Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  It was not only “straights” who read the murders at Cielo and Waverly Drives as some kind of critical commentary on countercultural life. In his memoir of the 1960s, novelist Robert Stone recalls that “the most extraordinary speculations as to motive and perpetrator went around. The most unsettling involved the number of people who suspect one another of having a hand in the murders. This included famous people who used not to do such things.”23 The list of names dragged through the rumor culture would include Roman Polanski himself, one Mama (Cass Elliot) and one Papa (John Phillips), and a number of other marginal film- and music-industry figures. Dennis Hopper claimed that the denizens of 10050 Cielo Drive had “fallen into sadism and masochism and bestiality.”24 Terry Melcher seconded this, reporting to his mother’s biographer that he assumed the murders were somehow related to “the weird people hanging around” Roman Polanski’s house,” who had been making homemade “sadomasochistic-porn movies with quite a few recognizable Hollywood faces in them.”25 (Manson himself lent credibility to this explanation—well, if he had any credibility to lend, that is—telling Ron Reagan in an interview, that the whole Tate-LaBianca mess had to do with missing videotapes that featured Yul Brynner and Peter Sellers “gobbling on each other’s knobs.”)26

  Many of the stories about what went wrong at Cielo Drive have to with films that may or may not have existed. This is a story about—among other things—the New Hollywood, and the case is complexly haunted by film—actual and imagined, “lost” and never found. There is the much-discussed homemade sex tape made by Polanski and Sharon Tate, which detectives removed from Cielo Drive and then, with great care, placed right back where they found it. There is the story told by Paul Krassner and so many others about a film made by Voytek Frykowski and Jay Sebring of their sexual torture of Billy Doyle, a drug dealer they claimed ripped them off: these two friends of Sharon Tate, as the rumor has it, took their revenge by lashing Doyle to a chair so that they could “whip him and then fuck him in the ass while a video camera taped the proceedings before a live audience.”27 (The story about Doyle seems to have made the rounds in and around Los Angeles; Bobby Beausoleil himself suggested to John Gilmore that the denizens of Cielo Drive “were dealing bad dope, burning people on dope deals—holding whipping parties and things like that.” Beausoleil’s pointed summary of this set of claims is that the people surrounding Sharon Tate “wore long hair and imitated things the young people were doing, but they were perverting it—making everything that these young people were doing that was beautiful and good—taking it and turning it into ugliness.”)28 Kenneth Anger wanted Bobby Beausoleil to star in Lucifer Rising, but killing Gary Hinman and going on the lam before being arrested took Beausoleil out of the picture. And then there are, of course, the Manson Family “snuff” films, much bruited by Ed Sanders, but which have never been found.29 What Sanders could not seem to acknowledge is, as many have pointed out, that the significant snuff film of the moment was Gimme Shelter, the documentary about the tragic concert at Altamont.

  All of these stories about film and bad (and sometimes criminal) behavior provides a snapshot of the culture of self-critique that developed almost immediately after the Tate-LaBianca murders. Marianne Faithfull, a major artist in her own right and also a member of the Rolling Stones’ bohemian circle, notes in her autobiography that it was “devastating” to “hear of Hendrix’s death, of Janis’s death, one right after the other. The awful feeling that we must really have fucked up. The Manson murders as a judgment on us all.”30 Such recrimination is also articulated in 1969’s Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Hopper and Peter Fonda, and perhaps the most influential movie produced by the “New Hollywood”—when Wyatt responds to Billy’s gloating (“We did it, man, we did it. We’re rich, man.”) with the devastating “We blew it.”

