No Journey's End: My Tragic Romance with Ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten

by Peter Chiaramonte

  For the next couple of weeks, I remained busy with my studies and more practice teaching. Track and field would soon be over for me by the end of the school year. Then what? If not summer school at OISE, then why not travel abroad for the summer? ‘Find myself’—as they say. Somehow finding myself felt tied or combined to finding out more about Ms. Van Houten. Time to get hip to Jagger’s kindly tip and go take that California trip?

  Jean and Gabrielle stopped by the track one Tuesday night near the end of a workout. We three grabbed a bite to eat, got high and went to a movie. We went to see Bound for Glory and stayed up half the night talking about each other’s personal sufferings and life’s hesitations. Predictably, I made a connection between Woody Guthrie’s yearnings for fame in Hal Ashby’s film and something else I’d recently seen in one of the books I was reading. The late Sharon Tate’s widower, Roman Polanski, was early on quoted as saying that he believed the real motive for his wife’s ill-starred murder was Charlie Manson’s bitter envy towards those whose talents led them to the kinds of wealth and recognition that were denied him. A pretty astute take on the case, if you ask me. I’d always thought Vincent Bugliosi was far less swift than Mr. Polanski from the get-go.

  A few days after that, the news broke out of LA that Roman Polanski had been arrested and charged with raping a thirteen-year-old girl at the home of his friend and actor, Jack Nicholson. The young teenaged model was Samantha Gailey. who, at the time the alleged offenses took place, Polanski had been commissioned to photograph for Vogue magazine. News agencies the world over listed a broad spectrum of escorting charges, such as furnishing a controlled substance to a minor (quaaludes and champagne), performing lascivious acts with a minor (including sexual intercourse), gross perversion (rape by use of drugs) and so on and so forth. They threw the proverbial book at him—quite a headline.

  After going without a man since the gangbanging she took at Spahn Ranch in the sixties, one had to wonder what kind of man Leslie would be attracted to nowadays. Who, besides lawyers, journalists, psychiatrists, or chain-smoking bulldaggers, were her choices, if any? Yours truly wasn’t like any of the men she’d known before—certainly not Misters Manson and Beausoleil. I understood very little or nothing about why young girls find guys with guitars and a song so appealing. Gods—listen to me—I was beginning to advertise like Waldo Lydecker in Laura.

  Leslie did mention a favorite teacher, a “Professor Malone,” whom she said had become a good friend and a role model. He taught English lit at the prison in Frontera, and Leslie said that she wanted me to meet him. I wrote her saying I hoped that meeting Michael might give me a better sense of what kind of man she was currently into. English teacher, eh? That might be a good clue for starters.

  * * *

  I’d read how a couple of Leslie’s former boyfriends had moved to Los Angeles with the same dreams and ambitions in mind. Both Bobby Beausoleil and Charlie Manson imagined themselves making inroads into the recording industry. The whole reason Manson decided to move his Family to LA in the first place was to make a name for himself in rock music. Both he and Bobby felt they had all the talent they needed in hand. What they lacked were contacts directly inside the business.

  Then, along comes Dennis Wilson of the rock band The Beach Boys, driving his silver GT 250 Ferrari. Wilson stopped one day to pick up Patricia Krenwinkel and another Manson girl called ‘Yeller,’ who had their thumbs out. The girls went with Dennis back to his place for a full-on sexual frolic like the threesome in A Clockwork Orange—the scene Stanley Kubrick set to the rhythm of the “William Tell Overture” in fast forward.

  The Manson girls didn’t really know who Wilson was, but, when they told Charlie about the event, he knew right away what that meant. He insisted the girls take him and the rest of the Family back to Wilson’s house at 14400 Sunset Boulevard—a beautiful log cabin estate first owned by Will Rogers. It was similar, in fact, to the one Wilson’s friend, Terry Melcher, rented with his girlfriend actress Candice Bergen way up in the clouds above Benedict Canyon.

