Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  What is clear is that the parents are not going to let the disappearance of their pesky children get in the way of having an enjoyable and educational night out. At a party sponsored by the Society for Parents of Fugitive Children, the parents get very high after smoking joints provided to them by the leadership of the organization, who also arrange for a brief lecture on weed protocol by a character named Schiavelli, played by Vincent Schiavelli: “After you inhale, you take the joint and you pass it to the person sitting next to you. Do not—repeat—do not hold onto the joint. This is called bogarting the joint and is very rude.” The Tynes end up back at their house, playing strip poker with their new friends, the Lockstons. They seem to have forgotten about Jeannie until she reappears in their midst, at a truly inopportune moment. Larry Tyne manages, awkwardly, to ascertain that Jeannie has run off at least in part because of a “boy.” He insists that Jeannie bring the young man, Jamie, home for dinner.

  It is at this climactic dinner that the real gulf between the parental and the younger generations becomes clear. Forman reveals in this scene that he has been using the whole movie to set his audience up for a mordant joke about the complexities of youth. Larry Tyne spends a good bit of the meal in the typical parent-as-inquisitor role; for most of the conversation Jamie refuses, or is unable, to talk. Jamie, as one recent commentator puts it, “to be frank, looks like Charles Manson c. 1970.”40 Tyne runs through the predictable questions and finally asks Jamie if he makes any money playing music: “Last year I made 290,000.” Tyne responds, quite literally, with a spit take: “What, uh . . . what did you say?” Jamie continues to speak a few lines of dialogue, which given his earlier, shifty silence, ends up feeling like a complex dramatic monologue: “290,000. Before taxes. It’s a very funny thing. Like, uh. You see a lot of things that, uh, say the government is doing that, uh, just, uh, makes you kinda angry, so you, uh, write some songs about it and, uh, you try and reach as many people as you can. And, uh, in the end you end up paying for those very same things that made you angry in the first place.” There is a brief pause in the speech, just long enough for Jeannie’s father to light one of the angriest cigarettes in film history. And Jamie continues: “But I guess, uh . . . I guess I accept contradictions.” Before the dinner ends Jamie informs Jeannie’s parents that he lives “frugally” (perhaps a jab at Easy Rider’s “simple food for our simple taste” commune scene?): “I’m saving up so I can buy an intercontinental ballistic missile. I think we should change the balance of power a little.” The film ends, fittingly, with some more music. After Jamie refuses to perform any of his music for the Tynes (he is concerned that given the setup he will not be able to “get his rocks off”) the parents themselves take the stage—with Lynne accompanying on piano, Larry belts “Stranger in Paradise,” from Kismet. But then Forman cuts one more time to the audition scene, where a young woman is playing “Feeling Sort of Nice,” a folk song keyed around the phrase “we’re on our own side.” The scene dissolves and the soundtrack segues into a group performance of the folk-gospel song “Amen”—popularized by Sidney Poitier in the 1963 film Lilies of the Field and then by the Impressions in 1964. Finishing his film with this marching song, Forman seems to be cosigning Abbie Hoffman’s contention that runaways formed a vanguard of the youth revolution.

  Where Forman uses elements of documentary style in Taking Off to emphasize the cluelessness of contemporary middle-class parents, Mormon youth counselor and fiction-writer Beatrice Sparks went full-on in the writing of her numbing book Go Ask Alice, a faux-teen diary that was presented, and often received, as authentic (with Sparks as the editor of the manuscript written by the now-dead teenager who is the book’s subject). Kirkus Reviews, for instance, noted balefully that readers of the book would never get to meet “Alice,” because she had died of an overdose.41 The book reaches us now as a caricature—a joke about well-meaning adults and their complete inability to understand the first thing about adolescent drug use or the pressures that pushed so many young people to leave their homes. Historian Mark Oppenheimer has written cogently of how quickly everything falls apart for young Alice: “On July 9, the normal child Alice goes on her first acid trip. By Sept. 6, she is complaining, ‘I’m getting so that no matter what I do I can’t please the Establishment.’ By December matters are grimmer: ‘I can’t believe that soon it will have to be mother against daughter and father against son to make the new world.’”42 Sparks, as Brian Herrera has explained, was able to get the diary into print largely because of her relationship with television personality Art Linkletter, who gave the manuscript to his own literary agent. Linkletter had recently suffered the tragic loss of his own daughter Diane, who committed suicide. While no drugs were found in Diane Linkletter’s system, her father insisted that her prior drug use had contributed to her death. Before long a fairly energetic rumor culture developed that held that Diane Linkletter had gotten so high on LSD that she tried to fly out a window.43

