by John Waters
In 1996 Leslie started to fight back, too, by arguing she should be paroled “because there is a system that says I can earn it. I have taken seriously what I have done. I have redesigned my life where I am a conscientious and caring individual. I am now who I would have been if I had not gone into a drug/Manson lifestyle.” At her last hearing she could not have been more honest. Still “deeply ashamed,” Leslie ignored the rule against looking at the victim’s families and begged the LaBianca survivors, “I ask that I be shown the mercy I didn’t give…and that is not easy in this [parole board] room but I’m going to ask for it. I am who I say I am.”
Leslie Van Houten has served more time than any Nazi war criminal who was not sentenced to death at Nuremberg. She has served more time that any of the Nazi defendants who were sentenced to life in prison except for Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who died in his fortieth year in prison (the exact amount of time Leslie has now served). She’s served more time than Lieutenant William Calley, who was originally sentenced to life in prison for the My Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. She has served longer than the surviving female members of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, a German terrorist group who murdered thirty-four people in the name of left-wing “politics” and “revolution.” This group began with the student protest movement in 1968, the same year Charles Manson was recruiting his hippie army of LSD soldiers. Brigitte Mohnhaupt was convicted of nine political murders and sentenced to five life sentences, but served just twenty-four years. Another member, Irmgard Möller, convicted of a 1972 bomb attack in Heidelberg that killed three American soldiers, was released in 1994 after serving twenty-four years. Courts ruled that “the decision for probation was reached based on the determination that no security risks exist today.” And none of these radicals even said they were sorry!
But how sorry is sorry enough? Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, and one of the few Nazi defendants to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even though he denied knowing of the Holocaust, struggled with this question. When Gitta Sereny (here she is again!) interviewed him for her amazing book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, following his release after serving all twenty years of his sentence in Spandau Prison, she asked the same kind of question about responsibility for the crime that the parole board asks Leslie. While Leslie participated in a much tinier version of a fascist regime, there are definite similarities in the issue of degrees of guilt. Was there something “inherently evil” inside Leslie, as Stephen Kay has charged? Was there a “lack of morality” underneath Speer’s initial attraction to “the cause,” wondered Ms. Sereny? “If I just answer that question with a ‘yes,’” a free Speer honestly responded after decades of reflection, “it would be too simple. For of course now I think it was immoral. But what does that mean? Nothing. How can it help our understanding of these terms which is what you and I are trying to do here, I presume, for me to say, ‘Yes, yes mea culpa.’ Yes, of course, mea culpa, but the whole point is that I didn’t feel this and why didn’t I? Was it Hitler, only Hitler, because of whom I don’t understand? Or was it a deficiency in me? Or was it both?”
“How can a man admit more and go on living?” Gitta Sereny asked Speer, probing how deeply he could go inside himself to take in the full weight of his repression of the horror of Hitler’s regime. The same incredulous response the prosecutors continue to have over the fact that Leslie knew there had been five killings the night before, yet chose to go along for the next night of mayhem fully aware of what would happen. “You knew all this,” Ms. Sereny challenged Speer about Nazi slave labor, “yet you stayed, not only stayed but worked, planned with, and supported. How can you explain? How can you justify? How can you stand living with yourself?” His answers could have been Leslie’s. “You cannot understand. You simply cannot understand what it is to live in a dictatorship and you can’t understand the game of danger but above all you can’t understand the fear on which the whole thing is based.” Leslie, too, struggled to explain to a parole board in 2004 how her life was hijacked onto such a horrific track. “It didn’t start out that way. It started off like a commune. And then the more he [Manson] measured how much we believed in him, the violence would become more acute until at the end it was very prevalent.” “I wanted to leave,” she remembered in sadness and frustration, “and I told him I was going to leave. And he took me to the edge of a cliff and he told me I may as well jump off because if I left I would die. Now, you know when you say something like this years and years and years later, and it seems so small. But at the time I believed him. I believed if I left him, the very same thing that happened to Leno and Rosemary LaBianca would happen to me. And now I carry the responsibility for that…”
While Speer admits “the intensity of the crime precludes any attempt at self-justification,” he stated wearily something I don’t think Leslie feels and, as much as I understand his statement, I don’t think she ever will. “I awake with it,” Speer says of his guilt, “spend my day with it and dream it. But my reply—I know it—has long been routine. I can no longer answer with emotion and people resent this.”