  When Dennis pulled into the driveway, he could already hear loud Beatles music playing and noticed a party going on with his house full of girls running ’round naked. When he opened the door, there stood all five feet two-and-a-half inches of Charlie Manson. Manson dropped to his knees to pay homage to a rock and roll legend, first by kissing his feet, then by offering Dennis drugs and whatever, or whomever, however often he wanted. He was welcomed to have all the girls one at a time or in countless formations.

  Since the girls reliably proved themselves willing to engage in whatever drug-induced sexual fantasies Dennis desired, The Beach Boys drummer consented to Charlie and these nubile groupies staying at his house, eating his food, driving his cars, and peeing in his pool, if they had to. Not known for his brains, style, or good sense, Dennis thought Charlie was some kind of deep thinker. But, more than that, he was seduced by the orgies Manson set up for him and his friends who fancied chasing sexy, naked sprites and fairies around the pool. Someone should have thought to invite Roman Polanski.

  Before what there was left of Wilson’s milk of human kindness had completely run dry, Manson put the bite on every celebrity musician who showed up at Dennis’ door looking for a party. Besides Dennis’ famous brother, Beach Boys composer Brian Wilson, Manson was introduced to another bona fide rock legend at the house, Neil Young. One time when Young came by the house, he tried to improvise a few chords on the guitar to go with the insane lyrics that Charlie made up on the spot.

  And, later on in the recording studio that Brian Wilson had in his house, Dennis had an engineer try to record some of Charlie’s singing and playing. One song Charlie thought would make him a star was sophomorically titled, “Ego is a Too Much Thing.” At least he was partially right about something. But, of course, nothing came of the demo.

  Regardless, Manson kept on bugging everyone to help find him a record deal with some major label. He had started to piss some people off. People like Mo Ostin of Warner Brothers Records had heard the demo and said they weren’t interested. However, Terry Melcher, a musical producer at Columbia with more than eighty top-selling hits to his name (including those by The Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders), hired Dennis Wilson’s friend Gregg Jakobson to find him new talent. In exchange for getting him stoned and laid on a whim, Jakobson promised Manson he would bring Terry Melcher to hear Charlie sing.

  Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson finally succeeded in dragging music producer Terry Melcher to Spahn Ranch to give Charlie Manson a listen—complete with a backup chorus of naked strippers that Charlie choreographed for himself.

  Jakobson said he hoped to capture the “spell” Manson and Beausoleil had cast over their rapt cult of women. But, reading this, I got the impression Jakobson might just be trying to get himself laid.

  Charlie felt sure a recording contract would be soon to follow once Melcher heard him play, and he told the girls what they must do to help make this happen. Although Melcher’s assessment was that the music did not merit further time or investment—not to appear rude or ungrateful—the producer shone Charlie on.

  “You’re good,” he said, “but I wouldn’t know what to do with you.”

  Of course, Melcher never returned any of Manson’s phone calls, hoping that he’d get the message. He got it all right, but it wouldn’t suffice. Not by a long shot.

  As Melcher and Wilson were leaving Spahn Ranch, Manson invited himself along for the ride. He took his guitar and hopped into the jump seat of Wilson’s Ferrari. When they drove Melcher home, Charlie got out to see where the son of Doris Day lived with his girlfriend Candice Bergen. He wasn’t invited in.

  He and Tex Watson returned to that same address (10050 Cielo Drive) more than a few times after that, ostensibly looking for Melcher, even after Terry had moved out and the Polanskis had taken the residence over. And since Melcher kept putting hi
m off (in order to save face), Manson reframed this rejection as an insufferable treason. And you know what they do to traitors.

  Terry Melcher returned once again to hear Charlie audition at Spahn Ranch. Not so much because he’d changed his mind about Manson’s singing, but because he was partial to having sex with a cutely attractive, precocious teen named Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka ‘Quisch.’ Her name was derived from the sound most men made the first time they saw her: “Ooh whee!” Unlike Dennis Wilson—who would do just about anyone—and Gregg Jakobson who was happy to lick up the leftovers, Melcher promised to return to hear Manson audition in exchange for another romp. Somehow Candice Bergen caught on and put the nix in on that. She knew what was going on with Terry even if Charlie didn’t. And however groovy Charlie’s songs may have sounded to fanatics ripped on mesc and meth at the ranch, Manson’s songs made little impact on a veteran critic like Melcher. He went for the Quisch, not the magic.

