Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (30 page)

A noticeable limp remained when I arrived back at CMF. The moment Manson saw me, he renewed his prevacation tirade. “You better shape up or I’ll take the other leg,” he bellowed.

“What?”

“I put a curse on you to scare you, but I didn’t use enough needles to kill you,” he explained, affecting his most sinister look. “A few more pins and you’d be dead.”

“Well, if that’s true, you almost got me there,” I said, half serious. After that incident, I was far more sympathetic to the guards and doctors who knocked on my door worrying about Charlie’s dolls.

Not surprisingly, Manson soon began getting his hands on banned contraband in order to make other things. The feeling was, if he busied himself building something else, he wouldn’t spend his time making dangerous voodoo dolls. In short order, he’d crafted a miniature electric fan about three inches tall, complete with a skillfully wound rotor. The materials, including numerous magnets and batteries, came from old radio parts.

“Damn, that’s pretty impressive,” I complimented as the little blades spun. Charlie smiled, extremely pleased with himself. The possibility existed that if he could make such a fan, he could also construct a motorized weapon of some kind. Regardless, the guards ignored it, happy that it wasn’t another doll.

The following month, Manson stood in his cell holding a tiny mandolin.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“I made it!”

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes I did.”

Sure enough, he showed me how he’d ingeniously crafted the little instrument using some guidelines from a book. He strummed it, playing a sweet tune. As I stood admiring his workmanship, he cracked an evil smile, dropped it to the floor, and stomped it into little pieces with his foot.

“What the hell did you do that for?”

“You figure it out,” he challenged.

Call me stupid, but I just didn’t get it. Although typical of his impulsive, masochistic behavior, what was the point? Why work so hard on something so beautiful, only to destroy it for a few seconds of shock value? Then again, isn’t that exactly what Charles Manson always did? Whether it was a guitar, a radio, a television, an impressionable young girl, or an entire family of devoted disciples, Charlie always seemed to destroy what he cherished the most. Strange little dude.

Charlie drew his next line in the sand over baby oil. Some of the night guards began secretly slipping him the solution to burn in a little lamp he made. The day crew felt he was using the illumination to stay up all night and make more voodoo dolls. Every morning, they’d confiscate whatever he had left. On the third morning, instead of letting the day guards take it, Charlie poured his entire supply over his head, anointing himself like a biblical king. He stood there, grinning devilishly, as the officer stumbled over what to do.

“Fu-fuck you, Charlie,” the guard stuttered, leaving in a huff.

That night brought a new supply. Realizing that the day officer was going to go berserk, Charlie prepared for his arrival by soaking a sheet and using it to tie his cell door shut. When the officer stormed to his cell, Charlie lit a match and set the oily cloth ablaze. The show earned him another stint in isolation, but from Charlie’s perspective, it was well worth it. He’d beaten the system again.

The longer Charlie stayed at CMF, the more his cell began to take on the appearance of his home at San Quentin. Bit by bit, the smoke-scarred walls swelled with pictures of natural landscapes and animals, mostly from
National Geographic.
This particular montage was heavy into predatory animals like wolves, eagles, and bears. As I admired his decorative work one afternoon, he put it into perspective as only he could. “I’d rather kill a man than a snake!”

That statement, twisted as it was, stayed with me for days. There was something about it that sparked a memory of a passage from a book I’d once read. Searching through my library, I finally tracked it down. It was Edward Abbey’s
Desert Solitaire,
the account of his lonely sojourn in the arid wilds. I perused it with new eyes, amazed how Abbey meshed natural beauty with savage violence—just like Charlie.

Cutting the bloody cord, that’s what we feel, the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, into freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the word, the only meaning that really counts. The freedom, for example, to commit murder and get away with it scot-free, with no other burden than the jaunty halo of conscience … My God! I’m thinking of the incredible shit we put up with most of our lives, the domestic routine, same old wife every night, the stupid, useless, and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the boring wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back in the capital, the foul, diseased, and hideous cities and towns we live in … the useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring the creeping strangulation.

