Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family

by John Gilmore;Ron Kenner

  Many years and many shadows of bars later, in jail for multiple murder, Manson doodled in a note pad propped against an edition of the Constitution. The designs were circular, round doodles, certain parts of which he had colored solid with radiating sunbeams symbolizing "rising signs."

  "Hey, somebody said, `What sign are you?' I said, 'Are you kidding? Everyday's my rising sign. Everyday there's a new rising sign."'

  The "rising sign," astrologers explain, is determined by the position of the sun at the time of one's birth. Yet even if there was a "rising sign" daily it would matter little - for Manson admits having rarely seen the sun. From earliest memories he recalls being fascinated by shadows playing mysteriously through dirty window panes, then the shadows of iron gratings over orphanage windows, the slats of steel bars in city jails, prisons; the shadows changing as the bars multiply in numbers and thickness, more and more until the light of day is hidden, until even in his doodles he shadows the sun.

  "And they want to know what my philosophy is," Manson said. "You know, I don't have any philosophy except that I don't think. I don't have hardly any thoughts. I just am."

  Another lesson he learned in the penitentiary, he'd remember, was, "You don't tell nobody nothing. I have learned not to tell people something they don't agree with ... I just listened. I never made opinions. I never learned how to do that, to make opinions. I never learned how to make decisions."

  In prison he knew "the score," he found out who he was. "All my life I used to believe that the good guys were on the outside and the bad guys were on the inside, in where I've always been," he said, facetiously. "Because everybody knows that inside all you have are convicts, thieves and liars. And you know they are the bad guys. And when they talk to you, you don't believe them. That is how I learned to `put-on,"' Manson explained. "By looking wide-eyed and nodding and saying `yes' and nodding some more. `Yes, yes, is that so?' and `Yes, I believe it, yes.' Because when they talked to me, I'd always say, `Yes, sure, yes, sure.' But you don't believe people like that. I didn't disbelieve them, either," Manson said. It was, actually, too dangerous to think. So he learned to play it safe, to "put-on."

  For a long time now he'd believed his mind could not be imprisoned. "It had nothing to do with anything they knew. So in a way, just by being locked up, I knew everything I had to ... On the outside, all the people walking back and forth and going in and out of everything, you see that their bodies are free, going this way and that; they are free to move, but their minds are locked up the same as in prisons and institutions - I realized I was better off in the penitentiary."

  One high-ranking prison official observed, "The worst that can happen to a person is that he loses the ability to make an independent decision - the man under a strict prison routine where every single minute of the day is planned by others has simply no possibility for taking a position of any kind. I have known cases where the personal insecurity has made people anxious about leaving the prison grounds. They prefer to live under a regimen and cling to an existence where all is arranged for them." Manson never learned to make decisions, and no effective "rehabilitation" ever reached him. Some believed the wall between Manson and society had become so impenetrable that even he was not yet aware of its density. His agile mind still sorted through muddy rationalizations, excuses he erected as to why it was all so difficult, why he was so innately a stranger - and was this condition as irrevocable as it seemed?

  A reformatory official recalls, "By the time Manson was twentyone, when we had to parole him, it was as though he'd gained something and we'd lost. Just talking to him for a time, if you were on the other side, you could see he thought it was a contest - we'd had our war and he was coming out on top. But he didn't want to get out especially, and I knew he'd be back behind bars. The outside world was a different world and it wasn't Manson's world."

  Manson says, "When I got out then, I said where can I go from here? I was from the street, from the alley, I had no father, no mother. I'd been in and out of orphanages and reformatories. I'd never had much schooling and I said to myself, `Where to?' Here we are. That's what there was and that's all that there was and I had no more thoughts about it ... Someone asked me, Aren't you thinking about it?' I said, `No.' They said, Aren't you worried about it?' I said, `No,' and I said `no' when they asked me if I was even thinking about what I was going to do. I had no thoughts about what I was doing. There had never been any thought. I was twentyone years old then. I hit the streets and I'd never had a drink of beer in my life. I'd never been with a woman - never made love to one in my life. `Women' had always been so far away from me. I mean distant that I was actually frightened of them. In back of myself I kept saying `no,' and `no, I wouldn't be able to adjust to what they were all doing ..."'

