Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover Read online

  Charlie could always make Kathleen feel guilty; she brooded about whether she’d been right not to get him the guitar. In December 1963 Kathleen wrote to the judge in Los Angeles who gave Charlie the ten-year sentence at McNeil. In the letter, she offered to put up her house in Washington as security for Charlie’s early release. She was even willing to risk her shaky reconciliation with Lewis by letting Charlie move in with them and the baby. The way she worded the offer indicated that she still thought of her son as a wayward teenager rather than a twenty-nine-year-old hustler: “For the first time in my life, I’m able to give Charles a nice home and help him to make a good life.” The judge turned her down.

  In prison, Charlie chose friends for what he could learn from them. The Scientologists had their uses. So did McNeil’s most famous inmate. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis became notorious in the 1930s as a member of the Barker Gang. Initially imprisoned in 1936, Karpis was transferred to McNeil in 1962 after the government closed down Alcatraz, the island penitentiary in San Francisco. Now in his mid-fifties, Karpis was no longer considered a threat to anyone’s safety; his work assignment was driving the bus that transported children of prison staff to and from the McNeil Island school.

  Charlie approached Karpis, though not for tips on robbing banks. Karpis was an accomplished steel guitar player, and Manson wanted to learn that instrumental technique. The older con obliged with some lessons, though he wasn’t much impressed with Charlie’s playing. Sometimes Charlie wanted to talk about Scientology instead of music. According to Karpis, Charlie “figured [Scientology] would enable him to do anything or be anything.” Having run with more than his share of cold-blooded killers, Karpis didn’t sense similar tendencies in Charlie. He thought the guy would be the last man on earth “to go into the mass murder business.”

  Charlie picked up more than Scientology insights and steel guitar licks at McNeil. He didn’t read books, but he listened as inmates who did talked about what they’d read. One of the most popular novels among the literate cons was Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Its themes of alienation, government deceit, and redemption for the despised resonated with the incarcerated. Charles was fascinated by the tale of fictional Valentine Michael Smith, born to human parents in a Mars space colony, raised by Martians and returned to Earth as a pawn of scheming politicians. Fascinated by religion, Mike founds his own faith, experiences group sex, uses psychic powers to make enemies disappear, suffers a martyr’s death, and returns in spirit form. As he would with the Bible, Dale Carnegie, and Scientology, Charlie later incorporated elements of Stranger in a Strange Land into a beguiling, hybrid pseudophilosophy.

  Then Charlie discovered his most influential teachers of all.

  • • •

  World news generally had little effect on Charlie. In January 1964, after two and a half years of incarceration at McNeil, he probably knew President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated but beyond that he had little access to or much interest in what was happening on the outside—with one exception.

  There were radios in McNeil, and Charlie loved listening to music. The vast majority of pop hits were hummable fluff that celebrated G-rated teen love and heartache. Folk artists with music that addressed social issues received more limited airplay. They and their causes didn’t matter to Charlie. But near the end of January 1964 Bobby Vinton’s “There! I’ve Said It Again” was blasted from the top of the charts by The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” A few weeks later, the British band kicked off its first short American tour with a TV appearance on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show. Most of America tuned in. “Beatle-mania” swept the nation; there had never been anything like it, even in the heydays of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. The Beatles’ burgeoning fame was such that it penetrated all the way into Charlie Manson’s cell at McNeil Island. Their songs were constantly on the radio. Charlie was intrigued by the music but even more impressed by the adulation the Beatles received. Charlie always yearned for attention; now he decided that fame was what he really wanted. If these four Beatles could have it, why couldn’t he? After all, he sang and played guitar, too. Countless other young Americans felt the same way, but few could have been as single-minded about it. Charlie started telling anyone willing to listen and also those who weren’t that he was going to be bigger than the Beatles, which meant bigger than any other music superstars ever. He didn’t care how implausible that sounded.

  Besides the incredibly long odds against eventual success, Charlie faced an immediate challenge. The Beatles wrote most of their own material. They were Charlie’s new role models, so he was obligated to do the same. Charlie spent virtually every waking nonwork minute hunched over his guitar. There was nothing special about the songs that resulted, though Charlie took great pride in them. In particular, his attempts at lyrics were banal: “She’ll never know what’s down inside/All this lovin’ I’ll always hide.” He debuted some of his tunes onstage; Charlie began playing in occasional variety shows featuring performances by prisoners. Sometimes he was part of an inmate band. Though there’s no record of how his performances were received, he couldn’t have been a complete flop because he kept appearing. He didn’t always play guitar. The prison had a battered drum kit for use in the shows and sometimes Charlie thumped on it. His drumming was as rudimentary as his guitar playing but he considered himself gifted at both.

