Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (29 page)

When Phil Kaufman heard that Charlie and the Family were living on Spahn Ranch, he went out to visit them. No one acted glad to see Kaufman. Charlie virtually ignored him. Kaufman’s contact at Universal hadn’t worked out, and now Charlie was working Wilson, Melcher, and Jakobson instead. So far as Charlie was concerned, Kaufman no longer had anything to offer other than friendship, and there was no particular advantage to Charlie in that. After an hour or so of getting cold-shouldered by everybody, Kaufman left, figuring he’d seen the last of Charlie and his followers, all that peace and love and expecting everybody else to do things for them. But at least they weren’t hurting anybody. They were selfish but harmless.

Local authorities soon learned that a group of hippies had moved onto Spahn Ranch out near Simi Valley.
They appeared to be just another commune of long-haired peaceniks, and there were already plenty of those in and around L.A., at least a couple of hundred. A few were even clustered right around Spahn Ranch. The area seemed to attract weirdos. Sure, all the communes, including the new one at Spahn, undoubtedly broke drug laws on a regular basis, but if lawmen arrested everybody who smoked weed or dropped acid they wouldn’t have time for anything else. The Spahn commune might require observation because a lot of vehicles seemed to be brought into the place. Hippies weren’t supposed to steal but car theft did seem to be a possibility.
The real problem was that Spahn Ranch was along the Los Angeles–Ventura county line and there was some question about jurisdiction. Neither county police department really wanted to take responsibility for law enforcement in the area, so nobody kept an eye on what Charlie and the Family got up to.

Charlie shut off the Family from most news of the outside world, except for occasional examples of how crazy things were getting. He’d use these examples to emphasize that everyone was lucky to be safely tucked away on Spahn Ranch under Charlie’s supervision—they probably wouldn’t last long if they ever turned away from him and left. That fall of 1968, Charlie had lots of violence to mention, beginning in late
August with
the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Starting on August 26, peace activists and student radicals packed the city’s Lincoln Park. Even as a Vietnam peace plank was voted down by Democratic delegates and Vice President Humphrey became the party’s nominee for president, waves of Chicago police, following the instructions of Mayor Richard Daley, attacked the protesters, choking them with clouds of tear gas and battering them with batons. Network television crews captured the carnage for their horrified audiences to see; coughing, bleeding, those protesters who were still able chanted, “The whole world is watching.” Afterward, irreconcilable factions began to emerge among the radicals. Some still advocated loud protest but working nonviolently within the political system. Others believed it was time to meet violence with violence, to “bring the war home.” Few believed that an election pitting Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon would elect a president dedicated to sweeping change. Humphrey’s ill-conceived “politics of joy” approach fell flat, while Nixon ran on a law-and-order platform.
After attending a Republican rally in Toledo, columnist Jimmy Breslin observed, “When Richard Nixon got finished, there was a strangler’s hand coming out of every cornfield in Ohio.”
In the imagination of many shaken older voters, the strangler was young and long-haired. Americans were turning on each other in fear and frustration, and many of the divisions were generational. In a year marked by assassinations, war, racial conflict, and escalating civil disobedience, there was no longer any sense of optimism. On November 5, Nixon narrowly defeated Humphrey and the nation braced for whatever was coming next.

•  •  •

On September 9 in England, the Beatles continued recording music for their next album, tentatively scheduled for release before the end of the year. At this session, a McCartney song was recorded. Internally, the band was having trouble getting along, and one of the points of contention was McCartney’s penchant for writing sweet ballads that were increasingly at odds with Lennon’s harder-edged compositions.
But the song McCartney presented now was, if anything, more raucous than anything Lennon had come up with in years. Ostensibly about a popular British carnival ride involving a steep slide, its composer envisioned it as “the
rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and this was the fall, the demise, the going down.” McCartney bellowed out the lyrics, all about getting to the bottom and then going back to the top and coming down fast but don’t let me break you. His band mates got caught up in the rowdy spirit and, McCartney later recalled, “we tried everything we could to dirty it up.” He named the song for the carnival ride: “Helter Skelter.”

