Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  Charlie’s mother was just fifteen when she gave birth. A short-term marriage to William Manson gave the child a name, if not a father. In direct contrast to the plethora of books and articles written about him, along with dozens of psychological evaluations, Manson’s life was influenced, possibly to a major extent, by his biological father—a man he’s insisted he never knew. The elusive “Colonel Scott” didn’t marry Manson’s mother, and to this day, very little is known about him other than that he died in 1954. However, unlike previous reports, Mrs. Manson says that Scott was the love of her life and hung around long enough to establish a relationship with his bastard son. The Colonel (there was no record of a first name) was a wily young man with a weakness for pretty teens. His nickname, common in Kentucky, may have indicated that he had a military background. This would explain Manson’s love for military ideals, as shown by his admiration for Rommel and Hitler, his collection of guns and swords, and the military-like maneuvers he performed in dune buggies during his desert-rat days. (Then again, Kentucky men with no military background are often called Colonel, like fried-chicken king Colonel Sanders. If Colonel Scott was merely a “Kentucky Colonel,” the military influence obviously doesn’t apply.)

  Manson idolized his father and was deeply hurt when his mother moved from Ashland, Kentucky, to West Virginia. It was only after he lost contact with his dad, and his heavily drinking mother started bouncing from man to man, that the four-year-old’s life began careening out of control. Knowing Charlie’s “no pain, no regrets” thought process, it’s obvious why he’s always denied knowing his father. To do otherwise would force him to confront the anguish he still harbors. The prison-hardened Charlie I knew was not one to reveal anguish about anything.

  Two years after leaving Ashland, his mother was convicted of robbery and sent to prison. Manson was passed around to relatives, one of whom, an uncle, made him wear a dress to the first day of school as punishment for whining and crying. The shame and humiliation were staggering, turning him into an angry whirlwind who lashed out at those who taunted him.

  Manson’s mother was released when he was eight. Charlie has often referred to her homecoming as one of the happiest days of his life. Four years, four states, and myriad towns and “uncles” later, his mom remarried and turned him over to the state, leaving her son angry and bitter.

  Tragically, as with so many other felons, the beginning of Manson’s lifelong criminal pattern coincided with the one-two punch of losing his parents. He hated the boys homes and juvenile halls and escaped whenever he could, stealing bicycles and food, unaware that he was building a rap sheet that would haunt him forever. He frequently fell to his hands and knees, asking God for deliverance, and for someone to come into his life who loved and needed him. Escaping again, he located his mother and begged her to let him stay. She did—for one night. The next day, she turned him in. Charlie had been snitched out by his own beloved mom! “I didn’t feel like a boy anymore,” he told convict turned author Nuel Emmons. “There were no tears, but I also knew I could no longer smile or be happy. I was bitter and I knew real hate.”

  More escapes followed, and Manson, now thirteen, was sent to the Indiana School for Boys in Plainfield, Indiana. The place was a barbaric misery pit teeming with psychotic youths and vicious, perverted guards. By his own account, he was repeatedly raped by older boys, sometimes after being prepared by a guard who rubbed burning tobacco juice up his anus for lubrication. “Every day was some kind of unimaginable experience,” he confided to Emmons, who produced a revealing book entitled Manson in His Own Words. “… At an age when most kids are going to nice schools, living with their parents, and learning all about the better things in life, I was cleaning silage and tobacco juice out of my ass, recuperating from the wounds of a leather strap and learning to hate the world and everyone in it.… I had some help in becoming the person I am.” The rapes ended when Manson clubbed one of his attackers with an iron window crank as the youth slept, severely wounding him. He hid the bloody weapon in the bed of another attacker, thus cleverly misdirecting the blame and killing two birds with one crank.

  He escaped for good at age sixteen, making it to Utah before being arrested. This time, he was sent to a federal reformatory in Washington, D.C., that was far more civilized. The homosexual sex there, at least, was by consent. Manson, for all his bad experiences, freely admits he willingly participated when he was on the other end of the pitcher/catcher exchange.

