Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (32 page)

“What do you think of the decision?” someone shouted.

“What decision?” Charlie shot back, summing it up rather nicely.

The following year, on November 28, 1979, Charlie dispensed with the circus altogether. He was playing Monopoly when he received the call to appear before the board. He’d just landed on “community chest” as the escort officer arrived, winning the right to pick up a card. “Get out of jail free” it announced. Charlie smiled at the irony and handed the small yellow card to the officer. “Give this to them,” he said. The hearing was held in absentia, and he was turned down again.

In 1980, Charlie decided to reappear. It was showtime again, and Charlie gave another of his spellbinding performances. Most of the media, though, not being up on Mansonese, couldn’t make heads or tails of his ramblings. One paper described it as “a bizarre discourse and incoherent prattle.” I understood it all, having spent years deciphering his odd sentence structure and jagged thought pattern. From my perspective, aside from the usual environment/bad parents/save the children/blood will flow stuff, he made two significant statements. He admitted that he was dangerous, and after years of silence or denial, finally confessed that he had been in the LaBianca house on the night of the murders. He explained that he left before the carnage began, which was true, and denied ordering the couple killed, which probably wasn’t.

Asked if he would escape if given the opportunity, he responded, “Yeah, I’d go. I’d just go out and leave you all alone.”

The parole was denied.

His fourth hearing was held on November 5, 1981. Charlie, in better spirits, put on probably his most memorable parole show ever. Rolling two white marbles in his hand a la Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg, and wearing the long hair and beard of his most famous photos, Manson entertained the panel and gathered media for nearly three hours. All it took to set the stage was a board member’s routine question about what the prisoner had done the previous year.

“I was cleaning the barn and I had to get a little of that old horse shit on my feet when I got down into the mud. But I got down there to clean the barn and I see that dude in there stealing the Cokes from that other guy.”

“Now you’re losing me,” the questioner interrupted.

“In the procedures that the stars exist in, someone has to hold those gold bars up and someone has to hold them lieutenants up there. And I say, ‘I’m talking to you, Sergeant!’ And the sergeant comes over and I say, ‘Who is it, the lieutenant?’ And I say, ‘Bring him here.’ I say, ‘Lieutenant, you know how my heart is.’”

“What are we talking about now?” the baffled board member asked.

“We’re talking about holding up procedures. So a cop gets in the way and I get into a fight with him. Who’s carrying the stick? Does Nixon carry the stick?”

The board member gave up trying to make sense of it. Didn’t matter. That bit of nonsense was just a warm-up, like a jazz singer hitting the scales to oil the throat. Charlie was oiling his brain.

Asked about the “bad things” he’d done during his decade in the slammer, the fog cleared as he adroitly turned the tables. “The bad things? What do you think it’s been, a picnic? It’s all been bad to me. I ain’t seen no good.”

Another board member queried him about a tiff he had gotten into with a female guard. Angry over some procedural matter, he allegedly told the lady officer, “You owe me because I freed you from a French whorehouse.” When she took umbrage at the silly remark, he reportedly dropped the T word. “Do you remember Sharon Tate? You’re going to end up just like her.”

Manson dodged the probe at the hearing by going on the offensive. “[She’s] a woman that just can’t work in prison. And she’s got no business in prison because she don’t know what the hell she’s doing to start with. I see inside her head all the way back to when she was a girl on the Good Ship Lollipop. When she comes up to me trying to play up to be a man, it don’t make no sense. She’s pecking on me. If a woman tells me something [like that] outside, she’d pick her teeth up off the ground. I’d punch my mother out for shit like that.…

“All these years I thought it was ‘the Man’ who was keeping me locked up. I didn’t know it was my mother or I would have gone out into the graveyard and got her head. I could have dug her grave up and took her head and gone off. What I’m trying to do is do right by everybody as good as I know how on the levels that I’m working on. We all have different levels that we do our little trips on. Well, I’m right alongside of you. The spaceship’s going up and—”

“Don’t start that trip again,” a panelist cut in.

