by Jeff Guinn
As soon as they were back in San Francisco, Charlie had another road trip in mind. He asked his parole officer, Roger Smith, for permission to drive out of state north to Washington. Charlie told Smith, Mary, Lynne, and Pat that he wanted to try to find his mother. She’d abandoned him when he was young, Charlie complained, but he still wanted to find her and reconcile. Smith agreed; he didn’t realize that Charlie knew very well where Kathleen was. Mary Brunner had quit her job at the Cal-Berkeley library. Charlie hoped to cadge some money from Kathleen to tide them over until he could find some other source of income. Charlie and his three women stayed in Seattle for several days, and he went through the motions of looking for his mother, poring over phone books, driving up and down supposedly familiar streets. They stayed with someone Charlie introduced as one of his former parole officers. The guy immediately brought out drugs for them to share. One day Charlie went out by himself and went directly to Kathleen’s house. She wasn’t pleased to see him. Before she let her son inside, Kathleen told her daughter, Nancy, to hide in the closet because he was a bill collector. Nancy stayed in there until Charlie stormed off, denied a last handout from his mother. He never spoke to Kathleen again. Afterward he told Mary, Lynne, and Pat that they might as well give up, he couldn’t find his mom.
There were other midsummer trips. Charlie, Mary, Lynne, Pat, and a few other girls Charlie was trying out for the group drove to Mendocino County and camped along the beautiful, tree-lined coast, sleeping in the VW bus. The town of Mendocino was an artists’ community, and people living there were welcoming. They thought the women in Charlie’s group looked a little odd because they had sewn together old blankets to serve as skirts. After a few days they were ready for Charlie and the girls to move on, because they carelessly scattered trash around the van. One night Charlie had his women build a roaring campfire. Though he usually avoided alcohol, he drank wine from a coffee cup and invited some of the locals to join them and hear some of his stories about life back in Appalachia and in prison. Charlie was entertaining as always, but then someone else joined the party. The interloper told some jokes and shared local gossip. Everyone’s attention switched to him, which made Charlie so angry that he threw his cup of wine at the interloper—so much for peace and love. Charlie and the girls drove back to the Haight the next day, and the Mendocino artists were glad to see them go. Years later, Charles Perry recalled that the weird group had a nickname for itself—the Trolls.
Charlie always seemed to have knives handy. Sometimes he’d take Mary, Lynne, and Pat off into the woods and make one of them stand in front of a tree. Then he’d back up a few steps and throw a knife so it would stick in the tree just over her head, like some circus act. It scared them, but Charlie explained it was a way of testing whether they really trusted him. If they flinched it meant that they didn’t. So they tried very hard to stand completely still, and when they did, Charlie always told them how wonderful they were. That kind of praise from him made the risk worth it.
Conditions in the Haight continued to deteriorate. Far from slackening as the summer progressed, the number of arrivals increased by the week. The Diggers gave up trying to feed everyone and retreated to a farm commune in the country. Many longtime Haight residents abandoned the neighborhood, moving to other parts of the city or away from San Francisco altogether. LSD was still readily available, so much so that the street price per dose dropped from $2 to one. But quirky weather conditions, cold one day and steamy the next, choked off local marijuana production and a serious weed shortage hit the Haight. Dealers and their customers filled in the drug gap with even greater quantities of heroin and the methamphetamine popularly known as speed. Since the speed freaks were distinguished by paranoid hallucinations and violence, they lent a nasty edge to Haight nightlife; brawls and muggings became common outside neighborhood clubs and bars.
It got even worse. Competing drug dealers stalked each other. One prominent dealer, well known for keeping a briefcase full of his illegal wares cuffed to his hand, was found slaughtered on a Haight back street. The briefcase was missing because his hand had been cut off. The population crush finally began to ease a little, not because people stopped coming, but because fewer stayed. A guitarist in a Texas band that came to the Haight expecting to perform for trippy, laid-back audiences, remembered later that “Haight Street smelled like piss, and a lot of little stores were closing down. All the people we thought were running around with flowers in their hair were now lying around with needles stuck in their necks.”
Darker philosophies competed with hippie hedonism. In September filmmaker Kenneth Anger rented a Haight theater for a program about British Satanist Aleister Crowley. The event was called “Invocation of My Demon Brother” and included a light show with slides presenting images of Crowley’s personal Tarot cards, a Satanic altar placed on the theater floor, footage from Lucifer Rising, Anger’s film in progress, and music by the Chamber Orkustra. It was appropriate for the Orkustra to perform—Bobby Beausoleil, its leader, was featured in Anger’s film. Attendance was sparse, and Anger didn’t sell enough tickets to earn back the $700 he’d paid to rent the theater. Worse, someone stole the Lucifer Rising film canisters. Anger suspected Beausoleil, who soon afterward left the Haight for Los Angeles. Shortly after arriving in L.A., Bobby met a music teacher and part-time drug dealer named Gary Hinman. Bobby and his current girlfriend, Laurie—he seemed to have a new lady every week—moved into Hinman’s house in Topanga Canyon. Fate had begun lining up the human pieces on its chessboard.
