The Manson Family’s attraction to the Beatles was a completely conventional stance. But Deputy District Attorney Bugliosi, coming into the Manson trial with a 103–1 record in felony jury trials (by his own accounting in Helter Skelter, the book), needed to construct a Manson who was exceptional—not representative. Bugliosi did just this at Manson’s carnival of a trial in 1970. But this was just a start; Bugliosi never took very long breaks from acting as hype man for Manson. And Manson never stopped being willing to participate in Bugliosi’s plotting of his role. He, like Norma Desmond, the main character of Sunset Boulevard, is pretty much always ready for his close-up.
Manson’s conviction for his role in the Tate-LaBianca murders was delivered in early 1971. Over the next five years or so Bugliosi continued to prosecute him—in public appearances, documentary films, and most significant by far, in the book and televised versions of Helter Skelter. These two immensely appealing texts promoted a “true” crime narrative which suggested that the horrifying threat of Manson and his Family had been contained—mostly by the good work of an energetic prosecutor and (some) police officers. That is what Helter Skelter is about—the narrating of Bugliosi’s victory over Manson; but it does something much different. Because Bugliosi is so interested in demonstrating just what a big thing it is he accomplished, he cannot help but depict Manson as embodying as much bad stuff as he could bring to mind. As scholar Jean Murley has smartly pointed out, Bugliosi and Gentry structure this book so that its multiple story lines would be sure to “attract and repel” numerous distinct audiences. There is red meat here for law-and-order types and for countercultural insurgents to chew on, compelling stories for frightened parents and questing youth.5 Bugliosi’s desire to turn the Tate-LaBianca murders into the most bizarre crime ever, to have Manson stand as the worst bogeyman of all time means that he cannot really offer readers anything like closure in Helter Skelter. The legal process has ended, but (as we can now see) Manson and the Family creepy crawled right off these pages and continued rearranging American furniture. In memoirs and manifestos, televised interviews and publicity stunts, the Family has always performed as formidable cultural actors. Bugliosi certainly never seemed to mind not having the stage to himself, as long as he kept getting called to relitigate the case on television news every August. Putting Manson in jail was one thing, but it is in Helter Skelter that Bugliosi did his much more significant cultural work (with major assists from Ed Sanders and too many others to name): he turned Manson into a celebrity whose popularity would never really dim.
The main thrust of the Helter Skelter story organized and circulated by Bugliosi is familiar and requires only the briefest summary. After all, Helter Skelter, co-written by Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, is generally credited as being the best-selling true-crime book in publishing history. The title of the book, as Jean Murley has explained, has essentially become synonymous with “Manson phenomenon.” Murley also very helpfully summarizes that it was Bugliosi’s book (along with the television miniseries developed from it) that converted Charles Manson from being a person into the “personality” he has remained since then. Reviving old ideas about the demonic nature of criminals, Bugliosi energetically embraced the possibilities offered by true crime to turn a criminal into a celebrity.6
According to Bugliosi’s book, Manson was motivated by his belief that an apocalyptic race war was imminent. This end-of-days conflict would nearly destroy the white population, but the victorious Black population would find that they did not know how to run things, and would come looking for Manson (squirreled away in the desert) to take over the reins of power. The wheel of history turned too slowly and Manson grew impatient; he began to wonder if African Americans would ever take the violent initiative that he had predicted. Thus, he ordered his followers to commit the murders in the hopes that a well-placed hint or two (most notably Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet being placed in the toilet tank of a gas station in what Manson thought was a Black neighborhood) would be a sufficient catalyst for hostilities to break out. At the second crime scene, the LaBianca house in Los Feliz, Family member Patricia Krenwinkel even wrote the name of the plan (“Healter Skelter” in her slight misspelling) in blood on the refrigerator. Gregg Jakobson and others offered clear testimony in 1970 that Helter Skelter was an important part of Manson’s worldview. But it was Vincent Bugliosi who insisted at the trial and in the larger cultural arenas he operated in that Helter Skelter was the Family’s engine, its ultimate reason for being, its alpha and omega.
