Manson remained at Hinman's house on the Canyon Road. Hinman was an active member of Nichiren Shoshu, a non-political Buddhist sect headquartered in Santa Monica. Hinman taught music at a school in West Los Angeles while working for his degree in political science at the University of California. His friends say he was a man who loved to talk and knew something about everything. One says, "He was a genuine person, and took a keen interest in those with radical views. And he was one of the most generous persons I've known." Another musician friend of Hinman's recalls, "He was ready to relate to anyone ... He wanted to know their thing. Hinman had many connections as well as friends in the music business, and that's what Charlie Manson wanted. Gary was sensitive to Manson's talents and his views, which I gathered were half-baked Zen, and enough Buddhist ideology to get Gary going. Also his ideas about music were you might say contradictory..."
According to Manson, "The Beatles confuse you with what they say. They trick you with distraction, with the beat. You get programmed from the front or programmed from the back. Music doesn't know time. Music is soul. And you can bring it in from the back. I can sing a song right now and when it's over you forget the words, the music, but it stays in your infinite unconscious. And then a few months later you hear another song, and it'll end with the same kind of riff ... It's the same. You forgot the words and yet in the back of your mind, what it means comes back to you. And it meshes in your mind, like the advertising people do. Talking about a beer, Coors is great, Coors is great. Pretty soon you think of beer and you know that Coors is great. And that is what the Beatles do, they confuse you with cadence, and program you in the back, behind the beat, and this is what stays with you. Dig?"
Charlie would talk and Hinman would listen, then Hinman would talk and Charlie would sleep. One friend of Hinman's said of Manson, "You can't steal the show from that guy - he expects you to think over every word he's said."
For some time there had been another member in Charlie's group - "Tex" (Charles) Watson. He was the last of three children, and his parents operated a service station/general store in a small Texas town northeast of Dallas.
In high school Watson never made a grade below B, excelled in athletics, played halfback on the football team and was named all-district during his junior and senior years. He played basketball, was on the baseball team, and set a state track record in high hurdles. Active in numerous school activities, one of his jobs was sports editor of the yearbook.
After graduation he enrolled at the North Texas State University, though his goals were uncertain and he went along as a business major. But shortly his grades dropped to a C average. During that time, Watson was picked up by the police on suspicion of stealing typewriters from his former school. A grand jury was impanelled but dismissed the charge on lack of evidence.
Three years later, in the spring of 1967, the University let out and Watson decided to leave Texas. He told several friends he'd have "better luck" in California, and planned to attend the state university in Los Angeles. He moved into an apartment on Glendale Boulevard and began classes, but realized he no longer knew what it was he wanted out of college - except an army deferment, and continued with a business major. Something was "bothering" him.
One friend recalls his first meeting with "Tex" in Los Angeles. The friend was with a girl Watson's age, but on being introduced, "Charles stood up and called her `Ma'am ...' He had a very outgoing personality. When he [Tex] came here he had a pretty good job, making good money. I know he had at least a thousand dollars worth of new clothes hanging in his closet."
Another friend, a student and salesman who attended college with Watson, recalls, "he started not caring about his school work, not caring about the job. I think he quit and then he was trying to get some money somewhere. When he first came to Cal State he had been a pretty aggressive person, aggressive in a good way, what you might call successoriented. But he was starting to withdraw from the people he knew. Someone getting himself into deep water ..
Watson was only to last the quarter at college. No one could say anything to him about it. He became edgy. "If you tried to encourage him, or get him to open up about whatever the heck it was that was needling him," recalls a girl, a classmate, "he seemed to withdraw more - or try to get away from you."