None of the Haight turmoil was reflected in a letter sent by Pat Krenwinkel to her father. She wrote, “For the very first time in my life, I’ve found contentment and inner peace.” For all his copycat, cobbled-together rhetoric and all-consuming self-interest, Charlie really was making the lives of his first three followers happier. Since Mary was no longer employed, they lived hand-to-mouth. Panhandling was part of their daily routine. Sometimes they’d do chores like washing windows in exchange for food. But Charlie had a knack for temporarily attracting individuals with something substantial to contribute—kids who’d left home with a few hundred dollars or credit cards snatched from parental purses or wallets, older people met on road trips in the VW bus who were intrigued by this vagrant hippie preacher and his scruffy girl disciples and opened their homes to them for a night or longer. The kids were shunted aside as soon as their money ran out or the credit cards were canceled. The adults were thanked for their hospitality and not blown off completely—they might come in handy again. But Mary, Lynne, and Pat rarely went hungry or without a comfortable place to sleep at night. Charlie preached to them about surrendering their egos. He made love to them and told them that they were beautiful. He sang them his songs and promised that soon he’d get a record contract and become a star and then they could share the love they felt for each other and all the universal truths that they’d learned with the rest of the world because they were so special. There were drugs, but none of the hard stuff, just weed to mellow out and acid trips to explore the outer reaches of their minds. They’d left behind biological families who didn’t actually care for them, Charlie stressed, to become part of a real family, one that accepted and cherished them for who they were and not what other people wanted them to be. Sometimes things got unexpectedly tense. Charlie expected rapt devotion and he could become angry if he thought the girls didn’t pay attention when he talked or, worse, paid attention to someone else at Charlie’s expense. Whenever he thought that happened he would yank hard on Lynne’s or Pat’s long hair. He’d hit Mary. The three of them would cower for a while afterward and remind each other that they were really very lucky to be with Charlie. He’d promised to show them a better way to live, and for the most part all three believed that he was keeping his word.
But Charlie had no intention of settling for life as he found it five months out of prison. Above all, there was his music; he practiced so that he would impress Phil Kaufman’s friend Gary at Universal. Charlie kept w
riting new songs, picking out tunes on his guitar by the light of campfires, struggling to remember spur-of-the-moment lyrics because he often lacked the means to write them down. He’d return to L.A. soon, he knew, not to recruit disciples but to establish himself as the star he deserved to be, something like Jesus entering Jerusalem. There was glory coming, and yet there was still so much more to do. Three devoted followers weren’t nearly enough. He wanted more, an impressive entourage worthy of his greatness, and not just comprised of women, either. Try as he might, Charlie hadn’t been able to recruit any men long term. Women were so much easier—you told them that they were beautiful, you picked up on their Daddy complexes, you had sex with them, and then if they were insecure and needy enough, they were yours. But it was harder with men. The best way to get them, Charlie knew, was through women. Join Charlie’s merry band, and its girls would do whatever you wanted. He was teaching Mary, Lynne, and Pat that sex was wonderful and any moral hang-ups about it were wrong. They’d come a long way. They would pretty much do anything with anybody if Charlie ordered them to. Problem was, all three were so homely. Maybe Lynne had a bit of pixie-ish charm, but the other two, nothing. Charlie told them they were beautiful and sexy despite their physical flaws, but even though they fell for it he knew better. With so much easy pussy—one of Charlie’s favorite words, then and later—available elsewhere from better-looking girls, what worthwhile male convert was going to be taken enough with Charlie’s B-grade women to throw in with him? He needed another girl, one who looked good, somebody already into sex who wouldn’t need weeks or months of coaxing by Charlie before she’d happily put out for any man he wanted her to. As the last days of the Summer of Love stumbled to their painful conclusion in the Haight, he found her, his first and only long-term follower recruited there.
Of all the followers who came to Charlie in his early ministry, none was quirkier or more desperate than twenty-year-old Susan Atkins. When her mother died of cancer, Susan, fifteen, was saddled with the responsibility of caring for a younger brother and a father who kept losing jobs. In high school she worked part-time to help make ends meet. She tried finding solace in the Baptist Church, in bad behavior at home and at school (for a short time she went to live with an uncle and aunt who found her incorrigible, and sent her back to her father), and in alcohol, drugs, and sex. Like Lynne, she attempted suicide. Susan craved acceptance and, above all, attention. As soon as she turned eighteen in the summer of 1966 Susan left home outside Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco. She went through a series of menial jobs and abusive boyfriends until that fall, when her latest lover and a friend of his invited her to come with them on a road trip to Oregon in a stolen car. They robbed a gas station on the way before being arrested by the Oregon State Police. Susan spent three months in jail before being sentenced to two years’ probation. She returned to San Francisco, where she lived in the Haight and worked for a while as a waitress before discovering more lucrative employment as a topless dancer. Susan wasn’t beautiful, but she was nice-looking and exuded aggressive sexuality. Her dancing attracted the attention of Satanist Anton LaVey, who was organizing a Witches’ Sabbath club show featuring topless female “vampires.” He hired Susan, and it was her dream job, eliciting the attention she craved from howling audiences by writhing naked onstage. But she didn’t last long in LaVey’s troupe, wearing down from excessive drug use and a raging case of gonorrhea. Susan began aimlessly wandering the Haight’s streets with no particular plan other than scoring drugs.
