The alliance of Hollywood, the anchor industry of Los Angeles, with the musical upstarts of Laurel Canyon and the Sunset Strip represented an immensely productive meeting. The most well-placed denizens of the New Hollywood were more than willing to trade their cultural capital for access to all sorts of parties: “They dined at Garson Kanin’s house, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Arthur Rubinstein. But they also gravitated toward the wilder younger set.”47 It is important to note that, with few exceptions, the major players in these artistic worlds were not interested in undoing the cultural hierarchies established by their predecessors. Michael Walker, writing about the musical side of the equation, suggests that the “rocker-hippie” community was “nominally countercultural, favoring long hair and thrift-shop apparel, but possessed of an ambition as blinding as any junior investment banker in a Brooks Brother suit.”48 Ray Asin, a neighbor of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, described a party that had taken place a few months before the murders at Cielo Drive, at which he observed guests arriving who were dressed in “hippie garb” but who, he assumed, were not “actually hippies as most arrived in Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs.”49
Hippies with Power
One crucial moment in the evolution of the new class of music-business stars came with the Monterey International Pop Festival of 1967. This event, the first major rock music festival, has often been heralded as the great first meeting of San Francisco’s “rawer” and more “natural” music scene with the more “polished” and “commercial” Los Angeles industry. This festival was organized by Los Angeles producer and impresario Lou Adler, along with John Phillips, who convened a Board of Governors for the three-day non-profit event, which included Adler and Phillips, Donovan, Smokey Robinson, Brian Wilson, Johnny Rivers, Alan Pariser, Terry Melcher, Andrew Loog Oldham, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and Jim (later Roger) McGuinn. The convening of this board has a few tales to tell—but one very obvious one is about Angeleno resistance to the San Francisco crowd. While representatives of the San Francisco scene were noticeably absent from the Board of Governors (and of course there were no women, and only one African American), Adler and Phillips knew that they needed to attract a number of the key bands from the Bay Area if the festival was to be the “seismic event” they hoped to host. Adler properly saw that the “San Francisco groups had a very bad taste in their mouths about LA commercialism. . . . And it’s true that we were a business-minded industry. It wasn’t a hobby. They called it slick, and I’d have to agree with them.”1 Adler and Phillips relied on the mediating influence of legendary jazz critic Ralph Gleason as well as San Francisco promoter Bill Graham, “whose entire modus operandi had always been about keeping one foot in hippiedom and the other in bottom-line business,” along with David Crosby, who was Los Angeles–based but had numerous friends in the Bay Area groups.2 Singer Jackson Browne later explained that, for him, Crosby was the “main cultural luminary”: “He had this legendary VW bus with a Porsche engine in it, and that summed him up—a hippie with power!”3
A hippie with power! That phrase should give us some pause—it will strike some of us as a contradiction—given that one dominant cultural reading of “hippie” is as being in opposition to “power.” But that one could be a hippie and not only want power but actually have power is important to understand as we come to consider how the Family enacted its creepy crawl across the entertainment industries of Southern California in the late 1960s. Peter Biskind recounts a telling anecdote in his book on the New Hollywood, about Donna Greenberg—a woman who “wasn’t in the business” but who was “clever, wealthy, attractive, and had a wonderful home, with rooms and more rooms for guests, a swimming pool on the beach, and an expansive patio.” As Greenberg later recalled “One beautiful, sunny Sunday morning, I was having breakfast on the patio with my four-year-old, the nanny, my husband, and our oldest son, who was thirteen or fourteen. . . . We had just had a paint-in, painting our seawall with peace signs, graffiti, that sort of thing. Suddenly the most frightening group of hippies walked onto our patio, stood around and stared at us, wandered through our house. I was petrified, but I didn’t know what to say, and it was also the ’60s, being nice to people who wore lots of beads and jewels and bandannas. There was a piano covered with all the pictures one collects of children and family and loved ones and everyone I knew. . . . They gathered around the piano and looked at the pictures. Then they walked out, leaving us shaken. They got down to the end of the beach, but they couldn’t get out, and a police car came, and I found myself walking down there and telling the police to let them go, they were my guests. Don’t ask me what the impulse was. It was the Manson family.” Greenberg was not a hippie, not by any of the standard definitions, it is clear, but she is influenced by hippie culture (with her family’s “paint-in” and its evocation of the hippie world of “be-in” and “love-in”) and is willing to identify with this scary band of hippies as opposed to the straight world represented by the police.4