  Now when Kathleen visited, all her son talked about was how he was going to become a famous musician. He seemed hungry for fame but not fortune. Charlie never mentioned anything about getting rich in the process and buying himself cars and a mansion, let alone doing something for the mother who currently paid for his guitar strings and picks with hard-earned waitressing money. Kathleen tried not to let it bother her. She understood that Charlie was never grateful for anything. At least he’d stopped griping at her so much. Besides, Kathleen had her own problems. Despite all he’d promised, Lewis kept drinking and losing jobs. She was damned if she’d let another child of hers be ruined by a parent’s bad example. She’d messed up with Charlie but it wasn’t going to happen again. In May 1964 Kathleen divorced Lewis. He tried to talk her out of it and afterward tried to worm his way back through postcards he sent to little Nancy. On the back of each one he’d remind the child that he loved and missed her. Maybe she’d beg her mother to let Daddy come home. Kathleen regularly let him visit Nancy—look what happened to Charlie from not having a father—but she was through falling for Lewis’s promises to straighten out. Kathleen still hadn’t given up on marriage. She resumed looking for a good man who would give her and her daughter some security.

  Charlie’s new ambition curbed his old habit of not being able to stay out of trouble. Many of the guards at McNeil were decent guys, but there were some—the cons could pick them out right away—who enjoyed bullying inmates just because they could. If they put you on report for infractions like slacking off at work or being insolent, you could argue if you thought you were unfairly accused but the prison bosses almost always sided with the guards. Then you temporarily lost privileges like writing letters or having visitors. If Charlie got into it with any guards he might have his guitar taken away, and he couldn’t risk that. So he recalled Dale Carnegie’s advice that the best way to win any argument was to avoid it altogether, and combined that with the biblical proverb about soft answers turning aside wrath. The result was a great trick—Charlie responded to the guards’ deliberately provoking questions with innocuous ones of his own. It went something like, “Hey, Manson, when you’re all alone with your guitar, do you fuck it?” “What guitar?” It pissed them off, but they couldn’t write him up for it.

  Senior McNeil staff noted Charlie’s extended good behavior and concluded that his love of music was the reason. He’d also begun talking to them about what he wanted to do when he got out of prison, and though his goal was far-fetched, at least it was legal. His May 1966 report stated that “Manson continues to maintain a clear conduct record . . . he has been spendi
ng his free time writing songs, accumulating about 80 or 90 of them during the past year, which he ultimately hopes to sell following release. . . . He also plays the guitar and drums, and is hopeful that he can secure employment as a guitar player or as a drummer or singer.” Still, the evaluator wasn’t convinced that Charlie had entirely changed: “He shall need a great deal of help in the transition from institution to the free world.”

  Counting the twelve months in the Los Angeles County jail while he filed appeals, in May 1966 Charlie had completed six years of his ten-year sentence. For the last two years at McNeil he’d avoided trouble altogether. That made him a candidate for early parole. In June Charlie was transferred back to the minimum security prison at Terminal Island. It was a significant step toward release.

  In October 1965 Kathleen remarried and finally got it right. This third husband was a wonderful contrast to the first two. He worked until he had enough money to open his own small business, and then he worked even harder to make it a success. They weren’t rich but anything above poverty level must have seemed heavenly to Kathleen. Unlike Lewis’s empty promises to be a good father to Charlie, Kathleen’s new husband adored little Nancy and couldn’t do enough for her. They all enjoyed doing things together, acting like a real family. Given a second chance at motherhood, Kathleen excelled. Decades later, Nancy felt certain that she’d had the best mom in the world.

  Lewis had a parting shot for Kathleen when she remarried, writing her, “Congratulations, you finally found a big, fat, dumb fucker, a meal ticket, ha, you two deserve each other, you two be miserable all your lives,” but after that he moved on and also remarried. All Charlie cared about now was music, so it was time for Kathleen to enjoy the nice normal life that she’d craved. She didn’t intend to displace Charlie entirely from her life; Kathleen just wanted a break from his problems. But except for one unpleasant encounter, Kathleen and Charlie never met again.

  • • •

  Phil Kaufman was a roughneck from New York who avoided jail as an eighteen-year-old when the judge let him join the Air Force instead. After his enlistment was up Kaufman eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he worked as an extra in movies and TV (Spartacus, The Donna Reed Show) and made friends with people in the music business before being busted for drug possession. He was nailed with a five-to-twenty-year sentence and bounced around several federal prisons before being assigned to Terminal Island. Its barred doors had hardly slammed shut behind him when he heard Charlie playing guitar and singing to himself. Kaufman thought the guy sounded a little like Frankie Laine. A guard growled at Charlie, “You’ll never get out of here,” trying to hassle him for no reason at all. Instead of snapping back or acting intimidated, Charlie paused in mid-strum, replied, “Get out of where, man?” and went back to playing while the guard fumed. Kaufman was impressed—that took real balls—and decided he and Charlie would be friends. Charlie was agreeable after learning that Kaufman knew people in the music industry and might be able to help him sell some of his songs. Kaufman discovered that Charlie only associated with other people for whatever he thought he could get out of them, but that was okay. The guy was damned entertaining. He might be almost illiterate but he sure wasn’t stupid. When Charlie told stories he’d make all these gestures and facial expressions—he just commanded your attention. Charlie told Kaufman that he took the Carnegie course to learn how to make strangers open up to him. He also talked sometimes about Scientology but not as though he was a real believer. Charlie would throw Scientology terms around and also quote long passages of the Bible from memory, but the feeling Kaufman got was that he worshipped only at the Church of Charlie.

