Part II
Creepy Crawling Los Angeles: Charles Manson on Our Maps
High Rollers
Let us find our way back to Los Angeles at the moment of the Manson murders with Terry Melcher as our guide. Melcher, a major figure in the Los Angeles music scene of the late 1960s and possible target of the murderous Family, released a particularly tricky song on his second solo album (1976), Royal Flush. The song is called “High Rollers” and it is a bitter commentary on “making it” in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Sung in the voice of a self-pitying “high-rolling stud,” the song describes a culture in flux, defined by movement—movement of people around the country and up the economic ladder. “High Rollers” is addressed, with dripping sarcasm, to a would-be star, someone who has come to Hollywood to make it: Melcher makes a dumb joke in the song about his character wanting to be big like (Bing) Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The narrator’s persona is complex—he is aware of (and seems to enjoy) his own privileged social position, invoking Joan Didion in a line that echoes the title of her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays. At the same time, the narrator of the song acknowledges the awkward position he occupies in modern Los Angeles, acknowledging that people like him are treated as untrustworthy by hippies and as bust-worthy by the cops. (Gregg Jakobson, Melcher’s musical collaborator and longtime running buddy has made it clear that in practice the police in Los Angeles were more likely to let this famous son of Doris Day and his posse off the hook, even when they were shooting out streetlights in the Hollywood Hills.)
Charles Manson, of course, was one member of the rebel culture Melcher’s narrator is trying to place in the lyrics of his song. By most accounts Manson’s primary motivation in moving from the hippie homeland of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco (where he went after being released from prison) to Los Angeles was to try to make it as a popular musician. Having been taught guitar by Alvin “Creepy” Karpis—formerly a leading member of Ma Barker’s murderous Depression-era gang—while serving time in the 1960s in California’s McNeil Island prison, Manson apparently thought he had a real shot at becoming a high-rolling stud in Los Angeles. Karpis, who was a self-taught musician, believed that Manson had “a pleasant voice and a pleasing personality,” but found him “unusually meek and mild for a convict” and thought it likely that Manson would prove too lazy to make a dent in the entertainment industry.”1 Manson also met Phil Kaufman, later an important music producer and manager, while they served time together and Kaufman—who was impressed by the “lilt” in Manson’s voice (which reminded him of Frankie Laine)—offered to connect Manson up with music industry people he knew. But Manson was not part of the younger generation of hip Angelenos. While he did manage to spend a fair amount of time with Neil Young, Manson claims to have felt disconnected from the younger cohort: “[T]hat’s not my generation. My generation’s Bing Crosby.”2
Built into Melcher’s pun about Bing Crosby, [Stills], Nash and Young is a tacit acknowledgment that Melcher himself was instrumental in connecting the generations indicated by the wordplay. Melcher was born in 1942, the son of Doris Day, who, by the time Melcher was three, had become a dominant presence on the popular music charts in the United States. He was a high roller by birth. By the time he was in his early twenties Melcher had already established himself as a presence in the California surf and hot-rod music scene, first as a member of Bruce and Terry (with Beach-Boy-to-be Bruce Johnston) and then with the Rip Chords, who had a top-ten hit in 1964 with “Hey Little Cobra.” Melcher’s reputation rests not with his early recordings, though, but with the production work he later did at Columbia Records. Melcher, in short, was a key figure in the musical culture of Los Angeles from the early 1960s through 1969.
We will get a better understanding of the broad cultural environment surrounding Manson if we start with what Barney Hoskyns has called the “manifold interconnectedness” of the cultural scene in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.3 Even Ed Sanders, who is deeply committed in his book The Family to expunging Manson and his followers from the mainstream of the counterculture, makes it clear that the cult leader had very successfully “plugged into the restless world of successful rock musicians and continued his adventures inside the interlocking circles of young sons and daughters of figures in the motion picture and music industries.”4 To understand the profound meanings of the Manson Family’s creepy crawl over the landscape of film and popular music production in the late 1960s, it is important to take a closer look at the scene Charlie Manson so energetically attempted to break into and what that has to tell us about the reorganization of American cultural life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Family may have been happily experimenting with all kinds of new social arrangements in their various home places, but they were also very much “of the world”—and that world was Los Angeles’s culture industries during a time of major social upheaval.
