The Manson Women and Me

Spring of 1962

We were talking about God. It was spring break and we had just left my parents’ house in Silver Lake and were on Sunset Boulevard headed to downtown L.A. I was feeling expansive. Not because we were talking about God but because the day before I had mastered a stick shift for the first time. My newly acquired skill meant that we were able to take my mother’s new car, a fire-engine red VW Bug that I’d been wanting to drive, and I was excited about our destination. Craig had never been to Olvera Street, the tree-shaded Mexican marketplace—part of the original Pueblo de Los Angeles—and I wanted to share it with him. I didn’t care that its shops were crammed with kitsch and crowded with tourists. The aroma of perfumed candle wax, the pastel piñatas, the cactus lollypops, and the Mexican jumping beans were all a joyful part of my childhood.

God entered the picture when I took a little detour around Echo Park to show him Angelus Temple, the church founded by evangelical preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. In addition to being the first woman to preach on the radio, in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, she was known for faith healing and for whipping up enormous crowds by speaking in tongues. Craig was religious— Lutheran or Methodist or one of those Protestant denominations I can never distinguish from each other—and I knew he harbored evangelical fantasies. Before he decided on politics, he had planned to be a minister, and he once confided that his goal had been to reach thousands, if not millions, of people with his oratory. Since I was an atheist, born and raised, we’d had a few conversations about religion, some of them testy.

“Too bad Preacher Aimee isn’t still alive,” I said. “She could have healed your knee.” We’d been in an accident six months before, and Craig was still hobbling on his injured knee. As soon as I said it I worried that he’d take offense, but I looked over at him and he was smiling. We were on safe ground.

“Did I ever tell you about my month as a Christian?” I said.

“You? A Christian?” I looked over. Still smiling.

I told him that in high school many of my friends were members of the Hollywood First Presbyterian Church, and I often tagged along to functions in the teen program. Unlike other high school parties, these were the opposite of hip and, I guess, so was I. No drinking, no sex, no dancing. Instead, they had taffy pulls, ice cream socials, and they played parlor games. At one of the parties, a counselor in the teen program introduced herself and invited me to join my friends the following weekend at a retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains.

This experience combined all that was great about camp with a religious dimension that, to me, translated as emotion, topped off with a bonus of just enough heterosexuality in the mix to make it interesting. Those folks knew what they were doing. The teen boys were in a club called the Crusaders . . . they were all good looking, athletic, and looked trustworthy. Think Mitt Romney. No longer my cup of tea, but in those days that type was my ideal 1950s cute guy. I loved every minute of that retreat—flirting, swimming, singing, and, occasionally, praying. After two days of that, I buckled under the pressure to accept Christ as my savior. I think that’s what’s called born-again, though, for me, it was born-again for the first time.

I was having fun dredging up the details for Craig, and my tone got increasingly jocular. “My parents were tolerant of my deviant behavior. I didn’t yet have my license, so they cheerfully drove me to Sunday school every week and every night, when they came into my bedroom to kiss me good night and found me reading the Bible, they said nothing. If they worried about me or laughed at my newfound religious zeal, they waited until they closed the door of their bedroom. In a way, it made sense. They always said they wanted me to be happy, and I was a happy Presbyterian. For one month, it was a match made in heaven. And then it wasn’t.”

“What happened?” Craig asked.

“It all started in the beginning,” I said, laughing. “You know, Genesis. That’s where it all started.” I remember liking my little joke—the double meaning of the beginning—but my audience wasn’t so appreciative.

“What do you mean?”

“The Sunday school teacher told me to start reading the Bible at Genesis and being the good little student that I was, I did. But Genesis was a problem for me. A big problem and I brought that problem to Sunday school. I talked about the obvious . . . you know, all the stuff the Bible says about creation doesn’t make any sense . . . take evolu—” Before I could finish the word, Craig jumped in.

“Sounds like you’re proud of being a smart ass.”

“Come on, Craig,” I said, “are you telling me that you don’t have a little trouble with the time table in Genesis? I’m a little hazy on it now, but doesn’t the Bible tell us that God created the universe in seven days? Or was it six? Either way, it’s not logical.”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “The point is that religion provides comfort to people. It’s about faith; logic doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters. We’re talking about young, impressionable kids.” I was into the volley so it took a while for me to become aware of how angry he was. Finally I noticed the scowl on his face.

“Why are you getting so worked up about this?”

“Because you have no way of knowing how important that church or that religion was to the other kids in that Sunday school class. Maybe there was a kid whose parents were getting a divorce. What if his faith was helping him get through it? And what about poor kids? Religion provides solace to them.”

