The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  After hearing the daughters’ account of the incident, I’d called a former member of Erhard’s staff, a physician named Bob Larzelere. He not only acknowledged that he’d been present when she’d been assaulted, he told me that he was the one who choked her, who felt her body go limp as he cut off the air to her windpipe. “I knew then that I would do anything that Werner asked. I would do anything for his love and approval . . . this is how low I had sunk.” (Erhard’s wife may have collapsed but she did not die from the attack.)

  In the initial letter I received from Pat, she wrote that through therapy she had discovered that Manson was not exceptional or interesting. “He used the same techniques as any abuser to control and manipulate his victims, coercing others through mental, emotional, or physical attacks.” She added that she had always wondered why the public finds him so titillating—“this angry, spiteful, vicious little man.”

  In our second meeting, she talked about the process of breaking Manson’s hold on her. “There were no epiphanies, just a gradual awakening.” An awakening, she said, that took a very long time. “I do embroidery, and I think of the years in prison as parallel to what happens when you have the task of sorting a big tangle of different-colored threads. One at a time, you pick out a strand and carefully try to pull it out. That’s what I’ve been doing all these years—sorting it all out, a strand at a time.”

  During the trial, in an effort to portray her as sympathetic to the jury, her lawyer had made much of the fact that she was tormented as a child because of a surplus of body hair. The only evidence of this I observed was the down on her forearms. Though dark, it wasn’t freakishly excessive and if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed it.

  When I asked her about it, she said she was teased mercilessly as a child and it contributed to her feeling that she was ugly, something Manson later used to his advantage. In the beginning of their relationship, he told her she was beautiful. He made her feel attractive for the first time.

  She mentioned that she’d read that there are now lasers that can remove excess hair. “When I heard about that it made me so happy to think that young girls don’t have to suffer the way I did.” And she did look happy when she said it. She so rarely smiled that when she did the effect was electric; the intensity of her close-set blue eyes penetrated her austere grayness.

  In our first extended conversation, she talked about her life without self-pity; though the content was dramatic, her manner of conveying it was not. “During the trial there was a rumor that Colonel Tate, Sharon’s father, was carrying a gun and was going to try and kill one or all of us. I’ve often thought how much better it would have been if he had killed me. As it is, I will leave nothing positive behind. No family, no career, no possibility of contributing to the world.”

  What she said was so resolute, there was no room for an atta girl platitude.

  “I know what I’m saying makes people uncomfortable. When new women come in here, everyone is aghast when I talk like this. But I’m not going to sit around and talk about hope when there isn’t any.”

  She’d also refused to talk about hope the last time she appeared before the parole board. She declined to ask friends and family to write letters pleading for her release because she knew there was no chance. (She later changed her mind and did ask for letters of support.) Her well-founded pessimism about release was based on the fact that, unlike Leslie, who was only present on the second night, Pat had participated both nights. Though she actually killed one person—Abigail Folger—she is legally guilty, and most would argue morally as well, of killing all seven of the people who died.

  Later, eating lunch at what was becoming my regular booth at McDonald’s, I thought about Pat’s pessimism, her lack of hope, her dour, bordering-on-sour disposition. There was something about her brutal candor that I admired. There was also something about it that made me uncomfortable, though I wasn’t sure precisely why. I once again reflected on the discrepancy between the tone of her letters, which was always warm, and her in-person demeanor. It would not be the last time this discrepancy puzzled me.

  chapter nine

  ORPHANED BY THE HOLOCAUST

  1960

  Catherine Share was an appealing dark-haired beauty in high school, and if I had voted on what she was most likely not to become, it would have been chief recruiter for a psychopathic serial killer. We were in the same social club at Hollywood High, and years later when I first heard her name associated with Manson, I assumed it was a different Catherine Share. When it proved to be the same person, I was sure she was on the periphery and if not on the periphery, then a reluctant participant in the activities of the so-called Family.

  Leslie set me straight: there was nothing peripheral or reluctant about her involvement. She was an aggressive recruiter for Manson. Her primary quarry: pretty girls who could be used as bait to attract men into the fold and girls who had access to their parents’ credit cards. Although she was in the inner circle of the group at the time of the murders, Manson had not included her in his plan either night. She’s quoted on a website (manson2jesus.com) as saying she wouldn’t have participated in the murders even if Manson had asked her to, but there’s ample reason to doubt the validity of that claim.

  What is not in doubt: after Manson was in prison, Catherine was a major aider and abettor on the outside, working assiduously and violently under his direction. Among her activities: an attempt to kill a witness and an attempt to rob a surplus store to steal guns. The most chilling, however, occurred in 1971 when she and several cohorts planned to highjack a Boeing 747 and kill one passenger every hour until Charles Manson, Tex Watson, and the three women were released from prison.

  When I think of her at Hollywood High, I remember a quiet, restrained girl with ink-black hair and a distracted air about her. She was smart and talented with a pure singing voice, a violin virtuoso, and a beauty—though not the kind of conventional beauty for which Hollywood High was known. There was something slightly off kilter about her angular features, and that lack of symmetry only contributed to her beauty. Her name when she was with Manson was Gypsy—a name she acquired, I assume, because of her exotic looks.

