by Greg King
Eventually, Manson grew tired of San Francisco, and the Haight in particular. Ironically, he disliked the criminal element which was rapidly taking over the district. He felt confined by the city.
Then, too, there were other fringe groups coming to the surface: Jesus freaks, the Satanists, the endless stream of bikers who poured into the city in long lines of motorcycles. There was simply too much competition, too many others trying to attract the attention of the flower children, and too much freedom of thought for Manson’s liking.
In September, 1967, Manson, Brunner and Fromme moved south, renting a house in Santa Barbara. Here, they met eighteen-year-old Patricia Krenwinkel, daughter of a respected, middle-class insurance salesman from Inglewood. A serious young woman, Krenwinkel was a former Sunday school teacher and Bible student; at one point, she had considered becoming a nun. Manson Family member Charles Watson later recalled: “Even though she was the sweetest of the girls, none of the men except Charlie ever got involved with her sexually. She was a little stand-offish.… When Charlie started Krenwinkel trying to get bikers involved with the Family by offering them girls, they all complained that Katie was too hairy.”15
By the time she reached Manson, Krenwinkel suffered from low self-esteem, which led to her heavy involvement with various drugs. “I never felt like I had a sense of who I really wanted to be or who I wanted to become,” she later declared. Cannily, Manson recognized her insecurities, and managed to turn them to his advantage, paying attention to her. “That night,” Krenwinkel remembers, “we slept together. And I felt really loved by him, almost immediately, mostly because I think at that point I was really desperate for someone to care. When we made love, all I remember is just crying and crying to this man, because he said, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful.’ I couldn’t believe that, I just kept crying.”16 Soon, Krenwinkel became a convert, and quit her job as an insurance clerk to join the Family.
In much the same way as Mary Brunner had allowed Lynette Fromme to share her bed with Manson, both girls now welcomed Krenwinkel. “It was awkward,” recalls Fromme of the situation, “but it easily became familiar.”17 Manson and his female followers headed north in a Volkswagon van, through San Francisco and up the coast into Oregon and on to Seattle. They stayed for several weeks; Manson wanted to look up some former fellow inmates, and also to try to locate his mother, who had moved to the Pacific Northwest a few years earlier. On this trip, Manson met twenty-five-year-old Bruce Davis, a former editor of his high school yearbook and student at the University of Tennessee. By the time he met Manson, Davis had been heavily involved with drugs. Davis joined Manson and his women, and became his principal male disciple.
During one of their frequent trips around California, the Family discovered an old school bus for sale. Manson traded his Volkswagon van as a down payment and took possession. He and his followers removed the seats from the rear two-third of the bus, creating a living space complete with refrigerator, portable stove and numerous pillows. They painted the exterior of the bus, including the windows, black. At the helm of the bus, Manson and his group of followers set off for Los Angeles.
On the way, they stopped in San Francisco, where, at a party, they met nineteen-year-old Susan Atkins. Atkins was an extremely troubled young woman. Her mother had died of cancer when Susan was fourteen, and the following years had been marked with family quarrels, involvement with drugs and sex, and ended when she ran away at the age of sixteen. Atkins became a waitress in San Francisco, staying with several habitual criminals who made a living holding up convenience stores. In 1966, she was arrested by Oregon State Police for riding in a stolen car, and spent three months in jail. Placed on probation for two years, she headed back to San Francisco, where she worked as a topless dancer. Occasionally, she danced at Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, participating in his Black Masses.