One wonders if the Manson Family today were all in one room, would there be an evil spectacle of hippie-devil anarchy, like I saw in that courtroom in 1977, or a group of broken, sad, disillusioned ex-con baby boomers? “These children that came at you with knives,” as Charlie once called his followers, are now senior citizens begging forgiveness. The other Manson girls are unrecognizable from the famous early newsreel footage that is still played ad nauseam every time a mention of the crime comes up. Susan Atkins, before having her leg amputated and dying in prison from brain cancer in 2009, wore a hearing aid and could have been mistaken for a suburban dental technician. Patricia Krenwinkel looks like an elderly high school history teacher. The men, many bald now for real, have a sadness and embarrassment about them. How humiliating to have been taken for a ride by such an obvious con man as Charlie. All the repentant Family members cling to the hope they will be forgiven or—even better—forgotten. Albert Speer wondered with Rudolf Hess as they served their long sentence in Spandau Prison whether, if released, they would meet “and have a good bottle of wine and perhaps find it in us to laugh about some of the memories of Spandau.” Rudolf Hess answered much in the same way as I believe Leslie would. “If we were ever all out, none of us would ever see each other again and most certainly we would not laugh.”
There is an amazing press photo that was taken by Peter Phun for The Press-Enterprise, a newspaper in Riverside, California, which shows a beautiful but haunted Leslie Van Houten being walked before the press in 2002 on her way to a court hearing in hopes of overturning the board’s rejection of her parole. Leslie is humiliated to still be handcuffed and chained after decades of nonviolence and she is sad that the press is still there to give the Manson brand another jolt of publicity. For security reasons the cops have made her wear her waist-length hair down, not in the dignified bun she usually wears. You can tell Leslie fears it will look “witchy,” as Charlie used to order. She is embarrassed by the attention but firmly proud of who she has become. Leslie looks absolutely stunning in her clear-headed maturity. This is the woman I am friends with today.
But one of her prison guards looks over at her in the picture in almost cartoonish fear—he still sees her as a dangerous Manson girl, and one can imagine the excited story he can now tell his wife and kids over dinner that night. Leslie will never be able to overcome this notoriety. But if that same prison guard knew her the way I know her, he wouldn’t be afraid anymore. He might even ask her to babysit his kids. Her crime was a long, long time ago and she has paid her dues to society. I hope Leslie Van Houten can be given a second chance. The best gift I can give her is a promise that she doesn’t ever have to see me again once she is released. “I’m not trying to get away with anything,” Leslie has told anyone who would listen. And she’s not. She’s really not.
R E I K A W A K U B O
Fashion is very i
mportant to me. My “look” for the last twenty years or so has been “disaster at the dry cleaners.” I shop in reverse. When I can afford to buy a new outfit, something has to be wrong with it. Purposely wrong. Comme des Garçons (like some boys) is my favorite line of clothing, designed by the genius fashion dictator Rei Kawakubo. She specializes in clothes that are torn, crooked, permanently wrinkled, ill-fitting, and expensive. What used to be called “seconds” (clothes that were on sale in bargain basements of department stores because of accidental irregularities) is now called “couture.” Ms. Kawakubo is my god. The fashion historian Kazuko Koike has described Rei as “almost like the leader of a religious movement.” I genuflect to Rei’s destruction of the fashion rules. She is formidable, reclusive, intimidating, and has described her work as an “exercise in suffering.”
