Charles Manson Now (23 page)
We briefly caught up on the previous years. It was good to see Stanton hadn’t changed at all and continued to exude a unique youthful, mysterious quality. He asked me if I had mentioned him to Charlie and I said I had. Charlie had told me that he remembered Stanton writing to him. He confirmed that he knew Stanton’s grandfather. When I asked Charlie what Anton LaVey was like, he told me the man was all right, basically a hustler who would do anything for a buck. Stanton’s stepfather is Nicholas Shrek, the man who wrote The Manson File and produced the documentary Charles Manson Superstar. Because of who he is, it is easy to see why Stanton’s knowledge of Manson and the Manson Family far exceeded mine.
Stanton told me: “I mean I’ve been listening to that Lie
[Manson’s debut album, Lie: The Love and Terror Cult] album since I was born. I was rocking out to Manson’s Lie album when Axl Rose was standing in the cafeteria line in elementary school. [Guns N’ Roses recorded Manson’s “Look at Your Game, Girl” on the album The Spaghetti Incident? as the unlisted thirteenth song.] I was Stanton LaVey when Brian Warner [Marilyn Manson] had braces on. In fact, I was evil before Ozzy Osbourne became Ozzy and started Black Sabbath. I’ve been here forever and Charlie will relate to this. There is a reason why Charlie’s memory of my grandfather is sort of vague and empty as it may come off with that slight twinge of negativity to it, much like my grandfather. Charlie and I go together like fire and ice, like blue and red, like hot and cold, love and hate, good and evil, like everything we’ve been here forever; this is Abraxis, baby. ‘We go way back, way, way back; isn’t that right, Charlie?’ Charlie is golden, Charlie is perfection, Charlie does no wrong. You cannot do wrong when you embody the truth in every drop of your blood. From the time I was able to say ‘Uncle Chuck,’ Charlie has been a beacon of truth, and a light bearer of the Luciferian order.”
I asked Stanton to define “Abraxis,” a term I had heard Manson use several times. During one of our conversations, Charlie told me Abraxis is balance, equilibrium between opposites. At his 1986 parole hearing, Manson identified himself by saying, “I am Abraxis, the son of God, the son of darkness, and I stand behind all the courts of the world.” Charlie had also told me Abraxis was one God composed of365 different gods and that every life form has its own God. I’d found the whole concept very confusing. Stanton told me Abraxis predates everything. It came before everything and will be after everything. It always is. Abraxis is all,
it is nothing; it is the only thing that truly ever was. “None of this is really happening right now,” Stanton proclaimed. “I can string together the words and the facts as we are calling them, but, not to sound too 1969, all we have, all we know, all we ever are, is the moment. Anything that ever was, never was anything that is yet to be, isn’t and wasn’t, and is already not, that folksy sounding ‘I’ll Never Say Never to Always.’“
Stanton began singing a Manson song:
Always is always forever
As long as one is one
Inside yourself for your father
All is none all is none all is one
Important to Stanton’s appreciation of Charles Manson is Stanton’s perception of truth, which he does not define in terms of “facts,” but in terms of “illumination” and “existence.” He explained that both Charles Manson and the memory of Anton LaVey are the two most powerful forces capable of changing the world’s reality. “They were merely two children fighting over a little blob of clay, two honest children fighting for no reason, but for the thrill and fun of fighting over the blob of clay and watching it change between their fingers as it passed from one hand to the other.”
I asked Stanton to start from the beginning and throw down what he knew about Manson and his family. And he told me that his theories are his and have been in development his entire life. His only apprehension stems from his respect for Charlie’s ownership of his own story. “For the record,” Stanton clarified,
“this is the story as I know it, and whether or not it is completely true, or whether or not Charlie wants it to be put forth is yet to be determined.”
Stanton would delve into a discussion of Susan Atkins and her role outside the Manson Family as a founding member of the Church of Satan. He told me that, around 1966, she participated in the Topless Witches Review, a striptease cabaret Anton produced at the Mitchell Brothers Theatre in San Francisco, as a publicity photo model on call for nude photo shoots. Between 1966 and 1968, she was featured in at least a dozen different men’s magazines, pictured alongside Anton in the ritual chamber at the Church of Satan or “Black House” on California Street. Stanton claimed that Bobby Beausoleil (who was convicted of carrying out the July 27, 1969 murder of Gary Hinman, whom Beausoleil claimed had sold him a bad batch of mescaline) was another original and influential member of the Church. Stanton told me his godfather, Kenneth Anger, had also been one of the founding members of the Church of Satan, and that during the church’s inception, Beausoleil had been studying occult practices and magic under Anger. Beausoleil could have been called Anger’s high magic apprentice.
