Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (24 page)

The first friend Wilson contacted was Gregg Jakobson, who worked as a talent scout and session arranger and was also trying to write songs with Dennis. Though few outside the innermost L.A. music scene knew his name, Jakobson was a critical player. Adopted by the chief of detectives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and his wife, Jakobson moved to Venice, California, with his mother and sisters after his father died. He was enrolled in University High, popularly known as Uni High, where he got to know Nancy Sinatra. Dean Martin’s daughter Deanna was one of his first girlfriends. Soon Jakobson was getting lots of work as a movie extra, and when some of his buddies, like Terry Melcher, got into rock bands and started cutting records, Gregg got involved in that, too, helping line up studio musicians and arrange session dates. He wasn’t in a band himself because he had a terrible singing voice.

Jakobson met Dennis Wilson in 1963. Melcher’s band was scheduled to open for the Beach Boys at a show in Hawaii. Melcher suggested that Jakobson come along on the trip. When he explained he couldn’t afford a plane ticket, Melcher offhandedly asked him to suggest some song titles. Off the top of his head, Jakobson threw out “Big Wednesday,” “Two’s a Crowd,” and a third title. Melcher called singer Bobby Darin, who owned a music publishing company, rattled off Jakobson’s impromptu titles and told him that soon he would have these three new songs for sale. Darin gave Melcher an advance of $1,000, Melcher gave the money to Jakobson, and off they went to Hawaii. Jakobson met Dennis Wilson there at
a pre-concert press conference. Wilson was bored, Jakobson suggested they skip out and go ride motorcycles, and a fast friendship began. When everybody got home, Jakobson helped Melcher write the three songs for Darin’s publishing company. From then on Jakobson, Melcher, and Wilson were inseparable. Soon afterward when Melcher became a boy wonder producer at Columbia, he hired Jakobson to scout available talent and to arrange studio sessions. That made Jakobson an important player in the L.A. music scene.

Wilson called Jakobson the second night that Charlie and his followers were at the house, insisting, “You’ve got to come over and meet these people,” and the next day Jakobson did. At first he didn’t think they were anything special. To Jakobson, this was Dennis being Dennis, taking in some strays and getting overly enthusiastic about how great they were. He always got bored and the people moved on and were soon forgotten. But Wilson had told Charlie all about Jakobson, why an aspiring singer-songwriter like Charlie ought to know him, so Charlie got Jakobson to one side and started talking, laying down the most interesting rap, and then he introduced Jakobson to Ruth Ann Moorehouse. Wilson wasn’t very picky about girls; he’d go after pretty much anything. But Jakobson was married, to comedian Lou Costello’s daughter Carole, and while he wasn’t strictly faithful, he was cautious. He found Ruth Ann irresistible, though, and they began what he later termed “a little thing,” meaning that whenever he was around Charlie, Charlie usually paired him off with Ruth Ann, and so Jakobson was always happy to come by. Even though Charlie forbade his followers to form individual attachments, Ruth Ann liked Jakobson, too, and
the other women teased her about it. When Jakobson wasn’t rolling around with Ruth Ann, Charlie would talk to him about the music business, about who Jakobson knew. Jakobson realized what the deal was—people tried to get him to use his contacts on their behalf all the time. He and Wilson listened to Charlie play some of his songs while the women sang along on the choruses. Jakobson thought that there might be something there, though his gut instinct was that Charlie was more interesting to look at than to listen to. But Wilson, always prone to go overboard, decided that Charlie was a genius. He took Charlie over to the offices of Brother Records so he could audition for the management there.

Nobody at Brother Records was impressed with Dennis’s new discovery. The original concept of the company had been that all the members of the Beach Boys would seek out new talent, and that they each had the right to record whom they chose, but the recently canceled tour had cost a lot of money and the rest of the band had little faith in Dennis’s judgment. He was told that Charlie couldn’t be signed to a deal just on Dennis’s say-so. Charlie didn’t help at all; he made a terrible first impression and a worse one in the days that followed. When he came to the office he acted like he owned the place; he was filthy and smelled bad. The staff privately nicknamed him “Pig Pen” after a character in the popular
Peanuts
comic strip. Charlie sat around Brother Records for hours, strumming his guitar and convincing everyone within hearing distance that, despite his pretensions about being a supremely gifted musician, he actually knew very few chords.

