Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Read online

  by

  John Gilmore

  and

  Ron Kenner

  This edition of The Garbage People arrives over twenty-five years after the celebrated series of Southern California murders which came to be known as Tate-LaBianca. The Garbage People has been until now a spectral "third" Manson title - a sought-after "true crime collectible," listed as "missing" from nearly every library in America. Now it is available again with important additional text and photo material. New vectors into the kaleidoscopic tale which spins inexorably out of the slayings emerge with the new material on Bobby Beausoleil (convicted killer of Gary Hinman), and on Beausoleil's occult alliance with experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. This revised edition of The Garbage People includes previously unpublished and very graphic crime scene and post-mortem documentation which depicts the aftermath of the Manson Family's frenzied brutality. Also included are rarely-seen images of life in the Family prior to the murders and through to the present, important locations and personalities, and the radiant beauty of slain actress Sharon Tate.

  The originality of The Garbage People is largely due to the brief but voluble encounters between the personalities of Charles Manson and John Gilmore (author of Severed - The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder). Gilmore's biography up to the point of meeting Manson provided him with a sympathetic yet hard-boiled take on Charlie's magnetic persona. Literally born and raised in Hollywood, offspring of an LAPD officer dad and a former starlet mom, ex-child actor Gilmore had already seen plenty of action on the seamy side of Hollywood before reinventing himself as a true crime writer. This accounts for his jaded perspective on Charlie's frustrated ambitions to stardom and desperate hustling for a record deal which are an integral part of this sordid tale.

  Both Gilmore and Manson came of age in the '50s under the shadow of the Rebel Gods of the Big Screen, Brando and Dean. Both had been on the fringes of the Beat scene, Manson in Venice and Gilmore in San Francisco's North Beach, and were a few years older-and-savvier than the giddy tie-dye and moccasin set. As a method acting buddy of James Dean, Gilmore shared in Dean's attempts to push the bounds of sexual experimentation and in his legendary deep-seated fascination with violence and death. Soon after writing The Garbage People, Gilmore was also instrumental in the marketing of the hippie love affair with The Road, having pitched the original treatment for Easy Rider to his "rebel" Hollywood pals Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson.

  While it is now conventional to either revile Charlie as "monster" or to hail him as "misunderstood prophet," Gilmore's own experiences have accorded him a kind of empathy with Manson's desire to go beyond conventional morality and his will to manipulate women to obtain his ends. The author recalls, "I think there was a strong sense of recognition if not identification between Manson and myself in some odd way, the leather-jacketed guy - outcast, rebel, dreamer; impelled to `go where no one has gone before.' Impelled."

  Ed Sanders, author of The Family, swooped into L.A. from his Woodstock-area home with a mission. By valiantly wading into the "sleaze" around the deadly fringes of Hollywood, he would attempt to restore the good name of peace-loving flower children around the world from the stain of guilt by association. Gilmore, however, saw those times in a less floral hue. "The hippies by the time of the book were on the skids; drugged-out, syphilitic slumps of forgotten kids huddled in rags in pissstained doorways - lost, lost, lost. Whatever they'd started had been sucked right into the commercial machinery and the skeletal remains of intent was left fit only for starving dogs. In the wake, or field of wreckage, of the hippie movement the Manson Family only kicked to death a few of the things still standing - a kind of coup de grace to the social pillars." Meanwhile, grandstanding prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (author of Helter Skelter) was Mr. Straight, ready to cash in on all the gore and take his righteous "drugs-and-free love" indignation all the way to the bank and hopefully the Governor's Mansion in Sacramento.

  When he first encountered Manson, Gilmore was already somewhat comfortable in the vibe-laden company of celebrated killers. In writing his previous book he had become a trusted confidant of the "Pied Piper of Tucson" Charles ("Smitty") Schmid, a much-hyped "lothario" and killer of at least three. (Access to Smitty also required extensive dealings with Schmid's then-leaner but equally ruthless defense attorney, F. Lee Bailey.) Gilmore's reputation from The Tucson Murders apparently preceded him to the remote reaches of Death Valley. He recalls that when he arrived in Independence, California, where Manson had just been booked on property damage charges, "Charlie knew who Smitty was, and he knew who I was and said to me regarding Smitty, `I love the guy."'

