Some people think of the ending. But the sequence that got to me was where Mia Farrow, playing Rosemary, discovers her husband who is in cahoots with their elderly neighbors and has drugged her. That scene is both a frightfully sadistic yet satirical send-up of Devil worship and the social obsession with terror.
Then, there’s the scene in which Rosemary, still in a trance-like state, is pinned naked to the bed. Her husband, Guy, Satanic ringleaders, Roman and Millie Castevet, and a grotesquely bare-naked clique of their brethren surround her. Some of the witches are chanting ritualistic hymns while others paint Rosemary’s breasts and torso with occult symbols in blood. During these hallucinations, Polanski occasionally gives us Rosemary’s point of view with his camera. For instance, her husband, Guy, changes into a beast with hairy arms, scaly hands, and claws at the ends of his fingers. Most frightening of all were his yellow eyes resembling the Devil’s.
Being semi-consciously raped, Rosemary cries out, “This is no dream! This is really happening!”
Everyone’s worst nightmare came true for an instant.
When I complained to Jean that I thought the director adopted a rather quaint detachment toward rape, he replied, “Everybody wants something wicked sometime. Just ask Roman Polanski.”
I thought that was a clever but callous thing to say.
January 17th was the date of my twenty-sixth birthday. I spent a good part of the day shopping in and around Kensington Market with my girlfriend. I’d known Gabrielle for more than a year, since we first met in the school of physical and health education. She was on the swim team, and I had been, unashamedly, courting my way through a few of the women’s varsity squads. We’d been seeing each other steadily the past three or four months since beginning teacher’s college. Gabe was studying to be an elementary school teacher.
She had a beautiful, substantial swimmer’s body—broad shoulders, dark hair, big brown almond-shaped eyes and a wonderfully soft pale complexion with freckles. I liked most things about her except that she wasn’t well read, and she wasn’t any more emotionally available to me than I was to her or any other woman. The fact is, I wasn’t a very good boyfriend. Even sex between us was awkward and hesitant on both of our parts. Lately, we’d begged off spending too many consecutive nights together. No doubt we each had our reasons why, but we never discussed them. Whatever doubts or suspicions I withheld, I suspected Gabrielle might have still been seeing her old boyfriend. I didn’t mind all that much, since I’d been carrying on the same way myself.
Gabrielle’s best friend, Karen, as it turns out, already knew my friend Jean from French classes they’d taken together. Big world, small café. Just ask Roman Polanski. So it was on my birthday that we four gathered to celebrate at Jean’s apartment on Bathurst Street. On the way there, the girls and I stopped for coffee, milk, butter, eggs and Betty Crocker brownie mix.
Everything in Jean’s refrigerator, except the bottles of beer, had to be thrown out when we got there. So we ordered Chinese take-out from the Palace Garden and carried back tubs of rice, stinky tofu, and things like baked octopus on top of our odd-looking pizzas. Jean also invited his friend and houseguest, Martin, to celebrate, and they went out to the liquor control board on Spadina Avenue to pick up four bottles of Henkel and one marvelous four-liter jug of red Portuguese wine.
Martin was an old friend of Jean’s from McGill University, who was spending a few nights in town on his way back to Los Angeles. He said he was a freelance journalist for the “underground press,” which I thought sounded cool. To make a living at that you had to be pretty good.
“Anything you’ve written I might have seen on the newsstands?” I asked.
“Not much in Canada. Only pamphlets I wrote when I was a kid in Montreal. I live in LA now. I did write something once that was picked up by Georgia Straight on a bounce. But mostly I write for offbeat sheets like The Barb and now a few things for the LA Free Press. Still learning the ropes, you know, makin’ the rounds.”
“Working on anything interesting at the moment?” Jean asked him.
“Right now, I’m delving into a story on museums of death in California.”
That’s when the girls left the room and returned to the kitchen.