“I don’t know how to communicate unless I can lay a foundation on where I’m coming from. It’s simply this: I say things like that and I do things like that. Sometimes I even screwed a waitress on top of a pool table once.…

“I wrote a letter and I told a lumber company, “If you keep cutting the trees down the way you’re cutting the trees down, you’re going to destroy all the chance we got for life balance on earth planet because your air and water don’t buy or sell.’ And nobody cares about anything but money. And if it ain’t profitable, then you can’t move it. So the air and water keeps on dying, they keep on sawing down and destroying the atmosphere. They keep pollutin’ the streams and they say it’s always been that way. You asked the question ‘Are you going to kill?’ They’re already dead! They’ve already destroyed themselves in all kinds of ways with bugs and everything you can think of. To catch life balance on planet earth will be the next job. They’re getting ready to blow it up.…

“Every time I get outside, you people are moving a little faster and talking a little quicker and you got things cut up a little more and you got more little things there and you got all kinds of little things. Pretty soon you go out and all your goats are gone. The ducks are gone. The geese are gone. A guy comes out with a big shotgun and he’s got a camera from Japan and things all over him. His gut’s hanging over and he’s loaded on ‘bennies’ talking about people killed in the desert. He calls the park rangers and the park rangers come with their forces and look for something to do for their coffee break. And pretty soon the highway patrol is in this thing.”

Whap! Parole denied.

Like Elvis refusing to do encores to keep the crowds hungry for more, Charlie passed on his November 30, 1982, hearing. With Manson unable to steal the show, LA. deputy district attorney Stephen Kay took center stage and sealed whatever microscopic chance Charlie had.

“Charles Manson is probably the best advertisement for the death penalty.… If he can’t follow the simple rules of prison, how can we expect him to follow the rules of society? I think the answer is obvious. He can’t. We have a man, Charles Manson, who told his followers that his hero was Adolf Hitler, and that Hitler is a genius for what he did to the Jews. I ask you this, can we ever risk letting Manson go free in a society that he tried so hard to destroy by promoting a black-white race war?”

Kay touched upon the “enormity and cruelty” of the Tate-LaBianca murders, and referred to Manson’s unrelenting antisocial activities and thought processes. “In his philosophy, and in his actions, the human life means absolutely nothing. The ease with which Manson gets others to commit violent crimes is scary. What we have is almost a monthlong murderous rampage directed by Charles Manson.… His activity in prison has been terrible. Threats, assaults, contraband. He has absolutely no respect for authority.… I think he feels that he gets attention by doing things like this [threatening and assaulting officers]. He’s the number one criminal in America, so he has to keep up his image by trying to scare people and showing what a tough guy he is. As long as this man is alive, he’s going to be a danger, whether he’s in prison or out. Nobody really knows what to do with this man.… To have this man ever paroled in his lifetime would be a travesty.”

This time, the board not only shut the iron door, they smartened up and used a loophole in the law to deny Manson an audience for three years. The lectures and grandiose performances, initially enthralling and amusing, had become redundant and tiring, so there was no need to call the circus and rubber-stamp a denial every twelve months.

A second reason the hearing dates were stretched over three years is that Manson was using them to speak to his followers. His twisted legions, both old and new, hungered for news and directives. The long accounts of his parole speeches were like manna from heaven. As Manson knew, he wasn’t winning a single convert on the board, but he was recruiting thousands on the streets. After every hearing, the ever present stream of mail would increase tenfold, taxing my censorship duties.

The word “censor” probably sticks in the craw of most free Americans, even when it comes to a prisoner’s mail. I’d be the first to agree. In Manson’s case, it was unequivocally the right step. As previously noted, locking Manson in a cage had not killed his sinister influence. This little man, shut down in maximum security, had come a poorly loaded gun away from assassinating a President of the United States. With an open line of communication, Manson could pose a threat to virtually anyone in the world, from a powerful political leader to an insignificant ex-con.

With all our scrutiny and diligence, the messages and commands usually got out anyway. There was no real way of stopping them. But by censoring his mail, we could keep him from increasing his long list of “Please let me kill for you” crazies—many of whom were dead serious.

Though Charlie wouldn’t be getting out of prison anytime soon, his endless legions of followers would forever be free—free, angry, and willing to do whatever he commanded.

