Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  In the book’s final section, “Creepy Crawling Art,” I wrestle with the remarkably robust afterlife of the Manson Family. It is difficult to convey an accurate sense of how amazingly present Charles Manson and the Family have been in the cultural life of the United States from 1969 forward. Manson has been a regular reference point in our discussions of mass murder, the dark arts, California, rock and roll, evil, and sex, just to name a few obvious areas. In this section I first draw a cultural map of all the places the cult leader and his followers have made their presence felt in American culture. Mike Rubin, writing in a fascinating article in Spin in 1994, wondered about the process by which Manson imagery had “creepy-crawled out of the fringes” right into the center of American culture. The only problem with Rubin’s piece is that his basic premise is faulty: from the moment he came to public consciousness in late 1969, Manson has never been far from the heart of things.25

  What I am calling “Manson Art” ranges from serious book-length investigations and extended musical works to (seemingly) thoughtless shout-outs, which on their own might serve to undercut Manson’s scariness but also, collectively, act to underscore the cult leader’s centrality to American conceptions of terror, class, sexuality, race, family, and so on. (There are, for instance, countless contemporary mystery novels that feature a police officer or private investigator saying some version of “I hope we don’t have another Charlie Manson on our hands.”) Signs of Manson and his followers are far-flung and include writing on the wall in blood, unconventional family arrangements, sexy/weird female hippies, and charismatic men with beards and “Southern” accents. Manson never got his musical voice recorded in a culturally significant way and worried about not getting his voice heard during his trial. But his major post-conviction interviews (with Tom Snyder, Geraldo Rivera, Diane Sawyer) have formed an important archive—as stand-alone cultural artifacts and as a deep reservoir of hip-hop samples. For every Killer Mike, using Manson soundbites as basis of serious and sustained political commentary, there are numerous rappers who dip into this material as easily available intensifiers in crime narratives.

  While I try to box the cultural compass in this section, I also suggest that some works of Manson art require more attention than others—either because of their impact or their complexity. Neil Young’s On the Beach (released in 1974, the year of Helter Skelter), for instance, from the dark and hilarious album cover to the music in the grooves, is a prime example of a work of popular art just drenched in Manson. On the Beach represents an effort by a major Los Angeles–identified artist to reckon with the wreckage left behind by the Family. As with so much of the work inspired by Manson, this is the art of “aftermath,” part of a loose, collective effort to sort out what comes after the apocalypse. It is simply impossible to imagine post-1960s American culture without Manson and the Family somewhere near the center.

  Part I

  Creepy Crawling Family: Charles Manson in Our Homes

  Mother Father Sister Brother

  “Picture in your mind that I am your father.” According to Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sadie Mae Glutz, a key early member of Charles Manson’s tribe of followers, this invitation was a crucial part of her initial seduction by Charles Manson in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967. Whatever Manson’s warmed-over Scientology-jargon-as-sexual-come-on lacked in subtlety, it worked exceedingly well on Atkins. “[I]t was,” as Atkins put it during her Grand Jury testimony in December 1969, “a beautiful experience.”1 Atkins’s own father, more or less a blank space, has never commented on the particulars of his daughter’s involvement with Manson except to admit that he had (obviously) miscalculated the danger he posed. In a bit of testimony that seems like it could have been scripted by Damon Runyon, all Edward Atkins was ever able to offer up with respect to why he had not tried to intervene more forcefully in the life of his delinquent daughter is that he thought the young hippies who constituted the Family were just a “slap-happy bunch of kooks.”2 Edward Atkins was not the only “straight” to underestimate the challenge that Manson and his followers were posing to conventional norms of family as they existed in the 1960s.

  While Manson and his girls did not invent sexual liberation, the generation gap, or group marriage (just for instance), after the arrests of 1969 they very quickly came to represent a dark burlesque of the alleged decline of the “traditional” American family. Sociologists, politicians, journalists, and other sympathetic observers were working assiduously in the late 1960s to make it clear that young runaways were, frequently, responding to a staggering number of challenges at home. But a popular discourse developed around the Manson Family that suggested the degradation and downfall of the young women was mostly a result of bad choices made by immature, impulsive, and possibly pathological rebels.3

  There is no unanimity on whether this “slap-happy bunch of kooks” even consistently referred to themselves as a family. In her grand jury testimony, Atkins insisted that “among ourselves we called ourselves the Family, a Family like no other Family.”4 Terry Melcher’s aide-de-camp Gregg Jakobson insists that he was the one who first described the ragtag group at Spahn Ranch as a family. For his part, Charles Manson denies that the group used the word to describe its social arrangement; according to the leader there “was no Manson Family” until the moment of arrest: “There was a music group known as The Family Jams, but . . . that Manson Family thing—the DA put that together.”