  When Melcher didn’t show up as planned, Manson went ballistic. His unwarranted sense of prerogative made him high dudgeon and fuming over this blatant rejection. He was frantic to find Terry and bring him back to the ranch so he might save face with his brethren. He drove to the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, but Melcher didn’t live there anymore. The landlord, business agent Rudi Altobelli (who was washing up in the guest house) asked Charlie to leave.

  The next day, during a flight to Rome, Sharon Tate asked Altobelli, “Did that creepy-looking guy come back there to see you?”

  She had been face-to-face with the Devil himself.

  In order to save face and keep faith with his followers, Manson made up a tale about Melcher having deliberately betrayed him and the Family. Charlie made Terry into a villain of Biblical proportions, saying he’d promised a contract for lots of money then reneged for no reason. Surely treachery of such magnitude must be a sign of the oncoming Apocalypse? For support, Manson referred his followers to what was proclaimed by The Beatles as well as the Bible. All the more reason, Manson told his disciples, for them to ready themselves and surrender to the divine magistrate of Helter Skelter. It was on.

  Being on peyote and singing along around the campfire, Charlie’s visions and songs may have sounded like prophecy, but, deep down, Manson’s take on “Helter Skelter” was primarily an excuse for settling a score. And being a con man par excellence, he could make up a legend as he went along. He wanted to scare the bejesus out of everyone and get Beausoleil to clam up about who ordered the hit on Hinman and why. Besides sending Terry Melcher, Dennis Wilson and their stripe a pretty clear message, Charlie thought he could combine this myth with a plot to get Beausoleil out of jail or at least make Bobby think so. So he and the others would keep quiet about such goings on.

  It angered Manson, who liked his followers to think of him as the ‘fifth Beatle’, when his message wasn’t embraced—let alone paid no attention at all. But who could blame Terry Melcher for passing on songs with such lines as “Cease to exist?” Pretty telling—though not exactly “Cortez the Killer.”

  It didn’t matter how many drugs you had taken. Manson’s lyrics all sound like gibberish to me, and I’ve written a few bad poems in my time. Except that a very pretty girl I was eager to know better had at one time taken this runt and his wearisome banter to heart. So what did I know? Dennis Wilson thought he saw something in Charlie’s song about getting a girl to submit herself and let go her ego to the point that she ceased to exist. Working on his own, Wilson recast the lyrics. In his version, the singer is asking the girl to cease to resist—which was more to his liking. He changed the title to “Never Learn Not to Love,” and he and his brothers, The Beach Boys, recorded the song on their label. Thinking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Manson Family’s invasion had already cost him, Dennis listed himself as sole composer, cutting Charlie out.

  When Wilson told Manson that he’d recorded his song with The Beach Boys, Charlie at first was elated. He expected “Cease to Exist” to appear on the next Beach Boys album that winter. But instead, The Beach Boys released “Never Learn Not to Love” as the B-side of their new single, “Bluebirds over the Mountain.” And, of course, there was no mention of Charles Manson.

  To Charlie, this represented yet another timeless disloyalty in the long saga of persecution he’d claimed to have suffered for thousands of years. There was sure to be hellfire and fury whipped upon the backsides of those rich and famous that dared dick around with the Devil.

  According to what Jakobson later wrote in Rolling Stone under a pseudonym, Charlie once gave Gregg a .44 caliber slug to pass along. “Tell Dennis I got one more for him,” said Manson.

  In another credible report, Manson once held a knife to Wilson’s throat and asked, “How would you like if I killed you?”

  Wilson tested, “Go ahead, do it.”

  Fortunately for him, Charlie was more mouth than action. He’d always pissed far more than he’d drunk.

  Wilson eventually cut his loses. Finally sick of all the theft, destruction and lies visited upon him by these worm-festered squatters, Dennis defaulted on his lease and left the Manson clan there on their own to await the sheriff’s eviction. All tallied—what with all the stolen items, dental treatments and serious damage to an uninsured Mercedes-Benz—Dennis Wilson was out hundreds of thousands of dollars. The medical bills alone had been staggering, especially after the girls all suffered an outbreak of virulent gonorrhea.

