The Summer of Love, Half-a-Century Later
Last week, I started seeing news reports that Charles Manson, now 80, the most notorious mass murderer of the 1960s-70s hippie era, had obtained a license to marry a pretty, 26-year-old woman who has been visiting Manson in California’s Corcoran State Prison since she was 17 and crusaded for his exoneration. “It is what I was born for,” she told reporters.
My reaction, prior to any analysis, was disgust; but I decided that the problem with the story was the sensationalist press coverage. Pathetic, deluded people, interacting with evil people—in Manson’s case, Satanic people—produce obscene results. It happens all the time. The only objection to the pending marriage of Manson and Afton Elaine Burton was that the press ensured that the obscene was ‘seen’ worldwide. End of story.
But then, as the story persisted, and curious about this young woman’s crusade to exonerate Manson—claiming she married him only to obtain access to information needed to advance his cause—they will not have “conjugal visitations”—I looked back at the Manson record.
That story is long and complex. Beginning with Manson’s birth in 1938, in Cincinnati, to an unwed 16-year-old woman, it grinds on painfully for three decades and more until the horrific celebrated slayings. The record is there to read and I will not repeat much of it, but Manson was in and out of relatives’ homes, orphanages, long periods living in motel rooms (his young mother got sent to prison for five years), ‘training schools,’ ‘juvenile homes’—most of these euphemisms for youth reformatories or prisons. None of them could hold young Manson; restless and determined, he escaped everyone. At first, he kept trying to return to his mother, who rejected him.
He began a long series of petty crimes and imprisonments, the system always finding ways to parole him. He married, he stole, he went to prison in various states, and he continued to get paroled and violated his probation. The record goes on year after year. When he involved himself in prison education, he succeeded; at 23, in the U.S. Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington State, he took guitar lessons from Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis, co-leader of the murderous Ma Barker/Alvin Karpis gang. He excelled in steel guitar.
‘Summer of Love’
And that is as good an entry as any to the story of Manson and the fondly recalled decade of the Sixties—decade of the commune, music as religion and revolution, psychoactive drugs, free love, incitement to racial antagonism, introduction of force as a New Left political statement, glorification of the drifter and the hippie, apocalyptic nuclear prophecy, and sometimes violence against the American middle class and its symbols of success.
Every one of these themes, without exception, played a part in the transformation of Charles Manson from a lifelong convict to a cult leader, the formation of the Manson cult and all that enabled it, the apocalyptic prophecy of race war that mesmerized the drugged Manson followers, and the monstrous attacks on essentially arbitrary victims that were among the most brutal and bloody murders every recorded.
On March 21, 1967, when he was released from Terminal Island, Manson was 32 and had spent half of his entire life in prisons and other institutions, often characterized a ‘model prisoner.’ You might think this would carry a certain social stigma, but from Karpis he had obtained contacts in the Hollywood music world. Manson worshiped certain songs of the Beatles as religious prophecy. His own music played a part in the quasi-religious cult he formed, which carried out the murders.
Early photographs show young Manson as a handsome man, with wild hair characteristic of the ‘Sixties. He always could attract women and obtain their support, financial and much, much more. He fathered three children along the way, by three different mothers, two of whom he married for a few years.
He gathered around him the ‘Manson Family,’ mostly of young women attached to him by sex, cult worship, and leftist ideology. For most of the period after his release from Terminal Island, he lived in communes that he created—a standard Sixties mode of living—surrounded by women for sex and service. As for free love, he moved in with one woman and somehow convinced her to support him and to permit no fewer than 18 other women to join them in the apartment.
The first such Manson semi-commune was in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, in 1967, the legendary ’Summer of Love,’ where ex-convict Mansion established himself as a guru. By then, he was taking advantage of the wide-open Sixties departure from established ideas, including religion. The Haight-Ashbury guru borrowed his ideas from the Process Church, which worshipped Satan. He also incorporated some Scientology.