Two days later in L.A.,
the Beach Boys did some recording, too. Dennis Wilson had been tinkering with “Cease to Exist,” changing lyrics as well as the music. Charlie’s original version explained to a girl that “submission is a gift” to give to her brother; among other revisions, Dennis changed “brother” to “lover,” transforming the theme from spiritual enlightenment to sexual surrender. Instead of ceasing to exist, the girl was seduced into ceasing to resist. Dennis changed the title, too—“Cease to Exist” became “Never Learn Not to Love.” The Beach Boys layered on their trademark harmonies and the result was judged acceptable enough to include on the album. On the credits, Dennis listed himself as sole composer.
It was a deliberate insult. Wilson had been thinking again about all the money it cost him as Charlie and the Family’s summer host, and besides that, on a recent trip out to Spahn Ranch, Clem took off in Wilson’s Ferrari at Charlie’s suggestion and totaled it. The guy damn well owed Wilson a lot and taking credit for Charlie’s song was payback. It was L.A. show business royalty in action—a Beach Boy could do what he wanted, and a wannabe like Charlie couldn’t stop him. Sure, Charlie would be pissed when he found out, but maybe he’d learn from this who was boss if he and Wilson worked on any other songs in the future.

Even as “Cease to Exist” morphed into “Never Learn Not to Love,” Charlie was preoccupied with something else. Spahn Ranch was fine in most ways, but there were still too many distractions for the Family there. Charlie controlled access to cars, and Spahn was too far out of L.A. for anyone to walk there, but the bikers offered rides when anyone asked and it was too easy for people like Susan to get out without any supervision. Sometimes Family members asked guests to stay the night without getting Charlie’s permission first.
One morning Charlie had to run off a guy who spent an unauthorized night with Leslie out in the ranch caves, and the next day the jerk came back with some mean-looking friends
and told Leslie right in front of Charlie and some of the Family that she should leave the ranch with them if she wanted. Luckily Leslie opted to stay with Charlie, but what if she hadn’t? It might have encouraged some of the others to think about leaving, too. Charlie’s goal was a record deal, and the Family was one of his main tools in obtaining it. Having followers hanging on his every word and gratefully doing his bidding also satisfied his obsession with being in charge.

With about three dozen members in his flock, Charlie was now less concerned about recruiting than maintaining control over the followers he had. Though he still made occasional exceptions—
a schoolteacher the Family nicknamed Juanita arrived with a vehicle and a lot of cash, maybe $10,000—for the most part Charlie informed Little Paul Watkins and Gypsy that he didn’t want anyone else brought in as prospective members. What he wanted now was some new roost that was so far removed from the city, from civilization, that he would be the only influence on the Family. Charlie himself would still find ways to commute to L.A.; he wasn’t about to lose his music industry contacts. Thanks to one of the Family, Charlie had a possible location in mind.

•  •  •

Sometimes Cathy Gillies talked about “Grandma’s place,” a property called the Myers Ranch that was so far in the depths of Death Valley that it was hard to reach even by car. Charlie set out on a fact-finding expedition and it was everything that he hoped for. Getting there from Los Angeles took hours, first by highway, then by rough backcountry road, and finally on through virtually impenetrable Goler Wash, with the Panamint and other craggy ranges with dire names like the Last Chance and Funeral Mountains looming above like serrated teeth. The entire area was wild and harsh. The scattered settlements in forbidding Inyo County—Trona, Shoshone—were more outposts than towns; Independence, the county seat, wasn’t much better. The closest town, Ballarat, was a virtual ghost town, but it had a bare-bones general store, the only place where basic necessities could be purchased. Wildlife abounded, but not humans. The county population was less than two people per square mile. Many of these were transients, prospectors poking around ridges hoping to strike gold. Permanent residents were mostly iconoclasts who had deliberately
removed themselves from the outside world. Law enforcement, always of some concern to Charlie, was sporadic. There were a few county police officers and some rangers assigned to Death Valley National Park. Mostly the desert denizens were left alone, just the way Charlie wanted.

