by Jeff Guinn
In April, Mary Brunner gave birth to a son. She wanted to give birth in a hospital with trained medical personnel on hand, but Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. Natural childbirth was the only way, and Mary would be helped by the other women in the group. The girls told Charlie they had no idea what to do; he replied that they were women, so they would naturally figure it out. When the child came, it was a breech birth. Mary suffered terribly and there was a great deal of uncertain fumbling, but she and her baby somehow survived. It would later be reported that the baby was born on April 1 and named Valentine Michael Manson in tribute to Stranger in a Strange Land, but an official birth record filed with the state of California gives the birth date as April 15 and the child’s full name as Michael Manson. But birthdays and given names didn’t matter to the group—they were tools used by the Establishment to keep track of people—and everyone called the baby Pooh Bear.
Pooh Bear was raised according to Charlie’s philosophy of everyone sharing in parenting responsibilities. Those outside the group who observed its child care activities were impressed by the affection and attention lavished on the boy and on all the other children who eventually became part of Charlie’s following. The adults were sometimes dressed in rags and often dirty, but the children always appeared clean, well fed, and obviously cared for. Within the group, there was some discrepancy between the way Charlie talked about children and the way he personally felt about them. No one ever saw Charlie strike a child, even when he was in a terrible temper, but he quickly became annoyed if a baby cried or toddler screamed. So the children were always kept away from the main group of adults, watched over in a tent or back room by baby-sitters assigned by Charlie. Parents could visit their children only with Charlie’s permission, which he usually withheld on the grounds that natural parents had a bad effect. Everyone in the group was equally father or mother to every child.
Shortly after Pooh Bear’s birth, Charlie took the group on another road trip in the bus, this time to a wooded area in Ventura County where they set up camp. It offered an opportunity for Charlie to have everyone’s undivided attention, and was a way of keeping anyone from getting too comfortable living with the conveniences of indoor plumbing and electricity. But they didn’t stay very long; Ventura County deputies arrested several members of the group, including Charlie and Susan Atkins, for using false IDs, and Mary Brunner was picked up for nursing her baby in public. None of the charges stuck, or probably were even meant to. The county cops just wanted to encourage Charlie and his shaggy entourage to move along. It worked, but not the way they intended. Far from feeling intimidated—after all the cells he’d occupied in federal prison, a night or two in a local jail couldn’t faze him at all—Charlie used the arrests to demonstrate to his followers how the Man fanatically persecuted the enlightened. They hunted around for other camping sites, and were particularly drawn to one place northwest of L.A. at the foot of the Santa Susana Mountains where they didn’t even have to camp as such because there was an old movie set on the property. The movie set, used for lots of 1950s and 1960s cowboy films, was part of a ranch owned by an old, nearly blind man named George Spahn. They stayed there for a bit, and then Charlie led them back to Topanga so he could resume his quest for a record deal.
• • •
The Beach Boys embarked that spring on a national concert tour, but this one had a twist. Before the band appeared, the Maharishi opened the shows by comfortably settling himself onstage and lecturing audiences about the wonders of Transcendental Meditation. People had bought tickets to hear music, not philosophic blather, and every night the Maharishi’s high-pitched, relatively thin speaking voice was drowned out by shouted demands for him to shut up and let the Beach Boys perform. The Maharishi’s nightly response was to grin, giggle, and keep talking. Beyond their own fascination with the guru, the band had hoped that this public affiliation with him would restore some Beatle-like cool to their fading popularity. It had the opposite effect. As word spread about the tour’s paucity of music and emphasis on lecture, advance sales plummeted to the point that only two hundred tickets were sold for a key New York show. The band’s managers canceled the tour at the halfway point, with a loss of about $500,000, money the Beach Boys badly needed to finance Brother Records and their own self-indulgent lifestyles. Some of the band members lost at least some faith in the Maharishi—was this what listening to gurus got you? Mike Love blamed the fiasco on the rest of the world not being smart enough to appreciate what the Maharishi was so graciously offering to share. He remained a devoted follower and refused to recognize anyone other than the Maharishi as a legitimate source of wisdom. And for Dennis Wilson, the canceled tour was too bad, but at least it freed him up to return to L.A. and get back to having fun with girls and drugs and whatever else appealed to him on any given day. Dennis didn’t feel especially burned by the Maharishi; he was interesting, and Dennis liked interesting people. He was always ready to meet more of them.
