The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  As we walked away, I asked my father why he didn’t show him his badge. I’d been disappointed. “Special agents don’t usually bring their daughters along on investigations,” he said, putting his arm around me.

  We walked down two more aisles. There were Cessnas but not the one we were looking for. By that time, the heat of the day had been absorbed by the tarmac and heat waves were pulsating up from the blacktop. “There’s a snack bar inside. Let’s go get something to drink.”

  We sat at the fountain in the air-conditioned café. My father ordered me an all around chocolate malt (chocolate milk and chocolate ice cream), a drink he had introduced me to as a little girl. As I sucked the thick milky mixture through the straw, he said, “You have an important decision to make. I want us to talk about it.”

  I assumed he was referring to the decision about which social club to join—two had accepted me.

  “I’ve already made that decision,” I said. “I like the Gammas.”

  “That’s not exactly what I’m talking about. Have you considered not joining any club?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I think I want to be in a club.” I was dissembling. There was no “think” about it. I had no doubts. As soon as I got to high school, scoped out the scene, as soon as I’d received my first invitation to a Coke session—the first step in rushing—I’d made that decision.

  Later, I wondered why he hadn’t delivered this lecture when I was first rushed. Maybe my parents didn’t think I’d get in so why stir the pot for nothing?

  He didn’t say anything right away and then asked if I remembered Polly, my best friend in grammar school. “Of course I remember her.”

  “Do you remember what happened to her?”

  “Did something happen to her?” I said, alarmed. So this was what this much-needed “help” was about. He didn’t need my help on a case, he needed to tell me my friend was dead. We had been best friends when we were younger but had grown apart when we went to different high schools. I went to Hollywood High; she went to John Marshall. There were gangs at Marshall. Though it was in our district, my mother didn’t want me to go there because she had so many foster kids on her caseload who attended. She never said it, but I think she was worried that I wouldn’t be safe there.

  “No, sweetheart,” he said, patting the top of my head. “I’m sure she’s fine. I’m talking about what happened to her when you were kids.” When we were in the third grade, a vicious little twerp named Jimmy started teasing her about being biracial. Her father was Chinese and her mother was Caucasian. He didn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese so kept referring to her “Jap” father and white mother. (There was still intense hatred of the Japanese in California, a leftover from WWII.) Every day at lunch this kid with a group of his creepy friends would taunt her. Sometimes Jimmy would yank her black silky hair and ask her why her hair wasn’t half white. Or he’d pull down the side of one of his eyes to simulate the epicanthic fold and ask why she didn’t have one round eye and one slanted.

  Polly would cry and I would stand helplessly by, screaming names at him. It was the first time I remember feeling pure hatred. He had a group of boys supporting him. We had no one—girls or boys. I don’t know how long we put up with it, but he started getting more aggressive. One day, he pushed her and knocked her down. That night I told my parents. My mother called the principal, who called Jimmy and his parents into her office. He stopped teasing Polly overtly but whenever he could catch her eye without the teacher noticing, he’d pull a menacing face.

  “Daddy, Jimmy wasn’t in a club,” I said. He laughed but then explained that not accepting people who are different originates from the same mind-set. It’s all about making some people feel special while making sure everyone else feels left out. The clubs are worse, he said, because they make it official. He asked me how many Asians were in the club. How many Mexicans? How many Negroes? I lied and said I didn’t know. I did know and so did he. There were none. He wasn’t finished with the lesson of the day.

  “Do you remember how you felt when you saw those signs in New Orleans?” He was referring to our stop in New Orleans on our way back from Europe in 1956. It was one year after Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Nothing had yet changed in Louisiana. The signs said WHITES ONLY and COLORED at the drinking fountains, the bathrooms, and in the train station. I nodded. I remembered having a stomachache the whole time we were there. “Do you really want to be a part of a system that excludes people?”

  My parents had told my brother and me to ignore the signs. No one seemed to notice when we drank at the colored fountain and sat in the colored section. I was surprised and maybe a little disappointed that our efforts at solidarity passed unnoticed.

