Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  A Newcomer, an Intruder

  It is interesting to think about Charles Manson’s post hoc explanations of the remarkably unthreatening way in which Helter Skelter circulated in his Family. It is interesting to think about Ed Sanders’s claim that no journalist observing the trial gave any credence to the theory of Helter Skelter promoted by the prosecution. It is also interesting to consider the claims made in the foreword to a revised edition of John Gilmore’s 1971 Garbage People (1995), which pretends that this volume has acted as a “spectral ‘third’ title” along with Helter Skelter and The Family in defining the true crime Manson landscape. Here the publisher makes the mathematically neat but historically indefensible claim that Garbage People has made an impact as the midpoint on a line graph stretching from Bugliosi (“Mr. Straight, ready to cash in on all the gore”) to Ed Sanders (trying to “restore the good name of peace-loving flower children around the world from the stain of guilt by association”).1

  If there is indeed a spectral third title, it is not Garbage People but rather the film documentary Manson by Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick, first screened in 1973, but which did not get much of showing until 1976. Jean Murley has written eloquently about this movie and is especially convincing about its status as a major product of what we might call the latency period of Manson narratives. As Murley puts it, this film was made between 1969 and 1972, before Manson had been frozen in place as a “cultural signifier of mayhem and subversion.” Unlike so many later narratives, Manson allows Family members to have a voice—through direct testimony, but also via the documentary’s ethnographic richness. In the movie we see the women of the Family engaged in what is obviously meaningful activity, from embroidering Manson’s vest, to scrounging for food and having group sex, to sitting in protest outside the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles. The film, which features music made by Family members Brooks Poston and Paul Watkins, is, as Murley claims, “[q]uiet, balanced, and small.” Abjuring the sensationalism that would characterize so many later narratives of Family life (and which, in fact, characterized Sanders’s book), Hendrickson and Merrick instead focus their attention on the Family as text—they capture the rituals and organizing principles of everyday life—while also paying careful attention to the historical context framing the Manson phenomenon. The filmmakers try to make sure that their viewers will read the life of the Family in the context of “violent street rebellion, the Vietnam war, and race riots.”2

  The Manson film has had an occult presence, at best, reemerging from legal limbo every so often to remind viewers that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter narrative is neither inevitable nor exclusive. One of the best things about Manson, the documentary, as Jean Murley has emphasized, is that it does not reenact the murders, abjuring whatever pleasures that action might have afforded to viewers.3 Instead, the movie acts, avant la lettre, as a corrective to the dozens of cultural productions—most notably Bugliosi’s book and the television miniseries based on it—that treated the killings themselves as the required money shot. But whatever Manson (or The Family or Garbage People) accomplished, it is foolish to suggest that any other text can compete with Helter Skelter when it comes to analytical or marketplace domination. That Bugliosi’s “Mr. Straight” persona was fairly widely challenged in the early to mid-1970s is largely irrelevant to his accomplishments at the trial and in the print and televised versions of Helter Skelter.

  It is not really possible to separate the presence of Charles Manson in the historical record and popular consciousness from the work done by Vincent Bugliosi and his co-writer Curt Gentry. The book established its claim to dominance almost immediately upon publication. If anything like a consensus developed about Bugliosi’s work in the wake of its release, it basically took the form of a grudging respect—this was an important subject but not much of an actual book. The New York Times actually evinced more than a little bit of discomfort in its review of Helter Skelter; while the account is generally favorable, the review carries a dismissive subtitle—“Manson Meets the Bug” (the “Bug” was a nickname promoted by the women of the Family during the trial and supported by defense attorney Irving Kanarek’s frequent mispronunciations)—and a sardonic tone. Additionally the Times devoted relatively few column inches to what the paper must have recognized was a fairly major publishing event. What is most interesting about the review is how fully it articulated the idea that both Charles Manson and Vincent Bugliosi practiced the hard sell. This represents an interesting moment in the cultural processing of the Tate-LaBianca murders. In a sense it is the last time that anyone with a central place in mainstream culture would treat the Helter Skelter theory as anything other than the simple truth about this case. “The entire notion” of these murders being committed in order to set off a race war, according to reviewer Michael Rogers, was “quirky, inconsistent and psychotic.” It remains something of a mystery, he goes on to write, that Manson was able to “sell it to his unimaginative, middle-class band of runaways. And it’s as much an accomplishment on Bugliosi’s part that he unraveled the whole twisted ideological package. But most to the prosecutor’s credit is that he managed to turn around and sell it himself to an unimaginative middle-class jury. In that courtroom feat, more than any other, Charles Manson truly met his match in Vincent Bugliosi.”4

