Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Terry Melcher’s use of “Indian tribe” in connection with the Family also invokes earlier usages—George Catlin’s nineteenth-century portraits of “vanishing” Americans, some New Deal photography, and, perhaps most directly, the countless Western movies that had been filmed at Spahn Ranch.

  Here is Gay Talese, writing in Esquire in 1970, about the ranch:

  The row of empty buildings extending along the dirt road toward Spahn’s shack—decaying structures with faded signs marking them as a saloon, a barber shop, a café, a jail, and a carriage house—all were constructed many years ago as Hollywood settings for cowboy brawls and Indian ambushes, and among the many actors who performed in them, or in front of them, were Tom Mix and Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, Wallace Beery, and The Cisco Kid.49

  Spahn Ranch was in terrible shape by the time the Manson Family came to squat there. It was rarely used as a film set anymore and in its latter days was used only for the occasional Marlboro commercial. The ranch also served as backdrop for the softcore Cowboys-and-Indians movie The Ramrodder, which was released in 1969 and included appearances by Family member Catherine “Gypsy” Share and Bobby Beausoleil.50

  Tommy Udo has correctly observed that in just a very few years Charles Manson was able to make “an astonishing number of contacts in the film, music, and entertainment industries.”51 But even more quickly than Manson was able to insinuate himself into the lives of the Los Angeles elite, he was thoroughly expelled—first by the testimony of Terry Melcher at the Grand Jury hearing and then by the aggressive closing of ranks enacted by the same entertainment-industry figures who had taken such pleasure from mixing it up with the Family. Despite the “moral and metaphysical aftershocks” from the murders, Peter Biskind is right to focus on how quickly “Hollywood returned to normal.” If the Manson episode represented some kind of “sign,” it was a sign that most in Hollywood were “too busy making movies, doing drugs, having sex, and spending money to heed.”52

  Terry Melcher acknowledged at Manson’s trial that he knew the suspect and had met him to audition him a number of times (Gregg Jakobson urged him to do this “around 100 times,” Melcher says); the producer first tried to claim that he “wasn’t really in the recording business very actively at that point. I was, you know, moving into, like a TV sort of area, and I wasn’t doing any recording at all.” That is not true, of course: after a hiatus of a few years Melcher had returned to work with the Byrds to produce their record Ballad of Easy Rider, released in November 1969. Melcher also insisted at Manson’s trial and at Tex Watson’s trial that he found little merit in Manson’s music. When Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi asked Melcher if he was impressed with Manson’s performance, he called Manson’s voice “average” and said “I wasn’t too impressed by the songs. I was impressed by the whole scene.” When Bugliosi asked Melcher to clarify that latter remark, Melcher said straightforwardly “Jesus is there anyone who is not impressed by it?” The judge struck this from the record, but with this final comment Melcher made it clear that he liked something besides the music out at Spahn Ranch.53

  The crisis of his association with the Manson Family seems to have stayed with Terry Melcher well up through the 1970s and left clear traces on the two solo records he released in that decade. In 1970, when Melcher testified at the main Manson Family trial, he used the opportunity of appearing as a witness—a reluctant witness, to be sure—not only to disentangle himself from the “hippie cult” but also to create space between himself and the other two Golden Penetrators, Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson. In 1970 Melcher would not even acknowledge the reality of his relationship with the Beach Boy. Bugliosi tried to explore this with Melcher:

  Q. You are a friend of Mr. Wilson?

  A. I have known him for about ten years.

  Q. Okay. Have you had any business association with him?

  A. No.54

  By 1971, at the Tex Watson trial, Melcher seems to have loosened up somewhat and was singing quite a different song. During this appearance, when Bugliosi asks Melcher where he met Manson he responds “At the home of a friend of mine named Dennis Wilson.” Bugliosi follows up to clarify Wilson’s identity (“Is Dennis Wilson a drummer for the Beach Boys recording group?”) and asks whether he is a friend of Melcher: “He has been for a long, long time.”55

