Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Of course “the sixties” did not “die.” The decade ended, as decades do—that is, if you believe in time as linear and coherent. What Manson did was offer an opportunity for plenty of people, situated all over the social spectrum, to wipe their brows, exhale a sigh of relief, and retreat into their privileged positions of (relative) individual power. Few have written more trenchantly about the abandonment and suppression of this era’s modes of cultural resistance than Jonathan Crary, who fiercely defends the anti-consumerism and collectivization that marked the sixties. Crary mourns the loss (or renunciation) of the insight that “happiness could be unrelated to ownership, to acquiring products or to individual status.” In an analysis that is not about the Manson Family in any direct way, Crary offers a remarkably useful framework for understanding the threat they posed (and the decades-long effort to characterize the Family as only the dark culmination of evil forces that had shot through the entire culture). As Crary puts it, “new forms of association” such as communes “introduced at least a limited permeability of social class and a range of affronts to the sanctity of private property.” The Manson murders did not “end” the 1960s but rather helped build an arena for what Crary calls the “counter-revolution”—a terrible backlash that has been constituted, at least in part, by the “elimination or the financialization of social arrangements that had previously supported many kinds of cooperative activity.”22 What Crary says about communal life in general has been devastatingly true about the Manson Family: it has become impossible to think of anything having to do with them outside of the notion that the group represented a terrifying caricature of the dominant culture. Where Richard Schechner and his Performance Group took the challenge of the Manson Family seriously and wrestled with questions it raised about collective living and power, few others in the aftermath of the murders were willing to do anything but run screaming.23

  Emma Cline’s 2016 novel The Girls is one good corrective to this: among other things, Cline is able to suggest, tentatively at least, that the women of the Manson Family were able to construct autonomous pockets of activity marked by sisterly support and thrilling unconventionality. The work of Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl is to build on the challenges made by Phil Proctor, Emma Cline, and a handful of others who have refused to place their bets on the conventional wisdom about this moment, and have chosen instead to explore how we have continued to live with all the messy complexities presented by the case.

  Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl moves all over the geographical map and all over the cultural map. Charles Manson and the many women (and a few men) who joined him are central characters in my account, but here they share space with many others on the complex landscape of a broader cultural history. A roll call of some key figures in the book might help give some sense of the scope: there is the late Vincent Bugliosi, of course, along with his freaky shadow, the poet and provocateur Ed Sanders, whose book The Family (1971) was the first major work published on the case. While Sanders has no doubt played an important role in our understanding of the power of the Family, it is Bugliosi who requires the larger portion of my attention. Manson’s conviction for his role as mastermind of the Tate-LaBianca murders was delivered in early 1971; over the next five years Vincent Bugliosi continued to prosecute him—in public appearances, documentary films, and most significantly by far, in the book (1974) and televised (1976) versions of Helter Skelter. If these two immensely appealing texts frightened a generation of young people, including me (quick experiment: do a Google search of “helter,” “skelter,” and “bejesus”), Bugliosi’s work also promoted a “true” crime narrative that brought the horrifying threat of Manson and his Family to light only to show how utterly that threat had been contained—mostly by the good work of an energetic prosecutor. And yet the Manson Family creepy crawl has continued unabated.

  Another prominent figure in the book is Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day and a prominent music producer. Manson was a talented amateur songwriter and musician (Neil Young thought he could have been great with the right band and the proper production) who invested in the fantasy that Melcher would provide him with access to music-industry glory. Melcher, who worked with the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders, among others, was first introduced to Manson by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who had become close to the Family, even letting a few of them live at his house for a while. Melcher got creepy crawled by the Manson Family in more than one way. In fact, aside from the seven people actually killed in August 1969 and members of the Family itself, there are few people who appear to have been as devastated by their contact with Manson as Melcher was. This privileged young man previously had counted himself—with the hunky Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and their mutual friend Gregg Jakobson—a charter member of a group whose reason for being was captured in its name: the Golden Penetrators.

  But Melcher seems to have lost his cockiness fairly quickly after encountering Manson. Melcher visited Spahn Ranch officially to see what he thought about Manson’s potential as a recording artist. That was not going to happen, of course: Melcher left the ranch lighter by fifty dollars (“they looked hungry,” he told Vincent Bugliosi at Tex Watson’s trial) and with something of a crush on Ruth Anne “Ouisch” Moorehouse, who was probably seventeen when Melcher met her. For quite some time after the murders, before deputy district attorney Bugliosi would unveil his Helter Skelter scenario, the dominant explanation of Manson’s motivation in sending his followers out to kill was that he was exacting revenge on Melcher for dashing his music business dreams.

  Melcher lived, but the Family was not done with him. According to numerous reports, they creepy crawled the Malibu home of Doris Day, where Melcher and his girlfriend Candice Bergen had gone to live after leaving their Benedict Canyon house on Cielo Drive, a house soon to be occupied by Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. What is clear from all available evidence is that Melcher, a perfect representative of the rising class of cultural movers and shakers in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, was undone by the Manson Family. In Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl I present an underappreciated story of how the Manson Family interacted with the new elite of Los Angeles (and beyond), separated by deep fissures of class, but trying to work out new methods of interaction. The scope and number of such meetings in and around the Manson case—before and after the murders—are staggering. Not just Melcher, but also Dennis Wilson and Dennis Hopper, Neil Young, and many others met with Manson and various members of his Family; Joan Didion met with Linda Kasabian; Kenneth Anger (and later Truman Capote) met with Bobby Beausoleil; filmmaker John Waters met with Leslie Van Houten.

