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

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

  Before Melcher could get out of there, a foreman at the ranch came stumbling out of a pickup truck. Drunk and belligerent, he was dressed like a cowboy, fingering a holstered gun—the same one that would later be used at the Tate murders. Manson stepped up to him and shouted, “Don’t draw on me, motherfucker!” socking him in the gut, taking his gun, and continuing to pummel him.

  It spooked Melcher. Here was a peace-and-love cult with naked girls roaming the old Western sets, and yet the constant threat of violence loomed over the place. It needed to be documented in all its oddity. A few days later, Melcher returned with Deasy and Jakobson, and the Family repeated their audition. But what had seemed spontaneous now felt rehearsed. Deasy returned a few more times, until he had a frightening LSD trip with Manson and vowed never to go back.

  It was all getting too toxic. Melcher conveyed his rejection through Jakobson, and that was the end of that. Manson’s last brush with greatness was gone, and he became full-on apocalyptic. Melcher never went back to the ranch or saw anyone from the Family again. Or so he said under oath, anyway.

  After the murders, as Hollywood panicked and the LAPD chased down leads, the Golden Penetrators realized that they hadn’t quite washed their hands of Manson. This is where their story began to feel unbelievable to me. Manson wasn’t charged with murder until late November. But Wilson, Jakobson, and Melcher had good cause to suspect him back in August, right after the killings. By then, they were frightened of Manson, though Helter Skelter does little to indicate their terror. When I saw how much they knew—and how quiet they’d kept, when their information would’ve helped police solve the case—I realized just how flimsy the Helter Skelter motive was. Its unforgettable grandiosity may have hidden a more prosaic truth: that a few rich guys had gotten in over their heads with an unstable ex-con.

  First, Wilson and Jakobson knew that Manson had shot a black man named Bernard Crowe about five weeks before the Tate murders. And Jakobson, who testified that he’d talked to Manson “upward of a hundred times,” was well acquainted with his friend’s bizarre race-war predictions. Manson warned him that “whiteys” in the affluent homes of Bel Air would be “cut up and dismembered,” and that the murderers would smear the victims’ blood on the walls, “scatter [their] limbs, and hang them from the ceiling.” And yet, when a group of affluent whites really was cut up, and Sharon Tate was hanged from the ceiling of her home in Bel Air, Jakobson apparently didn’t make the connection.

  Nor did it occur to him in mid-August, when he witnessed Manson’s violence firsthand. Manson broke into Jakobson’s home in the middle of the night, shook him awake, and produced a bullet. “Tell Dennis there are more where this came from,” he said. On the witness stand, Jakobson compared Manson that night to a caged bobcat: “The electricity was almost pouring out of him. His hair was on end. His eyes were wild.”

  A few days earlier, Manson had shown up at Wilson’s house, too, demanding fifteen hundred dollars. When Wilson refused to give him the money, Manson threatened him: “Don’t be surprised if you never see your kid again.”

  After Manson’s arrest, Wilson fell into a deep depression, spurring his problems with drugs and alcohol. Later, he told the Beach Boys’ authorized biographer, David Leaf, “I know why Charles Manson did what he did. Someday I’ll tell the world. I’ll write a book and explain why he did it.” He never got the chance. In 1983, three weeks after his thirty-ninth birthday, an acutely drunk Wilson dove from the deck of his boat into the chilly waters of Marina del Rey and accidentally drowned. Within days, a rock journalist wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about a jarring exchange he’d had with Wilson. “Me and Charlie, we founded the Family,” Dennis had said, apropos of nothing.

  The Golden Penetrators, then, had an abundance of reasons to accuse Manson of the Tate–LaBianca murders—immediately. They believed he’d shot someone dead. He’d threatened two of them with violence. They knew he stockpiled guns and knives at the ranch. And the slaughter at Melcher’s old house was exactly the kind he’d predicted, down to the most chilling detail. Shouldn’t they have connected the dots? Was it possible that there was a conspiracy of silence among them?

