The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  The contrast between his history and theirs is striking. As a little boy, Charles Manson had no father who claimed him; as a little girl, Patricia Krenwinkel’s father was taking her on Saturday morning walks in their Westchester neighborhood to watch the new LAX being constructed. When Charles Manson was eight years old, his mother was serving time for armed robbery at Moundsville State Prison in West Virginia; when Leslie Van Houten was eight years old, her mother was timing her daily batch of brownies so that her children would smell them baking when they walked in the front door from school. Tex Watson, described by his mother as the family’s “pride and joy,” was raised in an intact family, a member of the 4-H Club and the Boy Scouts. At his Farmerville, Texas, high school he was an honor student, a track star, a halfback on the football team.

  Most of the other young people in Manson’s inner circle—Mary Brunner, Sandra Good, Lynette Fromme—came from similar backgrounds. Susan Atkins, whose family had more than its share of drinking problems and financial woes, was an exception. As indicated above, Catherine Share’s childhood, after her mother died, left her vulnerable to a man who was skilled at preying on weaknesses.

  So how was this “angry, spiteful, and vicious little man” able to seize such absolute control over these kids? Clearly, when it came to manipulating people, he had some natural gifts, but prison provided an effective educational opportunity in this regard. On the cell block he learned the tricks of the pimp trade and acquired basic Scientology coercive techniques; his most influential teacher, however, was Dale Carnegie, the author of the best-selling, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Not only did Manson read the book, he took the course that was then offered by the prison. Manson enrolled and for the first time in his life, excelled as a student. Most of the tenets of Carnegie’s approach are fundamental sales techniques—make other people feel important, use showmanship to dramatize your ideas—but the combination of those techniques with Manson’s instinctive manipulative skills proved to be successful and lethal when applied to young people whose lives were unanchored and who were desperately looking for something to believe in.

  chapter twelve

  “I FELT LIKE A PREDATOR”

  October 1996

  A mong the second batch of Mondo Video A-Go-Go videos that I rented was a recording of Leslie Van Houten’s most recent parole hearing (at the time)—May 12, 1996. It was her eleventh appearance before the California Board of Prison Terms and, thanks to Mondo Video, I had the previous ones to compare it to. Over the years, the composition of the panel had changed, but the pattern of the questioning had not. These members seemed as bewildered by the killings as those assembled for each of the previous hearings. Though technically, their only purpose was to evaluate her suitability for parole, they couldn’t resist one more attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible. Parole Board Commissioner Thomas Giaquinto asked Leslie to describe what happened at the LaBianca house. I find Leslie’s answers to these questions astonishing, and it hasn’t gotten less astonishing with every reading. There’s nothing else she or anyone else has said to me that has saddened me, haunted me, puzzled me as much.

  LESLIE: I had Mrs. LaBianca lay down on the bed. I don’t remember putting the pillowcase over her head but I’m sure that I did. I wrapped a lamp cord around her and she began struggling as she heard her husband dying in the living room. When Mrs. LaBianca heard him dying she came forward and I was trying to hold her down and Pat attempted to stab her . . . and she hit her collarbone and the knife bent and I went out of the room and I called for Tex and Tex came into the room and killed her.

  GIAQUINTO: You stabbed her also, right?

  LESLIE: After that . . . Tex handed me a knife and said “do something” and I stabbed Mrs. LaBianca in the lower torso . . . I think sixteen times.

  GIAQUINTO: If you knew Mrs. LaBianca was already dead, why did you stab her sixteen times?

  LESLIE: I . . . I . . . I . . . couldn’t . . . it was such a violent act once I started I wasn’t able to stop . . . it was a horrible thing to do and while I was doing it I think I was fighting with myself... I . . . think back on that moment and I felt like a predator . . . I felt like a shark just out of control for that moment.

  GIAQUINTO: Surely, after the frenzy was over and you were calmer, surely then you felt some regret.

  No, she said, regret is not what she remembered feeling. She did remember wiping away fingerprints and changing into some of Mrs. LaBianca’s clothing. She remembered Tex taking a shower in the LaBiancas’ bathroom. She remembered drinking chocolate milk and eating cheese from the LaBiancas’ refrigerator. (It was on the door of this refrigerator that Patricia Krenwinkel, using a towel dipped in Mr. LaBianca’s blood, wrote, “Healter Skelter,” misspelling the title of one of the Beatles songs from the White Album.) Leslie remembered the three of them hiding in the bushes until dawn and then hitchhiking back to the Spahn Ranch.

  “Surely,” Giaquinto asked, “when you got back to the ranch you felt remorse. Horror? Regret?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  GIAQUINTO: Then what did you feel?

  LESLIE: I don’t . . . at that point empty and I went back to the farmhouse and I had some clothes and some change from the LaBianca house and I spoke with Dianne Lake and I told her that it had been fun. At least that’s what she said. I don’t remember exactly telling her that but it’s something I would have said . . . you know, everything at the ranch was supposed to be fun, no matter what it was.