  The orphaned teenager kicked around three more federal reform schools, then was paroled when he was nineteen. He got a job shoveling shit at a racetrack and married the first woman he ever made love to, a coal miner’s daughter he met inside a cardroom in Dean Martin’s wild and woolly red-light hometown, Steubenville, Ohio. For a while, he was happy again. His wife became pregnant with Charlie junior (who has no doubt long since changed his name), and Manson was content to play the young husband role. Financial problems and the limited opportunities available to a man with his education and background caused him to turn back to crime. An auto theft arrest sent him to his first adult prison, Terminal Island in San Pedro, California. His son was born while he was on the inside. Mrs. Manson dutifully visited—for about a year. Then, without so much as a Dear John, she left him for another man. He never saw either her or the child again.

  “I went back to being bitter and hating everyone,” he told Emmons. “I had been bitter when my mom turned me over to the court when I was twelve. I hated her when she refused to let me stay with her after my first escape.… The bitterness I had learned at Plainfield never left me. And though I don’t blame her or feel bitter toward her now, my wife had the full brunt of my hate then.… Until my wife left me, I was filled with honest thoughts for our future together.… The letdown I experienced when I realized I had lost her was the turning point in my life. I figured, screw all that honest-John bullshit. I’m a thief, and I don’t know anything else.”

  Manson was released in September 1958 and set out to be a big-time Hollywood pimp, a profession he thought was at the top of the bad guy food chain. He ran a few girls with moderate success, fathered another son—this one he never even saw—took a fall for passing a bad check, took a bigger fall bringing prostitutes across state lines, hid out in Mexico, was shipped back to the United States, and was slapped with a new, ten-year sentence. He served seven, bouncing between McNeil and Terminal Islands in Washington and California.

  With these critical pieces of the puzzle correctly in place, a picture emerges that better explains how Manson emerged as a 1960s guru. He merely had to look within himself to gain the insights needed to further alienate youthful recruits from their distracted parents. To this day, dysfunctional, loveless parents remain a constant theme with Manson.

  Prison, combined with his diminutive adult stature (five three, 135 pounds), shaped Manson’s well-known half-crazy mental attitude, along with his bizarre posturing. An unintimidating man who lacked physical prowess, he learned early on that in a grown-up prison, he desperately needed a psychological shield to ward off predatory inmates. He compensated for his shortcomings by enveloping himself in an aura of creepy evilness, spiced by a quick, sarcastic wit. Later, he added the body contortions and sudden jerky movements that would one day mesmerize the media. This gave him an air of unpredictability that scared bigger cons away. As every inmate knows, a “psycho” can go off without warning, inflict serious injuries, and/or force sudden confrontations that end with both participants being dumped into the dreaded isolation “hole.” Thus, the crazier Manson acted, the safer he became.

  Flush with success, Manson refined his new persona by practicing and perfecting a series of verbal outbursts and veiled threats, polishing the act until it was almost surrealistic.

  Prior to Manson’s 1967 release from Terminal Island, a counselor noted that “he has developed a casual glibness with words and certain techniques for dealing with people.” They hadn’t seen anything yet. Actually, Manson’s oratory and self-p
reservation skills were probably obvious even then. The difference was that he was a nobody, just another dirtbag con going nowhere. At the most, his antics may have merely amused his guards, doctors, and administrators.

  After leaving Terminal Island, Manson traveled to San Francisco and fell into the famous Haight-Ashbury flower children set. To Charlie, initially out of place and a decade behind the times, the bold new psychedelic world appeared like a carnival. Everyone dressed funny and people were doing drugs right out in the open! Going with the flow, he dropped his first tab of acid and went to a Grateful Dead concert, joining in with the frenzied dancers and wondering if he’d died and gone to heaven. Best of all, instead of being treated like an outcast because of his lack of roots, he was welcomed. Everybody was homeless in the Haight. Homelessness was hip! When night fell, people crashed wherever they happened to be. Charlie had suddenly become cool!

