Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  He had grown up behind bars. His real family included con artists, pimps, drug dealers, thieves, muggers, rapists, and murderers. He had known only power relationships in an army of control junkies. Indeed, Charlie Manson was America’s Frankenstein monster, a logical product of the prison system—racist, paranoid, and violent—even if hippie astrologers thought that his fate had been predetermined because he was a triple Scorpio.

  After having lived behind bars for most of his life, Manson began to explore and exploit the countercultural value system, from Haight-Ashbury to Strawberry Fields. Driving his family around in a school bus painted black, Manson stopped at the Hog Farm, whose school bus was painted in rainbow colors. While traveling, the Hog Farmers had found themselves at a fork in the road. Up above them, two sky-writing planes were playing tic-tac-toe, and the Hog Farmers decided to go one way if the X’s won and the other way if the O’s won.

  Now they were back on their land, all in a circle, chanting “om,” which somehow caused the visiting Manson to start choking and gagging, so his family began counter-chanting “evil.” It was an archetypal confrontation. Charlie even tried to exchange one of his girls for Hugh Romney’s wife, Bonnie Jean, but the black bus finally left, mission unaccomplished.

  Manson had convinced himself and his family that the Beatles’ songs—“Helter Skelter” and “Blackbird”—were actually harkening a race war, which he wanted to hasten by leaving clues to make it appear that black militants had done the killing. Stolen credit cards were deliberately thrown away in a black neighborhood. Healter Skelter (sic) was scrawled with a victim’s blood on the refrigerator, and the word war was scratched onto a victim’s stomach.

  Roman Polanski put a $10,000 contract out on Manson’s life.

  After Tim Leary had escaped from Eldridge Cleaver’s clutches, he was arrested by American agents and taken back to the States, then put in solitary confinement at Folsom Prison, in a cell right next to Manson’s. The two “hole-mates” couldn’t see each other, but they could talk. Manson didn’t understand why Leary had given people acid without trying to control them.

  “They took you off the streets,” Charlie explained, “so that I could continue with your work.”

  During Manson’s trial, Richard Nixon sprang his own leak in an encounter with the press corps, revealing the thrust of his speech to a gathering of law enforcement officials, where he had called Manson “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.” The next morning, a huge headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Times shouted: “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.”

  In court, Charlie held up a copy for the jury to see. When I saw that on the news, I said “right on!” for the first time. Behind my rhetoric was the false expectation that a mistrial would be declared because of Nixon’s blunder. But the jury was polled, and in effect they said, “Oh, no, it won’t affect my attitude toward the defendant—after all, Nixon is merely President of the United States.”

  Ed Sanders was covering the Manson trial for the Los Angeles Free Press and working on a book about the case, titled The Family. I wrote to him for permission to print any material that might be omitted from his book because the publisher considered it in bad taste or too controversial. Otherwise, I told him, I would have to make up those missing sections myself. Sanders put a notice in the middle of one of his reports: “Oh, yes, before we ooze onward, I am not, nor shall I be, the author of any future article in The Realist entitled ‘The Parts I Left Out of the Manson Story, by Ed Sanders.’”

  “A joke,” he assured me—but, understandably, a safeguard.

  I had known Sanders for ten years. He was always on the crest of nonviolent political protest and outrageous cultural expression. In 1961 he got arrested with others for trying to swim aboard the Polaris submarine. The next year he published a parody catalog listing actual relics, such as Allen Ginsberg’s cold-cream jar containing one pubic hair. He sent the catalog to universities and sold the items at outlandish prices. But now his courage and determination had taken a different path, and I flew to New York to pore through his Manson files. Sanders was a data addict, and his research notes were written in the form of quatrains. He had become an investigative poet.

  When I returned to San Francisco, a young man with a child on his shoulders came to my house and rang the bell. I opened the door, and he served me with a subpoena. Scientology was accusing me of libel and conspiracy—simply for having announced the nine-word title of an upcoming article—“The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy”—which, ironically, I no longer planned to publish.

  They were suing me for three-quarters of a million dollars. I published their complaint in The Realist, which allowed Scientology to reveal more about itself than anything I could have imagined about Sirhan. My attorney, James Wolpman, filed a petition to remove the suit to a federal court because of the constitutional question it raised concerning freedom of the press.

  Scientology eventually offered to settle out of court for $5,000, but I refused.Then they said they would drop the suit if I would publish an article in The Realist by Chick Corea, a jazz musician and Scientologist (who required those working for him to be Scientologists), but that wasn’t quite the way I made my editorial decisions, and I refused again. Scientology finally dropped their lawsuit altogether. However, their records show that they had other plans for me. Under the heading “Operation Dynamite”—their jargon for a frame-up—a memo read:Got CSW from SFO [San Francisco Office] to not do this on Krassner. I disagree and will pass my comments on to DG I US as to why this should be done. SFO has the idea that Krassner is totally handled and will not attack us again. My feelings are that in PT, he has not got enough financial backing to get out The Realist or other publications and when that occurs, will attack again, maybe more covertly but attack, nonetheless.

