by Jeff Guinn
The University of California at Berkeley was intended to dazzle the eye, but with architecture and greenery rather than fashion. The main campus was a small city in its own right, with high-rise student resident buildings, parking garages, and theaters. Surrounding them were acres of playing fields, botanic gardens, and, off to the west, glittering San Francisco Bay. The faculty was distinguished and the students ranked among the most gifted in the country. But in the spring of 1967, Cal-Berkeley had become less renowned for aesthetics and academics than for civil unrest. As student rebellion exploded in America, Berkeley was Ground Zero.
Across America, young people demanded social change, and many of their leaders came from a demographic that parents and other adults would have considered the least likely to rebel. At the conclusion of World War II, about 1.67 million or 10 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four were in college. In 1967, that number had swelled to seven million, or 32 percent, and it was mushrooming every year. Unlike their parents, this new generation of students, almost uniformly white, considered college education to be a right rather than a privilege. For many, the real challenge was not to make Dean’s List but to right government and social wrongs by any means necessary. In his inaugural address in January 1961, John F. Kennedy, at forty-three the youngest president ever elected, declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” but that generation didn’t wait for Kennedy’s recognition or their government’s permission. In 1960 a handful of student activists formed Students for a Democratic Society. SDS members’ ambitious agenda included the eradication of war, racial discrimination, and economic inequality.
By the time Charlie was paroled from Terminal Island in 1967, hundreds of thousands of protesters, mostly but not all young, had participated in SDS-orchestrated antiwar rallies around the nation. Student activists began occupying buildings on their college campuses, effectively shutting down school operations in response to whatever administration policies offended them, from lack of minority enrollment to perceived unconstitutional stifling of free expression. Administrators had a hapless choice between negotiating and being perceived as weak or calling in police, with resulting media coverage of students being dragged from campus in handcuffs.
Berkeley campus protesters organized the Free Speech Movement in 1964. A protest that December 2, when more than a thousand students occupied the school’s Sproul Hall, resulted in almost eight hundred students bring hauled off to jail. The Cal-Berkeley campus was shut down until January 3, when a new acting chancellor established the steps of Sproul Hall as an open discussion area where tables and leaflet distribution would be allowed for all student organizations. To the protesters, this was a significant victory, and school administrators believed it was a responsible decision based on compromise. But to critics, the Berkeley Free Speech incident exemplified craven administrators surrendering to spoiled brats. Actor Ronald Reagan made Berkeley Free Speech a major campaign issue when he ran for governor in 1966, promising that if elected he would “clean up the mess there,” which Reagan swore included “sexual orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you.” Reagan won the election handily, and sent a message through the media to the Cal-Berkeley students: “Observe the rules or get out.” Like college students all around the country, they did neither; Reagan’s threat reinforced their belief that the government was their implacable enemy. Berkeley activists reveled in their campus’s growing reputation as perhaps the most radical in the land.
Very little beyond his own personal experiences had ever affected Charlie. That changed on the day he arrived in Berkeley and began wandering its streets, heading to the university where a full-blown spirit of revolution reigned. Some of the young people he passed near the campus gates brandished placards and chanted slogans protesting America waging war, and Charlie may have wondered, what war, so isolated had he been.
During his reform school years from 1947 to 1954, Charlie had no inkling of China’s fall to the Communist party and American forces being held to a bloody draw in Korea. The reformatories offered classes in shop and welding but not current events. In May 1954, around the same time that Charlie was released from the reform school in Chillicothe and returned to live with his grandmother in a self-contained West Virginia hamlet, the Communist-backed North Vietnamese overran French forces at Dien Bien Phu. This led to the partitioning of the Southeast Asian nation into North and South and President Eisenhower, who months earlier espoused a “domino theory” in which other key Asian nations would tumble into communism if a single current democracy fell first, announced that the U.S. would send military advisors to South Vietnam. They would not, the president promised, take up arms against the North Vietnamese themselves. This middle-of-the-road policy was attacked from two sides—some critics believed that America needed to take part in the fighting and demonstrate to Communists everywhere that the U.S. would not tolerate insidious aggression. Others insisted that America had no right to assert itself in Vietnam at all. In 1965, when all Charlie could think about in McNeil was writing songs and becoming more famous than the Beatles, America began committing troops to combat on orders from President Lyndon Johnson. Even as the undeclared war escalated to a hot-button issue that bitterly divided the nation, Charlie could not have found Vietnam on a map.
