Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Bugliosi was certainly operating from a very clear understanding of the zero-sum stakes of the American adversarial system. In We Are Everywhere, Jerry Rubin writes of the theatrical framework of American trials: “both sides,” he writes, “put on a play and create a myth for the jury. Two versions of history. Two theatrical performances. The jury then goes into the jury room and decides what play feels more real to them.”17 Convicted Family associate Bobby Beausoleil went even further with this approach in an interview he gave to John Gilmore in the early 1970s. Beausoleil suggested to Gilmore that through “a big trial that judicial machine can make a million dollars. So they play this big game of theatrics and drag the thing out as long as they can.” Beausoleil underscored not only the profit-making impulse stitched into the “adversarial” system but also reminded his interviewer that the “public defender and the prosecutor have offices next door to each other, and they get their pay from the same window.”18

  Such matters were far beyond the prosecutor’s ken. Bugliosi’s plodding realism (as opposed to Irving Kanarek’s Theater-of-the-Absurd) won the day, of course, and it is equanimity, above all, that Bugliosi wants to project in Helter Skelter. Over the hundreds and hundreds of pages of this true-crime saga, readers never see a tear in the fabric of the prosecutor’s case—not even a seam, really. There is little here that would support Family member Sandy Good’s contention that outside the courthouse Bugliosi threatened her. That Bugliosi—if he actually existed—does not appear on the pages of Helter Skelter.

  Not Just the Facts, Ma'am

  Perhaps the best way to call attention to the relentlessness of Helter Skelter’s fealty to the constraints of the police and legal procedural forms is to discuss two times Bugliosi and his co-author break free of them in order to include what might initially seem like tangents. It is crucial that Bugliosi not veer too far away from his clear commitment to “objectivity” over the course of Helter Skelter. What David Schmid has written of the “nonfiction novel” developed by Truman Capote and others in the 1960s is equally true of Bugliosi’s true-crime tale: the claims to “objectivity” are carried in part by “authorial invisibility” even as the author gives up “none of his control over the shaping and presenting of events.”1

  Both of the ruptures in Helter Skelter break from the standard template in order to prosecute (at least by implication) a norm-setting agenda. The first break comes early in the book, in a discussion of the possibility that the Tate killings were inspired by a “drug burn or freakout.”2 While Bugliosi quickly dropped this investigative thread, many others—including Family associate Bobby Beausoleil—have called attention to the evidence connecting Sharon Tate and her friends at Cielo Drive to the drug underworld of Los Angeles.3 In his discussion of four men implicated by this early investigative work, Bugliosi notes that their names have been changed “for legal reasons” in Helter Skelter.4 After introducing the four suspects and noting his use of pseudonyms in this section, Bugliosi then goes on to explain that “Wilson, Pickett, Madigan, and a fourth man . . . were frequent visitors to the Cielo residence.” With this out-of-the blue reference to soul singer Wilson Pickett (a presence on the rhythm-and-blues charts and, occasionally, on the pop charts during the second half of the 1960s), Bugliosi makes a seemingly pointless pun in a book otherwise short on digressions, laugh lines, or really many elements of what might be called creative writing.

  In addition to his regular appearance near the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts beginning in 1963, and his steady incursions on the pop music charts, Wilson Pickett was also consolidating his persona in 1967 and 1968—a persona captured by the titles of two of the albums he released in those years—The Wicked Pickett and The Midnight Mover. Pickett’s adoption of the Bad Man pose in the late 1960s had roots, of course, in more than a hundred years of African American cultural productions, from post-slavery folktales, rhyming verbal performances of rebelliousness and protest, and blues songs. Pickett’s own cover version of the core African American crime story “Stagger Lee” in 1968 served as one declaration that he was trying on the mask such songs made available.

