Pulp Non-Fiction: The Satan Trap: Dangers of the Occult edited by Martin Ebon (Doubleday, 1976)

A companion piece of sorts to last week’s post on The Satan Seller, I don’t have much to say about this odd hardback - recently liberated from a box of books on its way to the charity shop - which can’t be easily gleaned from perusing the scans above.

As you will note from the list of his other works, Martin Ebon (1917-2006) seems to have been knocking out paranormal tomes of one kind or another at a prolific rate through the ‘70s (having apparently moved on from his previous specialist subject of communism). As such, ‘The Satan Trap’ has a “clips show” kind of feel to it, consisting almost entirely of brief extracts from articles first published in journals edited by… Martin Ebon.

Giving it a skim, it’s all much as one might expect, complete with a hang-wringing introduction citing campus unrest, “rootless frustration”, horror movies and LSD a factors encouraging young Americans to blunder blindly into meddling with forces they cannot understand.

Though I can claim no knowledge of Mr Ebon’s wider oeuvre or personal beliefs, his war-time service in the U.S. State Department and Office of War Information tends to suggest he was no greater fan of the communist regimes he spent much of the ‘50s and ‘60s writing about, causing me to reflect on the unhappy possibility that the poor fellow actually spent his entire career studying things he didn’t like. (There’s a beautiful symmetry to the fact that he published ‘World Communism Today’ in 1948, followed by ‘Witchcraft Today’ in 1971.)

Be that as it may, I do love the photograph of him holding court at the American Society of Psychical Research on the back cover here. I really hope that he kept a human skull on his desk in his wood-panelled study, and had the decency to smoke a pipe whenever naïve young people came to consult him on matters pertaining to the dark arts. I mean, you’d have to really, wouldn’t you?

The interesting cover painting for ‘The Satan Trap’ is by Kurt Vargo, a veteran New York-based artist who appears to still be working today.

Pulp Non-Fiction: The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke (Logos Books, 1972)

Naturally the ‘Pulp Non-Fiction’ header on this post should be read with heavy inverted commas, as I suspect that this particular volume rarely ventures within spitting distance of the truth…. but then, this series of posts has already veered pretty thoroughly into the realm of outright bullshit in the past, so what the hell, right?

Anyway - I’m sure that many collectors of weird/fantastical paperbacks will be able to relate to the experience of scanning across dusty shelves, alighting upon some black spines featuring exciting words like SATAN or DEVIL, and boom, before we know it, we’re heading home with a bunch of proto-Satanic Panic Evangelical Christian literature warning readers of the nebulous perils of dabbling with the occult.

Indeed, this particular sub-genre of quasi-theological blather seems to be have been so widespread during the 1970s that such volumes are sometimes difficult to avoid, even on this relatively godless side of the Atlantic.

Of course, the back cover copy here provides us with a few dead giveaways right out of the gate (“anti-occult counselling work”, “Melodyland Christian Center”), and even the cover artwork feels a bit ‘off’, with the hooded priest bearing a curious resemblance to those impressionistic “arms raised in praise” figures commonly seen on Xtian publications. (I’d like to think that this piece provided an unusually off-colour assignment for the guy who usually spent his days doing artwork for the Good News Bible or whatever.)

But, the publication date (1972) seems ripe for a bit of that post-Manson ‘Satanic hippie paranoia’ vibe I find so irresistible, and the prospect of a purportedly factual, first-hand account of some young fellow’s descent into the black arts proved too enticing for me to resist picking it up and at least giving it a quick skim-read.

A work of limited literary merit, ‘The Satan Seller’ is written largely in the perfunctory, “this thing happened, which made me feel bad, then this thing happened, which made me feel good” style common to ‘60s / ‘70s sleaze paperbacks - but with a near complete absence of sleaze. True, there are off-hand references to ‘sexual openness’ and ‘carnal favours’ to get the believers’ forbidden juices flowing, whilst the many women Mike Warnke encounters on his journey through human misery are routinely referred to as ‘chicks’ and ‘nymphos’ - but, mindful of their target audience no doubt, that’s about as far as the authors choose to go in this regard.

What is abundantly clear from the outset however is the implicit social conservatism and cultural insularity underpinning this whole racket.

After a hard luck childhood in rural Tennessee, young Mike finds himself packed off to Southern California to live with Roman Catholic relatives - so those would be his first two mistakes, presumably. Thereafter, he is soon frequenting - heaven help us - coffee shops, where, somewhat ironically, he is able to source “hard liquor” (really, this book is as such a substance abuse memoir as anything else), and also finds himself interacting for the first time with real life black people. (In fairness, this is not overtly criticised in the text, but y’know… they still make the point of mentioning it.)

Things go from bad to worse for Mike once he makes the fateful decision to enrol in - saints preserve us! - a liberal arts college, where, before you know it, he’s attempting to fit in with his groovy peers by “blowing weed” and experimenting with the wild world of LSD.

From there of course, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump until he’s mainlining speed and boosting his income by pushing the dreaded “H” around campus;

“I finally missed so many classes I was officially classified a drop-out. This put me into a different category now, a campus hanger-on. There were several of us, and we just hung around the student union building all ‘zacked’ up and looking as weird as possible.”

Deathless cliché though it may seem these days, it’s worth noting that the transition from ‘nice’ to ‘nasty’ drugs was admittedly a central narrative of the early ‘70s counterculture. Far less believable to me however is the idea that all of this campus hard drug use is supposed to be taking place prior to 1965 - a year which Warnke and his co-authors retrospectively diagnose as “a downward turning point for the entire world - for mankind”.

Without further elaboration, Civil Rights marches in Alabama, the Watts riots and Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York(!) are all cited as events signifying “..a quickening of the conflict between good and evil, God and Satan” during 1965. Furthermore;

“It was about then that the sale of narcotics suddenly accelerated, the flower children blossomed from out of nowhere, restlessness manifested itself in thousands of senseless acts all over the planet, rock music hypnotized, blanked-out thinking, and stirred confused youth to defiance of old values and traditions. Evil seemed to be afoot on Planet Earth.”

I think we get the picture. The “zacked up” Mike Warnke of 1965 however proves somewhat more susceptible to the zeitgeist, and when an acquaintance introduces him to a cabal of mystically-minded, well-to-do hipsters, he’s in like Flynn;

“We sat around in a circle and talked and smoked pot. It was not even a ritual. Just hip talk with genuine uninhibited interest in one another. No case histories, no sir! We did not even exchange last names. Dean had cautioned me about that.

As we got higher, the conversation ranged farther out into the twilight zone. Soon the fellows were snuggling up with the girls. And then they split off into couples. It was great, because there was a guy for every guy, not like most places I had been where there was a chronic chick shortage.

Cool-looking, sexy girls too. And every one was liberal. I mean, liberal! These chicks were free-lovers.”

Be warned readers - I’m a bit of a liberal myself, so who knows what might be going on around here after dark.

Suitably impressed, the young Warnke is soon a regular at these parties, finding himself on “a sex bender that was greater than any bag I had ever tried before”.

Expanding his gig as a dealer for his sinister friend Dean into more of a higher level bagman/fixer role on behalf of various shady and vague criminal enterprises, our hero gradually groks to the fact that he’s now knee-deep in “..the witchcraft kick”;

“The witches were mostly eighteen to thirty years of age, men and women from all walks of life, and I mean all: salesmen, carpenters, teachers, students, college professors, housewives, clerks, businessmen, truck drivers, and even a few preachers and priests. We were mostly white and educated, but it was open to all comers, and we had an integrated, ecumenical base that any institution would be proud of.

You could even specialize, like picking a major at college.

There were students of Satanism (utilizing the power of the devil through worship); demonology (summoning different demons - the devil’s helpers); necromancy (communication with the dead through the summoning up of spirits); vampirism (belief in vampires, blood-sucking ghosts); lycanthropy (the assumption of the form and traits of a wolf through witchcraft).