13.

T
HROUGHOUT MY LIFE,
people have asked me about Manson. “Does he really have some kind of magical way of controlling people?” “Does he have hypnotic powers?” “Does he have a diabolical charisma?” “Do his eyes have a magnetic attraction?” “Does his smile beckon?” “Is his charisma irresistible?” “Is he crazy?”

My response is that for some people, the answer to all of the above is yes—except for the last question. He isn’t crazy.

Much has been written about Manson’s powers and how he used them to seduce and control his followers. Dr. Livsey’s book,
The Manson Women,
promoted the theory that all the women who killed for Charlie were predisposed to murder before they met him. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi had a similar theory. I strongly disagree. Manson has two feet, picks his nose, cracks dirty jokes, catches colds, and feels happy and sad like everybody else. But he also has an undeniable effect upon people’s lives. He can make hate look like love, chaos like harmony, and lies like truth. He offers himself to his followers as a superior human being who has all the answers.

“I’ll never die,” he told me once. “I’m above death. When all of you are long gone, I’ll still be here.” However, at other times, Manson scoffs at his own omnipresent image. “If I had any real power, like they’ve said, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I’d put everyone under my spell and just walk out of this shit hole. But every time I try to do that, some dumb-ass guard slams a door in my face.”

As witty and deceptive as the most sophisticated scam artist, Manson can be compared to the travelling medicine men of the Old West, wowing the crowds with bottles of potent stimulants, then beating town before the hangovers hit. Manson’s psychedelic medicine bottles were marijuana and blotters of LSD, the perfect lollipops to attract wayward youth.

On February 14, 1967, some of Manson’s future followers were among the longhaired faithful at the famous “Be-in” held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They heard Allen Ginsberg chant a slogan Charlie would later take to heart: “We are one!” LSD guru Timothy Leary was there urging the young people to tune in and turn on. “Let it go,” Leary extolled like a father freeing his children from all their hang-ups. “Whatever you do is beautiful.” Little did Leary know, there was at least one person wandering around out there destined to put the phrase to the ultimate test.

Several years ago, a Harvard University professor completed a study at the Rockefeller Institute that posed the question “What is ‘demonic’ from a psychiatric point of view?” He cited three major elements in his conclusion: (1) nudity, (2) aggressiveness, and (3) a schizophrenic mentality—a tearing apart. The first one, nudity, was somewhat confusing, while number 2, aggressiveness, might be seen as obvious. It was number 3 that caught my attention. Below that, he had three subcategories: (a) whatever destroys unity, (b) creates discord, and (c) alters patterns.

Based on number three alone, and tossing out demented political leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and their ilk, I’d have to rate Manson as one of the major demonic creatures of our time. Tearing things apart, destroying unity, creating discord, and altering patterns are what he’s all about.

He’s also about sleight of hand and miscommunication. Under my watch, he’d been protected, provided for, tolerated, and sometimes even pampered. I lost count of how many guitars, televisions, radios, and tape players he acquired, destroyed, and was allowed to have again, usually through the bending of rules. Yet, to read his letters or hear him speak to his followers in the visiting room, you’d think he was spending his time chained to some torture rack. He wanted his Family to view him as a martyr suffering enormous pain and deprivation because of the great father of all demons—usually me. It was bullshit and he knew it, but it played better in Peoria.

Something odd was playing in Pleasanton around that time that again linked Squeaky and Charlie to Patty Hearst. Squeaky went after a Croatian nationalist terrorist named Julienne Busic with a claw hammer, whacking her a few good licks on the noggin before the guards broke it up. According to witnesses, Squeaky called Busic “a white, middle-class, rich bitch who doesn’t deserve to live.” The Pleasanton officers, who never prosecuted Squeaky, were probably sympathetic—as were most of New York’s finest. Busic was convicted of a 1976 bombing at La Guardia Airport that resulted in the death of a policeman. No motive was given for Squeaky’s attack at the time, but she would later tell a reporter that, to use modern slang, Busic “dissed” her. She called Busic “a rat, Patty Hearst’s best friend,” who was “very disrespectful of me.”