A competition of stories (one produced by the prosecution, one by the defense) is, of course, the basic structuring reality of trials in the judicial system of the United States. While the Manson Family women attempted to mount an effort to shape opinion outside the courtroom—on the sidewalks of Los Angeles, in the underground media—they had virtually no power to shape what actually happened inside the Hall of Justice. Sanders takes note of the fact that Manson had something like a “P.R. apparatus” that “reached out to the media tirelessly. Family members wrote letters, approached editors, visited newspapers” and managed to “get some sympathy”—including quite a bit from Ed Sanders himself. Sanders had some complicated work to do: he was committed to establishing the culpability of Manson and the Family in the murders, but he also wanted to demonstrate that the coverage of the arrests in the mainstream media had a distinctly “anticounterculture and antihippie flavor, as if the Mansonites, by their single set of transgressions” had represented the “real funeral of Hippie.”8
But of course the Family was not able to have much effect on the actual workings of the justice system. Their elaborate, coded vest story would have no bearing on the proceedings in Judge Older’s courtroom and their songs would not be heard by many. The Family’s lack of access to power was certainly apparent to Ed Sanders, but this reality did not necessarily make his work any simpler. Sanders, as American Studies scholar Thomas Myers has carefully explained, found himself in a particularly fraught position when it came to sharing his voluminous research findings on the case. Myers makes a convincing case that Sanders worried about the relationship of his work over the course of the 1960s to the frightening realities presented by Manson and his followers. Noting that Sanders’s primary vehicle of expression was not only called Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts but that it promised in its motto a “Total Assault on the Culture,” Myers explains that Sanders was aghast at the frequent depiction of Manson as a key figure of the counterculture—both by the underground press and radical activists (looking for political meaning in the murders he allegedly directed) and by the “establishment” (pointing to him as the logical apotheosis of the excesses of the counterculture). Quoting George Butterick on the possibility that Sanders may have been worried that somehow his oppositional words “had spilled over into unanticipated reality,” Myers concludes that the pacifist poet and musician committed himself to fighting against the way the Manson Family represented the “larger appropriation . . . of the very cultural program to which his life . . . had been dedicated.”9
This all is useful if overstated. There is really no evidence that Sanders took the Manson case quite this personally. While it took Sanders half a year or so to get clear on the fact that Manson simply was a bad guy who “welded together” a group of hippies and turned them into a “war-like clan,” after that point he was hell-bent on exposing the “acid fascism” (as David Dalton and David Felton of Rolling Stone would call it) energizing Manson’s power in the freak world of late 1960s Los Angeles.10 Robert Christgau, in his New York Times review of The Family, was (marginally) less fanciful than Myers in his explanation of Sanders’s compulsion to get involved with the Manson case:
Like Manson, Sanders was into sex, dope, the occult and the downfall of straight society. Both his Fugs monologues and Shards of God were full of references to jelly orgies, titanic mindwarps and arcane rituals. Of course, many of these references were ironic, overstated metaphors that weren’t intended literally. But metaphors have content—Sanders really does believe in expanded sexuality, sacramental and recreational psychedelics, and non-rationalistic modes of knowing—and irony is a sophisticated tool. What could Sanders do when a would-be groupie actually brought a jar of jelly to a Fugs concert—send her back for the Skippy? Such misunderstandings are inevitable when avant-gardism is transformed into a mass movement. This is a liability that long-haired criminals like Charlie Manson and who knows how many other punk charismatics can exploit.11
Christgau, perhaps writing out of his own cultural closeness to Sanders’s milieu (as an emerging East Village rock critic traveling in some overlapping professional and personal circles) slightly skews the weight of the biographical case. Sanders never demonstrates much in the way of self-doubt or concern that his own art or political practices were being put on trial. Rather, his approach is more that of a bohemian gatekeeper. Sanders used his relative power as a countercultural artist and activist (as opposed to the potential suspect of Myers’s and Christgau’s descriptions) to figure out if any of the “Mansonites” should be allowed to come over to his freaky side of the velvet rope.
