Early in the morning on October 31, 1969, a 25-man army of policemen, narcotics agents, juvenile officers, FBI agents, et al., had descended on Sheep Ridge Ranch without benefit of either invitation or search warrant. They said they were looking for juvenile runaways and Army deserters. When they arrested one of the female residents, Bill [a commune dweller] objected. Without warning, an officer swung around with handcuffs in hand and gashed Bill’s forehead with them. This led to a melee of hitting, shoving, and pushing, and the subsequent arrest of Bill and four others on felony charges of assaulting an officer.17
Charles Manson, it is worth remembering, was charged in Mendocino County in 1967 with “interfering with the questioning of a suspected runaway juvenile, Ruth Anne Moorehouse.”18 Powerful forces in the mainstream culture were initially indifferent, if not hostile, to the efforts made by the counterculture agents. But before too long outright opposition to these efforts was joined by co-optation with the passage of the Runaway Youth Act of 1974, which codified many of the counterculture practices into federal law. In addition to striving for “normalization” (essentially acknowledging that running away was not pathological and trying to keep the legal system out of the picture), the Act also validated “alternative” services with a government stamp of approval.19
But I am jumping ahead with this mention of 1974—the year of this important new law and of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. The “runaway” years to which I want to be sure to do justice here stretch from 1967 to 1973.20 I pick these years as bookends because both 1967 and 1973 were marked by the murders of young people, murders that energized the national conversation about the vulnerability of runaways. The 1967 murder involved a young woman named Linda Fitzpatrick and her boyfriend, James Hutchinson, known as Groovy. The two were found dead in a boiler room in the East Village. The murders received a great deal of press coverage, including a major series of articles in the New York Times by J. Anthony Lukas, who strove desperately to explain how this privileged daughter of Greenwich, Connecticut, could have come to the terrible end she did. Lukas’s major animus in his article is to demonstrate that while Greenwich and the East Village are less than an hour’s drive from each other, the residents of the two places occupy completely separate spheres of existence. When Lukas interviewed Linda Fitzpatrick’s mother, she told the reporter that she didn’t even know there was an East Village: “I’ve heard of the Lower East Side. But the East Village?” Fitzpatrick was not, strictly speaking, a runaway; her parents gave her “reluctant consent” to move to New York, presumably to go to art school.21
Whether or not Fitzpatrick was technically a runaway mattered less than how her story would be narrated in the press. The Village Voice’s writer recognized that the murders would be used as a cautionary tale, “a reminder to Americans that freaking-out in the land of the free and the home of the brave can be fatal.”22 Ada Calhoun has written recently that the “happy-go-lucky” Groovy was known around the East Village “as someone who helped runaways find shelter.”23 This brought Groovy to the attention of New York officials. He was arrested in May of 1967, along with his good friend Galahad, a Digger, for “impairing the morals of a minor”—in this case a “15-year old run-away girl whom they had let stay in their apartment, called a commune.”24 Groovy was clear that he was providing a “safe haven to newcomers who would otherwise be living on the street.”25 The question Lukas ultimately posed to the readers of his New York Times article had to do with how these parents could know so little about their child—where she lived, what she was doing in New York, whom she was living with. 1967 was the year that a public service announcement debuted that has become the object of consistent parody since then. But when deep-voiced men intoned, “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” every night, the question underscored the reality that many parents really had no idea. Denizens of the East Village processed the murders as a cataclysmic tragedy, as Ada Calhoun demonstrates in her history of St. Marks Place: “After the murders, many suburban kids were no longer allowed to visit the Village. Shops . . . suffered and the streets grew emptier . . . . Crime rose . . . there was a sense of looming apocalypse.”26
Although the Linda and Groovy murders shook up plenty of observers, that dark tale of the generation gap was enough of an anomaly that it did not actually cause much hand-wringing or concrete change. The Houston mass murders of 1973, on the other hand, were so shocking in their details, so clear in the message the killings delivered about official neglect of young people (in this case boys), that a dramatic response became absolutely necessary. The Runaway Youth Act of 1974 grew, in large part, from the horrors of the killings in Houston by Dean Corll. At least twenty-eight young boys and men were kidnapped, raped, and murdered by Dean Corll between 1970 and 1973. This mass murderer in Houston seems to have taken his victims with impunity, and even had two teenage accomplices who worked with him to commit the crimes. Corll’s family owned a candy factory—he was literally a stranger with candy—and he spent years on the hunt for potential victims to torture and kill.
