The movie's assistant director had found some well-made tents and wanted to know where he could get some for use in the picture.
"It turned out," Aiken recalls, "the tents had been made by Beausoleil," the "Beautiful Sun" that Kenneth Anger had earlier picked for the role of Lucifer. "`Let's find him,' the director said. `He can make some tents for us ...'
"Beausoleil," Aiken says, "was living then in one of his tents with four young girls he said were his wives. He had two dogs, and a large hawk that perched on his shoulders."
As well as putting up tents for props, Beausoleil was hired to play the part of an Indian. The astrologer met him on a hillside that afternoon. "He stood there bare-chested with that big hawk on his shoulder," he recalls. "Its eyes were everywhere and it kept making wary sounds in its throat and ruffling out its wings."
To the astrologer, Beausoleil appeared as a real Indian. "He had an old truck which we talked about. He was making repairs on it and planning a trip somewhere, like far away, an excursion. He reminded me of a boyhood friend I had. We'd conjured up all sorts of fantasies like going off in buckskins into dangerous everglades. We'd always wear dungarees, never dress-up pants ..
Aiken recalls that Beausoleil needed money and wanted to sell him one of his tents, an especially good one. "The wood was like honed by his hands, but I had nowhere to put the tent, no way to haul it.
"`If the truck was going,' Beausoleil said to me, `I could take it for you.' He was carving off branches to make a heavy stake. I always think of the knife he had," Aiken says, "A big bowie kind of knife with a hawk or firebird head on it - and he was in constant motion, his hands, feeling wood, testing the agility of branches, constructing things - a young man of outdoor action. But there was no role playing, no role. He was real. A primitiveness hard to describe and impossible to overlook. The girls with him were short, nameless types, like nymphs one would expect to find deep in the woods."
During Beausoleil's stint in the film he had sexual relations with one of the leading ladies and three of his wives disappeared into the hills, Aiken says. "It didn't seem to matter to Beausoleil. He had his dogs, his hawk, and his knife. He was the kind of man that could be stripped and thrown in the desert to perish, but by nightfall he'd be squatting in front of a handsome tent he'd built, dressed in buckskin and roasting fresh game over an open fire. He'd be content, having totally accepted his predicament as a way of life."
Though Aiken says Beausoleil was reluctant to discuss his past, he believed he got to know him as well as one could. "We talked at length about the Lucifer movie, the only other film that he'd been in, in which he'd played the Devil."
A film director friend of Aiken's had been a colleague of Anger's for twenty years. The astrologer suggested they get together, and a few days later the three met at a cafe in Hollywood and talked about Lucifer Rising.
"Beausoleil told us that Kenneth had stopped shooting the picture for some reasons, and during that time the footage, most of it, was stolen. He said he did not see Anger after that, as he [Beausoleil] left San Francisco with some friends. They just traveled around for awhile, and then he sort of settled in the Topanga area, built tents and was happy."
"Lucifer or not," Bobby says, "things had gone dead on the Haight and I had to be wandering again. I'd gotten involved with a thirteen-yearold girl named Cassandra who'd been attached to Anton LaVey's Satanic Church movement, and she was a regular on my altar as well as others ..." Bobby claims she became pregnant, had his child, but having once been Lone Eagle, he took wing again. But not without some sketch of a plan.
"During a fiasco at the Straight Theater in the midst of the Equinox Show, I met another guy named Kenneth - this one named Kendall, an artist down in Hollywood and brother of a talent agent. This Kendall kept staring at me and then he proposed the idea that he was interested in painting a portrait of me whenever I managed to get down to L.A. So I had that in the back of my mind - a place to crash ...
"I'd acquired an old Studebaker that had half the body sawed away and a sort of Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house built onto the rear section of the car." With this "cottage" stuffed with stolen musical equipment, lights, props, and cans of film from Kenneth Anger, and after a flop music tour of Berkeley with a new-formed "Devil's Band," Bobby drove out of San Francisco, heading south.
