Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Contemporary reviews of Aquarius tended to miss the point of the show’s breadth. June Thomas, writing in Slate, argues that there is “something cheap about using a monster like Manson as the big bad on a police procedural. Well, it’s sort of Manson . . . . Our charismatic creep is Marlie Chanson, just a random 33-year-old who, like Manson, had by this point spent more than half his life behind bars.”12 But Aquarius shows little interest in hewing to Manson’s own story; as lead actor Gethin Anthony put it, “We’re not presenting a biography . . . . [W]e’re presenting a paradigm.”13 (And it is probably just as well that the show does not attempt biography, given that the executive producer and writer of the show, John McNamara, claims to have done extensive research in order to create the show, and has learned that Manson is “not from Mars. He’s not from Hell. He’s a guy from Oklahoma, but, boy, did he make some bad, bad choices.” Bad choices, sure. Oklahoma? Not so much.)14 The “paradigm” presented by Aquarius is another expression of the “contemporary folklore” identified by Zachary Lazar as central to his own Manson project. In Aquarius Manson is the “rough beast” of Yeats’s “Second Coming,” a poem on so many commentators’ minds as 1967’s Summer of Love gave way to the wreckage of the last few years of the decade.

  In the show Manson is the hub of a crazy wheel whose spokes radiate out from him into the national Republican party, the gay-rights movement, the Vietnam War and the antiwar activism of veterans, the Black Panther Party, the Chicano movement (with the late-in-the-first season appearance of the journalist and activist Ruben Salazar), the hip capitalism under development in Los Angeles in the second half of the 1960s, the multifocal movement for sexual liberation, religious nonconformism, the rearguard activism of the real-estate industry attempting to sustain residential segregation, and psychedelic experimentation. John McNamara has been clear about the animus energizing his show: “Usually stories about the ’60s take the point of view of the radical left . . . . I’ve never seen a guy with a crew cut in a modern retelling of that era. So, that was the POV, and that was the entire reason to do the show.”15 McNamara claims to be a follower of the end-of-the-sixties narrative developed by Joan Didion and her followers—“I believe that Manson single-handedly destroyed the ’60s. Tate LaBianca was the end of the ’60s. It turned everything wonderful or explosive or radical or new or amazing into death, paranoia and murder.”16

  The series may ultimately come to support McNamara’s overcooked end-of-the-sixties rhetoric, but the Manson art of its first season has a much less trite story to tell—a story that is essentially about Manson as a creator of what we conventionally refer to as “the sixties.” The key year in the series is 1959; this is when Manson seems to have made first contact with right-wing lawyers Ken Karn (a repressed gay man) and Hal Banyin (a not-so repressed fetishistic torturer of sex workers). What Manson provides both men, as Aquarius frames the back story, is a way to express their unconventional sexualities in a relatively safe way. On the literal level, Manson is a pimp and these two men are johns. But Aquarius has a broader story to tell about how purveyors such as Manson and strip-club owner Lucille Gladner endeavor to support the work of Karn and Banyin, powerful social actors. The key establishment figures of Aquarius are rising stars of California’s neoconservative revolution; the spirit of Ronald Reagan, who took over the California governor’s office in 1967 (the same year the series begins) hovers over much of the action in Aquarius. Reagan does not get name-checked until the fourth episode of the first season of Aquarius, but his anti-youth, anti–African American, pro–private property, pro-law-and-order tactics define Aquarius’s Los Angeles.

