The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  I was stunned. In my mind, Catherine was Anne Frank, an Anne Frank who survived. My heart hurt for her and with that hurt came enormous respect.

  On the manson2jesus.com website, where Catherine, along with other former Manson acolytes, has written a short bio of herself, she doesn’t mention her parents’ suicide but states simply that they died during World War II. She says she was hidden from the Nazis, presumably in France, and that she remembers the “fear, loneliness, and confusion” of that time. In any case, her father commissioned a French lawyer to arrange for the French underground to get her out of France where the Vichy government had helped the Germans deport and/or kill most of the French Jews. It’s not clear where she was or precisely when it was that the French lawyer found a woman Catherine has described as “wonderful” to adopt her. She remembers her family life after that as being enviable, rich, and happy. And then her adoptive mother died of cancer when Catherine was sixteen and her world collapsed.

  The night when she told me her life was difficult, I assumed she meant having her father dependent on her was hard. And it was. But according to her boyfriend at the time, “difficult” is an understatement. After her mother died, the relationship with her adoptive father deteriorated. Some of this was because of his disability. Tasks that had been her mother’s now fell to Catherine. The house had to be kept in perfect order so he could find his possessions; if the house wasn’t orderly, he could trip on a stray chair or bang his head on an open cabinet door. Most young girls would find it difficult to take this on, but a girl who was grieving for her mother found it unbearable. When she failed to perform perfectly, her father would become enraged.

  At one point, Dr. Share developed a relationship with a former patient who moved into the house with her twin boys, displacing Catherine. But according to her former boyfriend, her father did more than neglect her. He verbally abused her—he called her a slut when he suspected she was having sex with her boyfriend. When she graduated from high school at the age of seventeen, he kicked her out of the house. (One of Manson’s gifts was exploiting young women who had histories of difficult relationships with their fathers.)

  Instead of going off to college with the rest of her friends, she supported herself working as a cashier at Akron in Hollywood—a cross between a Navy surplus store and Cost Plus—and she attended a few classes at Los Angeles City College.

  She had a short, doomed marriage during which she lived in Connecticut. After that relationship fell apart, she moved back to Hollywood where she worked as a musician on movie sets and where she met Bobby Beausoleil, soon to be a member of Manson’s tribe. The two of them acted in a soft-core porn film titled Ramrodder.

  1997, Dallas

  In 1997 I flew to Dallas, visited the Kennedy assassination exhibit in the book depository building, and had lunch with Catherine. It wasn’t easy to arrange. By that time she had been out of prison for quite a few years and was living under an assumed name. When I tracked her down she referred me to a friend of hers who was acting as her agent.

  Catherine had every reason to distrust journalists. I later found out that she’d recently been stalked by photographers who ambushed her at a Sunday morning church service. Because of that, she did not want me to know where she lived. Her friend/agent invited me to meet at her house and then we drove together to a local café. When I saw Catherine come through the door she was easily recognizable though she had gained a lot of weight since I’d last seen her. (She mentions overeating as a problem on the website.) She was still very pretty. The meeting did not yield much in the way of information. Catherine said she was writing her own account of her years with Manson—her friend/agent would be representing her to Christian publishers—and wanted the material to be fresh for her own book. I had wondered if any of the spark would be there between us. There was no spark, only vigilance on her part. How could it be otherwise, given what she’d lived through?

  Writer Eve Babitz had a different take than mine in high school. In a February 3, 1972, Rolling Stone article about attending Hollywood High, Eve wrote about sitting next to Catherine in her chemistry class. “On my other side was this nice girl named Cathy whose only flaw was that she was kind of gullible and that kept me from being too shocked when I saw her in Life magazine crouched under a rock as one of the ‘Manson Family’ and called Gypsy.”

  chapter ten

  MONDO VIDEO A-GO-GO

  October 1996

  Because I planned to spend time at the L.A. County Courthouse in search of transcripts and at the Los Angeles Public Library looking at old newspaper articles on the case, I decided I would camp out in Santa Monica at the house my brother and I had inherited from our parents. I had my evenings free so I phoned my parents’ oldest friends, a couple I’ll call Ruth and Sid, and arranged to meet them for dinner at a bar and grill on Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz Village. I had always been grateful to them for their friendship to my parents during my brother’s troubles. The couple was now in their nineties and no longer able to drive, but they lived only a few miles from the restaurant and insisted on taking a cab though I had offered to pick them up.