  His little guided tour down memory lane changed nothing. At that point in my life, I wanted to be part of a system that excluded people as long as I wasn’t the one being excluded.

  In junior high I wasn’t exactly a misfit; my identity wasn’t even that defined. I was a nobody. At twelve years old I was five-foot-seven, towering over everyone, in particular the boys. I skipped a grade in elementary school and I was convinced, though no one said it, that I was advanced because I was tall. Even then, though I was a year younger than everyone else in my class, I was still the tallest.

  The first dance I attended, I was the girl for whom the term “wallflower” was invented. I stood against the gym wall while the boys walked by, assessing and quickly rejecting what was on offer. I’m sure there were other girls not being asked to dance, but it didn’t feel that way. I only remember the humiliation of standing there alone. I had come to the dance with a friend with big bouncy curls and big bouncy breasts. She danced every dance. After the dance, a group of boys who were hot on her trail followed us out the door. They wanted us, rather her, to hang out behind the gym with them to smoke and who knows what. By that time I had somehow found the gumption to resist.

  “We can’t,” I said firmly. “We have to go.”

  The boys started pressuring my friend. She shrugged. “If she won’t stay, I can’t stay. We came together.” So they turned to lobby me. One of them finally said, “Look, if you stay, I’ll kiss you.” His tone and the look on his face was not of revulsion; it was the look of a martyr! Maybe I hadn’t had the self-respect or wherewithal to leave the gym during the cattle call, but I did have enough to tell my friend I was leaving with or without her and I did. The boy who had so magnanimously offered to kiss me said to my friend, “You don’t need her, my brother will take you home.” They walked to the back of the gym, and I called my mother to come get me.

  When I got in the car she asked if I’d had a good time. I said yes but my body language must have said otherwise. The next day, my parents announced that they had decided I was too young to go to dances. “I’m not too young,” I said, but that was as vehement as I got. I was relieved. So relieved.

  Because I no longer had to endure dances, and because I’d found a best friend (she also had big bouncy breasts but she was fiercely loyal), I existed below the radar. Popularity didn’t matter. Or so I told myself.

  Something changed the summer before high school. I don’t know what it was but I was no longer booby prize material. At Hollywood High I was rushed by a few of the social clubs and accepted by two—one of which was the one I wanted to get into: Gamma Rho.

  It’s hard to exaggerate the outsized part these junior sororities played in the social scene at Hollywood High. Eve Babitz, in her book Eve’s Hollywood, wrote that in that era, she so feared being excluded from the social clubs at Hollywood High that she avoided the whole scene by going to a school out of her district and a long bus ride away. “In Hollywood High School you were at the mercy of your cunty peers who whispered and squealed and giggled and screamed about who was being rushed by what sorority. Even today I am nearly heartbroken not to be invited to something, so you can imagine how the prospect of sororities looked to me at the age of fourteen when
I had no control over my sanity.”

  Gamma Rho was one of three in the top tier, an unspoken designation that I suppose was based on their selectivity. Gammas were known for being wholesome, preppie, and prudish. Our club jacket was a blue blazer. The other clubs had boys’ baseball jackets. The other two in the top tier were the Deltas, beautiful, glamorous, smokers, drinkers; and the Lambdas, just as wholesome as Gammas but maybe less prudish, more athletic. Eve Babitz, who subsequently transferred to Hollywood High after all, wrote at some length in Rolling Stone about the beautiful girls of Hollywood High, claiming that they were not only beautiful but sophisticated. They were so sophisticated, in fact, that they were “running off to Rome with older men—directors, producers, actors.” All I can say is maybe that applied to a Delta or two (Melody did run off with a big movie star but it was years later), but no one I knew either in or out of Gammas was running off to Rome with anybody. Officially anyway, the Gammas had a lock on their chastity until their wedding nights.

  My dad and I finished our drinks and returned to the search. He continued his lecture. He said the clubs were based on the Greek system in colleges and universities. Fraternities and sororities, in addition to being intellectually benighted and morally corrupt, were guilty of racism and anti-Semitism. “And they’re closed off from other influences. By the way,” he said, “just out of curiosity, does the club know that you had a Jewish grandmother?”

