Joe was convinced that Sebring’s murder had to do with something more than hippies trying to ignite a race war. Sebring, he told me, had been involved with mob guys from Chicago and Las Vegas. He cut their hair, partied with them in Vegas. Then, after the murders, Little Joe got a call from General Charlie Baron, a casino executive and mobster, who told him, “Don’t worry, Little Joe, you’re going to be all right.” He presumed that the murders had been a drug deal gone wrong, and that Jay and Frykowski had been targeted.
That was all I got. I needed more information. I’d have to get another haircut.
I let a month go by, so I really needed one, and soon enough I settled into Little Joe’s leather chair again.
Charlie Baron’s call haunted him to this day. It came “right after” the murders, Torrenueva said, before anyone had any notion of who’d committed them. “You didn’t do anything to anybody,” he said Baron told him. “Nobody’s going to do anything to you.” The implication was that Baron and his associates were well aware of who committed the crimes, and why.
But then Joe was done snipping. So I went back for a third haircut.
“Charlie Baron was very close to Jay,” Joe told me in our third conversation. He added: “Charlie killed people.” When Baron was a young man during Prohibition in Chicago, he “shot two guys who were going to kill him for fixing a fight.” He later went to Havana to run casinos for Meyer Lansky, another mob figure. When he returned to the United States, he was Lansky’s eyes and ears at the new Sands Casino in Vegas.
Baron was hardly an outlier in Sebring’s shop, which was a “nest of mobsters and criminals,” Torrenueva said. But it was Baron who scared Little Joe the most, even before his phone call. Despite Baron’s known mob ties, he had some type of security-intelligence clearance with the federal government. He always packed a gun, and he was close with a cabal of right-wing military intelligence and Hollywood figures, many of whom had been Sebring’s clients. Little Joe alleged that they “did terrible things to black people,” and that “it was Charlie who did the worst things.”
I couldn’t get him to elaborate on that. But I did ask him why, if he was following the Tate murder investigation and knew that the police had no leads, he didn’t tell the cops about his call from Baron. Because he was too close to higher-ups in law enforcement and intelligence, Joe said.
He added yet another intriguing name to the list of Baron’s associates: General Curtis E. LeMay, a legendary fighter pilot who’d implemented the carpet bombing of Japan during World War II. A notorious hawk, LeMay had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d tried to organize a coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he wanted to force the military to flout the president’s orders and bomb the Soviet missile bases they’d found in Cuba.
It was a lot of names to process, and the implications were dizzying. I had one question that Torrenueva was especially reluctant to answer. Why would Sebring—at the time, arguably the best-known men’s hairstylist in the world—involve himself in crime? He had so much to lose, and clearly he was thriving.
But he hadn’t been, Torrenueva was pained to say. “The deals kept falling through. He was a bad businessman.”
“Do you think he sold drugs?” I asked, aware that Frykowski had possibly been doing the same.
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
Sebring’s problems had multiplied throughout the sixties. He’d clash with other barbers who wanted to unionize. In 1963, a group of his stylists had defected, en masse, to start their own business. At other times, he’d had to hire bodyguards because some guys had come into the shop and “roughed up” several employees, Torrenueva said, for reasons that were never shared with him. Sebring carried a gun, and “he shot someone once who came to his house and was giving his father a rough time at the door.”
The bottom line: Sebring, like Frykowski, had a lot more going on at the time of his murder than had ever been revealed. Whatever it was, Little Joe thought it had more to do with his death than any hippie/race-war motive did. Which meant that, in addition to drug dealers and Hollywood’s seedier hangers-on, I had to account for mobsters, ex-military figures, and intelligence agents in my reporting. I was already worried about wandering into the weeds—now I risked veering off the map entirely.
Coda: Down the Rabbit Hole
I was writing a story about Charles Manson that had, so far, very little of Manson in it. It was more about the way that events, in all their messy reality, boiled down to canonical fact; the way that a narrative becomes the narrative.