  Historian Eric Avila has written of the rise of Southern California’s conservatism of the second half of the twentieth century as an expression of “countersubversive” backlash “that targeted civil rights crusaders, feminists, antiwar demonstrators, and gay activists as culpable for the social ills and economic malaise wrought by economic restructuring, deindustrialization, and the dismantling of the welfare state.”17 While viewers are invited to see Karn and Banyin as familiar-enough villains, it is their relationship with Manson that moves them from garden-variety bad guys to truly terrifying agents of destruction. The relationship of the Republican power brokers to the ex-con is intimate, but unstable. Aquarius certainly does not encourage viewers to think that the three can form anything like a sustained alliance. This is, after all, a police procedural, and there is little doubt that the “good” white cops—Sam Hodiak, the World War II veteran and father of a son gone AWOL from Vietnam; Brian Chafe, working undercover as a hippie (Manson’s double, in this respect) and living as the husband of a Black woman; and Charmain Tully, the newbie who is sure she can keep up with the boys in the station—will form the shaky blue line holding back the forces of anarchy. Hodiak is particularly important because he can understand and “speak” the languages of a diverse range of Southern California constituencies. How surprised radical Black Panther Bunchy Carter looks when Hodiak completes his quotation of Trotsky’s maxim “You might not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.” That said, Aquarius makes clear that the Anglo-power that would come to define the Reagan Revolution, with its emphasis (as Avila puts it) on “patriarchy” and “privatization” is most fully embodied by Karn and Manson, not by the self-described “mongrel” Hodiak, who had a Jewish parent!18 Aquarius does not have a clear point of view about Manson’s role in the political and cultural life of Southern California in the 1960s. It does, however, have a relatively clear case to make about how Manson’s imprisonment in the 1950s and 1960s prepared him to understand how institutions work, and manipulate them to his own benefit. In a melodramatic moment of confrontation Hal Banyin tells Ken Karn that “Charlie gives us what we both need.” The point of this purple declaration is that it is true—Manson helps the two men live the idea that their desires should define the world around them.

  White male desire is at the heart of many of the retellings of the Manson story under consideration here. In his novel Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon has his character Shasta accuse Doc of being attracted to the promise of male dominance presented by Manson: “Submissive, brainwashed, horny little teeners . . . who do exactly what you want before you even know what that is. You don’t even have to say a word out loud, they get it all by ESP.”19 Aquarius reminds us that Manson’s pathological vision of white-male triumphalism is a demonic twin to what Eric Avila has explained as core work of Southern California’s mainstream culture—the culture of Walt Disney and his sanitized theme park in Anaheim, of the removal of Chicanos from Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium, of the highway construction that, among other things, would expedite the travel of newly suburban white people to Dodger Stadium (and other urban attractions).

  While Aquarius has relatively little interest in Manson’s actual biography and often seems to go out of its way to get things wrong—why call what is obviously Spahn Ranch by the name of a different Family crash pad, the Spiral Staircase?—it has an appropriate investment (expressed visually and aurally) in depicting the racial segregation undergirding the postwar developments that defined life in Southern California. Avila’s book demonstrates persuasively that white flight could not have been achieved without the concentrated will and investment of government, private industry (including Hollywood, professional sports, and real estate interests) and countless individual citizens. Aquarius can only hint at all this, but its relatively early invocation of Nixon and Reagan, its bizarre subplot about a Cuban American police officer who has been “passing” as white, and its painful segregating of the music on the soundtrack (Black music when Hodiak goes to South Central to pay a visit to the Black Panthers, seemingly random Spanish-language music when drug kingpin Guapo is onscreen, and so on) indicates that the creators of the show are purposefully emphasizing the forces of separation in late 1960s Los Angeles culture. When Elliot Hillman, a record-company executive, visits the Family on the ranch, he tells Charlie,
“This thing you got going on out here. It’s bigger than songs. It’s a worldview.” It is obvious that Hillman is trying to manage Manson here—out of his fear of violence and his hope for some more of that Family free love—but it is equally obvious that the makers of Aquarius are using Hillman to express the show’s truth: Manson does have a worldview, and it is consonant in many ways with that of Ken Karn and the national Republican figures for whom he works.

  It would be overblown to make these large claims for one network television show if not for how regularly Manson art has been asked to carry such heavy cultural baggage. Manson art, to borrow the name of a key Rolling Stones album of the second half of the 1960s, is the art of Aftermath. It is the art of what novelist Dana Spiotta has called a “cracked Southern California creepiness,” a landscape of almost-abandoned Western movie sets, bleached bones in the desert, of the eruption of the irrational after the moment of intense crisis.20 In the aftermath, as readers and viewers and listeners, we are left with the challenges presented by encrusted layers of meaning. The cultural conversations inspired by the case cannot be easily contained by clear-cut interpretive frameworks or definitive rubrics.

