Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  This disorganized market of collectors was somewhat rationalized in the early 1980s, when a “magazine devoted to Mansonabilia began to appear on newsstands in Los Angeles, New York, and several other cities. It was called The Dead Circus, and, in the premiere issue, there was a full-page ad offering a color photograph of Charlie sporting a full erection.” After a “prominent art dealer in Philadelphia” pays $10,000 for the picture, it turns out to “be a fake.” It is actually a picture taken at Woodstock, of a “sandal maker from Taos, New Mexico.” Manson’s appropriate response to this entire turn of events is to muse that now “at least I know how much my pecker is worth.”15

  The discovery of this morbid market for Mansonabilia gets the attention of Manson himself, who has, for years, been quietly sitting on the knowledge that he has control of the single most desirable collector’s item of all: six canisters of 16 millimeter film that capture the Manson Family in its heyday—with a particular focus on their orgies with music- and film-world celebrities, and possibly with some film shot inside Sharon Tate’s house on the night of the murders. Here John Kaye seems to be inviting readers to think about Don DeLillo’s novel, Running Dog (1978), which is organized around an international collectors’ search for a pornographic film shot in Hitler’s bunker. In that novel, too, there is a magazine that gives the book its title. The real goal of Kaye’s book is to indict readers (and of course, himself) as co-conspirators in the fetishizing of Charles Manson and the Family. When Manson more-or-less rhetorically asks a neighbor of his in prison what “would be the ultimate possession” if you “really wanted to own a piece of the Manson family legend,” Kaye is provoking the reader: while he has already planted clues about what Manson might be hinting at, he also knows that each of us will, in this moment, imagine our own vision of the most desirable Manson collector’s item.16

  Earlier in the novel Kaye had already explored in a quite literal way how the Manson Family violence can serve as a form of pornography for viewers. Gene Burk learns this when he visits the House of Love, a brothel that is on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas—on exactly the site where his own father ran a twenty-four-hour newsstand from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. At the House of Love, a sex worker tells Burk, there is a “Manson suite.” At the Manson suite a cast of actors “re-creates the murder . . . . Everything is performed according to the trial transcript. The dialogue, the floor plan. It’s all exactly the way it was.” Kaye’s barely hidden challenge has to do with why so many of us have become such willing audiences for such ritual performances.17

  Burk ultimately gets deeply involved with a “forgotten” member of the Manson Family, a woman named Alice who has been living a relatively marginal existence since the time of the killings. Alice’s name is certainly meant to invoke the complexities of Wonderland, not only the fantasy world created by Lewis Carroll, which was such a crucial text for members of the late 1960s counterculture, but also Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, site of four horrifying murders in 1981 often compared to the Tate-LaBianca killings for sheer bloodiness. What is most important about this Alice is that she has access to the grail—the films that have been obsessively discussed, searched for, and not found since 1969. Alice may still “walk among us”—The Dead Circus operates firmly in this tradition of Manson art—but Kaye’s argument in introducing it is to suggest that it might be time for all of us to renounce our willingness to engage with the Manson Family as entertainment, arousal, a good time.

  It would be virtually impossible to list all of the articulations of popular and “high” art of the past few decades that indulge in the type of crudely voyeuristic Manson-collecting Kaye is targeting here. Perhaps we can draft Tony O’Neill’s sophomoric 2010 novel Sick City (it’s title “daringly” borrowed from a Manson song) to stand as a representative of this deep well of material. This sub–William Burroughs romp through the dark underbelly of Los Angeles shares The Dead Circus’s interest in possible Tate-related film, but here the aim is not to offer a critique of the exploitative economy of collectors but to shock the bourgeoisie. Or somebody. O’Neill’s novel also has a hot-property piece of film—a party scene from the late 1960s, with “some pretty big people. Steve McQueen was there. Sharon. Roman Polanski. Lee Van Cleef. Mama Cass.” Sharon Tate is the ultimate sex object at this party: “They all fuck her. Steve McQueen fucks her, and then he rolls off her, and Yul Brynner has a go. Mama fuckin’ Cass is naked and eating her pussy, while someone is screwing her from behind.” The two men who are discussing this potentially valuable film agree that if they could get their hands on it to sell, it would be like having “the Holy Grail, or the Shroud of fuckin’ Turin.”18