  With little direction, Manson returned to West Virginia and drifted from one menial job to another, dissatisfied with each. For a short time he worked as a waiter in a cafe where he met Bertha, a movie usherette. She had an old Ford convertible and allowed Manson to drive her around the city. She was the first girl he had sexual relations with.

  Another was a young waitress in a hospital dining room. She became pregnant with his child and they were married in January, 1955.

  He worked in a gas station, a parking lot, was employed as a box boy in a market. Prior to his marriage, a relative Manson stayed with remembers, "Charlie slept a lot and would wander around. It was plain he wasn't doing anything in particular to help himself, but like he was waiting around for something to happen. I personally couldn't see that he had anything to wait for ..

  Even after marriage, Manson says, "I met a few girls and they all had something I liked. I could see how much of a stranger I'd been to people living in the free world. After awhile I met this one girl and she wrapped her pussy around me. She wanted to go to California, so I stole a car and we drove to California ..."

  After reaching Los Angeles, he was arrested and charged with car theft. Convicted, he was sentenced to Terminal Island Prison at Los Angeles. The judge who sentenced him later told an attorney: "I asked Manson if he had anything to say, if he was willing to present some extenuating circumstances, but he said nothing and showed no concern about returning to prison."

  Manson was to return repeatedly, and with each trip back to the "joint," the gulf widened between the "tough guy" and the man who might exist in an organized society.

  Back in West Virginia, his wife put together her belongings and brought Manson's baby to California. She took a small apartment in Los Angeles near San Pedro to make regular visits to the prison. The visits continued for almost two years. "During that time," says a friend, "she must have aged ten years. She began to feel she was wasting her life - her time. She was pretty confused. She'd say, `I sit there and look him in the face and I can't get the feeling that he cares or gives a damn about me or the baby. I don't understand him ... I don't think I even know him. He doesn't make any sense.' She said she couldn't get into Charlie's way of thinking and so she stopped visiting him. There were too many problems."

  Manson then made an unsuccessful attempt to escape from Terminal Island. An inmate says, "He just had to do it, had to try, he said. Something about his wife. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred it can't be done. Charlie figured he had that one percent on his side." Another excuse to keep his inner "dynamo" going, on the run.

  He was still doing time when his wife served him with divorce papers. Her life with Charlie had ended.

  Released on five years probation, Manson drifted to Venice, California. Those who knew him then knew a man of many faces. One musician, Bob Shell, remembers: "In that short time I'd known Charlie I felt one could get to know him many times over, even in the turn of a day. I had no knowledge of what he was up to but we talked and talked around the beach. I could see he was hitting on some pretty negative factors, that he was calling on them, and I tried to show, you know, that those factors couldn't be taken apart from the others, but he thought they could be. He had an answer for
everything, and he didn't believe that he had any particular limits. You have to understand that Charlie wasn't on the same bag he's onto now. He had a lot of the `punk' going for him, like a young hood. You know, the Elvis hairdo, and he'd worn this leather jacket around the beach. In the time I got to be around him a little I don't think he had much use for other people."

  Another who knew Manson in Venice was Jeanie Morse. "He was a `straight' person as far as I was concerned. There was this time in Venice and when we'd gone into town there was a place on La Brea and Sunset Boulevard, and he knew some of the other people there. You could say he was hanging around with some pretty heavy people. Not like the hippies are now. I mean they were a rough bunch of people. And they had conflicts with the law. It is my opinion, that being what I felt from Charlie, was that he wasn't anything like, you know, dudes on the street, in the cars, in the restaurants, and in all the big buildings with all the straight lives going on. He didn't even trust me or get close to me and I was a goddamn hooker then. He wasn't the same as the others. What he had to do, he had to go down there where he'd find some of the people that he was like, and that were like him. The same kind of, I believe most were in or out of prisons, that's the only people he had."

