Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover

by Jeff Guinn

  The Dale Carnegie course was one of Terminal Island’s most popular programs for its convicts. There was a waiting list of prisoners who wanted to enroll. Class was limited to twenty-five or thirty inmates, and instruction lasted about four months. As a relatively new inmate, and one with an escape attempt already on his record, Charlie ranked low among applicants. But prison officials believed that Dale Carnegie’s positive outlook on life might be just what moody, erratic Charlie needed. He was jumped ahead of everyone else and enrolled in the course. Besides lectures, class members were expected to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, study several pamphlets (probably including Effective Speaking and Human Relations and an early edition of How to Remember Names), and occasionally turn in written assignments. Charlie had always evinced limited reading skills, but in this Carnegie class he proved that he could not only read but fully comprehend printed material if he was sufficiently engaged, and if instructors were helpful enough. Virtually every word in the Carnegie publications resonated with Charlie. For the first time in his life he was considered an outstanding pupil.

  The first pages of How to Win Friends seemed to formally codify all the instinctive ways Charlie had manipulated people since childhood. It was as though Dale Carnegie not only read Charlie’s mind, but recruited him as a disciple by elaborating on Charlie’s own thoughts.

  “Everything you or I do springs from two motives: The sex urge and the desire to be great.”

  “Begin in a friendly way.”

  “The only way on earth to influence the other fellow is to talk about what he wants and show him how to get it.”

  “Make the other person feel important.”

  “The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.”

  “You have to use showmanship. The movies do it. Radio does it. And you will have to do it if you want attention. . . . Dramatize your ideas.”

  Chapter Seven, “How to Get Co-Operation,” contained advice that Charlie adopted as the most vital tool in his manipulative arsenal: “Let the other fellow feel that the idea is his.” Later, when police, judges, and juries struggled to understand how Charlie Manson was able to convince others to carry out his criminal directives, they could have found the answer there in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Over half a century later Phil Kaufman, who knew Manson in prison and later in Los Angeles, remembered, “That was Charlie’s big trick. He’d decide what he wanted [someone] to do and then talk about it so the girl or whoever would think that she thought of it and it was her idea. I saw him do it all the time. I mean, it was constant. It was where he got his power over [gullible] people.”

  Charlie’s instructors in Terminal Island’s Dale Carnegie course were surprised when their star pupil quit before completing the four-month program. But once he felt that he’d learned what he needed, Charlie had no further interest in sitting in a classroom. He was ready to move on.

  Charlie spent the rest of his time at Terminal Island thinking about what he would do next—thanks to all he gleaned from imprisoned pimps and Dale Carnegie, he had a plan. To keep in decent physical shape he boxed and played in pickup basketball games. Charlie was a good athlete. For recreation he played his guitar; Frankie Laine’s songs were still his favorites. Above all, Charlie stayed out of trouble. Like every other federal prison, Terminal Island was overcrowded and it was standard procedure to grant early parole to inmates who behaved. On September 30, 1958, Charlie was released after serving two years and five months of his original three-year sentence.

  As a condition of his release, Charlie was required to report regularly to a parole officer. He stated that he planned to live with his mother in her Los Angeles apartment. Kathleen had some doubts about how well that arrangement would work, but she also felt obligated to try to help her son build a new, law-abiding life. She was still separated from Lewis, though his pleas for reconciliation moved her and Kathleen was thinking about trying with him again. If she reunited with her estranged husband, Charlie would have to live somewhere else—he and Lewis could never get along. But in the meantime, Kathleen told Charlie that he could stay with her.

  Charlie also had to demonstrate to his parole officer that he could find and maintain gainful employment. The finding part didn’t prove difficult—lots of menial jobs were available in Los Angeles—but keeping a steady job seemed beyond him. In rapid order Charlie worked as a bus-boy, a bartender, a gas station attendant, and a frozen food locker clerk. Getting fired on a regular basis didn’t really bother him; the idea was to be working somewhere that the parole officer could check when Charlie went in to see him. All the while, Charlie was setting himself up to make a full-time living in the business that he now believed was his natural calling.