In other words, “Soon you will be an old man, working hard, killing yourself, living in a paper bag. When will you stop chasing money and become free like us?”

Manson’s problem was that, unlike Abbey, he wasn’t geared toward literature. He could grip an audience orally, but had difficulty putting his thoughts down in writing. Squeaky, on the other hand, was just the opposite. Her speeches lacked force, mainly because of her tinny voice. But give her a pencil and paper, and the girl could move you. I was never sure whether Charlie admired her talent, or resented it. A clue came in May 1978. Squeaky submitted a riveting article to
Rolling Stone
that the editors were anxious to print. Although she was eager to spread the word to the magazine’s young readers, she refused to allow its publication without her master’s approval. Instead of giving his queen her moment in the sun—and promoting himself to boot—Charlie squashed it. His lame excuse was that
Rolling Stone
was Jewish-controlled and he wanted nothing to do with their dirty money. Lynette docilely accepted his decision.

Even without the infusion of publicity the
Rolling Stone
article would have provided, Manson’s mailbag remained full. As the years passed, I was disturbed by a transformation that was taking place. Time was muting the horror of Manson’s actions while amplifying his celebrity. Instead of sacks overflowing with the musings of crackpots, a wave of letters started coming from respectable citizens and organizations. The leader of the Cascade Council Camp Fire Girls in Washington wrote requesting that Charlie be allowed to speak to her group! Seems the girls had taken a vote on which person in the whole world they would like to talk to. Former president Richard Nixon was first, and Manson was a close second. Nixon brushed them off, so they came to Charlie. I immediately called the lady who wrote the letter, explaining that the last thing she should ever want to do was to expose her impressionable charges to a man known for turning young women into sexually depraved murderers. The troop leader saw the folly of her ways and withdrew the request. After I hung up, I visualized the scene had it occurred. There, around a blazing campfire, would be all these fresh-faced little suburban girls. In the center, hopping around like a drug-crazed Rumpelstiltskin, would be Manson. With eyes ablaze, he’d tell them that the key to life is to drop acid, give voracious blow jobs on command, and happily submit to being sodomized in the dirt. Once so enlightened, they would then be encouraged to rise up and hack their parents to death.

Esquire
magazine followed by asking for Manson’s favorite dirty joke. They wanted to include it in a section consisting of fellow celebrities like movie stars, athletes, and politicians. A Canadian wax museum requested permission to cast Charlie in wax. Doctors wrote from around the world insisting they could cure him. Researchers from major universities sent detailed questionnaires as part of their highbrow studies. Ministers offered to convert him to their various beliefs and promised to remember him in their prayers. Since it wasn’t necessary to censor these fine folks, Manson read them all, passing the best ones to Squeaky or Sandra to put on file. For what? That remained a mystery.

I searched the records for some insight into this mystery. Bingo. The previous year, in May 1977, Sandra had filed a blistering legal brief that offered a possible answer. Sandra was appealing her federal conviction for mailing a staggering three thousand threatening letters to corporations and individuals on behalf of a post-Helter Skelter Manson offshoot organization called the International People’s Court of Retribution (IPCR). The IPCR was a more palatable place to herd those who believed in theory with some of the Family’s pro-environment ideas, but weren’t ready to engage in the violent, crazy stuff. Sandra’s document provides a brilliant insight into the mind of a devoted Manson follower. Although she was desperate to win her freedom, her slavish loyalty to Charlie came through loud and clear, destroying any chance she had of actually winning her otherwise well-stated argument.

