Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl
Page 31
Central to Bugliosi’s success at reinforcing his own power was his reassuring affect. One of the major crises fueled by the Tate-LaBianca murders and subsequent trials had to do with the way this helter-skelter violence seemed to reveal a horrifying transference of loyalty enacted by the Manson girls from parental authority to the not-quite peer authority of Charles Manson. Manson was older than all of his followers, but only months apart from Bugliosi. Bugliosi’s central goal was to convince the jury that he, the prosecutor, could be trusted to put everything back together again that Manson had broken.
Bugliosi did not have much of a fan club during the investigation or trial. Theo Wilson, who covered the trial for the New York Daily News, later described in detail how deep the enmity toward Bugliosi ran among the journalists at the courthouse. As Wilson recounts, the esprit de corps that developed in the trial trenches did not extend to Bugliosi. “The prosecutor had . . . irritated some of the reporters,” she writes, “by telling them how to write their stories, and berating them for not recognizing the importance of his work in the courtroom.”21
Bugliosi also managed to create deep animosity between himself and the Los Angeles Police Department. The frame established by Bugliosi around his discovery of the Helter Skelter motive is that only the prosecutor had the broad vision and courage to figure out what was really going on here. Helter Skelter described not only the chaos that would ensue once Manson and the Family kicked off the world-historic racial uprising but also the status of the investigation until Bugliosi got involved. Even as late as the publication of the book Helter Skelter, Bugliosi was still prosecuting his case against the detectives assigned to the Tate murder, who, by his account, almost completely bungled the investigation. Forty years after the crime, one of the LAPD detectives, Mike McGann, felt called upon to defend the work he and his colleagues had done: “I have nothing but respect for Bugliosi as a lawyer, but his attitude pissed me off. He didn’t solve the case. We solved the case. We brought the case to the district attorney’s office in a pretty good package. He found more evidence, but that’s what he’s supposed to do.”22 It is worth noting that Bugliosi was not the only one criticizing the LAPD; Theo Wilson agrees that the “police work on the case was so bad that evidence was being found by TV reporters and other civilians, including a precious little kid who found one of the Family’s guns near his house.”23 Jim Knipfel has written sharply of how the television miniseries version of Helter Skelter emphasized the “morons and muttonheads” vision of the LAPD first offered by Bugliosi and Gentry in their book: “I’m actually shocked they’d paint the LAPD as a bunch of incompetent boobs, but they did.”24
But Bugliosi was not critical of all the police work—just that done by the Los Angeles Police Department on the Tate case. The LaBianca investigation, for jurisdictional reason, was led by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office (LASO) instead of the LAPD and Bugliosi found much to admire in their work. This is not surprising, given that the LASO detectives shared much with the prosecutor himself. As Bugliosi tells it, the LaBianca detectives were “generally younger” and “better educated” than those working on the Cielo Drive murders. They also combined an inclination to use “modern investigative techniques” such as pro forma fingerprint runs and abundant polygraph tests, along with a willingness to consider “far out theories” (including the meanings of the bloody writings at the Waverly Drive home of the LaBiancas). Most gratifying to Bugliosi is that the LASO detectives took note of the similarities between the word “rise” found on the front door and the use of the word “arise” in the current Beatles’ song “Blackbird.” The LASO detectives also noted that the same album that included “Blackbird” also had songs called “Piggies” and “Helter Skelter.”25
Bugliosi uses the pages of Helter Skelter, in short, to continue to prosecute his case against the Manson Family (and their alleged Bugliosi-scripted motivation) but also to make an argument about how the forces invested with power by the establishment would need to respond to this frightening new world of crime and disorder. Relatively early in Helter Skelter, Bugliosi offers a key of sorts for the reading of his own work: “Given Roman Polanski’s affinity for the macabre; rumors of Sebring’s sexual peculiarities; the presence of both Miss Tate and her former lover at the death scene while her husband was away; the ‘anything goes’ image of the Hollywood jet set; drugs; and the sudden clamp on police leaks, almost any kind of plot could be fashioned.”26 Fashioning a “plot” is always the prosecutor’s burden in the courtroom. Bugliosi, it is clear, shouldered this mantle with impressive gusto and sustained creative energy. While Irving Kanarek’s behavior as defense attorney during the trial has often been dismissed as simple and desperate obstructionism, it is worth thinking about his tactics as part of a consciously wrought strategy to interrupt the methodical unfolding of Bugliosi’s master narrative. Kanarek failed to succeed in this effort, of course, as have most attempts to chip away at the prosecutor and author’s confident tale-telling. Kanarek’s one bravura courtroom move was his decision to simply rest without launching a defense case. He believed (or at least acted as if) the jury would share his belief that the prosecution had only inadmissible hearsay to offer in its case against Charles Manson.
