Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl
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Praise for Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl: The Many Lives of America’s Most Infamous Family
“It’s a fascinating book, forcing us to recognize something we might rather not think about: how and why we have kept Charles Manson and his followers alive in our minds, rather than consigning them to the dustbin of history.”
—Booklist
“A disturbing account of the many ways Charles Manson pervades American culture.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jeffrey Melnick offers a sobering corrective to the apocalyptic hysteria surrounding the hippie horrors of Manson’s Family. This rigorous recontextualization of time and place forces us to understand the killings in a new way.”
—Barney Hoskins, author of Hotel California
“Why is Charles Manson, the assassin of flower power, so impossible to bury? The answer according to Jeffrey Melnick is that the demon and his runaways carved their signatures into the very heart of a complicit counterculture. Riveting and unsettling, this book recalls another chilling classic: Thomas De Quincy’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”
—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
“[Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl] is a riveting meditation on the afterlife of the Manson Family. Jeffrey Melnick reveals how deeply the Family burrowed its way into American culture, often in ways that undermined collectivism and helped to shape the backlash against the sixties.”
—Alice Echols, author of Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
“Melnick retells the Manson saga not as true-crime investigation or psychological thriller, but as kaleidoscopic cultural history, unpacking how an indelibly American horror story has echoed down the years in our popular consciousness via books, films, and especially music. It’s a fascinating book—and as unstable patriarchal white dudes of varying stripes continue to shape the national narrative, an inescapably timely one.”
—Will Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever
“Jeffrey Melnick’s [Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl] is a compulsively-readable guide to the American fascination with the Manson Family. Expertly weaving psychology, sociology, history, and pop culture, Melnick’s work covers everything from the Family’s Freudian roots to its continued commodification, from Joan Didion to Nicki Minaj. We know the Manson Murders have been part of the cultural landscape for the past fifty years, but Melnick shows us why. The book is a must-read not only for those fascinated by the Manson Family, but anyone fascinated by America.”
—Allison Umminger, author of the highly acclaimed Manson novel American Girls
“[Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl is] a contentious, revisionist, often obnoxious, but thorough and undeniably important cultural-historical study of the era’s major American cult leader.”
—Devin McKinney, author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
For my mother, who always encouraged me to read all the books I could reach—even the scary ones.
Other books by the author:
9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009; Arabic translation by Azza Alkhamissy, 2010)
Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction, with Rachel Rubin (New York University Press, 2006)
Race and the Modern Artist, eds. Josef Jarab, Jeffrey Melnick and Heather Hathaway (Oxford University Press, 2003)
American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, eds. Jeffrey Melnick and Rachel Rubin (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)
Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (University Press of Mississippi, 2000)
A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Harvard University Press, 1999)
Copyright © 2018 by Jeffrey Melnick
First paperback edition, 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Cover photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Print ISBN: 978-1-94892-476-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-94892-477-1
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Introduction: Creepy Crawling through the Sixties: Charles Manson and History
PART I Creepy Crawling Family: Charles Manson in Our Homes
Mother Father Sister Brother
The Family That Slays Together
Ranch, Hill, Farm
Hush Little Dropout
The History of Consciousness
PART II Creepy Crawling Los Angeles: Charles Manson on Our Maps
High Rollers
Hippies with Power
Hungry Freaks
The Bad Fathers of the Feast
Family Affairs
PART III Creepy Crawling Truth: Charles Manson and Our Crime Tales
The Bug vs. the Fug
A Legion of Charlies
Hippie Ugly! Hippie Shit! Toothpaste Good!
A Newcomer, an Intruder
Not Just the Facts, Ma’am
PART IV Creepy Crawling Art: Charles Manson in Our Minds
Blood in a Swimming Pool
They Are Still among Us
He’s a Magic Man
Waves of Mutilation
Desperados under the Eaves
Zeroville
Wrecking Crews
Epilogue
Endnotes
Works Consulted
Acknowledgments
Index
Plates
Introduction
Creepy Crawling through the Sixties: Charles Manson and History
The year 2019 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders that made Charles Manson a household name, and the man and his Family are still everywhere. In 2016 they were on network television with the return of Season Two of David Duchovny’s Aquarius to NBC’s schedule. They are at the center of Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, which has been prominently reviewed all over the mainstream press, hitting the New York Times Best Seller list within two weeks of publication. They are in the news in the developing story of the most recent parole hearing of Family member Leslie Van Houten, a dear friend of filmmaker John Waters.
