Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family

by John Gilmore;Ron Kenner

  "From the shaft of the bottomless pit ... came locusts on the earth, and they were given the power of scorpions. They were told not to harm any green growth or any tree, but only those who have not the seal of God on their foreheads ... Their faces were like human faces, their hair like women's hair ... They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit."

  And Charlie Manson was the "King" of his world. Wallie says, "He had a very aggressive line. He'd stare at your eyeballs, he'd just stare at your eyes, and he'd start in on this scam - this thing of his - he'd ask questions. He'd be very dynamic about it, just something a more normal man doesn't normally do, you know, and tells you, `I don't like your hair,' or `I like your hair' or something, `Why are you wearing makeup when it's not natural, where's your real face . . .' and all this, and `What do you believe in?' and `You should believe in this . . .' After a couple of hours of his talking and you're getting brainwashed."

  "Once I had this movie star," Charlie points out. "She wanted me to make love to her. I told her that if she came up to the ranch, and took off all her makeup, and she was up there for a while, and I got the feeling, then I might make love to her. But she wanted to be released so bad, she said `Charlie, you have to do it,' and she was really mad. And I told her, I was at her house, `Okay, you go climb up that mountainside. If you want to make love to me you go climb up that mountain, and climb back down.' The reason I told her to go up that mountain and climb back down is because when she came back down again she'd be too tired to screw, she'd be too tired, maybe she wouldn't want to. Now I could screw her when I wanted to, not when she wanted to get it. That's the time - when she's tired, she doesn't want to do it . . . So when I start screwing her, and chomping on her, and she's so tired that when I finally get to her and build her up, and she starts moving, I can get to her mentally. She's so tired physically, I can get to her mentally and get inside her soul and body, and be inside her body and mind and control her." And the girls would put their minds and their bodies into the hands of "the master."

  In his barren relationships, Charlie pretended to have "no wants - no needs," that he was self-sufficient. But after awhile he would manipulate, gear up the relationship to an area of confidence, or intimacy, to where he could take hold of whatever he wanted.

  As head of the Family, Charlie manipulated. But what was it he really wanted? He wallowed in sex at the ranch, and in being worshipped as he had never known or even hoped for. Yet Charlie still couldn't be satisfied. It was as if the newfound affection wasn't really reaching Charlie the person but only the "ego" of the con man. It seemed Charlie, "the father," actually could love and seek to satisfy only himself, the loveless, fatherless boy who never grew up. As if in some strange way, among the many "put -on" faces of Manson, the "father" image was at the command of the son, at the command and mercy of Charlie's past. It seemed the boy within him was craving revenge on an incredibly indifferent world. With minds weakened by acid and amphetamines, Manson began to mold, as it were, the weapons he'd use in his war.

  Linda, who said she'd been using LSD, peyote and "speed," claimed her chief reason for taking drugs was for "God realization ... For one thing, I thought I could see God through acid. The acid told me it was God," she said, though adding, "I realized you don't have to take LSD or peyote to discover God." She said the Family used drugs regularly. It was a part of the life. "We lived together as one family, as a father ... and the children."

  Charlie recalls, "I may have implied on several occasions that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am...

  "When you take LSD enough times you reach a state of nothing, of no thought," he admits. "An example of this, if you were to be standing in a room with someone and you were loaded on acid and the guy says, `Do you like my sport coat?' And the guy would probably not pay any attention to him and say, `I bought this sport coat at Penney's,' and then he still would not pay any attention to him. About two or three minutes later the guy loaded on LSD will turn around and say, `My, you have a beautiful sport coat,' because he is only reacting - he is only reacting ..."