Martin Bijaux was five years older and tougher looking than the rest of us. He looked to me like a thirty-something Maurice “Mom” Boucher without the brush cut. Heavy set. Long, straight, light brown hair to his shoulders. I wasn’t too rapt until we got high and he started seriously talking. When he mentioned a friend of his who once interviewed Roman Polanski, I was impressed. That reference led me to ask him what he knew about the Manson Family and Leslie Van Houten. It turned out he knew quite a lot more than I had expected.
Talking to Martin kept me, if not the others, deeply enthralled for most of the evening. I remember the slow motion dances the girls teased us with, mimicking underwater dance moves they’d been taught in synchronized swimming. I wasn’t tempted. Someone cut the lights. There were twenty-seven birthday candles (one for good luck) on a bakery cake and a blue-on-white maple leaf outline of a hockey player wearing number “26” in the icing. Everyone gave me a book as a present. Everyone except Jean, who was getting drunk and couldn’t find his. Gabrielle made me the gift of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Martin handed me two unwrapped copies of Rolling Stone magazine. One of them was at least six years old, and both were about Charlie Manson.
Martin flipped open one of the magazines to show me the page beginning “The Year of the Fork, Night of the Hunter.” Interview journalists, David Felton and David Dalton, conducted this sit-down with Manson in prison. The other article, titled “Manson,” was written by a Hollywood talent scout who went by the pseudonym Lance Fairweather. His real name, Martin explained, was Gregg Jakobson—a friend of The Beach Boys’ drummer Dennis Wilson.
It was Jakobson who introduced Manson to music producer Terry Melcher. Melcher lived with actress Candice Bergen at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. I already knew from reading Helter Skelter that, after the couple moved out, the next residents to occupy the estate were film director Roman Polanski and his pregnant wife Sharon.
Gabe and Karen said they were both getting bored having to hear any more about “the bloody Manson Family” from us. We were politely reminded it was a birthday party after all. I was feeling high, and with red wine things always got blurry. But I did recognize that several things were happening at once, and some of it I wasn’t fully aware of. Maybe the girls getting bored was just part of it. Someone had taken Led Zeppelin’s Presence off the turntable and replaced it with David Bowie’s Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Martin and I kept on talking and ignored all the ruckus. But things on the dance floor began heating up.
“Sex will be expected later,” Gabe declared out of nowhere.
She had one arm bent on her hip and the other crooked with her head in her palm. She was looking at me, but her face could be seen in more ways than one. Drunken Cubism. I noticed that got Jean’s attention. I thought I detected some drunken slurring in the way Gabrielle said it, so I suspected she might either be lying or else just showing off. She and Karen whispered to each other and giggled before drifting back to the kitchen to drink some more champagne and clear away leftovers. Soon enough, the girls were back to singing and dancing with a thoroughly sloshed Jean Cousineau to accompany them.
Nodding toward the Rolling Stone magazines he gave me, Martin explained, “Before I left Montreal, I dug those out of a box I had stashed at my brother’s. Jean told me you were interested in Manson when we spoke on the phone. So I brought them with me knowing it was your birthday.”
“I appreciate that. It’s a real treat, Martin. Thanks. I’ll read them with interest.”
At one point later on, Jean came groovin’ and jiving back into the living room with each of the ladies in tow. Th
ey were waving joints around like children’s sparklers. With his free hand, Jean handed me a hastily wrapped (with tin foil and tape) copy of The Garbage People by John Gilmore. Then he went drifting and spinning back toward the girls. This was fine with me since I wanted more time to talk to Martin alone.
“Come with me, brother. I have something to show you,” Karen said, hooking both Jean and Gabe by their elbows and steering them back to the kitchen.
Something they were baking in there had begun to smell good. Turns out Martin contributed a vial or two of the honey oil he brought with him, and the girls added that to the brick of hash Karen had crumbled into the brownie mix.
“Those smell pretty good,” I said, bringing Martin another tumbler of red wine.
He moaned insincerely, “Oh no, not more dessert. I had too much food and cake already. I don’t think I can take it.”
