Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  What is interesting in Eyes Wide Open is Gross’s decision to have his cult leader articulate the terrifying possibility that he and his followers will be back. In the place of Manson’s relatively philosophical and mournful courtroom speech at his trial, Gross uses this moment in his book to proffer a warning: “Watch,” the cult leader tells the assembled, “no one knows when the master will choose to come back.” Houvanian puts a point on his creepy-crawl rhetoric with the suggestion that he might return while the non-specific “you” are asleep.5

  It turns out that Houvanian has maintained control over at least some of his followers and has been controlling them from inside of his prison cell. The real point, of course, is that Houvanian no longer has much work to do: the initial “infection” took hold decades ago and his followers will never be cleansed of his influence. While this variant of Manson art can, on occasion, seem to follow the contours of the zombie film, it sometimes seems closer to the “contagion” subgenre, with the consistent implication that there is a little Manson in, if not everybody, enough people to be a menace.

  In an essay on “Hip Pocket Sleaze,” John Harrison has helpfully explained how quickly publishers and film studios began to churn out pulp stories drawing on the Manson Family as a ready-made horror package: “From skid row film producers to sleazy underground paperback publishers, the sensational aspects of the savage killings committed by members of the Manson Family—from its celebrity victims and the shattering of the ‘peace and love’ illusion to the LSD orgies and charisma of the Family’s leader, Charles Manson—were a potent melting pot of ingredients ripe for exploitation.” Harrison argues that movies “like The Love-Thrill Murders (1971), I Drink Your Blood (1971) and The Deathmaster (1972) were clearly inspired by the Manson case and kept audiences in grindhouses and drive-ins entertained with lurid tales of violent, doped-up hippies on a murderous rampage.”6

  Joining the “mainstream books” that “appeared covering almost every aspect of the Manson case and subsequent trial (and helping to create and define the popular true crime literary genre in the process)” publishers also circulated “fictional potboilers which used the news headlines as merely a springboard for an adventure far more raunchy and gaudy.” Part of the point of this horror film and fiction was to allow audiences the titillation of safely experiencing Manson-inspired terror, and then to neutralize the threat as quickly and decisively as possible. The cult leader in Ray Stanley’s The Hippy Cult Murders (1970), after indulging himself in all kinds of terrifying rituals of sex and violence is, by novel’s end, dispatched with “swift and savage justice.”7 This early generation of Manson art, obviously, had more than one function. It was sexually titillating, it marginalized youth cultures, and it threw a big bear hug around cops. But what it promised above all was fast resolution—terror coming out of nowhere followed by bad guys getting their comeuppance like lightning.

  But these simple pleasures of pulp fiction could not be sustained. The ongoing tale of Manson art reveals a much different moral, one that requires audiences to acknowledge that they are in the story—that stories of the Manson Family are stories of their own time, their own place. The most perfunctory versions of this story tell us that either Manson’s Family (i.e., his communal family of choice) or Manson’s family (i.e., his biological offspring) are creepy crawling our landscape.

  The 2007 film Gimme Skelter, for instance, is organized around the character Philip Valentine, who grew up in foster care believing that he is truly the son of Charles Manson. (There is some consensus that the first “real” Manson Family baby was Michael Valentine, born to Mary Brunner and named for the main character of Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.) Gimme Skelter—whose title, it probably goes without saying, brings together the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Manson in a great/horrible pun only notable for how long it took someone to make it—tracks this Valentine as he leads a murderous gang through its paces. The Manson scenario is half-hearted. Time is spent in the desert and the group members get instructed to do “something witchy” in connection with their crimes. The animus for all of this, the film finally informs us, is that Valentine wants to rack up a higher kill count than his murderous father in order to get some much-desired attention from him. It is a strange Oedipal twist Gimme Skelter delivers—“Father, I want to kill (more people than) you”—but still it underscores the availability of Manson as a sign of ongoing cultural horror.

