The way out of a room is not through the door

Christian Lorentzen
MANSON: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLES MANSON
by Jeff Guinn.
Simon and Schuster, 495 pp., £20, August, 978 085720 893 4

IT STARED with the jitterbug, or with a ketchup bottle. Kathleen Maddox couldn’t get away with
dancing in her hometown. Ashland, Kentucky in 1934 was too small, and if she let a boy hold
her hand word would always get back to her mother Nancy, a strict Christian widow. But across
the river was Ironton, Ohio, and there she could dance at a club called Ritzy Ray’s. That might
have been the place she met Colonel Scott, a small-time local con artist who made his dimes
collecting tolls from drivers crossing a free bridge. When Kathleen got pregnant, Scott told her
he’d been summoned away on military business. In fact, he was a civilian (Colonel was his given
name) and a married man. Kathleen gave up waiting for him and found a husband, William
Manson, employee of a local dry cleaner. They moved to Cincinnati. She named the baby after
her dead father, Charles. She was 16.
And she was still a bit wild. She kept going out most nights, and after three years
William divorced her for ‘gross neglect of duty’. She filed a bastardy suit against Scott, and won
$5 a month in child support. She got $25 on her day in court, and that was all. She and her
brother Luther were now in the habit of driving to Chicago, where Kathleen would flirt with
men in bars and lure them out into the street so that Luther could beat them up and take their
money. They tried it closer to home at least once. On 1 August 1939 Kathleen and her friend
Julia Vickers met Frank Martin, who took them driving around Charleston, West Virginia in his
grey Packard convertible. At Valley Bell Dairy he bought them cheese, and at Dan’s Beer Parlor
he got them pints. Kathleen said they ought to rent a room somewhere; it would cost $4.50.
Martin put down three dollar bills and a couple of quarters to show he was willing. Kathleen
called Luther from a pay phone. They picked him up at a petrol station and went to another
beer hall, where Vickers stayed behind. Back on the road, Luther told Martin to stop the car,
and they got out. Luther had a ketchup bottle full of salt. He stuck it in Martin’s back and told
him it was a gun. Martin was not convinced, so Luther knocked him over the head. Brother and
sister got away with the car and $27. They were arrested the next day. Nobody in the family
was ever good at not getting caught.
‘It was an impetuous decision’, Jeff Guinn, a Texan journalist, writes, ‘that would affect
–and cost – lives over the next three-quarters of a century.’ Somewhat portentous, but not
wrong. Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson is a cradle-to-grave treatment, though
the graves belong to other people. The subject remains in California, an inmate at Corcoran
State Prison, where he issues statements his followers disseminate via the website of his Air
Trees Water Animals organisation. A recent example: ‘We have two worlds that have been
conquested by the military of the revolution. The revolution belongs to George Washington,
the Russians, the Chinese. But before that, there is Manson. I have 17 years before China. I
can’t explain that to where you can understand it.’ Neither can I. Guinn explains a lot in his
usefully linear book. The standard Manson text, Helter Skelter, the 1974 bestseller by his
prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, and true-crime writer Curt Gentry, is a police and courtroom
procedural, with no shortage of first-person heroics (‘During my cross-examination of these
witnesses, I scored a number of significant points’); the first corpse is discovered on page six.
No one is murdered in Guinn’s book until page 232. He brings a logic of cause and effect to the
madness.
The Ketchup Bottle Holdup was the point where the five-year-old Manson’s life veered
from hard luck to horror show. His mother and uncle went to prison in Moundsville, West
Virginia. He was taken in by his aunt Glenna, in nearby McMechen, where his uncle Bill was a
railroad engineer. On the boy’s first day at school, his teacher humiliated him and he ran home
crying. His uncle wouldn’t stand for such sissyish behaviour, and sent him back the next day in a
dress of his cousin Jo Ann’s to teach him a lesson. Jo Ann (not her real name) is one of Guinn’s
sources, and she relates tales of the boy’s constant lying, his attempts to attack her with a sickle
and later to steal her father’s gun, and his talent as a piano player and singer of hymns. He was
a charmer, but also selfish and disloyal, a whiner and a snitch. Kathleen was paroled after three
years and took her son back to Charleston. She married a circus hand she met at an AA
meeting, though neither of them quit drinking, and he kept at it heavily. They drifted to
Indianapolis. The boy’s truancy and shoplifting put a strain on the marriage, so Kathleen
decided to send him to a Catholic school for delinquents. A psychological examination found he
had ‘a tendency toward moodiness and a persecution complex’. He ran away, was caught
robbing a store, and was sent to Boys Town in Omaha. The subject of a 1938 Spencer Tracy
movie, it had a reputation for turning troublemakers into nice young men, and was the gentlest
place he could have hoped for. But after four days, he and a boy called Blackie Nelson broke
out, stole a car, got hold of a gun, robbed a grocery store and a casino, and headed for Peoria.