The war protesters weren’t the only shocking sight to Charlie. On the same blocks, young black men openly harangued white passersby for money. They shouted that they were trying to feed hungry kids, but there was unambiguous threat in their tone and appearance—quasi-military dress, dark glasses, and often black caps or berets. They were the Black Panthers, a recent phenomenon, but only the latest manifestation of the rage felt by many black Americans.
In 1967 America was wracked by near-unbearable racial tension. Steady progress was too slow for blacks frustrated by high unemployment, low wages, and substandard living conditions. Riots regularly broke out in ghettos from Washington, D.C., to the Los Angeles slum called Watts. President Lyndon Johnson privately bemoaned the ingratitude of black Americans and predicted to an aide that “Negroes will end up pissing in the aisles of the Senate.”
Around the country, but particularly in California and the Bay Area, young black militants declared that they were ready to defend themselves, their families, and their property. In Oakland in October 1966, not long after Charlie was transferred from McNeil to Terminal Island, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, reacting after San Francisco police shot and killed an unarmed sixteen-year-old black youth, had formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers set up free health clinics and breakfasts for ghetto kids, but Charlie, like much of white America, noticed only their sunglasses, paramilitary dress, and the weapons that some of the Panthers openly carried (legally under California law). In Charlie’s previous limited experience outside prison, the few blacks that he encountered were called niggers and knew their place. To him, the Black Panthers demanding donations by the Cal-Berkeley gates were the equivalent of the militant, intimidating Black Muslims that he’d seen inside McNeil and Terminal Island, but the Panthers were armed and loose in the free world. Angry black men with guns meant that white people were going to die. From the moment when Charlie first encountered them in Berkeley, the Panthers impressed and scared him.
We don’t know whether that first night Charlie looked up his prison pal or slept on a grassy place or a park bench. He’d been given $35 on his release from McNeil, so he may have rented a cheap hotel room. But when the sun came up, Charlie didn’t have anybody telling him what to do. Freedom—except he wasn’t completely free. Soon he’d have to report to his new parole officer across the Bay in San Francisco, and then keep regular appointments after that. He’d have to demonstrate that he had found work or was at least looking. A lot depended on the officer he got. Somebody understanding would give Charlie time to adapt; a hard-ass could make his life miserable. That was hanging over his head. But for a little while he could check things out in Berkeley.
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sp; So Charlie spent a few days wandering around the Cal-Berkeley campus and Bancroft Strip. As always Charlie was ready to absorb anything that might prove useful. He listened to the impassioned speeches by the protesters, though their goals didn’t resonate—he had no interest in a war overseas, anything that kept down blacks and women was just fine with him, and the only free speech he cared about was his own. But Charlie did home in on their sense of alienation. That was something he understood.
Right away he understood that he’d come to a place where it was all right to look and act different. In Berkeley, people who might have been marginal characters anywhere else helped make up the norm—a “savory soup” in the words of SDS leader Bill Ayers. All Charlie had known before, in reform school and prison and even McMechen, was forced conformity. Berkeley was the polar opposite and he loved that being a rebel there was okay. Charlie always liked to think of himself as a rebel, standing strong against the Man. Here, he fit right in; Charlie was even distinguished because of his criminal background. Far from having to hide it, Charlie was pleasantly surprised to find that he could brag about his jail time. As far as these new acquaintances were concerned, he’d stood up to government and its fascist cops—pigs in revolutionary argot—and lived to tell about it. He was welcome in their circles; as always, Charlie’s stories were entertaining and he undoubtedly spun all sorts of exaggerated tales about the prison tribulations that he’d endured. But Charlie quickly realized that these students had nothing else for him. Their focus was on changing the world, not doing things for Charlie. They would have embraced him as an active member of their revolutionary struggle—having an ex-con at their sides would legitimize their own self-image as rebels. Charlie had no interest in that. Acceptance was all that the radicals had to offer him, and it wasn’t enough.
