The conversations that took place among the jailed women and their visitors seem to have been wide-ranging and profound in impact. In addition to the regular instructors, the prisoners had visits from a number of key figures from the emerging “women’s music” scene, including Meg Christian, June Millington, Holly Near, and Linda Tillery.10 They learned about poetry from Judy Grahn, and took seminars with writer Paul Krassner and with scholars speaking on politics, the blues, and women’s history. The women were also encouraged to share their own talents; their embroidery impressed many guests and, as Faith recounts in heartrending detail, the three also sang a beautiful “close harmony” version of Buck Owens’s country-and-western hit “Cryin’ Time.”11
This was not “deprogramming” as it came to be familiarly called in the 1970s, but rather an acknowledgment that a holistic political, social, and cultural education was the most powerful tool to help convert Van Houten, Atkins, and Krenwinkel back into the “independent, promising young people” they had been before being turned into “obedient disciples who lost their ability to think for themselves.”12 Faith was a radical feminist and a radical criminologist and worked assiduously with male and female comrades to create spaces of potential self-discovery for Van Houten, Krenwinkel, and Atkins. In doing so the Santa Cruz collective never lost sight of the fact that the prison system itself was at the root of the whole tragedy. Faith was aware that their leader’s patriarchal “dogma was an inventory of the flaws of the society that rejected him and infantilized him as a prisoner without choice or responsibility.”13 Given her broader goals surrounding reform of the legal, judicial, and penal system, it is not surprising to find that Faith had little patience for Vincent Bugliosi, who not only prosecuted the women but then cashed in with a “mass-market novel-like book” full of “inaccuracies” and “sensationalized myths.”14 Welcoming Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten into an ad hoc collective of conscious feminists would mean rejecting the dominant rhetoric of the powerful men who had, thus far, controlled their lives.
Aside from the Santa Cruz feminists, very few in the world of politics, journalism, academia, or popular culture have worried much about the intellectual or emotional well-being of the Manson women. This is prison, after all. While Atkins (like Tex Watson) underwent a religious conversion and attracted the notice of some who were putatively interested in her “soul,” for the most part these women have never been the object of much public concern—not when they were vulnerable young women and not when they were aging prisoners (Atkins has since died). Film director John Waters’s decades-long friendship with Leslie Van Houten is atypical to say the least. A-List Hollywood film and music figures were never particularly interested in following up on their late 1960s contact with the Manson girls. With little outside of Faith’s book and Waters’s writing on Van Houten in Role Models, Atkins’s own autobiography, and some scattered academic work on the Family, there is little available to those who might be interested in understanding anything about the inner lives of the Manson women or how their crimes have been processed in the larger culture. Here we have needed to rely on the creative artists. While Manson himself has, of course, dominated the field of cultural representations, there is much fictional work to guide us in beginning to construct an understanding of the women. From Stephen Sondheim to Madison Smartt Bell, Cady Noland, John Kaye, and some others, there has been a fairly consistent stream of cultural representations that at least dignify the Manson women as interesting subjects of consideration.
