The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  While in prison, my brother turned into the person he was meant to be. (This is a version of something I’ve heard Leslie say about her transformation, once she had rid herself of Manson’s influence.) I believed, though I never said this to him or to my parents, that getting arrested saved his life. Before that, his behavior was increasingly reckless, and he’d picked up unsavory companions along the way.

  We laughed a lot that day. I know because for some reason I brought along a tape recorder. My brother and I reminisced about growing up in Hollywood in the 1950s. Candace joined in with her own version; Craig, who grew up in Ontario, was our audience. He was taken by the mythology of Hollywood High, and once he discovered that was my alma mater, he pressed for information about the celebrities I knew, despite the fact that they were mostly of the B-list variety.

  That day, my brother and I compared notes. I had more on my side of the ledger, but in terms of star power, he won the competition. On my list: Linda Evans, Stefani Powers, Tuesday Weld, Yvette Mimieux, various Mouseketeers. On my brother’s list: Ricky Nelson and Mike Farrell (of M.A.S.H.).

  Candace had a list, too, but the people on it were less well-known in mainstream culture. Her mother was a delicate blonde beauty who supported her two children working as a dancer. One day, a well-known bookie and a member of the L.A. Jewish Mafia walked into the club on the Sunset Strip where she was working. He fell in love and the two subsequently got married. (Relationships with exotic gentile dancers was a tradition with his Jewish Mafia compatriots—Mickey Cohen, for example, had well-publicized relationships with Tempest Storm and Candy Barr—both big names in the world of burlesque.) The career wasn’t a good fit for Candace’s mother. After she married Max, she got out of the business.

  While my parents liked Candace, her involvement with my brother had a serious complication. Max was on the list of mobsters my father’s IRS team had targeted. He thought he could avoid awkwardness by assigning one of his guys to investigate. It wasn’t so easy. At one point, Max pressured Candace to call my father to ask if he would intercede on his behalf. Clearly Max didn’t know anything about my father who must have erected some kind of Chinese wall to avoid a conflict of interest. It all had a happy ending: Max had very good lawyers who kept him out of prison. By the time my brother was released from prison and he and Candace got married, my father had retired so both sets of parents were able to attend the wedding. My father and Max actually liked each other and eventually became friends.

  As I say, the only thing to mar that day at Don Lugo was Craig’s apparent detachment. It wasn’t until I listened to the tape that night that I realized that his distance from me, from all of us, wasn’t short, it was planetary.

  Craig and I had a date to meet for dinner the next night in Los Angeles at El Cholo. It was one of my old favorites and he’d never been there. I arrived a little late and he was already seated. Before he noticed me, I stood to the side, watching him for a minute. He was holding up the large menu displaying every combination imaginable, but his eyes looked unfocused. I remember, I will always remember, the pained look on his face. It was memorable but, at that moment, not decipherable—as mysterious as the Mona Lisa . . . except there was no smile. Annoyance? Anger? Guilt? And then I knew: I’m about to get dumped.

  I’d been half-expecting this outcome since the first time he asked me out. By every measure, he was out of my league—way out. For one thing, he was a striking physical specimen. When we met I was studying somatypes in Psychology 1A. He was a classic mesomorph: athletic, well-developed musculature, rugged, and perfect posture. He hewed so strictly to type that it looked as though he had posed for the sketch of the mesomorph in my textbook. (After I’d seen his body unclothed, the sketch in my textbook was, in my mind, replaced by Rodin’s Thinker.)

  Craig had a lot of other boxes checked. He was ambitious, smart, and disciplined—so disciplined that during Finals Week, while I and everyone else I knew were pulling all-nighters cramming for tests, he was so up-to-date with his classwork, he spent the week reading novels. Even more appealing, unlike the other guys I had dated, he had a self-made quality. His family was blue collar and in no financial position to put three kids through college. Starting in high school, Craig worked as a bricklayer in the summers and was supporting himself.

