by Jeff Guinn
New names weren’t mandatory; Lynne Fromme for some time remained Lynne. Charlie was still Charlie, or occasionally Jesus Christ.
True to Charlie’s teaching, the group had little in the way of possessions, but a certain level of financing was needed to pay basic expenses—rent (though that often was ignored until landlords threw them out), clothes and mending supplies, parts for automobile and motorcycle repair, and drugs, enough weed and acid to satisfy the daily needs of a growing conglomeration of ragged young women and men. The girls were usually sent out to panhandle, and Charlie’s recruiters, Watkins in particular, sought out potential converts who seemed to have a few dollars in their pockets to contribute. Charlie was adept at convincing curious, well-heeled older people to give him substantial gifts like cars—he would meet them on the beach or in the city, engage them in conversation, and intrigue them with stories about the harmonious real family he was gathering, and how he was trying to teach these poor desperate kids a better way to live. It didn’t pay off very often, but whenever it did Charlie had a car, or at least a few gently used expensive suits or a fancy stereo, to trade for drugs or generic cheap clothing. The barter system thrived in the Love Generation. When absolutely necessary, Charlie and Watkins and whatever other men were associated with the group at the time would hire out to clean swimming pools and stables—Charlie always did like being around animals.
Food was never a problem. Charlie taught the others how to scrounge edible throwaways in supermarket garbage bins, making it appear as though it was his original idea rather than admitting he’d learned it from the Diggers back in the Haight. They were astounded at the bounty they found there—Lynne compared it to diving inside a giant salad. The girls were also instructed to flirt with grocery store stock boys, who for a kiss and cuddle or a blow job would sneak out fresh produce or even milk, meat, and candy bars, to which Charlie sometimes seemed addicted. On any given day, the group ate whatever it got, and its daily hauls grew more plentiful and varied as their gathering techniques became more sophisticated. Sometimes one or two of the women would put on “straight” clothes, blouses and hemmed skirts or conservative slacks, go to food stores, identify themselves as Girl Scout leaders, and ask for donations for snacks. Other times, group members would volunteer as stall assistants at farmers’ markets; at the end of the day, they would be given whatever fruits or vegetables hadn’t been sold and weren’t fresh enough to offer to the public again the next day. The group ate well, and everyone was proud of their ingenuity.
In February, the Beatles embarked from England on a highly publicized pilgrimage to the Maharishi’s main camp in India. They were joined there by Mike Love of the Beach Boys and actress Mia Farrow, who had just completed director Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby. The retreat was scheduled to last three months, but long before then the Beatles were disturbed by rumors that their saintly guru not only ate meat—he preached strict vegetarianism—but also attempted to seduce female attendees. Suspicious, uncomfortable in such a primitive setting, and, above all, bored and grumpy, John Lennon and Paul McCartney began composing songs; some were simple sing-alongs, others biting and caustic (Lennon’s “Sexy Sadie” tunefully eviscerated the Maharishi), and a few were experimental to the point of being downright weird. All of them, along with some others written after their return to Britain, would be released around year’s end.
Though the disenchanted Beatles left the Maharishi’s camp ahead of schedule, Mike Love remained his devout follower. Afterward, he actively promoted the Maharishi, in public and within the Beach Boys band.
• • •
Phil Kaufman was released from Terminal Island in March 1968. He was happy to learn that his old jail pal Charlie was nearby in Topanga, and even more pleased when Charlie invited him to stick around for a while. Kaufman would have been glad to enjoy Charlie’s company, but it turned out that this scrawny little guy had collected himself a harem, girls who obeyed his every command and seemed glad, even eager to have sex with a buddy of Charlie’s who’d been locked away from women for much too long. Kaufman happily indulged himself in every erotic fantasy he’d imagined back in his cell bunk and some more things he’d never personally thought of but apparently Charlie had taught the girls to do. Charlie told him privately that the big problem in the world was blacks having all those babies; someday whites might be outnumbered. Charlie’s solution was that white guys needed to get as many white girls pregnant as possible, starting with the women in the group.
When he wasn’t having sex with the girls, Kaufman chatted with Charlie and learned that the Universal tryout hadn’t been successful. If Kaufman understood that Gary Stromberg’s promise to Charlie of maybe trying again sometime in the studio was more of a tactful brush-off than a promise, he didn’t explain that to Charlie. Charlie was upbeat about his music and all the new songs he was writing. He quizzed Kaufman about more industry contacts—anybody else besides Stromberg to suggest? Kaufman didn’t have more names at the moment, but said that now he was out of jail he was going to get back into show business, movies and music, he’d look up people he’d known and also make new contacts. Charlie made it clear that while Kaufman was doing that he should stay with the group, enjoy the girls, and of course introduce Charlie to whatever recording industry heavy hitters he made friends with. It sounded fine to Kaufman. He liked living with Charlie and the gang. Kaufman had some strong first impressions of Charlie’s women. Lynne, he figured, was the most die-hard Charlie nut, hanging on his every word. Susan Atkins was like Charlie’s guard dog, kind of crazy and mean. Pat Krenwinkel was okay. She did a lot of the hardest chores. None of the women struck Kaufman as very smart with the exception of Mary Brunner, but brains were clearly not what Charlie was looking for among his female followers.