How can we understand Vincent Bugliosi’s success at selling Helter Skelter as motive, book, career? This work of understanding his cultural victory requires a few parallel inquiries, all set in the years from 1969 (the murders, the arrests, the Grand Jury) through 1976 (the airing of the miniseries). The first task is to offer a quick overview of how Vincent Bugliosi literally prosecuted Helter Skelter. Here we will need to pay special attention to how Bugliosi, Curt Gentry, and the makers of the televised version of the book shaped the case into the now-familiar form of “true crime.” John Harrison has aptly called Charles Manson “paperback’s first true crime hero,” arguing that Manson could “be considered the catalyst” for the “thriving market for true crime paperbacks” on the contemporary scene.7 Vincent Bugliosi’s construction of himself as a trustworthy representative of the straight world—as a modern folk hero of sorts—will be at the heart of my investigation of Helter Skelter. But I also want to give the proper attention to the context Bugliosi’s rhetorical victory was set in. Bugliosi was, for instance, in dialogue with Ed Sanders, author of The Family (published in three editions from 1971 to 2002) who first covered the Manson affair for the Los Angeles Free Press.
Ed Sanders, the radical poet, member of the countercultural rock group the Fugs, and founder of the journal Fuck You, has been shadowing Bugliosi from almost the moment that the deputy district attorney was assigned to the case. It is too one-dimensional to suggest that Sanders has acted as the countercultural foil to Bugliosi’s straight man, but from his early Free Press work in 1970 to his most recent writings on the case, Sanders has refused the crazy math of Helter Skelter in favor of a much more richly contextualized analysis of the case.
Sanders has nothing like Bugliosi’s reach, but his work in the Freep (as the Los Angeles Free Press was commonly called), in The Family, and elsewhere serves as an important reminder that the dominance of Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter should not deceive us into thinking that the prosecutor’s work has gone unchallenged. So, while the “true crime” accomplishment of Bugliosi’s efforts in the courtroom, in his book, and in the miniseries will be carefully investigated, Helter Skelter needs to be returned to its original setting. Ed Sanders’s challenges to Bugliosi will sit at the center of this exploration, but I want to reintroduce the multiple voices angling to be heard in the aftermath of Manson’s arrest and the trials of the Family. From “legitimate” journalists to representatives of the underground press, to pulp writers and B-movie producers, to members of the Family itself, there is a dense thicket of claims about Manson and his followers that need to be considered. Helter Skelter was—and remains—a claim, a proposition, a hypothesis. As a basic explanatory template Helter Skelter has, of course, won the day, even as it has been challenged by Sanders, Family members, and various scholars and journalists. The remaining work is to figure out how this victory was accomplished and what competing narratives it elbowed out of the cultural and political marketplace. And ultimately, we need to begin to understand why Bugliosi’s triumph has ultimately not been successful in shutting down the creepy crawl that Manson and his followers have enacted and inspired from 1969 down to our own time.