“It’s not a coincidence that Bobby Beausoleil and Susan Atkins, these two key figures in Helter Skelter, were there for the creation of the Church. Bobby and Susan are the Adam and Eve of the Manson Family.” Stanton described this time period at the start of the Church of Satan as the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the new beginning. “It’s a glass half full, half empty
type of thing,” he said. “You say the end times; I say the start times.” And, while he admits he doesn’t know about everything planned and executed by the Manson Family and the Church of Satan between the years of 1966 and 1969, he is certain there was more going on beneath the surface bloodshed at the Tate and Hinman houses. Stanton assured me that the Tate murders, in which Atkins participated, were not executed as simple copycat murders to take the blame off Beausoleil for the Hinman murders.
“This is where fact turns into theory on my part. I’m quite positive that Bobby’s incarceration for the murder of Gary Hinman was sort of something like the Dead Sea scrolls if you will: to the pre-planning and the very calculated staging of a world event, with as much emphasis and importance placed on Helter Skelter or the date as was placed on the victims and on who did the killing.” Stanton insisted that, looked at side-by-side, it is impossible to seriously consider one murder the copycat of another. “That’s just a built-in excuse. It’s, ‘Oh, we’re hippies on LSD; this is as close as we could come to a copycat murder.’ Come on. Maybe the DA, or the judge, or somebody bought that because of Helter Skelter and pop tabloid sensationalism. You know the mindless masses are going to believe whatever dish they are served, eat it up, and not give it a second thought.”
Stanton suggested that every single aspect of the Manson Family murders is significant. He told me that if you took Helter Skelter and “trimmed the fat” from it, you would be left with a series of events that could not have happened unless they were intended to happen. Therefore, absolutely nothing was spontaneous or accidental, right down to who was killed, how they were killed, and at what place and time. “Since when is
killing a pregnant movie star, putting an American flag over her head, hanging her from the banister, and scrawling ‘death to pigs’ on the wall just something that felt right at the moment?”
Stanton told me that Bobby and Anton were also featured in the same Kenneth Anger film called Invocation of My Demon Brother. It was during the making of this film, Stanton suspects, that his grandparents, Kenneth, Bobby, Charles Manson, and Susan Atkins were all in the same place at the same time. But from what he dug up by “badgering” his grandmother and repeatedly questioning Bobby, Stanton discovered everyone had a different story about how the ensuing events unfolded. The inconsistencies don’t discourage Stanton. They fascinate him. “This was something I was brought up to prepare for. I may come off as self aggrandizing or something of the sort by saying this, but I really believe it to be the case that my presence here on Earth right now, or at least one of the reasons I exist is for this very purpose.” Stanton’s self-definition stems from the sequences, the coincidences that have come together just perfectly in his life.
I thought about all the events that had led me to this apartment to hear Stanton share his story. What were the odds? I was starting to believe that this journey had a momentum of its own. It was intense, and we both felt it. “It’s about as heavy as it gets,” Stanton said, almost as if reading my mind. “We are gnawing on the bone of human history as we know it; we are chewing at the bone right now because the meat is gone. We have torn away from that. We are vultures at high noon.”
Stanton explained, “I was in no small way prepared and groomed for my role, by way of never knowing who my own biological father is.” Stanton alluded to the story of his father,
who he was or was not, and described it as an illustration of order that exists in chaos. Stanton told me chaos is everywhere, much the same way God is everywhere for those who believe. Stanton went one step further by suggesting that everything people see and label as God, that which Stanton says they “use as a dump site for all their fears and self doubts,” is merely chaos. “It is the electricity that keeps the whole thing going.” Stanton told me Anton possibly understood this idea better than anyone else ever has. “He [Anton] told me that when the pendulum swings in one direction for long enough and far enough, it is inevitable and necessary for someone or something-a movement, meme, religion, brand, ideology, icon, philosophy, magic-to push it back.” Stanton attributed such things as the intensity of the events on August 8, 1969 or the collection of rock stars that died at the age of twenty-seven to this principle. “It’s one of these spooky, uncanny, sort of paranormal unexplained truths that just can’t be escaped or overlooked.” Stanton acknowledged that what he was saying sounded crazy and promised me: “It’s going to sound crazier and crazier.”