  In Rogers’s apt rendering, Helter Skelter comes to light not as an interpretive given, but instead as a theatrical contest. Rogers’s intervention would have little impact, of course. Bugliosi’s version of events would soon become entrenched as conventional wisdom for explaining the Manson Family. Still, Rogers’s claim is interesting for the position it takes on the persuasive abilities of powerful men: the jury, in this reviewer’s account, is made up, essentially, of the parents of the young people who constituted the Family. The implicit (and somewhat surprising) claim here is that it is not particularly hard to control the minds of “middle-class” people—whether teenage runaways or full-grown members of a jury.

  In his review Rogers also correctly noted that Bugliosi’s achievement was not only in Helter Skelter’s substance—its explanation of Manson’s motive—but also in its tone. The book’s success, as Rogers explained, was rooted very much in its ability to create a narrative voice that captured the easy authority of the prosecutor. The prose of Helter Skelter, as Rogers put it, is “methodical, tight, occasionally ironical and rising to emotional pitch only on rare occasion. And even when Bugliosi raises his voice, one still senses the calculated flavor of a closing argument to the jury.”5 In Helter Skelter, as Rogers’s review suggests, Bugliosi is not only doing the important work of (re)litigating the case—he is also demonstrating how a proper middle-class father instructs his charges.

  Bugliosi’s appearances on local media during the trial made it clear that he was more than willing, and quite able, to represent navy-blue-suited rationality. It is worth remembering that Bugliosi and Manson were exact contemporaries—they were born just three months apart from each other in 1934. In addition to obtaining convictions, another main task for the prosecutor (inside and outside the Hall of Justice) was to present a comforting visual and auditory antidote to Manson with respect to what thirty-five looked like in California in 1969. Bugliosi’s work (in the court of public opinion anyway) was made easier by the fact that the defense team did not exactly present a formidable opposition. Bugliosi consistently dominated Los Angeles television news coverage, with little challenge from anyone on the defense team. The local media could not get enough of Bugliosi during the trial—he looked good, but not too good, and he spoke well. Next to Bugliosi, members of the defense team looked socially marginal. The cameras lingered on the defendants’ lawyers only long enough to show audiences a sketchy shyster (Irving Kanarek), a baffled if amiable young hippie (Ronald Hughes) and an above-it-all cosmopolitan (Daye Shinn, rarely filmed or photographed without a grin on his face or cigarette in hand, seeming to be on the lookout for his missing cocktail). Bugliosi’s performances in public, on the other hand, reve
aled a relatively young man—with a reassuringly receding hairline signaling gravitas—more than able to take on the mantle of reassuring authority.

