Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Charles Manson’s ranch and Mel Lyman’s hill offered liberatory opportunities to a few men and a new form of patriarchal control for most women. In his memoir, Tex Watson remembers life at the ranch with fondness, and recalls being served sandwiches “full of sprouts and avocado and cheese” by willing young women: “It was as if we were kings, just because we were men, and nothing could make them happier than waiting on us, making us happy.”35 The extreme gender hierarchies of Spahn Ranch and Fort Hill were outliers in the counterculture world, no doubt, but they were outliers in degree, not in kind. The upsetting truths revealed via the dramatic spectacle of Manson and the less studied but still influential example of Lyman were really open secrets. The innovative social organization promised by the reinvention of communes in the 1960s had turned out to be a terrible disappointment for many participants.

  Even the most successful communes—the most obvious example being The Farm, in Tennessee—tended to be rooted in very traditional gender behaviors and relations. The Farm had its own guru, Stephen Gaskin, who was ultimately partnered with Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery, widely considered to be a bible of the home-birth movement. While the Farm’s large intentional community did quite a bit of progressive work (not only in midwifery, but also in sustainable agriculture and anti-nuclear activism) its gender ideology was retrograde. Maggie Gaskin, who was married to Stephen from 1967 to 1975, suggests a natural, immutable basis for this commune’s arrangements: “The women . . . are very, very female . . . . There are a lot of children around that are there because they’re wanted, and the women are going back and doing very feminine things, like weaving and cooking with a lot of pride, doing it as a woman-thing.”36 As historian Timothy Miller explains, Ina May Gaskin’s incredibly successful work as a midwife was situated in a broader Farm culture of anti-abortion and anti-birth control politics. Miller writes that in “its opposition to abortion the Farm made a remarkable offer: ‘Hey Ladies! Don’t have an abortion, come to the Farm and we’ll deliver your baby and take care of it, and if you ever decide you want it back, you can have it.”37 The documentary Manson (1973) makes it clear that Family ideology promoted a similar approach to baby-making and baby-raising.

  It is interesting to see that on its current webpage FAQ the Farm directly confronts the question of gender hierarchies at the commune. Under the question “How has the culture shifted over time regarding gender roles?” there is an answer that might be boiled down to “Not so much.” “Gender roles have shifted,” readers are told, “as the first generation of children have left home enabling more women to pursue more varied and lucrative careers.” That is not nearly the whole story, though: “However in the new families with young children . . . we tend to remain somewhat traditional, encouraging moms to be with the children with the dads being breadwinners, at least while the kids are still little. However dads change diapers, feed, bathe, and play an active role in their family.”38

  There were, of course, many, many meaningful and sustained efforts to transcend the limits of the conventional nuclear family among communards, and it is possible, if you look hard enough, to find media narratives that admit that all kinds of groups, from lesbian separatists to spiritual seekers, have done so. But for the most part our ability to see different communal models as successful was stunted first by the negative examples of Manson, Lyman et al., and next, and perhaps more profoundly, by what Jonathan Crary has called a “counter-revolution” that erased the gains of the 1960s generation. “The main thrust,” Crary writes, “has been either the elimination or the financialization of social arrangements that had previously supported many kinds of cooperative activity.”39 Crary is correct to suggest that “the idea of a commune derived from any form of socialism” became intolerable in the wake of the 1960s experiments. He points not only to broadly popular cultural narratives about Soviet and Chinese collective efforts here, but also to the “countless narratives of cult-like communes of obedient converts ruled by homicidal madmen and cynical manipulators.”40 If Crary is right to criticize the use that has been made of Manson, Lyman, and their commune-betraying brethren by the forces of capital, it is important to notice that the collectivist dream of the 1960s was not only attacked from without, but also poisoned from within.

  For all of the radical promise built into the commune movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it turns out that the lasting challenge to the conventional family of the post–World War II era would not come from hippies, Yippies, or the creepy-crawling Family of Manson’s invention. As Judith Stacey and other sociologists and historians have made abundantly clear, the deepest and most lasting changes came not in conscious proactive rearrangements, but in on-the-fly responses to the challenges of the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and the claims made by women carrying the challenges of the second-wave feminist movement. For her part, Judith Stacey writes that the traditional “family is not here to stay. Nor should we wish it were. On the contrary, I believe that all democratic people, whatever their kinship preferences, should work to hasten its demise.”41 In its haphazard way, the Family certainly tried.

  Hush Little Dropout

  In his Getting Back Together, participant-observer Robert Houriet acknowledges that a sizable number of commune dwellers were “transients,” many of whom were “pregnant runaway girls.”1 We cannot fully understand the story of the Manson Family or the hold its members had on the popular imagination if we don’t take the runaway question seriously. It serves us well to at least ask why we have not been able to find a deeper sympathy for the vulnerable young women who joined Manson in San Francisco’s Haight and at various spots in Los Angeles, including Dennis Wilson’s house, the Spiral Staircase, the Yellow Submarine, and Spahn and Barker Ranches. Since the late 1960s, a loose coalition of Americans including government officials, journalists, filmmakers, fiction writers, and social scientists devoted considerable energy to outlining (and attempting to solve) the problem of the runaway. But few tears were shed for the runaways who found their way to Manson. The sexualization of these young women made it almost impossible to see them as vulnerable or available for rescue.