“Come on, Craig,” I said, “these were not poor kids . . . we’re talking about some of the most privileged kids in L.A.”

“That snide remark about my knee shows . . . well, your . . . ignorance. Faith healing gives people hope.”

“What about talking in tongues?” I asked. “Does that give you hope? Do you even know what’s being said?”

“You are so fucking cocky.” Now he was yelling.

I had to admit I was feeling a little cocky, but it had to do with mastering a clutch and a gearshift. I didn’t think my views on evolution and talking in tongues reflected arrogance, just common sense. “Why can’t we talk about this calmly? I can’t believe how seriously you’re taking this.”

“Stop!” he yelled.

“Jesus, what is going on with you? This is crazy.”

“Let me out of the car,” he bellowed.

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“Stop!”

I kept driving.

He suddenly reached his leg over my leg and jammed his foot on the brake. The car came to a screeching halt and both of us lurched forward. If there had been a car behind us, it would have sailed into the back of the car, launching the VW engine into our backs.

Shaking, I pulled over to the curb. I was only seventeen, but I was certain the adrenaline surge was going to give me a heart attack. I looked at him, expecting an apology. He was defiant. “I asked you to stop!”

He got out of the car and walked about a half block up Sunset Boulevard. I had no idea what to do. Now, of course, I wonder why I didn’t just leave him there, but I don’t think it occurred to me. I hate to admit it, but I pleaded with him to get back in the car and, eventually, he did. We didn’t go to Olvera Street and we didn’t talk. I took him back to his brother’s car that was parked at my parents’ house.

We had argued before, but outbursts like this started after we had the accident. We’d been on a lonely stretch of Highway 99, somewhere around Turlock in the San Joaquin Valley, on our way home for Christmas vacation. A sixteen-year-old kid who’d only had his license a couple of weeks moved into our lane without signaling. We crashed into him and Craig’s right knee slammed into the car keys that were in the ignition, damaging the tendons in his knee. I hit my face on the dashboard, but, according to the paramedic, I avoided serious injury because I’d been asleep. We were in Craig’s 1949 Chevy—no bucket seats, no seat belts—so I was sleeping with my head in his lap. I was bruised and my nose and my lips were so swollen they joined together, comprising a single facial feature.

It was a bad night for me and Craig but perhaps a worse night for the kid who’d been driving the car that hit us. When we were all in the emergency room at Turlock (it was, literally, one small room) the kid kept saying his father was going to kill him when he got home. He was standing, slightly rocking and trying to steady himself against the wall, and then he fainted, falling face-first into a crash cart. The clatter of the metal on the tile floor was terrifying. The nurses revived him with some mixture, I assume of smelling salts, and he seemed okay, but he was so scared I think he might have preferred remaining unconscious.

For some reason the accident seemed to have unleashed anger at me. Craig hadn’t hit his head, so I didn’t understand his new belligerence.

Even though he couldn’t walk without a crutch and my face was so grotesque people stared at me, we kept telling ourselves that we were lucky that more damage wasn’t done. But something had changed. As I said, we had always argued a bit, but now our fights were more frequent and fiercer.

The first time he hurt me was one morning when we were eating breakfast in the dining room of our dorm complex after school started in January. Two days before, I’d confessed a flirtation I’d had with a guy who also lived in the same complex. I don’t know why I confessed it. I told myself that my motive was honorable . . . I didn’t want us to have secrets between us. It’s quite possible, however, that it was retribution for Craig’s policy of not acknowledging me as his girlfriend when we were on the Cal campus as part of his political calculations. As I said before, he planned to run for student body president some day and believed that girls would be more likely to vote for him if he was unattached romantically. I laughed it off, but it hurt my feelings.

He insisted on calling the flirtation an “extra-marital affair.” When I pointed out that we weren’t married and it was not an affair but a flirtation that involved some kissing, it made him angry. When I realized that he was also hurt, even tearful, I felt terrible. I promised to cut off contact with the guy. I thought it was settled, but the next morning it became clear that it wasn’t. I was sitting next to Craig at a long, communal table, and Craig’s crutch was propped up against the table. The guy, I’ll call him Michael, walked by with some friends, and just as he did, Craig’s crutch slid down to the floor. Before I or Craig had a chance to retrieve it, Michael picked it up and propped it up again in the same place. I said, “Thank you.” Michael nodded at me and kept walking. Craig didn’t say a word, but he took my hand, which was in my lap twitching nervously, and smashed it forcefully against the underside of the table, bruising my knuckles. I was stunned. It hurt like hell, but I was embarrassed so I said nothing. I massaged my hand and watched it turn blue. We never talked about it.