Sanders explains in the introduction to a revised edition of The Family that as he began to research the case he became increasingly distressed “over what these people and their connective groups had done and were still doing.”12 While Sanders was not going to accept the caricature of Manson as natural evolution of the counterculture, he was even less likely to accept the simplistic solved “picture puzzle,” as Thomas Myers calls it, presented at the trial by Vincent Bugliosi.13 Even before the trial began, Sanders was questioning the approach to the crimes being promoted by the prosecution: “What is lacking if the defendants are guilty,” he wrote in May 1970, “is a motive. No one in the media has really swallowed the whole Helter Skelter routine.” In the book version of The Family, Sanders was even more succinct in his evaluation of the Helter Skelter theory, using his signature nonsense insult: “oo-ee-oo.”14 That said, Sanders was making it clear by the time he first published The Family in 1971 (before Tex Watson had even gone on trial) that he was on a mission, helping to rid California of the “curse of ritual sacrifice, Helter Skelter and satanism.”15
In order to contest the neat package Bugliosi and his team produced at the trial, Sanders embarked on what he learned from his mentor, the poet Charles Olson, to call a “saturation job.” Olson first developed this idea in a letter to the poet Ed Dorn, and later revised it for publication:
“Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it.”16 Sanders was, to put it mildly, a participant-observer when it came to doing the work of investigating the Family. He explains that on occasion his research “required the adoption of a persona to secure data, as when I posed as a New York pornography dealer with Andy Warhol out-takes for sale during an elaborate two-month caper in which I attempted to purchase certain famous porn-films of Manson and the Family and citizens of Hollywood.” At other times, Sanders found himself impersonating “a Satanist,” as well as a “dope-tranced psychopath.”17 Thomas Myers says that in his researching of The Family, Sanders converted himself into equal parts “countercultural Continental Op [from Dashiell Hammett’s detective fiction] and Emersonian transparent eyeball.”18
Myers’s phrase is evocative, but it captures none of the manic intensity of Sanders’s work—either in terms of the exhaustive efforts he made to find out everything he possibly could about the Manson Family and all its tentacles, or about the sometimes exhausting form his writing ultimately took in The Family. Here Robert Christgau’s review is helpful—particularly his coinage of the phrase “data-mania.” As Christgau observes, Sanders “refuses to philosophize, psychoanalyze or make excuses”: “‘The Family’ is nothing more than a chronological arrangement of . . . facts, apparently written direct from the files, rapidly. . . . There is no theorizing, and no new journalism either—no fabricated immediacy, no reconstructed dialogue, no arty pace.”19 (It is instructive to compare Christgau’s description of Sanders’s work to John Gilmore’s account of his own approach in writing true crime books—including his 1971 Manson book, The Garbage People. Gilmore, originally trained as a method actor, described his research as growing from that early teaching: “I wasn’t a reporter, a chronicler. I was the artist, and these experiences and encounters were as paints, hues
, tones, values and varnishes I was laying across a space to form a vibrating picture, mirroring the human experience.”20)
The Family is neither the neo-noir of Thomas Myers’s description nor the rawboned documentary Robert Christgau reads it as. Although the word would not come into widespread general critical usage until a few years after The Family was published, it seems clear now that Sanders was working the same artistic vein as the visual artists called “hyperrealists” in this moment. What Ed Sanders shared with the hyperrealists—Duane Hanson (Supermarket Shopper, in 1970 and Woman Eating, 1971), Audrey Flack (Farb Family, 1970) and Chuck Close (Nat, 1971) in sculpture and painting, but also John Cassavetes (Husbands, 1970) in film—was the ability to pull off the sleight of hand through which a radical challenge to dominant politics, aesthetics, and ways of thinking cloaks itself in the neutral garb of documentary precision. Perhaps my favorite hypperrealist moment in The Family comes when Sanders gives his readers directions—really clear directions—to “Devil’s Hole,” the putative entrance to the bottomless pit in Nevada where Manson, allegedly, told his followers they would live while the race war was playing out above ground:
One such entrance to The Hole was thought to be the so-called Devil’s Hole in the northwest triangular corner of the Death Valley National Monument where the monument extends briefly into Nevada. Devil’s Hole, fenced off from potential visitors, is a baleful pit full of water, and inhabited by blind fish, according to the Family. A couple of skin divers had drowned several years previous trying to touch bottom.
