Acres of Perhaps

by Will Ludwigsen

  “It’s okay, brother,” Charles Manson told him, laughing.

  “It’s everything but okay, shithead,” replied DePaoli.

  From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.

  Charlie sauntered past the news cameras in his disco cowboy suit all covered in soot, but the holster was empty. He was mugging for the reporters, answering some of their questions with his little reflection trick.

  “Why’d you do it, Charlie?”

  “Why’d you make me do it, brother? Why’d you kill all the whales and keep your kids in your prison-schools? Why’d you send all them little brown people to heaven from Vietnam? I did it because you did it.”

  “Why Studio 54?” cried another.

  “Why? Why is a lie, woman. There is no why. There’s only Is. They all deserved to dance in the sky.” Then he turned to the camera and said, “Stay tuned after these messages, home audience, because there’s gonna be more!”

  That was the start of Charlie’s dark magic for the rest of the world, the reason every newspaper from Tokyo to Berlin came to cover the trial, the cause of a sharp spike in the sales of guns and guard dogs. He had the power to make you a celebrity just by killing you, and in the dark corner of too many gawkers’ hearts, it’d be worth it.

  From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.

  By himself away from the cameras, Charles Manson was downright obsequious to authority. He said “sir” and “ma’am” to the guards and joked with them amiably. He saved the wide-eyed declarations of race and class warfare for the media.

  I went to see him as soon as I could, and from the moment I did, he asked me to call him Charlie. That was nice, seeing as how we’d be colleagues for the next eight months.

  “I’m Vince Cozzi from the DA’s office,” I told him, in case he thought I was his public defender.

  “Yeah, I know who you are. You’re doing a great job.”

  “Thanks. You know I’m trying to put you and the others away in Sing Sing for the rest of your lives, right?”

  Charlie shrugged. “What’s another prison, man? I’ve been in them all my life. I like the one with the sky above it better, but sometimes that sky gets scary. That sky looks at you.”

  “You could save the state a lot of money by pleading guilty, you know,” I said.

  He grinned. “Then I wouldn’t have my say.”

  “I’ve talked to Violet. She’s been having your say.”

  “What’s that crazy bitch been saying?”

  “She says you’re trying to start a revolution with disco. You call it ‘Night Fever,’ and once all the people rise against the squares, you’ll take command of them all.”

  “First of all,” he said, “nobody calls them squares anymore except for squares. Second of all, that’s Violet’s trip, man, not mine. It’s the kids who are having this revolution, not me. I’m just showing them the way because nobody else will.”

  “There are eight dead people and sixty-five wounded,” I said. “You’re still nine hundred short.”

  His amiable smile faltered. “Nine hundred short?”

  “Of Jim Jones. You should have waited a year or so, Charlie, because now you won’t even be remembered in his shadow.”

  “You got a funny way of asking a brother to plea out,” Manson said.

  “I know you’re not going to plea out,” I said. “But what I don’t get, Charlie, is why you’d think attacking a disco club would make the people inside join you instead of hate you. Unless you thought they already did.”

  He opened his hands and spread them wide as though to say he contained multitudes.

  From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.

  “JESUS HAD NO LAWYER”

  Manson to Serve as Own Attorney

  Fires Third Public Defender

  From the New York Post, February 17, 1979.

  DISCONSPIRACY

  Murders, Arson to Be Tried as Continuous Crime

  Manson Agrees to Cozzi Motion

  From the New York Post, February 21, 1979.

  Charles Manson did his best for nearly four months to disrupt the court, instructing his followers to scream at Justice Dudley, to turn their backs to the flag, to chant their songs. He leaped out for Capote when he was on the stand. He drew his finger across his throat when Violet Wensinger took the stand.

  “Your world is jive!” he screamed once when Justice Dudley overruled one of his many frivolous objections. “Don’t you understand, brother? You of all people?”

  Justice Dudley, who is African-American, had Manson removed from the courtroom. When the girls and Samson started to shout, “Your world is jive!”, he had them removed, too.

  Manson’s antics drew a few dozen malcontented teenagers in front of 60 Centre Street with the last remaining free Family members, led by Velveteen Pugh. At night they giggled and slept in a ragged camp of old Boy Scout tents. During the day, they threatened reporters and looky-loos with the coming disco apocalypse.

  “The spirit you judge is your own,” Velveteen told one tourist from Seoul. “You hate his hustle because you hate your own.”

  There was a certain desultory spirit to their declarations, though, and the cuffs of their yellowing satin pants were frayed. In the light, the missing sequins and safety pins were all too apparent, and their faith was dying out under the sun as surely as Manson was dying in the courtroom.

  From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.

  On June 27, 1979, the People rested.

  We’d called 64 witnesses, introduced 119 pieces of evidence including a four-by-four foot section of Truman Capote’s wall, and racked up 14,000 pages of court transcript. We had fingerprints from Englert, Kovacs, and Wensinger at the scene. We had handwriting experts identify the writing on the wall with a 75% certainty, not great but at least circumstantial. We’d undermined the diminished capacity defense with psychiatric examinations of all suspects but Charlie, who refused.