More than the details of Corll’s crimes, what’s important here is how little the police in Houston cared about these young men, one after another going missing, being reported by their parents, not turning back up. In Skip Hollandsworth’s long article on the murders in Texas Monthly, he reports that when “parents protested” about the lack of police interest in finding the young men, “the officer said that all sorts of kids were hitting the road, hitchhiking across the country, joining communes and being part of the ‘hippie’ movement. The investigators said that unless there was clear evidence of foul play, no official search could be conducted.”27 After Corll was killed by Wayne Henley (who, along with another teenager, David Brooks, was coerced to support Corll in his criminal activity), it became clear that the parents of victims had been turned away by the police again and again. As Hollandsworth tells it, “police barely investigated the boys’ disappearance . . . . The officer who received the report on [one boy] labeled him a runaway after learning he had previously left home and stayed with friends because he had been having arguments with his father about such issues as the length of his hair. The officer who got [another boy’s] report also labeled him a runaway, after finding out that someone thought he’d seen him at a house where runaways often gathered.”28
The response was swift and appropriately critical. As far away as the Soviet Union, Izvyestia was suggesting that “indifference” and “murderous bureaucracy” were to blame for the killings. The police chief in Houston remained unmoved, suggesting that the parents had been responsible for neglecting their sons. Houston’s mayor added that “the police can’t be expected to know where a child is if his parents don’t.”29 The captain of the juvenile division of the police department also suggested that “some parents don’t want their children returned.”30 A minority discourse also developed that hinted that the victims “came from broken homes.”31
The Linda Fitzpatrick/Groovy murders and Dean Corll’s crimes suggest something about the complex set of feelings evinced by the group of insurgent young people most often referred to as runaways. The runaways got processed in many cultural forms, from comic books to art films, but nothing like a single point of view emerged. To develop an understanding of the relative lack of empathy expressed across the culture for the young women of the Manson Family it will help to take a brief tour through some of the major ways cultural producers in the United States expressed their complicated points of view about the runaway challenge to the American family. The arrest of Manson and his followers late in 1969 acted as a climactic moment in this ongoing crisis of the family. The challenges these young people embodied made it clear to many observers that it was now an urgent matter to organize a cultural course correction.
The trouble with sorting out the runaway problem in the late 1960s and early 1970s is that it was rare to find any clarity about who or what was to blame for the phenomenon. When Lillian Ambrosino wrote a sympat
hetic book simply called Runaways for the progressive Beacon Press in 1971, there was very little she could say concretely about why young people were “taking off” in such large numbers—the basic “push” and “pull” factors were rarely discussed with any specificity. While it was obvious in the 1930s that young people who hit the road were largely motivated by economic concerns, in the 1960s, to Ambrosino, the major push seems to have come from what she called “hypocrisy”: “The youngster who leaves the ‘hypocrisy’ of his household, or society, goes in search of the warmth, integrity, and meaning he has been led to believe thrive within communes or among groups of flower folks.” Trying rhetorically to save the runaways from an understanding of their identity as “spoiled” (as sociologist Erving Goffman put it), Ambrosino assures her readers that “many runaways actually love or respect their parents.”32 An earnest sociological study published a few years before Ambrosino’s book in 1967, “Suburban Runaways of the 1960s” also struggled to understand the social landscape of running away. The authors of this study also make clear that economic factors seem irrelevant, given that their research was done during a period of “unprecedented national affluence.” Trying to head off simple or blaming conclusions, the authors admit that the runaway is “more likely to come from a broken or reconstituted family” but argue that it would be “misleading . . . to assert a simple cause-and-effect relation between broken homes and running away. To do so would ignore the fact that half the runaways came from intact families.” The authors also took pains to note that it is “popularly believed that families in which the mother works outside the home are functionally equivalent to broken homes. The working mother is frequently blamed for any deviant behavior in her child.” While not directly taking issue with this assumption, the study’s authors do note that their findings make clear that “the presence of a working mother does not seem to be a crucial factor in whether a child runs away from home.”33
