Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (26 page)

But Susan and the others botched the Mendocino experiment. Soon after they arrived and rented a place in the small town of Philo, parents began complaining to county police that their underage children were being given drugs by women living in what neighbors dubbed “Hippie House.” Following up on one mother’s call, officers found the woman’s seventeen-year-old son suffering violent, drug-induced hallucinations on the rental property. Susan, Mary, Yeller, Pat, and a few hangers-on were arrested on a variety of drug charges, and baby Pooh Bear was placed in foster care. Now Charlie had to find some way to rescue them all, but he couldn’t leave L.A. himself—it was critical that he stick around to keep working on Wilson and Jakobson about getting signed to Brother or another label.
So he called Bobby Beausoleil and asked him to go to Mendocino and see what might be done. Beausoleil was agreeable. He was spending his summer driving up and down the California coast in his pickup truck, which he’d rigged with a folding tent in the bed to provide sheltered sleeping quarters at night. As usual, he had female companionship. His girlfriend Gail was still with him, and so was Gypsy. Since he’d talked to Charlie last, Beausoleil had added a third girl to his informal harem. Her name was Leslie Van Houten.

Eighteen-year-old Leslie was a native of Monrovia, a Los Angeles suburb. Her comfortable middle-class upbringing was shaken by her parents’ divorce when she was fourteen, but Leslie seemed to compensate well, making lots of friends and playing baritone sax in her high school marching band. But Leslie was rebellious, too. She constantly questioned authority, made only average grades despite keen intelligence, and, like
many teenagers in the mid-1960s, became sexually active early and developed a fondness for drugs, mostly weed and LSD. During the summer of 1967 when she was seventeen, Leslie ran away to the Haight for a few weeks with her boyfriend. They were disillusioned by what they found there—use of hard drugs was rampant and instead of the anticipated warm hippie welcome, the teen couple found a hostile reception in the overcrowded streets. Leslie was pregnant when they returned to Monrovia; even though she wanted to have the baby, her mother firmly advocated abortion and won out. Leslie was resentful; she graduated from secretarial school, and then instead of going to work at some L.A. company she left for San Francisco again, this time with a friend named Dee who wanted to reconcile with her husband back in the Haight. Leslie wanted the break from her parents and siblings to be permanent; after arriving in the Haight, she called them to say that she was dropping out and they’d never hear from her again. She signed up as a Kelly Girl to support herself. But then Dee met Bobby Beausoleil at a party and brought him home, where he and Gail and Gypsy met Leslie. They suggested that Leslie join them and Beausoleil’s white pit bull on their aimless coastal trip and she agreed—it sounded like the kind of hippie adventure she’d dreamed about.

There was a moment when Leslie almost didn’t go, and she remembered it later as the turning point in her life. All four of them couldn’t fit in the cab of Beausoleil’s truck, and when the others came by to pick up Leslie for the trip, she decided to ride in the truck bed. Beausoleil thought she had climbed onboard before she actually had and drove away, leaving Leslie standing on the sidewalk. The other three, comfortably seated up in front, weren’t aware that they’d stranded her. Leslie waited for almost fifteen minutes, wondering if they were going to come back and, as the minutes passed, thinking that maybe this was an omen, maybe she should stay behind in the Haight or even go home to Monrovia. But she thought about her phone call to her family, how she’d told them she was gone forever, and so she stood there patiently until somebody in the truck finally noticed Leslie had been left behind and they came back for her. But it had been a near thing, and afterward Leslie wondered how different her life might have been.

Much of the early trip was fine. The four travelers went where they
pleased, either panhandled when they needed money or else Beausoleil played guitar for tips. They enjoyed fine weather and beautiful scenery. But Gail wasn’t pleased to share her man with two other girls, and Gypsy constantly suggested to Leslie that they ought to leave. Bobby Beausoleil wasn’t where it was at, Gypsy insisted. There was this guy named Charlie she’d met through Beausoleil, and Charlie was a real guru who could teach them how to live better. She even hinted that Charlie might be something more than mortal. Leslie was intrigued, especially since Beausoleil and Gail argued with each other a lot, but she was a little put off by Gypsy’s referring to Charlie and his group as a commune. In Leslie’s limited hippie experience, single girls like her were usually not welcome in communes because the women already there didn’t want to share the men with newcomers. Though Gypsy assured her that the other girls in Charlie’s group were cool, Leslie didn’t want to risk any hassle. She thought she’d stick with Beausoleil for at least a little while longer.