  The more Manson became the "tough guy" through the many "faces," the less he could emerge as the one person who might have really cared, who might have developed a strong enough identity to hang on and live instead of "putting on" another face. But he ran, failing to recognize the limits of human personality. For awhile he fancied himself a "movie producer" and sought to enlist young girls as starlets. He wandered through Hollywood, drifted around beach towns, through odd jobs. At times he gave the impression of being a "businessman," but none of the schemes he dreamed up materialized. And "bad trouble," his lifelong companion, dogged a little bit nearer every day.

  He wrote a bum check for $37.

  Soon after, he was arrested again for forgery. The problems mounted. Three days later he was released to the U.S. Treasury Department and held on mail theft and forgery of treasury checks. He was also charged with parole violation and was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

  From Los Angeles he was sent to the Federal Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington. "I was given a name and a number and I was put in a cell," Manson says, "and I lived in a cell with a name and a number ..." He remembers mainly "just sitting in jail, thinking nothing ... Nothing to think about ... Everybody used to come in and tell me about their past and their lives and what they did. But I could never tell anybody about my past or what my life was or what I did because I have always been sitting in that room - I had a cot, a basin, a wall. So, then it moves on to awareness, to how many cracks can you count in the wall? It moves to where the mice live and what the mice are thinking, and you see how clever mice are.

  "I am only a reflection," he would claim. "I have done everything I have always been told. 1 have mopped the floor when I was supposed to mop the floor, and I swept when I was supposed to sweep ... As you put two people in a cell, so would they reflect and flow on each other like as if water would seek a level. I have been in a cell with a guy eighty years old, and I listened to everything he said. `What did you do then?' And he explains to me his whole life, and I sat there and I listened and I experienced vicariously his whole being, his whole life, and I look at him and he is one of my fathers. But he is also another one of society's rejects." With the other "rejects," Manson knew he belonged. One ex-convict friend of Manson's at McNeil says, "Some guys like Charlie are institutionalized ... He was at home in prison."

  Another McNeil friendship bloomed between Charlie and a man almost twice his age. Alvin "Creepy" Karpis arrived at McNeil after spending a total of twenty-six years on "The Rock" - Alcatraz. One ex-McNeil inmate says, "Creepy - who nobody called that to his face, had been the FBI's most wanted man - Public Enemy Number One in the thirties until he'd been busted in New Orleans by J. Edgar Hoover himself. Like a lot of guys who'd wind up on The Rock after being bad ass in the other joints, Karpis was sent straight to Alcatraz. So Karpis was there with Floyd Hamilton - who'd been with Bonnie and Clyde, and Machine Gun Kelley, and Doc Barker - the youngest son of Ma Barker's gang. What the law nailed Karpis with was kidnapping, and they had him tucked away on The Rock longer than anybody else ever did time there, and he wasn't going nowhere until they sent him to McNeil.

  "It didn't make no difference to a lot of people that he'd done all that time in Alcatraz. He was still Karpis, you know, and he wasn't even sixty years old ... A lot of people tended to shy away from him, even though you're in the joint and nobody's supposed to be nothing. They didn't shy away because of him being any threat to someone's personal safety, but because he was like a star, you know - he'd always been that ... He was A-OK, and what made it easier on people was that Karpis was such a skilled musician. He'd pick up a guitar and play it like a professional ... Also he could do this with other instruments, but the guitar seemed to come alive when he picked it up. Blues, boy, blues, and he could play snappy stuff. Man, it was a real joy listening to that man play, and that's why Charlie Manson went to him, to learn what he could from Karpis about playing the guitar ..."

  Ex-Public Enemy Number One Alvin Karpis, record-holder for time on The Rock, says, "Charlie came to me a few times at McNeil, at first, proposing some situation in which he could learn more about music and the guitar from me. He said he knew a little and I told him to sit down and play something, and he went ahead and did that. I saw he had a feel for it - he wasn't bad at all, but there was a lot of room for improvement. I was working with the recreation committee at the time and had a pretty free reign. Charlie wanted to write music, compose stuff he had in his head, and learn to play that successfully.

