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

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

  I moved on to Terry Melcher. If Manson had wanted to teach him a lesson, why did he order the killings of people who had no real connection to him, other than that they’d lived at the same address at different times? Melcher didn’t know any of the victims at the Tate house. I couldn’t even find evidence that he’d met any of them. Plus, by Bugliosi’s own account, Manson sent his followers to the Cielo house knowing full well that Melcher didn’t live there anymore.

  Bugliosi dodged those questions, instead reiterating the terror that Melcher felt during the trial and for years afterward—fearing that Manson or someone from the Family still wanted him dead. Could he put me in touch with Melcher? The mere fact that I’d asked seemed to unnerve him a bit. He said I’d have a hard time getting him to talk. Later, when I did manage to track down Melcher, I’d find out why.

  As the sun was setting after many hours of talk, I asked Bugliosi if he could share anything with me about the case that had never been reported before—the journalist’s Hail Mary. I could see by the furrow of his brow that he was really thinking about it. I pulled a book from my bag: Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, a history of L.A.’s music industry. I’d been reading it for research—what with all the rejections I’d gotten, I had a little more free time on my hands than I’d expected—and I wanted Bugliosi to look at a passage I’d highlighted. Hoskyns alleged that a few S&M movies had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied up and flogged against his will at a party there. Other sources, including Ed Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.

  Bugliosi seemed to be in the midst of some kind of internal debate. After what felt like a long silence, he told me to turn off my recorder. “This can never be attributed to me,” he began. “Just say it’s from a very reliable source.” (I’ll explain later in the book why I’m treating this as an on-the-record response.)

  When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.”

  It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,” Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”

  The more I thought about it, the more startled I was that the footage was so sordid. It gave yet more weight to the “live freaky, die freaky” motto. And soon after, it occurred to me: if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was telling the truth—and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged—the tape seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect, and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.

  I hoped that I could verify Bugliosi’s story. It was the first piece of new information I’d found so far. In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the house.

  In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bugliosi to authorize search warrants. If he’d learned about the tape from the detectives back in August—if he’d been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return to the house—then something in the police investigation had necessitated his involvement much earlier than he’d ever acknowledged. Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know, because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.

  Ugliness and Purity

  Helter Skelter opens with a famous sentence: “It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes down the canyon.” The first half of the book, concerning the police investigation, traffics in the dread of that sentence. Given Bugliosi’s revelation to me, it was the first place I started looking for a break. If he had changed one detail about the case, could he have changed others? That question would recur throughout my entire investigation.

  The LAPD had assigned two separate teams of detectives to the cases, one for the Tate murders and one for the LaBiancas. Despite the similarities in the crimes, the LAPD had concluded, as mentioned earlier, that the LaBiancas were the victims of a copycat crime. After all, there was seemingly little common ground between the luxe Beverly Hills set at Cielo and the suburban couple in Los Feliz.

  The police fanned out in what would become the largest murder investigation in Los Angeles history. The LaBianca team operated in relative anonymity; the press couldn’t muster much interest in their case, at least not when Sharon Tate’s killer was on the lam. On the other side of town, by contrast, the Cielo crime scene was like a carnival. The LAPD had assigned twenty-one men to the case. Helicopters hovered over the hilltop property. Guards stood watch around the clock at the entry gate.

  Detectives moved to lock down their initial suspect right away. William Garretson, the lone survivor of the night’s massacre, was dragged out of the guesthouse sleepy-eyed, shirtless, and barefoot, shoved into a patrol car, and driven straight to headquarters, where he was read his rights and charged with five murders. Garretson, only nineteen, couldn’t explain why he hadn’t heard anything that night, except to say it might have been because he had the stereo on. For three days, he was on front pages around the world as he languished behind bars. Finally, police concluded he was just a slow kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  In those same first twenty-four hours, the Tate detectives got a tip. A friend of the victims had been telling people that he knew who the murderers were; convinced that his knowledge would get him killed, the friend had gone into hiding. He was Witold Kaczanowski, an artist and Polish émigré who’d known the Tate crowd through his countryman Voytek Frykowski. Police tracked him down through Roman Polanski’s manager. Lured by the promise of twenty-four-hour police protection, Kaczanowksi finally consented to be interviewed.

  He believed that Frykowski had been involved in the drug trade with a host of career criminals and other unsavory characters. One of these was a man named Harris “Pic” Dawson, who had, at a recent party, threatened to kill Frykowski. Remember how Susan Atkins wrote the word “Pig” on the front door of Cielo Drive, in Sharon Tate’s blood? Kaczanowski thought that word was “Pic,” as in Pic Dawson.

