by John Waters
“Are you crazy enough to believe in me?” Charlie asked Leslie, and after months of LSD trips, isolation in the desert, and hours and hours of his continuous insane political rantings, Leslie, like most of the other girl converts, was. “‘Bow like sheep,’ Manson would order us,” Leslie recalled in 1983. “We wore Bowie knives on belts around our waists and were only [dressed] in our underwear, I think, unless it got cold,” she told Connie Turner. “We’d sit around on our feet and grunt…we were seeing how long we could go without drinking water…I was carrying a twenty-pound backpack filled with rice. We were building roads from nowhere to nowhere by moving rocks around…It was hard.” Susan Atkins, Leslie’s codefendant, said in one of her parole hearings that they “were three young women clearly not in our right minds who lived in slavish obedience to a madman.” Catherine Share, an early Manson Family member who finally managed to break free after serving time for the gun robbery, remembers Manson “just stealing everyone’s soul.” “Thinking is stinking,” he used to say. And while Gypsy never killed for Charlie, she understood the state of mind of the ones who did. “The killers couldn’t even form a thought,” she sadly remembered from her own experience. Tex Watson’s psychologist’s reports stated that Tex “had confusion as to who or what he was. Sometimes he ‘felt like a monkey’! He actually believed that the victims were imaginary people.” Tex told the shrink that he looked in the mirror at the Tate house, trying to figure out who he was. “I wasn’t anyone,” he remembered. “I wasn’t Charles Watson, I was an animal. The end of the world was then. I was the living death…”
Seeing Leslie today in the visiting room, it’s hard to imagine her with this past. The X on her forehead has almost faded away, and she looks like an upscale intelligent woman I could definitely come across in my life in New York or Los Angeles. She could be seated next to you at any dinner party of professional people and it would never dawn on you that this woman had been in prison for four decades. She even went to the Oscars with a female friend in 1978 when she was out on bail, and nobody recognized her! “But what did you talk about to the people you met that night?” I wondered, knowing she had been released not that long before from death row, not exactly a center of industry screenings or “For Your Consideration” Oscar campaigns. “If someone brought up one of the nominees,” she said with a shrug, “I’d just say, ‘No, I missed that one’ or ‘I was away when that was playing.’”
Leslie and I have gotten older together in that visiting room and I’ve seen the prison rules constantly change. I used to be able to buy her three packs of cigarettes to take back to her cell, but now it’s illegal to smoke anywhere in jail in California. The cigarettes-as-money system that used to feel so old-school Women Behind Bars is gone forever. Now I get to buy her three cans of Pepsi! Stylistically, it’s just not the same thing. Worse yet, about five years ago, suddenly none of the women in Leslie’s jail were allowed to use any kind of hair coloring. Overnight the entire prison population aged ten years in appearance, and on my first visit since the ban, I knew something was wrong, but it took me several minutes to realize that everybody had two-inch gray roots. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment!
Leslie and I have shared good times and bad times. And yes, Leslie does have good times. She’s taught illiterate women to read in prison classes, she’s stitched a portion of the AIDS quilt, made bedding for the homeless, recorded books on tape for the blind. She has clerked for the administrators, the nurses, the associate warden, the head of education, the kitchen, and the priest. And it’s not that she jumps from job to job—rules restrict inmates from working longer than two years in the same position. She can be lighthearted, too. She even sang “Santa Baby” at the prison Christmas show one year.
Yet somehow Leslie continues to live through the bad times without despair and inspires others to do the same. When Divine died suddenly in 1988, Leslie was one of the first to console me by letter. “I’m so sad and wish I could be closer for you. I know you loved him and enjoyed in the success of his life and helped him through his hard times…I am sorry I will not get to know him.” She counseled me on a personal level, too. After a relationship of mine ended, Leslie was a good shoulder to lean on, and I hope I’ve given her good advice, too, when she’s had crushes from prison on men in the outside world. I’ve met two of her longest-lasting roommates: Becky, the bank robber whom I adored and who is now free, and another inmate I called “Little Miss Manslaughter” because she was so bubbly and was an actual fan of my movies before she was sentenced.