Atkins’ first meeting with Manson made a deep impact. She listened to his music and was enchanted. They had sex that first night, and Manson told her to imagine that she was making love with her father, which, according to Atkins, heightened the experience immeasurably. Rechristened Sadie by Manson, Susan Atkins became the newest member of his roving Family. “Susan,” recalled Watson, “was the evangelist of the group, always praising Charlie, repeating his teaching, urging the rest of us to give ourselves to him totally, even while her own ego was fighting back sometimes, asserting itself against his domination. It wasn’t so much that she resisted doing what Charlie told her; she just wanted to be special; she refused to be annihilated.”18
Manson picked up another female follower, Ruth Ann Morehouse, the teenage daughter of former Methodist minister Dean Morehouse. Called Ouisch by the Family, she had run away from her family in Ukiah to join up with Manson after meeting him on a previous visit to the Bay area. Her father, understandably upset, called the police and tried to have Manson arrested for harboring a teenage runaway, but Manson managed to save himself by convincing Morehouse that he meant his daughter no harm, talking of his ideas of peace and love. He capped this triumph by turning the former minister on to LSD. Thereafter, Morehouse not only allowed his daughter to join the Family, but also himself became one of its fringe members.
One of the most amazing aspects in the early years of the Manson Family is the sheer number of important contacts which they had made. On arriving in Los Angeles in the fall of 1967, Manson managed to secure recording time for his music at Universal. He made several demos; these brought no attention but, he claims in his autobiography, he was allowed free run of the studios, and became friendly with numerous celebrities. Manson asserts that he had sex with many of these important personages, heavily implying that their tastes were far from wholesome. “I could authenticate experiences with some of those in Hollywood that would make the sexual practices I enjoyed look pure and innocent,” he later declared.19
Eventually, the Family settled in the Topanga Canyon area, in a house known as the Spiral Staircase. While in residence at the Spiral Staircase, the Family first became involved with the numerous Satanic groups operating in the area. Cultists gravitated to the house, which was owned by a woman apparently involved in both Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in San Francisco and several other fringe groups, and the rituals the Family witnessed included Black Masses, animal sacrifice and blood drinking.20
Once Manson took up residence in Los Angeles, his contacts with the occult—and the contacts of those who surrounded him—continued. Manson himself acknowledged that the time he and his Family spent at the Spiral Staircase, and the people they encountered there, was the beginning of the darker side of their existence. “I think I can honestly say our philosophy—fun and games, love and sex, peaceful friendship for everyone—began changing into the madness that eventually engulfed us in that house.” 21
Manson met another group of people whom he described as the “Devil’s Disciples,” and accompanied several members north on a trip to Mendocino. Just how heavily involved Manson and his followers were in these groups is difficult to determine. But, in spite of Manson’s later claims that he disliked the activity surrounding the Spiral Staircase, a wealth of secondary evidence suggests just the opposite—that he and his followers went far beyond anything they ever encountered at Topanga Canyon.
One of the attendees at these parties was twenty-year-old Robert Beausoleil. Author Truman Capote would later describe him as handsome, “but in a rather husterlish camp-macho style.”22 He ran away when he was twelve, after suffering, according to his account, years of sexual and physical abuse. At fourteen he was made a ward of the Court and sent to reform school.23 Wandering in Los Angeles, he made a living as a rock musician and occasional actor. In 1968, he appeared in two low-budget films: a “western-porno” called Ramrodder, starring with soon-to-be fellow Manson family member Catherine Share, and, a documentary called Mondo Hollywood, which, ironically, also featured a segment on Jay Sebring.
“To me, Devil-worship was a lot of shit,” Beausoleil once declared.24 But gradua
lly, he became indoctrinated, and through the use of acid came to at least accept the basics of Satanism. When first meeting Manson, Beausoleil told him that he was the devil, and he himself was on an all-meat diet. His most obvious Satanic link was to film director Kenneth Anger.
