Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  From soon after the murders down to our own time, Bobby Beausoleil has been one of the most energetic supporters of the notion that Manson and his followers did form a family. Beausoleil is a fascinating figure in the story of the Manson Family. He was not a member of the immediate Family but something like a close cousin. Unlike Manson, he seems to have been generally understood to be a talented and professionally competent musician. Among other things Beausoleil played guitar in a band called the Grass Roots (not the “Let’s Live for Today” Grass Roots, but a different ensemble) that featured Arthur Lee, later to front the important psychedelic act Love. He seems to have exerted something like Manson’s power—without the spiritual mumbo-jumbo—over the women who joined him. As with virtually every single issue related to the Manson Family, its crimes, and its motivations, it is absolutely necessary to take insider testimony (from Family members, from Vincent Bugliosi, from Terry Melcher, and so on) as motivated and partial. In Beausoleil’s case it is especially important to understand that once he went to prison he seems to have enjoyed, at least at times, the opportunity to play the trickster. This is especially true for the interview Beausoleil gave to Truman Capote in the early 1970s, ultimately published in Music for Chameleons, which is full of rhetorical acrobatics (not to mention Capote’s sly and provocative fictionalizing). Beausoleil has, in the years since the Capote interview, seriously challenged its veracity. But here (and elsewhere) Beausoleil is quite straightforward about his role at the center of the Manson family’s crisis:

  The girls got on the stand and tried to really tell how it all came down, but nobody would listen. People couldn’t believe anything except what the media said. The media had them programmed to believe it all happened because we were out to start a race war. That it was mean niggers going around hurting all these good white folk. Only—it was like you say. The media, they called us a “family.” And it was the only true thing they said. We were a family. We were mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son. If a member of our family was in jeopardy, we didn’t abandon that person. And so for the love of a brother, a brother who was in jail on a murder rap, all those killings came down.

  If our acceptance of the Beausoleil hypothesis (and our understanding of Manson and his followers as a family) must rely on the words of insiders with complex motivations, it is important to remember that the “love of brother” motive is not exculpatory: it is explanatory. In the wake of the arrests and the challenge to the workings of the Family as it had been most recently constituted at Spahn and Barker ranches, it seems to have been a matter of real moment for many of the key players to explain who they were and why they had acted as they did.19

  What these people wanted to make clear—Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil, along with Patricia Krenwinkel, Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, Mary Brunner, Catherine Share, Sandra Good, Paul Watkins, Lynette Fromme, and many others—is that, whether or not they used the word “family,” they had been living for an extended period of time connected by an ethic of nurture and commitment. In her late 1970s, post-conversion autobiography, Susan Atkins insisted that their Family had much in common with conventional ones, explaining approvingly that Barbara Hoyt introduced her to Manson’s group in the Haight by telling her “this is another kind of family—a real one. We all live together and take care of one another.”20 The Manson Family, according to Atkins, followed many recognizable protocols; dinner, she writes, “was an important time for us—the time when we overtly drew together as a community or family.”21 Members of the Family procured, prepared, and ate food together; they made plans for the future; they gave birth to and began raising children according to their own sense of what was best; they fought among themselves and deferred to the authority of their powerful male leader.

  It has become commonplace in accounts of the Manson Family to call attention to the difficult situations many of its members had experienced in their families of origin. Again, Donald Nielsen offers an apt summary: “in general their families of origin were experienced as damaged and troubled, either because of the death, divorce, or other absence of one parent, or the extreme domination of father over mother, or some other variant of asymmetry between parental roles.”22 Manson himself faced horrifying tribulations as a boy and teenager; speculation about just how bad has become something of a cottage industry for biographers and fiction writers. Many of the young women who joined Manson either lost parents to death, or suffered extreme abuse or neglect. Perhaps none suffered more family loss than Catherine “Gypsy” Share. According to Vincent Bugliosi, Share’s birth parents were both members of the French Resistance and committed suicide during World War II. Her adoptive mother, a French woman who married an American man, was diagnosed with cancer during Share’s teenage years and committed suicide when the young woman was sixteen.23