Ms. Kawakubo’s reviews have mostly been brilliant but the bad ones make me prouder to wear her clothes: “unwearable,” “post-atomic,” “that shrunken, hopeless look,” “as threadbare and disheveled as Salvation Army rejects,” and, best of all, “fashion is having a nervous breakdown.” “I’m always more or less annoying,” Kawakubo admitted to Judith Thurman in a revealing 2005 New Yorker profile. Wearing what Ms. Thurman describes as “Rei’s favorite accessory—a dour expression,” Kawakubo admitted that, between collections, she and her husband, Adrian Joffe (president of her company, who sees her once a month), “travel to Yemen or Romania” for…what? Fun? When asked by Thurman, “What makes Rei laugh?” she answered without a smile, “People falling down.”
I had first heard of Comme des Garçons in 1983, when my friend Gina Koper, who was from Baltimore but now lives in New York, said to me, “You’ve got to see this new fashion place that opened in my neighborhood—you won’t believe it!” Since I knew Gina understood radical fashion situations from working as a white teenage girl in 1969 in a Baltimore Super Fly–type men’s store called the Purple Bone, I eagerly went with her. The first Comme des Garçons boutique in America was in SoHo, on Wooster Street, and it looked like a morgue. A few black rumpled pieces of clothing lay like wounded bodies on slabs. “Is that a hat or a coat?” nervous customers would ask the severely intimidating sales staff (or “co-combatants” as Rei later called them—“We are the Comme des Garçons army. ‘Staff’ is too boring a word”). I was amazed at the gall and the wit of the Japanese clothing designs. Many pieces looked fresh out of the sale bin at the Purple Heart thrift shop in Baltimore, but as Vogue later put it, “Destruction has its price and it’s not cheap.” I couldn’t afford any of the men’s clothes at the time but I hoped one day I could. Suddenly I felt like a drug addict who takes his first shot of heroin. I was about to become addicted to Comme des Garçons and maybe, if I worked hard, Rei Kawakubo could be my dealer. I left the store feeling like a king.
I always cared about clothes but I rebelled early against the preppy look my parents wished I’d wear. Even today the sight of a pair of khakis turns my stomach. As soon as I got out of the house and moved to downtown Baltimore I discovered thrift shops and, brother, did we have good ones. Still do. Where do you think all the vintage shops in New York get their stuff? It’s just a three-and-a-half hour drive south to “Charm City,” and even though today the most mutant thrift shop worker in the deepest ghetto knows what a Bakelite bracelet is, Baltimore is still cheaper than anywhere else. Our favorite fashion showroom in the sixties was the Carry On Shop, then located downtown on Howard Street. Most of the clothes were donated by rich people associated with Johns Hopkins Hospital, which ran the place. I remember “Fill Your Shopping Bag for a Dollar” day, when all the Dreamlanders purchased their looks for the year. We bought so many clothes there for our early movies it felt like the wardrobe department at MGM. And even on regular days, when the prices were a little higher, we got creative. Especially Divine and David Lochary. Outraged that any item might cost more than three dollars, they began bringing their own pricing equipment: cardboard that matched the existing price tags, a crayon the same color as used in the store, and a trusty little stapler. Ripping off the existing price tags, scribbling in the price they felt was fair, and stapling it back on the garment made stylish clothes available to even the poorest fashion fanatic.
Of course there were cheaper thrift stores, but you had to work hard to find good stuff at places like the Hadassah, a real dive that even homeless people snubbed. Maybe stuff was free; I can’t remember. But you can see Divine shoplifting there in a scene in Mondo Trasho that was filmed while the shop was open, with real customers, and without permission. Divine, dressed in a gold lamé toreador outfit and a tousled blond wig, just walked in and started picking her way through the dresses, many crammed in so tight you could hardly move the hangers, while I just filmed away with my silent 16 mm movie camera. I guess somebody was working there that day, but with this clientele the clerk had seen it all and obviously didn’t care what we were doing. The bins of clothes were even worse, filled with stained smelly garments that inmates of locked wards in the state mental institutions would reject. But if you picked through long enough and hard enough and didn’t mind getting a skin rash, you might, if you were very lucky, find a stunning 1950s gown that nobody was wearing in the late sixties. It might have cost a nickel.
