Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211)

by O'Neill, Tom; Piepenbring, Dan (CON)

  It may be something in his charismatic, enigmatic personality, some intangible quality that no one else has yet been able to isolate and identify. It may be something that he learned from others. Whatever it is, I believe Manson has full knowledge of the formula he used. And it worries me that we do not.

  In the end, Manson and his followers got the death penalty anyway. Bugliosi said that they had, “coursing through their veins,” the willingness to kill others. For the jury, as for the public, that was a much more comfortable truth: these people were an aberration. Brainwashing, complete loss of agency—these were difficult to contemplate, let alone to accept.

  “When you take LSD enough times you reach a stage of nothing,” Manson had said in court. “You reach a stage of no thought.” No one wanted to dwell on that. Ingrained evil, teased out of young women by a mastermind—that was something. And something was better than “a stage of nothing.”

  When the jury delivered death sentences to the four defendants—Manson, Krenwinkel, Atkins, and Van Houten; Kasabian had become a witness for the prosecution and was granted immunity—the three women sprang to their feet. Their heads were freshly shaved, as Manson’s was. They’d enlarged the Xs on their foreheads, as Manson had. And they were livid.

  “You have judged yourselves,” Patricia Krenwinkel screamed at the jury.

  “Better lock your doors and watch your own kids,” Susan Atkins warned.

  “Your whole system is a game,” Leslie Van Houten shouted. “You blind, stupid people. Your children will turn against you.”

  Out on the street, Sandy Good, one of Manson’s fiercest loyalists, looked into a TV camera and said, “Death? That’s what you’re all going to get.”

  With that, the Family was swept off the national stage, and the public could relegate these grisly crimes to the past. Seven people had been brutally murdered. But the nation was confident that we knew how and why, and that the evil people were behind bars.

  2

  An Aura of Danger

  “Live Freaky, Die Freaky”

  When I started interviews for my Premiere piece, in April 1999, much of what you’ve just read was unknown to me. I’d gotten through Helter Skelter, and I knew the murders had left a mark on Hollywood, but that was about all. In a few years I’d develop a deep obsession with the case; I’d have the trial transcript at my fingertips and binders full of press clippings at my disposal. But in the beginning, I was flummoxed.

  Helter Skelter had captured the story definitively. Its author had ensured that Manson was locked away. How could a magazine feature top that? Leslie, my editor, had given me leeway in finding an angle. But her first suggestion—how did the crimes change Hollywood?—wasn’t enough for me, and I suspected it wouldn’t be enough for her, either.

  My earliest weeks of interviews pulled me in wildly different directions. At first, I was compelled by the way the murders had sundered friendships in Hollywood, revealing strong opinions about the era’s morality, or lack thereof. As I cycled through Hollywood cliques, I found that I was reigniting thirty-year-old rumors and rivalries. Everyone, over time, assigned the blame for the crimes a little differently. I was dealing in memories that had survived decades of erosion. Even my most reliable sources were shaky on the details. As for the unreliable sources, I kept reminding myself that many of them were washed-up Hollywood personalities, often in their dotage. Their memories had warped to accommodate their bruised egos, their ulterior motives, and, above all, their sense that they were at the center of any story worth telling.

  A lot of the contradictions I heard centered on the house at Cielo Drive, and the decadent scene there in the months before the murders. That house still signified a lot in Hollywood. For some, the death of Sharon Tate and her friends aroused as much fear as it did grief.

  After the murders, the media had blamed Hollywood’s “unreality and hedonism,” as the New York Times’s Stephen Roberts put it, for having fostered an atmosphere where mass homicide was all but guaranteed. Roberts, then Los Angeles bureau chief of the Times, talked to a lot of Hollywood people in those first weeks. Bugliosi quoted him in Helter Skelter: “All the stories had a common thread: That somehow the victims had brought the murders on themselves… The attitude was summed up in the epigram: ‘Live freaky, die freaky.’”

