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

by Peter Chiaramonte

  But then on Friday August 11th, nine years after the crime for which she originally stood convicted, Leslie Van Houten was sentenced to two life terms for the August 10th 1969 murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Plus an additional life term for conspiring to murder, including those killed at 10050 Cielo Drive the night before. No matter that Leslie had never been there or even heard of what happened until it was over, the law always seems a curious contraption to someone as naïve as I was.

  Max tried to explain about the all-encompassing conspiracy charge to Betsy and David, but, I must say, it still didn’t make any real sense to me. For one thing, this conspiracy charge allowed Stephen Kay to continue to show the most gruesome crime photographs, including those of a pregnant and horribly mutilated Sharon Tate Polanski, at any and all trials or parole hearings Leslie must endure from here to eternity. But Les wasn’t there and didn’t hear anything about it until after it happened.

  During my next visit with Leslie, I could see that she remained hopeful in spite of the odds. There was still some talk in our camp that the worst she might serve would be maybe a year or two—tops. We were sure she’d be at least given a firm date for her release in as little as six to nine months. Even I could wait that much longer.

  “I can’t seem to sleep much,” Leslie said. “I’m too tired to read or write either. Please don’t expect too many letters from me right away. I’m feeling pretty beat up. I’ll write more when I’m feeling better. You know, Peter, it’s important to me that you are free. You have a way of locking yourself up just like I am. I haven’t the choices you have anymore. Please don’t put on any more handcuffs.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, feeling dazed and confused by that particular reference.

  “I don’t want you to ever not do something you wanted to do...not because of me or some thought of me getting in the way. If you want to do something, just do it. The only thing I ask is that you use your discretion on how much to tell me. Sometimes it’s best to not share everything, and this would be one of those times. I don’t believe that loving one another, even as friends, should mean ever putting on limits. I’ve had all of that I can take.”

  “I still don’t see what you’re getting at Les.” Maybe I did. Still, I pretended.

  “Now’s not the time for any more head games. You know what I’m saying. I don’t want you to wait for me any longer.”

  Every word she delivered felt like a body blow. Therefore, I tightened my gut.

  She said, “I’m not saying I believe in open, free relationships. Because, if things were more regular, I wouldn’t be saying these things. It’s just super-important that you understand the way things are different now. Some things we wished for will never be. Okay? There’s no use pretending. I want you to be free. It’s important.”

  “Then who will you share your dreams with, if not with me?” I asked, ashamed of how pathetic that sounded.

  “Who will I share my dreams with? I’ll share them with me. I have to make a life for myself inside of prison...something you wouldn’t know about. It’s pretty far from the places you’re going.”

  “We could still get there together, Leslie. That was the plan. If not for you, I wouldn’t be going anywhere either.”

  “It wasn’t the ‘plan,’ Peter. Not anymore. That was the dream. The plan would have come later. Now, we must make other plans.”

  I was crushed.

  “I don’t see how things are much different. We’ve been through this sort of thing before. What’s changed?”

  “Everything’s changed. Things are different now. Can’t you see? It’s important to me we don’t create a prison environment between us. What we had, we had. Now, it’s over. It was spontaneous,and I want us to hang on to the memories of that if we can. I’m tryin’ to explain as best...”

  “What’s to explain? I said. It’s seems clear to me.”

  Clearly it wasn’t. Leslie repeated her stance.

  “I’m not very good at this, but it’s inevitable. So I want to do it now and get it over. I think by now it’s obvious things aren’t the same, nor will they ever be. You need to find somebody else.”

  I didn’t want to hear anymore. So, in order to win a stay of execution, I decided to run and retreat.

  “Whatever you say, Leslie,” I said, standing up but continuing to talk on the headset. “If you want it this way, then that’s the way it must be. I’ll wait until things settle down before I bring it up again. You say when it’s okay for me to come see you.”

  I was a zombie in shock—most obviously.

  “Okay then,” she said. “Most of all, I wish you happiness. Go well, my darling.”

  Leslie put down her headset, stood up, turned her back to me and was taken away to her cell.

  What did I just hear her say? Was there some level of wisdom going on that I missed? “Now it’s over.” “You need to find somebody else.” What the fuck? I couldn’t believe it, nor face up to it.

  Leslie was more of her own person at this point than I was. Self-reliant, true and tough to a fault. I got the feeling she was trying to help raise me to a higher level of first-person awareness in myself. She had a way of understanding herself that involved delving deeper than simply cataloguing the most effortlessly accessible pieces. I wanted and needed more of that transcendent power for myself, and maybe that’s what attracted me to Leslie most of all in the first place. Leslie was never an object for me the way other people—especially women—could be or become. Even when we were apart, she always felt close—just like music. I could feel the pulse in my chest and my fingertips, and always felt a little dizzy.

