Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family

by John Gilmore;Ron Kenner

  A relative recalls, "Susan had an almost indifferent air about it." Although near Christmas, Susan brought her church choir to the house and stood beneath her mother's bedroom window. They sang Christmas carols until late into the night.

  When her mother died, Susan's grandparents came to help organize the family. Her father was unemployed. The costly funeral had been a burden, and Susan was constantly fighting with her brothers. The grandparents were rejected by Susan as they exerted supervision, authority coming much too late in the girl's life. To some extent, Susan had had her own way.

  In school Susan was an average student, with no disciplinary record or trouble. A friend of the family says, "She had been a good kid, basically, sort of lax at times ... not really expressing herself, but I think the trouble was that she was left alone a lot of the time. And there was really no place for the girl to turn if she happened to have any kind of problem ... if she needed help."

  Susan's father had been able to get into construction work at the San Luis Dam, when the girl enrolled in Los Banos High School in 1965. Those who knew the family remember numerous quarrels, often heated arguments, between Susan and her father. Her father seemed unable to provide the guidance Susan began to need, or the discipline that might have stabilized her emotions for the future. A friend of Susan's recalls: "She just didn't seem to care. Like when her mother died, she didn't show any real sadness about it. I don't think Susan cared about anything very much. There was something wrong with her. . .

  The following year Susan broke family ties. She went to San Francisco and involved herself with young men who moved quickly, usually just ahead of the law. Susan bragged to one girl friend that she had taken part in some gas station holdups, in the robbery of a liquor store, and that she was helping a man steal cars.

  She was arrested in Oregon, and held on charges of car theft and concealing stolen property. It was not long after her release on probation that she was arrested again.

  Her father, remarried by then, pleaded with the courts to keep his daughter "off the streets ... She needs help," he said. "She should have been out and away where help could be given, not turned back on the streets to go through it all again."

  Out on probation, Susan returned to San Jose to live with a relative - then with a girl friend. She was going to "stay put for awhile," she told the friend, but there were parties, there were people with dope, and when the parties were over there was the "boredom of San Jose ..."

  Susan returned to San Francisco. She tried different jobs, but, as her friend recalls, "Susan would go off with some guy if she thought he was treating her okay. She didn't care too much who the guy was if he offered her some square deal. She made a lot of trips back and forth to Los Angeles, and I think she felt for a while she was right on top of it."

  She got a job as a cocktail waitress, then as a topless dancer in a small go-go club. The entanglements with men went on.

  "One guy was going to marry her, and when this didn't pan out I think she took it more to heart than anything else," the girl friend says. "He'd been a good dude. So she started staying with different guys like she was trying to prove they were all for nothing, and none of it worked out for her. She didn't know what she was after. Just going with the tide."

  She wound up on the Haight. There, trying to shake loose of her past, "not giving a damn" about a future, she felt she could drift with no demands.

  "I was living in a house that primarily consisted of young people living together," Susan says. "We all shared our means of support, and I was sitting in the living room on the first floor of the house when a man walked in and had a guitar with him. All of a sudden he was surrounded by a group of girls. Well, I sat and watched and he sat down on the couch and I sat down to his right and he started to play music ... First he just started playing similar songs and went through Spanish - a couple of Spanish songs and sung a few songs, and then the song that caught my attention most was `The Shadow of Your Smile,' and he sounded like an angel ... And when he was through singing, I looked up and asked him if I could play his guitar ... I wanted to get some attention from him. I don't know why, I just felt I wanted some attention from him, and he handed me the guitar and to myself I thought, `I can't play this,' and then he looked at me and said, `You can play that if you want to.'

  "Now, he had never heard me say `I can't play this,' I only thought it. So when he told me I could play, a common expression, I blew my mind, because he was inside my head, and I knew at that time that he was something that I had been looking for. But he just represented something to me inside, and I went down and kissed his feet. I don't know why I kissed his feet, I just kissed his feet, and then . . .