In early fall 1967, Susan visited some friends at their Haight apartment and met another guest—Charlie had dropped by with his guitar. That day, Charlie wasn’t entertaining with one of his own tunes. He still felt a strong attachment to pop schmaltz, and as Susan came in the room he was singing “The Shadow of Your Smile,” a favorite of lounge crooners everywhere and the absolute musical antithesis of cutting-edge, counterculture songs. As he sang Charlie accompanied himself on guitar, as usual bashing out basic chords rather than any intricate notes. But that didn’t matter to Susan—her lifelong trait was to react in extremes, and she instantly decided that Charlie was a guitar virtuoso. When he finished the song, Susan continued gazing at him adoringly, and Charlie didn’t miss the signal. Here might be just the girl he needed. He pounced, utilizing the Dale Carnegie technique of figuring out what the other person wanted and demonstrating how he could provide it. In Susan’s case, it was simple. She obviously admired his guitar, and Charlie said that if she really wanted, Susan could pick it up and play it. She was stunned—how could this stranger know she was thinking about that? They danced a little to records, and afterward had sex, with Charlie using a tried-and-true preliminary. He knew that many girls had guilty sexual feelings about their fathers, so he brought that up before initial lovemaking. He told Susan that to break free of the bad experiences and inhibitions that were crushing her, she needed to imagine that she was making love to her father. When they were finished, Charlie promised Susan that he’d never let her fall. That was all it took; she swore she’d follow him anywhere. Maybe Susan seemed odd, even a bit crazy, an attention addict who’d need a lot of special handling, but she was still the sexy disciple that Charlie needed. He told her to come with him and become part of a real family.
After Susan joined, Charlie took his women up to Sacramento, where they met another guy he knew from prison. Pete operated three whorehouses in town, one a “10-minute” for laborers and blue-collar workers looking to get laid fast and cheap, a regular place for customers with more time and money, and a fancy, discreet house that catered to state legislators. Charlie told the women that Pete was mobbed up and they thought that for once Charlie seemed to look up to somebody. Charlie asked Pete to let the girls work in his houses for a day; it was a good way to remind them that they had to have sex whenever and with whomever Charlie ordered them to. The girls obeyed, and afterward whenever they were running short of money Charlie would tell them that he was thinking of sending them to Pete for a while, but he never did.
Mary Brunner became pregnant with Charlie’s baby. She was thrilled; maybe this would secure her place as Charlie’s main woman even if she didn’t yet have him all to herself. Charlie was pleased, too. He said that only babies were spiritually pure, and when this one was born it would provide everyone with the perfect example of how to be. In the months ahead, other women in the group would get pregnant and hope that Charlie was the father, but they never could be sure because at about the same time Mary got pregnant he began ordering them to have sex with lots of different men, guys he wanted to induce to join the group or at least contribute something to it. But no birth control ever—Charlie said it wasn’t natural and wouldn’t allow it.
Now that they were five, and Charlie expected to keep adding more—he hoped men—the VW bus was no longer big enough. They took more trips and Charlie did some vehicle scouting. He swapped the VW plus some scrounged cash for an old yellow school bus in Sacramento. As they had with the VW bus, he and the girls tore out the seats and replaced them with sleeping bags and cushions. They painted the outside, first in a rainbow swirl of colors and then in black. “Hollywood Productions” was lettered on the side—it was a good joke on all the straights they passed on the road; maybe they’d think they were seeing a crew out shooting a movie.
On the days they spent in the Haight, Charlie sent the girls out to make friends and screw possible male recruits to expand the group. They ended up with some hangers-on, one of whom had a sick baby, and the women collectively contracted a variety of venereal diseases. That made them regular patrons of the Free Clinic, as it was named, and Charlie always went along, though never for treatment himself. Charlie seemed impervious to disease, which reinforced his followers’ growing belief, one he encouraged, that if he wasn’t entirely divine he was something higher than human. Smith, the clinic’s founder, had several more opportunities to chat at length with Charlie, who was especially preachy when his group brought the baby in to be treated for a ye
ast infection. He explained to Smith that he was teaching his disciples to become like children themselves. He felt they could accomplish this by completely emptying their minds of all corrupting influences. In keeping with the clinic policy of remaining nonjudgmental, Smith let Charlie prattle on without challenging anything he said. But in the doctor’s personal opinion, Charlie seemed more than ever to be an unoriginal con artist taking advantage of middle-class girls who had problems with their parents and thought living “off the land, so to speak” was an exciting adventure. Another thing was very obvious to Smith: Charlie might preach equality, but he completely dominated the group. These girls unquestioningly did whatever he told them.