  These individual stories of affliction rarely led to sympathy for Manson or the women. Observers were much more likely to indulge in blaming expressions of dime-store psychology. Here is a real piece of analysis offered up by an accredited psychiatrist in 1970: “They formed the ‘bad’ family, in caricature of their parents. It was a schizophrenic family, the outgrowth of early emotional deprivation. They were, in a sense, reenacting the primal scene. To a child’s irrational mind, the sex act resembles a man trying to murder a woman (or a woman killing a man depending on the sexual position).” This “expert” witness, writing in a book called I Hate My Parents: The Real and Unreal Reasons Why Youth Is Angry, also suggested that Susan Atkins’s killing of Sharon Tate’s fetus might have been a displaced reenactment of how she felt when “her mother got pregnant with her little brother.”24 Maybe.

  David E. Smith also wrote psychodynamically about Manson in his 1971 book on the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, drawing on his own observation of the Family and on input from other professionals. Smith concluded that Manson was a delusional schizophrenic. He was, according to this account, trying to “find his parents” through a complex process whereby he would become “a parent himself to younger and weaker people . . . thereby nurturing himself by proxy.”25 Psychology, in short, was no help. Charles Manson had been the object of psychiatric reporting since at least 1951 (as biographer Jeff Guinn makes clear), and there has rarely been anything that could pass for helpful insight about his behavior in any of this writing. Manson himself told John Gilmore that when he was released from prison and found his way to the Haight-Ashbury he was gratified to meet some hippies who looked up to him: “I had someone to protect.”26 But Manson’s own dime-store psychologizing seems no more trustworthy than that published by actual trained professionals.

  Professional and amateur sociologists and historians of the family have much more to offer us than the psychoanalysts do. Radical activist Abbie Hoffman, for instance, understood by the late 1960s that much of what was taking place on the larger political landscape was energized by more localized battles taking place between parents and children. Hoffman was one of the major proponents of the idea that runaway teenagers were at the vanguard of social revolution—modern actors in what he came to call a “slave revolt.”27 Hoffman was also among the many who worried early and often about what kind of “surrogate” families the young people were finding when they reached the Haight, the Village, and other countercultural zones.28 Ed Sanders shared this concern, describing the vulnerable flower children as being akin to “plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.”29

  If we are going to understand anything about how the breaking news of the Manson Family’s alleged crimes in the second half of 1969 circulated, we will have to understand just how widely held was the belief that the American family was in decline, if not utter chaos in this era. As historian Natasha Zaretsky explains, the alarm about the family “emerged out of the cultural ferment of the 1960s.” The so-called traditional family was under perceived attack from the women’s liberation movement, which expanded on Engels’s vision of the subordination of women as endemic to life in the famil
y under capitalism, and from the gay liberation movement, which made demands vis-à-vis “love, sexuality, and kinship” that could not be satisfied within the bounds of the conventional heterosexual family. According to Zaretsky, “Policymakers and social scientists claimed the institution of the family was under unprecedented strain.”30 One of the major elements of “crisis” obsessively repeated in these cultural conversations had to do with the absence or relative disengagement of fathers from American family life: by the early 1970s one in six American children was growing up in a family without a father; even fathers who were literally present were described by many observers as being alienated from and inaccessible to their children.31 For his part, Manson always recognized that his own fatherlessness made him immediately suspect and tried, in his statement, to transform his experience into a critique of the cruel realities of American jurisprudence: “My father is the jailhouse,” Manson said. “My father is your system.”32 Attempts to reckon with changes in American family life—changes wrought by the expanding presence of women in the paid workforce and changes wrought by a devastating shift to what would only some years later be recognized as a decades-in-the-making conversion to a post-industrial labor system—erupted into a panicky, multifront attempt to sort out just what had gone wrong.33 The Tate-LaBianca murders were not infrequently brought into the hysterical discussion, as when one tabloid in the early 1970s insisted that not only were there “Twenty Million Charlie Mansons Running Loose” in the United States but that the cause was clear: “Doctors Say Parents to Blame.”34