“Suburban Runaways of the 1960s” cannot offer much to explain why so many young people had been running away in this period except to suggest that they come from families that are perceived to be characterized by “conflict.” The authors of the study also suggest that suburban boredom might be a real cause of teenage disillusionment and a factor in the ultimate decision to leave home. Using a phrasing that is especially interesting for our purposes, these sociologists contend that in “the helter-skelter suburbias with their minimal or nonexistent symptoms of public transportation, recreational activities typically are lacking, and what few exists are inaccessible to large numbers of adolescents.”34 Senator Birch Bayh, writing an introduction to a study of “boy prostitution in America” in 1976, suggested (after repeating the misleading claim that the victims of Dean Corll were runaways) somewhat vaguely that many flee their homes because of disappointments at school and “look for companionship, friendship and approval from those they meet . . . . The generation gap is very real.”35 One Digger, quoted in novelist Bibi Wein’s 1970 study of the “runaway generation” tried to emphasize “pull” over “push” factors, arguing that young people were “not really running away”: “They are running to something they think is there which isn’t there. They think it’s just groovy . . . oh boy, all these fascinating, you know, hip types, they don’t have to go to school, they live in these groovy communes—which of course isn’t true . . . . They think it’s really an exciting thing. It’s complete freedom, but they don’t realize that it’s kind of hard to have freedom if you’re out panhandling for food, or selling the Free Press to pay your rent.”36 Journalist Robert Sam Anson, writing in the late 1970s about the exploitative use of the “million runaways” by the pornography industry, argued that the “talent pool is bottomless”: there were, according to Anson, “unnumbered children who . . . simply belong to parents who don’t give a damn.”37 Anson sharpened the focus even more by quoting a producer of pornography who informed him that these are children of “lawyers, doctors, policemen, preachers—who are attracted to older men because their fathers have no time or them. They are searching for a father.”38 Without wading into the dime-store psychologizing of the Anson-approved porn producer, it is safe to say that many of Manson’s followers—Lynette Fromme (who had a “dictatorial” father), Susan Atkins, and Ruth Ann Moorehouse come right to mind—suffered dramatically from having fathers who parented on the sad spectrum that stretched from neglectful to abusive.
Perhaps the most poignant articulation of all on how parental failure fed into the problem of runaways was Paul Schrader’s 1979 film Hardcore, which is meant as a sort of summary statement on the crisis; a few years before this, Schrader had scripted Taxi Driver, another film concerned with a vulnerable young runaway. In Hardcore, George C. Scott plays Jake Van Dorn, a single parent whose daughter Kristen disappears from an amusement park she visits with her Calvinist youth group. Van Dorn hires a private investigator, Andy Mast (Peter Boyle) to hunt her down. Boyle takes on the work of finding Kristen but makes sure that Van Dorn understands the problem he faces: informing Van Dorn that “stag films” are legal and hinting that this might be where his daughter has landed, he invokes the dark heart of American captivity narratives stretching from the earliest days of Anglo settlement in the Americas through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), and warns the grieving father that “when I find her you may not even want her back.” Schrader’s reference to The Searchers is made manifest every time Mast calls Van Dorn “pilgrim,” a usage that was noted by Janet Maslin in her New York Times review of the movie in 1979. It is important to keep The Searchers in mind here—Hardcore was initially slated to be called Pilgrim—because the claim made about Kristen is that whatever led to her “captivity” may have permanently damaged her and made her unfit for reintegration into straight society. It is not hard, of course, to see that this judgment was in the air around the Manson “girls.” For his part, it seems clear that Schrader wants Manson in his picture, at least when he has the porn director in the film coach Kristen to get in the mood for her scene by channeling Susan Atkins: “[Y]ou’re setting your mind free, you’re thinking about your dad.”
