Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  The closest he ever came was, ironically, earlier that week. Charlie, odd as it might sound, was lamenting the price of his fame. “How can I win?” he asked rhetorically. “Look at my cards. Cult leader. Mass murderer. Dope dealer. Con man. The Antichrist. You know, I’m like a snake in prison. I got no arms, no legs, just a mouth and a tail. I don’t bite anyone, but I wag my tail and show my fangs, and everybody freaks out!”

  As always, it never occurred to him that if he stopped wagging his tail and showing his fangs, everybody might stop freaking out. And if everybody stopped freaking out, he might get his arms and legs back. In fact, he had a chance, an admittedly slim one, but a chance to accomplish his appendage regeneration that very same week. If Charlie could only harness his charisma and oratory skills and pour them into something positive, he might be able to dazzle the parole board and convince them to at least consider the possibility of one day setting him free. Sure, the headlines would be brutal, but this wasn’t about headlines. This was about Charlie performing in a room before a captive audience that wanted to hear what he had to say, and wanted to believe that even someone like him was capable of change. To rehabilitate Charles Manson would have been a giant feather in the cap of the California Corrections Department. From that standpoint, his parole hearing might not have been the waste-of-time slam dunk that everyone believed. And if anybody could wow an audience, it was Charlie. If he could swallow his fierce, destructive pride and funnel his power and energy into an uplifting “I’ve been healed, Praise God!” speech, he might have a shot.

  The problem was, that was asking too much. Faced with a sympathetic audience backed by an international press corps, did he have the brains to try and save a thread of his future, or would he use the soapbox to spread more fear and loathing by spewing the same tired stories of hate, defiance, and bloody revolution?

  My money, sadly, was on the latter.

  Manson’s parole hearing was set for November 16, 1978. The gatherings are required by law, even when the con has no possible chance of parole and the whole thing is a charade. Most murderers do at least fifteen years. Famous felons like Manson usually do more, and may never be released. With Charlie having been caged on the Tate-LaBianca convictions for a mere eight—one year for every person his Family had killed—his prospects were indeed slim.

  After rejecting his first attorney, Charlie reluctantly accepted another. He hated lawyers as a rule, deeming them part of the “injustice system.” This was no exception. Every time I passed the visiting room while he was conferring with his taxpayer-provided mouthpiece, he’d shout the same thing, “He’s not my attorney, he’s yours!”

  In order for the television cameramen and news photographers to fully capture the upcoming event, Charlie was required to sign a release. I walked in while he was jerking his lawyer around and interrupted the fun. “Do you want to sign this or not?” I asked.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then nobody gets to take your picture.”

  Charlie turned to his attorney. “What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t sign it. Better keep a low profile.”

  “What do you think, Ed?” he asked, turning to me.

  “I don’t give a damn what you do,” I snapped, weary of his power trip. Charlie mulled it over, taking his sweet time.

  “Sign it or not. I don’t have all day,” I demanded, attempting to snatch it away from him. Charlie pinned it to the table with his fist, paused dramatically, then signed with a flourish.

  “Can’t have a show without an audience,” he quipped, inviting the world to capture his latest performance.

  The world came—in force. The media were so thick I could hardly walk through the halls of the administration building. Only a few lucky pool reporters were allowed inside the hearing itself, forcing the rest of the mob to cool their camcorders outside. Restless and bored, they clamored for news. A representative group scurried to the warden’s office to request an interview with an officer who had worked closely with the imprisoned cult leader. “Get up here, Ed,” Dr. Clanon ordered, sounding exasperated. “Some of the reporters want to ask questions about Manson. They’ve been waiting around here for hours and the hearing is still going on.”

  It was my first experience with a mob-scene interview, and it turned out to be disconcerting. The reporters and cameramen crowded around, pushing and shoving for position, practically knocking one another down. They peppered me with a machine-gun volley of questions all asked at the same time. “What does he do in his cell? Who does he talk with? What does he talk about? What does his cell look like? Does he make voodoo dolls? Why did he break his guitar?” On and on they went. I answered in short, crisp bursts, trying hard not to say anything I’d be sorry for later. The constant flashes and bright television lights began to disorient me. Huge spots danced before my eyes, giving me a splitting headache.

  “Do you think he’ll get a [parole] date?” someone asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too soon.”

  “When do you think he’ll get out?”

  “Probably never.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t think the public would stand for it. That’s my opinion,” I offered, totally blind and physically reeling.

  While I fended off the press, Charlie was inside putting on one of his shows. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything close to the inspirational mea culpa that would have moved his audience. True to form, he offered his standard accusatory “You’re destroying the forests, rivers of blood will flow” speech that guaranteed that he wouldn’t be released anytime this century. The freshly inked swastika tattooed on his forehead didn’t help much either.

  When the hearing broke, the media mob abandoned me like yesterday’s news and rushed to capture Charlie’s historical exit. They pressed against a closed gate as Manson was whisked down the hall.

  “Well, it’s back in the hole,” Charlie quipped, playing to the crowd.

  “What do you think of the decision?” someone shouted.

  “What decision?” Charlie shot back, summing it up rather nicely.