  The tour of Manson art I offer makes no claims of being comprehensive or even systematic. The premise of any such study (if it is to be trusted) must be that Manson art is so large you can’t get over it and so wide that you can’t get around it. As Pynchon has written, the influence of Charles Manson and his Family, and the havoc they caused, “spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day.”21 Historian Rick Perlstein has argued suggestively that if one wanted to rename the politically and culturally charged United States of this era, one way to do so that would capture the apocalyptic rhetoric defining the life of the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s would be to call it “Nixonland.” But “Mansonland” would also do, wouldn’t it?

  They Are Still among Us

  The major goal of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter was to declare the Manson case closed. That is a truism, of course. With notable exceptions that only prove the rule, the central impulse of true-crime writing is to solve the crime and expel the criminal from the body politic. Bugliosi’s sales and his harder-to-measure but no less significant cultural influence suggest that Helter Skelter did its work successfully. Bugliosi offers a true-crime master class in this book, which includes a “plausible” motive, a stable of bad guys put behind bars, and the expression of powerful consensus that the thrilling and threatening social mixing defining Los Angeles in the late 1960s had gone too far. Bugliosi is the good father to Manson’s anarchic “Uncle Sugar” (as Kenneth Anger called him in Hollywood Babylon), setting things right in Southern California as he reasserts the proper workings of patriarchal authority. True crime is a formalist art—it is rare for a true-crime book to deny its readers the pleasures of procedural certitude. When a true-crime book complicates the case in question, rather than simply resolving it (as with Errol Morris’s Wilderness of Error, a sort of meditation on true crime, rather than a true-crime book itself), the repudiation of convention is likely to be foregrounded as a titillating challenge to genre expectations.

  In general, though, the true-crime accomplishment of Bugliosi’s investigative and courtroom drama Helter Skelter is to establish Manson and his Family as scapegoats who can then be fully neutralized. Helter Skelter accomplishes the central task of true crime non-fiction—it announces (as Gerald Ford also said in 1974, in his inaugural address) that “our long national nightmare is over.” The conventional true crime work include no portentous afterwords, no “remains to be seen” implications stitched in, no dark inferences to be drawn about what the future might hold. True crime tends to work in favor of the status quo; the form belongs to police officers, prosecutors, and journalists. The compulsive focus of the true-crime book is to demonstrate that all has been set right.

  But there is a considerable subset of fictional Manson stories that compete fairly directly with true crime’s reassurances. If one of the blessings offered by standard true-crime work is its certitude, the mainstream of Manson art has largely consisted of attempts—by gallery artists and pulp-fiction writers, popular musicians and filmmakers—to point out that the applecart has not been set right. Vincent Bugliosi may have succeeded in locking up Charles Manson (and a handful of Family members), but his work at the trial, in the book, and in the television movie, seems to lack force when plotted against the hydra-headed creature of Manson art. This branch of Manson art is largely comprised of hauntings—often in the form of fictional visitations by putative Manson offspring, as well as by forgotten followers, or dangerous copycats. At times the haunting is less literal, and takes place on the level of feeling. This Manson art, what I am naming as “They Are Still among Us,” seems to borrow from various horror-movie tropes (“You can’t kill what is already dead”? “They’re back”? “Seed of Chucky”?) as it carries a resolutely concrete message about the persistence of deviance, the incompleteness of Bugliosi’s prosecution, the enormity of the sickness present in Southern California in the late 1960s, and the impossibility of “curing” it by locking up a few relatively powerless “slippies.”

