by Jeff Guinn
The Diggers fascinated Charlie. He tagged after them, noting their morally superior attitudes and observing their daily task of scrounging from supermarket dumpsters and turning the cast-off food into nourishing, even tasty, meals. Charlie certainly approved of the Digger women doing most of the work while the men gave orders. Here was a group that everyone looked up to, and Charlie, the shrimp who was constantly picked on in school and in prison, always yearned for respect. But Charlie was never tempted to join the Diggers—intriguing as they were, everything they did was ultimately for the benefit of others, not themselves, and that ran directly counter to Charlie’s approach to life. Besides, they espoused a philosophy of no individual leaders, and Charlie always wanted to lead.
In the Haight, there was an obvious way to do that, a way that appealed to Charlie’s considerable ego and required exactly the talents that he possessed—imagination, glibness, and an uncanny ability (gleaned in equal parts from pragmatic prison survival and Dale Carnegie classes) to manipulate others by perceiving and then exploiting their ambitions and weaknesses. Virtually everywhere Charlie looked in the Haight there were street preachers pontificating to one or two or dozens of misfit listeners desperately seeking someone special to tell them what to do, how to live, what to think. Reinventing himself as a Haight guru and gaining a flock of worshipful followers was irresistible. Charlie still expected that someday soon he’d head south to Los Angeles to snag a recording contract. But the guru business clearly had its own charms and, just like music, it required attracting and retaining an audience. All the biggest stars had entourages, followers to stroke their egos, run their errands, indulge their every whim. Charlie set about recruiting his in the Haight.
He began not by preaching, but by listening. For days Charlie drifted from one street guru to the next, memorizing their best lines and putting together his own street rap. Charlie was in no rush with his research. Unlike most Haight newcomers, he had no immediate financial concerns. Mary Brunner still had her job at the university library back in Berkeley, and most nights Charlie hitched back across the Bay and slept at her place. Mary understood that it was none of her business what Charlie did during the day while she was at work. Her obligation was to pay the rent, cook for him, clean his clothes, make love whenever he felt like it, and tolerate any other girls he brought home. And, as Charlie began to preach his way around the Haight, there were suddenly a lot of them.
The street philosophy Charlie initially spouted was a hybrid, cobbled together from Beatles song lyrics, biblical passages, Scientology, and the Dale Carnegie technique of presenting everything dramatically. Guitar in hand—sometimes he’d sing an original tune or two to warm things up—Charlie would find an open spot on the sidewalk or in the park and begin chatting with whatever waifs were nearby. He’d talk about becoming free by giving everything up—possessions, individuality, ego. The more you surrendered, the more you had. Death was the same thing as life and nothing was bad. Society insisted some things were wrong, but that was just to hold you down. Breaking away from your inhibitions was important. Love everybody. He offered nothing radically different from hundreds of other would-be Haight gurus with the exception of his presentation. Charlie was a masterful orator, letting his voice fall so his listeners needed to lean in to hear, then roaring so that they had to pull back a little, building a singsong rhythm and smiling and gesturing broadly. He entertained as well as enlightened. The term charisma was just coming into wide use and Charlie had it. To an extent he was successful from his first day as a self-anointed guru. People listened. When he wanted drugs, his audiences had plenty to share. Girls agreed that inhibitions were bad and had sex with him. He took some of the girls back across the Bay and enjoyed more time with them at Mary’s apartment. But something was missing.
Charlie wasn’t accomplishing anything more than dozens of other Haight gurus. Every day he was in direct competition with the rest of them. Some kids would listen to Charlie, swear lifelong allegiance, and then desert him the next day for some other pontificator. The ones willing to stay loyal to him on a long-term basis weren’t worth having. Charlie was quickly reminded of what he’d previously learned as a pimp: the best recruits were bruised and needy but not completely broken. On any given day in the Haight, Charlie could call to his side dozens of hapless young souls who needed everything but had nothing to contribute for his own benefit beyond doglike devotion. They were too socially inept to bring in money by panhandling, too clingy to share his attention, and too disoriented to run even the simplest errands. For Charlie, a more effective way of building a useful entourage was to test potential followers one at a time, and to do it away from competing gurus. When he had a few select disciples, then they, in turn, could go out and recruit for him, with Charlie making the final decisions on who was worthy to remain in the group. Jesus had done the same sort of thing, and during some of his LSD trips Charlie began to believe that he had a lot in common with Jesus, since they both tried to build a following from the dregs of society. Bigger than the Beatles, equal to or maybe even the reincarnation of Jesus—Charlie didn’t aim low. But when he did select his second follower, she wasn’t from the Haight.