Dennis ignored the pointed lack of enthusiasm. He went out of his way to talk Charlie up to the rest of the Beach Boys, to his other music industry pals, and even to the media. In an interview with
Rave
, a British magazine, Wilson repeated some of the philosophy that Charlie had shared with him: “Fear is nothing but awareness. I was only frightened as a child because I did not understand fear, the dark, being lost, what was under the bed. It came from within.” Wilson elaborated that his new friend Charles Manson, whom he’d nicknamed “the Wizard,” calls himself “God and the Devil. He sings, plays, and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records.” Charlie was anxious for Wilson’s prediction to come true, but the other Beach Boys and Brother Records’ management dug in and delayed. They hadn’t heard anything in Charlie’s primitive songs that persuaded them he could make the label money if they did sign him. If they could just avoid making any commitment to Charlie for a while, maybe Dennis would kick him to the curb or else he’d just go away.

Charlie had no intention of going anywhere. He and his followers didn’t always spend the night at Wilson’s—sometimes they’d retreat for a day or two to the ranch with the movie set. But they always came right back to the log mansion on Sunset Boulevard, Charlie to stay close to Wilson and the women to take advantage of the bathrooms. At the ranch, the sanitary facilities were limited to outhouses, buckets, and a
hose. Besides enjoying Wilson’s hospitality, the girls genuinely liked him as a person. Charlie was smart enough not to push his songs on Wilson all of the time; he’d encourage Wilson to sit at the piano and play some of the tunes he was working on, too. Just as they did with Charlie, the girls would gather around and sing along, sharing music and friendship. Wilson seemed intimidated whenever any of the other Beach Boys came by—the Family women thought they were creeps—but when he was away from them Wilson’s playful side always shone through. He loved the Rolls-Royce given to him by his brother Brian. In L.A. it was the ride of choice for many of the city’s richest, stuffiest people.
Wilson would get some of the Family girls to pile in and tear off down the freeways, looking for other Rolls-Royces and pulling up beside them. Then he’d encourage the girls to hang out his car windows, sticking out their tongues and making faces and just having silly, simple fun mocking the squares. How could the girls not adore Wilson almost as much as Charlie? But they never really thought about leaving Charlie for him—Charlie’s hold over them was much too strong for that. Besides, Charlie taught that the only time that existed was now, and right now they could be with Wilson all they wanted.

It seemed to Gregg Jakobson that every time he came around Wilson’s place, Charlie and the others were always around, sunning themselves by the swimming pool, lounging inside with the stereo blaring, rummaging in the refrigerator for snacks. In return, Charlie set up friendly orgies for Wilson and Jakobson and any other friends. The girls would undress and then run around the property pretending to be fairies. The men chased after them and were sexually rewarded by their giggling captives. None of the women ever complained that she wasn’t in the mood. They did whatever Charlie told them to, and usually they liked it.

People in the Brother Records office couldn’t believe it when Dennis let Charlie keep hanging around, apparently indefinitely. They hired a detective to run a background check and learned that Charlie had done hard time and was still on probation.
When Dennis heard the news, he was elated rather than concerned. Sure, Charlie had told him tales of doing hard time, but lots of posers claimed to have been unfairly put in jail by the Man. Charlie really was an ex-con? To Dennis, that made him even more interesting.

Wilson was part of a rock star social set where everyone was in the habit of dropping in on everyone else. No call ahead was deemed necessary; if one celebrity pal wasn’t in, you just went on to the home of the next. Hanging around at Wilson’s, Charlie constantly met other people who might be able to get him his record deal. He kept his guitar handy and played his songs for anyone willing to listen. That wasn’t unusual; at any given time, just about all the successful L.A. musicians had protégés hanging around, hoping for their own chance at stardom. Wilson made it clear that he was sponsoring Charlie.
Rocker Neil Young came by Dennis’s one day, improvised some chords to go with goofy lyrics Charlie was tossing out, and liked the results enough to suggest to Mo Ostin of Warner Brothers Records that Charlie was worth a listen. Young recalled telling Ostin, “This guy is unbelievable—he makes the songs up as he goes along, and they’re all good,” but Ostin wasn’t intrigued enough to give Charlie an audition. Charlie noticed a pattern—Dennis Wilson and Neil Young were rock stars, but neither one had been able to get him signed to a label, at least so far. Charlie needed to find and impress somebody even higher up the music business food chain, and, thanks to Dennis and Gregg, he thought that he knew just the right person.

