“DENNIS WILSON: I LIVE WITH 17 GIRLS”
In early 1968, Charlie told Roger that he wanted to transfer his case down to LA. He’d made some good contacts in the music industry there and wanted to pursue them. Roger submitted the paperwork to his counterparts in the Southern District and thought that was that.
After he finished his doctoral program and left probation work, Roger and Dr. David Smith opened a clinic for speed addicts in the Haight, a walk-in basement with some couches and an office in back. He was surprised when Charlie showed up to visit with five of his girls some months later. No other former probationer had done that before.
As the girls gushed about how Charlie’s fame in the music industry was just a matter of time, they didn’t look stoned, disheveled, or in any trouble. Just happy to crow about his successes.
“He’s singing with the Beach Boys and Terry Melcher, and he’s going to get a contract,” they said.
Regardless of whether a contract was ever a real possibility, Manson certainly had reason to continue pursuing his dream. In a 1968 interview in the Record Mirror—entitled “Dennis Wilson: I Live With 17 Girls”— the Beach Boys drummer said of Charlie, “When I met him I found he had great musical ideas. We’re writing together now.”
When Roger tried to press Charlie for more information, he was his typical noncommittal self. “Oh yeah, playing some gigs here and there,” he said.
While Charlie was staying in Topanga Canyon, he met up with his prison pal, music producer Phil Kaufman, who was released in March 1968 after serving five years for importing marijuana.
For a time, Kaufman was happy to partake of the sex and drugs that Charlie provided, but then he went on his way. Charlie did go see Kaufman’s friend at Universal Studios, but nothing came of it.
Dennis Wilson’s months-long episode with Charlie and the Manson Family started with his innocent meeting of two young hitchhikers named Katie and Ella Jo, whom he picked up twice in Malibu that spring.
The second time, Dennis took them back to his house and chatted with them for a few hours, sharing his recent experience with the Maharishi. In turn, they told him about their guru, Charlie Manson, who had recently gotten out of prison after twelve years. They thought Dennis should meet him.
When Dennis got home from a recording session in the wee hours that night, a man emerged from the back door to greet him. Dennis was understandably scared, so Charlie, who was in his foot-kissing period, got down and kissed Dennis’s feet.
“Do I look like I’m going to hurt you, brother?” he asked.
Dennis walked into his house to find a dozen of Charlie’s friends inside, most of them girls.
By this time, Charlie had collected small pockets of people, who were staying in different places, and were often taxied back and forth by Lynette Fromme, who served as a “den mother” of sorts for the Family. Some stayed at a place known as the “Spiral Staircase” house in Topanga Canyon, and some were at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth.
But now that they’d found this groovy new pad in Pacific Palisades, a former hunting lodge owned by cowboy political humorist Will Rogers, Charlie started directing his people to send girls and drugs to Dennis’s house. The more he could bring to the party, the better chance he had of getting that record deal.
Catherine Share was one of those new girls. She was staying with Bobby Beausoleil at his place in LA when a man wearing a cowboy hat and a beard drove up with two young girls in a beat-up car. No one made introductions before Bobby sped away on his motorcycle, but it was clear that Catherine was supposed to get into the car with them.
The girls, who turned out to be Lynette and Ouisch, said nothing as they all drove toward a lavish house in the Palisades, where the cowboy pulled up to a security gate, punched in the security code, and drove inside the compound of wooden logs, glass, and tall eucalyptus trees.
“This is your dream, isn’t it, girl?” he asked Catherine. “Start living it.”
Inside, young, attractive people were swimming in the pool—lots of girls with bare breasts, passing joints around.
The cowboy disappeared and reemerged clean with wet hair, wearing loose yoga-style pants and a silk robe. She soon learned they were Dennis Wilson’s clothes and this was the rock star’s house. But the cowboy seemed so comfortable there, it was as if he were welcoming her into his own home.
“Hello, I’m Charlie Manson,” he said, as if they hadn’t already met.
They had sex that night, just as Charlie did with all the new girls. And once he was satisfied with his assessment, Catherine was initiated into the Family as Gypsy.