  The compelling attraction I felt for her the moment I saw her picture in the paper long ago didn’t just occur in that instant. There was something familiar already present. And what I found most intriguing from the very beginning was the connection I made between her striving for transcendence through reflective experience and psychedelic explorations of my own. I thought we shared the same intellectual-affective curiosities as well as the same vulnerability to any number of nefarious miscreants who happened along at some exact moment.

  21

  La Grande Illusion

  Three days later, Leslie was taken under armed guard back to the California Institution for Women at Frontera, which made it sound more like a college campus than what it really was. I spent that day at her mom’s. It took less than an hour to pack the few boxes of books and things that I kept there, including my Smith Corona electric, best black and blue denims, good leather boots and a jacket. I took time to shop for comfort and buy enough new toys to distract me. That seemed to work before, so I tried it again. But, as Andy Higgins always reminded me when quoting self-taught philosopher, Eric Hoffer, you can never get enough of what you really don’t need.

  All the same, I bought myself a new pair of Munari hockey skates and six Sherwood R5 fiberglass sticks from the pro-shop inside the ice rink at Santa Monica. There was a rink just like it that Martin and I found in Santa Barbara called the Ice Patch. It was only a couple of miles from my new digs on Braemar Drive and ten to twelve minutes, by car, east of the University of California at Santa Barbara—less if you picked the right hour. When in doubt of your feelings, put on your skates.

  There was more than one sense in which my situation appeared to get better in proportion to how Leslie’s grew worse.

  Less than a week later, on the 23rd of August, I sent Leslie a card with a long letter enclosed for her 29th birthday. It included a half-dozen stanzas from a new book of poems by Leonard Cohen. Despite our diverging tracks and new road conditions, Les and I were both prone to the same sorts of overcast mood on occasion. Les didn’t write as often as I did, but we still talked on the phone every once in a while. She knew where I would be on my itinerary of “goodbye LA” stops and visits. So she was able to call on a sch
eduled rotation of family and friends. Leonard Cohen seemed the perfect accompaniment for the transitions we each had to make. Hey, that’s no way to say ‘goodbye.’

  On September 7th, I paid Mark Phillips my first month’s rent. Then, we got busy and auctioned off some of the stuff left by the grad student from Bremen. I used some of the proceeds to buy paint for my bedroom, hallways and bathroom—mostly Mediterranean white with pastel blues and green trim. I lay awake on the couch the whole first night while the paint dried, listening to ocean waves crashing. The next morning, I felt far more at home than I might have imagined so soon—especially when the first mail addressed to my new address arrived in the mailbox. The letter was from Leslie Van Houten, CIW 13378, 16756 Chino-Corona Road, Psychiatric Treatment Unit 67, Frontera.

  My dearest Peter~

  It’s very late at night. I can’t seem to sleep. My legs have recovered a bit from a week of throwing pots around—lifting heavy pans of excess food and running clean dishes to their proper locations. It’s a job that eats up a large part of the day. Not what you would call intellectually stimulating.

  It was good to talk to you and even better to hear you’re as anxious as I am to get started with school. I know it will make you feel better once you find peace and order in your life again. You couldn’t be living in a more beautiful place or going to a better university. It’s really fine there. I wish I could be there to join you.

  I’m holding up OK. Thanks. It’s hard. But slowly I’m creating a mellow scene for myself. I’m spending a lot of my time alone. I would rather be alone than get into the jail talk—all the games—and so on and so forth. Old faces I can’t relate to. It’s rough writing because I must probe my own thoughts, rather than just entertain them. You know what I’m talking about. It’s no journey’s end and I mean it.

  I’m anxious to start receiving the information from Antioch College. I think I’ll start with English literature. Then move into film studies from there. What do you think? We can discuss it when you visit. It shouldn’t be much longer before your forms are approved. Please give my hello’s to your friends and all the wild horses tied to the fences…

  Love~

  Leslie

  When she called the next weekend, Leslie said, “Your visitor’s application report came in and it’s on the superintendent’s desk. I’ll call you when I hear their determination, which should be sometime later this week. I sure hope so.

  “I have no one to talk to,” she often said. “Sometimes I miss a good conversation more than I miss eating good food.”

  Other times when she called, we talked about the work I was doing to prepare for classes—well, that’s mostly what I talked about. I told her all about my exciting travels. It was mostly all about me. Leslie was patient at first, putting up with my boasting. I don’t know why I was telling her about the briefings I got on the dynamics of seduction in the legends surrounding our program. Maybe that’s what you get from staging Gestalt encounter groups in Esalen-style hot tubs. Mark Phillips had several sagas of femme fatales and dark knights to tell me about. I shared this gossip in letters to Leslie. I might have done better to keep such things to myself. I want to go back if I could and take several steps over. Don’t you wish life was like that? But the only way forward is straight up the road. The way ahead seems lighter the clearer you can see back to the fork in the road that led you to this vantage point.