  It seems clear that we should read Go Ask Alice as commentary on the generation gap and the runaway crisis. In one diary entry, “Alice” tells of a moment when she was doing some cleaning and the Beatles’ song “She’s Leaving Home”—the ur-text of this runaway moment—came on the radio. As the diary’s author explains things, “[B]efore I knew what was happening I had tears dripping down my face like two spigots had been turned on inside my head. Oh that song was written about me and all the others of thousands of girls like me trying to escape.”44 The figure of Alice is complex, to say the least. For every moment of sympathetic vulnerability, Alice just as often pushes readers away with self-indulgent rationalizations: “I better take some of Gramps’ sleeping pills. I’m never going to be able to sleep without them. In fact I think I’d better take a supply of them. He’s got plenty.”45 The book’s narrator ranges from absurd references to “the old Negro spiritual,” which actually seems to be “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat, to girlfriend guides to hair care (“I wash it in mayonnaise and it’s shining and soft enough to make anyone turn on.”) to what should have been the ultimate giveaway for any conscious reader that this was the work of an adult—the mention of bringing “gelatin salad” to a potluck.46

  Sparks was working in a tradition of American literary expression that dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century, organized around “mediated” first-person accounts of alcohol and drug use. These thrilling stories promise complex satisfactions—as a reader you thrill to the particular dangers the lead character faces, occasionally feeling some sympathy, but also take more than a little pleasure out of judging the shameful fall from grace. Many of the stories produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s about young runaways offered up just such delectable reading experiences—and Go Ask Alice was likely the most far-reaching of all. While it must have been difficult for some readers to understand “Alice” as a completely sympathetic character, it does seem clear that she is presented as (and was certainly received as) worthy of care and concern.

  These examples reveal that the culture surrounding the Manson Family was open to the possibility that young women runaways were misguided but not irredeemable. They needed support—professional help—and could not be left to the wolves of the streets. One of the best summaries of this nuanced approach to the drug-using runaway is found in Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Kicks” from 1966—a top-five hit produced by none other than Terry Melcher. The song, written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, is remarkably gentle with its object of address, a young woman who takes a “magic carpet ride” and thinks, the narrator explains, that she has found the answer to all of her problems in drug use. The song imagines its female protagonist is some kind of runaway—though “Kicks” carefully avoids making it clear whether she is literally on the road or just taking escapist trips in her mind. This is a corny cautionary tale, to be sure, but one with a generous spirit. From Mann-Weill’s peer-oriented lyrics to Mark Lindsay’s warm and compassionate lead vocal, the song is non-judgmental and at least a litt
le hopeful. The song’s narrator commits to helping the “girl” find her way to recovery—in fact the emotional heart of the song comes with the singer reminding the troubled young woman that all she really needs is some help. The gender politics of “Kicks” may reach contemporary listeners as patronizing; the song never allows for the possibility that the imagined drug-user is on the kind of visionary and spiritual quest that was so highly valued by and for male seekers in the 1960s.47