  While quick to dismiss Charlie as "nuts" for the record, when pressed Gilmore will cop to a grudging respect for Manson's eerie ability to tap into the Irrational. "He was a very imaginative and energetic and charismatic man, and Polanski is right in a sense, that he was an artist, and he was spurned, as was Smitty, and Starkweather - all would-be artists, thwarted or spurned, and getting even by their murderous rages. They've settled old scores. To me, having repeatedly supped with the Devil, you might say, it is very understandable."

  The Garbage People is noteworthy for its view of Manson's sadly truncated childhood and coming-of-age behind bars as being actually significant to all the events which followed. What emerges in the course of The Garbage People is that Manson wasn't just marking time in the string of reform schools, jails, and penitentiaries where he has spent the vast preponderance of his existence. He was also picking up an interest in psychic phenomena from his early mentor and mysterious boyhood pal Toby, and learning to play guitar from Barker Gang hoodlum "Creepy" Karpis at Terminal Island. A powerful and otherworldly mind was being shaped by Charlie's travels through the American Gulag and brief, frenzied forays into the wonderland "outside." The harsh realities of that oppressive upbringing forged a man whose psyche was "at war" with American Society in a way that hippie "dropouts" could scarcely imagine. Manson's case study in penology becomes well worth reexamining in our furiously myopic era of "three strikes, you're out" and prison-construction mania.

  Reporter Ron Kenner's bifurcated situation at the time of the writing of The Garbage People was certainly a factor in its view of Manson as a symptom of American society rather than simply its nemesis. Kenner had been on the L.A. Times' blood-and-guts Metro section staff during the Watts Riots while at the same time a committed left-wing activist. At the time of Manson's first arrest, Kenner was a police beat reporter who was also involved in an organization called "The Committee" made up of excons, families, community members, and professionals who would take up complaints from prisoners with the corrections authorities. A well-timed intervention by "The Committee" was actually credited by both sides of the bars for heading off a prison riot in Chino.

  This updated edition of The Garbage People derives additional narrative power from the inclusion of a new voice from the "inside." It is the voice of the uncontainably virile warrior spirit of the "Lone Eagle," convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil, looking back on the events unre- pentently from his vantage point on San Quentin's Death Row. Psychedelic musician, underground film cult figure, warlock, and finally catalyst to Helter Skelter - his outlaw tale is now told in its entirety for the first time and largely in his own words. Bobby Beausoleil's epic saga from El Monte grease monkey to seminal noise-music pioneer to camp Occult Messiah to Topanga teepee-dweller doesn't actually end at Death Row, as he has also been involved in the founding of the infamous white prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood.

  While the media-demonization of Charlie at the time of the killings was nearly instantaneous, the '80s
and '90s have seen Manson transformed through the relentless permutations of marketing forces into an inchoate icon of rebellion. This latter-day Charlie-mania has extended to such absurd heights as Axl Rose sporting a Manson T-Shirt in his arena rock appearances and recording the Manson composition "Look at Your Game, Girl" as a CD bonus track, and Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor moving into the now-demolished Cielo Drive mansion to allow its ambience to infuse the recording of his Downward Spiral album.

  As Gilmore sees it, "these killers are not so special as killers of humans. They just became famous from it. Others have killed but the chemical ingredients to make them stars just wasn't on the menu. We're in a `star system,' and being a star is what it's all about. Jimmy Dean and Janis Joplin and Lenny Bruce became stars in other ways. Manson is a star. It's no wonder to me his face is on T-Shirts. They are sociological stars - trailblazers of perhaps a new vision of reality where we have finally learned to love the bomb and we've mutated to the point where 12-year-old junkies and mass-killers grinning from headlines is just our American way of life now. We are mutants perhaps - and these sociological stars are our knights who ride ahead, lowering the lance of annihilation. Charlie doesn't even see himself as real anymore. He sees himself as a spirit - the guru of annihilation."