  The problem was, thirty years later, no one could agree on who had brought the “freakiness” into the home, and why. I had to wonder if there was a conspiracy of silence in Hollywood. It had taken months for the LAPD to crack the case. In that time, Manson and the Family had almost certainly killed others. If Hollywood hadn’t circled the wagons, it seemed there was a good chance the investigation could have ended sooner. So many of the people I spoke to had strong ideas about why these murders had happened—and yet none of them had spoken to the police, and many remained unwilling to go on the record with me.

  The one thing everyone seemed to agree on—everyone outside of the DA’s office, that is—is that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter motive didn’t add up. It had worn thin with police and Hollywood insiders, and it was wearing thin with me, too. I tried to unpack this idea that Manson chose the Cielo house to “instill fear” in Terry Melcher, the record producer whose rejection had apparently so enraged Manson that he activated a race war.

  One problem was that Melcher, by all accounts, had no idea that this was why the Family attacked his former home. They never told him that they wanted him to be afraid—they didn’t follow the murders with any kind of communication to him. According to Bugliosi, Melcher never realized the crimes had anything to do with him until months later, when the police got in touch with him. How was this motive supposed to work if Melcher was never apprised of it?

  The grander scheme underlying Helter Skelter—to start a massive race war by making it look as if Black Panthers were behind the murders—didn’t land, either. Although Manson was clearly a racist, and while he had a wild, eschatological philosophy, no one believed even for a second that black militants were behind these killings, as he’d hoped it would seem.

  So was the Family just too dumb, or too drugged, to pull it off? Or was there another reason for the murders that had nothing to do with race wars and scaring Melcher? It seemed to me that the Manson murders had garnered much of their infamy—and Bugliosi much of his fame—from the Helter Skelter motive. A hippie race war spawned by an acid-drenched, brainwashing ex-con: it was such a fantastical conceit that the murders lived on in pop culture. With a more commonplace explanation—a drug burn, say, or Hollywood infighting—they would’ve faded into history after a few years, and Bugliosi would never have written the most popular true-crime book of all time.

  With an eye on other possible motives, I focused on three questions in my first weeks of reporting. First: Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the killers?

  Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities?

  Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny?

  Here, as neatly as I can tell it, is what I learned in the early, frantic weeks of my reporting. Just as important is what I didn’t learn—which goes a long way toward explaining how a simple three-month magazine assignment turned into a twenty-year obsession.

  “The Dancing Was Different”

  Julian Wasser, a photographer for Life magazine, was my first interview. Almost right away, I felt the kind of cognitive dissonance that followed me through my reporting. I’d meet my sources at a fancy restaurant of their choice—in this case, Le Petit Four, a sunny sidewalk café in West Hollywood—and, within minutes, as the conversation turned toward violence, the plush setting would feel totally incongruous. Such was the case with Wasser, who told me over a tuna niçoise salad about one of the saddest days of his life.

  Day
s after the murders, as part of an editorial for Life, Wasser had accompanied Roman Polanski on his first return visit to the house on Cielo Drive. One of Wasser’s pictures from that day is a study in grief. Polanski, in a white T-shirt, sits slumped and devastated on the front porch of his home, his eyes carefully averted from the faded word “Pig” written in his wife’s blood on the front door.

  “It was too soon,” Wasser told me. He’d shadowed Polanski as he moved through the bloodstained rooms. It wasn’t a home anymore; it was evidence. “There was fingerprint-dusting powder all over the bedroom and the phones, and there was blood in the carpet. It was thick like Jell-O.” And there was so much of it that it hadn’t even dried yet, Wasser said. “You could still smell it… Salty, carnal.” The odor reminded him of a slaughterhouse.

  Right away, Wasser regretted the assignment. But Polanski wanted him there, even at his most vulnerable moment. It wasn’t an exercise in vanity, at least not entirely. Hoping to help solve the murders, Polanski had invited along a psychic, Peter Hurkos, whose alleged clairvoyance had made him a minor celebrity. Wasser was enlisted to provide duplicates of his photos to Hurkos, who could glean “psychic vibrations” from them.

