Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Humor was one strategy of control. Most notable here, as reported by Rolling Stone in its issue of May 14, 1970, was a skit performed at the seventeenth annual Installation Banquet of the Los Angeles Criminal Bar Association called “One Manson’s Family: The Family That Slays Together Stays Together.” The phrase in the subtitle followed a familiar formulation of course. Since World War II, the Irish-American anti-communist priest Patrick Peyton had been promoting a movement that came to be known as the Family Rosary Crusade, whose slogan was “The Family That Prays Together Stays Together.” The template has been revised countless times, including by the Los Angeles rock band Spirit, who called their 1968 album The Family That Plays Together, in recognition of the relationship of band leader, Randy California, and his stepfather, the band’s drummer Ed Cassidy.

  In any event, the “family . . . stays together” formulation proved irresistible to Marvin Part, the lawyer who wrote the skit—and who had, briefly, been the court-appointed attorney for Leslie Van Houten. (Part seems to have been something of an amateur musician; his obituary in the Los Angeles Times notes that he got great joy in his later years from the time he spent with his ukulele group.)4 In its piece on the banquet and the skit, Rolling Stone shielded its eyes a bit, noting that while it was still not clear whether or not “the charges against Charles Manson and his commune/Family are true,” one thing that is clear is that “the whole gruesome affair does not inspire much laughter. In most people.”5

  The lawyers and their guests, however, were not most people. They counted among their number not only skit-author Marvin Part, but also William Keene, who had been the original presiding judge in Manson’s trial, and Raymond Choate, who would go on to oversee Manson’s trial for the murder of Spahn Ranch worker Donald “Shorty” Shea. When asked about the propriety of the event, Choate appeared remarkably unconcerned. The skit was perfectly within the bounds of propriety, according to Choate, who explained it away simply by noting that it was only performed for “a group of lawyers, their wives and close friends.”6 Rolling Stone only gave limited data about the actual content of the comic skit, but according to an account later published in The Manson File there seems to have been plenty of talk about money: “I want to sell your records,” one verse went, “So I can get my fee.” This song was sung to the tune of West Side Story’s “Gee, Officer Krupke,” a song sung by “depraved” young gang members and now a vehicle for serial jokes about grubby lawyers. Another line from the skit imagined a different musical path to financial success, as the singing lawyers imagined that they could “take your story,” and “make . . . a sequel to Hair.”7 “Charlie, bube,” the lawyer promised, throwing in a little Yinglish in case it was not already clear that this was a Jewish lawyer talking, “There’s plenty of money / We’ll both make a pile / And we can share it / Family style.”8 While the lawyers could comfortably joke about monetizing their own clients, the skit also makes it clear that they think the Family was made up of “slap-happy kooks.” These talented members of the Criminal Bar Association were, to use the lingo of the time, “squares”: hippies hit their radar not so much as a terrifying challenge but as a humorous sideshow. (Leslie Van Houten’s trial lawyer, Ronald Hughes, came to be known as “the hippie lawyer,” because he demonstrated some actual knowledge of youth subcultures during his questioning and also, no doubt, because he had a beard. During a November 1970 recess in the trial, Hughes went on a camping trip and disappeared. His body was not found until much later.)

  The lawyers were not the only ones to use humor as a tool of containment against the Family. Reporter Theo Wilson, who later wrote about her experiences covering the Manson trial for the New York Daily News in her book Headline Justice, acknowledges that journalists also found time to mock the Manson Family. As Wilson explains, reporters in Los Angeles were worn down by the tedium of the long trial; at one point, she writes, “we thought one of the jurors would leap out of the jury box . . . screaming, ‘Oh, God, make it stop!’ the way prosecution witness Linda Kasabian burst out when she described the killings at the Tate house.”9 It is interesting to observe Wilson struggling to sort out her feelings about all the key players she encountered through her work at the Hall of Justice. While it is clear that she was not particularly sympathetic to Manson’s hippie family, she also had little patience for Vincent Bugliosi and his self-mythologizing: “The prosecutor had already irritated some of the reporters by telling them how to write their stories, and berating them for not recognizing the importance of his work in the courtroom. He also said, in all interviews with him, that he was dedicated so totally to the prosecution of the Manson Family that he had little time for his own family. So we didn’t feel concerned about not inviting him to share our after-hours get togethers.”10

