Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  The importance of the automobile tailfin as cultural marker should not be overlooked. In his reading of the cover, Reich helps us begin to understand the presence of the car in the sand. Referring to the “latent tailfin” of the Cadillac, Reich calls the car an “icon of obsolescence” and argues that its presence indicates a radical break with the past. The tailfin, as Phil Patton and Karal Ann Marling explain, spoke brashly of American triumphalism—of living under a regime of such stunning abundance that cars could function not only as a practical mode of transportation but also as an object of overblown style.8

  Marling writes that by the mid-1950s “nobody really knew what a car looked like anymore.” Cars, she writes, could take virtually “any form that signified speed, modernity, and a ponderous luxury.”9 This added up, as Patton summarizes, to a “comic-book vision of travel.”10 These earthbound vehicles were meant, of course to evoke flight, and space flight more particularly. “Rocket” was a key word in car design by the late 1950s. The back end of the car was what communicated most loudly. Part of the implication built into this design choice was that the “fantastic and insolent chariot” (in the words of critic Lewis Mumford) was always going to be out front of whatever you were driving.11 Here it is important to note that the production of these cars was also complexly tied up, as Bernard Gendron and others have shown, with the production of rock-and-roll music. “Cadillac” and “El Dorado” were names not only of a car brand and model but of doo-wop groups as well.12 While Jackie Brenston’s 1951 rhythm and blues song “Rocket 88” is often cited as a key text in this respect, the real anthem of this cultural investment was Chuck Berry’s 1956 song “You Can’t Catch Me.” In this song, Berry—the poet laureate of the fast car—introduces a narrator who tells of a species of car he calls a “Flight Deville” (genus “air-mobile”), which manages to go airborne when the police appear on his tail. The United States may, as Reyner Banham put it, have been “debauching itself with tailfins” while the Soviet Union was busy building Sputnik, but the car/rocket nexus contributed to an American mythology of power and speed that few challenged.13

  The meaning of the buried Cadillac on the cover of On the Beach is overdetermined to be sure. It is impossible to offer even a thumbnail sketch of the centrality of the Cadillac to American popular music; the subject, like the car, is huge. But I want to make sure to emphasize how cagey Young and his design team were in making the rocket tailfins a central element in the cover art for the record that includes his definitive work of Manson art. If the original tailfin acted, as Phil Patton argues, as a sort of punctuation on a number of political, social, and cultural trajectories of the 1950s, then Young’s apocalyptic joke on the cover of On the Beach certainly repurposes the fins to serve a similar role for the 1960s.14 Right after recording On the Beach, but before it was released, Young debuted a song at the Bottom Line, in New York’s Greenwich Village, called “Long May You Run.” The audience howled with laughter as Young sang this gorgeous folk song, a valentine to a lost love—his first car (which was actually a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse he called “Mort”). In this song Young wonders whether the car has ended up in the Beach Boys’ possession. On the cover of On the Beach the cranky singer just buries the damn thing in the sand.15 After Manson, there is no more “Fun, Fun, Fun.”

  On the cover, Young is staring at an ocean with no waves; the last one has broken and will soon reach the beach. The Beach Boys’ two major signs of mobility, the car and the surfboard, have been rendered obsolete. The stagy surrealism of the cover invites speculation about the action directly preceding this scene. On the Beach was made during the time Young was living with Carrie Snodgrass, best known for her starring role in Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), and includes a song called “Motion Pictures”: there is plenty of reason to read the cover as if it were a still from a film. Young, for instance, seems to be dressed in character. That lemon-colored blazer is located fairly far outside of Young’s usual sartorial repertoire, which could be described as “feral forest dweller.” The “story” told by the cover, as I have been suggesting, is a post-crisis story. Something terrible has happened in Los Angeles and Young has walked away, seemingly unharmed. In this scenario, Young plays—and seems to be dressed as a weird updated version of—The Great Gatsby’s narrator, Nick Carraway. Young stares at the ocean, perhaps meditating on how “careless” the powerful people he knew in Hollywood and in the Los Angeles music scene were. As F. Scott Fitzgerald explained, “[T]hey smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” With “Revolution Blues” as a key track on On the Beach, it is clear that for Young the murders of August 1969 are the root of this Southern California apocalypse.