In the hands of Vincent Bugliosi, Ed Sanders, and so many others, the story of Charles Manson and his Family is told again and again as a cautionary tale, a story we tell ourselves so that we will remember not to go down the particular roads they traveled. But we never do get done with them, do we? The “many lives” of my subtitle is meant as a small reminder that since 1969 there has been a truly astounding cultural investment made in the Family. The work of this section is, in some ways, to orient the Family in actual time and real physical space so that in the second half of the book we can begin to make sense of all the cultural work they have done for us since 1969. David McBride has underscored the important point that we know so much about the Los Angeles counterculture, have so many images of its denizens, because well, it was Los Angeles. The local counterculture, as he explains, “had to exist under the watchful gaze of the locally-based mass entertainment industries always on the lookout for captivating, sensationalist fodder which they could package and market.”5 At the same time, as Gerry Carlin and Mark Jones have argued so persuasively, “the tarnished aura of Hollywood informs the Family’s story, from its early days driving a Volkswagen bus with ‘Hollywood Productions’ lettered on its side, to occupancy of the Spahn Ranch, used in numerous classic westerns, B-movies, television series, and advertisements.” The Family rejected “mundane reality” in favor of a more “performative gestalt” (the Hollywood star factory) “in which role-play and ritual” reigned supreme.6 So what we find in Los Angeles at this moment is an emerging new class of film-world entrepreneurs who liked to present themselves as anti-authoritarian and countercultural now being confronted by real outsiders. The Manson Family represented an unwelcome reminder (to Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and all the rest) that they only played cultural rebels onscreen while sustaining the energies of (hip) capitalism. Their confrontation with the Manson Family forced them to acknowledge the contradictions built into their position.
The Manson Family did not kill Terry Melcher on the night of August 9, 1969. Even so, the idea that Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian left Spahn Ranch that night (at the direction of Charles Manson) with the intention of either killing Melcher or putting a scare into him, immediately became a sort of given for the many people trying to come to terms with the horror in the wake of the summer tragedy. In this version of things, Charles Manson, incensed that Melcher had bailed on a promise to sign Manson and record his music, sent his minions to 10050 Cielo Drive to kill Melcher, or at least to deliver him some kind of message. Susan Atkins herself has promoted this argument at various times. It became something like conventional wisdom in the second half of 1969 that the murders were the work of a “failed musician” who was targeting entertainment-industry figures.7 This aspect of the lore surrounding the Tate-LaBianca murders has now passed mostly into the domain of richly detailed rumor culture and has been demoted in the historical record—first by Ed Sanders’s gonzo work The Family in 1971, which focuses on bad drug-deal fallout and the grimy occult influence of the Process Church, and then, of course, by Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 Helter Ske
lter, the true-crime bible of the case, with its killer hook—the theory that Manson ordered the murders as part of a larger plan to kick off an American racial apocalypse.
But in 1969 the Melcher hypothesis was, briefly, gospel—at least in Los Angeles. From this first principle—that the son of Doris Day was being targeted by a crazed band of hippies (“Grudge Against Doris Day’s Son Linked to Tate Slayings” is how the Los Angeles Times put it)8—it was only a gossipy hop, skip, and jump, to imagine Frank Sinatra leaving town to save himself from being skinned alive while being forced to listen to his own music; Steve McQueen instructing his wife to sleep with a gun under her pillow; and the frightful possibility that the Family would soon send Richard Burton’s penis and Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes in a bottle to Eddie Fisher.9
The existence of the Melcher hypothesis offers us an opportunity to explore a relatively underappreciated moment in California’s counterculture history, a moment when the hip aristocracy of Los Angeles’s culture industries dallied with emerging figures from the margins, mingling in the homes of Laurel Canyon, mingling on the Sunset Strip, and mingling at the Manson Family headquarters of Spahn Ranch (the Western movie set that became, in 1969, a gathering point for these various tribes of Los Angeles).
As is usually the case with rumors, this hysterical tale-telling had a relatively clear case to make and it was essentially that the murders at 10050 Cielo Drive represented a sort of horrifying but necessary cleansing of the cultural scene. The wild cultural mixing that had been rife in the previous half decade—from the dancing at the Whisky a Go Go to the “orgies” at Mama Cass’s house in Laurel Canyon, to the (alleged) S and M parties (allegedly) filmed at the Tate-Polanski house itself!—were bound to lead to a crack-up. This rumor culture that developed in Los Angeles in the second half of 1969 had, predictably, a disciplinary thrust; it was time to stop dancing with these freaks. Joan Didion owns the brand on this strand of LA mythmaking, as I have discussed in the introduction. In her essay “The White Album,” a title mischievously borrowed from the Beatles album that allegedly inspired Manson’s crazed race-war talk, Didion argues, “This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969.” Speaking directly of the rumor culture that developed in and around the murders, she continues, “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.” Didion writes, “The tension broke that day . . . . The paranoia was fulfilled.”10 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, in The Sex Revolts, pick up on this line and put even more emphasis on inevitability: “the Manson murders were the logical culmination of the counterculture’s project of throwing off the shackles of conscience and consciousness, the grim flowering of the id’s voodoo energies”11 Music historian Barney Hoskyns seconds the notion that the crimes were inevitable, suggesting that there was “a palpable sense of evil in the air . . . that had more than a little to do with the ever-increasing decadence of the music scene.”12 Gail Zappa, who had a catbird seat in Laurel Canyon with her husband Frank Zappa, also endorses the notion that everybody knew that something wicked was this way coming: “If you were surprised by the Manson murders, you weren’t connected to what was going on in the canyon.”13