There the pair became apprentices to Nelson’s uncle, a professional thief. But within
two weeks Manson was caught robbing an office, and sent to a tough reform school in
Plainville, Indiana. Punishments included whippings with paddles, ‘duck walking (staggering
painfully about with hands clasping ankles) and table bending (arching backward with shoulder
blades barely touching the surface of a table; just holding the position for a few moments
ensured that a boy could not walk normally for hours afterward)’. He was 13 years old and a
runt: he later claimed that a staff member encouraged other students to rape him, a claim the
sceptical Guinn credits. His method of fending off aggressors was to play the ‘insane game’,
screeching and flapping his arms. He tried to escape at least six times, and made it out twice:
the first time in a mass breakout that ended for Manson when he was caught robbing an
Indianapolis petrol station; the second time, now 16, he was stopped in a stolen car at a
roadblock in Utah. Crossing state lines made it a federal rap, and it landed him at the National
Training School for Boys in Washington, DC. His IQ was found to be above average (109), and he
was judged to be ‘aggressively anti-social, at least in part because of “an unfavourable family
life, if it can be called family life at all”‘. A psychologist who examined him wrote: ‘One is left
with the feeling that behind all this lies an extremely sensitive boy who has not yet given up in
terms of securing some kind of love and affection from the world.’ Guinn takes this as an
instance of Manson conning his way into a transfer to a cushier (less brutal) institution. He got
it, as well as a scheduled parole hearing. But a month before the hearing he was found raping
another boy while holding a razor to his throat. He was moved to a maximum security
institution. His wardens now believed that he was ‘criminally sophisticated’ and ‘shouldn’t be
trusted across the street’. A further reversal in behaviour persuaded them to let him out two
years before his release was required. He was 19.
He went back to McMechen to live with his aunt and uncle. He was ostracised by the
clean-cut town youth, who saw him as a degenerate freak when he bragged about his crimes
and about ‘shooting up’ in the clink. He was somebody people found repulsive or irresistible. A
railroad man called Cowboy Willis took a shine to him and introduced him to his daughter
Rosalie. ‘It was an unlikely romance’, Guinn writes, ‘between a cute popular girl and the town
pariah’. They married, Manson bought his first guitar, and he worked at a racetrack sweeping
out stables. On Sundays he went to church with his grandmother. Rosalie was soon pregnant,
and the bills started to be a strain. Stealing cars was Manson’s solution, but he had to do it
across the river in Ohio to avoid reprisals from the local mob. And he was growing restless. His
mother and her husband had moved to California. He wanted to join them. He stole a Mercury,
and took his wife to LA.
He kept driving the car when he got there, and a cop spotted the Ohio licence plate.
Manson pleaded that living in the outside world confused him, and admitted that he’d stolen
another car and taken it to Florida. A psychiatrist determined that ‘with the incentive of a wife
and probable fatherhood, it is possible that he might be able to straighten himself out.’ If he
had only shown up for his next hearing, he probably would have been given five years’
probation. Instead he and Rosalie skipped town for Indianapolis, where he was booked. He was
sentenced to three years at Terminal Island Penitentiary in Los Angeles Harbour. After a few
months Rosalie divorced him and went back to Appalachia with another man and the newborn
Charlie Jr. (She died of lung cancer in 2009; her son committed suicide in 1993.) Twelve days
before a parole hearing Manson was caught trying to hotwire a car in the prison parking lot. He
took another IQ test and scored 121. He could barely read or write, but he was clever in his
way. The inmates who fascinated him were the pimps. He wanted to learn their trade. It was
his first flicker of ambition. He enrolled in a fashionable prison course on the teachings of Dale
Carnegie, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. ‘Let the other fellow feel that
the idea is his’ would become an essential part of his repertoire as a cult leader.
On the outside he tried to make a go of it as a pimp, but after seven months, he was
caught again trying to cash a forged US Treasury cheque for $37.50 at a supermarket. As federal
agents questioned him about it, he swallowed the cheque. One of his prostitutes, Leona Rae
Musser, got him off by claiming she was pregnant with his child. She wasn’t, but they married.