The installation of Helter Skelter as “true” by Vincent Bugliosi and his supporters has helped to shape not only the contours of nonfiction crime writing, but larger discussions of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Helter Skelter, as prosecutorial narrative, as “true crime” book, and as television miniseries, has c
ontinued to exert remarkable power in cultural conversations about marginality, murder, and collective guilt. While “true crime” can seem to promise straightforward solutions to complex problems (“placing a boundary around something knowable,” as Jean Murley puts it),8 Helter Skelter offers some compelling evidence for how this hybrid form—an innovative mix of police procedural, courtroom drama, and popular sociology—not to mention amateur musicology—can disturb certainties even as it can organize chaos. Murley has made a good case that Helter Skelter is the book that “bestowed autonomous genre-status” on true crime.9 But what this means may not be as straightforward as it first appears. I am thinking here of cultural critic Mark Seltzer’s maxim that “true crime” is “crime fact that looks like crime fiction.”10 Modern true crime, as Jean Murley explains, also tends to offer up copious detail on the “contexts of murder, simultaneous distancing from and identification with the killer, four-part narrative structure of crime-backgrounds-trial-puishment, the creation of narrative tension and interest . . . a narrator insider . . . and an overriding sense of the inevitability of evil.”11
Crime fiction can take many different forms, but the important role models for Bugliosi come from nineteenth-century “mysteries of the city”—those delectably dirty novels of urban underworlds filled with constant violence and hot, weird sex. Helter Skelter might have helped to “dignify” true crime as a mainstream proposition, but that does not mean that it bypasses the pleasures of perversity built into precursor forms. The purple prose of Bugliosi and Gentry comes from the nineteenth-century Gothic as does the book’s sense of untamed, inherent evil and its opposite number, upstanding righteousness. Murley has made a compelling case that a large proportion of the most significant American true crime books from the mid-1960s through the 1970s were sited in the West. The mysteries of the city were rewritten as tales of the West, and a huge number of social anxieties about life in that region were processed in this genre of books that pretended to be about just the facts.12 But as literary scholars long ago recognized about the Gothic novels of the nineteenth century, part of the fun for readers is being given the opportunity to immerse themselves in a world that, supposedly, has nothing in common with their own lives. Fears about cults, communes, youth experimentation with drugs and sex could be delightfully entertained in the pages of Helter Skelter and then safely sequestered as the evildoers are locked up in the back end of the true crime book. Helter Skelter, as Jean Murley has rightly explained, mostly serves a function that might be summarized as “I told you so.” But that disciplinary conclusion is not achieved before Bugliosi indulges plenty of his readers’ worst nightmares or fondest fantasies.13
It is very difficult to communicate how imperfectly the usual words (“trial,” say, or “testimony”) fit the proceedings that traveled under the name The People of the State of California vs. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel. While Manson himself is usually rightfully plotted at the center of the carnival of events in Judge Older’s courtroom, we must also consider the truly astounding role played by Manson’s lawyer Irving Kanarek. The byzantine set of courtroom activity that essentially stripped Manson of his right to defend himself is outside of my concerns here, but it should be noted that Kanarek was not exactly Manson’s first choice.14 “Dilatory” is the adjective that Bugliosi uses in Helter Skelter to try to indicate what he had heard about Kanarek before the Manson trial. But even a cursory reading of the trial record makes it clear that “dilatory” suggests a methodology at once too passive and too organized to capture Kanarek’s approach. The number and nature of Kanarek’s objections are legion: “[T]he prejudicial value far outweighs the probative value” was just the chorus of an epic ballad of sidebars, requests for mistrial, stalling tactics, and other verbal challenges thrown up by the remarkably inventive lawyer. That Bugliosi was able to fashion something like a coherent case over the nine-and-a-half-month-long trial is a testament to the deputy district attorney’s focus and patience. Kanarek was found in contempt of court four times during the trial—the first time for interrupting too much.
By way of illustrating the challenges Kanarek posed to the logical unfolding of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter script, let me introduce Linda Kasabian, a one-time Family member who turned state’s evidence in exchange for immunity. After Susan Atkins renounced her Grand Jury testimony (and forfeited the deal she had made with the prosecution to avoid the death penalty), Linda Kasabian became the linchpin of the prosecution’s case. While Kasabian had been with the Family for only a brief time, she had been exposed to all the key elements of Charles Manson’s racial belief system and was ready to report fully about them under Bugliosi’s direction. But on July 27, 1970, before Kasabian could begin testifying (just after the bailiff instructed her to raise her right hand) defense attorney Kanarek was up on his feet with this: “Object, your Honor, on the grounds this witness is incompetent and she is insane.”15 Of course Kanarek was admonished by the judge and the jury was instructed to disregard his comments. The conversation about Kasabian’s competence was continued at the bench, with all lawyers and Judge Older conferring. Patricia Krenwinkel’s lawyer Paul Fitzgerald summarized defense counsel’s objection to Kasabian’s appearance: Kasabian, due to her “prolonged illegal use of LSD is a person of unsound mind, is mentally ill, is insane, is unable to differentiate between truth and falsity, right and wrong, good or bad, fantasy and reality.”16
Kanarek began his cross-examination of Linda Kasabian with the (seemingly genuine) suggestion that she have sodium pentothal administered to her in the hopes that this would ensure that she tell the truth. From here Kanarek’s main tactic in impugning Kasabian’s sanity and veracity was to question her at length about her LSD use. In the fog thrown up by the defense attorney in his attempt to use Kasabian’s approximately fifty admitted LSD trips to undercut her reliability, Kanarek outdid himself with this: “Well, will you tell us what did you think of, say, on your 23rd trip?”17 Kasabian, of course, could not answer; she did promise to try to remember as the trial continued.
