Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson

by Jeff Guinn

The young men behind the wheels of the three cars inching down Sunset—sometimes it could take hours to maneuver through the traffic and crowds along the Strip—were out for a night of fun and basking in the celebrity that they’d worked so hard to attain. Terry Melcher, Gregg Jakobson, and Dennis Wilson had been close friends for years. Individually, they’d reached separate pinnacles in the music business: Melcher as a producer, Jakobson as a talent scout/recording session organizer, and Wilson as the drummer for the Beach Boys, and thus the most famous of the trio. Together they were part of an informal society known as the Golden Penetrators. Its membership was limited to anyone who had sex with women from one of show business’s most famous families. It wasn’t the most exclusive of organizations; some of these women were every bit as promiscuous as the men pursuing them. The Melcher-Jakobson-Wilson triumvirate reveled in their hedonism; in a city that had long ago waived most moral or legal limits for the famous, their philosophy was “We’re us, there are no rules, we get to do this.”

The Whisky a Go Go, located on Sunset just past the edge of Beverly Hills, was the most famous club in town and probably in all of America. Magazines from Time to Playboy touted it as the hippest place to see and be seen. Each night, long lines routinely stretched for blocks two hours or more before the Whisky opened at 8:30. The cover charge kept out panhandlers and riffraff. Regulars always anticipated thrills beyond those to be found at any other club on the Strip. Performers recorded chart-topping live albums at the Whisky. The flower of the music scene regularly dropped in; recent visitors included Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, and Eric Clapton. Hendrix and Young even jumped onstage to jam. The Whisky usually alternated lesser-known local bands with big-name acts like the Turtles and Eric Burdon and the Animals. The club had been one of the first venues on the modern-day Strip to feature black musicians. Among others, Buddy Guy and Sly and the Family Stone graced its stage, and when Little Richard performed, rock gods Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones came to hear him. Every visit to the Whisky was certain to be special in some way. Anyone in Los Angeles who had pretensions of being cool had to make the scene. Even Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton partied there.

The Whisky was the apex of cool, home ground of the hip, but intimidating for everyone else. The club wasn’t particularly big, with a capacity of just 350, but its decor was guaranteed to impress. Decorated in dramatic tones of red and black, the venue featured a stage in the middle of a raised dance floor. There were a few tables for the public and a small, separate seating area for show business dignitaries. Dangling above the floor were glass “cages” occupied by scantily clad female dancers who pranced provocatively to records whenever each evening’s bands took a break between their 9:30 and 11:30 sets. These entertainers were dubbed Go-Go dancers, and copycat namesakes entertained in clubs all over the world.

Nancy was baffled when Kathleen complained that her mother wouldn’t allow her to have any fun. Surely Ashland offered all the wholesome pleasures that any decent teenage girl could want. Besides church and Sunday School, which bestowed the unparalleled joy of worship, the town had lovely parks in which to stroll, soda shops, and even the South’s first enclosed shopping mall, where decent, limb-covering dresses were sold. Kathleen could enjoy these delights in the company of other nice girls from the church, and at some point she would surely come to love and marry a boy of proper Christian faith.

Since he was in constant danger of being beaten and suffering sexual assault, it was at Plainfield that Charlie developed a lifelong defense mechanism he later called the “insane game.” In dangerous situations where he could not protect himself in any other way, he would act out to convince potential assailants that he was crazy. Using screeches, grimaces, flapping arms, and other extreme facial expressions and gestures, Charlie could often back off aggressors. It didn’t always work; in Plainfield and later in adult prisons, Charlie sometimes had to submit to stronger inmates who didn’t care whether their prey was crazy or not. In these cases, he did whatever he had to. At the Boys School and afterward, Charlie Manson always survived.

Modern experts in child psychology, juvenile justice, and the history of the American reform school system in the 1950s agree that Charlie’s adult pattern of lawbreaking and violence was virtually guaranteed by the experiences of his childhood. He had no nurturing father figure. While his mother loved him, Kathleen often battled her own demons at the expense of her son’s emotional security. Charlie entered the reformatory school jungle as an undersized, helpless twelve-year-old who survived by convincing bigger, predatory kids that he was crazy. The most notable skills Charlie exhibited as a child were criminal—he could steal cars, break into small businesses, rifle safes, and commit armed robberies like a grown-up. His childhood was certainly troubled in ways that were no fault of his own. But there was also something in Charlie that consistently led him to act out in ways completely against his own self-interest. He made bad situations in which he found himself even worse.