  Much of this rhetorical zombie action is found in crime fiction—the darker id put into regular dialogue with the superego of true crime’s nonfiction. This fiction is, for the most part, weird and unruly. It rarely focuses on Manson himself as a “character” or even as engine of main plots, but rather posits the unsettling premise that Manson and his Family have continued to creepy crawl over the landscape of Southern California and other parts of the United States, or that there are countless Manson-inspired or Manson-like killers on the loose. Often these Manson references work on the level of what I have been calling the “shout-out”; they help establish context and gravity without necessarily making any claim to operating as an independent expression.”1

  Take a recent example, Andrew Gross’s 2011 crime novel, Eyes Wide Open. With its immediate titular evocation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut and its concern with the sexual rites of a secret society, Gross signals to readers that he may indeed be bringing them onto the landscape of the creepy crawl. The main contemporary plot in the novel has to do with the tragic death of Westchester doctor Jay Erlich’s nephew, Evan, in California. Evan lived unhappily with mental illness for years, and his death is quickly ruled a suicide. But when Erlich arrives in California to support his ne’er-do-well brother, Charlie, he quickly comes to believe that Evan’s death is somehow tied to his father’s connection to a murderous cult leader decades earlier. It is in the narrating of this backstory that Gross borrows liberally from the history of Manson and his Family. Gross’s cult leader is Richard Houvanian, coincidentally Armenian, and with a dream of popular-music stardom that will strike even the most casual Manson case observer as familiar. Houvanian develops a set of readings of popular songs (particularly by the Byrds and the Doors) that support his own apocalyptic vision; the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” becomes Houvanian’s ur-text, a song performed by Jim Morrison’s group to communicate with the cult leader and offer support for his apocalyptic vision.2

  Living at “Riorden Ranch”—Spahn here displaced to Big Sur (using some geographical sleight of hand to throw us off the trail!)—Houvanian and his family indulge in wild drug-use and sexual experimentation, until the owner of the ranch makes a move to evict the commune. In August of 1973 members of the Family “ritualistically” slaughtered Riorden and five guests at his house, and then moved on to the home of Sally and George Forniciari to kill them (Look! The second set of murders are of a couple with an Italian last name!). The chests of the victims were smeared with bloody words including “Judas,” “whore,” and “betrayer.” The Manson material is blatant enough, even as Gross makes peremptory efforts to mask his source material. (One can imagine the dark nights of the soul the author spent trying to figure out how to reconfigure the character of Tex Watson before landing on the ingenious
solution of renaming him “Tel.” Gross’s only real competition here comes from literary novelist Madison Smartt Bell whose cult leader does not want to say “creepy crawl” to his followers so he says, “Go slither.”)3

  Gross seems to be following Raymond Pettibon’s dictum that since Manson is already there, you might as well use him. (The recent movie California Scheming (2014) seems similarly happy to use whatever it needs of Manson—and of course the Mamas and the Papas for its title—to advance its contemporary plot. In this teen potboiler, Chloe has a picture of Manson on the wall, coerces friends to go on a creepy crawl, and organizes a night of terror, but the references to the convicted cult leader have virtually no substance and work exclusively in the area of character development. Chloe’s obsession is a quick way to establish that she is a sociopath.) Given the pro forma usages of Eyes Wide Open, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that for Gross the Manson-frame is personal. Gross’s father lived at the top of Benedict Canyon, and at one point hosted fifteen-year-old Andrew, visiting from New York. “My dad moved out to L.A. in the ’60s and my older brother [who gets transformed into the major character “Charlie” in Eyes Wide Open], a wayward spirit trying to become a musician, was out there as well, and uh . . . took up residence on the Spahn Ranch, where Manson lived. The two of them came up to my father’s place one day and tried to sell him on anteing up for a demo.” According to Gross, Michael Gross and Manson were joined by an “over-selling sidekick who called himself a rock producer and may well have been Terry Melcher.” (Nope: Maybe Gregg Jakobson.) There is little point in trying to hunt down the accuracy of the author’s historical scholarship. What matters is that Andrew Gross drew from the Manson tale when he needed an efficient way to establish sustained horror in his crime thriller.4