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- Forming Of The Family
Released from prison into a new world of liberation, Manson's
appetite for female company was insatiable. Within two
years he had surrounded himself with a loyal following
of naive and willing disciples.
By July 1969 Charles Manson and his Family were living
a primitive commune life on the edges of the desert. They
were based at the old Spahn Movie Ranch near Chatsworth,
often retreating to the more desolate and inaccessible
Barker Ranch in Panamint Valley. They were a fluctuating
population, but there was always around 30 or 35 followers,
three quarters of them women and a few of them children.
The murders were carried out by members of the hard core
Family, people who had known Manson, or been under his
influence for the last two years and were devoted to him.
When they were eventually picked up by the police, they
were living like wild dogs, coyotes a favourite Manson
image of himself.
But how had Manson turned a flower power commune into
a training ground for mass murder, and why had white middle
class Americans allowed their children to go to him? When
Charles Manson, small time hood and petty criminal, walked
out of Terminal Island Penitentiary on 21 March 1967 he
was 32 years old and everything had changed.
The restrained, conservative world he had left behind
when he started his prison sentence had been replaced
by the new generation of love and peace and doing your
own thing. Tuning in, turning on, dropping out were the
new catch-phrases. Incoming inmates had told tales of
what was going on outside the prison walls, but Manson
had not believed them. Now he did.
Convict's dream
"Pretty little girls were running around every place
with no panties or bras and asking for love. Grass and
hallucinatory drugs were being handed to you on the streets.
It was a different world than I had ever been in and one
that I believed was too good to be true. It was a convict's
dream and after being locked up for seven solid years,
I didn't run from it.
I joined it and the generation that lived in it. Manson
commented. Manson came out from Terminal Island with $30.00
in his pocket and his guitar in his hand. All of young
America was on the move, and they were all going where
he was going San Francisco.
Everywhere, people were rebelling against authority, dropping
out of college courses, refusing to toe the 'straight'
line, mocking the establishment, trying to establish a
counter culture. For the first time in his life, Charles
Manson, the institutionalized reject, was in step with
the rest of the world. His disaffected view of society
was welcomed, approved, endorsed.
Manson described that period, 'And we slept in the park
and we loved on the streets and my hair got a little longer
and I started playing music, and people liked my music
and people smiled at me and people put their arms around
me and hugged I didn't know how to act. It just took me
away.' What the press called the Manson Family started
out unspectacularly.
Manson with his guitar and fashionably long hair quickly
became a regular in the hippie scene on San Francisco's
Haight Ashbury and on the campus at Berkeley (University
of California). He would hang out, smoke marijuana, busk
with his guitar.
That was what he was doing when he met Mary Brunner. a
librarian: a slim, flat-chested red-head, she was not
pretty but definitely Manson's 'type' and he moved in
with Mary. A few weeks later he had acquired a VW minibus,
and he and Mary took off, travelling up and down the West
Coast (Manson's movements had to be approved by his parole
officer) finding out for themselves about communal living
and loving.
Manson went to LA trying to set up his career as a rock
superstar. On Venice Beach, he met Lynette Fromme, a slim
redhaired girl who had just had a confrontation with her
father. Manson brought her back to Mary, and the nucleus
of the Family was formed. In September they were joined
by disaffected legal clerk Patricia Krenwinkel.
Manson was establishing a harem: he and his busload of
girls, all ten years or more younger than him, were invited
to all the best parties. His method of domination was
acid (LSD) and sex. Half a lifetime ago. Charles Manson
had been married and had fathered a son. While he was
in prison his wife had divorced him and taken their son
with her.
Calling the tune
In the 1950s, Manson had for a short period been an unsuccessful
pimp, falling in love with his main girl, who had clumped
him. With Mary and another girl called Darlene. whom he
had picked up, he discovered something new. By sleeping
with both girls on a rota basis. Manson called the tune,
controlled the situation.
He learned to wield the power of sex. Later on, when there
were more Family members Manson would be the one to choreograph
their orgies, arranging the bodies artistically, directing
who should do what to whom and how.
Every woman who joined the Family was initiated by Manson.
first with a 'tab' of LSD and then with a few hours of
sex. When university drop-out Bruce Davis joined them,
the VW needed to be replaced, so Manson traded it in for
an old school bus. They painted it black and wrote Hollywood
(spelling it Holywood) Film Productions on the side to
avoid trouble with police.
The black bus became famous in the vicinity. Manson and
his group moved around in all the fashionable places in
town, with Manson trying to establish himself on the fringes
of the movie and music worlds.
More joined in: the delinquent Susan Atkins (Sadie Mae
Glutz); Ruth Ann Moorehouse, the preacher's daughter who
married a hapless bus driver in order to leave home and
join the Family. Red-haired Dianne Lake, whose parents
had dropped out to join the Hog Farm commune; Bobby Beausoleil,
the pretty boy actor and musician who had starred in Kenneth
Anger's underground film Lucifer Rising.
Through Bobby, Manson was to meet Kitty Lutesinger. Cathy
Share (Gypsy) , Leslie Van Houten and Gary Hinman. among
others. Charles (Tex) Watson, the All American ex-athlete,
met the Family through Beach Boy (Californian band) Dennis
Wilson. Wilson was so fascinated by their lifestyle that
he allowed them to freeload on him unmercifully.
He housed them, fed them and supplied them all with clothes
from his own wardrobe. By mid 1968 Manson had most of
his Family. There were three girls to every boy. The size
of the Family had grown so rapidly that the bus could
no longer cope and they had started living in and around
Topanga Canyon in various shacks.
It is probably impossible to document every person wandering
the West Coast who blundered into the Manson circle and
out again, but the people listed above formed the permanent
Family. They were joined by Brooks Poston, TJ (the Terrible)
Walleman, Steve Grogan (Clem), Juan Flynn. Nancy Pitman,
Cathy Gillies. Sandra Good, Juan Flynn, Joan Wildebush
(Juanita).
Mary Brunner had given birth on 1 April to Manson's son
Valentine Michael (named after Robert Heinlein' s hero
in the cult science fiction book Stranger in a Strange
Land). Susan Atkins was soon to produce her son Zezozoze
C. Zadfrack. When twice-married young mother Linda Kasabian
and Stephanie Schram joined the Family in 1969 the cast
was complete.
Misfits and outcasts
The family was not made up of obvious misfits and social
outcasts, although they may have become so. Manson did
not surround himself with people like himself paranoid
petty crooks. The majority of the Family members were
easily led and impressionable young people. Many were
middle class white girls librarians, clerks, students,
university graduates, teachers.
They provided easy gurufodder for Manson. Only Susan Atkins
had a criminal record. The material possessions various
Family members brought with them cars (Juanita). access
to property (Sandra Good, Cathy Gillies), substantial
amounts of money (Linda Kasabian). daddy's credit cards
(Patricia Krenwinkel) allowed the Family to carry on.
Through an associate of San Diego. socialite Sandra Good,
the Family moved on to the Spahn Movie Ranch and began
to live as counterculture outcasts, feeding themselves
from the perfectly good food thrown away by supermarkets
every night, helping out on the ranch, hustling dope,
stealing or 'borrowing" credit cards and cars.
Through Cathy Gillies they acquired the Barker Ranch,
handing over one of Dennis Wilson's gold records to its
bemused old owner as rent. In the desert, Manson ruled
supreme. Some Family members found the isolation.
Manson's increasing paranoia and the menacing presence
of the Straight Satans biker gang too much, and left or
rather escaped. However, Manson's earliest adherents proved
his most devoted; they would do anything he wanted, or
they thought he wanted. They were ready to kill without
mercy or remorse. |
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