We grabbed the keys and let Charlie out because, after all, he’d been the bait. I wasn’t sure how far we’d get with him carrying that fucking guitar, but we made it through six sets of security doors, across the yard, and down to the docks before anybody seemed to notice. It was a terrible storm that night, I remember.
When me and Billy start shucking off our shoes, Charlie looks out over the water and says, “Where’s the boat?”
“The boat?” I says. “What boat? We’re the boats.”
Then the siren starts to grind and the footsteps of the guards start to patter in our direction.
Charlie looks at me and then out at the water and then me again and he says, “I can’t swim.”
Charles Manson can’t swim. Who’da thought?
They caught me and Billy three days later in Arizona but they got Charlie right away, standing there on the dock with the guitar on his back, watching us go. They gave him another ten years.
Sometimes I wonder what would be different if Charlie got out when he was supposed to. But then, he’d probably be as big an asshole in the 60s as he was in the 70s.
From The Making of Charlie: A Prisoner’s Testimony,
by Ronnie Provus (with Veronica Levy).
Farrar and Straus, 1983.
Yes, Charles Manson’s New York of 1977 had its seedy side. When he was released from Danbury Federal Correctional Institution on January 9, Manson rode the bus to a city where 149,000 violent crimes would be committed that year. The so-called Council for Public Safety, comprised of police, firefighters, and other public employees, produced the helpful pamphlet “Welcome to Fear City” to warn tourists away during Mayor Beame’s public service cutbacks. There was graffiti and there were muggings and if you saw something called “The Lion King” advertised in Times Square, it wasn’t for children.
Yet it’s easy to overstate the squalor of the city, exaggerated now for mythic effect and exaggerated then from a fear of the increasing diversity in the streets. If there was graffiti on the subway cars, it was because new voices had something to say. There were new kinds of people loving and living in new kinds of ways. Some of them were doing new and dangerous things.
Some of them were having fun.
From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.
I came to New York to dance, though not in the way I ended up doing it for Charlie. I started ballet lessons when I was four. My mom drove me the hour south into Indianapolis at least twice a week for twelve years through school for a hundred recitals and fifty performances, not to mention all the classes. Everybody told me I was graceful, beautiful, and amazing, which I believed until about ten minutes after I arrived in New York after high school.
Coming to New York from Indiana is like sailing across the ocean and hitting the Sargasso Sea; it’s dense and you slow down, and all you can do is row. I rowed to schools that didn’t want me and dance companies that didn’t need me. I rowed to jobs at bars and restaurants. I rowed from roommate to roommate, hoping one would make enough for half the rent of a little sixth-floor apartment in the Lower East Side.
The place scared the crap out of me, I’m not going to lie. Everybody makes a big deal out of how dirty it was with everything from newspapers to cars heaped in the streets and under bridges, but what freaked me out the day I arrived was seeing a playground with no grass. None at all. There was a swing set and a merry-go-round, but the ground was just pale cracked pavement. When kids jumped off the swing at the highest it would go, they’d land with this awful “whap!” of their sneakers like someone beating out a carpet.
That’s not what playgrounds are supposed to sound like.
Everybody seemed scared or angry all the time, which is really the same thing. That’s something Charlie told me, one of the few true things.
I stayed anyway because I thought if I didn’t, it was all over for me. My father had picked out the spot where I’d stand behind the counter in his pharmacy for the rest of my life (or until a husband took me home, which he’d have been just as happy with), and I could see it in the linoleum fifty years later on the day I’d die, all worn down to the gray.
I got a job at a bar on Reade Street but I was still auditioning and going to parties where artsy people went. I couldn’t get into many of them, but a girlfriend took me to a club called Infinity in the Village, this old envelope factory with columns inside and a giant neon penis on the wall. Sometimes famous people came, she said, and all you had to do while waiting was dance.
So I danced that 4/4 beat through fifty songs a night that all sounded the same. But then there came this...hymn, that’s what I’d call it, a hymn. All the nervousness went away and I moved with a powerful abandon I never knew I had in me. It was my song about my life, and it was called was “Dancing Queen.”
I know I wasn’t the only Dancing Queen in 1977, but it didn’t bother me. What I wanted was to be special but part of something, if that makes sense. There was something about the people in that club—like when we all moved at once we didn’t have to be scared or angry anymore. Infinity felt like a secret place where we were hiding from the rest (though there were plenty of drug freak outs and bathroom beatdowns).
That’s where the idea started in me, the one that Charlie stoked: there were a few people in the world who got it, whatever “it” was, and they had to meet in secret like spies in enemy territory. While the blind dumb zombies marched by on the streets, the Special Ones listened to their tribal music, took their tribal communion, and danced their tribal moves.
Everybody called it disco, but I just thought it was dancing.
From Disco Aphrodite: A Manson Girl Speaks Out from Prison, by Violet “Aphrodite” Wensinger.
Doubleday, 1981.
I’m not going to say that fate set me on a collision course with Charles Manson, but right about the time he was stepping foot in Manhattan, I was returning home from my time in Albany on the Attorney General’s staff. Change was in the air, both for the city and my own career.