  Terry Melcher spent years after the Tate-LaBianca killings trying to sort out his relationship to the Manson Family. I move Melcher from the margins of this story to the center, because he stands as the best example of how the Manson Family reorganized the cultural landscape of Los Angeles in their moment of fullest social integration and also continued to shape individual consciousness and artistic productions for years to come. Melcher treated Manson and the Family as if they were part of his entourage—as “groupies,” really. But Charles Manson creepy crawled from the fringes of the culture industry and insinuated himself into the center of Southern California’s cultural life for a brief but significant moment. Whatever delusions might have accompanied his travels through the rock-and-roll clubs, homes, and studios of Los Angeles, it is clear that Charles Manson had taken the notion that the music world was characterized by class fluidity, that it was an arena where talent and charisma and commitment would be rewarded. But these Wilson brothers, these children of Doris Day and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, were not so eager to see the gates opened to all freaky comers. While some report that Manson and perhaps Tex Watson socialized at 10050 Cielo Drive, ultimately Watson would have to scale those gates by brute force when the Family wanted to make its most dramatic impression.

  Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl is not a straightforward narrative history of the Manson case. We have shelves groanin
g under the weight of Manson true-crime books, memoirs, and biographies. I’m more interested in sifting through the contexts and the implications of the murders, life at the Ranch, the Family in Los Angeles, the way the case shaped modern true-crime literature, and the place Manson has come to play in American popular and “high” art. While I follow a roughly chronological scheme in Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl, a central point is that Manson (as Mojo Nixon sang about Elvis in 1987) is everywhere.

  I have been living with the Family since I first discovered Helter Skelter on my parents’ bookshelf in the mid-1970s and watched the 1976 miniseries. (Helter Skelter was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I know I am not the only child to read Bugliosi and Piers Paul Read’s Alive at far too young an age.) I have made my way through piles of pulp and literary novels, watched a scary number of 1970s splatter films, tracked down every hip-hop Manson shout-out I can find (and listened to one hip-hop collective called the Manson Family and one group known as Heltah Skeltah), immersed myself in the vast literature that developed in the early 1970s about runaway youth and communes, figured out the relationship of the Pixies’ 1989 song “Wave of Mutilation” to Manson and the Beach Boys, read true-crime accounts of the Family that predated even Ed Sanders’s work, collected all Manson-related rumors I could find, and spent hours puzzling over a sculpture made by John Waters featuring baby-Manson and baby-Michael Jackson playing together.

  I came to the project knowing that significant courtroom dramas often come to hold a remarkable amount of cultural energy. Since I developed a deep interest in the Sacco and Vanzetti case as an undergraduate, and the Leo Frank case some years later, I have rarely moved far from my commitment to teach and write about major trials and their cultural fallout. Manson, though sentenced to death at his original trial, had his sentence commuted in 1972 when California changed its death-penalty law. But increasingly the actual Manson has become an unimportant shadow of our “cultural” Manson. This is how cultural history often works: the presence of the real cannot help but enter into a dialogue—often a very thrilling, productive, and colorful dialogue—with the claims of the fictional.

  That dialogue is very much at the heart of Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl. Cultural meaning develops in fits and starts, not so much with clear, defining moments or conclusive statements, but rather out of tensions, eruptions, projections, and contradictions. The obsessive interest American artists and audiences have demonstrated for Manson and his girls is not a simple matter of “attraction,” nor can it easily be dismissed as rubbernecking repulsion. What makes it fascinating, to me as a cultural historian, is its capacity. If I might flirt with a cliché for a moment, it might be said that the Manson Family is not a historical destination, but a vehicle. In Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl, we will find ourselves riding in dune buggies to all sorts of interesting places, from meaningful countercultural margins to the absolute dead center of Americans’ efforts to define themselves in a time of great chaos.

  The book is divided into four main parts. In the first section, “Creepy Crawling Family,” I get right down to business and try to start figuring out how Charles Manson and his Family have shaped all of our families in the half century or so that they came to public consciousness. While Manson himself has consistently denied that he ever referred to his Spahn Ranch collective as a “family,” this group of young people not only came to be called “the Family,” but were generally understood as having launched a major challenge to the conventional family of modern America. In this opening section of Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl I explore how Manson and his “girls” emerged as a nightmare vision of what had gone wrong with American households in the late 1960s. The fact that these young women still generally get called “girls”—in historical narratives, in film, and in fiction—begins to hint at our confusion regarding who they were and how they lived. There was a wide range of women who came to be known as the Manson girls: some were exploited and abused minors, while others (Catherine “Gypsy” Share comes to mind) seem to have exercised a fair amount of power in the Family context. The “girls” were vulnerable runaways, pragmatic sister-wives, and terrifying tricksters. In an era when the basic terms of what counted as a family were being rearticulated, the women of the Family were offering complex evidence about how these social negotiations might play out in real time.