But as I said, I was getting impatient with these secondary matters, especially as I spoke to those in the know who hinted about evil spells, solemn rites, hard-core Satan worship and really deep stuff.”

Great! Let’s get to it then, shall we?

“In the centre of the circle was the altar - a granite slab supported on two sawhorses. On the slab, a girl lay on her back, nude and waiting, her skin glowing red in the light given off by the candles and the balefire glowing in a crucible nearby. An inverted cross and an image of a goat’s head stood at each end of the altar.

[…] 

The service was a Black Mass. All the traditional rituals were reversed and deliberately profaned. The sacraments were desecrated. Blasphemies took the place of prayers. Words attributed to Satan were read from the book, The Great Mother, which Dean, now standing, held open, resting the back of the book on the girl’s stomach.  

[…]

I had been high on a massive intravenous jack of speed, excited by the sudden chance to be “in,” and in addition, something in the air was going to my head. From having read and talked about rituals, I suddenly realized that the smoke curling up from the crucible on the altar was fumes of deadly nightshade - belladonna. When properly vaporized, it gave off fumes which put you in the right state of mindlessness. Under all these influences, my mind drifted off.

[…]

Later, after Dean had changed back to his street clothes - his pin-striped suit and well-pressed trousers - metamorphosed again to just an ordinary, everyday guy, I said, ‘This is for me, man. When can I get initiated?’ 

We got into the car. ‘At the next full moon,’ he said thoughtfully.”

Well, not exactly the most imaginative literary Black Mass I’ve ever encountered, but it’ll do.

Notes: 

1. What’s a ‘balefire’, exactly? Wiktionary definition. Filed away for future usage. Thanks, ‘The Satan Seller’.

2. Searching for a Satanic grimoire entitled ‘The Great Mother’, the closest match I can come up with is The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, published in 1955 by Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann. Although it’s easy to believe Dr Neumann may have claimed some space on college-educated hippie bookshelves, I very much doubt he had much to say therein on the subject of Satanism, so your guess is as good as mine here really.

Anyway, as the book goes on, Mike is properly initiated in to The Brotherhood, subsequently enjoying a memorable lesson in potion-making with a suburban witch, and seeing his drug-dealer gig expanded into that of a full-time Satanic evangelist, praying upon hip, turned on youngsters, with a steady stream of neophytes demanded by his masters. (“Screen out the squares. Soften out the marks. Provide the readiness,” he is urged.)

These particular Satanists, it soon becomes clear, live in mortal fear of actual, physical demons popping up out of the ether to molest them, should they snigger during rituals or place their toes outside the magickal circle, whilst a further note of paranoia is added by the mysterious presence of the tall, slim, taciturn ‘adepts’ who sometimes attend The Brotherhood’s rituals and are treated for all due fear and reverence. (Distant shadows of UFO/conspiracy mythology already creeping in here perhaps?)

In this vein, one thing ‘The Satan Seller’ seems at pains to make clear is that the organisation Mike has joined is a big-time proposition, its tentacles expanding into all corners of conventional society. Many of its adherents are wealthy and sophisticated, and it boasts week-long training courses, a strict line management structure and assigned offices dealing with “coven business” - filing invoices, answering correspondence and so forth. (“The chicks did a good job of keeping the place neat and tidy,” Mike notes when his newly refurbished apartment becomes one such establishment.)

Delightfully, there’s also a lot of detail about the down-to-earth practicalities of operating a covert Satanic sect;

“‘Say, Mike,’ Paul said, ‘will you give me a hand with this altar?’

‘Sure, Paul, be right there.’ I went over. ‘For the love of the devil, what did they make this slab out of, and where did you get it? It weighs a ton.’ We heaved the slab of black granite marble into the back of Paul’s pickup, then the heavy box of robes and ritual items.”

Various shenanigans which need not detain us here ensue as Mike swiftly makes his way through the ranks of the brotherhood. Enthralling as all this may seem however, things are dulled by the flat, pointedly non-salacious and comprehensively square fashion in which events are conveyed, leavened, inevitably, with achingly dull passages of soul-searching self-reflection. (For a Satan-worshipping drug-fiend, Warnke seems terribly concerned with getting to bed early.)

I did however enjoy the following bit, in which Mike, having obtained mastery over his own small coven, discusses livening up their dusty old rituals with a similarly ascended “chick”, whose forthright views he finds a little challenging;

“‘I think you need to get rid of all that archaic stuff, put a more mod appeal into the rituals. Use some acid-rock music to set the mood. Then you can shut off the music before you start the actual ceremony. Get a little hand clapping into the meetings, and, sure, go heavier into the blood and the bread.’

‘We’ve got some people who still go to Catholic Mass, then come down to the second stage,’ she continued. They go to Mass for the status and because it’s a front for the benefit of their parents, and so on, but they’re hip with us and eager to do little jobs, like stealing communion bread laid out by the priests -’

[…]

For a split second, her eyes narrowed. She wet her lips with her tongue and continued, ‘And holy water. You know the procedure with the holy bread. After the Catholic priest has consecrated it to Jesus, the guy pockets as much as he can without being noticed. Then we step on it to desecrate it and pass it around whilst we’re drinking the blood or whatever.’”

Desecrated communion wafers! Boy, I bet nobody ever thought of that one before. What kind of so-called Satanists are these guys, anyway?

Further hi-jinks ensue later in the same chapter, when\ the aforementioned “chick” instructs Mike to attend a nearby “rock concert” in order to undertake some missionary work;

“I had planned on using acid-rock to keep our young crowd tuned in. Now we had a chance to renew our acquaintance of what was ‘in’ with the hard-core hippie cult when we made the scene in Victorville.

[…]

Paul knew where we were headed and had Hank turn off on an ungraded road that went along a riverbed which had only a thin stream of water in it. Where level land fanned out in a broad valley dotted with scanty shrub, we found them, the flower children, blank eyes staring out through veils of hair.

[…]

Some had moved wrecked, engineless cars to the riverbank to use as dormitories. Some were moving aimlessly down the road, tripped out. Others were awake enough to beat noise out of tinny guitars, and a few were animate enough to sway to the discordant rhythms.”

I love how palpable the post-Manson nightmare of feral, junkyard-dwelling, braindead hippies is here. Feel the fear!

Half a century down the line, we might also be apt to wonder at the fact that the young Mr Warnke - a college drop-out who takes massive quantities of drugs, practices free love, wears bell bottoms and polka dots and ministers to a mystic, underground cult - considers himself to be entirely outside of the hippie movement. But, well… there are hippies and then there are hippies, I suppose. Who knows.

Besides which, we probably also have to take account of the fact that, despite being neck deep in counter-cultural hoo-hah, Mike still somehow manages to come on like the grand duke of squaresville. I suppose evangelical xtian rebirth will do that to you. This can be seen all too clearly a few paragraphs later, when he observes;

“When it came time for the blast, some pros in rock entertainment showed up.”

Befriending the leader of these “pros” (Lydia, “wrapped in a slinky silver sari”), Mike is allowed on-stage, interrupting their “music” (as he disdainfully refers to it, with inverted commas) for an impromptu rap on the joys of Satanism;

“‘You do for him,’ I pointed out, ‘and he does for you. When you get on a bummer, he’s there to ease you. Have hassles? No sweat. He takes care of your cares. He gives you an easy coasting and gives you a nice, soft crash pad when you need it. Heard of the magic dragon? That’s Lucifer, man! Ever hear of Pan? He’s love, man. Free and easy love. Satan’s cloven hooves are from Pan, and Pan was the natural god of love and fertility. Satan’s the pusher of all your heart’s desires and pushes up the flowers of the earth. Well, all I can say, man, is: get with it. You know.’”

You forgot ‘far out’ and ‘dig it’, Mike.