Bobby Beausoleil, Charlie’s buddy from the Spiral Staircase, dropped by soon after Charlie and his followers returned to Topanga. He had a new girlfriend named Gail and also a second female traveling companion named Catherine Share, who everybody immediately started calling Gypsy. Beausoleil was involved in another movie, X-rated, building sets for the film besides acting in it. The girls in Charlie’s entourage thought Beausoleil was snotty, but most of them still melted at the sight of him because he was so good-looking. They nicknamed him Cupid. Gail didn’t like it; she was very possessive of Beausoleil. That was unacceptable under Charlie’s rules, so Gail was never considered for recruitment and Beausoleil remained uninterested in anything other than occasional visits, though he still liked Charlie personally. Gypsy, though, got caught up in the group spirit right away. She liked the people with Charlie, and she appreciated his devotion to music. Gypsy was a gifted musician herself. The daughter of French resistance fighters who died during World War II, she was brought to America by an adoptive mother and grew up in Hollywood. After her adoptive mother died, Gypsy began wandering and ended up tagging along with Beausoleil and Gail. During this first meeting she wasn’t quite ready to leave them for Charlie, but it was something she continued to think about as she bummed around California with the other two.
Charlie might have been able to talk Gypsy into leaving Beausoleil and staying with him, but he didn’t try. As much as he always was glad to find appropriate new followers—with Gypsy’s outgoing personality and obvious buy-in to Charlie’s teachings, she would make a great recruiter for the group—he didn’t want to risk alienating Beausoleil. Besides, now that the group roughly numbered around twenty, meaning there were plenty of people to scrounge food and panhandle and fix cars and motorcycles, Charlie didn’t need to concern himself as much with day-to-day responsibilities. He’d been back in L.A. for almost six months, and he still didn’t have a recording deal. His mistake with Stromberg at Universal was putting his faith in a mid-echelon record executive, somebody who couldn’t really be expected to recognize great music because he wasn’t a musician himself. What Charlie really needed was some big rock star as his patron, somebody who would understand the great stuff he heard and get Charlie a deal just by demanding it.
So Charlie rededicated himself to finding just the right music star sponsor. He used some of his girls as scouts, sending them out to prowl Topanga and the Strip and see who they might meet. That was fine with the women—it sounded like more fun than panhandling or digging around grocery store dumpsters. They were tasked not with telling other stray girls about this wonderful guru named Charlie, but with tracking down established rock stars and convincing them to give a listen to Charlie’s amazing music.
Sometime in late spring Pat and Yeller went hitchhiking on the Strip. They’d barely stuck out their thumbs when a big, good-looking guy drove up and offered them a lift to wherever they were going, but how about swinging back to his place first for some milk and cookies? That sounded like fun to the girls. Pat and Yeller sped off
with Dennis Wilson, exactly the kind of patron that Charlie wanted.
CHAPTER NINE
Charlie and Dennis
From 1961’s regional hit “Surfin’ ” through late 1966’s international smash “Good Vibrations,” no American band was more popular or sold more records than the Beach Boys. Their success was based on two critical elements—leader Brian Wilson’s songwriting, and his ability to blend band members’ harmonies and studio musicians’ instrumental wizardry to transform those songs into multilayered magic. The Beach Boys’ sound was unique, and it was why they succeeded. The way they looked was ordinary. Bassist Brian and his lead guitarist brother Carl both battled weight issues; guitarist Al Jardine was short and nerdy-looking, and singer Mike Love was prematurely balding. Only drummer Dennis Wilson resembled a typical teen idol, and even at the pinnacle of the Beach Boys’ fame Dennis was the bane of the rest of the band thanks to his lack of self-discipline. Dennis knew no limits in his fondness for alcohol, drugs, and sex, but he was also the only Beach Boy who actually surfed, thus providing inspiration for many of brother Brian’s earliest hit songs. Risk always appealed to Dennis; when the Beach Boys played a New York City show at the same time the World Trade Center was being constructed, late one night he sneaked into the site, climbed to the top of the scaffolding and swung by his arms at horrifying heights, thrilled by the danger. As a drummer, Dennis’s skills were adequate at best, but he brought tremendous energy to the band’s live performances, which was especially important since it was virtually impossible for them to precisely reproduce Brian’s complex studio sound onstage. Because of their ongoing frustration with his immature behavior, the other Beach Boys had no real sense of Dennis’s potential as a songwriter, even when Brian took to his bed for months at a time and stopped cranking out hit singles and glorious, extended song cycles that resulted in classic albums like Pet Sounds. Without Brian’s full-time participation, the band began to flounder. The decision by its members and management to skip the crucial Monterey festival in 1967 effectively ended the Beach Boys’ long run at the top of the charts.