  The following year, on November 28, 1979, Charlie dispensed with the circus altogether. He was playing Monopoly when he received the call to appear before the board. He’d just landed on “community chest” as the escort officer arrived, winning the right to pick up a card. “Get out of jail free” it announced. Charlie smiled at the irony and handed the small yellow card to the officer. “Give this to them,” he said. The hearing was held in absentia, and he was turned down again.

  In 1980, Charlie decided to reappear. It was showtime again, and Charlie gave another of his spellbinding performances. Most of the media, though, not being up on Mansonese, couldn’t make heads or tails of his ramblings. One paper described it as “a bizarre discourse and incoherent prattle.” I understood it all, having spent years deciphering his odd sentence structure and jagged thought pattern. From my perspective, aside from the usual environment/bad parents/save the children/blood will flow stuff, he made two significant statements. He admitted that he was dangerous, and after years of silence or denial, finally confessed that he had been in the LaBianca house on the night of the murders. He explained that he left before the carnage began, which was true, and denied ordering the couple killed, which probably wasn’t.

  Asked if he would escape if given the opportunity, he responded, “Yeah, I’d go. I’d just go out and leave you all alone.”

  The parole was denied.

  His fourth hearing was held on November 5, 1981. Charlie, in better spirits, put on probably his most memorable parole show ever. Rolling two white marbles in his hand a la Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg, and wearing the long hair and beard of his most famous photos, Manson entertained the panel and gathered media for nearly three hours. All it took to set the stage was a board member’s routine question about what the prisoner had done the previous year.

  “I was cleaning the
barn and I had to get a little of that old horse shit on my feet when I got down into the mud. But I got down there to clean the barn and I see that dude in there stealing the Cokes from that other guy.”

  “Now you’re losing me,” the questioner interrupted.

  “In the procedures that the stars exist in, someone has to hold those gold bars up and someone has to hold them lieutenants up there. And I say, ‘I’m talking to you, Sergeant!’ And the sergeant comes over and I say, ‘Who is it, the lieutenant?’ And I say, ‘Bring him here.’ I say, ‘Lieutenant, you know how my heart is.’”

  “What are we talking about now?” the baffled board member asked.

  “We’re talking about holding up procedures. So a cop gets in the way and I get into a fight with him. Who’s carrying the stick? Does Nixon carry the stick?”

  The board member gave up trying to make sense of it. Didn’t matter. That bit of nonsense was just a warm-up, like a jazz singer hitting the scales to oil the throat. Charlie was oiling his brain.

  Asked about the “bad things” he’d done during his decade in the slammer, the fog cleared as he adroitly turned the tables. “The bad things? What do you think it’s been, a picnic? It’s all been bad to me. I ain’t seen no good.”

  Another board member queried him about a tiff he had gotten into with a female guard. Angry over some procedural matter, he allegedly told the lady officer, “You owe me because I freed you from a French whorehouse.” When she took umbrage at the silly remark, he reportedly dropped the T word. “Do you remember Sharon Tate? You’re going to end up just like her.”

  Manson dodged the probe at the hearing by going on the offensive. “[She’s] a woman that just can’t work in prison. And she’s got no business in prison because she don’t know what the hell she’s doing to start with. I see inside her head all the way back to when she was a girl on the Good Ship Lollipop. When she comes up to me trying to play up to be a man, it don’t make no sense. She’s pecking on me. If a woman tells me something [like that] outside, she’d pick her teeth up off the ground. I’d punch my mother out for shit like that.…

  “All these years I thought it was ‘the Man’ who was keeping me locked up. I didn’t know it was my mother or I would have gone out into the graveyard and got her head. I could have dug her grave up and took her head and gone off. What I’m trying to do is do right by everybody as good as I know how on the levels that I’m working on. We all have different levels that we do our little trips on. Well, I’m right alongside of you. The spaceship’s going up and—”

  “Don’t start that trip again,” a panelist cut in.

  “I don’t know how to communicate unless I can lay a foundation on where I’m coming from. It’s simply this: I say things like that and I do things like that. Sometimes I even screwed a waitress on top of a pool table once.…

  “I wrote a letter and I told a lumber company, “If you keep cutting the trees down the way you’re cutting the trees down, you’re going to destroy all the chance we got for life balance on earth planet because your air and water don’t buy or sell.’ And nobody cares about anything but money. And if it ain’t profitable, then you can’t move it. So the air and water keeps on dying, they keep on sawing down and destroying the atmosphere. They keep pollutin’ the streams and they say it’s always been that way. You asked the question ‘Are you going to kill?’ They’re already dead! They’ve already destroyed themselves in all kinds of ways with bugs and everything you can think of. To catch life balance on planet earth will be the next job. They’re getting ready to blow it up.…

  “Every time I get outside, you people are moving a little faster and talking a little quicker and you got things cut up a little more and you got more little things there and you got all kinds of little things. Pretty soon you go out and all your goats are gone. The ducks are gone. The geese are gone. A guy comes out with a big shotgun and he’s got a camera from Japan and things all over him. His gut’s hanging over and he’s loaded on ‘bennies’ talking about people killed in the desert. He calls the park rangers and the park rangers come with their forces and look for something to do for their coffee break. And pretty soon the highway patrol is in this thing.”