Stanton supplied a unique take on the purpose ofthe Internet: “As far as I’m concerned, the Internet was made and designed with the express purpose of collecting information from history and purging or deleting stories like Manson’s, specifically.” Stanton explained this is why he is the only person he’s heard of who is permanently blacklisted from having a reference on Wikipedia. “It’s intentional,” he said, “and it’s because of what I represent, because of the voice and the reach that I have.” He described a war between “dueling powers,” wars within wars within wars happening as we spoke According to Stanton, the world is
staged, all of the time. He told me there is a specific reason he has no Wikipedia page at the same time he is the subject of a five-page feature in SPIN magazine simply for recording half a song. Stanton was serious when he said, “Those two things just don’t make sense, but there is a very important reason for it, and that reason brought you here tonight.”
I already felt I’d been brought there that night. What Stanton was telling me didn’t sound that crazy at all. I wanted to understand more about how the stars had aligned in Stanton’s life since his childhood. Before my mind could finish formulating my questions about Stanton’s beginnings, he began to give me all the answers.
Stanton’s birth certificate reads, “father unknown.” Anton assumed the task of naming Stanton, whose name is taken from the same novel as his mother’s: Nightmare Alley. Stanton explained, “The two lead characters are the Great Stanton and Madam Zeena. She is thirteen or fourteen years his elder, as my mother is mine. And, throughout the whole thing, the two are in love at the same time they are at extreme odds.” As a child, Stanton was told his father had been a fisherman who’d docked one summer in 1977at Half Moon Bay, where his mother worked at her brother Bill’s bait and tackle shop. According to this story, the fisherman came into the shop with his father and the two sold their catch to Bill before the fisherman spent the night with Zeena. He set sail the next day, never to be seen again. Zeena couldn’t remember his name. “So I was told I had a nameless seaman for a father. That’s the kind of funny you come to expect from Anton LaVey.”
Stanton’s now estranged mother hasn’t spoken to him
since she rejected her father Anton. “She dumped me off on my grandmother Dianne [Anton’s wife] and swore she’d never speak to either of us again. Which, considering I had never done anything wrong to her, is strange.” Around this time, Dianne confessed the true identity of Stanton’s father, which turned out not to be true at all. “I was told my father was really a local delinquent who dropped out of my mother’s school.” Anton painted for Stanton the picture of a young man who was a hood, car thief, drug dealer, and pot smoker. “I was seventeen years old at this point and I was already all of those things. Of course it was an easy sell; I was basically told that my father was me.”
When I asked Stanton to elaborate on the idea of himself as his own father, he told me he exists as an early experiment in Satanic selective breeding, cloning. “I’m not telling this story because I give a shit about the fact that I’m a test subject; I’m way cool with all that. I’m telling this story only as a way of illustrating the kind of intentional information detours and roadblocks set up strategically at specific times and delivered by specific people for specific reasons.” I could tell the issue was a touchy topic, so I didn’t press Stanton to reveal any more. He left the subject by saying that the scheme of his life works as a miniature version of the “tactical diversion, mass manipulation, and Satanic ritual magic” behind some of the world’s most notable people and events, namely the Manson Family murders of August 1969, Altamont, The Zodiac Killer, and the publishing of the Satanic Bible.
Stanton reverted back to the subject of the Church of Satan, circa 1966, declaring Susan Atkins its spokes model, and Bobby Beausoleil, Kenneth Anger, Anton LaVey, and Charles Manson
its founders. Stanton told me the Church had only one official meeting. It was an all night event in San Francisco, during which the blueprint for the plan “The Start Times” was drafted. Church members gathered at the former Russian Embassy, a beautiful four- or five-story Victorian house complete with all the traditional trim and ornamentation. Stanton spoke of a famous photo depicting Bobby in front of the embassy. Scrawled in red on the door behind him is a bit of Aleister Crowley’s moral law: Do What Thou Wilt. “This is Bobby, pre-Manson Family: not just a member of the Church of Satan, but a very special student, one that had special purpose and responsibilities.” Stanton speculated that the building is one in which “secrets will forever be kept.” Stanton had once spoken to Bobby about the mysterious meeting, but Bobby’s memories were hazy from the LSD that undoubtedly influenced most of the evening. What Bobby does remember from that night, the night he was introduced to Charles Manson, is “surreal and psychedelic.” Bobby could recall, upon entering the Russian Embassy with Kenneth, seeing Anton LaVey in full ceremonial ritual garb: his widow peak scowl, cape, horns, sword-the works. Anton’s full regalia meant, according to Stanton, that he was performing some form of ritual black magic ceremony or satanic ritual.