  I shrugged. “They wouldn’t care.”

  “You’re sure? According to Jewish law, you’re one hundred percent Jewish because you inherit your Jewishness from your mother.”

  I laughed. “Daddy, you’re making too much out of this whole thing. Kids don’t care about these things. The club is just for having fun. For eating lunch together. Having parties. And doing volunteer work. The Gammas help blind kids.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’re not going to forbid you to join.” He said they simply wanted me to understand the ramifications of the decision. I would be sacrificing values he knew I had, and he wanted me to consider my decision carefully. I said I would but I didn’t. Not for a second.

  “If you decide to join, you might end up regretting it one day.” He was right but for reasons I don’t believe even he predicted.

  Years later, I thought about this: My brother attended Hollywood High four years before I did. He was in a club at a time when social clubs were no less discriminating. My father never gave him the lecture about joining. I’ve never known what to make of that.

  We never did find the Cessna. Was there a Cessna?

  chapter twenty-eight

  THE METAPHORICAL MICROSCOPE

  May 1998

  I was sitting on a park bench in the small civic center complex of a suburban town outside of L.A. waiting for Leslie’s mother. She would not have wanted me to tell you what suburban town. She barely wanted to tell me which one. Three decades after the murders she was still trying to protect her privacy. When I was first introduced to her at the prison (she was visiting Leslie, I was visiting Pat), she was courteous but cool. This reserve, Leslie explained later, was the result of the brutal way she and her family were treated by the media during the first trial. Despite this, she eventually agreed to meet with me, much to Leslie’s surprise.

  The air was moist, the sky a pale gray. The marine layer hangs heavy this time of year, making the late spring close and dreary. But a counterpoint to the gloom was the display of jacarandas. In May, the blossoms of these magnificent trees adorn the L.A. basin with lavender, making so many areas—from the bleakest blocks of South Central to the featureless civic center plaza where I was sitting—look like paradise.

  I’d arrived more than a half-hour early. Mrs. Van Houten inspired this kind of punctuality; at least she inspired it in me. When I’d observed her interacting with people in the visiting room, she’d been an erect, well-coifed woman with white hair and sharp blue eyes. She had an air of brisk competence and the sort of authoritative presence teachers once possessed before the 1960s upheaval blurred the dividing line between teachers and students. In her tailored dress and sensible pumps, she’d stood out among the relatives visiting inmates. Most mothers of inmates are too beleaguered—they are often taking care of their grandchildren full-time—to manage anything other than sweats when they visit.

  That morning when I was dressing to meet her, I put more thought into my attire than I would ordinarily. Mrs. V. inspired in me, in addition to punctuality, the wish to be perceived as a girl with good breeding. It was the Sabbath. Mrs. V. was a churchgoer. I could hear my own mother’s 1950s admonishment about wearing my Sunday best. I pulled a dress from my closet. Punctuality. Proper attire. The wish to please. My projection? My regression? Or clues as to what kind of mother she was to Leslie growing up?

  In preparation for the meeting I’d reread all of Leslie’s psychiatric reports for the preceding three decades. All had attempted, as one prison psychologist put it in 1980, to “bridge the seemingly enormous gap between the high school prom princess and the barefoot participator in murder.” Such attempts inevitably focus on the mother. When it comes to mothers of murderers we want consistency, logic, cause and effect. We want their stories to offer clues to the behavior of their progeny. Clues are there, perhaps, but consistency and logic are scarce.

  When Leslie got to prison, clinicians examined her relationship with her parents with a fine-grained lens. Year after year of psychological testing unearthed few causal factors. The most damning observation about her parents was made in 1991, though it had a distinctly 1950s ring to it. After administering the house-tree-person projective test, clinical psychologist Dr. J. J. Ponath concluded: “The placement of the tree is characteristic of a person who has grown up under the influence of a dominant mother and an emotionally unavailable father.”