Kanarek’s post-Manson career took a much different path from Bugliosi’s—it included a very public breakdown in the Torrance, California, district attorney’s office in 1989, and a subsequent disbarment in 1991. Kanarek has surfaced occasionally—most poignantly during his “Motel 6” years of the 1990s—during which he publicized his efforts to be readmitted to the California bar.27 Even as Kanarek attempted to call attention to his own plight, including his sense that his defense of Jimmy Lee Smith (one of the “Onion Field” killers, convicted of killing a Los Angeles police officer) led to his own persecution at the hands of LAPD, the lawyer never fully stopped promoting his brief on behalf of Manson. But the defense attorney’s proposition that Manson was not only “legally innocent” but also “actually innocent” has never gained much traction even as it rests on a basic truth of the case—that Charles Manson did not kill anyone at Cielo Drive or Waverly Drive.28 What Kanarek consistently fails to take into account (or purposefully ignores) is that the offenses imputed to Manson by the prosecution were at once much less concrete and much more pervasive than the simple charge of murder. Manson was essentially accused by Bugliosi of felonious misuse of male power in the process of promoting a crackpot vision of racial violence at the End of Days.
It is significant that Bugliosi titled his book Helter Skelter and not Slaughter in Los Angeles or The Tate-LaBianca Murders (though he does allow for The True Story of the Manson Murders as his subtitle). Before Bugliosi and Gentry published Helter Skelter in 1974, the other major books on the case—The Family above all, but also The Garbage People—used their titles to signal something about the perversion of countercultural communalism embodied by Manson and his followers; in essence these titles invite readers into a completed drama. The aims are quite distinct, to be sure. Gilmore wanted to point at the Family’s social marginalization and desperation while Sanders aimed to use his main title to call attention—strangely enough, for him, in an understated way—to how Manson exploited the collective to carry out some very concrete aims (have sex, sell drugs, promote Satanism). In both of these cases the true-crime titles are meant to indicate something collective and relatively stable—a set of social arrangements organized by Manson and his followers to establish their place in the larger culture. My own title, of course, is meant to call attention to an ongoing process—a continuing challenge to mainstream cultural norms, institutions, and protocols.
But Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter signals what might have happened had the prosecutor not done his work so successfully. Helter Skelter is a cautionary tale about hierarchies of power, organized around a nightmare vision of the breakdown of patriarchal authority. Bugliosi’s performance in Helter Skelter served as smug punctuation on an intragenerational skirmish he had already
won in 1970. In a courtroom overseen by Judge Older (who had nearly twenty years on Manson and Bugliosi), the prosecutor enacted a reassuring demonstration that the men of his generation were ready to take charge—having dispatched the insurgent Charles Manson and his deviant and criminal Family. Bugliosi was doing important cultural work here, joining Joan Didion (also born in 1934) in acknowledging that things had gone frighteningly off-course in Los Angeles in the past few years. Manson’s crimes, as outlined by Bugliosi, were multitudinous: “Manson fuck much,” as Ed Sanders put it, and so on. Manson was himself aware of what he was being charged with, and attempted to refute the claims in his November 1970 speech to the court:
These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. Most of the people at the ranch that you call The Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked them out or they did not want to go to Juvenile Hall, so I did the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them that in love there is no wrong . . . . I was working at cleaning up my house, something that Nixon should have been doing. He should have been on the side of the road, picking up his children, but he wasn’t. He was in the White House, sending them off to war.29
Manson’s attempt here to dress himself in the garb of the caring patriarch could not contend with Bugliosi’s successful construction of the defendant as an abusive and exploitative father.
A year later, in 1971, David Bowie would release his song “Changes,” with its bracing echo of Manson’s formulation. In Bowie’s songs, the radical children have not been kicked out—just spit on. (In “Oh! You Pretty Things,” the next song on Hunky Dory, Bowie returns again to these same children who are driving their parents crazy) With its stuttered enunciation of the title word instructing listeners to meditate on the roots of “Changes” in the Who’s hit 1965 song “My Generation,” Bowie’s image of countercultural youth being spat upon represented a brave, if generally unnoticed, reversal of the powerful claim then emerging about antiwar protesters spitting on returning veterans from Vietnam. The appearance of the “spitting image,” as sociologist Jerry Lembcke has called it, framed a moment when the much-discussed generation gap was being rearticulated and processed as peer conflict.30
That peer conflict was put on dramatic display during the Tate-LaBianca investigation and even more starkly in the courtroom script enacted by Vincent Bugliosi and Charles Manson. Working under the approving eyes of Judge Older, the prosecutor easily outmaneuvered the accused and convinced the jury that incipient Family induced chaos required swift and decisive corrective action. Vincent Bugliosi and Charles Manson were mismatched combatants. With his UCLA law pedigree and institutional leverage, the prosecutor was able to use his bully pulpit not only to convict Manson but also to expel him from the center of the cultures—mainstream and counter—he had so successfully creepy crawled for the past couple of years. Manson seems to have been aware that he was being neutralized in the courtroom. After being denied the right to represent himself, the defendant told Michael Hannon of the Free Press that he “never said” he was “capable of being a lawyer”: “I just didn’t want to lose my voice.”31 Manson attempted throughout the trial—with his flashing of the famous Nixon headline, his run at Judge Older, and his various efforts to use his eyes and body language to communicate with other people in the court—to stay visible and audible (and to try to get a mistrial declared). But Bugliosi did not find it difficult, ultimately, to convince the jury that his crime story should be credited, and that Manson (not to mention Polanski and the other suspicious short men of Los Angeles) needed to be quarantined from the mainstream—at least rhetorically.
