Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Sanders’s brief mention of Salazar’s murder (chronicled, famously, by Hunter S. Thompson’s “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” published in Rolling Stone the following April) is one more reminder that the poet was using his perch at the Los Angeles Free Press not only to narrate the wild action of the Manson trial itself. The work Sanders would ultimately publish in book form as The Family is relentless in its offering of “facts.” When Robert Christgau reviewed The Family glowingly for the New York Times he called attention to its “data-mania” and avoidance of the literary artifice of the New Journalism—“no fabricated immediacy, no reconstructed dialogue, no arty pace.”21 Sanders’s prime directive by the time of The Family (certainly influenced by his sense that he would be talking to a much broader audience than the readership of the Free Press) was to distinguish Manson’s criminally antisocial activities from the consciously rebellious modes of countercultural life. It is not hard to understand Sanders’s strategic decision to step back from the broader social commentary of the Free Press series in favor of the gonzo just-the-facts-ma’am approach of The Family, but this also meant a substantial loss for what “truths” could be processed in Manson “true crime” literature. One of the real contributions Sanders made when he joined the Free Press as its special “Manson correspondent” was that he understood he could at once provide an in-depth account of the legal issues playing out in the courtroom while also using the case as a mirror, a cudgel, and a stack of Marshall amps. What was perhaps most impressive about Sanders’s Manson series is how hard he worked to domesticate the courtroom. In other words, one of Sanders’s central objectives in this journalistic work was to illustrate that the cultural space of the trial was not “pure” but held concentrated doses of the corruption and violence which defined the larger culture. This came most clear in Sanders’s linkage of the death penalty in play in Judge Older’s courtroom and the death being wrought by American forces in Vietnam.

  In mid-August, 1970, Sanders filed a long article that ranged from sharp critique of Linda Kasabian’s immunity deal, description of a few hot rumors being passed among journalists (did Jay Sebring cut the hair of the LaBiancas’ daughter?), and a brief overview of the poetics and politics of “Irving Kanarek jokes” being told in the Hall of Justice. But the article takes a sharp turn in its last two paragraphs. Here Sanders, possibly responding to criticism of his coverage of the case up until this point (“Those who have accused me of making a hero out of Charles Manson can go make motions of unification with a weather balloon”) issues something like a manifesto:

  This trial, this case, these defendants, these prosecutors, this system of capital punishment, this prison system . . . bring into sharp focus everything that ails this mammal society of humans called America. I could write a hundred pages about what it’s like to die in the gas chamber, with the exact rituals of lung snuff, defecation of the person gassed, the whole barbaric dungeonistic spectacle of capital punishment. Or I could write a thousand pages detailing the dreadful massacres inflicted upon those suffering victims now overtaken to the earth, those seven souls . . . .

  This country which perfected the concept of the “free-fire zone” in wars against the Orient, this country which finds free fire zones and the spirit of the fragmentation bomb suffused upon the well kept lawns of the homeland, this country is in trouble. It is time to stop the fires of cruelty that Mr. Salter spoke up against in arguing against the death penalty for Bob Beausoleil. It is time to stop. Later for the code of Hammurabi. Later for cyanide. Later for barbarism. Get out of Vietnam. Get out of encroachment, get out of the gas chamber, get out of the temple of human hamburger.22

  In January 1971, Sanders would put an even sharper point on his anti–death penalty position in an article the Free Press titled “Five Poignant Points to Ponder”—a sort of summary of the trial as the case was sent to the jury. Here Sanders invokes what had become a familiar objection to the prosecution of Manson: not that he was “innocent,” but rather that it was unfairly selective of the government to hold Manson accountable for his crime if it was going to be unwilling to try other products of its institutional indoctrination: “[I]f you kill Manson you have to kill Calley.” With this Sanders is invoking the American army lieutenant who directed the My Lai massacre of March 1968; these crimes did not come fully to light until November of 1969. Calley’s trial, which began in November 1970, raised questions of individual culpability in the context of chain-of-command responsibilities.23

  Ed Sanders had as little patience for claims that Calley was simply “following orders” as he did for the prosecutorial claim that Manson telling his female followers to “do something witchy” constituted a directive not only to murder Sharon Tate and her friends but to write words in blood and all the rest. The Manson/Calley connection that Sanders emphasized was energized in late March of 1971: on March 29 Manson was sentenced to death and Calley was convicted (and then sentenced to life in prison on March 31) and numerous newspapers had the stories jostling each other on the front page.