Joan Dreifus, of Glendale, dated Watson on occasion. She claims "Tex changed his manners and, you might say, his personality practically overnight. I said to him, `What's wrong? What's gotten into you lately?' That was when he looked me right in the eyes and smiled in a strange way, and he said, `Dope is getting into me.' I said, `You're kidding,' and he said, `I've been turned on to something that is way out -' And that's what it is, he said, that was happening to him. But I could see he was becoming a hippie ... Because everybody around is either making marijuana or taking something, I didn't make a big deal out of it because Tex was. But then after a little while I saw that he was-was turning into something I just didn't know that well any more. He said, `I'm finding out who I am,' and he said he'd become involved with an `Infinitesimal Soul' - and he had a teacher, or guru as he called it - they were in a rock music group or forming one. And Tex said, just stating it like that, that he was finding out his own true self ... I never saw him again."
The salesman friend reported, "He got deeper in the drug scene, and then I lost track of him for about five months. The next time I saw him, something had happened. He had hair down to here, and there had been a definite change. This nice guy who came out here became someone else, a completely different person. He was almost incoherent at times. He had very little communication with anyone he previously knew or anyone, I guess, in the so-called `straight world."'
Other "straights" who knew Tex said he was spending a lot of time with a hippie commune, and constantly talked about some type of guru, and a rock singing group he was associating with.
The "guru" was Charlie Manson, who, during his stay with Gary Hinman had met Dennis Wilson, a big name drummer and leader of a successful rock group, the Beach Boys.
It seemed the musician sensed in Manson an "original - far out" talent, and believed something could be done for him in the music business. Manson was invited to the performer's expansive home in Pacific Palisades, and it was not long before he was attending parties and associating with celebrities. Soon enough he was using the mansion as his own address.
One young woman, "Wallie" Sellers, although not part of Manson's crowd, was staying at Wilson's - "I was a friend, and then one day I was in the Palisades and Wilson came rolling by in the car ... I was living in Malibu at the time, and he said, `Hi,' you know, `Come on down and see me sometime . . .' Others where I was staying in Malibu were on speed and I couldn't handle that other scene," she says. "And so I went down there to Wilson and I said, `Wow, can I rent your guest house from you?' He said, `Sure,' and I said, `How much would you like?' and he said, `Well, we'll talk about it later.' I moved everything down there, and then this old man who was staying there wanted the guest house, because, you know, he wasn't really part of the people. So, I had all my stuff there and then I took a room in the main house. Otherwise I never would have done that."
Wallie, then engaged to be married, had her own room and remained at the house about six months "about the same time Charlie and his girls arrived on the scene."
She says, "When I first met Charlie, and when I first looked at him, my first impression was that he was like people that I used to know in Hollywood, you know, they were just scammy people. They were nice, they were friends of mine and all this, but they were out to get what they could get, and this is what I first saw when I looked at him. I didn't even have to talk to him ... But the more I got to know Charlie - the more I started to like him.
"Charlie cut an album," she remembers, "using the girls in the background, and it was really sort of an interesting album. Everybody thought he was a good musician, more or less, and he used to write a lot of songs. His one big one was `Burn All Your Bridges,' that was one of his favorite
songs, and everybody loved it, too ... When I moved down there, there were these girls, one was only sixteen at the time," she recalls. "Charlie was definitely the kingpin, the head man. He brought his little harem over there, brought his girls to Wilson's and he got free rent ... Charlie really seemed to believe in what he was doing, although I didn't go for it, because I couldn't believe him. There were too many things missing, you know, his great philosophy on love, and all this stuff, and brotherhood. I couldn't see how it would work if you're sitting in a $150,000 house and somebody else is paying the rent." Charlie's hopes "were not unrealistic at all," Wallie says. "He had some top musicians, and Wilson was backing him, and he had the free use of a recording studio. Charlie had a very nice voice. He sounds something like the voice in, what was that record about Martin Luther, JFK and Bobby Kennedy all getting killed - Martin, John and Bobby - sounds just like the voice of Dion.