  Given how much cultural energy was expended on the “problem” of runaways and what this phenomenon had to say about the state of the American family, about youth culture, about the “generation gap,” it becomes more and more difficult to understand how little effort was made to stitch the Manson women into this cultural script of fear and concern. Jeffrey Sconce and others have made clear that the Manson girls were used as “a site of sexual fantasy, or at least fixation, for the culture at large,” but rarely were they offered up as objects of parental concern.2 In fact, one of the few people in or around the Manson case to express any interest in the welfare of the young women of the Spahn Ranch commune was Terry Melcher, who testified that “the reason I went back the second time, I felt sorry for these people. There were a lot of girls that were obviously young and I assumed that most of them were runaways, or whatever.”3 As with so many older men who noticed the fraught realities of life as a young runaway, Melcher might not have harbored the purest motives; his alleged interest in Ruth Ann Moorehouse suggests some dark possibilities. But it is striking how rarely observers even mentioned that the Family had become sort of a clearinghouse for runaways.

  It might be worth taking a moment here to think about how those dark possibilities found troubling public expression in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s in the form of a band comprised of young women who called themselves the Runaways. Kim Fowley, whom we will meet again in the next section (rubbing his hands in glee over the pleasure he found in the all the young women streaming into Laurel Canyon in the 1960s), was at the center of all this. With an assist from Rodney Bingenheimer, the so-called “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” Fowley helped put the band together and contributed to their output as a producer and lyricist. For years, histories of Fowley have used words like “impresario” and “Svengali” (which at least hints at the power d
ynamic built into the relationship of this powerful older man and these younger women). But given recent autobiographical testimony from the band’s bassist, Jackie Fox, and good journalistic work by Jason Cherkis, it has become clear that more accurate words to describe Fowley include “rapist,” “abuser,” and “exploiter.” The story of the Runaways makes clear that (at least in the 1970s) Fowley was purposefully casting a net to catch vulnerable young women. Cherkis describes Kari Krome, an early contributor to the Runaways, as Fowley’s “type”: thirteen years old when she met Fowley, Krome was “a young girl who spent too much time dodging her violent stepdad and bouncing from apartment to apartment in various working-class neighborhoods.” Fowley, as Cherkis puts it, took a regular interest in Krome and became “the most responsible adult in her world.”4 In 2015 Cherkis published his Huffington Post article that described in terrifying detail how Fowley used a combination of drugs, emotional manipulation, and physical power to control these young women. His rape of Fox, with numerous others observing, was the fullest expression of his violent abuse of young women.

  The bystanders who witnessed the rape of Jackie Fox serve as a reminder that the social investment in the safety of young women (particularly runaways with or without a capital “r”) was shot through with remarkably damaging misogyny, one effect of which was to reduce all women to the status of sexual objects. There seems to have been no backlash, for instance, to Fowley taking out an ad in the June 1975 issue of Back Door Man that essentially invited women who were either above eighteen or “under 18 and legally emancipated (with paper work)” to come join the much older man as a paid sexual partner. (It probably goes without saying that the zine Back Door Man took its name from the Howlin’ Wolf song, which features a man making “his midnight creep” who reminds listeners that men don’t know what he is up to, “but the little girls understand.”) Jason Cherkis also notes, correctly, that the behavior of Kim Fowley and others like him was enabled by countless rock journalists, writing of the band as the “Sex Kittens of Rock,” who “saw the Runaways as little more than the teenage sluts of Fowley’s imagination.” Charles M. Young’s infamous Crawdaddy article about the group was full of bizarre eruptions including the claim that, playing live, the band made “a direct sexual challenge, almost too threatening.” This piece ended with an unparalleled bit of rhetorical violence/masochism: hearing from the band’s choreographer that young men were masturbating at a San Diego gig, Young writes “I am overcome with the urge to jack off against the stage, get my teeth kicked out by a vicious roadie, claw my way through a thousand demented teenagers puking cheap wine and luded out of their cerebral cortexes, just so I could touch the platform boots of these 16 year old girls.”5

  The unwillingness or inability to situate the Manson Family in the context of the runaway crisis appears as what literary critics have taught us to understand as a “structured absence”: the thing not said or not represented tells us not only about what the culture has decided must be repressed, but also speaks loudly about what we do want to privilege or make manifest. That these young women were generally construed as spoiled dropouts—as opposed to vulnerable runaways—is one of the many tragedies of the Manson phenomenon. What should have served, as Sconce writes, as “a cogent lesson about the excesses of male power” became instead “a parable legitimating a generation’s retreat back into” more familiar tendencies of patriarchal control.6 A major part of that control was the enshrinement of a type of bystander culture in which the physical and emotional safety of young women was demoted in favor of privileging the physical and emotional needs of men.

