By June of 1968, Dennis’s marriage had broken up, and he was renting an old hunting lodge, once owned by Will Rogers, on Sunset Boulevard. Late one night, he pulled his Ferrari into his driveway and noticed the lights on inside. That wouldn’t have surprised him—friends drifted in and out all the time. But after he parked the car, the back door opened, and out walked a small man with long dark hair and a scruffy beard, wearing jeans and a work shirt. Dennis had no idea who this guy was, and something about him was frightening.
“Are you going to hurt me?” Dennis asked.
“Do I look like I’m going to?” the man replied.
The stranger fell to his knees and kissed Dennis’s feet.
That was how Dennis met Charles Manson.
Of all the troubling subplots in the history of the Beach Boys, Dennis’s relationship with Manson stands alone, and the episode affected all of us for years to come. My cousin’s interest in Manson now seems inexplicable, but in reality Manson tapped into parts of Dennis that make it all too explainable.
It starts with the positives about my cousin. To his credit, Dennis was generous to a fault. He really didn’t give a damn about cars or clothes or anything of material value, and was glad to give away what he had. We once rented a piano for him, but when it was time to return it, he didn’t have it. He had lent it to someone but couldn’t recall who. Money? Didn’t care about that either. One night he was in a bar in Tulsa, after a concert, and he couldn’t get served because he didn’t have an ID. He was with our promoter, who was carrying our cash from the box office, and Dennis told him to give the bartender what he had, which could be held as security. The promoter put $10,000 on the counter. In cash. To Dennis, it was only money, and he wanted a drink.
The other thing about Dennis, and this is the negative, was that his appetite for sex was insatiable. I’m hardly one to sit in judgment, but for Dennis, too much was never enough. He once picked up two women that he was going to take to his house, but instead, he stopped at the house of our road manager, who lived on the very same street. When the road manager later asked Dennis why he just didn’t go to his own house, Dennis said, “I couldn’t wait that long.”
Dennis’s obsession made its way into our 1969 song “All I Want to Do,” which was written by Dennis and mixed at a studio in the Capitol Tower. After the vocal tracks were completed, Dennis wanted to perk up the ending; so according to our sound engineer, Stephen Desper, Dennis walked over to Hollywood Boulevard, found a prostitute, and brought her back to the studio (using a side door to avoid the security guards). Desper had arranged a love nest in the middle of the studio, using a carpeted riser as a bed, some acoustic blankets for cushion, and another upended riser for privacy. Two condenser mics, mounted on long booms, hung over this makeshift cove. With Desper working the controls, Dennis and his partner disrobed, put on headphones, and listened to the song while providing their own lusty bass line. One take provided all the acoustic effects that were needed, but Dennis said he wanted to “overdub” a second pass. So they did it again, the song and the sex, and Desper integrated these carnal flourishes into the track, in stereo.
So it was completely in character for Dennis, in the spring of 1968, to pick up two young women hitchhiking on Sunset Strip and to bring them back to his house. Dennis mentioned his involvement with Maharishi, and the women said they too had a guru, named Charlie. The women didn’t know who Dennis was, but when they returned to Manson, he knew exactly who Dennis Wilson was.
Manson was a thirty-three-year-old former convict (armed robbery and car theft) who believed he was a talented singer/songwriter and was just one recording contract away from stardom. He was also a charismatic speaker who, starting in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco during the Summer of Love (1967), reeled into his thrall desperate young women. Manson extolled their beauty, insisting that they submit themselves to him, sleeping with them to demonstrate his love, and exhorting them to surrender their egos. He compared himself to Jesus and used LSD as a perverse sacrament. It was all part of the initiation. These were his disciples, and they were now part of a family, a family that actually cared about them.
Manson and his “girls,” as they were called, moved to Los Angeles at the end of 1967, the better for him to fulfill his destiny as a rock star. They lived in communal arrangements and picked up stragglers along the way, including some men, increasing the size of the group to about twenty. But Manson’s efforts to break into the music industry foundered, so when two of his girls told him that Dennis Wilson had picked them up and taken them to his house, Manson pounced.