  In this “Wilson, Pickett” moment Helter Skelter swerves from a brief, and ultimately irrelevant, summary of the activity of a few (presumably white) drug dealers in the Tate-Frykowski circles, to an invocation of the Midnight Mover. (That song could be described as a Creepy Crawling Blues; it literally features a main character who is sneaking in and out of homes in the dark of night.) For a book that takes place in Los Angeles in the 1960s, there are hardly any Black people present. Given Bugliosi’s insistence on the racial paranoia at the heart of Manson’s cracked Helter Skelter vision, the true crime narrative itself suggests that the cult leader did not encounter many African Americans in his peripatetic Los Angeles life.

  One of the few Black men to feature at all in Bugliosi’s true-crime tale is Bernard Crowe, a.k.a. “Lotsapoppa.” Manson may have believed that Lotsapoppa, a well-known drug dealer, was also a Black Panther, and at least briefly believed that he had killed Crowe during an altercation over drugs and money: in fact, he only wounded him. (I cannot resist mentioning that another “Lotsa Poppa” broke into limited public consciousness in the 1960s. This “Lotsa Poppa” was an Atlanta-area soul singer who had a regional hit with a cover of “I Found a Love,” originally recorded by Wilson Pickett’s group the Falcons, and re-recorded as a solo song by Pickett himself in 1967.)5

  The appearance of “Wilson, Pickett” as half of the list of drug dealers considered as suspects in the early days of the Tate-LaBianca investigation cannot help but serve as a racialization of drug use and drug sales. Bugliosi’s book is ultimately about the “frightening” claim that too many social boundaries were being breached in Los Angeles (white/black, celebrity/civilian, rich hippie/poor hippie, street culture/private life) in the era of the Manson Family’s rise to visibility; projecting creepy-crawling evil onto recognizable Others (hippies, Black people, Hollywood stars) became a central part of Bugliosi’s courtroom and true-crime strategies. Where Ed Sanders takes as a given that the Tate-LaBianca murders had to be plotted on a very busy map of cultural meetings, Bugliosi frames this reality as the germ of horror.

  The next break in Helter Skelter also comes relatively early in the book when Bugliosi takes some time out to give some background on Roman Polanski. After a concise description of his film career and his relationship with Sharon Tate, Bugliosi moves on to a brief summary of the numerous “non-friends” who had negative things to say about the Polish film director: “One, referring to the fact that Polanski (like Manson) was just over five feet tall, called him ‘the original five-foot Pole you wouldn’t want to touch anyone with.’”6

  If it is not immediately clear why Bugliosi wants to recount this syntactically tortured and not so funny remark, this break in the narrative opens up an episodic case made by the prosecutor over the course of the book having to do with the shortness of the men at the center of the case. Just after the “five-foot Pole” quip, Bugliosi suggests that whether “one was captivated by his gaminlike charm or repelled by his arrogance,” Polanski “appeared to touch off strong emotions in nearly everyone whom he met.” (Translation: Audrey Hepburn or Napoleon? You decide!)7 While gamin is the masculine form of the French noun meaning “street urchin” or “waif,” by the time Polanski rose to fame the word was much more familiar in American popular culture in its feminine form (gamine) and was used almost exclusively to refer to female screen actors. Calling Polanski gaminlike was, then, a way to call into question how well he measured up to standard visions of American masculinity.

  This concern with Polanski’s size turns out not to be an isolated moment in Helter Skelter. While it is not surprising for a prosecutor to recount forensic details, Bugliosi seems particularly intent on establishing the vertical challenges of a few key players in the case. Danny DeCarlo, treasurer of the Straight Satans motorcycle club, is identified as being only 5' 4" tall—although Bugliosi does spare a moment
to mention that DeCarlo was known as Donkey Dan—not small in all respects, as it turns out. Bugliosi also mentions that Jay Sebring was 5' 6" and apparently liked to tie up women and beat them. But the most diminutive of all was Manson himself: “I hadn’t realized how small he was. He was just five feet two . . . . I could not believe that this little guy had done all the things it was said he had.”8 Deana Martin, daughter of Dean Martin and close friend of Terry Melcher, describes Manson as having been “very small” and looking like “every other hippie on Sunset.”9 Bugliosi emphasized his “surprise” at Manson’s size throughout his post-trial career; in one interview he reveals that he felt “shocked how little he was. He was scruffy, with long, scraggly hair, and kind of hunchbacked. I thought, ‘He doesn’t look imposing.’ But I’d already learned enough about him to know that it would be a great error on my part to underestimate him.”10 Cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce has explained that a major effort was made in the mainstream media to cut Manson down to size, with repeated references to the cult leader as “pint-sized” and “diminutive.”11