I had to decide if stories like Little Joe’s, Charlie Tacot’s, and Billy Doyle’s were worth looking into, and, as a responsible journalist, if I was justified in dragging my magazine into it. It definitely meant asking for an extension from Premiere and risking, in the final publication, looking like a fool. No matter how you viewed them, these were conspiracy theories. But I was riveted by the stuff I’d turned up that contravened the Manson story as we knew it. For better or worse, it felt like there was something covered up all these years, ripe for exposure. Maybe with the passage of time, people who knew about these things might divulge them at last.
I was starting to figure out that Bugliosi had sifted so many stories out of Helter Skelter—to make his narrative about the conviction of the mad hippie guru and his zombielike followers easier and cleaner. If that were merely an editorial choice, so be it. But if he’d changed things to protect people, or to shore up holes in the investigation, then I felt justified in digging deeper. It seemed impossible that a story like Little Joe’s, heavy with intelligence agencies and organized crime, could coexist alongside the Helter Skelter motive. I knew that, in the late sixties, intelligence agencies regarded dissident youth movements as the greatest threat to the nation’s security, and they’d marshaled their efforts accordingly. Insofar as hippies, musicians, and movie stars played a role in those movements, I could see how the broadest outline of Little Joe’s story could have some truth to it. But even a hardened national-security reporter would have trouble verifying his claims, and that I was not.
These were the concerns I faced by the summer of 1999. The obvious answer would be: keep pushing. The only problem was, my deadline was fast approaching. I owed Premiere five thousand words, and I’d written zero.
3
The Golden Penetrators
Instilling Fear
Maybe I was naive to think I could discover what was going on at the Tate house in the months before the murders. People had been trying to untangle that rats’ nest of rumors for thirty years, and not with a magazine deadline looming in front of them. Now I’d determined to my satisfaction that Frykowski and Polanski had a lot to hide, and that their connections to the drug trade could’ve put them plausibly in Manson’s orbit. Beyond that, my sense of Manson’s link to Hollywood was still too tenuous for my liking. And if I felt that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter motive was only a high-profile contrivance, I needed to find the bald truth it concealed. Hoping for a better angle, I focused on one figure who was among the most perplexing in the case: Terry Melcher.
Without Melcher, there would have been no murders at 10050 Cielo Drive. He was the clearest link between Manson and the Hollywood elite. A music-industry bigwig, he’d promised Manson a record deal only to renege on it. The official story was that Manson, reeling from the rejection, wanted to “instill fear” in Melcher—so he chose Melcher’s old house on Cielo Drive as the site for the first night of murders. He knew that Melcher didn’t live there anymore. He just wanted to give the guy a good scare.
This was a vital point in the case. According to Bugliosi, Manson never went to the house the night of the murders—he just sent his followers there and told them to kill anyone they found. To convict Manson of criminal conspiracy, then, and get him a death sentence, Bugliosi had to establish a compelling, premeditated reason that Manson had picked the Cielo Drive home.
Terry Melcher was that reason.
Melcher testified that he’d met Manson exactly three times, the last of which was around May 20, 1969, more than two months before the murders. After Manson’s arrest, Melcher became so frightened of the Family that Bugliosi had to give him a tranquilizer to relax him before he testified. “Ten, fifteen years after the murders I’d speak to him and he was still convinced that the Manson Family was after him that night,” Bugliosi had told me.
If Manson had wanted to kill Melcher, he could have. He had Melcher’s new address in Malibu. Gregg Jakobson, a musician and a friend of the Beach Boys, had testified at the trial that Manson called him before the murders, asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass.”
“Yes, why?” Jakobson answered.
“Well, he doesn’t anymore,” Manson said. The Family had “creepy-crawled” Melcher’s Malibu home—that’s what they called it when they dressed up in black and sneaked around rich people’s places—and stolen the spyglass. When Melcher himself testified, he confirmed that he’d noticed it missing around “late July or early August.” Candice Bergen, his girlfriend, had noted the disappearance, too.