Dennis was the perfect mark—a famous, well-connected entertainer who could help a musical neophyte get discovered. Dennis lived in a luxurious house, on three acres, with a swimming pool and plenty of guest rooms. Guileless about others, indifferent about his own possessions, a rebel in his own right, Dennis was all too happy to allow Manson and his girls to move in, use his charge cards, take his clothes, eat his food, even drive his Mercedes. Manson, after all, had something for Dennis—a stable of young women who catered to his every desire.
Sex, however, wasn’t the only appeal. Manson knew how to nurture the grievances of new recruits, telling them that their father caused their problems. This made sense to Dennis, who surely told Manson about the beatings he had received from Murry. Manson’s frustrations with the music industry and his diatribes about the injustices of the world dovetailed with Dennis’s own disappointments that his music skills were not taken more seriously and that society never really understood him. Manson was a racist, and Dennis, while not outspoken or meanspirited, may have absorbed his father’s uncharitable view of black people. Finally, while Dennis had been drinking heavily for a number of years, he had also developed an appetite for drugs, including LSD, and Manson’s blending of psychedelics, sexual servants, rock music, and new-age rhetoric was too much for Dennis to resist. In the summer of 1968, Manson and his girls moved into Dennis’s house, and Dennis joined the family.
In a few short months, Dennis swerved from Maharishi to Manson, two diminutive but hypnotic figures who promised a better world for their followers. Dennis was looking for answers—no different from the rest of us—except he had no filter to distinguish between the divine and the diabolical. In a 1968 interview with the Record Mirror, he said: “I still believe in meditation, and I’m experimenting with tribal living. I live in the woods in California, near Death Valley, with seventeen girls.” Referring to the first two girls he met, he said, “I told them about our involvement with the Maharishi, and they told me they too had a guru, a guy named Charlie, who’d recently come out of jail after twelve years. His mother was a hooker, his father was a gangster, he’d drifted into crime; but when I met him I found he had great musical ideas. We’re writing together now. He’s dumb, in some ways, but I accept his approach and have learned from him.” Asked if he was supporting all of these people, Dennis said, “No, if anything, they’re supporting me. I had all the rich status symbols—Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, home after home. Then I woke up, gave away fifty to sixty percent of my money. Now I live in one small room, with one candle, and I’m happy, finding myself.”
Dennis took Manson out to nightclubs, introduced him to people in the industry, and proselytized to me and the other Beach Boys about his new guru’s wisdom and depth as well as his musical talents. Bruce Johnston and I finally drove out to Dennis’s house to meet his new roommates over dinner. That itself was interesting. Charlie’s girls drove Dennis’s Rolls-Royce to a supermarket in Pacific Palisades and scrounged for discarded vegetables, which they brought home and prepared. On some of these trips, they panhandled from people who they thought could afford it, and one can only imagine the person who gave them spare change only to watch them climb back into their Rolls.
My most vivid memory of Manson occurred after dinner. He told us to come into the den, where he turned on a strobe light and revealed all of his girls lying there, naked. He started passing out LSD tabs and orchestrating sex partners. I love the female form, but this was too much even for me. The place was hot and claustrophobic, so I walked out to take a shower. No sooner had I stepped under the showerhead than one of the women walked in with me. It was “Squeaky” Fromme, who years later, dressed in a red nun’s habit, tried to assassinate President Ford. (Her handgun didn’t go off.) Squeaky thought this would be a fine time to take a shower with me, but before I could tell her to get lost, Manson himself arrived.
He looked up at me with those dark, beady eyes and said, “You can’t do that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You can’t leave the group.”
“I’m really sorry, Charlie. But Bruce and I have to get back to the studio.”
We got the hell out of there, and as we pulled out of the driveway, I thought, Denny, you’ve got a real nut case for a roommate now.