  “Asshole Buddies”

  Rudi Altobelli, the owner of the house on Cielo Drive—Tate and Polanski’s landlord, and Terry Melcher’s before that—became one of my best sources. It was thanks to him that I started looking into Melcher’s story in the first place.

  When I met up with Altobelli in the spring of 1999, he’d never publicly spoken about the murders that had occurred at his house, except in trial testimony. I wasn’t sure why he’d agreed to talk now, and to me, of all people; I’d heard it would be a waste of time even to bother asking. But Altobelli had always been unpredictable. One of the first openly gay men in Hollywood, he’d made a living as a manager, his clients including Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. In November 1969—three months after the murders, before the killers had been found—he shocked the community by filing a lawsuit against Polanski and Sharon Tate’s father to recover the damages his property had sustained during the murders. It was an appallingly callous response: to seek money from a victim’s family because she’d bled on Altobelli’s carpet as she lay dying.

  I knew, then, that I’d have to tread carefully with Altobelli. True to old Hollywood form, he suggested we meet at Musso and Frank Grill, a legendary outpost that looked right out of a film noir. Many of its red-jacketed waiters seemed so old that they could’ve been working there when it opened in 1919. One of them led me through the wood-paneled room past red banquettes to Altobelli, at a corner table, already treating himself to the first in a succession of Gibsons (with extra onions). Compact and nattily dressed, he was a few weeks shy of his seventieth birthday, but he had no lines on his face and no gray in his hair. Admittedly vain, he’d begin all our meetings by asking “How do I look?”—it came before hello. His glasses were always tinted: on some days blue, on others pink, orange, or light purple.

  After dinner that night, he kept calling to chat, and I took him out for years to come. The restaurants were always fancy; the bills were always mine. And I always felt, through hundreds of hours of conversation, that I wasn’t getting the whole story. His go-to defense was unchanging: “I may not tell you everything, but I have never lied to you.” (Robert Towne, who wrote the screenplay for Chinatown, called Altobelli “the most honest man in Hollywood”—a low bar to clear, maybe, but I’d take what I could get.) If I printed anything without his permission, he said, “I’ll find ya and cut your balls off and feed ’em to you.” Fortunately, he later decided it was all on the record.

  Altobelli had bought the Cielo house in 1963. In May 1966, he rented to Terry Melcher, who was known at the time for having produced the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Altobelli liked to befriend his tenants—he’d live in the guesthouse and rent out the main property—and soon the two became what he called “asshole buddies.” (An affectionate term, he assured me.)

  Not only was Altobelli one of the few people who’d befriended both Melcher and Tate—he was one of the few who’d seen Manson on the property before the murders. He provided critical testimony for the state, identifying Manson as the man who’d barged into his guesthouse looking for Terry Melcher on March 23, 1969. His ID was reliable; he’d already met Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house the summer before. He’d sat on Dennis’s bed atop a “dirty satin sheet with cum spots on it,” Rudi told me, “while Manson sat on the floor” playing music. “I didn’t like the vibe from him,” Rudi added. “I even told Terry to keep those people off the property.”

  It sounded like Altobelli, and others in his circle, had suspected Manson from the start. And that was true, Altobelli said. When he heard about the murders, he thought of Manson right away. Altobelli was in Rome at the time, and his memories troubled him enough that within hours of the murders, before he’d even boarded a flight home, he called his lawyer, Barry Hirsch, who told him he should mind his own busi
ness.

  Altobelli returned to Los Angeles hoping to move back into his house right away. The LAPD forbade him. Instead, he crashed with Melcher and Candice Bergen at their place in Malibu. That house belonged to Doris Day, Melcher’s mother, but she seldom used it. During Altobelli’s stay, Gregg Jakobson stopped by and invited him for a walk on the beach. As they strolled along the surf, past beautiful oceanfront homes fortified in recent weeks with fences, guard dogs, and security systems, Jakobson told him “about the musician that Manson was supposed to have killed.”