Then she was. He skipped town, and she testified against him. (She divorced him, and nothing is
known of their son, Charles Luther.) He got a ten-year sentence. In 1961, he entered the federal
prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert
Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From
Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he
was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic experiences. He seized on Heinlein’s anti-
government paranoia and his concept of group sex as a sort of sacrament. The last element of
what Guinn calls his ‘beguiling, hybrid pseudophilosophy’ was his own destiny as a pop star
who would be bigger than the Beatles. He practised constantly on his guitar and wrote songs. In
this respect at least, though rather old, he wasn’t very different from a lot of American teenage
boys. His musicianship was less than average.
HE PANICKED a little before his parole in March 1967. ‘He has no plans for release as he says he
has nowhere to go’, his last prison report stated. He received permission to go from Los Angeles
to visit another former inmate in Berkeley. He’d stepped from the 1950s into the Summer of
Love. Guinn takes a dim view of hippies (dirty), cops (incompetent) and celebrities (craven). His
San Francisco is a nightmare of bad sanitation, methedrine, heroin and The atmosphere was
con genial enough for Manson, now 32 years old and an aspiring singer-songwriter. He saw that
being a guru had more growth potential than pimping - a different proposition in an age of free
love. His first follower was Mary Brunner, a lonely 23-year-old assistant librarian at Berkeley;
she took him in and initiated him into environmentalism (a cause he still advocates, in his way).
The second was Lynette Fromme, an 18-year-old runaway he found on a trip to Venice Beach.
‘The way out of a room is not through the door,’ he told her, ‘just don’t want out, and you’re
free.’ When he walked away, she followed.
A recruitment phase began. The women were mostly from broken down middle-class
families. Manson told them they were beautiful and nothing was their fault. The message was
to do away with guilt and shame, with the ego, with worldly possessions, with the hang-ups of
the outside world. He would fill the void. He started saying he was the Second Coming. He
needed money and a way to get around. A minister called Dean Moorehouse picked him up
hitchhiking and brought him home. Manson persuaded Moorehouse to give him the family
piano, which he dragged down the street and traded for an old Volkswagen minibus. He drove
off, taking Moorehouse’s teenage daughter Ruth Ann with him. Her mother called the police,
who caught them but not before Manson had made a convert of her. He told her to marry
someone, which would legally free her from her parents, and then find him. On a trip to Los
Angeles, he picked up Patricia Krenwinkel, whose father paid the monthly bills on her Chevron
credit card: gas money. ‘For the very first time in my life,’ she wrote home, ‘I’ve found
contentment and inner peace.’ Manson and the three women were panhandling and
freeloading and eating from bins in the autumn of 1967 when Manson recruited the topless
dancer Susan Atkins in Haight-Ashbury. Unlike the others, Atkins ‘looked good’ and wasn’t shy.
Manson told her ‘she needed to imagine she was making love to her father.’ Sex would be the
means of recruiting male followers, as well as obtaining food, shelter and the attention of men
with ties to the recording industry. They traded the minivan for a school bus they painted black.
The Family went to LA.
Stardom, he told them, would be the way to share his teachings and their love with the
world. It was a dream that kept them motivated when it was hard to find food, when there was
no place to shower, when they had to sleep in the bus or with strangers, or when Manson
imposed discipline by pulling their hair or hitting them. They had hope. The first opportunity
was with Gary Stromberg of Universal Music. Manson had his number from a fellow inmate.
Stromberg booked a three-hour studio session for him: ‘an unmitigated disaster’, according to
Guinn. ‘I ain’t used to a lot of people,’ Manson said. But Stromberg liked him, and was
impressed with the way he could order the women around. Universal was considering making a
film about Christ coming back to America, and he discussed it with Manson, who said Jesus
should be black and the Romans Southern rednecks. It was a little too much for the suits.
Stromberg told him to work harder on his songs.
He moved the Family to a house in Topanga Canyon. Their numbers were climbing, to
around twenty including a few male members who were vying for the role of Manson’s second
in command - by the spring of 1968. Some female initiates were rejected because Manson
deemed them insufficiently vulnerable or sexually compliant. (The bar was lower for men.)
Others, like Angela Lansbury’s daughter Didi, were kept around because they were a ready
source of cash, and then let go when it ran out or their credit cards were cut off. There were
competing gurus (anarchists, Buddhists, Satanists etc) in Topanga, so Manson took the Family
on long road trips across the South-West in the school bus, apeing the Beatles’ Magical
Mystery Tour. Otherwise the daily routine consisted of a perfunctory breakfast of leftovers;
morning work for the men on cars and motorcycles lent or given to the Family; foraging in
grocery store bins for the women; afternoon orgies; group dosings of LSD (Manson tended to
give himself a lower dose); dinners where Manson performed his own songs and those of the
Beatles on his guitar. Everybody got a nickname. Nobody was allowed to drink alcohol; eat
meat; keep wristwatches, clocks or calendars; read books besides the Bible; wear glasses; or
use birth control. They called the first child Pooh Bear.