  Melcher was much more equivocal when it came to defining his relationship to Gregg Jakobson; Jakobson was, essentially, being set up to take the hit for the Golden Penetrators. On some level this seems to reflect his greater intimacy with Manson and the rest of the Family, but there is also a status issue here. Jakobson did not have the same small-f family status Melcher accessed through his mother and Wilson enjoyed with his brothers to protect him from the creepy stain of the Family. In his testimony, Melcher seems to have steadily pushed Jakobson out of his inner circle. In his Grand Jury testimony Melcher referred to a “friend of mine named Gregg Jakobson, who at one time had worked for me . . . in the capacity as a talent scout.”56 At the actual trial of Manson, Melcher first responded to Vincent Bugliosi’s question about his relationship with Jakobson by saying, “We have a lot of mutual acquaintances; and I think for about one year he worked for me as some sort of, I guess, talent scout, you might call it, looking for songwriters or recording groups and the like.”57 On cross-examination by Paul Fitzgerald, Melcher acknowledged Jakobson as also a “close personal friend.”58 By 1971, Jakobson is demoted in Melcher’s testimony; now he is characterized by the producer as having been “in my employ as a talent scout . . . although he wasn’t in my employ at the time . . . he took me to Spahn Ranch.” As Melcher was presenting things, when it came to engaging with Manson, Jakobson was freelancing.59

  Jakobson did not simply consent to Melcher’s denial of him. At the trial, Jakobson claimed, in response to a prompt from Bugliosi, that he worked consistently for Melcher: “My title was . . . vice-president,” Jakobson claimed. When Bugliosi asked for clarification (“vice-president in charge of talent”?) Jakobson explained that there was no additional title—just “vice-president”: “I was the only one at the time.”60 While there is more than a little pathos in Jakobson’s failed attempt at self-aggrandizement (he seems to have been “Gregg Jakobson, Vice-President of the Golden Penetrators”) Jakobson did successfully establish that if he was going to be able to act as the representative of the Los Angeles musical elite it was because he was so centrally positioned—whatever his title—in the arena of music production. Jakobson’s testimony at the 1970 Manson et al. trial and at Tex Watson’s 1971 trial at once put Manson at the heart of Los Angeles’s musical and social life in the last two years of the 1960s while also underscoring that Manson was of interest as raw material and not finished product. Jakobson, according to his own account, found the Family to be something along the lines of “scenic.” Jakobson acknowledged that he spent quite a bit of time in recording studios with Manson and says plainly that Manson wrote the song that would become the Beach Boys’ “Never Learn Not to Love.” But he emphasized above all that he was trying to drum up interest in making a documentary film about the Family. Jakobson created a setting for the anthropological possibilities suggested by Melcher’s testimony, explaining that often when he was at Spahn Ranch, he thought of how “nice” it would be for the film: “I stood there on the field out in the back of the ranch with the motorcycles and the girls and the guys and the horses and the trucks and the brown grass and the green trees and the blue sky and the stream would have made a very nice picture for other people to see.”61 Jakobson imagined that with the Family as subject he could midwife a rebirth of Spahn Ranch (“Spahn’s Ranch” as the Family seems to have referred to it) as a working film set. This did not happen: the Ranch burned down in 1970.

  Family Affairs

  The Manson murders were some kind of catastrophe for musical Los Angeles and the New Hollywood. Of course there was the personal pain: the loss of Sharon Tate for her husband and her friends in the film and music industries; Terry Melche
r’s deep psychological misery; and John Phillips’s having to feel a little uncomfortable around Roman Polanski for a little while. But the popular rhetoric surrounding the Manson case suggests another order of magnitude altogether. It regularly (still) causes observers to make the most remarkable claims about its impact. Greil Marcus is always a trustworthy source of hyperbole and he does not disappoint here: “The specter of the Manson slaughter hung over every Hollywood icon, hanger-on, or rock ‘n’ roll musician, as if it were L.A.’s Vietnam.”1 Leaving aside the “every” as too easy of a target to go after, what can we make of Marcus’s claim that this was “L.A.’s Vietnam”? Presumably Marcus’s equation is “Manson is to Los Angeles as the American war in Vietnam is to the people of Vietnam” and that, of course, will not do. The Manson murders did have a profound impact on the music and film communities in and around Los Angeles but it is important to resist the sort of mystifications offered by Greil Marcus and Van Dyke Parks, the important Los Angeles music figure and Beach Boys’ collaborator who has argued that the 1969 murders somehow represented a “collective sin” and led to a necessary reevaluation of the “idealism that had gotten us to this point.”2 This is an interesting claim to parse: if “this point” refers to murders of well-off, glamorous, Hollywood figures, by people who had very much been in their orbit for the past year or so, then the “idealism” Van Dyke Parks is throwing under the bus is really just the short-term open-door policy of rich people who decided for a brief time that it would be fun to let the freaks in.