But none of this could really have prepared us for the two months in 2016 that saw the publication of Alison Umminger’s American Girls or Emma Cline’s The Girls. Both are serious works of cultural criticism and neither has a plot that matters much. The most significant accomplishment of the two books is telegraphed by the titles: on some level “Manson” does not need to be in either title (and the massive pre-publication press Cline received makes this especially true) for readers to understand quickly that we are in this territory. But more important is that both Cline and Umminger want readers to entertain a reframing of the story that does not demote Manson but that does imagine overlapping circles of activity, some of which have him centrally involved, some of which do not include him at all. After all, the “Family” was mostly—both in terms of sheer numbers and in terms of the daily kinwork and survival skills necessary to prop the project up—organized around the young women. This is where Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo’s work on women in the counterculture proves helpful as we begin to consider the fictional inventions offered up by Umminger and Cline. Lemke-Santangelo explains that the surface reality of conventional gender roles should not obscure the reality that counterculture women were “launching a subtle rebellion against prevailing class and gender norms.” She writes, “Rejecting the suburban domesticity of their mothers, hippie women revived an older, agrarian ideal that assigned greater value and visibility to female productive labor. They also cast off the privatized nuclear family structure in favor of a type of communal living that, like large extended families of the past, permitted women to share chores, conversation, advice, and practical knowledge.”15
Cline’s novel insists on the sustaining power of these female relationships—at least for the relatively brief time that her narrator is part of a Northern California commune obviously modeled on Family life: “The men in this book are sort of unimportant,” Cline has said in an interview, “even though they set things in motion. I liked the idea of the Manson character and cult leader being peripheral. It’s really about the shifting relationships of the girls.”16 Family associate Bobby Beausoleil has offered his own support for this position, suggesting that he understood that Leslie Van Houten’s initial attraction to the group had more to do with her desire to be around other women rather than somehow falling under the hypnotic power of Manson himself.17
There is little that is surprising about The Girls, except perhaps for the intensity of focus—Cline resists the temptation so many other creative artists have indulged to trot Manson out for some crazy-sexy-preachy close-ups. While many of the key supporting players (Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher) are here in minimal disguise, the focus is on what Lemke-Santangelo has called “the arena in which they labored, and the sense of mission and purpose that informed their work.”18 The dumpster figures here as an important site of Family activity: Cline knows what the Diggers knew and what Lemke-Santangelo knows—that this scavenging was “a mode of resistance, a political act.”19 Commune historian Timothy Miller has proposed that the garbage at the Safeway supermarket was an important link in the hippie food chain and Cline makes sure to focus on this activity a handful of times—although she does anachronistically use the 1980s coinage “dumpster diving” to do so. What matters most to Cline is to sketch out the social webs connecting these young women who had “passed into a familial contract” and whose female togetherness proves so compelling to young Evie.20 Cline’s protagonist insists upon the magnetic force that issues from this female-centric collective. The novel starts, simply, with Evie remembering how she “looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.”21
Cline encourages readers to think about how the girls changed the landscape with their resourceful presence. Finding nourishment in dumpsters flies in the face of conventional ideas about what counts as food and what as garbage.22 Even more important than the garbage dump/food run in her novel is the creepy crawl. The women of the ranch—that “orphanage for raunchy children”—come to recognize how powerful their very presence is. Evie reminisces about how momentous the creepy crawl could feel: “We were ripping a tiny seam” in family life—just so the family in question would “see themselves differently, even if for a moment”23 She recalls, “Homes had been reshaped. Turned suddenly unsafe, familiarity flung back in their owners faces, as if taunting them—see, this is your living room, your kitchen, and see how little it helps, all that familiarity.”24
Even so, the narrator of The Girls recognize
s her own marginality, at least as she has been rendered in the official story. She has read and noticed that she is not mentioned “in most of the books.” Evie does not appear in “the paperbacks with the title bloody and oozing, the glossed pages of crime-scene photographs. Not the less popular but more accurate tome written by the lead prosecutor, gross with specifics, down to the undigested spaghetti they found in the little boy’s stomach.” Wonderfully, according to Evie, she only appears in a “couple of lines” in “an out-of-print book by a former poet.”25 Cline is not willing to take only this one shot at Ed Sanders, and continues by having Evie note that he had “gotten my name wrong.” She continues, “The same poet also claimed the CIA was producing porn films starring a drugged Marilyn Monroe, films sold to politicians and foreign heads of state.”26 The wicked parody and critique of Bugliosi and Sanders holds a serious argument, about how little these men understood about the workings of the Family. All of the books, as Evie understands them, make it sound like “the men force the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not all the time.”27 With this careful and ambivalent declaration of agency, Cline reminds us that this Family had complex power dynamics.