  The annual confluent education retreat was held that fall in a venue at the University of California facility out by the edge of the Devereux Lagoon known as Cliff House. This small conference center was built on a fine point of land that overlooked the spectacular view of the Channel Islands. Inside, there was a wood fireplace made of fieldstone at one end of the hall, and the kitchen was all laid out for the potluck at the opposite end. I brought two bottles of wine, two loaves of fresh bread and four jars of white sturgeon caviar. I’d picked up the wine and caviar that same afternoon from my new neighbor’s Portuguese cook.

  I was the last to arrive—a few minutes late and probably stoned when I got there. (That’s why I kept a bottle of Scope in the glove box.) George and Stew were just coming to the end of their introductory remarks when I was putting the wine in the freezer. I could hear individual members of the new cohort introducing him or herself. I was last to say who I was, where I was from and what led me to Santa Barbara. I didn’t exactly make up the last part, only I left out any reference to Leslie. My professors were the only ones in Santa Barbara who knew my reason.

  Later on in the evening, I found myself working in either one-on-one or slightly larger ensembles of colleagues, mostly from Europe. (Only half the class that year was from the United States.) I was especially drawn to working with a trio of fast friends I met that were from Norway—Otto, Annamarit and a beautiful woman named Audhild Brændsrød. She was, in fact, the challenge Mark Phillips had warned me about coming into the program. Turned out that he had his own agenda on that front, and I was the last one in that “triad” to know what my roommates were up to. Thus began the next endless chapter of my romantic life, such as it was. But that’s a whole other story.

  Suffice it to say that before I met Leslie I hadn’t taken too many girls seriously in terms of long-lasting romances. It sounds trite to say easy come, easy go, but that’s because the cliché is an archetype. Still, that doesn’t do justice to the way I felt about Leslie. One way I thought to get over one girl was by way of another. You can never get enough of what you really don’t need to make you happy.

  Audhild was blonde and about the same height as Leslie—maybe a bit shorter—with a very different allure. Whereas Leslie rarely, if ever, wore lipstick or makeup, Audhild sure knew how to light up a dark room like a lantern. She had an arctic sparkle in those cool, pale cobalt-blue eyes of hers. And, that night, she had on a light shade of fox-blue eye shadow and soft-pink lipstick that I soon discovered tasted like peaches. Les always reminded me of former fashion model and Vogue editor, Carine Rotfeld, for some reason. To me, Audhild was more like Swedish actress Bibi Andersson. And that’s not just me being superficial either. Mike Malone said he thought so too, when I took Audhild to meet the Malones the very next weekend. I don’t know what I was trying to prove by taking her with me to Laguna Nigel and Rosarito. But that’s what began to happen on a regular basis. Things naturally emerge and evolve, don’t they? And so must our tolerance for imperfection—in ourselves as well as in others. See? I may have learned something in school after all.

  My first semester in graduate school involved basic training in Gestalt therapy, psychosynthesis, bodymind conditioning and dreamwork. It was kind of a cult, come to think of it. I also read antecedent philosophy and existential psychology on my own. My professors were all into F.S. Perls quite a lot, and my new housemate, Mark, counseled me in that subject as well. We studied his “hot seat” transcripts and discussed Gestalt theory in classes with George Isaac Brown. I also read all I could comprehend of Gregory Bateson, then a regent of the University of California. Bateson was living and teaching at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. That’s where confluent education got its start. That’s also where Otto Fuglestad and I often took off for the weekend.

  During the aftermath of what had happened with Leslie, Stewart Shapiro got involved with my personal affairs. He and I had a meeting with George and Mark, after which George recommended—and Stew insisted—that I undergo special counseling with a Jungian psychiatrist, Samuel Correnti. Dr. C. was a colleague of theirs who worked in private practice. Since Stew wanted to make this a condition of my being admitted into doctoral studies, I agreed to see Correnti twice a week for an hour.

  When I asked Les over the phone how her own psyche work was going, she said, “It’s been kinda rough in here lately. Today was a real bummer. We had our weekly group. All that means is that everyone sits in a room and complains. It’s stifling. Everyone takes advantage of the fact tha
t if anyone leaves before it’s over they get a write-up. So childish. So boring. Nothing positive. Only gutter talk.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with my frustration if I were you, Leslie. I really don’t know how you hold it together.”

  It was clear to me then just how much braver she was than I was or, frankly, how much stronger she was than any of those I’d seen in the hallowed halls of justice that condemned her to prison.

  “I told you I’m seeing the Malones when they visit. It helps to have friends on the outside,” she said.

  “Isn’t there anyone inside you can count on for friendship?” I asked her.

  “Only some. I need to protect myself from all the ugliness inside of this place, that’s for sure. It beats down on your soul. See...in here, even the word ‘positive’ is something you never hear used. I need to protect myself from that sort of thing. I need to have my walls up to maintain my own sense of who I am as a person. I’m sorry I haven’t responded much to your letters. I feel there’s a lot I want to say, but it’s hard to write about nothing but sadness. It will be better when you visit. Then, we can talk and at least search into each other’s eyes.