  His "children," Charlie says, are "everyone that loves me, anyone that will return my love." He says, "I would like to be a good father and do what my children would like me to do," but then, sometimes, the "children" would have to be punished. He recalls that one member of his Family was "kicked out of her house when she was thirteen. She always liked to get attention from her father ... So she would do things like drop coffee and spill things and do childish little things so her daddy would come and spank her on the hand. So she brought that problem to the ranch," he says. "She asked to be spanked several times. She came close to burning the ranch up and I would tell her, `Would you quit doing that,' I says, `If you don't stop doing that I'm going to spank you. I'm going to whip you.' And she would keep doing it, so as any father would do I conditioned her mind with pain to keep her from burning the ranch down or to keep her from doing something that she may have done that would affect everyone."

  But Manson had his own plans that were to affect others. He continued programming members of the family, preparing them to carry out his orders without question - the drug effects began to blur distinctions among the many faces of Charlie - it was not really the "father" anymore - as much as an extremity of the "Infinite Soul" which was, of course, everything and everybody in Manson's inside world. He treated them rough, in a manner similar in theory to the army breaking away a young person's individuality. "I did all sorts of nasty things to the girls that I could think up." Manson says, "One girl - I picked up this stick and threatened her, and I used the goddamn stick on her. `Don't act out of fear' I said, and don't get hung up on the father. She'd say she wanted to make love to some guy but was afraid of daddy and society, that they'd find out about it."

  A young attorney who knew Manson was later to comment on Charlie's authority at the ranch. "Charlie needed to express the power and leadership, he had to be the father. When he `liberated' these young girls he was still expressing the power - he is the father. I asked Charlie, `What about the mother and son, and what you call the equal relationship - the brother and sister - isn't there an equality in here somewhere? Couldn't you be one or the other - you're always talking about the one extreme, the father and daughter relationship . . .' Charlie said to me, 'A woman came to us, she was bringing her fifteen year old daughter to me. I said, "We don't want you lady, you're too old, you couldn't hack it here. You'd sit around and everybody would see your flabby stomach and know how old you are, know all the hang-ups you have." And she says, "Whatta you mean, my layers of defense mechanisms?" And I said, "Yeah," and the fact that the daughter's - she doesn't have the pure relationship, she's just had one relationship - with her father. The old woman's had other relationships with men that have hung her up in various ways over the years, for so many years, and also her body, she couldn't hack it. But the fifteen year old has just had the relationship with her father. She's clean - she's fresh. I can get to her still, she doesn't have the "layers" around her.'

  "Charlie liberated them from the father image," the lawyer says. "He uses them but then tells them `don't be used.' Then he tells them, `Go out and do beautiful things. I told one girl to go out and be beautiful. Next time I saw her she was riding by on a horse - it was beautiful. When they find out their fantasies are not what they really wanted, then they just want to liberate their souls, and I do this ..."'

  One dropout from a motorcycle group, twenty-one-year-old Carl Foster, became part of the Family at the ranch. "At first," he said, "It was hard to figure these women around Charlie. He once said to me, women must live for men, that's why they're put on the earth, they must serve men, have to die for men, and kept saying how they were like batteries, when they run down they must be recharged by loving them or they had to be dumped. It got so five or six girls a week would be coming up to the ranch in these cars they'd borrowed somewhere or probably stole - some junk with doors half coming off, and a f
ew of these girls were so damn young they should've been in grammar school. Here, gradually, a lot of stolen cars started to pile up around the place, and Charlie told them, and told all of us, that nothing was important there except that the only way for us to be happy on earth was to serve him - was to become his slaves ..."

  Charlie had no use for "old ladies" or mothers around the ranch. Yet, it seems, in some strange way, his basic needs differed little from the girls who sought in him a guiding force - an authority replacement they could love intimately. Manson, who as a child knew neither love, compassion nor his mother in any meaningful way, finally found a host of young girls competing to "mother" and care for him intimately. But for Charlie the love had come too late - he had no use for an emotion he could not humanly understand. And if he could not "love" these young girls, running from pressures they could not understand, certainly he could use them.

  Men visited the ranch. Linda says during these visits Charlie "told us to make love to them and to try to get them to join the Family. If they wouldn't, not to make love to them."