Kenneth Anger was an avant-garde filmmaker who used experimentation and intense visuals to create dream-like images on screen. His works were nightmarish mixtures of psychedelic pictures, violence, music and color. Anger himself had been a follower of the infamous Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed Great Beast and England’s premier occult figure in the early years of this century. In the late 1960s he joined Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in San Francisco.25
Anger met Beausoleil in 1967, while he was preparing to film the second part of a Satanic trilogy, Lucifer Rising. The first installment, Invocation, had been released the previous year. Anger hired Beausoleil to star in his new film, playing the part of Lucifer. In addition, Beausoleil formed an eleven-piece band, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, which provided the score for the film. Before filming was complete, however, Anger and Beausoleil got into some kind of disagreement, and the latter reportedly made off with a chunk of the completed footage. Nevertheless, Anger was able to complete Lucifer Rising, and had enough stock footage left to do the third installment, Invocation of My Demon Brother, which again featured Beausoleil as Lucifer.26 Anger declared at the film’s premier, “My reason for filming has nothing to do with ‘cinema’ at all. It’s a transparent excuse for capturing people.… I consider myself as working Evil in an evil medium.”27
The stay at the Spiral Staircase was brief; after a few months, Manson moved his Family out, and, at Beausoleil’s invitation, they camped out at the ruins of a burnt-out mansion he had recently rented in Topanga Canyon. Together with Beausoleil, Manson formed a band called The Milky Way. They had one, short-lived performance at a country-western club in the Canyon, but were fired after a single set. The owner claimed that they were attracting the wrong kind of crowd to his establishment.28
Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil were, in spite of their musical connection, largely at odds with each other. Each was a powerful, determined personality, and each had his own set of female followers. But Beausoleil, unlike Manson, was not obsessed with the idea that he was a latter-day prophet sent to preach a new way of life to the younger generation. Although Beausoleil became a member of the Family, and later committed murder on Manson’s behalf, he was always on the fringe of the group, coming and going at will, and was never caught up in the Helter Skelter philosophy.
During this time, the Family continued to grow. One new convert to Manson’s way of life was Dianne Lake. Known in the Family as Snake, Lake had joined the famous Hog Farm Commune at the age of thirteen, and left with Manson when he visited the encampment. Catherine Share, called Gypsy within the Family, also came into Manson’s orbit. The daughter of Hungarian-German-Jewish parents, she had been born in Paris in 1942, and was brought to the United States eight years later when she was adopted by a California family. By the time she joined the Manson Family, Share had attended several years of college, been married and divorced, and acted in several small film roles.
Other new members included Sandra Good, daughter of a well-to-do California stockbroker; Brooks Poston; Kitty Lutesinger; sixteen-year-old Paul Watkins, known in the Family as Little Paul; and Nancy Pitman, called Brenda within the Family, who had come to Manson through the latter’s friendship with Deirdre Lansbury, daughter of actress Angela Lansbury. By this time, too, Manson had become a father again, when Mary Brunner gave birth to a son, Valentine Michael Manson, whom they called Pooh Bear.
In the summer of 1968, Sandra Good, through a friend, arranged for the Family to visit the Spahn Movie Ranch, just above the town of Chatsworth in the Simi Hills at the northern fringe of the San Fernando Valley. The ramshackle collection of decaying sets stood as scenery for films like Duel in the Sun and the television series The Lone Ranger.29 It was owned by eighty-year old George Spahn, who, crippled with arthritis and nearly blind, was no longer up to its day-to-day running. Manson arranged for the Family to move into the collection of collapsing, haphazard movie sets and shacks; in return for this housing, he and his Family would take care of the ranch and the horses which were rented out to visitors, and cook and clean for George Spahn. Contrary to popular belief, however, the Family’s residence at Spahn Ranch was never continuous for very long. They stayed for several months at a time, alternating between it and other houses for the next year-and-a-half.
The Spahn Movie Ranch stood just off the old Santa Susanna Pass Road, sprawling across a stretch of desert snuggled between the Simi Mountains and Topanga Canyon. A number of dry creeks and a freshwater stream crossed the land, which was filled with enormous rocks and boulders. At some distance from the main buildings was a waterfall and a large rock formation with a shallow cave in the side of a cliff. The movie set itself was near the roadway, a fake western town, with a boardwalk along which such buildings as the Longhorn Saloon, a jail, a hotel, the Rock City Cafe, an undertaker’s parlor, a carriage house filled with dusty old vehicles, and a number of smaller stores were constructed. A barn and coral stood off to one side, along with several bunk houses and trailers used by the ranch hands. A little further up the fire road stood a large ranch house, and several shacks into which the Family first moved.