  The police found him credible, especially because they’d learned about another altercation at the Cielo house that past spring, when Tate and Polanski had thrown a going-away party. (Although the couple had moved in only on February 15, by the end of March they had to leave for separate film jobs in Europe, where they’d remain for most of the summer.) At their farewell party, attended by more than a hundred guests, three gate-crashers had behaved so aggressively that Polanski had them kicked out. They were Billy Doyle, Tom Harrigan, and Pic Dawson.

  Hoping to ask Polanski about these three, police anxiously
awaited his return from London, scheduled for the evening of August 10, the day after the bodies had been discovered. Polanski flew back to L.A. under heavy sedation, with his longtime producer Gene Gutowski and two friends, Warren Beatty and Victor Lownes. At the airport, he was spirited through a side exit to a waiting car while Gutowski read a statement to the throngs of press.

  The chairman of Paramount Pictures had arranged a suite for Polanski on the studio lot—a place where he could avoid the prying eyes of the press, and the killers, too, if they were out to get him. But before he arrived at Paramount, Polanski had his car stop at a Denny’s parking lot for a hushed conversation with Kaczanowski. Bugliosi never reported this in Helter Skelter. The media never knew about it. To me, it was something to explore.

  After they chatted at Denny’s, Kaczanowski got in the car and headed to Paramount with the director; they talked all the way to the lot. When the LAPD arrived at the studio that evening, they were barred from entering Polanski’s suite until he’d finished the debriefing. Bugliosi didn’t find that worth mentioning; he only wrote that “Polanski was taken to an apartment inside the Paramount lot, where he remained in seclusion under a doctor’s care. The police talked to him briefly that night, but he was, at that time, unable to suggest anyone with a motive for the murders.”

  Polanski’s friends Lownes and Gutowski confirmed the secret Denny’s meeting in interviews with me. Both defended it as a simple exchange of information between two longtime friends. And yet Polanski, in a polygraph exam with the LAPD, had denied knowing Kaczanowski at all.

  Sensing there was more to the story, I sought out Kaczanowski, who, like so many others connected to the victims, had never spoken to reporters about the murders. Over the phone, somewhat to my surprise, he promptly agreed to discuss the case with me. Yes, he said, the Denny’s meeting had happened, but, despite its seeming urgency, there was nothing so furtive about it. He’d only answered some of Polanski’s questions about Frykowski’s possible drug dealing. Kaczanowski emphasized that his suspicion—that Pic Dawson had targeted Frykowski—sent the police on a months-long chase that amounted to nothing.

  And yet it was easy to see how Frykowski may have gotten in over his head in those months before the murders. It was a turbulent time at the Cielo house, I learned—much more fraught than Bugliosi had reported. When Tate and Polanski left, they gave Frykowski and Abigail Folger the run of the place, and things got weird. The couple threw parties all the time. The door was open to anyone and everyone. The crowds grew rowdier, the drugs harder—not just pot and hash, but an abundance of cocaine, mescaline, LSD, and MDA, which was then a new and fairly unheard-of synthetic. Frykowski was especially enamored of it.

  Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan, the same trio who’d been booted from the party in mid-March, were now regular guests at the house, sometimes staying for days at a time. They also supplied most of the drugs. By July, the three men, all international smugglers, had cornered the market on MDA, which was manufactured in Doyle and Harrigan’s hometown, Toronto. Frykowski wanted in. Although he didn’t have much cash—Folger, his heiress girlfriend, kept him on a tight leash financially—he negotiated a deal with his new friends, making himself a middleman between them and Hollywood.

  Soon after we spoke on the phone, Kaczanowski visited Los Angeles. I met him in the backyard of his friend’s home in West Hollywood. A handsome man with a craggy face, thick black hair, and robust blue eyes, he spoke with a heavy accent and a reserved, contemplative air. Though it was maybe three in the afternoon, he opened a bottle of red wine and poured us each a generous glass.

  He’d been the last of Frykowski’s friends to see him alive. The two had gotten together at his gallery just hours before the murders; he’d intended to visit the Tate house that night, but he was too tired. Frykowski had called him around midnight, likely just minutes before the killers arrived, to try to talk him into coming over.

  Now he showed me a large manila envelope full of old ephemera, including Frykowski’s airline ticket to the United States, dated May 16, 1967, and a reference letter Polanski had written for him on Paramount stationery. These artifacts seemed to transport Kaczanowski. The sixties, he said, were often on his mind.

  “I can close my eyes and I feel that it’s still 1969. I hear people’s voices, I see their faces,” Kaczanowski said. He was amazed at how the usual indicators of class and status had disappeared in Hollywood at the time, where “the most extreme ugliness with total purity was mixed up.” This blurriness was the inevitable outcome of the open-door policy they’d all subscribed to at the end of the decade. “Totally primitive, uneducated people” could dress and act like visionary artists. “And you couldn’t know absolutely who was who. You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet and it was impossible to make a distinction.”