  Polanski led them to the nursery, which Tate had carefully furnished and decorated in anticipation of the baby. “Roman went over to the bassinet and just started crying. I said, ‘This is such a private moment, I shouldn’t be here,’ and he said, ‘Please, don’t take any more pictures right now.’ It was just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve never seen anything, in my mind, so intrusive, even though he had invited me… The enormity of it,” Wasser added, “going into this pregnant woman’s bedroom and seeing her intimate area covered with fingerprint powder and realizing what happened there.”

  Hurkos, it turned out, didn’t share Wasser’s sense of solemnity. A week before the Life story ran, pirated reproductions of Wasser’s photos appeared on the front page of the tabloid the Hollywood Citizen News. The psychic had sold his copies, vibrations and all.

  Wasser described the “great fear” that descended on Los Angeles after the murders. “I lived in Beverly Hills. If you went to someone’s house they wouldn’t let you in. The normal selfishness and paranoia was magnified a hundredfold. It was another reason for not answering your door.”

  I heard a lot of that in my first interviews. Sales of burglar alarms and security systems had apparently soared after the murders, and people were quick to ditch their drug stashes. There’s a famous, anonymous line from Life, from the very article featuring Wasser’s pictures, actually: “Toilets are flushing all over Beverly Hills; the entire Los Angeles sewer system is stoned.”

  Others took more drastic precautions. At the funerals of his friends Tate and Sebring, Steve McQueen carried a pistol in his belt, his publicist Warren Cowan told me. The actor was in the throes of an anxiety that pervaded Hollywood, where everyone suspected that the killer might be among them. Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair journalist known for his reporting on the entertainment industry, told me, “Hollywood did change… The dancing was different. The drugs were different. The fucking was different.” He and his wife were so frightened that they sent their kids to stay with their grandmother in northern California.

  Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, said that her father had hired a security guard. “He was there from sundown to sunrise for months,” she explained. “Mom fed him to death, I think. He was uniformed with a gun and he sat in the kitchen all night. I can remember the whole tone of this city afterward… it defined fear.”

  In 1999, apparently, that fear was still alive and well, at least among Hollywood’s A-list, many of whom declined to speak to me, even though thirty years had passed. I was rebuffed by the intimates of Tate, Polanski, and Sebring—sometimes with vehemence, sometimes with tersely worded emails or phone calls. “No interest.” “Doesn’t want to be involved.” Or just the one word: “No.” Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda said no. Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, both reputedly close to Tate and Polanski: no, no. Candice Bergen, Terry Melcher’s girlfriend at the time of the murders, said no, too—as did David Geffen, Mia Farrow, and Anjelica Huston, among others.

  As the rejections piled up, I had my own bout of paranoia. Had some memo gone out? My request had asked simply if they’d like to discuss the aftereffects of the murders on their community; it didn’t feel like I was prying. And Premiere, since it was dedicated entirely to the movie business, usually garnered some enthusiasm from this crowd. Bruce Dern: no. Kirk Douglas: no. Paul Newman: no. Elliott Gould, Ann-Margret, Hugh Hefner: no, no, no. All told, more than three dozen people turned me down. Some were household names, but plenty of the decidedly nonfamous found reasons to decline, too. It was looking like I’d have a story about Hollywood with no one from Hollywood in it.

  Hoping for something more revelatory, I went to less well-known names. Peter Bart, the longtime editor in chief of Variety, had been close to Polanski, and what he told me gave me some semblance of a lead.

  “I must confess that that crowd was a little scary,” Bart said, referring to Polanski and Tate’s circle. “There was an aura of danger around them… there was an instinctive feeling that everyone was pushing it and things were getting out of control. My wife and I still talk about it,” he said. “Anybody who underestimates the impact of the event is full of shit.”

  This was my first taste of the “live freaky, die freaky” view: the idea that Polanski’s circle, with its bacchanalian parties and flexible morals, had brought about their own murders. I thought there might be something here. After all, the murders had been solved and the victims had done seemingly nothing to instigate them—but Bart, and others I’d soon speak to, still claimed that their lifestyles were to blame.

