Chapter 20

Spahn Ranch

In the summer of 1968, Dennis Wilson arranged for Manson to record some demo tracks. Wilson’s brother Brian had split the cost of installing a studio in his house on Bellagio Road in Bel Air with his record label, Capital, on the understanding that The Beach Boys would then scout out new talent and record them for Capital’s benefit. Dennis accompanied Manson and several of his women to his brother’s house, where they spent the night recording several songs. The first night stretched into a second, and then a third, leaving Brian Wilson distinctly uncomfortable. “I never saw them,” he recalled; “the bad vibes filled the house and I locked myself in the bedroom.… They had weird names, they were dirty, they showed little respect for our property.”¹

On August 9, 1968—exactly one year before Sharon was murdered—Gregg Jakobson apparently arranged for Manson and some of his followers to record in a Van Nuys studio. This resulted in several additional demo tapes, to add to Manson’s growing collection. Jakobson was impressed enough with Manson and his lifestyle to sit through endless philosophical discussions and even considered joining the Family himself.

In the fall of 1968, Manson succeeded in selling The Beach Boys one of his songs. Called “Cease to Exist,” Manson allegedly wrote it as a fable for the group, then in the midst of disagreements. But they tampered with the song before they recorded it, much to Manson’s anger. The words of the chorus, “Cease to Exist,” were changed to “Cease to resist,” thereby giving the song a vaguely sexual connotation which was the last thing Manson had intended. They changed the title, too, calling the song, “Never Learn Not to Love.” As eventually recorded, with the typical Beach Boy harmonies and back-up instrumental, the song was a far cry from what Manson had first written. The song went on to The Beach Boys album 20/20 and was eventually released as a B-side to another single, “Bluebirds over the Mountain,” on December 8, 1968. The single reached sixty-one on the Billboard charts before disappearing into obscurity. Manson, in payment, received an unspecified amount of cash and a BSA motorcycle.²

Throughout the summer and fall of 1968, Manson was continually after Terry Melcher to cut him a deal, to pull some industry strings. Melcher was to make a few half-hearted attempts, but his interest in Manson had never been very great. But Manson and members of his Family persisted in cultivating a relationship. In late summer, 1968, Manson Family members Charles Watson and Dean Morehouse both apparently attended several parties given by Melcher and his girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen, at their house at 10050 Cielo Drive—the same house in which Watson would slay Sharon a year later.³

On another occasion, Watson hitchhiked to Beverly Hills and walked up Benedict Canyon Road, Cielo Drive and the cul-de-sac which ended at the gate to 10050. Having let himself in to the property by pushing the automatic gate control button, Watson made his way to the back door and rang the bell. A maid answered and recalled that he had made an earlier visit with Dean Morehouse. She left Watson sitting in the kitchen while she herself went off to find Melcher. In a few minutes, Candice Bergen walked in to the kitchen and demanded to know who he was and what he wanted. Watson explained that Gregg Jakobson had been arrested on drug charges, and that he needed bail money, but Bergen, apparently annoyed by the fact that Watson was covered in grime, eyed him suspiciously. When Melcher entered the room, he told Watson that he was unable to help, saying that there was no way for him to come up with the money as it was a Saturday.⁴

Sometime in the fall of 1968, Terry Melcher lent Watson and Dean Morehouse his Jaguar, which they picked up at 10050 Cielo Drive and then drove to Ukiah to pick up Mary Brunner’s baby Pooh Bear, Manson’s son. Melcher even gave Watson his Standard Oil credit card to use.⁵ After returning to Los Angeles, Watson apparently took advantage of this fact to fill up the Family’s schoolbus as well.

Manson himself visited the property at 10050 Cielo Drive on numerous occasions. Once, he sat in the back seat as Dennis Wilson drove Melcher home. Manson did not leave the car, but continued to sit inside, strumming his guitar.⁶ Manson also became involved with the property on Cielo Drive not only because of Melcher but also because Rudi Altobelli, the owner of the estate and permanent resident of the guest house, was a major agent in the city. If Wilson and Melcher could not come through for him, Manson reasoned that Altobelli could pull all of the right strings. Altobelli later described how, in the late summer of 1968, both Melcher and Jakobson had talked excitedly about Manson and his Family, and were anxious to arrange a meeting.

Altobelli eventually did meet Manson, but it was not at Cielo Drive. One evening he attended a party at Dennis Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard mansion, and Manson and his followers naturally formed a large portion of the invitation list. Wilson introduced the pair. Altobelli agreed to listen to one of the demo tapes which Manson had recorded that summer. But he was not interested in Manson’s philosophy, incessantly spilled out during the course of the evening. Jakobson had spoken of Manson’s great ideas about love and peace and life, but Altobelli, uninterested, apparently brushed him aside.