The question of force and the hierarchies of power that structure all families are at the heart of Alison Umminger’s American Girls. This dark young adult novel is a metacommentary—a story about stories—on the Manson Family. The book opens with an epigraph from Manson himself, and it is one of his best lines: “These children that come at you with knives, they are your children.” The rest of the novel is essentially a reckoning, an inquisition into why exactly your children are coming at you with knives. (Or stealing your credit card. Or running away from home. Or getting obsessed with the Manson Family.) The simple and profoundly disturbing answer is that these abusive and neglectful parents have it coming.
The framing narrative of American Girls features a family that has ceased to exist in any meaningful, functioning way. Anna’s mother, Cora, has discovered, midlife, that she loves women and one woman, Lynette (yes, Anna takes note of how odd this name coincidence is) in particular. When Anna comes to realize, as her sister Delia did years ago, that their mother is unable to care for them, she runs away to Los Angeles where her sister is trying to make it the film industry. Anna steals Lynette’s credit card to finance her trip, and makes explicit that she has now joined the tribe of Lost Girls exemplified by the women of the Family—with one major difference: “I would never have gone after my mother with a knife, not while a credit card was cleaner and cut just as deep.”28 After some settling-in time in Los Angeles, Umminger presents readers with the novel’s one sort-of-deus-ex-machina. The ex-boyfriend of Anna’s sister is working on a film that is partly inspired by the Manson Family and he hires Anna as a research assistant. This set-up allows Umminger to endow young Anna with a kind of Manson-omniscience, which then informs her understanding of gender relations, family dysfunction, and the nature of celebrity. As with so many YA protagonists, Anna works hard to achieve deep knowledge about the landscape surrounding her and the players who populate it. When Anna’s sister appears in makeup she has been wearing for a role in a zombie movie, the younger woman concludes that “in Hollywood you couldn’t tell the killers from the actors.” Anna leaves unspoken what she has learned about women becoming “zombies” under patriarchal control.29 Charles Manson, she comes to understand, was like a “psychopathic film director,” giving hippies orders about what to do and when. The cult of celebrity, she concludes, is “vomit-worthy.” It ultimately seems fairly straightforward to Anna why a young woman might want to become a Manson girl and kill Hollywood stars.30
What is most devastating about Umminger’s novel is the insistence that we focus on the family (and not the Family) as the prime vehicle of violence in modern life. After a summer in Los Angeles and an immersion in the details of the Tate-LaBianca murders, Anna comes to realize that for most people, “the real danger wasn’t violence like you saw on the television news, random and exciting,” but the everyday violence of what is done to young women in their family’s homes, and then out in the world when they take their vulnerable selves away from the primal scene.31 The Manson women, as Evie comes to realize, were primed to commit violence by their own families of origin, “ready and willing, scarred by the silent cruelty behind those carefully locked doors.”32 Anna’s revelation comes as a result of all of her reading, but seems especially informed by her reading of Jess Bravin’s biography of Squeaky Fromme. (American Girls is a very academic novel, demonstrably informed by deep reading in the relevant literature.) While Anna begins her whole narration with a declaration that Leslie Van Houten was her “first Manson girl,” it becomes clear that Lynette Fromme reaches her as the most representative and tragic of the Family.