  Coincidentally, as I was diving into my Manson research, I received a letter from Charlie himself. He had seen a copy of The Last Supplement in prison. During the trial, I had published a piece of apocrypha in The Realist about his stay at Boys Town—“Charles Manson was My Bunkmate” by Richard Meltzer. A defense attorney read it to Manson and he got pissed off. He complained, “You know how long I stayed in Boys Town? Two days!”

  Now, in response to his letter, I mentioned that the article had been intended only as a satire of media exploitation. He replied: “Yes, brother, the world is a satire and I did see all sides of your story, ‘Charlie’s Bunkmate.’ But I think in Now with no cover. Most people take into their minds bad thoughts and call it joking. Some lie and call it funny. I don’t lie.”

  In pursuit of information, I visited Warren Hinckle. He was my editor at Ramparts, and after that folded, at Scanlan’s, which also folded, but he had been planning to publish an article on the Manson case in Scanlan’s, and now he brought me to former FBI agent William Turner, who had checked out Doris Day. The only connection she could possibly have with the Manson case was that her son, record producer Terry Melcher, had met Charlie and was interested in his music, and that Melcher was a former tenant of the Beverly Hills mansion where the massacre took place. Aha! I realized that could be the focal point of my satire—a torrid affair between Doris Day and Charlie Manson—a perfect metaphor for the coming together of the image and underbelly of Hollywood. Just for the hell of it, I wrote to Manson and asked if he ever had sex with Doris Day.

  His reply: “Yes, and I also fucked Rin-Tin-Tin and the Virgin Mary.”

  I didn’t know in what satirical direction I was heading, so I just continued to absorb whatever details I could find out about the Manson case. A prison psychiatrist at San Quentin told me of an incident he had observed during Manson’s trial. A black inmate said to Manson, “Look, I don’t wanna know about your theories on race, I don’t wanna hear anything about religion, I just wanna know one thing—how’d you get them girls to obey you like that?” Manson replied, “I got a knack.”

  Hinckle also brought me to the renowned private inves
tigator Hal Lipset, who informed me that not only did the Los Angeles Police Department seize pornographic films and videotapes that they found in Sharon Tate’s loft, but also that certain members of the LAPD were selling them. Lipset had talked with one police source who told him exactly which porn flicks were available—a total of seven hours’ worth for a quarter-million dollars. Lipset began reciting a litany of porn videos.

  The most notorious was Greg Bautzer, an attorney for Howard Hughes, with Jane Wyman, the former wife of then-Governor Ronald Reagan. There was Sharon Tate with Dean Martin. There was Sharon with Steve McQueen. There was Sharon with two black bisexual men.

  Lipset recalled, “The cops weren’t too happy about that one.”

  But when he told me there was a videotape of Cass Elliot from the Mamas and the Papas in an orgy with Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers, and Warren Beatty—coincidentally, Brynner and Sellers, together with John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, had offered a $25,000 reward for the capture of the killers—suddenly there was a personal element intruding upon my investigation. In the summer of 1968, Tim Leary and I had been guests on the Les Crane show in Los Angeles; of course I publicized the upcoming Yippie counter-convention. After the taping, we went to a big party at Tommy Smothers’s house, where I met Cass Elliot. We liked each other immediately.

  The next day she called to invite me to dinner at her home that evening. Instead, we decided to meet Leary at a restaurant in Laguna Beach. David Crosby drove us there in a station wagon, while Cass and I cuddled and kissed on a foam-rubber mat. On the way we stopped at the Mystic Arts combination head shop and health-food store, with a magnificent meditation room. Two years later it would burn to the ground, on the same day that all the other head shops in the area were also destroyed by fire.

  Although Cass and I slept together that night, we didn’t have sex. In bed she kept talking about Billy Doyle, who was arriving from Jamaica the next morning. She seemed to be afraid of him. During breakfast the three of us sat around talking about the music scene, drug use, and the politics of protest. Doyle liked to act tough and mysterious.

  “We know all about you,” he told me. “You better watch your step.”

  Now I came across Billy Doyle’s name in The Family. He was the drug connection for two of the victims, Voytek Frykowski and his girlfriend, coffee heiress Abigail Folger. Ed Sanders wrote:Sometime during [the first week in August] a dope dealer from Toronto named Billy Doyle was whipped and video-buggered at [the Tate residence]. In the days before his death, [another victim, Jay] Sebring had complained to a receptionist at his hair shop that someone had burned him for $2,000 worth of cocaine and he wanted vengeance. Billy Doyle was involved in a large-scale dope-import operation involving private planes from Jamaica.

  And Dennis Hopper was quoted in the Los Angeles Free Press:

  They had fallen into sadism and masochism and bestiality—and they recorded it all on videotape too. The L.A. police told me this.

  I know that three days before they were killed, twenty-five people were invited to that house to a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.

  Naturally, Billy Doyle felt it was rude of Sebring and Frykowski to tie him to a chair, whip him, and then fuck him in the ass while a video camera taped the proceedings before a live audience. But police investigators eliminated him as a suspect in the murders. However, on Friday evening, just a few hours before the massacre took place, Joel Rostau—the boyfriend of Sebring’s receptionist and an intermediary in a cocaine ring —visited Sebring and Frykowski at the Tate house, to deliver mescaline and coke.