  There is no cleaning up the mess that Los Angeles has become in Young’s world, or in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Chinatown was Polanski’s first Hollywood film after the murders, and led to much chatter about its connection to the events at Cielo Drive. A few years earlier Polanski’s version of Macbeth (1971) had many critics searching for possible Manson resonances as well. As Charles Derry has put it, “the obvious relationship between Macbeth and the real-life tragedy of Sharon Tate . . . has been pointed out by critics as often as it has been denied by Polanski.”16 Bryan Reynolds, who has undertaken an especially careful reading of the film and its reception, says categorically that “Every review of Macbeth of which I am aware makes reference to the butchery of Polanski’s wife, unborn child, and friends.”17 Critic Roger Ebert, for instance, found it “impossible to watch certain scenes without thinking of the Charles Manson case. It is impossible to watch a film directed by Roman Polanski and not react on more than one level to such images as a baby being ‘untimely ripped from his mother’s womb.’”18 (The comparisons were rough ones, to be sure. Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb, but this was an early version of a C-section. He lived to tell the tale and kill Macbeth.) Perhaps the ugliest twist came with Pauline Kael’s review in the New Yorker, which dangerously flirted with blaming Polanski for the crimes of the Family: “Even though we knew that Roman Polanski had nothing whatever to do with causing the [crimes], the massacre seemed a vision realized from his nightmare movies.” Historian Vincent Brook has echoed Kael’s rhetoric, with a slightly different focus, in Land of Smoke and Mirrors: the “Satanic possession theme” of Rosemary’s Baby, Brook writes, was “gruesomely reenacted in real life” when Sharon Tate was killed by Manson’s associates.19

  Chinatown has been widely accepted to represent an effort on Polanski’s part to process his horror at the murder of Sharon Tate. Polanski’s biographer, Christopher Sandford, argues that the “catharsis” of “the Manson murders was to be found here rather than in Macbeth.” Sandford, for his part, reads the film’s ending as an acknowledgment of the emotional poetics of being a bystander. As Polanski’s screenwriter Robert Towne put it, “beautiful blondes always die in LA” and the movie, therefore, needed to have a “tunnel at the end of the light.”20 Most historians, appropriately, have focused on the larger politics of in the film. Mike Davis, for instance, is less concerned with the local details of the movie, valuing more its willingness to depict what he calls the “capitalized lineages of power” that came to define the politics of Southern California.21 Steven Erie has been especially efficient in his description of the primary animus of Chinatown. Towne and Polanski, as Erie puts it, sculpted a story of a “larcenous land grab among Gothic family romance,” essentially summarizing that Chinatown’s vision of the conspiratorial politics of water and power in California functions as an allegory of both Watergate and Vietnam.22

  That said, the lure of drawing direct connections between the film’s imagery and the more recent past in Los Angeles has proven to be powerful. Writing of two of the film’s main characters, investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) and Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), Vincent Brook argues that viewers “can’t help superimposing P
olanski’s likely horrified reaction to Sharon Tate’s murder onto Jake’s devastated expression as he stares at Evelyn’s limp body in the driver’s seat.”23 Foster Hirsch takes this interpretive tendency much further than Brook does; Hirsch takes it for granted that Gittes is a stand-in for Polanski, and that the detective’s interactions with Evelyn Mulwray and her power-hungry and incestuous father Noah Cross represent the director’s attempt to confront the loss of his mother (in Auschwitz) and his wife (in Los Angeles). “Jake’s failure to rescue Noah’s daughters,” in Hirsch’s reading, can be interpreted as “a metaphor of Polanski’s inability to save his pregnant wife . . . and his mother.” Hirsch achieves quite a bit of lift here in this bravura analytical leap, suggesting finally that Noah Cross, therefore, represents a “combination of Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler.”24 I support Hirsch’s interpretive impulse (i.e., Chinatown can be read as an important entry in the catalog of “Manson art”), even as I do not want travel with him along his overblown psychoanalytic trajectory.

