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

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

  I asked Tacot: “Do you think Voytek did fuck Billy?”

  “Yeah, that’s why Billy was so pissed at him,” Tacot said. “Voytek would have been killed if I hadn’t intervened.”

  “Would Billy have hired killers?” I asked, thinking of Manson.

  “No. He would’ve taken all the pleasure himself.”

  In his interview with the police, Doyle had allowed that he was furious at Frykowski and his set. “When I was chained to the tree,” he said, “they were the object of my rage. Which was an unreasonable and unnatural rage.” To calm him down, Doyle said, Tacot had “chained a sign to the tree that said ‘You are loved.’” Doyle was stuck there for more than a day.

  After that, Tacot told me, the pair headed off to Jamaica, where apparently they were making a movie about marijuana. (No footage from this film has ever surfaced. Others have said the two were involved in a large narcotics deal.) On August 9, while they were away, “Manson goes up and kills those people and everyone’s looking for [Doyle],” Tacot said. He and Doyle were suspects within days. “I picked up the phone one day and the Toronto Star informed me that me and Billy were in the headlines: two wanted for murder.” A couple of days later, back in the United States, “I took a lie-detector test,” Tacot told me. “They knew I had nothing to do with it. Billy, too. He was in Jamaica with me. We were cleared, out of the country. You can’t kill somebody long-distance.”

  True enough, but you could arrange for someone else to do the killing. Tacot adamantly denied that he and Billy Doyle knew Manson—they’d never even met the guy. Nor, he said, had they sold drugs to anyone staying at the Tate house.

  “We were consultants,” he said. “We’d tell them if it was okay or not.”

  “If the drugs were okay?”

  “Yeah.” He added, “Billy was fucking a whole bunch of broads up there.”

  “Did you ever hear about any orgies?” I asked.

  “If you want to consider Billy fucking the broads an orgy.”

  Charlie Tacot wasn’t exactly the picture of virtue. I wanted to find other people who’d known him, who could say if he’d known Manson. It wasn’t hard. Seemingly everyone in town had partied with Tacot at some point. Corrine Calvet, a French actress who’d worked in Hollywood since the forties, had one of the most alarming stories of them all. Calvet was as famous for her turbulent life as her film roles. She’d starred opposite James Cagney in What Price Glory? In the fifties, she married Johnny Fontaine, a mobster-turned-actor who’d been a pallbearer at the gangster Mickey Cohen’s funeral. A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo.

  I met Calvet at her beach-facing apartment in Santa Monica. Solemn and unsmiling, in heavy makeup, her gray hair swept back, she got right to the point.

  “The only thing that I can tell you about this Manson,” she said, her accent inflecting the words with glamour and gravity, “is that Charlie Tacot brought him and the girls to a party at our house. Two hours after they were there, I caught Charlie Manson taking a piss in my pool. I told Charlie Tacot to get them out of here and they left. After the tragedy happened, the FBI came by and told me I was next on their list to be killed.”

  When I expressed shock at this, her eyes narrowed. With genuine malice, she said, “Maybe you are new at this. When I tell you something, don’t question it! I don’t say it unless it is true.”

  I explained that Tacot had denied ever having met Manson or anyone in the Family. “Maybe he has good reason to say that,” Calvet said, letting her words hang in the air. She was certain: “Charlie knew them.”

  I pressed her again. Was she sure that Tacot brought Manson and the girls to her party?

  “Well, I would not put my hand in the fire, saying that Charlie brought them over, but Charlie knew them.”

  I tried to get more out of Calvet, but the rest of the interview was frosty. When I asked her for specific dates, or even years, she grew exasperated, throwing her hands up in disgust. “I do not know years, do not ask me.” Before long, she’d had it with me altogether. “I want you to leave now,” she said. And I did.

  Thinking I could eventually get Tacot to let his guard down, I began to visit him at the Santa Anita Convalescent Center in Temple City. His health was failing, and he had trouble walking. I found him lying in bed naked, a sheet pulled just above his groin; he was bald, with a silver mustache, bony arms, and a gravelly voice. I noticed a fading tattoo on his forearm. On the wall he’d hung a photo of his granddaughter at her senior prom. Later, when he rose to get exercise using a walker, I saw how tall he was: six foot six and rail thin. Although his faculties were waning, he was sharp. He still commanded enough authority to boss around the short orderly who assisted him.

