The Manson Women and Me

1998, 1968

It had been more than an hour since I slipped my request to visit Leslie through the slot in the waiting room, but there was still no sign of her. I started to worry that they had forgotten about me. It had happened before—more than once.

“Do you think there’s a problem?” I said, leaning into the microphone so the guard on the other side of the bulletproof glass could hear me.

“No,” she said.

“It’s been over an hour.”

She shrugged. “It happens.” She looked down at the stack of forms she was shuffling. She was not going to provide me with the gift of eye contact.

I sat back down.

A man sitting in an adjacent row looked at his watch and let out an exasperated sigh. He’d been waiting when I arrived so his impatience was well deserved. “She said the same thing to me,” he said, motioning in the direction of “it happens” Hannah.

He was a slender man who looked to be in his fifties with a sun-weathered face and faded blond hair. He looked nautical or a good imitation of nautical in a pale yellow Ralph Lauren polo shirt and Vans. He also had the ever-so-slightly shell-shocked expression of a straight-arrow guy who hadn’t yet adjusted to the necessity of having to deal with the Department of Corrections. He told me his daughter had recently been convicted on a drug charge. He had a string of complaints against the judicial system, starting with the district attorney who prosecuted her for what he considered a minor offense right up to and including the snotty guard behind the glass. He raked his fingers through his thinning hair and said, “To think I voted for Pete Wilson.”

This was not the first discussion of its kind I’d had with people in the waiting room. If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no law-and-order Republicans, or at least not many, in prison visiting rooms. I’d wager that prisons have been responsible for converting more people to progressive politics than any other single institution or organization. The first time many Americans come into contact with a totalitarian regime is when someone they care about goes to prison. You don’t have many more rights than a prisoner when you’re visiting one, except that you get to go home when the visit is over.

And then I saw Leslie, handcuffed, entering the visiting area with her minder. It was always a shock to see her escorted in handcuffs, standard operating procedure.

After we settled outside with drinks, chips, and cigarettes, I asked her to tell me more about her experiences in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. She said the first time she went there she was too young and not at all prepared for the trials and tribulations of emancipation. The second time she was eighteen and ready to make the break with her mother permanent. “I was older and I wasn’t as frightened,” she said, lighting her filtered Camel. “It was exciting and I wanted an adventure.”

I told her that I, too, had lived in the Haight in the 1960s and it was exciting. That era, defined by its swirl of garish tie-dyed colors and stoned lingo is so effortlessly caricatured that it’s easy to forget the pervasive joy and optimism that prevailed in the early days. There was a feeling that something important was happening—rules were being broken, advances were being made—and you could sense it by walking down the street. There was an innovative spirit everywhere: in the music, the art, the sciences, in the academy. Much has been written about the rage of the 1960s—David Horowitz and Peter Collier, former radicals and born-again right-wingers, titled their book about the ’60s The Destructive Generation—but the overall momentum was propelled by idealism.

The vibrant twenty-five-square-block area at the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park—journalist Warren Hinkle called it “a psychedelic city-state”—was characterized by two- and three-story Victorians built in the 1890s. Over the years the once-upscale district had depreciated, and by the 1960s housing was a bargain. A group of kids could rent a five-bedroom Victorian with stain-glassed windows, wainscoting—gas lamps, though wired, were still in place—and a sun-drenched backyard for a few hundred dollars a month. These circumstances were perfect for communal living, and communality was the order of the day.

When Leslie and I compared notes on our time living there, we agreed that there was something about the place that felt uniquely welcoming—in fact, no neighborhood, before or since, made me feel as safe, nurtured, or entertained. In the S.F. Examiner, Michael Fallon described the Haight as “part old Calcutta, part circus.”

At the time, I was in graduate school and in a new marriage to a medical student, and we had some adjusting to do. Occasionally, as a symptom of that adjustment, I would angrily bang out of our apartment at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and walk two blocks to the House of Donuts on Stanyan Street. I wish I’d taken photos: even at those hours it was an all-night costume party with people wearing topcoats and ponchos, granny dresses, serapes, and a variety of robes—from bathrobes to monk’s robes.