  The persona of Charles Manson and his bizarre sway over the Family remain undeniably riveting to the public a quarter century down the line. The Garbage People is a gripping account of one of the most multifaceted and chilling sagas of our time, containing elements of random murder, cursed glamour, mind control, hallucinogenic drugs, psychic phenomena, Satanism and witchcraft, rebellious sexuality, Haight-Ashbury, rock'n'roll, and biker gangs, not to mention dune buggies tearing across the desert floor in search of the "hole in the Earth." I am pleased to announce the publication of this new revised and updated edition of The Garbage People, which is both a greatly overdue re-publication and, with the additional text and photos, a fascinating new work in its own right.

  Stuart Swezey

  Publisher

  Amok Books

  They'd all been sentenced to die in California's gas chamber, mass-murderer Charles Manson and his handful of hippie renegade killers - Tex, Susan, Bobby, Leslie, Patricia ... But they would live on, death sentence erased by the moratorium on capital punishment. They would live to marry, bear children, "find God," and as some claim, to be born again; the once-pending deaths by lethal gas commuted to life imprisonment with eligibility for parole.

  "But we cannot be killed by you," says Charles Manson from behind the bars separating him from the society that asked for his death. "I cannot die," he says, "because I live eternally, the reflection of the soul that is you, you see - that you hate, as you hate yourselves ..."

  Facing Charles Manson is like watching a caged inmate in a nut house. Watching, because you can't really have an exchange with Charlie. You are the target, appreciative or otherwise, for a gamut of histrionics and double entendres that could've dumbfounded Sigmund Freud.

  Charlie looks nuts. Most of what he says sounds nuts. I'd seen the scam before, and for a guy like Charlie who's spent most of his sixty years locked up in any number of cages - a lot of the punishment unwarranted and without real provocation on Charlie's part for the amount of time he'd be behind bars - he had the shuck down to a first-rate act. Basically seeming like a Damon Runyon kind of "dese'n'dem" guy off an East Coast street, lizard-like Charlie could pop into another role - Hollywood Boulevard con man or leathery hillbilly, guitar-twanging drifter. He gave all his roles a new twist by turning hippie at an opportune time. His freshly paroled sexual appetites hit at a run the free love shenanigans - the airhead teenier and doped girls jumping like pogo sticks through the Swing ing Sixties of the Great Society. That was a challenge Charlie was ripe for - the line of least resistance. As a short, homely little ex-con, Charlie wasn't keen on resistance. He was the kind of guy that went in through the back doors, always ready for a hand-out, and what he couldn't get, he'd steal. His instincts, as hot as a dog's, could lead him to the hidden stuffusually, no matter whose house it was.

  For those that would offer resistance, there'd be trouble - though not necessarily with an apparent, direct connection.

  Charlie talked and talked during our Los Angeles County Jail meetings, and to give his ricocheting mental aberrations a little religious zing, he'd mouth half of what he said in what appeared to those around him as cryptic parables - a seer whispering through his beard. But to an eye trained to the cages, it was philosophical mumbo jumbo; the old vacuum salesman's heart-hunting line, gibberish intended to be elevated to wisdom in the listener's ear. Basically it did nothing more than clog like wax.

  You had to be susceptible. You had to have shed your self- that skin of who you are, via tripping on chemicals or by having had it flogged off your hide in the "corrective institutions." "You must be empty," Charlie'd say in the goosing spiel of a sideshow barker. Empty yourself to be filled with Charlie; worn as a glove, as it were, and if you could be filled with Charlie, you could do his bidding. That was what he was after. It was no accident.

  What did Charlie want ... ? What was his bidding?

  To be king on a personal mountain - somewhere locked down in the center of Charlie, to be viewed as a kind of god-figure filtered out of Charlie's jailhouse thinking like you'd siphon gas from a rusty can. He wanted to wreak some small havoc on a traitorous society by letting slip his ragtag dogs of war - geese, throat-stuffed with Charlie's kaleidoscopic philosophy of hate which they pranced about calling "love." Havoc - on a small scale like Charlie, but sufficient to set the world on its ear for a spell. And Charlie's name would be in the history books as one to be reckoned with.