THEIR NEXT RELOCATION made it seem as if Manson’s predictions were coming true. Dennis
Wilson picked up Krenwinkel and another Family woman hitchhiking and offered to take them
home in his Ferrari for milk and cookies. When Manson heard they’d been to a Beach Boy’s
house, he demanded they take him there, along with everybody else. The drummer was not at
home, so they settled in for a party. The drummer pulled up after midnight, and Manson
greeted him. ‘Are you going to kill me?’ Wilson asked. ‘Do I look like I am?’ Manson kissed his
feet. Wilson let the Family stay in his log cabin on Sunset Boulevard for the rest of the summer,
fed them, and tried to help Manson with his music. Manson listened to Wilson talk about his
abusive father, and provided him with a harem. Wilson called Manson ‘the Wizard’. But
Wilson’s efforts to sign him to the Beach Boys’ Brother Records went nowhere, and a session at
his brother Brian’s home studio was another debacle (‘This guy is psychotic,’ the engineer said;
he was also filthy and foul-smelling). There was another close call with Neil Young, who came
by the cabin one day and played with Manson. The Byrds’ producer Terry Melcher, son of Doris
Day, was often at the house. He wanted to bring Ruth Ann Moorehouse home as his maid; his
girlfriend, Candice Bergen, wouldn’t have it. Towards the end of summer the Beach Boys went
on tour, and when Wilson returned he learned that $800 had been charged in his name at Alta
Dena Dairy. Counting a totalled Mercedes, the Family’s freeloading that summer had cost him
$100,000. He shied away from a confrontation, sneaked off to a small apartment, and let his
landlord evict the Family when his lease on the log cabin ran out.
They moved to the Spahn ranch, on hundreds of acres 35 miles north-west of
downtown LA, full of hills, streams, caves and the disused sets of 1950s westerns and television
shows. George Spahn, the octogenarian owner of the property, was offered Fromme as a
housekeeper and concubine (her reactions to his pinches got her the name Squeaky). A change
of scene always reinvigorated the Family, and living on a movie set was fun. ‘It was Halloween
every day,’ Krenwinkel said. But boredom always threatened, and why didn’t Jesus Christ have
a record contract yet? To compensate, Manson’s pronouncements became more apocalyptic
when the Beatles’ White Album came out at the end of 1968. Its songs contained prophetic
codes about a coming race war (called ‘Helter Skelter’): the blacks would rise up and enslave
the white pigs; the Family would wait out the carnage in a city underneath the desert in Death
Valley, where they could assume new forms and grow in number to 144,000; then they would
emerge to rule the world, which the blacks would gladly hand over, having found they weren’t
up to the task. (Until now Manson usually hid his racism from the women.) Preparations
ensued. A ranch in Death Valley belonging to a Family member’s grandmother would be the
base from which they would search for the hole that would lead to the underground city
(where the Beatles would join them). An arsenal of knives and guns was accumulated. Cars
were stolen and refurbished as dune buggies.
On 19 April police looking for stolen cars raided the Spahn ranch, arrested several of
the Family – though not the absent Manson – and impounded some dune buggies. The arrests
didn’t stick, but Manson’s paranoia was heightened. He warned the Family that if he was
arrested they should expect him to act crazy: the insane game again. There were two more
musical disappointments: Wilson recorded a song for the Beach Boys with lyrics by Manson as
the B-side of a single, but he’d changed the title and some of the words, kept the songwriting
credit for himself, and the single was a dud. Melcher came to the ranch twice. The second time
the man recording the audition was slipped a tab of acid and suffered a bad trip, and Manson
beat up another drunk visitor. There would be no record contract.
The embarrassment made Manson desperate and his rage harder to conceal. He said
he’d been betrayed by Melcher and Wilson the way Jesus had been in the Bible. He ratcheted
up the end-times rhetoric: the Helter Skelter race war was ‘coming down fast’. But control was
ever harder to maintain among the now three dozen Family members, and a wave of defections
started. Money was also scarce, and a lot of it would be needed for provisions on the move to
Death Valley. Manson tried to swindle a drug dealer called Lotsapoppa, who claimed to be a
member of the Black Panthers. Manson shot him in the chest, left him for dead, and got away
with the money. But his new fear was of Panther reprisals. (In fact, the wound had not been
fatal, and Lotsapoppa wasn’t really a Panther.) The Spahn ranch was essentially militarised,
with armed Family members on guard duty around the clock (except there were no clocks).