  I had to get closer to those who’d known Sharon and Roman, anyone who’d attended these supposedly lurid parties. But the rejections kept coming. I’d been in touch with Diane Ladd’s manager, having heard that Ladd, who’d been married to Bruce Dern at the time of the murders, ran in some of the same circles as Tate and Polanski. Her manager promised to set up an interview. The next day she called back, saying that Ladd had had an “emotional, visceral reaction.” The manager said, “I don’t know what happened with Diane back in the sixties, but she adamantly refused to have anything to do with the piece. She even told me that if her name was in it, she was going to contact her attorney.”

  Peter Fonda gave me yet another no. Not long afterward, I came across him at a gas station in the middle of the Mojave Desert, of all places, some five hours outside L.A. True to form, he was in leathers and on a Harley. I approached him with my business card and tried to explain the story as succinctly as possible. He seemed receptive. But later, when I followed up again, the answer was still: no.

  I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”

  Bugliosi’s First Slip

  There was one major player who agreed to talk to me: Vincent Bugliosi. Not only did he sign on for an interview, he invited me to his new home in Pasadena, the same one where, years later, he would threaten to “hurt [me] like [I’d] never been hurt before” if I published my findings.

  There was no sign of that animosity during our first meeting. On a sunny spring day, Bugliosi gave me six hours of his time, driving me around to show me various landmarks related to the crime and enjoying a long lunch with me in one of his favorite restaurants. I was flattered to have captured his attention—here was the man who’d put away one of the monsters of the twentieth century. Later I would question the motive behind all his generosity.

  A prosecutor makes a lot of enemies over the course of his career, and Bugliosi, I’d learn, made more than most, both in and out of the DA’s office. But considering that he’d once fielded death t
hreats from Manson himself, he lived in a surprisingly unprotected home, quintessentially suburban. He and Gail, his wife of forty-three years, were still moving in when I visited that April of 1999; Bugliosi, white haired, lean, and blue eyed, greeted me with a firm handshake and a litany of apologies for the unpacked boxes. In the living room, flowers of all kinds, dried, artificial, and real, burst from pots and vases.

  Their kitchen, adorned with Gail’s chicken and rooster tchotchkes, could’ve been right out of a fifties sitcom. Bugliosi picked up a hairless cat that brushed against his leg—a rare Siamese breed, he told me. The cat’s name was Sherlock, “because he snoops everywhere.” Gail put out a plate of cookies and a pair of iced teas for us.

  Bugliosi was a fast talker. He sent a tsunami of words in my direction, sometimes jumping out of his chair for no apparent reason. Gail, an island of repose by comparison, busied herself at the kitchen counter. I caught her rolling her eyes as her husband told me that the movie version of Helter Skelter, from 1976, “was number one that year” and “had the biggest ratings in TV history, prior to Roots.” He’d essentially been on a thirty-year victory lap, and he had his talking points down cold. It was hard to get him off script. As he drove me around that day, he was still reliving his encounters with Manson in the courtroom. Sometimes it seemed he was quoting almost verbatim from Helter Skelter. On the surface, he seemed chatty and forthcoming, but everything he said—for hours—was canned.

  Still hoping for a good angle, I tried to probe, however gently, at the holes I’d noticed in Helter Skelter. For one, how had the cops missed so many clues in the case—why hadn’t they solved it much sooner? As he did in his book, Bugliosi blamed sloppy police work. They never would’ve cracked the case without him, he told me.

  I wanted his take on the Cielo house’s caretaker, William Garretson, who’d been the only one on the property to survive that night. Garretson lived in the modest guesthouse separated from the main home. His story was so unlikely that, at first, he’d been the LAPD’s number one suspect. He swore that his stereo had been playing loud enough to drown out the murders. He’d heard no part of the brutal slaughter, even though the screaming and the gunshots had occurred only sixty feet from his bedroom window. And Bugliosi concurred, albeit reluctantly. The police, he reminded me, had conducted sound tests that supported Garretson.