  So it is no surprise that Ed Sanders had plenty of company in 1971 and after when it came to bringing Manson and Calley into conversation. Journalist and activist Paul Krassner recalls in his memoir that he spoke on his radio show (on KSFX in San Francisco) about similarities between Manson and Calley—describing Manson as an “individualized version of the state.”24 The alternative press was full of Manson/Calley features. Marvin Garson’s San Francisco Good Times (successor to the San Francisco Express Times) published an early April front page article by Yippie and antiwar activist Stew Albert that challenged powerful figures of the establishment to accept Manson and Calley as products of their own handiwork. Do not “feel superior to these two orphans,” Albert directed, “to whom you denied both your love and your wealth, and yet thought you were their father.”25 In New York, Allen Katzman was prosecuting a similar case in the the East Village Other suggesting that if “Sharon Tate and her friends were slanty-eyed ‘gooks’ and lived in Viet Nam, Manson and his followers would have been following orders and therefore immune to the Ten Commandments.”26 Bobby Beausoleil made an even broader point to John Gilmore, during a jailhouse interview soon after his conviction. “When you talk of killing innocent people, what about the truly innocent and humble people of the villages who are living from day to day, planting their rice and raising their children in peace? And then this mechanical Godzilla sends airplanes over there and drops bombs on their home, defoliates their land and kills their children.”27

  The crimes of these two “institutionalized” men (Manson as a product of the prison system, Calley through the military) were put most literally into dialogue in a play written by Andrew Dallmeyer, which arranges to have the two men sitting in a prison cell together, discussing the contradictions of living in a society that first trains men to kill and then punishes them for successfully fulfilling its prescriptions. Much more in Sanders’s gonzo vein were graphic works that appeared in 1971 in comic book and magazine form. First up was a simulated boxing match between Calley and Manson organized in the pages of National Lampoon (in its August 1971 “Bummer” issue). With a composite of Calley and Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman on the cover—and Neuman’s usual “What, me worry?” morphed into “What, My Lai?”—National Lampoon’s feature was narrated by Howard Cosell and offered pre-fight interviews and a round-by-round analysis of the match. Calley ultimately wins (after some crucial intervention from President Nixon) but not before Manson predicts, Muhammad Ali-style, that the day of the fight will be “the helter-skelter date, when I’ll be the No. 1 welterweight.”28

  The release of this issue of National Lampoon more or less coincided with the publication of the comic book A Legion of Charlies, which was written by Tom Veitch and illustrated by Gregg Irons. The title joke was rooted in the fact that William Calley was a member of “Charlie” Company. Legion of Charlies has been heroically summarized by M. Steven Fox on his website:

  Legion of Charlies . . .
incorporates Manson’s power to control the minds of others into a story about Calley coming to San Francisco after his release from prison. In the story, Calley is named Rusty Kali [yes, it’s a bad Hindu-pantheon joke], and he suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, promptly killing a prostitute he has bedded on his first day in the city. After returning to the streets, Kali drops some acid and has a vision about Manson, which changes him into a mindless puppet and “dedicated follower of the word of Charlie!”