  Tacot shared his room with another patient, and he seemed to resent the enfeebling atmosphere of the place—“too much groaning around here,” he said—so I offered to drive him to his favorite restaurant, Coco’s, a California chain known for its pies. Taking him out to lunch was an elaborate procedure. People from the rest home wheeled him out to my car, lifted him in, and put the wheelchair in the trunk. Once we were at Coco’s, however, I had to lift Tacot into the wheelchair myself—an intimate maneuver for two near strangers. Humiliated, he began to threaten me, albeit ineffectually. “Do you realize who you’re dealing with?” he rasped as I attempted to hoist him out of my passenger seat. “I could have you hurt, or killed!”

  In Coco’s, with food in front of him, he calmed down a bit, and soon we were having a freewheeling if combative conversation about the murders and Hollywood in the sixties. Tacot had lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1950s, when he moved there from Mexico with his wife. He had two daughters, one of whom, Margot, would later confirm a lot of her father’s story: he was a drug dealer, she said, who operated on the fringes of the music and acting world. Although he would often get arrested, she said, “nothing ever stuck. Someone always took care of it for him.”

  Tacot continued to deny ever having known Manson, and he bridled at the insinuation that he had anything to do with the crimes. The Tate murders, he went on, led to “the most fucked-up investigation I’ve ever seen in my life.” He had sued the Los Angeles Times for announcing him as a suspect. Any effort to implicate him, he said, was probably just the LAPD covering up for their bad police work.

  As he grew more comfortable, Tacot made an unexpected revelation: at the time of the murders, he worked for an intelligence agency—he wouldn’t say which—and reported to Hank Fine, a veteran of the army’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS). This had been a World War II–era operation so secret that it wasn’t even acknowledged by the federal government until 1972. Fine, a Polish émigré whose true name was Hersh Matias Warzechahe, was “an assassin who shot people for the government,” Tacot claimed.

  Thinking the old guy was fantasizing, I barely followed up on the revelation. But he, and later Billy Doyle, would often reference Fine, only to refuse to answer any questions about him. When I looked into him, I learned neither man had been lying. Tacot also described his friend Doyle—they were still close—as “a dangerous man. He’d kill you in a fucking minute. Both of us are second-generation intelligence.

  “Don’t write this stuff,” he implored me. “You’ll get killed. These are very dangerous men, they’ll find you and kill you.” (That was a warning I’d hear a lot from various parties over the years.) Tacot reminded me that Bugliosi, when he wrote Helter Skelter, had given pseudonyms to him and his friends, and not just for the sake of politeness. “He was afraid American intelligence would kill him if he exposed us,” Tacot claimed. He added that Bugliosi was “an asshole” who’d never interviewed him or Billy. “Vincent Bugliosi knows to keep his mouth shut. I’d’ve got him killed. I didn’t tell him that—didn’t have to.”

  I tried to get Tacot on the subject of Frykowski, who was, to my mind, the victim with the shadiest cast of characters around him. Frykowski was on drugs al
l the time, Tacot said. Contradicting what he’d told me on the phone, he said that Frykowski had sold MDA, but only to close friends.

  I didn’t take Tacot out again, but I kept calling and visiting him. I found him evasive, or senile, or a little of both. And the more I asked around about him, the more he seemed to vanish into the mist of the sixties. Some people told me, with certainty, that Tacot had been an assassin for the CIA, that he was a “gun freak” and an incredible marksman. (In his 2006 autobiography, Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it, the musician David Crosby identified Tacot as a “soldier of fortune” who taught him how to shoot a gun.) Others said that he was an ex-marine who’d served in Korea and used to show off his impressive knife-throwing skills. I heard that he grew pot in Arizona; that he was a child molester; that he was a coke smuggler; that he was an uncredited screenwriter; and that his intelligence ties were all fictitious. And the strange thing was, none of this was entirely implausible. About the only thing everyone could agree on was that Tacot had been involved in a lot of schemes—that he’d been a drug dealer and, even more, a drug user. But then, as one source put it, “Hey, man, aren’t you?”