  Dennis Hopper met Charles Manson at least once. I say “at least” because that is what we know for sure (and this once is by Hopper’s own admission). Hopper would not be the first major figure in Hollywood or the Los Angeles music industry to underplay his connection to the man Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys called “the Wizard.” Neil Young is one of the few figures from this time and place willing to acknowledge how central Manson was to the scene: Young goes beyond simply arguing that as a musician Manson was “great, he was unreal” and admits that he promoted Manson to Mo Ostin, president of Warner Bros. Records.31 Calling Manson “one of the main movers and shakers” of the Southern California scene of the late 1960s, Young makes it clear that Manson very quickly insinuated himself into a world that included some of most powerful members of the New Hollywood and the new rock-and-roll aristocracy. Young also insists that a very quick revisionist history developed as soon as Manson was indicted in December of 1969, noting that many “well-known musicians around LA knew him . . . though they’d probably deny it now.”32

  As tempting as it is to speculate about, we do not need to sort out how “good” Manson was as a musician. What he sounded like in his moment, what he could have sounded like with the right band is irrelevant to the central issue of how Manson used whatever talents he did have to carve out a place of real significance in late 1960s Los Angeles. In any event, reports on Manson’s musical ability are hopelessly tangled: for every Neil Young remembering Manson’s music with fond appreciation there are plenty of observers who testified that while Manson had a definite magnetism in his spontaneous performance, he could not sing a lick when it came time to try to make tracks in the studio. For his part, Bobby Beausoleil (who briefly played in a rock band called The Milky Way with Manson) has offered up wonderfully contradictory evaluations in various interviews. To one interlocutor, Beausoleil—who had used his connection to Frank Zappa to try to advance Manson’s musical ambitions—said the following: “Just between us, Charlie doesn’t have a whole lot of talent. (Strumming chords) ‘This is my song, my dark song, my dark song.’”33 But on another occasion Beausoleil changed his tune and argued that Manson “was a very talented songwriter, good musician, lyrically, just excellent. He was somebody with an incredibly intense, vivid, expanded imagination.”34

  In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (subtitled How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood), Peter Biskind suggests that Hopper visited Manson in prison, at Manson’s invitation. As Biskind explains, “Manson wanted Hopper to star in the film version of his life.”35 At first Hopper balked—out of respect, he says, for the memory of his “good friend” Jay Sebring. Curiosity “finally triumphed over scruple,” as Biskind tells it, and Hopper went to meet Manson. According to Hopper, Manson said that “like, y’know, he was a big star and like, his whole life he had been acting out a movie, but there hadn’t been any movie cameras there.”36 What is important here is Manson’s oft-described belief that there had to be a prominent place for him in the culture of the New Hollywood and the Los Angeles rock-and-roll scene of the late 1960s. We need to credit Neil Young’s claims about Manson’s promise (all Manson needed was a “band like Dylan had on ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’”) and take seriously Gregg Jakobson’s insistence that what he really wanted to do—rather than get Manson signed to a recording contract through Terry Melcher—was make a film documentary of the Manson Family: “I said to Terry, ‘This guy should be captured on film. You’re never gonna capture this guy on tape.’ It’d be like having footage of Castro while he was still in the mountains or something. This guy was a real rebel. It had to be movie footage.”37

  Charles Manson did not simply fantasize that he and his Family had come to have a place of some prominence in the volatile world of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. His “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” interaction with Dennis Hopper represents simply one rather last-ditch attempt to draw on the credit he (reasonably) thought he had accrued with the rising sons of Los Angeles. Charles Manson and his Family were not bizarre outliers in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. We need to come to a new understanding of them, in fact, as key figures in this
scene. One of the most treasured bits of lore surrounding Manson and his music-business contacts has to do with the time Manson and some of the girls spent living with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys in Wilson’s house on Sunset Boulevard. Wilson (a charter member—along with Terry Melcher and Gregg Jakobson—of the self-styled club known as the “Golden Penetrators”) not only enjoyed the apparently unlimited sexual access he had to the young women in his home, but regularly tried to “share” this access: no less an expert on sleaze than John Phillips recounted years later that he would “shudder” every time the other men would invite him over to participate in the sexual escapades of this group. Wilson himself would punctuate his experiment in communal living by claiming that all it had left him with was the “largest gonorrhea bill in history.”38 But Manson and his “girls” were not a disease. They were players in what, in other contexts, we call the “New Hollywood,” or the “freak scene,” or, simply, “Los Angeles.” The intersection of Manson’s Family with major stars in the New Hollywood and the Los Angeles music scene turned out to be a dangerous crossroads, but not because evil was “in the air” or because the counterculture held within it the seeds of its own destruction or any of the other nonsense that has been peddled by Joan Didion and her acolytes.