  I have watched this video many times. It never gets less painful to imagine the horror Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca experienced. But each time I’m also struck by Leslie’s honesty, by her willingness to accept full responsibility, and by her refusal to rationalize any part of her participation. In my experience these are all rarities among convicted murderers.

  chapter thirteen

  FOLIE À FAMILLE

  1968

  When Leslie and Pat describe how they ended up in Manson’s lethal orbit, I can’t help thinking about the fable of the frog. If a frog is thrown into boiling water, he will leap out of the pot. If he’s thrown into a pot of tepid water, he happily burbles away as the heat under the water is ever so slowly increased and will never attempt to escape. He’ll just slowly be cooked to death. (Apparently this is an urban legend. If the lid is off the pot, the frog will attempt to escape when the water gets hot, no matter how gradually. But I have always found it so useful as a life lesson that I’m reluctant to part with it.)

  Pat and Leslie say that if, when they first met Manson, he had been the malevolent dictator he later became, they would have headed for the hills. But he was a guy talking about God and Oneness and spiritual love, and he seemed in possession of an uncanny knowingness. He not only knew their thoughts and feelings, he seemed to have some special extrasensory connection with all living creatures—babies, dogs, coyotes, lizards. He was wise, he was gentle, he was attentive, but he was also childlike and playful. His spirit of adventure was infectious and best of all, at least in the beginning, there were no rules, and both of them had spent the past few years chafing at rules.

  Leslie’s attraction to Manson was very different from Pat’s. She didn’t see him as a romantic figure but as a mystical one, so her attachment was not that of a lover, as it was with Pat, but as a leader, a guru, a God.

  To be free of self, to fuse with Charlie and each other, they had to cut loose from their families. He wanted them to be, he said, the way they were before their parents contaminated their souls and twisted their hearts. “Who you are is beautiful,” he told them. “It’s everyone else—society, school, your parents—who are wrong.” Before Charlie came along, Pat had seen herself as a failure in society; Leslie saw herself as a disappointment to her parents. For both of them, Charlie’s dismissal of society’s expectations was a salve.

  “He knew just how to play on our dissatisfactions,” Leslie said.

  Gradually, his nurturing, supportive message turned into one of criticism, hum
iliation, and sometimes physical abuse. What had started out as an opportunity for a fresh start became a war against not only their past but their present autonomy. (By that time, it was too late, not only because of their attachment to him, but also because of their attachment to the other women in the group. It felt like a family.)

  Both women talked about how important the feeling of sisterhood was. Manson, who’d never genuinely belonged to any family, knew how to engender the feeling of connection and family, something these kids yearned for.

  But there was a cost to belonging to that family. The once-free-spirited commune morphed into a totalitarian society, a society without points of reference to the outside world.

  Manson allowed no clocks, no calendars, and he micromanaged everything from the music they played (only his songs, and songs by Moody Blues and the Beatles) to when they had sex and with whom. He dictated when they could take drugs and he often orchestrated the “trips” they had. (The most vivid of these, according to Leslie, was the day they dropped acid and, with Manson as both director and star, they reenacted the crucifixion of Christ.) Soon, the boundary between hallucination and reality was hopelessly blurred.

  Eventually they came to fear him, but the fear was intertwined with dependency and what felt like intense love. He told them the ultimate test of that love was the willingness to die. “I would die for you, would you die for me?” was his mantra.

  One of the psychiatrists who testified at Tex Watson’s trial and later at Leslie’s second trial postulated that the so-called Manson Family was a folie à famille—a psychiatric term that refers to a group of people who share elements of mental illness such as delusions. He explained that in this way, Manson’s pathology became the group’s pathology.

  The power he wielded in his little kingdom fueled a long-held ambition to be a recording star, and he managed to make enough contacts in the music business to bolster this dream. In 1968, Pat and one of the other girls met Beach Boy Dennis Wilson when they were hitchhiking in Malibu. The girls introduced him to Manson and he introduced Manson to rock manager Gregg Jakobson, who had produced The Doors.

  Jakobson would later tell Vincent Bugliosi that he’d been drawn to Manson personally and fascinated by the “whole Charlie Manson package.” The two men got to know each other over a period of a year and a half. “Charlie loved to rap about his views on life,” Jakobson told Bugliosi. I include this here because one of the frustrations Pat and Leslie have had over the years is trying to get people to understand how they could have been attracted to Manson. I have no idea if Jakobson is any measure of normality, but he was certainly more mainstream, to the extent that a music producer can be mainstream, than most of Manson’s young followers.

  Jakobson introduced him to Doris Day’s son Terry Melcher, who had produced The Byrds. This was a critical introduction to Manson. He was counting on Melcher to provide his big break.

  Jakobson eventually arranged for Manson to record a demo, with the Family as backup. By the end of 1968, Manson’s dream of cutting an album became a dangerous fixation. When he listened to the Beatles’ White Album, the message he “heard” in their lyrics was that the time for revolution—a revolution between blacks and whites, a revolution with the title of “Helter Skelter”—was nigh and we anoint you, Charlie, to start that revolution with your songs.

