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The following article appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in June 1970.
An interview with Manson also appeared in the same issue.
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YEAR OF THE FORK,
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
by David Felton and David Dalton June 1970
"But the decadence of history is looking for a pawn
To a nightmare of knowledge he opens up the gate
A blinding revelation is served upon his plate
That beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate"
-PHIL OCHS, "Crucifixion"
Three young girls dance down the hallway of the Superior Court
Building in Los Angeles, holding hands and singing on of Charlie's
songs. They might be on their way to a birthday party in their short,
crisp cotton dresses, but actually they are attending a preliminary
hearing to a murder trial.
A middle-aged lady in Bel Air wants to "mother" Charlie, and
two little girls send a letter to him in jail: "At first we thought
you were guilty. But then we read in the papers about these kids who
were stabbed to death in the same way as the Sharon Tate murders. We
knew you hadn't done it because you were in jail at the time. We knew
you hadn't done it anyway when we saw your face in the newspaper
...Love,...."
Charlie gets letters from little girls every day. They come from
New Hampshire, Minnesota, Los Angeles. A convicted bank robber who
met Charlie in jail writes "The Gospel According to Pawnee Fred, the
Thief on the Other Cross," in which he asks, "Is Manson Son of Man?"
Thirty miles northwest of the courthouse, seven miles due north
of Leonard Nimoy's Pet Pad in Chatsworth (supplies, fish, domestics,
exotics), a circle of rustic women at the Spahn Movie Ranch weave
their own hair into an elaborate rainbow vest for Charlie. Most of
them are early members of Charlie's three-year-old family. There's
Lynne Fromme -they call her Squeaky- Sandra Good, Gypsy, Brenda,
Sue, Cappy, Jeany.
"We've been working on this vest for two years," says Sandra,
"adding things, sewing on patches. It's for Charlie to wear in
court." And Squeaky adds, "Wouldn't it be beautiful to have a
photograph of Charlie wearing it? And all of us standing around
close to him, hugging him like we used to?"
Wouldn't it be beautiful to have the others standing around, too,
the rest of the family, the others imprisoned? Tex Watson and Patti
Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian and, oh yeah, the snitch, Sadie Glutz.
Her real name is Susan Atkins, but the family calls her Sadie Glutz,
because that's what Charlie named her.
Meanwhile, Charlie sits blissfully in his cell at the Los Angeles
County Jail, composing songs, converting fellow inmates to his gospel
of love and Christian submission, and occasionally entertaining a
disturbing thought: Why haven't they gotten in touch? A simple phone
call would do it. Surely they've received the telegrams, the letters.
Surely they realize that he knows, he understands their glorious
revelation; he understands the whole fucking double album.
"Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives"
-GEORGE HARRISON, "Piggies"
* * * * * * * *
Ten blocks from the new county jail stands the old County Hall
of Justice, a grotesque, brown brick fortress that for decades has
guarded the Los Angeles Civic Center from aesthetic inroads. The
entire sixth floor belongs to the district attorney and his staff,
a member of which, now alone on his lunch hour, unlocks a file cabinet
and withdraws several neatly bound, family-type photo albums. Slowly
he turns each page, studies each snapshot, each personality:
* Sharon Tate, considered one of Hollywood's prettier, more
popular, promising young stars; wife of genius film sorcerer Roman
Polanski. After her biggest film, Valley of the Dolls, she retreated
to private life to enjoy her first pregnancy. The photographs show
her in her eighth month.
* Wojiciech Frykowski, Polanski's boyhood pal who came to
Hollywood with hopes of directing films himself. His luck at this
was dismal, and even Polanski later admitted he had little talent.
Instead, he began directing home movies inside his head, investing
heavily in many forms of exotic dope.
* Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folgers Coffee millions, an
attractive Radcliffe girl considered by neighbors to be the most
charming of Polanski's house guests. She met Frykowski in New York
and had become his lover.
* Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old from the Los Angeles suburb
of El Monte, a friend of Polanski's caretaker, unknown to the others,
a nobody like the rest of us. Had fortune been on his side, he would
have so remained.
* Leno LaBianca, owner of a grocery-store chain, and his wife
Rosemary, an ordinary couple of the upper middle class, fond of such
quiet pleasures as boating, water-skiing and watching late-night
television in their pajamas. They knew nothing of Sharon Tate and
her friends, living miles away in different neighborhoods and
different worlds.