  When I arrived they were already seated, but Sid, always courtly, struggled to stand to pull a chair out for me. They were a decade younger than my parents, so when I was growing up, I always thought of them as my parents’ young friends. Even in their nineties they had a youthful air. Sid was lean but his face was plump with high, apple cheeks and a rosy complexion. His dark hair was accented with silver at the temples. Ruth was still a strawberry blonde and wore her hair, as she always had, in a pageboy. She had a tailored Nancy Reagan quality. She was more reserved than her husband, but under that reserve was a deep reservoir of kindness and warmth. It was that warmth that had helped buoy my parents emotionally as they dealt with my brother’s situation. In addition to providing emotional support, Sid, who had been a judge in Los Angeles, helped my parents navigate the court system.

  After dinner, he asked me what I was working on. I should have been prepared for the question, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about Leslie and Pat. I was beginning to discover that even though the Manson murders had occurred thirty years before, the feelings were still fresh and the anger near the surface for people who were around at the time. Ruth and Sid were liberal Democrats, but political leanings seemed irrelevant when it came to discussing anyone connected to these murders. Liberals and conservatives alike tended to find the Manson women, or anyone associated with the women, contemptible. But because Ruth and Sid had always been so unconditionally loving and parental with me, I decided to risk talking about Pat and Leslie.

  I told them about the television documentary I’d seen, my visits to the prison, and my quest to find out if the two women were as transformed as they seemed. At first, neither of them said anything, but Ruth had a quizzical expression on her face.

  “Are you surprised?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she said, smiling. “It’s familiar territory for you.”

  What territory was she referring to? My brother’s history? Criminal justice issues about which I’d written? Prisons I’d visited while doing stories? All were true. Before I could ask what she meant, she said, “That poor woman.”

  Which woman? There were so many involved who could be described that way. Sharon Tate? Sharon Tate’s mother? Abigail Folger? Her mother? Mrs. LaBianca? Ruth may have been kind-hearted, but I doubted that she was referring to either Pat or Leslie. The most logical would be Mrs. LaBianca because she’d been a neighbor of Ruth’s. Perhaps she’d even known her. “I agree,” I said. “It was a horrible way to die.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean the murder victim. Of course that was terrible, but I was actually talking about Leslie Van Houten’s mother. We had the same employer, though I didn’t know her. I couldn’t help feeling bad for her.”

  Ruth had been an administrator for the Los Angeles Board of Education for more than thirty years; Leslie’s mother worked in the same system as a teacher fo
r high-risk youth. It’s a massive school district, but Ruth explained that once the murderers were identified, the gossip quickly spread through the bureaucracy. “The word through the grapevine was that she was very proud. I don’t mean that in a mean way. She didn’t try to hide who her daughter was, but she made it clear she did not want to talk about it . . . but who would?”

  Though Sid had been a superior court judge at the time, he said he didn’t have any special knowledge of the case. “But anyone who worked anywhere near the courthouse knew what a circus the trial was.” Actually, anyone who lived in L.A. or anyone who had a television set knew what a circus it was. Every morning during the trial, Manson groupies conducted a vigil, sitting on the sidewalk outside the Hall of Justice, holding up photos of Manson.

  Ruth talked about how frightened everyone was in their Los Feliz neighborhood before the police had a suspect. “At night, the streets were empty. People were afraid to leave their houses,” she said. “I remember thinking that wasn’t entirely logical since the LaBiancas were killed in their house.”

  Ruth said she wished they could provide me with some sort of scoop about Manson or the murders, but whatever they knew was already public knowledge. I said as much as I liked scoops, that wasn’t what I was after. I was primarily interested in the women, their lives before, during, and after the murders.