  There were a couple of other things about the guy. Before he was transferred to Terminal Island, Kaufman had done time in half a dozen other prisons. In all of them, the races pretty much kept to themselves. But Charlie took it to an extreme. He wouldn’t talk to or even look at blacks if he didn’t have to, and the same thing with the Latins. He just didn’t like them, didn’t think they were anywhere close to a white man’s equal. The Black Muslims impressed him, though, the way they stuck together and made it clear that they were not to be messed with. Even the meanest guards let them be. Charlie believed that all blacks were genetically inferior and most of them were dumb as rocks, but give enough angry ones guns and they could probably wipe out much of the white race.

  Then there was what Charlie wouldn’t talk about. He and Kaufman yakked a lot, but after a while Kaufman realized that Charlie never mentioned anything about his family—parents, wife or ex-wife, kids, anybody. Not one word, not ever. Whoever they might be, it was like he’d banished them from his mind. Kaufman tried to draw him out on the subject a couple of times, but nothing doing.

  In August 1966 Charlie got his last prison report. It noted that he refused opportunities to take vocational classes to develop employable job skills and that he no longer claimed to be a Scientologist. Charlie had a single passion: “He has come to worship his guitar and music.” Still, “he has no plans for release as he says he has nowhere to go.” The report concluded, “He has a pattern of criminal behavior and confinement that dates to his teen years. . . . Little can be expected in the way of change in his attitude, behavior or mode of conduct.”

  The evaluator’s negative prognostication made no difference. Federal prisons were overcrowded. Charlie had stayed out of trouble and was eligible for parole. He was told that he probably would get out in the spring.

  Phil Kaufman thought Charlie was a decent singer who “couldn’t play guitar for shit.” His songs were okay but nothing special. Still, Kaufman had seen people with less talent get recording contracts. Since he wasn’t up for parole for another year or so, Kaufman couldn’t personally introduce Charlie to friends in the music business. But he still helped him out with a contact. Kaufman suggested that after Charlie was out for a while and had a chance to adjust to the free world, he ought to polish up a couple of his best songs and go see this guy Gary Stromberg at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Charlie should say that Phil Kaufman sent him. Gary would listen to what Charlie had. There was no way to tell, but he might be interested. For once, Charlie seemed genuinely grateful. He said that he’d work on his songs some more before trying Universal, and that he’d stay in touch with Kaufman. Then, when Kaufman got out, he and Charlie could get back together. That sounded good to Kaufman. Charlie was weird but he was fun to be around.

  In March 1967 Charlie learned that he’d be paroled on the 21st. At age thirty-two he was finally going to be free again after almost seven years. As the date drew near, Charlie’s dreams of music stardom and being bigger than the Beatles collided with memories of his previous hardscrabble life outside prison. The facade slipped; Charlie panicked and told Terminal Island officials that he didn’t want to be paroled after all. He felt safe in prison; he didn’t think he could adjust to being outside again. If they let him out he’d end up doing things that he shouldn’t. Charlie was being both personally insightful and honest, but the wheels of the penal system bureaucracy were turning. On the morning of March 21, Charlie found himself out on the sidewalk with a cheap suitcase and his guitar, not certain where to go. He didn’t think he was ready to see the guy at Universal yet. He felt shaky and needed some time to get used to being free, to not having somebody right there all the time telling him what he could and couldn’t do. Charlie had a few phone numbers of inmates he’d known at Terminal Island who were already out on parole. He called one in Berkeley and the guy said that he should come up there. Charlie didn’t have any better options. His Los Angeles parole officer gave him permission to relocate and assigned him to regular check-ins at a San Francisco office. Charlie headed north, probably by bus or thumbing a ride. He knew life on the outside was going to be different than before, but he had no idea how much.

  Perhaps if Charlie had been released from a federal prison in some other state and decided to try his luck in a college town, he could have reentered society someplace where gra
dual assimilation was possible. But of all the places he could have chosen for an initial post-prison destination in California, Berkeley was the one guaranteed to plunge him straight into the deepest waves of national upheaval. Like fictional Valentine Michael Smith before him, Charlie was about to become a stranger in a strange land.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Berkeley and the Haight

  Berkeley streets teemed with people who didn’t look like anyone Charlie had ever seen before. He was used to the drab inmate coveralls, guard khakis, and buzz cuts of prison. The crowds he now encountered comprised a human kaleidoscope. Men had long hair like girls. Girls wore work shirts and denim jeans like men. Lots of the guys had shaggy beards. Many of the girls obviously weren’t wearing bras. Both sexes wore beads around their necks. The air was redolent with the aroma of the food being hawked by street vendors, and just about everyone seemed to be smoking something. There were other odors, too—human sweat, which Charlie certainly recognized, and burning joss sticks, which he probably couldn’t. There was almost too much for Charlie to take in all at once, and the closer he got to the college campus, the more bizarre things became.