  Contrary to the witless and incendiary grotesqueness of O’Neill’s novel, Kaye takes care to construct a scenario of punishing self-critique and renunciation. Alice’s definitive gesture is to walk out into the desert, toward Barker Ranch, and burn the reels of film that have been in her care. As the film smolders, Alice “said their names out loud: Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Steve Parent, the five who died at 10050 Cielo Drive on August 9, 1969.” As Gene and Alice walk away from the site of the destruction, in “the absolute stillness of the moment, he felt something that passed for peace, and a voice inside him spoke with fierce clarity: Keep me in your heart. That’s all I ask.”19 It is not clear whether the voice belongs to Burk’s own lover, tragically killed in an airplane accident, or to Sharon Tate’s fetus who, according to Alice, just wanted “a name and a birthdate and a mother to sing him a lullaby.”20 This rather mushy New Age conclusion to the burning ceremony cannot mask Kaye’s quite sharp critical analysis, an interpretation that emphasizes how important consumer behaviors (collecting, reading, watching, and so on) have been to the maintenance of Charles Manson’s power. Kaye suggests in The Dead Circus that the actual presence of Manson Family members on the contemporary scene is a minor detail, essentially the answer to a trivia question or an online quiz. The central cultural dilemma facing those of us who want to engage with the legacy of the Manson Family, Kaye suggests, is how to do so without being economically exploitative, culturally sensationalist, or just plain gross. (Time to announce this: my own older child said to me, when I was a few years into the research process for this book, “It is really time for you to start writing. Otherwise this is all just a very weird hobby.”) Whether we think of ourselves as living in the true-crime domain of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, or the (mostly) pulp world of those “live among us” tales, Kaye insists that we must investigate our own obsessive interest in keeping the Manson story alive.

  Gene Burk, for his part, is ready to put not only Manson behind him, but also the collecting that has structured his retirement: “That’s it,” Burk tells his brother, “I’m done. No more collecting.”21 Putting on his own version of the “Big Boy Pants” that the Juvenairs sang about in the song Burk considered buying earlier in the novel, Gene Burk here acknowledges that his investment in the Manson case has not primarily been about tying up loose ends from his days as a detective. He has been collecting Manson for his own private purposes, in an obsessive attempt to redefine himself after he has given up his job and lost his lover. As music journalist Amanda Petrusich has helpfully summarized, “[C]ollectors customize an identity via the serialization of objects.”22 The appeal of collecting Manson, as John Kaye makes clear, comes with the special offer it makes to grant mastery to the collector over the the irrational and the downright messy. John Kaye’s Gene Burk stands as a reproach to all of those (all of us) who embrace Manson as a private obsession—a route to control whatever dark forces we struggle with, forces that can be conveniently projected onto this one man.

  He's a Magic Man

  Keeping Manson and his Family alive in our movies and fiction, our music and visual art, has contributed to the development of a form that builds on an important American dark art, what we might now call a slow-motion Gothic. The historian Karen Halttunen has
written cogently about the complex challenges we face when we try to figure out what to “do” with murderers in our midst. According to Halttunen, the “most important cultural work” of crime narratives has been to construct the criminal as “a moral monster from whom readers were instructed to shrink, with a sense of horror that confirmed their own ‘normalcy’ in the face of the morally alien, and with a sense of mystery that testified to their own inability to even conceive of such an aberrant act.” But what Halttunen calls our “ambivalent engagement” with killers is not so simple to master; as she puts it, our “fascination with the ‘monster’ betrays our uneasy sense that our intense interest implicates us, if only as voyeurs, in the crime.”1

