There is a particularly poignant moment that comes in just about every retelling of the night of the murder at 10050 Cielo Drive, which finds Abigail Folger looking up, smiling and waving at Susan Atkins as Atkins passed by the room Folger was reading in. Built into these accounts is the implicit claim that Atkins looked like she belonged in this swinging Benedict Canyon pad. Virtually everywhere that Manson and his Family went in and around Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969 they were welcomed as friends and lovers, brothers and sisters. While many notable figures back-pedaled from the Family as news of the arrests broke, filmmaker John Waters remembers thinking that they “looked just like my friends at the time”; Waters goes on to admit that Tex Watson reminded him of “Jimmy, the frat-boy-gone-bad pot dealer I had the hots for in Catholic high school, the guy who sold me my first joint.”39
The Manson Family’s freak bona fides were also, no doubt, underscored by their manifest anti-consumerist stance. From their thrift-store visual palette to their reclamation of usable food through regular trips to dumpsters outside of supermarkets, the Manson Family presented a sharp alternative to the material traps of hip capitalism so firmly in place by the late 1960s. (This political aspect of the creepy crawl would, finally, find expression in 2004 in the German film The Edukators.) It is worth repeating here that the Family’s calling card was the creepy crawl—breaking and entering into a private home, rearranging furniture, perhaps having a quick snack, and then leaving without, usually, taking anything. The creepy crawl represented the upsetting flipside of dumpster diving. If the Manson Family was able to develop a sustainable model of food production by making something out of nothing (i.e., meals from what most Americans would call garbage), it was also intent on underscoring the emptiness at the heart of rampant materialism by leaving “valuable” objects behind when they were ripe for the picking. Paul Watkins offers a strong case for understanding Manson’s surprising level of influence over Dennis Wilson as originating in his ability to prey on Wilson’s confusion at being “an all-American middle-class surfer kid who had suddenly made it rich and didn’t know quite how to handle it”: “Dennis sure as hell had it made . . . the classic Spanish-style Hollywood mansion, complete with manicured lawns, vibrant recently cultivated rose gardens, and an enormous kidney-shaped swimming pool. The inside was no less lavish: furnished to the hilt with antiques, original French paintings, Persian rugs and countless mementos and photos of the Beach Boys’ international acclaim in the record industry.”40 Wilson also had fancy cars, including a red Ferrari, which was totaled by Watkins and Steve (“Clem”) Grogan.
Wilson was a “prime target for the Family,” Watkins writes. Manson “self-righteously played the role of Robin Hood, taking from the rich, namely Dennis, to give to the poor, namely Charlie. He really went to work on Dennis, made him feel guilty for possessing so much wealth, urged him to renounce it in exchange for a simple communal life based on love: Charlie’s love.”41 Of all the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson seems to have been the only one with consistent aspirations to freakiness; Mike Love always made following the Maharishi and taking hallucinogens look like right-wing frat boy behaviors. Rachel Adams has argued that for many countercultural freaks in the 1960s, it was possible to “profess” radicalism without introducing “progressive solutions to the social order they condemned” and while also remaining “ignorant of the contradictions in their own attitudes.”42 Wilson does seem to have developed some sense of his own “contradictions”—largely under Manson’s direction. The freak dancing of Vito Paulekas and his troupe (filmed evidence of which can be found in the 1968 documentary You Are What You Eat) was predicated on the premise of letting go, tapping into the unconscious, merging with other people, and working without a script. Manson’s freak achievement, especially vis-à-vis his exploitation of Dennis Wilson, was to create the illusion he was improvising, working for some collective good, all while he was running a long con. Manson himself was more than happy to abscond with goodies from Wilson’s mansion, including “most of his wardrobe” and “all of his gold records”—which he would later hand out “in the streets of Hollywood to passersby, just to blow their minds”—at the same time he worked to convince Wilson this was all part of a program of self-actualization. Manson challenged Wilson to think about the empty symbolism of gold records: “What did they mean to the spiritual man? What did they represent other than the epitome of American capitalism?”43 Wilson had plenty of ground to travel; Paul Watkins claims that when the Beach Boy first came into contact with the Manson Family he “came on like a polished playboy bachelor—glib, loose-jointed, and hip.”44