  When I looked into Hank Fine, the MIS guy Tacot had said he’d reported to, I learned that, like everything Tacot said, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Fine, who’d been a movie PR man from the 1940s until his death in 1975, had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the counterintelligence agency that oversaw the MIS and evolved into the CIA after World War II. His work often seemed to combine Hollywood and spycraft. Eddie Albert, the star of the sixties sitcom Green Acres, told me that Fine had sent him on undercover missions to Mexico during the war; from his sailboat, the actor had photographed German landing sites and military training grounds. Though I found no proof, the consensus among Fine’s associates was that he’d continued working in espionage operations through the sixties. His only child, Shayla, told me that his public-relations gig was a cover—and, yes, she said, Tacot had reported to her father. What kind of work were they doing? She never knew, except that it was classified.

  Whenever I saw Tacot, I returned to the subject of Fine. “Don’t mention that name anywhere!” he barked, seeming genuinely disturbed. When I asked why not, he said, “None of your fucking business! You’re fucking with the wrong people!”

  Or was I fucking with lowlifes who only wanted to present an illusion of importance? I really couldn’t say. And when I finally was able to talk to Billy Doyle, things didn’t get any clearer.

  Tacot gave me Doyle’s number. “He’s a retired old man just like me,” he said, “and he may not want to talk too much. Don’t push him if he doesn’t.”

  But Doyle liked an audience, just as he had in 1969. I called him often at his home in Toronto, and he talked for hours, sometimes rambling at such length that I would turn off my recorder to save tape. Just when he was trying my patience, he’d say something provocative and I’d have to switch the recorder back on and try to get him to repeat it. He had a short temper, and when he exploded, usually out of nowhere, it could be hard to calm him down. One time, when he didn’t like my line of questioning, he told me, “I was shooting targets at a thousand yards yesterday,” implying that I could soon be one of them. Another time, when I’d tried to get some specifics about Hank Fine, Doyle yelled, “Go in the bathroom, swallow the gun, and pull the trigger!” When he wasn’t angry, he sometimes got a kick out of teasing me: he would make a major revelation and then retract it the next time we spoke. I got the sense that he sometimes trusted me enough to tell the truth, only to realize later that he shouldn’t have done that.

  Doyle believed that Polanski and Frykowski were Polish spies, the former subverting American democracy with his decadent films. He was sure that Polanski had something to do with the killings. (It went both ways: I’d heard that Polanski thought Doyle had something to do with the killings.) He denied that he’d ever been a drug dealer. I read him passages from the police report, in which he’d confessed to, even bragged about, having vast amounts of cocaine. But even after that, he denied it to me. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to carry two pounds of coke on a plane, he said. When I asked him about MDA, the drug that he and Voytek had allegedly bought in large quantities, he said he’d never even heard of it. He relented when I read him some quotes from the transcript—okay, fine, he’d taken it.

  I brought up his and Tacot’s alibi for the night of the murders: they’d been in Jamaica, you’ll recall, filming “a pot movie.” Doyle admitted that the movie was a ruse. He and Tacot had really been doing intelligence work there, he said, as part of some effort to keep Cuba out of Jamaica.

  “Dead white men will pull your tongue out if you tell this shit,” he said. “You have to understand that the government doesn’t want to have any exposure on the Jamaican thing—there never was a Jamaican thing. They don’t want to know about it.” When I asked why, he said, “How the fuck do I know? I’m a Canadian citizen. I went with Charles on an adventure. I thought we were going to do a movie.”

  “But that’s not what you were really there for, and you knew it.”

  “That’s right.”

  It’s an exchange that illustrates how cryptic Doyle could be—and how he reveled in it. I had to ask about the story behind his alleged rape. He said that never happened, either.

  “Charles was spreading the rape story to have fun at my expense,” he explained. “Even my mom and dad asked if I was raped.” And yet he betrayed the same uncertainty he’d shown to the cops so many decades ago, telling me that he’d had a friend take photos of him naked so he could examine his rear end.