Dennis wanted Brother Records to record Manson, bringing him into our offices and hyping his talents. (He gave most people the creeps.) Dennis set up recording sessions for Manson with Stephen Desper in Brian’s home studio. The idea was to cut a demo good enough to convince either the Beach Boys or others of Manson’s appeal. Manson arrived at Brian’s home with several of his girls—they sat on the floor in a daze, apparently stoned, though they also found the bathroom. Marilyn later said she had to disinfect the toilets. Desper thought Manson’s songs were okay, perhaps even recordable, and Manson returned on several occasions (Brian stayed in his bedroom). But Manson resisted Desper’s instructions, was ill informed about the industry, and was fidgety and impatient. At one point, Manson pulled out a switchblade, supposedly to clean his fingernails but more to intimidate Desper. Our sound engineer, used to the idiosyncrasies of artists, later said it didn’t faze him. He finally had to end the sessions, not out of fear but because Manson smelled so bad. The guy was not fond of showers. Desper also couldn’t understand why so many young women, eagerly awaiting him at each session, wanted to sleep with him.
Someone at Brother Records checked Manson’s background and discovered his criminal past, and our accountants were raising flags about unexplained expenditures on Dennis’s charge card. For my cousin, the truth about Manson slowly emerged. Beyond what was spent on his card, Dennis paid the medical costs for the women who were treated for sexually transmitted diseases. His house was ransacked. Furniture, clothes, guitars, stereo equipment, gold records—they took most everything of Dennis’s that wasn’t nailed down. They also totaled his Mercedes. By summer’s end, Dennis figured he had lost about $100,000 to his roommates, and even for him, that was too much.
Though Dennis didn’t back down from anyone, he didn’t want a confrontation with Manson, who had a penchant for flashing his switchblade and making threats. So instead of demanding that Manson and his girls leave, Dennis just vacated the premises. The house was leased, and when the lease expired, the owner kicked out the squatters. Manson decamped to Spahn Ranch outside of Los Angeles but continued his association with Dennis, whom he still needed to launch his career; and Dennis, through some combination of loyalty and gullibility, continued to visit Manson with producers in tow.
Dennis liked one of Manson’s songs, called “Cease to Exist,” whose lyrics he tweaked. I didn’t think much of it, but the Beach Boys changed the tune some more and recorded it as “Never Learn Not to Love.” Dennis took the credit for what was essentially Manson’s music and lyrics. Though the song is remembered by few, it did appear on the B side of a 45, and we performed it on The Mike Douglas Show in early 1969.
That was the extent of our direct musical involvement with Manson, and Dennis, for his part, slowly recognized Manson’s demonic streak. In May of 1969, in an interview with Rave, Dennis was asked if he was afraid of anything. “Sometimes the Wizard frightens me—Charlie Manson is another friend of mine who says he is God and the devil! He sings, plays, and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records.”
Around that time, Dennis’s illusions about Manson finally ended, when he paid a visit to Spahn Ranch. Upon his return, Dennis stopped by Brian’s house, where I was working in the studio. Dennis was visibly shaken, and I asked what was wrong.
“I just saw Charlie take his M16 and blow this black cat in half and stuff him down the well,” he said, referring to a black man.
Dennis was too frightened to go to the police. I think he was just hoping that Manson and his family would disappear, but his entanglement could not be undone.
Dennis had introduced Manson to Terry Melcher, the former musical partner of Bruce Johnston, who by 1968 had produced the Byrds’ covers of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and had helped Paul Revere and the Raiders become a top-selling rock group. Any artist would love to work with him, and that included Manson, who accompanied Terry and Dennis on several of their club outings. Manson was also in the car one day when Dennis dropped Terry off at his rented home at 10050 Cielo Drive, at the top of a steep hill in the Benedict Canyon area. Terry lived there with his girlfriend, the actress Candice Bergen.
Once Manson realized that Dennis wasn’t going to deliver a recording contract, he homed in on Terry, who, like any producer, was always looking for new talent. Perhaps as a favor to Dennis, he went to Spahn Ranch twice in the late spring of 1969 to hear Manson sing. Terry was Manson’s last hope, but he was unimpressed and had to tell Manson that he couldn’t help him, effectively ending Manson’s musical ambitions.