  Speaking for other men on the ranch, Foster said, "The girls were all around the place and you were always welcome to share them or take whoever you wanted. But when you did, you then became part of Charlie's property, too. He'd said that he'd need to have men around, because, as he put it, there was no limit to what a man could do. But then, the women held power over the other men - that way, the women were the key to everything, and Charlie had it all sewed up."

  Wallie recalls that Charlie "was always trying to find some man, some guys he could put on the Family - he wasn't at all pleased with the men that were out there. That's why Charlie wanted Tex there.

  "But Tex was kind of wrought up inside," she remembers. "At first he was sitting there with his ego perfectly intact, saying, `Why do the girls love Charlie better than me?' I guess," Wallie says, "later it just started building up and building up. `Why can't the girls love me?' You know, `Why do they have to like Charlie?' I guess he finally had to prove himself."

  Marge Smith says, "Watson was impotent, he couldn't make it in a straight manner with a chick. And he was also very peculiar, brutal in a quiet way, if that can make much sense ... I have seen him on occasions just sitting, very high, and cracking his finger knuckles and staring at Charlie."

  "During the day," Susan said, "We would all gather and go through our changes and do what we were doing that day. By changes, I mean like if I didn't like what one of the girls was doing, you know, I'd go over and I'd move about and say, `You're stupid for doing that.' That is what a change is, and what she did she did because that is what she did and what I thought about it was irrelevant to what she actually did, it didn't matter . . .

  There were times Susan seemed to disappear. She'd desert the ranch and family as though in moments of panic, as if the "liberation of her soul" was not yet complete. She'd rush off in one of the junk cars, or hitchhike south to Hollywood.

  Manson said, "Sadie was taking things from me, and disappearing for weeks at a time. Like I had some hash, and she took it and was gone. And when she came back I told her, you didn't have to take it. If you wanted it, I'd give it to you. I give anyone anything they wanted, if I had it. They didn't have to take. Another time Sadie took the records I had and sold them. I didn't ask her what she did with the money or anything ... At the ranch I told her to sweep the floor and make me one of those sandwiches, because that is all a woman is for. That is why God put them here, and no girl is going to stand in my way of my thing ...

  Susan says, "We'd get programmed to do things, like stealing, which I took upon myself, really ... The Family would get programmed by Charlie, but it's hard for me to explain it so that you can see the way - the way I see the words that would come from Charlie's mouth - would not come from inside him, it would come from what I call the Infinite. Like, he just said we needed credit cards and we need that and we could use some of this," and Susan would assume she'd have to go out and get them for him. "And also anything that we saw that we needed, it was up to the girls. We knew this, to take care of our men . . ."

  Susan recalls when "we hitchhiked over into an area and we were scared to death," it was something Susan hadn't ever "experienced, and wanted to experience it because everybody else in the Family was doing it - creepy-crawling. They never actually took anything, I don't think, inside the residence other than money. I never actually saw any money that they got from inside any of the residences. This girl and I ... there was an automobile parked on the side of the road. I opened the door and looked inside the glove compartment and saw some credit cards. I reached in and took them. I turned them over to Charlie."

  The girls continued doing everything Charlie wanted them to do, Susan says. "Charlie always told us, `You do what you want to do. If you do not want to do it, do not do it.' But when he would ask me to do something, I felt I had to go ahead and do it because I knew he would do the same thing for me, otherwise he wouldn't ask me to do it ...

  "Then we'd all gather at night and sit down and start singing, and Charlie would always play the guitar and we'd always sing songs and he used to make up the songs. Songs that I have never heard before or words that I have never heard before put together in such beautiful manners. Some were happy, some were very - some left me with an open head, left me just sitting there like I was dead."

  As the Family went through its "changes," Tex, in particular, was changing radically. Stuart Guthrie, a Los Angeles actor, remembers when his brother, Mike, and Tex came to California together. Both had gone to high school and college, and they stayed with Guthrie when they first arrived from Texas. He recalls how Watson was upset at the prospect of Mike going into the army. "The psychological relationship was very much Mike the leader and Tex the follower," Guthrie said, "and when my brother got drafted I think that's why Tex went with Manson, like he didn't have any place to go."