"There was something peculiar when I first moved in there," she says. "They had a certain vibration thing around the house - I call them Charlie and the elves, because that's what I saw when I first went down there - the elf girls is what they were. They had long hair and stuff, and they sat there eating bread, and making bread and doing the whole bit, you know, in a big expensive house, and I kept thinking, `Wow,' and they were so calm, so completely calm. And then Charlie came in on the scene, and I thought, `Well, he's kind of doing a scam' - that's his thing, what he wants to do there. But about the vibrations there - he would say, `Don't bring any people into the house that have got the wrong vibes. You know, don't bring any strangers in here.' He liked the set-up the way it was, under control, and I don't think he wanted to lose control of the atmosphere. He had control over everybody's heads, and he didn't want anybody throwing in any big questions." Charlie's girls "thought of him as their master, sort of," Wallie says. "It was kind of like a harem situation, and the girls all liked each other, they were sort of dykes, and Charlie was a little in love with Wilson, so everything worked out just fine," she laughed. "Everybody was happy ... All these people wandering around, the elves, wore no makeup or anything else, and then there was Charlie as the kingpin man from Mars. Charlie thought Wilson was going to buy him and the girls a ranch, and was trying to promote this more than anything. Between trying to promote Wilson to buy them the ranch, and others to get him into music, that was about all he was interested in. He thought money from the music would enable him to support the ranch he wanted Wilson to buy. Everything seemed simple.
"One night we went out to visit some people in Topanga Canyon and when we came back down the mountain we went to the SelfRealization Fellowship Church and walked around. He got in a really serious mood for once ... He knew I wasn't falling for his elf thing, and he was using different approaches on me, and I think a few times he let some of himself out. So we were walking around the church and he was saying, `I don't think I've ever gone out and had a good time with a girl, just having fun, with a girl that has as much class as you do.' And he got into this big thing about `class.' And about how nice it was to just spend a normal evening, you know, just drive in the car over to some people's house ... you come back, you stop and you take a walk ... it really impressed him that it was something normal, that he was able to do this with a girl that he thought had `class.' And he said, `You know, no matter what ever happened to you, you'd never lose that class.' Another time he said that, and he was almost mad about it. Definitely, he felt very insecure about this, that's why he surrounded himself with most of the girls ... they were from very rich families ... I'd just listen to the stories these girls would tell, about the psychiatrists and this and that. And it was really sort of sad, but I thought, well, Charlie seems to be doing more for their heads than the psychiatrists . . . I mean, he didn't surround himself with trash to start with. He picked from the cream of the crop, then brought them down to his level."
Wallie got to know Tex. "He had a very good sense of humor and he was just kind of like a big fuzzy dog or something, you know. He was always trying to make people laugh and trying to get attention and everything and he usually was successful in that. He had a fairly dynamic personality, and when he was exerting it he was very pleasant." Yet at Wilson's house Watson had always been known as "Square Tex." Still he was "sensitive" and "very sweet," though "kind of wrought up inside."
At the house, they were taking LSD "every once in a while," Wallie says, but the drugs were not "a regular pattern" in the beginning. "The first drugs that ever came down there, ever there for any amount of time, were brought by Watson," she recalls. "He used to bring pot, to get himself accepted and everything. He really wanted to be with it and he was really square ... He's a fairly good-looking tall guy, and he's always been fairly popular with girls, and then there's this little runt, Charlie, and all the girls loved Charlie, and they won't do anything without his permission, without his saying so. He's number one, you know. So Tex really wanted to be into this scene, because he believed - in the philosophy - this is where he started, he wanted to believe in the philosophy."
Eventually, Wallie recalls, "Wilson sort of put his foot down because all these new girls would come around - freaky girls - weird. Wilson said, `It's not cool around here anymore. There's too many people and I want you to split ...
Some who had followed Charlie from San Francisco settled on an old isolated ranch one mile west of Topanga Canyon Road in the mountains near Chatsworth. Owned by George Spahn, the ranch had been the location site for the William S. Hart cowboy movies of the 1920's.