  Charlie’s career as a pimp got off to a slow start. Judy and Flo, the first two girls he recruited, didn’t last long on the streets. Little is known about them besides that Judy’s father complained about Charlie to the cops, and that was the last thing Charlie needed. If he hadn’t understood it before, he made it a rule afterward—none of his women were allowed to maintain close ties to their families, except in cases like Flo’s, since she regularly got money from her parents. Charlie moved out of his mother’s apartment—Kathleen had a pretty good idea of what he was up to, and she didn’t approve. Instead Charlie took up residence with another pimp, who unfortunately for Charlie was being covertly monitored by the FBI. Federal agents shared Charlie’s new address and apparent wrongdoing with his parole officer, who called Charlie in. He denied everything but wasn’t convincing. Charlie’s next court report noted that “This certainly is a very shaky probationer and it seems just a matter of time before he gets in further trouble.”

  Charlie may have envisioned pimping out dozens of high-dollar girls in Los Angeles and living in relative luxury on their earnings, but the hard truth was that he found it impossible to scrape together even a modest living from the pittance his limited, ever-changing lineup brought in. He fell back on his old criminal habits, though not for very long. On May 1, 1959, just seven months after he’d been paroled from Terminal Island, Charlie was arrested for attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check for $37.50 at a Ralph’s supermarket. He told the L.A. cops who picked him up that he’d stolen the check from a mailbox, meaning he’d committed two federal offenses. The police turned him over to the Secret Service; when a pair of federal agents questioned Charlie, they showed him the check and formally asked if he’d forged the signature on it. Charlie tried to outfox them; a post-interrogation report noted, “The check itself has disappeared; [the agents] feel certain [the] subject took it off [the] table and swallowed it when they momentarily turned their backs.” Unfortunately for Charlie, the Ralph’s clerk, the arresting L.A. policemen, and the federal agents all testified that they’d seen the check and his forged signature on the back of it. The case against him proceeded.

  Kathleen was shaken by Charlie’s latest misadventure. She wasn’t surprised that he’d tried his hand at pimping—he always seemed able to make girls do whatever he wanted—but it seemed as though her son was destined to be a career criminal. Summer 1959 was a hard time for Kathleen. On July 19, Nancy Maddox died back in West Virginia. Kathleen’s own experience with Charlie had taught her how much a child’s criminal behavior could hurt a parent, and she deeply regretted the pain she had caused her mother. There was no way now to make up for it; all Kathleen could do was to continue supporting Charlie in his time of trouble, since she felt responsible for the bad way he’d turned out.

  In mid-September, nineteen-year-old Leona Rae Musser met with Charlie’s probation officer and informed him that she was pregnant with Charlie’s baby. She pleaded for the charges against Charlie to be dismissed; then she and Charlie would get married and he would go straight. Leona wasn’t pregnant; she was working for Charlie as a prostitute. But she managed to elicit sympathy from the parole officer and the court. A deal was struck: Charlie would plead guilty to forging the check, and the mail theft
charge would be dropped. Charlie was sent back to Dr. Edwin McNiel, who’d examined him four years earlier after his arrest for car theft. Dr. McNiel’s latest opinion was that Charlie was a terrible risk for probation and should be returned to prison, but at his trial in September Leona made another tearful plea and swayed the judge. Charlie received a ten-year suspended sentence and remained on probation.

  The close call didn’t faze him; he continued pimping out Leona and whatever other girls he could attract to his stable. Even though everything in his criminal past indicated otherwise, Charlie always believed that he was never going to be caught again. In December he tried to expand his territory, driving Leona and another girl from California to New Mexico to turn tricks in Lordsburg. They were arrested there, and Charlie faced fresh federal charges of violating the Mann Act, which prohibited transporting women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. Charlie tried to thwart investigators by marrying Leona; wives could not be forced to testify against their husbands. Though she’d fibbed about it six months earlier, now Leona really was pregnant with Charlie’s child. While the FBI prepared its case, Charlie carried on with his lawbreaking ways. He didn’t limit his criminal activities to running prostitutes. By the end of the year he’d been arrested twice more by the LAPD for grand theft auto and use of stolen credit cards. Both of those charges were dropped for lack of evidence, but the Mann Act violation was about to be brought before a federal grand jury. Charlie didn’t wait around to be indicted; he skipped town.