Over the years, Manson researchers have generally agreed that Melcher was stretching the truth. Karina Longworth, whose podcast You Must Remember This devoted a whole season to Manson, said in one episode that Melcher “was vague about the details of his meetings with Manson, and probably shaved a couple of visits to the ranch off the official record.”
It would be one thing to fudge the numbers a bit—it’s easy to see why someone would want to understate their relationship with Charles Manson. But I became convinced that this was graver than that. I found proof that Melcher was much closer to Manson, Tex Watson, and the girls than he’d suggested. A year before the murders, he’d even lived with a member of the Family at the house on Cielo Drive.
There was a strong likelihood that Melcher knew, immediately after the crimes, that Manson was involved—but he never told the police. I found evidence that Melcher lied on the stand, under oath. And Bugliosi definitely knew about it. Maybe he’d even put him up to it, suborning witness perjury.
Just like the omissions about Polanski’s sex tape and Frykowski’s episode with Billy Doyle, this raised questions about Bugliosi’s motives. Did he change the story to protect Melcher, a powerful record producer and the only child of one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars? Had he streamlined certain elements for the jury’s sake, in the interest of getting an easy conviction? Or was this part of a broader pattern of deception, of bending the facts to support a narrative that was otherwise too shaky to stand? Helter Skelter (the motive) and Helter Skelter (the book) seemed more illusory by the day.
Chasing the Melcher angle further imperiled any chance of hitting my deadline. It soured my relationship with Bugliosi; it brought on the first of many lawsuit threats; and it turned my fascination with the case into a full-blown obsession. But it convinced me more than anything that I was onto something—that the full story behind the Manson murders had never been properly told.
“I Live with 17 Girls”
The story of Manson and Melcher starts with Dennis Wilson. By the summer of 1968, Wilson, then twenty-three, had reached an impasse. He’d become world famous as the drummer for the Beach Boys, helmed by his brother Brian; now the band was in decline, edged out by more subversive acts. He and his wife, Carole, had recently divorced for the second time. She wrote in court filings that he had a violent temper, inflicting “severe bodily injury” on her during his “rampages.”
The couple had two young children, but Dennis decided to rusticate as a bachelor. He moved into a lavish, Spanish-style mansion in Pacific Palisades, once a hunting lodge owned by the humorist Will Rogers. The home boasted thirty-one rooms and a swimming pool in the shape of California. He redecorated in the spirit of the times—zebra-print carpet, abundant bunk beds—and hosted decadent parties, hoping to have as much sex as possible.
One day, Wilson was driving his custom red Ferrari down the Pacific Coast Highway when two hitchhikers, the Family’s Ella Jo Bailey and Patricia Krenwinkel, caught his eye. He gave them a quick lift. When he saw them again soon afterward, he picked them up a second time, taking them back to his place for “milk and cookies.” History hasn’t recorded what kind of cookies they enjoyed, or whether those cookies were in fact sex, but whatever the case, the girls told Manson about the encounter. They weren’t aware of Wilson’s clout in the music industry—but Manson was, and he insisted on going back to the house with them.
After a late recording session, Wilson returned to his estate to find the Family’s big black bus parked outside. His living room was populated with topless girls. Whatever alarm he felt was eased when their short, intense, unwashed leader, Manson, sunk to his knees and kissed Wilson’s feet.
This night ushered in a summer of ceaseless partying for Wilson. Manson and the Family set up shop in his home, and soon Manson recruited one of the group’s deadliest members, Tex Watson, who picked him up hitchhiking. The Family spent their days smoking dope and listening to Charlie strum the guitar. The girls made the meals, did the laundry, and slept with the men on command. Manson prescribed sex seven times a day: before and after all three meals and once in the middle of the night. “It was as if we were kings, just because we were men,” Watson later wrote. Soon Wilson was bragging so much that he landed a headline in Record Mirror: “I Live with 17 Girls.”
Talking to Britain’s Rave magazine, Wilson offered disjointed remarks about his new friend, whom he called “the Wizard.” “I was only frightened as a child because I didn’t understand the fear,” he said. “Sometimes ‘the Wizard’ frightens me. The Wizard is Charles Manson, who is a friend of mine who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records,” the Beach Boys’ label.