After so many years in prison, Charlie relished the freedom to roam. Every few weeks he left the Haight on directionless two- or three-day rambles up and down the California coast, hitching or else driving a 1948 Chevrolet that someone made available to him. In May 1967 he took the Chevy south toward Los Angeles and ended up in Venice, one of a series of beach towns north of the downtown L.A. sprawl. Venice had a reputation as a bohemian community; lots of artists and musicians lived there. Charlie parked the car and wandered along the sidewalk that ran parallel to the Pacific Ocean. Benches were set all along the sidewalk so people could sit and watch surfers riding the waves. On one of the benches a small, redheaded girl sat and sobbed. Eighteen-year-old Lynette Fromme had just left home after another fight with her strict, domineering father. Lynne had a history of emotional problems. Though she’d been an outgoing child who was a good enough singer and dancer to appear as part of a professional troupe several times on national television (prophetically, her signature tune was “Doin’ What Comes Naturally” from the Broadway show Annie Get Your Gun), as a teenager she’d turned to sex and drugs, in part as a response to tension between her parents. Lynne attempted suicide twice while in high school and was rumored to have had an affair with one of her teachers. She’d recently enrolled in small El Camino College with a vague plan to earn some basic credits and then transfer to the University of California. But then she and her father argued again, and she fled from their home in Redondo Beach to this bench in Venice.
Charlie sensed an opportunity. He walked over and asked, “What’s the problem?” Lynne blinked back tears and glanced up; her first impression was that he seemed like a hobo with class. Charlie told her that he was called the Gardener because he tended to all the flower children back in the Haight. Soon they were sitting together and Lynne told him all about her life, how she was frustrated and wanted to escape from everything. Charlie couldn’t have seemed more sympathetic, yet mysterious. He told her, “The way out of a room is not through the door; just don’t want out, and you’re free.” Then Charlie spun some tales about his time in prison, how he’d learned to free himself mentally while stuck in solitary confinement. He’d come to Venice that morning because he’d somehow felt compelled to, Charlie told Lynne, intimating that fate must have brought them together. Now he was going to drive back to the Haight—she was welcome to come along. At first Lynne said no, she had to finish the semester at school, but when Charlie turned and walked away she jumped off the bench and ran after him.
Charlie took Lynne home to Mary, and set about indoctrinating her. For a while the three of them simply hung out, and then one day Mary went out and Charlie told Lynne to take off her clothes. Lynne was ambivalent about sex, but Charlie explained how none of it was bad. She’d never felt attractive and he told her that she was beautiful.
After one or two false starts on her part they finally made love, and then they had sex with Mary watching, and then Lynne watched Charlie and Mary doing it, and gradually all her inhibitions were gone and the next thing she knew the three of them would go out on drives into the hills where she and Mary would take off all their clothes and pretend to be wood nymphs while Charlie played a flute that he’d found somewhere. Charlie was so wonderful and wise. Lynne wanted to stay with him forever, and he said that she could. He and Mary gave up the place in Berkeley; along with Lynne, they took an apartment in the Haight. It meant that Mary had to commute to work at the Cal-Berkeley library, but it was more convenient for Charlie and that was what mattered. Lynne and Mary got along fine, and Charlie wanted to add another member to the household. He had somebody in mind.