  Manson put an even sharper political point on the whole question. What the straight world called “the Family,” its leader insisted, was made up of young people that same world had rejected, “so I took them to my garbage dump.”5

  For their part, Rolling Stone’s reporters wanted its readers in 1970 to know that this was indeed a Family. “The press likes to put the Manson family in quotation marks,” David Dalton and David Felton wrote, but “it’s a real family, with real feelings of devotion, loyalty and disappointment. For Manson and all the others it’s the only family they’ve ever had.”6 Susan Atkins herself would insist on this in her first autobiography, arguing that “family” feelings were developing even before the young renegades moved south from San Francisco to Los Angeles.7

  There were a number of obvious reasons for the American media to flip its collective wig in the wake of the Tate-LaBianca murders and subsequent arrest of Manson and his compatriots. Not least among these is that the freaky residents of Spahn and Barker Ranch most certainly were operating as some kind of family. But from the second half of 1969 until, really, our own time, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, Lynette Fromme, and all the rest have posed a remarkably robust challenge to conventional ideas about what a family should look like and how it should operate. On a very meaningful level Manson and the Family were social entrepreneurs. They recognized that the post–World War II experiment in family reorganization (essentially the move to a male-directed nuclear family that lived under one roof with no other relatives present) had run its relatively short course and needed to be replaced with other forms of collective life. In the late 1960s the Family was surrounded by many others who were also actively innovating new forms to replace the increasingly irrelevant nuclear, patriarchal family. The new institutions created were called “communes” and “crash pads,” “shelters” and “families.” The breakdown in what had been conventionally (and misleadingly) called the “traditional family” contributed a considerable amount of energy to wider conversations taking place all across society that were concerned with child-rearing, gender and power, the best way to live in groups, and sex. These conversations were held at special White House conferences, on television shows, in encounter groups, at universities, and in works of popular psychology. There was a remarkable amount of cultural agreement that the American family was undergoing some kind of paradigm shift. Manson and his followers became grist for this mill even before they gained criminal notoriety in December of 1969.

  David E. Smith, cofounder an
d director of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, engaged in a study of Manson and his followers before they left for Los Angeles in 1968. While he didn’t publish his findings until 1970, it is clear that Smith understood these young people to be launching a major protest against the rigid structures and undernourishing realities of conventional family life. Smith ultimately found much that was troubling about the communal arrangements hammered out by Manson and his followers, and in the article he ultimately published with his cowriter Al Rose in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in 1971, Smith refused to use the term “family” to describe the group he insists was known as “Charlie’s Girls”: “Approximately 20 members of this commune referred to themselves as a ‘family,’ but we have chosen the term ‘group marriage commune’ because of the polygamous sexual relations.”8 Smith, of course, was engaged in some damage control here. As a dedicated countercultural provider, he was interested in creating distance between the Manson Family and the other alternative communities he came into daily contact with through his work at the Haight clinic. But these people were living under one roof (well, on a bus), having sex together in a male-dominated milieu, and procuring and eating food together. They might not have looked much like their own—or Smith’s—families of origin, but they were certainly acting like a family of choice in this late 1960s moment.

  The sociologist Donald Nielsen has helped us to understand why it was so hard to accept that the Manson group was a family. While plenty of cultural commentators were willing to acknowledge, and often mourn, the disappearance of the “traditional” family, most found Manson and his girls simply too unsettling in their modes of interacting. In the aftermath of their arrests, the Manson Family became “objects of terror and titillation,” as Nielsen explains. The upset they caused was largely a result of how their behavior served to confuse “such usually distinct social relations as brother and sister, daughter, husband and wife.”9 The social webs constructed by Manson and his compatriots included elements of standard parent–child relations but also encompassed what Nielsen has called “a whirl of kinship terms.” As a result of this, the members of the Family made it nearly impossible for representatives of straight society to understand them or develop anything like empathy for them.10 If other counterculture upstarts were expanding the rhetoric of brotherhood and sisterhood in the 1960s—often in a recognizably progressive social and political way—Manson and his girls were doing so in an uncomfortably “creepy” way. Elected, appointed, and volunteer representatives of straight culture responded with incomprehension, anger, and discipline. “Incest” was the barely repressed term in all of this: Susan Atkins, of course, was frantically pointing at the missing word in her description of her first sexual encounter with Manson. Agonized attempts to explain what exactly was wrong with the Manson Family in the 1970s and beyond, without using the word incest, act as a poignant reminder that “incest is not the taboo.” As literary scholar Christine Grogan has explained, “it happens too often” for that to be true. What is forbidden is “talking about it.”11