For anyone interested, to get to Devil’s Hole you proceed to Death Valley on Route 127. Then drive north to a town called Death Valley Junction. Hang a right there and proceed to Ash Meadows Rancho. Then grab a northish country road across the California–Nevada Line to the Hole.21
There are facts aplenty in The Family, but they don’t exist in an artless vacuum. What Sanders achieves in The Family is a gonzo version of what Clifford Geertz called “thick description”—the anthropological practice of paying attention to context, listening to “native informants,” staying focused on webs of social discourse, and remaining attentive to details with meticulous care.22 The inclusion of geolocators in the pages of The Family, along with the book’s media criticism, agitprop, legal and rhetorical analysis, anti-Satanist rants, and so on, makes it plain that Sanders is not the “transparent eyeball” of Thomas Myers’s description. His work is highly stylized political journalism and history. It masks itself as an objective and chronological account of the crimes, investigations, trials, and aftermath, but also manages to incorporate a huge amount of social critique, much of which has to do with the corruption of the American legal and judicial systems.
The main tool of Sanders’s cinematic book is the extreme close-up: Tex Watson’s stash of powdered amphetamine is in a Gerber’s baby food jar; the Family listens to the Beatles’ record Abbey Road on a “battery-operated” portable turntable; one of the Beach Boys’ gold records ends up “in the hands of George Spahn’s brother.”23 If the book has a breathless, “and then, and then, and then” feel and this relatively linear organization makes it read like documentary, it is important not to underplay how explicitly the book presents a hyperreal vision of multiple overlapping presents. The seeming clarity of The Family is a willful act of writerly misdirection; it is Sanders’s main method for establishing his rhetorical credentials as he takes on the mainstream press, Vincent Bugliosi, Richard Nixon, and the rest of the establishment.
In his work for the Free Press and then on what became The Family, Ed Sanders was flying two flags. He was working diligently to explain just what kind of freak Charles Manson was and, in doing so, create plenty of daylight in between Manson and the rest of the tribes constituting the counterculture. But he was also attacking Vincent Bugliosi’s claims of being omniscient and evenhanded. While Sanders let his apparently single-minded data curation do most of the arguing for him, Rolling Stone’s David Dalton and David Felton were much more up-front in their analysis of how hard it was to argue with the dominant culture, even quoting social philosopher Norman O. Brown: “[L]egalistic rationalism does not get away from magic,” but “on the contrary, it makes the magical effects so permanent and so pervasive that we do not notice them at all.”24 Dalton and Felton go on to argue that contemporary citizens are “under a spell” and that “the courts, the government have mesmerized us with documents, facts, fetishes to keep our minds off what is really happening.”25 But where Sanders regularly suggests that the “magic” of judicial protocols could only be mobilized by the state, Dalton and Felton theorized quite differently in the Rolling Stone cover article; to them the messiness of the Manson case (just what crime was Charlie really being accused of, anyway?) was going to make it impossible for the trial to do its work of “assigning blame” for a “single, separate crime . . . with a single, obvious motive.”26 Manson, they believed, would be able to “manipulate” the system more or less by being his own unpredictable self. Sanders was less sanguine about the power of Manson, his Family, and his legal team to combat the awesome force of the state. Sanders’s understanding of the situation proved much closer to the actual result.
