Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  But she said yes to screenwriter Guinevere Turner and director Mary Harron. The film credits her book and Ed Sanders’s The Family as major sources, but it is the Faith book that gives the movie its central energy and narrative shape. Faith died in 2017, so it won’t be possible to get the final word on what changed her mind about selling the rights to her book. But Harron and Turner came to the project with queer and feminist bona fides that must have comforted Faith; additionally, Turner was raised in the Lyman Family cult and brought some very personal insight to the project. It is almost certain that the film will not offer much box-office competition for Quentin Tarantino’s Manson-adjacent project Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—now slated for release the very same week as the book you are holding—but it represents a thrilling punctuation mark on the Manson legacies I have tried to trace out in Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl.

  What is most immediately significant for my purposes is that Turner and Harron trot out the too-familiar Didion quotation to frame a film that completely repudiates its passive-aggressive attempt to shut the door on the thrilling, liberatory potential of so many 1960s-era cultural and political innovations. This is a movie, after all, that is centrally concerned with the power of feminist consciousness raising! The movie captures a fascinating reality about crime and its aftermath, something I have been trying to say over the hundreds of pages of this book but that Rachel Monroe has captured much more efficiently than I was able to:

  “[Our] lives aren’t split into a before and after; in fact, they haven’t changed much at all. Maybe, if we’re Joan Didion, we have a panic attack and start to lock our front door. Meanwhile, the rest of us eat our oatmeal and do the crossword puzzle as always, only with an occasional shiver of dread: something horrible happened somewhere else today. Most of us, at least. But there are many ways to be a victim of a crime, and not all of them look like you might expect.”1 That is the beginning premise of Charlie Says.

  When Karlene Faith begins her teaching work with Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel, one of the first things she does is pull out the bible of the women’s health movement, Our Bodies, Ourselves (first commercial edition was in 1973), to share with them. As the movie unfolds, she will also share the crucial collection of feminist writing Sisterhood is Powerful (1970) and Del Martin’s Battered Wives (1976). The movie goes out of its way to make clear that some of Faith’s academic colleagues also need help expanding their minds; precious screen time is devoted to showing Faith helping these other women come to an understanding of the Manson women as victims in their own right.

  The film is scholarly and precise. When the three incarcerated women are introduced to the audience they are singing a Moody Blues song; those of us who have immersed (too) deeply in Manson Family lore remember that this group was one of the only acts besides the Beatles to get played on the Family turntable. The filmmakers offer up a careful and complex scene of dumpster diving that leads into a brutally violent Spahn Ranch dinner scene. The creepy crawl is represented too, as the dark and playful performance crime it was. The moment when Leslie Van Houten takes her turn stabbing the already-dead Rosemary LaBianca is framed as an intertextual invocation of all the horror films inspired by the Manson crimes.

  Given that the movie was directed by Mary Harron, who has deep investments in, and connections to, the Velvet Underground, it strikes me as fairly likely that the film’s title is meant to summon up the group’s songs “Candy Says” and “Lisa Says.” The Velvet Underground has been of special interest to Harron; she has written about them (in New Musical Express in 1981), made a film about Valerie Solanas (I Shot Andy Warhol in 1996), the radical feminist who attacked the Velvet Underground’s art world patron, and solicited a score for American Psycho (2000) from the VU’s John Cale. This group’s late 1960s output is another good reminder not to credit Joan Didion’s apocalyptic tale-telling. More trustworthy observers than Didion have long suggested that countercultural life around the US started turning especially dark around the time of the “Summer of Love” in 1967. If the countercultural fabric got torn it was not because a few celebrities were killed in August of 1969. We would be better off attending to the plight of returning veterans, the not unconnected influx of harder drugs into American cities, the ongoing runaway crisis, and a major effort by the dominant culture—from the president on down—to repudiate and abandon young people and their culture.

  It is “Lisa Says” that particularly seems to haunt Harron’s movie. Already recorded by the group in 1969, “Lisa Says” got a much fuller articulation on VU-leader Lou Reed’s first solo album in 1972. Here Reed sings of a young countercultural woman who could have sprung from the pages of Ellen Herst’s painful article, “Mel and Charlie’s Women,” about the vulnerable people brought under the control of Lyman and Manson, those patriarchal cult leaders. The narrator of “Lisa Says,” like the three family members featured in Charlie Says, and like the women mournfully described by Ellen Herst, finds herself forced into all sorts of compromises while searching to fulfill her basic needs of care and community. This title character recognizes that the powerful man who seems to be controlling her destiny—the “good time Charlie, always out having his fun”—reads her as a simple “California fool.” Charlie Says reverses the ironic titles of the Velvet Underground song to remind its viewers that women who liberated themselves from their patriarchal families of origin too often lost their voices in the countercultural spaces they came to occupy. What is most thrilling in Harron’s movie is the reminder that the second wave feminism developing in the 1960s would flower in the 1970s in women’s health collectives, consciousness raising groups, political street activity, record companies, publishing ventures, academic women’s studies departments, and so much more. The vehicle, Harron reminds her viewers, is the radical act of women talking and listening to each other.