  Similarly, he told me that Corrine Calvet was dead wrong when she said that Tacot had brought Manson to her house. “That’s a lie,” he said, noting that Tacot and Calvet had once dated. “She will say anything to grasp at stardom. Men with badges and guns have raised these questions before,” he added, “not police, FBI, sitting in D.C.” That in itself was astonishing to me; I hadn’t heard that the FBI had investigated the murders, but I would find out later that it was true.

  I suggested that I didn’t believe him about Calvet. “You are going to come to a horrible truth,” he said. “Be nervous that you may have discovered the truth and you won’t like it.”

  As spurious and slimy as he could be, I found him believable when he repeated that there was more to the murders than had been reported. Later, when I’d interviewed so many people that some of them had started to compare notes, he said something really impenetrable. “The community has looked at this as a settled thing until you started talking to us.”

  “What community?” I asked. “Who?”

  “The ties that bind.”

  Eventually, Doyle became convinced that I was Roman Polanski’s private investigator. It was never clear to me how much he actually believed this, but it was enough to make me back away from him. I sunk a lot of hours into cultivating sources like Tacot, Doyle, and the crowd surrounding them. They’d been so close to the Tate murders that they were suspects, and yet they’d assumed no role in the mythology surrounding the events of August 9. Bugliosi, like the LAPD, had summarily acquitted them of any involvement in the killings—they were his book’s classic red herring. But I still wasn’t convinced. In their sleazy, run-of-the-mill criminality, their motivations seemed much more viable than a lofty idea like Helter Skelter. The more I talked to them, the more I recognized certain inadequacies in Bugliosi’s story, which had curtailed so many explanations in favor of the most outlandish one.

  A Haircut from Little Joe

  I wanted to keep one eye open to the possibility that Tacot, Doyle, and their associates had some link to the Manson group. After all, in The Family, Ed Sanders had written that it was likely that Mama Cass Elliot knew Manson through her drug connections—it seemed probable that Doyle and Tacot were pivotal there. Plus, Elliot had been friends with Frykowski and Folger; and Elliot’s bandmates were close to Polanski and Tate. In ot
her words, everyone knew everyone else, and nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.

  Maybe I could suss out the connections there, but I was less enthusiastic about these supposed ties with intelligence agencies—except that I was about to get another push in that direction. Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair journalist who’d been friends with Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, had given me a tip: get a haircut from a man named Joe Torrenueva.

  Nicknamed Little Joe, Torrenueva had been eighteen, fresh out of barber school, when Jay Sebring took him under his wing as an apprentice hairstylist. That was in 1961. Sebring, not yet thirty, was already one of the biggest names in fashion, having revolutionized men’s grooming. He was the first to “style” men’s hair rather than simply cut it. He patented a “Sebring method,” through which “your hair is shaped and conditioned to stay natural between visits,” as promotional materials explained, and he introduced a line of hair-care products. (Sebring wasn’t his given name; he was born Thomas Kummer and renamed himself after a racetrack in Florida he liked.)

  Sebring saw his clients in a private room with only one chair. When Torrenueva began working for him, he was charging an unheard-of twenty-five dollars for a haircut—the going rate was a buck fifty. But his customers were happy to pay a premium, and in turn, he catered to their whims. Sebring traveled every few weeks to Las Vegas, where his clients included Frank Sinatra and several casino owners. Torrenueva always went with him, and in those quiet rooms, as the scissors snipped and tufts of hair gathered on the floor, he saw the casual intimacy between Sebring and his clients, who confided in him even when Little Joe was within earshot.

  Now, like his mentor, to whom he referred in hushed, almost reverential tones, Little Joe was a “barber to the stars.” He saw his clients in a private, oak-paneled room in Beverly Hills. His price was a hundred bucks. Dunne had told me that if I bided my time and didn’t press him too hard, Joe might open up about the murders. When I showed up, he seemed aware of my ulterior motive. Slight and soft-spoken, he sighed and paused before nearly every sentence.