In the late spring of 1968, the Beach Boys were about to release Friends, their nineteenth album in just seven years—record labels constantly badgered proven hit makers to produce more product before their popularity waned. Friends was fated to bomb, reaching only number 126 in the long-playing charts; none of its twelve songs became a hit single, or even came close. It went virtually unnoticed that two of the album’s songs were composed by Dennis and Steve Kalinich, and one of them, “Little Bird,” was as good or better than anything Brian contributed to the album. Dennis hoped to write many more songs and wanted friends like Steve to work on them with him. Dennis was adept at crafting instrumental music, but he struggled with lyrics and needed a partner with a knack for words.
Around the time that Friends was released, Dennis’s fame, especially in L.A., was equivalent to the celebrity enjoyed by a Hollywood actor who’d once been featured in Academy Award–winning films but had since fallen on hard times with a series of box office flops. He was coasting on past success, with no particular promise of better times returning. But it wasn’t in Dennis’s nature to obsess or even worry too much. He still had plenty of money, though the Beach Boys’ Brother Records office tried to dole it out carefully to him, since Dennis was a world-class spendthrift. He was separated from his wife and living in one of the prime rental properties in the city, Will Rogers’s old hunting lodge on the west end of Sunset Boulevard. It was a spectacular place, its rugged log exterior encasing a mansion-like interior. Dennis and his buddies partied there almost nonstop, with the merriment usually spilling out onto the extensive three-acre grounds or an enormous swimming pool. There was lots of room for guests, and on any given night Dennis was likely to invite home itinerants who had somehow caught his eye. Few stayed long, but while they did Dennis pressed food and drugs and gifts on them. He was a generous-hearted man, and his longtime friends were certain that at some level he felt guilty about his wealth, that somehow he didn’t deserve the good things that had happened to him. The Wilson boys came from a working-class background. Their father, Murry, who owned a small machinist’s shop, was a terrible-tempered frustrated musician himself who physically abused his sons, Dennis in particular. He mocked their hit records and insisted on managing the boys until they finally summoned the courage to fire him. All three of the Wilson brothers bore psychological scars. Brian’s were the most obvious, but Dennis harbored violent resentment of his father.
There was nothing unusual about Dennis stopping to pick up hitchhikers or bringing them home. His offer of milk and cookies to Pat and Yeller was sincere. Years later, Pat recalled that Dennis served raw milk, the only kind he drank. After their snack, they talked a while and the girls told Dennis about Charlie. When Dennis had to usher them out so he could leave for a recording session, he told the girls that he hoped to run into them again.
Yeller and Pat had no idea who Dennis Wilson was; nobody in their group paid attention to the Beach Boys. But Charlie recognized the name and insisted that the girls take him and everyone else back to the log cabin on Sunset.
It was well after midnight when Wilson pulled his Ferrari into the driveway of his palatial home and noticed that there were lights on inside. As he parked, the back door to the house opened and Charlie Manson emerged, smiling and waving as though he were the host greeting a guest. The tiny man’s attitude unnerved Wilson, who asked, “Are you going to hurt me?” Charlie replied, “Do I look like I’m going to?” He dropped to his knees and kissed Wilson’s feet, then gestured for him to come inside, where the rest of Charlie’s group, all of them relaxed and acting at home, were waiting. The school bus was parked just outside; this was Charlie’s best opportunity yet and he wasn’t going to miss it. Pat and Yeller formally introduced him to Wilson, who was somewhat nonplussed by the unexpected crowd but was never one to shut down a party, especially when some of the girls were topless and the stereo was blasting out the Beatles. The revelry went on for hours, and when Wilson woke up the next day Charlie and his followers were still there and showing no signs of leaving. It was okay with Wilson if they stayed a while. His immediate interest was the women, Nancy Pitman especially, but they all willingly did anything sexual that he wanted. Over the next few days Wilson spent a lot of time talking with Charlie and decided that the guy was deep, with all this stuff to say about how everything was really the same, which meant bad was good, which meant all the things Wilson did that the rest of the Beach Boys bitched about weren’t wrong after all and they had no business trying to make him feel guilty about them. When Charlie talked about how parents ruin their children, Wilson mentioned his father and all the beatings that he’d taken at his hands. At that point, Wilson couldn’t wait to introduce Charlie to his friends—the guy had wisdom that needed to be shared.