Since no cable TV is available in jail, Leslie has seen few of my movies, but did finally get to see my version of Hairspray, and it was nice to get her good review. “I loved it,” she wrote to me. “I was really into the public dances and all that. I lived to go to the Harmony Ballroom in Anaheim. I bought my shoes by how well they slid on the wood floor. I’m telling you, it was my life!” It was her life. From “Mashed Potato” to Manson’s “Monster Mash” is just a few short years. Luckily for her, Leslie still has a sense of humor. She even joked about my role in Hairspray as an evil psychiatrist who uses a ridiculous optical medical tool to hypnotize a teenage white girl into never dating black boys. “I never had one of those spinning wheels flashed in front of my face,” Leslie admitted, referring to decades of therapy. “Do you think it would help?”
I’ve always secretly wondered if Leslie ever felt “cool” when she was with the Manson gang and I finally got up the nerve to ask. She looked at me in confusion. “Cool? We had no concept by then of any such possible word!” she answered. And now the “celebrity” was even more unfathomable. “There’s nothing sadder than to be asked for an autograph because of infamy,” she once wrote to me. “I’ve had to explain I’m not proud of what I have done or why they [people] are aware of me. It’s an awful feeling. The ‘unwilling star.’” And when her autograph or letters are sold on murder memorabilia sites, it makes her feel worse because someone she has written to has betrayed her, and she’s not sure who—“So creepy. All disgusting and distasteful.”
We’ve always discussed current events, how paralyzed she was with sadness over the Waco tragedy and how similar David Koresh was to Manson—even more so than to Jim Jones. Or how she understands the mind-set of kamikaze suicide bombers because that was how she was trained by Manson to feel and act once. And when the riots broke out in L.A. in 1992, after the acquittal of the police in the Rodney King beating, an event Manson loyalists likened to Helter Skelter finally happening for real, Leslie was so far away from the Manson ideology that the comparison never even occurred to her. “This has been a really emotional time for me,” she wrote that week. “First there was the first execution in nearly half a century in California”—Robert Alton Harris, who was strapped into the gas chamber for thirteen minutes, released due to appeals, and then put back in the same day and executed—“and then the days L.A. went mad. I sat watching on TV images usually seen in other countries. John, it was so frightening—to think of what is supposed to be safe as totally out of control.”
I’ve tried to be Leslie’s “agent” in the world of Hollywood. She agonized with me about whether to cooperate and be interviewed for the TV newsmagazine show Turning Point, but once she met Diane Sawyer, Leslie agreed this news correspondent was “a class act.” After seeing the completed show, Leslie admitted she “had been treated better than I ever have.” When the distressing news came in 2003 that CBS was remaking Helter Skelter as a new TV movie, I called the director, John Gray, whom I didn’t know, at his home. Probably wondering why I was calling, or worse yet, thinking I was happy about the news, he took my call and listened quietly as I begged him to realize what a terrible unfair effect this project would have on Leslie’s parole chances, how she was ashamed and horrified about the crimes, how further notoriety on the case would only please Manson and hurt the privacy of victims’ families. I think my call may have worked a little, because when I saw the finished project, Leslie’s character was minimal
and her part in the crime was truthfully shown to have been ordered by a vengeful Manson. A year or two later, my hunch was proven correct. In Los Angeles, in a restaurant to meet my agent and five minutes early, I was shown to my table alone and the waitress approached me with an odd expression. “Can I ask you something personal?” she shyly requested. “Sure,” I replied, realizing she recognized me but never expecting what was coming next. “Are you the head of that ‘Friends of Leslie’ organization?” “No, there is no ‘head’ and that group has been disbanded officially, but there are many people who support her parole chances,” I answered. “Because I played Leslie in the newest Helter Skelter,” she revealed. Only in L.A.! Her name was Catherine Wadkins, and I suddenly felt bad, realizing I might have contributed to making an actress’s part smaller. “Yes, you did,” she confided after I told her the story of my call to her director, which she already knew about. “That’s okay.” Catherine smiled. “I think Leslie should get out and I tried to play the part in a way to show how brainwashed she was.”