Some of Dennis’s friends were happy to join the scene with Charlie and the girls, which included groovy, psychedelic group sex sessions, facilitated with hash, LSD, and strobe lights. In a practice the Family continued at Spahn Ranch, a few men lay naked on the floor of a room full of nubile teenage girls and young women, where everyone touched and made love to whomever was nearby, regardless of gender. It was, as one female Family member described, as if they were all “like just one.”
Meanwhile, Charlie tried to make the most of his new connections with Dennis’s friends—famous musicians like Neil Young, talent manager Rudi Altobelli, talent scout Gregg Jakobson, and music producer Terry Melcher—even tagging along to night clubs with some of them.
Young, a singer-songwriter, saw something in Manson’s music, but he wasn’t sure what. “It was beautiful, it was just a little out of control,” he said.
Jakobson was impressed enough by Charlie’s songwriting talents to talk him up to Melcher, who had met Charlie at the house a couple of times.
Sharmagne Leland-St. John-Sylbert, who was one of Jay Sebring’s girlfriends, wasn’t impressed by Charlie or his musical abilities. She first heard him play in a tall office building at 9000 Sunset Boulevard, which housed some of the most influential music firms of the 1960s and ’70s. Her boss, Jim Dickson, manager of the Byrds, had an office there, down the hall from Beach Boys manager Nick Grillo.
On her way to work one morning, Sharmagne passed Charlie in the hallway. His hair stringy and dirty, he was sitting barefoot and cross-legged in jeans on the floor, playing an acoustic guitar outside Grillo’s door. It wasn’t unusual to see groupies and wannabe performers hanging out in those hallways, waiting to be discovered.
When she headed to the bathroom a few minutes later, she thought he was gone. But as she tried to get into the bathroom, she felt the door pushing toward her. He came out, saying nothing as he walked by.
Inside, she was shocked to see words scrawled in lipstick on the light-colored tile wall, sexually explicit and demeaning references to a woman involved with Byrds member Chris Hillman.
A year or so later, Sharmagne was mourning Jay’s death as she watched a news conference about the Tate slayings on TV. When they showed a photo of Manson’s face, she recognized him immediately.
Holy smokes, that was the guy sitting outside the Beach Boys’ door! she thought. Creepy.
“His face was everywhere, always, for the next few months,” she said. “It was always there.”
Mike Love, another member of the Beach Boys, didn’t fall for Charlie’s shtick either. Dennis invited Mike to the house one night for “dinner,” after which Charlie initiated a group sex session. It wasn’t Mike’s scene, so he left the room.
Charlie immediately burst into the bathroom, where Mike was showering. “You can’t do that,” he said, clearly annoyed. “You can’t leave the group.”
Mike just ignored him, but Dennis fell victim to Charlie’s wiles. Recognizing that Dennis felt like a low man in the Beach Boys hierarchy of talent, Charlie told the drummer how talented he was; Dennis responded with mutual encouragement.
Charlie had more than enough charisma and troubadour charms to win over young men who were far more vulnerable than Dennis—lost souls with no direction, looking for love, validation, and acceptance. Like Charles Watson, a twenty-two-year-old from Texas.
In the spring of 1968, Watson was driving his truck along Sunset Boulevard toward Malibu when he stopped to pick up a hitchhiker who introduced himself as Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Dennis told Watson he was thumbing a ride because he’d crashed his Ferrari and his Rolls Royce.
Watson hadn’t heard of Dennis, but he’d definitely heard of the famous all-male singing group. He was even more impressed when he saw Dennis’s expansive home in the Palisades and was invited inside.
As Watson walked into the kitchen, Dennis introduced him to the Reverend Dean Moorehouse, a pot-bellied bald man with a long gray beard, who sat at a table with some young girls.
“There’s someone you should meet in the living room,” Moorehouse said, taking him to a small man with big energy who was playing the guitar and singing on the couch, surrounded by more girls. The man looked up at him and smiled, exuding a gentle, welcoming warmth.
“This is Charlie,” Moorehouse said. “Charlie Manson.”