  If it is true that Charles Manson turned out to be a delusional reader of the Beatles’ “White” album and the mastermind of the multiple murders on August 8 and 9, it is likewise true that it was plausible for Manson to believe that he might find a prominent place in these new cultures—as an embodiment of what Laurel Canyon historian Michael Walker has nicely summarized as an “unprecedented breed of incipient celebrity.” ABC news correspondent Dick Shoemaker remembers talking to his contacts in Hollywood right after the Tate murders and having many of them tell him that they were convinced that the Cielo Drive attacks had something to do with “celebrityism.”39

  Shoemaker’s coinage (“celebrityism”) is both awkward and quite useful. There was something new and unfixed about the celebrityism of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Well before the night of August 8, Charles Manson had become something of a fixture on the cultural scene. Manson and his followers (not only his girls but some of the boys who followed him too) were at home in Dennis Wilson’s house, on the Sunset Strip, at Venice Beach, at Frank Zappa’s log-cabin home/crash pad, at Mama Cass’s house, and maybe even at 10050 Cielo Drive, where at least a few of the Family are reported to have socialized well before the summer of 1969. Crossing paths with Doris Day’s son, with Angela Lansbury’s daughter, with the Byrds, Love, and the Beach Boys, just to name a few acts, the Manson Family was in a complex and dynamic relationship with Los Angeles’s film and music (and drug and biker) cultures. While the Family’s central strategy was stealth, and their major tactic the creepy crawl, they also made a full-frontal attack on the citadels of film and music production in Southern California in the late 1960s. From the slightly surreal home-base of Spahn Ranch, the superannuated Western movie and television setting, now a weekend horseback-riding attraction and hippie commune, the Manson Family launched a sustained charm offensive in and around Los Angeles before finally changing gears and resorting to a murderous harm offensive.40

  Kim Fowley, who wore a number of different music business hats in Los Angeles, gives a good thumbnail sketch of the years from 1965 to 1969 with a special focus on the ways the music and film businesses helped define each other. The Byrds, according to Fowley, were at the center of all this. In 1965, Fowley explains, “the movie business really got into ‘the music business’ for the first time with the Byrds at Ciro’s nightclub.” Actors “started coming down every night to see the Byrds, and pretty soon you had Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda checking out rock ‘n’ roll.” Fowley goes on to note that in short order “Fonda got in with the Byrds, Nicholson got in with the Monkees and even Steve McQueen could be found announcing to the world that ‘Johnny Rivers playing the Whisky a Go Go was god’. ”41 The first two cases would turn out to be especially significant, since Fonda would soon star in Easy Rider—a film that relies heavily on non-diegetic use of two Byrds’ songs (“Ballad of Easy Rider” and “Wasn’t Born to Follow”) and Jack Nicholson would soon collaborate with the Monkees on the screenplay for their psychedelic movie Head.42

  This was not, of course, the first time that Hollywood and rock and roll had crossed paths. From the use of Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” in 1955’s Blackboard Jungle, Little Richard’s appearance in The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), and through Elvis Presley’s tenure in Hollywood, the film industry took note of and consistently tried to capitalize on the success of rock-and-roll music. This was following an old Hollywood tradition of working assiduously to incorporate the advances in American popular music into the mainstream of film production, from the early 1930s hiring of Tin Pan Alley composers to come work in Southern California and major roles offered to singing cowboys in Westerns, to the regular adaptation of Broadway musicals into screen versions. Various and regular attempts were made to domesticate rock and roll as a proper subject and soundtrack for film productions. Hollywood film (and later television) studios learned to use sites of popular music production (whether in New York, Nashville, Bakersfield, San Francisco, or, increasingly, Los Angeles itself) as a sort of minor league—offering up players, styles, and stories as raw material for modern films and television programs.