  The young women followers of Charles Manson broke all sorts of mainstream norms regarding sexual activity, appearance, drug use, and consumerism. But it is likely the alleged violence of some of them that most disturbed the wider public. Some of the Family women, after all, were convicted of killing a pregnant woman, who begged for the life of her baby. It seems fairly clear that the fear created by the Manson girls was complexly tied up with social anxieties about women’s liberation. Ann Jones has written persuasively about a destructive rhetoric that developed in the 1970s (mostly rooted in the work of criminologist Freda Adler) that essentially blamed the rise in crimes committed by women on the women’s liberation movement. Seeing causation instead of a highly motivated anti-feminist correlation, Adler described the rise in crime as the “shady aspect of liberation.”35 Whatever sympathy the Manson women might have accessed as young women was forfeited because they had too much non-monogamous sex and then murdered a pregnant woman.36

  The alleged crisis in the family was addressed in multiple contexts—from children’s television shows to government-sponsored conferences. Sesame Street debuted in 1969, and viewers of later seasons might be surprised to find out how strongly the show threw in on the side of “traditional” families. In the “Father, Mother, Children” song, which debuted in the first months of its initial season, the puppets gave very clear definitions of each role. The first character to sing is the father, who explains that there are “a few things you need to be a father”: “First of all you need to have a wife.” In addition to being kind and being able to “fix anything,” a father also “buys you food and clothes” and “works all day to get you those.” A mother on the other hand, needs to have a husband, and does not seem to leave the house. The mother puppet explains that “a mother cooks, a mother sews, a mother washes all the clothes.” The main job of the child-puppets is to make clear that this is a conventional nuclear family. Daughter puppet, in addition to making clear that she likes dolls (unlike her rascally brother who is busy making mudpies), announces that she is “a daughter, which means I have a mother and a father”; the son then identifies himself as her brother, which, he explains, means that “we have the same mother and father.” Got that? “Family” means there are no single-parents, no blending, no anything other than mother, father, sister, brother. Sesame Street’s definition of “family” in 1969 had no room for Charles Manson, Catherine Share, Terry Melcher (who grew up with a stepfather), or the Waverly Drive family of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, both of whom came to their second marriage with children born during previous marriages.37

  In the topsy-turvy world of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sesame Street’s family song was the site of norm-setting conservative politics, and the White House was the sponsor of heartfelt, radical efforts to come to grips with the new realities shaping the landscape of family life. The report of the 1970 White House Conference on Children and Youth still has the power to startle for how unblinkingly it confronts the challenges facing American families. The conference was made up of multiple panels of health professionals, politicians, administrators, artists, activists, media figures (Mr. Rogers!), and others. While we know now that virtually nothing recommended by the Conference participants was taken seriously by the government or by private industry, the discussions of family life and the welfare of children remains refreshingly unconventional. Among its many conclusions about why it was so hard to pass legislation and create programs that would support all families is the simple reality that “family” was still being defined in far too narrow and traditional a way as “the nuclear household of husband, wife, and their children—the male the breadwinner and the female the homemaker.” This report noted that representatives of official culture too readily and too regularly assumed “that this type of home environment is the best for the child.” With a daring directness, this subcommittee asserted that “children can and do flourish in many family forms other than the traditional nuclear structure.”38