  If Manson and the Tate killings were going to inflect the art of Terry Melcher (and so many others) it is hardly surprising to find available analogies connecting Roman Polanski’s 1970s work with the terrible crimes that so afflicted him. As I have been suggesting all along, however, one did not have to suffer directly from the Family’s murderous creepy crawl to feel compelled to make art that, in one way or another, engaged with the case. While much of the Los Angeles art of 1974 (and 1975 and 1976) was organized around an apocalyptic vision of some kind of end times, that was hardly a new trope post-Manson. As Mike Davis has explained in his book Ecology of Fear, “the destruction of Los Angeles has been a central theme or image in at least 138 novels or films since 1909” (and he didn’t even count songs).25 As I have been suggesting, though, what was new in the Manson-art world of the 1970s was the turn—as in Melcher and so many others—toward what film historian Peter Biskind has called, in reference to Warren Beatty’s work in Shampoo, “auto-critique.”26

  Shampoo appeared on screen in 1975 as the Hollywood version of Terry Melcher’s emotional politics (with quite a bit of capital-P Politics in the mix as well). Warren Beatty, who starred in the movie and co-wrote it with Robert Towne, has made it clear that the vicious murders at Cielo Drive had shaped everybody working in Hollywood: “It was impossible to escape it in this town, even if you were not friends with the people involved”—which Beatty was.27 Beatty explains that the “original version of Shampoo,” a film about a Los Angeles hairdresser generally understood to be modeled on Jay Sebring (who cut Beatty’s hair), was “strongly influenced by the killings.” This script, Beatty claims, “stretched out over a period of months, got into drug running, and was headed towards an apocalyptic ending.”28 The film manages to feel apocalyptic as it stands, even without any direct reference to Manson, Tate, or the murders. Production designer Dick Sylbert, who also worked on Chinatown, helpfully describes Shampoo as a reversal of the earlier movie: “What you hide in Chinatown, you show in Beverly Hills.” Sylbert goes on to explain that in order to capture this focus on “display, vanity, narcissism” he littered the design with mirrors—“two hundred or so.”29

  Shampoo is self-reflexive, to say the least. It is not only about an individual Los Angeles hairdresser who happens to be narcissistic; it is about the narcissism that Beatty thought plagued life in Hollywood. In thinking about the relationship of the movie to the events of August 1969, it is helpful to take note of film critic Karina Longworth’s claim that Beatty was amazed that so many in the film community believed that it was the murder of an “actress and a hairdresser”—and not the election of Richard Nixon in 1968—that marked the end of the dreams of liberation that characterized the late 1960s.30 Shampoo begins on the eve of the 1968 election, and that time-stamp is all over the movie. It features an election night party, and Richard Nixon on a television screen, celebrating his victory and promising that his administration will “bridge the generation gap.” The movie opens with a sex scene scored by the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and hurtles toward the 1970s with Spiro Agnew talking about ending permissiveness and Nixon promising an “open” administration. Beatty and Towne have a forceful (if not light) touch. When Goldie Hawn’s character Jill says, “Sometimes I get this terrible feeling that something’s gonna happen” we could be on the pages of Joan Didion’s “White Album.” But Beatty generally does not want to mystify what is happening to his characters in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. He does not want to let them off the hook with an appeal to the sort of passive and apolitical (or anti-political, actually) doom-mongering Didion wears as armor.