  Whap! Parole denied.

  Like Elvis refusing to do encores to keep the crowds hungry for more, Charlie passed on his November 30, 1982, hearing. With Manson unable to steal the show, LA. deputy district attorney Stephen Kay took center stage and sealed whatever microscopic chance Charlie had.

  “Charles Manson is probably the best advertisement for the death penalty.… If he can’t follow the simple rules of prison, how can we expect him to follow the rules of society? I think the answer is obvious. He can’t. We have a man, Charles Manson, who told his followers that his hero was Adolf Hitler, and that Hitler is a genius for what he did to the Jews. I ask you this, can we ever risk letting Manson go free in a society that he tried so hard to destroy by promoting a black-white race war?”

  Kay touched upon the “enormity and cruelty” of the Tate-LaBianca murders, and referred to Manson’s unrelenting antisocial activities and thought processes. “In his philosophy, and in his actions, the human life means absolutely nothing. The ease with which Manson gets others to commit violent crimes is scary. What we have is almost a monthlong murderous rampage directed by Charles Manson.… His activity in prison has been terrible. Threats, assaults, contraband. He has absolutely no respect for authority.… I think he feels that he gets attention by doing things like this [threatening and assaulting officers]. He’s the number one criminal in America, so he has to keep up his image by trying to scare people and showing what a tough guy he is. As long as this man is alive, he’s going to be a danger, whether he’s in prison or out. Nobody really knows what to do with this man.… To have this man ever paroled in his lifetime would be a travesty.”

  This time, the board not only shut the iron door, they smartened up and used a loophole in the law to deny Manson an audience for three years. The lectures and grandiose performances, initially enthralling and amusing, had become redundant and tiring, so there was no need to call the circus and rubber-stamp a denial every twelve months.

  A second reason the hearing dates were stretched over three years is that Manson was using them to speak to his followers. His twisted legions, both old and new, hungered for news and directives. The long accounts of his parole speeches were like manna from heaven. As Manson knew, he wasn’t winning a single convert on the board, but he was recruiting thousands on the streets. After every hearing, the ever present stream of mail would increase tenfold, taxing my censorship duties.

  The word “censor” probably sticks in the craw of most free Americans, even when it comes to a prisoner’s mail. I’d be the first to agree. In Manson’s case, it was unequivocally the right step. As previously noted, locking Manson in a cage had not killed his sinister influence. This little man, shut down in maximum security, had come a poorly loaded gun away from assassinating a President of the United States. With an open line of communication, Manson could pose a threat to virtually anyone in the world, from a powerful political leader to an insignificant ex-con.

  With all our scrutiny and diligence, the messages and commands usually got out anyway. There was no real way of stopping them. But by censoring his mail, we could keep him from increasing his long list of “Please let me kill for you” crazies—many of whom were dead serious.

  Though Charlie wouldn’t be getting out of prison anytime soon, his endless legions of followers would forever be free—free, angry, and willing to do whatever he commanded.

  13.

  THROUGHOUT MY LIFE, people have asked me about Manson. “Does he really have some kind of magical way of controlling people?” “Does he have hypnotic powers?” “Does he have a diabolical charisma?” “Do his eyes have a magnetic attraction?” “Does his smile beckon?” “Is his charisma irresistible?” “Is he crazy?”

  My response is that for some people, the answer to all of the above is
yes—except for the last question. He isn’t crazy.

  Much has been written about Manson’s powers and how he used them to seduce and control his followers. Dr. Livsey’s book, The Manson Women, promoted the theory that all the women who killed for Charlie were predisposed to murder before they met him. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi had a similar theory. I strongly disagree. Manson has two feet, picks his nose, cracks dirty jokes, catches colds, and feels happy and sad like everybody else. But he also has an undeniable effect upon people’s lives. He can make hate look like love, chaos like harmony, and lies like truth. He offers himself to his followers as a superior human being who has all the answers.

  “I’ll never die,” he told me once. “I’m above death. When all of you are long gone, I’ll still be here.” However, at other times, Manson scoffs at his own omnipresent image. “If I had any real power, like they’ve said, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I’d put everyone under my spell and just walk out of this shit hole. But every time I try to do that, some dumb-ass guard slams a door in my face.”

  As witty and deceptive as the most sophisticated scam artist, Manson can be compared to the travelling medicine men of the Old West, wowing the crowds with bottles of potent stimulants, then beating town before the hangovers hit. Manson’s psychedelic medicine bottles were marijuana and blotters of LSD, the perfect lollipops to attract wayward youth.

  On February 14, 1967, some of Manson’s future followers were among the longhaired faithful at the famous “Be-in” held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They heard Allen Ginsberg chant a slogan Charlie would later take to heart: “We are one!” LSD guru Timothy Leary was there urging the young people to tune in and turn on. “Let it go,” Leary extolled like a father freeing his children from all their hang-ups. “Whatever you do is beautiful.” Little did Leary know, there was at least one person wandering around out there destined to put the phrase to the ultimate test.