  There are many pages in the book devoted to Bugliosi’s analysis of what Manson took to be directives in the White Album lyrics, the how, why, and where of the racial war. (Like everything else associated with Manson’s motive, the selection of the title “Helter Skelter” for the revolution is subject to interpretation. In their book, Bugliosi and Gentry write, “ ‘Helter Skelter’ is another name for a slide in an amusement park.”) The blacks were going to win the battle, and the entire white race, save Manson and Family, would be destroyed. They would be spared because the blacks would recognize that they needed a few whites to lead society. In “Honey Pie,” they urged him to sing the truth to the world when they asked Honey Pie to show the “magic of your Hollywood song.” In “Revolution,” they told him they were waiting for him to sing the word that would trigger the “real solution. . . the plan” they’d “love to see.”

  Working day and night, Manson wrote an album’s worth of new songs incorporating the Beatles’ mandate. Melcher agreed to come and listen to the songs and, in preparation, the women cleaned the house, rolled joints, and cooked a special dinner. Melcher never showed up.

  The extent to which Manson truly believed in “Helter Skelter” is still debated, but what is not in question is his bitter disappointment and frustration about his album’s dead end. One person who believed that his thwarted music career was the motive behind the murders was Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate’s husband. “Manson’s rage was that of the spurned performer—one who seeks revenge on others for his own lack of talent and recognition,” he wrote in his 1984 memoir, Roman. In the book, Polanski contends that Manson targeted that house because he believed that Terry Melcher, the man who declined to produce his compositions—compositions Polanski described as mediocre—still lived there. He speculates that the murder of the LaBiancas was an attempt to confuse the issue.

  chapter fourteen

  FALLING IN LOVE WITH ANNE FRANK

  1958

  It wasn’t until I started re-tracing my interest in Catherine Share that I understood the way the issue of Jewishness hovered in my youth and why the Manson swastika was so significant to me. At some point, Hitler and Manson, the macro and micro of monsters, merged in my imagination, and Catherine was an unwitting participant in that merger.

  In high school, my Jewish heritage defined who I was. Not because I talked about it but because I didn’t. And I especially never mentioned it to the girls in my immediate social circle.

  There is a theory that anti-Semitism is more rampant in Austria because, unlike Germany, after World War II, Austria refused to confront its treatment of Jews so all that poison has lain dormant. For some reason that feels loosely analogous to the effect submerging my Jewish identity, even as diluted as it was, had on me while I was in high school.

  Jews are now such an open, vital part of our culture, it’s sometimes difficult to remember the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in the 1950s. There were still quotas in medical and law schools, country clubs and social clubs either had quotas or banned Jews altogether, and more affluent neighborhoods had restrictions. When I was younger I was aware of all this but at a remove. I was, after all, only one-quarter Jewish. As a child, my grandmother emigrated with her family from Russia in the late 1800s. Her family was religious, but as an adult, she wanted nothing to do with religion and they wanted nothing to do with her. She was an atheist, an anarchist, and a vegetarian who had a child out of wedlock and sent her daughter (my mother) to school with a note pinned to her dress, “Do not feed my child meat.”

  As a kid, I was aware of anti-Semitism. I knew about Hitler. I knew Jews had been imprisoned in concentration camps and executed. And I was vaguely conscious of anti-Semitic chatter but only because my parents discussed it. Given that my mother and grandmother spoke Yiddish to each other, I should have felt more connected but I didn’t. And then I fell in love with Anne Frank.

  In the spring of 1956, when I was twelve and my brother sixteen, our parents took us out of school to travel through Europe for three months in the spring. This trip could be described as the most wonderful thing a family could do together or a familial catastrophe of epic proportions. It was, in fact, both. It was wonderful in all of the predictable ways—culturally, historically, artistically, architecturally—but it also exposed pathological strains in our family dynamic. From the outset my mother’s Jewishness was a factor. A variable? A theme? A hurdle? Or, put another way, she was never as Jewish as she was before and during that trip. It also, eventually, occasioned my own Jewish awakening.

  The conflict started when my father brought home a color brochure for the Volkswagen microbus he planned to buy. W
e’d pick it up in Southampton, England, drive it through thirteen countries, camping whenever possible, then ship it home and sell it. In those days, you could make money doing that. The profit would pay for the use of the car in Europe.

  My mother picked up the brochure, leafed through it, handed it back to my father. “I won’t travel in a car Hitler invented.” My father said she was thinking of the VW Bug and even that, Hitler didn’t invent, only promoted. She replied that everyone knew that Volkswagen was a Nazi company and she’d think of Hitler every minute that she was in the car.

  And then my father brought home a slick color brochure of the SS Kungsholm, the Swedish American passenger ship we would take coming home from Copenhagen to New York. I was thrilled with the brochure. Swimming pools, movie theaters, gift shops, ice cream parlors. “Look,” my father said, showing my mother the map of the staterooms. He pointed out that we’d be saving a bundle of money because he had reserved inside staterooms. My mother erupted: “No Goddamn way. My mother came from Russia in steerage,” she yelled, her face scarlet, her eyes blazing. “I’m not going anywhere in steerage.”