  There are, of course, challenging stories about Bugliosi that have been circulating at least since the time of Helter Skelter’s publication. In our own time it has become simple to access these counternarratives—both about his work as prosecutor and about his personal life. On the latter front, a simple web search of “Bugliosi” along with the keywords “milkman” and “mistress” reveals that there is a solid core of Manson-case enthusiasts who have devoted quite a bit of energy to researching questions widely publicized by George Denny III in 1974 about the prosecutor’s personal rectitude. Denny first crossed paths with Bugliosi in his role as lawyer for Manson Family member Bruce Davis in the trial for the murder of Spahn Ranch laborer Donald “Shorty” Shea. But for years after this, Denny had something of a side career as a thorn in Bugliosi’s side. His well-publicized attacks on Bugliosi reached its peak in 1974 during the time Bugliosi was unsuccessfully running for attorney general of California. Denny (working on behalf of William Norris, Bugliosi’s Democratic primary opponent) held a press conference on the eve of the election to detail his accusations. According to Denny’s statement, Bugliosi had harassed (and then paid off) his family’s milkman in 1969 after developing an obsessional fear that the milkman was the actual father of his child. Bugliosi’s deviations from his “Mr. Straight” persona continued in 1973 when, according to some accounts, he beat Virginia Caldwell, a woman he allegedly had a sexual relationship with, after she refused his demand to have an abortion. If Bugliosi was going to serve his role successfully he would need to keep his own expressions of violence and experiments in sexual liberation under wraps.6

  These questions about Bugliosi’s personal rectitude dissolved in the narrative power of Helter Skelter. The prosecutor was one of the two most important “characters” in the Manson case, and he makes sure to narrate the story in a way that makes this clear. Defense attorney Paul Fitzgerald’s oft-repeated quip about the lack of evidence the state was bringing into the courtroom (“All the prosecution has are two fingerprints and Vince Bugliosi”) was an early articulation of what would collectively become a fairly wide-scale cultural practice. If Helter Skelter came to be understood as something like potential social chaos, then its opposite number—and vanquisher—was certainly Vincent Bugliosi.7

  Bugliosi needed Manson. Or to put this another way, Bugliosi needed a Manson that he could make work for him. Cultural critic Rob Sheffield has written recently that Bugliosi felt compelled to move Tex Watson from the center of the crime story he was authoring, even though Watson “might seem more like the leading man—he was there both nights, did the actual killings, etc.” But as Sheffield puts it, Watson was “all wrong for the part. He had short hair and boy-next-door looks—a high school football hero, for crissakes.”8 If Watson was “all wrong,” then Manson was all right: he was “a longhair, wild-eyed cartoon villain” who fit the “auteur” role perfectly and was more than willing to “embrace” the celebrity that came with his arrest and trial.9 From here Sheffield joins the George Bishop tradition of suggesting that Manson himself was not quite up to the task Bugliosi required of him by stitching him into this starring role, but I think like so many others Sheffield underestimates Manson’s game-playing skills. And, as I will discuss in the final section of this book, Manson himself has turned out to be such a compelling character that the voice he worried about “losing” in the courtroom has never been very successfully silenced. Manson and his Family cohort have always managed to creepy crawl out from the disciplining pages of books by Bugliosi, Sanders, and others, and have found ways to tell their own stories and to participate in making themselves available to all manner of creative artists. The central point here is simple: However we want to tell the story of the Tate-LaBianca murders, we seem to always have to put Charles Manson and Vincent Bugliosi at the center and in an incredibly intimate relationship with each other. Bobby Beausoleil has summarized all this as efficiently as anyone. About Manson and Bugliosi he has said, simply, “[T]here was a romance there.”10

  Bugliosi and Gentry introduce the prosecutor with considerable fanfare in Helter Skelter—but not until Part Three of the book. This is where Bugliosi makes the move to position himself at the center of a chronicle that, until this point, has been a fairly standard police procedural—with the major caveat that it is a police procedural about what a terrible job the police were doing. Here the authors insert a strange note, addressed more or less directly to “the reader,” who has already become, through the first third of the book “an insider in a sense highly unusual in a murder case.” At this point, Bugliosi explains, the reader must be prepared to meet the prosecutor—“a newcomer, an intruder”; having been content to act as offscreen director up until now, Bugliosi (in a ridiculously anticlimactic “reveal”) strides on stage as the star of the show! There is little doubt that the choice of the word “intruder” here is purposeful. Bugliosi, with no cape or tights, is the superhero who will set right all the chaos set in motion by the Family creepy crawls. His appearance is a sign that the creepy crawl has ended. But the fears inspired by Manson cannot be put to rest until Bugliosi changes into his superhero clothes; as David Schmid has put it, there is a “disarming absence of modesty” about Bugliosi. “Garbed in the cloak of the people’s champion,” Schmid continues, Bugliosi establishes himself over the many pages of Helter Skelter as a powerful enough figure to get in the ring and grapple successfully with the cult leader.11