  There was no other meaning or message. For a person beaten, tormented, raped, warped and abused throughout life, it was simply time to swing back a little of the medicine. There was nothing in our "society" (as we call it and know it), for Charlie - a dog whipped and chained, learning only the whip and the chain. "There is never freedom," Charlie would say. "There is only the whip and the chain."

  Ejected from prison as he'd been spit out of society, Charlie faced a fate he'd fought against in a world desperate with its errors. Knowing only the whip and the chain, this vagabond-alien went in search of some hole he could climb into but found a social order he could kick around for a change - subtly, for unlike the "garbage people" he found to do his bidding and labeled a kind of "family," he would make caution and patience his hand maidens.

  Charlie knew how to "read" pain in a soul shredded and whipped, and beneath the flowering facade of the new counterculture he encountered (the hippies and light shows and dope and the Beatles), he saw the "Age of Aquarius" and the "hippie movement" as a joke. "Existence was a simple joke -" the Great Society convulsed in heaves, regurgitating what it could not absorb. It was, Charlie believed, the breaking up of the world.

  Revolution festers in such a state, and a dictator could shoot up like a spring stalk, unfooled by the self-excusing liberalism and the "freedom" rhetoric babbled by Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey or Alan Ginsberg, or the clot of literary and scholarly fringe-kickers looking for late-night T.V. notoriety. "Wads of phlegm in the throat of life," Charlie called them. He saw with socially untarnished eyes, new eyes accustomed to walls and basins and uniforms. What he faced in the outside world was nothing more than a jailhouse joke.

  "What this society needs is a Hitler," Charlie told some hippies in San Francisco. "A goddamn Hitler to set this system straight."

  Not many men could be a Hitler, but seeing himself as standing knee-deep in puke, Charlie says, "I could see these people on the street - see them with clean eyes, you know. These people on the street were like me," he says. "Thrown out of life like your paper coffee cups and hamburger sacks and rags and stinking Kotex pads and dirty rubbers. They were the garbage floating around and shit sticking to the sides of your toilet and your drain holes ... That's what they were doing as hippies," Charlie reasoned, "floating around like orange
peelings and sinking to the bottom like rotten garbage - food for the sharks and for the barracudas ..."

  Charlie realized he could bunch together this garbage, and he could "gather your old tires and tin cans, and I can go out in your deserts and make use of all the junkyard," he says. "So I took these people that were your garbage, that'd been thrown away by society, and I put them to use. I made them put water in cans and make things work in order to keep living on the outside. Because that was me - the outside, and the biggest joke is I never wanted to be on the outside. You put me on the outside and whatever's gone down is what you created - that is your reality, not mine."

  Following the murders of Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and several others savagely slain in a bloodbath reign, Charlie and several "garbage people" would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. While in prison, he had put together a book, supposedly in his own words, but written by another inmate, in which Charlie is portrayed as allegedly having killed a black drug dealer. But one of Manson's ex-followers says, "Charlie never killed anybody. When it came down to letting blood, the most he could do was cut an ear or someone's hand. He couldn't personally cut off a head or stab a knife or point-blank lay someone out ...

  "But he knew, man, he knew who could do it. He could smell it like a disease that was stinking on you. It was like he knew what you were capable of, even though you didn't know it. He put the guns and the knives and rope in our hands and said, `Over there, you go over there and do it,' and we all went over there and did it. He didn't even watch it going down, but stayed home rocking and daydreaming like some old Aunt Jemima or someone's grandmother waiting for the chil'ren to come home and get washed for supper ..."

  There was the real Charlie Manson: the shrunken Svengali as ultimate garbage collector, grooming his found-art to revere him as a "Jesus superstar," or the Hitler he dreamed of - the one and only to deliver redemption. Others under his spell saw him as the Devil - "here to do the Devil's work ..."