  In his absence, Leona looked out for her own best interests. In mid-pregnancy and eager to avoid a prison sentence of her own, she told the federal grand jury in Los Angeles that Charlie had indeed taken her from California to New Mexico to turn tricks. Her testimony guaranteed that Charlie would return to prison. After the grand jury formally indicted him, Charlie’s previous ten-year probation for treasury check forgery was revoked and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. On June 1 he was picked up in Laredo, Texas, and extradited to California. Three weeks later in a Los Angeles court, Charlie was sentenced to serve out his ten-year check forgery sentence in the United States Penitentiary on McNeil Island in Washington’s Puget Sound. A decade of hard time in prison was the last thing that Charlie wanted. He appealed the revocation of his suspended sentence and was held in the Los Angeles County jail while the appeal was pending. He got some good news in July—the Mann Act charge was dropped, probably because it was so certain that Charlie was in line for a lengthy sentence anyway. The inevitable bad news followed; though Charlie and his assigned public defenders managed to string out the process for almost a year, in June 1961 the appeal was denied and Charlie was transferred to McNeil Island. He was just twenty-six, but counting reform schools he had already been in some form of custody or on probation for almost fourteen years.

  Except for being surrounded by water, Terminal Island and McNeil Island had very little in common. The California prison was adjacent to the mainland and easy to reach. The Washington penitentiary sprawled over more than two thousand rugged acres and was largely self-sustaining thanks to a large farm maintained by inmates. The most common access was by ferry; the prison maintained a few speedboats. Because commuting was so difficult, many administrators and guards lived with their families on the island. Their homes were built and roads maintained by convict work crews. There was even a school for staffers’ children.

  The prisoners, who numbered about one thousand when Charlie arrived in the summer of 1961, were housed in a “stacked” five-tier cell tower. They were a mix of white-collar criminals, petty hustlers like Charlie, and vicious thugs. Daily prison life at McNeil was hard; every convict was expected to work, and guards had a relatively free hand with discipline. Few inmates plotted breakouts. Though McNeil was considered a medium- rather than a high-security prison, the rough, deep waters around it assured that escape was virtually impossible. When three inmates tried to float to the mainland on a raft fashioned from a plywood sign, the two who were recaptured had suffered hypothermia. The third had drowned.

  When Charlie arrived at McNeil, staff evaluators found him to be “an energetic, young-appearing person whose verbalization flows quite easily.” Charlie had learned from the Dale Carnegie course at Terminal Island: “he gestures profusely and can dramatize situations to hold the listener’s attention.” He hadn’t completely mastered the art of false sincerity. The report noted, “He hides his loneliness, resentment, and hostility behind a facade of superficial ingratiation.” And, despite his year-long struggle to stay out of McNeil, Charlie admitted that in a sense he was glad to be there: “He has commented that institutions have become his way of life and that he receives security in institutions which is not available to him in the outside world.”

  For Manson, prison meant not just security but school. Though he didn’t sign up for any of the academic or work training courses available at McNeil, he continued his education there all the same. McNeil had inmates who were glad to share information on a variety of subjects, black and white magic and hypnotism among them. There was a large fellowship of born-again Christians eager to bring Charlie closer to God, but he’d had enough of that. The group that really captured his attention, less for his acceptance of their spiritual beliefs than the way in which they expressed them, was the Scientologists.

  Much as Dale Carnegie introduced his sales philosophy to the general public with How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, in 1950 pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard utilized the best-selling Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health to publicize his technique of achieving mental health and happiness. Carnegie’s focus was on changing the perceptions of other people; Hubbard taught how to change yourself. He advocated “auditing,” confronting traumatic events in the past to move beyond them, becoming free of old fears and restraints and moving toward a “clear” or theta state where the mind is able to embrace spiritual freedom without negativity. In 1954, Hubbard and his growing legion of followers founded the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on certain “essential tenets”:

  You are an immortal spiritual being.

