Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  It is important to keep in mind that the sheer fact of our obsessive repetition of Manson lore is a big part of the story I am after here. Sarah Churchwell has written convincingly about such repetition in her book on Marilyn Monroe. “Repetition can itself be a pleasure,” she writes. “It creates and fulfills expectation at the same time, and provides an illusion of control. We get what we were expecting, and what we wanted.”3 When it comes to Manson, it is not just that we ritually retell the facts of the case, or namecheck Manson and his minions in song, story, film, and so on; we use “Manson” as a historical shortcut, a quick and efficient way to tell much larger stories. Here’s an example. Joan Didion was one of the many journalists to find gold in the Manson case. Relatively early on she cozied up to Linda Kasabian who had turned state’s evidence and according to some reports was planning to write a book about the former “Manson girl.” Didion did not write that book, but she did write about the murders at length in The White Album (and I imagine some of you reading this could probably chant this along with me): “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”4 There is plenty to argue with in Didion’s actual “insight” as well as with her writing persona. (Barbara Grizzuti Harrison took care of the latter: “I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorators having pleated instead of gathered her new dining room curtain.”5) I have been researching Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl for some years, and I only wish I had kept count of how many times I came upon these words of Didion, repeated as gospel; without an accurate count, the best I can offer at this point is an indefinite hyperbolic numeral along the lines of “umpteen” or a “gazillion.” (Plenty of observers drew much more modest conclusions than did Didion: for instance, Dean Martin’s daughter Deana, who was very much tied up with rising class of entertainers at the center of the Hollywood scene, remembers assuming that the Tate murders were likely the outcome of a “drug-crazed” burglary gone wrong.)6

  Charles Manson and members of his Family were convicted in 1971 for crimes connected to seven murders committed in August 1969. From the time Manson and his followers were arrested up until today, the Family has also regularly been prosecuted for killing the counterculture, the “free” love movement, hitchhiking, the freak scene, and the 1960s as a whole. Along with the doomed concert sponsored by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway in California just a few days after the decisive break in solving the case, Manson quickly became a punchline and an epitaph. The spectacular murders of August 9 and 10, 1969, five at the Cielo Drive home shared by actor Sharon Tate and director Roman Polanski, and then two at the Waverly Drive home of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca the next night, contributed an enormous amount of energy to a story that got told over and over again, in many different forms, about how this was a tragic but necessary reboot: the counterculture had gone “too far” and these murders were somehow the natural result of too much something—with drugs and sex the most commonly cited villains. Critic Rob Sheffield has captured this cultural love affair with putative endings quite elegantly: “Manson-and-Altamont became the new Beatles-and-Stones, providing Nixon’s America with the perfect twin metaphor for why kids were in need of some restraints. You still see Manson and Altamont cited as examples of why freedom doesn’t work.”7 It may or may not be true that Family member Tex Watson announced at Cielo Drive that he was the Devil, doing the Devil’s business; no amount of incorrect repetition can make it be true that “Sympathy for the Devil” was the song the Rolling Stones were playing when the Hells Angels killed audience member Meredith Hunter at the Altamont concert. But insisting that “Sympathy for the Devil” was in the air sure makes for a good story.8

  Decades are weird and unstable fictions. Michael Denning has reminded us that “decades are by no means the most adequate way of periodizing cultural history” and encourages us to think (in his example about what we usually refer to as “the thirties”) about “generations” instead.9 But it long ago became commonplace to refer to the period from around 1965 to 1974 or so as “the sixties”; the cultural investment in the sixties is focused on organized liberation movements and countercultural challenges to mainstream traditions, morality, and rituals. And it is in this framework that Manson is alleged to have done his dirty deeds. Insofar as we have developed a collective belief in a meaningful and recognizable stretch of time that we agree to call “the sixties,” there is a surprising consensus that Manson somehow helped to end the era. The stunning amount of investment that has been made in this construction should remind us above all that plenty of people were really eager to shut the door not just on Manson but on all the hippies, Yippies, and freaks he came to stand for. For sheer destruction of human life, the Tate-LaBianca murders do not rise to the level of the daily horrors inflicted at the same time by American forces in Vietnam, but we do not have the same tendency to imagine that this war “killed the sixties.” The uncomfortable truth is that Manson was quickly converted into a weapon used to discipline the unruly generation in which he had immersed himself.