  "He wasn't impatient ... I instructed him and we often played quite a bit together. He had a serious devotion to what he wanted to do ... musically, and where there is that desire in one, it's not a long ways to actually achieving what it is you want to do. We talked often and there was something unmistakably unusual about Manson. He was a runt of sorts, but found his place as an experienced manipulator of others ... able to take the run of something and go with it ...

  "He wasn't educated but had a great deal of native ability, though it was in a manner of getting whatever it was he was after. For instance, I wasn't in the business of instructing, but found myself in that position with Manson. So it was like I could be sitting here and it dawned on me that this fellow had gotten me into something I hadn't intended. You see, it was the manipulation - quite skillful, and then at that point we talked about it and he laughed. Oh, friendly enough, though he had a very uneven personality. I don't mean his temperament, but more of his personality. And he told me he had approached me in the `reverse,' by showing me, as he put it, the qualities of myself that were in line with that he was after .. .

  "Until after I'm dead, I'd be unwilling to let it be known I'd been fooled like that, but the fact is that he was right in that I was not resentful or reluctant to teach someone to play an instrument or to be friendly, but I did feel manipulated, and under circumstances where it hadn't been necessary ... It revealed to me that this fellow, as interesting as he could be at times, undertook his situations as part of a deception. You see, in a devious manner for some personal gain. If you're `conning' someone, you're `conning' someone, but if you fail to tell the difference between it being a necessity to get what you're after, then you're not only fooling the other party, but you're pulling the wool over your own eyes as well ... What you wind up with, is two blind men."

  Karpis says Manson had "the run of the place. He joined all the prison groups and got to be on all the committees, especially the recreation committee. He learned how to get his way by conforming to what his case worker wanted. He'd talk, by saying what it was that was right for what he wanted ..."

  But finally, in March, 1967, despite Manson's protests, his "time was up." He was conditionally paroled again.

  "They were ready to let me out
and I said, `Oh, no, I can't go outside there. I can't and I'm not able to adjust to their world. I'd be a stranger.' But they said, `No, it was time. I had to go outside.' But I wanted no part of that world outside. The people there are the ones that smile and shake your hands and pat your backs, and smile some more and pretend that they are good, that they are your friends, but there were none of them there ... I knew that I couldn't adjust to that world, not after all my life had been spent locked up and where my mind was free. I was content to stay in the penitentiary, just to take my walks around the yard in the sunshine and to play my guitar and sit and play it in my cell, or do all the things that I'd been used to doing in prison ...

  "After I got out I was frightened. It was being frightened in a funny way. I didn't know where to go. I was thirty-two, on the streets again, and I didn't know anything. I didn't even know anything about dope or LSD. I didn't want to leave jail, but they insisted I go and they gave me - I think it was $35 - and I had a suitcase filled with old used clothes."

  Karpis was still serving time the day Charlie left the prison. "I shook Charlie's hand," he says. "And when he'd gone off, I shook my head. Manson was definitely ill-prepared for life. He left McNeil and I saw nothing but a string of penitentiaries before him. Bad, bad news all the way down."

  Out of prison, Manson knew no one. No one knew him. He had a guitar, and plans about music he could formulate only in close-cornered spurts. And, he said, his mind was portable, that was a fact. He had carried it through jail cells and penitentiaries most of his life. It was a portable Pandora's Box.

  The streets of the city and crowds and buses were foreign to him. He was a stranger.

  "For several days I just rode the bus around. I slept on the bus and the drivers woke me up when we reached the end of somewhere. `You're at the end,' they'd say. `End of the line.' Getting off the bus was the same as getting out of jail. Finally I wound up in Berkeley and I looked up this friend I'd known in prison. They were poor and I stayed there, but I felt I was eating the food right out of their mouths, and also, he had been ordered that he couldn't associate with ex-cons, people like that. I didn't get along at all with his old lady and they fought all night. So I left there and took another bus, and another one and I was in San Francisco ..."