The first friend Wilson contacted was Gregg Jakobson, who worked as a talent scout and session arranger and was also trying to write songs with Dennis. Though few outside the innermost L.A. music scene knew his name, Jakobson was a critical player. Adopted by the chief of detectives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and his wife, Jakobson moved to Venice, California, with his mother and sisters after his father died. He was enrolled in University High, popularly known as Uni High, where he got to know Nancy Sinatra. Dean Martin’s daughter Deanna was one of his first girlfriends. Soon Jakobson was getting lots of work as a movie extra, and when some of his buddies, like Terry Melcher, got into rock bands and started cutting records, Gregg got involved in that, too, helping line up studio musicians and arrange session dates. He wasn’t in a band himself because he had a terrible singing voice.
Jakobson met Dennis Wilson in 1963. Melcher’s band was scheduled to open for the Beach Boys at a show in Hawaii. Melcher suggested that Jakobson come along on the trip. When he explained he couldn’t afford a plane ticket, Melcher offhandedly asked him to suggest some song titles. Off the top of his head, Jakobson threw out “Big Wednesday,”
“Two’s a Crowd,” and a third title. Melcher called singer Bobby Darin, who owned a music publishing company, rattled off Jakobson’s impromptu titles and told him that soon he would have these three new songs for sale. Darin gave Melcher an advance of $1,000, Melcher gave the money to Jakobson, and off they went to Hawaii. Jakobson met Dennis Wilson there at a pre-concert press conference. Wilson was bored, Jakobson suggested they skip out and go ride motorcycles, and a fast friendship began. When everybody got home, Jakobson helped Melcher write the three songs for Darin’s publishing company. From then on Jakobson, Melcher, and Wilson were inseparable. Soon afterward when Melcher became a boy wonder producer at Columbia, he hired Jakobson to scout available talent and to arrange studio sessions. That made Jakobson an important player in the L.A. music scene.
Wilson called Jakobson the second night that Charlie and his followers were at the house, insisting, “You’ve got to come over and meet these people,” and the next day Jakobson did. At first he didn’t think they were anything special. To Jakobson, this was Dennis being Dennis, taking in some strays and getting overly enthusiastic about how great they were. He always got bored and the people moved on and were soon forgotten. But Wilson had told Charlie all about Jakobson, why an aspiring singer-songwriter like Charlie ought to know him, so Charlie got Jakobson to one side and started talking, laying down the most interesting rap, and then he introduced Jakobson to Ruth Ann Moorehouse. Wilson wasn’t very picky about girls; he’d go after pretty much anything. But Jakobson was married, to comedian Lou Costello’s daughter Carole, and while he wasn’t strictly faithful, he was cautious. He found Ruth Ann irresistible, though, and they began what he later termed “a little thing,” meaning that whenever he was around Charlie, Charlie usually paired him off with Ruth Ann, and so Jakobson was always happy to come by. Even though Charlie forbade his followers to form individual attachments, Ruth Ann liked Jakobson, too, and the other women teased her about it. When Jakobson wasn’t rolling around with Ruth Ann, Charlie would talk to him about the music business, about who Jakobson knew. Jakobson realized what the deal was—people tried to get him to use his contacts on their behalf all the time. He and Wilson listened to Charlie play some of his songs while the women sang along on the choruses. Jakobson thought that there might be something there, though his gut instinct was that Charlie was more interesting to look at than to listen to. But Wilson, always prone to go overboard, decided that Charlie was a genius. He took Charlie over to the offices of Brother Records so he could audition for the management there.