  Simultaneously, hundreds of other Vietnam veterans across the country undergo the same transformation, inciting a mass migration of Charlie-zombies to a remote retreat in the mountains of Utah. The Legion of Charlies is born on this mountain and they celebrate with a frenzied riot that includes cannibalism as spiritual communion. According to the gospel of Charlie as espoused by Kali, members of the legion can acquire another person’s power just by eating them. Led by Kali, the Legion of Charlies begin a trek around the world, devouring political leaders (such as Spiro Agnew and Chairman Mao) and assuming their powers.

  This lethal turn of events does not go unnoticed by President Nixon, who invites the Legion of Charlies to New York for a meeting. But Nixon’s secret purpose for meeting the Charlies is to seize them and take control of the powers they’ve ingested. Unfortunately for Tricky Dick, the spirit of Charlie possesses more celestial power than he ever expected!29

  Legion of Charlies joined Sanders and so many others on the political and cultural Left in arguing that Manson and Calley need to be understood as Frankenstein monsters and their crimes had to be traced back to their roots in the programming done by the institutions of the dominant culture.

  If National Lampoon and Legion of Charlies represented the “low” culture avant-garde construction of the “true crimes” of Manson and Calley, then surely the emblematic work of the “high” culture avant-garde was Commune, a theater happening first presented in December 1970 by Richard Schechner’s Performance Group. Commune played for over two years, as theater historian Esther Sundell Lichti has explained, “in one form or another . . . both at The Performing Garage and on tour.” As Lichti makes clear in her work on Commune, the piece “began with an exploration of the idea of community, in both its real and mythic senses.” Commune was developed as a collective workshop experience “to which all members contributed thoughts, ideas, and materials” and ultimately revolved around “two events: the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family, and the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai by American soldiers.”30 Schechner, a major figure in avant-garde New York drama and theater education, has made it plain that the crimes of Charles Manson and William Calley were construed by the company as constituting “rather identical incidents of national policy.”31 This consonance is underscored in the performance in such a way as to make audience members consider their own complicity as well. Patrons entering the theater space were asked to give up their shoes; these shoes are later worn by actors portraying the Manson Family killers as they commit their crimes at Cielo Drive (all of which unfolds as “Calley” is describing his own crimes).32

  In the years immediately following the Tate-LaBianca murders it was a common feature of commentary on Manson to suggest that the “true crime” at issue here (as with the My Lai massacres) was how murderers are produced by the American military and prison complexes. This was not always a particularly nuanced rhetoric: much of it seems to be inspired by the Rolling Stones’ key “insight” in their 1968 song “Sympathy for the Devil” that all of us were somehow responsible for the killing of John and Robert Kennedy. Vincent Bugliosi would argue against this cultural tendency in his prosecution and, with much broader social impact, in the true crime book he ultimately wrote with Curt Gentry. But it flattens out the meanings of the Manson case to ignore this earlier attempt—haphazard, undigested, and unsustained, ultimately, as it was—to rehumanize Manson (de-demonize him?) by stitching him back into a recognizable web of social relations. Manson himself joined the argument at his trial. “We train them to kill,” he said, “and they go over and kill, and we prosecute them and put them in jail because they kill.”33

  Hippie Ugly! Hippie Shit! Toothpaste Good!

  It was Ed Sanders who launched the most sustained challenge to the Bad Man narrative constructed by the prosecution in the Manson case. The “truth” in the serialized “true crime” Ed Sanders produced for the Los Angeles Free Press has very little to do with the investigative police work and courtroom drama that would form the heart of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. Rather, Ed Sanders used the trial of Charles Manson to prosecute his own case in the Los Angeles Free Press about the murderous contradictions at the heart of United States domestic and foreign policy in 1969 and 1970. Rather than cede to the aggressive “end of the sixties” rhetoric developing around the murders and the trial, Sanders advances an alternate politics that uses the trial to propose a number of crucial areas in which the cultural and political meanings of the sixties itself was being put on trial along with Manson and his followers. With perhaps greater consistency and more intensity than any other published commentator, Ed Sanders worked to demonstrate how Manson was being used as a sign of all of the “excesses” of the counterculture: “Manson fuck much. Guilt! Manson live commune. Guilt! Manson LSD. Guilt! . . . Hippie Dirty! Hippy Whore! Hippie Ugly! Hippie Shit! Toothpaste Good!”1