  Charles Manson had objected to testimony 1,455 times. Of those, 85 were sustained.

  The next day, Justice Dudley asked Manson to call his first witness.

  “I’ve got one, your honor,” he said. “Me.”

  “Very well, Mr. Manson.”

  Charlie sheepishly rubbed his hand in his hair. “Do I ask myself a question in one voice and then answer it in another?”

  “That’s not necessary. When you take the stand, you can give Mr. Sivasco the questions you want to answer.”

  Greg Sivasco, Manson’s “consulting” public defender, will one day be remembered as a saint of the criminal justice system. Manson had taken almost none of his advice and demanded he be removed more than once. Members of the Family had snuck into his apartment and moved the furniture around before leaving a bullet on his pillow.

  Greg handed Charlie a yellow legal pad and Manson wrote a single question on it.

  Charlie placed his hand on the Bible and swore he’d tell the truth. Then he sat down and Greg, sighing, approached with the legal pad.

  “Mr. Manson,” he said, “Can you tell us what it’s all about?”

  Justice Dudley glanced toward me, expecting me to object to such a broad question. I didn’t because I wanted Manson to have all the rope he needed.

  “I was born to a whore in Cincinnati,” he began. “I never knew my father, and so the system became my father. I’ve spent most of my life in your jails, sometimes the ones with bars and sometimes the ones you live in with paychecks and timecards.”

  If Manson had ever gotten a paycheck, I’d found no evidence of it.

  “I’ve wanted one thing my whole life, to be free. I’ve been free in my head but not free in my body, but when I got out a couple years ag
o, I saw some people had figured it all out. They wore crazy clothes and they talked about love, and you’d done your best to put away the people like that in the Sixties but all you’d done was drive them into the darkness where they belonged. They were my people, and I came home to claim them.

  “They were all about love, just like I’m all about love. I love people enough to free them from the life your system has made for them. Everything hateful you’ve said about me is your own reflection. I’m your mirror, your garbage dump mirror, where you throw all the things you don’t want to see in yourselves.

  “Did those kids kill because they love me? I don’t know. But I do know our country kills people all the time without loving them.

  “Mr. Cozzi’s given us a fair trial, as fair as he could anyway, but he’s all wrong about Night Fever. It’s not murder. It’s love. It’s about the people who have so much love inside that they have to dance, and it’s about the terrible people who’ve given up on dancing who want to stop them.

  “It’s an ugly time, brothers and sisters, an ugly time. In an ugly time, people don’t know what’s beautiful. You don’t know the music that’s beautiful. You don’t know the clothes that are beautiful. You don’t know the people who are beautiful because if you do, you got to know you’re ugly.

  “None of us killed nobody. The 70s killed them and maybe it was us who were the hands, I don’t know. All I know is I’m the trashman who picked up the kids you threw away, and you will do with me as you will, as you always have.”

  “Are you concluded, Mr. Manson?” Justice Dudley asked.

  “I am concluded.”

  “Mr. Cozzi, your cross?”

  In my briefcase, I had a spiral notebook of questions for Charles Manson, catching him in any of a thousand lies and inconsistencies, peeling back the gilding of religious philosophy he’d painted on his selfish desire to kill the people who’d rejected him, their rightful master. I could have kept him up there another three months.

  But the truth is I was tired. Justice Dudley was tired, the jurors were tired, the reporters were tired. We were tired of watching this performance and we wanted it to be over, me most of all.

  “One question, Charlie,” I said.

  He looked surprised. He’d wanted to spar with me, his nemesis, the black knight of the straight world.

  “Your sentence in federal prison was ten years longer than it had to be, thanks to your botched escape attempt. If you’d gotten out in 1967 instead of 1977, do you think the kids you ‘picked up’ then would have killed anybody?”

  Throughout the trial, I avoided any appearance of taking advantage of Charlie’s basic incompetence as an attorney. In this case, any lawyer who’d passed the bar would have objected based on speculation. But Charlie didn’t, because if there’s one thing Charlie liked to do, it was talk about bullshit things that never happened.

  He thought it over.

  “You know, it’s hard to say.” Charlie threaded his fingers through his beard. “It’s hard to say. Back then, it was all about the hippies, wasn’t it, and that’s a whole other kind of love. Their angels were the Doors and the Beatles. They had a lot of heavy music, man, those kids. They were all serious and angry, and you see what that got them. They still got thrown away and blown away, just like the good kids always are. And I’d have picked them up, you’re right about that.”

  He shook his head regretfully.

  “No Bee Gees, though? No strobes? No hustle? It mighta still happened, but I’ll tell you this, Mr. Cozzi: it wouldn’t have been as fun.”

  From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.

  MANSON GUILTY

  Manson, Kovacs, Englert Sentenced to Life without Parole

  Wensinger Eligible After Forty Years

  From the New York Post, July 3, 1979.