  How could that girl, a Jewish girl whose biological parents had died under Hitler’s reign, dedicate her life to a man who carved a swastika on his forehead? How could that same girl later marry a member of a white supremacist prison gang? This was not the behavior of a rebellious kid. She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman when she attached herself to Manson and a thirty-three-year-old woman when she married Kenneth Como, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood whom Manson met in San Quentin.

  When Catherine Share and Leslie Van Houten were teenagers, though eight years apart, they shared many attributes—smart, pretty, popular—but when I ponder Leslie’s transformation from “prom queen to murderer,” I have to rely on my imagination to recreate who she was in high school. Catherine’s transformation was more astonishing and more upsetting for me personally because I did know her before. I wouldn’t have known the earlier version as well as I did, though, if it hadn’t been for our club’s slumber party when I was a senior and she was a junior.

  There were many elements that came together to make that night remarkable for me. The house—a house so spectacular it could have been a movie set—was definitely one of those elements. It was located off of Mulholland Drive, a wealthy, wild area emblematic of Los Angeles, often used as a backdrop to movies. Also, it marked a time in my life when connecting with people who were different from my usual friends held a particular excitement. Unlike previous slumber parties, there were no crank calls, no lemon squeezes, no Ouija boards, no charades. We just talked, and Catherine and I talked a lot.

  There was one more ingredient that made the night special. As I looked around at the girls in attendance, a small group of eight or ten, I realized that the narrow-minded culture of our club that had been a torment to me—a culture created by the older, all-white, Protestant girls—had cha
nged. My class was the first to rush and accept girls who were not WASPs. For me, that night reflected, if not celebrated, the shedding of what had been bad about the 1950s and embraced what was good about the 1960s.

  When I discovered that Catherine was a kindred spirit—and when I say that, I mean when I discovered that she was Jewish—it was the first time I felt comfortable about my membership in the club. Until that moment, I had lived like a secret agent. The clubs at Hollywood High were patterned after college sororities and were so elitist and exclusionary the administrators were in a pitched battle to get rid of them.

  I’ll admit the possibility that I projected more onto Catherine than was there, but that night she seemed to embody a depth and complexity that I admired and felt had been missing in my life, certainly in the club. Or maybe the intensity of my feelings was simply the result of having gotten lost on my way there. By the time I arrived safely I was so relieved, I loved everyone at that damn party and this certainly engendered an intimate connection with her. At least it did for me. I have no idea whether it was mutual. When we got together decades later in Dallas, Texas, I noticed a flicker of recognition when she first saw me. Was that flicker an acknowledgment of what we shared that night or simply an acknowledgment of the familiarity you feel with friends from high school? Either way, it was clear that whatever had existed between us was no longer there.

  Mulholland Drive is a narrow, winding, country road snaking fifty miles along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from Hollywood to the beach in Leo Carrillo State Park in Malibu. The slumber party was scheduled to start in the late afternoon on a Saturday, but I couldn’t go until the evening. I had a standing date with my father to go sailing every Saturday, and because my parents didn’t approve of the club, though they didn’t forbid me to participate, I decided life at home would be easier if I didn’t cancel sailing. Arriving late, however, meant that I had to drive up there alone in the dark.

  I wasn’t crazy about that plan. Mulholland Drive was legendary for being a place where rich people lived and, because of its isolation, a place where scary people lurked. When I was in high school, there was a stretch that served as lover’s lane, and every time anyone parked there, the story of the man with a hook for a hand was retold. In various versions, a man had escaped an insane asylum or was a serial killer or both. A couple making out in a car sees a man walking toward them in the dark. The boyfriend frantically starts the car and speeds off. When the couple arrives at the girl’s house and the guy gets out to open the car door for her, there’s a hook dangling from the door handle.

  Film critic David Thompson describes Mulholland Drive as both civilization and a dangerous wilderness—“an idealized spectacle and a place from which to survey the classic city of visibility even as you drive, the paranoia turns into a model for both grace and dread.”

  Dread precisely describes my feeling as I took wrong turn after wrong turn in my father’s old 1949 Cadillac. There were no people walking on the road, no phone booths, no streetlights. At one point, I was so lost on a side road that I couldn’t even figure out how to give up and drive home.

  Finally, I stopped the car in front of a house that looked like it would be friendly to a young girl and unwelcoming to men with hooks. There was no high fence around it. No security gate. In fact, as I recall, few of the houses I passed had either of those accessories. I got out and knocked on the door. A middle-aged man in a silky robe over striped pajamas let me use his phone and stood there while I relayed information between him and the mother of the hostess of the slumber party. Between the two of them, I was able to find my destination.

  None of the above has anything directly to do with Catherine, but in my mind it’s always been connected. Here’s what I think: if the Tate-LaBianca murders had taken place a decade earlier, I might still be lost on Mulholland Drive. The fear that was generated by the blood bath at Sharon Tate’s house—a house in another wealthy, isolated area of L.A.—meant that houses would no longer be unsecured. No house would be standing there naked without a major security apparatus protecting it and if, by some miracle, I had gained access to a front door, no one would have let me in at night to use the phone. I may have been a young girl, but that would no longer signify safety. Leslie, Susan, and Pat were young women. Before Tate-LaBianca, people were frightened of urban legends with hooks for hands. After Tate-LaBianca, they were frightened of everything.