The facade of the main street, a cluster of rundown movie buildings, had become a ghost town with its Longhorn Saloon, the Rock City Cafe, some stables, weathered props and old trailers. Millions of moviegoers once viewed this old "wild west" setting, but the dust had settled. Rusted car parts littered the grounds and few visitors passed by, only some horse owners or occasional riders in the surrounding hills.
Charlie and several girls found the ranch by chance one afternoon while driving the black bus through the mountains. To Charlie, collecting misfits and rejects, the ranch seemed like a junked version of times gone by. Manson, who was later to say, "Where does the garbage go, as we have tin cans and garbage alongside the road, and oil slicks in the water, so you have people, and I am one of your garbage people," found the old ranch like water settling in a ditch. Tin cans, old bedding, teenage dropouts, anything rejected, he felt he could put to use. The Family could live rentfree, create an "inside" world within the "outside" world, while Manson pursued his dreams.
At first it came as a surprise to find the old black bus parked on the property, and the group was told they'd have to move, a ranch hand recalled. But Charlie talked with owner George Spahn, said the bus wasn't working and asked permission to remain until they could fix it. Then the girls started taking care of the ranch owner, and after that they just stayed. It was Susan, Charlie and some of the other girls who had moved the bus onto the ranch - "There was no other girls at the ranch when we moved there ... We girls took care of old George Spahn, took care of his lunches and things like that, and managed to take care of ourselves as best we could," Susan said.
Susan, who took to sunbathing naked on rocks, describes the ranch as "very beautiful ... The buildings are dilapidated and falling apart but the surrounding is like a wooded area. There's quite a few acres on the land and George Spahn, who is eighty years old and partially blind, still rents out horses for people to go horseback riding."
It was a new life. "In order for me to be completely free in my mind," Susan says, "I had to be able to completely forget the past. The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity by doing so with a name. I started to pick out a name, a very long French-sounding sexy name .. Manson later named her "Sadie Mae Glutz."
"Skip" says, "I had a shack of my own on the ranch. Some of the others stayed in the old trailer, a couple of the empty buildings. We cooked, really kept the place clean. The girls were so great. They seemed to be talented in womanly arts, sewing, taking car
e of the babies. They made it beautif 1. Up in San Francisco everyone was having abortions. But at the ranch the girls liked the babies and the world seemed to revolve around them."
Susan's baby came in October. "Charlie delivered my son. He delivered him and one of the girls held me in an easy position. My son's name is Zo Zo Ze Ze Zadfrack . . . "
"Charlie delivered three babies. He was the midwife, so to speak, he was more with us women than he was with the men. At first," she says, "life at Spahn ranch with Charlie was beautiful, very, very peaceful." The elderly Spahn would leave the ranch in the late afternoons, and throughout the night it was a paradise for the family. "We called ourself the Family," Susan said, "A family like no other family ... We all made love with each other, got over our inhibitions and inadequate feelings and became very uninhibited."
Skip says, "We'd sit around the fire and sing songs, cowboy songs, too. Some that Charlie would write himself. He'd play guitar. It started opening up after a while ..
Susan recalls, "As people would come and people would want to drop out of sight they'd give us mostly everything that they had and we'd usually give away - in other words, we never held onto anything, we always gave it away. In fact, we gave away more than we ever had ..
One new girl to Charlie's Family was Linda Darleen Kasabian. Her parents had divorced when she was young. Her father had worked in mills and construction jobs in New Hampshire, then migrated to Florida. Her mother remarried.
Linda had been a good student in school but was described as a "starry-eyed romanticist," unable to find whatever it was she was searching for. She had unhappy relationships with a number of boys, planned to marry one and quit high school. The marriage "didn't happen," and she married someone else. She was sixteen. One year later she was divorced. At seventeen she moved to Boston, met a young hippie and married him. She became pregnant and the couple traveled to California, where she and her husband split up, going separate ways.
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 10