During 2016 and early 2017, Manson’s presence—at once frightful and comic—took on added resonance in the context of Donald Trump’s campaign for, and ascension to, the presidency of the United States. Given that Manson has served for decades as a kind of shorthand for charismatic pathology, it would have been hard to resist Manson/Trump juxtapositions. So, during the campaign multiple Internet rumors about Manson’s putative endorsement of the candidate circulated; more than a few compared Trump to the cult leader with respect to the power he held over his followers. In the ear
ly days of 2017, when Manson was rushed to the hospital for an undisclosed health emergency, Andy Borowitz (at the New Yorker) and other comic writers suggested that now the president-elect would have to take the cult leader’s name off his shortlist to fill the Supreme Court seat of Antonin Scalia that had been denied Merrick Garland by Republican obstructionism. Others noted similarly that when they saw Manson’s name trending on social media after his health scare they at first assumed it was because Trump must have named him to a cabinet position. Most efficient of all was a widely circulated GIF that simply put video footage of Trump and Manson side by side so that viewers could observe and draw conclusions from the similarities in their exaggerated facial expressions, which often take the form of non-verbal insults.
We also find that Scott Michaels is continuing to do brisk business with his Helter Skelter van tour (part of his larger Dearly Departed “tragical history” business). The tour, as Michaels has explained, brings “victim people” and “Manson People” together to drive around Los Angeles and see everything from the restaurant where Sharon Tate and her friends ate their last meal to the apartment where the daughter of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca lived with her boyfriend—who, according to the tour guide, was definitely a biker, and may have been tied up with the Manson-affiliated Straight Satans club. When I took the tour it became clear to me that part of Michaels’s business involves using the Manson case to entertain folks who are celebrating birthdays and other major life events.
As 2017 began, Manson’s staying power was undimmed: there was a major survey of the art of Raymond Pettibon in New York featuring numerous Manson-inspired works, a heavily promoted Family documentary on ABC, early word of a new film project based on the meeting of Manson and television host Tom Snyder in 1981, and online whispers suggesting that the year might also finally bring us the long-rumored indie film project, Manson Girls. Manson was present in trailers for a narrative film—Bigger Than the Beatles—released in 2017 that traced out the relationship of Manson and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and in well-promoted teasers about Manson-related movies from prestige film directors Quentin Tarantino and Mary Harron.
Manson’s death in November 2017 is not likely to change much about how he has operated in, and on, the American consciousness. The coverage of his demise at eighty-three did not show any indication that the volume was being turned down: the sober paper of record, the New York Times, headed its obituary with a phrase that described Manson as the “Wild-Eyed Leader of a Murderous Crew.” Twitter was briefly aflame with the news—and was largely taken up with baby boomers instructing millenials why they should not be commemorating the event with “RIP Charles Manson.” As the year ended, Manson appeared near the top of almost every list of major celebrity deaths, and rarely was he treated with anything other than the ritual horror that has so often attended mention of his name. The Times’s predictably detailed coverage repeated at some length the narrative first proposed by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi at the 1970s trial, and then later codified in his 1974 book Helter Skelter, that suggested Manson directed his “murderous crew” to kill seven people over two nights in August 1969 as part of his evil plan to incite a race war. While Bugliosi worked hard at the trial of Manson and his followers to develop this story and never stopped working on it up until his own death in 2015, this Helter Skelter story has become much more important as a cultural script, meant to explain a good deal about the chaos of the American 1960s even if it could not necessarily hold water as a full or coherent explanation for Manson’s actions. “Wild-eyed” also appeared in Vox’s coverage of Manson’s death, in a piece that also uncritically quoted Bugliosi on Manson’s race-war plans and his centrality to the culture. “Manson,” according to the prosecutor, “has become a metaphor for evil, and there’s a side of human nature that’s fascinated by pure unalloyed evil.” Our continued investment in Manson suggests that we are taking on the role played by the talent manager Col. Tom Parker who, upon the death of Elvis Presley, was asked what he planned to do: “Why, go right on managing him.” There is every indication that we plan to go right on managing Manson, who shows no signs of becoming any less useful to us in death than he has been as a living presence for the past fifty years or so.1
The past few years have been relatively strong for Manson-related cultural chatter but this is really a question of marginal degree. Since August 1969, when a few members of the Family spent two nights killing seven residents of Los Angeles in what generally travels under the banner of the “Tate-LaBianca murders,” the Family has never slipped from the American radar for long. We have rarely been able to talk about “the sixties” (or “the seventies”) without Manson and his “girls” somehow entering the discussion; many of our most important cultural conversations about teenagers, about sexuality, drugs, music, California in the sixties, and yes, about family, mention the Manson Family in one way or another, whether we’re always fully aware of it or not.