  What is most convincing in Charlie Says is the agreement forged among the four women in the prison—Karlene Faith, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and Leslie Van Houten—that they all shared the sense in 1969 that something big was about to happen. The revisionist thrill of Charlie Says comes with the “both/and” sophistication of its analysis. Something “big” did happen—many big things, in fact. But Charlie Says makes the case that the tragic murders of August taught many lessons, including the central one seized upon by Karlene Faith and her colleagues working with imprisoned women in California, which was the same one seized on by Ellen Herst and so many other women living in late 1960s countercultural spaces: “it’s not exactly a groove to hustle on the street, bake bread for your hippie farmer, serve the God incarnate, commit murders.” Charlie Says is forthright in its depiction of the horrors of the two nights of murder and in its critique of Family members who could calmly discuss the merits of Tiny Tim and his ukulele while eating breakfast on their way back to Spahn Ranch after brutally killing Rosemary LaBianca and Leno LaBianca. But it also takes seriously the promises of education and rehabilitation. A month or so before I sat down to write this epilogue, Leslie Van Houten was again recommended for release by the California Board of Parole and is currently undergoing the standard review process—including the final say by the governor of the state. It is not clear, of course, whether he will share the critical optimism that anchors the work of Karlene Faith, Mary Harron, and Guinevere Turner.

  When I was finishing up final revisions of the first edition of this book (then known as Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America’s Most Infamous Family) the literal body of Manson was still on ice. Manson died in November of 2017, but I needed to get my manuscript to my editor early in the winter of 2018. As I tied up loose ends, cutting out song lyrics whose copyright owners wanted too much money per phrase and so on, I was also trying to keep track of Manson’s body and estate, which were still being fought over. Elizabeth Yuko, writing in Rolling Stone, explained the jurisdictional mess which brought the question of Manson’s body to Kern County (where he died) and the
question of his estate to Los Angeles County (where he last “willingly” resided). Three men—a son, a grandson, and a friend—were fighting over Manson’s remains.2 It is impossible for me not to read the fight over the actual body as a literal expression of the metaphors and allegories I spent years of research and hundreds of pages trying to investigate. Whom does Charles Manson belong to? Why do so many still struggle over him? Living with Manson on ice has not proven too difficult thus far, largely because all of the scripts were already written and largely familiar, and most of the major players have long been ready for their close-ups.

  I will be careful not to make any predictions about the contours of developing “Manson Art” because I am a historian and not a soothsayer; also, the one modest guess I made in the introduction (about “online whispers” suggesting The Manson Girls movie might be finally hitting the screen) turned out to be….wrong. That said, the 50th Anniversary of the crimes this summer and the possible release of Leslie Van Houten and Bobby Beausoleil in 2019 is sure to reinvigorate the competition over Manson’s legacy that has been fought out for 50 years. British documentarians got into the conversation a bit early, with the 2018 Liev Schreiber-narrated documentary Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes, which also features a few talking head appearances by me, basically playing that guy from Jim Carrey’s 1994 movie The Mask who says things like “we all wear masks, metaphorically speaking.”

  Quentin Tarantino will certainly be at the center of the conversation we have. His film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is being heavily promoted already, and it is only early spring. By the time of its release at summer’s peak, we will have been treated to trailers, posters, leaks about the plot, interviews with stars and bit players, and more. Tarantino’s team has been clear that the film is not “about” the murders, but everything about it suggests we are to read the trailer’s yellow-and-brown-palette of pleather-clad men as an attempt to capture Hollywood in 1969 as a doomy joke. This is Quentin Tarantino-land, so of course the mise-en-scene is meant to make his viewers feel a little scared of and a little superior to the action on screen. But the trailer for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood also opens with a discussion between two characters—one a lead actor played by Leonardo DiCaprio and the other his stunt double, played by Brad Pitt—discussing just what it is that a stunt double does. This efficiently sets up the possibility that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is going to be centrally involved with questions of doubling and shadowing and so on. And before long, Tarantino cuts to a shot of a smiling and waving Charlie Manson, and all of us who have been trained in Manson lore since the 1970s are wondering: whom is Manson a double for? I don’t know yet if Tarantino is going to help us understand the villains of 1969 as “after all…you and me” but I certainly won’t be surprised if he evinces some sympathy for this devil.

  I have just made a guess that Quentin Tarantino’s film will make some kind of allusion to an infamous Rolling Stones song. I can almost guarantee that a movie by Tarantino called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will almost certainly keep us all busy tracing down its film intertextuality (beyond the Sergio Leone-inspired title) for years to come. For now, his trailer shows us a number of Hollywood movie marquees, including one for William Friedkin’s film version of The Night They Raided Minksy’s (1968) which, to boil things down perhaps far too much, is a story about a young woman who runs away from home, becomes a burlesque dancer, and ends up in the back of a police vehicle. Given the complex moral universes Tarantino’s characters so often occupy, it is not impossible to imagine that his film will offer at least some support to the idea promoted so fully in Charlie Says that is time for us to pay some attention to the women of the Manson Family as actual people with dimensions. Another 2019 film, The Haunting of Sharon Tate, is also creating some low-level buzz in this 50th anniversary year and also promises to make some female characters in this narrative more complex than usual: unfortunately, the only dimension this very cheesy-looking film appears to add to our cultural stock is a paranormal one.

