Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  According to Bishop, Charles Manson had a vision, to be sure, but it was “disjointed.” Bishop will not acknowledge that Manson’s inarticulateness is largely a result of his disempowerment—in the courtroom, of course, but really for all of his life. Bishop suggests that Manson could tailor aspects of his “demented doctrine” to willing audience members but that he could “not put the whole thing together.” It was Bugliosi who was able to stitch the amorphous bits of Manson-wisdom into a unified worldview; with his “organized, reasoning mind,” the prosecutor was able to present to the jury the apocalyptic philosophy that he claimed animated all of Manson’s crimes—the Helter Skelter that would later give his own book on the trial its iconic title. In his most efficient and profound declaration, Bishop suggests that it “was quite possible that Bugliosi believed in Helter Skelter more than did Manson!”44

  Most of Witness to Evil is taken up with a plodding narration of the trial’s daily happenings. A much more interesting book, by far, is 5 to Die, written by Ivor Davis, a British journalist who, while earlier working for Reuters, had traveled with the Beatles and Jerry LeBlanc. Like Schiller’s book, 5 to Die was rushed into print in January of 1970. Schiller’s book was published (as Vincent Bugliosi points out in Helter Skelter) by New American Library—which was owned by the same parent company that “also owns the Los Angeles Times.”45 5 to Die was issued by Holloway House, an independent Los Angeles publishing concern owned by two Jewish men, Ralph Weinstock and Bentley Morris, which had been, as Justin Gifford explains, a “niche publisher of adult magazines and erotic paperbacks,” until it turned, after the 1965 Watts Riots, toward marketing to an audience of “Black working-class consumers.” By the late 1960s Holloway House had become “the premier publisher of underground Black literature by publishing Iceberg Slim’s Pimp: The Story of My Life” and later added Donald Goines (and the magazine Players, often referred to as the “Black Playboy”) to its roster.46

  5 to Die is an odd hybrid. Davis tried to flog a reprint of the book on the fortieth anniversary of the case as a serious work of investigative journalism; his promotional materials include an anecdote about a fortuitous meeting he had with Aaron Stovitz (co-prosecutor on the case with Bugliosi until he was pulled for refusing to honor the judge’s gag order) years after the trial, during which Stovitz told him that 5 to Die had provided the state with the “blueprint” they would use to obtain convictions of Manson and the other defendants. The authors of 5 to Die do seem to have had access to some Family members, but the book is most noteworthy for how awkwardly it combines very sharp social criticism with pulpy descriptions of the victims at Cielo Drive (which included more than a hint that these victims were not completely innocent) and the deliciously perverse sexual life of the Manson Family.

  Here is “Votyck Frokowsky” (the transliterated spelling of his name would not settle into stable form for some time) according to Davis and LeBlanc: “a big, bold, full-fleshed man who lived in a grand manner. He was full of life and he worshipped life, enjoyed every minute of it to the hilt. His voice was big, his gestures were large and his actions were sweeping . . . when he drank, he drank a lot, when he loved, he loved fully . . . he believed he was immortal like all people do, and he believed that he would die young, too, and saw no conflict in that because he lived for the moment.”47 Living large seems to have included taking a whole lot of LSD, the authors suggest, as they acknowledge that “no one”—not even their almost-omniscient selves—“will ever know what hallucinations might have scrambled through his mind that night as he lay on the deep-upholstered brown sofa in the living room.”48 The big Polish man’s girlfriend, Abigail Folger, comes in for similar treatment. “Gibby,” the heiress, “had a firm lip and cool, intelligent eyes that some might mistake for the mark of hardness, but when her face lit up with a smile of pleasure . . . she was all woman, soft and fragile.” The authors worry about her tendency to socialize with hippies, and raise the possibility that she came in contact with Manson in the Haight-Ashbury.49