Aside from a number of those who would come and go, the Manson Family was now almost complete. By the end of the summer, Leslie Van Houten, Steve Grogan and Charles Watson would join. And, by the end of the summer, Charles Manson would be back on his quest to conquer the musical world.
Chapter 19
Wilson and Melcher
In the summer of 1968, Charles Manson made his most important social and business contacts, two men who were to be deeply involved with the Family during the following eventful year. The first of these was Dennis Wilson, drummer of the rock group The Beach Boys. The second man, Terry Melcher, would play an even greater and, for Sharon Tate, ultimately more fatal role in Manson’s life.
Dennis Wilson, singer and drummer for The Beach Boys, lived at the time in a large house set in the middle of a three-acre estate at 14400 Sunset Boulevard. Formerly the hunting lodge of Will Rogers, the house was surrounded with manicured lawns and a swimming pool in the shape of the state of California.1 Wilson, having gone through a messy divorce, frequently picked up hitchhikers while driving through Los Angeles, taking them back to his house for sex and drugs. One day, he picked up two female hitchhikers, Ella Bailey and Patricia Krenwinkel, both members of the Manson Family. Back at his Sunset Boulevard residence, Wilson listened for several hours while the two women spoke almost exclusively of a man they knew named Charlie.
Wilson had a recording session that evening, but he allowed the two girls to stay at his house in his absence. When he returned at three in the morning, he discovered a black-painted school bus parked in his driveway. On entering his own house, he found the living room full of a dozen or more scantily clad women; in the middle of the group was Charles Manson. Frightened, Wilson asked, “Are you going to hurt me?” Manson approached him and said, “Do I look like I’m going to hurt you, brother?” while he knelt down and began to kiss Wilson’s feet, a favorite action to demonstrate his humbleness. Wilson was suitably impressed: he allowed Manson and his Family to stay with him for several months.2
Manson and Wilson spent a good deal of time discussing song-writing and singing duets. Although Wilson sat through these long musical sessions, and tried to promote Manson heavily to others he knew in the industry, he later told Vincent Bugliosi that “Charlie never had a musical bone in his body.”3 While Wilson and Manson chatted happily, the women of the Family cleaned the house, shopped, and cooked. At night, they provided Wilson with sexual entertainment, but soon enough, the singer put a stop to this. Most of the Manson Family had a number of venereal diseases, and Wilson took them all to his Beverly Hills doctor for penicillin shots—“probably
the largest gonorrhea bill in history,” he later said.4
Soon, Wilson had cause to regret his generosity. The Family members simply appropriated anything and everything they wanted. Manson continually asked for money, to pay off creditors, to buy new musical instruments, to pay for studio time, to buy drugs. Most of Wilson’s clothes disappeared as well, worn by the family or simply given away by them to people they met on the streets. Then, too, there was the occasion when several members of the Family took Wilson’s uninsured $21,000 Ferrari and smashed it into the side of a mountain near Spahn Ranch, totaling the vehicle.5 Susan Atkins’ teeth needed to be fixed, and Wilson paid the bill for her dentist. He even gave Manson a number of gold records which had been awarded to him as a member of The Beach Boys. Altogether, Wilson later estimated that he ended up losing about $100,000 of his money or belongings to the Manson Family.6 After the murders in the summer of 1969, Wilson commented, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world, because I got off only losing my money.”7
The other important personage introduced to Charles Manson that summer was Terry Melcher. Melcher was the son of Doris Day, and worked as a producer at Columbia Records. His interests had included the groups The Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders. In addition, he also headed a number of smaller music publishing and television related businesses. If anyone could pull the strings in Hollywood for Manson, it was Melcher.
Melcher first met Manson at a party at Dennis Wilson’s house. He walked into a room to find Manson sitting in the middle of a group of admiring females, gently strumming his guitar. Whether or not Melcher was impressed by Manson’s disputed musical abilities, he agreed to his friend Wilson’s suggestion that he arrange for some studio time for Manson in the near future.