Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover

by Jeff Guinn

  In late February, Charlie decided it was time for the Family to move from the rental house on Gresham. He’d been preaching that they had to begin preparing for Helter Skelter, accumulating supplies to take with them out to the desert. In the interim, Charlie felt it would be best for everyone to return for a while to Spahn Ranch, where there would be room to store the things they would be accumulating. Squeaky was sent to sweet-talk George Spahn into letting them come back. Charlie also gave Squeaky an additional assignment. Spahn Ranch was a useful place, plenty of room and a lot closer to L.A. than Barker. Squeaky should somehow convince old George to leave her the ranch in his will. How much longer could the doddering old guy live, after all? Squeaky half succeeded; George reluctantly said the longhairs could come back for a while, temporarily, but he never rewrote his will. Charlie hung on to the rental house on Gresham for a while longer, and it was good that he did. For a month or so, Spahn would periodically kick the Family out; they’d retreat to Gresham while Squeaky wheedled him to relent. Finally Charlie decided it didn’t matter whether Spahn allowed them to be there or not—they were staying until they relocated to the desert.

  Just to make certain that things would be ready for them when they moved on to Barker, Charlie sent several Family members, including teenager Brooks Poston and schoolteacher Juanita, to stay there. It wasn’t an assignment they relished. Death Valley was just as inhospitable in cold weather as it was during the broiling summer. But nobody disobeyed Charlie.

  In some ways the Barker Ranch contingent had it easier than the rest of the Family remaining at Spahn. Previously, Charlie had kept everybody busy doing chores with the ranch hands. Now he conducted lengthy desert survival courses. Everyone had to learn how to live under extreme conditions. Charlie tested everyone to see how long they could go without water. To fool pursuers, he demonstrated how to walk across sand or dirt without leaving obvious footprints. Charlie also said that he’d met someone who was a karate expert and would come out to Spahn to teach them how to fight hand-to-hand, but he never showed up.

  Hand-to-hand wasn’t going to be the Family’s main form of defense anyway if they had to fight their way through Helter Skelter to the bottomless pit in the desert. There had always been knives around, and now Charlie ordered everybody to carry one, usually a sturdy folding buck knife. Charlie resurrected his old knife-throwing games, commanding different women to stand in front of a board while he fired knives over their heads and by the sides of their faces. They had to lose their fear of knives, Charlie explained.

  And now there were guns, too. Charlie began acquiring all that he could, trading cars and drugs for them. There were shotguns and rifles that had to be hidden in caches around Spahn so the ranch hands wouldn’t see them and complain to their boss. There were some handguns, too, one a long-barreled .22 called a Buntline after the famous weapon supposedly carried by Old West legend Wyatt Earp. Over the next months the Family put together a good-sized arsenal. Sometimes Charlie and a few of the men would go off into a gulch with the handguns for target practice. The surrounding hills effectively muffled the sound of the shots.

  Even with the knives and guns, Charlie never suggested that the Family members would ever attack anyone. They were training only so that they could defend themselves if necessary. The way Charlie explained it, the goal was to avoid the coming bloodbath, not participate in it. The blacks were going to be too ferocious; only after their initial rage was spent, and they turned their attention to running the world instead of conquering it, would they realize that they needed Charlie and the Family. Since Helter Skelter was so imminent, the immediate challenge was preparing to escape. They planned an exact route from Spahn to Barker Ranch, marking spots along the way where containers of food could be concealed—if they were trying to elude close pursuit, they wouldn’t have time to stop and forage for meals. Charlie ordered the women to experiment with pickling and otherwise preserving food to be buried along the route in barrels. They did their best but were unsuccessful, and Charlie bawled them out. Their failure was putting the fate of the Family—and the world—at risk.

  Family men and women alike were enlisted for another crucial aspect of the escape plan. Charlie decreed that the flight to the desert would be made in a convoy of specially equipped dune buggies. They’d learned from their first stay in Death Valley that ordinary vehicles couldn’t navigate much of the rugged terrain. There were plenty of dune buggies for sale on L.A. car lots, but the Family was always strapped for cash and Charlie had no intention of paying for them anyway. The Family would trade for them or steal them. Sometime that spring Charlie got possession of one and set out to modify it for long-term desert use. He wanted brushcutters on the front bumper, extra panels on the sides, and a winch welded to the frame. Charlie took this project particularly seriously—this tricked-up dune buggy would be the working model for those to come. He managed to get the dune buggy through the doors of the movie set saloon so they could work on it out of the blowing dust.

