by Nancy Bacon
‘God, no—no! Murder! Death!’ A woman’s voice, pitched high with terror, sliced through the dark room and there was an audible gasp from the assembled hippies. There was a thud as a body hit the floor and someone quickly relit the candle. Princess Lida Ramu, queen of the hippies, self-ordained witch, and believer in the unknown, lay stiff and rigid, a thin rope of saliva at the corner of her lax mouth. She was in a trance and recounting the horrible murders that were taking place that very minute in Benedict Canyon. If there had ever been any doubt that Lida the Witch had the power, that doubt no longer existed in the minds of her guests that sultry August evening. She writhed and moaned and repeatedly murmured, ‘They’re dead! Killed! Murdered—all of them—dead!’
The next morning the papers were full of the bizarre and macabre murders that had taken place in sedate and pompous Beverly Hills. Even the Los Angeles coroner, Thomas Noguchi, no stranger to bloody, grisly crimes, was shocked by what he found at the Tate home. The bodies were hacked, slashed, and repeatedly stabbed, their sexual organs mutilated in a most grotesque manner. Sharon’s swollen belly, carrying an eight-month-old unborn child, had been deeply cut with an X—and one of her breasts had been removed. Jay’s sexual organs had been severed and reportedly stuffed into his mouth. He and Sharon were bound together with a thin white rope—the kind Jay had used to tie me up that evening less than a month before.
Rumors ran wild in Hollywood’s underground news media. Whispers had close friends of Sharon and Roman claiming they knew the murders would take place weeks before they actually happened. They no longer hinted at black magic, but openly accused the victims of being members of a depraved cult which worshipped the devil and was fond of inflicting and receiving pain.
Hollywood was in a spasm of fear. Celebrities hired private detectives to stand guard around the clock. Guns were purchased in astonishing numbers. Huge, fearsome watch dogs were snapped up by still others who lived in the area and a kind of gray quiet settled over Los Angeles.
For weeks, months, police searched and arrested and questioned countless suspects-but they still remained baffled and without a lead of any kind.
Suddenly, four months after the rampage of death, police announced they had solved the murders. Sketchy information appeared about a band of hippies who lived in a rundown western town (Spahn Movie Ranch) and were led by a mystical, bearded Pied Piper, Charles Manson.
Once again fear careened throughout Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The Beautiful People were still terrified. Had the police really captured all of them? Were there some in hiding, perhaps, who felt an obligation to carry on the carnage against society and the Establishment? Being rich and famous doesn’t always exclude one from the same fears the commoners feel. In this case, the rich and affluent were the hunted.
Manson told police that he had commanded that everyone in the Tate home be murdered as a warning to all the hugely successful entertainers that had acted without compassion to those trying to break into the ranks of show business. It seems Charlie Manson had aspirations toward becoming a singing star, but all the Hollywood doors had been closed to him. Seething with rejection, hating those who were too beautiful and successful, he decided to eliminate them one by one, until the powers that be recognized his talent—and his needs. Everyone wants to get into show biz! Even a demented madman like Manson.
Susan Atkins joined the ranks of the infamous when she spilled her story to a grand jury in the hope of escaping the gas chamber. She told of a communal family that consisted of some thirty hippies who lived in a derelict, rundown movie ranch and followed, blindly, the orders of a small, long-haired, demonic Mahdi-Manson. She said that six or seven members of the family took part in the killings on orders from Manson, but that he did not participate in the murders himself. Miss Atkins said that Manson had ordered everyone to dress in black clothes, to take their knives and drive to the home of Sharon Tate, and to kill everyone there. He wanted to ‘teach the Establishment a lesson’ and show the world that their gods and goddesses of the silver screen were mere mortals after all.