On one of Charlie’s first hitchhiking trips, he was picked up just outside San Francisco by an overweight former Congregational minister named Dean Moorehouse. Moorehouse and Charlie got into a good conversation and Moorehouse brought Charlie home to meet his wife and daughter. The wife didn’t make much of an impression, but teenage Ruth Ann did. She was a cuddly tomboy, funny and uninhibited, an irresistible little bit of jailbait. Charlie could tell she liked him and bought into the whole ex-con-turned-guru thing, but at that particular moment he wanted to get his hands on something else in the Moorehouse home. A battered piano was in the corner of a room, and true to the spirit of the times when Charlie said he liked it, Moorehouse told him that he could have it. Soon after Lynne and Mary moved with him to the Haight, Charlie went back to the Moorehouses’ to get the piano, though he had no intention of hauling it back to the Haight. Instead he trundled it a few blocks down the street, where he swapped it with one of the Moorehouses’ neighbors for an aging Volkswagen minibus. The minibus meant that Charlie was not only mobile, he had room to bring five or six people along with him. The first one he brought was Ruth Ann, who was eager to run off with Charlie. They managed to have sex a few times before her mother sicced the law on Charlie. He and Ruth Ann were picked up in Mendocino north of San Francisco. She was sent home and Charlie was charged with interfering with the questioning of a suspected runaway juvenile. Charlie was in his Jesus mode when the cops booked him. He gave his occupation as “minister” and his name as Charles Willis Manson rather than his given middle name of Milles. He explained that the new name spelled out his real identity and mission: Charles’ Will Is Man’s Son—Charlie was the Son of Man, carrying out the Lord’s will.
Ruth Ann had guessed that her parents would try to force her to come home. Before they were separated by the cops, Charlie advised her to find someone and marry him; any single guy would do. Married women were legally emancipated from their parents. Ruth Ann could desert her new husband anytime, and then go anywhere with anyone she wanted. Charlie would stay in touch so she’d know where to find him. In the immediate aftermath of their arrest Charlie got a thirty-day suspended sentence and three years tacked onto his probation, and Ruth Ann married a guy named Edward Heuvelhorst. Then she bided her time until Charlie was ready to summon her.
By mid-June school was out all over America and teenagers flooded the Haight. Charlie picked through them, talking to many, taking more time with a few, but nobody seemed quite right. Things in the Haight were nuts. Everybody had known the kids were coming, but nobody realized that there would also be countless Bermuda shorts–wearing adult tourists brandishing cameras, eager for snapshots of authentic Haight hippies flashing the peace sign or smoking dope or any of the other depraved things that the folks back home had heard about. It became impossible to drive on Haight streets because they were too crowded.
For many of the hippies, the big thrill of the summer was the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles’ latest album. From sleeve photos to musical content, it was taken as an affirmation of everything the Haight wanted to represent. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were decked out in psychedelic pseudo-military garb, lime green and pink and bright blue and orange. They all had long hair and mustaches. The band’s name was spelled out on the cover with flowers. The songs themselves abandoned completely any reference to teen romance. Instead there was a tribute to getting high with a little help from your friends, the all-too-true tale of a girl leaving home because her parents didn’t understand her, a droning Indian-flavored reminder that we’re all one, a trippy ditty titled “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” with the suggestive initials L.S.D., and a final song about a day in somebody’s life that concluded with John Lennon telling the rest of the world that the band would “love to turn you on.” For all the current chaos in the Haight, its desperate denizens took Sgt. Pepper as a sign that the Beatles understood.
All over America it was a traumatic summer. Thirty-three race riots in major cities required intervention by police and, often, the National Guard. Fifty-three percent of those arrested were black males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Young men in ghettos turned on their own communities; sociologists classified the summer 1967 uprisings as “commodity riots” involving looting and burning of local businesses. None of them were “community riots” with interracial fighting. There were no riots of any sort in the Haight, but plenty of rapes. An even greater danger to its overflowing community were drug overdoses and diseases brought on by malnutrition and exposure. Despite the best efforts by the Diggers and neighborhood churches, thousands of people, mostly teenagers, went hungry during the day and slept wherever they could find a few feet of space at night. Even though it was summer, Bay Area nights were chilly and damp. The music played in clubs or in the Panhandle was almost always punctuated by hacking, phlegm-soaked coughs from the audience. Sick kids staggered on their own or were helped to the public health services at Park Emergency Hospital near Golden Gate Park; from there they were routinely shunted off to other facilities, where they were equally unwelcome and went mostly untreated.