  Just as work on the dune buggy started, Tex Watson returned. He’d missed the discipline of the Family during his time away; it seemed to him that life in the outside world was too self-indulgent. Charlie sometimes got weird, but he preached about important things and if some kind of race war really was coming it would be better to be with him. When Tex got to Spahn, Charlie forgave him for deserting. It was a practical decision on Charlie’s part—Tex was a gifted mechanic and his skills were badly needed on the dune buggy in the saloon. Even with Tex pitching in, work on it went much more slowly than Charlie wanted. When it was finally ready for a test drive, the modifications had made it too wide to fit through the saloon doors. It took the combined efforts of everyone to turn the vehicle on its side. Then they had to push it out across the sidewalk and tip it back up on its wheels again. That accomplished, Charlie jumped behind the wheel; everyone else scampered behind on foot in a merry procession that lasted right up to the moment Charlie tried to drive the dune buggy across a shallow creek. The weight of all the add-ons was too much, and the dune buggy sank to the top of its hubcaps in creek-bottom mud. Everyone tried to tug it loose, but the wheels were mired too deep. Charlie wound a chain into the winch, wound the chain around a nearby tree branch, and tried to pull the dune buggy free of the gluey mud, but the branch broke. Frustrated, Charlie stalked off, calling back over his shoulder that nobody else could leave until the dune buggy was extracted from the mud and driven back to the main ranch buildings, and they’d better get the job done—no excuses.

  The remaining Family members looped the winch chain around another tree branch and tried again. Gypsy grabbed the chain to keep it from tangling. This time the winch seemed to work; the dune buggy shifted in the mud. Just as its tires began to pull free, the chain somehow wrapped around Gypsy’s thumb. She screamed in pain; her thumb was being slowly torn off her hand. But Charlie had ordered that the dune buggy be pulled out, no excuses—what if she let go of the chain to save her thumb, and then they weren’t able to get the dune buggy out of the mud after all? For long agonizing moments Gypsy endured the pain rather than risk failing Charlie. She finally let go and they winched the dune buggy free from the creek muck, but it had been a near thing for her thumb.

  Parts for dune buggy renovations were expensive. Essential desert survival supplies cost a lot of money, too. The Family needed immediate, regular sources of income—it wasn’t enough to depend on occasional handouts from benefactors anymore. Charlie’s immediate impulse was to make use of his women. He explored the possibility of signing them up as topless dancers in L.A. men’s clubs. But when club managers looked over the female Family members, they turned them down. With the exception of Susan Atkins, they were all relatively flat-chested. Charlie next considered sending some of the women north to Sacramento to work in his friend Pete’s whorehouses in Sacramento. But that would involve transportation costs, and Pete would want a cut from whatever the women earned turning tricks. Charlie needed every cent, so that was out. Then
the Family tried turning one of the ranch buildings into a nightclub. They painted the inside walls black, daubed on some sloppy psychedelic designs, wired up their record player, and put beer on ice. The name of the bar was Helter Skelter.

  The Helter Skelter bar patrons were ranch hands, bikers, and a lot of area kids who were glad to patronize a place where IDs were no problem and everyone could openly smoke weed. They drank beer, listened to music—mostly from the White Album—and watched some of the Family women who served as Go-Go dancers. Sometimes Charlie performed. A jar labeled “Donations” was prominently displayed on a counter. Things went well for a few days until local cops charged George Spahn with operating a bar without a license. The old man was mad as hell, especially when he had to pay a $1,500 fine. That was the end of the Helter Skelter bar, and Charlie had to find another way to make some fast money. In the end, he made the most obvious decision. It was 1969 and he was in L.A., after all. It was always possible to turn a quick buck by dealing drugs. But to do that, he needed a closer alliance with some of the bikers.

  Since the 1950s when the first Hells Angels chapter was organized in San Bernardino, Southern California had served as the unofficial home base for dozens of motorcycle gangs. Many of these had formal organizational structures, with officers and dues and even club charters. Though many were comprised of enthusiastic cyclists who simply liked getting together with like-minded buddies after work and on weekends, others were more sinister, with violence and drug dealing as common among their members as riding bikes. Hells Angels was by far the most notorious, and though its members protested that they never started any trouble, they were constantly in the news for brawls and arrests. Many ordinary citizens feared the Angels and any other biker clubs that resembled them. This was something the self-styled “outlaw” bikers relished.