  I’m not sure she heard me because she said, her face brightening, “Oh, I just remembered a bit of trivia. Do you know who once lived in the LaBianca house?”

  “ No.”

  “Walt Disney.”

  “Really?” I said. “I’ve seen photos and it didn’t look grand.”

  “Oh, it’s not. It’s a fine house but modest for someone like Disney. He lived in it in the 1930s while he was building a house a few blocks away. The one he was building was his version of Hansel and Gretel’s cottage.”

  After we ordered dessert, Sid mentioned a case he’d had the year before he retired. “One of the defendants was a Manson nut. I don’t think he was an official follower; well maybe he was, I’m not sure, but before that I didn’t realize Manson had any kind of following. Apparently he’s a genuine cult anti-hero.” He shrugged and shook his head, a go figure gesture. “The guy worked in a store that specializes in cult novelties. Or, now that I think of it, maybe he stole merchandise from the store.” He laughed. “You’d think I’d remember that. In any case, I’m only mentioning it because the store is in this neighborhood.” He said he used to drive by on his way home from work and was tempted to peek in but never did. “My hunch is they have quite a bit of Manson memorabilia.”

  I thought, once again, that I should clarify my lack of interest in Manson himself, but in light of their eagerness to help me, it seemed churlish to keep harping on that so I said I would check it out.

  After dinner, Sid and Ruth offered to escort me to the store. “It’s only a few blocks,” Sid said. “I don’t think you should go alone.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, holding up my cell phone. “I’ll be fine.”

  I was touched. No matter how old I was or how old and frail they were, they would always act in loco parentis.

  After they left, I realized that though I wasn’t interested in Manson memorabilia, I was interested in people who were. I walked a few blocks down Vermont until I got to Mondo Video A-Go-Go.

  I was instantly transported into a world I had only imagined. At first glance I couldn’t help feeling that someone had lifted an enormous rock and the inventory of Mondo Video A-Go-Go came to life and crawled out. I thought of the survivalist guy who owned the Army and Navy surplus store in Falling Down with Michael Douglas. That guy wore a black watch cap and a black leather vest that revealed his tattooed biceps. I think he might have worked at Mondo Video A-Go-Go. He certainly shopped there. That’s not entirely fair. There were no guns on display and, unlike the survivalist guy’s hate speech in Falling Down, no obvious homophobic material. The store’s tag line, however, could be: If it’s offensive, we’ve got it. The walls were festooned with posters, buttons, bumper stickers, magnets, much of which looked to have been designed by Hitler or his disciples.

  I saw swastikas, whips, Ku Klux Klan hoods. There was a dizzying array of cult and specialty films clearly labeled and well organized. A sampling: UFO documentaries, serial killer flicks, amputee porn, midget porn, all manner of S & M, black exploitation films, lost episodes of The Twilight Zone. I didn’t ask but my guess was that tucked away somewhere were snuff films. I was grateful, needless to say, that I was not accompanied by the judge and his wife.

  There was a group of men gathered at the counter and, out of the corner of my eye, I was pretty sure I could make out a photo of a disembodied penis and its adjoining testicles taped to the cash register. I was feeling way too shy to call attention to myself by asking a question. I spotted a guy set apart from the crowd who was reading liner notes on a CD. He had a hank of coal-black hair sprouting out of an otherwise shaved head and was wearing a black leather jacket. If he wasn’t a card-carrying member, then perhaps he was an employee. Sotto voce I asked if there were any Manson videos. “Oh, let me see, I think I can find one or two,” he said, smiling. He led me down the crowded aisles to a massive section of Manson-related material.