  Joan Didion’s words have contributed a great deal of energy to this cultural effort. This apocalyptic tale-telling had a clear case to make about the promiscuous cultural mixing that had been rife in the previous half decade. As the story goes, this was all bound to lead to a crack-up. Didion has not carried the torch by herself, of course. The end-of-the-sixties rhetoric has become a standard feature in voice-over documentary narration (what Twitter regulars have come to refer to more generally as Ron Howard voice), in journalistic feature stories, and in the work of plenty of professional scholars such as Todd Gitlin, who frames his reading of the Manson affair as belonging in the “realm of the demonic”: “There was a sense of doom in the air,” Gitlin informs us. “The culture,” Gitlin explains, was “full of intimations of ending.” A “hunger for an end.”10

  Newspaper coverage in the moment of Manson’s arrest was much less likely to indulge in this kind of mythmaking. Take, for instance, an article that appeared in the Sandusky Register (Ohio) in mid-December, 1969, under the headline HOLLYWOOD: WHERE ALL WALKS OF LIFE MINGLE. This wire-service story made a clear case that one way to understand the Tate murders was as an unfortunate side effect of the relative cultural openness of Hollywood. This center of film and music production, according to the article, is a community where a person’s “pedigree or background is of no consequence.” One result is that the area is particularly vulnerable to “bums, losers, drifters and hustlers.”11 A similar story appeared a day earlier in the Raleigh Register (West Virginia) written by UPI’s Hollywood columnist, Vernon Scott. Scott’s basic take was that in Hollywood it was too easy for untrustworthy people to insinuate themselves into elite culture because (unlike in, say, Denver) there are no “background checks” or “questionnaires” to fill out.12 To put it simply, the crimes of Manson and the Family very quickly made a very big impact in national and local media across the United States.

  I don’t want to take up too much space in this introduction prosecuting a case against Didion, Gitlin, and their latter-day followers who want to use the Manson moment as an occasion to shut the door on a number of the most ambitious movements and social experiments of the 1960s. There are plenty of Latin phrases you could throw at these forces of simplification and generalization (post hoc ergo propter hoc, for example), but what I care most about is how they participate in building a cult(ure) of Manson. The creepy crawls were short-term and episodic, but the whole point of this book is that even locking up a number of the key members of the Family has not done much to expel Manson from our midst. From Didion to Sanders to Bugliosi to the dozens, if not hundreds, of artists who have kept him present in our midst, the creepy crawl abides. Manson’s Family have proven to
be the (uninvited) guests who never leave.

  There is a video found in the AP archive dated 1971 (and now on YouTube) that shows five women associated with Manson literally crawling through the streets of Los Angeles. This is, as the AP record puts it, a “stunt”—the young women are making sure that the people of Los Angeles know that even with their sisters and brothers behind bars, the creepy crawl lives on. It is pretty fascinating to track the reactions of the people they encounter. First a young man walks by, content with the apple he is eating and not paying much attention to the crawling women: this is Los Angeles and who knows what else he has seen on his walk. Then, after the camera shows us that they are crossing the intersection against the “Don’t Walk” sign, we see the Family women pass a very square-looking white woman in matching sweater and skirt, white handbag slung over her forearm. This woman makes a slightly alarmed move to give these crawlers a wide berth, but then cannot help but turn back in order to get another look at the fascinating sight. At the same time, two youngish looking African Americans pass the women but appear not to even notice them. On the next block a fairly hip group of young white people comes out of an office building to watch the show. For the most part they are having a good time, except for one woman who is nervously chewing on her fingers. Two construction workers continue to do their work. A woman with a brown paper sack catches up to the crawlers and bends down to feed one of them; it is not clear if she is part of the stunt or not. The final significant figure, who I hope received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in some alternate universe, appears in the final seconds of the clip. He is white and middle-aged. He is mostly bald and his pants are hiked up a little bit higher than the national average. When we first see him he is pointing with alarm at the group—it seems possible he is trying to enlist somebody else to help him rectify the situation. But then we see him again as he crosses the street to get closer to the action: with one of the most eloquent shrugs in film history, this Angeleno has undergone a change of attitude. Our furniture is being rearranged, his shrug seems to say, and I guess there is not a damn thing we can do about it. Over the course of the 1970s it got more and more difficult to shrug the Family off. We wrestle again and again with what the new arrangement of furniture means.

  How wonderfully apt that Manson’s most lasting cultural innovation was named after a Mattel product that now regularly shows up on lists of the most dangerous toys ever produced. The Creepy Crawlers were toy bugs, made of cooked molded plastic. Things got hot and hands got burned. There was something big going on (“We get to use a really hot oven”) and something really little too (“Mine is grosser looking than yours”). The Family’s creepy crawlers similarly combined elements of serious adult activity—the challenging of the boundaries of middle-class safety and private property—and carnivalesque kid stuff (“Let’s watch them sleep!”). In a strange and captivating way, the Manson Family has combined elements of adolescent precocity and adult infantilization. This cultural stew has proven to be relentlessly compelling.

  Over the years, Charles Manson himself has regularly alternated between describing himself as a mythologically endowed Bad Man and as a simple, almost childlike ward of the state. At a 1981 parole hearing, Manson insisted to the board, “I don’t read or write too good and I’ve stayed like a little kid. I stopped thinking in 1954.” On the other hand, some ten years later he told a similar group, “I’m an outlaw . . . and I’m a gangster and I’m bad.”13 But the wild variations in Manson’s self-presentation (you can track the evolution in the hair, the beard, the giggle and the cackle with very little effort via YouTube) have not had all that much of an influence on the larger culture’s habitual invocations of California’s most famous convict or of his followers. The Manson Family lets us talk about the banal unholy trinity (sex, drugs, rock and roll) in all its many forms, but also about historical time itself: they are the main characters in an origin story about the end of the 1960s.