  While the romance-novel noir of these descriptions is predictable enough, the book takes an especially dark turn when it comes to describing the general level of alleged debauchery at Cielo Drive: “Wild drug trips, gang bangs, ritualistic witchcraft practices, sadism, blindfolds and diamond encrusted whips.”50 (True-crime scholar David Schmid reminds us that “blaming the victim” is a hallmark of true-crime work on women killed by serial murderers.)51 The evolving true-crime genre here takes a wild detour into nineteenth-century Gothic. All Davis and LeBlanc’s version of the Tate murders needs is a secret passageway or two, a perverse monk, and a confidence man (oh, actually it has that) and it would be ready for primetime (in 1845 or so). Obsessive focus on ghastly murders and the ensuing trials often contains more than a hint of the pornographic. The Tate murders—the death-scene photographs of the partly clothed doomed “starlet,” the developing narratives of Manson Family orgies, and the investigative/speculative details about what the “beautiful people” people did behind closed doors—provide a sumptuous feast for the eyes of titillated readers. Well before Bugliosi could rationalize the “true-crime” tale at the trial and in his published and broadcast work, many others rushed in to construct a dark caricature of contemporary social life. Bodies are in motion, seemingly firm boundaries are being breached, films may or may not be available. It would be hard to say if Davis and LeBlanc are more intrigued by the sex lives of the rich and famous or the sex lives of the Manson Family. (On the latter front, they recount a wonderfully implausible story about an undercover police officer who had, before the arrests, infiltrated Family life at Spahn Ranch—with “shaggy hair” and “fragmentary beard.” The police officer faces an impasse when the cult leader requires that he go through the usual orgy-as-initiation process. The lawman, as Ed Sanders would likely put it, decided to “get after it”).52

  Perhaps the winner (loser?) in the “blame the victim” sweepstakes came in a chapter of The Beautiful People: The Pacesetters of the New Morality, written by J. D. Russell, and full of the sort of juicy details familiar to readers of Confidential. Given her work as a Hollywood actor, Tate was a fairly familiar face to consumers of magazines with names like Raw Flix (not to mention Playboy, which had a feature on Tate in 1967). The chapter in The Beautiful People acts as a useful summary of tabloid interest in Tate after her death. Most central here is what the murders brought to light about the “dark side” of Hollywood: “The growing drug-dazed Cult of the Kink was slammed forcibly into the limelight with the grisly, macabre murders of actress Sharon Tate and four others.”53 Cielo Drive, we are no longer surprised to learn, had been the site of “wildly freaked-out drug parties with weird sexual overtones.” If there is a dash of social commentary in The Beautiful People, it has to do with the promiscuous mixing that had become the norm in the New Hollywood. These people moved across many “castes”—having dinner one night with Garson Kanin, “rubbing shoulders with the likes of Arthur Rubinstein” but also interested in socializing with the “wild younger set.”54 Even that level of commentary is absent from Gay Talese’s article “Charles Manson’s Home on the Range,” published in Esquire in March 1970. Talese, you might recall, could not seem to take his eyes off the dry humping of two of the Ranch’s residents long enough to say anything analytical.

  Of these pulpy immediate accounts, it would seem that Ivor Davis and Jerry LeBlanc’s 5 to Die would be as easy to dismiss as The Beautiful People or “Charles Manson’s Home on the Range” if it pursued a simple agenda of arousal. But as with the prose of nineteenth-century American Gothic literature, LeBlanc and Davis combine (as Leslie Fiedler said of George Lippard, author of The Quaker City [1845]) “sex, horror, and advanced social thought.” “Pornography,” as Fiedler put it in his analysis of Lippard, “is justified as muckraking.”55 In Davis and LeBlanc the sexualized descriptions of violence seem to tip into self-parody. The authors understand they are in the business of titillation. Moreover they know that their role in th
e backlash is to make sure to indict the sketchy victims along with the frightful villains. The book does not hold back when it comes to full-out horror. This is most evident in their narration of the death of Donald “Shorty” Shea, a ranch hand at Spahn’s. Shea’s final moments, according to 5 to Die, featured members of the Family simultaneously “sticking knives into him” and “stimulating his penis.” With a wink to the reader, the authors provide a “money shot”: at “just the moment of climax, they chopped his head off with a machete.” In case this is not clear enough, Davis and LeBlanc emphasize that this must “have been a sight,” as Shea’s head came off at one end while his penis was “spitting away at the other.”56

