Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (12 page)

Charlie’s new ambition curbed his old habit of not being able to stay out of trouble. Many of the guards at McNeil were decent guys, but there were some—the cons could pick them out right away—who enjoyed bullying inmates just because they could. If they put you on report for infractions like slacking off at work or being insolent, you could argue if you thought you were unfairly accused but the prison bosses almost always sided with the guards. Then you temporarily lost privileges like
writing letters or having visitors. If Charlie got into it with any guards he might have his guitar taken away, and he couldn’t risk that. So he recalled Dale Carnegie’s advice that the best way to win any argument was to avoid it altogether, and combined that with the biblical proverb about soft answers turning aside wrath. The result was a great trick—Charlie responded to the guards’ deliberately provoking questions with innocuous ones of his own. It went something like, “Hey, Manson, when you’re all alone with your guitar, do you fuck it?” “What guitar?” It pissed them off, but they couldn’t write him up for it.

Senior McNeil staff noted Charlie’s extended good behavior and concluded that his love of music was the reason. He’d also begun talking to them about what he wanted to do when he got out of prison, and though his goal was far-fetched, at least it was legal. His May 1966 report stated that “Manson continues to maintain a clear conduct record . . . he has been spending his free time writing songs, accumulating about 80 or 90 of them during the past year, which he ultimately hopes to sell following release. . . . He also plays the guitar and drums, and is hopeful that he can secure employment as a guitar player or as a drummer or singer.” Still, the evaluator wasn’t convinced that Charlie had entirely changed: “He shall need a great deal of help in the transition from institution to the free world.”

Counting the twelve months in the Los Angeles County jail while he filed appeals, in May 1966 Charlie had completed six years of his ten-year sentence. For the last two years at McNeil he’d avoided trouble altogether. That made him a candidate for early parole. In June Charlie was transferred back to the minimum security prison at Terminal Island. It was a significant step toward release.

In October 1965 Kathleen remarried and finally got it right. This third husband was a wonderful contrast to the first two. He worked until he had enough money to open his own small business, and then he worked even harder to make it a success. They weren’t rich but anything above poverty level must have seemed heavenly to Kathleen. Unlike Lewis’s empty promises to be a good father to Charlie, Kathleen’s new husband adored little Nancy and couldn’t do enough for her. They all enjoyed doing things together, acting like a real family. Given a second chance at
motherhood, Kathleen excelled. Decades later, Nancy felt certain that she’d had the best mom in the world.

Lewis had a parting shot for Kathleen when she remarried, writing her, “Congratulations, you finally found a big, fat, dumb fucker, a meal ticket, ha, you two deserve each other, you two be miserable all your lives,” but after that he moved on and also remarried. All Charlie cared about now was music, so it was time for Kathleen to enjoy the nice normal life that she’d craved. She didn’t intend to displace Charlie entirely from her life; Kathleen just wanted a break from his problems. But except for one unpleasant encounter, Kathleen and Charlie never met again.

•  •  •

Phil Kaufman was a roughneck from New York who avoided jail as an eighteen-year-old when the judge let him join the Air Force instead. After his enlistment was up Kaufman eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he worked as an extra in movies and TV (
Spartacus, The Donna Reed Show
) and made friends with people in the music business before being busted for drug possession. He was nailed with a five-to-twenty-year sentence and bounced around several federal prisons before being assigned to Terminal Island.
Its barred doors had hardly slammed shut behind him when he heard Charlie playing guitar and singing to himself. Kaufman thought the guy sounded a little like Frankie Laine. A guard growled at Charlie, “You’ll never get out of here,” trying to hassle him for no reason at all. Instead of snapping back or acting intimidated, Charlie paused in mid-strum, replied, “Get out of where, man?” and went back to playing while the guard fumed. Kaufman was impressed—that took real
balls
—and decided he and Charlie would be friends. Charlie was agreeable after learning that Kaufman knew people in the music industry and might be able to help him sell some of his songs. Kaufman discovered that Charlie only associated with other people for whatever he thought he could get out of them, but that was okay. The guy was damned entertaining. He might be almost illiterate but he sure wasn’t stupid. When Charlie told stories he’d make all these gestures and facial expressions—he just commanded your attention. Charlie told Kaufman that he took the Carnegie course to learn how to make strangers open up to him. He also talked sometimes about Scientology but not as though he was a real believer.
Charlie would throw Scientology terms around and also quote long passages of the Bible from memory, but the feeling Kaufman got was that he worshipped only at the Church of Charlie.