  In Bugliosi’s rendering Manson comes to light as a troll—small, ugly, and yet somehow possessed of great power. (It might be worth mentioning here that there is nothing objectively “true” about the prosecutor’s articulation of Manson’s appearance. Compare Bugliosi’s description of the convicted criminal to that offered by artist Raymond Pettibon, who has used Manson’s image repeatedly in his work: “Here was this charismatic, good-looking guy whose followers might be your own daughters.”)12 Bugliosi could not allow for the possibility that part of Manson’s appeal to the young women who constituted the bulk of his Family’s membership was simply that he was physically attractive. Bugliosi’s burden in Helter Skelter is to make clear that Manson’s power was disturbingly nonstandard—it was, in fact, occult and pathological. Paul Watkins, often described as Manson’s “second in command,” had a much different reading of Manson’s stature. Watkins argued that Manson gravitated to “Little Paul” as a result of the “definite camaraderie” that arises among small men. According to Watkins, being “five-foot-five in a macho world of six-footers was never easy. It’s a bit like being a racial minority.”13 Where Bugliosi could see only deviance (and childishness—“this little guy”) in Manson’s physical self, Watkins finds the origin of Manson’s empathetic outreach and powerful charisma.

  Once we accept the (obvious) premise that true-crime books are not only true, it becomes much easier to see how invested these books are not only in narrating details of the crime(s) in question, but also in prosecuting various other cultural concerns. Feminist sociologist Karlene Faith has been particularly sharp in her critique on this front. According to Faith, Helter Skelter was “a best-seller, and is still in print today, replete with inaccuracies due to the defendants’ false testimony in court and their own propagation of sensationalized myths.”14 Helter Skelter, like so many true-crime books, invites readers to enjoy the thrill of “actual” crime-scene spectacle and investigative puzzles while also presenting a carefully crafted tale that moves with the inevitability of myth. The characters are simply drawn, representing basic types rather than fully dimensional human actors. While Vincent Bugliosi invoked fictional Los Angeles detective Joe Friday (from the television show Dragnet) to suggest that his co-writer Curt Gentry helped him to organize the material of the Tate-LaBianca murders and ensuing trials into a “just-the-facts” chronicle, it is important to remember that the selection and organization of those “facts” is at the heart of the process by which readers constitute particular meanings out of narratives.15 If Ed Sanders and other insurgent figures were interested in banishing Manson from the counterculture, Bugliosi’s job was to expel him from mainstream culture. The seemingly irrelevant details about the size of Manson (and Polanski and Sebring and DeCarlo) act as a reminder that these are men on the fringe—perhaps powerful in one sense or another (Polanski’s cultural cachet, Manson’s personal magnetism, and so on)—but not fit for a place in conventional society. Choosing between Bugliosi and Sanders is something like choosing between allopathic and homeopathic remedies: do you want someone very distant from the accused to neutralize the fears they inspire or do you want someone in their world to inoculate you against them with a little bit of freaky medicine?

  Bugliosi’s attempts to marginalize Manson (in the arena of pretrial public relations, at the trial itself, and in post-trial accounts—Helter Skelter, above all) should not be understood as simple cruelty or as triumphalist crowing. One important task Bugliosi had to accomplish in his work as the voice of the People of the State of California was to “cultivate” Manson as a scapegoat and make him available as a container for a considerable measure of free-floating social anxiety about the counterculture. The work of sociologists of the 1960s and early 1970s on deviance (especially that done by Howard Becker and Kai Erickson) makes clear that “outsiders”—as Becker called them—are created by their host culture and are not simply revealed as having some inherent defect. Deviants, in short, are made and not born.16

  It is not difficult to see that Bugliosi was invested in demonstrating that Manson and his codefendants did not simply do bad things but embodied profound deviations from key mainstream conceptions of family, gender, love, adulthood, sexuality, and so on. Where Sanders’s agonized text is meant to anatomize just how Manson perverted countercultural practices for his own benefit, Bugliosi’s work was much less nuanced: counterculture bad, law and order good.