After Charlie got in touch and asked Beausoleil to help out with the problem in Mendocino County, Bobby drove to Los Angeles so they could discuss it in person. Charlie and the Family happened to be out at the ranch that day rather than at Dennis Wilson’s. Beausoleil parked the truck and he, Gail, and Gypsy got out; Leslie, not in a sociable mood, only briefly left the cab. She thought the movie set was interesting, and the girls in the group were friendly and not bitchy, as Gypsy had promised. But Charlie, whom Leslie glimpsed only in passing, didn’t seem all that special, and soon Beausoleil had them back in the truck driving up to Mendocino County. It turned out that there wasn’t anything he could do—the county cops held Susan and the others in the county jail through most of the summer, when they were found guilty of the drug charges and sentenced to time served. Mary Brunner was able to regain custody of Pooh Bear, and everyone straggled back to Charlie in L.A. There was no more talk of finding the Family a permanent home. Leslie and Gypsy went on with Beausoleil, but as his fights with Gail escalated, Leslie began thinking that maybe soon she’d let Gypsy talk her into joining the Manson Family instead.

The squabbling in Bobby Beausoleil’s truck paled compared to national tumult in 1968, especially that summer. Tom Hayden would conclude
more than forty years later that
there may never have been twelve months in national history when so many cataclysmic events occurred in such rapid succession as in 1968. Race riots raged with staggering regularity; it seemed virtually every major city ghetto was in flames. On June 6, with America still stunned by the murder of Martin Luther King just two months earlier, Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on the same night he won California’s Democratic presidential primary. Besides the horror of the event itself, Kennedy’s death further inflamed youthful opposition to the American political process. With Kennedy gone and Eugene McCarthy faltering Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democrat nominee. Student radicals, who linked Humphrey to Lyndon Johnson’s military escalation in Vietnam, were appalled, and some determined that the time for nonviolent protest had passed. The SDS leadership made plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August; Bill Ayers would recall in his memoir that “insubordination [became] life itself. Go further, we said. Shock, offend, outrage, overstep, disturb. Know no limits. Lose control.”

•  •  •

In the waning weeks of the summer of 1968, Charlie was offending, overstepping, and disturbing, and as a result he was losing control of Dennis Wilson.
There was something in Charlie, Neil Young reflected many years later, that eventually drove most people away—his disproportionate sense of self-importance and entitlement. Charlie believed that he had the right to do and have anything he wanted. Anyone not falling completely under Charlie’s spell eventually noticed and was put off by it. For months, Wilson had subsidized Charlie and the Family. They assumed that everything he had was theirs—his clothes, his cars, his gold records—and for a while it was okay with Wilson. Charlie wanted to be a rock star and Wilson did what he could to help—it wasn’t his fault that nobody else was impressed enough with Charlie’s music to offer him a record deal. Instead of being grateful for all Wilson had done, Charlie kept demanding even more. It wasn’t just his constant badgering about a record deal, though that was bad enough.
Charlie also expected to be accepted by Wilson, Jakobson, and Melcher as an equal. Because they’d been nice enough to take him with them to a few parties and some clubs, he believed that he was one of
the elite gang and expected to go all of the time. When Charlie did get invited along, he invariably found some way to make himself the center of attention, as he did the night at the Whisky a Go Go when he dominated the dance floor. The traits that Wilson initially found intriguing about Charlie had become aggravating.

There was also the way Charlie went after every girl he met, even when they clearly weren’t interested. Wilson fooled around with the Family women whenever he got the chance, but he had other girlfriends. One of them,
a teenager nicknamed Croxey, came around the house a lot and wasn’t interested when Charlie tried to get her to join the Family. Croxey also wouldn’t cooperate in Charlie’s group sex scenarios. Once, when he found himself alone with the girl and she refused to have sex with him, Charlie pulled a knife and said, “You know, I could cut you up in little pieces.” Croxey dared him to do it and Charlie backed down. It was a story that Wilson could believe, because Charlie had threatened him with a knife, too. Most people would have thrown Charlie out, but Wilson let it go. Charlie wasn’t actually stabbing anybody or cutting anyone’s throat.