There were a couple of other things about the guy. Before he was transferred to Terminal Island, Kaufman had done time in half a dozen other prisons. In all of them, the races pretty much kept to themselves. But Charlie took it to an extreme. He wouldn’t talk to or even look at blacks if he didn’t have to, and the same thing with the Latins. He just didn’t like them, didn’t think they were anywhere close to a white man’s equal. The Black Muslims impressed him, though, the way they stuck together and made it clear that they were not to be messed with. Even the meanest guards let them be. Charlie believed that all blacks were genetically inferior and most of them were dumb as rocks, but give enough angry ones guns and they could probably wipe out much of the white race.

Then there was what Charlie wouldn’t talk about. He and Kaufman yakked a lot, but after a while Kaufman realized that Charlie never mentioned anything about his family—parents, wife or ex-wife, kids, anybody. Not one word, not ever. Whoever they might be, it was like he’d banished them from his mind. Kaufman tried to draw him out on the subject a couple of times, but nothing doing.

In August 1966
Charlie got his last prison report. It noted that he refused opportunities to take vocational classes to develop employable job skills and that he no longer claimed to be a Scientologist. Charlie had a single passion: “He has come to worship his guitar and music.” Still, “he has no plans for release as he says he has nowhere to go.” The report concluded, “He has a pattern of criminal behavior and confinement that dates to his teen years. . . . Little can be expected in the way of change in his attitude, behavior or mode of conduct.”

The evaluator’s negative prognostication made no difference. Federal prisons were overcrowded. Charlie had stayed out of trouble and was eligible for parole. He was told that he probably would get out in the spring.

Phil Kaufman thought Charlie was a decent singer who “couldn’t play guitar for shit.” His songs were okay but nothing special. Still, Kaufman had seen people with less talent get recording contracts. Since
he wasn’t up for parole for another year or so, Kaufman couldn’t personally introduce Charlie to friends in the music business. But he still helped him out with a contact. Kaufman suggested that after Charlie was out for a while and had a chance to adjust to the free world, he ought to polish up a couple of his best songs and go see this guy Gary Stromberg at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Charlie should say that Phil Kaufman sent him. Gary would listen to what Charlie had. There was no way to tell, but he might be interested. For once, Charlie seemed genuinely grateful. He said that he’d work on his songs some more before trying Universal, and that he’d stay in touch with Kaufman. Then, when Kaufman got out, he and Charlie could get back together. That sounded good to Kaufman. Charlie was weird but he was fun to be around.

In March 1967 Charlie learned that he’d be paroled on the 21st. At age thirty-two he was finally going to be free again after almost seven years. As the date drew near, Charlie’s dreams of music stardom and being bigger than the Beatles collided with memories of his previous hardscrabble life outside prison. The facade slipped; Charlie panicked and told Terminal Island officials that he didn’t want to be paroled after all. He felt safe in prison; he didn’t think he could adjust to being outside again. If they let him out he’d end up doing things that he shouldn’t.
Charlie was being both personally insightful and honest, but the wheels of the penal system bureaucracy were turning. On the morning of March 21, Charlie found himself out on the sidewalk with a cheap suitcase and his guitar, not certain where to go. He didn’t think he was ready to see the guy at Universal yet. He felt shaky and needed some time to get used to being free, to not having somebody right there all the time telling him what he could and couldn’t do. Charlie had a few phone numbers of inmates he’d known at Terminal Island who were already out on parole.
He called one in Berkeley and the guy said that he should come up there. Charlie didn’t have any better options. His Los Angeles parole officer gave him permission to relocate and assigned him to regular check-ins at a San Francisco office. Charlie headed north, probably by bus or thumbing a ride. He knew life on the outside was going to be different than before, but he had no idea how much.