  Guthrie explains that when Tex went for his own army physical exam, "he came in and wanted to clean himself up, so he cut his hair off. Then he went down to the draft board and they didn't take him. That's the last time I saw him until some months later, when he came down from Spahn ranch, and when I saw him again he had changed from a rational human being to a vegetable." Guthrie attributes the change to LSD. "He had been taking drugs every day for a long time, not just smoking grass. He was taking mescaline, acid, speed, acid, acid, acid, acid, acid ... So far gone, it's like I said, `Call your mother, Tex, call your family, they haven't heard from you in over a year. They don't know if you're dead or alive. Call home.' And I had to tell him where his mother lived, and what her phone number was. He couldn't even remember where they lived. He was just a bleeding vegetable, moving around, doing whatever Manson told him to do, like a robot."

  Carl Foster, feeling that on the ranch he was "sinking more and more into a dope-head," recalls, "the girls - they'd do absolutely anything Charlie told them to do. Well, at first when I'd first gotten to know them, I thought it was mostly because he was really an expert at making love. I'd never seen one person, one man, have such control over other human beings. It was just like they had a built-in machine in their heads, and it was Charlie that ran the controls. It was, you see, he had taken over the control of so much of our feelings, and emotions, and even what we'd eat, our drink, the money we had, or whatever we had and he seemed to control our drugs and our sex, too. The girls groveled at his feet. That's a fact - Charlie programmed them like you would a computer. He'd feed suggestions into their heads without them really knowing that he was doing it - he might say to them, `I need some money. This is what I have to have - some money.' He wouldn't come right out and tell them to steal it, but that's just exactly what he meant for them to do. Like myself, later on, he'd never give me an order outright, like to steal something, but he'd buss it into my head by telling me how he needed this or that. Then, the next thing I knew, I was out somewhere stealing and it would be for Charlie ..."

  Foster believes that Charlie is "an insane
genius. I believe to this day he is just about capable of anything and he could work miracles and all. I really think there were times when he didn't believe he was a human being - but he thought of himself as a superman or something put on the earth to be worshipped ... And he would talk to you in a soft, soothing voice like someone lulling you to sleep, and even though he'd later on suggest things that would seem impossible, yet you could not stop yourself - even if you were in a straight world - from going out and doing it."

  In short, life for the Family was becoming the will of Charlie.

  Susan remembers, "Starting about a year or so ago, Charlie said, `I have tricked you into doing what I want you to, and I am using you and you are all aware of that now, and it is like I have a bunch of slaves around me.' And he often called us sheep."

  The Family members who lived at the ranch believed now that they were in paradise; but their lives were no longer their own. They were part of something else - being swept, gliding on a volition other their own. Charlie told them all, "I have brought you to paradise." It didn't matter that he'd tricked them. "There is no beginning now, and there is no end," he preached. "There is no past. There is only now in this infinite time ... We are all one member - one force."

  A leader of the Straight Satans motorcycle club, Danny DeCarlo, first met Manson in March, 1969. "Charlie had a motorcycle, a threewheeler that had a blown engine on it, and he wanted me to fix it. He wanted me to rebuild the engine; on Harleys, I am an expert." DeCarlo fixed the motorcycle at the ranch and stayed on. "I spent seventy-five percent of my time at the ranch. My house was the bunkhouse," which he shared with Bobby Beausoleil. His reason for remaining: "there were a lot of pretty girls up there." DeCarlo was interested in one particular girl, but also he got to know the others. About Susan, he says, "We didn't get along too good." As for Katie: "We talked, that is about it, but I never did nothing, you know, snatched her up or anything." He got to know Tex. DeCarlo said he also met Beausoleil at that time. DeCarlo got to know two other girls - Linda Kasabian, "I know we got together once," and a young girl - Leslie, who'd been with Bobby Beausoleil. DeCarlo says he wasn't interested in her, though "she was interested in me some, but I wouldn't ... She chased me around a lot."