  Hells Angels were never involved with Charlie Manson; they were too self-important to bother with such a nobody. But the Family had considerable appeal to the lesser Straight Satans, who enjoyed posturing as rough, tough outlaws who lived as they pleased and defied anyone to stop them. Many of the Straight Satans held day jobs, but in off-hours they enjoyed riding out to Spahn, where they’d work on their bikes and, at Charlie’s suggestion, sometimes enjoy the women. It was a mutually beneficial association—the bikers helped keep the Family motorcycles in good repair. But now Charlie wanted to expand the relationship. The Straight Satans would join the Family in drug deals. Sometimes the dope Charlie would get from suppliers would be sold by him directly to the bikers. Other times, the Straight Satans would join the Family as middlemen by selling the drugs to third parties. The bikers were amenable, especially when Charlie offered an additional perk to his new business partners. When they wanted sex they could choose among the available Family women as always, but now the prettiest girls, Ruth Ann and Leslie, were put at their constant disposal. It helped that the two women liked hanging out with the bikers anyway. Besides having fun, they were making a crucial contribution to the Helter Skelter escape plan.

  Some Straight Satans spent a lot of time at Spahn, particularly club treasurer Danny DeCarlo, who was having trouble with his wife at home. As much or more than anybody, DeCarlo enjoyed the Family women, who nicknamed him “Donkey Dan” for an alleged physical attribute. To a swaggering biker like DeCarlo, it was the ultimate praise. Charlie cannily made DeCarlo his chief contact in the Straight Satan hierarchy, and DeCarlo took the responsibility seriously. He tried to keep Charlie happy with the arrangement—he didn’t want to be cut off from the girls, after all. When Charlie admired a sword belonging to Straight Satans president George Knoll—Charlie always liked anything with a blade—DeCarlo negotiated a deal where Knoll traded the sword to Charlie in return for Charlie’s paying one of Knoll’s traffic fines. The sword immediately became Charlie’s weapon of choice; he had a special scabbard for it welded to the frame of his personal dune buggy.

  Though Charlie needed the Straight Satans around to facilitate drug deals, their presence also caused problems. George Spahn was still negotiating with developers, who made it clear that having so many undesirables on the property would inevitably drive down any proposed purchase price. Squeaky, ordered by Charlie to eavesdrop on George’s conversations and report any potential problems, informed her leader that ranch hand Shorty Shea sometimes volunteered to help George rid the ranch of the bikers and the Family, too. Shea, clearly, was an enemy who had to be watched.

  Besides irritating George Spahn, the Straight Satans upset some of the Family with their disparaging descriptions of black people as shiftless, stupid niggers. In all his Helter Skelter rhetoric, Charlie had been careful not to be overly critical of blacks. He taught his followers that they were different from the white race, and that it was only proper karma or fate that they should rise up against their oppressors. However, Charlie explained, blacks weren’t suited to be in charge, which would work to the Family’s eventual advantage, but they were lesser intellects, not subhuman. When the bikers became a constant presence on Spahn with all their nigger talk, Charlie gathered his followers and explained that, in the days ahead, they might even hear him joining in the bikers’ racial slurs. It wasn’t what he himself believed, Charlie emphasized. He was only pretending to have the same prejudices to keep the bikers happy, a necessary little deception to further the Helter Skelter escape plan. Nobody in the Family was to take Charlie’s talk seriously. But soon afterward, Charlie began sometimes departing from his daily Helter Skelter pronouncements to lecture instead on “the human flower garden,” how the races shouldn’t mix because then there would only be one kind of flower instead of a garden full of unique, beautiful blooms. The way Charlie said it, it didn’t seem racist.

  Something that Charlie either didn’t suspect, or else ignored because he couldn’t do much about it, was the bikers’ habit of passing hard drugs to Family members. Charlie allowed weed almost any time, and LSD in monitored doses. But the Straight Satans regularly indulged in whatever they could score, often speed, which often caused paranoia and violent tendencies in users. The bikers were all over Spahn, and they liked slipping pills to members of the Family on the sly. Charlie couldn’t watch everywhere at once. Susan and Tex in particular liked the extra goodies. Though they otherwise feared and obeyed Charlie, they organized a secret stash that they furtively dipped into frequently. Enough of the others regularly ingested speed to develop edgier attitudes. As Charlie continued preaching about the war to come, more of the Family felt prepared to fight.