  Using his con’s instincts, he quickly discovered that many of the lost, aimless youth gathered around him were ripe for his antiestablishment, antiparents rap and were desperate for a leader. Listening as well as talking, Manson refined his prison tirades into a more polished and socially acceptable philosophy. Mary Brunner, his first recruit, influenced him greatly. Brunner, a librarian at Berkeley, was an environmentalist who preached the need to save the air, water, trees, earth, and animals. She gave Charlie a place to stay, and later became the mother of his third son. He rewarded the college-educated twenty-three-year-old by bringing in a young lover off the streets and laying down a “nobody belongs to anybody” rap. Brunner accepted it and became point zero in what was destined to be the strange and overflowing Family.

  Thanks to Mary B, Charlie’s new sermons went something like this: “The system that corrupted and caged me is corrupting the world. People have given up God to lust for money. Jews, the rich, and those in authority are destroying the planet by polluting the air and water. The black man is growing in power and polluting the races.”

  Manson found that Mary’s “green” side, the environmental issues, was especially appealing to the longhaired, colorfully dressed hippies. The prison elements began to fade as the needs of the outside world took a firmer hold on his consciousness. The destruction of the environment was pushed to the forefront.

  “It’s not my world, it’s yours,” he lectured. “You let your parents destroy the earth while I was in prison suffering in darkness. Now you must change it. If the world dies, we all die, because we’re all one. I’ve been sent to save you and your planet and to tell you what must be done. If you want to be in my truth and in your own truth, you must do something to stop the pollution. I’m already in trouble. They’re watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake so they can drag me back to prison. But I’ll show you the way and what you must do. I’ll teach you so that you can survive, so that you can kill if you have to when the time comes.”

  The time for killing would be years later. In 1967, Manson was mostly about sex, freedom, and more sex. On that end, it was a kindhearted preacher who started Manson on his way. The reverend picked up the scruffy hitchhiker, brought him home to dinner, and when he learned of Manson’s interest in music, generously gave him an old piano. Manson traded the piano for a Volkswagen van and hit the road, collecting young women like a snowball rolling down a hill. Squeaky was next, scooped off a street in Venice. Patricia Krenwinkel was rescued from a drug house in Manhattan Beach. Bruce Davis was the first male, swallowed up in the Pacific Northwest. The infamous Susan Atkins breezed in from the Haight in a haze of marijuana smoke.

  Squeaky detailed her historic first encounter with Charlie in one of her numerous fanciful writings, offering a penetrating insight into both Charlie’s style and the immediate effect he had on his potential recruits.

  “Suddenly, an elfish, dirty-looking creature in a little cap hopped over the low wall grinning, saying, ‘What’s the problem?’ He was either old, or very young, I couldn’t tell. He had a two-day beard and reminded me of a fancy bum, rather elegant, but my fear was up. ‘How did you know?’ I started to say, and he smiled really bright, and I had the strangest feeling that he knew my thoughts. ‘Up in the Haight, I’m called the gardener,’ he said. ‘I tend to all the flower children.… It’s all right,’ he told me, and I could feel in his voice that it was. He had the most delicate, quick motion, like magic, as if he glided along by air, and a smile that went from warm daddy to twinkly devil. I couldn’t tell what he was. I was enchanted and afraid all at once, and I put my head down and wished he would go away, and when I looked up, really he was gone! And I turned my head, wanting to talk to him now with urgency. And as soon as I turned back around, there he was again, sitting on the wall, grinning at me. I had only conceived of such things in fairy tales. ‘So your father kicked you out,’ he said with certainty, and once again my mind went with the wind, and I laughed and relaxed.… We talked and I felt very good with him and freer, much freer. ‘The way out of a room is not through the door,’ he said, laughing. ‘Just don’t want out and you’re free.’ Then he unfolded a tale of the 20 years he’d spent behind bars, of the struggle and the giving up and the loving of himself.

