Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl
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While plenty of critics have called attention to the distressing sexism of so many New Left and countercultural men (and organizations), Herst’s prose is particularly clear and direct. What is most important for Herst to establish is that the horrifying gender politics organizing the families of Lyman and Manson are both noteworthy, in a sense, because they are so familiar—rancid wine poured into a straw-wrapped Chianti bottle. Herst is adamant that Manson and Lyman not be credited as “evil geniuses.” After all, Herst writes, the “evil they practice is the evil of sexism that each has adapted to his own needs.” Herst is particularly struck by the fact that Manson’s early criminal activities included pimping: her condemnation of both Manson and Lyman is rooted in the fact that both “thrived off the resources of women.” Herst calls attention to how Manson and Lyman built their familial empires on the financial resources of women: “How fortunate for Mel Lyman to have fallen in love with Jessie Benton, falling heir to a great deal of Thomas Hart Benton’s property in the bargain.”11 But the argument is much more than an attack on cult leaders—it is ultimately a reckoning of the links connecting this vision of sexual liberation, women’s labor, and male pleasure. After noting Manson’s early career as a pimp, Herst goes on to explain that living “off women is of course, what pimps do. How progressive of hippie men to have liberated themselves from the confines of straight jobs so that they can go and do likewise.” Herst is not calling every hippie a Manson or Lyman, but she does want to emphasize that “freak women everywhere” are turning over the welfare checks and the money they make in sex work to their male partners.
The multifront attack organized by Ellen Herst in “Mel & Charlie’s Women” is, among other things, a reminder that this conversation about communes, cults, and new familial configurations had especially high stakes for young women who considered themselves a part of the counterculture and/or the women’s movement. The ideological and strategic heart of second-wave feminism was, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, embodied in the phrase “the personal is political,” and Ellen Herst uses the rise of Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, and their less entrepreneurial male hippie peers to engage in what is essentially a meditation on power relations in contemporary sexual politics. The rise of Lyman and Manson represents to Herst the terrible but logical outcome of what she sees as a loyalty to very conventional, hierarchical gender relations in far too many counterculture relationships and institutions. “Boston’s own happy family,” Herst writes, “the Fort Hill commune, under the supreme guidance of Mel Lyman, shows striking similarities to the Manson ménage: total submission to the will of one male and total subjugation of women.” While Lyman is not as immediately terrifying as Manson (his “method is softer . . . the mode of control is romantic, rather than violent”), his theoretical framework—“a whole myth about woman as slave”—is every bit as terrifying as that of his California colleague. Jessie Benton herself, when she finally gave an extended interview to Brian Burnes in 1986, confirmed that Herst was hardly exaggerating when she explained that the “women on the hill serve the men. There is a traditional division of labor, with the men doing the heavy work and the women rearing the children and keeping the kitchen.”12 This was not the first exposé of gender and power in hippie relationships, of course: the commune scene in Easy Rider (1969), some of the photography of Lisa Law, the casual, cruel sexism of the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw,” (1972) which promotes the idea that women can be passed around by men as easily as they share the communal wine bottle, just to name a few examples, were some of the raw data being considered by feminists disappointed in how fully men in the counterculture were embracing the privileges of their gender. (Law, one of the crucial chroniclers of this time and place, would later reflect that she actually did not enjoy “that kind of living. It always seemed that women ended up doing a lot more chores than the men.”)13 When Peter Lawford asked Family member Paul Watkins in a KABC-TV documentary (Charles Manson: A Portrait in Terror) why Manson wanted so many young women around at Spahn Ranch, Watkins answered simply “to do all the work.”14 Herst was, perhaps, most disturbed by how Lyman, Manson, and their minor-league brothers used the languages of domestic fulfillment and spiritual achievement to take advantage of a woman’s right to pleasure. Herst is interested in the economic realities at the base of gender exploitation. She explains, for instance, that young women are often put in vulnerable positions because they are forced to rely on men for places to stay—a direct result of men having more access to making money in the street economy of selling drugs. But Herst also insists that the economic asymmetry is intensified by emotional needs, and here she gets very personal: “Shocked as I am by the particular viciousness of Manson’s treatment of freak women . . . I’m not really surprised. Nor am I at a loss to understand why women take it. When I was 21 I had a boyfriend who reminds me of Manson and Lyman in more ways than I care to remember, and I still carry with me the fear that I, like Susan Atkins, etc., would be dominated by some man.”15