* Gary Hinman, music teacher, bagpipe player and one-time friend
of Charlie Manson's. He once, in fact, gave the Manson family his
Toyota, although the circumstances surrounding that gift have since
come into question.
The snaphots are homey little numbers, color polaroids taken by
staff photographers from the county coroner's office and the Los
Angeles Police Department. They show all the wounds, the nakedness,
the blood. Sometimes the exposure is a little off, but the relevant
details are there - shots of the rooms, the bullet holes, the blood
on the furniture and floors, the bizarre blood writing on the walls,
words like RISE and HELTER SKELTER and PIGGIES.
* * * * * * * *
Los Angeles is the third largest city in America, according to
population, but easily the largest, according to raw real estate.
It is bordered by the Pacific Ocean to the south and southwest, by
Ventura County to the west, by the San Gabriel Mountains and fireprone
Angeles National Forest to the north and by scores of cruddy,
smoggy little towns and cities to the east. Charles Manson knew his
city well. Like many Los Angeles residents, he learned to drive long
distances regularly without giving a second thought. During his two
years as a free man in Southern California, he frequently "made the
rounds," visiting friends, keeping business appointments, preaching
to small groups, giving and taking material possessions.
Starting at Spahn Movie Ranch in the extreme northwest corner of
Los Angeles, drive two miles east on Santa Susana Pass Road to Topanga
Canyon itself. It was here that Manson and his family first lived
after arriving from Haight-Ashbury in late 1967, and it was here that
Manson first met Gary Hinman. Hinman's house is a little further down
the road, almost where Topanga Canyon meets the beach at Pacific Coast
Highway.
You can't see into the house now, of course, because the cops
boarded it up last July after they found Hinman's body perforated with
stab wounds. They say he was tortured for forty-eight hours. On a
nearby wall they found the words POLITICAL PIGGIES and a neat little
cat's-paw print in blood. Bobby Beausoleil, a guitarist and member of
Manson's family, has already been sentenced to death, and Manson and
Susan Atkins are awaiting trial in the matter.
After driving onto Pacific Coast Highway, take a left, and after
two miles, take another left. Now you're on Sunset Boulevard, winding
through wealthy Pacific Palisades where, for a short time in early
1968, the Manson family lived with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. Wilson
moved shortly after Manson allegedly threatened him with a bullet.
Keep driving east on Sunset for another eight or ten miles past
Brentwood Heights, past Mandeville Canyon, over the San Diego Freeway,
past UCLA and Bel Air and Beverly Glen. And when you reach the center
of Beverly Hills, turn left on Canon and head north into Benedict
Canyon. Now here you may need a more detailed map because the streets
get pretty tricky with all the turns and dead ends. But up in
Benedict Canyon there's this little dirt road, Cielo Drive, which
dead ends at the old, rambling, hillside house where producer Terry
Melcher, Doris Day's son, used to live. Manson paid several business
calls on him there, but the business was never completed before
Melcher moved out early last summer.
Neighbors hardly had had a chance to meet the new residents when
on the bright Saturday morning of last August 9th, Mrs. Winifred
Chapman, a maid, ran screaming from the house, across the huge grounds
and parking lot, through the iron gate and down the road: "There's
bodies and blood all over the place!"
Not a bad description. Police found Steven Parent just inside
the gate, shot five times in his white Rambler, the wheels of the car
already turned toward the road in a mad attempt to escape. Wojiciech
Frykowski's body lay in front of the house, shot and stabbed again and
again. Twenty yards down the rolling lawn, underneath a fir tree,
they found Abigail Folger dead and curled up in a bloody nightgown.
Inside the house Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate lay stabbed to death
near the living-room couch, connected by a single nylon cord wrapped
around their necks and thrown over a rafter. Sebring was also shot
and his head covered with a pillowcase. On the front door police
found the word PIG written in blood with a towel. If the gate's
locked, you won't be able to see the house because it's set back some
from the road. Anyway, that's where it is.
Now make a U and head back down to Sunset. Continue east for
another ten miles, along the famous and more and more plastic Sunset
Strip, past the tall, swanky office-building monuments to Hollywood
flackery, past the decaying radio empires of the Forties, clear to
Western Avenue, where you take a left. A mile north, Western turns
right and becomes Los Feliz Boulevard, cutting east through the
wealthy, residential Los Feliz District that skirts the foothills of
Griffith Park. After about three miles, just before Los Feliz crosses
the Golden State Freeway, drive into the winding, hillside streets to
your right, where you'll find Waverly Drive.
