Charles Manson Now (30 page)

XIII
UNCOVERING THE FINAL DETAILS

It was Stanton LaVey who told me about John Aes-Nihil. Stanton has known John since he was a kid, when John was his mother’s and stepfather’s (Zeena and Nikolas) roommate. Stanton and John were close and John used to drive Stanton to school. Stanton told me that what makes John unique, aside from the deep connection he feels with the Manson Family, is the fact that he has been interested in Manson from the beginning: 1969.

John created the market for Charles Manson memorabilia, the now-popular nostalgia scene surrounding the stuff of serial killers, true crime, and all things underground. According to Stanton, “John Aes-Nihil is the original swap meet, flea market, smut peddling, bootlegging pirate.” Most important, Stanton said, is that John does what he does for the right reasons, “taking care of people” along the way. “His intentions personally are deeper, philosophical; he wants to carry this information forward into the future, in one of the oldest, truest ways tested: through magazines, literature, books, and archives.” Stanton said he could guarantee that John is the authority on all things Manson, that he “knows all.” His archives have been accessed by virtually everyone attempting to discover or produce anything related to Manson. He owns every piece of video and the rarest photos. He has personally interviewed hundreds of people related to the Manson Family and documented it all. His interest borders on obsession; it’s staggering.

I made the drive out to the Mojave Desert where John has
lived for a while. He has since told me that the desert, out in the middle of nowhere and away from everyone else, is a haven for Satanists. John is pretty soft spoken; he has a deliberate way of talking, as though he thinks about everything first. In a way, he has the composure of an artist and, after spending about ten minutes with him, it was clear to me that this man was one of the most fascinating people I have ever met. I was disappointed I had only a few hours to spend with him. I wished I could have spent a week out in the desert, learning as much as I could from John.

John started filming and directing The Manson Family Movies in 1974 while living in Oakland. The focus of the project was to reproduce the rumored films Manson family members made of each other’s exploits leading up to and including the events of August 1969. John embarked on an immense amount of research before he began shooting the home video style footage. He tried to keep the reenactments as authentic as possible, using the same locations, and keeping the family’s “feel.” The film premiered in 1984.

John told me how the real Manson Family movies (ifthey ever, indeed, existed) might have gotten started. According to the story he was told, a TV station had been doing a shoot at Spahn Ranch when some of the crew’s equipment was stolen. Filmmaker John Waters asked Tex Watson about the alleged theft, a crime Tex said never happened. Ed Sanders, author of The Family, claimed that the family filmed a satanic cult snuffing someone at Ventura Co. Line beach. According to Sanders, the filming of this event led to the family’s filmed recreation of its own murders. Sanders’ account alleges that a “famous New York Artist,” which to some sounds like code for “Andy Warhol,” acquired these films. John
said he once asked John Waters if he ever talked to Warhol about this. Waters had; when he’d asked Warhol if Warhol owned the movie, his response was simply “I don’t know.”

John believes he got the real story about the family films from interviewing Robert Hendrickson, director of the 1973 documentary Manson. John said that Robert and his friend Craig had been working on a movie about Jesus, when they somehow ended up at Spahn Ranch and started making a movie about the family. Eventually, director Laurence Merrick got involved and told Hendrickson, as well as the family, that he could make everyone rich from the resulting documentary. “Apparently,” said John, “Merrick never gave the family any money-and you know what happened to him.” (Merrick was shot in the back by a deranged student of his acting school in 1977.)

John started the Manson Archives and the Archives of Aesthetic Nihilism around 1980. John coined the term “Aesthetic Nihilism,” which is art or music so extreme it “verges on destruction.” He then started work on the first of the Tennessee Williams Trilogy, while living with Nikolas, Zeena, and Stanton in Hollywood. John’s next project was The Ma Barker Story, the prequel to the Manson Family Movies, to be filmed at Barker Ranch. He has also contributed volumes to the music and photography scenes; he’s collaborated with everyone from Kenneth Anger to William Burroughs.