In 1968 Terry Melcher was one of the most powerful figures in American popular music. The son of actress-singer Doris Day and her first husband, musician Al Jorden, Melcher was formally adopted by his mother’s third husband, agent Marty Melcher. He and his stepfather, who was extremely religious and a strict disciplinarian, never got along. Melcher had some success as a teenager playing in a series of bands, but made his real mark in the industry at age twenty-two when he went to work for Columbia Records as a producer,
a relatively high-level position that many thought he reached only because his mother owned so much stock in the company. In 1965 when Columbia signed the long-haired Byrds, Melcher was assigned to the band because he was the youngest producer on the label and the higher-ups thought he might be able to relate to them. Melcher did more than that, bringing in the best studio musicians and making “Mr. Tambourine Man” a huge hit. Melcher guided the Byrds to more sales success, and then proved he was more than a one-band wonder by turning a regional band called Paul Revere and the Raiders into a pop hit machine. In all, Melcher produced more than eighty chart hits for
Columbia. In an industry where the only track record that counted was making money, the label gave him carte blanche in signing and producing any musicians that he liked. With plenty of Columbia’s money to spend, Melcher hired Gregg Jakobson to scout the city music scene and make recommendations.

To Charlie, getting signed by Terry Melcher should have been a cinch. Jakobson liked Charlie, Melcher hired Jakobson to find new talent, so Jakobson would recommend Charlie to Melcher and a recording contract would follow. But it wasn’t that simple.

Terry Melcher was now a fun-loving twenty-six-year-old who enjoyed nothing more than hanging with his buddies Dennis and Jakobson, smoking a little weed and chasing girls before going home to his cottage atop Cielo Drive and his gorgeous, live-in actress girlfriend, Candy Bergen.
But unlike Dennis Wilson, eager to please and willing to talk record deals with just about anybody he met who wanted one, Melcher kept his social life separate from business. Also unlike Wilson, he was careful about the friends he made and the people he invited into his home. Having grown up as the son of a star who lived in a gated, guarded community, Melcher was wary of strangers, especially those he perceived as hustlers. Though he trusted Jakobson, Melcher would never sign anyone strictly on his pal’s say-so. He would want to study any recommended artists carefully and weigh their material against the strict industry bottom line—would their music make his label a lot of money? If Melcher didn’t think so, it wouldn’t matter to him if his close friend had recommended the musician or even if Melcher himself thought that someone’s songs were artistic masterpieces. Because of that, Jakobson was careful not to push anyone too hard on Melcher. He would mention someone, suggest that maybe Melcher meet the artist, and after that perhaps ask Melcher to give the person’s music a listen. Where Charlie expected instant bonding and a contract, Jakobson knew that the best possible approach would be for Melcher to get to know Charlie and then, perhaps, he’d permit some sort of audition. So when Jakobson first mentioned Charlie to Melcher, he talked about this interesting guy who had a bunch of girl followers who ate out of grocery store garbage dumps. This guy, Charlie, could order the girls to do anything and they would do it without question. By the
way, Charlie wrote songs and performed them. Melcher ought to come over to Wilson’s and meet him.

Melcher did, and Charlie turned on the charm. But his new target had been fawned over and pitched to by hundreds of other would-be rock stars, so Melcher wasn’t automatically impressed. He didn’t ask Charlie to go get his guitar and play for him. What he did want was to get to know Ruth Ann Moorehouse better, and Charlie was quick to get Melcher and the sexy teenager together. Melcher’s encounter with Ruth Ann went so well that he told Jakobson
he thought he’d move the girl into the house at Cielo as a housekeeper. Charlie would gladly have handed Ruth Ann off to Melcher in hopes that she’d help persuade him to sign Charlie, but Candy Bergen knew what kind of housekeeping chores Terry had in mind and vetoed the plan.

Even though Jakobson was attached to Ruth Ann himself, he didn’t resent his friend for trying to latch on to her, too. It was part of the spirit of the times—you shared everything, even girls. He was careful not to nag Melcher about Charlie; a record deal would either work out or it wouldn’t. Besides, Jakobson was still impressed with Charlie more as a character than as a musician. Maybe the guy could be a comedian. He was witty enough. Jakobson considered suggesting that Melcher fund a documentary about Charlie and his followers. It might be a hit as a movie or on TV. He tried to write down a film proposal but had trouble finding the right word to describe Charlie’s disciples. Remembering how Charlie referred to them, and how they often referred to themselves,
Jakobson called them “the Family.” He used the term a couple of times to Melcher and Wilson—and to Charlie and the group members themselves. Everybody liked it and it stuck. From then on they were Charlie and his Family, or Charlie and the Manson Family.