Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover

by Jeff Guinn

  Late afternoon usually found the women going out on food runs, sometimes returning with all kinds of bounty and others with only a few handfuls of limp, scraggly produce. Whatever they got comprised the dinner menu. Attendance at this meal was mandatory. The women did the cooking, and then everyone sat around as platters of food were passed. The men ate first and the women got what was left. Each person took a few bites of whatever was on a platter and then passed it along. Nothing was wasted. Sometimes the fare was bizarre. One day someone gave the Family a case of Cool Whip in plastic containers. For that evening’s meal, everyone dipped their hands into the containers and licked the Cool Whip off their fingers.

  Sometimes in the afternoons, sometimes after dinner, everyone gathered around while Charlie preached. Most often, he had his guitar and would play and sing his sermons; the girls would stand up and dance as they listened. Other times Charlie chose a biblical approach—Jesus often taught in parables, and Charlie did, too. A memorable lesson for the Family involved a king and queen. Every day the king would say to the queen, “I’m hungry,” and she would reply, “Let me go fix you a sandwich.” The king ate the sandwich and everyone was happy. This was their routine until one day when the king said he was hungry the queen answered, “Honey, I’m really tired. Would you mind, just for today, fixing your own sandwich?” The king said, “Okay,” but while he was on his way to the kitchen the queen called after him, “While you’re out there, would you get me one, too?” Every day after that she told the king to make a sandwich for her; their roles had been neatly reversed. Charlie explained that this was the way women tricked men and took control. They appealed to men’s love, to their sense of sympathy, and the men fell for it. Much of what was wrong with modern society, Charlie warned, was because, more and more, men were no longer in charge. It wasn’t going to be that way in the Family. In this blessed, enlightened group, women served men and everyone was better off because of it.

  After the meal and the preaching there was music. Often, Charlie sang his own songs and everyone else joined in on the choruses. Otherwise it was the Beatles, the Magical Mystery Tour album over and over, or else albums by the Moody Blues, a British band whose use of orchestral accompaniment was considered unique. The only other music Charlie allowed at these times was a Top Ten hit, “Born to Be Wild,” by the American band Steppenwolf. Charlie liked the music of the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane but didn’t consider them appropriate for this special part of the day. Some of the Family grumbled to themselves that Squeaky had it lucky; she spent most of her time in the main house with old blind George, and George had his radio tuned to country music all day, the kind of steel guitar–accompanied laments widely known as “shitkicker.” Nobody in the Family particularly liked shitkicker music, but at least it wasn’t Magical Mystery Tour and the Moody Blues and Charlie’s songs all night, every night. Of course, no one complained to Charlie about it, or around his chief lieutenants, Watkins and Gypsy.

  Usually, sex involved random pairing off, during the afternoons or after dinner and Charlie’s preaching at night. Anyone in the Family was supposed to be willing to sleep with any other member. Permanent pairing off as couples was prohibited, though Charlie sometimes assigned two people to stay together so that one could keep a close eye on the other. After he finally admitted Tex Watson to full membership in the Family, Charlie “gave” him Mary Brunner as a regular sex partner. Charlie himself continued to prefer young Dianne Lake, the teenager he’d recruited from her parents’ commune, and Dianne developed proprietary feelings toward him. When Charlie had sex with another woman in the Family—he considered it an obligation to give each of them a turn with him once in a while, and they thought of it as an honor—Dianne would be bitchy to the other girl afterward.

  Group sex was completely orchestrated by Charlie. He would specify who would do what and with whom. Sometimes the sessions were drawn-out and complex; Charlie promised that the acts were sacramental and an ongoing way to break down all the false inhibitions forced on the Family members by repressive society. That sounded fine to the participants, though there was the inconvenience of more women than men. But doing something that would horrify the straights made the orgies that much more fun. It was liberating.

  As a special treat, Charlie would encourage the Family to act out group fantasies. They would run around the movie set pretending to be cowboys, or else sail imaginary ships among the hills as swashbuckling pirates. Several of the girls liked dressing up as fairies; they’d imagine that they’d grown wings on their backs and could fly. Charlie encouraged elf themes. Sometimes during LSD trips he’d suggest that maybe a time would come when the girls really could become elves, wings and all.