In those days, our parents’ generation had just thrown away all their 1930s and ’40s clothes, and since those were freshly out of fashion, our gang started dressing like we were in a low-budget Busby Berkeley movie. I soon grew tired of the Dick-Powell-on-amphetamines look and switched over to a style I developed that made even speed freaks nervous. I loved finding the most hideous cowboy shirts, ones with padded guitars on them, or shrunken heads, or my favorite—giant tarantulas (Stiv Bators later ripped off the sleeves and wore it in Polyester). I found a jacket that was a uniform for some sort of dog handler/watchdog company that featured a giant snarling German shepherd on the back and wore that for years (you can see me in it on the cover of the A Date with John Waters CD). Pointy-toe suede shoes were easily purchased pre-punk, and we called them “shit-kickers.” With my pre-moustache skinny 6’1", 130-pound frame and my long stringy hair, I succeeded in horrifying even seasoned thrift shop enthusiasts.
Then, in 1970, in a misguided attempt to steal Little Richard’s identity, I grew my pencil-thin moustache. At first it didn’t work right. It’s tough for a white man who isn’t that hairy to grow one. Sure, I shaved with a razor on top and trimmed the bottom with cuticle scissors, just like I do every day now, but it still looked kind of pitiful. Then “Sick,” the friend of mine from the Provincetown tree fort who had moved to Santa Barbara and changed her nickname to “Sique,” gave me some fashion advice when I was staying with her. “Just use a little eyebrow pencil and it will work better,” she advised, and then showed me how. Presto! An “iconic” look: a ridiculous fashion joke that I still wear forty years later. Surprised? Don’t be! It is called a “pencil moustache,” isn’t it? And there is only one pencil that does the trick—Maybelline Expert Eyes in Velvet Black. My entire identity depends on this magic little wand of sleaze. It has to be sharpened every time it’s applied, too—which in my case is twice a day or so. More if you’ve been making out. Believe me, I’ve tried expensive, smearproof eyebrow pencils, but they’re too thick, too penetrating, too indelible. There’s only one eyebrow pencil for me—and that’s Maybelline!
I always carry one in my pocket, keep another in my car, and have backups in each of my homes. Once I was in the hospital after being mugged and I guess because of my concussion I had forgotten to bring my Maybelline. I was so panicked that I would limp over to the mirror and try to gouge it on with a regular number two lead pencil used for writing. It didn’t work. Since I knew the only visitors I had scheduled that day were my parents, I decided to involve them. I didn’t have much of a choice. We had certainly never discussed how I did my moustache. I just remember their vaguely nauseated expression when they saw it for the first time when I came back from California. We had so many issues at the
time, the moustache had to get in line. I bit the bullet, called my mother, and said, “Don’t ask any questions, just go to the drugstore, get me a Maybelline eyebrow pencil in Velvet Black, and bring it to me in the hospital.” Silence on her end. “Okay,” she finally muttered with mortified annoyance. When Mom and Dad came in the hospital room, she snuck the prized package behind her back and gave it to me without my father seeing. We never ever discussed it again.
I’ve forgotten to put on my moustache some days and I have to lurk around like Clark Kent looking for a phone booth until I find a car mirror on an uncrowded street (not easy in Manhattan!) or a public restroom where I can, unobserved, repair the damage to my image. I remember once starting out the day with a visit to Mary Boone’s midtown art gallery. Mary came out of her office, took one look at me, and blurted in a horrified voice, “What happened to your moustache?!” Instantly feeling nude in public, I realized the problem, mumbled some excuse about the lighting, and left immediately. I raced home in the privacy of a cab, drew it in, blended it, and started the day all over again.