  Altobelli didn’t remember the musician’s name. I wondered if he was thinking of Gary Hinman, a musician who’d been killed by the Family thirteen days before the Tate–LaBianca murders. If Jakobson knew about that murder, he would’ve almost certainly connected the Tate–LaBianca deaths to Manson, too.

  That day on the beach, Jakobson reached into his pocket and pulled out a bullet. “He said, ‘This one’s for Terry.’ It was from Manson.”

  This strained credulity. As mentioned above, during the trial, Jakobson had said that after the murders, Manson broke into his house, gave him a bullet, and told him to show it to Dennis Wilson. The message: “There are more where this came from.” Maybe Altobelli was getting all of it mixed up? But he was insistent. “No, he said it was for Terry!”

  Then why didn’t he tell Terry about it?

  “Because when I’m told to mind my own business by my attorney, I mind my own business. In fact, I should be minding my own business now and shut up.”

  How could Altobelli have spent so much time with Melcher, doing nothing but discussing the tragedy and speculating on possible culprits, without sharing this crucial information—without telling his friend that there was a bullet with his name on it? He knew it would’ve helped solve the case. Altobelli did say that he called his attorney one more time to fill him in. He was told, again, to mind his own business. (Hirsch declined to comment.)

  If Altobelli was telling the truth, then all four of these men—him, Melcher, Wilson, and Jakobson, the main links between Manson, Hollywood, and the house on Cielo Drive—had to know that Manson was behind the murders. And yet all they wanted to do was forget about it. Three weeks after the crimes, Altobelli moved back into the house on Cielo Drive, with Melcher as his new roommate—an arrangement that’s never been reported before.

  Altobelli returned out of a desire to reclaim his home from the evil that had infested it. He hoped to restore some order to the place. By then it had become a morbid mecca for Hollywood’s elite, who came by wanting a glimpse at the scene of the crimes. Even Elvis Presley came to pay his respects. Altobelli turned most of these visitors away—but he welcomed Melcher, who’d expressed a bizarre yearning to stay in his old place again. With Altobelli’s blessing, Melcher lived there for a month, maybe longer. He hardly left the property.

  “He probably figured it was safe there,” Altobelli said. “That lightning wouldn’t strike twice.” Melcher came alone—he seemed to have split up with Bergen. Settling back into the house, he became morose, as Altobelli remembered, wandering around in a daze and drinking heavily. Another friend, the screenwriter Charles Eastman, who lived several doors down on Cielo Drive, said that Melcher showed up at his place wearing Voytek Frykowski’s clothing. “I said, This is too gruesome, this is ugly, I don’t like this.”

  Melcher was living out his attachment to the place in macabre ways. “He felt, as everybody did, that the house was sacred,” Eastman said. He loved it so much that he’d even tried to talk Altobelli into selling it to him. Which made me wonder: Why had he and Bergen ever moved out? Bugliosi hinted in Helter Skelter that their departure was abrupt, but he never said why.

  They left in the middle of the night, with no warning and four months left on the lease, Altobelli told me. “Terry blamed it on Ruth [Simmons], their housekeeper… He said they were frightened of her. That she was domineering and a drunk. That it was the only way they knew to get rid of her.”

  Melcher and Bergen, both privileged children of Hollywood royalty, were so frightened of a housekeeper that they’d sooner move out of a house they loved than fire her? A power couple, scared of the maid.

  Eastman was convinced that something else was to blame: Melcher “knew that Manson was after him.” Altobelli and Melcher were always being pestered by strange visitors, girls with funny names, he said. “My feeling was that Rudi and Terry both had reason to be uncomfortable about Manson and his people.” Eastman had even written about it in his journal in March 1969. He read the entry to me:

  Rudi criticizes Terry for leaving behind so many cats when he moved. When I ask him why Terry moved, he tells me it was money, that Terry became peeved at the rent… remembering Terry’s love of the house and how many times, according to Rudi, that Terry offered to buy the house from him, it seems odd to me that he moved away so suddenly, so abruptly.