I’d accepted a position at Peterson, Bryant, & Winter, and in fact, they already had my name plate on a door and a secretary assigned to me, when Robert Morgenthau invited me out for drinks at the Algonquin. I think I’d had two when he asked me to join him in the New York County District Attorney’s Office.
I was honored but it was out of the question. “I can’t take a demotion like that,” I told him.
“It’s not a demotion,” he said. “You want to make a million dollars in private practice or do you want to be the Mayor of New York someday?”
“Can’t I do both?” I asked him.
“Don’t be such a Republican, Vince,” he said.
His ability to make that joke, his attitude that my party didn’t matter for the business of the District Attorney’s office...that’s what sealed the deal.
Eighteen months later, I was prosecuting a disco psychopath cult leader and his followers.
From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.
Certain angry white men like to tell us that the hedonism of disco required a Charles Manson. The idealistic 60s degenerated through drugs and communism to its natural consequences in the Kent State shootings and the riots at the Democratic National Convention. Then came the 70s when we decided that all we could change were ourselves, mostly with crystals and astrology and smooth dance moves. David Bowie’s “glitter apocalypse” required horsemen, and those horsemen were Charlie and his Family.
We were frivolous and self-absorbed. A creeping post-war consumerism had led from ranch houses to sequined cowboy boots, and if nothing else, it was a time of enormous advertising efficiency. Millions bought the same pet rocks, wore the same wide collars, danced to the same lyric-less songs, and spoke the same jive.
For these stern judges of culture, we deserved Manson. We summoned him in our club bathrooms thro
ugh a mirror speckled with cocaine like Bloody Mary.
From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.
When I wasn’t working at the bar or dancing at Infinity, everything seemed cold and shaky. I wasn’t doing well at my auditions or meeting anyone in the business. My life was a 12” remix, stretched thin with a throbbing beat that kept me dancing, but the silence between records was terrifying.
One night after work, I was supposed to go to a party in the Upper East Side with some agents and producers around to stare down my dress. I changed in the women’s room of the bar and wobbled out to the subway station on my highest heels. When I got to the map, though, I froze. I’m not sure why, but it looked like a bunch of spaghetti all of a sudden and I couldn’t make sense of it.
I sat down on a bench, a bad idea at night in those days, and I started to sob. I mean, really sob: like you do when someone dies. I wasn’t sure who was dead. Maybe the girl who could have greeted old ladies at her father’s drug store. Maybe the one who could have danced at the Met. Or maybe the one who’d get old and leathery serving drinks.
Then I felt this hand on my shoulder and I swung around real fast ready to punch the creep, but it was this little man with a lot of hair and an understanding smile.
“It’s okay, baby,” he said in a soft voice with a slight Southern accent. “I can’t make sense of these trains either.”
We both laughed, and I got a longer look at him. He wasn’t disco yet but he had tight white slacks and a vest over his bare chest. He wore terrible scuffed white shoes and a brown belt.
“Where you from in Indiana?” he asked.
I was amazed because there’s fifty states and he got it on the first guess. As time would go on, I’d believe it wasn’t a guess.
“Near Indianapolis,” I said.
“Me, too.” He held out his hand to me. “They call me Charlie.”
When I took his hand, he raised mine to his lips. If anybody else had tried to pull that, I’d have snatched it away, but already I was learning that Charlie had the power to seem innocent and knowing at the same time. If the kiss was a game, it was a game we both knew not to take seriously.
“What did you come here to do?” he asked me. “Everybody comes here to do something.”
I started to cry again and he sat down next to me, holding me by the shoulder for at least ten minutes. That’s how long it took me to say, “I came here to dance.”
“Then dance,” he said.
“Where?”
“Everywhere you are, girl,” he said.
He wouldn’t stop looking at me, waiting, so I stood up and showed him a few of the positions and then a demi-pointe, which is all I could do in my shoes.
“That’s incredible,” he said, applauding. He stood up and tried the moves himself, tottering on his feet and falling to the pavement.
That night, we made love back at my apartment with my roommates like four feet away. He kissed my toes. Do you know what a ballerina’s toes look like? That’s what blew me away, what made me think he was Jesus: he loved the ugly in me but didn’t think it was ugly.
From Disco Aphrodite: A Manson Girl Speaks Out from Prison, by Violet “Aphrodite” Wensinger.
Doubleday, 1981.
At the core, Charlie was a pimp. He was good at it. Not all his followers were as easy to find as Aphrodite Wensinger, but Charlie could see a person’s weakness in the worn heels of shoes, in a smudge of mascara, in a crooked hemline. It helped that everybody comes to New York for the same three or four reasons and they (like all of us) think they’re unique.
What was horrible about Charlie was that he had an unfailing eye for the dancers, the artists, the writers, the poets: the women who would have some day sung in their own voices instead of his.