  There were many ways to think and talk about runaway youth in the late 1960s. In his 1968 book, Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie Hoffman insisted that runaways were “the backbone of the youth revolution.” According to Hoffman, a fifteen-year-old “who takes off from middle-class American life is an escaped slave crossing the Mason-Dixon line.” Hoffman also noted that an “underground railroad exists” to help these young radicals navigate their way around the country.7 (Hoffman’s claims here also serve as a good reminder that in the 1960s and 1970s “runaway” virtually always implied “white” as well.) It was possible, then—at least for some avowed members of the counterculture—to understand the phenomenon of young people running away from home as part of a larger social movement. Peter Coyote, one of the founders of the Diggers, a San Francisco–based street activist group, makes it clear that older radicals considered runaways to be a responsibility they needed to take on. Coyote explains, “Digger shelters, crash pads, and hippie communes helped develop the sense of extended family and linked underground communities.” Coyote’s use of the word “family” seems purposeful, a counterculture reclamation project. “There were all these way stations where you were welcome and you were extended family,” Coyote writes.

  There was this loose linked sense of family and sharing of resources and alliances. You’d go someplace and you stay for awhile, and you’d pitch in and work there and live . . . . Information about these shelters was transmitted by word of mouth, through underground press advertisements, postings in local counterculture business, and at times was even noted in the mainstream press . . . . Children who set out on their own had places to go other than the street.8

  According to Coyote, the Diggers even had a lullaby that summarized the group’s whole approach to runaways: “Hush little drop-out, don’t make a peep, / Diggers gonna find you a place to sleep / And if your stomach stands in need / Diggers have a big Panhandle feed / And if of clothing you need more / Everything’s free at the Digger store.”9

  Coyote’s subtle invocation of the street opens up the troubling reality that many teenage runaways were not only living on the street, but also working the streets. Scholar David McBride has summarized, perhaps with more power than subtlety, that the two major alternatives facing female runaways were “prostitution and commune living,” both of which were “hardly empowering.” McBride suggested that “the degradation of prostitution was self-evident” but that commune life was also more than a little bit problematic: “[W]omen’s majority status in communes belied the fact that ‘leadership’ was almost exclusively male.”10 Even if McBride overstates the case, it is clear that from the mid-1960s at least through the mid-1970s, a passionate conversation developed around young female runaways, which, as Karen Staller explains in her book on runaways, essentially presented these girls and women as “vulnerable and exploitable . . . and driven to deviant acts to meet their basic survival needs.”11 Family associate Bobby Beausoleil has claimed that during the time he lived in Hollywood in the late 1960s he tried to make sure that his basement apartment could serve as a crash pad for vulnerable runaways.12

  In response to the relative defenselessness of The Young Runaways (that is the title of a 1968 film) a fairly extensive network of hip youth-service providers developed around the country. In hot spots such as the Haight-Ashbury (where David E. Smith worked at the Free Medical Clinic) and Greenwich Village, agencies providing housing, job leads, health care, social opportunities, and other services developed rapidly. These countercultural organizations attempted, Karen Staller writes, to respect the autonomy of these teenagers; often the service providers understood themselves to be part of a “civil rights movement” working on behalf of an oppressed minority. Young people had the right, in this framing of the issue, to leave “unhappy and unstable family backgrounds,” in order to search for more evolved “substitute” families being developed in communes and elsewhere.13 Ann B. Moses, a social-service worker and scholar, has offered a nice shorthand to understanding the cultural divide in approaching runaways. The mainstream press offered advice to parents on how to cope when faced with a runaway child; the underground press regularly published tips on how to avoid being caught.14

  The Diggers were at the center of the effort to frame running away as a progressive choice, but they also recognized that counterculture elders needed to take responsibility for actively
making it possible for young people to be on their own in the city. The construction of “Digger Free,” Karen Staller explains, included “free food, store, shelter, education, on street survival, clinics, and referrals to other service.” The Diggers’ good works and outreach efforts came in for more than a little mockery. The mainstream media called them “mod monks” and “psychedelic social workers.”15 But whatever attacks were made on the Diggers, it is clear that the model they created was copied and built upon for years to come. From Huckleberry House in San Francisco (whose name invoked an earlier era’s righteous and young fictional hero who headed West) to Covenant House in New York, agents of “alternative” social services drew inspiration from the work done by the Diggers.

  The triage practiced by the Diggers, churches, and other social service agencies was made more difficult by the fact that much of the work they were attempting to do was illegal given that “most states had criminal laws against harboring a minor or interfering with custodial rights.”16 Richard Fairfield recounts a relevant incident at the Sheep Ridge Ranch commune in California, which is also notable for the parallel it draws between runaway youth (presumably female) and members of the military who have gone AWOL (presumably male):