Manson and his counsel were certainly able to disrupt the regular workings of the courtroom, but ultimately it was Vincent Bugliosi who controlled the narrative, garnered a conviction, and—as Sanders would see things—protected the moneyed and powerful interests of Hollywood. By late 1970 Sanders was using his space in the Free Press to launch a full-bore critique of the trial and the evidence it revealed about the corrupt workings of the police and the prosecutor’s office. Sanders was particularly incensed that Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson were being shielded from having to reckon with the consequences of their various entanglements with the Manson Family. While Sanders does not accuse the two (or Gregg Jakobson) of any crimes per se, the Freep journalist was determined to explain to his readers just how partial the “truths” revealed at the trial were. In an article published in October 1970 with the headline “Manson & the missing groin clink” and the subhead “Where oh where is Dennis Wilson,” Sanders speculated that Terry Melcher would get away with simply testifying that he never did help Jakobson make that documentary about Manson. Sanders noted that Melcher would definitely not say anything at the trial about the underage Ouisch. As for the Beach Boy, Sanders claimed that Wilson had been acting crazy whenever “questioned by authorities” and it was plain that Irving Kanarek would not be able to get Wilson to testify at the trial with respect to the “surprising list of famous starlets, children of entertainment giants, and people with hot careers—all with whom Manson clinked groins.”27
This web of “indiscriminate apertural-appendage conjugation,” as Sanders later called it in The Family, would not make an appearance at the trial because Vincent Bugliosi did not want it to.28 Sanders’s work for the Free Press and then in The Family was very much organized around the notion that Manson and his Family were intimately tied up with various overlapping communities in and around Los Angeles. Sanders’s early sense was that “dope traffic” was going to turn out to be the key to understanding the series of events leading to the eventual murders at Cielo and Waverly Drive. By the time he published The Family Sanders was also convinced that various non-traditional religious practices (i.e., “Satanism”) played a major role in the process by which the Family went completely off the rails. To Sanders, Manson’s “true crime” was using his leverage in the counterculture to wreak great damage and bring disrepute onto hippies and other bohemians. Drugs and “outsider” religious organizations kept Manson more or less in the general swim of things in California in the late 1960s; a theory of race war pushed him fairly far beyond the boundaries of relevance.
But acknowledging that Manson had insinuated himself socially and sexually into the elite circles of Los Angeles’s film and music industry would work against the truth Bugliosi wanted to establish—that Manson was a completely marginal and delusional figure,
plotting Helter Skelter as revenge for a lifetime of feeling disempowered. Ed Sanders argued in his Free Press series that no serious journalists bought Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter theory to explain the crimes. He also mocked the input of Brooks Poston, a close Family compatriot of Manson, who could allegedly put himself into a trance state at will and who testified that the cult leader had directed these killings in order to somehow “trigger off the destruction of the United States by Black militants”: “I mean, come off it,” is Sanders’s response.29 (Bugliosi, in what was likely a fit of triumphalism, given that his version won the day, quotes defense attorney Irving Kanarek’s dismissal of Helter Skelter in his closing argument. Kanarek wondered if the jury was “to believe that by means of a wallet found in a toilet tank Mr. Manson intended to start a race war.”30)
As late as his 1992 parole hearing Manson himself was still challenging the Helter Skelter theory: “[A]s far as lining up someone for some kind of Helter Skelter trip, you know, that’s the district attorney’s motive. That’s the only thing he could find for a motive to throw up on top of all that confusion he had.” Manson went on to instruct the parole board that Helter Skelter was not a theory of race war, but “was a song and . . . a nightclub—we opened a little after-hours nightclub to make some money and play some music and do some dancing and singing and play some stuff to make some money for dune buggies to go out in the desert. And we called the club Helter Skelter.”31
What virtually none of the true-crime writers has wanted to acknowledge is how not crazy it would be to worry about interracial violence, particularly in Los Angeles, and particularly in 1969. I need only mention the mayoral election of that year, which pit the candidate of the white establishment, Sam Yorty, against the insurgent African American candidate, Tom Bradley. Bradley ran far ahead of Yorty in the April primary, but Yorty (carrying water for the FBI’s COINTELPRO) very successfully raised concerns that Bradley was putting together a threatening coalition of Black Power advocates and radical leftists. Paul Mazursky’s strange film Alex in Wonderland, released in 1970, approaches the question of Black revolution as a matter of some moment, but very few narratives of the Los Angeles scene—and the Manson Family more particularly—take seriously how deeply so many residents of Los Angeles were worrying about race relations in 1969. In the Manson context it is, somewhat surprisingly, only the television series Aquarius that puts Black Panther Bunchy Carter right at the center of things in Los Angeles.
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