Evidently a full-blown addict by this point, Mike begins mistreating his cult-assigned slave girls (off-page, of course) and, becoming ever more frenzied in his dedication to the cause, starts sacrificing cats during his coven’s rituals, before encouraging his followers to dedicate their pinkie fingers to Satan, cutting them off and eating them(!), which I think officially makes them more bad-ass than the Yakuza, though I’d have to double-check.

Further echoes from the nexus of shady rumours which accumulated in the wake of the Manson trial [see my post on Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’ here] can meanwhile be detected In the following digression;

“At one of the secondary meetings I got to talk with my old friend the police officer, who was present with a young lady.

‘Are you the guys who are killing all those dogs and draining their blood?’ he asked me. ‘Reports of this have increased by 500 percent over the past three months.’ He shook his head. ‘Would you talk to your people? The whole thing is causing quite a litter problem.’ I remembered reading reports in the San Francisco paper about an increase in the number of dead animals found along the highways, so I guess it was not exactly confined to our area. In some cases, the incision was made as expertly as any surgeon’s - a ‘tribute’ to our movement’s students in this art.”

Mike’s higher ups in the Satanic organisation are apparently so impressed by his evangelical fervour that, before he can even get his head together, he finds himself hustled on-board a private jet bound for (where else?) Salem, MS, there to be inducted into the company of what seem to be the next in a never-ending series of layers of well-to-do Devil-worshipping big-shots.

From hereon-in, ‘The Satan Seller’s authors go very heavy on the overtly fantastical paranoia / conspiracy stuff, portraying the Satanic overlords as the high level source of every evil on the face of the earth;

“The word Illuminati was whispered around here, too, though it was still the wispiest of references. […] A worldwide, super-secret control group with perhaps as few as a dozen at the very top… with key men controlling governments, economies, armies, food supplies… pulling the strings on every major international event… and not just now, but for generations, centuries, since the beginning of civilisation… manipulating men by their egos and their appetites, rewarding and depriving, enraging and pacifying, raising up first one side and then the other, maintaining a balance of frustration, bitterness and despair…?”

Poor old Anton LaVey and his Wurlitzer organ don’t get much of a look-in, in other words.

(Actually, LaVey makes a brief cameo in the following chapter, when big-shot Mike Warnke runs into him at some boring occult conference, summarily dismissing him, accurately though with no small degree of hypocrisy in this context, as a jive-ass phony.)

And… that just about concludes the ‘fun’ part of the book, sadly, as shortly thereafter, Mike is double-crossed by one of his underlings, forcibly ODed and thrown out on the street as part of an internal cult power struggle - at which point he finally comes to the realisation that leading a sect of blood-thirsty devil-worshippers can be a pretty cut-throat business, and that self-proclaimed devotees of evil do not necessarily make for the most reliable friends.

The narrative subsequently segues back into what I’m going to assume is something slightly closer to Mike Warnke’s actual life story, as, strung out and destitute on the mean streets of San Diego, he pulls a full 180 on his earlier life choices and, uh…. joins the navy.

Safely back within the nurturing bosom of the military-industrial complex, he in short order finds Jesus, gets shipped out to Vietnam, wonders how he can ever reconcile his new Christian faith with the horrors he finds there, heads back home shell-shocked but serene, begins his ministry, and decides that hitting the road on an “I was a teenage devil worshipper” ticket will be a good way to make a quick bu - I mean, uh, expose the evils of the international Satanist conspiracy which blights all of our lives and prevents the Lord’s earthly paradise from becoming a reality.

And speaking of making a quick buck, if there was one thing Warnke learned from his days as a Satan Seller, it’s how to milk it for all it’s worth. In addition to t-shirts, baseball caps and the book I currently hold in my hand, 1972 found Mike Warnke & Associates of Danville, Kentucky offering no less than six record albums for sale to the faithful - seven bucks a piece, postage paid.

Did these albums contain “music” I wonder? And does it lose the inverted commas when offered in praise of the correct deity? Or are they just testifyin’ and such like? I’m sure a brief google search would tell all, but I really don’t want to go down that particular wormhole just at the moment.

For now, I’ll merely conclude by noting that, for all its shameless hucksterism and bland / unimaginative prose, the central, Satanism-related segments of ‘The Satan Seller’ at least provides a fascinating (and frequently uproarious) insight into the curious confluence of mixed up ideas which initially emerged from conservative/right wing reaction to the counter-culture of the late 1960s, latching directly onto the psychic blowback from Manson, Altamont, Patty Hearst and the era’s sundry other hippie horror stories.

Often recalling the furtive, barely disguised sexual fantasies first propagated by the original witch-hunters of the late middle ages, the kind of ideas and imagery wantonly thrown about in books like this one would gradually mutate over the next few years, acquiring a degree of spurious mainstream legitimacy as they migrated into the realm of pop psychology, precipitating the more genuinely dangerous delusions of the 1980s ‘Satanic Panic’ movement. But that, thankfully, is a story for another dark night of the soul.

Pulp Non-Fiction: The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion by Ed Sanders (Panther, 1973)

I.

“Tex then told Sadie to scout the house for other people. She evidently climbed up the redwood ladder to look in the loft. And then she walked to the south, toward the hallway off which were the two main bedrooms of the house. In the room on the left, Abigail Folger lay reading alone. She looked up, she saw Sadie, and Abigail waved! Waved and smiled, and Sadie smiled back and walked away. Hi death.”
- p.233

Long ago, in my late teenage years, I decided it was time for me to overcome my natural distaste for ‘true crime’ subject matter and get the full dope on this whole Manson Family business, which I kept finding fearful references to in the ‘60s counter-culture books and rock biogs that composed the bulk of my non-fiction reading at the time.

A remaindered copy of Los Angeles County Assistant D.A. & Chief Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustive 1974 book ‘Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders’ certainly did the trick with regard to nailing down the essential facts of the matter (or, the officially recorded versions thereof, at least), but at the same time, the book’s mountain of dry, forensic detail raised as many questions as it answered, particularly with regard to the aspect of the whole business that most interested me – that being, the wider cultural and sociological circumstances that allowed these insane events to transpire in the first place.

When I learned of the existence of Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’, I naturally supposed that an investigation undertaken by a member of The Fugs might shed a slightly different light on things, but sourcing a copy of Sanders’ book proved difficult at the time, and besides, I didn’t really have the stomach for reading two massive Manson tomes in quick succession.

Fast forward to 2019 however, and I’ve actually ended up with two paperback copies of ‘The Family’ (boring story not worth recounting here), so, with Charlie himself now finally six feet under and the ever-classy Quentin Tarantino apparently revving up his new, Manson-related movie for release to coincide the 50th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders… the time finally seemed nigh to actually read the damned thing. (1)

Before continuing, I should issue a disclaimer to clarify that I generally take a dim view anything which seeks to glorify and/or obsess over the activities of real life serial killers. In and of himself, Charles Manson was little more than a psychotic confidence trickster and pimp, worthy of no more interest or respect than any other creep who has ever made a career out of exploiting human misery.

What fascinates me rather is the frequently extraordinary nature of the marginal – and otherwise largely undocumented - worlds in which Manson moved, and the unique socio-cultural circumstances that allowed him to achieve such remarkable success (in psycho cult leader terms, at least) within them.

Manson’s followers have often been likened to locusts in terms of their tendency to hoover up cash, drugs, vehicles, food, crash-space and favours from anyone who gave them even the slightest opportunity to do so, but in the same way, Charlie himself strikes me as a kind of cultural locust.