Watson was the son of a service station–grocery store owner and his wife, a domineering woman nicknamed Hot Rod Speedy Lizzie, who had laid out life plans for Watson, the youngest of their three children. Groomed to be a passive follower like his father, Watson did what he was told, which was to study marketing at North Texas State University.
Lured to the glamour of the Sunset Strip while working as an airline baggage boy, he’d left Texas State during his junior year to move to LA. He briefly enrolled at Cal State Los Angeles, dropping out this time to sell wigs in Beverly Hills.
Quitting that job as well, he resorted to hocking wigs and marijuana out of his truck, but he eventually just stuck to selling drugs.
Soon, he wasn’t as worried about pleasing his parents, or figuring out what to do with his life. Sitting in Dennis Wilson’s living room that afternoon, his mind opened up and he felt at peace, as if he belonged there. As if he were part of something bigger than himself.
He also liked feeling pampered by the girls, who served the men cheese and avocado sandwiches. Listening to Charlie’s songs about love, Watson felt the music speaking to him.
As Watson was leaving that night, Dennis invited him to come back to hang out and swim in the pool. Before he knew it, Watson had his own room there.
His drug experimentation progressed to peyote, speed, and LSD as he absorbed the Manson philosophy: the key was to lose your ego and join with others as one entity, so each of you would “cease to exist” independently. Charlie even wrote a song with that title.
Watson felt a bond with Charlie, his philosophy, and his girls—a deeper kind of love, connection, and freedom than he’d ever achieved through sex alone. He also felt the material world slipping away.
Charlie slowly worked his way into Watson’s head. Possessing little self-confidence, Watson later concluded that he’d fallen under a sinister form of sorcery the day they met, and that Charlie’s music was a “ritual of magic, a formula of words, chants, recited for my deception. While smoking hash with Manson, unknowingly I chose to open my mind to evil and to give myself as the sacrifice. A coincidental meeting with the shaman that I will regret for the rest of my life.”
After Watson moved with Charlie to Spahn Ranch, George Spahn nicknamed him “Tex” because of his Texas accent, and also because, well, there could only be one Charlie at the ranch.
Despite Charlie’s charms, his lack of education and his years in reform schools and prisons put him in a whole different class from people like Dennis Wilson and producer Terry Melcher. In the end, he couldn’t help being himself.
Always looking for an angle, Charlie and his Family constantly worked Dennis for handouts, food, clothes, and money. For months, Dennis was generous and complied with their requests, even giving Charlie nine or ten of his gold records.
As Dennis later told prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, he treated the whole Manson crew to penicillin shots to treat their gonorrhea. He paid for studio time and also set up recording sessions at his brother Brian’s studio so Charlie could put down some of his original songs.
But when Dennis finally reached the limit of his generosity, he didn’t know how to get Charlie and the girls to leave the house. So he took off in August and moved in with his friend Gregg Jakobson, leaving it to Gregg to evict Charlie and his crew.
Charlie responded by sending a threat to Dennis. Handing Gregg a bullet, he said, “Tell Dennis there are more where this comes from.” Not wanting to scare Dennis, Gregg never delivered the message.
Although none of Charlie’s studio recordings ever made it into distribution, the Beach Boys did use one of Charlie’s songs on their 20/20 album, which was released in 1969. Charlie had titled the tune “Cease to Exist,” but when the album came out, he was furious to discover that Dennis had rewritten some of the lyrics, changed the title to “Never Learn Not to Love,” and taken full writing credit for it. It stung even more when the Beach Boys played the tune on The Mike Douglas Show.
“I gave him a bullet because he changed the words to my song,” Charlie explained later.
Because the Manson crew had stolen and damaged so much of Dennis’s property—trashing the house and crashing Dennis’s uninsured $21,000 Mercedes Benz, for an estimated total loss of $100,000—Dennis hadn’t felt obligated to give Charlie a shared credit, let alone any royalties.
Dennis eventually shared his experiences with Bugliosi, but he refused to testify at trial, fearing for the safety of his seven-year-old son and himself, especially after Charlie found Dennis again and threatened him personally.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world, because I got off only losing my money,” he said.