“Squeaky Fromme should never have been Squeaky Fromme, and not just the nickname, the whole deal.”33 This is Anna’s conclusion, as she readies herself to return home, after her strange Los Angeles summer, which has included a friendship with one of two very famous television twins (modeled on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody) and a brush with a Miley Cyrus–type character who is one hurt away, if that, from taking a knife to her own father. Or somebody. What Anna has learned about Lynette Fromme, the “no duh” of the biography she has been reading, is that she was profoundly abused by her father. (In his book Jess Bravin quotes Fromme as saying that her father taught her “everything about sex.”34 Given that Bravin otherwise paints a portrait of a man who cruelly withheld contact from his daughter—rarely speaking to her and forcing her to sit apart from the rest of the family at dinner—it is clear that Bravin is suggesting outright sexual abuse.) Anna ultimately acknowledges the likelihood that more than one motive drove the Manson Family as they committed horrible acts of violence in August 1969. But she also comes to believe that if she could travel to the past and send a message to her country that would improve the future, it would be this: “Please give your daughters sturdy bedroom doors that lock from the inside. And when they are hungry, give them a place at the table.”35 Physical safety and emotional security, the active acknowledgment of appetite—these, Anna learns during her strange Los Angeles summer, are the project of the family. But for too many young women the family is the site of danger and denial. (Short-story writer Laura Elizabeth Woollett joined Umminger and Cline in 2016 with her story “Charlie’s Girls,” which also tried to move beyond the usual shame and panic that previously characterized narratives of Family life. Woollett constructs a liberationist framework around the women of the Family and ends her story with an incantatory call-to-arms, narrated by a Family member explaining the continued dedication of the girls: “We sing for those girls outside, who we love. For our daddies hiding behind their newspapers, our mommies crying over burnt meatloaf. For all the square-eyed people watching us on television. Until the whole world knows we’re not afraid, we’ll keep singing.”)36
In 2018 these works were joined by an amazing film, Lonnie Martin’s The Last of the Manson Girls. Martin’s film—originally the final project for his MFA at American University—is organized around journalist Paul Krassner’s visit to (and acid trip with) Lynette Fromme, Sandra Good, and Brenda McCann in the early 1970s. The Krassner framing is important to the film, to be sure. Presenting the writer as a sort of shaggy Lenny Bruce (as played by Dustin Hoffman in Bob Fosse’s biopic), Martin reimagines Krassner as a sort of trippy Jewish, slightly paranoid everyman. Carrying unresolved questions inspired by investigative radio host Mae Brussell, Krassner turns himself into a sort of countercultural private investigator. While the narrative of Last of the Manson Girls is centrally concerned with whether Krassner will crack the case—who is N. Dight? And what does this naval intelligence officer have to do with Manson?—Martin’s real animus is to explore the relationship of these three women to each other and to the Family more generally. Krassner is welcomed into the fold, invited to try on the much-storied embroidered vest the Family’s women made for Manson, and reminded that he has more i
n common with these marginalized young people than he does with the forces of straight culture arrayed against them.
But the central plot of Last of the Manson Girls ultimately carries much less weight than its contributions to our basic understanding of Fromme, Good, and McCann as actual human beings. To begin, Fromme makes it clear that she will not be called “Squeaky” anymore. Whatever allegiance she maintains to Manson and the Family, she has made a break with the more cultish aspects of her earlier life. The three women have dimensions; they are witchy but also funny. They are intimidating, but also frightened. In a few key scenes (especially one that finds Fromme whispering into Krassner’s ear, telling him the secret about her birth family she has been carrying so long) Martin reminds his viewers that the appeal of the Family had much to do with injuries sustained by these young women earlier in their lives.
Although Alison Umminger, Emma Cline, and Lonnie Martin are not the first people to try to call attention to the necessity of replotting the family at the center of the story of the Family, their achievement comes with the intensity of their focus on how the Manson girls came to be the Manson girls. The warped dynamics of the Family deserve the kind of attention these artistic works insist upon, not least because they serve as a reminder that these young hippie goddesses did not spring from the head of Charles Manson or from the heads of their own fathers. They were creating relationships, forging bonds, enacting violence that made some kind of sense in situations not mostly of their own making. It is worth remembering that the end of the Family was also the end of two other families, the Tate-Polanski family and the LaBianca family. Umminger repurposes a key line uttered by Susan Atkins as the final dialogue of the movie Roger is making: “I don’t feel sorry for you, bitch” is what Atkins reportedly said when Tate pled for the life of the fetus she planned to name Paul Richard Polanski. The murders were a terrible punctuation on what the Manson girls had been saying all along with their creepy crawls: the family is not safe. Things got truly messy when this family tried to integrate itself into the chaotic celebrity culture of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Just as the Manson Family created the illusion that it was challenging some of the most pernicious aspects of “traditional” American family life, so too did key figures in Los Angeles’s music industry create confusion by signaling cultural democracy while insisting, ultimately, on protecting entrenched hierarchies.
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