“Mel & Charlie’s Women” explores how women get “trapped by the promise of love and sexual gratification.” Writing about the family arrangements of Manson and Lyman is Herst’s method for getting at the much larger question of how women’s need for pleasure and companionship can be taken advantage of by unscrupulous men. Lyman, as Herst explains, was able to cloak a “total contempt for and exploitation of women with a whole poetic trip.” Manson worked in a slightly different vein. “What I find most insidious,” Herst writes, “is the extent to which Manson used sex—by all accounts he was some kind of super stud—to dominate women.” Herst’s conclusion about Manson, in this respect, applies to all the countercultural men who trouble her: “This form of control is frightening because it’s so hard to see through—since pleasure itself, which is hard to come by, becomes used against you.”16
That the pursuit of pleasure was defined by already existing power relations was a familiar insight by the time Ellen Herst published this article on Charles Manson and Mel Lyman in February 1972 (the publication date was a day after Valentine’s Day). What is striking about Herst’s addition to this literature is the tone of urgency and desperation. Writing as Ed Sanders was, from within the counterculture, Herst rejects Sanders’s tone of ironic detachment in favor of passionate engagement. She cares about Manson and Lyman, of course, but her real targets are found all over the counterculture, from alternative journalists, to Yippies, to your “average hippie guy.” Herst condemns rock critic Nick Tosches, for instance, for including in his review of Sanders’s Family an aside about what a “good lay” Manson was reputed to be. Yippie leader Stew Albert is taken to task by Herst for commenting on the sexual deprivation (“compulsory masturbation”) Manson will suffer as a result of his prison sentence. Herst explains to her readers that Albert’s statement “confirms all my basic suspicions about your typical male heavy . . . that he thinks that being cut off from a supply of willing and helpless females is a terrible and unjust fate.” “It’s enough,” Herst avows, “to make many of us choose a course of voluntary masturbation.” Name-checking the Rolling Stones album of 1971, Herst notes it would be better to have “sticky fingers than bloody hands.”17
What Herst is after, ultimately, is a reconsideration of how the promise of sexual liberation (that it would be liberating!) had turned out to be a cruel lie. The new family was new only insofar as powerful men were gaining access to more vulnerable women than ever in terms of number and intensity. By the end of this extraordinary article Herst makes it clear that her goal is to encourage a reconsideration of sex and romance under capitalism as crucial elements of the false consciousness that keeps women in a subservient position. Herst’s conclusions draw from her sober realization that “your average hippie guy and street freak doesn’t have the elaborate poetic and financial power of Mel Lyman (8 homes at Fort Hill, a brownstone and loft in NYC, a duplex in Buena Vista, two houses in LA, 280 acres in Kansas . . . pretty good for an ex-folkie who just wants to be God), nor that
satanic majesty of Manson, but he can make the myth of love work for him.”18 Writing particularly about the rigors of street life, but drawing conclusions that seem applicable to the larger landscape of the counterculture, Ellen Herst concludes that women continue to be hurt by their desire “to find some new man, some new pleasure that will make it bearable.”19
The most at-risk young people, those living on the streets, were of special concern to radical and progressive members of the counterculture. Jeffrey D. Blum and Judith Smith, also writing in 1972, worried about the reality that so many young women did not seem “to be in control of their sexual situations.”20 As Blum and Smith put it, some aspects of the developing scene appeared to “be even more oppressive to women” than the older “regimen of monogamy.” They write, “repeatedly, these young women were led into sexual relations that they did not want because to have refused to sleep with a man would have been ‘unfair’ to him and would have meant they were as outdated as brassieres.” Blum and Smith concluded, “for an adolescent to feel committed to sleeping with everyone is as oppressive as to feel that one must not sleep with anyone.”21