Judy “Cookie Puss” Moore, nicknamed from the Carvel ice cream cake TV commercials she found hilarious, came from rural Alabama with three of her plays in a suitcase. Christina “Ziggy” Duffy, an intern at the New York Times for her first summer in the city, was from Marseilles Illinois, a place the residents pronounce “Mar-Sails.” Libby “Frodo” Kovacs had run away from her home in Portland, Maine because her psychiatrist father had some strange ideas about sex education. Paula “Princess” Olivolo, Colleen “Velveteen” Pugh, Misty “Slinky” Coleman…they came to be themselves but Charlie made them his.
None of Charlie’s women (as he liked to call them and we still unfortunately encourage) were from New York or from other large cities, none were black or Hispanic, none had family nearby, and all felt brave every night they went out. They were brave, which is what Charlie found delicious and nourishing about them.
From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.
Charlie moved in and I was fine with that. He wasn’t making any money but his plans were longer-term than paychecks.
We shared a mattress on the floor in my corner of the apartment and he’d talk all night about where he came from, about his mother trading him to friends for a bottle of liquor and the priests touching him at Boys Town. In the dark, he was honest in a way I never saw again when all the others came along. I guess that’s the benefit of being the first girl.
Charlie was worried about my hang ups. He said I was too close to buying into the whole house-in-the-suburbs bullshit story and to help, he brought home a woman he’d met on the NYU campus to live with us and get me out of my ego. She’d been standing on the sidewalk at the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, grinning up at the building with her eyes closed.
Charlie had stood beside her with his arms outstretched and said to her, “Let’s catch them.”
Her name was Libby Kovacs, though we’d soon start calling her Frodo because she never wore shoes and had weird hairy toes. She wasn’t a fan of grooming in general, which I learned that first night when Charlie insisted we had to fully know each other to live as one. He placed tabs of acid on our waiting tongues and choreographed our dance.
Did I want to do it? No, but I wanted to be Charlie’s kind of person, someone who’d be willing to do anything that led to life. He’d talked all about how the other people with their mummified hearts stared straight ahead to nothing and I never wanted to be that to him.
Charlie found Sam Englert next and we called him Samson because he was huge and had long hair, plus he had all that Bible stuff swimming in his head. He was sweet, fumbling in bed with us like a boy just out of high school which was what he was. He had a truck, an old Ford with wooden slats on the sides, and that’s probably what Charlie saw in him. That and the religious stuff.
I took all three of them to Infinity one night, mostly because I was curious how they’d behave. Libby had been dancing before and she plunged out on the floor like a cop wading into a brawl; she lost her shirt about thirty minutes later and didn’t notice. Samson swayed on the floor with girls and some guys flocked all around, pulling on his arms and belt like they were dancing around a maypole.
Charlie...he spent the whole night walking backwards as though trying to get it all into his eyes at once. He watched DJ Ca$hflow at the booth, fascinated by the dual turntables and all the switches and sliders, probably most fascinated by the power: DJ Ca$hflow could make people move and feel as one.
Libby lured Charlie onto the dance floor and showed him her own clumsy moves, but he passed her with his own in about ten minutes. He could flow out there like a cobra rising from a basket, and people kind of backed up in wonder at this guy in an old buckskin jacket strutting like he’d grown up on Soul Train.
All he kept saying that night—yelling through the music—was, “Man, where have these people been?”
It was nice to blow his mind for a change.
From Disco Aphrodite: A Manson Girl Speaks Out from Prison, by Violet “Aphrodite” Wensinger.
Doubleday, 1981.
Yeah, I remember mee
ting Charles Manson. It was the single whitest conversation I’ve ever had.
I’m spinning out “The Hustle” and he’s bopping his head along, lurking next to me and watching every move. Dude was a world-class lurker. He had a way of standing right in your blind spot.
He leans in and says, “Is that a synthesizer you think or some guy on a flute?”
He’s talking about the music, I realize. The song. All that tootling.
“I got no idea,” I tell him.
“Maybe it’s a piccolo,” he says.
“I don’t know what it is, man, but you’re standing too close.”
He doesn’t move. He just says, “Because if that’s a piccolo, that brother’s really blowing.”
That’s what Charlie was to us, the kind of white guy who kept a list of jive in his pocket. He carried around that little gun but most of us thought it was a toy, a prop. He seemed goofy and harmless. Like, if the dude came for me in an alley, I was pretty sure I could take him, you know?
Interview with Marcus “DJ Ca$hflow” McDriscoll. “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.
Q: Ms. Kovacs—
A: Frodo is my true name.
Q: Okay, Frodo: you stayed together in one apartment, is that right?
A: Yeah. It was fun.
Q: How many people lived there?
A: I don’t know. About fifteen, coming in and out. We just had pillows and mattresses on the floor. We called it the Safehouse because anybody could come in to get away from whatever—the fuzz, their old men and old ladies, their parents, whatever. You were supposed to bring a little something for everyone to share, a little acid or some weed. We weren’t into the heavier stuff, at least not until later when we needed it.
Q: What did you eat?
A: Oh, meals were a big thing for Charlie. We sat in a circle Indian-style and ate whatever we’d found in the trash behind Pathmark. The people in this city think it’s garbage but the rest of the world calls it food.
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