  A central part of Bugliosi’s mission—in court and on the page—was to neutralize the countercultural threats posed by the Family. Bugliosi’s emphasis on the stature of key male figures in the case served as one strategy he deployed to undercut the potentially frightening power Manson exercised. Joined with this was Bugliosi’s relentless efforts to infantilize the young women who circulated in Manson’s orbit. Describing the Family women again and again as “girls” (or “little girls”) acted as Bugliosi’s attempt to render Squeaky, Sadie, and the rest as neither terrifying nor sexually alluring. In Helter Skelter Bugliosi writes that although Squeaky Fromme and Sandy Good were both in their twenties, there was a “little-girl quality to them, as if they hadn’t aged but had been retarded at a certain stage in their childhood. Little girls playing little-girl games.” Elsewhere in the book he refers to Leslie Van Houten’s “little-girl cuteness” and cites jailhouse informant Virginia Graham’s sense that Susan Atkins appeared to be a “little girl lost.” Finally, Bugliosi also makes a point of suggesting that “for some reason” Manson seemed to attract only “flat-chested girls.”17 George Bishop, in his quickie true-crime book Witness to Evil, also spares a moment to discuss the breasts of the Family’s women, but in the service of a much more complex argument than Bugliosi would ever launch. Noting somewhat cruelly that these “girls” tended to be “moderately endowed both intellectually and physically,” Bishop then turns the camera on the “middle-aged observer” of the trial (himself? All the older men in the courtroom?) who was likely to “mistake vacuity for cuteness and nubility for sensuality.”18

  Concerning a very different context (Atlanta in the Progressive Era) the historian Nancy MacLean has written about the practice of referring to young women as “girls.” MacLean explains that this practice grows from a fantasy promoted by powerful people about how long young women can occupy the safe space of childhood.19 Central to Vincent Bugliosi’s work in court and on the pages of his authoritative true-crime account of Manson and the Family is an attempt to press “reset” on the gender console. Bugliosi needed the jury (and then his readers) to understand Manson as some kind of crime family Godfather, a patriarchal agent who was completely able to program the behavior of his female followers. Mario Puzo’s Godfather novel, released in the same year as the Tate-LaBianca murders, sold some nine million copies in the first two years after its initial printing. Francis Ford Coppola’s film version of Puzo’s book did more business at the box office than any other movie released in 1972.
The Godfather—in print and on-screen—posited a world in which women barely existed. One of the few women who exerts anything like agency over the course of the epic is the outlier (i.e., non-Italian) Kay Adams.

  If The Godfather represents part of a cultural backlash against the insurgency of women’s liberation and other countercultural movements, then so too does Bugliosi’s true-crime book act as a sort of course correction. True-crime narratives frequently involve reenactments of some type. Errol Morris’s near-obsessional forensic work in his 2012 book on the Jeffrey MacDonald case is just one recent example of true crime’s burden. Bugliosi’s task in the courtroom, in press briefings, and ultimately in Helter Skelter, however, was not simply to recount the “facts” of the case, but perhaps even more significantly, to embody the proper workings of white-male agency. However scandalous Bugliosi may have been in his maelstrom of a private life, no matter how intemperately he may have spoken to Sandra Good outside the courthouse, no matter how completely he alienated a large number of police detectives and members of the press corps covering the case, Bugliosi kept his eye on the people who mattered: first, the jury hearing the case against Manson and his co-defendants, and then the reading and viewing audiences who would continue—by the millions—to validate what one observer has aptly enough labeled Bugliosi’s “myth-building, crazyass” approach to explaining the motive in the crimes.20