  John and Michelle Phillips hosted an infamous New Year’s Eve party at their Bel Air mansion as 1968 became 1969. By some accounts (including Michelle Phillips’s own), nine hundred people showed up, and Ed Sanders says that Charles Manson was one of them; John Phillips himself has crowed that he and Michelle invited all of their “Hollywood friends, plus the cast of the new L.A. production of Hair.”3 Here we find a wonderful snapshot of what Tex Watson called “phony Hollywood hippies” (the Mamas and the Papas and their “Hollywood friends”) meeting up with “hippies” from the musical stage—many of whom, according to a thrilled John Phillips, came in costume (i.e., naked). Hair had opened on Broadway in the spring of 1968 and in Los Angeles that fall. It represents one more relatively significant piece of evidence as to how easily mainstream institutions of popular culture—in this case Broadway and the Los Angeles music industry—incorporated the social challenges of the counterculture.

  The musical of Hair itself made a major splash—as antiwar statement and as engine of pop hits. Most significant by far was the 1969 medley of “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” released by the 5th Dimension—a Black pop vocal group who first charted in 1967 with a cover of the Mamas and the Papas “Go Where You Wanna Go.” The 5th Dimension was thoroughly a product of the Los Angeles professional music scene, signed to Johnny Rivers’s Soul City label and produced by Bones Howe (who had engineered many of the major hits released by the Mamas and the Papas); these records featured the contributions of the Wrecking Crew, including Terry Melcher’s friend Mike Deasy, who played guitar on a number of the 5th Dimension albums.4

  The album packaging continued the process of muting whatever social protest might have been built into the original performance of the song onstage. If the song contained a list of a few hints of antiwar (well, pro-peace at any rate) sentiment, the 5th Dimension LP package turns the whole proposition into a matter of goofy style and astrology. Photographs of each of the five singers dominate the inside of the gatefold LP package. The astrological sign of each is given (both women, Marilyn McCoo and Florence LaRue, are actually Aquarians!) and the fashion choices range from Carnaby Street-on-a-very-light-dose-of-acid for the women to sophisticated Player (Ron Townson has a pipe.) for the men. Art director Ron Wolin very carefully deploys elements of psychedelic visual arts—multicolored letters in the title, kaleidoscope effects—without tipping into the overtly trippy.5

  This is a long way from the purposefully chaotic inner gatefold of Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! Zappa’s liner notes encourage his (implicitly male) readers and listeners to consider how they can join his movement and become “emancipated from our national social slavery”; the 5th Dimension record, from the glamorous wardrobe and beatific smiles on the faces of the singers, to the information for the group’s “International Fan Club,” suggests a clear demarcation between performers and audiences. While Charles Manson may have put feelers out to Zappa’s Laurel Canyon scene through Bobby Beausoleil, it was the much straighter musical world of the Mamas and the Papas and the 5th Dimension to which he aspired and energetically attempted to crash. The world of Mike Deasy and Bones Howe overlapped with John Phillips, Terry Melcher, and Dennis Wilson (and Dennis Hopper): this was a social milieu defined by professional class allegiance. Critics and historians are correct to note that the Tate-LaBianca murders shook up this population of people working in the music and film industries—but the events of August 1969 and the ensuing trials did not add up to “Vietnam.” The landscape was not devastated, the murders were not mass, the people were not terrorized. The days of the nine-hundred-guest New Year’s Eve party (freaks welcome!) might have come to an end, but business was, more or less, as usual.

  The most obvious immediate effect of the Manson murders—after the bolts were locked, the bodyguards hired, and the guns bought—is that the elite of Hollywood and Los Angeles’s music industry came to a fuller understanding of themselves as socially distinct from Vito Paulekas, from the girls who the Mamas and the Papas sang about in “Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)” in 1967, from Charles Manson and the Family. Those girls who were so appealing in 1967—the narrators of the Mamas and Papas’ song, trained in East Coast reserve and repression, still cannot help but interact with them—are invisible to the singer of “Our House” who can only see one woman and is driven to beseech her to play her music all through the night—but only for him. The secure private home has replaced the dream of porous boundaries. The freaks have been sent on their way.