He wound up at Kenneth Kendall's house in West Hollywood, bringing with him two girls he'd picked up on the trip. Bobby stacked his loot and booty into a small shed to the rear of Kendall's studio, but seemed disinterested in the artist, and the portrait Kendall wanted to paint.
"But he agreed to it," Kendall says, "for the storage space and the use of a cot in another room. I never saw anyone in my life with such dirty fingernails," the artist says. "Bobby was restless, rude - surly - an untidy, arrogant child. He refused to sit still as I tried to paint a picture of him. He was too busy carving a death's head pipe in which he smoked enormous amounts of grass - marijuana. I could not get him to concentrate on remaining still for any length of time at all. Finally, he was too bored or busy with the silly girls to show up for the portrait, so I abandoned it.
"He stayed for a short time - sleeping on that army cot, and littered like an animal. He slept in his clothes and didn't bathe at all. Here is a young man gifted with an incredible handsomeness, and obviously of many talents, who seemed to have no interest whatsoever in what was happening in the real world ... I knew he was a thief, and I worried about asking them to leave. Luckily, after a time, he took off with one of the girls. He left the other one behind as you'd forget something, and I didn't have any qualms about asking her to leave.
"Along with that girl, he did leave behind some of the things he'd stolen from Kenneth Anger, but the rest of it he either hocked or simply threw away - with an apparent, incredible indifference to the value of anything. It was very hard to tell - but he seemed to treat people the same way he treated objects he no longer had a use for, or that were simply too burdensome to carry any further."
Next stop for Bobby was the offered sanctuary of the basement of Gary Hinman's house in Topanga Canyon.
According to Joe Brockman, "This guy Hinman was a straight dude, an Establishment person with a nice pad on Canyon Road. He was letting hippies stay there until they got themselves squared around. Hinman was a Buddhist, and into the Eastern religion stuff - the incense and crap, and into music and had all these Zen ideas that hippies were trying to get into their heads. He was okay - maybe a little queer, you know, and he liked to rap, and he could talk and talk and he was an easy guy to talk to ..."
A week or so of freeloading at Hinman's, and then Bobby bummed his way down the canyon and wound up at a house in Malibu, "shacking on a woman's sofa and screwing her until I could scrape together enough bread to head north again. I knew I could put together another group - another band - maybe calling it the Zen-Bones Band, and make the rounds of Berkeley ...
"Three - maybe four days or so," Bobby says, "and a few of these girls came around with this little guy who's Charlie Manson. One of the girls with this Manson is a girl I was sleeping with up at Hinman's. She was all over me again, and I was wondering what the situation was with this Manson, who said he was a musician and song writer. That, of course, made us click right away, and we talked music. I talked about the groups in the Bay area and we hit it off because he'd been on the Haight at the same time. I couldn't remember seeing him around but we'd run across the same people, and the same places.
"And yet," Bobby says, "there was something that just didn't fit together between us. Call it a clashing of wills - maybe it was always to be that way - a clashing of personalities. But in other ways we got along fantastically, even with that certain friction that was at the bottom of us getting together ...
"The girls had told him about Gary Hinman kicking me out, and Charlie wanted me to come along with him since they were going on the road with a lot of girls, and we could talk about music, do something together about getting some recording
s made.
"I said no, I had other things to do - I didn't travel with anybody. I could see Charlie liked that, even though it was clear he wanted more people to hang around him. But our relationship right from the start was what you might call `open-ended.' And right from the start I was sure something going to be coming down. If we merged the two personalities, I knew, and so did he with that way he knew things, that we'd indeed raise hell on earth ..."
Before hooking up with Charlie for the "helter-skelter express," Bobby made it to a club in Berkeley called the New Orleans House, staged a flop performance, then trekked north "to a sort of hippie ranch" near Napa. He says he'd sometimes sit for hours on a porch playing conga drums to the sun.
"It was the pure peasant life," he says. "Goats - milking the goats, drinking wine, we'd make earth music. Everything could be shrugged off except what there was to feed the instincts ...