In addition to his extensive and well-documented connections to the music and movie industries (which we need not reiterate here), the wider scope of Manson’s activities also seemed to encompass various other cult religious groups, assorted ‘hippie’ communities (including the core San Francisco scene centred around The Diggers, The Grateful Dead and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic), several fringe Christian churches, Scientology and its shadier off-shoots, Anton Lavey’s comical Church of Satan, certain therapy / self help institutions, behavioural/hypnosis specialists and the formative roots of California’s New Age culture, along with the world of literary science fiction, prison sub-cultures (of both racist and homosexual varieties), college students and Berkeley activist groups, pirate radio broadcasters, underground and documentary filmmakers, the world of strip clubs, go-go dancers and ‘stag films’, outlaw motorcycle gangs, desert motor-racing enthusiasts, a wide variety of drug traffickers and manufacturers, the community of stuntmen and cowboys hanging around the Spahn Ranch, and even the culture of modern day gold prospectors and wilderness homesteaders whom The Family interacted with in Death Valley.

Excepting perhaps Dennis Wilson, I’m not aware that Manson ever hung out with any surfers (his activities being primarily directed in-land), and his virulent racism prohibited him from interacting with any black, Latino or Native American sub-cultures (despite his constant bleating about “Black Panthers”, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was ever even in the same zip code as any of them) - BUT, that aside, it seems as if pretty much EVERYONE who has was cultivating a lifestyle outside of the square, mainstream norm in Southern California in the late 1960s was touched by the dirty fingers of Manson at some point, and the groups on the above list who had any credibility to begin with all found themselves degraded and damaged to some extent by the association. Meanwhile, he managed to feed something gleamed from every single one of them into the insane, indigestible gumbo of his eventual ‘Helter Skelter’ project.

II.

How did so many doors open for him? That’s the question that fascinates. Purely in terms of his attempts to infiltrate the entertainment industry, the fact that a character this unkempt, criminally-minded and evidently deranged could manoeuvre himself into a position one step removed from figures of such diverse cultural import as Doris Day, Kenneth Anger, Nancy Sinatra and Neil Young, is remarkable. Even if he’d never turned to murder, Manson's exploits as a kind of Sunset Strip Rasputin would remain intriguing to those of us with an interest in this particular historical milieu.

And happily, as the back cover blurb for Panther’s UK paperback of ‘The Family’ strongly implies, these wider connections between Manson and the cultures he managed to infiltrate is very much the subject that Sanders gets stuck into herein, striking an extremely precarious balance between credibility and sensationalism in the process.

At the outset, I was slightly worried that, given his own sub-cultural affiliations, Sanders may have been tempted to take a more sympathetic line on Manson and his cronies than Bugliosi, but rest assured, he goes even harder on them than the Chief Prosecutor, if such is possible, with his pejorative-heavy descriptions of the Family members betraying the anger of a man who has seen the public image of the movement he tied himself to warped and discredited by the actions of a bunch of kill-crazy goons.

As anyone who taken even the slightest interest in this stuff will be aware, attempting to research the wider activities of the Manson Family is liable to lead one pretty quickly into a bottomless Death Valley black hole of mis/disinformation, rife with missing links, random dead ends and irresolvable contradictions. For each verifiable fact that can be established about The Family, there are a thousand rumours, exaggerations and outright lies to contend with.

As Sanders outlines in his introduction, his method for dealing with this was basically to trawl through the testimony of anyone and everyone who interacted with The Family and proved willing to talk about the matter (indeed, the author implies that his hippie/yippie ‘cred’ allowed him access to deeper sources than the authorities were able to tap), and then to cross-reference these interviews against a map and timeline outlining (as far as is possible) the locations and activities of the killers, their associates and (where relevant) their victims. Basically it seems, everything that proved both interesting and not verifiably untrue made it into the book, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.

As we’ll discuss below, Sanders’ excursions into the further realms of speculation got him into no small amount of trouble, and the accuracy of more or less everything he throws into ‘The Family’ remains open to question, but, when you’re dealing with a set of witnesses who were likely various combinations of stoned, mentally ill, terrified, brain-washed and self-interested at the time of their testimony, I’d argue that he was probably right to retain as many of the “apparently”s, “allegedly”s and “it is reported that..”s as possible.

I do wish that Sanders had been a bit more forthcoming about his sources, and a bit more circumspect about the wilder rumours he offers up as ‘fact’, but at the same time, when it comes to defining the contours of the vast psychic maelstrom emanating from the undeniably grim realities of Hollywood, August 1969, I tend to think there is probably just as much value in hearing what people were saying about the events in their immediate aftermath, as in the cold hard facts themselves – and, so long as you can take him with a generous pinch of salt, Sanders’ book certainly provides an invaluable record of the former.

III.

“It seems strange that all of a sudden they got in to wearing black capes. The girls made Charlie one that reached to the floor. With a flourish Manson tried it on, remarking how no one for sure now could see him when he creepy-crawled. Mary Brunner had a black cape. Sadie had a cape. Squeeky, according to Danny DeCarlo, used to dye clothing black in a pot in the Spahn Ranch kitchen.”
- p. 185

If nothing else, the version of Charlie presented here was certainly industrious. Whereas you’d naturally expect a messianic cult leader to express hostility toward competing gurus, Manson, in keeping with his locust-like M.O., often seems to have actively encouraged the crossover of personnel and ideas between his ‘Family’ and various other groupings of fringe whackos, and Sanders’ book is particularly strong when it comes to making the case that the Mansonites were not an isolated phenomenon, but merely the most high profile symptom of a entire network of similarly demented (and potentially dangerous) groups who seemed to flourishing on the far outskirts of American society.

It is reported, for instance, that in 1968 Manson was present as a “guest of honour” at a bizarre trial / exorcism rite undertaken by some kind of homosexual “death cult” operating out of a commune house (the Waller Street Ashram, otherwise known as the “Devil House”) in Haight Ashbury. During this alleged event, a young man identified only as “Pussycat” – the former lover of the cult’s boss, one Father P., who is later said to have visited Manson at Spahn Ranch - was put through a series of gruelling ordeals to try to save him from a supposed demonic possession orchestrated by a deserter from the group. “Poor Pussycat,” quoth Sanders. (2)

The author also spends a full chapter outlining the eye-opening history of an outfit known as the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O., an illegitimate off-shoot from the branch of the famed Crowleyite magickal order, which seems to have mutated by the late ‘60s into a controlling personality cult masterminded by a woman named Jean Brayton, the wife of a USC philosophy lecturer.

Like The Family, The Solar Lodge made their home on a remote desert ranch, and there seems to have been a clear crossover of ideas (and, Sanders implies, personnel) between Brayton’s group and the Mansonites. Brayton is reported for instance to have also preached a gospel of hard-line racism, predicting the approach of an apocalyptic race war and telling her followers they would need to hide-out in underground caverns to survive the resulting carnage (sound familiar?).

The control Brayton and her husband exercised over their followers seems to have been even more sadistic and authoritarian than that practiced by Manson, but, thankfully, The Solar Lodge was put on ice in July 1969, when their leadership was arrested en masse on child abuse charges, after some horse traders who had visited their ranch called the police, having observed what investigating officers later confirmed to be a six-year-old boy chained up in a six foot square wooden crate and left exposed to the desert sun – which gives us some insight into the kind of outfit these particular creepos were really operating.

It should be noted however that, despite the publicity surrounding this ‘boy in the box’ case, Sanders’ claims regarding Manson’s connections with the Solar Lodge seem never to have been verified elsewhere. A brief web search reveals that the Braytons – who were soon back on the street and heading up another neo-Crowleyite religious order after initially fleeing to Mexico to avoid the child abuse charges – actually initiated legal action against Sanders in 1973, reaching an out of court settlement which ensured that the entire chapter related to the Solar Lodge was excised from future editions of ‘The Family’. Presumably, Panther’s UK paperback, dated that year, must have made it to the printers shortly before this agreement came into effect. Lucky me! (3)

In parallel with the Solar Lodge, Sanders also raises the spectre of a particularly shady motorcycle gang known as the Satan’s Slaves, whose members are alleged to have provided the connecting tissue between the Solar Lodge, the Mansonites, the Ku Klux Klan and something the author refers to as the “Kirke Order of Dog Blood” (seriously, don’t ask). (4)

“There are subjects associated with the Manson case that are so soaked in evil that the mere knowing of them is like a nightmare,” Sanders states later in the book, kicking off a chapter in which he addresses rumours of unidentified Satanic groups (presumably, but not definitively, connected to the quasi-mythical Kirke mob referenced above) carrying out animal sacrifice / blood-drinking / orgy rituals on several remote West Coast beaches in 1968-69. Pretty hair-raising stuff.