The major solution to the individualistic anarchy of the streets was supposed to be found, of course, in the era’s great collective experiment—the commune. But as Blum and Smith make clear, even “in rural communes, sex roles are preserved: the males chop the wood, and the females bake the bread.”22 Robert Houriet published a fascinating book in 1971, Getting Back Together, which recounted his tour around a large number of American communes to collect data on how the project was faring. His experience bears out Blum and Smith, even as it underscores the absolute necessity of developing these new modes of relating. After visiting one commune in Pennsylvania, Houriet recounted that few of the residents “would talk of their parents or past, and when they did, it was bitterly.” These young seekers had grown up in “comfortable sterile homes . . . in interchangeable suburbs with almost mocking names like Heritage Hills Estates. They were reared in families that were not families at all.”23 As with many of their peers around the country, many of the commune dwellers signified their break with the past—their “membership and adoption of a new family”—by “dropping their patronyms and assuming new names like Odessa, Dancing Bear, and Vesta.”24 But these social innovators did not break with the gender rules that had structured their families of origin. Houriet explains that at High Ridge Farm, in Oregon, “as elsewhere in American society, the women as a group still bear most of the responsibility for the children.” “Out in the country,” Houriet contends, “there is a natural impetus to revert to traditional roles: Women stay inside, cook, and look after the children, while men plow, chop, and build roads.”25
A different sell was made by residents and promoters of a number of communes. Wavy Gravy, for instance, described his Hog Farm commune as “an expanded family, a mobile hallucination, a sociological experiment, an army of clowns.”26 It would be hard to argue with the claim that many communes were populated by “expanded” families, but all too often the central fact of the expansion had to do with a scaling-up of male privilege. It was part and parcel of the sensationalist mainstream coverage of the Spahn Ranch community to refer to Manson’s women followers as a “harem” or as what Jerry LeBlanc and Ivor Davis called an “army of modern day slaves and zombies.”27 Jeffrey Sconce has rightly suggested that one reason representatives of straight culture were so upset by Manson is that he acted, on some level, as a master of seduction, an “art that many males had been aspiring to understand through the sexual revolution of the sixties.”28 While no one would confuse Manson with the suave studs of the mainstream (Sconce points to the “airline pilot seducing young stewardesses” as an exemplar), it became something of a ritual for representatives of the dominant culture to make clear that whatever sexual license the cult leader was enjoying at Spahn Ranch, none of it came to him because he was a real man.29 Manson might be the sexual king of his commune, but, as Sconce explains, articles in the popular press consistently referred to him as “diminutive” and “pint-sized.” Manson, in this reading, had to be understood as some kind of otherworldly magician—a “psycho-Svengali” in Sconce’s formulation—rather than one more man abusing women in some of the most familiar and horrifying ways.30
The Spahn Ranch commune bedeviled straight culture for the most obvious reason—its residents were at the center of a shocking murder case—but also because Manson and his girls embodied confusing elements of the New Freedom. The Family was a screen onto which a wide array of fantasies was projected (including the all-too-familiar “these little girls are really sexually hot”). It is instructive to see how desire and disgust battled it out in the mainstream media as the complex realities of commune life came to light. It comes as no surprise, on the one hand, to find purple material in Movie Mirror, Silver Screen, and National Insider, and all the other outlets anthologist Tom Brinkman collects under the rubric of “Bad Mags” or in pulp novels and films. But intense interest in the Sexual Life of the Commune was also expressed in Life and Time and most of the rest of the “good mags” as well and reaches us today as a form of voyeuristic violence against young women over and above the abuse the Manson girls lived through at the ranch and elsewhere. Time, for instance, took a moment to mention the “nude or bare-breasted” young women, “catering to” Manson’s every whim—including performing a “sex act” on him while he discussed business with a “chagrined ranch hand.” The ranch hand, or one of his colleagues, got his own close up in Gay Talese’s borderline softcore article on the Family that was published in Esquire in early 1970. First off, Esquire titled the piece “Charlie Manson’s Home on the Range” to make sure its readers understood that the Family commune at Spahn Ranch was some kind of horrifying caricature—a perverse mashup of Old West romance and New West freakiness.31