  After they were kicked out of the house on Sunset Boulevard, things back at the ranch with Charles Manson became even more crazy and violent. One sign of the changes taking place at the end of the summer of ’69 was how obsessively Manson kept playing The Beatles White Album over and over again with everyone tripping like mad whores on acid. He’d program these malleable teens with endless mantras and repetitions.

  “Can you hear it? Can you hear it? Can you hear it? They’re speaking to me. They’re speaking to me. They’re speaking to me…”

  Crap upon piles of crap like that ad infinitum. Can you imagine the effect that would have on your mind over time? Especially if you’d taken to dropping a hit or two of pure white Owsley acid?

  Sometimes Manson needed more than drugs and hypnotic suggestion to keep the stronger-willed girls like Leslie and Patricia in line. That’s why he kept them away from outside influences that might challenge the dogmas he was spewing.

  More and more of Manson’s canons had to be memorized. Junk like: society is corrupt; forget everything your parents and teachers taught you; there is no right or wrong, good or evil; life and death are the same thing; death is the next step on the way to creating a better life. What a mix: naked nymphs, programmed ego killing and moral abandonment. Something for the whole Family.

  And Manson had other more conventional ways too of weaving his evil magic. Once, when Pat Krenwinkel managed to escape and get pretty far away, somehow he found her. (Just how far she got I’d be sure to ask Leslie.) That fact alone was enough to frighten her into believing there was no escaping his power. And one time when Leslie had been grumbling about being ordered to have sex with some of the bikers, Charlie threw her into his dune buggy and drove to the top of the Santa Susana Pass, where he dragged her to the edge of a steep cliff and told her, “If you want to leave me, go ahead jump.” Because that was her only alternative to staying. So Leslie ended up staying so long and doing so much and many drugs that it no longer mattered. She had little individual sense of self left and what there was had nowhere else to go at the time.

  * * *

  Throughout the last half of 1969, the ranch owner George Spahn had begun asking his men to run an increasingly violent, deluded and megalomaniacal Charles Manson and his Family off of his property. This was being encouraged in particular by one of his ranch hands, Donald ‘Shorty’ Shea. The big record deal Manson was counting on never ensued and the Family had already been kicked out of Wilson�
�s cabin on Sunset Boulevard. Things weren’t looking so rosy for Charlie.

  When his preordained stardom just wasn’t happening, Charlie became ever-more paranoid and violent. He could feel the heat closing in. He knew he would need lots of money to pack up his Family and hide out in Death Valley. That is, before the Black Panthers invaded Spahn Ranch and attacked him. Because those were the kinds of delusions this bozo was under. Because Charlie Manson was a racist, his hallucinations tended to take that form. That’s what you see when you’re on acid. The distinction between what’s going on inside you and what you see on the outside become blended, blurred and disturbed.

  Members of the Straight Satans motorcycle gang were of course similarly racist outlaws whom Manson hoped would become his protectors. They were planning a wild and wicked orgy up at the ranch one summer weekend. So they sent Bobby Beausoleil to buy a thousand tabs of mescaline from his “friend” Gary Hinman. Hinman, who in addition to going to graduate school at UCLA, manufactured his own methamphetamine and mescaline in the lab in his basement. The bikers later claimed the drugs were tainted and demanded their money back. So Manson seized this opportunity to embezzle even more cash from Gary, who was rumored to have recently inherited tens of thousands of dollars. At least that’s what Mary Brunner had heard and passed on to Manson.

  On July 25, 1969, just two weeks before the killings at 10050 Cielo Drive and 3301 Waverly Drive, Charles Manson sent Bobby Beausoleil, Susan Atkins, and Mary Brunner (the mother of Manson’s child) to pay Hinman a visit at his house in Topanga Canyon. Since at one time they had acted as friends, at first there was no cause for alarm. Bobby had often used Gary’s place as a crash pad to hang out, fuck around and do drugs. But very soon the intruders, who came armed with a knife and a gun, began demanding their money back for the mescaline Hinman had sold them to pass on to the Satans.