Perhaps if Charlie had been released from a federal prison in some
other state and decided to try his luck in a college town, he could have reentered society someplace where gradual assimilation was possible. But of all the places he could have chosen for an initial post-prison destination in California, Berkeley was the one guaranteed to plunge him straight into the deepest waves of national upheaval. Like fictional Valentine Michael Smith before him, Charlie was about to become a stranger in a strange land.

B
erkeley streets teemed with people who didn’t look like anyone Charlie had ever seen before. He was used to the drab inmate coveralls, guard khakis, and buzz cuts of prison. The crowds he now encountered comprised a human kaleidoscope. Men had long hair like girls. Girls wore work shirts and denim jeans like men. Lots of the guys had shaggy beards. Many of the girls obviously weren’t wearing bras. Both sexes wore beads around their necks. The air was redolent with the aroma of the food being hawked by street vendors, and just about everyone seemed to be smoking something. There were other odors, too—human sweat, which Charlie certainly recognized, and burning joss sticks, which he probably couldn’t. There was almost too much for Charlie to take in all at once, and the closer he got to the college campus, the more bizarre things became.

The University of California at Berkeley was intended to dazzle the eye, but with architecture and greenery rather than fashion. The main campus was a small city in its own right, with high-rise student resident buildings, parking garages, and theaters. Surrounding them were acres of playing fields, botanic gardens, and, off to the west, glittering San Francisco Bay. The faculty was distinguished and the students ranked among the most gifted in the country. But in the spring of 1967, Cal-Berkeley had become less renowned for aesthetics and academics than for civil unrest. As student rebellion exploded in America, Berkeley was Ground Zero.

Across America, young people demanded social change, and many of their leaders came from a demographic that parents and other adults would have considered the least likely to rebel. At the conclusion of World War II, about 1.67 million or 10 percent of Americans aged eighteen
to twenty-four were in college. In 1967, that number had swelled to seven million, or 32 percent, and it was mushrooming every year. Unlike their parents, this new generation of students, almost uniformly white, considered college education to be a right rather than a privilege. For many, the real challenge was not to make Dean’s List but to right government and social wrongs by any means necessary. In his inaugural address in January 1961, John F. Kennedy, at forty-three the youngest president ever elected, declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” but that generation didn’t wait for Kennedy’s recognition or their government’s permission.
In 1960 a handful of student activists formed Students for a Democratic Society. SDS members’ ambitious agenda included the eradication of war, racial discrimination, and economic inequality.

By the time Charlie was paroled from Terminal Island in 1967, hundreds of thousands of protesters, mostly but not all young, had participated in
SDS-orchestrated antiwar rallies around the nation. Student activists began occupying buildings on their college campuses, effectively shutting down school operations in response to whatever administration policies offended them, from lack of minority enrollment to perceived unconstitutional stifling of free expression. Administrators had a hapless choice between negotiating and being perceived as weak or calling in police, with resulting media coverage of students being dragged from campus in handcuffs.

Berkeley campus protesters organized the
Free Speech Movement in 1964. A protest that December 2, when more than a thousand students occupied the school’s Sproul Hall, resulted in almost eight hundred students bring hauled off to jail. The Cal-Berkeley campus was shut down until January 3, when a new acting chancellor established the steps of Sproul Hall as an open discussion area where tables and leaflet distribution would be allowed for all student organizations. To the protesters, this was a significant victory, and school administrators believed it was a responsible decision based on compromise. But to critics, the Berkeley Free Speech incident exemplified craven administrators surrendering to spoiled brats.
Actor Ronald Reagan made Berkeley Free Speech a major campaign issue when he ran for governor in 1966, promising that
if elected he would “clean up the mess there,” which Reagan swore included “sexual orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you.” Reagan won the election handily, and sent a message through the media to the Cal-Berkeley students: “Observe the rules or get out.” Like college students all around the country, they did neither; Reagan’s threat reinforced their belief that the government was their implacable enemy. Berkeley activists reveled in their campus’s growing reputation as perhaps the most radical in the land.