For a time, Charles Manson was able to deploy the recognizable signs of the “freak” to penetrate the world of Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher, and Gregg Jakobson. He danced at the Whisky, lived at Dennis Wilson’s house, recorded at Brian Wilson’s home studio. But for all of his ambition, Manson was not prepared to make it as a popular artist. If Manson was any kind of artist, he was the kind that we generally understand as a “naïve” or “outsider” artist. This is not to suggest that Manson and his Family did not commit a considerable amount of energy (and money) to its musical project. Paul Watkins explains in his memoir that the Family practiced its music daily, and invested a large amount of money in “new sound equipment” and instruments: “Through Dennis and Greg [sic] we lined up recording sessions at Brian Wilson’s studio. But none of them went well. Charlie liked to improvise, even during live recordings, and it just didn’t work. Invariably our best sessions were outside the studio, in a relaxed environment.”45 It is clear that Manson was made remarkably uncomfortable by the professional demands of making music in a recording studio. When Manson was interviewed for Rolling Stone’s cover story on June 25, 1970, he admitted that he was never able to get comfortable enough to perform well in the recording studio: “I never really dug recording, you know, all those things pointing at you. You get into the studio, and it’s hard to sing into microphones. [He clutches his pencil rigidly, like a mike.] Giant phallic symbols pointing at you. All my latent tendencies. [He starts laughing and making sucking sounds. He is actually blowing the pencil!] My relationship to music is completely subliminal, it just flows through me.”46
“Flow” might have been a reasonable organizing principle for the freak dancers sponsored by the Byrds and the Mothers, and Frank Zappa may have been comfortable releasing the music of Wild Man Fischer—thus putting the “sideshow” back in contemporary attempts to redefine “freak” with a positive spin. But Manson could never find the proper sponsor with the consistent interest, industry savvy, and musical skill to help him fly his freak flag in an organized way. On some level what Manson most notably lacked was a “company freak.” In her essay on the “company freak” (also known as the “house hippie”), scholar Devon Powers has written persuasively of men like Billy James, Jim Fouratt, and Danny Fields, who were basically hired by record companies as mediators, charged with translating the new musical forms and social stances into marketable products. But Powers wants us to notice that these men did not simply “bridge” two distinct cultures—they forged “a common culture . . . an environment in which rock music, the capital of major labels, and the individuals who transacted that relationship made sense together.” What was most important about the company freak was his “performative role”—the way he claimed “institutional and social space” through his own acts of communication and his own forging of professional and personal relationships.47 For a time it looked like Phil Kaufman would play this role for Manson. But he simply did not have the industry juice to help Manson break into the big league. Manson thought he was auditioning various men—Kaufman, Melcher, Wilson—to serve as his “company freak,” but it turned out that none of them really wanted the job. As a result Manson was left to his own devices, and his own devices were not nearly up to the task of breaking him into the music business.
The Bad Fathers of the Feast
The death of this tentative arrangement that b
rought entertainment industry celebrities so close to everyday people was hastened, for sure, by the killings at 10050 Cielo Drive. Michael Walker has nicely summed up the immediate Laurel Canyon reaction to the murders: “The next day, across Laurel Canyon, you could practically hear bolts snapping into place behind doors that for the past five years had gone unlocked day and night.”1 Phil Proctor, of the Firesign Theatre comedy group, remembers his sense that now parties at Jeanne Martin’s house felt “filtered,” as if references were now being checked.2 One film journalist notes that the “intimidating automatic gates that had heretofore been beneath contempt in the Age of Aquarius became de rigueur.”3 The mainstream press acknowledged this new reality; the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article soon after the arrests with a headline that read “Manson Arrest Reaction: The ‘War on the Longhairs’” and which went on to detail all the ways that hippies were now coming under intensified suspicion.4 Sally Stevens, a Los Angeles record-company executive, explains that everyone “thought at first it was a big dope dealer who was revenging himself on people. There was one guy, a boyfriend of Cass Elliot’s, everyone thought it was him, and he’d fled for Algiers or something.”5
