Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  The real action of the movie from this point forward mostly has to do with the burgeoning relationship between the elder Compton and Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), an angry, reactionary factory worker. Joe is delighted to discover that for all of his own talk about the evils of hippies, Bill Compton has actually done something about them. The movie traces the painful contours of their cross-class friendship and follows the men as they go on adventures that include visiting each other’s favorite bars, trying to live through a dinner party at Joe’s house, and ultimately joining a party of hippies, smoking pot, and having sex with some of them. When Joe and Bill are ripped off by some of these hippies, they trace them to a commune upstate and there the mayhem ensures. Joe kills the first bunch and then Bill jumps in to finish off the rest—including his daughter, whose face is not visible to him.

  Joe and Bill are separated in this movie by profound class differences. But while Joe is centrally interested in the not-so-hidden injuries of class, it ultimately has a more dramatic tale to tell about the generation gap. The movie was originally slated, in fact, to be called The Gap. It was released, as Hoberman reminds us, just months after a group of workers on Wall Street attacked a large group of young protesters (responding to the Kent State killings) in what came to be known as the Hard Hat Riots. But the way that class acts as a wedge between Bill and Joe—a scene where Joe makes Bill tell him how much money he earns is especially hard to watch—is dissolved in the unity of their hatred for the younger generation. These men, the movie tells, feel that something has been stolen from them, a vision of how the world should work, the chance to enjoy the sexual, emotional, and spiritual gifts the young generation have taken as their due, a more general feeling of being able to express their authority. When they go on their rampage at the movie’s end, it is a declaration of war against the people who they think have changed the rules of the game.

  Up until the mass murder that ends Joe, it is possible to read the film’s point of view as ambivalent. The film’s young hippies are awful, to say the least—self-indulgent, casually cruel, unable to recognize the subjectivity of the other. But when Joe and Bill begin their hunting expedition the movie shows its hand. In the masculine ritual of defining and neutralizing targets (and the movie has let us know a number of times that Joe wishes Bill would go hunting with him—not least because it would level off some of the differences in power that have been plaguing Joe throughout the film) the men find the water they can most comfortably swim in. Peter Boyle himself was clear about the generational animus of Joe: “The message of the movie is very plain,” he told the New York Times. “It says that we’d just better stop that war in Vietnam now; that we’d just better stop killing our children there or we’re going to be killing our children in the streets here.”54 But Boyle was either indulging in naivete or being purposefully obfuscatory. Of course he knew that during this “working-class war,” as historian Christian Appy has called it, the sacrifice of the sons of Joe and his blue-collar kin was a given. What the film Joe also begins to suggest is that certain American daughters, particularly those who had taken up with socially marginal men, would also prove to be disposable.

  Perhaps in Joe we begin to find some indication as to why the Manson “girls” could not be plotted on the broad map of cultural concern that included so many other young runaways and dropouts. Because some of Manson’s followers did engage in criminal acts, and all participated in what many members of the surrounding culture understood to be immoral behavior, it was difficult for contemporary observers to stitch them into the developing narrative of abandoned children (or, at the very least, “misunderstood” children) that was coming to form something like a field of conventional wisdom about young runaways of the late 1960s. Manson was no Digger, but he served a similar countercultural caretaking function as that radical group did. Donald Nielsen reminds us that “most of Manson’s followers had run away from or been driven out of original families of birth,” but in accepting Manson’s ministrations they seem to have forfeited any support they might have otherwise accessed as vulnerable women living away from home.55 There seems to have been something about the contract forged between Manson and these women, something about how the Manson girls had transferred their allegiance from the father at home to the father at the ranch, that undid many observers. The “scruffy little guru” had come to operate as a “hyperbolic” representation of the Father in a manner that felt like rebuke and even mockery to older men.56

  The young women who collectively became known as the “Manson girls” were not going to be stitched into available American tales of heroic runaways stretching from Huckleberry Finn to the X-Men; girls and women have always had less access to this tradition, and it would, of course, be much simpler to imagine them as the ruined daughters of the captivity narrative—the powerful story that so often included more than a hint that, even after their kidnap and rape, these young white woman come to “feel” Indian and want to stay with their new daddies. Or at least they might come to appear “Indian” enough to white eyes that they could never be assimilated back into the dominant culture.

  Perhaps if the Manson girls had been able or willing to act out a public renunciation of Manson’s power over them in the days leading up to the trial or at the trial itself the father-injury might have been minimized. But their ritual scarification in the early days of the trial, their courtroom interruptions and witchy behavior on the streets outside the Hall of Justice, and their steady stream of press releases and other publicity efforts made it clear that these young women were not going to be renouncing the commitment they had made to the head of their Family. Media critic Jeffrey Sconce has argued that the “X” mark that Manson’s followers carved in their foreheads served to interrupt or deflect the sexual objectification that had afflicted them since they first appeared in Los Angeles—and likely even before that. Additionally, the scarring acted as an act of identification with, and support for, Manson—the women were following his lead in doing so.