The next outburst was a couple of weeks later. We’d been to see Westside Story, which was playing at the Shattuck Theater. As we were walking back to the car in the underground garage after the movie, we started fighting about Natalie Wood. One of us said her singing voice had been dubbed and the other said it wasn’t. I don’t even remember which of us took which position, but I do remember the nightmarishly dim light in the garage, the dead echo to his voice as he yelled at me, and my fear as he started to wave his crutch overhead—not close enough to hit me but close enough to make me think he was going to. I felt the breeze as it passed near my head. I don’t know if he intended to strike me, but I think the possibility even scared him because he immediately cooled off. We got in the car and he drove me back to my dorm. We didn’t talk.

I remember telling my kids about this relationship years later and how puzzled they were. It wasn’t consistent with how they saw me. My son, who was then a teenager, was especially surprised. He and I were going through a tumultuous time in our relationship, but he was protective of me and couldn’t fathom a guy hitting me.

I told them it was long before there were general discussions of battered women. There was no talk of syndromes. No talk of “no one is immune.” No talk of partner abuse being an equal opportunity phenomenon. In those days it was straightforward: he was a guy, I was a girl, and every once in a while boys hit girls.

Now it’s possible to look back with relief and see that it wasn’t the beginning of a pattern of relationships. It was a departure from my life’s trajectory, not the norm. Nonetheless, it could have been a dangerous one.

* * *

One of the reasons I tolerated the physical abuse was that I thought it was my fault. I now know this is a common perception of abused women the world over, but I didn’t know it then. Here’s how my thinking went: because of my family’s education, I was better with words, so when we got into verbal sparring I had the upper hand. Therefore, it was unfair of me to keep arguing once he got angry. As my arguments sharpened, his frustration would build and build. By the time I recognized how angry and out of control he was, it was too late. I’d see the impotence in his face and I’d feel terrible. I had no right to hurt him, to unman him in that way. He couldn’t help his feelings, but I could’ve worked harder to control myself. I pushed him too far. I was supposed to be making him feel big and powerful, and instead I was making him feel small and helpless—perpetuating the inequality of our upbringings. He had to fight for everything he had achieved, and it had all come to me easily. Instead of violent boy against articulate girl, it was a war between the classes, at a particularly sensitive time in our country’s history, especially at Cal where we were supposed to be overturning society’s inequalities.

In recounting this, I think about Leslie telling me how the women felt terrible for Manson, for his rejection, for his institu-tionalizations. It was their parents’ generation that did that to him, and knowing that made them feel guilty. Whereas they had come from middle-class neighborhoods with loving families, he’d been abandoned to fend for himself. He used that guilt to manipulate their sympathy.

As Manson pointed to Leslie’s and Pat’s families of origin as their biggest problems, Craig, too, blamed my parents. He said my parents had been too lenient when I was growing up and had not set enough limits, so he was redressing the balance. This was ridiculous on several fronts. My parents were liberal politically, but in terms of setting limits, they were the strictest parents I knew. But even if they had been lenient, what kind of twisted excuse is that to hit someone? I knew that at the time, but I was too preoccupied with my own guilt to even argue with him about it.

What else did we fight about? We fought about sex. We fought about sex all the time. (This, I did not include in my talk with my kids.) My official position was that I wanted to be a virgin when I got married, but the truth was that I didn’t feel ready. (I may have been the last holdout among girls of my generation—I certainly was among my friends.) I was seventeen. He was twenty-one and he’d already had several girlfriends with whom he’d had sex. We did sleep together—on weekends we’d take little road trips and stay in motels—but I held firm to my position. He lobbied constantly. He said if I loved him, I would have sex with him. That’s what people did who loved each other, he said. Though I held my ground, I felt guilty about that, too. It didn’t seem fair to him. I would propose that we stop sleeping together. He said we shouldn’t stop sleeping together, we should keep sleeping together but we should have sex when we slept with each other. And around and around and around we’d go.

So, we argued about sex, we argued about religion, we argued about politics. I was more liberal. There was a new group of young turks on campus who raised issues that I cared about—free speech and academic freedom as well as the right of students to take positions on off-campus public issues such as civil rights and capital punishment. The group was called Slate and it was a precursor to the Free Speech Movement, which came along a few years later. Craig was more aligned with student leaders whose platforms had to do with campus issues. Want a jukebox in the Bear’s Lair (the café in the student union), Craig’s your guy.