  The “Son of Manson” artistic thread has a tale to tell about a certain level of cultural disquiet related directly to the sexual activity of Family members during the heyday of Manson in Southern California, and about the unwillingness (or inability) of the Manson Family to assign children to nuclear family formations. In short, these genre films and novels organized around Manson children reveal not only a concern with Manson’s diffuse cultural influence, but also about the possibility that even as his body is locked up, his “blood” might be running through the land. Crime-fiction writer Michael Perry explores this notion in his 1994 book Skelter, a follow-up to a 1992 book he wrote, which imagines that serial killer Ted Bundy did not die in the electric chair and is still himself on a rampage. This truly strange book features a cult-leader wannabe who calls himself “J’osuf” and an acolyte named Trumbo who ultimately learns that his own “real” father is Charles Manson. Trumbo learns this from Manson himself, who also promises not to reveal this truth to anyone else: “I don’t want you having the baggage I had to carry around—reform school, jail, trouble every minute of my life.”8

  These fictional narratives of Manson parentage are framed in the larger culture by numerous attempts—mostly in Internet news outlets—to answer some variant of the question “Where Are Manson’s Children Now?” These pieces all tend to ask three basic questions—Is s/he really Charles Manson’s kid? How scarred is s/he by this fact? And how dangerous? These works demonstrate little inclination to plumb the larger implications of Manson’s family/Family.

  More ambitious work has mostly been carried forward by artists interested in cultural legacies of the Manson Family’s creepy crawl rather than in relatively foursquare questions about actual paternity. A number of crime fiction writers have traced the impact of Manson-aftershocks, including major figures such as T. Jefferson Parker in California Girl (2004) and Jeffrey Deaver in The Sleeping Doll (2007), the latter of which centers on a criminal who is referred to as “Son of Manson” but bears no direct connection to the cult leader. William Harrington also teases out the continuing influence of Manson on his followers in a very strange hybrid work titled Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders, which operates from the principle that the titular detective (spun-off from the television show of the same name) was involved in the original Tate-LaBianca investigation and is still trying to tie up loose ends from the case. Manson seems to be continuing to direct the activities of his followers, perhaps including a recent murder with requisite blood-writing on the wall. This slightly demented book arranges to have Columbo visit Manson in jail as he tries to collect information about the criminal plans of still-faithful Family members who, according to Columbo (channeling Damon Runyon, it seems), have names likes The Kid, Bum Rapp, Squatty, Boobs, and Puss Dogood. This approach also structures Nicholas Sarazen’s Family Reunion (1990), which revolves around an investigative journalist who pieces together a narrative about the possible threats posed by former Family members.

  It is interesting to consider two issues of Marvel Comics’ Punisher from the late 1980s that intervene quite remarkably in the ongoing evolution of this “still among us” trope. In October and November of 1988, the Punisher, a Vietnam Veteran, decides that he can no longer abide the fact that Manson (here “Samson”) escaped the death penalty. It is Manson himself who still walks among us! While there is some evidence to suggest that Punisher belongs to a distinct trajectory of “crazed returning vet” narratives, these comic books ultimately encourage readers to understand any of his behavioral deviations from th
e norm as the product of his otherwise healthy and deep patriotism. The Manson character here is frighteningly powerful. Punisher has his Vietnam bona fides, to be sure, but Samson has that swastika on his forehead—the symbol seems to grow at times and the comic artists call attention to it by sometimes turning the bad guy’s eyebrows into arrows pointing at it. And Samson has the potent long hair of his biblical namesake, even when he is in jail.

  These two issues of Punisher take pains to elaborate on the initial Vietnam reference. Taking a little bit of historical license, Punisher’s writer has Samson’s crimes take place on the same day that William Calley is convicted for his Vietnam murders. When it comes time to kill the Squeaky Fromme character, Punisher pushes her from a helicopter. When Punisher needs help settling all of his scores, he appeals to an old buddy from Nam, who is more than willing to join this new campaign. In many ways Punisher fits a film template that historian Lary May has described in convincing detail.