  Charlie maintained control other ways. Whenever anyone in the Family passed Charlie on the ranch, particularly on the wooden sidewalks of the movie set, Charlie would stand in front of them and make faces and jerk his hands around. The Family member was required to mimic all of Charlie’s expressions and gestures. Flawless imitation meant that the person was well on the way to spiritual enlightenment. Failing to match a Charlie grimace or movement indicated the presence of too much ego, and the follower was firmly chastised. People rarely got everything right, so Charlie did a lot of chastising.

  Yet he also did considerable praising. Charlie had a keen understanding of how much each individual Family member could be corrected without breaking down. Just when anyone felt that he or she couldn’t go on, that there was no pleasing the undisputed leader, Charlie would come over for a friendly talk or suggest that they take a walk and enjoy some one-on-one fellowship. He had an exceptional sense of touch, knowing just how to pat someone’s shoulder or gently stroke a person’s hair.

  One of Charlie’s most inflexible rules was that children should not be raised—ruined—by their biological parents, even among the Family. Pooh Bear, Charlie’s son with Mary Brunner, was considered the child of every full-fledged Family member. When Susan Atkins gave birth to a son in October, that baby was taken from her and kept separate with Pooh Bear. Susan named her child Ze Zo Ze Cee Zadfrack because “it seemed like a good name.” As the Family ranks expanded to include more parents, their children joined Pooh Bear and Ze Zo Ze in a separate area. There was some competition among the women to have the next baby. Charlie urged them all to get pregnant—it was, after all, a natural state for women—and they were willing. Each wanted Charlie as their child’s biological father. But except for Pooh Bear, Charlie did not sire children among his female flock. At Spahn Ranch, Sandy Good was the next to get pregnant. The father was a new recruit named Joel Pugh, and sometimes Sandy said that they were married and used his last name. It helped when she applied for welfare. Charlie hated the government, but he was eager for its handouts.

  Wristwatches, calendars, and clocks were forbidden; Charlie said he wanted everyone to concentrate on the now rather than worry about what some soulless gadget said was the correct time. Eyeglasses weren’t allowed either. Charlie explained that whatever the state of their vision, that was their natural way to see the rest of the world, and only natural things were good. New members were relieved of their glasses immediately; some of them developed permanent squints. Books weren’t allowed on the ranch, either. All anyone needed to know was whatever Charlie wanted them to. Authors were evil, trying to play mind control games on readers. Charlie went so far as to burn some books in front of the others. There was one exception—Charlie had a Bible.

  Because Charlie preached so much and had rules about so many different things, it was inevitable that sometimes he’d seem to contradict himself or act in ways that seemed opposed to what he told the others they should do. One of the most obvious was his anti-Semitism. Charlie often presented himself as the reincarnation of Jesus, but he also hated Jews and frequently preached that they were evil. Another was on frequent display during the Family’s communal LSD trips. A key component of Charlie’s philosophy was that LSD should be used to explore inner consciousness—the liberatin
g effect of the drug would help users overcome socially mandated inhibitions. Whatever you felt and did while tripping was invariably right. But during group LSD sessions, Charlie’s rule was that everyone had to stay seated wherever he placed them. Sometimes a Family participant was overwhelmed enough on a trip to jump up without Charlie’s permission, and whenever that happened he would hit the offender with his fist or, sometimes, with one of the chairs. It was the opposite of what Charlie taught, inhibiting a natural reaction to a sacred drug, but afterward he would explain that if he seemed to be violating his own philosophy, that meant that his followers simply weren’t smart enough yet to understand what was going on. Finding anything that appeared to be a flaw in Charlie actually exposed flaws in themselves. They accepted the explanation because they believed in him. They might make mistakes or misunderstand, but anything Charlie said or did had to be right. They were all stupid and he was doing his best to make them smart. The beatings were part of his gift to them.

