PORN AND
THE MANSON MURDERS

PORN AND THE MANSON MURDERS

The recent TV movie, Helter Skelter, perpetuated the myth of Charles Manson. In 1969, when the news broke about the massacre of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her house guests, there was a sudden epidemic of paranoia in certain Hollywood circles. Actor Steve McQueen fled to England, for example, and I wondered why. After the trial of Manson and his brainwashed followers, I began my own private investigation, if only to satisfy my sense of curiosity about the case.

I corresponded with Manson, visited Charlie’s Devils in prison, including Susan Atkins, and—in a classic example of participatory journalism—I took an acid trip with a few family members, including Squeaky Fromme, who is now behind bars for the attempted assassination of then-President Gerald Ford.

Ed Sanders’ book, The Family, had mentioned that Los Angeles police had discovered porn flicks in a loft at the crime scene, the home Tate shared with her director husband, Roman Polanski (who was in London at the time of the murders). And yet, the prosecutor in Manson’s trial, Vincent Bugliosi, denied in his book, Helter Skelter, that any porn flicks had been found. It was possible that the police had indeed uncovered them but lied to Bugliosi.

I learned why when I consulted the renowned San Francisco private investigator, Hal Lipset, whose career had been the basis for an excellent film, The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman. Lipset informed me that not only did Los Angeles police seize porn movies and videotapes, but also that individual officers were selling them. He had talked with one police source who told him exactly which porn flicks were available—a total of seven hours’ worth for a quarter-million dollars.

Lipset began reciting a litany of those porn videos. The most notorious was Greg Bautzer, an attorney for financier Howard Hughes, together with Jane Wyman, the former wife of then-Governor Ronald Reagan. There was Sharon Tate with Dean Martin. There was Sharon with Steve McQueen. (That was a silent Aha! moment for me, since one of the victims was Jay Sebring, Hollywood hair stylist and drug dealer to the stars.) There was Sharon with two black bisexual men.

“The cops were not too happy about that one,” Lipset recalled.

There was a video of Cass Elliot from the Mamas and the Papas in an orgy with Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers and Warren Beatty. Coincidentally, Brynner and Sellers, together with John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, had offered a $25,000 reward for the capture of the killers.

I always felt the executioners had a prior connection with their victims. I finally tracked down a reporter who had hung around with police and seen a porn video of Susan Atkins with one of the victims, Voytek Frykowski. When I asked Manson about that, he responded: “You are ill advised and misled. Sebring done [sic] Susan’s hair and I think he sucked one or two of her dicks. I’m not sure who she was walking out from her stars and cages, that girl loves dick, you know what I mean, hon. Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers...”

Meanwhile, Charlie has become a cultural symbol. In surfer jargon, a “manson” means a crazy, reckless surfer. For comedians, Manson has become a generic joke reference. I asked him how he felt about that. He wrote back: “I don’t know what a generic is, Joke. I think I know what that means. That means you talk bad about Reagan or Bush. I’ve always ran poker games and whores and crime. I’m a crook. You make the reality in court and press. I just ride and play the cards that were pushed on me to play. Mass killer, it’s a job, what can I say.”

But Manson has apparently been moonlighting, because his new CD, All the Way Alive, was recently released. He was discussing with the producer of his album the notion that people’s public images can be vastly different from the way they behave in their private lives. As an example, Charlie mentioned “the sex movies Steve McQueen and Peter Sellers were doing with Sharon Tate.”