  What is perhaps most striking about the committee reports is how fully they signed on to a progressive vision of how a family could be constituted. It is worth remembering that this report was issued just five years after the release of the so-called “Moynihan Report,” which argued, among other things, that African American youths were being raised in a “tangle of pathology” caused mostly by the matrifocality of Black family life. The White House Conference on Children and Youth, accepted as a given that a family could be “single parent, traditional, dual work” or even “commune.” While the report made clear that the participants in the conference believed that “the majority of children can find the conditions for character and personality development in the nuclear family,” it was also important to establish that their recommendations for changes in policy, social infrastructure, and consciousness did not “favor any particular family form.” (The report never makes clear whether this openness can apply to all families or is, rather, a privilege of whiteness.) As such, the report advocated unequivocally for the government to help “make visible the increased variability in family forms and to recognize the right of individuals to live in any family form they feel will increase their options for self-fulfillment.”

  This White House Conference did not only encourage the government to recognize changes in family structure and behaviors that had developed on an ad hoc basis during the years immediately preceding its meeting. The report also made clear that the executive and legislative branches had to get in the business, actively, of helping to sustain nontraditional families. In essence, the argument contained in the pages of the report argued for what, in the 1980s, would come to be called “wraparound programs”—community-based centers that would help tend to the educational, social, cultural, and health concerns of all children and their families. The conference suggested explicitly that the US Government needed to begin creating a model of what it called the “human service center,” which would “provide a new approach to the socially isolated and the alienated and hopefully could partially replace the extended family and neighborhood supports of the past.”

  Instead of wringing hands over the decline or destruction of the “traditional” family, the White House Conference on Children and Youth implicitly acknowledged that “family” is always evolving, both in theory and in practice. The “quasi-familial institution” of the community center (which strangely, the subcommittee suggested might be housed in a variety of s
ites, including a department store!) was not meant as a band-aid for wounded families or as a consolation prize for have-not children. To the contrary, the recommendation was built on the premise that the diversity of American experience represented an opportunity for progressive social change that could potentially benefit all children—not only those of the “needy.” The surprising conclusions and progressive suggestions for change made in this report largely went unheeded. They could not begin to calm the pervasive fears that had taken hold that the “crisis” in the family had to be met with swift and decisive rearguard actions.

  Paying attention to this relatively underappreciated moment in American cultural and political life helps us better understand more about how the Manson collective was able to creepy crawl into our homes. The example they provided was consonant with the larger argument being developed in the culture that “real” and “traditional” families were under attack. The Manson Family did not have a coherent spiritual code or theoretical underpinning. Manson never got much beyond regurgitating bits from Scientology, Robert Heinlein, the Process Church, Dale Carnegie, and hippie bromides he encountered in San Francisco. At his trial, Manson insisted that he put no pressure on any young woman to join or stay with his family. According to his account all he did was “let the children loose and follow them. That is what I did . . . . That is what I was doing, following your children, the ones you didn’t want, each and every one of them.”39 Bobby Beausoleil was similarly mystifying, telling John Gilmore (author of an early book on Manson) that what he had done was take young women from the “sterile and plastic world without truth that their mothers and fathers had made for them” and created for them “a whole new world of laughter and song and magic . . . a crazy, tilted, springtime world where love is king.”40 It seems likely Beausoleil was at least partly pulling Gilmore’s leg here, and Manson’s utterances have to be taken in the context of performance; he has never not performed wildly in court appearances and interviews. But the point remains that insofar as Manson and Susan Atkins and all the rest launched a fairly significant protest against traditional belief systems, it was mostly on a very sophomoric level. It is not so hard to shock the bourgeoisie, as the Doors did, with a round of “Father . . . I want to kill you/Mother I want to fuck you.” (Or the other way around for Susan Atkins who, in her first book, wrote of her father that “I know he wanted to have an affair with me, especially after my mother died . . . . I was very well built, very attractive . . . . I actually did want to have an affair with him.”)41 The incoherent nature of the Family’s rebellion should not interfere with our ability to see how its broad cultural creepy crawl helped energize the growing panic about the dissolution of “real” families in the United States. The Family was not an organized or methodical attack on the family. But to many observers it sure felt like it was.