Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family

by John Gilmore;Ron Kenner

  Things started coming through to Bobby the following summer. "Pictures and images," he says. "It was like I was an artist and my canvas was my mind. I was stealing things and selling them, there was no kick in stealing, it was like a profession with me, and other things were going on in my head.. .

  "It was like I could hear the clanging of the Viking swords, echoing in some great hall. Just a little ways down the line, a little later on, I realized that it was Valhalla - that great hall where Odin eats the souls of heroes slain in battle. Odin's the god of war, the god of the souls and the god of poetry ... It came to me to write, I wrote very early. It was just coming from me ..

  Then Bobby was arrested for stealing. "It happened because I was off-balance," he says, "getting arrested. I was disconnected with the act of it, and so consequently I got my ass in a sling. Breaking probation."

  Back to reform school, where the notions and images of the Vikings came to him almost nightly. "She'd come to me and I'd ride with her," he says. It was as though with the sinking sun, the clouds would shape into Vikings, rising up over the horizon, "like a lot of rolls of smoke and fog - like they were riding out of the clouds, and I'd lay there and listen to the clanging of the swords - that sound of steel on steel ..."

  He fancied himself a collector of things and people as well as ideas. "I always had stuff that had to do with war. Like I had a First World War leather helmet and the goggles pushed up on it. I'd wear the goggles around, but it was always the helmet I was after. That came to me after I got out of reform school again, and was just goofing off and then I saw that what I always wanted was the war helmet. Later on in San Francisco I'd wear a top hat, and this was the extension of the helmet - like a war bonnet. I could feel myself in a helmet to be the shining warrior of the North - the great white warrior ... the bringer of light.

  "It wasn't anything that fancy at the time - the fancy stuff came later through Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker. But I can remember as a boy, and I told Kenneth this, that I got a big tin can like an old coffee can and I shined it up and painted on it, made it intricately into a Viking helmet.

  "I knew as a boy that I was a warrior. I would have the power and I would be above other things. I could live as I wanted to and I wouldn't have to account to anyone for my doings - my comings and goings. And everything I'd do would be right. I could do no wrong. It's like having this magic amulet - this magic helmet or wand, or a magic walking stick that would make one more powerful and there'd be no failing, or no doing wrong ..."

  Experimental filmmaker and writer Kenneth Anger, proclaimed a "warlock" by his peers, was presenting a Winter Solstice at a rented theater on Haight. One San Francisco reporter said, "They came from all over to attend. I saw faces from Hollywood and New York. A field day for the avantgarde. The Winter Solstice was offered in the true Aleister Crowley tradition."

  Astrologer Robert Aiken recalls, "Kenneth was planning a new film which he was calling Lucifer Rising, and in a room that contained close to a thousand people milling around, he went straight through the gathering and stood in front of Bobby Beausoleil. He picked him out `as though sight by destiny,' Anger would later claim, and stared at Bobby and said very loudly, `You are Lucifer!"'

  Though Bobby Beausoleil became the Devil in Kenneth Anger's film, his special notoriety was yet to come through Charlie Manson.

  "The writing and the music that was coming out of me," Bobby says, "my thoughts and my energies were like concentric circles - expanding and shifting." He felt that it was as though someone could reach out and grab hold of his energies like you'd clutch at a handrail or a ring on a merry-go-round. His idea of music was not, he says, "governed by the rules of melody and time, handed down by stiff-collared composers of years past." No, for Bobby it had to be something quite different.

  "I'd been interested in music from an early age. My ear was sharp," he says, "and I knew music as if by some inner balance. I could make up songs as easily as I'd steal."

  Cut loose from reform school, Bobby "went with the wind, earning the name Lone Eagle," and he moved through the "underground movement" as a snake slides through grass.

  Passing tourists who viewed the "Magic on Haight" through closed car windows, scoffed at the witches and warlocks in their multicolored robes or black sheaths, adorned with stars, talismans, amulets and "shields of secret seals." One such "spectacle" and soon-to-be friend of Beausoleil's, was a lean young man with sunken cheeks and shoulder-length hair called "Loomis." In a small leather sack that hung from his neck was "the silver ring of a witch burned at Salem."