MANSON NEVER got the chaos he wanted. He tried three times, but he couldn’t light the fuse.
His friend Bobby Beausoleil, a star of Kenneth Anger’s short film Lucifer Rising, was in a fix with
a biker gang after selling them $1000 worth of tainted mescaline. Manson offered him back-up
to recover the money from his dealer, Gary Hinman; they would take Hinman’s Fiat and
Volkswagen bus and whatever else they could get for the Family. Hinman let them have the
vehicles, but throughout a weekend of beatings – Manson showed up to slash his ear with a
sword – Hinman insisted he had nothing more to give, and would call the police when his
attackers left. Manson, who worried any police scrutiny would uncover his murder of
Lotsapoppa and send him to jail for life, told Beausoleil to kill Hinman and make it look like the
work of the Panthers. He did, and fled north in the Fiat but it broke down outside San Luis
Obispo. Passing high-way patrolmen ran a check on the vehicle and found an alert connecting it
to the murder. The bloody knife was in the tyre well.
Beausoleil’s arrest threatened to bring the law down on the Spahn ranch. By the logic
of paranoia, there seemed to be two options: break him out of jail, or commit copycat murders
that would both persuade the authorities to free him (because the real killers were still at large)
and unleash the racial frenzy Manson had been predicting all year. In other words, the way to
escape a murder rap was to commit further, essentially random murders. By this point, in
Guinn’s account, Manson was the captive of his own bullshit:
He’d hoped that the police would think that the paw print and words ‘political piggy’
scrawled on Gary Hinman’s walls with Hinman’s own blood were proof that the Black
Panthers had committed the murder. If the cops and the media had made enough out of
it, that might have initiated white reprisals, black retaliation, and then Helter Skelter – if
not an apocalyptic race war, then at least local violence between the races, sufficient
bloodshed to impress upon the Family that Charlie had the power to bring about
cataclysmic events. But it didn’t happen that way, perhaps because Hinman wasn’t
important enough. The concept was still valid. The victim or victims just had to be more
prominent.
The target was chosen because it was Melcher’s old residence on Cielo Drive: the one
place Manson was sure famous people were living. Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate had just
rented the house. Polanski was abroad. The pregnant Tate had appeared in Valley of the
Dolls and Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers but was hardly a celebrity. She was having a
quiet night at home with friends: her ex-fiancé, ‘internationally known men’s hair stylist’ Jay
Sebring; the coffee heiress Abigail Folger; and Folger’s boyfriend. They were all murdered, as
was a local teenager who’d stopped by and was on his way out. Manson sent four Family
members to do the job, led by Charles ‘Tex’ Watson. They were high on speed and armed with
knives and a single .22 pistol. Tate was the last to die; she begged them to take her with them
and kill her only after her baby was born. Watson stabbed her to death and Atkins wrote pig on
the front door with her blood. They returned to the ranch, and Manson went to Cielo Drive in
the early morning to vet their work. He wiped off fingerprints, made the crime scene look more
theatrical by draping an American flag over the sofa by Tate’s corpse, and left a false clue: a pair
of glasses (no Family member could have been wearing them). The next day he deemed the
press reaction insufficient: there had to be another killing. Grocery chain owner Leno LaBianca
and his wife Rosemary were ordinary people unlucky enough to live on a street where the
Family had once been to a party. ‘HELTER SKELTER’ was written in blood on their refrigerator.
The trial gave Manson what he’d always wanted: he was famous, with his picture on
the cover of Rolling Stone and a national platform for the insane game. Other murders were
committed and attempted by the Family: most famously in 1975 when Squeaky Fromme,
dressed in a red nun’s habit, stepped out of a crowd, aimed a .45 at Gerald Ford, and was
tackled by Secret Service officers. The story lingers and books like Guinn’s are written to remind
the Baby Boomers why they cut their hair and switched from hallucinogens to anti-depressants.
The Family members who aren’t dead or out of sight are born-again Christians. Manson now
sends sketches and statements to the keepers of his online flame. He remains a vegetarian and
a subscriber to National Geographic. He occasionally puts on a show at on-camera parole
hearings. You can watch them on YouTube: ‘Is this going in the history books?’

From left to right: Manson on his first day of school, 1939; on his wedding day, 1955; on trial,
1970.