Dr. David E. Smith, an intern directing the alcohol and drug abuse screening unit at San Francisco General Hospital, was appalled at the callousness of his colleagues. City officials had no intention of increasing health services to the Haight; instead, they debated whether to try to stem the stream of summer arrivals by posting “Hippies Not Welcome” signs on bridges leading into San Francisco. Smith decided to open a free health clinic in the Haight. He found some doctors and nurses who were willing to donate a few pro bono hours each week, and after leasing some vacant dental offices on Clayton Street and stocking them with basic medical supplies Smith opened his clinic on June 9. It operated under a simple philosophy: Anyone would be treated without charge, and the staff would make no moral judgments about patients. More than 250 hippies lined up for treatment on the first day, suffering variously from pneumonia, hepatitis, venereal disease, skin and gum infections, malnutrition, dysentery, and complications from botched abortions. There were 350 the next day, and by the third the clinic had run out of antibiotics and bandages. Smith had opened the clinic with his own money and a few small donations. Without financial help it wouldn’t stay open for long. Fillmore promoter Bill Graham volunteered to put together a series of fundraising concerts. The first, featuring Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, raised $5,000. Joplin, fond of hard drugs and unprotected sex, was a regular clinic patient. City leaders weren’t pleased; health inspectors made regular visits to the clinic, hoping to cite unsanitary conditions and shut the place down, but Smith and his staff kept the premises in good condition. A greater threat to the clinic’s operations was posed by undercover police officers looking for illegal drugs. Clinic staff posted a prominent sign: “No dealing, no holding, no using dope—any of these can close the clinic.” Not wanting to scare away potheads or trippers in dire need of care, the sign’s message gently concluded, “We love you.”
Since Charlie was still trolling the Haight for potential followers, he dropped in to the clinic from time to time. He and the staff there would sometimes chat; Charlie always seemed to be in a sociable mood.
Smith remembers Charlie practicing lines he’d copped from other would-be Haight gurus, testing them on the sick hippies lined up for treatment on the sidewalk outside the clinic. Charlie’s entire rap was love and peace and give up your ego, Smith recalls, the same rhetoric offered by all the other street preachers. He never alluded to anything violent.
• • •
Charlie ripped the seats out of the Volkswagen bus and Mary decorated it with a rug and pillows and curtains so there was room behind the driver for people to stretch out comfortably. He, Mary, and Lynne drove the VW bus down to Manhattan Beach outside Los Angeles, where Charlie wanted to visit Billy Green, an old acquaintance from prison. Green introduced Charlie to nineteen-year-old Pat Krenwinkel, a plain girl going through a particularly bad time. A native Californian whose parents had divorced when she was in high school, Pat had been living with her mother in Alabama, but hated the segregation in the South and being called a Yankee by the locals. She moved back to California and lived in an apartment with her older half-sister and nine-year-old nephew. According to Pat, her sister was hooked on drugs and the nine-year-old was incorrigible. Billy told Pat’s sister that Charlie needed a place to stay, and as soon as Charlie took in Pat’s chaotic home life he pounced. During his three-day stay (Mary and Lynne were stashed elsewhere) he focused his entire attention on Pat, making love to her and telling her she was beautiful, something no man had ever said to her before. On the third day he asked her to leave town with him; he was going to drive around America. Pat wanted a way out but was cautious enough to ask Billy Green his opinion. Green said that she ought to go with Charlie—what could it hurt? Pat’s belief that Charlie was going to be her boyfriend was disabused when Charlie stopped to pick up Mary and Lynne; she’d have to share him. But Pat and the other two young women got along. It was a time for free love, after all, and no possessiveness. Charlie seemed so wonderful, so magical, that even a little of his attention brought happiness and a sense of security. Pat brought something to Charlie, too—a Chevron credit card that her father continued to pay off every month. Charlie immediately took control of the card. He had not only acquired his third permanent follower, he no longer had to worry about paying for gas.