Another Hollywood personality introduced to Manson was the Polanskis’ good friend John Phillips. Both Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher approached Phillips with tapes of Manson and asked him to listen to their new discovery. Phillips wasn’t very enthused, but Wilson tried to draw him in. One day, he rang Phillips and told him: “This guy Charlie’s here with all these great-looking chicks. He plays the guitar and he’s a real wild guy. He has all these chicks hanging out like servants. You can come over and just fuck any of them you want. It’s a great party.”⁷

“Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson,” Phillips later said, “and the people who were living with Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house used to call me all the time, you know, and say, ‘Come on over, it’s incredible.’ I’d just shudder every time. I’d say, ‘No, I think I’ll pass.’”⁸

By the beginning of August, 1968, Dennis Wilson had had enough. He moved out of his house on Sunset Boulevard and into a small apartment with Gregg Jakobson. He left it up to his business manager to throw out Manson and his followers. Manson immediately went back to Spahn Ranch, asking if they could stay at the outlaw shacks—small wooden huts that had formerly been used as set pieces for the numerous westerns filmed at the Ranch. George Spahn agreed, and the Manson Family moved in, staying for just over two months.

Manson’s relations with George Spahn always remained good, and Manson made sure that the girls took care of the old man, ensuring that he never had the opportunity to find out what was taking place at the ranch. But, for other residents of the Spahn Ranch, having Manson and his band of followers living in their midst was a less than comfortable experience. The ranch hands in particular disliked him, and never trusted either Manson or his Family. Randy Starr, Donald Jerome “Shorty” Shea and Juan Flynn were all witnesses to the comings and goings at the ranch, many of them illegal. In time, as Manson became more comfortably ensconced at Spahn, he arranged to make drug deals at a high level. For a time, the ranch served as a kind of mid-way point, between the stretch of Death Valley and the sprawl of Los Angeles, a place where bikers converged to leave their stashes, and where Manson, in turn, sold to those from the neighboring areas.

For Manson, Spahn Ranch represented a pratice Utopia, a place where he could remain firmly in control and steer the destinies of those around him. “I see the young love coming and getting free of all the programs,” he once told follower Paul Watkins.⁹ At the Ranch, Manson was able, to a large degree, to separate his Family members from their previous lives.

“Being at Spahn’s made it easier,” Watkins later wrote. “We were isolated from society. We had no TV sets, no newspapers, and we rarely left the ranch except to drive into town on garbage runs or into the valley to pick up a truckload of corn for the horses. We were nearly always together: sleeping, eating, making love, playing music, working on the ranch. There was nothing more important to any of us than putting Charlie’s scene together.”¹⁰

“It was a great place, actually,” recalls Lynette Fromme of the Spahn Ranch. “We could make anything we wanted out of it. It was like having the Our Gang set. You could turn it into anything.”¹¹

“It was all very fun in the beginning, innocent,” Van Houten later declared of their time at the Ranch. “At first, the Magical Mystery Tour was that we would be cowboys, or gypsies or pirates, and every day, it was to wear a different role, so that we would get more out of ourselves. Every day was Halloween.”¹²

Life at Spahn Ranch was a more or less leisurely existence while Manson waited for his big recording contract to come through. The Family helped take care of the horses Spahn kept to rent out to weekend visitors, cleaned the barns and occasionally acted as guides to curious tourists. Several of the women were detailed to look after the group’s children: by this time, Manson’s son Pooh Bear had been joined by Susan Atkin’s bastard son, who she named Zezo Ze-ce Zadfrack, as well as several other infants. The Family doted on these offspring, but Manson in a determined effort to sever all links between parents and children, pointedly refused to let mothers care for their infants, instead charging other female members with the task.

In time, the Family spread over the ranch, erecting tents, building lean-tos, and trying to find secret hiding places. The women would borrow ranch hand Johnny Swartz’s 1959 yellow and white Ford and go on garbage runs to Hughes Market at Chatsworth Plaza, just down the road, spending the rest of the afternoon preparing the food for the evening meal. Dinner was a communal event, often taken outdoors, sitting around a campfire while Manson sang or rambled on about philosophy.