  The Tate murders and details of Family life provided (minimally) fact-based opportunities to project potentially shameful fantasies onto safely distant characters—members of the elite creative class and figures from a marginal “hippie cult.” Both Ed Sanders’s The Family and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (with dramatically different affect) promoted a true-crime modality—that powerful form still with us today—relentlessly focused on discovering and recounting the “facts.” But Davis and LeBlanc’s book inhabits a much less settled form than “true crime.” These authors make it clear that unlike Bugliosi they do not intend to reassure readers or tie up loose ends. Numerous scholars in African American studies have explained how narratives written by escaped slaves served multiple objectives: abolitionist rhetoric and prurient thrill were not casual or accidental narrative partners, but complementary elements in a carefully designed social text. Before Helter Skelter was able to establish its norms for an “appropriate” way to talk about the case and its many tentacles, the Tate-LaBianca murders energized a broad and robust cultural conversation about class, sexuality, gender roles, and much more.

  Ivor Davis and Jerry LeBlanc used the affair to launch some devastating—and still startlingly useful—social critique. While the authors of 5 to Die shed no tears for the accused cult leader, they insist that Charles Manson also has to be understood as a “one-man indictment of America’s penal institutions.” This “guru,” they explain, “stands as a monument to the failure of welfare, the police, the courts and the prison system of America to divert a scrawny kid from the road mapped out before him in all its shocking inevitability—a road beginning in squalor and headed for destruction via neglect, dissatisfaction and alienation.”57 In addition to putting Manson on this path of personal doom, life in prison, according to Davis and LeBlanc, also exposed the “slight” guru to “strange religious sects and the occult, mesmerism and scientology, that controversial pseudo Freudian religion.” While stopping short of launching a defense brief on Manson’s behalf, the authors here return him to context—the prison—most responsible for his acculturation. If Manson was able to turn his followers into “robots” after a “sort of Manchurian Candidate conditioning” it was a result of his own training in various prisons.58

  This emerging narrative of Manson’s “institutionalized” character was underscored by Alvin “Creepy” Karpis (late of Ma Barker’s gang and a prison-house associate of Manson earlier in the decade) and by a writer for the Los Angeles Free Press, in January of 1970, who reminded readers that Manson was not a product of hippie culture, but rather “the product of a violent, uncaring society and of brutal, oppressive penal institutions.” Toward the end of 1970, John Lennon joined this opinion, in a Rolling Stone interview during which he argued that Manson “is a child of the state, made by us.”59 In our time no one has made this argument more forcefully than rapper Killer Mike, who samples a Manson interview to powerful effect in his song “Belly of the Beast.” With a Jonah-inspired title that also makes obvious reference to Jack Henry Abbott’s 1981 prison memoir and perhaps to a speech issued by South Africa’s African National Congress in 1980, Killer Mike (with Manson’s help) makes a clear case that the main work of the prison is to institutionalize and brutalize. The rhetorical question repeated at the song’s end (“do you know what you’re creating when you send the boys to the belly of Satan?”) makes plain the argument that the state holds the ultimate responsibility for making career criminals like Manson.

  5 to Die’s other major analytical intervention comes with the authors’ attempt to offer a thumbnail social history of Inyo County, the home of Barker Ranch—where much of the Family fled to in the wake of the August 1969 murders. In a cutting aside, the authors note that law-enforcement had, just before the Manson Family arrests, been taken up with sorting through the recently discovered remains of a plane crash. This, they note, is “the biggest story” in Inyo County since “the early nineteen-forties,” which saw “an influx of Japanese” who would soon be imprisoned “in barbed wire camps.”60 While the Family understood Barker Ranch to be safely removed from Los Angeles, the authors of 5 to Die use this vignette to explain how the once-remote region has come to be defined by Los Angeles people. Davis and LeBlanc describe a region that “lives on tourists, hunters, fishermen, skiers—and thirst of Los Angeles.” Not only were outsiders exploiting Inyo County assets in situ, but the city was now regularly drawing resources away from the area. “[T]he whole county is practically owned by Los Angeles, bought lock stock and barrel for an elaborate aqueduct to bring water” from the mountains to “the metropolitan area, but in effect stifling all local industry and growth. There are small towns, and smaller ones, and ghost towns.”61 This is no longer a journalistic narrative solely concerned with murder victims and their killers—it is ethnic history, environmental history, political and economic history. 5 to Die is a contribution to the literature of the Manson Family creepy crawl that reminds us that the case provided plenty of room—at least until Vincent Bugliosi and his team streamlined the story—for multifarious critical and historical investigations.