In the weeks subsequent to Lynette Fromme’s visit to President Ford in Capitol Park … defendant [Sandra] … made strong statements regarding the consequences of environmental destruction … If I warn you your house is on fire, it does not mean I set the fire, rather I give you a chance to save your house and your life.… The fact that the defendant was seen as the threat, rather than the threat being the problems she spoke of and the consequences of not facing and dealing with these problems is something you must look at.…

Good argued that in the seven years since the Tate-LaBianca murders, a vast myth has been created called the Manson Family. She reasoned that the killings had to be understood as “seven more murders in Los Angeles,” which had occurred “amidst a time of war in Asia, international political intrigue and assassination, and social and political and environmental dissolution in this country.… A cross-section of white Christian children took the lives of seven people at the same time young American men were killing and being killed in Vietnam.…” Good continued: “The world watched as President Nixon said that Manson was guilty. An opportunity was provided for lawyers to get publicity, district attorneys and judges to gain political advancement and scores of media people and book writers to create stories and get rich selling the most marketable items—sex and violence. A myth and monster was created in true Hollywood style and the public has devoured it. No one understands or even has a small glimpse of the real family.… In Good’s view “the Family was convicted by public frenzy and fear,” she had been judged unfairly as “another ‘mad Manson maniac’ that’s got to be locked up before she ‘gets in our house.…’ As it stands, lies and illusions cover all that we have to offer and explain the thoughts that are running this country to violence and anarchy and the lies that cover us will leave the United States looking like the Tate house.…”

Returning to her defense of the letters, Good conceded that “in many cases, the letters were worded shockingly strong,” but defended them as having been sent “to people whose activities have been shockingly devastating to life. Companies who knowledgeably cause cancer-causing elements to flood our air, waters, food; industries that tear up the earth and destroy the life on it for resources to make products that we do not need to live are not sane, reasonable, concerned people who can be pleaded with to stop.… By warning these people of what will befall them, they were being given a chance to save their own lives by presenting to them an alternative whereby they would leave something other than poisoned air, water, concrete and death for our children.… By law, defendant should not have come to prison for warning, and you will see much death that she did not cause but warned to prevent. Who has concern enough to risk prison for telling the mean truth that no one wants to hear?…”

Sandra’s appeal, suffice it to say, was denied. She did, however, win a major victory six months later when she was transferred to Alderson Federal Prison in West Virginia—home of those two squabbling, fun girls, Squeaky and fellow presidential assassin wanna-be Sara Jane Moore. Like Lynette, Sandra had no use for Moore, but she was in heaven being with her best pal Squeaky. Their letters took on a decidedly upward beat, especially when they were ripping Moore, something they did with relish.

“She has no thought to replace it [the existing government structure] but with her own, superimposed on old photos of Lenin and Marx. She’s like the head of these people because she had all the words. She’s snotty, almost aristocratic. She was married to a wealthy man, a doctor of some kind I’ve heard, in the San Francisco area. She drops names like a society gossip. I’ve heard her talking to greedy black women about shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. Only Godless blacks will listen to her long, even though her offers of money are tempting. She gathers fools and instigates discontent. She’s good at her job.”

In the same letter, Squeaky, writing for both herself and Sandra, gave their updated take on the race issue. “We see how the black people have been taught to follow the white Hollywood images. We said that race mixing destroys both their race and ours and you can’t have one without the other. It has nothing to do with hate, but hateful people of all races and self destructive people of all races will be destroyed. That the debt must be paid to earth and the future of our children, not to the past thoughts of debt.”

After that, they relayed an interesting conversation they’d had with a television cameraman regarding the Manson Family’s association with the famous musical group the Beach Boys. The original version of the band included brothers Brian and Dennis Wilson. (As an aside, Charlie helped pen the group’s song “Never Learn Not to Love,” which he had called “Cease to Exist.”)

“He [the cameraman] asked about Dennis Wilson. He’d seen Dennis on TV say that his brother, Brian … [wanted] to get him away from us and how that had straightened out his head.… “The cameraman used to be a big fan of theirs but said they’d lost their creativity. Blue said that was because they had been untrue to you [Charlie].”