  One of those get togethers, in October 1970, was a “Helter Skelter party.” Wilson still seemed quite tickled by the event when she got around to writing about it in her 1998 memoir—at least in part because she was taking the opportunity to spill the beans about an event that seems to have stayed secret up until that point. Wilson explains that “like all these parties it was for fun. And like all trial parties, it was strictly off the record and not one word about it ever surfaced.” The party offered its participants “release from the truly awful events unfolding every day in the courtroom, letting us laugh in spite of the tragedy that had brought us all together.”11 The “fun” of the Helter Skelter party included invitations that parodied Family speak and the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” all at once (the start time was listed as “Night is day and day is night and I am you and you are me” and the venue as “The Bottomless Pit”). Reporters dressed as their favorite trial “character,” with Wilson offering her take on Linda Kasabian, wearing “a blond wig with long pigtails and a demure peasant dress” and carrying a doll meant to represent the child Kasabian left at Spahn Ranch when “she fled after the murders.”12 Other journalists dressed as 6' 5" Panamanian Juan Flynn, as Barbara Hoyt (carrying a plastic hamburger to represent the LSD–laced meal other Family members dosed her with in an attempt to prevent her from testifying at the trial), and as Susan Atkins, wearing all black “creepy crawlie” clothing. Prizes were given out for best costumes and, as Wilson tells it, a good time was had by all—except for the “house dick” who was made nervous by all these “hippies” wearing wild clothing and sporting X marks on their heads.13

  But it is hard to imagine that anyone, even a hotel’s stuffed-shirt hired detective, could mistake the journalists for actual hippies. Part of the “fun” of dressing up in costume comes with calling attention to the distance that separates the costume’s object from the costume’s wearer. Did the hotel detective really mistake Theo Wilson’s friend Sandi Mettetal for Juan Flynn? A picture of this party has surfaced on various Manson websites and it is likely doctored—Vincent Bugliosi appears in it looking happy to be there—but it has elements that otherwise check out as legitimate (including a sign on the wall that quotes Tex Watson’s “here to do the devil’s work” line from the night of the Tate murders). One thing clear in this picture is that no sighted person who had been conscious in California over the past few years would have been fooled by these “costumes.” The reporters are making fun of the Family—their dress, their ideology—and having (as far as this evidence demonstrates) a wild time doing so. The Family certainly presented a threatening set of frightful challenges to more mainstream observers, but this party of journalists, along with their legal compatriots and the horror film directors hitting the scene in the 1970s, developed a number of strategies that proved at least temporarily useful in exorcising the social and cultural demons troubling the American family. Fictive “good” families were taking back the social spaces the Family had seemed to threaten so frightfully.

  Ranch, Hill, Farm

  Charles Manson represented a dark provocation and a compelling spectacle. His usurpation of parental authority at Spahn Ranch and elsewhere was terrifying, to be sure, but terrifying in an utterl
y compelling way. Americans could not stop looking at and talking about the Family—in fictional forms like horror movies and in “real” life conversations. Part of Manson’s achievement was to tap so successfully into (as Terry Melcher once put it) “what’s going on today.”1 Manson played all the roles he wanted to play: he referred to other members of the Family as his “children”; he mocked the trial judge by shouting, “Hey dad . . . look at the truth over here”; he poignantly told the court that he had “stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don’t understand.”2 Abandoned son, loyal brother, nurturing father—Manson’s public persona stitched together a variety of significant familial roles.