And we fought about his hands-off policy toward me in public when we were on campus. I no longer even pretended to buy his reason. As I pointed out to him, John Kennedy married Jackie and women still voted for him.

And then there was the issue of his parents. We didn’t fight about them; we didn’t talk about them at all. He’d always been close to his parents, and we both knew that if he stayed with me he’d have to give up his relationship with them. It didn’t seem fair.

The worst fight we had happened in early June, right before I left school for the summer. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember that it fit the pattern. It started as a tiff, built to an argument, and by the time I was aware of his intensity, it was too late. He punched me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me.

Why did I put up with it? For one thing, and this now seems weird, each time it happened it felt like an isolated incident. My boyfriend hit me . . . not my boyfriend hits me. As I say, no one was talking syndrome.

I never, not once, considered breaking up with him because he hit me. I loved much about him. I loved his husky voice and his wide, hazel-eyed gaze, his athletic good looks. I loved his relationship with his sister and his brother and how proud he was of his parents’ strong marriage. Unlike the frat boys I had dated, he didn’t have even a whiff of entitlement about him. He had every reason to be anti-Semitic and wasn’t. But most of all, I loved that he had chosen me. I was astonished when he asked me out. That’s why his disavowal of me as a girlfriend on campus was especially hurtful. It confirmed my belief that I wasn’t quite good enough.

The night he hit me in the stomach, I ran up to my dorm room. I was crying, so my roommate demanded to know what happened. She was so upset that later, after I’d gone to sleep, she called her mother in Southern California to talk about it. The next morning, her mother called to talk to me. She said I should break up with Craig. She’d had a dream that he killed me. It felt like a premonition.

I thanked her for being concerned, but I told her not to worry. “He’s not going to kill me. It was my fault. I push him too hard. I have to learn when to stop arguing.”

My memory about how my own parents reacted is hazy. I don’t remember that they were particularly upset. Actually, I don’t remember that they were upset at all. Now it seems out of character that parents, especially a father who thought his daughter should have her own career and was a version of an early feminist, would tolerate such a thing. I think maybe there was still a feeling that the rules of engagement were different with couples. Either that or my parents also bought into my belief that I was lucky to have landed him. I also don’t know how much I revealed. I think I told them that he hit me, but I also think that I would have downplayed it. I was reluctant to reveal problems because I didn’t want them, especially my mother, to intercede. All of this is confusing to me now. If our daughter were ever in a relationship with a man who hit her, at any time in her life, my husband and I would not have held back. Maybe I didn’t tell them all of it.

I was never again involved with a man who hit me. Strangely, however, for the rest of my life I’ve thought of myself as the kind of person who couldn’t be with a man who would hit me. I’m pretty sure the people who know me best would assume that too. I’m not suggesting that this relationship became a repressed memory—I was aware that it happened—I just somehow didn’t think it counted. It wasn’t until I started to recall the details through the lens of my inquiries about the Manson women that I wondered if some of my assumptions about myself (and other women) were accurate.

Without articulating it, I’ve believed that women like Pat and Leslie are on a (metaphorical) list of women who could get involved with men who would mistreat them, while I was on a different list—a list of women who would never be involved with such men. Or if a woman on my list did find herself with such a man and he struck her once, she would immediately leave him.

Given my history, and given what I know of Pat’s and Leslie’s, I’ve had to rethink that list. Each of them has such a strong sense of herself as a woman now, it’s difficult to comprehend that either could have ever been so categorically dominated by a man.

Considering the similarities in our histories, the categories are not nearly as clear as I once thought they were. The two factors that kept me from bolting—believing that it was my fault and the honor of being chosen by him—blended together to produce the glue that caused me to stick, and also prevented me from having a clear-eyed look at our relationship. Both Pat and Leslie talk about variations of these same themes preventing them from seeing Manson clearly before it was too late.

So, am I really on a different list after all? Are any of us? I know, or think I know, that, other than protecting my children, there are no circumstances that would cause me to murder. But my experience with Craig shows that I might have been more vulnerable to some of the steps that led up to that horror than I’d like to admit. The issue, I think, is the question of departures—departures from what one could predict about one’s life, given family history, genetics, and a whole lot of other variables.

In my case, the departure didn’t define me. I can chalk it up to youthful naïveté and turn it into a deeper understanding of what causes abused women to stay in dangerous relationships. For Leslie and Pat, however, their paths crossed with Charlie, not Craig, and the departure defined the rest of their lives.