But, judging from the size of the man, it looked to me like he’d taken it plenty of times—without apprehension.
“Peter, you know how Van Houten met Manson, don’t you?” Martin asked me. I said I knew very little about that part of the story—except I did know it was through Leslie’s boyfriend.
“Beausoleil, the guy who killed Gary Hinman, introduced them,” I said.
“That’s right. It was Bobby Beausoleil who brought her to Manson. A real ladies’ man, from what I understand. Did you know that when Leslie met him in San Francisco, the first thing she told Bobby was that she would love him forever? She thought he was the most beautiful man in the world. It’s all in the book Jean just gave you. No matter that the prick worshiped himself as the Devil. Same as Manson. She goes in for the strangest dudes, doesn’t she?
“Did you know,” Martin added, “Bobby told a reporter I know that the first time he had sex with Leslie they were both tripping on acid.”
“The heart has its reasons,” I said.
“Know what else? The dude liked to dress up. Something weird about that one.”
“Sex as theater perhaps?” I was guessing, torn between horselaughs and grimacing yuckiness.
Martin said, “Yeah, well, to each his own. Both Beausoleil and Manson had a thing for kinky getups and sex fantasies about them in common. They were both into drugs, music, and girls.”
Who wasn’t, I thought, so I shrugged and let Martin continue.
“They thought they were gonna become big rock stars and be like the next Lennon and McCartney. Too much acid. But Beausoleil always had girls because of his looks. Charlie had lucky charms. As a pimp, Charlie saw he could use a guy like Bobby to lure more girls to his cult. The girls in turn would lure more men, and Manson needed the men for protection.”
“Drugs, music, girls, and violence,” I amended. “What were all the guns, knives, bikers and swords at Spahn all about anyway?”
Martin said, “You know Manson’s a paranoid racist...”
“Is that all?”
“Among other things, yeah. He was afraid of the Black Panthers, especially after he and Tex Watson stole two grand from a drug dealer named Bernard Crowe. Manson was worried Crowe would bring some of his gang to even the score. Charlie ended the threats by shooting Crowe in the stomach. He thought he killed him. Only he didn’t. But Crowe never reported the shooting to police. That was just a week or so before Tate.”
“Yes,” I said, “I remember reading about that in Helter Skelter.”
“Yeah, well, there’s more…”
The whole time Martin and I were having this conversation, the two-on-one play in the kitchen was getting louder and wilder. And why not? It was a party, after all, and everyone did their own thing for the most part.
The party ended neither with a whimper nor with a bang, as it turned out. I shoveled Gabrielle out of the taxi and into bed at my place, where she quickly passed out. So much for the “Let there be sex!” declaration. Just as well. That too was becoming a puzzle without all the pieces. So that’s how I began my twenty-seventh orbit of Helios. The same as the first one, more or less, sleepless and naked—the same way I’ll probably go out.
5
Leslie in the Sky
With Diamonds
Friday, February 11th, 1977. The competitive indoor track and field season had begun. I knew Olympic Coach Fred Foot by reputation long before I worked with him at the University of Toronto Track Club. I was also Professor Bruce Kidd’s graduate assistant at the school of physical and health education. That’s how I first met Andy Higgins, in fact. And it was upon their faith and friendship that my future at the University of Toronto, if I had any, would unfold. So I naively assumed that since Foot had inspired the likes of Kidd and Higgins, he would have the same effect on me. No such luck.
Fred Foot was a bona fide legend in Canadian track and field. Since the 1950s, he successfully coached a steady stream of athletes to the Olympic Games and all other major trials in which Canadians are eligible to compete. For example, with such famous runners as Bill Crothers and Bruce Kidd, Fred Foot inspired generations of other athletes and coaches to follow. He gave our country’s best the belief they could compete with the rest of the world, and, reliably, his beliefs were proven right. Which made things worse for me though.