In August 1968, Manson and his family started visiting Harold
True, a UCLA student who lived with some other guys on Waverly. They
were all good friends, and the family just liked to go up there and
hang around and smoke dope and sing and shoot the shit. True later
moved to Van Nuys, where he presently lives with Phil Kaufman, a
former member of the family who produced Manson's record.
True's neighbors, incidentally, were Leno and Rosemary LaBianca
who, a year later on the morning of August 10th, were found stabbed
-or rather carved- to death inside their home. The words DEATH TO
PIGS, HELTER SKELTER and RISE were written, again in blood, on the
kitchen walls. And someone had etched WAR on Leno LaBianca's stomach
with a fork.
Anyway, those are just some of the spots Manson liked to visit on
his frequent tours of the big city. Cut back to Los Feliz, head north
on the Golden State Freeway for eighteen miles, cut west across the
north end of the Valley on Devonshire Street -another ten miles- turn
right on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and you're practically back at the
Spahn ranch.
The whole round trip in eighty miles or so. That may seem like
a big distance, but actually the roads are good and it shouldn't take
longer than two or three hours, especially if you take it on a Sunday
afternoon or, say, late at night.
* * * * * * * *
Perhaps no two recent events have so revealed the cut-rate value
of public morality and private life as the killing of Sharon Tate and
the arrest of Charles Manson. Many were quick to criticize The Los
Angeles Times for publishing bright and early one Sunday morning the
grisly (and since recanted) confessions of Susan Atkins. Any doubts
about Manson's power to cloud men's minds were buried that morning
between Dick Tracy and one of the world's great real-estate sections.
Sexy Sadie laid it down for all to see.
Critics accused the Times of paying a healthy sum to promoter
Larry Schiller, who had obtained the confession from Miss Atkins's
attorneys in return for a cut of the profits. The Times responded
publicly with silence, privately with denial. No money was paid, said
the editors. Schiller had sold the story to various European Sunday
editions, they said, and an eight-hour time difference allowed the
Times to pick it up from one of their European correspondents. In
other words, "If we hadn't run it here, some other paper would have."
ROLLING STONE has since learned that the Times explanation was
at least partly correct. No money was paid, that's true, or at least
not that much. Because, dig, the Times people didn't buy the
confession - they wrote it. Word for word. Not only the confession
but the book that followed, The Killing of Sharon Tate, with "eight
pages of photographs," published by New American Library, a Times-
Mirror subsidiary.
In the volume, Schiller gratefully acknowledges "the invaluable
aid of two journalists who worked with the author in preparing this
book and the original interviews with Susan Atkins." Those two
journalists, it turns out, were Jerry Cohen and Dial Torgerson, both
veteran members of the Times rewrite crew.
What possible justification could the Times editors have had for
running the confessions? Can an individual's right to a fair trial
be compromised so easily by the fictitious right of the public to be
entertained? If Miss Atkins's confession does not constitute damaging
pretrial publicity, what does?
Clearly Charles Manson already stands as the villain of our time,
the symbol of animalism and evil. He is already so hated by the
public that all attempts so far to exploit his reputation have failed
miserably. Of the 2000 albums of his music that were pressed, less
than 300 have sold. A skin flick based on popular assumptions about
Manson and his family, Love in the Commune, closed after two days in
San Francisco. Even Cohen and Torgerson's book is reportedly in
financial trouble.
The most blatant, if less damaging, assault on the concept of
pretrial impartiality comes not from the Establishment or the Far
Right, but the Far Left, the Weathermen faction of the SDS. According
to an item from the Liberation News Service, the Weathermen have made
Manson a revolutionary hero on the assumption that he is guilty.
Praising him for having offed some "rich honky pigs," they offer us
a prize example of bumper-sticker mentality: MANSON POWER - THE YEAR
OF THE FORK!
The underground press in general has assumed a paranoid-schizo
attitude toward Manson, undoubtedly hypersensitive to the relentless
gloating of the cops who, after a five-year search, finally found a
long-haired devil you could love to hate. Starting in mid-January,
the Los Angeles Free Press banner-headlined Manson stories for three
weeks in a row: MANSON CAN GO FREE! M.D. ON MANSON'S SEX LIFE!