  David Dalton and David Felton proposed to the readers of Rolling Stone in the cover story of its June 25, 1970, issue that the “question that seemed to split underground editorial minds more than any other was simply: Is Manson a hippie or isn’t he?” Dalton and Felton were purposefully reducing a whole complex of pretrial investigations into this simple formulation. It was not only the “underground editorial minds” that had become obsessed with this question. The New York Times was a relatively early (and earnest) participant in the conversation, with a December 15, 1969, story on page one, titled “The Hippie Mystique.” The title is some kind of failed gloss on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published six years earlier. The whole point of Friedan’s use of “mystique” (with its echo of the key Marxist term “mystification”) is that prescribed gender behaviors were seductive to women exactly because there was so little public opposition to the notion that these social constructions were, in fact, natural outgrowths of biological sex. But Roberts’s article, like so much mainstream media work in the immediate aftermath of Manson’s arrest, had to acknowledge that the “longhairs” had been coming under attack for some time. “The Hippie Mystique”—title notwithstanding—actually takes pains to explain that Manson is not a hippie; the accused had “rejected” the label and furthermore (according to an unnamed psychiatrist serving as a source for Roberts) hippies stress the “beatific” while Manson is all about the “demonic.”62

  If the New York Times’s reporter struggled, with apparent sincerity, to sort out the realities of Family life from the more general hippie ethos (“essentially anarchistic”), Life magazine was much more interested in using Manson’s arrest and his obvious “non-hippie” modalities as an excuse to work on the sex/horror axis. The cover of the December 19, 1969, issue is now one of the more familiar images surrounding the case. The story is presented under the title “The Love and Terror Cult” and it does not take long for the magazine’s writers to make clear that they will be scripting this as something like a horror movie, subgenre zombie. Davis and LeBlanc, too, had called the Family “an army of modern day slaves and zombies.” While later cultural representations of the Family would lean toward vampires and cannibals (a
s with 1971’s film I Drink Your Blood, which invokes both), in the immediate aftermath of the crime “zombie” was the preferred image. The Life story is invested, perhaps above all else, in warning about how older men like Manson might take advantage of the free-love ethos of the larger hippie movement. “The Love and Terror Cult” works a groove that would become central to Ed Sanders’s approach to the Family (anticipating Sanders’s focus on the “valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes”), but from a position of patronizing disgust, rather than Sanders’s in-group concern. Manson and many others like him (“criminals and ex-cons”) have “discovered a new sort of refuge in the last couple of years: they grow hair, assume beads and sandals, and sink—carnivores moving in with vegetarians—into the life of hippie colonies from the East Village to Big Sur.”63

  “The Love and Terror Cult” articulates a moral panic about hippie life that serves, above all else, as a warning to parents to keep a close watch on their children. Revelations about the Tate-LaBianca murders, and this “love and terror cult” accused of committing these crimes, “struck innumerable Americans as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe . . . about their children.” While the article’s headline uses the word “and” to join “love” with “terror,” the body of the piece makes it clear that this is really about love (sex, really) as terror. The one real journalistic coup in the article is a sidebar that features input from Manson’s parole office and, much more significantly, Dr. David E. Smith, of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, who had come into regular contact with the Family during its San Francisco sojourn (and co-wrote the essay about their living arrangements with Alan J. Rose). The careful work Smith and Rose published was intent on placing not only the Family, but also the larger culture under the microscope. “The final and most interesting questions,” Smith and Rose argue, “relate to why this alternative communal life style holds such an attraction for thousands of adolescents and young adults. Why, for example, were these young girls so attracted and captivated by a disturbed person such as Manson? What is happening within the framework of the dominant culture and its monogamous, nuclear family units, that so many youths must feel compelled not simply to rebel but totally reject traditional life styles?”64 But in Life’s sidebar, not surprisingly, the thoughtful San Francisco doctor has his work reduced to another exhibit in the developing effort to expel Manson and the Family from the counterculture: the Family “was unlike any other commune I’ve known. They called themselves a family, but most family communes are monogamous sexually.”65