Now, of course, the world knows the intimate details of the mad, hate-obsessed Manson—but this has not stilled the fear. Rasputin-like, Manson was a spiritual leader in every sense of the word, and millions of Americans had to face that fact—even as they cringed in revulsion. He was worshipped by his followers and referred to as a ‘high priest,’ ‘God’ or ‘the Devil’—he was called both ‘Satan’ and ‘Jesus’, and the American public was forced to face the fact that he was the very image of the revolt and violence that had become fashionable with the young people—with their own children. They were forced to ask themselves how our society could have produced a Charlie Manson—a creature of violence, capable of inflicting numbing cruelty upon others; a sick, twisted reject who set himself up as a leader and commanded his subjects in acts of horror and death.
In 1970, I had been assigned by a magazine to get the story on Manson, so I contacted my friend Osmo, who told me, ‘I think it was June or July when I first met Manson.’ He lolled against a tree in my backyard and lovingly stroked his shoulder-length blond hair as he methodically drew on a joint. His eyes were dreamy, his attitude relaxed. ‘I went out to the ranch with a cat called the Kid. He was hooked on some chick who lived there-Squeaky, I think her name was. (Lynn Fromme, a member of the family who had been taken into custody, questioned, then released—her nickname was Squeaky.) Anyway, the Kid was strung out on smack (high on heroin) and when we got there he shot up again and just went on the nod and crashed. He had the wheels, so I was hung there until he came to. Then this chick comes out, ya dig, and says, ‘Hey, wanna drop some acid?’ and I didn’t have anything else to do, so we each popped a tab and sat down to wait for it to hit.
‘I had just dropped a couple of days before and was still on from it, so this hit me right away. I saw an old car parked in front of the house and I climbed up on the roof and sat down, watching this chick, ya dig. She was wearing this skimpy little dress and she sat down on the porch steps and let her legs fall open. She wasn’t wearing any panties and she reached down and kinda played with her pussy for a while, then got up and disappeared into the house.
‘I was really coming on to the acid now and didn’t think about how long she had been gone, but there she was again, sprawled in the doorway on the porch steps and holding a big, motherfucking knife! I made it, she says, smiling real funny-like. Then she opens her legs and shoved the handle of the knife into her cunt. So I sit there on top of the car and watch—what the hell. Then she says, Charlie really digs knives. He makes us all carry a knife and we have to make them ourselves, too. She bent her head and smiled that funny grin and watched herself masturbate.’
I learned that the Kid and Manson did not get along. Most hippies don’t get involved in hard drugs like heroin and the Kid, although just barely nineteen years old, had been hooked on the stuff for years. He was no stranger to Manson’s group, however, and had married one of the girls in the family. The Kid told me that it wasn’t just a handful of hippies and drifters who believed in Manson’s powers, but even the rich and influential were affected by him. Timothy Leary, self- appointed king of drugs, once sent a limousine to the ranch with orders to this driver to pick up Manson and drive him straight to Leary’s lair. The feisty little guru reportedly told the driver to ‘Fuck off. If Leary wants to see me he can come out here.’
A sexually permissive attitude was the order of the day. Girls were passed from man to man each night and were made by Manson to fuck anyone he told them to—even occasional strangers who wandered into the ranch. Girls were given to men from the so-called straight world as gifts—when he wanted a favor in return.
Another female member said: ‘We made love at least once a day, usually more, with somebody. Sometimes Charlie wanted to see us girls making love to each other and just said, Go in there and fuck that dude—he’s a friend of mine. And we did. Nobody could refuse Charlie anything. He was beautiful.’
&nb
sp; Manson may have been of a generous nature with his girls, but he did not deny himself in the process. More than one told me that they witnessed the scrawny little guru when he called in one or more of his girls and commanded them to perform bizarre sexual acts with him—while he sat chatting with guests!
‘There was just no morality at all,’ Osmo told me. ‘This chick who was jacking off with the knife when I was there, was a pretty little thing, but dingy as hell. She had dropped acid so many times and experimented with so many mind-expanding drugs, she was really strung out in the brain. While I was sitting there watching her, somebody yelled, ‘Hey, Pig, come in here and suck my cock’—and without a word she got to her feet, pulled her dress over her head and walked naked into the house.’
Two occasional visitors to the Spahn ranch, Cosmo and Valentino, belonged to a different type of ‘family’—this one presumably founded on kinder, more gentle factors. The high priestess of his little group is none other than princess Lida Ramu, the good witch of the west.