  A major constituency sure to make its voice heard this year is the collection of people who travel under the banner of victims’ rights. The victims’ rights movement has turned into part of the powerful backlash I have been trying to explore throughout this book—a backlash that used the Manson Family murders as an excuse to repudiate many of the advances led by countercultural and previously marginalized voices in the 1960s. “The movement,” as Rachel Monroe puts it, ‘was, in a way, an attempt to turn back the clock on the social and judicial reforms of the 1950s and ’60s.” Monroe’s work on the complex politics and demographics of the victims’ rights movement helps us understand that this cultural force has to be understood as “a conservative offshoot of 1970s-era radical feminism, when activists mobilized on behalf of victims of rape and domestic violence, arguing for restitution, psychological counseling, and a defined role for victims in legal proceedings.” But the movement was taken over by “a coalition of crime victims, prosecutors, prison officials, and conservative politicians,” ultimately becoming “one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the state of California.”3

  Members of Sharon Tate’s family—at first her mother, then her sisters and others—have been at the forefront of this movement and usually more than willing to make common cause with the most reactionary forces in political and criminal justice circles in California and Washington, DC. Debra Tate will be—already has been, in fact—out front in efforts to deny parole to Bobby Beausoleil and Leslie Van Houten, even though neither of these two figures had anything to do with the murder of Tate’s sister Sharon. But one of the insidious achievements of the victims’ rights movements is to invest all established victims as having developed a sort of blanket moral authority and jurisprudential leverage. “Victims” in this social vision are blameless relatives, mothers and sisters of the victims of violent crimes. The social construction of victimhood, as Monroe and others have argued, does not include sex workers, the already incarcerated, or people otherwise engaged in what the legal system construes as illicit activity. (Since I wrote this paragraph, California Governor Gavin Newsom reversed the recommendation of the state’s parole board to free Beausoleil.)

  I don’t want to overclaim, but work by journalists like Rachel Monroe, legal scholars Raphael Ginsberg and Lynne Henderson, and countless defense attorneys across the land, serves as a poignant reminder that “victims’ rights” is much more than a simple attempt to give family members the opportunity to explain the extent of their loss and the depth of their grief. After all, as Monroe explains, hand-in-hand with the “the heart-wrenching stories” told by grieving mothers came “increasingly conservative, tough-on-crime policies: mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines; 15-year parole denials; three- (or even two-) strike laws for repeat offenders.” Not to mention an end to conjugal visits. In short, much of the work carried out by the victims’ rights movement supported policies that conservative prison reform propagandists had been advocating for in earlier decades. The victims’ rights movement participated—sometimes unwittingly and sometimes consciously—with the institutions, agencies, and figures organizing what legal scholar Michelle Alexander has called The New Jim Crow. The Manson case has helped enact a racist backlash against the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1960s: the huge number of people caught up in this new generation of “tough on crime” laws were nonviolent drug offenders, a majority of whom were African American. Manson’s putative Helter Skelter apocalypse has come to pass, but it looks different than his frenzied imagination had produced: as Rachel Monroe puts it, it has “just been a longer, slower fight, more like a war of attrition.”

  Let me quote Rachel Monroe’s brilliant work one more time—and also urge you to keep an eye out for her book Savage Appetites, also due out this summer. The victims’ rights movement, as Monroe explains, created “a strategic alliance between those who had been the victims of violent crime and people who had not been victimized but still lived in a state of hei
ghtened anxiety.” The liberated cultural and political activity of the 1960s “felt like social chaos to a large segment of the population.…Who knew whose daughter might be murdered by the next sex-crazed hippie cult?” The undeniable achievements of the reactionary victims’ rights movement—Doris Tate was one of George H.W. Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light”—has been accomplished largely through its appeal “to non-victims who nonetheless felt threatened by a polarized society and rising crime rates.”

  One of the pleasures of writing this epilogue is having the chance to acknowledge just how many things I missed the first time around. The short answer is: many. The longer answer is: the internet is a beast and I did my best. But the number of lovely people who have written to me since the book came out to say something nice, but also mention this or that heavy metal or punk song that I neglected is humbling. (The Irish band Therapy?—yes, they use that question mark—have a really good song called “Dancing with Manson,” and there is a much-loved, long lost Irish group called The Slippies who seemed to be named for Manson’s joke about not being a hippie.) And this Encylopaedia Metallicum message board has more leads to Manson citations than I can count.4 Playing catch-up since finishing work on the first edition of the book also allowed me to finally get to John Roecker’s astounding Manson movie Live Freaky, Die Freaky: it took me awhile to recognize that among its many other burdens, this film (with voicings by Tim Armstrong of Rancid, Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day, and a bunch of other famous musicians—Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s!—not named Armstrong) really wants us to recognize how ridiculous it is that so many of us have treated Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter as some kind of bible.