  The scar is central here. We recall the moment in John Ford’s captivity-narrative Western The Searchers when John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards finally meets the “Indian chief” responsible for his niece’s kidnap and rape: “I see why they call you Scar,” he mordantly observes. While no scar is visible on the captive daughter, viewers understand what Ford is up to here—there will be no washing away of the essential Indian stain that has been left on the young white woman.

  Unlike Patty Hearst, whose family would be able, half a decade later, to afford to hire expert witnesses like Robert Jay Lifton to testify to the complex processes that led her to identify with her oppressors, the Manson girls could not stitch their perceived betrayal into a tale of “brainwashing.” The young women who had settled with Manson at Spahn Ranch had made a bet against the parental establishment in forging a relationship to the cult leader, and the response to their treason would include few elements of mercy. After the facts of the Tate-LaBianca murders were sorted out, numerous sensible and perceptive observers would find it hard to avoid communicating a sense of doomy paranoia about how this had all shaken out. In her book on Leslie Van Houten, the brilliant radical criminologist Karlene Faith summarized the feelings of many when she wrote that the “fear and harassment of hippies that occurred after the crimes was as destructive to healthy communes as it was to those already dysfunctional. It was as if the dominant culture, in cahoots with the media, had been waiting for the Manson ‘family’ to happen so they would have ‘proof’ that the hippie movement was no good.”57 That is certainly the sentiment expressed in the work of syndicated columnist Vernon Scott, who managed to bring together the Cielo Drive murders and the suicide of Diane Linkletter by assigning a healthy dose of blame: “The sub-culture of trippers, pot-blowers, speed takers, LSD addicts and amphetamine junkies contributed to both tragedies.” (To his credit, Scott distinguished between garden-variety hippies who just went to music festivals and took off their clothes in “paroxysms of flouting the esta
blishment” and this more ominous kind who engaged in “eerie, weird and freaked out” behaviors.)58

  Manson’s girls were essentially treated—by Bugliosi and in the popular press—as particularly toxic groupies. A basic definition of “groupie” in the late 1960s would have to go beyond the simple description “devoted follower of rock group” to incorporate a clearer statement about the sexualization and more-than-occasional dehumanization of these (often underage) people. When she reviewed the 1970 documentary Groupies, film critic Judith Crist described the movie as an “unforgettable portrait of the lost ones—hard-bitten whores, teeny-boppers, girl-next-door lovelies, neurotics and near-psychopaths.”59

  It is hard to know what Judith Crist was seeing (though not hard to imagine what she was hearing in the everyday world she was living in). The documentary Groupies introduces a wide-range of young women, many of whom seem to be anything but lost. The testimony offered suggests on more than one occasion that having some element of control in deciding when to have sex, with whom, and on what terms, was being incorporated in a framing of the self as liberated and powerful. “It makes me in a way feel . . . superior,” offers one of the young women. Perhaps even more revealing is the testimony from another subject of the film who (purposefully, it seems) cannot tell the camera with clarity which rock star she first had sex with: “Who did I start with? Oh! Fuck! Forget it! The Box Tops!” This young woman’s refusal to list a particular person, her tongue-in-cheek naming of her sexual conquest with the band-name-collective rather than by individual name (and possibly with a punning reference to sexual position as well) represents an insistence on female agency. In an offhanded, yet summary way, another contributor underscores the benefits of the “groupie” lifestyle: “You get to fuck the prettiest boys, you get to smoke the best dope.” Journalist Amanda Petrusich has written recently that it is worth considering that “sex was not the only option for these women, but it was their preferred option.”60 While I want to take this liberationist approach seriously, it is also necessary to take into account scholar Lisa Rhodes’s more nuanced approach to the subject, especially her reminder that to engage with all of the issues surrounding young female rock fans and their sexuality is also to confront very difficult questions about the “sexualizing of children” and the matter of who benefits most from the “moral system” that establishes taboos and the attendant modes of discipline and punishment.61

  Charles Manson may not have become the kind of star he hoped to be in Los Angeles, but there surely was a common understanding of his female Family members as having the same sort of “spoiled identity” that afflicted the young women of Los Angeles and elsewhere who came to be called “groupies.” (It is worth noting that when news broke in 2013 that Manson might be marrying a young woman who had been visiting him in prison, numerous news outlets snickered at the news and identified Afton “Star” Burton as a groupie of the “serial killer.”) Recall that Family member Sandra Good reported that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi once accosted her outside the Hall of Justice at Los Angeles to warn her that he was going to “get her” because she performed oral sex on Manson. The act named and the partner identified seem equally suspect in this telling: in Good’s anecdote, Bugliosi is targeting her for choosing to practice her sexuality in a way and with a partner who fall outside of the norms he is trying to establish as part of his case against the Family inside the Hall of Justice. The story Bugliosi told about the Family combined two time-tested American artistic forms—the captivity narrative and the Gothic horror story. The Manson Family tale as constructed in the popular consciousness was, then, a terrifying Western and a terrifying Eastern. While Spahn Ranch was, on the face of things, an outdated movie ranch that offered a home to numerous young runaways, the prosecutor was able to frame it as a poisonous site of imperilment and a secret chamber of horrors.