In the book Helter Skelter, Bugliosi skates over the extreme difficulty he had producing the central narrative he was intent on constructing. While Helter Skelter in its basic vernacular meaning and in the Manson application signifies wild chaos, Bugliosi is intent on reproducing the unfolding of the prosecution’s case as logical, coherent, and clear. In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi gives little detailed information about Kasabian’s testimony. Admitting that he moved as quickly as possible through the orgy issue, Bugliosi explains that he turned to other matters: “Helter Skelter, the black-white war, Manson’s belief that the Beatles were communicating with him through the lyrics of their songs, his announcement, late on the afternoon of August 8, 1969, that ‘Now is the time for Helter Skelter.’”18 The prosecutor introduced the race-war motive in his opening statement and managed to have a number of key witnesses—Kasabian and talent scout Gregg Jakobson perhaps most powerfully—attest to its centrality in Manson’s philosophy. Gregg Jakobson, as always during the trial, was more than willing to acknowledge his own intimacy with Manson and his deep knowledge about Manson’s motives. Jakobson testified that Manson believed in an “imminent” race war and recounted Manson’s acknowledgment that he needed to help to set off the Helter Skelter cascade. Additionally, as Jakobson explained, African Americans would emerge victorious from this cataclysmic conflict but would prove unable to lead their own new society and would come find Manson and the Family in the desert and beg the cult leader to take the reins. Jakobson also offered testimony with respect to Manson’s faith that the Beatles were “prophets and they were prophesying Helter Skelter. . . . They were the leaders of the movement.”19 At the trial Bugliosi took incredible care to parse the lyrics of the White Album with Jakobson’s help. Bugliosi has argued in numerous venues that he knew that he needed to find a “crazy” motive to explain these crazy crimes. With the help of Jakobson and a few other witnesses, Bugliosi was ab
le, ultimately, to tell a “true” story to the jury—about rock and roll, an apocalyptic battle, and mind control—which turned out to be more compelling than other motives floating around, most notably the initially dominant “revenge on Terry Melcher” and the truly compelling Bobby Beausoleil–inspired “love of brother” explanations.
These other two alternative explanatory frameworks have had major support from the time of the crimes onward, but they bring with them much less occasion for larger social investigation and critique than does the Helter Skelter motive. In other words, to make a case that Manson ordered the killings at Cielo and Waverly Drives because he was angry at Terry Melcher for refusing to sign him to a record contract would have required an accompanying portrait of Manson as weak, untalented, pathetic, and narcissistic: one more Los Angeles failure. The “love of brother” Beausoleil narrative is organized around a sense of Manson and the Family as, above all else, a criminal enterprise—tied up with biker gangs and petty “business” matters. This motive builds on a sense of Manson as “institutionalized,” unable to make it in the straight world and comfortable only around other lawbreakers. Neither alternative motive would have easily opened up on to the broader social questions Bugliosi wanted to litigate, nor would they allow Bugliosi to create a sense of Manson as a frightening bogeyman. (It is the latter achievement, by the way, that Bugliosi has relitigated repeatedly since the trial ended. In an afterword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Helter Skelter for instance, Bugliosi more or less rejects the notion that the trial carried any major social weight. Rather than join the Didionesque “end of the ’60s” camp, Bugliosi encourages his readers to understand our continuing obsession with Manson as simply a cut-and-dried product of the fact that this was “the most bizarre mass murder case in the recorded annals of crime” and “people are magnetically fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre.” Good lawyer, bad historian.)20
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