by John Waters
In 1976, Leslie’s original conviction was thrown out due to “ineffectual counsel” (her original lawyer drowned in the middle of her trial and was replaced), and she was given a new trial in 1977. This time, she was all by herself as a defendant in the courtroom. Remorse had started to creep in soon after she was imprisoned away from Manson. Locked away forever, Leslie, Susan, and Patricia were of no further use to Charlie and he dropped them quickly. The outsider voices of reason from the prison social workers started to seep in and Leslie began to see the holes in Manson’s brainwashing. “When I’d be questioned,” she later told the author Karlene Faith for her very insightful and intelligent but little-known book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten, “I’d go blank and become frustrated like when a machine jams and just sits there making noise. In my head nothing was functioning. I was trying to understand, breaking down stiff little slogans that had been drilled into me.” When two other Manson girls, Mary Brunner and Catherine Share, aka “Gypsy,” were sent to jail and placed with Leslie, Susan, and Patricia, Leslie grew tired of listening to their Manson talk and confided to Patricia, “I’ve changed. I’m not into this.” “It took three years to understand and five or six years of therapy to ‘take responsibility’” for the terrible crime she had helped commit.
Leslie finally had a good lawyer for her second trial. Taking the witness stand truthfully for the first time, she tried to explain her state of mind through the Manson madness and his control techniques. And the jury listened, too. After about twenty-five days of deliberation, there was a hung jury; seven voted guilty of first-degree murder, and five manslaughter due to her cult domination and uncertain mental health at the time of the crime.
Refusing to offer a plea bargain, the prosecutor took her to trial for a third time in 1978 and added a felony robbery motive (clothes, a wallet, and a few coins had been taken from the LaBianca home), a crime that now couldn’t legally be excused by state of mind. But this time Leslie made bail, was released from prison, and found employment as a law clerk while living in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. She was free for six months and lived quietly, unnoticed by the press. When a few of her new neighbors found out who she really was, after they already thought they knew her, all were “supportive” and “protective” of her anonymity.
When Leslie’s third trial finally began, she came to court every day on her own. Long gone was the shaved head, and the X on her forehead was covered by bangs. No more trippy little satin riot-on-Sunset-Strip miniskirt outfits either, like the ones she and her female codefendants had worn to the first trial. This time she was dressed tastefully and looked lovely, something that obviously didn’t sit well with Stephen Kay, the prosecutor who had inherited all the Manson-related cases from Vincent Bugliosi. “All dolled up,” Mr. Kay cracked to the press, giving Leslie one of her first, but definitely not last, opinionated fashion reviews. When she was finally convicted of first-degree murder at the end of the trial, life imprisonment suddenly became very real.
Rolling Stone gave me the go-ahead to pursue the Leslie Van Houten interview, so, in 1985, seven years after her final conviction, I wrote to “The Friends of Leslie,” a now-disbanded loose-knit support group made up of Leslie’s real family (Mom, Dad, brothers, sisters—all glad to have her back from Manson even if it was in prison) and her jailhouse teachers and counselors, who had seen how this teenage girl had been completely dominated by one of the most notorious madmen of our time during the 1960s, a decade that may never be surpassed in misguided revolutionary lunacy. Susan Talbot, one of the organizers, who met Leslie via classes offered in prison through Antioch College (the same ones Patty McCormack attended!), wrote me back and told me that Leslie was not interested in being in Rolling Stone or any other magazine at the time, but recommended I write Leslie to see if there was any rapport. In other words, Susan (who did know who I was, whereas Leslie did not) was intrigued and slightly puzzled by my offer of support but mistrustful of my intentions. Who could blame her?
By now I certainly knew that what Leslie had done was anything but “art.” Her participation in the LaBianca murders was a very real atrocity that she could never make go away like a bad hairdo or a dose of the hippie clap. This was no youthful recklessness that today some baby boomer might turn into a nostalgic tattoo. No, this was fucking awful. I used to joke that “we’ve all had bad nights”; well, Leslie really had a horrible one! But of course the LaBiancas’ night was much, much worse.