"We were a band of gypsies. There were dogs, birds ... I rescued a hawk from a cage and it became a part of my life. I had three girls there and a cabin in the redwoods. Who the fuck could ask for more?
"There were always small matters, like check forgery, thefts, things like that - small crimes to keep a true gypsy life in Napa, plus the cops were looking for some of us. The people that ran this ranch were the same ones that owned the New Orleans House in Berkeley - and with the heat, cops being around, they asked us to move on."
Often, Bobby felt himself losing track of where he was - of where he was heading, where he'd come from. "I had to keep reminding myself I was heading where I was going -" which meant he'd put up a sail and the wind would fill it and he'd lean over the prow of himself, "watching for what was to come."
Drifting through Mendocino, a few girls there, "a few more over here ..." Again through San Francisco, one particular girl he met seemed to connect to Bobby, she laughed and smiled and he laughed with her, "even though we didn't have a penny to pass between us ..."
Her name was Leslie. They slept in an abandoned, burnt-out bus and brought another girl aboard. The girl he'd gathered in as his own - Leslie - claims that Bobby had the most beautiful face of any man she'd ever seen. "He was an angel," she says, "and I told him I would love him forever." She told Bobby, "I'll go anywhere in the world with you."
He said, "Would you come to hell with me?"
"Take me," she said to him.
Her last name was Van Houten, her parents were divorced, and she had one older brother. Her father was an auctioneer, her mother a school teacher. Like Susan Atkins, Leslie had been active in the church and a regular member of the choir. She'd been a girl scout and attended schools in Monrovia where she proved herself an above-average student, graduating in 1967 from Monrovia High. Her parents led active lives in the Village Presbyterian Church and were well-known for their work with the Parent Teachers Association.
The house Leslie grew up in was typical of the neat middle-class neighborhood, and each Christmas the front of the house was trimmed cheerfully with lights. Several years before, her parents had adopted two Korean orphans, a boy and a girl, to live with them. After Leslie graduated high school, she planned on becoming a nun, "more drawn," she later put it, "to the mysticism of Catholicism than to the Protestant way ..." Then she met two hippie girls who shared their dope with Leslie, and the three ambled north to San Francisco and into the Haight scene.
Then she met Bobby Beausoleil. "I had about six girls with me by the time we got back up to Mendocino from San Francisco," he says, "and I played music around the area. Leslie had come up with us - I hadn't made love to her until we got up to Mendocino. We hadn't had sex on that old bus, nor did we on the way north of the city. I wore a top hat, and I had become Sir Hokus - a wandering minstrel, singing my songs and poems for a few coins ...
"Leslie and I made love on acid. It was a tremendous experience. I was dressed in a Confederate soldier uniform. I had a sword. I had come back from the war - I was making love to Leslie and making love to all the women - making love to all of them is like making love to one woman."
From Mendocino, Bobby's band of gypsies flopped into a couple of hippie halfway houses in the Santa Cruz area. But by now, Bobby was using different disguises to keep one jump ahead of the law. "I wound up with a truck, an old beat-up that had been passed back and forth between dope deals, and I managed to trade it for a school bus. With Leslie and a couple of the other girls, we headed south out of Santa Cruz ..."
Within days, Bobby traded the school bus for an old army weapons truck. He made a large bed in the back of the converted camper section and began to live alongside the railway tracks, "eating whatever we could," he says. "We were gypsies. I got good at stealing food from people's yards. I stole a sheep and I killed it and butchered it for us, and we roasted it over a fire - a few fires over a few days, and full of the lamb, we went on. Living alongside the railway tracks kept taking me back to my childhood. I kept thinking about that big old grey house I'd lived in by the tracks. The second house I lived in when I was a kid had a wooden - a board floor in the garage. I lost a frog in there, it went down into the boards. I used to sneak through holes in the fence to play with the little girls across the yard ... One of them used to show me her pussy."
The wind was rising again for Bobby, and the sail climbed up - catching the motion. "The road just kept rolling south," he says, as his band of thieves and gypsies roamed southward along the edge of the ocean. "A few days maybe, and we were climbing right away from the coast and up into the hills of Topanga Canyon ..