  "Manson and I have much in common," Loomis claimed. "There's no need to say it between us .. .

  Joe Brockman says, "I stayed with Loomis for about a week once and he told me he had things going with Charlie Manson. I said, `Loomis, it sure don't show on you.' He said, real calm, `The Devil is with us.' I said, `I don't think so.' He smiled and said, `Then it doesn't matter to you, you are the dealer, aren't you?' I said, `That's right.' But dealing as I was, I got busted on a car theft thing. When they busted me I had no fear. I did have three or four tabs in my hand I was taking somewhere. I dropped them - swallowed - and I didn't start going up then. In jail I was up, up, up and away! I was so stoned that when they took me to court I was a giant sunbeam in there. They were all dead and downers and I was pure sunshine, just beaming. I spent a few days and kept seeing Charlie in my head, like his face saying something but it was a whisper, and I couldn't hear it. Back in court, I was still so stoned I wasn't tuned in to what they were doing with the papers and all that, with me and my case. But they dismissed it and then I was walking back on Haight and here comes Loomis. He saw me and gave a funny salute like he did, but his eyes were really serious. I said, `Where's Charlie?' He smiled and said, and that was all he said, `You see, dealer, we've been thinking about you.' And that blew my mind. I just said, `Wow!"'

  Loomis, who claimed to practice black magic, says: "Satan exists the same as God does and Christ. People who believe that Satan cannot exist are denying that God exists - denying that there's a day that follows the night. An atheist is just a materialist, someone that's on a bummer from birth to death. Just nothing. If you have a Ying and no Yang you've got zero, dig. You're isolated from nature. So long as Satan's there, there's the balance. Like Germany, look at the God-produced stuff, the great music and writers, artists ... But on the other hand, the Nazis and concentration camps, the six million Jews. I mean, it's the same thing, Germans, Mexicans, English ... You believe in life, you believe in death. You believe in God, you believe in Satan, and they're all together, all one, like our bodies and this-here world. It is true that you are me and I am you and all that separates us is individual souls that are locked up inside our skins. There's no fucking difference. It's as plain as the nose on your face, and there is - there cannot be any real death, just getting into something else ... Death is a figment of man's imagination," Loomis goes on. "It's a fraud perpetrated by the Establishment that's being driven in by greed, and that's what makes him nothing ... Like acid. It's the real way to free yourself from the system and get in touch with what's happening, with what it means to be alive. Not that you want to escape, that big boogie word, from the system, but that you want to step back and look at it, see its flaws and how it's shot to shit with faults and is slowly killing anyone that's got something going. Now when you're up, if you go on a bummer it's only Satan trying to say something to you, and by denying him you're denying yourself. I mean, that's how Charlie and I'd rap. I say God, the idea of Jesus which is held as sacred by the Catholics is only a put-on. And they have killed his real way of reaching them by the fraud they're trying to sell, man, and because they deny the existence of the other side of the universe, which is Satan. And he lives fully, man, and he digs the whole scene. Just by being a criminal you become an acolyte in the Devil's parish, and I mean Manson," Loomis goes on, with a cryptic grin. "He was baptized in Hell ... You swing one way or the other, and in plain truth, one is no more holie
r than the other. I mean, if you're a holy person, you're a holy person, and you do what you feel is right - I mean, it's up to the one on the other side of the fence to say it's wrong .. .

  Contrary to Loomis' theories on Satan, one California minister, George Peters, believes Satanism is a threat to modern society. He traveled through San Francisco, and had opened the doors of his Los Angeles parish as a shelter for hippies. He administered food, warmth and spiritual aid to hundreds who had "dropped out too far." Among these, he said he encountered hippies under hypnotic spells. "But the most alarming thing," the clergyman says, "is the Satanic mind power hypnosis. There are some people who have a fantastic, unbelievable mind power, and they are able to control the thoughts, emotions and motivations of an individual entirely and completely. I've talked with doctors and psychiatrists - to decide what to do with them."