‘Lida’s a real trip,’ Cosmo told me once. ‘She won’t put up with any bullshit or any phony establishment freaks. She just goes into a trance, man, and drains them—I mean, she literally drains them of every ounce of energy. She really freaks people out who bug her sensitivity—like, dig, she and a friend made this wax baby, like the one they used in Rosemary’s Baby, with the horns and everything. She was going to present it to Roman Polanski as a warning to stop with all those creepy-crawly movies about the unknown and that junk, dig.’
‘Hey, man, there’s more,’ Valentino mumbled from the depths of his long, shaggy beard. ‘What about all those cats who think the baby was meant as an omen to Sharon Tate that her own baby would be born like that? Because of Polanski’s eerie movies about sadomasochism and the devil and all that there.’ His head dropped back to his chest and disappeared into the matted patch of hair and beard.
Bits and pieces, gathered from reluctant sources, hinted that the grotesque wax figure in the crude coffin was a symbol of Polanski’s blatant display of black magic; that his wife was doomed to give birth to a deformed baby—a baby who would be a tool of the devil—a baby who must be put to death before it reached life.
Others argued that the baby played no part in the murders. It was Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring whose time had come and who had to be put to death as a warning to the affluent. This was determined by a mad, dwarf-like demon who needed to lash out at the Establishment with a psychotic, horrifying violence.
I heard from a few family members that Sharon had paid a visit to the Manson ranch with Abagail Folger and that Manson had flipped over the blond goddess. But he was short and dirty and his ravaged face held strange, penetrating eyes, one of which was turned at an angle, giving him a cock-eyed look. Sex goddesses sneer at trash and Sharon was no exception. She put down Manson’s timid advances with five well-chosen words: ‘Fuck off, you little creep.’ Manson seethed at this public slap in the face. How dare she, this blond, leggy creature, refuse his hand offered in love and friendship? (Since then, more reliable sources revealed Manson and Tate never met and that Manson sent his minions to the mansion because he thought music producer Terry Melcher, a former tenant, still lived there.)
While meeting and interviewing the principles in this most bizarre of Hollywood crimes, I was often shocked at the many hang-ups of the so-called Beautiful People set.
I remember talking to Joe Hyams and his wife, Elke Sommer, about their ghost—and not quite believing what I was hearing. It seems Joe and Elke had finally managed to get enough money ahead (movie stars are notorious spenders) to buy their dream home in Beverly Hills. They hadn’t been there a fortnight when they began to see and hear strange things. It wasn’t long before they were convinced that they had a ghost sharing the mansion with them. At first they thought it rather elegant to have one’s own ghost haunting one’s own mansion. Then it began to get on their nerves. Elke thought it was haunting them because they had come by their fortunes too easily. Guilt, I learned, is a major hang-up among most show business folks. Most of them cannot accept the fact that they earn more in one week than the average Joe earns in a lifetime. Result—guilt. And from this guilt there results a most complex personality.
In writing my article, I speculated on this theory of famous folks and their hang-ups and remembered, with fondness and some amusement, the famous, infamous, rich, and royal folks that I had known and loved. It reminded me of what F. Scott Fitzgerald said to Ernest Hemingway: ‘Rich people are different from you and me.’ To which Hemingway replied, ‘Yes—they have more money.’
And more hang-ups, I thought, remembering my numerous encounters with these very special people. I remembered how I had become one of them and had believed, as they did, that sex, booze, whips, and dope was fun.
when the party is over
When I got divorced, I asked for three things: My daughter, child support, and alimony for two years. I figured I’d be earning plenty on my own within two years, and everything would be fine.
But in 1970, I was forced to undergo a radical double mastectomy… and my life was never the same. Back then, women didn’t talk about things like that. It was almost shameful. In the mid-seventies, former First Lady Betty Ford, millionairess Happy Rockefeller, and newsperson Betty Rollin finally broke the ice. This was all very interesting to me as I was naturally curious about how other women felt about their ordeal. However, in almost all cases the women were married and pretty well settled into their lives. There were not very many young, single women writing about their experiences and I knew that cancer doesn’t just strike mature, married ladies; I was just out of my twenties.