  "Well then, a day or so later, Charlie came back to the house and I knew it was him and I went running downstairs to meet him at the door, and we walked back upstairs and he asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with him and I said, `Yes,' and we walked a couple of blocks to another house in Haight-Ashbury and he told me he wanted to make love with me. Well, I acknowledged the fact that I wanted to make love with him and he told me to take off my clothes. So I uninhibitedly took off my clothes, and there happened to be a full-length mirror in the room and he told me to go over and look at myself in the mirror. I didn't want to do it, so he took me by my hand and stood in front of the mirror and I turned away and he says, `Go ahead and look at yourself, there is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect. You always have been perfect.' He says, `This is in body form. You were born perfect and everything that has happened to you from the time you were a child all the way up to this moment has happened perfectly. You have made no mistakes. The only mistakes you have made are the mistakes that you thought that you made. They were not mistakes ..

  "He asked me if I ever made love with my father. I looked at him and kind of giggled and I said, `No.' And he said, `Have you ever thought about making love to your father?' I said, `Yes, I thought I would like to make love with my father.' And he told me, he said, `All right, when we are making love imagine in your imagination that I am your father and, in other words, picture in your mind that I am your father.' And I did, I did so, and it was a very beautiful experience ..

  Susan says, "In time, he was to call himself Satan. And the Devil sometimes. He personally never called himself Jesus, but he represented a Jesus Christ-like person to me. He said Jesus Christ was but a man like any other man and with awareness of the world and the universe, and he gave up his life willingly so that we could live in order to become the same, not Jesus Christ, but the same consciousness that Christ was endowed with. We must be willing to experience the same thing Christ did for us."

  Was Charlie Manson evil?

  "In your standards of evil," Susan says, "looking at him through your eyes, I would say yes. Looking at him through my eyes, he is as good as he is evil, he is as evil as he is good ... You could not judge the man."

  During the summer, "black magic" and "white magic" became a religion for many on Haight. To those who knew him, Manson not only participated, but saw himself as a kind of wizard. Within a short time he had banded together a following, younger than himself, a group that relied on sex and drugs to escape "Establishment pressures." Once released from the "vise-grip," they were open to "mystical experience," and Manson, the wizard, was there to show the way. Yet even to them, Manson would remain a stranger.

  A San Francisco priest observed, "They lacked the will to fight the Devil's invasion." What will they had, the priest says, "had been smudged out like a little pencil line you rub over with an eraser." He believed that "evil is not neutral, and the older I get the more I'm convinced of it. It is a force as active as good. No, I no longer believe that evil is a neutral thing."

  Those who grouped themselves around Charlie Manson came from scattered families, and in a short time acid and amphetamines altered their personalities.

  Joe Brockman says, "Maybe no one's had as much acid as Timothy Leary, but here was a man that knew what he was doing. He had objectives - he
had his thing before him. That there's what makes the difference. Now those that were hanging around Charlie that I dealt to, the ones that come in flowers on buses, BANG, they're up - the trip is a groove. They think that's what's happening - I mean, the way it should be, the trip, so they stay up as long as they can. I think out of maybe a hundred people I turned on personally, there were maybe three I heard went on actual bummers. One, this girl Willa, she cut her throat with some scissors, to release her soul. But that's the average law, same as walking across the street or driving your car." Joe claims LSD is softer on life and limb than the family automobile. "You get it or you don't ... But what happens is not some sudden bummer like Willa, because that's a natural deal to happen. But the trip for those of Charlie's crowd, and the others that hung around, the trip became the thing that was happening, what you'd call reality. And like being down was being down, unreal. They didn't turn their eyeballs around and look themselves in the head and see what's happening in there like Leary did. No, the others looked right out like I did at first, and what they see they think is what's happening. Now, that is not what Leary preached. He never said a groovy trip is where it's at, because a trip like that that goes on and on and can only lead to a giant bummer in a broad sense, like the whole thing is a bummer."