  Reverend Peters relates his own experiences with "those in possession of the Satanic power. They can sit down with two or three people, and in a minute they'll be under his control. It is like a total power. They'll do anything he wants. Get fifteen to twenty people together, this one person controlling them. We can't allow this to happen, the controlling of minds. What do we do with them? If you question a person with this power, he gets very angry. `Isn't this a place of freedom? What am I doing wrong?' he asks. They don't want you to disturb the hold they have over others. So we get in and say, `we want to talk to you.' But they don't want to be alone, won't meet you alone. They have to have someone with them. They want to look you in the eye. `Look me in the eye. If you don't, you're afraid. Look me in the eye . . .' So, they can get control of your eyes. Satanic hypnosis is not the Pat Collins Hypnosis, or any other sort of hypnosis used by doctors or laymen for any benefit. It is a mind communication. Thoughts are being imposed - someone they've never seen. Those who have been heavily on drugs like LSD, STP, mescaline and strongly in that, are the ones that are most receptive. They are ripe for capturing what they call vibes, sensitive to things unseen. It's a spiritual kind of power. These kids on drugs, they're already sensitive to vibes, so those with the Satan mind thing can send vibes into these people and capture their minds. Say, `He's talking to my head.' They may not talk. Just look at them, maybe thirty minutes to an hour, then when they walk out everyone else walks out with them. I have seen this, one person taking everyone with them like a shepherd."

  In time, the Reverend would say that he feared the idea that Robert Beausoleil and Manson could be glamorized into cult status. "The followers," he says, "the true believers - they simply get in line ..

  Kenneth Anger said that he was working on his "masterpiece," Lucifer Rising. Bobby says, "He fancied himself to be skilled and proficient in the black arts - and had this contact with this group called `The Process.' This was part of the group that swiped the Aleister Crowley materials and occult ropes and supplies ...

  "Everything had to do with homosexual themes," Bobby says. "Kenneth began showering me with gifts. He told me, `You will become the beloved and through me you will rise to be feared and held in reverence.' He said I'd be remembered for generations. I said it sounded okay to me ...

  Bobby had written a long narrative poem, his Wanderings thru Frisco, about his attempts to put together a rock group - playing with makeshift and spur-of-the-moment combos and "no-talents." He "designed" in his mind what he wanted to do - a group made up with the idea of blending "maybe two - maybe many types of sounds and music to create a new, weird, freestyled music - to hear it as a clanging, a clutter of banging noises and weeping and moaning, and all exploding out at the same time ... I walked around Frisco with the sounds in my head, going around and around - I got so I could pinpoint every second of it."

  With several other "junior rock players," Bobby staged a concert at the Glide Memorial Church along with the Sexual Freedom League.

  "I'd been living with two guys in a warehouse," Bobby says. "An old abandoned place with two other artists, and we were coming up with some sort of money to keep from getting kicked out. I kept trying to get some action going, form a group of musicians. I'd lettered and plastered posters all over the Haight area, announcements for auditions, for any sort of musicians looking to join up with a group. The idea was to form an orchestra, cut a record and move ahead with it into the commercial business.

  "Finally we put together an eighteen piece orchestra. I called it Orkustra - an All Electric Jazz Band, and we opened at a place in Berkeley. Gerald Wilson composed some of the music and arranged it, and worked with the group. I had the idea of making an album for the Pacific label - The Golden Sword.

  "I had this image in my mind of a sword - like it's pictured on the cover of a book called Imperium, by a guy the FBI was hounding and busted into infinity ... a hated and feared man by the name of Francis Yockey. He wrote that book under the name of Ulick Varange, a pen name. It was a big book and I read it a lot - studied it and tried to make as much of it as I could - but my course was different. There was something about it - some passive idea that kept me put off by it. I finally would come to believe that I was a man of action, I had to go through things no matter what they were or how dangerous they may have seemed to someone on the outside.