  There is a fabulously campy 1971 movie, The Love-Thrill Murders, inspired by the Manson Family murders, which includes an orgy scene during which the freaks turn on the straights: “You had fun with us freaks,” one of them says, “now it’s our turn.” This is paranoid pulp cinema, of course (and its central message has been repeated ad nauseum from the day after the Tate murders to our own time, pretty much). But it is only separated from the analysis of Joan Didion and Greil Marcus by its mode of address. While Charles Manson seems briefly to have held Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson (and maybe Terry Melcher) in his thrall, he was never able to develop the sustained power that he craved and that Mel Lyman enjoyed in the Fort Hill commune in Boston and that Father Yod developed in Los Angeles and then Hawaii. Some—including Peter Maas in a 1970 Ladies Home Journal article—claimed that Manson recognized that music had failed him as a route to power: “How are you going to get the establishment?” Maas claims Manson said. “You can’t sing to them. I tried that.”6

  It is worth noting here that Charles Manson is undoubtedly using “establishment” here to refer to people like Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson, powerful figures in the music world of Los Angeles who may have enjoyed the frisson of danger or wildness provided by Manson and the Family, but who had no compunction about expelling them from the Garden. In public, especially at the trials, Terry Melcher claimed that he did not particularly take note of social differences separating various populations in Los Angeles. This became especially clear during Tex Watson’s trial, when defense lawyer Maxwell Keith asked Melcher to try to describe what impression Watson made on him when they first met, in 1968: “Do you remember anything about his physical appearance . . . ? Did he look like a hippie or did he look straight?” To this direct question Melcher acknowledged that if he “had to choose between his having appeared as a hippie or as a straight, as you put it, I would say a hippie.” Melcher went on to confirm that Watson’s hair was long—about as long as Melcher’s, a
nd that he wore blue jeans (“I presume so. That’s what most young people wear.”). Keith goes on to ascertain that Watson was certainly not wearing a business suit, but that Melcher “wouldn’t classify him as a hippie,” just because “he didn’t wear a coat and tie.” To this Melcher tried to open a little rhetorical space by arguing, “I don’t classify anybody as a hippie, sir.” This line of questioning trailed off before Melcher could say whether he considered himself a straight or a hippie, with the music producer attempting, once more, to claim, “I don’t know how to classify.”7

  But Terry Melcher knew how to classify: he knew that he was not a hippie himself. Ed Sanders correctly notes that Manson had focused on the children of famous people in Los Angeles “in order to scarf up free credit cards, money, hospitality, fame-grope, connections and most important, acceptance and adulation.” Sanders also noted that these “children or relatives of entertainment personalities . . . often form close associations with one another.”8 These children—the son of Doris Day, the daughters of Dean Martin, Edgar Bergen, Angela Lansbury, and Lou Costello, and so on—may have done some drugs and consorted with some figures from the margins, but they ultimately were able to close the curtain when they chose. The Family, as Manson himself so eloquently put it at his trial, was populated by “people you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents did not want.”9 Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson are the powerful couple at the center of this experiment in social interaction—the Daisy and Tom Buchanan of The Great Manson: “They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Their behavior in relation to the Manson Family underscores that Maxwell Keith was on the right track when he enlisted Terry Melcher to help him draw the line between “straights” and “hippies.” In late-1960s Los Angeles living as a “rich hippie” may not have been strictly impossible, but it was a tough act to pull off consistently. And Melcher and Wilson were certainly happy to have others clean up their mess—Melcher with his dumping of his Manson problem onto Gregg Jakobson, and Wilson with the deputizing of his manager to evict Manson and the Family from his Malibu home. Thomas Pynchon captures this moment of rejection efficiently in his Manson-drenched novel Inherent Vice, in which his character Doc Sportello says that what he has been “noticing since Charlie Manson got popped is a lot less eye contact from the straight world. You folks all used to be like a crowd at the zoo—‘Oh, look, the male one is carrying the baby and the female one is paying for the groceries,’ sorta thing, but now it’s like, ‘Pretend they’re not even there, ‘cause maybe they’ll mass murder our ass.’”10