  It has always been much more comfortable to deny that the Family was a family than it has been to acknowledge how its configuration could cast a harsh light on more conventional American families. One obvious result of the refusal to acknowledge this group as a family fed directly into Vincent Bugliosi’s surprising decision to prosecute the Helter Skelter motive. This was a value-added proposition to begin with. The deputy district attorney did not even have to provide motive to get a conviction against Manson. But when it came time to construct his account, Bugliosi landed on what was actually quite an implausible theory: the prosecutor wove together various strands of Manson’s philosophy to suggest the cult leader organized the murders as part of a chaotic effort to inspire a race war that would leave him, essentially, as ruler of the world. Numerous commentators—from active participants in life in the Family to later critics—have attempted to draw attention to the rather left-field nature of Bugliosi’s story.12 Defense attorney Irving Kanarek made cutting reference to the notion promoted by Bugliosi that Manson had instructed Linda Kasabian to drop Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet in a gas station bathroom in Sylmar, mistakenly believing this was a Black neighborhood: “Are we to believe that by means of a wallet found in a toilet tank Mr. Manson intended to start a race war?”13 For his part, and insofar as he has ever given anything like coherent testimony, Manson has been fairly consistent in his claim that the Helter Skelter motive was Bugliosi’s fiction; to the Family, its leader insists, Helter Skelter was simply a song and the name of an “after-hours nightclub” opened at Spahn Ranch “to make money and play some music and do some dancing and singing and play some stuff to make some money for dune buggies to go out in the desert.”14

  What does Bugliosi’s fantastical Helter Skelter theory have to do with the integrity of the Manson clan as a family? Most directly it acted as a sly refusal to acknowledge what so many people saw as the much more obvious explanation for the murders: “love of brother.” Once the Melcher hypothesis was discredited (that is, the idea that the murders were some kind of revenge Manson organized against the record producer for refusing to sign him)—most informed observers were certain that Manson and/or Tex Watson very clearly understood that Melcher had moved out of the Cielo Drive home that Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski now inhabited—it became easier for many to understand that the murders in August may have been intended to call attention away from the Family’s role in the late-July murder of Gary Hinman. The short version of this story is that Hinman was killed by Bobby Beausoleil with the help of Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner (and possible assists from Bruce Davis and Manson himself) as a payback for a drug deal gone bad. The writing the Family members left on Hinman’s wall—POLITICAL PIGGY with a paw print—was itself meant to hint at Black Panther involvement. Once Beausoleil was arrested for the crime, while driving Hinman’s car, the other two nights of murder were carried out as a sort of false flag operation: if people were still being killed, with similar writing in blood left on the walls, then perhaps investigators would conclude that Beausoleil could not possibly be the right suspect in the Hinman murder.

  But Manson and his band of nicknamed followers (Sadie, Squeaky, Ouisch, and the rest) were not a family in any way that Bugliosi was willing to recognize. It is worth noting that Bugliosi introduces himself as an “intruder” in Helter Skelter when he wants to move from being an “unseen narrator” to a character in the drama. After running down the basic facts of his professional resume and his intellectual bona fides, the prosecutor adds, “Married. Two children.”15 Bugliosi trusted that his readers would understand (as he knew the jury he had faced would understand) that Manson had a family too, but that this family was a travesty of “normal” families, an insult to the many people in the dominant culture who could capture their own reality by simply writing, “Married. Two children.” Bugliosi did want to present the Spahn Ranch gang as the Family when it suited his goal of calling attention to what he saw as the delusional heart of the enterprise. But the gate swung shut when it came to allowing for the possibility that this group acted like a regular family, that it displayed loyalty, took risks for each others’ benefit, and so on.

  Why was it so hard for Bugliosi and so many others to accept that, as Donald Nielsen has finally insisted, the Manson Family murdered “out of love”? Nielsen, one of the wisest commentators we have on the case, acknowledges that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter scenario may well “have circulated in some form among the group members, but it certainly was not the actual motive for the Tate-LaBianca crimes. Instead, the motive was more mundane and integrally connected with the issues concerning social experience” in the present, rather than with fantasies about the future. Nielsen reminds us that numerous members of the Family said that the crimes of August were inspired by their loving effort to cover up the murder of Gary Hinman, “but no one could take such an account seriously.”16 None of this is to suggest that we develop any kind of late-game sympathy for th
e people who killed Gary Hinman and the victims at Cielo and Waverly Drives. But rather than continue to accept the seemingly natural logic of Vincent Bugliosi’s Beatles/race-war theory it is important to imagine that the killers acted, in the summer of 1969, out of impulses that may well have been rooted in real family feeling.

  The bulk of Manson’s female followers were born in the first few years of what historians, journalists, and sociologists have come to refer to as the “baby boom.” They were children of the 1950s and their mothers were the women Betty Friedan described as suffering under the “feminine mystique,” that constellation of limiting social expectations she summarized in 1963 as the “problem that has no name.”17 The white, middle-class nuclear family of the 1950s was already being memorialized, mourned, and idealized by the late 1960s. This “elusive traditional family” (as Stephanie Coontz has described it) was the object of all sorts of intense projection during the moment of the Tate-LaBianca murders.18 As the Manson Family came into focus in the late 1960s they served an important social function as a red flag: the Family got waved around as a warning and a call to action. The time was ripe for some retrenchment, some battening of the hatches, some scapegoating. The Spahn Ranch gang simply could not be legitimized as a social unit by the forces shaping mainstream opinion in the United States because of how this would undercut the status-claim of more conventional nuclear families. Vincent Bugliosi and his co-conspirators in the mainstream media worked assiduously to invalidate the notion that Manson and his followers could be understood as part of a wave of emerging alternatives to the much-bruited nuclear family.