Manson wouldn’t stand for it. Consumed by rage and seeking revenge against a corrupt society, he convinced his followers that the apocalypse was coming in a bloody race war, at the end of which he and his disciples would take over. All of this was prophesized, Manson said, in the White Album—in the very songs that were written by the Beatles in Rishikesh. Invoking one of those numbers, Manson called the race war “Helter Skelter.”
To get it started, he and his followers had to commit some spectacular murders, and Manson chose to kill the occupants of 10050 Cielo Drive. Terry Melcher, however, had moved out in January of 1969, with Candice Bergen, and was living in a house owned by his mother, Doris Day. The move was no accident. I was good friends with Terry and also got to know Doris well. Terry, Doris’s only child, was extremely close to his mom. He had told her about Manson—and about some of his scary antics, his brandishing of knives, his zombie followers—and that Manson had been to the house on Cielo Drive. This petrified Doris, and both Doris and Terry told me that she insisted he move out. A mother’s intuition, perhaps, and it may have saved his life.
The next occupants of the house were Roman Polanski, who had just directed the satanic rituals in Rosemary’s Baby, and his wife, the actress Sharon Tate. Four members of Manson’s family—three women and a man—entered the house late at night on August 9. Manson had ordered them to murder all who were there, and they killed five people, including Tate, who was eight months pregnant. (Polanski was out of the country.) Also murdered was Jay Sebring, America’s most famous hairdresser. Tate was a beautiful starlet whose death, on its own, would have been headline news, but the slaughter’s cold-blooded carnage, its gratuitous brutality, transformed the murders into one of the most sensational crimes of the century. One victim was stabbed fifty-one times; another, twenty-eight times; another was bludgeoned with the butt of a gun; two victims were hanged by a nylon rope over a ceiling beam.
Two more murders were committed the following night, of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, and Manson himself participated in these. The slayings were equally gruesome (one of the assailants carved “WAR” in Leno’s stomach), but three months passed before the authorities connected the two crimes.
Neither Dennis nor I nor anyone associated with the Beach Boys had any idea that Manson was involved in these murders. Stories were written linking the crimes to drugs and sex rituals and the occult, but no one knew who was responsible, and panic swept the city. Gun sales soared. Security systems were installed. Guard dogs were purchased.
—
I had my own issues during this period, which were challenging enough but were affected by the Manson craziness.
In 1968, after I had been at a studio session at Western Recorders, Suzanne met me outside, with Hayleigh in her arms, and there she told me that she wanted to end the marriage. Hayleigh wasn’t even two yet, so she didn’t understand what was being said, but she knew something was terribly wrong. I’ll never forget the look on her face, as if something had crashed all around her. I’m sure my face didn’t look much better. I didn’t want to split up but also didn’t realize how unhappy Suzanne was. Christian was a baby at the time, and I now have a better appreciation for how much stress Suzanne was under. I was traveling constantly, still free to do what I wanted to do, while she was home with two young children. Those roles may have been the norm in that era, but she had every reason to resent how they played out in our marriage.
I was less forgiving about how the actual process of the separation and divorce played out. Suzanne and I were still living together at 1215 Coldwater Canyon when she told me she was having an affair with Dennis. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I was angry over her infidelity. I had had my dalliances as well. But I was outraged that she was sleeping with my cousin. More than outraged, actually. Seething. For Dennis (as he later told me), it was an act of vengeance. I had briefly dated his first wife, Carole, before she had met Dennis, and Dennis resented that. It was just part of our insane competition over women. Now Dennis was going to return the favor and sleep with my wife, tit for tat. And Suzanne obliged.
The day Suzanne told me about the affair, I tried to maintain my perspective, but I couldn’t, and the more I thought about it, the angrier I got—feelings of disbelief mixed with fury. So angry that I really wanted to kill both of them; so angry that I sat in our den and thought of how I would do it. These were horrible, lethal thoughts. My wife and my cousin, both dead.