I wrote to Leslie to let her know I sympathized about the terrible predicament she must be in now that she realized that the ludicrous truth she once believed in was a complete sham. Leslie was left holding a bag so terrible that few of us could imagine the weight. I hoped in some tiny way to help her carry it by imagining it myself.
Leslie wrote back guardedly. She didn’t know my films, of course; she had been on death row when Pink Flamingos had been released, and even I knew my trash epics were certainly not shown in prison during those years. She admitted my letter did not “put her off” as I had worried, but added she was “not certain of my intentions.” “But if you are in a hurry,” she warned, our friendship could never happen.
So I took it slowly. I wrote to her of my frustration in trying to get the sequel to Pink Flamingos made and she wrote me back about what else? Prison. Living in a cell “the size of an average bathroom with another person.” Leslie never complained but called jail “a big tragedy. All those broken souls desperately seeking a way to leave themselves.” What I soon realized was that Leslie was trying to do the exact opposite—seeking a way to get back to who she would have been if she had never met Manson. I knew that jailhouse manners dictated that the prisoner, not the visitor, is allowed to bring up the crime, and if it is mentioned (“Manson is a pathetic, disgusting, worthless old man”), you are allowed maybe one or two follow-up questions. When Leslie finally wrote, “I’d enjoy meeting you,” I still hoped to interview her and hopped on a plane.
I have now visited Leslie in the same visiting room in the California Institute for Women in Frontera, California (without freeway traffic problems about an hour’s drive east of Hollywood), for the last twenty-four years. The only real change in the cafeteria-style space is the cheesily cheerful photo backdrop you can pose in front of with your convict friend. This “green screen” of prison happiness has been altered through time—first it was a yellow-tinged country scene, then a blue floral motif, and finally a green and blue skyline. When friends look at the Polaroid pictures of Leslie and me that I have displayed privately on my office bulletin board, they are often confused. Not knowing that an in-house prison photographer snapped these shots through the years for five dollars each, they wonder who the woman standing next to me in front of the misleading generic tableau is. “Your sister?” many ask. “High school reunion?” others assume. When I trust someone enough to tell the truth, they are shocked at “how nice she looks.” How “like one of our friends” she appears.
On our first visit, Leslie, who looked then, and still does, very much like the actress Hilary Swank, explained that she had no interest in being in Rolling Stone because of what she had done. She was ashamed of it, not proud, and hoped that one day the terrible notoriety would fade. Little did either of us know that this wretched infamy would not only never fade away, it would become stronger through the years as Manson became the great American tabloid bogeyman.
Leslie and I continued to correspond and I was flattered that she grew to trust me. After several more visits, she wrote in 1987, “I feel good about you because I do not believe you would harm me. You make me feel good about myself…I need that…not to feel like a freak. I’d like to propose that this year we become closer friends. You inspire me to do something with myself.” Leslie inspired me, too. Inspired me to believe that if you wait long enough and work hard enough on your damaged psyche, you can eventually come out of it with some kind of self-respect and mental health. I never again asked Leslie to be interviewed until I began t
o write this book in 2007, and by then she knew I wanted to write about her recovery, something she could finally feel good about.
Will there ever be a “fair” answer to how Leslie should pay for these crimes? Can you ever recover from being called “a human mutant” or a “monster” by the government, especially when you know that they were right at one time in your life? How can you feel optimistic about your own rehabilitation when you see yourself reproduced as a bald-headed dummy with an X carved in your head in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum? How do you begin to deal with the pain of the victims’ relatives when the world has turned your former image into a Halloween costume?