One night in the fall of 1970 I was making love with my current man, and he was caressing my breasts when he suddenly raised himself upon an elbow and said, ‘Did you know you had a lump here?’
I didn’t really think anything about it. I mean, you read about how a woman finds a small lump and she immediately panics, calls in the relatives and starts writing her will. Well, that’s not the way it happened with me. I just thought it was probably a swelling from all the exercise I had been getting lately or maybe it was one of those little fibrous cysts a woman sometimes gets in her glands. So, I just murmured something about the lump being my pulsating passion for him and pulled him back into my arms.
It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I thought about what he had said. I checked myself in front of the bathroom mirror and sure enough, there was a little hard marble-like swelling in my left breast, near the armpit. I still wasn’t frightened but I told a couple of girlfriends about it and they convinced me to go to a doctor. The first one I saw told me it was probably nothing, gave me some antibiotic for a possible infection (from my previous silicone injections? He said no, it was not that) and sent me home.
Three months later my left breast was swollen and red and very painful. This time I really did have an infection of some kind but I responded to the medication and was fine again in two or three days. Things went on normally for the next eight or nine months and I was not aware that several more lumps had formed in both breasts. To make a long story short, I went to the doc, was put in the hospital the next day, and operated on the following morning,
When I awoke I no longer had my lovely 38-C’s. I had been sliced from armpit to armpit and stitched up like a Thanksgiving turkey with two drains inserted into my body beneath each breast—or the place where they had been. The drains were long, thin rubber tubes which were inserted up into the cavity of each breast and into the incision to drain out the old blood. The blood would flow through the tubes and empty into a clear plastic cup with a lid. It looked a little like a dish of Jell-O by the time my blood had drained off for a few days. Those awful drains and the long needle inserted into the back of my hand was the most painful part of the surgery.
The doctors came in, examined me and began changing the bandages and I almost flipped when I saw all the blood, those ugly tubes and awful black stitches.
My chest was totally flat, the nipples tuckered up as tight as hard little raisins, blood caked in the creases, one pointing straight up at me, the other one over to one side, almost under my arm. I turned my head away until the bandaging was completed. I had had to sign a release the night before stating that I wouldn’t hold the hospital responsible if they ‘lost’ my nipples in surgery.
My first visitor, my dear old friend Griff the Bear, almost made me pop my stitches with his get-well card. He had scotch-taped two Playtex Living Nipples from a baby bottle to the card and said those were my spares. And right then and there I knew it would be okay with my friends. I didn’t give much thought to men and how they would react.
In fact, I didn’t give much thought to anything for over a week. I just lay back, rolling over every four hours to receive that lovely injection the nurses brought like clockwork. I think I was still stoned when I left for home nine days later. And the
prescription I had had filled kept me in a state of rosy relaxation for another week or so.
Then one day I woke up and I wasn’t stoned anymore and I looked down at my raw, ugly chest, the thick black stitches marring the white skin like something out of a horror film, the twisted nipples cocked at odd angles from one another, one almost hidden by a flap of skin that tucked under my armpit. The scar looked like an axe murderer had been at me. I fell across the bed and cried until I couldn’t catch my breath.
My roommate Wendy, and Griff, rushed into the bedroom and tried to comfort me but I was absolutely hysterical. I cried for three days until Wendy became worried about me and called a doctor she knew who prescribed an antidepressant drug. It worked and in a couple of days I was able to joke, ‘Well, I went in looking like Jayne Mansfield and came out looking like Twiggy. Guess I’m fashionable, huh?’
I’ve always had many, many friends around me, people dropping by at all hours, shooting pool, swimming, whatever, that my life was no different than it had ever been. Only now we talked a lot about my operation and how lucky I was, and so on. When I finally did get around to noticing men again, I naturally turned my attention to the guy I had been dating before the surgery.