Though he’d learned to give and take sexual relief with other boys in reform school, Charlie was mostly attracted to women. He could go to the prostitutes in Wheeling, but they cost money that Charlie didn’t have. The thing about the prostitutes that mostly interested Charlie was how they subsidized their pimps—men making their livings off of subservient women seemed like a fine thing to him.

But just as he had been on earlier visits to Wheeling, he was still fascinated by pimps. At Terminal Island, they were sometimes willing to talk about the intricacies of their trade. They bragged to Charlie about recruiting young women and bending them to their will. You had to know how to pick out just the right girls, Charlie learned, the ones with self-image or Daddy problems who’d buy into come-ons from a smooth talker. First you kept them separated from family and friends. Then you brought them under your control with a judicious combination of affectionate gestures and just enough beatings to remind them who was boss—Charlie yearned to be somebody’s boss. The veteran pimps cautioned him that it was critical to stay away from women who were completely nuts, because then you’d spend all your time propping them up emotionally instead of sending them out on the street to work. You wanted girls who were cracked but not broken. The trick was to make them love you and fear you at the same time. Charlie listened and learned.

All Charlie had known before, in reform school and prison and even McMechen, was forced conformity. Berkeley was the polar opposite and he loved that being a rebel there was okay. Charlie always liked to think of himself as a rebel, standing strong against the Man. Here, he fit right in; Charlie was even distinguished because of his criminal background. Far from having to hide it, Charlie was pleasantly surprised to find that he could brag about his jail time. As far as these new acquaintances were concerned, he’d stood up to government and its fascist cops—pigs in revolutionary argot—and lived to tell about it. He was welcome in their circles; as always, Charlie’s stories were entertaining and he undoubtedly spun all sorts of exaggerated tales about the prison tribulations that he’d endured. But Charlie quickly realized that these students had nothing else for him. Their focus was on changing the world, not doing things for Charlie. They would have embraced him as an active member of their revolutionary struggle—having an ex-con at their sides would legitimize their own self-image as rebels. Charlie had no interest in that. Acceptance was all that the radicals had to offer him, and it wasn’t enough.

By the time Augustus Owsley Stanley III appeared on the scene, the twenty-nine-year-old had already lived a colorful, quixotic life. He rejected his patrician family back in Kentucky, joined the Air Force and served as a radar technician, learned Russian as a first (and last) step toward becoming an Orthodox monk in that country, burned through a couple of marriages, taught himself auto mechanics by redesigning the engine of his MG, and finally settled on his ultimate career goal: to perfect psychedelic drugs and get them into the hands of as many users as possible. Owsley invented a bogus company named Bear Research Group so he could order massive quantities of chemicals directly from the manufacturers, then set up a Bay Area laboratory to concoct his own. There he experimented with LSD dosage strength, testing his friends with free samples. He had plenty to spare—Owsley’s initial stock of ingredients was enough for 1.5 million doses. From the first, he considered himself the greatest among the LSD gods. After visiting with Timothy Leary at Leary’s home in Millbrook, New York, Owsley returned to California and cracked, “Leary may be the king in this little chess game, but what nobody realizes is that I’m the rogue queen.”

Owsley not only controlled LSD appearance but price. His acid was acknowledged as the best; when dealers flocked to snap up his latest batch, he would sell to them only after they promised not to charge their street customers more than $2 a dose. Owsley himself was a regular sight on Haight sidewalks and clubs, often handing out his wares for free. He liked to treat friends to steaks at some of San Francisco’s better restaurants—his theory was that humans were natural meat eaters whose digestive systems became polluted by vegetables. Owsley paid for these sumptuous feasts with $100 bills, the only currency he would accept from dealers. It was rumored that on days when Owsley held court to sell his latest batch of LSD, there were no $100 bills to be had at most banks within a sixty-mile radius of San Francisco.