It was possible in some scattered locations to live decently, if not in luxury. Underground streams cut beneath the desert floor, so wells and irrigation sometimes were options. Cathy Gilles’s relatives made their ranch almost attractive, with vegetable gardens and a few well-kept buildings.
But Charlie was drawn to the adjacent property; the living area of Barker Ranch consisted of two stone houses, a shed, and a small pool that provided water. A generator was available to supply very limited electricity; the property was fifty miles away from any power lines. The main house had a wood stove and a bathroom with shower and sink. The closest major city was Las Vegas, just beyond the California-Nevada state line. The ranch was primitive and so far removed from any semblance of modernity that it seemed like the far end of the world. Charlie looked up owner Arlene Barker and asked permission for him and the Family to stay there. He explained that he was an important musician hoping for some solitude to work on new material. To prove his point,
he gave Barker a Beach Boys gold record that had been taken from Dennis Wilson’s lodge on Sunset Boulevard. It was fine with Barker, so most of the Family moved in. Charlie left a few members behind at Spahn Ranch, and, probably using some of newcomer Juanita’s money, sent Family member Bruce Davis and Sandy Good’s husband, Joel Pugh, to London, where they spent time at the Scientology headquarters. Charlie was always looking for new material to flesh out his preaching.
Davis returned a few months later, but Pugh stayed behind.

Almost immediately, many of Barker Ranch’s new residents began complaining. The place was blistering hot. Spahn Ranch had been bad enough, but at least it wasn’t hundreds of miles from anywhere. There were telephones and lots of shady places on Spahn, not like here where there wasn’t even radio reception and you had to check under every rock for snakes and scorpions. Because cooking had to be done on a wood stove, wood had to be chopped before any meals were prepared and that was awful work in the blazing heat. Charlie did his best to shut down the
bitching. Sometime soon, he warned, things in the outside world were really going to turn bad—out-and-out street combat—and “young loves” like the Family were going to be particular targets. He’d found a place where they were safe, and now they were complaining? What was the matter with them? Out here in the desert they’d set up a perfect community and soon other young loves fleeing the bloodthirsty mobs in the cities would come flocking to it. Charlie’s followers would be shining symbols of the only purity left in the world. And somewhere nearby in the desert was a hole, a hidden hole that led down into wonderful tunnels that would let anyone travel anywhere on earth. Charlie and the Family would find that hole. He mentioned it frequently during group LSD trips at Barker. The idea of the hidden hole held the attention of his acid-addled audience. Why couldn’t there be such a thing? They tried to adjust to their harsh new living conditions, but problems that Charlie hadn’t anticipated soon emerged.

At Spahn Ranch, it was a simple thing to scrounge food from L.A.-area groceries, but these so-called garbage runs were impossible in Death Valley, where there were no grocery stores. One time when the food supply ran particularly low,
Charlie told the women to fan out into the desert and bring back edible plants. When they told him they didn’t know anything about desert plants, Charlie said that as women they were supposed to know about such things, so go out and gather something. But they couldn’t, even when he bawled them out for being unwomanly. So to feed the Family, Charlie had to either buy food from the limited stock at the Ballarat general store, or else bring it in every few days from a city, which was inconvenient given the difficult travel conditions between the ranch and either L.A. or Las Vegas. Buying food also required money, and out in the desert Charlie didn’t have any sources of that.
He tried sending some of the girls to Las Vegas to panhandle and they had limited success, claiming to passersby in front of casinos that they needed donations to buy food for an Indian tribe. But Charlie saw real danger in letting his followers spend much time there; he’d brought them to Death Valley to keep them away from disruptive outside influences, and Las Vegas was a hotbed of temptation.

A dwindling drug supply was also a concern. In L.A. Charlie could
get his hands on as much acid and weed as he needed, from the bikers visiting Spahn Ranch or from dealers. In the past, Charlie was in position to trade things for the drugs—motorcycles donated to the Family, beadwork done by the women, sex with some of the girls if that was what a supplier wanted. But out in the desert there was nobody to donate tradable goods, let alone swap significant quantities of drugs. Charlie needed a constant supply of LSD for group tripping sessions, and weed to help everybody take the edge off any frustrations with the primitive conditions on Barker Ranch.