  Accordingly, Kaczanowski remembered “so many strange people” coming and going from the house on Cielo Drive, where he would sometimes stay with Frykowski for days at a stretch. “I didn’t trust them,” he said of the guests. “They walked so freely through the place.” He would ask Frykowski who these people were, and the answer always came with degrees of removal—they were friends of this guy, or friends of friends of so-and-so. That was why, after the murders, he felt he’d gotten a bead on who the killers were: the same set of drug dealers that Bugliosi mentions passingly in Helter Skelter.

  “I remember Voytek telling me that they threw Pic Dawson out of a party,” he said, taking a sip of wine. “They told Pic Dawson to take his backpack and fuck off.” Kaczanowski remembered another party, a few weeks before the murders, where he’d had to kick out two very drunk guys. At the gate, “they were standing on the other side, looking at Voytek and me, and they said, ‘You sons of bitches, we will be back, and we will kill you.’”

  All the months of partying with Frykowski had a cumulative effect. He met so many threatening characters that, when his friend turned up dead, he was convinced one or more of them was to blame. He’d wondered if Frykowski, or even Polanski or Sebring, had ever encountered Manson or his followers. His concern and uncertainty still felt raw. Here was someone who’d been so close to the victims that he’d held on to their possessions for all these years—and he still couldn’t rule out the possibility of a revenge motive. As I sat across from him, the elaborate puffery of the Helter Skelter motive, and all the panicked headlines that came with it, seemed to recede into the afternoon smog.

  If Frykowski were alive, I ventured, and Kaczanowski could ask him one question, what would it be? Looking down into his wine, he said quietly, “Did you ever meet anybody from the group of people who came to kill you?”

  “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins”

  Having finished what would be her final film, The Thirteen Chairs (also known as 12 + 1), Sharon Tate came back to the Cielo house in July 1969, more than seven months pregnant. She wanted to have her baby in the house she loved. But Polanski, who was supposed to have returned by then, deferred his homecoming. He needed to continue scouting locations for his next film. Assuring her that he’d be back in time for the baby’s arrival, he asked his old friend Frykowski to stick around with Folger and keep Tate company.

  That, at least, is the version Bugliosi provides. Once I’d heard from him about Polanski’s tape and the seedier side of Cielo, I started pushing harder in my interviews, and diverging stories developed. Polanski’s intimates said that Tate was grateful for the company. She didn’t want to be alone in the secluded estate, especially at the end of her pregnancy. As for Polanski himself, his friends described him as careful, conservative, even square, and deeply in love with his wife. If he said he had to stay on in London for work, then that’s what he was doing.

  Others remembered it differently. Tate had been horrified at the scene that greeted her upon her return to Los Angeles. She was leery of Folger and especially of Frykowski, whom she suspected of drug dealing—she wanted the couple, and the crowd attached to them, out of her house. As I won th
e confidence of some of her closest friends, they came out with intensely disturbing stories. Her marriage was in shambles, they said, and many of them didn’t want her to fix it—they wanted her to leave it.

  Polanski had established a pattern of abuse, emotional and physical. The Sharon Tate they knew, warm and vivacious, was diminished in his presence. “The difference in Sharon was incredible,” said Elke Sommer, the German actress who appeared with her in The Wrecking Crew. She “just wasn’t herself when she was with him. She was in awe, or frightened; he had an awesome charisma.”

  That meant that Polanski could walk all over her. One friend, who called him “one of the most evil people I ever met,” said that he had smashed Tate’s face into a mirror, and, on another occasion, forced her to watch a recording of him having sex with another woman. He cheated on her constantly, and he made sure she knew about it. Another friend remembered an incident in which Polanski had asked his wife to wear the same dress that one of his other lovers had worn; when she appeared in her own dress instead, he threw her into the pool in front of their friends. Others said that Polanski hosted orgies at the house without his wife’s knowledge or consent.

  Dominick Dunne, who’d been close to Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, was confident on that point. “I never went to their orgies, but I know they existed, and I think Jay was in on it, too,” he said to me. The director James Toback—who would himself be disgraced, nearly twenty years later, by more than two hundred allegations of sexual assault—was even more certain. One night, Warren Beatty had invited him to a party at the Tate house. Toback brought Jim Brown, a football all-star who’d become an action-film hero. At the party, people began to whisper about an orgy. “I was going to be included because I was with Jim,” Toback told me, “and I was certainly up for it, but Jim declined.”