chapter thirteen

FOLIE À FAMILLE

1968

 

When Leslie and Pat describe how they ended up in Manson’s lethal orbit, I can’t help thinking about the fable of the frog. If a frog is thrown into boiling water, he will leap out of the pot. If he’s thrown into a pot of tepid water, he happily burbles away as the heat under the water is ever so slowly increased and will never attempt to escape. He’ll just slowly be cooked to death. (Apparently this is an urban legend. If the lid is off the pot, the frog will attempt to escape when the water gets hot, no matter how gradually. But I have always found it so useful as a life lesson that I’m reluctant to part with it.)

Pat and Leslie say that if, when they first met Manson, he had been the malevolent dictator he later became, they would have headed for the hills. But he was a guy talking about God and Oneness and spiritual love, and he seemed in possession of an uncanny knowingness. He not only knew their thoughts and feelings, he seemed to have some special extrasensory connection with all living creatures—babies, dogs, coyotes, lizards. He was wise, he was gentle, he was attentive, but he was also childlike and playful. His spirit of adventure was infectious and best of all, at least in the beginning, there were no rules, and both of them had spent the past few years chafing at rules.

Leslie’s attraction to Manson was very different from Pat’s. She didn’t see him as a romantic figure but as a mystical one, so her attachment was not that of a lover, as it was with Pat, but as a leader, a guru, a God.

To be free of self, to fuse with Charlie and each other, they had to cut loose from their families. He wanted them to be, he said, the way they were before their parents contaminated their souls and twisted their hearts. “Who you are is beautiful,” he told them. “It’s everyone else—society, school, your parents—who are wrong.” Before Charlie came along, Pat had seen herself as a failure in society; Leslie saw herself as a disappointment to her parents. For both of them, Charlie’s dismissal of society’s expectations was a salve.

“He knew just how to play on our dissatisfactions,” Leslie said.

Gradually, his nurturing, supportive message turned into one of criticism, humiliation, and sometimes physical abuse. What had started out as an opportunity for a fresh start became a war against not only their past but their present autonomy. (By that time, it was too late, not only because of their attachment to him, but also because of their attachment to the other women in the group. It felt like a family.)

Both women talked about how important the feeling of sisterhood was. Manson, who’d never genuinely belonged to any family, knew how to engender the feeling of connection and family, something these kids yearned for.

But there was a cost to belonging to that family. The once-free-spirited commune morphed into a totalitarian society, a society without points of reference to the outside world.

Manson allowed no clocks, no calendars, and he micromanaged everything from the music they played (only his songs, and songs by Moody Blues and the Beatles) to when they had sex and with whom. He dictated when they could take drugs and he often orchestrated the “trips” they had. (The most vivid of these, according to Leslie, was the day they dropped acid and, with Manson as both director and star, they reenacted the crucifixion of Christ.) Soon, the boundary between hallucination and reality was hopelessly blurred.

Eventually they came to fear him, but the fear was intertwined with dependency and what felt like intense love. He told them the ultimate test of that love was the willingness to die. “I would die for you, would you die for me?” was his mantra.

One of the psychiatrists who testified at Tex Watson’s trial and later at Leslie’s second trial postulated that the so-called Manson Family was a folie à famille—a psychiatric term that refers to a group of people who share elements of mental illness such as delusions. He explained that in this way, Manson’s pathology became the group’s pathology.

The power he wielded in his little kingdom fueled a long-held ambition to be a recording star, and he managed to make enough contacts in the music business to bolster this dream. In 1968, Pat and one of the other girls met Beach Boy Dennis Wilson when they were hitchhiking in Malibu. The girls introduced him to Manson and he introduced Manson to rock manager Gregg Jakobson, who had produced The Doors.

Jakobson would later tell Vincent Bugliosi that he’d been drawn to Manson personally and fascinated by the “whole Charlie Manson package.” The two men got to know each other over a period of a year and a half. “Charlie loved to rap about his views on life,” Jakobson told Bugliosi. I include this here because one of the frustrations Pat and Leslie have had over the years is trying to get people to understand how they could have been attracted to Manson. I have no idea if Jakobson is any measure of normality, but he was certainly more mainstream, to the extent that a music producer can be mainstream, than most of Manson’s young followers.

Jakobson introduced him to Doris Day’s son Terry Melcher, who had produced The Byrds. This was a critical introduction to Manson. He was counting on Melcher to provide his big break.

Jakobson eventually arranged for Manson to record a demo, with the Family as backup. By the end of 1968, Manson’s dream of cutting an album became a dangerous fixation. When he listened to the Beatles’ White Album, the message he “heard” in their lyrics was that the time for revolution—a revolution between blacks and whites, a revolution with the title of “Helter Skelter”—was nigh and we anoint you, Charlie, to start that revolution with your songs.

There are many pages in the book devoted to Bugliosi’s analysis of what Manson took to be directives in the White Album lyrics, the how, why, and where of the racial war. (Like everything else associated with Manson’s motive, the selection of the title “Helter Skelter” for the revolution is subject to interpretation. In their book, Bugliosi and Gentry write, “ ‘Helter Skelter’ is another name for a slide in an amusement park.”) The blacks were going to win the battle, and the entire white race, save Manson and Family, would be destroyed. They would be spared because the blacks would recognize that they needed a few whites to lead society. In “Honey Pie,” they urged him to sing the truth to the world when they asked Honey Pie to show the “magic of your Hollywood song.” In “Revolution,” they told him they were waiting for him to sing the word that would trigger the “real solution. . . the plan” they’d “love to see.”

Working day and night, Manson wrote an album’s worth of new songs incorporating the Beatles’ mandate. Melcher agreed to come and listen to the songs and, in preparation, the women cleaned the house, rolled joints, and cooked a special dinner. Melcher never showed up.

The extent to which Manson truly believed in “Helter Skelter” is still debated, but what is not in question is his bitter disappointment and frustration about his album’s dead end. One person who believed that his thwarted music career was the motive behind the murders was Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate’s husband. “Manson’s rage was that of the spurned performer—one who seeks revenge on others for his own lack of talent and recognition,” he wrote in his 1984 memoir, Roman. In the book, Polanski contends that Manson targeted that house because he believed that Terry Melcher, the man who declined to produce his compositions—compositions Polanski described as mediocre—still lived there. He speculates that the murder of the LaBiancas was an attempt to confuse the issue.