Without being in the business, Donna Greenberg was still situated right at the heart of the New Hollywood, with her house in Malibu Colony and her friendship with Bob and Toby Rafaelson (Bob Rafaelson helped bring the Monkees to television, directed Head and Five Easy Pieces, and produced numerous other key films of the era). It was perhaps just old-fashioned noblesse oblige that motivated Greenberg to protect her “guests” from the police. But there is something more complicated at work in the behavior of those members of the Southern California film and music cultural elite who expressed, in a variety of ways, some level of attraction for hippie culture and hippie people. Thomas Frank has taught us to notice how quickly and efficiently the forces of American consumer capitalism coopted the language, style, and sounds of the hippies, incorporating what seemed like rebellion—like a radical challenge to the dominant culture—into the everyday language of advertising. In fact, Frank rightly cautions us to resist the temptation of imagining that there is, or has ever been, some pure and authentic counterculture safely set apart from the corrupting influence of the dominant culture, noting that “from its very beginnings down to the present, business dogged the counterculture with a fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV-watching millions and the nation’s corporate sponsors.” Frank goes on to note that every “rock band with a substantial following was immediately honored with a host of imitators; the 1967 ‘summer of love’ was as much a product of lascivious television specials and Life magazine stories as it was an expression of youthful disaffection; Hearst launched a psychedelic magazine in 1968; and even hostility to co-optation had a desperately ‘authentic’ shadow, documented by a famous 1968 print ad for Columbia Records titled ‘But The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.’ So oppressive was the climate of national voyeurism that, as early as the fall of 1967, the San Francisco Diggers had held a funeral for ‘Hippie, devoted son of mass media.’”5
“Hippie” was a name for all manner of cultural, social, political, and economic activity. While Charles Manson, with his followers, was able to engage with the social world of the New Hollywood, the gate swung decisively closed when it came to his attempt to convert personal closeness into cultural prestige or financial gain. If Manson himself occupied a fairly ambiguous position, his girls were placed rather definitively in the scene as sprung go-go dancers—out of the cage and made available to the Golden Penetrators and just about any and all other comers, from Beach Boys to old men like George Spahn, owner of the ranch. Manson and the Family were welcomed into this kingdom of Dennis (Wilson and Hopper) as something like dancing bears, neat tricks to be enjoyed for a moment or two, but certainly not to be taken seriously as friends, as peers, as talent, or as co-workers. Gregg Jakobson has, since the original trials of Manson, Krenwinkel, Atkins, and Van Houten, been fairly straightforward about the fairly straightforward pleasures offered up by the Manson girls at Dennis Wilson’s house on Sunset Boulevard and at Spahn Ranch.6
The Manson Family might
creepy crawl into the bedrooms of the rich and famous (according to various accounts these nighttime raids brought them to the homes of Doris Day in Malibu, John and Michelle Phillips in Bel Air, and Dennis Wilson on Sunset Boulevard). They might live more or less as squatters at Dennis Wilson’s house for months, eventually forcing the musician to seek refuge in Gregg Jakobson’s basement. They might persuade Jakobson into arranging for Terry Melcher to come “audition” Manson out at Spahn Ranch. But Manson could not insinuate himself into the business culture of the new Los Angeles. Of all Manson’s associates, it is really only Bobby Beausoleil who seems to have made any headway (in San Francisco and Los Angeles) as a performing artist. Beausoleil was a founding member of the Orkustra, who played around the Bay Area and, according to some accounts, became the unofficial house band of the Diggers. Beausoleil was not only making inroads in avant-garde film; he was also professionally tapped into the Los Angeles rock-and-roll scene, particularly through his connection to Arthur Lee. Beausoleil briefly played with Lee in a band called the Grass Roots, soon to rename itself as Love.