What started as a party, drawing kids from all over the country, took a more sinister turn as social upheaval roiled the country. The rage over the war in Vietnam was ignited daily by televised images of mothers and children fleeing from napalm and carpet bombs; by 1968, the body count of American servicemen killed had reached an average of fourteen hundred a month. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Atlanta in April 1968, and the following June, the month Leslie arrived, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

Social scientist Helen Perry, one of the early observers of the Haight in the 1960s, likened the scene to the delta of a river where all the uprooted sediment of America was washing ashore. The uprooted sediment she was talking about were disaffected kids like Leslie fleeing their parents. Michael Fallon is credited with coining “hippie,” a word, so the story goes, that he created out of “hipster.” Norman Mailer, in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” defined hipster as someone who, because of World War II, the brutality of concentration camps, and the diabolical invention of the H-bomb, had divorced himself from society, “to exist without roots,” Mailer wrote, “to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”

Kids in the Haight like Leslie may not have been reading Mailer, but they were definitely acting out their own imperatives. The most sheltered generation in history now rejected the very institutions that had sheltered them. The conformity of the 1950s gave way to an infatuation with change. Alter your clothes, grow your hair, change your name, unleash your sexual inhibitions. Try everything, experiment constantly, accept nothing as given.

The context for the so-called Manson Family was a subculture committed to communal effort and social change. In 1967, Dr. Dave Smith opened the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic for medical problems, and the Diggers, a group founded by Peter Coyote in 1966, established crash pads for the kids pouring into the district. The Diggers also distributed free clothing from a storefront and served free food in the Panhandle every day to more than two hundred people. One of the units of social change in this era was the group, and there were groups of every stripe on every corner: consciousness raising groups, encounter groups, Gestalt groups, sensitivity training groups, Synanon square games, community organizing groups, and group therapy.

At the time, I was in graduate school at San Francisco State and married to a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco. Political activity was fervent on both campuses, but the proximity of the medical school to the Haight—the buildings on Parnassus Hill loom over the district—created an uncomfortable coexistence of counter-culture and institutional practices. It’s hard to overstate the upheaval and the contradictions.

A few examples: to the astonishment of the chancellor, the once-staid Dean of Students, after a weekend at Big Sur, reorganized his office, doing away with the hierarchical structure so that the secretaries had as much say as the dean; medical students started challenging big pharma, though it wasn’t yet called that, vilifying lazy doctors who relied on drug company hucksters for prescribing information; my husband and I, along with six other couples, were part of an encounter group organized by a faculty psychiatrist who facilitated marathon weekend sessions. These encounters challenged what had once been solid boundaries. The word “inappropriate” had vanished, and if someone had “boundary issues,” another term not yet in vogue, it was because he or she felt pressure to cross them, not maintain them.

Not only did the medical students and their wives and girlfriends bare their souls in these groups, the faculty advisor who led the group did as well. These intense sessions routinely produced confessions of infidelity, accusations of infidelity, expressions of aggression, and lots of crying. Early Monday morning, the same guys (in this group, the med students were all guys) who had peeled off their crisp white coats on Friday night to expose their soft underbellies put the coats back on and, with very little sleep, showed up for rounds where humiliation by arrogant superiors, in effect since the time of Hippocrates, continued to be the order of the day.

The friction between hide-bound tradition and the counterculture was the environment Manson discovered when he arrived on the scene. Shedding the past was one of the themes, and potent agents for doing so were drugs: marijuana, mushrooms, and LSD. Taking acid, Ken Kesey called it the “acid test,” was a way of nullifying the values you had internalized and thumbing your nose at everything your parents, your schools, your church considered worthwhile.

Timothy Leary, with his tune-in-turn-on-drop-out exhortation to young people everywhere, promoted “the death of the mind” through LSD. Reality, he declared, is an illusion. At the 1967 Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, dressed in white robes, Leary, sounding very much like Manson would later sound, proclaimed, “The only way out is in,” and urged people to start their own religions. “You are a god, live like one,” was the refrain. Proselytizers like Leary, drunk on drugs, spirituality, and their own grandiosity, either didn’t know or didn’t care how this death-of-the-mind message got translated to kids who had barely formed minds to begin with or how literally some might take the invitation to act like a god.