Sanders goes on to print verbatim the transcript of an interview with a young male Manson Family hanger on, who claims to have been present at the Spahn Ranch when a set of films – apparently made by another cult group – were screened, depicting both the killing of domestic animals and the apparent decapitation of a human female, carried out in ritual circumstances on a nocturnal beach.

To be honest, the interviewee sounds pretty out of it, but Sanders insists that the information he provided on other subjects proved reliable, so – make of this what you will. As far as I’m aware, nothing concrete on any of this has ever come to light in subsequent decades, so by this stage, it’s nothing more than another sinister, apocryphal underground legend to add to the ever-growing bonfire of such, any grain of truth lost in a long-forgotten vortex of misfiled missing persons reports and blighted, undocumented lives.

In fact, Sanders seems to have had a real bee in his bonnet about the possibly that The Family may have filmed some of their own crimes (presumably using the equipment they stole from a CBS outside broadcast truck in early ’69?), repeatedly hinting that certain “uptight persons” are holding back information from him on this subject to protect their own skins. Whoever these “persons” were, they must have done a pretty good job, because again, fifty years on, this hypothetical footage remains elusive, insofar as I’m aware. (5)

Amid all this shady occult networking, I was surprised to note that Sanders’ book entirely overlooks Manson’s widely documented connections to that most infamous of Scientology spin-offs, The Process Church of the Final Judgement. The details of Manson’s interactions with The Process Church became public knowledge so early in the game that they even made it into New English Library’s otherwise largely fictitious Manson book (which I wrote about here), so it seemed surprising to me that Sanders would have ignored such a rich vein of High Weirdness.

Well, guess what – the first edition copy of ‘The Family’ consulted by writer John Anthony Day for this review, published in The Harvard Crimson magazine in 1971, apparently contained an extensive (indeed, the reviewer claims, excessive) amount of information concerning Manson’s connections to The Process. But, Day also notes that Robert De Grimston, founder of the Process Church, had launched a $1.5 million lawsuit against Sanders and his U.S. publishers. So, consulting the entirely Process-free 1973 U.K. paperback, we can probably guess how that worked out. (6)

IV.

Sanders’ narrative becomes even sketchier, and even more queasy, when he occasionally turns his attention to the wider scope of The Manson Family’s crimes – unsolved category. Basically this consists of a grim run down of unsolved killings (primarily rape-murders of young women, with a weirdo/mutilation element) which were committed during 1968-69, at points when Sanders’ research leads him to believe that members of The Family were in the immediate vicinity.

As you can well imagine, reading capsule summaries of these cold cases – each of them a potential mini-Black Dahlia, just waiting for the True Crime podcasters to descend – is a grim business, and I’m actually not sure which possibility is more disturbing to contemplate; that Tex, Clem, Charlie and the gang were occasionally enjoying a brutal “boy’s night out” as they drifted hither and yon across the West Coast, or alternatively, that these killings actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the easy scapegoat of Satanic psycho-hippies, instead simply representing yr average, run-of-the-mill crime stats for a large American state over a two year period, the faceless perpetrators simply blending back into the mainstream ebb-and-flow of society and keeping their heads down. (7)

Of all the legally dubious claims contained within ‘The Family’ however, Sanders perhaps sails closest to the wind when he isuggests a connection between Charles Manson and the Esalen Institute, a storied and influential spa resort and spiritual / therapeutic retreat based in Big Sur, which survives to this day.

These claims centre around the admittedly intriguing fact that, a week prior to the Tate-LaBianca killings, Manson seems to have jumped behind the wheel of a stolen Hostess Twinkie bakery truck and spent a weekend tooling around the Big Sur area – entirely on his own, unusually, although he did manage to recruit a new Family member / sex slave / punching bag (a pregnant seventeen-year-old named Stephanie) along the way.

Sanders believes that Manson travelled to Big Sur to visit Esalen, and indeed, various rumours to this effect swirl about the lower depths of online Manson-ology. This is significant due to the fact that Cielo Drive murder victim Abigail Folger was a frequent visitor to the Institute, and Sharon Tate may or may not have also attended at some point.

The suggestion of a tangible connection between Manson and his future victims is chilling enough in itself, but once again, Sanders over-plays his hand by stating, apparently apropos of nothing, that both Folger and Tate were present at Esalen on the same weekend that Manson allegedly visited – a suggestion which I’m sure is contradicted by the official record, if not elsewhere in this very book.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Esalen Institute have spent the past fifty years vigorously denying that Manson ever came anywhere near them (their statements on the matter have been pretty weird and contradictory however, but.. that’s another story), and indeed, Sanders reports that a cast iron veil of secrecy hangs over the whole affair, even stating that representatives of the Institute have issued what he describes as a “veiled snuff threat” against him, should he persist in pursuing the matter.

Was there another, subsequent edition of ‘The Family’ with the references to Esalen also redacted? I wouldn’t be surprised. (8)

Exactly how many re-drafts did the text of this book go through to avoid legal action, I wonder? Three, four? I mean, I’m guessing the Kirke Order of Dogs Blood were unlikely to put a call through to their lawyers, but even so, if Sanders took some of the stuff he reports here remotely seriously, he must have spent a few years in fear of waking up some dark night with the smell of axle grease in his nostrils and a curved blade pressed to his throat.

V.

“There was one heavy problem facing Helter Skelter. By early 1969, the West Valley Station of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had in use Bell-65 two-man helicopters with powerful searchlights installed that could light up a city block from 1000 feet in the air. Manson had various plans to deal with these helicopters. One was to attack the helicopter with magic. Another method was to thwart the helicopters at night by taping the headlights of the dune-buggy battalion with black tape, leaving only a small slit to allow a thin ray of light to escape, hopefully undetectable from the air.”
- p. 124

There is much more I could go on to say about other aspects of ‘The Family’; there is so much rich, soggy flesh here to pile onto the bones of the crazed milieu Manson and his followers operated within. Not least, the significant portion of the book which Sanders devotes to outlining the vast auto-theft / dune buggy manufacturing ring orchestrated by the Mansonites during their final months of freedom - an operation which proved necessary simply to keep the cult’s membership mobile and maintain supply lines across the incredibly inhospitable terrain which Charlie seemed increasingly fixated on forcing his followers to inhabit.

As is implied by the book’s memorable sub-title, Sanders details Manson’s apparent dream of drilling his Family into a unit of full on, ‘Road Warrior’ style desert outlaws, undertaking armed raids on the small towns bordering the Death Valley national monument, carrying off food and women like some kind of motorized neo-vikings, and bamboozling the cops from their impenetrable network of underground hidey-holes.

Even if they’d been left to their own devices however, the chances of The Family achieving this level of self-sufficient barbarity seems remote. Another thing that becomes clear from Sanders’ book is that, far from their rep as ruthless killers, these hapless hippies – many of them nursing either young children or severe mental illness by the time Helter Skelter took hold – were simply not prepared for the hardship of the desert.

As food and shelter became scarce, as Charlie became more violent and demanding, and as lines of communication between various outposts started to fray, The Family’s vital biker allies disappeared, and tertiary family members began drifting away at a steady rate, several of them walking vast distances across the desert in the search of help.