  When I finally arrived at the house, in spite of my tense drive, I was awestruck. Not before or since has a house made such an impression on me. I remember that the angled glass walls, luminescent, glowing, gorgeous, reminded me of my aunt’s engagement ring, an emerald-cut diamond. The windows were lighted in such a way as to create an airborne effect, as though, with the flick of a switch or the loosening of a tether, the whole house could float away.

  Sometime later I saw a black-and-white photo in Life magazine that at first glance reminded me so much of the house, I thought maybe it was that house until I looked at the Hollywood Hills location. I cut it out and taped it into my scrapbook. As it turned out, it was a photo of Case Study House No. 22, the most photographed house in the world and considered the iconic photo of modern architecture. It’s certainly iconic in my life. When I look at that photo, I remember Mulholland Drive. I remember that slumber party. I remember that night. I remember Catherine. I think of Charles Manson.

  Once inside, I saw pillows, duvets, sleeping bags, and clothing strewn around the otherwise pristine living room—a living room that could have been and probably was at some point featured in Architectural Digest. The jumble of clutter on the expanse of plush, cream-colored carpeting was comically incompatible with the manicured setting. I remember girls smoking. I remember the array of sleepwear—half the girls wearing Lanz flannel nightgowns with rows of tiny hearts and flowers, vestiges of our girlhood, and the other half wearing baby doll pajamas that foretold our upcoming womanhood. This lacy diaphanous sleepwear was new on the scene—sexier than flannel nightgowns but not yet as erotic as Victoria’s Secret lingerie. (I think of that slumber party every time I read the account of Sharon Tate’s murder, ten years later, and picture the baby doll pajamas she was wearing.) There was an empty space on the carpet next to Catherine, so I threw down my overnight case and sleeping bag. I remember she didn’t smile or even look at me initially. I sat down on the floor and leaned my back against the wall, still feeling a little breathless from my scary drive on Mulholland.

  After I calmed down, Catherine and I started to talk. At first her reserve continued but as the night progressed, she got more expressive. I’m pretty sure we discussed a Hollywood High student who had chopped down trees on campus (see chapter 49). Maybe I told her my plan to go to Cal after graduating, or she told me her plans, though hers would come a year later. I was younger but graduated first because I had skipped a grade in elementary school. I doubt that we talked about the flag twirlers, the booster club, or the Red Cross Club, all of which, according to the HHS yearbook, she was a member. I’m sure we talked about boyfriends. Hers was in my class, a smart, good-looking musician. The two of them played folk music together. I remember we mostly talked about family; her boyfriend’s mother and my mother, both social workers, had been colleagues at one time. But it was Catherine’s family situation that I found compelling and that I thought about for years afterward.

  She told me she was adopted, which I hadn’t known. She told me that life at home was hard, which I hadn’t suspected. She lived alone with her father, a psychologist, who was blind. I was captivated by elements in her story. For one thing, I had a cousin I adored who was adopted—the only adopted person I knew until I met Catherine—and, for me, there had always been a mystique surrounding her very existence. Also, I’d recently started volunteering at the Foundation for the Junior Blind and was learning about those challenges. (Later, when I was in college, I worked as a counselor at Camp Bloomfield, the camp for blind kids a few miles away at the very end of Mulholland Drive.) It f
elt like more than a coincidence. These details, along with the fact of her Jewishness, which I discuss later, contributed to a feeling that our connection was somehow preordained.

  I was touched by how tough her life seemed. Certainly more difficult than my life or the easy, privileged lives of the other girls in our club. These particulars made her seem vulnerable and appealing and translated to complexity, to character; to my adolescent eyes, her father’s blindness cast him in a sympathetic light. The truth was more complicated, but I didn’t discover that until later.

  As the others dropped off to sleep, we kept on talking. When the sun started to lighten the sky we dragged our bedding out to the swimming pool, laying it down on chaise longues. The air was cool and steam was rising from the pool; we could hear the high-pitched chorus of coyotes. The pool was cantilevered out from the house and, from our perch on the deck, we could see the bejeweled grid outlining the blocks of the city below. Or I think we could. Over the years, I have stared at the photo of Case Study House No. 22 so many times, I’m not entirely sure I didn’t, in my imagination, superimpose the grid portrayed in that photo onto the view from the pool that morning.

  What I learned directly from Catherine and what I subsequently learned about her life from other sources have merged, like the Case Study House No. 22 and the actual view from the slumber party swimming pool. All of the versions contain elements of the following: She was born in Paris in 1942. Her biological father, who was Hungarian, was a member of the French Resistance. Her mother, who was German, may or may not have also been part of the Resistance. Her maternal grandmother died in a Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe, and both of her paternal grandparents died in concentration camps during World War II. Some accounts have her parents committing suicide in Paris when she was two years old.