  Charlie was getting edgier, too. He was under tremendous pressure. There was the new business arrangement with the Straight Satans to monitor, the challenge of keeping the Family convinced about the imminence of Helter Skelter, and the ongoing frustration of trying to make contact with Terry Melcher, his last hope for a record deal. Little Paul Watkins added to Charlie’s already heavy load when he reported after a trip to Barker Ranch that the Family members there had met a miner named Paul Crockett. Crockett was a desert rat with considerable knowledge of Scientology. Brooks Poston and Juanita were talking to him a lot, and Crockett was apparently finding fault with things Charlie had told them. It seemed to Watkins that there was some danger Brooks might leave the Family and live and work with Crockett. Charlie certainly didn’t want to allow that—ever since the Haight, he’d been paranoid about losing followers to rival gurus—but he couldn’t leave L.A. with everything else that was going on.

  At one point he took out his frustration on Watkins, lunging at him and wrapping his hands around his throat. It was no bluff; Charlie intended to strangle his follower to death, and Watkins struggled but felt himself weakening. Then, convinced he was about to die, he stopped fighting back, and the moment he did Charlie released his grip. Watkins decided that the best way to deal with Charlie in a violent mood was not to resist in any way. That seemed to throw him off and make him stop. Watkins decided that “death is Charlie’s trip,” and that although Charlie preached about love, all he really wanted to do was kill p
eople. Charlie’s assault on Watkins was a rare instance of bad judgment. Until that moment, Watkins had been one of his most faithful, dependable disciples. Now he began having doubts.

  • • •

  Had he and Little Paul Watkins compared notes that spring, Gregg Jakobson might have agreed. Though Dennis Wilson was visiting less often and Terry Melcher remained out of touch with Charlie, Jakobson continued to come out to Spahn. He’d decided that Charlie had no real potential as a recording artist. In person, Jakobson thought, Charlie could charm any audience; his songs weren’t bad and his improvisational ability was exceptional. Using broad facial expressions and gestures, he could augment mediocre music with his personality, but, as Jakobson knew well from his experience as a music industry talent scout, that wasn’t enough. Putting on a successful stage act was one thing. Records were what people listened to. They could only hear, not see, the artist, and that was where Charlie came up short. Charlie still thought Melcher might sign him to a record deal, but Jakobson was happy to let Melcher deal with that problem.

  Jakobson still thought Charlie and the Family would make great subjects of a film documentary if he could get some funding together. He sometimes discussed the project with Charlie, and though Charlie liked the idea of being a movie star—he didn’t really get the difference between a documentary and a feature film—he disagreed with Jakobson’s approach. Jakobson wanted to present the Family as the ultimate commune, one proving it was possible to live the way that you wanted if you were inventive enough. He especially loved the garbage runs, the idea that they ate well on other people’s trash. To Jakobson, the Family comprised a great cast. Besides Charlie there was crazy Susan, sweet-but-dumb Tex, deceivingly innocent-looking Squeaky, socially awkward Pat, and sexy little Ruth Ann. Present them as quirky, earnest seekers of a better way of life and audiences might very well fall in love with them. Charlie, though, wanted himself and his followers shown as outlaws, courageously defying authority and getting away with it. They argued back and forth, and one day Charlie suggested that they walk just beyond the Spahn boundaries to where a housing development was going up. Charlie asked, “What’s it remind you of?” and when Jakobson replied that it was just people building houses Charlie said, “No, it’s like a graveyard.” Jakobson was sick of Charlie’s endless allegorical word play. He snapped, “You’re full of shit,” and was shocked when Charlie pulled a handgun, pointed it at him, and asked, “What would you do if I pulled the trigger?” Jakobson wasn’t sure if he was serious, but he wouldn’t give Charlie the satisfaction of seeing him scared. “I guess I’d be dead,” he answered. Charlie put the gun away and resumed the conversation as though there had never been a pistol-waving interruption. Jakobson was disgusted. He still wanted to get a film deal going; he was professional enough to sublimate any grudges in favor of doing business. But after the gun incident Jakobson was convinced that Charlie’s “main thing” was fear, not love.