Dennis arranged for Charlie to do some recording at brother Brian’s home studio out of a sense of guilt. It was clear to him, though not to Charlie, that Brother Records was never going to offer Charlie a contract. Dennis had tried to make that happen and failed. Giving Charlie a chance to get his songs taped at a state-of-the-art facility was still a substantial opportunity, especially since Brian didn’t like Charlie and Dennis had to plead with him to allow it. If Charlie didn’t realize the significance of this effort made on his behalf, Dennis did, and
it eased his conscience. And who knew? Maybe Charlie would unexpectedly create some musical magic and come out of it with quality tapes that got him a record deal somewhere after all. The main thing was, Dennis wanted to rid himself of any sense of obligation to Charlie.

Wilson went so far as to get Stephen Despar, who’d built the studio for Brian and worked on some of the Beach Boys’ albums, to run the session. Before Despar met Charlie, Dennis advised him not to believe anything he might have been told by other Brother Records staff—Charlie had talent but was usually misunderstood. Despar was agreeable; after working with quirky Brian, who was currently grossly overweight and
liked to record wearing only pajama bottoms, he figured it would be impossible to run a session for anybody odder.

Despar was used to musicians arriving with lots of instruments and, he hoped, charts of the songs they wanted to record so he could get a better idea of what he was expected to get on tape. Charlie only had one guitar, but he also brought along several girls from the Family whose sole function seemed to be rolling joints and asking to use the bathrooms upstairs. Brian Wilson didn’t even leave his bedroom to greet Charlie. Brian’s wife, Marilyn, appalled at her unkempt guests, Susan Atkins in particular, scrubbed all the toilets in the house with disinfectant after they left.

Despar expected Dennis Wilson to come with Charlie and produce the session, but Dennis never showed. So Despar did his best to set up microphones and tried to make Charlie feel comfortable. When Charlie took out a cigarette but couldn’t find a match in his pockets, Despar went into Brian’s kitchen and found matches for him. Charlie made a point of thanking him profusely. Then they began recording, and it simply didn’t work. Charlie resented even mild instructions to move closer to the microphone, or warnings that his guitar was out of tune. These were his songs and he would perform them his way; Despar’s job was to keep the tape rolling. Despar had every right to feel offended—Brian Wilson and the other Beach Boys were also temperamental, but they were established artists with exceptional musical credentials, not some scruffy wannabe whose songs, so far as Despar could tell, were nothing special. Still, Dennis had asked him to do what he could with Charlie, so Despar suggested they try again the next night. Maybe the guy would be a little more relaxed then, a little more cooperative. But Charlie wasn’t. He resented all of Despar’s suggestions, and pulled a knife when Despar decided that he’d heard enough. Despar walked out and called a senior staffer at Brother Records, complaining that “this guy is psychotic.” He was assured that whatever had been recorded so far was plenty. Despar told Charlie that the sessions were over, and somehow Charlie left convinced that he’d done so well a Brother Records recording contract was forthcoming.

It wasn’t, but when Dennis listened to the tapes he thought that “Cease to Exist” had potential. The Beach Boys were preparing to record
another album, and Dennis wanted to contribute several tunes. Maybe, with some tweaking, “Cease to Exist” might be one of them. When Dennis told him what he was considering, Charlie was thrilled. He expected that the song would be recorded by the Beach Boys exactly as he had written it, or at least that his lyrics would remain intact. Wilson let him believe it.

Toward the end of the summer, the Beach Boys left L.A. on a brief concert tour. Charlie and the Family stayed at Dennis Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard lodge while he was away. They’d already claimed all of his possessions as their own, and now they glommed on to one of his charge accounts.
When Wilson returned home after his week on the road, he was surprised to be called in by the accountants in the Brother Records office. They demanded to know how it was possible for Dennis to run up an $800 Alta Dena Dairy bill during the time that the Beach Boys had been away on tour. Wilson realized what had happened, but the bill was in his name, and Brother Records had to pay it. He caught hell for the expenditure, and in turn he got really pissed off at Charlie. When Wilson added everything up, including a Mercedes that someone in the Family totaled, he calculated that his summer guests had cost him at least $100,000. It had to stop.