In her young adult novel Family (2011), Micol Ostow imagines that the Manson Family was a “network of sisters and brothers, each of them shattered in some unique way.”42 There is no doubt that many of the individual members of the Family carried deep wounds from their past into their present lives. There are plenty of reasons to agree with Life magazine’s reading of Manson’s female followers as having been “lured . . . into a sisterhood of exploitation” through “flattery, fear and sex.”43 But all of the hand-wringing discussions in which the larger culture indulged about the particular pathologies of the Manson Family often served as a barely masked form of truth-telling about so many families—that the home is so often the site of the most intense and sustained abuse that children experience anywhere in their lives. If the Manson Family was sick, how much of its dysfunction was a next-generation effect that could be blamed on its members’ families of origin? Manson may have acted, as so many observers have pointed out, as a kind of caricature of the dominant and hurtful father. But the grotesque cartoon of patriarchy that Manson animated could not have succeeded if his followers were not vulnerable to his ability to dominate them.
Not every Manson girl was in a situation quite as starkly heartbreaking as Ruth Ann Moorehouse, known as Ouisch to the Family. Ruth Ann Moorehouse joined the collective after her father, Dean Moorehouse, picked up Manson hitchhiking. Dean Moorehouse attempted something like a rescue of his daughter, but according to the best accounts, was soon taking LSD himself and beseeching Manson to let him join the family. His explicit agreement to let Ruth Ann stay with Manson, although she was still legally a minor, sent a clear message about how literally this one father was willing to participate in the exploitation of his daughter. Gregg Jakobson has more than once suggested that Manson was not the only man with designs on Ruth Ann Moorehouse. According to Jakobson, his good friend Terry Melcher was also smitten with Ouisch and considered moving her into the Cielo Drive home he shared with Candice Bergen to serve, in Jakobson’s heartrending euphemism, as “a housekeeper.” As Jakobson tells the tale, “Candy Bergen knew what kind of chores Terry had in mind and vetoed the plan.”44
Dianne Lake, called “Snake” by the Family (as a commentary, Ed Sanders suggests, on the “transverse ophidian wiggles she made during intercourse”) was also allowed by her own commune-dwelling parents to travel on her own.45 Some accounts suggest that Lake’s parents even gave her a note to carry around with her (though Lake has recently disputed this)—a permission slip for field trip with Manson—to make clear that she was free to follow her bliss.46
But in this place and at this time permission was just a kiss away from submission. Allowing your daughter to travel freely in countercultural circles, as Ruth Ann Moorehouse’s father did, as Dianne Lake’s Hog Farm mother and father did, and as, perhaps, Deirdre Lansbury’s mother, actor Angela Lansbury, did as well, must have struck these parents as either a positive act of progressive parenting or as a reasonable compromise growing from their own hopelessness about managing their children.47 But we must recognize that the sexual liberation and family reorganizations of the 1960s and 1970s often meant, in a practical way, that young women were ending up in positions of great vulnerability. Submission is stipulated as a social good in Charles Manson’s song “Cease to Exist,” which appeared in 1969 as the B-side of a Beach Boys single (and then on their LP release 20/20). When the Beach Boys recorded Manson’s song “Cease to Exist” as “Never Learn Not to Love” they also changed a crucial line in which Manson suggested that women must submit. Instead, the Beach Boys transformed the imperative sentence into a descriptive one simply by changing “give it” to “given.” (Bobby Beausoleil has recently suggested that Manson’s anger at the Beach Boys vis-à-vis this song had more to do with messaging than money: he was, apparently, upset that the group turned his statement of spiritual purpose into a song of seduction.)48 When Manson used “brother” in his original version of the song (called “Never Learn Not to Love”) he was most likely using it in its expanded countercultural sense of “comrade” or “lover”; Donald Nielsen reminds us that Manson was particularly invested in expanding the “‘brotherly’ rhetoric widespread in the 1960s counterculture.”49 But the Wilson brothers, who grew up in a “traditional” nuclear family headed by a father who wielded fear and humiliation as everyday weapons of control, were not able to wrap their vocal cords around the line as written and changed “brother” to “another.” Perhaps Dennis Wilson and the others just thought that “another” scanned better than “your brother.” (It does.) But one of the uncomfortable tales the Family had to tell in the late 1960s is that expressions of control were not incidental by-products of the “traditional” family; domination (and sometimes resistance) were foundational.
Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ wounded genius, seems to know this. Wilson briefly summarizes the relationship of Manson to celebrity musicians like Terry Melcher and his own brother Dennis (“Terry was . . . the guy in the middle of the situation with my brother . . . and Charles Manson”) and then notes that “Terry and Manson didn’t get the right ideas about each other and they stopped being friends.” Wilson then wonders for a second whether Manson sent his followers to Cielo Drive to look for Melcher or “if it didn’t make any difference to them who was in the house.” The very next sentence is something of a surprise: “Families can be the strangest, most horrible things.”50
Paul Watkins, one of Manson’s most trusted co-conspirators, and author of what is perhaps the most interesting family memoir that we have, writes that essentially “Charlie’s trip was to program us all to submit.”51 Manson did not invent the idea that the family operated along recognizable vectors (i.e., gender, age) of power. What Manson figured out is that helping to liberate children from their own parents did not necessarily imply a critique of all authority. If Manson’s Family represented, as Todd Gitlin has suggested, a “parody of patriarchy,” it remained unclear who or what was being parodied.52 While plenty of commentators in the late 1960s and early 1970s recognized that young people were testing new social organizations that removed the scaffolding of generational power in favor of peer equity, it remained difficult for many observers to notice that Manson had substantial holdings in both the old ways and the new. As Paul O’Neil put it in Life magazine in December 1969, Charles Manson was “no hippie. . . . He was an entrepreneur.”53
The Family That Slays Together
It was not easy to set right all the applecarts that were upset by Charles Manson and his family in the second half of 1969 and the years following. In the first half of the 1970s the makers of pulp and horror films devoted a considerable amount of energy to figuring out how we were going to live with these countercultural challenges to the “traditional” family. A major thematic concern of American films in the 1970s was how far mainstream (even “liberal”) Americans would go to defend themselves and their families against intruders and aggressors. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) is probably the most critically celebrated of these, and Charles Bronson’s Death Wish likely the most successful in terms of box-office earnings. But Steven Spielberg’s television movie Duel (1971), starring Dennis Weaver, and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) also raised the question of whether mainstream Americans would fight back against marginal crazy people.
Perhaps most influential of all are the horror movies Last House on the Left (1972) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The latter must have gained much of its resonance for audiences as a vehicle to process the fears raised by Manson and his followers. The family in Texas Chainsaw Massacre is literally made up of cannibals. They live by consuming (i.e., destroying) the members of other families. I Drink Your Blood (1970) also trucks with a Manson-like family and some measure of cannibalism (kicked off by a truly bizarre plot point involving rabies-infused meat pies). Wes Craven, who directed Last House on the Left, would pick up on the cannibal theme in his 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, in which the crazy “hillbilly” family kidnaps a baby from the “n
ormal” family because they want to eat it. For its part, Last House on the Left fits more snugly in the cluster that includes Straw Dogs and Death Wish. Here, two parents are driven to engage in extreme violence after their daughter has been sexually assaulted and shot by a gang of criminals that has a blood family at its core.1
This movie essentially organizes a battle between two kinds of family: Mari and her parents (a relatively stable nuclear family) fight for their lives against a criminal family, which includes some blood connections but also a non-relative named Sadie. (Sadie was played by Jeramie Rain, who according to numerous sources had already played Susan Atkins in an Off-Broadway stage production, and later moved into Sharon Tate’s house on Cielo Drive reportedly without knowing what had happened there! Marilyn Burns, who played Sally in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, went on to play Linda Kasabian in Helter Skelter.) After Mari is forced to have oral sex with her friend Paige, then is shot and left for dead, her parents—as is so often the case in movies of this kind—become compelled to match the criminal family’s level of violence. Mari’s father turns murderous and her mother bites the penis off one of the gang members after she has seduced him into believing she wants to perform fellatio on him. The messages are confused, to be sure, in Last House on the Left. But one thing that is completely clear in Wes Craven’s movie is that if American parents are going to keep their children safe at home, they will have to ratchet up their game and fight off the awesome power of these countercultural forces of destruction.
The Exorcist, from 1973, represents a slight variation in this two-kinds-of-family horror film. The top-grossing movie of its year, and second best-selling novel of 1971 when William Peter Blatty published it, The Exorcist makes the battle remarkably intimate. The demonic forces threatening the sanctity of the family are literally inside of young Regan McNeil, played by Linda Blair. In the Blatty novel, the writer made it clear that he was interested in “manifestations of evil in the modern world,” with references to the Holocaust and American war crimes in Vietnam. But the film, as Nick Cull has explained forcefully, “avoided the novel’s epigrams and allusions to the spectacular evils of the age.” Instead, as Cull notes, the film revolves around a concern with “inter-generational conflict.” This agenda is prosecuted most directly “in early scenes of The Exorcist in which we learn that Regan’s mother is an actress in a film portraying campus dissent. She is seen begging an angry crowd of students to ‘work within the system.’” Overall, Cull argues convincingly, “the theme of a young girl’s transformation into a demon-possessed beast played with America’s growing fear of its youth.” The devil is here to do the devil’s business, and will do so from inside your daughter’s body.2
Terror on the Beach (1973), starring Dennis Weaver as the conventional father, choreographs a similar, if slightly less gory battle between a traditional family and a scary hippie family than the horror movies did. In this decidedly TV-movie, Weaver is taking his wife, daughter, and son on a family vacation to the beach—driving them, interestingly enough, in a rented VW microbus, the automotive symbol of the counterculture. The movie quickly establishes its Manson investment by having the VW run off the road by a dune buggy driven by members of the hippie family; it turns out they have another vehicle that is broken down and needs a tow. The Glynn family helps the hippie family. Rather than express simple gratitude, the leader of the rogue family taunts Neil Glynn by saying “Thank you, Mr. Whitebread.” Neil Glynn’s son recognizes that the hippies are criminal—their truck is full of goods that he can somehow tell are stolen. But his father insists that the hippies’ business is not their business.