Cultural critic Greil Marcus is likely Didion’s most slavish and unhinged follower in the logical fallacy sweepstakes: in his recent book on the Doors he reminds us that while Jim Morrison’s band was not at Woodstock, they were at Cielo Drive, “looking back from what they already said.”14 While it is admirable that Marcus wants to read the Tate-LaBianca murders and Woodstock as part of a complex larger narrative of countercultural life in the late 1960s, his breezy conclusion is malignant. He basically argues that if the murders of “Sharon Tate and her house guests” had been solved in the week between the crimes and the opening of the Woodstock festival, and if it had been clear that these crimes had been “the work of a hippie commune,” then press reports about the rock festival would certainly not “have been so fulsome.” In writing her self-involved take on the case, Joan Didion at least had the decency not to pretend her claims had any particular currency outside of Los Angeles. Marcus acts as if there is an organic tie between Manson and his followers on the one hand, and the (largely) peaceful “450,000-strong hippie commune that briefly established itself as Woodstock” on the other. But the connection is retrospective and fantastical, the product of decades of investment in a mythology created by people like Joan Didion and Greil Marcus who both seem to very much love California but who also both seem to have been knocked off their game a bit by hippies. (It is probably worth noting that Marcus came of age in Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and seems to have fashioned his identity, at least in part, as distinct from the less political hippies across the bay in San Francisco.)15 I want to be clear here—there was a very important chronological link between the Tate-LaBianca murders and Woodstock: they both took place in August of 1969. But that does not mean that the Spahn Ranch commune had much to do with the pop-up “commune” that convened at Woodstock. Some participant-observers at Woodstock (Paul Krassner, for instance) also became important commentators on the Manson phenomenon—but usually without insisting upon the false equivalences structuring Marcus’s work. The Manson case gets used over and over again as a way to throw the baby (hippies) out the with all that bathwater they were (allegedly) not using. As we make our way through this complex cultural landscape it will be important to remember that very few actual hippies have written or spoken at length about Manson and the Family. For all of the cultural chatter about the Family that has developed over half a century, voices from hippie communities are relatively scarce. Much more useful than Marcus’s formulation is Mike Rubin’s reminder (supported more recently by Rob Sheffield) that the synergy of Manson-plus-Altamont has completely trumped whatever might be learned from the juxtaposition of Manson-plus-Woodstock.
The strange rhetoric of inevitability that developed in the wake of the August murders had more than a touch of victim-blaming in it. In a book titled 5 to Die, which made it into print by January of 1970 (months before any of the trials got started), Ivor Davis and Jerry LeBlanc did not hold back when it came to repeating rumors supposedly circulating in and around the canyons of Los Angeles: “Wild drug trips, gang bangs, ritualistic witchcraft practices, sadism, blindfolds and diamond encrusted whips: And wasn’t Miss Tate pregnant and what was she doing with her ex-boyfriend Sebring? . . . The rumors were mean. After all, who really knew whether the baby was his?”16 Davis and LeBlanc also wonder about the wealthy Abigail Folger (of the coffee Folgers) who was raised in “the fashionable hills of San Francisco,” but also “probed the other side of life and was no stranger to the hippie center of the world, the dozen-odd ramshackle blocks centered on Haight-Ashbury.” Thinking of the brief time Manson lived in the Haight, and the focused work he did there corralling his first followers, the authors ask rhetorically of Folger, “who knows who she might have met there”?17
The authorial attack is similar—although quite a bit more clear in its right-wing politics—in another book published in 1970, J. D. Russell’s The Beautiful People: Pacesetters of the New Morality, a pulpy collection of work drawn from Confidential magazine. Here, hairdresser Jay Sebring is depicted as “slight” and “aesthetic-appearing” (we should probably read “aesthetic” as “gay”—it at least suggests Sebring was mildly kinky), and as “never” playing the role of the “overt hero.”18 A bit later in the book Russell suggests that Sebring was obsessively attracted to sadomasochistic scenarios. Filmmaker Roman Polanski is simply described as Sharon Tate’s “Svengali,” and 10050 Cielo Drive comes to light as the site of “wildly freaked-out drug parties with weird sexual overtones.” Russell reports that police in Los Angeles had become interested (given the “sado-masochistic drug freak-outs” taking place at Cielo Drive) in exploring that “
narrow line” that separates “the killer and the killed!”19 Russell concludes that “the pace-of-life swing set of which Sharon Tate was a part left her vulnerable to the insanities of the environment she inhabited.”
This is put even more directly in the first book ever published on the case, Lawrence Schiller’s The Killing of Sharon Tate, which was rushed into print in 1970 (and written with the cooperation of Susan Atkins). According to Schiller, many of the “silent majority” found the whole thing oddly satisfying, watching “relieved, happy” as these two “out-groups” engaged in a battle royale.20 In 5 to Die Jerry LeBlanc and Ivor Davis report that one Benedict Canyon neighbor noted simply, with poetic smugness, that the denizens of 10050 Cielo Drive had gotten their just desserts: “Live Freaky Die Freaky.”21 Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was only slightly less blaming of the victims in his true-crime account of the case: “Given Roman Polanski’s affinity for the macabre; rumors of Sebring’s sexual peculiarities; the presence of both Miss Tate and her former lover at the death scene while her husband was away; the ‘anything goes’ image of the Hollywood jet set; drugs . . . almost any kind of plot could be fashioned.”22
Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl Page 14