  These movies—perhaps most notably the Dirty Harry and Death Wish franchises and then later some Chuck Norris films and the Rambo series—“emerged in the 1970s and lasted . . . until the early 1990s” and gave “vivid expression to the political backlash unfolding at the time against the social movements and cultural upheavals of the 1960s.”9 The protagonist of these films, as May explains, is usually a disgruntled police officer or military person; the challenges of American life, particularly in the city, are explicitly described as a “war.” Punisher has particular echoes of Charles Bronson’s character in Death Wish—both vigilantes spring into action after acts of horrific violence are committed against their families in New York’s Central Park. (May reminds us too that the bad guy in Death Wish III looked like Manson and shared some of his mannerisms.) The stakes are high in these films and the “cheers for the righteous detective or vigilante” in movie theaters showing them represented a sort of wish fulfillment through which the loss of the Vietnam War and the disorder on the home front are set right.

  Read in this light, Punisher’s right-wing politics becomes more legible. Punisher’s creators seem quite purposefully stitching him into this anti-counterculture, pro-establishment cultural movement. Punisher is not just mad about the crimes committed by Samson and his followers, but he hates their whole damn creepy crawling “hippie pranksters” mode (and yes, Punisher does take this whack at Ken Kesey and his followers). While the kind-of-Manson-kind-of-Patty-Hearst “Liberation Army” depicted here claims to be making war on “rich capitalist pigs,” Punisher can see through the rhetoric in order to take measure of “the usual collection of drug abusers and career criminals hiding behind a cloak of political involvement.” By the time the “Samson” storyline reaches its conclusion, as Samson’s followers begin to morph from scary hippies to scary punks, readers will not be surprised to see the jacked-up Punisher completely dominating the bad guy (who, in a neat twist, is depicted as tall). Having been paralyzed in the struggle, Samson begs Punisher to kill him, and the hero obliges. They walk among us no longer, at least not in the Marvel universe.

  The “walk among us” trope has figured not only in genre fiction and comic books, but “high” literary fiction as well. Most recently Madison Smartt Bell has brought together the Tate-LaBianca tragedy and the 9/11 attacks in his book The Color of Night (2011). The main character begins to relive old experiences from her time with the Family (here called “The People”) as a result of seeing footage of the twin towers falling on television. Michael Lindgren correctly points out that Bell seems to be making some broad and unsupportable claims about the relationship between the violent tragedies of the late 1960s in the United States and the devastation of September 11th. Bell has ambitious (self-indulgent?) mythology-inspired aims in The Color of Night, and has explained that the female characters are to be read as Maenads—the female followers of Dionysus. Bell is interested in exploring the relationship between terror and ecstasy and does so in about as coherent a form as that goal suggests. (He also does not seem to know—or does not want to acknowledge—that Richard Schechner and the Performance Group got to this idea with Dionysus in ’69 a long time ago.) This book has the predictable Manson allusions (Family members are given new names—Creamy, Crunchy, and Stitch, women are instructed to do witchy things after their crimes, members are told to “slither”—that is, creepy crawl, and so on) and the now-familiar implication that Bugliosi did not complete the work of shutting the Family down. The Color of Night, in fact, draws on Bell’s interest in mythology and in spirit possession to plot the 1969 crimes as simply one point on the timeless graph of violent frenzy. Bell’s work is explicitly anti-historical—evil is a root force in the world and it erupts into violence when the stars align.10