  This was a patriarchal clan, and Manson was, by far, its most powerful man. One of the most uncomfortable truths presented to us by the members of the Family is that their families of origin were also characterized by numerous broken taboos and trespasses of various significant boundaries. After the Tate-LaBianca murders came to light, numerous attempts were made to marginalize and pathologize the everyday life of the Family. But a preponderance of evidence suggests that the Family operated in many recognizable “family” ways—doing important socializing over meals, following the dictates of a central male figure, and so on. A caricature of the nuclear and patriarchal family to be sure, the Spahn Ranch community also shined a bright light on some major contradictions of the sexual- and gender-liberation movements of the late 1960s.

  Among other things, the group that settled at Spahn Ranch was what was generally called a commune in the late 1960s. The Manson Family created a problem that never really went away for other countercultural groups settling in communes on ranches, farms, and in urban settings. As Neil Young would later say, “It was the ugly side of the Maharishi. There’s this one side, with flowers and white robes, then there’s something that looks a lot like it, but isn’t at all.”24 Additionally, although rarely discussed in a focused way, a good number of Manson’s young compatriots were runaways. The problem of the runaway formed a major crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a great deal of political and media attention was expended on attempts to diagnose and solve this problem. Manson’s girls hardly ever received the sympathetic attention bestowed on other runaways, but it is important to stitch them into this history in order to explore the possibility that they deserved something more humane and nuanced than the severe neglect and punishment that came their way. Over the course of this section I try to reckon with how this one infamous Family contributed crucial data to an ongoing conversation about how families should be organized and how their members should act.

  In the second section of the book, “Creepy Crawling Los Angeles,” I put the Family in its proper place—the chaotic, fascinating, and ultimately punishing world of Southern California in the second half of the 1960s. Here I examine in detail how the Tate-LaBianca killings forced observers to envision California as both a place of horror and darkness and as a landscape of creation. What did Manson and the Family do to—and get from—the rising class of creative artists (mostly in the film and music industries) as they creepy crawled through the Valley and the canyons, the Strip, and the beach? While Ed Sanders, Vincent Bugliosi, and so many others have pushed us to think of the Manson collective as a sort of marginal eruption—a social disease—here I put them back where they belong, near the center of the cultural life of Los Angeles in the last few years of the 1960s. Manson used the power he held over his young female acolytes to carve out a temporarily comfortable place for himself in and around Los Angeles. I offer up a much more detailed picture than previously available of the social hierarchy of a transforming Los Angeles and how Manson slotted himself into this fluid social order.

  Manson and his followers operated in an interesting space in this new Los Angeles. They were not rock stars or film actors (though Bobby Beausoleil had already enjoyed some success as a musician, and he and Catherine Share had both appeared in a softcore porn film—shot, coincidentally, at Spahn Ranch). Nor were they simply—or only—the kind of devoted fans often referred to as groupies (although Family member Cathy “Cappy” Gillies may have been, with Buffalo Springfield). While I have mentioned that Neil Young is the rare celebrity willing to describe Manson as occupying a central role in the social and cultural world of hip Los Angeles, there
is plenty of evidence that the “scruffy little guru,” in the words of one Beach Boy, assimilated quite well. Manson donned the mantle of the “freak,” an identity related to but distinct from “hippie,” as he made his way into the hearts, minds, and homes of some of the most powerful players in Los Angeles. I also discuss how fully and quickly this loose collective of “freaks” was ejected from the center. It did not take long for an informal conspiracy of denial to take hold, as many of the young power brokers guiding the direction of the entertainment industries worked to expel the traces of Manson from their midst. These people—from major actors to a wide range of LA musicians—have been upfront about their backlash against young freaks: no more picking up hitchhikers, no more open doors in the canyon, no more crash pads.

  In Part Three, “Creepy Crawling Truth,” I take a look at the complex ways the Manson Family has become a central figure in true-crime writing of the past forty-five years. Here I explain how Manson has captivated audiences, mostly through the strategic work carried out by Vincent Bugliosi inside and, more significantly, outside the courtroom. For too long Bugliosi has appeared as an objective reporter, a sort of “just the facts, ma’am” figure. But the prosecutor was a complex character, and in this section I reintroduce him as such. There are really two main characters in this section: Vincent Bugliosi and Ed Sanders. Bugliosi, of course, was the prosecutor in the original trial and later the coauthor of Helter Skelter. Sanders was a poet, provocateur, rock musician, and reporter for the Los Angeles Free Press, one of the most important alternative newspapers in the country. Sanders, like many other members of the counterculture, initially found Manson and the Family to be sympathetic characters. But Sanders undertook a fascinating journey during his time covering the trial, and ultimately came to denounce Manson. He provides us with a crucial case study for understanding how Manson first creepy crawled his way onto the landscape of the counterculture and then was exorcised by some of its key figures. Sanders has revised his book numerous times and more recently published a (re)hash of it in the form of a biography of Sharon Tate. Like Terry Melcher, Ed Sanders seems never to have really gotten over Manson.