  “Kicks” articulated a politics of care that has run through much of the rhetoric surrounding runaways from the 1960s to our own time. Across the political spectrum (from Abbie Hoffman to Art Linkletter), expressions of concern about runaways, and particularly female runaways, became a cultural shorthand—an efficient way to talk about a whole host of social, cultural, and political problems. Linkletter, for his part, received a Grammy for a spoken-word record he released soon after his daughter’s death, an ostensible letter from a father to a runaway daughter, called “We Love You, Call Collect.” (The flip side was Diane’s response, “Dear Mom and Dad.”) Linkletter, the popular television personality, could not have been more square and voluntarily served the forces of reaction whenever he could. While the persona he adopted in “Call Collect” was gentle, understanding, and patient, in the real world Linkletter was aggressively anti–youth culture. Linkletter pioneered a feature called “Kids Say the Darndest Things” on his radio and television shows, but in his public life he worked assiduously to censor expressions of the rising generation in popular culture. In 1969, for instance, Linkletter testified in front of a Congressional committee on drug abuse that a full 50 percent of songs on rock-and-roll radio stations are “secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on and groove with chemicals and lights shows at discotheques.” Leaving aside the obvious questions—if the messages were secret, who broke the code for Daddy Art?—it is clear that Linkletter was using the runaway and drug crises, along with his own family tragedy, to organize a resistance to the developing economic, social, and cultural power of his daughter’s generation.48

  That said, Linkletter’s “Call Collect” could only do its work by draping itself in the appearance of parental solicitude. “I’ve read there are thousands just like you,” Linkletter intones, his voice dripping with mock concern, “searching for something they fail to find at home.” This spoken-word record offers up little in terms of understanding or solution: what Linkletter comes up with, essentially, is that young runaways should come home because they make their parents sad. Unlike the empathetic narrator of Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Kicks,” Linkletter’s Grammy-winner has little to offer outside of a vague promises of stability and (relative) quiet. Linkletter must have noticed that the Byrds had a huge hit in 1965 with their version of Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and so slips a little bit of Ecclesiastes into “Call Collect.” Lindsay and the Raiders, of course, abjure such lofty language of a more conversational approach. Even so, I want to be clear that both Linkletter’s record and Paul Revere’s were signing a social contract that held that youthful drug users and runaways were lost, and could not find themselves without outside help.

  In between the positions staked out by Abbie Hoffman on one end (Every Runaway a Revolutionary!) to Art Linkletter on the other (Respect Tradition!), there was a canvas filled with all manner of popular art having to do with these young dropouts. Historian Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo has written of a “series of prime-time programs” that aired on television between 1968 and 1970 about young women seduced into joining the drug culture by “older, guru-type males, drug pushers, or seemingly innocent boy-next-door figures.” “The lucky ones,” as Lemke-Santangelo explains, are saved by parents or the police; the rest fall into prostitution or try to fly out windows. Lemke-Santangelo makes a case for many of these young runaways as “remarkably resilient, resourceful, and determined to secure and maintain their freedom and autonomy.”49 Radical sociologist Lewis Yablonski made a similar case in 1968, when he wrote of the hippie movement more generally, but purposefully used the language of the runaway crisis: “The participants were running away from a plastic society—at the same time they were running toward the difficult-to-define and even more difficult-to-live-by human ethic of love.”50 The culture industries in the United States, however, entered this conversation with a much different agenda and had a much different tale to tell: these young women had been plunged into a social maelstrom, and they were lost and vulnerable.51

  The Young Runaways, a 1968 B-movie, is a perfect example of the damsel-in-distress approach described by Lemke-Santangelo. The real problem the film lays out (as the title song performed by Arthur Prysock makes clear) is that too many current major social questions cannot be answered satisfactorily. As a result, a generation gap develops. As with so much of this Runaway Art, the parents are not so much evil as they are clueless. In this case, Raymond Allen is an ad man who realizes (too late) that he has spent his life trying to sell “our way of life” to teenagers, but has not really bothered to listen to his own daughter. The movie shows a culture that lacks the infrastructure to address these new challenges. In one canned speech worthy of a 1930s gangster movie, a police officer reminds Mr. Allen that there are fifty thousand runaways in Chicago alone, with only eight cops assigned to work with/on them. In a bizarre bit of pop sociology, this police officer explains to Raymond Allen that it is only youngsters from “good” homes who run away, largely because “ghetto kids” have a safety valve in “crime and gangs.” The movie’s real summary moment comes when the police officer notes ruefully that there is “something weird going on in this country.”