Key players in the music business developed a remarkably consistent and inflated rhetoric about the killings—especially during the period of immediate fallout when the “Melcher hypothesis” was still in play. An oft-repeated anecdote about the aftermath of the Tate murders holds that Stephen Stills “ran around shrieking, ‘They’re killing everybody with estates.’”6 At the same time a communal game developed that Peter Biskind has called the “I-almost-got-killed bandwagon.”7 Dennis Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas, with some exasperation, confirms that he knew large handfuls of people who claimed they were supposed to be at 10050 Cielo Drive—that they had been invited over that night but decided at the last minute not to go.8 Biskind reminds us of the complex webs connecting up the victims at Cielo Drive to various players in the New Hollywood: “No one was untouched. Everybody knew them. They had their hair done by Sebring . . . or had been invited up that night and begged off because they were too tired, too stoned, or had something better to do.”9 The realities of these multiple connections particularly obsessed Roman Polanski, husband of Sharon Tate, who launched an informal investigation of his own, once he returned from London to Los Angeles after the murders. John Phillips has recounted that Polanski dusted Phillips’s garage for fingerprints, and later directly questioned Phillips as to whether he was the killer; Phillips understood Polanski worried he might have been motivated by revenge after Polanski had sex with Phillips’s estranged wife, Michelle. In fact, production designer Richard Sylbert (who worked on Rosemary’s Baby with Polanski) explains that the director suspected a number of his friends because he had either “fucked their girlfriends or their wives.”10
The novelist Robert Stone, in his memoir Prime Green, is especially eloquent about the tumult in Los Angeles in the days and weeks after the murders: “It was saturnalia time in Hollywood, a very grim feast of the meaningless. The youngsters disappeared from the boulevard as though the bad father of the feast had eaten them.” The frenzy included a lashing out and a turning inwards.11 Stone argues here that a major change followed the murders at Cielo Drive; never, he writes, “did the lights go on so fast and the glitz come off the columns and the glass balls shatter as in the wake of a couple of murders.”12 Stone is clear in his claim that the killing of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, and Abigail Folger (but not so much Steven Parent who, as John Phillips says, “was a single man none of us knew”) also had a fatal effect on the loosely organized, but real, alliance of Los Angeles industry insiders, camp followers, and unaffiliated freaks.13 There “was a whole lot of shaving going on in Los Angeles,” Stone writes: “Good-humored tolerance of the neo-bohemian scene was suspended.”14
In subtle fashion Stone works here to unsettle the world-weary “oh-how-dreadful-to-be-murdered-now-be-a-darling-and-hand-me-a-cigarette-won’t-you” paradigm established by Joan Didion in her essay “The White Album.” Recall that Didion’s central claim in this essay is that when news of the Tate murders broke, the truly terrifying thing was that “no one was surprised.” But the agitation all over Los Angeles gives the lie to Didion’s above-it-all formulation. John Phillips remembers how “paranoia swept through Beverly Hills and Bel Air. . . . There were bizarre theories that attempted to link the murders to LSD and Satanic rites, kinky and deadly sexual perversions, and somehow to Polanski’s own penchant for violence in movies.”15 Robert Stone remembers the wild theorizing too—including that Nixon had organized all this bloodshed, somehow, to “embarrass the antiwar movement. A well-known person offered a theory that naval intelligence had killed the victims.”16 (It is possible that Stone is mixing up dates here and is here thinking of radio personality Mae Brussell, who began promoting her very complex naval intelligence theory in 1971.) Stone remembers the days after the murders as being drenched in fear. As the novelist fancifully puts it, when “the bearded trolls and their consorts were run out of town, fear remained. People hired body guards. At one house (I swear) the protection would follow a swimmer doing laps up and down the length of the swimming pool.”17 The Manson Family had creepy crawled all over the terrain of the Los Angeles area and it was going to take some time and quite a bit of effort to make the scene feel secure again.