  He had political ambitions and made almost every decision based on what he believed would serve that purpose. He’d been offered a scholarship at an Ivy League school but chose to go to Cal because he figured that when he ran for governor of California, he would have more contacts in the state. Governor would be a stepping-stone to running for president. I believed in him and his ambition so much, I had no doubt that he would some day be president. He decided to live in the dorms rather than join a fraternity. His plan was to live in a different dorm every semester so he could maximize the number of contacts he could make. Looking back on it now, some of this seems creepy, but at the time John F. Kennedy’s presidency gave these Machiavellian plans a certain credibility, at least to me.

  I knew who he was before he knew who I was. He was running for some kind of campus-wide office, and I’d seen his campaign poster on the bulletin board in the dining hall. I didn’t just see it, one night when I was walking back to my dorm room and there was no one around, I stole the glossy black-and-white headshot and stuck it in my notebook. When I got to my room, I hid it in my underwear drawer. A few days later my roommate discovered it when she was looking for a scarf to borrow. She never stopped talking about it.

  One night at a Valentine’s dance, a “social” between my dorm and Craig’s dorm, I found myself standing alone by the punch bowl watching my roommate do the twist with a guy she’d met the night before at the library. I never met anyone in the library. As I drank my punch watching couples gyrating to Chubby Checker and feeling invisible, I thought I might as well have stayed in junior high. I tossed my plastic glass in the trash bin and started walking toward the elevator to go back to my room. I heard, “Hey, don’t leave.” I turned around and saw Craig. He was extending his hand out to me. “Come dance with me.”

  That was in February. By the end of that semester in June, we had spent part of every day with each other in Berkeley, but we’d be apart for the summer. He was living at home with his parents in Ontario working at his job at the local brickyard. I was living with my parents at their beach house in Santa Monica and taking summer classes at Santa Monica City College.

  Since his parents lived so close to the prison—Ontario is only a few miles from Chino—I invited him to meet me there on a Sunday so I could introduce him to my brother. They hit it off. He said, “I’ve met your family. It’s time for you to meet mine.” He suggested I come for Sunday brunch the following week before going to the prison. We agreed to withhold the information about my brother until his parents had a chance to get to know me.

  As soon as I saw the home he grew up in, a snug craftsman bungalow, I knew I would like his family. It had the kind of front porch I had always wanted with an old-fashioned glider and a well-worn overstuffed couch. The stucco exterior was powder blue with white trim and, of course, the lawn was bordered with a white picket fence.

  His dad worked in a factory; his mom was a homemaker. They were proud of their kids—all three of whom worked to put themselves through college. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual, in my experience, was that they weren’t threatened when their kids talked about issues with which they weren’t familiar: art, literature, philosophy. At breakfast, when Craig and his sister got in an extended argument about Nietzsche, they observed it like a tennis match, the scoring of which they didn’t quite understand but nonetheless enjoyed.

  Both of Craig’s siblings were getting married that summer—his sister’s wedding was in three weeks; his brother’s in six weeks. While passing platters of pancakes and sausages, there was a lot of wedding talk.

  The next day Craig called me. “They loved you.”

  The next week I got an invitation in the mail to
his sister’s wedding. Two weeks later, I received one to his brother’s wedding.

  I was excited about the invitations. My mother was, too. She said she wanted to take me shopping at the Broadway Hollywood for dresses. We hadn’t shopped together since high school—it always led to conflict—but she insisted. I was mixed about her enthusiasm. Sometimes she was embarrassingly pleased about whatever popularity I managed to garner and would bring it up with people who were neither impressed nor interested. The shopping foray went surprisingly well, except for a little skirmish in the beginning. She said I only needed one dress. I said I needed two; clearly some of the same people would be at both weddings. She said since they were six weeks apart, no one would remember. I told her they would. We agreed that I would pay for one dress out of my savings from waitressing. She would pay for the other.