  Beatty’s George defers taking responsibility for his actions: “Can we talk later?” is something of a mantra for him in Shampoo. And this is what Beatty, for his part, most wanted the audience of his film to notice. While his sexually popular hairdresser—“Let’s face it. I fucked them all,” he ultimately confesses—seems centrally placed in his particular subculture, he is destined to live on the outskirts of the political moment. Beatty explains George’s marginality with a remarkable phrase; George is doomed, according to Beatty, because he does not participate in the “forensics of national survival.”31 The climactic line in Shampoo comes, as many observers have noted, when Lester Karp (Jack Warren) wonders aloud about George’s motivation for having sex with so many women, including his own wife: “[D]o you get your kicks sneaking around behind people’s backs taking advantage of them? Is that your idea of being anti-establishment?” Beatty’s George looks baffled for a moment and then settles the matter with a simple explanation: “I’m not anti-establishment.” This is a profound moment in the history of Manson art, representing as it does Beatty’s rather sly (and cruel?) effort to project Jay Sebring into the 1970s in order to argue that the hairdresser’s (and Sharon Tate’s) dalliance with the Los Angeles counterculture should not be read as anything other than slumming. While George is, in some obvious ways, patterned after Jay Sebring, he also brings Terry Melcher to mind. As played by Warren Beatty, George is at once remarkably privileged and completely unable to enjoy his privilege. This is a movie about a powerful culture in decline, and George’s main function is as the canary in the coal mine. If he is not having fun, then who possibly could be? With this one line of dialogue, Shampoo reminds its viewers of how little it took for the promises of liberation to be revealed as desperate, compulsory pleasure-seeking.

  Wrecking Crews

  “We’re the wrecking crew.” This is what David Herrle has Tex Watson say in his crazy-quilt book of poems Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy (2014).1 The “wrecking crew” mention is a good joke. That was the name, of course, of the loose assemblage of Los Angeles–based session musicians (including Terry Melcher’s friend Mike Deasy) who laid down the tracks for so many recordings in the 1960s and 1970s. And it was the name of a Dean Martin movie that also featured Sharon Tate (1968). Herrle cannot leave things here—his book is a web of references and Manson is only one of the poet’s many reference points, along with such avatars of creative destruction as Marie Antoinette and William Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen. But it is in the reference to the session musicians—an emblem of underappreciated artistic achievement—that Herrle locates his most poignant citation. After naming the Family after the session players, Watson then points over to Jay Sebring’s dead body and says that the carnage is “our poetry, our song, our sculpture.” Herrle is building, it seems, on Ed Sanders’s proposition that Charles Manson was a “performance killer.” With one referential move after another, Herrle reminds us that the Manson murders were (among so many other things) acts of complex performance. This is the crux of the seduction and the frustration for creators of Manson art: they have so much competition from the man himself.

  Manson was literally an artist of course—a writer and singer of songs. But his artistic legacy is not found in “Look at Your Game Girl” or “Cease to Exist”/“Cease to Resist” but rather in his more curatorial efforts. Sanders beg
an to articulate this idea in the early 1970s, and Zachary Lazar has more recently put punctuation on it. The Sway author has argued that the Tate-LaBianca murders have a “perverse aesthetic quality to them. They were orchestrated in a way that is calculatedly terrifying. . . . [Y]ou couldn’t script a more terrifying scene.”2 Lazar goes on to note that Manson’s instruction to his girls on that August night, as they left the former movie ranch to go kill the current movie star, to “do something witchy” should “essentially” be translated to mean “be creative.”3 The creativity of Manson and his Family has bedeviled artists working in their wake who are confronted with an inspiration at once so ripe for meditating upon but also so inconveniently articulate in its own right. Herrle’s “wrecking crew” line is a good one, but it is no match after all, for Tex Watson’s own alleged words to Voytek Frykowski: “I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business.” Watson is equal parts Captain Ahab—baptizing his weapon not in the name of the father but in the name of the devil—and African American folk figure Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s son-in-law. Like Manson, Watson is a “performance killer.” As with Manson (who reputedly hollered “Don’t draw on me,” Western-movie style, at a drunk stuntman at Spahn Ranch) and the witchy Manson women who wrote in blood on the walls and wove their own hair into a vest for their leader, Tex Watson knew how to stage a scene. Ed Sanders, for his part, simply could not stop wondering what movies the Manson Family made at the ranch.