  There were dozens and dozens of videos—almost three decades’ worth of TV interviews, parole hearings, snippets from Court TV of Manson, Tex Watson, and the three women—all obviously recorded on someone’s home VCR. I braved the crowd at the register and purchased a lifetime membership for $10. I could now rent videos during the week for only $1.50 a night, on the weekend for $2.50. I rented my first ten, bought some microwave popcorn, drove back to Santa Monica, and started watching.

  chapter eleven

  DISORDERED THOUGHTS AND DEMENTED MACHINATIONS

  In the decades after the murders, before the California legislature put an end to it, Charles Manson appeared on a wide array of network and cable tabloid shows from all over North America as well as Europe. Among the interviews in my stack were those by Geraldo Rivera, Tom Snyder, and Ron Reagan Jr. The shows were inevitably billed as containing never-before-heard answers to never-before-asked questions, but, in fact, the interviews were interchangeable. Manson was playful, he was maniacal, he was nuts. He alternated between the nonsensical and the almost astute, and it was always difficult to discern how much he was intentionally disordering his thoughts or how much his thoughts were disordering him.

  Each interviewer became confused by his neologisms, charmed by his antics, and then, inevitably, horrified at being seduced. The realization was a reminder of what the creep actually did, so the interviewer then felt compelled to express outrage at the murders. Manson would then get angry and slightly menacing. A favorite trick: he coiled the microphone cord around his hand in a way to suggest that any minute he might decide to leap forward and wrap it around the interviewer’s neck.

  His responses were tangential, and most of his conversations consisted of word play based on loose associations.

  “Are you a criminal, Mr. Manson?”

  “There’s no such thing as a criminal. If I be in my will, if I will be, I’ll shoot you, I’ll beat you, too.”

  “Do you have any children, Charlie?”

  “I have lots of children. I don’t know how many children I have, sometimes I think you are a child.”

  And always, grandiose, delusional ideas. “I don’t operate on a local level. When you’re with me you’ve got to think much, much bigger than that.”

  The spectacle of interviewers such as Tom Snyder and the exceedingly young and earnest Ron Reagan Jr., probing Manson’s philosophy of life, is comical. (Ron Reagan: “What would you do if you were released?” Manson: “If I’m paroled I’ll run for president.”) Each interaction further reinforced Manson’s grandiosity.

  His trickery and quixotic use of language made a precise diagnosis problematic. Because his thoughts often seemed chaotic, some experts concluded that he was a latent schizoph
renic. His actions, however, were controlled and calculating. Whatever else he was, there was general agreement that he was a psychopath. In Helter Skelter, Roger Smith, who had been his parole officer when he lived in San Francisco, was quoted as calling him “a manipulative little anti-social.”

  I made sure to watch the videos in the morning. I needed many hours to pass between my viewing and my sleep. Each interaction captured what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” and I didn’t need Manson’s demented machinations invading my dreams.

  When I wasn’t watching the videos, I was either at the library reading the L.A. Times coverage of the original trial on microfiche or checking out magazines and books about Manson or members of the Family. I soon realized that my initial plan to avoid material on him was self-defeating. I couldn’t understand the women without having some understanding of him. Since the initial trial, a cottage industry of Manson material had been published, so I soon amassed a little library of books written by people claiming to know the real person.

  According to many accounts of his childhood, including a biography written by his former cellmate, Nuel Emmons (Manson in His Own Words: The Shocking Confessions of the Most Dangerous Man Alive) and, more recently, Manson by Jeff Guin, there is much about his early life that’s in dispute. Manson has offered an array of stories, some of them contradictory, to interviewers over the years. But there is some agreement about the following: there was a teenage mother, Kathleen Maddox, and a biological father, Colonel Scott, a married con man who took off before the baby was born. There was a stepfather, William Manson, who hung around long enough to have his name affixed to his stepson’s birth certificate.

  At fifteen, Kathleen Maddox was not an ideal mother. She hung out at bars, leaving the boy with a variety of unsuitable sitters. Manson himself told the story that she had so little attachment to her infant son that she once offered him to a barmaid in exchange for a pitcher of beer. When the boy was four years old, Kathleen was sentenced to five years in prison for robbing a service station with her brother. So Manson’s youth was spent bouncing between religiously fanatic grandparents and state institutions where he was routinely abused by staff and other inmates. Given his childhood, it would have been a wonder had he turned out to be anything but a user and abuser of people. But the young people he attracted were a different story. Though none had had picture-perfect childhoods, most of them were raised by parents who appeared to give them the basics: love, protection, opportunities, and more than a modicum of material comfort.