  None of this had ever come out before. Other friends of Melcher agreed that he and Bergen had “snuck out in the middle of the night” because of threats from the Family. “Melcher was afraid of them,” one source told me. “They said, ‘If you don’t produce our album, we’ll kill you.’” After the murders, Melcher seemed “really guilty.” He “probably felt he should have said to [the new tenants, Tate and Polanski]: Don’t rent the house, there are these people who have been harassing me there.”

  Altobelli gave me the number for Carole Wilson, Dennis Wilson’s ex-wife. It was after their second separation that Dennis had taken up with Manson and the girls, much to Carole’s chagrin. The two shared custody of their two kids. Later, I would hear from a reliable source that Carole had had photos taken at Dennis’s house, capturing him cavorting naked around the pool with women from the Family. She used them to pressure Dennis, getting him to agree to her terms in the divorce.

  Carole kept careful tabs on her ex’s goings-on. “She kept a diary from the day Dennis first met Tex Watson,” Altobelli told me. “It has everything in it, everything on Terry—she hates him.” Meanwhile, she pursued a romance with Jay Sebring, which I’d never seen reported before. It felt significant, in light of the fact that her ex-husband had been intertwined with Sebring’s killers.

  It was just before the weekend when I reached Wilson. I told her that I was exploring the possibility that her former husband and his friends had been more involved with the Manson Family than previously reported, and I wondered if Manson’s reach in Hollywood was further than had been known. “Yes, it sure was,” she replied. She asked that I call her back on Monday—we could meet for coffee.

  When Monday came, though, she’d changed her mind. “I thought long and hard over the weekend,” she said, “and I can’t talk to you.” There were a lot of people involved, she explained—too many. “It’s a scary thing,” she said, “and anyone who knows anything will never talk.”

  I couldn’t draw her out on that. She suggested that I talk to Melcher and Jakobson, but she wouldn’t put me in touch.

  Meanwhile, I’d started to hear more sordid stuff about Melcher’s affiliation with the Family. Bob April, a retired carpenter who’d been a fringe member of the Family, told me with confidence that Manson “would supply girls” for “executive parties” that Melcher threw, giving well-heeled business types unfettered access to Manson’s girls. But what would Manson get in return?

  “That’s why everyone got killed,” April said. “He didn’t get what he wanted.” Melcher had promised Manson a record deal “on Day Labels,” his mother’s imprint. But Doris Day took one look at Manson “and laughed at him and said, ‘You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to produce a fucking record for you.’ Said it to Charlie’s face.” Melcher and Manson “knew each other very well,” April said. “I’ve tried to get this out for years.”

  The Paper Trail Begins

  I was doing shoe-leather reporting on a thirty-year-old story. The memories I heard were rife with the omissions, contradictions, and embroidery that come with the passage of time. I would
interview people and then rush to the library to fact-check, as best I could, what they’d told me—in books about the case, histories of Los Angeles, biographies of organized crime figures, old news clippings, and more. But if I wanted to report this story with veracity, I needed contemporaneous, documentary evidence: the paperwork. When sources like Charles Eastman would mention having journals, I would beg them to find them, often calling back repeatedly until they did. But first and foremost, I wanted police reports and trial transcripts. The case had been the longest and costliest in California history, and Bugliosi said that the transcript numbered more than a million pages. Where was that? Could I have access to it?

  The LAPD told me they’d destroyed all their investigative reports; they’d retained some files, but they weren’t about to release them to me. How could they have trashed their records of the most infamous case in the history of the city? I didn’t believe it. I asked them to put it in writing, and they did, stating in an official letter that “a thorough and proper search” produced “no records”; all the evidence had been “destroyed.”

  I turned to unofficial channels. I’d heard about a “researcher” named Bill Nelson, an older man who was obsessed with the murders. He’d self-published several books about the case and had a lot of original police reports. Nelson was purportedly a pretty strange guy: he stalked former members of the Family and relatives of the victims, trying to befriend them so he could interview them. He’d become close to Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, even traveling with her to Paris to visit Roman Polanski, but they’d had some falling-out before her death in 1992.