  During the Manson trial, several associates of Sebring were murdered, including Rostau, whose body was found in the trunk of a car in New York. Ed Sanders, who had already engaged in years of agonizing research into the Manson case, remarked that, personally, he had no desire for permanent meditation next to a spare tire.

  So it appeared that the Manson family had actually served as some sort of hit squad for a drug ring. What a great satirical premise.

  When President Kennedy was killed, Mae Brussell was a twice-divorced suburban homemaker with five children. Her seven-year-old daughter saw Lee Harvey Oswald on TV—he had a black eye and was saying, “I didn’t do it, I haven’t killed anybody, I don’t know what this is all about.” She decided to send him her teddy bear. It was all wrapped up and ready to mail when she saw Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby on TV. Mae had to wonder, “What kind of world are we bringing our children into?”

  One bit of research led to another, and she started a weekly radio program, “Dialogue Assassination,” originating on her local rock station, KLRB in Carmel, California, and syndicated to a half-dozen other stations. What had begun as a hobby turned into a lifetime pilgrimage. She purchased the Warren Commission report for $86, studying and cross-referencing the entire twenty-six volumes, without the aid of a computer. It took her eight years and 27,000 typewritten pages. She was overwhelmed by the difference between the evidence and the commission’s conclusion that there had been only a single assassin. In fact, she concluded:

  “Lee Harvey Oswald was set up to take the fall. But the Warren Commission ignored physical evidence from the scene of the crime—bullets, weapons, clothing, wounds—and based its judgment that Oswald was just a disturbed loner on the testimony of some thirty Russian emigres in the Dallas-Forth Worth area. Most of them, according to the testimony, were affiliated with anti-Communist organizations that had collaborated with the Nazis during the war.”

  Then she began to study the history of six hundred Nazis brought to this country after World War II under Project Paperclip. They were infiltrated into hospitals, universities, and the aerospace industry, further developing their techniques in propaganda, mind control, and behavior modification. She observed how the patterns of murder in the United States were identical to those in Nazi Germany. The parallels between the rise of Adolf Hitler and the rise of Richard Nixon were frightening to Mae. Hitler came into power as the result of more than four hundred political assassinations. So, rather than just investigating the death of John Kennedy, she collected articles about the murders of people involved in his assassination.

  And, instead of limiting her research to the killing of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace, she began paying attention to the untimely, suspicious deaths of judges, attorneys, labor leaders, professors, civil rights activists, reporters, authors, Black Panthers, Chicanos, Native Americans—and Mary Jo Kopechne. Mae believed that Chappaquiddick was yet another CIA-orchestrated dirty deed; the National Safety Council had never found a single case of anybody escaping from a submerged car the way Senator Ted Kennedy supposedly had.

  One afternoon in February 1972, Mae read in The Realist about the lawsuit in response to my announcement of “The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy.” She immediately phoned to assure me that Scientologists had nothing to do with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. “Oh, I knew that,” I told her, “but the article was just gonna be a satire, and they took it seriously. I’m working on something else now instead. Let me ask, do you know anything about the Manson case?”

  “Of course,” she said. “The so-called Manson murders were actually orchestrated by military intelligence in order to destroy the counterculture movement. It’s no different from the Special Forces in Vietnam, disguised as Vietcong, killing and slaughtering to make the Vietcong look bad.”

  “Oh, really? Could I come see you?”

  Hassler drove me to Mae Brussell’s home. She was about fifty, plump and energetic, wearing a long peasant dress patch-worked with philosophical tidbits, knitting sweaters for her children while she breathlessly described the architecture of an invisible government. Her walls were lined with forty file cabinets containing 1,600 subject categories.

  Every day, Mae would digest ten newspapers from around the country, supplementing that diet with items sent to her by a network of res
earchers and young conspiracy students known as Brussell Sprouts—plus magazines, underground papers, unpublished manuscripts, court affidavits, documents from the National Archives, FBI and CIA material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and hundreds of books on espionage and assassination. Each Sunday she would sort out the previous week’s clippings into various categories as though she were conducting a symphony of horror.

  “About 80 percent of all CIA intelligence information comes from printed news,” she said, “so I am doing what they are doing, without being paid, and without selectively writing my own history, but using all the material.”

  “So how come you’re still alive?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m not,” she chuckled. “I’m a robot.”

  But it was obviously a question that she had considered. If she knew so much, why hadn’t they killed her?

  “The CIA works on a basis of need-to-know,” she explained. “Because if you know too much, you may not do what you’re supposed to do. You must have a given order to do something, but if you know that the end result is that somebody’s going to be blown up twelve miles away—and all you’re supposed to do is deliver an envelope—you may think about it. One agent called me—he had killed ten people for the CIA. When members of the CIA cut his jugular vein, he had to sew it up, and he vowed vengeance against them because he had killed ten people, and when he was ordered to kill a member of Congress, he wanted to stop. Various agents listen to my program. It’s a safety valve for them, on how far things are going.”

  “Are you saying that the intelligence community has allowed you to function precisely because you know more than any of them?”

  “Exactly,” she said, laughing at her own truth.