The indictment of Manson and members of his Family in December of 1969 were, if anything, even more devastating to the music community in Los Angeles than the murders themselves had been. The developing possibility that the “guy with the long hair and the beard could turn out to be the devil was really a nightmare.”18 In the wake of the arrests and indictments the Los Angeles music community worked assiduously to erase any impression that Manson was one of them—a professional musician. Rolling Stone magazine checked with the president of the musicians’ local in Los Angeles who said “he had checked his union’s records and that Manson definitely was not a musician.”19 In a more diffuse way, the hip and powerful cultural elite of Los Angeles expressed their panic at having been so intimately tied up with the mastermind behind these mass killings. In his book Bitter Carnival, literary critic Michael André Bernstein has written of how dramatically Manson’s arrest acted as a tragic “warning sign of just how high the cost of ‘breaking down’ the footlights” had become.20 Richard Schechner’s immersive theater projects, Commune and Dionysus in 69, opened up the question (in the context of the Tate-LaBianca murders) of what it meant to erase the boundaries that usually separate audience and performers. These theatrical responses launched by Schechner and his troupe gained meaning from the wider context—all those dramatic everyday meditations on impurity and hysterical efforts to draw clear boundaries of class and vocation, and to rationalize what had gone wrong in Los Angeles. In a 1974 interview with Rolling Stone, Terry Melcher recounted that it had been clear to him that the media was going to try to script the Cielo Drive murders and the December indictments as a “New Hollywood/hippie/drug shakedown.” Melcher suggested that the events of the second half of 1969 “really turned a lot of people against each other. I noticed that a few people became afraid of me. I know I became afraid of everyone else.”21
The indictment of Manson and his Family members put a very definite punctuation mark on all the speculation that had occupied the Los Angeles entertainment world since the murders. There were, of course, the early attempts to situate Manson as some kind of countercultural hero. But for the most part, all the evidence connecting Manson and his Family to the larger world of popular artists in Los Angeles was deeply upsetting. This was not, as Peter Biskind acutely reminds us, death by “pigs” (as “Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and Easy Rider had fantasized it.”)22 There was going to be, it soon became clear, a sort of “correction” of the cultural marketplace as the news of the “hippie guru” circulated. Additionally, and as many other commentators have noted, the cultural confusion caused by Manson’s indictment
in early December was intensified by the tragic free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway not even a week later. The painful social truths exposed by the Hells Angels’ murder of Meredith Hunter, an African American audience member, was captured on film by the makers of Gimme Shelter. This chilling moment is joined by a bizarre inability on the part of a few key performers to demonstrate that they understood just how fully the imagined audience/Angels/performers alliance was disintegrating. The filmmakers responsible for Gimme Shelter (the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin) managed to smuggle a surprising amount of critical material into the movie—perhaps none as devastating as the single word (“bummer”) uttered by the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia after another musician informs him of the brewing violence. In the same vignette, Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead, just cannot seem to stop smiling.
The anti-hippie backlash came quickly and reached the music world of Los Angeles as something of a calamity. Session musician Randy Cierley (who also recorded under the name Randy Sterling, with Cher, Neil Diamond, Frank Zappa and many, many others) remembers worrying about the revelation that this had been the work of a “failed musician.” Cierley felt clear that whatever else resulted from the arrests, this was going to “hurt longhairs.”23 The coverage in the mainstream press confirmed that the arrests and indictment of the Family members would feed into a narrative of the dangers of countercultural living. Life magazine’s December 19 issue, with a tight shot of Manson’s face—eyes whited out to make him look demonic—and the headline “The Love and Terror Cult” (subhead: “The Dark Edge of Hippie Life”) contributed to the quickly evolving notion that the violence of the past few months had to be understood as part of the inevitable wreckage caused by the social and cultural insurgency of the younger generation. It would not take long for pulp fiction and film to jump on this particular dogpile. One industry insider, reflecting on the meaning of the arrests for the evolving “neo-bohemian” scene in Los Angeles, claimed that this series of events “just destroyed us. . . . I mean everyone was looking at everyone else, not quite sure who was in that house and who knew about it. And then no one trusted hippies anymore. . . . Everybody went behind closed doors.”24 Producer Jack Nitzsche put things even more frankly: “Then it quickly became, ‘No more fucking hippies hitchhiking.’ Rule number one: that shit is over. ‘No I don’t want to buy a Free Press newspaper from you.’”25 (One interesting renunciation of this distancing comes with the 1975 film Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, which reimagines hitchhiking as a way to build family. Screenwriter John Kaye, whom we will meet in the final section of this book, has claimed that the idea for the book came to him after he picked up two members of the Family in Los Angeles. Somewhat spooked by the X marks on their foreheads and their intimidating silence, Kaye claims to have engaged in an “act of creative transmutation and joyful surprise” to bring this story to life in a form that was “both whimsical and serious.” His story gains resonance, of course, given the presence of Papa John Phillips’s teenaged daughter Mackenzie playing the younger of the “twins.”)26 Buck Henry, who was centrally situated in the New Hollywood, argues that the crime at Cielo Drive “affected everybody’s work, it affected the way people thought about other people.”27 Writing from the other coast in the East Village Other, Allen Katzman suggested that the murders had brought the “community of moviedom to a point of psychotic silence.”28 A major effect of the killings was to draw a much firmer border between the freaks and the famous.
Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl Page 19