  Fonda and Hopper and their New Hollywood compatriots were not the first to take “today’s music” seriously. In its own oddball and confused way, AIP’s Riot on Sunset Strip provided a relatively sympathetic picture of the new youth cultures in and around Los Angeles. Released in 1967, this Sam Katzman production tried to offer a balanced view of the conflict between the police and the young people who milled around outside the rock clubs on the Strip. The voice-over that opens the film tells the audience that these young people “are not dangerous revolutionaries in a beleaguered city. . . . These are teenagers” who are simply demanding “the right of self-expression.” The movie has its own traditionalist points to score—these poor wayfaring teenagers often come from “broken” homes and have not gotten enough attention or love. For what it’s worth, one of these young women, Andrea, is the daughter of police officer Walter Lorimer; Lorimer attempts to make peace between the longhairs, the local business people who complain about them, and the police rank-and-file who seem mostly to want to bust some heads. “Getting together in groups” is not unlawful, Lorimer reminds his colleagues (and the viewers) and the film’s argument is that, for the most part, if you leave young people to their own devices they will simply dance. Albeit interracially. Danger intrudes in the form of Herbie, son of a big Hollywood celebrity, who introduces Andrea to LSD. Havoc—including a gang rape of Andrea—follows from this dosing; a similar crime is committed in Easy Rider during a trip as well. While earlier Riot on Sunset Strip had been relatively neutral on the question of marijuana usage, here it takes a staunch anti-acid position. This all leads film scholar Christopher Sharrett to accuse Riot of having it both ways, “able to cater to its target market while also justifying adult paranoia about out-of-control teenagers.” Sharrett notes that any sympathy the film has shown for its teenagers is undercut at the end with its warning that “half the world will soon be under twenty-five, so we must stay vigilant (or some such).”43 But this sort of final statement has been deployed in Hollywood film as a sort of inoculation against claims of prurience since at least the 1930s (especially with respect to gangster films).

  Riot on the Sunset Strip is what has come to be called an “exploitation” film. But unlike the cruel indifference of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”—the most famous piece of art inspired by the Sunset Strip riots—this film actually acknowledges that there some important issues being worked out in and through the conflict of young people and the “establishment” outside the Pandora’s Box club on the Sunset Strip. Mike Davis, in his passionate essay “Riot Nights on Sunset Strip,” makes it clear that th
e young people on and around the Strip were slowly but inexorably radicalized by police oppression—what they came to call “blue fascism.” With support from some notable music industry figures, the youth on the Strip—dismissed in the mainstream press as “teenyboppers” and “striplings”—were developing into a serious insurgent force. In “For What It’s Worth,” Steven Stills, a countercultural insider, took note of the same riot depicted in the movie and came away with the patronizing certainty of false equivalences—all the signs say the same thing! In this rousing call to neutrality and its killer faux-gospel hook, Stills instructs the young hippies of the Strip to stop, look, and listen. And really just to stop.

  With this 1967 song, it is already possible to start seeing some cracks forming between “real” hippie and phony Hollywood hippie, between the Strip and the canyons, between those with access to power in the film and music industries and those still figuring out how to operate the levers on the “star-making machinery.” (Manson, of course, denied that he and his Family were hippies of any kind and preferred to call his group “slippies” as a way of calling attention to how they had slipped “through the cracks of society.” More often Manson made sure to point out the generational differences that separated him from the masses of young people in the Haight-Ashbury and on the Strip.)44

  But for a significant moment a remarkable cultural synergy developed among the various constituencies described in the title of another exploitation film as the “Hippie Revolt.” Easy Rider really is crucial here, not least because it relied so heavily on the new music. “The real big moment,” Kim Fowley explains, came when the makers of Easy Rider decided to use “individual . . . songs as the elements of the soundtrack.” In short, the film did not have a written out score—no “Elmer Bernstein or Bernard Hermann” as Fowley put it.45 This decision demonstrated not only a major cultural investment in the value of the new music—it also represented a major financial investment: cinematographer László Kovács contends that the producers of the movie spent $1 million for the licensing of these songs, which he claims was about “three times the budget for shooting the rest of the film.”46