Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
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How does one reconcile Manson’s apparent interest in escaping with his desire at Terminal Island in 1967 to stay behind bars? Prison had become his home, he told the authorities back then, and he didn’t think he could adjust to the world outside. Even today, I suspect that Manson isn’t miserable or even unhappy behind bars. Having spent forty-two of his fifty-nine years in jails, reformatories, and prisons, he obviously has become totally institutionalized, and therefore most likely isn’t uncomfortable in an incarcerated setting per se. However, after he got out in 1967 he undoubtedly learned to like having a harem of girls (“Up in the Haight, I’m called the gardener. I tend to all the flower children,” he had told Squeaky when they first met) and riding dune buggies up and down the desert more. Further, like never before, Manson now has to look over his shoulder. He knows that any con who wants to make a name for himself can kill him and then he becomes famous.
* Manson also receives ten cents for every Manson T-shirt sold. In California, the profits of convicted criminals can only be seized if the money-making venture is directly related to the crime. The T-shirts and Manson’s song in the Guns N’ Roses album do not qualify for seizure. (Senate Bill 1330, which is presently before the California legislature, would expand the scope of seizure to include the sale of anything “the value of which is enhanced by the notoriety gained from the commission of the crime.”) However, in 1971, the son of Wojiciech (Voytek) Frykowski, one of the five Tate victims, got a $500,000 judgment against Manson and his four co-defendants. As a result of a writ of execution on the judgment (with interest worth $1,200,000 in 1994), in late February of 1994 the son, who lives in Germany, received his first royalty check for $72,000 from the Manson song in the Guns N’ Roses album.
* Though Squeaky and Sandra were not allowed to visit or even correspond with Manson, a prison spokesman at the time said that the two of them would come to the prison about once a month “to inquire about how Manson was doing.” A friend of Squeaky and Sandra told Time magazine that the girls believed Manson’s imprisonment was part of a grand design, “that he would rise again some day, like Christ. They spend all their time preparing themselves for the day he rises.”
† The Manson Family’s hatred of former President Nixon stems, of course, from Nixon’s headline-capturing declaration during the trial that he believed Manson to be guilty. In author Ed Sander’s best-selling book, The Family, he quotes a Manson therapist at Vacaville as saying Manson believed his own personal hex on Nixon had caused him to fall.
* Manson’s personal medical records being confidential, the California Department of Corrections said they cannot confirm whether Manson in fact had, or presently has, the cancer.
* Guns N’ Roses wasn’t the first rock group to record a Manson song. With minor changes in the lyrics (e.g., “exist” was changed to “resist,” “brother” to “lover”), Manson’s composition “Cease to Exist” was recorded by the Beach Boys and released on the B side of Bluebirds over the Mountain on December 8, 1968, under the new title “Never Learn Not to Love.” The single never got past number 61 on the charts, but both sides of the 45 rpm were included in 20/20, the Beach Boys’ last album with Capitol Records the following year. Although the Beach Boys never credited Manson as being the composer, Paul Watkins, Brooks Poston, and Gregg Jakobson each confirmed to me it was Manson’s song, and in the 1986 biography of the Beach Boys, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys, author Steven Gaines acknowledges this.
Mike Rubin, a New York City writer who has been tracking the rock music scene in America for years, says that in addition to Guns N’ Roses, he knows of at least five other rock groups who have either recorded a song of Manson’s or a Manson tribute song within the past decade.
In early January of 1994, the industrial hard rock group Nine Inch Nails recorded their most recent album, Downward Spiral, at the former Tate residence. Trent Reznor, lead singer and songwriter for the band, says that although he called the jerry-built studio constructed for the recording of the album “Le Pig,” and although there are songs on the album like “Piggy” and “March of the Pigs” with confrontational lyrics (the word “pig” was printed in blood by the killers on the front door of the Tate residence and the words “death to pigs” on the living room wall of the LaBianca residence), this was all a coincidence—that the realtor through whom he leased the home failed to tell him it had been the scene of the Tate murders. The “Le Pig” studio was also used by a hard rock group called Marilyn Manson in which lead singer Mr. Manson recorded the vocals for its soon-to-be-released album Portrait of an American Family.