Charlie had a vague plan to support himself as a musician, ideally playing in clubs or at least doing the wandering minstrel thing, singing on street corners while people tossed coins in a cup. But every Berkeley block was already lined with street musicians, many of them performing original songs and almost all of them, like Charlie, dreaming of fame. There were too many for anyone to eke out a living from tips. Club jobs were practically impossible to come by. Charlie would have to make money another way.
In many cities other than Berkeley, pimping might have been an option. Charlie had some experience with that, but in Berkeley sex wasn’t for sale because it was so readily available for free. One of the tenets of the student radical movement was free love, enjoying sex without bourgeois concerns about morality or fidelity. No one owned anyone else’s body. The concept was made more palatable to women by the increasingly widespread availability of birth control pills, first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, the same year Charlie spent in a Los Angeles jail appealing his ten-year sentence at McNeil.
Charlie’s other employment choices in Berkeley weren’t acceptable. Busboy in a restaurant, attendant in a parking garage, janitor in an office building—he’d had those kinds of jobs before. Now he considered himself a great artist, a musician with tremendous talent. Menial work was beneath him unless there was no other option, and almost immediately the perfect option presented herself.
• • •
Twenty-three-year-old Mary Brunner was a Wisconsin native who earned her BA and then moved west to California like so many other young people who wanted more exciting lives. Square-faced, homely Mary worked at Cal-Berkeley as an assistant librarian. Charlie met her on campus. Mary stood out because unlike most other university denizens, she was dressed conservatively in a blouse buttoned all the way up to her neck. Still new to the area, Mary hadn’t made any friends. Charlie could always tell when a girl was lonely. This one was prime prey. Mary was walking her dog, and Charlie initially connected with her by making a fuss over the pet. He had his guitar and he sang her some songs. They talked about all kinds of things—Mary’s big social cause was protecting the environment, and Charlie convinced her that he felt exactly the same way. When Charlie artfully got around to mentioning that he didn’t have any place to stay, Mary said he could sleep at her apartment for a few nights until he found someplace else. That was all the opening that Charlie needed.
Though Mary briefly resisted—she was still a conservative Midwest girl at heart—Charlie eventually coaxed her into bed. His temporary stay became permanent. Even though he couldn’t pimp her out, Mary was a fine meal ticket for Charlie. She went to work at the library every day while he took his guitar and prowled Berkeley free of concern about paying bills. Sometimes he brought other girls back to Mary’s apartment. If everybody else was practicing free love, Charlie didn’t see why he shouldn’t. Mary didn’t like it, but Charlie could make her feel beautiful and important and she didn’t want to lose that by throwing him out. She gradually got used to sharing him. None of these other girls stayed around very long, anyway. Casual sex was one thing, but most young women in Berkeley didn’t plan to sublimate their own best interests to Charlie’s. Mary, smart but lonely, was glad to do it. In spite of the other girls, he made her feel special; for years afterward she continued believing that somehow, someday, it would just be she and Charlie. The relationship wasn’t entirely one-sided. Mary was extremely knowledgeable about environmental issues. As usual, Charlie listened and remembered what he heard—who knew when it might prove useful? But for perhaps the last time, besides parroting back phrases to feign empathy he genuinely adopted some of the ideas as his own. He became a committed environmentalist.
Berkeley was fine in some ways for Charlie but it was only a temporary stopping place. He still expected to make it in music and become bigger than the Beatles, and that wasn’t going to happen there. At some point he intended to return to L.A. and meet with the guy at Universal that Phil Kaufman had put him on to. Before that, though, there was another place that Charlie wanted to try. He crossed the Bay Bridge for meetings in San Francisco with his parole officer, Roger Smith, who seemed to genuinely like Charlie and didn’t push him too hard about finding work. During these trips Charlie had a chance to look around the city, and he discovered a place where he knew that he could not only fit in but flourish. So while he returned to Mary’s place in Berkeley at night, he began spending his days in the boxy San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury, right on the eastern edge of vast Golden Gate Park. Charlie may have considered himself a musician, but he was still a predator. If Berkeley was renowned for its student radicals, the Haight was just as famous for its burgeoning population of hippies, out to change the world through gentle, generous example rather than revolution. Their preferred gesture toward the Establishment was presenting a flower, not a rigid middle finger. They shared possessions gladly and tried to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
After all his experiences during childhood and in reform school and prison, it was ingrained in Charlie to take advantage of everyone that he could. The master manipulator could not have found a more perfect hunting ground than the Haight.