MANSON INTERVIEW! EXCLUSIVE! EXCLUSIVE! Later, the Free Press began
a weekly column by Manson written from jail. About the same time, a
rival underground paper, Tuesday's Child, ran Manson's picture across
the entire front page with the headline MAN OF THE YEAR: CHARLES
MANSON. In case you missed the point, in their next issue they
covered the front page with a cartoon of Manson on the cross. The
plaque nailed above his head read simply HIPPIE.
Of course, not all the stories in the Free Press and Tuesday's
Child were pro-Manson. Some were very lukewarm, others were simply
anticop. The question that seemed to split the underground editorial
minds more than any other was simply: Is Manson a hippie or isn't he?
* * * * * * * *
It's hard to imagine a better setting for Manson's vision of the
Apocalypse, his black revolution, than Los Angeles, a city so large
and cumbersome it defies common senses, defies the absurd. For
thousands of amateur prophets it provides a virtual Easter-egg hunt of
spooky truths. Its climate and latitude are identical to Jerusalem.
It easily leads the country in our race toward ecological doom. It
has no sense of the past; the San Andreas Fault separates it from the
rest of the continent by a million years.
If Manson's racial views seem incredibly naive, which the
are (after preaching against the Black Panthers for two years, he
recently asked who Huey Newton was), they are similar to views held by
hundreds of thousands of others in that city and by that city's mayor.
Citizens there last year returned to office Mayor Sam Yorty, whose
administration was riddled with conflicts of interest and bribery
convictions, rather than elect a thoughtful, soft-spoken, middle-ofthe-
road ex-cop who happened to be black. Full-page newspaper ads,
sponsored by a police organization, pictured the man as a wild African
savage and asked voters, "Will Your Home Be Safe with Bradley as
Mayor?"
The Spahn Movie Ranch may seem a miserable place for kids to
live, with its filthy, broken-down shacks and stagnant streams filled
daily with shoveled horse shit. Life there may seem degenerate, a
dozen or more people eating garbage, sleeping, balling and raising
babies in a twenty-foot trailer. But for more than two years most of
those kids have preferred that way of life -life with Charlie- than
living in the homes of their parents. The press likes to put the
Manson family in quotation marks - "family." But it's a real family,
with real feelings of devotion, loyalty and disappointment. For
Manson and all the others, it's the only family they've ever had.
One is tempted to say that Manson spent twenty-two of his
thirty-five years in prison, that he is more a product of the penal
system than Haight-Ashbury. But it cannot be dismissed that easily.
Charles Manson raises some very serious questions about our culture,
whether he is part of it or not.
There is no new morality, as Time and Life would have us believe,
but a growing awareness that the old morality has not been practiced
for some time. The right to pursue different goals, to be free of
social and economic oppression, the right to live in peace and equity
with our brothers - this is Founding Fathers stuff. In the meantime,
we must suffer the void, waiting for the old, dead, amoral culture
to be buried. For the younger among us, the wait is extremely
frustrating, even unbearable.
Into this void rode Charles Manson in the fall on 1967, full of
charm and truth and gentle goodness, like Robert Mitchum's psychopathic
preacher in Night of the Hunter with LOVE and HATE inscribed on
opposing hands. This smiling, dancing music man offered a refreshing
short cut, a genuine and revolutionary new morality that redefines,
or rather eliminates, the historic boundaries between life and death.
Behind Manson's attitude toward death is the ancient mystical belief
that we are all part of one body - and integral tenet of Hinduism,
Buddhism and Christianity, as expressed by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians:
"For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of
that body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ."
But Manson adds a new twist; he wants us to take the idea
literally, temporarily. He believes that he, and all human beings -
are God and the Devil at the same time, that all human beings are part
of each other, that human life has no individual value. If you kill a
human being, you're just killing a part of yourself; it has no meaning.
"Death is psychosomatic," says Manson.
Thus, the foundation of all historic moral concepts is neatly
discarded. Manson's is a morality of amorality. "If God is one, what
is bad?" he asks. Manson represents a frightening new phenomenon, the
acid-ripped street fighter, erasing the barrier between the two outlaw
cultures -the head and the hood- described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test:
The Angels were too freaking real. Outlaws? They were outlaws
by choice, from the word go, all the way out in Edge City.
Further! The hip world, the vast majority of acid heads,
were still playing the eternal charade of the middle-class
intellectuals -Behold my wings! Freedom! Flight!- but you
don't actually expect me to jump off that cliff, do you?
Perhaps it was inevitable for someone like Manson to come along
- someone who would jump off that cliff.
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