This last bit excited Manson, who was desperate to leverage his connection with Wilson into a music career. The two cowrote a song, “Cease to Exist,” whose lyrics claimed that “submission is a gift.” (Later that year, the Beach Boys recorded it as a B side, changing the title, finessing the lyrics, and dropping Manson’s songwriting credit—a snub that fueled his anger toward the establishment.) Manson fraternized with some of the biggest names in music. Neil Young remembered meeting him and the girls at Wilson’s place. “A lot of pretty well-known musicians around L.A. knew Manson,” Young later said, “though they’d probably deny it now.”
Among these was Terry Melcher. He and Wilson had pledged allegiance to the “Golden Penetrators,” a horny triumvirate they’d formed with their friend Gregg Jakobson. The Penetrators, who’d painted a car gold to celebrate themselves, aimed to sleep with as many women as they could. Wilson’s ex-wife referred to them as “roving cocksmen.” Obviously, then, Melcher would want to rove over to Wilson’s house—it was full of promiscuous young women. Sometime in that summer of ’68, at one of Wilson’s marathon parties, he crossed paths with Manson for the first time. After another such party, Melcher rode back to Cielo Drive with Wilson, and Manson came along in the back seat. As Melcher later testified, Manson got a good look at the house from the driveway.
When the end of summer came, things went south with Wilson, who’d finally grown tired of footing the bill for the endless party: upward of $100,000 in food, clothes, and car repairs, plus gonorrhea treatments. According to Bugliosi, Wilson was too frightened of Manson to throw him out. Instead, he simply up and left in the middle of the night, leaving the messy business of eviction to his landlord.
But it must’ve been more complicated than that. Wilson gave three interviews in which he raved about Manson and the girls—and all of those interviews date to the winter and summer of 1969, nearly a year after he and the Family had supposedly parted ways. Why would Wilson brag about his connections to a man he’d just schemed to escape?
The only sure fact is that Manson and his group decamped to the Spahn Ranch in late August 1968. Wilson moved
into a Malibu beach house with Gregg Jakobson, who’d also recently split from his marriage.
Having drifted from Wilson—his best shot at a record deal—Manson knew he had to hitch his wagon to Terry Melcher’s star. As his chances at fame dwindled, his mood darkened. He became obsessed with the Beatles’ White Album, released in late November 1968, and started to preach about the prophecies of a race war embedded in its lyrics. Things only got worse in the winter of ’69, when he arranged for Melcher to come out and hear his music. Manson prepared meticulously for the prospective meeting, but Melcher stood him up.
On March 23, a desperate Manson went searching for Melcher, thinking he’d goad the producer into a record deal. He found his way back to the house at Cielo Drive, having remembered that Melcher lived there. Instead, Sharon Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami, intercepted him. Hatami had never heard of a Terry Melcher. He told Manson to go to the guesthouse and ask the owner of the property, Rudolph Altobelli, who explained curtly that Melcher no longer lived there and hadn’t left a forwarding address.
Manson prevailed on Gregg Jakobson—still a friend, and still a fan of the girls—to book another session with Melcher. This time, it worked. That May, Melcher made the winding drive to the Spahn Ranch and auditioned Manson in person, visiting twice over four days.
Manson had rounded out a dozen or so of his best songs with backup singing from the girls. Performing in a gully in the woods, the girls sprawled on the ground and gazed up at their leader, who sat astride a rock with his guitar. “I wasn’t too impressed by the songs,” Melcher would later testify. “I was impressed by the whole scene… by Charlie’s strength, and his obvious leadership.” As a courtesy, the producer complimented Manson, saying that one or two of his songs were “nice.” He had no intention of offering a recording contract, but he saw how the Family’s rustic, cultish lifestyle would lend itself to a TV documentary. Melcher suggested that his friend Mike Deasy, whose van was outfitted to make field recordings, could come out to the ranch and capture another performance.
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 9