On a typical day for Charlie’s group in Topanga, everybody got up late and the women got some breakfast together from whatever was left over from the night before. It might be fruit or raw vegetables or cookies if there were a few boxes of those. Nobody much cared; breakfast wasn’t really a formal communal meal, just the chance for everybody to get something in their stomachs to start the day. Then Charlie and Kaufman and whatever other guys were there worked on cars and motorcycles—Kaufman couldn’t believe how people just gave Charlie these things. But what made a bigger impression was Charlie’s attitude toward these sets of wheels, some of them really sweet rides. He refused to let the group get possessive about any of them. As soon as they were completely road-worthy he’d trade them off or even just flat out give them away, telling everyone that doing so was a reminder not to become materialistic. Sometimes people in the group, always peripherals who weren’t going to last long anyway, would get angry to see a car or bike they’d be working hard on disappear like that, and once or twice they threatened to kick Charlie’s ass. Then Charlie would stun them with his word games, telling them to go ahead if that was what they really wanted, and then something like, didn’t they really want him to find them even better rides than the ones he’d given away? And that always worked, though it was obvious that if the time came when it didn’t, all the women would rise up and swarm to Charlie’s defense. They damn sure wouldn’t let anyone hurt him.
Kaufman loved the way Charlie routinely made his followers believe that they came up with ideas that were actually his own. Kaufman knew where Charlie got that technique. In Topanga, one of the girls might say that she wanted fruit, and Charlie would say, “Oh, I get it, you want to work at the farmers’ market this weekend so we can get some. That’s a great idea! You’re really smart!” The girl would feel proud that Charlie had praised her and her great idea, when what Charlie had really wanted was for somebody to work the farmers’ market and bring food home. The technique worked on more important things, too. A new recruit reluctant to hand over her car’s pink slip could be praised in front of the others for demonstrating how hard it was to give up material things. But, Charlie might say, right here and now she’s going to do it and offer eve
ryone else an example of overcoming possessiveness and embracing a better way to live. Why, this girl right here is already way ahead of everyone else who’d been with Charlie for months! Look how enlightened she is! And he’d get the pink slip and the girl would thank him for taking it. Amazing, just amazing.
While the men worked on the cars and bikes, most of the girls left to pick through grocery store garbage bins. They’d come back with their haul and, before fixing and serving dinner (meals were exclusively prepared, served, and cleaned up after by the girls because these tasks were defined by Charlie as women’s work, the proper role for all women all of the time being the service and gratification of men), sometimes everyone would gather for a group dosing of LSD, with the drug administered by Charlie. Paul Watkins told authorities later that Charlie always took a lesser dose than he doled out to everyone else, the better to keep his wits about him. When everybody was beginning their trip, Charlie would begin to preach, talking about giving up individuality and possessions, how life and death were the same. Charlie never in any way mentioned committing violent acts to bring about the better world he envisioned. Each time he stuck to what Phil Kaufman called “peace and love.” Besides a few used for cutting and preparing food, there were no knives around, or any guns.
Some afternoons there would be group sex. Wherever they were living, a room was always set aside for that purpose, with drawn curtains and rugs and cushions on the floor. Sometimes what you did and whom you did it with was determined by individual whim, or, as Kaufman recalls, “whoever you fell on.” Other times, Charlie served as director, telling each participant what he or she would do, and with whom. There were always more women participating than men, but Charlie rarely ordered lesbian acts. Everybody was supposed to be dedicated to satisfying everyone else’s needs, but inevitably some of the women did a lot of the work and received little attention back. That, according to Charlie, was fair because making men happy ought to be their priority.
Dinner was taken as a group, with large steaming platters of food passed around and everyone eating as much as they liked. Afterward, Charlie would usually play his guitar and sing. The women were his chorus. If they didn’t sing Charlie’s songs, they sang the Beatles’ latest tunes over and over again. Some of them got sick of every song on the Magical Mystery Tour album but they sang them anyway. It was as though Charlie considered the Beatles to be adjunct members of his real family. Though he controlled the music played at wherever the group was calling home, Charlie did allow his followers to tune in whatever stations they liked on car radios. So everybody got a full dose of all the psychedelic, a-change-is-gonna-come songs that dominated the airwaves—tunes by the Jefferson Airplane and the Doors and the Rolling Stones. Nobody paid much attention to the less far out, nonrevolutionary stuff by bands like the Beach Boys.
Sometimes Charlie and select others, members of the group he wanted to reward, would go out at night, dropping in on Topanga acquaintances and occasionally crashing gatherings. Most people were very informal and didn’t mind too much if strangers showed up. Phil Kaufman had quite a few friends around the city, and he would take Charlie with him on visits. One old pal Kaufman hooked back up with was named Harold True. Harold lived in a nice rental house on Waverly Drive in the upper-middle-class L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz. Charlie went to Harold’s a couple of times for parties. He was a good host. Long afterward Pat Krenwinkel remembered that he always shared lots of drugs. Charlie became familiar with the area and got a good sense of its relative luxury and the people living there. There weren’t any mansions but there were some fine homes, including Harold’s and the ones around it. The group made several visits to Harold’s before he moved in the fall. A while after that, a couple named Leno and Rosemary LaBianca moved into the house next to where Harold had lived.