The Manson Family engaged with a thriving and well-established Los Angeles bohemia, which—as cultural historian Rachel Rubin demonstrates in her book Well-Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture—hosted productive moments of contact between all manner of groups and individuals who had not, in fact, “met” very regularly in the past.7 It seems pretty well-established in the historical record that Manson wanted something from Terry Melcher—he thought the producer could get him a recording contract. Various members of the Family have testified (in court and out) that whatever Melcher actually intended, Manson believed the producer was his route to music-business success. It is also clear that gaining access to the recording industry was crucial to Manson’s sense of how he would spread his influence beyond the relatively narrow confines of the Family. To this day Bobby Beausoleil is insistent that Manson was not particularly interested in a contract per se but understood it as an important way to expand his platform.8
Given Manson’s current status in American cultural life as something of a terrifying joke, it becomes somewhat astounding to recreate the moment of his fullest assimilation into the celebrity culture of Los Angeles. Dennis Wilson seems to have been the entry point for Manson during the time that has come, in the historical literature, to be referred to as Manson’s “Sunset Boulevard” period.9 Manson and Wilson came to a tacit understanding that revolved around Wilson having unfettered access to Manson’s female followers and in return letting Manson and other members of the Family live at his house and meet a number of other key figures from the music world. Wilson seems to have first met Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey, two of Manson’s followers, in the spring of 1968, when he picked them up hitchhiking (two different times, in Malibu).10 After the second ride, Manson appeared late at night to greet Wilson in his driveway after the musician returned home after a late recording session. Wilson became intimately involved with Family life; he had sex regularly with a number of the women, paid to have Susan Atkins’s teeth fixed, loaned his car out, and introduced Manson to Gregg Jakobson and other members of his inner circle.11 When the power dynamics got too challenging to negotiate, Wilson essentially abandoned ship, moved in with Jakobson and told his manager to get rid of the Family.12
Dennis Wilson became something of an evangelist for the Family. He liked Manson’s worldview and he experienced life with the girls as a sexual utopia. At first the appeal seemed primarily physical. A few years after Wilson’s dalliance with the Family, the Grateful Dead would record a song, “Jack Straw,” which begins with an exuberant reminder of how women (like wine) can be passed around from man to man. This seems to have been the standard operating procedure at Wilson’s home on Sunset Boulevard. John Phillips recounts that Wilson (and according to Phillips, Melcher too) frequently tried to sell him on Manson: “He has all these chicks hanging out like servants. You can come over and just fuck any of them you want. It’s a great party.”13 While Phillips claims to have rejected Wilson’s regular offers, he had already memorialized the broader cultural phenomenon in the 1967 song “Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)” which went top twenty in the United States.
Of course Dennis Wilson’s house on Sunset Boulevard (formerly owned by Will Rogers!) was not the only site at which such sexual meetings were taking place. Kim Fowley insists that daily life in Laurel Canyon, since the advent of the Byrds on the Strip was characterized by these regular and transitory meetings of “civilian” women and industry men. Fowley, narrating this moment with a hyperbole that borders on critique, suggests that “All these chicks would hitchhike up to the Canyon Store from the Strip, girls from Kansas who’d heard about Laurel Canyon. ‘Hi! Folk-rock musicians! I’ll clean your house and fuck you and I’m vegetarian and I can make you macrobiotic stuff as you’re shooting heroin.”14 With something like amazement, Fowley adds that he “was a creep, an ugly guy, and suddenly even creeps could get laid.” “Get laid” should be read with great care here, given what we know about Fowley’s predatory 1970s life in Los Angeles.15 Dennis Wilson went well beyond appreciating the fruits of Charles Manson’s experience as a pimp. To put it most plainly, Wilson seems not only to have been getting off, but was also getting off on getting off; part of Wilson’s pleasure, no doubt, came from talking about all this with his male friends in the music business.