With patience. God knows, Leslie Van Houten has patience. Patience to not find religious fanaticism that would forgive her instantly and take away her responsibilities for her actions. Patience to know and accept that she can’t take back the defiant and deluded things she was programmed to say at her first trial: “Sorry is only a five-letter word. It can’t bring back anything.” Or her rantings to the jury on hearing all the defendants, including herself, being sentenced to death: “You blind stupid people. Your own children will turn against you.” Or the terrible thoughts she admitted to prison psychologists at the time, about how she “felt kind of bad” she didn’t get to go the first night (when Sharon Tate, her unborn baby, and four other victims were brutally murdered). Or how she was “hoping if we did it again, I would get to go.” Or worse. After Tex Watson stabbed both Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, he told Leslie to “do something,” and “feeling like a shark” or “a primitive animal, a wildcat who had just caught a deer,” Leslie remembered, she stabbed Mrs. LaBianca sixteen times with a knife in the lower back.
Decades later, when a parole officer had reviewed eleven different favorable psychiatric reports, all concluding that Leslie was suitable for parole and no longer a danger to the community, he listened to her sadly try to explain her addled thought process at the time of the murders and her shame for “the girl I was at nineteen. The best way to show remorse is to be the best person I can be today.” He told her sympathetically but unforgivingly, “You’ve dug yourself quite a hole and it’s going to take a little time to get out of it.” It sure has.
Can you ever dig your way out of that hole by trying to explain LSD to a parole board whose members have never taken a trip? Could they understand Leslie’s plea that at the time of the murders “it was a constant exercise to try and not come down,” as she remembered in Connie Turner’s excellent but as yet unpublished Van Houten book, tentatively titled Talk About Leslie? “We spoke to each other in the nonsensical space the drug induces,” Leslie struggled to explain. “I became saturated in acid and had no sense of where those who were not part of the psychedelic reality came from. I had no perspective or sense that I was no longer in control of my mind.” Could a parole board ever fathom that Leslie actually believed she was an elf “three inches high” who would “grow fairy wings” at the time of Helter Skelter, as she later told Michael Farquhar in The Washington Post in 1994? Apparently she was not a lone elf. The Family women “would try to find elves hiding up in the trees and sitting quietly, so they might show themselves.” Leslie’s dad backs her up, too, remembering in Connie’s book how he visited Leslie “in county jail right after they had been picked up. Leslie told me she didn’t know if she should cut holes in the back of her blouse to hold her wings or to put little pockets.” Great. What does society do with a killer elf who decades later is now all better? Who could understand?
I could. I took a lot of LSD myself when I was young. From 1964 to about 1969, I took acid many, many times and never once had a bad trip. LSD quickly gave me confidence in my lunacy. “Don’t tell young people that!” my mother always begs; but it’s true. I remember tripping my brains out and dangerously crawling around the roof of the Marlborough Apartments in Baltimore after an LSD party and suddenly realizing I could make these crazy movies I had been dreaming up. My friends and I cemented our relationship with LSD, and became a parody of a movie studio, and together our celluloid madness began to strengthen and grow. We had a “family,” too.
But as nuts and angry as we were, would we have committed the atrocious crimes of my movies in real life if we hadn’t had the outlet of underground filmmaking? Well, who knows? We certainly never met one of the most notorious con men of the century, Charles Manson. And we were never looking for a spiritual leader the way Leslie was. I guess I was our gang’s leader. My parents never blamed the crowd I ran with; they knew I was the bad egg. “We’re not your puppets!” David Lochary used to yell at me when I went overboard on directing or thinking up stunts to film, like Divine shooting up liquid eyeliner for real. My “family” knew how to say no to me. Why couldn’t Leslie do the same in her distorted world?
Could I have gone off the deep end with my cinematic “orders”? I had planned a raid on the Maryland State Board of Censors in which the actors from Desperate Living would “home invade” the offices, chain themselves to the furniture, and refuse to leave until the anticipated cuts from our film were restored. Some of the actors (including three-hundred-pound Jean Hill) had actually agreed to this photo op if I’d pay the bail, but luckily I didn’t have to test their dedication to movie cult-madness, because right before our Board of Censors screening Governor Harry Hughes took office and disbanded the board in his first days of power. And even though Divine’s character in Female Trouble asks his audience, “Who wants to die for art?” and then shoots a fan who yells, “Yes!” (played by Vincent Peranio, my longtime friend and production designer), I don’t think any of my movie gang would have killed for cinema.