Phil Kaufman’s stay with the group lasted about five weeks. He wasn’t able to help Charlie make any useful new music connections, and he sometimes had the nerve to disagree with him. The thing Charlie couldn’t risk was someone arguing with him, telling him he was wrong about anything, no matter how insignificant, in front of the others. But before Charlie determined that Kaufman had to go, he tried to make him a permanent convert rather than a guest. One of the others had driven the school bus on a quick trip to San Francisco, and the bus broke down. When Charlie went up to retrieve it, he invited Phil to come along. As they drove north in one of the ubiquitous cars given to the group, Charlie hit Kaufman with the full recruiting rap and demanded that he join the group full-time as a follower. Kaufman laughed and replied, “Hey, save it for other people.” Charlie snapped, “You’re too smart to be here.” After they got back to Topanga, Kaufman recalls, Charlie and the girls made it obvious that he’d overstayed his welcome, ignoring him much of the time. He left and lived for a while with a series of other friends, including Harold True, until he got his own place. Kaufman and Charlie weren’t completely estranged. They stayed in touch and a few times Kaufman visited him and the rest of the group, but after a while he stopped coming because it just wasn’t the same.
• • •
America continued to unravel in March 1968. President Johnson had organized a blue-ribbon commission to study the cause of civil unrest—racial rioting—and its report placed most of the blame squarely on “white racism.” Unless blacks and whites could somehow reconcile their differences, the commission warned, America might well find itself divided into two permanently hostile camps.
On March 12, Johnson suffered a staggering political blow when Eugene McCarthy came close to defeating him in the New Hampshire presidential primary. That encouraged New York senator Robert F. Kennedy, a longtime Johnson critic, to announce that he, too, would challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Those student radicals still willing to use the political system to bring about change had been solidly in McCarthy’s camp. Now they had to choose between the cool, cerebral McCarthy, who had become their champion when no other politician was willing to step forward, and the charismatic Kennedy, who besides his own crusading image carried the legacy of his assassinated brother. Unwilling to risk the humiliation of losing his party’s nomination, and promising that he would spend the remainder of his time in office seeking an equitable peace settlement in Vietnam, on March 31 Johnson stunned the nation and the world by announcing he would no longer seek reelection.
Four days later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Within hours, there were horrendous riots in New York and Washington. The violence expanded throughout the country; 125 cities experienced extensive race-related violence, and 55,000 troops were called out to help quell the battles in the streets. A machine gun post was set up on the steps of the U.S. Capitol after rumors spread that black mobs intended to swarm inside and attack legislators.
• • •
If Charlie discussed current events with his followers at all, it was not to debate Vietnam or racial issues but to remind them how fortunate they were to be with him instead of having to fumble their way through the uncertain, scary world outside the group. The worse things got out there, the easier it was for Charlie’s followers to fall further under his influence. They were avoiding the real issues of the day, indulging themselves in sex and drugs, and being assured by their leader that they were better (and luckier) than anyone else in the world for doing it. Of course they loved Charlie.
April was a terrible month for America but a fine one for Charlie. First, he found a young woman who would become one of his most devoted disciples. Like many others who decided to follow Charlie, Sandy Good was the child of divorced parents. She was sickly as a young girl, and underwent a series of surgeries to correct respiratory problems, one of which involved the partial removal of one lung; these operations left her throat and torso badly scarred. Both of Sandy’s parents indulged her, and later in life even she would admit that she often acted spoiled. By the mid-1960s Sandy was drifting between colleges, trying, like many peers, to find herself, to decide what she wanted fr
om life. She lived in Oregon and San Francisco, and in the spring of 1968 she went down to Los Angeles to visit a friend. While she was there, she met Charlie, and was instantly won over by his promise to make her part of a family that really loved her. Charlie found something to instantly love about Sandy, too—thanks to a trust fund established for her by her father, a stockbroker, Sandy got a check for $200 every month. Sandy gladly turned the money over to Charlie. He contacted her father several times asking him to increase the monthly amount, wheedling at first and then insisting and finally demanding to the point that George Good broke off communication with his daughter—but the monthly checks kept coming.
Sandy had trouble fitting in with the other girls at first. She wore makeup and jewelry and sometimes had a haughty way of carrying herself. But Charlie worked on her, taking extra time for one-on-one talks about the evils of individuality; the last thing he wanted was for Sandy to feel unwelcome and leave, taking with her the $200 monthly stipend. To make her more acceptable to the others, Charlie ordered Sandy to strip, had her stand naked in front of everyone, pointed to her scars and used them as examples of the terrible ways birth parents abused their offspring. If they’d really loved Sandy, Charlie demanded, why did they allow doctors to disfigure her like that? Of course Sandy had a lot to overcome, more than just about anybody else in the group, so cut her a little slack. The more problems people had giving up their egos, the worse their parents must have been. Still, Sandy took longer than most to assimilate, and she did not receive a nickname for several months.