That said, Wilson and Gregg Jakobson, to use the painful coinage inspired by another cult leader, also seem to have drunk fairly deeply of Manson’s Kool-Aid. Long after Wilson fled his house to get away from the Family, the Beach Boy was still speaking positively of Manson in an interview to a British music magazine, Rave, in which he called Manson a friend, dubbed him “the Wizard,” and explained that Manson “thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother records.”16 Dennis Wilson’s involvement with Manson was extensive enough to become a bother to the rest of the Beach Boys—one of whom described Manson to Vincent Bugliosi as a “scruffy little guru.”17
While Wilson actually lived with the Family, Jakobson appears to have been even more taken with Manson as a thinker. Separated from this intense time by a span of decades, Jakobson remembers his main attraction to Spahn Ranch as being organized around the appeal of these available young women. But Jakobson’s role in helping Vincent Bugliosi to “crack” the code of the case (i.e., his explanation of the Helter Skelter philosophy) and his acknowledgment during the Manson trials—especially Tex Watson’s—that he had been in Manson’s presence somewhere around a hundred times bespeak a much deeper investment. Jakobson, in fact, became quite deeply engaged with Manson’s worldview. We need not credit the analysis of John Phillips (for instance) that the whole story could be reduced to sex. Barry Miles has been more careful in situating the Manson phenomenon as part of a larger set of cultural processes through which “underground” belief systems began to have an influence on “regular Hollywood.”18
However much Manson may have shaped the worldview of Dennis Wilson or Gregg Jakobson, he did not get signed by the Beach Boys’ Brother, or any other record label. The Beach Boys did release a version of his song “Cease to Exist” (now renamed “Never Learn Not to Love”) as the B-side of their 1968 single, a cover of Ersel Hickey’s “Bluebirds Over the Mountain” and then as a track on their hodgepodge 1969 LP 20/20. “Never Learn Not to Love” is credited only to Dennis Wilson; while the song never became an important part of the Beach Boys repertoire, Wilson did step up from behind the drums to sing it on national television on the Mike Douglas show in 1968.19 The Manson Family’s creepy crawl over the cultural landscape had put them right at the heart of American popular music production in the late 1960s.
The matter of credit and royalties for “Never Learn Not to Love” is not inconsequential.20 For all of his success at insinuating himself into the musical life of Los Angeles, Manson was clearly ill-equipped when it came to dealing as an eq
ual with music-business professionals such as Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher, and Gregg Jakobson. During the trial of Manson Family member Charles “Tex” Watson during August of 1971, Melcher admitted that he went out to Spahn Ranch in April of 1969 at Gregg Jakobson’s urging, in order to audition Manson. The April meeting served as a makeup session after Melcher failed to appear in March at a Family home in Canoga Park when the Family was first expecting him (and for which some of the girls had baked cookies).21 After listening to Manson perform, accompanied by naked humming women from the Family, Melcher then spoke “briefly” with Manson and asked him a few questions: “I gave him a few basic suggestions and found out that he wasn’t in any union . . . and therefore he couldn’t really professionally record.”22
The most interesting thing that happened at this meeting is that Melcher ended the interaction by handing Manson some money. At Watson’s trial Melcher explains that he gave money to Manson because the assembled group “looked hungry.” Under Vincent Bugliosi’s careful questioning, Melcher powerfully reclaimed the class distinction between himself and the Family: after Bugliosi’s prompt (“So you felt sorry for them and you gave Mr. Manson $50”), Melcher replied “Well, sorry, or charit—yeah perhaps sorry.”23 Manson read—or at least presented—the exchange quite differently; as Jeff Guinn explains, Manson presented the exchange to his followers as representing some sort of advance contract.24
Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl Page 16