John told me he acquired a lot of his Manson archives from Bill Nelson. Nelson has self published a couple of books about Manson and Tex Watson. When John mentioned Nelson, I recognized his name but could recall little else. “Oh, Boy-Nelson,” said John. “I met him when I lived in Hollywood and we
started trading Manson materials. He said that he used to work for the Secret Service; he also said he had been a minister and a used car salesman.” John told me he and Nelson used to meet at various Denny’s parking lots to go through all of their Manson memorabilia. Once, Nelson showed up to one of their meetings and said his wife wanted him to get rid of his collection. John bought Nelson out-or so he thought. John told me that Nelson’s sale was “the ultimate deal” because it included thirty-six slides of the photographs Roman Polanski took of Sharon Tate on the set of The Fearless Vampire Killers. John said the most amazing of these slides are all stamped August 1969; they are the photos that Voytek, Jay, and Sharon took of each other on August 5th, just days before they were slain.

John owns the original Tate murder crime scene photos, each stamped by the corner on the back. I asked John how Nelson ended up with such rare and exclusive items. “Somehow Nelson ended up with all of it.” I told John about the crime scene photos I’d seen at The Museum of Death. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I sold them a set of prints.” I asked to see his photos and he pulled out a filing box filled with rare, many one-of-a-kind Manson pictures. I saw Polaroid photos of Charlie and the girls; some were photos from happier times, before all the madness. When John handed me the crime scene photos, he showed me the backs where they were verified. I was silent. There was really nothing I could say. I felt somehow connected to what had happened. I was shown the slides that came from Sharon Tate’s camera, the pictures taken just days before she was murdered. The group of friends looked so alive. It was obvious that they were having fun and that they were all very close to one another. Most of all, they
seemed oblivious to what would happen next. I commented on how beautiful Sharon was and John took me out to his garage, where he showed me a poster-size print of a shot Polanski took of Sharon nude in the snow. It was breathtaking: the most amazing photo of Sharon I’d ever seen. John said that, in the early ‘70s, he would meet random people at parties in Haight-Ashbury who said they’d been at the wild parties Polanski gave.

John has also talked with famed Hollywood journalist Paul Krassner about the home movies. Krassner allegedly told John that he has actually seen a film in which Charlie, Susan, Voytek, and Abigail are at the Tate house doing MDA and having sex. Apparently the Los Angeles Police Department seized pornographic films and videotapes found in Polanski’s loft during the murder investigation. Krassner claimed the films also included Cass Elliot in an orgy with famous celebrities. Krassner believes that the secret celebrity sex tapes lie at the heart of the investigation’s cover-ups. Krassner and others (notably private and police investigators) feel that the stars’ actions could have been motivated mostly by the damage such tapes could do to their careers if they surfaced. John told me about additional movies that featured Sharon Tate with Dean Martin and Steve McQueen. Krassner wrote Charlie about the movie and received this response: “Sebring done Susan’s hair and I think he sucked one or two of her dicks. That girl loves dick, you know what I mean, hon’? Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers….”

John affirmed, “The main thing about the Tate murder situation was the slumming, the
movie stars converging with hippies.” He talked about the “piles” of “insane” stories regarding the parties at the Tate house. He said Roman, Sharon, Jay, and movie stars from all over Hollywood would go down to the Sunset Strip to pick up hippies and take them back to their houses for drugs and sex. “Eventually,” John pointed out, “that’s going to blow up in your face.” In his opinion, the murders were a direct result of all this wild interaction between the “rich and famous and the infamous and unknown.”

John told me Nelson tried to get these videos from the same two cops who were in possession of the crime scene photos. Apparently the cops told Nelson the videos merely showed Sharon and Roman having sex. Allegedly the LAPD told Roman they would return his films ifhe took a lie detector test, the results of which compose part ofJohn’s collection.

I asked John about Polanski’s polygraph. “Well, of course Roman passed the polygraph,” he said. John doesn’t believe Polanski had anything to do with his wife’s brutal death, but he believes Polanski knew Voytek was trouble, and regretted the fact that he hadn’t kicked Voytek out of his home before the horror.