  I was a wild child in the 60s like so many others. I smoked grass, dropped acid, woke up in places I didn’t remember. I had ideas about what it meant to be free, and most of those ideas came from the music and men I thought I loved. If I was Violet’s age in 1977, there’s no telling what I’d have done for Charles Manson.

  What I got that Violet Wensinger never did was the chance to fall in love with other things, including myself.

  Some still call Violet “the Good One” of the Manson Family, but there’s no question that she’s where she belongs for killing Chip Auldridge, at least for now. Others say she’s what happens when you’re selfish enough to try to find yourself and someone else finds you first.

  Disco was selfish and it was glamorous; it was silly and it was vain. It wasn’t much worse than all the other dumb things we do to belong, all the terrible music we listen to. It was human, beautifully human, and on the edges of all human things there are the monsters who don’t understand them.

  Charles Manson couldn’t dance, couldn’t sing, couldn’t play an instrument, could barely play records. In the end, he couldn’t even kill. He found better people to do those things, and he did his best to find their worst.

  Manson was an angry little man whose aching singularity of need for fame and appreciation could never be filled. It couldn’t have been filled in the 1720s or the 1840s or the 1960s.

  He was as inevitable to the 70s as an anvil falling from the sky, which is to say not at all.

  From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.

  Q: Ms. Wensinger, were you offered a plea agreement for your testimony here today?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Did you accept it?

  A: No.

  Q: Why?

  A: Because I stabbed a man. Because I helped kill five others. Because now that I know everything Charlie is, everything he was wrong about, all the lies he told, even now I can look over at him at that table and see the spinning lights. I can hear the beginning of “Dancing Queen,” and I’m afraid if he held out his hand to me, even now, I couldn’t save myself from the beat.

  From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.

  S2E2: “DARK HORSE CANDIDATE”

  Air Date: September 14, 1962

  Writer: Hugh Kline

  Director: Dean “Deano” McDonald

  Synopsis: The unnamed President of the United States (James Agar) is on a goodwill tour of our allies in Eastern Europe when bad weather compels his flight to land in an obscure country unfortunately named “Krzalya.” The storm forces the President’s Secret Service agents to secure a nearby crumbling abbey to quarter him and his staff for the night, and the Special Agent in Charge Andrew Carlton (Richard Wyatt) finds no one living in the building though it has been wired for electricity.

  It’s a late night for the President as he consults with his re-election campaign manager (an uncharacteristically oily Leslie Nielsen) over brandy in a Medieval library. They discuss the dirty tricks they plan to use in the campaign against their “weak-livered” opponent, and they laugh the evening away and toast their ingenuity.

  Carlton and the other agents patrol the grounds but their communications are limited by the thick stone walls. Several times, Wyatt believes he hears footsteps behind him and whirls with his gun drawn to find only a shadowed hallway, and clearly the atmosphere is getting to him. It doesn’t help that he discovers dungeons and torture chambers clearly used within living memory.

  In the small hours, a procession of cloaked figures winds through the corridor toward the President’s room, and the agent on duty vainly fires his sidearm until he drops to the floor dead with his face twisted in a rictus scream. Other agents including Carlton approach but one of the figures stops them at the door with an admonishing hand.

  Outside the room while the President shrieks on the other side, the specter tells Agent Carlton about the former master of the abbey, a cruel baron deposed in a “night of daggers” after dec
ades of tyranny. Carlton listens only briefly before rushing inside the President’s chamber.

  There, the President is sitting up and calmly buttoning a shirt as he gets dressed. There are no screams and no evidence of the apparitions. Carlton asks if the President needs anything, and the President replies, “Yes, to get back home and back to making a difference.”

  In the final shot from the chamber, we hear the airplane taking to the now clear skies while the camera zooms in on the real President howling for help and shaking his dungeon chains.

  Commentary: There was no shortage of political corruption even in 1962, but the pure anger of this episode presages that of the later Sixties. Several luminaries of the free speech and civil rights movements cited this episode as “a real mind-blower” from their childhoods and an inspiration for their lives of activism.

  When asked years later about his inspiration for the episode, Hugh Kline sheepishly admitted that there was a mansion set available on a nearby soundstage from a Roger Corman film and one of an aircraft from a war picture, and he merely combined the two.

  POE AT GETTYSBURG

  When Edgar Usher Poe received word in the White House of the nearly 50,000 Union and Confederate casualties at Gettysburg, he is reported to have clutched his white tonsure of hair and collapsed to the floor crying, “Am I but the President of the Dead?”

  I would not in my ignorance have guessed that when I wrote so often in my newspaper about his total unsuitability to the office. To me at my safe desk in Cincinnati, he was a Boston-born and Kentucky-raised man waging a slow and indecisive war with mixed loyalties. Until we made our brief acquaintance on that train journey to the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, I had no conception that it was these fractures (and more besides) which made him whole.

  Thirty years after his death, it is easy to forget in this celebration of his life that he had his weaknesses: prone to melancholy and hysteria, acidic in his words, quick to be slighted and slow to forgive it. He took the secession of the Southern states as a personal repudiation of his presidency, and he exulted in early Union victories—though not for long.