  Novelist Tony O’Neill has gotten at this quite efficiently in Sick City (2010), in which he has a character ruminate that “over the years the whole fucking incident got so mythologized that it’s almost like it never happened in concrete reality. Like it was always some fucking awful movie about the death of the sixties.” O’Neill’s own failure of imagination (well, maybe it is actually Ed Sanders’s limited imagination he is borrowing) won’t let him get much beyond this insight; all he can really come up with is that maybe there were other actual movies that got lost in the chaos of the moment—movies that showed a party at which “everybody takes off their clothes”—even Mama Cass—to “take a pop” at Sharon Tate.14 But for the most part it has been nearly impossible to avoid superficial summaries—such as the one offered up by television journalist Diane Sawyer in 1994—that these murders embodied a “savagery that brought an end to the decade of love.”15 The “decade of love,” apparently, had been able to live through the firehoses turned on civil-rights marchers, a handful of heartbreaking assassinations, and a desperately brutal war in Southeast Asia. But it could not make it past some writing in blood on a couple of walls in Southern California.

  Ultimately, while O’Neill briefly resists what he rightly points to as the mythologizing of Manson, he also participates in promoting the rumor culture and literary and journalistic hand-wringing that was ignited in Los Angeles in the second half of 1969 and really took off once prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi started dropping hints about the race-war/Helter Skelter angle. Bugliosi’s linkage of the murders to Manson’s obsessive, delusional Beatles fandom helped turn the end-of-the-1960s hot take into something like conventional wisdom. This is not to say Joan Didion and her disciples have gone unchallenged. Among others, Bobby Beausoleil, who, in his many decades in prison, has provided some of the most incisive commentary on the Family, the crimes, and the cultural fallout, has challenged the approach taken by her and so many others. (“I guess, because I know the truth, to me that explanation seems ridiculously simplified. How can anybody not see through that? Murder by Beatles records—this is what happens if you listen to Beatles’ records and take LSD!? What could be a more blatant attempt to discredit the youth movement of the sixties than that?”)16 But sensible testimony offered by Beausoleil and others cannot even begin to stem the Manson tide. As Curt Rowlett has correctly noted, the arrest, public discussion surrounding, and trial of Charles Manson and members of his Family, helped energize the creation of a consequential new cultural figure, the “crazed hippie”—joining the parallel development of the “crazed returning veteran.” (The most significant appearance of the “crazed hippie” in the immediate wake of Manson’s imprisonment came with the case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, accused of having murdered his wife and two children in early 1970. MacDonald claimed that his family was killed by hippies chanting, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.”)17

  In an earlier book of mine, on American cultural life after 9/11, I recounted a great line Joe Biden used when he was running for president in 2007. Mocking former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s own campaign for the White House, Biden claimed that every sentence Giuliani uttered consisted of “a noun, a verb, and ‘9/11.’” It’s a sick burn and I will shamelessly repurpose it here because in many ways this book seeks to understand the meaning of the many sentences that have been articulated over the past forty-five years or so that consist of a noun, a verb, and “Charles Manson.” Invocations of Manson and his followers are so routine that it becomes interesting to think about how much weight is actually being carried by such references. By exploring this dynamic, the book is in a way an unruly history of our time—a history of the counterculture, but also of the mainstream culture it was in dialogue with, of children and their parents, of rock stars and groupies, of Los Angeles as a vibrant center of American life and also as the site of death and destruction.

  The uncanny thing about repetition—with its alternating currents of pleasure and fear—is that it does not necessarily lead to anything like greater insight. This is why, for all
of the gallons of ink and miles of film and so on that we have devoted to the Manson Family, it still made sense, not that long ago, for Bill James to write that the “cultural impact of the Manson murders is enormously under-appreciated.” But even James cannot get out from under the rhetoric of end-of-the-sixties inevitability: “A culture based on categorical trust and unconditional acceptance was a balloon waiting to burst and Charles Manson was the needle.”18 So wait, the hippies were a balloon? An overfilled balloon? Because? They were too nice? Writer, director, and actor Buck Henry says that the Tate-LaBianca murders were “the defining event of our time”—not Nixon’s 1968 election; the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the escalating war in Vietnam; or the multiple race riots of the second half of the 1960s, but these seven killings. Van Dyke Parks, an associate of the Beach Boys and sui generis musician in his own right, argued that Manson “took a crap in the mess kit” of the 1960s and in doing so “scattered what had been a unified social field.”19 Shitting in our food, popping our balloons, changing our whole damn world—what can’t Charlie Manson do?! With only a smidgen of perturbed hyperbole, Peter Vronsky has summed up this whole tendency by suggesting that Manson and the Family are “the shadow in every baby boomer’s sweet memory of another time long past. Manson represents in our collective consciousness how the sixties came to die.”20 Much more nuanced is Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theater, who resists talk of inevitability and doom and argues more cogently that the Tate-LaBianca murders represented an “aberration and a warning.”21