  John Kaye’s The Dead Circus (2002) stands as perhaps the most satisfying literary refutation of the common practice of mystification of Manson that is given voice in Madison Smartt Bell’s book (and elsewhere). Beginning with two invented pieces of documentary evidence, Kaye establishes immediately that Manson’s legacy will have to be traced on an actual landscape of social relations. After presenting an excerpt from a newspaper article about the 1985 murder of Eddie Cornell, with a quotation from a police detective who (apropos of nothing else, so far) denies that this murder had anything to do with the Manson case, Kaye then offers up a long quotation, allegedly drawn from “unpublished prison notebooks” written by Manson: “I am, just a child with salt and cinders underneath his skin, a chooser not a beggar . . . . I’m safe here in this cellblock . . . . But you’re not safe out there, because your hearts are locked against the children who cried out for help, who left you with the silence of an empty bedroom, their clothes in their closets and their schoolbooks still on the shelves, the air crackling with their anger.” “They are waking up now in dead alleys or climbing out of ditches,” this fictional Manson continues, convincingly, “and soon they will be loose and running, half-starved and forgotten, crossing and recrossing this fouled country, waiting until the winds calm and the flames die out before they decide to come home.” Finally, Manson warns, “that, my friends, is when you get to face the truth.”11

  Like the pulp novelists, Kaye also describes Family members who are still among us (the book features a major character named Alice who was a significant player in Family life), but his chronicling of the current day activities of Manson women is not the important story in The Dead Circus. To be sure, Kaye is scrupulous in his attention to detail—both in historically sourced actual detail and in his outright fictional creations, which often have an uncannily documentary feel. The Dead Circus acts as a sort of primer to the dark byways of Southern California life (and especially the music industry) from the mid-1960s through the 1980s. It jumps off from the story of Bobby Fuller, the Los Angeles rocker who died in Hollywood in 1966 under strange and still unsolved circumstances. Kaye has few peers when it comes to describing the Family and its murderous work. He is especially interested in tracing out the legacy of the abuse many of the women in the Family suffered, and suggests that Manson too was the victim of sexual abuse (by a stepfather) as a child. The historical accuracy is less important than the attempt Kaye makes to plot the members of the Family into a convincing chronicle of suffering and victimization: “We were girls who were tender, with hurt places,” one fictional Manson woman explains. “We were all just gullible girls with separate selves,” she says, “part of a creepy chain of hope that carried the wrong message.”12

  The Dead Circus is organized around Gene Burk, a Los Angeles cop in the 1960s, now retired and focusing on his record collecting. Burk’s hobby is not a tangential bit of characterization. Through his activities readers come to learn that that Kaye’s real aim in the book is to prosecute all of us for consuming—consistently and pruriently—the details and material culture of the Manson case. The Dead Circus is what we might call a metanarrative; it is a book about collecting (stories, songs, films, and so on) and about how collectors—and readers and listeners and viewers—can become a part
of the stories they collect. It is, in short, a book about how all of us create Manson. Kaye’s book is, it seems, the work of someone deeply invested in the world of popular music collecting (or at least someone willing to do lots of research before writing his novel): an early plot thread has to do with a rare 45 Gene Burk wants to buy of “Big Boy Pants,” a (fictional) song by the (real) Juvenairs, who were the predecessor group to Danny and the Juniors (also real). Later in the book, Burk negotiates for a photograph reportedly taken during an early (fictional) Linda Ronstadt recording session, during which Ricky Nelson played guitar and sang, alongside Family member Cathy “Gypsy” Share, who also sang backup. The dealer who offers the picture to Burk refers to it as “Ozzie and Harriet meet Charles Manson.”13

  The book’s statement of purpose comes in passages that reveal where it got its title:

  Beginning in the late 1970s, the underground market for pictures and artifacts associated with the Manson murders had been growing steadily, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. This fact had not gone unnoticed by Charles Manson or those members of his family who still remained loyal to him while he was incarcerated. In 1981, for example, a welder from Traverse City, Michigan, paid $500 for a pair of soiled panties owned by Patricia Krenwinkel; and six months later, he paid another $750 for the Kinks concert-logo T-shirt that Clem Grogan was photographed wearing outside the downtown courthouse in Los Angeles, where Charlie was on trial.14