I asked John what happened to Nelson. John said that Nelson had secretly held on to some of his collection. When he decided to sell what remained, John was on a European tour with his films and Nelson couldn’t get a hold of him. So he sold to another collector from North Carolina, who’d previous bought items from John. When he received Nelson’s compilation, the collector contacted John and sold him what he had acquired. It turned out that Nelson was having a nervous breakdown, undergoing various operations, and popping “piles” of drugs. John told me Nelson was “most likely nuts from the beginning” since he’d been a convicted pedophile long before John met him. John sees Nelson’s interest in the Manson murders as a “voyeuristic obsession,” a desire
to live vicariously through the sexual exploits at the Polanski residence and Spahn Ranch. “He was insanely jealous of the sex orgies. While the family was partying at Spahn, Nelson said, he was preaching at a church in Canoga Park. The main thing is that Nelson was trying to be a normal Christian during the hippie era, and when he discovered the Manson family, he realized he’d really missed out.” Apparently, Nelson’s obsession knew no limits. He supposedly stalked family member Sandra Good for years.

I asked John to explain how he first got interested in Manson. He told me he read about the Tate murders in the paper when they happened and that, sometime before that, he had read an article in Time about a roving band of hippies ripping off tourists in Death Valley. He told me he’s always seen the Manson trial as a witch-hunt. John believes Manson isn’t responsible for the Tate murders. He told me, “I have always believed that you are responsible for what you do. Period. If these kids killed people it was because that is what they wanted to do. Any other belief about what happened is ultimately a dead end. Nowadays it is government policy that no one is responsible for anything and everything is someone else’s fault and only the government can save you. So now you know why everything is a giant mess and Charlie is still in prison for your sins.”

Now, John believes, the Manson story has turned into a “mass culture universal myth.” John said no one knows what actually happened; even Tex Watson, who actually committed the murders, claims to have no idea what was really going on. Because of this, it’s possible the public perception of Charles
Manson will someday shift. John told me about a writer named Wayne McGuire, who wrote a few articles for Crawdaddy and Fusion in the late ‘60s and then disappeared. McGuire predicted a future massive, worldwide schizophrenic breakdown, during which Charles Manson would morph into a major American folk hero.

I asked John to explain his take on the origins of the Manson murders. He would lay it out like this:

“When Charlie was released from Terminal Island and ended up in Haight-Ashbury, the hippies were attracted to him and he went with it. Constantly there were all these kids coming to him and asking him what to do about everything. Haight-Ashbury was being taken over by speed freaks and all of that. So they left San Francisco and went to LA. Then there was the spiral staircase, where the family spent a lot of time. The spiral staircase was a house located in the back of the Malibu Feed Bin at the intersection of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway. Supposedly the family and Satanists and movie stars really got down there.

“Bobby Beausoleil lived in the Haight with his band The Orkestra. Ken Anger was there and dinged out on Bobby and told him he had to be Lucifer in his movie so Bobby said sure. So Ken and Bobby are living at a Victorian mansion called the Russian Embassy because that is what it used to be. While living with Kenneth Anger for four or five years, I taped every interview he did and he told the Bobby story at least twice. He said, “Bobby told me he needed to go to LA to buy band equipment, so he left in the van I bought him with the money
I gave him. Upon his return, I found a large square object wrapped in black plastic in the foyer. Our dog Snowfox was ripping at it, so I opened it and it was a bale of marijuana. I was outraged, as this could have gotten us all arrested. I threw him and the weed out. I subsequently went out, and when I returned the place had been broken into and all the footage of Lucifer Rising was gone. Bobby had driven my van to LA and the van broke down next to the Spahn Ranch, where he met those Manson people.

“Bobby knew Gary Hinman from when he’d previously lived in LA. Gary was selling weed that had been sprayed by the government with paraquat. The Manson people bought some of this and sold it to the Hells Angels who got horribly sick from it. This led to Bobby killing Gary, which led to the other murders.

“A number of points in Ken’s version of the story are very unlikely. Bobby drove to Topanga Canyon. He may have met the family at the spiral staircase. He did stay with Gary; they apparently had a thing going on. The family was wandering around in a bus they parked at Gary’s. The family and Bobby moved onto the Spahn Ranch. The family stayed with Gary Hinman, whom they met through Bobby Beausoleil. Gary was involved in some sort of drug situation.