Four months after the Be-In and two months before the summer of love, thirty-year-old Manson moved out of federal prison and into Haight-Ashbury. He’d been in and out of prison for the previous seventeen years for a variety of crimes, including grand theft auto, pimping, mail fraud. The Haight was a predator’s paradise. “Pretty little girls running around every place with no panties or bras and asking for love,” he said in Manson Speaks, a book written with Nuel Emmons, a former prison mate. “It was a convict’s dream after being locked up for seven years.”

By then the hazards lurking in an open, accepting community of young people intent on shaking off parental shackles were beginning to be apparent. To the everlasting regret of many, Ken Kesey had already invited the Hells Angels to the party. “We’re in the same business, you break people’s bones, I break people’s heads,” he was quoted as saying during the summer of love. By that time, many of the flowers cited in Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco” (“For those who come to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”) were pinned to the dirty matted hair of bikers and hard drug users.

When Leslie and her friend arrived in the Haight, they stayed with a young couple and their baby in a railroad flat near the panhandle. One night, Leslie went to a party at a house on the corner of Stanyan and Carl, across from Golden Gate Park. There she met Gypsy, aka Catherine Share, and Bobby Beausoleil. Bobby, a guy with hazel eyes and a heart-shaped face, was cute and cocky, a bad boy like the other Bobby, but with a harder edge. He had worked as a child actor in Hollywood, a sometime musician, and had played several parts in offbeat films—one of them being Mondo Hollywood, a film with a segment featuring Jay Sebring’s hair salon, another of many synchronistic tendrils connecting the victims to their eventual slayers but having no causal relationship. Gypsy was a musician, making her living playing music in films. She had hooked up with Bobby on a film set in Topanga Canyon, and he, a couple months later, introduced her to Charles Manson.

(If this were a movie, it would be at this point that a split screen would appear showing parallel narratives. On one screen we’d see Leslie’s fateful meeting with Gypsy and Bobby; on the other, we’d see Charles Manson driving up and down the coast with Pat and Mary Brunner, collecting new recruits. Leslie didn’t know until years later that Gypsy was doing exactly the same thing—collecting girls for Manson.)

At the party in San Francisco, Leslie got stoned with Bobby. They flirted, they danced, and later had sex. She assumed she was going to be his girlfriend but he already had one: Gypsy. No problem, explained Bobby. He was adept at parceling out his favors to more than one woman at a time.

Gypsy and Bobby, who were living in a bread truck with RANDY’S TRAVELING CIRCUS painted on the side, invited Leslie to hit the road with them. She agreed and they headed south along the coast. “It was our version of the Merry Pranksters,” she recalled. “We’d drive along the coast tripping out and picking up people as we went. Gypsy kept telling all of us about this wonderful commune near Los Angeles where people were present in the moment, where they lived for the day, not the past or the future.”

At one point when Leslie was describing her experiences in the Haight, we noticed a young woman standing nearby trying to get her attention above the din in the visiting room. She was young, maybe early thirties, and though she had a broad smile, there was something timid and almost fearful about her.

“Leslie, I’m so sorry to interrupt but I wanted you to meet my husband.” A slim young man who looked even more timid than his wife stepped forward, and Leslie extended her hand to shake his. She introduced me to the couple, we exchanged comments about the weather—it was hot and humid—and Leslie and the woman talked about an inmate they both liked who had recently been released. And then the couple moved along.

Once again, I was struck by Leslie’s warmth. She gave this small interaction her all. It was easy to see why so many people at the prison sought her out and why she had so many long-term friends on the outside.

“Where were we?” she asked. I reminded her that we’d been talking about Catherine Share. “Oh, yeah.” She told me that she didn’t know until years later that Gypsy was scouting girls, pretty girls or girls who had cars or cash or their parents’ credit cards. “Gypsy called me in prison in the early nineties to apologize for recruiting me. That was the word she used. ‘Recruit.’ She said that was her assignment from Manson. I was stunned. I had no idea that it was that well planned.”

I told Leslie that Catherine and I had been in the same high school sorority at Hollywood High.

“Was she pushy then?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “Actually I thought of her as quiet, reserved.”

“She’s one of the pushiest people I’ve ever known.”

The commune Gypsy was talking to Leslie about, the commune near Los Angeles where she said people lived for the moment, not the past or the future, was at Spahn Ranch, the destination for Randy’s Traveling Circus truck.