After dinner, the drugs came out: pot, hash, LSD, peyote, mushrooms—whatever the Family happened to have on hand. “They came in different, various ways,” recalled Steve Grogan. “Some people just brought in a bag of weed. Other times one or two members of the group would go out and buy drugs. It was all bought so everybody would ingest them at the same time. That was one of the rituals, that no one would be taking any drugs without everybody else being able to participate at the same time.”¹³

“The evening ritual,” said Paul Watkins, “was always the same: we’d eat dinner, listen to Charlie rap for an hour or two, play music together, then make love—either in small groups or as a Family. Once or twice a week we’d set aside an evening to take acid. Use of drugs in the Family was never indiscriminate or casual. Rarely did we smoke grass during the day, and Charlie forbade anyone taking acid on his own. Drugs were used for a specific purpose: to bring us into a higher state of consciousness as a Family, to unify us.”¹⁴

Some nights there were orgies, which, in later literature, assumed truly gigantic proportions. Former Family member Linda Kasabian, for example, testified that Manson directed the couplings, picking out partners and supervising initiations. Sometimes, orgies were staged to impress visitors if Manson wanted them to join his group, and the women were occasionally used as bargaining chips, with sex in exchange for money or drugs with the bikers who hung out at the ranch. That Manson eventually came close to dominating the sex lives of his followers is without dispute, although it would be incorrect to think that the only sexual encounters on the ranch were those which occurred at Manson’s direction. But the numerous tales of nightly orgies, rapes, and even necrophilia which later surfaced—all of these seem, in retrospect, to have been greatly exaggerated by the contemporary media reports hungry for any details of the seedier side of life at the Spahn Ranch prior to the murders in August, 1969. Even Charles Watson later admitted: “Despite some of what has been written about Manson’s methods of breaking down inhibitions, I never saw any male homosexual activity in the Family; in fact, I heard Charlie preach against it several times. I never saw or heard anything about the sexual initiations that were reported, either—Charlie supposedly performing perverse sexual acts with a new member while the rest of us watched.”¹⁵

For the most part, however, these evenings were filled with talk about death of the ego and loss of individualism in favor of the group. “I am you and you are me,” Manson told his Family. “What we do for ourselves, man, we do for everyone. There’s no good in life other than coming to the realization of the love that governs it.… Coming to ‘Now,’ dig? People, you know, wear all kinds of masks to hide their love, to disguise it, to keep themselves from conquering their own fear. But we have nothing to hide … nothing to be ashamed of. There is no right and wrong.”¹⁶

Steve Grogan later recalled how Manson repeatedly told the group “to get rid of our egos, because if our egos were involved in anything we do, it would bring in confusion.”¹⁷ “To lose the ego is to die,” Manson once said. “And when you die or a part of you dies, you release that part to love. So what it means is overcoming your fear of death. Fear is the beginning of growth. Yet, it’s what holds us back. Fear is a higher form of consciousness, ‘cause it gives us a glimpse of the love. So it’s like you have to submit to your fear … your fear is your pathway to love.”¹⁸

Manson became expert at testing his followers. Watson later recalled how Manson would walk up to him, gun in hand, and say, “Go ahead, shoot me.” When, inevitably, Watson refused, Manson would take the gun back, declaring, “Well, now I have the right to kill you.”¹⁹ To a large extent, this was, as Paul Watkins recalled, “a game of awareness, being aware primarily of what Charlie wanted, anticipating Charlie. My success in the Family was based on my ability to play the games. I learned to pick up on Charlie’s signals, knew when he moved a certain way or assumed a certain expression just what he wanted.”²⁰

Such pronouncements were quickly absorbed by the various Family members. “Whatever is necessary to do, you do it,” Sandra Good later declared. “When somebody needs to be killed, there’s no wrong. You do it, and then you move on. And you pick up a child, and you move him to the desert. And you pick up as many children as you can, and you kill whoever gets in your way. This is us.”²¹

Manson’s philosophy duly impressed many of those he encountered. David Smith, who ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic and knew Manson, collaborated with Al Rose on an analysis of Manson and his followers which was written before the murders in 1969. Titled “The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study,” the article eventually appeared in The Journal of Psychedlic Drugs in 1970.

Rose and Smith described Manson as:

a thirty-five-year-old white male, with a past history of criminal activity.… He was never arrested or convicted of a crime of violence, and, in fact, during the study expressed a philosophy of non-violence.… He was an extroverted, persuasive individual who served as absolute ruler of this group marriage commune.… Tales of Charlie’s sexual prowess were related to all new members.… Charlie would get up in the morning, make love, eat breakfast, make love and go back to sleep. He would wake up later and make love, have lunch, make love and go back to sleep. Waking up later, he would make love, eat dinner, make love, and go back to sleep—only to wake up in the middle of the night to have intercourse again. Such stories, although not validated, helped him maintain his leadership role. Charlie had a persuasive mystical philosophy placing great emphasis on the belief that people did not die and that infant consciousness was the ultimate state.… Charlie used the words of Jesus, ‘He who is like the small child shall reap the rewards of Heaven,’ as a guide for the group’s child-rearing philosophy.… However, Charlie’s mysticism often became delusional and he, on occasion, referred to himself as ‘God’ or ‘God and the Devil.’ Charlie could probably be diagnosed as an ambulatory schizophrenic.… Charlie set himself up as ‘initiator of new females’ into the commune. He would spend most of their first day making love to them, as he wanted to see if they were just on a ‘sex trip’ … or whether they were seriously interested in joining the group.… An unwillingness, for example to engage in mutual oral-genital contact was cause for immediate expulsion, for Charlie felt that this was one of the most important indications as to whether the girl would be willing to give up her sexual inhibitions.… Charlie felt that getting rid of sexual inhibitions would free people of most of their problems.… The females in the group had as their major role the duty of gratifying the males. This was done by cooking for them and sleeping with them.… Of the fourteen females in the ‘immediate family,’ two were pregnant at the time of our observations. Both said that Charlie was the father, although there was no way to verify the claim, as sexual relations in the group were polygamous. It should be noted that Charlie was held in such high regard by the girls that all of them wanted to carry his child.”²²