The film wants us to understand that the Glynn children are alienated from their parents. In stagey scenes, first we observe Neil and DeeDee Glynn discussing how out of touch their parents are from the realities of their lives. Neil Glynn complains that they “don’t seem to understand we learn, we grow.” For her part, mother Estelle Glynn recognizes that her daughter has learned and grown, but dismisses her evolution as silly: “[T]wo years of college and you’re ready to change the world.” Things ultimately come to a head in Terror on the Beach after it becomes clear that the family of hippies means to torment the blood family. Among other tactics used by the hippies is to record the conversations of the straight family and then blast it back at them incessantly through a PA system they have rigged up. It is not clear exactly why these hippies want to torture these squares. The logic of inevitability structuring the film seems to be rooted in the notion that these different kinds of families cannot share the same social landscape. One type of family (guess which!) ultimately will have to run the inferior type off the American road.
Nothing is sublimated in Terror on the Beach. The climax of the movie comes with a literal fistfight on the beach between the two “fathers.” The Glynn parents ascertain that this wild bunch conceives of itself as a family—or at least this is what the leader, Jerry, has been telling them. But the Glynns capture one of Jerry’s followers and he seems pretty happy to switch sides. In the final fight he literally steps in to help Neil Glynn win the fight—while Estelle Glynn looks on approvingly, wearing her red-and-white gingham dress.
That “family” could come to signify, among other things, an engine of dramatic violence, could not have been too surprising to American audiences of the late 1960s or early 1970s. Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather was the second highest selling novel of 1969, and Francis Ford Coppola’s film version was the highest grossing movie of 1972. The Godfather presents an interesting vision of how “family” could signal at once blood relations (along with adoptive kin) and a criminal and commercial enterprise, and that the most powerful men—Vito, Sonny, and Michael Corleone, and Tom Hagen—must constantly police the boundaries to make sure that the central animating principles of family life are being protected and nurtured. The family, Puzo and Coppola tell us, is always under siege and must be constantly defended against the forces arrayed against it—other families, drugs (how important it is for Vito to refuse to let his family get into the trade in illicit drugs!), and so on. Terror on the Beach hardly had the ambition or scope of The Godfather, of course, but like that film (and novel), and like Last House on the Left, it was organized around the idea that the modern family had to protect itself by engaging in acts of horrifying violence.
The cinematic hysteria about the decline of the American family seeped into more than just the horror genre in the wake of the Tate-LaBianca murders and the arrests of Manson and his co-conspirators. Billy Jack, the fifth highest-grossing movie of 1971, substituted a truly mesmerizing earnestness in the place of terror. Here the good family is the countercultural one—a collective made up mostly of the kids living at the Freedom School, a sort of experimental commune/boarding school/halfway house. Nathan Rabin has pointed out that this is a square’s vision of the counterculture: there is plenty of time spent on having the young people at the school discuss social problems—they “rap it out”— but there are no drugs, no sex, no organized political protest.3 The only conventional family we learn much about in Billy Jack is that of Bernard Posner and his father Stuart, who represent all that is cruel, parochial, and punishing about the townspeople who resist the innovations of Jean’s Freedom School. Billy Jack himself is a fascinating combination of mainstream and counterculture: he is part Native American, a Vietnam vet, a loner, a martial-arts expert, and a lover of Jean and her marginalized charges. As with the horror films and The Godfather, Billy Jack argues that the work of the family (here represented by the motherly Jean, her partner Billy, and their countless needy children) is inseparable from the commission of violence.
Throughout the movie Jean, a pacifist, beseeches Billy to remain nonviolent—even after she has been raped. But the film makes clear that Billy Jack has no choice: his beautiful violence—the ballet that brings his right foot into contact with Stuart Posner’s face—is politically, socially, and aesthetically right. While Billy Jack made no direct comment on the Manson Family, it pa
rticipated in a cultural process that was made necessary, at least in part, by the frightening way that the Spahn Ranch gang threw some basic realities of American family life into stark relief. While Manson and his followers were outliers in what historian Rick Perlstein has named “Nixonland” in recognition of the power of that other murderous Californian on the landscape of late 1960s America, they also sang a song of family that sounded like a funeral dirge. The threat to the family represented by the Family had to be contained.
Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl Page 6