  I loved the dresses we found—cotton sundresses that could be dressed up with strappy high-heeled sandals. We had lunch afterward at the Pig’n Whistle a few blocks up Hollywood Boulevard from the Broadway. Before I hit puberty and started challenging my mother at every turn, this had been our tradition. In those days the restaurant had a special kid’s menu—a pig mask—and provided crayons. After lunch we walked farther up Hollywood Boulevard to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and strolled through the forecourt where there are imprints of the hands, feet, and signatures of movie stars. When I was a kid my favorite had been Roy Roger’s horse Trigger’s hoofprints. Later I was more partial to Betty Grable’s legs. And then we went next door for another mother-daughter tradition—sharing a hot fudge sundae at C.C. Brown’s. I was happy that day. We both were.

  The following week Craig’s parents were going to visit a relative in one of the L.A. suburbs, I think it was Monterey Park, and they invited me to meet them at an over-the-top Polynesian-themed restaurant—exotic drinks in coconut shells, water falls, jungle trails. I loved it. At one point, after taking a few sips of Craig’s rum drink (he was twenty-one, I was not), I vowed that if I ever had kids, I’d bring them there.

  The night before I had talked Craig into allowing me to tell his parents about my brother. I worried that when they finally found out that I’d been visiting him during those weeks Craig was home, they would be distrustful of me forever. But I realized that the jungle setting with the attendant monkey and waterfall sounds would not be conducive to a serious heart-to-heart.

  At dinner I told his mom about the dresses my mother and I had bought to wear to the weddings. “Oh, no,” she said. “That must have been expensive. Can you return them?”

  I was confused. Why would I want to return them?

  “I don’t think so. We got them on sale.”

  She put her hand on my arm and told me she would love to make them for me. “I’m finished making the bridesmaids’ dresses for my daughter’s wedding.”

  All of them?

  She smiled. “There are only five.”

  “She’s a master seamstress,” her husband said.

  “Oh, no, I’m not. I’m a good seamstress . . . by no means a master.”

  She asked again about whether I could return the dresses. I shook my head.

  “I’m pretty sure I can’t.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Next time.” I wasn’t sure what next time meant. Neither did Craig or his father.

  “Are you trying to marry off our Craig?” his father asked, slapping his son on the back. We all laughed.

  When I described Craig’s parents to my mother—their house, their kids, their warmth, their generosity—she said, “Salt of the earth?”

  I told her I thought that she and my father would like them, though I wasn’t sure they’d find a lot to talk about. “They’re Democrats. They voted for JFK.”

  All was not so rosy that day at El Cholo. When I sat down, I saw that Craig’s face looked even more pained up close. I took what practitioners of yoga call a cleansing breath, but it had little effect on the fluttering in my chest. I started to talk and I kept talking, emitting a stream of words from my mouth . . . no, not a stream, a fire hose. In some lunatic way I thought that if I kept talking he couldn’t break up with me or maybe it would give him time to change his mind. I told him about El Cholo’s green tamales. How they were only available that time of year. I told him that I had eaten there regularly with my best friend’s family and how we went there after Mass on Sundays. I pointed out celebrities on the wall. “Let’s see, I think there’s a photo of Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper . . . oh, there’s Jack Nicholson.” I walked over and pointed to Jack’s photo. I said I was sure there was a photo of Frank Sinatra. I said that restaurant had been there so long, there were probably photos from silent pictures. I said I was sure I’d seen a photo of Charlie Chaplin and his daughter.

  I was still standing up near the wall when he blurted: “You can’t come to my sister’s wedding.” The fluttering had migrated from my chest to my gut. I sat down at the table.

  “You want to bring someone else?” I remembered that he had a high school girlfriend in Ontario. I felt tears forming.

  “No,” he said. His tone was gruff. He sounded angry. “I don’t know how to tell you this. It’s my parents—”

  “I thought they liked me. You said—”

  “They do . . . I mean they did—”

  “Oh, you told them about my brother—”

  “No. I never got that far.”

  I had run out of steam. I was utterly confused, but I had no more energy to divert whatever was about to come my way.

  “It’s because you’re Jewish.”

  This seemed so crazy that it occurred to me that he was just using it as an excuse. He wanted to break up with me for the reason I feared. It was general: I was not in his league and he finally realized it. Or it was specific: he met someone new. And then there was the old girlfriend. I’d seen a photo. She was beautiful . . . a blonde, with a creamy complexion and huge blue eyes. Hitler would have swooned. And then I remembered the hybrid thing, mischling. It seemed nauseatingly disloyal, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking if his parents knew the degree of my Jewishness.