  “We came back to the fact that I didn’t have any place to go. He told me that he was on his way to the woods up north and that I could come with him if I wished. I declined, having obligations to fulfill, having three weeks of my first college semester left. Then I looked at him, wanting to get up, crunching up my face in thought. ‘Well,’ he said, moving down the walk. ‘I can’t make up your mind for you.’ He smiled a soft feeling and was on his way. I grabbed my books, running to catch up with him. I didn’t know why. I didn’t care—and I’ve never left.”

  Charlie got hot in a Nevada cardroom and won enough money to trade his beloved van for a black school bus, giving Squeaky and the traveling gang more space—and more room to grow. He returned to the preacher’s house and rewarded the man who made it all happen by seducing his fourteen-year-old virgin daughter, Ruth Ann Morehouse. If that wasn’t bad enough, a few weeks later, he carried Ruth Ann away on the fun bus. (Manson would later admit that Ruth Ann was the only person he ever snatched from a parent. All the others had left home, or run away, on their own.) When the raging reverend came after him in Los Angeles, Charlie slipped the guy some LSD and reversed the tables, preaching good parenting to the confused, and considerably mellowed, father. Ruth Ann stayed.

  Diane Lake, another fourteen-year-old, escaped her parents’ hog farm and joined the harem shortly thereafter, giving Ruth Ann a playmate. Bobby Beausoleil, a handsome Hollywood hustler, hopped aboard and brought four others, Catherine “Gypsy” Share, Leslie Van Houten, Gary Hinman, and Kitty Lutesinger.

  The bus kept rolling, attracting kids like a magnet. Nancy Pitman, Paul Watkins, Sandra Good, Steve Grogan, Charles “Tex” Watson, Linda Kasabian, and Stephanie Schram followed. Manson made love to nearly all of the women and some of the men, alternating on a daily basis.

  With a bus overflowing with mostly young, nubile, and sexually liberated girls, Charlie was welcomed at every party, home, and gathering from San Diego to Oregon. Even the Hollywood movie and music set was intrigued. For a while, Manson and his love bus were well known among the thrill-seeking movers and shakers who ruled a select number of motion picture and music studios. Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys, hung with the Family for nearly a year, enjoying the girls so much that he opened his sprawling mansion to the whole gang. Wilson collaborated with Charlie on some Beach Boys songs, and even allowed his new best buddy to record some of his own tunes in his brother Brian Wilson’s private home studio. (The skittish Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ troubled creative force, was so appalled by Manson and his clan’s “bad vibes” he hid in his bedroom the whole time they were there.)

  Manson wheedled his way into Hollywood to such an extent that it was whispered, and Manson later confirmed, that he was the dominant homosexual lover of a major film superstar. To Manson’s credit, he has never identified this man—a
lthough he later wrote that he somehow had the run of Cary Grant’s spacious office and parking spot at one of the big film studios, and was propositioned by other familiar names. The bigger mystery surrounding his unnamed secret lover might be how the thirty-something Manson had the energy for such a physically demanding extracurricular activity. He already had a busload of fifteen women who demanded regular servicing.

  One answer might be the drugs that fueled the good times. On LSD, Manson saw himself as an omnipotent being who possessed the ability to communicate psychically with his girls when he wasn’t fornicating physically with them. He claimed to have the power to issue unspoken mental commands which they would immediately obey. He once described himself as having X-ray eyes, looking through the clothes and flesh of Mary Brunner, clearly seeing the darting form of the five-month-old male fetus he had planted inside her. Another trip took him back to his youth, to a dark period at one of his reform schools when he saw the face of Jesus reflecting back at him through a pane of window glass. Only the LSD flashback version painted the scene differently. The face was no longer Jesus’, but a full-figured, godlike man in a white robe. Speaking in a commanding voice, the ghostly apparition placed the girls in Charlie’s care and gave him responsibility for them. When the robed being left, Charlie found himself suspended in air, wearing his own white robe. He had become a god!

  After that, whenever the group staged their elaborate playacting parties, Charlie invariably chose to be Jesus—a selection that had a standingly believable effect on some of his followers. With the LSD helping to intensify the eerie performances, Charlie would later admit that it was difficult to come down and try to be mortal when the trip was over.