Leslie never asked me for money or material goods over the years. I’ve sent her books I loved and together we’ve discussed novels by James Purdy, Mary McGarry Morris, Michael Cunningham, and Anne Tyler. After maybe one too many of my intense choices, Leslie started requesting her own titles, many of which had to do with the history and plight of the Native American Indian, and I was happy to oblige. The only reading material I sent her that was rejected by the mailroom was, oddly enough, an issue of Paper magazine that included a fashion shoot that must have contained a little too much nudity. Once I offered to buy Leslie a TV for her cell but she declined. My kind of gal.
I was lucky enough to meet some of Leslie’s friends on the outside, too. She has a support group that is tireless and relentless. “I like that several people close to me are also now friends of yours,” Leslie wrote me after years of visiting. The most dedicated is Linda Grippi, a friend of Leslie’s since high school who began visiting her not long after she was convicted and has never stopped. Linda is practically a nun in the religion of Leslie’s rehabilitation and the firmest believer that Leslie should be paroled. Linda has dedicated her life to the cause of Leslie’s freedom. She is a kind but convincing levelheaded pit bull who goes after anyone who believes otherwise with a reasoned defense. If Linda could testify at Leslie’s parole hearing as “support,” the way the victims’ families can, I think Leslie might have already received a release date.
But Leslie meeting my friends was more problematic, because of their East Coast locations and the strict rules about visiting high-profile prisoners like her. I am afraid I have betrayed Leslie, too. A long time ago she mentioned to me that she “hoped I never ‘used’ our friendship or her plight for freedom” as dinner party conversation in my travels around the world. And I am embarrassed to admit, in my enthusiasm for her rehabilitation and my pride in our friendship, I have. Leslie Van Houten is quite a name to drop, and famous people are eager to hear her story. When we were filming Cry-Baby, Johnny Depp heard my pleas concerning Leslie’s parole and offered to visit her. Leslie, like everyone else in the world, had great respect for Johnny Depp and was moved that he, as my buddy, cared about her case. But we must have been nuts! Can you imagine the press if they found out? Think of the headlines—“Johnny Depp joins Manson Family.” Luckily for all of us, Johnny’s visiting form was turned down because of an “impending assault charge,” probably a hotheaded reaction to paparazzi.
Initially both my mother and Leslie’s were nervous about our friendship. “Does the Manson Family have to have our address?” my mother moaned when I once had a letter sent there. And in 1998, Leslie commented to The Baltimore Sun in a long profile of me that she “found it ironic” that her mother and supporters initially “were concerned” for Leslie, as if “knowing him could somehow hurt my reputation.” But over the years our mothers softened and grew used to the idea. Leslie’s mother went to see Pecker and my mother needlepointed me a pillow that says “Leslie.” As our parents got older and poor health struck, Leslie and I commiserated on how lucky we were to have parents who had lived long enough so we both could make peace with them over our notorious pasts. “None of this” was her parents’ fault, Leslie told a parole board. And when Mrs. Van Houten died in 2005, Leslie wrote her friends a great tribute, admitting it was “very hard for me not to be there for her at this terrible time (of her illness) just to fix her hair, read to her, just be near her. As it is, I cherish all the qualities of her that are alive in me. She lived a good life. She was a world-traveler, helped in unionizing the L.A. teachers, she was part of the Mothers Marching Against Vietnam and was very proud of that. Mama liked Hillary Clinton and wrote her support letters. So I share with you, my friends, the life of Jane Louise Edwards Van Houten. A woman who was a good mother who I loved dearly. We worked our way over very hard times and came through with sincere tenderness. She was pleased you were my friend. Take a moment to say, ‘Hear, hear,’ for a life that was well-lived.”