A week? Maybe less - maybe more. Bobby was looking to steal something in a shopping center. "I see these girls running around - these were the ones that had been with Charlie Manson, and the one in particular that had come to Malibu that time. One of them was going back to Gary Hinman's house, and I said, sure, I'd tag along.
"They wanted me along with the other males - punks, is what these guys were. These girls could tell them what to do - like go sleep with the other men and we'll call you when we need something - go chop wood or fetch this, get something to eat for us ...
"I wasn't about to do what any woman told me to do. My mother and I never got along. She had me declared incorrigible and every woman was the same as that. I never listened to a word she'd say, nothing anyone would say. It was her that had turned on me ... It's a man's world but a woman's society, and that's what's the matter with society."
Bobby and his small band continued to squat in Topanga. He roamed free in the hills, surviving as "a man of the mountains," holding court over a small cluster of hippies squatting alongside their tents, until he met Robert Aiken, and managed to get some work through the movie production company.
"We had some interesting talks," Aiken says. "On another occasion, I accompanied Beausoleil and the director of the Topanga film to a friend's apartment in Beverly Hills. The minute Beausoleil saw the pool, he said, like a child, `Oh, boy, a pool! That means I can swim -' and he threw off his clothes as he hurried outside to the water.
"When he was finished swimming, he and the director sat in the apartment and talked about Scientology until dawn. Bobby talked about a guy he knew named Charlie Manson, who was like `a holy man,' and whose head was totally tuned in to Scientology. It was morning and the director was completely exhausted, but Bobby was fresh and ready to put in a good day's work.
"I could never imagine Beausoleil as being ordinary," Aiken says, "or normal, in any regular sense. He was apart from the main wheels of society. Perhaps that was what Kenneth Anger's perceptive eye had caught instantly ...
"The movie in Topanga ended and we, the small crew, dismantled the property. When we left, Beausoleil was sad, sort of. It had been his ground that we'd stayed on, and he'd been very happy with all the activity ...'
It was late June, the astrologer recalls. "Beausoleil had plans but the putting of them into action seemed distant. He didn't want to go down on the Strip where they'd call him `Bummer Bob.' He was satisfied, he said, to stay in the tents in the woods with the h
ippies. But he was like being eaten up by the desire to move on - it was like a tide that was pulling at him. I could sense that there was nothing in the world that was going to hold him except a steel cage ...
"He had a lot of close people around there and he seemed to be waiting, like for a command or something to come out of the blue."
Bobby says, "It was in the air - like a storm kicking up. Ever since meeting Charlie Manson and feeling that kind of brotherhood between but all that fire and friction between us as well, it spelled something was going to be going down. When I used to say that blood was going to run, I now knew exactly what I was saying by that ..."
"Helter-skelter is what it was," says Joe. "Charlie was all over like a queen bee, buzzing all around. He was changing, I should say it was more like a fever with his music ideas. He told us in the bus, `You're all a part of it, we are going to have what there is . . .' But the only action I saw was his hanging around with music people. He was staying in a house on the hill. Some of us slept on the bus. Many that had come along - and then there were others there in the wash - and a lot had scattered around the hills, too.
"Charlie would have maybe half a dozen of the girls, all running around naked up there, and he would give them to guys to ball or whatever, and he'd give them around like that, pass them out to people he figured could get him into the music business. I wasn't doing much then because I wasn't feeling good, and when Charlie asked me to move up into this house he was staying in, I passed on it. I'd already been in this shack up behind the little shopping center in Topanga, with these girls and a couple of guys, and they weren't close or anything with Charlie. He'd gotten to know a guy named Gary Hinman, who was going to get something going, something to do with the music - that's what Charlie told me. Pretty soon he moved into Hinman's pad with some of the girls, I think a couple of the guys, too ... The people I was with were on speed and after a week or so I was pretty sick. It was in my chest, and they took me to the General Hospital. They told me I was getting tuberculosis and had to stay there."
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 9