When a combination of armed police units and National Park officials finally began carrying out raids and pulling the Mansonites into custody on grand theft auto and arson charges in September/October 1969, the roving miscreants are reported to have been in an appalling physical condition, riddled with sores and parasites and caked in mud to protect themselves from the sun, the girls having tonsured and shaved their hair into bizarre, Mohawk-ish arrangements….. a far cry from the heady days of '68, when Gregg Jakobson and his fellow “golden penetrators” would cruise over to the group’s latest Hollywood hang-out to enjoy a few sexual favours in exchange for vague promises of booking Manson in for another studio session.

Where might this trip have ended, if the authorities hadn’t moved in to put a stop to it? Would the whitened bones of The Family’s hardcore members and assigned assassins now be buried in the sands of some distant canyon, as survivors of the nastier end of biker/field hippie sub-culture mutter darkly of their legend, and probable fate?

God knows, it certainly would have saved the State of California a lot of time and effort, and given a few generations of “transgressive culture” assholes and neo-nazis one less incarcerated icon to look up to.

Crazy, man. Crazy.

A song for the closing credits:




----

(1) I was initially shocked to hear that Tarantino (and, more to the point, the studio marketing bods backing him up) had decided to tie-in the release of their new movie with the anniversary of – uh - *a mass murder*, but cooled down after reflecting on Jello Biafra’s memorable answer to a question re: whether a Dead Kennedys concert on the anniversary of JFK’s shooting was in good taste: “well, the assassination wasn’t very tasteful either”.

(2) It is interesting to note that, despite his racism, misogyny and relentless enthusiasm for heterosexual congress, Manson never seems to have espoused any homophobic sentiments, having spent much of his of early life exploring the “other side of the tracks” whilst incarcerated.

(3) Those wishing to journey further down the Brayton / Solar Lodge rabbit hole are advised to begin here.

(4) Trying to google up some info on the Satan’s Slaves who were active in California in the mid/late ‘60s turns up practically nothing, beyond the knowledge that dozens of other motorcycle clubs have used the same name over the years (most prominently in the U.K.), and a reference to a California-based gang bearing that name who were “patched over” by (ie, incorporated into) The Hell’s Angels in 1978.

(5) Adult film fans with a stronger stomach for research than myself may wish to take note of the following paragraph, from p. 126: “Around this time [January 1969] Charlie and the girls made a pornographic movie by the swimming pool at 2600 Nicholas Canyon Road in the hills above Malibu. The producer, according to Los Angeles homicide officers, was Marvin Miller.” Your safety filter-free search engine of choice awaits.

(6) It seems ironic in the extreme that De Grimston should have filed for defamation against Sanders in the same year that The Process Church’s official magazine proudly published an article dictated by Manson from his prison cell, but Jesus/God/Lucifer/Satan moves in mysterious ways I suppose.

(7) The timeframe of Sanders’ book, it should be noted, discounts the inclusion of the several rather more compelling “officially unsolved” murder cases which sprang up in parallel with the trial of Manson and his co-defendants during 1970, including the violent death of at least one woman who severed ties with the remnants of The Family, and the mysterious disappearance of a controversial and reportedly incompetent attorney who for a time was representing several of the Mansonites in court… until he reportedly went on a camping holiday and never returned, delaying the trial for several weeks as a result. But, this isn’t a True Crime blog, so I’ll shut up now, and let you investigate further, should you wish to.

(8) If you’ve somehow found your way out of the other internet wormholes I’ve dumped on you so far in this post, take a leap into this one for everything you need to know re: Manson and Esalen. My own takeaway is that, compared to a lot of these rumours, the kernel of this one actually seems pretty plausible. 

I mean, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that Charlie may have called on the Institute, either to try to connive his way in as a guest lecturer/visiting guru, or to audition for someone involved in organising Esalen’s annual folk festival, and that he may have subsequently kept quiet about it to salve his ego after the Institute - known for its tight security and elitest attitude - presumably just told him to get lost.

From there, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that, in the depths of his enraged, stoned/paranoid mind, he might have pegged the Esalen crowd as the same “type” he encountered when he scoped out 10050 Cielo Drive in search of Terry Melcher? And, a week later, Helter Skelter time? We will likely never know, but hey - it’s a theory. What’s that? Oh yeah, NOT A TRUE CRIME BLOG. Sorry.

Bloody NEL: The Making of Tania: The Patty Hearst Story by David Boulton (1975)

If I approached New English Library’s cash-in Patty Hearst book expecting the same kind of questionable laffs I extracted from their cash-in Manson book, disappointment was soon the result.

Perhaps having learned a thing or two since they entrusted their earlier true crime opus to a pseudonymous London-based hack channelling a fictitious Californian hipster, NEL instead assigned this gig to David Boulton, a legit journalist and broadcaster whose achievements to this date had included a book about Conscientious Objectors during the First World War and a history of the Ulster Volunteer Force.

As such, ‘The Making of Tania’ presents what I am inclined to believe is a fairly sober and credible overview of the facts as they stood at the time of writing, largely avoiding the kind of sensationalism I was expecting (and, to be honest, quite looking forward to), and resorting to speculation only when gaps in the factual narrative make it unavoidable.

Above all, Boulton’s book serves to remind us that, extraordinary though the Hearst case may seem when viewed at a distance, the deeper one digs into the details, the more senseless and depressing the events surrounding Patty’s kidnapping in February 1974 become. Tapping into the very dankest corners of America’s pre-Watergate darkness, it is a story that leaves almost everyone involved looking irresponsible, ineffectual and ultimately idiotic.

One of the most interesting aspects of reading a factual account written so soon after the events described is the huge holes that remain in the centre of the narrative Boulton builds from the sources available to him (holes that to a certain extent remain unfilled, or at least bitterly contested, to this day).

At the time of writing, the majority of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s core members were already dead, and the survivors (including Patty/Tania) were on the run, their whereabouts unknown. Unsurprisingly, none of them had stopped to give any interviews.

Whilst the SLA’s movements and activities could be pieced together with a reasonable degree of accuracy (more thanks to the efforts of the media than the police, it seems), the details of what actually transpired within the group – their personal relationships, the balance of power, decision-making processes, and the means by which the members (most of them fairly comfortable, educated, white twenty-somethings lest we forget) ended up being driven to such an extreme degree of fanaticism – all of these things were (and to a significant extent, still are) a complete unknown.

Although a substantial amount of space in the book is taken up with reproducing the SLA’s assorted communiqués and tape transcripts in full, this feels less like an easy way to fill pages, and more like a necessary decision on Boulton’s part. After all, these unedifying diatribes – so charmless, hypocritical and sickeningly self-congratulatory you’re forced to wonder how their authors could possibly have taken them seriously – represent the only insights we have into the thought processes of the people who are ostensibly the “main characters” of our story.

One can easily imagine the frustration that legitimate activists working for left-wing/socialist causes must have felt when these ridiculous, gun-toting bozos suddenly came out of nowhere to instantly dominate all media coverage of progressive politics, but, they could hopefully at least take some succour from the fact that the SLA saga also served to show the USA’s state and federal law enforcement agencies at their absolute worst.

Repeatedly, the authorities’ failure to properly secure crime scenes or follow up evidence led to them missing easy chances to apprehend SLA members (potentially without bloodshed), and, when they did eventually catch up with them – in a casual rooming house in Compton, South Central L.A. in which the bulk of the group had inexplicably taken up residence, apparently without making the slightest effort to disguise their identity – the resulting confrontation was handled appallingly by both the LAPD and FBI.

That no innocent bystanders were killed as the cops opened up with automatic weapons, smoke bombs and hand grenades in a heavily populated urban area, without even bothering to make certain that the buildings in front of them were free of civilians, is little short of a miracle. (Astonishingly, Boulton reports that at one point they were moments away from opening fire on the wrong house, until a passing child(!) informed them that the “white girls with guns” were actually behind them, on the other side of the street.) Would the Feds have behaved like this had the SLA chosen a more affluent white neighbourhood for their showdown? You tell me.