  The “secret films” at the heart of the novels by John Kaye and Tony O’Neill certainly serve as good reminders of how a cultural investment with high-profile murderers can be transformed into acts of exploitative viewing. But the “zombie” plot in Manson art—the compulsively repeated notion that Manson’s children or members of his Family are at large wreaking havoc—argues in favor of our watchful stance. Simon Wells is correct to suggest that Charles Manson (and, I would add, his Family) long ago transcended the concrete facts of their lives and crimes and “morphed into a popular metaphor for unbridled horror.”2 At the heart of the Manson Family terror is the simple fact that they fit in with various emerging and powerful social groupings in Los Angeles. They fit in on the Sunset Strip, in Laurel Canyon, and even at fancy Hollywood parties. The dark shadow accompanying the “live among us” plot grows from a blame-the-victim implication that Sharon Tate and her friends somehow brought this all on themselves. The modern penny dreadfuls were full of this suggestion: “Somewhere along the line,” Movie Life Yearbook suggested in 1969, Sharon Tate “may have begun to lose sight of her real self.” Tate’s death, according to this line of (un)reasoning, may have been caused by her “lack of selectivity in choosing her friends and her great need to have as many of them as possible” in order to compensate for the “false and one-dimensional image Hollywood had created for her.”3 In November of 1970, a pulp magazine called Movie Mirror suggested that Manson and Tate were twins of a sort, both pursuing “glamour in separate ways” but inevitably meeting in a “horrible culmination of all that has been kept secret in Hollywood.” Modern Screen asked the core question fairly directly: “What went on at the ‘swinging’ party that led to mass murder!”4 If Manson and his Family could so fully infiltrate the inner sanctum of Hollywood and Los Angeles’s popular music culture, then why should we have any expectation that they would be ejected simply because a few of their members were put on trial and in jail?

  It would be foolish to deny that Manson’s primary function in expressive culture has been as a sign of horror, a dark exclamation point on the cultural formation we generally refer to as the sixties. John Moran, composer of an opera inspired by the Family’s activities, has captured this belief system efficiently. “He really did close the ‘60s,’” Moran has suggested. “Until the murders, psychedelia had been associated with the idea of love. After Manson and because of the way the media portrayed him, psychedelia became associated with flipping out and violence and fear.”5 Tommy Udo has rightly noted that “horror films post-Manson betray the real anxieties of the public in a way that a factual film or documentary could not.”6 The list of Manson-inspired (or Manson-inflected) horror films in the immediate wake of the killings and trials is impressive, and includes not only Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), but numerous less well-remembered films, ranging from I Drink Your Blood (1971), in which the band of hippies is literally rabid, and The Other Side of Madness (1972), also known as The Helter Skelter Murders.

  In his book Subversive Horror Cinema Jon Towlson helpfully summarizes the ways that the Manson Family’s cultural creepy crawl helped define the vocabulary of horror films of the 1970s. These films (most notably Last House on the Left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre) portrayed the “American counterculture during this period as extremely dark.” The films served as an articulation of the popular idea that “even peace-loving hippies harbored antisocial, violent impulses.” The “dark counterculture” of these horror films present a landscape on which “rape, murder and sadism have replaced peace and love as the alternative to bourgeois social norms.”7

  In this light, the actual references to the Manson murders in Last House on the Left, or various other horror films of the 1970s, are probably less consequential than is their general vision of an anarchy loosed on the American scene by a counterculture whose murderous members cannot be easily distinguished from the positive forces of what soul singer Otis Redding, at the Monterey Pop festival, called the “love crowd.” David Ray Carter, writing about Texas Chainsaw Massacre (released in 1974, the same year as Bugliosi’s true-crime bible), argues that American audiences would have been very likely to read the film in the context of Manson: “The film was released three years after Charles Manson and his ‘family’ were convicted,” he writes, and “it would be difficult to imagine that audiences viewing the film in 1974 would not make a correlation between the film and the Manson family.”8 Much of the landscape of horror film post-1970 is shaped by Manson Family themes and images; John Cline and Robert G. Weiner have suggested that numerous films in this era articulated Manson-related social fears, particularly having to do with “home invasion” or the breaching of private space on the one hand, and with cults and threatening subcultures on the other.9 The “Manson framing” that gives outline to so many horror movies of the 1970s and beyond usually works as a sort of cultural quarantine. Manson has been invoked consistently and terrifyingly in this “contemporary folklore.” But even as we applaud these rituals of expulsion—presumably taking comfort in these stories in which Manson and his Family emerge on our landscape only to be mocked, neutralized, killed—we have also developed a fairly solid culture of appreciation surrounding the cult leader and his followers.