Very early on, Manson was concerned with breaking inhibitions and standards, crushing the moral and psychological barriers in his followers. Part of this philosophy was designed to break the ego of the initiates, to reduce them to a common level, on which they became emotionally dependent on Manson. Once their resistance was broken, it was much easier for him to indoctrinate them to his way of thinking.

Manson also used humiliation and violence. “If someone didn’t do something just exactly the way he said it,” recalls Steve Grogan, “he would go into a tirade, break something or slap somebody around or slug them. And a lot of times—when I look back on it—it looks like he was using the girls to talk to different people through, people who just came to the group, like men. He would yell at the girls and tell them, ‘You’re stupid. Why don’t you do it this way?’”²³

Manson was certainly crafty enough to recognize and play on his followers’ emotional weaknesses, but his eventual command of their bodies and minds rested more with their own inabilities to come to terms with life outside the Family than with any mythological powers which Manson purportedly possessed. Manson, for all of his influence and power, simply managed to manipulate in each of his followers that which already existed. He himself would always claim, in his self-serving fashion, that he had ordered no one to do anything, and that every one of his followers was free to come and go at will, to choose freely what to do and what not to do. Even though the evidence does indicate the large degree to which Manson was able to manipulate his Family, on this issue, at least, it is generally correct to take him at his word. All of the Family members were free to make their own decisions. That they all decided to believe Manson’s bizarre philosophy speaks more for their own disturbed states of mind than for Manson’s power over them.

Many of the Family members were later to claim that it was only after they met Manson, and he broke down all of their previously held beliefs, that they came to such a state of dependence and unquestioning trust. Often—and particularly in the cases of two of the most prominent future murderers, Susan Atkins and Charles Watson—they insisted that it was a combination of Manson’s powerful hold over them, along with his incessant distribution of drugs, which led them to commit their crimes. In effect, they presented themselves as good-hearted, all-American youths, corrupted through both Manson’s evil influence and by the use of mind-altering drugs.

At the time of their trials, much was made of their seemingly ordinary backgrounds: Leslie Van Houten, a former church choir member and honor student; Patricia Krenwinkel, a Bible student; Charles Watson, a gifted athlete and scholar in high school. Only through such terrible factors, they, their defenders and the media proclaimed, could such normal, average and decent youths—who might have come from any family across America—become mindless killers. Defense attorney Paul Fitzgerald, for example, took great pains to tell the media that the members of the Family on trial for murder “had not so much as smoked a cigarette before they met Charles Manson.” It was a comfortable, convenient view which eased the minds of many parents unable to come to terms with the fact that their own children might also be capable of such horrible crimes.

None of Manson’s followers, however, came to him without the fundamentals upon which he himself capitalized to launch the murders. They were not zombies, controlled through their leader and through drugs, lacking the elements within themselves to become criminals. Those who participated in the eventual murders had all been heavily involved with multiple sexual partners and engaged in frequent drug use long before they came into Manson’s orbit. As Dr. Clara Livsey has pointed out in her study of the Manson Family, Susan Atkins, “after telling of her gross promiscuity, her abuse of drugs, her disavowal of any decent conventions before she met Manson … states that Manson ‘worked on ridding us of our inhibitions.’ What inhibitions, one wonders, did she have left before she met him?”²⁴ Thus, it is impossible to ascribe their enthusiastic willingness to murder simply as a symptom of their lives with, and influence by, Manson.

“These men and women who came to Manson brought an element within themselves which he was later able to exploit to his own criminal ends,” says Vincent Bugliosi. “None of them had to be coerced to commit their crimes. There was something in them which reveled in their crimes, which refused to fight against the notion of right or wrong as you or I would do. It was Manson’s ability to recognize this ingrained willingness to kill which led to the murderous events of the summer of 1969.”²⁵