitting memos on information about the Spahn Ranch that other deputies weren’t even allowed to see. We were to submit intelligence information but not to make any arrests. Manson was in a free fire zone, so to speak. He was living a divine existence. We couldn’t touch him.
And so it was that the presence of racism had morphed the Sheriff’s Department into collaborators in a mass murder. But who was the higher-up that gave them the order to leave Manson alone? I was certainly prepared to believe that’s what occurred. I had been gathering piece after piece of a mind-boggling jigsaw puzzle, trying to make them all fit snugly into one big cohesive picture, but without having any model to pattern it after.
Manson was on Death Row—this was before capital punishment was repealed (later reinstated, but not retroactively) in California—so I was unable to meet with him. Reporters had to settle for an interview with any prisoner awaiting the gas chamber, and it wasn’t very likely that Charlie would be selected at random for me. In the course of our correspondence, there was a letter from him consisting of a few pages of gibberish about Christ and the Devil, but at one point, right in the middle, he wrote in tiny letters, Call Squeaky, with her phone number. I called, and we arranged to meet at her apartment in Los Angeles. On an impulse, I brought several tabs of LSD with me on the plane.
Squeaky Fromme resembled a typical redheaded, freckle-faced waitress who sneaks a few tokes of pot in the lavatory, a regular girl-next-door except perhaps for the unusually challenging nature of her personality plus the scar of an X that she had gouged and burned into her forehead as a visual reminder of her commitment to Charlie.
That same symbol also covered the third eyes of her roommates, Sandra Good and Brenda McCann. “We’ve crossed ourselves out of this entire system,” I was told. They all had short hairstyles growing in now, after having shaved their heads completely. They continued to sit on the sidewalk near the Hall of Justice every day, like a coven of faithful nuns being witness to Manson’s martyrdom.
Sandy Good had seen me perform at The Committee in San Francisco some years previously. Now she told me that when she first met Charlie and people asked her what he was like, she had compared him to Lenny Bruce and me. It was the weirdest compliment I ever got, but I began to understand Manson’s peculiar charisma.
With his sardonic rap, mixed with psychedelic drugs and real-life theater games such as “creepy-crawling” and stealing, he had deprogrammed his family from the values of mainstream society, but reprogrammed them with his own philosophy, a cosmic version of the racism perpetuated by the prison system that had served as his family.
Manson stepped on Sandy’s eyeglasses, threw away her birth-control pills, and inculcated her with racist sensibility. Although she had once been a civil rights activist, she was now asking me to tell John Lennon that he should get rid of Yoko Ono and stay with “his own kind.” Later, she added, “If Yoko really loved the Japanese people, she would not want to mix their blood.”
The four of us ingested those little white tablets containing three hundred micrograms of acid, then took a walk to the office of Laurence Merrick, who had been associated with schlock biker exploitation movies as the prerequisite to directing a sensationalist documentary, Manson.
Squeaky’s basic vulnerability emerged as she kept pacing around and telling Merrick that she was afraid of him. He didn’t know we were tripping, but he must have sensed the vibes. I engaged him in conversation. We discussed the fascistic implications of a movie, The French Connection, and he remarked, “You’re pretty articulate—”
“For a bum,” I completed his sentence, and he laughed.
Next we went to the home of some friends of the family, smoked a few joints of soothing grass, and listened to music. They sang along with the lyrics of “A Horse with No Name”: In the desert you can’t remember your name, ’cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.
I was basking in the afterglow of the Moody Blues’ “Om” song when Sandy began to speak of the “gray people”—regular citizens going about their daily business—whom she had been observing from her vantage point on the corner near the Hall of Justice.
“We were just sitting there,” she said, “and they were walking along, kind of avoiding us. It’s like watching a live movie in front of you. Sometimes I just wanted to kill the gray people, because that was the only way they would be able to experience the total Now.”
That was an expression Charlie had borrowed from Scientology. Later, Sandy explained that she didn’t mean it literally about killing the gray people—that she had been speaking from another dimension. She told me that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi once snarled at her as she kept vigil outside the courthouse: “We’re gonna get you because you sucked Charlie Manson’s dick.” The girls just sat there on the sidewalk and laughed, because they knew that oral-genital relations did not constitute a capital offense.
When we returned to their apartment, Sandy asked if I wanted to take a hot bath. I felt ambivalent. I knew that one of the attorneys in the case had participated in a ménage à trois with Squeaky and Sandy, but I had also been told by a reporter, “It certainly levels the high to worry about getting stabbed while fucking the Manson ladies in the bunkhouse at the Spahn Ranch—I’ve found that the only satisfactory position is sitting up, back to the wall, facing the door.”
Visions of the famous shower scene in Psycho flashed through my mind, but despite the shrill self-righteousness that infected their true-believer syndrome, they had charmed me with their honesty, humor, and distorted sense of compassion. They sensed my hesitation, and Squeaky confronted me: “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Not really. Should I be?”
Sandy tried to reassure me: “She’s beautiful, Paul. Just look into her
eyes. Isn’t she beautiful?”
Squeaky and I stared silently at each other for a while—I recalled that Manson had written, “I never picked up anyone who had not already been discarded by society”—and my eyes began to tear. There were tears in Squeaky’s eyes too. She asked me to try on Charlie’s vest. It felt like a perverted honor to participate in this ceremony. The corduroy vest was a solid inch thick with embroidery—snakes and dragons and devilish designs including human hair that had been woven into the multicolored patterns.
Sandy took her bath, but instead of my getting into the tub with her—assuming she had invited me—I sat fully dressed on the toilet, and we talked. I was thinking, You have pert nipples, but instead I said, “What’s that scar on your back?” It was from a lung operation.
Brenda asked for another tab of acid, to send Manson in prison. She ground it into powder which she then glued to the paper with vegetable dye and the notation, words fly fast, explaining that Charlie would know what it meant. She stayed up late that night, writing letters to several prisoners with the dedication of a polygamous war wife.
Squeaky visited me a few times in San Francisco. On the way to lunch one day, she lit a cigarette, and I told her about the series of advertisements by which women were originally conditioned into smoking: a woman standing next to a man who was smoking; then a woman saying to the man, “Blow some my way”; and finally a woman smoking her own cigarette. Squeaky simply smiled, said “okay,” and dropped her cigarette on the sidewalk, crushing it out with her shoe.
Another time, when I attempted to point out a certain fallacy in her logic, she responded, “Well, what do you expect from me? I’m crazy!” Once, she told me she had been beaten up by members of the Mel Lyman family from Boston because she wouldn’t switch her allegiance to them, even though they’d had plans to break Manson out of jail while his trial was taking place, by means of a helicopter. She said they were “well organized.”
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 32