  While Abbie Hoffman (and presumably many of his allies on the left) saw the runaways as constituting a “slave revolt,” the much more common and powerful mainstream response was to suggest that the young female runaways had become enslaved in the process of running away. Max Lerner referred to the women as slaves in the New York Post and the teaser for an article by Jean Stafford in McCalls promised that the well-known writer would “ponder the meaning of the Tate murders” and consider how “the girls who tried so hard for freedom . . . won only the most awful kind of slavery.”62 Jerry LeBlanc and Ivor Davis, in their early journalistic treatment of the case also used the phrase “modern day slaves”63; Susan Atkins herself would later describe the process of her affiliation with Manson as a “drive for freedom” that led her into “the worst bondage possible.”64 It would take years for the more forgiving language of “brainwashing” to find a place in treatments of the case. But if this Family was constituted by one Master and dozens of slaves, why did so few put their minds to the issue of emancipation? How could the Manson girls be freed from these chains of slavery—even, or especially, the ones who would spend most of their adult lives behind bars?

  The History of Consciousness

  There would be no fancy expert witnesses to help defend the women of the Manson Family at trial, but there was a remarkable effort to aid in their self-liberation, made by a coalition of feminists associated with the History of Consciousness program at University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Santa Cruz Women’s Prison Project. They were there at the invitation of Virginia Carlson, the warden at the California Institution for Women (CIW), which housed the Special Security Unit (SSU), where Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten were imprisoned.1 This is a remarkable—and still underappreciated—chapter in the history of the Manson Family, a moment when a group of radical feminist activists and intellectuals inserted themselves into an unfolding drama that had for the most part been organized around powerful men and the vulnerable women they exploited. These feminists were enacting a truly profound form of theoretically informed practice. Soon after the end of the trial and California’s abolition of the death penalty in 1972, the women (and some men) of the Santa Cruz project recognized that the three convicted women would need to see themselves as belonging to a different community, a new family of sorts, that was rooted in the individual dignity of each woman and the power to be found in collective support and education. Prison administrators approved a program devised to raise the consciousness of the imprisoned women according to radical feminist principles. More than forty years after the experiment was devised and implemented it is still more than a little shocking that it was approved.

  Feminist sociologist Karlene Faith was a central figure in this effort and has written about it in detail in her book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten as well as in a monograph on women’s confinement and resistance.2 Faith, along with her entire cohort, really, has embodied astounding restraint and has kept a low profile with respect to her work in prison with these women. Susan Atkins, for her part, was not shy about promoting the importance of the work done by Faith. In her autobiography Atkins writes with deep gratitude about Faith, whom she refers to as a “light in the darkness.” Through the Women’s Studies curriculum that Faith and her collaborators brought to the SSU, Atkins was able to develop a new sense of how she had “walked into” her own oppression. Through the intervention of Faith and the other feminists, Atkins experienced a revolution in her mind: “suddenly I found myself free.”3

  Virginia Carlson, the prison warden, must have been some kind of feminist herself. According to Karlene Faith, Carlson wanted to “raise the women’s consciousness to a point where they would be able to think clearly for themselves, and recognize how deeply their subordination and rote obedience to Manson had degraded their humanity.”4 According to Faith, the warden wanted the women in the SSU to “be introduced to the idea of women’s liberation as a way of gaining self-sufficiency.”5 Now, of course, this is Faith retrospectively explaining her sense of things, but the fact is that from 1972 to 1976 Carlson invited “carloads of graduate student inst
ructors, professors, law students, artists, performers and community activists from throughout the state,” to “corrections valley” where they came to teach a curriculum that included studies of women and the law, ethnic studies, creative writing, and radical psychology.6 In Faith’s account the volunteers were especially affected by the work they did in the SSU with the Family women. Here they met “three young, attractive, intelligent and unexpectedly endearing and vulnerable women” who appear to have thrown themselves into their studies with great energy.7 The program seems to have been in place for four years, with an interruption during the first year after Faith closed a letter to a prisoner with the suspect word “venceremos” (essentially “we shall overcome”), the slogan of Che Guevara.8

  It is clear that this engagement was not completely comfortable for all participants immediately. Candace Falk, who was a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and went on to become a historian and founder of the Emma Goldman Archive at University of California, Berkeley, noted that she felt some discomfort in hearing the three women talk about the erotics of murder and also by the fact they used some vocabulary (i.e., “revolution”) that was central to her own vision—but they were using it in a much different way. Falk stayed committed to the goals of the program without ever feeling comfortable with the visits to the members of the Family.9