Likewise, the six SLA members within the house may have been armed, dangerous and deluded individuals, culpable for any number of crimes including several murders, but they did not deserve to die like dogs - shot down as they tried to flee, or left to suffocate in the basement of a burning building. Whilst I have limited sympathy for their half-baked ideology and misguided activities, the descriptions herein of their final minutes are enough to make any reader feel sick to the stomach.

I’d like to think I’m not the kind of person to automatically criticise law enforcement agencies without good reason, but reading Boulton’s note that the charred body of Camilla Hall – shot in the head by a police marksman - was found next to the skeletal remains of the Siamese kitten that had accompanied her since her pre-SLA days as a Berkeley drop-out, led me to share the anger of the Compton resident who subsequently spray-painted a perfect, elliptical epitaph on the side of a building overlooking the smouldering ruins: “IT TOOK 500 COPS…” .

Meanwhile, the evidence Boulton presents regarding Donald DeFreeze – aka ‘General Field Marshall Cinque’, de facto leader of the SLA – vis-a-vis the possibility that he was working as a paid informant and agent provocateur for a (no pun intended) “black ops” unit within the CIA right up to (and even beyond) his suspiciously hassle-free ‘escape’ from Soledad prison in 1973, is extremely compelling.

I’m not sure what info has come to light on this in subsequent years, and I’m aware that relying on a single source for something like this is always a mistake (particularly when the source in question is a 40+ year old New English Library paperback), but again, this is an instance in which the facts seem to speak for themselves.

DeFreeze was unaccountably acquitted of serious criminal charges (all involving firearms) on half a dozen occasions during his time in LA, and, when he finally ended up behind bars, he was allowed to practically walk out of a disused wing of Soledad, after Vacaville prison’s anarchic ‘Black Cultural Association’ programme had allowed him to establish personal connections with the unaffiliated Berkeley ‘radicals’ with whom we would later go on to form the SLA.

Again, you can do the math. Could this ‘wild card’ police operative – already noted for his schizophrenic tendencies and dangerous obsession with guns and explosives – have slipped his handlers and gone off-piste only when he realised the fun he could have leading a cabal of machine gun-toting white chicks, provided he could keep his “political” bullshit flowing well enough for them to buy him as a revolutionary Black Power guru..?

Thanks to the gusto of the police gunmen in Compton, we will never know whether or not ‘Field Marshall Cinque’ genuinely believed in the revolutionary ideals he espoused via the SLA’s propaganda, and, in fairness, Boulton doesn’t extend his speculation quite as far as I have in the preceding paragraph. But, it is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that DeFreeze was deliberately placed within the initially harmless Berkeley milieu in order to inform on and incriminate its occupants... thus potentially making this whole sorry mess just another gift to the people, courtesy of the paranoid excesses that predominated within US law enforcement during the final years of J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI.

Surprisingly, about the only person to emerge from Boulton’s book with any dignity at all is Patty’s father, Randolph Heart (the fourth son of William Randolph Hearst). Following his daughter’s kidnapping, Hearst went to great lengths to arrange meetings with representatives of organisations affiliated with the SLA, and announced, apparently in earnest, that his view of the world had been changed as a result of these discussions. He implemented the SLA’s demands for a vast public food programme about as well as he could within the prohibitive timeframe and guidelines the kidnappers had outlined, eventually sinking so much money into it that the solvency of his business empire was put in jeopardy, and he enraged the editorial staff of his newspapers by ordering them to re-print the SLA’s monotonous tracts in full, as they had demanded.

For these efforts, Hearst received nothing but abuse from all quarters, including from his own daughter. Given his impossible situation, one can hardly blame him for effectively washing his hands of Patty’s fate following the Compton blood-bath, and withdrawing from the public eye insofar as was possible. For this of course, he received yet more abuse – all of which leaves me feeling rather sorry for the poor guy, regardless of his nominally unsympathetic status as the multi-millionaire son of a notorious tyrant.

All of which, I realise, tells you very little about the aesthetic or editorial policy of New English Library, which is what I instigated this series of posts in order to discuss. But what can I say – as an example of no nonsense, long form journalism, ‘The Making of Tania’ proved an unexpectedly engaging read, blowing the dust off a series of now-historical events that I was broadly aware of, but had never really taken the time to read up on in this level of detail.

I hope I won’t need to derail this weblog into factual/, ‘true crime’ territory too often – rest assured, no icky serial killer fascination is forthcoming - but, like the Manson murders a few years earlier, the Hearst/SLA saga is a tale that has entirely transcended it’s historical context, becoming a key ingredient in the stew of the crazy culture that BITR exists to celebrate, and as such I find that freshening up my knowledge of the genuine article every now and then proves quite rewarding.

Pan’s People: Villainy Unlimited by Derick Goodman (195?)

N.B. – I’m unsure whether or not this Pan edition actually dates from 1957 – only the copyright / first publication date is given. Given the Pan catalogue number (G327) I’m guessing 1959/60-ish.

Since I last shared some Pan paperback covers here in 2016, I’ve been fortunate enough to add some really great new Pans to my collection, particularly with regard to the imprint’s always interesting crime list. So, the next few weeks seems as good a time as any to share them with you. Expect a new post every few days.

As I’ve observed in the past, these books remain cheap and easy to find, without too much of a cult cache or a collector’s market sniffing around them, but nonetheless they are frequently things of beauty – none more so than this wonderfully atmospheric cover by Dave Tayler. (Source.)

The silky light and shade here reminds me of a golden age Hollywood movie poster more than anything, and, needless to say, the book itself sounds like a fascinating read too – I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck into it at some point (perhaps during a future trip to Paris, fingers crossed).

Bloody NEL: Satan's Slaves and the Bizarre Underground Cults of California by James Taylor(1970)

"It happens. It has happened. It will happen again. The West has its spaces -- wide-open spaces. The fuzz can't be everywhere. The nearest police station could be a hundred miles away. A fire only shows for a few miles. Sound only travels a short distance before erasing itself in the atmosphere. […] Across the canyon, in the other hills, another group played out the last rites of a witchcraft ceremony -- and the orgy prepared to cut loose."
- p. 126

Following on from the Manson-ite speculations contained in my review of The Dunwich Horror earlier this month, not to mention the recent announcement that Quentin Tarantino intends to make a new Charles Manson movie (reaching cinemas in time for that all important 50th anniversary, no doubt),  this feels like as good a moment as any to pull this one off the shelf and give it a quick once over.

New English Library hold a well-deserved reputation as the sleaziest of UK paperback imprints, but even so, they really outdid themselves here with an example of pulp non-fiction at it’s most crassly exploitative, complete with an unaccredited publicity shot of the recently murdered Sharon Tate gracing the back cover.

Predictably enough, searching online for info pertaining to one ‘James Taylor’ who “tried to found his own religion” in “the ‘golden land’ of California” yields little, but regardless, we can assume that the whole ‘religion’ thing didn’t work out too well for the mysterious Mr Taylor, as the early months of 1970 seem to have found him taking a deep breath and banging out no less than 127 pages of prose for NEL, armed with nothing more than a few newspaper articles, a passable command of contemporary hipster patter and a vague memory of watching some horror movies.

As a result, I think we can safely claim that ‘Satan’s Slaves’ was one of the first (if not THE first) “Manson books” to hit shelves anywhere in the world – an achievement only slightly undermined by the fact that it is utter bollocks.