But, yes, I know the LaBianca kids don’t have a mother around anymore because of my friend Leslie. No matter how patient Leslie or her supporters are, we know this terrible fact will never change. But when, if ever, will there have been enough punishment? Vincent Bugliosi, the original and fairest Manson Family prosecutor and author of Helter Skelter, originally predicted in his book that the “girls” would serve “fifteen to twenty years” and called Leslie “the least committed to Manson,” but later told the National Enquirer, “I want Leslie Van Houten to remain in prison for the rest of her life.” He once admitted to Larry King after hearing Leslie speak on the show, “I was impressed by her. In defense of her I can say this, she seems to be a model prisoner and everyone seems to say she is very remorseful for the murders.” But Stephen Kay, who prosecuted Leslie in her later trials and has argued against her parole many times since, seems even more confused on how much time she should serve. Admitting “I’ve always said she [Leslie] was the smartest and maybe the most normal of them all,” he also commented in the Los Angeles Times, in 1980, that he didn’t feel Leslie Van Houten should be locked up forever, but it was “too soon to release her now.” He would rather “wait until she was at least forty years old.” Sixteen years after that, a Court TV reporter asked him, “Will you always fight Leslie Van Houten’s parole?” And he answered, “Always is a long time. I’m not saying she will never be suitable for parole, I’ve not said ‘never.’” But when the old National Enquirer comes around, he encourages their readers to send in coupons against her release and claims, “Leslie Van Houten should never be paroled.”
The parole board can be equally confusing when it comes to sending signals to Leslie about a possible release. After eighteen parole hearings, some members praised her—“You’ve come a long way,” “You’re much closer [than] you might realize”—while denying her a date, always citing “the enormity of the crime,” the only thing she can never change. It is painful to watch Leslie sit there year after year, her face lined in sorrow in long Warholian close-ups on Court TV as she listens to the same gruesome details of her crime that the prosecutor read into the record at every hearing. No matter how much progress she’s made or how good the psychiatric reports, she is forced to redescribe or come up with new details of that terrible night or be accused of “not opening up” to her part in the crime, and then is punished as the prosecutor takes her honest memory of the insane Manson reasoning and uses it against her in future hearings. As Christie Webb, Leslie’s last parole defense attorney, so succinctly put it in 2004, “Deputy D.A. has proved that Leslie Van Houten was a danger in 1971 and, yes, she was. She was when she was with the Manson cult. She tried to explain her relationship to Manson—how she would die for him, how she would kill for him. She tried to explain that and told that to psychiatrists in 1970 and 1971 when she was still under the influence of cult indoctrination and then it’s used against her 38 years later.”
In 2002 a California Supreme Court judge realize
d that a rejection of her parole was made “without any explanation of reason” and ordered the parole board to get back to him in ninety days to show “some evidence” of why Leslie should not be released and what she must do to rehabilitate herself. In November of that same year Judge Bob Krug said of the parole board’s ruling, “I cannot find any indication where Miss Van Houten has done anything wrong in prison. They can’t keep using the crime forever and ever. That turns her sentence into life without parole. If I was Ms. Van Houten I wouldn’t have a clue what to do at the next hearing.”
“Unreasonable risk to the community” is another reason used to turn down Leslie year after year. “I don’t want anyone to wake up and find Leslie Van Houten is the next-door neighbor,” Stephen Kay argued in 1986, conveniently forgetting that Leslie had had next-door neighbors when she lived peacefully on parole between her second and third trial. An even more persuasive argument against this reasoning was the successful parole and release of Steve “Clem” Grogan, aka “Scramblehead,” one of the most brainwashed men in the Manson Family. Grogan was convicted (along with two other defendants) in a separate trial for the murder of ranch hand Shorty Shea, carried out because Charlie thought Shea was a snitch. Sentenced to life in prison but released after serving fourteen years (maybe because there was at least a reason for this type of murder that someone could understand), Mr. Grogan commented to the parole board, “I still haven’t got over the emotional part…the atrocity that I did.” Grogan, who was certainly as committed to Manson’s lunatic cause as Leslie was at the time of the crimes, has never been heard from by the law since. Away from Manson, he got his life back together, found employment, and now lives lawfully and quietly out of the eyes of the press, crime historians, or Manson groupies. Contrary to what Charlie preaches, sometimes sense does make sense.