  Despite the insight Joe attributes to acid advocates, Timothy Leary, a university professor, writer, and scholar, was reduced through LSD to a criminal on the run, having escaped from jail on drug charges, and seeking refuge in foreign countries.

  Charlie, who had been to the "bottom" and claimed to have unlocked his own mind, had a way of controlling those who turned their backs on their pasts. And in part he aided in that amputation. With no pasts, they sought the immediate - a grouping together as a sort of family that could share on their level of "awareness." So they created a family and placed Charlie at the "head of the table."

  Marge Smith, nineteen then, says, "I was so wiped out and had to have something to go by. Charlie's thing was spontaneous, he turned me on and I seemed to turn him on, and he rapped love and being together and that's what I wanted. I never had it where I came from, so I said, `Fuck what's back there.' Like some people believe in the Holy System, the Establishment, I believed in Charlie and where we were at."

  As she says, "Nothing had any meaning except what we gave it." Manson "rapped" that there could be no guilt, no shame, no blame; no past to hold onto, no "individual" to be singled out. He claimed to "unlock" their minds and clear away their past.

  "There is no good and no bad," he'd tell them. "There is no difference between you and I. There is only one thing and that thing is everything. I am the father. You are the father. I understand the universe through me. The truth is, and that's all. It doesn't matter what words you use, millions of words you use, the truth is what it is. That's the truth. What's here and now. I go there and I'm not here anymore. And now I come back and I'm not there anymore ... Just what's here and now is what counts. It's infinite and it's nothing. It's all there is and it doesn't matter what you do. It is all perfect and the way it's supposed to be."

  One young man soon to become close to Charlie was Robert Beausoleil - "handsome, strong, a leader in his own way, sun in Leo," says Robert Aiken, a Los Angeles astrologer and actor. "Beausoleil - beautiful sun. He had a movie star Robinson Crusoe quality, very open in a primitive way, apart from society with no use for its codes, its restrictions. They simply didn't apply. A freedom bound person. But yet he was no young idealist spouting off mystical witticisms, and no soft loving hippie. Not that way at all. The sunny magnetism, but an element of mystery and the dark, a darker cast to his aura that leaned on the sinister. Freedom bound, but one that the freedom binds, and one such as Beausoleil was bound for trouble ..."

  While Charlie was opening to the new environment on Haight like a Venus flytrap, Bobby Beausoleil migrated into the hippie scene from his last stop-over - Los Angeles. On the Sunset Strip they had called him "Bummer Bob," a name that angered him and drove him further into his own silence.

  Hazily gazing back into his own life, Bobby says, "Maybe it began with my birth in Santa Barbara, California - November 6, 1947 - another Scorpio, like Charlie Manson.

  "I had no desire to wait the full nine months," Bobby says, "I wanted to get going, so I kicked myself out of the woman's womb weeks earlier than I was expected."

  He'd eventually say, with a nonchalant air, "They were a nice enough family, I suppose, but I hit the road when I was twelve years old without any interest in looking back over my shoulder ..."

  Perhaps Bobby's dread of backwards glances stems from the abuse he experienced as a small child at the hands of an aunt and uncle. According to Vickie Devin, a girl Bobby would try to marry several years later in Hollywood, "Bobby went through that mill - it was bad," she says, "typical of the worst of the sexual and other abuse brought down on a little kid. But he couldn't tell anyone - he didn't tell anyone, and it went on and he kept trying to get away from it ... He wanted to run. He never told anyone, I don't think, except me - a lot later, and underneath the cool attitude, he was filled with some kind of ugliness - the abuse had twisted him awful."

  Bobby's wandering was cut short when he was brought back as a runaway. "It went against my grain," he says, "this rude imposition of being pulled back against my desires ... There were things I had to do - places to go, things I sensed and knew that I had to throw myself into. I knew that life was a big arena and I was ready for anything that could come along."