According to legend, the surviving Beats of San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury gave the new kids a derogatory nickname. The Beats liked to think of themselves as skeptical, clued-in hipsters. These goofy little dupes were something less: hippies. The term got thrown around a lot in the Haight and eventually was picked up by the local media. In September 1965 the San Francisco Examiner published a prominent story about the regeneration of the neighborhood. Its headline described the Haight as “A New Haven for Beatniks,” but in the body of the story, Haight residents were collectively identified as hippies. The kids embraced the term.

Winter weather in San Francisco is notoriously erratic, making any outdoor program chancy, but January 14 dawned clear and bright. Organizers were concerned that the San Francisco press would emphasize a smaller than expected crowd, so Haight shops and cafés voluntarily closed for the day in an effort to encourage residents to go to the Polo Field instead. They shouldn’t have bothered. By 9 A.M. hippies in rainbow robes and feathered headdresses began arriving in the sprawling meadow. They mingled with students wearing blue jeans and T-shirts. More than twenty thousand were present by the official 1 P.M. kickoff, everyone crammed together and no one minding. The Diggers distributed free turkey sandwiches; Owsley donated a large, particularly potent batch of LSD tabs dubbed “White Lightning.” Anyone who felt like tripping on acid did so in style. Ginsberg, who desperately wanted to be as important to the hippies as he had been to the Beats, opened the program by chanting “We are all one!” while someone blew into a conch shell. Leary encouraged all present to turn on, tune in, drop out, and a dozen San Francisco bands performed. As the sun set around 5 P.M., Ginsberg offered a final chant to close the program. Then the crowd stunned park officials by cleaning up every scrap of trash before wandering off into the dusk, still singing and chanting. The Be-In was a magical event, far surpassing what its organizers could ever have hoped for, and it was directly responsible for de...

Charlie wasn’t accomplishing anything more than dozens of other Haight gurus. Every day he was in direct competition with the rest of them. Some kids would listen to Charlie, swear lifelong allegiance, and then desert him the next day for some other pontificator. The ones willing to stay loyal to him on a long-term basis weren’t worth having. Charlie was quickly reminded of what he’d previously learned as a pimp: the best recruits were bruised and needy but not completely broken.

Dr. David E. Smith, an intern directing the alcohol and drug abuse screening unit at San Francisco General Hospital, was appalled at the callousness of his colleagues. City officials had no intention of increasing health services to the Haight; instead, they debated whether to try to stem the stream of summer arrivals by posting “Hippies Not Welcome” signs on bridges leading into San Francisco. Smith decided to open a free health clinic in the Haight. He found some doctors and nurses who were willing to donate a few pro bono hours each week, and after leasing some vacant dental offices on Clayton Street and stocking them with basic medical supplies Smith opened his clinic on June 9. It operated under a simple philosophy: Anyone would be treated without charge, and the staff would make no moral judgments about patients. More than 250 hippies lined up for treatment on the first day, suffering variously from pneumonia, hepatitis, venereal disease, skin and gum infections, malnutrition, dysentery, and complications from botched abortions. There were 350 the next day, and by the third the clinic had run out of antibiotics and bandages. Smith had opened the clinic with his own money and a few small donations.

There was glory coming, and yet there was still so much more to do. Three devoted followers weren’t nearly enough. He wanted more, an impressive entourage worthy of his greatness, and not just comprised of women, either. Try as he might, Charlie hadn’t been able to recruit any men long term. Women were so much easier—you told them that they were beautiful, you picked up on their Daddy complexes, you had sex with them, and then if they were insecure and needy enough, they were yours. But it was harder with men. The best way to get them, Charlie knew, was through women. Join Charlie’s merry band, and its girls would do whatever you wanted. He was teaching Mary, Lynne, and Pat that sex was wonderful and any moral hang-ups about it were wrong. They’d come a long way. They would pretty much do anything with anybody if Charlie ordered them to. Problem was, all three were so homely. Maybe Lynne had a bit of pixie-ish charm, but the other two, nothing. Charlie told them they were beautiful and sexy despite their physical flaws, but even though they fell for it he knew better.