  Depending on which of Leslie’s psychiatric reports you believe and from what year, Mrs. Van Houten was emotionally remote from Leslie, favoring her sons, or an overindulgent mother, spoiling her daughter and preventing her from learning how to defer gratification. Or, if you prefer, she was so strict, so demanding of deferred gratification, of sacrifice and discipline, that it had caused Leslie to rebel in such a disastrous way.

  Most evaluators expressed bewilderment that a girl with such bright beginnings had become a murderer. But one, Joel Hochman, stated that he was not surprised. In a 1971 report, he divined homicidal rage from an early age. That rage, he implied, derived from her too-comfortable early years. He described her as a child with poor impulse control and given to temper tantrums, “a spoiled little princess who was unable to suffer frustration and delay gratification.” He was not at all puzzled, he wrote, that this rage was directed at Mrs. LaBianca. “Let me make it clear, Mrs. LaBianca was an object, a blank screen upon which Leslie projected her feelings, much as a patient projects his feelings on an analyst whom he doesn’t know. These feelings were, in fact, feelings she had toward her mother, her father, toward the establishment.”

  In 1981, psychologist Ruth Loveys took a different tack. In a letter to the parole board, she described the relationship between Leslie and her mother as having many positive aspects but identified what she saw as significant emotional distance between them, which, in her opinion, led to Leslie’s early feelings of emptiness and inadequacy. Earlier reports had suggested that Leslie could be self-critical as well as believing that she was undeserving. Loveys attributed these tendencies to a mother who “inadvertently instilled in her highly imaginative daughter a very heavy sense of social conscience for less fortunate people along with the subtle message that it was wrong to put oneself first. There was a well-intentioned but inordinately burdensome emphasis placed on such values as sensitivity to others rather than to oneself, on being ladylike at all times, not making waves and later having a role in life that was healing to others. The underlying philosophy of the home was that self-effacement and suffering are the greater goods.”

  In one of her appearances before the p
arole board Leslie said, “In thinking back, I think sometimes maybe I almost had too much going for me and I just started to put myself down.” Loveys interpreted that to mean that the successful life that seemed imminent for her—she was smart, she was pretty, she was charming—was in fact frightening to her because it would mean the loss of her mother’s love and sympathy. Because her mother’s love and sympathy was always directed toward deprived persons, Leslie systematically embarked on a plan to strip herself of all her attributes that would lead to success.

  Loveys later expounded on this theory in an undated article on primal therapy in the Denver Primal Journal: “I was absolutely certain of one thing, Leslie had acted out so as to make of her life one long sacrifice and had tragically fulfilled her mother’s early teaching that suffering is noble and purifying,” thus making her a prime candidate for Manson. This made me angry. I did clinical work long enough to know there is no such thing as the kind of certainty she expressed. It’s simply one more example of fitting the patient into the mold of a therapist’s theory of human behavior.

  If the situation weren’t so tragic, much of this speculation would be laughable. The mother was too strict or she was too indulgent, her standards were too high or she had none at all. Leslie couldn’t defer gratification or her mother insisted that she always defer it. As I read the reports, I couldn’t help thinking about the decades of blame the mothers of autistic and schizophrenic kids have had to endure. From the refrigerator mother theories to the theory of double-bind communication, mothers were in the perpetual hot seat. The truth is, however, that in all but the most egregious cases of emotional or physical brutality (such as Manson’s childhood), the “science” of causality is far from scientific. Place most families under a metaphorical microscope and pathology will reign.

  Joel Hochman’s observation that Mrs. LaBianca was a surrogate for Leslie’s mother, however, did make me think of my brother’s crime. He and my parents had argued heatedly and often about money. They would make it available to him but only with very short strings attached, strings he believed infantilized him. When he dropped out of school, they refused to continue supporting him. When his girlfriend discovered she was pregnant and wanted an abortion, he refused to talk to our parents about it. He told her they were too frugal to help. (I believe this was a ridiculous misreading of my parents’ frugality.) He later said he was forced to do something drastic.