Van Dorn ultimately takes the reins of the investigation himself, enlisting the help of Niki, a sex worker who has been on the streets herself since the time she was fifteen. Supporting the two-distinct-worlds rhetoric of J. Anthony Lukas’s Linda/Groovy coverage in the New York Times, Van Dorn tells Niki that she could never possibly understand him—“a man who believes in God, who doesn’t pursue women, who believes in social order, and believes that at the end of his life he will be redeemed.” When Van Dorn finally finds Kristen, the daughter is unwilling to let her father off the hook. “You never gave a fuck about me before,” she says, and then adds “I’m with people who love me now.” In his awkward speech that follows, Van Dorn meditates on gender, parenting, and expressiveness: “Baby, I do love you. I just never knew how to show you. It’s very difficult for me. Nobody ever taught me.” Encouraging the audience to see the wounded, emotionally repressed father as the origin of the problem afflicting the younger generation, Hardcore made a clear case that parents had contributed in a major way to the runaway crisis.
Hardcore was certainly not the first piece of American art to present the possibility that the problems faced by runaways were, in large part, created by the parents. Early in the decade, Milos Forman’s film Taking Off, Horace Jackson’s Johnny Tough (a revision of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows set in Black Los Angeles), and the fake diary Go Ask Alice (both from 1971), all made the case that the utter incompetence of contemporary parents was helping to make fleeing seem like a relatively sane choice for many young people. The 1974 television movie Born Innocent (starring Linda Blair) was similarly blaming of the parents: Chris Parker is forced to run away again and again to escape an abusive father and neglectful mother. Ultimately she is sent to juvenile prison where she is brutally raped with a plunger by other teenagers. The violent imagery was blamed by one parent for a copycat attack on her own nine-yea
r-old. This horrifying series of events led to the creation of the Family Viewing hour, which lasted for one television season.39
Taking Off, Forman’s first American movie, is an underappreciated comic tour de force that suggests that hapless parents bear a large percentage of the responsibility for the alienation of their children from mainstream culture. The movie plays as a sort of serious parody of the Beatles’ 1967 runaway epic “She’s Leaving Home,” although here the daughter is searching for much more than “fun.” Larry and Lynne Tyne are Forest Hills parents whose daughter Jeannie has run to the East Village. The main action of the film consists of scenes of the Tynes figuring out what to do in response to this family tragedy, intercut with scenes of Jeannie and other young women—including Carly Simon and Kathy Bates—auditioning for an unnamed musical opportunity. Gently skewering the musical pretensions of the younger generation (from earnest folkie performances about the time when “even horses had wings” to the lute-playing madrigal singer who tells her lover “you can fuck the lillies / and the roses too / you can fuck the maidens / who swear they’ve never been screwed” as long as she gets to be first in line). Forman saves his sharpest critique for the parents who appear to not have any idea about what matters to their children.
Taking Off mostly wants to tamp down the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the runaway problem. The film does acknowledge that running away has become epidemic; when Larry Tyne asks a lunch-counter employee to hold onto a picture of Jeannie to look at in case the girl shows up there, the woman tosses it into a box full of similar pictures. At the same time, Taking Off tries to defuse the panic surrounding the phenomenon through the implication that this has become, more or less, a rite of passage. Jeannie’s flight does not seem to have been spurred by any major crisis—her parents are just sort of awful in a general way. One way Forman indicates that Larry Tyne is going to be no help to his daughter is that he pronounces “where” as if the “h” comes first.
Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl Page 10