That’s not to say of course that it is anything less than a wholly enjoyable read for those of us inclined to read such a thing in the first place. Writing in a free-flowing, gonzo style that allows him to leave narrative strands hanging whenever he feels like it and switch subjects on a dime, Taylor initially sets out his stall with a bunch of vague “L.A. – city of evil” / Hollywood Babylon type think-piece blather, before giving a general “overview for the squares” of the expansion of California’s 1960s counter-culture from it’s Beat Generation origins through to the glory days of Haight/Sunset decadence.

Taylor then moves on to a few case histories of earlier L.A.-based religious hucksters (Father Riker, L. Ron Hubbard, Sister Aimee McPherson), all related with the “insider gossip” curled lip sneer of a mid-century tabloid expose. Adding to the general tabloid vibe, the author also throws in some great, entirely arbitrary, chapter headings like ‘NO HALO FOR SATAN’ and ‘INTERCULTIC BATTLEGROUND’, which I enjoyed. He also goes into great detail concerning the careers of certain cult leaders and religious organisations (eg, the ‘Bakar Ifna Temple’, ‘Charles Irish’) whose activities remain so thoroughly underground that a google search turns up nothing except references to this book.

More parochially, the supposedly California-dwelling Taylor also finds time to criticise the ‘blundering’ attitude of Britain’s Labour government in reforming the trade unions, and complains that the MBEs awarded to The Beatles are “little short of bribery”, for some reason.

Charles Manson himself fades in and out of the book’s digressive flow, with the paucity of concrete info available to Taylor at the time of writing sometimes becoming painfully clear. [Although the month of this book’s publication in 1970 is unknown to me, the author mentions several times that a date for the Family’s forthcoming trial – which began in June of that year – had not been set whilst he was writing.]

Interestingly, Taylor does reference the alleged connection between Manson and The Process Church of the Final Judgement, demonstrating that this idea (now a ubiquitous part of the mythos surrounding Manson) was already common currency even this early in the game. He also speculates, apropos of nothing, that Manson might have picked up some of his mystical hoo-doo by “meeting a Scientologist in prison”, so… there ya go.

Happily, when rehashing the available press cuttings starts to run thin, Taylor wisely decides to take off into the realms of pure fantasy, penning a number of lengthy, entirely fictional fantasias of Death Valley orgies and Satanic invocations whose blood-curdling content could have fitted right into some post-Manson hippie horror movie of the ‘Werewolves on Wheels’ / ‘I Drink Your Blood’ variety. At some point in proceedings, the author even seems to drift into an assumption that Manson and his followers were actual, card-carrying Satanists (see caption on the photo above), and he also alleges that Manson personally ordered the slayings of at least twenty five people in the Los Angeles area.

Needless to say, if you dig the particular aesthetic of this cultural moment, and if the extreme bad taste of the whole venture doesn’t put you off, ‘Satan’s Slave’ proves an absolute hoot, best enjoyed as a piece of somewhat factually-influenced pulp fiction.

[UPDATE: according to this paragraph in Tony Allen’s ‘Brit Pulp! The Fast and Furious Stories from the Literary Underground’ (Sceptre / 1999), ‘Satan’s Slaves’ was actually the work of frequently pseudonymous NEL scribe James Moffat, best-known for writing the ‘Skinhead’ series and various other young adult books under the name ‘Richard Allen’.]

This Week’s Wheatley: Dennis’s Mates.

 “The Reverend Montague Summers was a most interesting man. He was not only a great authority on witchcraft, werewolves and the rest, but also wrote a number of excellent books on Restoration theatre. He always dressed a clergyman, and, with the silvery locks that curled down on either side of his pale, aristocratic face, he was the very picture of a restoration bishop. But quite a number of people maintained that he had either been defrocked or had never taken holy orders at all.

I remember his telling me one evening of an exorcism he had performed in Ireland. The wife of a cottager was apparently possessed by a devil. When Summers arrived she was foaming at the mouth and had to be held down. With bell and book he performed the ceremony. A small black cloud issued from the woman’s mouth. She became quiet, the black cloud disappeared into a cold leg of mutton that had been put on the table ready for supper. A few minutes later, it was seen to be swarming with maggots.

Summers asked my wife and me to spend the weekend at his house in Arlesford. We motored down on the Friday afternoon. When we were taken round the garden, my wife spotted the most gigantic toad she had ever seen, and in the bedroom we were given there were a dozen enormous spiders.

On the Saturday morning my host took me into a room that was empty except for a pile of books. Picking up a small leather-bound volume, he said, ‘Look, this is just the thing for you. It is worth far more, but I’ll let you have it for fifty pounds.’ I did not want it and, anyhow, could not have afforded it. Much embarrassed, I said so. Never have I seen a man’s expression change so swiftly. From benevolent calm it suddenly became filled with demoniac fury. He threw down the book and flounced out of the room. An hour later I had sent myself a telegram. By Saturday evening my wife and I were home again in London. That was the last I saw of the ‘Reverend’ Montague Summers.”

“Rollo Ahmed was a very different character. He was an Egyptian by birth, and from his father’s family had acquired his initial knowledge of the ‘secret art’. However, his mother was a native of the West Indies and, while Rollo was still in his ‘teens, his parents decided to leave Egypt. For many years he lived with them in devil-ridden islands and the little-explored forests of Yucatan, Guiana and Brazil. In these places he acquired first hand knowledge not only of the primitive magic of the forest Indians, but also of Voodoo and the use of obeahs. Later he explored Europe and Asia for further knowledge of the mysteries and for a while lived in Burma, where he became a practitioner of Raja Yoga.

He was a small, slim man, neither bombastic nor subservient, with a most cheerful personality and a ready laugh, and he spoke English perfectly. Several times he dined with us in Queen’s Gate. On one occasion on a freezing night in mid-winter he arrived without a hat or overcoat, dressed in a thin summer suit. He had walked all the way from Clapham Common; yet his hands were glowing with warmth. This he declared was due to his practicing yoga, and he offered to teach my wife and me yoga breathing. We had a few lessons, but were too heavily engaged with other matters to follow it up.”

[…]

“From him I learned a great deal. Later I was told that he had slipped up in a ceremony and failed to master a demon, who had caused all his teeth to fall out. Soon after the opening of the war, I lost sight of him, as I had other things to think about.”

“I was introduced to Aleister Crowley by a friend of mine who was a very well-known journalist and later, as a Member of Parliament, became one of the leaders of the Socialist Party. I will therefore refer to him as Z. Crowley dined with my wife and me several times. He was a fascinating conversationalist and had an intellect of the first order.”

[…]

“Having had Crowley to dinner several times, I told my friend Z. that, although I found him intensely interesting, I was convinced he could not harm a rabbit.
‘Ah!’ Replied Z. ‘Not now, perhaps. But he was very different before that affair in Paris.’ The affair in Paris was as follows.
Crowley wanted to raise Pan. One of his disciples owned a small hotel on the Left Bank. Crowley, with his twelve disciples, took it over for the weekend and the servants were given a holiday. On Saturday night a big room at the top of the house was emptied of all its furniture, swept and garnished. Crowley and his principle disciple, MacAleister (son of Aleister), were to perform the ceremony there, while the other seven remained downstairs. He told them that, whatever noises they might hear, in no circumstances were they to enter the room before morning.
Down in the little restaurant a cold collation had been prepared. The eleven had supper and waited uneasily. They all had a great deal to drink, but got only stale-tight. By midnight the place had become intensely cold. They heard shouting and banging in the room upstairs, but obeyed orders not to go up. The door was locked and they could get no reply to their anxious calls, so they broke it down.
Crowley had raised Pan all right. MacAleister was dead and Crowley, stripped of his magician’s robes, a naked gibbering idiot crouching in a corner.
Before he was fit to go about again, he spent four months in a lunatic asylum. Z., who told me all this, had been one of the disciples, and an eye-witness to this party.”

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All text from the chapter ‘Modern Occultists’ in Dennis Wheatley’s ‘The Devil And All his Works’, pp. 256 – 261.

Photographs via the internet.

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