  Your experience extends well beyond a single lifetime. And your capabilities are unlimited, even if not presently realized.

  Furthermore, man is basically good. He is seeking to survive. And his survival depends upon himself and his fellows and his attainment of brotherhood with the universe.

  As he had with Dale Carnegie, Charlie adopted those aspects of Hubbard’s teachings that lent themselves to manipulating others. He still projected himself in the future as a pimp, not a spiritual advisor. Most potential prostitutes had terrible self-images. Telling such girls that they didn’t have to be crippled by the past, that they were immortal spirits temporarily trapped in their bodies, that they were basically good and capable of achieving anything—these could be powerful recruitment techniques. Meanwhile, proclaiming himself as a wholehearted rather than a calculating Scientology convert had immediate advantages. Prison officials were always glad when inmates embraced a faith that encouraged positive attitudes. Faith helped boost potential for parole. As a relatively new arrival at McNeil, Charlie had a long way to go before parole, but conning evaluators into believing he had become a devout Scientologist was a good first step. His September 1961 report noted, “He appears to have developed a certain amount of insight into his problems through his study of [Scientology]. Manson is making progress for the first time in his life.”

  Sometimes Charlie did seem to be progressing. He participated in prison sports—softball, basketball, even croquet. He joined the inmate drama club. But there were stumbles, too. After unspecified contraband was found in his cell, Charlie was made a prison janitor, the lowest work assignment. In August 1963, Charlie was served with divorce papers from Leona, who’d relocated to Denver. She’d given birth in early 1961 to Charles Luther Manson, Charlie’s second son. While there is no record that Charlie ever saw the baby, he must have at least been on decent terms with Leo
na when the child was born, since the boy’s middle name honored Charlie’s late uncle. Leona was granted the divorce and full custody of the child in January 1964. Nothing further is known about Charles Luther. There is also no record of Charlie reacting in any way to the divorce. He’d married Leona in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid prosecution, and she’d ended up testifying against him. Then and later, Charlie had no use for relationships from which he didn’t benefit.

  Though he’d lost another wife, he still had his mother. When Charlie was sent to McNeil, Kathleen moved from Los Angeles to Washington state to be near enough to visit him. Though she knew Charlie deserved to be in prison, her heart still ached for him. Kathleen found work as a waitress. As part of her new life she even reconciled with Lewis. He swore that he had changed, and she wanted badly to believe him. With Lewis back, Kathleen reflected even more on all the mistakes she had made with Charlie; if she’d been a better mother, he surely wouldn’t have turned out the way that he did. When she visited the prison he was never interested in her life or how she was. Charlie always had a list of things he wanted her to get for him. She did her best, but money was tight. Lewis still had problems keeping a job and waitressing wasn’t lucrative. On one fall visit Charlie demanded money for a new guitar, and was angry when Kathleen told him that she couldn’t afford it.

  The next time she came, she had a surprise for him. Kathleen wished she could somehow go back in time and raise Charlie right. That was impossible, but now that she was back with Lewis she decided to give motherhood a second try. So she came to visit Charlie at McNeil with an infant in her arms, and proudly informed him that he now had a sister. She and Lewis had just adopted the baby, who was named Nancy after Charlie’s grandmother. Charlie shocked Kathleen with his reaction: How much had adopting the baby cost? When Kathleen said the fee was $2,000, Charlie exploded. How could she waste that kind of money on adoption when she’d just told him she didn’t have enough money to buy him a guitar? He shouted that he never wanted to see Kathleen or the baby again. Charlie eventually relented and Kathleen resumed her visits, but she was afraid that seeing the little girl might set him off again. Later, some of little Nancy’s earliest memories were driving to McNeil with her mother and one of Kathleen’s friends, then waiting in the car with the other woman while Kathleen went inside to see Charlie.