  At age fourteen, Bobby was made a Ward of the Court by a Juvenile Court judge. "That was when my parents washed their hands of me, and inside of myself I said it was good riddance - not me, but their having separated themselves from my life by their own desires ...

  "That was after I'd been sent to reform school. When I got out of there, I was sent to live with my grandmother in South Gate, California, which is just part of Los Angeles, just outside of L.A., but a part of it. A dump. The house I was in was a dump and then it was condemned. My grandmother was moved out of the house and I just hung around South Gate. It was like hanging around some tin gate to Hell."

  Bobby describes himself back then as "a greasy kid in a greasy leather jacket and boots, and with chips on both shoulders like the size of ammunition boxes." His grandmother rented "a flop" in El Monte - "just east of L.A., where all the new Nazis were hanging out ... Officially I was supposed to be staying with her - the old woman - but I was actually sleeping over in a trailer with a couple of buddies down the block ...

  "I stayed with them most of the time," Bobby says, "sleeping in the trailer, in a part of it, and these guys brought this young girl in and we all had sexual relations with her. She had hair on her pussy and everything. About a week later she came back, wanting more. She wanted to be fucked by all three of us, but the other guys were gone so she stayed with me - hanging on my cock. We screwed around all day until it was time for her to leave and go home because she had to go to Mass at the church."

  The girl came back to the trailer, "knocking on a little window over the mattress I was on," and Bobby climbed over one of the other kids that was still asleep and went outside. "I don't even think the sun was up yet - she was supposed to be going to school but wanted me to fuck the shit out of her, so we walked over behind a water tank and I took her in the weeds, kicked some tin cans aside and laid her there. She'd already taken off her underpants and had them in her coat pocket.

  "The best one could call me," he says, "was a petty crook ... a greasy punk, because that's what I was. I swiped things. Got good at it. I could swipe things right under your nose without you even seeing me doit...

  "The boy's uncle who had the trailer ran a broken-down gas station where I used to hang out, working for this screwy uncle sometimes, goofing off in the grease. I wore Levis that were all greasy, and a black leather jacket." Bobby had the feeling that he wanted to kick ass, but he wasn't sure how tough he was. He was a "pretty boy - a pretty-faced boy," who had the girls coming a
round all the time.

  He knew about cars, "fixing this or that," he says. "I could fix things that I didn't know about by trying to figure them out, taking them apart and then I could put them back together. I built a few carburetors while I was hanging around the gas station - the other boys didn't help much. I guess their uncle figured I liked to do it, so he'd ask me instead of them. Like knowing it was something I could prove myself at, so he'd have me do it for what he called the experience of it. He didn't want to pay me anything - as it was, he figured since I was staying in the trailer I was sort of like a son maybe, and rooming me was enough, I suppose. I couldn't kick because I was getting sexual activities with the girls around there - they weren't anything you'd write home about, anything you'd take to a dance or somewhere nice - it was just sex, and they came around hot and wanting to screw around. I was there to accommodate them. And they'd accommodate me."

  But Bobby's mind was always somewhere else. "Like this Martin Luther King, I had a vision, too, only I wasn't sure what it was. When I'd try to think about it, I'd get this distance sort of feeling like I was drifting in a fog - a sort of airplane without any engine and going into a fog over some black forest, and down into it. Gliding, you know. It was somewhere in the forests in ancient Germany ..

  He saw a cartoon, "way back after I'd booted myself out of the woman," with Bugs Bunny and Hermann Goering, a fat, bumbling cartoon of the Luftwaffe leader and henchman of Hitler. In the middle of "farting around with Bugs Bunny," the rabbit disguises himself as a Nordic maiden in a steel helmet, riding through the woods on a gigantic white horse, muscles rippling in its shanks. "You couldn't even hear its hooves because it was like a dream - that same fog. That's how it came into my mind - not the cartoon of it, but the images it made in my mind. She had steel shields over her tits and long blonde braids hanging down to her ass ..