  When he was able to ramp down his purposefully extravagant prose a tiny bit, Sanders was also able to explain how Manson’s “true crime” was set into starker relief by the prosecution’s strategy of using Linda Kasabian—the star of the state’s case—as the “good” hippie counterpart to Manson. Sanders noticed fairly quickly how Kasabian was being used by her prosecutorial and journalistic supporters as what original case prosecutor Aaron Stovitz called a “true flower child” who had unwittingly fallen under the influence of Manson. In the summer of 1970 Sanders speculated that Kasabian was essentially becoming an object of what Tom Wolfe, in that same moment, was defining as “radical chic” (though really “liberal chic” in this case). Though born in 1939, Sanders was really more of a late-model fifties radical/beatnik than a hippie, and his feelings about Kasabian were colored no doubt by his sense that she was a turncoat—naming names in order to spare herself.

  Sanders was especially incensed at the role played by New Journalist Joan Didion who, according to his description, was preparing a version of Kasabian’s “flower strewn life story” for publication and would likely “appear on Johnny Carson” before long.2 The Kasabian book never did appear, though Didion ultimately incorporated some of this material into The White Album, a key text in establishing the Manson case as the “end of the sixties.” By her own admission, Didion joined Vincent Bugliosi in making sure that Linda Kasabian looked the part she was attempting to play at the trial. As Didion explains, she was enlisted by Kasabian to shop for the dress that this “flower child” would wear as she began her testimony at Manson’s trial: “I went to the Magnin-Hi Shop on the third floor of I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and picked out, at Linda’s request, the dress in which she began her testimony about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. ‘Size 9 Petite,’ her instructions read. ‘Mini but not extremely mini. In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold. Or: A Mexican peasant-styled dress, smocked or embroidered.’”3 There was some urgency to Didion’s errand, as the journalist explains, because Bugliosi had vetoed Kasabian’s original wardrobe choice, “a long white homespun shift” because—according to the prosecutor-cum-fashion-consultant—long “is for evening.”4 While the prosecutor was rejecting the dress Kasabian wanted to wear to court, a number of the other Manson women continued to work on their own piece of “homespun”—the vest they had been making Manson for the past couple of years. In Rolling Stone’s June 25, 1970, cover story, Family member Sandra Good explained that various women had been “working on this for two years . . . adding things, sewing on patches. It’s for Charlie to wear in court.”5 Paul Watkins ex
plains that from the day he first joined the Family he noticed that “there were always girls working on Charlie’s ceremonial vest—a vest embroidered by hand in every imaginable color, a vest begun the day the Family was started by Charlie’s first female follower, Mary Brunner. During the Summer of Love it was embroidered with flowers . . . then little scenes were added depicting the Family’s odyssey across the country, and finally, their arrival at Spahn’s. There were scenes of making love, riding horses, smoking dope, dancing, making music, going to the desert.”6 Watkins is eloquent in his description of the vest’s function as a counterhistory of the Family and its times, a chronicle meant to challenge the official story of the Manson Family being constructed by Vincent Bugliosi and his witnesses in court: “In time the vest became a vibrant, living chronicle of events within the Family, all the way through the period of Helter-Skelter, the murders and the trials. Over a two-year span more than fifteen girls worked on the vest continually—sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch. It looked like a medieval tapestry depicting a legend or a myth. During the trials, after the girls cut their hair, great locks of it were sewn into the fabric.”7 Rolling Stone certainly understood the significance of the vest. In its cover story on the Family and the case in June of 1970, the first two pages include pictures first of Manson wearing the vest, and then a close up of the back of the vest itself. In Manson, the 1973 documentary on the Family directed by Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick, one of the women says simply of the vest, “It’s our story.”