  As much as Charlie liked keeping his followers isolated, he still encouraged a limited number of visitors. Dennis Wilson, relieved that he was finally rid of the Family on a daily basis, began showing up once in a while at the ranch, happy to hand over a few dollars when needed and always ready to romp in the hay bales with some of the girls. Wilson genuinely liked many of them and worried whether they were all right out there on Spahn. He told Charlie that the Beach Boys were planning to record “Cease to Exist.” Having a single song recorded by another artist’s band wasn’t the instant superstardom that Charlie craved and believed he deserved, but at least it was a start. When “Cease to Exist” became a massive worldwide hit and everyone learned that it had been written by Charlie Manson, things would finally get rolling for Charlie’s own career as a performer. It was taking longer than Charlie had anticipated, but it was still going to happen. Charlie’s certainty that he was about to hit it big was reinforced when Terry Melcher also made a few ranch visits. Melcher still didn’t commit himself about listening to Charlie’s tapes or getting him into the studio for an audition, but at least he was staying in contact. Playing gracious host, Charlie always presented Ruth Ann to Melcher for his pleasure. The other girls were available to him, too, but she remained Melcher’s favorite.

  Gregg Jakobson also came around, usually with Melcher or Wilson. He was still convinced that there was something marketable about Charlie—maybe not music, but certainly in film, perhaps a TV documentary. Toward that end he spent considerable time just walking around the ranch with Charlie and talking to him, trying to draw him out on his background. Charlie had plenty of colorful stories to tell about being the illegitimate son of a teenage prostitute, and how he was terribly abused in reform school and prison. Charlie told Jakobson about inventing the “insane game” to survive, and bragged that now it was easy for him to “change hats” and instantly alter his personality to fit whatever company or situation he found himself in. Jakobson watched him do it—firm yet fatherly with the Family, just obsequious enough with George Spahn, buddy and musical equal with Wilson and Melcher, and crude redneck pal to biker gangs. Charlie liked having the bikers come around occasionally because they had expertise in motorcycle repair and the Family always seemed to have one or two banged-up bikes. He didn’t want them showing up too often because they demanded beer. Alcohol was another thing Charlie banned among his followers. He preached it was mind-numbing rather than mind-expanding. But the bikers loved to drink, so whenever they were expected the Family had to go out and panhandle enough to buy a couple of cases. Charlie and the Family weren’t above occasional shoplifting, which they didn’t consider stealing because everything belonged to everyone. But it was practically impossible to sneak out of a store with a case of beer tucked under your shirt.

  Sex with outsiders became a daily routine for Family women. Charlie would bring over whatever men he wanted to impress and please that day—not just Wilson, Melcher, or Jakobson, but bikers and drug dealers—and tell the women to line up in front of them. Charlie sometimes held the pretty girls back, keeping them as a special treat for VIP visitors. Each man was encouraged to pick out whichever girl he wanted, and Charlie would order her to go with the guy and do anything he told her. If a girl refused to do something, that meant she still had hang-ups and Charlie punished her, sometimes by making her strip naked in front of everyone else and then ridiculing her. It was effective. The girls learned not to refuse any request and never to seem reluctant or squeamish.

  Charlie enjoyed showing off his musical expertise, especially when Wilson, Melcher, and Jakobson were around. He always joked about the primitive conditions at Spahn Ranch compared to the luxury of Wilson’s former log cabin mansion, especially about the piles of horse manure that dotted the ranch property. The manure attracted swarms of buzzing flies. One day Charlie, Wilson, and Jakobson were roaming around an area where the rental horses had just abundantly dropped mounds of waste and flies were everywhere. Charlie had brought along his guitar, and he stood there with the flies all over him and began strumming and singing a song he made up on the spot, about the flies and their buzzing and what it all really meant. Jakobson had been around lots of successful artists, even some musical geniuses like Brian Wilson, and he thought Charlie had them all beat when it came to improvising. Reflecting many years later, Jakobson thought that Charlie would have been a natural rap music performer, “reporting” in songs all the latest details of the hard life out on the streets.