  To be sure there are no major components of pro-Manson sentiment circulating in literary, film, or visual cultures. There is no body of culturally significant work we could call “Mansonist” or “Mansonical.” There are, of course, Family members who have created exculpatory “non-fiction” chronicles about their own lives and involvement with Manson, and there are celebratory images and stories created by latter-day followers, many of whom travel with Manson under the environmentalist ATWA (Air, Trees, Water, All the Way Alive) banner. But these works are parochial and rarely enter into substantial cultural conversations outside of their own very tight circles of production and reception. With few exceptions (Paul Watkins’s co-written memoir comes to mind) these are works that mean to settle scores and preach to the converted with little investment in artistic strategy.

  Even as Vincent Bugliosi and so many others, including Manson himself, have worked assiduously to write this charismatic figure out of the mainstream of American cultural life (as uneducated, short, a “hillbilly,” a deviant, and so on on) his talismanic power has never waned since 1969. Jeffrey Sconce, who has aptly called Manson the “psychopath of choice” for successive generations of journalists looking for a good story, notes that “Manson’s notoriety is not based on a simple arithmetic of atrocity, his evil residing somewhere other than in a mere body count.” Manson’s hold on the collective imagination of Americans, as Sconce puts it, grows from a complex calculus of sex, gender, and power; Sconce provocatively suggests that what might provoke “outrage” in public discussion of Manson “can often serve as fuel for fantasy in private thought.” The guilt of Manson and his followers, Sconce notes, was never as interesting to observers as was the question of how to understand the “real” relationship that connected Manson to his Family.10 It is no surprise, then, to find that outside of Bugliosi and a few others, there has been relatively little attention paid to the courtroom trials of Manson and the Family. Our interest in Manson has been much more about how he lives in our world, rather than how he lives in his.


  Consider a rumor about the song “Magic Man” by Canadian rock group Heart, led by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson. Jeffrey Sconce explains that for a few years in the mid-1970s, a story circulated that the song was not only about the cult leader but that “profits from the record were being turned over to him.”11 (The secret-message variant of the rumor is, of course, particularly rich given the vibrancy it gains from how it interacts with Bugliosi’s vision of Manson as a tragic misreader of the Beatles). Internet message boards and other sites continue to host versions of this rumor; it has traveled at least as far as the Wilson sisters themselves, who felt obliged to address it in their joint autobiography in 2012.

  As with so many texts that generate rumors, there is little concrete in “Magic Man” to suggest a Manson connection. But as David Ray Carter argues about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, audiences in 1976 were prepared to hear a song about a powerful (possibly older man) controlling a young woman as being inspired by the seemingly hypnotic power Manson held over his female disciples. “Magic Man” is keyed around a competition between a young woman’s mother and her suitor, both of whom are clamoring for her to “Come on home, girl.” The song has elements that point away from Manson (“Never seen eyes so blue”) and elements that point toward Manson—at least in a broad sense (“It seemed like he knew me / He looked right through me” could come out of an autobiography by one of the Manson girls). It is not, additionally, much of a stretch to hear “Played inside the months of moon / Never think of never” as being rooted in, in some very vague way, in Manson’s own “I’ll Never Say Never to Always.” But of course neither the actual lyrics nor the sound of Heart’s song is particularly important to the creation or circulation of this rumor.