The switchblade . . . and the butterfly.
I turned to meditation, and in this room all by myself I shut my eyes and began to cool down. At times the anger resurfaced, but it didn’t get the better of me. I kept meditating and concluded that that was them, that’s what they wanted to do, but it wasn’t me and I didn’t want to involve myself with them. I continued to meditate until the anger slowly drained from my body. And finally I was relaxed.
I have a certain amount of empathy for people in prison. I can understand how emotions can get the better of you and lead you into doing something terrible. Without TM, I might have done something terrible.
I moved into my house in Manhattan Beach and was living there when the Tate-LaBianca murders occurred. Around that time I got a phone call. I picked it up and said hello, and a man’s voice was on the line.
“Prepare to die, pig.”
I didn’t know who it was, and I’m sure many people would have just hung up, but that wasn’t my style.
“Fuck you!” I said. “Come down to Manhattan Beach, and we’ll see who dies!”
No one came to visit, and he didn’t call again.
In November, three months after the murders, the case finally broke. Manson family members had been picked up for grand theft auto and began leaking information. The authorities promptly contacted Dennis, and front-page stories soon appeared about the Beach Boys’ connection to the crazed cult leader who allegedly masterminded these slayings. Brian and Marilyn, whose home studio was used by Manson, each wrote the police department’s phone number on their arm and kept it there for two weeks.
Terry Melcher, who had recently vacated Tate’s home and had rejected Manson, had even more reason to be scared. The police recommended that he get some guns and a bodyguard. Terry assumed that Manson had meant to kill him—as revenge—and the lives of five innocents were taken instead. The guilt was devastating. According to Terry, when he went to see a psychiatrist, the doctor said, “I don’t know what to tell you. You’re going to be crazy for a while.” Terry went on the lam, and a full year passed before he was told that he was not Manson’s target—Manson knew that Terry had left 10050 Cielo Drive. But that didn’t change the fact that Manson knew of that house only because of Terry, and I know from our conversations over the years that Terry was haunted by those murders for the rest of his life.
At least Terry could testify at Manson’s trial in 1971. Dennis, shaken to the core, couldn’t do that. He couldn’t talk about it with anyone—family, friends, the investigators. To my knowledge, he never told the authorities that he saw Manson murder that “black cat” at Spahn Ranch, and he certainly couldn’t testify in court, where he would have had to look Manson right in the eye. Dennis never wanted to face the questions: How could you allow a bunch of future murderers to be your roommates? How could you even think of wanting to join such a “family”? How could you befriend its maniacal leader? Dennis, I think, just wanted to lock away the whole episode in some deep recess of his soul, but as the years went by and his troubles with alcohol and drugs deepened, it was one more burden that he couldn’t escape.
After the arrests were made, I realized that my threatening phone call had come from someone in Manson’s group, and it occurred to me that I was on TV singing a song that Manson had essentially written. I assumed that his followers would have liked to murder all the Beach Boys, but at no point was I frightened. I knew what a real threat looked like—I had been robbed at gunpoint at a gas station and had had a Luger pointed right in my face in Munich. I went to school with tough kids who taught me that if you back down, you get rolled. For better or worse, I don’t get intimidated.
The worst part of Suzanne’s affair with Dennis wasn’t even the affair. Terry Melcher later told me that after we separated, Suzanne and Dennis would sometimes go out and leave our two young children with a babysitter. On one occasion, the babysitter was Manson disciple Susan Atkins. I never sought confirmation from Suzanne or Dennis, but Terry was one of the most trustworthy people I knew, and he would not have fabricated such a story. During her trial, Atkins testified that she held Sharon Tate—who pleaded with the killers to spare her life and that of her unborn child—while another assailant, Charles “Tex” Watson, stabbed her to death. In a theatrical flourish, Atkins used Sharon Tate’s blood to write “PIG” on the outside of the front door. She was convicted of participating in eight murders and was sentenced to death. And she was our babysitter.