  “Yes, they do, and it makes no difference.” He shook his head. “They said terrible things about Jews and how it doesn’t matter to them how diluted it is. A drop of Jewish blood is the same as a gallon of Jewish blood except they didn’t use the word ‘Jewish.’ And they certainly don’t want grandchildren with tainted blood.”

  The flutter was now in my head, making me dizzy. I was having trouble imagining the conversation. How could these people, people who apparently used the word “kike” or its first cousin, be the same warm, generous . . . salt of the earth folks with a glider on their front porch?

  “How did it even come up?”

  “Last night on the drive home my mother asked me about your religion. I hedged a little but finally said I thought you were an atheist. They didn’t like that much, but that was nothing compared to what came next.

  “ ‘She’s a Jew!’ My mother said it accusingly, like, ‘She’s a murderer!’ She had such an ugly look on her face. I wanted to throw up.”

  The waitress came over to take our orders, but Craig told her to come back later. Much later. We were both quiet. Finally, I said, “How could you not have known they hated Jews this much?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I didn’t want to know. Or I did know but we haven’t had conversations about that sort of thing for a long time. When I was in high school we fought about Negroes who they dislike even more than they do Jews. I wanted to ask a Negro girl to a dance and they flipped out. They said that as long as I lived under their roof, I would have to abide by their rules. Maybe we fought so much about Negroes, I forgot about the Jews. Or maybe I was hoping they had changed.”

  We never ordered. Neither of us felt like eating. He walked me to my car, actually to my mother’s car. She’d recently bought a VW Bug.

  “I thought your mother hated German cars.” I had told Craig about our contentious trip to Europe. Thinking about the trip
and the new VW suddenly lightened my mood.

  “You see, people can change,” I said, kissing his cheek. “My mother loves this car. Maybe your parents will change . . . maybe they’ll change before your brother’s wedding and I won’t have to try and return two dresses. Just one.”

  chapter fifty-two

  A MAKE-BELIEVE DODGE

  1968–1969

  Spahn Ranch, the group’s second outpost, was in the northern part of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, and though it wasn’t as remote as Barker Ranch in Death Valley, according to Pat and Leslie, it, too, felt like a separate reality. It was surrounded by steep, bouldered foothills, and the property had its own creek and waterfalls, which fed a crystal-clear swimming hole. To the kids in Manson’s tribe, most of whom grew up watching Gunsmoke, the town was the perfect setting for a make-believe world. The ramshackle buildings, once used for cowboy movies and TV shows, may have been falling down and covered with dust, but they were intact enough to serve as a make-believe Dodge. Just as in Dodge, there was a rickety boardwalk that ran along Main Street—the first building was the Rock City Café and the Long Horn Saloon, which had a jukebox. Down the boardwalk farther there was a jailhouse, a funeral parlor, and a carriage house full of old stagecoaches.

  The exteriors were make-believe as were the identities of the people inside. Manson orchestrated the shedding of former identities through role-playing and costumes. There was a huge pile of dress-up clothes for that purpose. Every day, a new costume. Every day, a new identity. According to Leslie, there was a different theme every day: one day they all dressed as cowboys, the next as pirates, the following day as gypsies. It was a never-ending Halloween party . . . playtime, but playtime with an agenda.

  Zimbardo calls this peeling away of former identities the “Mardi Gras effect.” Mardi Gras, he writes, was originally a pagan ceremony and was incorporated by the Romans along with Christianity. In practice, Mardi Gras celebrates the excess of pleasure-seeking, living for the moment. Responsibilities are tossed aside while participants indulge their sensual nature in communal revelries. There’s a reason this period of loosened constraints comes right before Lent when there will be a relatively tight lid on pleasure. Mardi Gras, which he calls “deindividuation in group action.” involves temporarily giving up limits on personal behavior without concern for consequences.