Under Foot’s tutelage, long-distance runner Bruce Kidd won eleven Canadian Championships during his career. He also won five US National titles and one in the United Kingdom in distances from a mile to a marathon. Bruce was only twenty-one years old when he competed at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Both Kidd and Foot had been instrumental in getting the Toronto Star involved in sponsoring the annual Star-Maple Leaf Gardens indoor track meet, and tonight was the night.
This had always been a premier athletics event, with several internationally ranked athletes competing each year. The year before, in fact, my friend Bruce Simpson won the pole vault with a clearance of 5.38 meters (more than seventeen and a half feet) and was ranked among the top five in the world in his sport. So, once again, we looked forward to a memorable evening. I invited Gabrielle, Karen and Jean to come along and found them the best seats close to the action.
One of Foot’s athletes decided to pass on her sixty-meter heat so she could stay fresh for the two hundred later. But this was late in the day for such changes. It now meant she’d have to run the heat anyway to not be disqualified later. I told her to pull up right after the gun and she did, although she made it look terribly obvious. Someone complained to the officials. I was willing to withstand a verbal rap on the knuckles for the mix-up, if only Coach Foot had left it at that.
Fred chewed me out in front of a crowd of athletes, spectators, officials, coaches and snack vendors too—anyone within general earshot, including my friends in the stands. I could feel my face blushing and burning. Finally, the esteemed coach stormed away in one direction, and I just as quickly launched myself with the opposite bearing. I’d been publicly humiliated. I was angry and scared.
Later that night, after the meet, Gabrielle, Karen, Jean and I shared a pitcher of draft and a basket of wings somewhere on Yonge Street. Neither Gabe nor I was much in the mood for clumsy lovemaking afterward, so I kissed her goodnight at the subway at Wellesley Street and walked the rest of the way home through Queen’s Park alone. Jean and Karen went their way as well.
As a matter of course, when I got home, the first thing I did was check for mail in the front hall. On top of the rad there was a letter posted to me with a US postage stamp. The return address stamped in the corner read:
NAME: L. VAN HOUTEN
BOOKING NO. 4186-613 BKS. NO. 5001
P.O. BOX 54320 TERMINAL ANNEX
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90054
Twice on the back with the utmost surety was stamped: INSPECTED LOS ANGELES COUNTY JAIL. How reassuring that was, I thought. I just sort of weighed it in my hand at first. It was lighter and thinner than the letter I’d sent her six weeks b
efore. What the heck. I couldn’t wait any longer and tore the envelope open without daring to imagine what she had to say.
The letter was written in pencil on two pages of yellow legal-sized paper. Leslie thanked me for taking the time to write a long letter. She mentioned that her lawyer, Maxwell Keith, had passed it along as soon as he got it. She wrote a few things about her transfer from the California Institution for Women in Frontera to the Sybil Brand County Jail in Los Angeles. She’d spent time there before, when on trial in 1970-71.
“Not much has changed,” she said.
Sybil Brand was a short distance from her mother Jane’s house, somewhere I’d never heard of, called Monterey Park. Her mom was a teacher. Bonus, I thought. Her brother David and sister Betsy lived in and around LA as well and could now visit her more often than before. Her brother Paul Jr. lived with his wife in San Francisco, and her dad was working up north somewhere in Washington State. Pretty tame stuff for the most part. But still, it was a start.
I played both sides of Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony, got high and reread Leslie’s letter a couple of times. Then, I started to write a response. I stayed up late and woke up early. There was a minefield of scattered, crumpled paper on my desk and all over the floor. Each time I’d finished a page of rough notes and read what I had, I tore them up and started over.
It was Saturday morning, and I had nowhere special to be. So, naturally, I went for a run. Since my competitive sprinting days were over, I ran more for my mind than my body. The physical attributes were now more of a side-effect.
The weather was crisp and clear, and the sun shone through halos and curls of high whirling clouds. I headed west along Davenport Road, up the Baldwin Steps and right on through Spadina Park past Casa Loma. Last evening’s skirmish with Fred Foot needed to sweat itself out.
No Journey's End: My Tragic Romance with Ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten Page 5