  The father business was, of course the most troubling to Manson’s many audiences inside and outside the courtroom. Manson was, to use some anachronistic language, a Father with Benefits. He had sex with his children, and arranged much about their sexual lives even when he was not directly involved in the acts. He took the privileges of being a family patriarch without shouldering the usual burdens of providing food, money, or conventional markers of status. And he did all of this in a culture that was in the midst of scaring itself with terrifying stories about the dissolution of the “traditional” patriarchal family. R. D. Laing had been encouraging readers in the late 1960s to think of the family as a site of “micropolitics.” Historian Andreas Killen has recognized the importance of Laing to countercultural youth and has persuasively argued that their disappointment in the failure of their own families to act as agents of progressive change led many to construct “wild travesties of patriarchal authority.”3

  Manson was not the only daddy walking this line: he was joined by a number of other older men attempting to capitalize on the father-hunger certain younger people were feeling. Perhaps most successful at occupying this role for his followers was James Edward Baker, better known as Father Yod. Father Yod’s group, the Source Family, was organized in Los Angeles and lived there quite comfortably until a mid-1970s move to Hawaii. With a thriving health-food restaurant (also known as The Source) and a Family band as well (Ya Ho Wha 13, which sometimes included Sky Saxon, formerly of The Seeds, and oh, didn’t they ramble), this group sustained important myths about the benevolence and magical power of its Father. Evie Shapiro described how she and her sister (who became Source Family member Electra) had grown up with a rigid and authoritarian father. In searching for a way out of the strictures of her family origin—“surprise, surprise,” as Shapiro tells it—Electra found a replacement father, who was gentle, loving, and kind. Electra more or less supports this reading of her journey, explaining that many Source Family members were desperate to find a “loving, paternal figure.” When Magus the Aquarian first went upstairs from The Source to meet Father Yod, he bent over to kiss the older man’s feet. Father Yod responded first by saying “Far fucking out” and then by announcing to the younger man that “You are my son and I am your father.”4

  Perhaps the most important story that has been ritually retold by Source sources has to do with the first baby born to Father Yod’s family. When Sunflower delivered this child it appeared in the world with the umbilical cord wrapped three times around its neck, and appeared to be stillborn. Father Yod sprang into action, breathed into the baby, and “five seconds later” he was alive and ready to be named Solomon.5 There is by now plenty of evidence that Baker, a full generation older than his young followers (he was born in 1922), leveraged his graybeard status to take sexual advantage of his acolytes. But unlike Manson, this cult father seems to have been able to keep himself out of trouble and avoid unwelcome attention from straight culture. Father Yod also managed to die in 1975—crash landing after his hang-gliding debut (and swan song, as it turned out)—well before the most upsetting details of his warped “parenting” came to light. Father Yod’s family has done a relatively effective job of protecting his name and even in promoting the Source Family’s music to a later generation of rock fans and musicians (including Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins).

  Father Yod did his work literally wrapped in gauzy white robes and rhetorically cloaked in gauzy romantic visions of benign loving freakiness (he played his role as a sort of American Yogi Bhajan with a little Walt Whitman earthiness thrown in). But in the early 1970s there was only one “father” who could really compete with Charles Manson for his ability to both command a loyal following on the local level and inspire a national frenzy of negative media attention. Boston’s Mel Lyman, who first came to visibility as the harmonica player for Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, established a commune in the Fort Hill section of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. While relatively underappreciated as a cultural force in our time, Lyman did some serious creepy crawling of his own in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The height of media attention to the Lyman family came with a fear-inspiring two-part article published in Rolling Stone in December 1971 and January 1972; Lyman was the cover model for the first half of the article.6

  This David Felton article (collected in the book by Dalton and Felton, with Robin Green, published in 1972 as Mindfuckers: A Sourcebook on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America) was meant to shock and made its position clear with a few direct comparisons to Manson. The subtitle for the first half of the exposé was “Inside the Cult Led by Mel Lyman, the East Coast Charles Manson.” Scarier yet was a reflection by Jim Kweskin himself, in response to a question about the relationship of the two tribes. In what became the most oft-quoted part of the entire, very lengthy, investigation of Lyman’s family, the one-time leader of an important folk-revival band had this to say: “The Manson Family preached peace and love and went around killing people. We don’t preach peace and love. And . . . we haven’t killed anybody—yet.”7