  "It was the same with the music ... We were close, real close, but the orchestra fell apart, and out of this came the Bedrock One, a five-piece group and we screamed impromptu music at the hippie happenings and clubs, and around the Haight area - that's how we were working at the Glide Memorial along with the Sexual Freedom League.

  "We played behind a scrim, had about ten girls from around the Haight as belly dancers, if you could call them that - but it was okay, and they wore clothes and stuff and outfits made up for the show - some of the costumes were rented, some swiped, and some I designed and had made up with a couple of local dressmakers who were into doing shit for the hippies. The purpose of the show was for audience participation, to get everyone wild and to take off their clothes and start screwing - right there where they were, screwing in the aisles, on the seats, man, and wherever they could get it in ...

  "One young girl is raped on the altar of the church. I was leading the music, the Bedrock One, but I was more taken in with the idea of raping the altar than the girl being raped on it.

  "It was a fiasco - lights blew up, the tape started breaking ... No sooner was I finished with this disaster than this other young girl has been pregnant, and had a child she says is mine. I said, `Okay, that's fine - it's fine to have a child, but the Lone Eagle stays in no one place for very long at a time."'

  Kenneth Anger asked Bobby to come to his house. "It was an old ornate Victorian place that'd been a Russian Embassy, and Anger had it converted into a sort of sorcerer's temple with all this magician regalia. There was this young handsome boy living with Kenneth, but when I got there, Kenneth told him, `This is Lucifer,' and he kicked the kid out. Kenneth then told me, `You have to move into this temple and take your rightly place immediately - as you see,' he said, `I've made room for you.' It was all necessary he told me, so I could be the central figure in his masterpiece."

  The filmmaker had special powers, Bobby says. He had strange, uncanny intuition, and he had a brilliant mind. "First he gave me this special gift," Bobby says, "a walking stick, a fist clenched for a handle with snakes carved up the sides and between the fist. This was one of the things that had belonged to Aleister Crowley, and had been stolen from the Crowley materials at an exhibit.

  "To me, Devil-worship was a lot of shit. The friends Kenneth Anger had were weak, they were fakes to me, like if you decorated yourself with a lot feathers and paraded around telling everyone you were this f icking giant bird, so you have these creeps thinking you look good, so it makes you feel good - like you look good, but try to fly, man, and you do a crash right on your head. It was shit, to me, until I started heavily into the acid trips. This was pure acid - the Owsley Special tabs - that Kenneth had scored by the pocketfuls."

  This was how it started, Bobby says, the metamorphosis of Bob
by Beausoleil - from Lone Eagle, into the Angel of Disobedience. Into a devil. All that Kenneth saw in his head was later to be proven in fact. "Now, whether this was suggestion," as Bobby puts it, "or the real power of hypnosis, it makes a point, but still there was all this material to begin with which, in my case, was rolling faster as time went on. I was already a thief and an outlaw, and I had contempt for the world.

  "Kenneth brought it all to a head. He made me the star of Lucifer Rising, and I was rising, and he made me believe that I had this power inside of me and that it radiated out of me.

  "Maybe he was right - the movie and who I was were fused together. He was projecting me as the angel of disobedience, and this was the turning point in my life ..."

  He used purple, Bobby says. "This powerful color - this iridescent, vibrating purple. The walls were purple, contrasting with orange like the ceiling or the floor or the baseboard. This house had high vaulted ceilings with orange carvings, and each was painted a different vibrating color, every strip of woodwork would shimmer and vibrate. There was this psychological use of color as a disorienting factor. It was a sorcerer's temple, and what Kenneth was doing to my head, worshipping me as an evil god ...

  "Each acid trip became more and more an earth-shattering experience," Bobby says. "I was experiencing Lucifer, the angel on earth.' I believed that during the rituals, Kenneth was showing me myself, that this reflection of who I was and what I was doing was because of who I was, not that Kenneth was making me this, and here I could assume the role, in this ornate environment with its flashing colors, scrolls, fancy filigree, symbols - weird, weird, amulets, talismans, voodoo things, golden cat's heads, giant eyes, magic drawings, silver cocks and a human skull ..."