• • •
San Francisco always attracted those who didn’t fit in anywhere else. People came to the city to do what they wanted instead of what was conventional. When conservatives gained control of city government in the 1940s, they determined to bring widespread licentiousness under control with police raids, real estate restrictions (for instance, no apartment rentals to mixed race couples), and tighter zoning and health inspection regulations. Almost immediately they were challenged by a generation of interlopers known as Beats, nonconformists whose leading figures, mostly writers and poets like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, drifted to San Francisco from the East Coast. The Beats adopted the city’s North Beach as their particular stomping ground, sitting in coffeehouses discussing literature, reading and writing avant-garde poetry, drinking red wine, smoking marijuana, and occasionally dabbling in psychedelics. They celebrated themselves as hipsters; they disdained squares who sold out to the clean-cut American dream of homes i
n the suburbs, station wagons, and nine-to-five jobs. After a while, attrition set in. Though a core of Beats remained in the city, strip clubs gradually equaled and then surpassed the number of coffeehouses on North Beach. Many of the remaining Beats joined other disenfranchised iconoclasts and college students in residing in a neighborhood near Golden Gate Park and the campus of San Francisco State University. The area was somewhat seedy, but its declining two- and three-story Victorian houses had great appeal to limited income renters; a lease could be had for a modest sum, and these places had warrens of small bedrooms that could be subleased to other near-impoverished boarders. There were a limited number of lower-scale shops and cafés. The Panhandle, a long finger of Golden Gate Park, extended right into it. If you were different, if you didn’t have much money but still wanted to live in beautiful, quirky San Francisco, then this was a good place to be. The neighborhood even had a name: Haight-Ashbury, for two of the streets that intersected at its geographic heart.
If location and architecture were the first defining aspects of Haight-Ashbury, fashion followed close behind. Most of the students and social drifters who lived there had limited wardrobe budgets. Though the Haight lacked high-end shops, it had more than its share of secondhand clothing stores. By some cosmic quirk, many of these featured all sorts of inexpensive, ruffly garb: “Edwardian,” in mid-1960s parlance. So many Haight denizens paraded in long colorful dresses or military-style coats with lots of epaulets and gleaming buttons. These could be inexpensively accessorized with strings of beads and festooned with feathers or flowers. It was great fun to dress differently from the straights, who all seemed to want to look as well as to think exactly alike.
And there were drugs. Marijuana and hashish, which had been in common use since the heyday of the Beats. But, above all, there was the drug. Lysergic acid diethylamide, popularly known as LSD, was first synthesized by Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland in 1938. It was intended as a medical stimulant for respiration and circulation, but tests indicated that ingesting LSD resulted in periods of heightened, dreamlike states that might prove beneficial in psychiatric treatments. There was a low incidence of increased anxiety as a result of negative reactions, but no drug ever tested perfectly without side effects. In the late 1940s Sandoz brought LSD to the market. As intended, psychiatrists began to make use of it, but so did the CIA and American military, who believed the drug might prove useful as a tool for mind control and interrogation. In the 1950s they sponsored a number of tests, often hiring civilians as human guinea pigs. One of these was Ken Kesey, a graduate student at Stanford who signed up in 1959 for a government-sponsored test at Veterans Memorial Hospital in Menlo Park. Kesey loved LSD, which he called “acid.” Three years later he published One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a novel about psychiatric patients that became a best-seller and provided Kesey with the financial means to continue exploring the social and intellectual possibilities of LSD. He bought an old bus, had it painted in an eye-catching swirl of color, and set off with equally LSD-dedicated pals to enjoy whatever adventures might befall. They called themselves the Merry Pranksters and often held acid parties at Kesey’s home.