What is it about Manson, about the Family, that fascinates us and feeds our imaginations, and that hosts a range of artistic and cultural conversations? How and why they do they seem to matter, still, to so many of us? Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl: The Many Lives of America’s Most Infamous Family will explore these questions. While Vincent Bugliosi, Ed Sanders, Jeff Guinn, and others have told and retold the story of the actual movements of Manson and his followers in the second half of the 1960s, what they have not done is offer a sustained exploration of the Manson Family in the deep context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and as a cultural force to this day. How has this small-time con man and his ragtag minions creepy crawled through our social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years now? While Manson and his followers gained their notoriety in connections with the killings of August 9 and 10, 1969, it was creepy crawling, more than murder, that was their emblematic crime, and it is creepy crawling that gives this book its frame.
I want to be clear here that I understand that Manson and the Family are most well-known for the murders of 1969, and that these murders provide an abundance of salacious, terrifying, and bizarre details: the writing in blood on the wall (RISE and the misspelled HEALTER SKELTER at the LaBianca house), the stunning dialogue reported from Cielo Drive, the post-murder snacks and showers at Waverly Drive—there is a generation’s worth of film, fiction, and song built from the basic elements of the crimes. But I am not interested in the crime itself, and this is not a true crime book in any conventional sense. I will not take you back to those two nights when everything came down fast. As will become clear over these pages, I am much more interested in what went down in and around Los Angeles before the murders to bring Manson and the Family into the center of this Southern California culture, and how their crimes and their overall presence have been impossible to shake after their dark fame was established. It is in this light that I focus on creepy crawling rather than murder. The murders were bounded events. They happened, investigations and trials ensued, the convicted were incarcerated. But the creepy crawl never ended: Manson and his followers continue to make challenges to our sense of family, to our legal and judicial systems, to our minds. The Family, in short, has been central to the construction of American identity from the last days of the 1960s through our own time.
What the Family meant by creepy crawling was at once simple and profoundly upsetting. Leaving their communal home at Spahn Ranch in the San Fernando Valley, the Family would light out for private homes. Once inside, the Family members would not harm the sleeping family members. Instead, they would rearrange some of the furniture. That’s all. Stealing was sometimes part of the agenda, especially toward the end, but it was not the raison d’être. (At the Manson trial, Family member Linda Kasabian sort of tried to explain this stealing with a spiritual/political framework: “[Y]ou take things which actually belong to you in the beginning, because it actually belongs to everyone.”)2 No dead bodies, no blood on the wall. Just the bare minimum of evidence that the sanctity of the private home had bee
n breached—that the Family had paid a visit to this family. When trial prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the creepy crawl in Helter Skelter (1974), he recounted that he trusted the jury would understand that the creepy crawl was a dress rehearsal for murder. It was not, but that was prosecutor talk, an argument launched by a lawyer who never really stopped trying the case.
The significant cultural legacy of the Manson Family is embodied in the creepy crawl. The central claim of this book is that we have yet to reckon with how much “furniture” the Family has moved around (or had moved around in its name). Our understanding of Manson and the Family’s place in our national history has been too often hampered by cliché, above all that they represented the “end of the sixties,” which is tempting, and convenient: after all, the murders took place in August 1969 and Manson and his confederates were indicted that December. It was the end of the 1960s. But that only gets us so far. There is little question that the Manson Family has held sway (to borrow the title of Zachary Lazar’s Manson-inspired novel, which Lazar borrowed from the Rolling Stones’ own end-of-the-sixties song of the same name) over our minds for almost half a century now. The power of the Manson Family goes well beyond matters of body count and even beyond the manifestly gruesome details of those two August nights—or the night in July when Gary Hinman was killed by Family associate Bobby Beausoleil and a few Family members. When we talk about Manson and his Family we only sometimes talk about Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Rosemary LaBianca, and Leno LaBianca. While those seven tragic deaths certainly form one starting point for all the conversations we have about the Spahn Ranch commune, their details tell little about how we use Manson, Squeaky Fromme, Sadie Mae Glutz, Cupid, Ouisch, Snake, Tex, and all the rest in these wide-ranging and weighty discussions.
The Family appears so many places, communicating so many different claims about who we are, what we fear, and how we got here, that is has long been necessary to develop a key to crack the Manson Code. My hope is that Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl provides that key. The central job the book takes on is a kind of detective work that Vincent Bugliosi was not inclined or trained to do. Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl starts with the same question that Helter Skelter, and really all mystery stories, are organized around: whodunit? The major difference between these works and mine is that they are interested in the question of “who” and I accept that we already know that (sort of). The question we really need to attack has to do with the “it”: what is the “it” exactly that we are accusing Manson and the Family of having done? Murder, of course, but what else? Misreading song lyrics? Eating garbage? Having too much sex? Doing too many drugs? Loving one another?