  This type of speechifying is echoed in the better known Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, a television movie that first aired in 1976. Here a young man who has taken a friendly interest in Dawn gets told by a court officer that the “streets are crawling with liberated teenie hookers” who are, these days, “running at 8 and 9.” When this young man, Alex, asks whether there might be a spot in a halfway house for Dawn, the bureaucrat reminds him that there is not enough funding to create spaces for all who need them: “So the streets win by default,” the young man answers, incredulous. In Dawn the pimp takes the place of the cult leader, exerting total, warping control over a bevy of young women.

  Two films from 1971, Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring (which debuted on television) and Runaway, Runaway joined The Young Runaways in communicating a sense of utter bafflement about the breadth and depth of the problem of runaways without turning too judgmental about the young people in question. In Runaway, Runaway young Ricki is picked up hitchhiking as she runs from home by a nice guy named Frank who smartly says to her, “So you’re a runaway!” and tells her that he is in the business of finding and returning young runaways to their parents—but only, he hastens to add, the rich ones. Ricki faces a number of dangers—street people! lesbians!—but mostly is taken care of by Frank, who turns out to be her own personal catcher in the rye, the kind of 1970s-style catcher in the rye who ends up in bed with his teenage charge.

  Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring is even messier, featuring Sally Field as “Dennie,” a young woman whose parents are clearly the ones who are out of control. (It is probably worth noting that both of these runaway heroes have androgynous names; Carol Clover has taught us to notice that the “final girl” in slasher movies often is given a gender-neutral name as a hint to readers that she will access male power in order to survive the horrors facing her. These runaways will also stand relatively firm in the face of the social dangers facing them.)52 While it would be foolish to pretend that this television movie has a clear or coherent argument to make, it does make plenty of effort to let viewers know that as things fall apart around her, Dennie should not be held responsible. We see Dennie meaningfully looking at her parents’ single beds, and we learn something about their loveless marriage; we see young Dennie playing with a doll as the filmmaker immediately cuts to a hippie man “playing” with her body; we se
e an ice cream truck that says “Caution Children” on the back, and an exterminator’s truck from a company called “Wonder.” By the movie’s end the one thing that is clear is that Dennie has become more of a parent than her own and will now try to save her sister from the injuries she has suffered herself.

  These pulp films, whether appearing on television or in the theaters, held out the hope that young people would be saved, cleansed, redeemed. Taken together they establish a cultural baseline with respect to the crisis of runaway white youth: the situation is bad, but not too bad. There are good cops and court officers, halfway house administrators and friends, all these helpers, who are doing their best to make sure that the young runaways will find their way home and get some support. These “problem” films rarely communicate a sense of despair or permanent damage. From Milos Forman’s Taking Off through these lower-brow offerings, there are strong suggestions that a cultural reboot will not take much more than what Art Linkletter prescribes in “Call Collect”: some good talk—and especially some good listening—will help bridge whatever gaps are separating the generations. This context helps us understand just how threatening Manson’s girls appeared upon arrest and during the trials. The well-developed cultural vocabulary and packed social toolkit organized to confront the runaway crisis would not be up to that task of saving or curing or redeeming these outliers.

  The one cultural artifact I know of that might help us understand the total banishing of the Manson girls from the realm of cultural concern is John Avildsen’s heartbreaking and terrifying (and largely forgotten) 1970 movie Joe. Film critic and historian J. Hoberman has puzzled over the fact that in our own time Joe is a “movie without a reputation,” especially given that it made something of a splash in its moment of first release.53 It is hard to do justice to the emotional (and physical) grotesqueries this movie presents. Perhaps it would be best if I cut to the chase and reveal that the film ends with one of its lead characters “accidentally” shooting his own daughter to death and for many viewers this will not even come close to being the most painful thing they have seen in the past hour and forty-five minutes or so. The basic plot is simple: Melissa Compton (played by Susan Sarandon in her first role) has left her parents’ home to take up with her boyfriend, a drug dealer and wannabe painter in the East Village: there are faint echoes of the Groovy/Linda Fitzpatrick story here. After Melissa experiences a serious, but not fatal, overdose, her parents go to her apartment to gather her belongings, and her father, Bill Compton, “accidentally” kills her boyfriend.