  When Phil Kaufman heard that Charlie and the Family were living on Spahn Ranch, he went out to visit them. No one acted glad to see Kaufman. Charlie virtually ignored him. Kaufman’s contact at Universal hadn’t worked out, and now Charlie was working Wilson, Melcher, and Jakobson instead. So far as Charlie was concerned, Kaufman no longer had anything to offer other than friendship, and there was no particular advantage to Charlie in that. After an hour or so of getting cold-shouldered by everybody, Kaufman left, figuring he’d seen the last of Charlie and his followers, all that peace and love and expecting everybody else to do things for them. But at least they weren’t hurting anybody. They were selfish but harmless.

  Local authorities soon learned that a group of hippies had moved onto Spahn Ranch out near Simi Valley. They appeared to be just another commune of long-haired peaceniks, and there were already plenty of those in and around L.A., at least a couple of hundred. A few were even clustered right around Spahn Ranch. The area seemed to attract weirdos. Sure, all the communes, including the new one at Spahn, undoubtedly broke drug laws on a regular basis, but if lawmen arrested everybody who smoked weed or dropped acid they wouldn’t have time for anything else. The Spahn commune might require observation because a lot of vehicles seemed to be brought into the place. Hippies weren’t supposed to steal but car theft did seem to be a possibility. The real problem was that Spahn Ranch was along the Los Angeles–Ventura county line and there was some question about jurisdiction. Neither county police department really wanted to take responsibility for law enforcement in the area, so nobody kept an eye on what Charlie and the Family got up to.

  Charlie shut off the Family from most news of the outside world, except for occasional examples of how crazy things were getting. He’d use these examples to emphasize that everyone was lucky to be safely tucked away on Spahn Ranch under Charlie’s supervision—they probably wouldn’t last long if they ever turned away from him and left. That fall of 1968, Charlie had lots of violence to mention, beginning in late August with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Starting on August 26, peace activists and student radicals packed the city’s Lincoln Park. Even as a Vietnam peace plank was voted down by Democratic delegates and Vice President Humphrey became the party’s nominee for president, waves of Chicago police, following the instructions of Mayor Richard Daley, attacked the protesters, choking them with clouds of tear gas and battering them with batons. Network television crews captured the carnage for their horrified audiences to see; coughing, bleeding, those protesters who were
still able chanted, “The whole world is watching.” Afterward, irreconcilable factions began to emerge among the radicals. Some still advocated loud protest but working nonviolently within the political system. Others believed it was time to meet violence with violence, to “bring the war home.” Few believed that an election pitting Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon would elect a president dedicated to sweeping change. Humphrey’s ill-conceived “politics of joy” approach fell flat, while Nixon ran on a law-and-order platform. After attending a Republican rally in Toledo, columnist Jimmy Breslin observed, “When Richard Nixon got finished, there was a strangler’s hand coming out of every cornfield in Ohio.” In the imagination of many shaken older voters, the strangler was young and long-haired. Americans were turning on each other in fear and frustration, and many of the divisions were generational. In a year marked by assassinations, war, racial conflict, and escalating civil disobedience, there was no longer any sense of optimism. On November 5, Nixon narrowly defeated Humphrey and the nation braced for whatever was coming next.

  • • •

  On September 9 in England, the Beatles continued recording music for their next album, tentatively scheduled for release before the end of the year. At this session, a McCartney song was recorded. Internally, the band was having trouble getting along, and one of the points of contention was McCartney’s penchant for writing sweet ballads that were increasingly at odds with Lennon’s harder-edged compositions. But the song McCartney presented now was, if anything, more raucous than anything Lennon had come up with in years. Ostensibly about a popular British carnival ride involving a steep slide, its composer envisioned it as “the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and this was the fall, the demise, the going down.” McCartney bellowed out the lyrics, all about getting to the bottom and then going back to the top and coming down fast but don’t let me break you. His band mates got caught up in the rowdy spirit and, McCartney later recalled, “we tried everything we could to dirty it up.” He named the song for the carnival ride: “Helter Skelter.”