If the actual and symbolic rearrangements of furniture enacted by the Family during their creepy crawl represented symptoms of a frightful cultural ailment, then Bugliosi’s bedlam-conjuring vision of Helter Skelter served at the trial, in print, and on screen, as the remedy. As a declaration of Bugliosi’s power to put things right in Los Angeles and beyond, Helter Skelter served as a relatively successful short-term strategy: the prosecutor convinced the jury and the author sold a huge number of books. But Helter Skelter could not ultimately act as anything like a final punctuation on the upheaval wrought by the Family (or to put it more precisely, the upheaval laid at the Family’s door). Bugliosi could not put the stopper back in this jug. Manson and his girls have proven to be far too interesting, far too unruly, to be bound inside the covers of “true crime.” From the time of the crimes to our own time, the Family’s overflow has been consistent, seeping into and helping to define our film, our music, our visual art, our fiction, our material culture, and our drama.
Part IV
Creepy Crawling Art: Charles Manson in Our Minds
Blood in a Swimming Pool
The visual artist Raymond Pettibon has this to say about why Charles Manson has appeared so often in his own work: “Manson is a kind of shorthand. I guess . . . you could create your own character like Manson, invent your own cult leader, and invent activities and stuff around him. But Manson already comes with all that baggage so he’s really useful.”1 On some level Pettibon’s claim reads as a simple restatement of Voltaire’s oft-quoted maxim that if god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. But Pettibon’s use of “shorthand” and “useful” warn against such a simplistic interpretation. Since December of 1969 Manson has permeated the visual, aural, and textual vocabularies of American vernacular and high art. He has functioned as a hint, a name conjuring up a web of associations, a part representing the whole. For decades now, Manson and his Family have demonstrated a remarkable level of “usefulness”; they have creepy crawled across the landscape of American fiction, horror film, indie rock, painting and installation art, animated and live-action television, comic books, T-shirts, and all manner of Internet cultural productions.
Artists across genre and across time have found ways to make use of Manson and the Family. While it is tempting to make some broad declarations to try to get a handle on all this (“There is no American horror film in the 1970s without Manson!” “Manson matters more to indie rock of the late 1980s than to any other genre!”), it is perhaps better to admit that Manson’s creepy-crawling ubiquity is going to make neat categorization and clear chronology difficult. While we can certainly identify key moments when the Manson Family held particular power over the cultural imaginary of the United States, the real story here is that Manson has never left our minds for long. And there is no reason to think his death will change that. If 1974 must be taken seriously as a crowning year for Manson art, so must 1989. And 2016 shaped up to form a fairly dramatic spike on the graph of Manson creation as well.
Manson and his Family, their crimes, and the basic challenges they made to conventional morality and social arrangements have served as a remarkably rich pool of inspiration for artists high, low, and in-between for for fifty years now. I cannot pretend to capture much more than a representative sample of the Manson-inspired art of our time. From the horror movie borrowings to the punk rock and hip hop shout-outs, the pulp magazine and fiction references, and the crucial role the cult leader has played as inspiration and subject matter for photographers, painters, and other visual artists, Manson has never left us for more than an instant. The cultural action here has to do with history, social arrangements, changing landscapes: how these people came to live in this way at this time. And what does their example mean for the rest of us? For half a century now Manson has served as a cultural Rorschach test; invocations and versions of him are multiple, contradictory, and unpredictable. To understand how deeply Manson has served as an artistic and cultural touchstone since 1969, it is important to consider the broadest possible range of artifacts, from the most “serious” visual arts presented in a gallery context and “high” literary novels, to the most ephemeral articulations of Internet culture.
“Manson” (as
subject, as accent, as punctuation) has been a major source of input for the arts over the course of four decades so far. Perhaps the central burden “Manson” has shouldered is as vehicle of passive resistance—not the “No! in thunder” that Herman Melville ascribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and which American critics from Leslie Fiedler to Pauline Kael (in writing about 1974’s Godfather II) to rock critic Greil Marcus have identified as a central burden of American literature, and film, but the less celebrated tradition of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, who “would prefer not to.” Faith Franckenstein, a member of the Lyman Family of Boston, argued that her group was not concerned with whether Manson was guilty or not: “He made a gesture against all the things we do not believe in.”2 Bringing Manson to the table, more often than not, has been a way to refuse the deceptive promises of American success and comfort.
The cultural power of Manson has not been consistent, linear, or organized. Manson art is not the work of a coherent movement; there is no manifesto, no positive program. But there is a swath of American art created in the wake of the Tate-LaBianca murders that includes not only the most obvious true crime works and prison conversion narratives, but also American splatter films of the 1970s, the early work of John Waters, and the California folk and country-rock music of the 1970s that emphasized individual feelings of dread and the privileging of personal experience over broader cultural concerns.