  Bugliosi’s readers cannot possibly miss what a big deal he is when he hits the stage. This “sudden switch from an unseen background narrator to a very personal account is bound to be a surprise,” Bugliosi suggests, and then goes on to reason that the “best way to soften” the blow is to introduce himself. In addition to informing the reader of his stunning win-loss record (104 felony jury trials, and “only one loss”), Bugliosi also provides the important information that he has acted as technical advisor and script editor for “two pilot films” of The D.A.—a series made by Jack Webb, of Dragnet fame. According to Bugliosi, the star of the show, Robert Conrad, “patterned his part after the young prosecutor.”12

  The shift in narration turns out to be something of an anti-climax. Bugliosi’s function is to restore order, and Helter Skelter is nothing if not orderly. There is no “oo-ee” in Helter Skelter, no “snuff buffs” coming to watch the trial. Bugliosi and Gentry want neither to compete with the “nonfiction novel” version of true crime that Truman Capote talked so much about in the second half of the 1960s, nor the fevered hyperrealism of Ed Sanders. This entry in the true-crime genre has more than one case to prosecute—the one against Manson and his Family, of course, but also against the Los Angeles Police Department and a smaller-stakes one against Polanski and Tate—and does so with an abundance of detail and a shortage of narrative charisma. By the time Helter Skelter was published Bugliosi had already made his case and now seems only to want to memorialize that achievement—and settle a few scores.

  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt captures the flatness of Helter Skelter in his New York Times review, noting that once Bugliosi has made his claim about motive the book “doesn’t seem to have much point any more.” The reviewer goes on “to wonder about his ulterior motives for continuing, and to suspect him variously of pandering to commerce, of trumpeting his ego, of plumping for law and order and even of running for political office.” None of these critical punches lands very hard. Of course the prosecutor believes in law and order and wants to make money, and he did run for higher office. But Lehmann-Haupt’s review does capture a certain surprising aimlessness to Bugliosi’s book. This did not keep it from becoming a runaway bestseller, of course, as well as serving as the basis of the hugely influential television movie released in 1976.13 The book, as Jean Murley has pointed out, benefits from Bugliosi’s ability to take advantage of a “burgeoning paperback market.” It was a
selection of the Book-of-the-Month club and the Playboy Book Club and was also helpfully condensed (in Book Digest) and serialized (in the New York Times).14

  But what does Helter Skelter do? On some level its main function is to promote the mythology of Manson’s unified purpose that Bugliosi developed at the trial. Helter Skelter lacks the hallucinatory hyperrealism of Sanders’s Family, but it does share that book’s basic strategy of cramming in as much detail as possible. For his part, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted that while Bugliosi hints in the book that a trial lawyer cannot risk overwhelming the jury with too much detail, in his book he does not “give the same consideration to his readers.”15 Sanders creates webs of meaning based on making cultural, political, and social connections that at times seem to exist only in his own head. Bugliosi, on the other hand, offers up a dogged “linear chronology” that situates the case in a narrow groove. Bugliosi is one of two main “characters” in the story, we learn virtually nothing about him. “Married. Two Children” is about all Bugliosi tells readers to give a sense of who he is as a person. In the broadest sense the two major chroniclers of Manson, Bugliosi and Ed Sanders, were both embedded as participant-observers with their subjects, but Bugliosi’s careful distancing of himself from the Family serves to remind readers that he remained untouched by whatever appeal (political, musical, sexual, etc.) the Family might have carried. Sanders could not make the same claim in The Family and nor does he want to. When Sanders mentions his family, he gives them names—he discusses staying in a hotel with his wife Miriam and daughter Deirdre in Los Angeles as he prepares to take a “tour of Mansonland” with Abbie Hoffman and Phil Ochs.16