Talese ramps up the sexual energy immediately: “The horse wrangler, tall and ruggedly handsome, placed his hands on the hips of a pretty girl wearing white bell-bottomed trousers and casually lifted her onto a hitching post near the stable; then, voluntarily, almost automatically, she spread her legs and he stood between her, moving slowly from side to side and up and down, stroking her long blonde hair while her arms and fingers caressed his back, not quickly or eagerly but quite passively, indolently, a mood harmonious with his own.” (Talese was a “New Journalist.” Along with some of his most esteemed peers in this field—Joan Didion and Truman Capote most notably—this means that he was as interested in presenting his research findings with a novelist’s touch as he was with getting the facts right. But there was no requirement that the touch be as sexualized as this.) “Home on the Range” continues with the Ranch couple engaging in “their slow erotic slumber for several moments under mid-morning sun, swaying silently and looking without expression” into each other’s eyes. Talese goes on to imagine that the couple are “totally unaware of their own lack of privacy”—or maybe getting off on it?—and also totally unaware of “the smell of horse manure near their feet.” This is classic bad New Journalism: it is hard to know how a reporter could possibly know what his subject is currently smelling. But that is not the point here: Talese wants to marginalize the commune-dwellers by making it clear up top that not only do they “get after it” (as Ed Sanders would put it) in public, they “get after it” while sinking into shit.
That is the disgust part. The desire element is also here, as when Talese recounts how “voluntarily, almost automatically,” the young woman “spread her legs and he stood between her, moving slowly from side to side and up and down.” The phrase “voluntarily, almost automatically” should give pause to modern readers. The “voluntarily” is meant to be reassuring: these young women actually want to have sex with these young men! But “automatically” conveys a different mood and argues for a different conclusion entirely—this female Family member has apparently been so successfully controlled by Manson that she will have sex more-or-less on autopilot. Many elements of Manson-culture
proved to be compelling to a very broad American audience, but perhaps nothing contributed to the mainstream investment in all of this more than the idea that this was a Family that hosted a nonstop orgy.32 The radical writer Paul Krassner, who spent some significant time with Squeaky Fromme and other family members, got at this dynamic efficiently by recounting a moment of alleged overheard conversation that he claims a prison psychiatrist told him about. As Krassner tells it, an African American inmate confronted Manson and said, “Look, I don’t wanna know about your theories on race. I don’t wanna hear anything about religion. I just wanna know one thing—how’d you get them girls to obey you like that?”33 This captures well the “desire” side of the equation, but it is crucial also to attend to the disgust that always shadowed expressions of attraction. And what seems most thrilling to men hovering around the case is that young women were having their sexual lives directed by this one man.
Here we might turn to a legal filing made by Manson Family member Sandra Good (listed as “Goode” in the court papers) “in order to show cause in re contempt against Vincent Bugliosi.” In this fascinating document, Good claims that Bugliosi had confronted her outside the Hall of Justice and called her a “goddam two-bit whore”; according to Good, Bugliosi informed her that “he knew that I ‘s-----d Charlie Manson’s d---k’; that he has proof and he is going to bring it out in the trial, that I was a ‘goddam f-----g tramp’ [‘whore’ is crossed out on the document]; then he said, ‘I have one thing to say—I’m going to get you and I’m going to get you good. I’m going to have you behind bars if it’s the last thing I do.’”34 Good’s affidavit is less significant for whether it can prove its claims or not, but gains heft because of how clearly it lays out the process by which all the complex dimensions of Family life on its commune would be flattened out and sexualized when placed under judicial and media scrutiny. It is also noteworthy that Bugliosi regularly blamed young women for the actions they carried out while under the control of Manson. In constructing his legal strategy, it must be emphasized, Bugliosi normalized rape and held young women accountable for the violence done to them.