I never told Leslie this, but off camera I had killed somebody, too. Accidentally. Completely accidentally. In 1970 Mink Stole and I were driving up Broadway, a Baltimore thoroughfare that is divided by a safety island. It was early Sunday afternoon, we were not on drugs or liquor, and an elderly man, without looking, stepped off the curb right in front of my car. His body flipped up and landed on the hood with his face pressed toward mine through the driver-side windshield. This image so horrified me that I have used it over and over in my later films (Tab Hunter run over in Polyester, the schoolteacher killed by Kathleen Turner in her car in Serial Mom, the “Fidget” character’s near death as he falls off the drive-in marquee and lands on his parents’ car windshield in Cecil B. Demented). As I pulled over to the side of the road in shock, the man’s body slid off the hood of my car to the street, leaving indentation marks that reminded me of the snow angels you made as a child by lying down in snow drifts and waving your arms. “He’s okay,” Mink mumbled in hope. “No, he isn’t,” I said realistically as I heard his death rattle. A crowd gathered around the car and luckily, oh so luckily, a cop approached and said, “I saw it all happen and it wasn’t your fault.” What a miracle. I had long oily hair and was dressed in my usual thrift-shop-pimp-meets-hillbilly outfit and Mink was still in her “religious whore” period—wearing all black clothing with tons of rosaries around her neck way before Goth. We looked like complete lunatics. I called my dad to get our insurance information and he was immediately nervous. “Is anybody hurt?” he asked. “Well, yes…the man died,” I had to admit. “Oh, my God!” I heard my poor father moan. “Now this!”
But did I feel guilty? Even when I heard the victim was the beloved “peanut man” from the nearby Broadway Market? I didn’t know him, but some of my friends did. I felt no guilt because I knew the accident wasn’t my fault, but I certainly felt horrified. When my grandmother called later that night, she said, “I’m praying for that man’s soul.” I honestly replied, “Can’t you ask God why he picked my car to walk out in front of?”
If any deaths result from a car accident, you have to go to court, no matter whose fault it was. As my “manslaughter” trial began, my parents sat next to me in support, worried that, because of my hair and my already notorious cinematic reputation, I’d get convicted. It was a great relief to see that the deceased had no survivors, or at least
none came to trial. The whole hearing was over in three minutes after the cop testified to seeing the unfortunate man just walk into oncoming traffic without looking. This awful experience will never leave me, but it hardly qualifies me as a murderer. I can’t begin to imagine what Leslie feels today when it was her fault. All I could do was try to warn future jaywalkers of the dangers through dialogue in my movies. Patricia Hearst, playing a school crossing guard, tells Johnny Depp as he exits school in Cry-Baby, “Look left. Look right. Then walk!”
The attorney Paul Fitzgerald, after many years’ involvement defending the Manson women at various trials, said to the Los Angeles Times, “If Leslie Van Houten had never existed, the LaBiancas still would be dead.” But Leslie won’t let herself off that easily. “I blame myself,” she answered. “I’m part of what made him [Manson] a leader. If he didn’t have followers, he wouldn’t be a leader.” She later told Karlene Faith, “A follower is as responsible [as a leader] for allowing a leader to lead them foully.”
As much as the sex angle was built up in the press, the truth was surprising to some. Leslie slept with Manson “maybe three times,” she testified in court, and only “in the first month” she was with the group. Leslie would never admit this, but she had better taste in Manson men. Bobby Beausoleil, aka “Cupid,” was the most traditionally handsome of Charlie’s boys—he had starred in Kenneth Anger’s movie Lucifer Rising—and was Leslie’s first boyfriend inside the Family. Even Charlie was a little in love with Bobby, and Leslie remembers being shocked at seeing Bobby orally service Charlie during one of their group sex evenings. “I didn’t ‘sleep with the devil,’” Leslie told Karlene Faith, “I slept with an ex-con who had an extensive record of pimping and abusing women. But I didn’t know that.” “The ranch,” she remembered, according to Connie Turner, “was set up and run the same way as a stable of hookers, although none of us realized it at the time.”