It is notable that once Manson assembled his commune of subservient women, he never lacked for places to stay. Always someone was charmed by the notion of hosting a commune, so that the Mansion Family occupied a series of ranches in California. If Manson needed to sweeten the deal, he simply ordered some of his women to provide their host with sex. None of their hosts ever seemed to have questioned the beauty and idealism of this ever-moving commune. The love was free in lieu of rent.
The Beatles, LSD, Race War, and Murder
The ghastly conclusion was at once complex, with an alleged series of ‘code words’ from the Beatles’ White Album, and pathetic and deluded, with Manson advising his followers of an imminent apocalyptic race war, which they needed to launch to show blacks ‘how to do it.’ All of it, bizarrely, was tied up with creating their own new album of songs. Like cultists then and now, he predicted the fate of the world. At the meetings with his followers around outdoor fires, LSD and magic mushrooms excited imaginations and strengthened convictions. Manson believed, or said, he was the Messiah, and that when nuclear war brought the end of the world, he and his chosen followers, hiding in the desert, would be saved. And then, they would rule the planet.
Manson ordered and planned the attack on actress Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, and three friends living in a rented house in Hollywood. The group had come to Manson’s attention entirely by accident; the victims did not matter; the plan was to create an atrocity, blame it on blacks, and so launch a race war. Mansion himself cased the place several times, but, in the end, did not accompany the attackers. He ordered Charles ‘Tex’ Watson and three women to commit the murders and “totally destroy everyone…as gruesome as you can…”
They did. Sharon Tate, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, begged to live long enough to have her baby. Susan Atkins, stabbing her in the stomach, is reported to have said, “Look, bitch, I have no mercy for you.” They stabbed her 16 times as she cried out “Mother…mother…”
Others of the victims fought back, ran from the house across the grounds. All were run down and killed, one stabbed 28 times, one 51 times. Manson had ordered ‘something witchy’ to be left to incite the coming apocalypse. They wrote ‘pig,’ a useful Sixties epithet, in Sharon Tate’s blood on the front door.
As police, prosecutors, and courts investigated, they discovered that there had been prior murders and that there were subsequent murders, including that of supermarket executive Leo LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. Mrs. LaBianca fought hard for her life, even with a lamp cord tied around her neck; she used the lamp itself to hold off the Manson ‘women.’ Ultimately, she was stabbed 41 times, because Manson wanted all the attackers to be personally implicated.
The trials were extended, at times bizarre, as Manson tried to handle his own defense and later disrupted the court—as did the women, still loyal to him. At the end, Manson and three others received death sentences, but, in 1972, California discontinued the death penalty, saving their lives. As a result, almost 50 years after the savage slaying of Sharon Tate and the others, Charles Manson, at 80, is about to marry a new 26-year-old female devotee.
Murder in the Name of ‘Helter-Skelter’
Charles Manson must be an extraordinary man. With a seemingly utterly loveless childhood, living in institutions from which he always escaped, sometimes with extraordinary difficulty, and then prisons where he managed to prepare his future on the outside, he adapted with perfection to the ‘Sixties in its heartland, California. Still a young man, but with several lifetimes worth of hardening in the crucible of prisons, he seems to have adapted flawlessly to all the idols of the ‘Sixties—communes, weird cults, free love, celebration of ‘outsiders,’ deviant religions, music as mystical politics, efforts to incite race wars, and the determination to introduce violence into the political and social equation.
In April 2012, Manson was denied parole for the 12th time, at a hearing where prison officials raised the issues of schizophrenia and paranoid delusional disorder. The next parole hearing will be when Mansion is 92. The alleged diagnoses, of course, imply that mental illness lies behind Charles Manson’s bloody, inhuman homicidal attacks. But individuals with those illnesses do not become messianic mass murders.
In this milieu, Manson acquired power with seeming ease, seeming not to miss a theme or nuance of the decade, so that, at the height of his influence, he could command the merciless slaying of his victims on behalf of the cause he called, after a Beatles song, ‘Helter-Skelter.’
About the Author: Walter Donway
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