  The Lyman Family was more tapped into mainstream circuits of power than any of the other patriarchal cults under construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and had far more access to cultural (and financial) capital than most. Unlike the Manson Family, squirreled away at a decrepit old movie ranch, the Lyman Family lived on top of a hill and integrated into mainstream business culture and countercultural music and media activity in a way that the California group never could. This family included among its members a number of well-placed cultural figures, including Jessie Benton, who married Mel Lyman and who was the daughter of painter Thomas Hart Benton. This family also included rock critic Paul Williams, and actors Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin (who both starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point). One reason the Lyman Family was able to sustain itself so successfully even in the face of such tremendous negative attention is that they had a serious business plan. As with Father Yod and his followers, the Lyman Family knew how to make money. Lyman was able to attract a couple of financial “angels”: the key venture capitalists of the Fort Hill project seem to have been Jim Kweskin and actors Frechette and Halprin. It is likely that a good bit of startup money also came from Jessie Benton, though Family spokespeople have long insisted that its continued ability to thrive is due completely to the work of its flagship business, the Fort Hill Construction Co.8 The Lyman Family also used the pages of the alternative newspaper The Avatar to promote itself.

  While Felton’s account of Mel Lyman’s family has come under regular attack since its publication in the early 1970s, some of its basic insights seem unremarkable and true. Like so many other communes of this moment, the Fort Hill settlement was organized according to very old-fashioned gender hierarchies and was especially focused on serving the needs and following the dictates of its mystically powerful male leader. While Mel Lyman remains something of a cipher, it is clear that some combination of personal charisma and strategic use of hallucinogens (the “acid fascism” of Mindfuckers’ subtitle) allowed him to attain a great deal of power over his followers. Fort Hill was a closed and, at times, heavily guarded community, and even in Boston much of what passed for knowledge about the group was actually rooted in speculation and fantasy projection.

  Vi
rtually all coverage of the Lyman Family—from a gentle and earnest overview in the city’s African American newspaper, the Bay State Banner, to a very critical article in the Boston Globe in 1970, to Felton’s alarming Rolling Stone piece—agreed that Mel Lyman himself was something more than just “leader,” or “chair” of the commune. The Globe, for instance, called attention to the “severe authority structure” on Fort Hill, and reminded readers that Lyman was accepted by his followers “literally as a god figure.”9 What Andreas Killen called a “travesty” of conventional patriarchal family life was in abundant evidence in Lyman’s Family.

  By 1972, Boston’s After Dark, a forerunner of the alternative weekly the Boston Phoenix, would publish a scathing indictment of the gender politics built into Lyman Family life on the Hill. Written by Ellen Herst, and published under the title “Mel & Charlie’s Women: The Souring of Street Life,” what was assigned as a book review (of Ed Sanders’s Manson book and Mel Lyman’s Mirror at the End of the Road) immediately announces itself as something very different: “This isn’t a book review. It’s my response as a woman to reading all the gossip about Charles Manson and Mel Lyman. And, more than that, a response to the whole of hippie / freak culture and the ‘place’ of women in it. I mean, it may be total drag to spend your life at the dishwasher, washing machine, supermarket, etc.—and of course we know that—on the other hand it’s not exactly a groove to hustle on the street, bake bread for your hippie farmer, serve the God incarnate, commit murders: to name a few options.” Herst uses Manson and Lyman as an occasion to mourn the dashed hope that sexual liberation and other counterculture challenges to conventional family life would spell anything like equality for women. The real innovation of these new families, according to Herst, was in figuring out how to boil down and dress up the most exploitative aspects of patriarchal family life.10