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As poorly prepared for life on the outside as he was, Charlie was able to blend in with his guitar into
the hippie scene in San Francisco. The high-point of the Haight Ashbury culture was past and the only ones
left were the diehards and the last ones to the party. Charlie was never impressed by the hippie culture, but
he lived off it and it didn’t expect much from him. He learned about drugs and how he could use them to
influence people. Charlie started to attract a group of followers, many of whom were very young women with
troubled emotional lives who were rebelling against their parents and society in general. He battered down
their inhibitions and questioned the validity of their notions of good and evil. For the most part, Charlie’s
followers were weak-willed people who were naïve, gullible and easy to lead. LSD and amphetamines were
additional tools by which Charlie altered their personalities to his needs.
In spring of 1968, Manson and his followers left San Francisco in an old school bus and traveled around. Eventually, he and a few of his group moved in with Gary Hinman, a music teacher with a house on the Canyon Road. Through Hinman, Charlie met Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Manson and his girls starting hanging around Wilson every chance they had. Manson tried to leverage the acquaintance with Dennis Wilson but it didn’t go anywhere. Eventually, Wilson became uncomfortable with Manson and his girls and told them to split. About that time, Manson found George Spahn and conned the old man into letting him and his followers live on the Ranch. Squeaky Fromme, one of Charlie’s devotees, made sure that the elderly man’s sexual needs were fully satisfied. The Manson Family survived by a combination of stealing and scavenging. Much of their food was taken from what the supermarkets discard each day.
Charlie was still hell-bent to market his music to somebody. Through his contacts with Dennis Wilson and another man in the music business, Charlie met Doris Day’s son Terry Melcher. The plan was to interest Melcher in financing a film with Manson’s music. At that time, Melcher owned the house on Cielo Drive that was eventually leased to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. At various times, Manson had been by the property in a car with Dennis Wilson. Melcher was asked to listen to Charlie and decide whether or not he wanted to record them. Melcher went out the first time and listened to Charlie sing his own compositions and play the guitar. Some of the girls sang and played tambourines. Melcher went out a second time a week later, but the music was nothing he was interested in recording. What he didn’t realize is that Manson had built this recording opportunity with Melcher into something very real in his mind. When nothing came of it, Charlie was plenty angry and blamed Melcher for his disappointment.
Another facet of Charlie, although not nearly as important to him as his music, was his philosophy. To a large extent, this "philosophy" was a con, something he dreamed up to impress his followers, but he probably believed some of it. The core of this philosophy was a kind of Armageddon. Charlie preached that the black man was going to rise up and start killing the whites and turn the cities in to an inferno of racial revenge. The black man would win this war, but wouldn’t be able to hang on to the power he seized because of innate inferiority.
In 1968, Charlie was forecasting racial war when all of a sudden the Beatles released their White Album, which had the song "Helter Skelter." The lyrics fit Charlie’s theory to a tee: "Look out helter skelter helter skelter helter skelter/She’s coming down fast/ Yes she is/Yes she is." Now, the racial Armageddon had a name. It was Helter Skelter. Helter Skelter would begin, according to one of Charlie’s devotees, "with the black man going into white people’s homes and ripping off the white people, physically destroying them. A couple of spades from Watts would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district…and just really wipe some people out, just cutting bodies up and smearing blood and writing things on the wall in blood…all kinds of super-atrocious crimes that would really make the white man mad…until there was open revolution in the streets, until they finally won and took over. Then the black man would assume the white man’s karma. He would then be the establishment…"
Charlie and the Family would survive this racial holocaust because they would be hiding in the desert safe from the turmoil of the cities. He pulled from the Book of Revelations, the concept of a "bottomless pit," the entrance of which, according to Charlie, was a cave underneath Death Valley that led down to a city of gold. This paradise was where Charlie and his Family were going to wait out this war. Afterwards, when the black man failed at keeping power, Charlie’s Family, which they estimated would have multiplied to 144,000 by that time, would then take over from the black man and rule the cities. "It will be our world then," Charlie told his followers. "There would be no one else, except for us and the black servants. He, Charles Willis Manson, the fifth angel,Jesus Christ, would then rule the world. The other four angels were the Beatles.
How did this hokey philosophy result in the blood bath at the Tate and LaBianca houses? Well, Charlie the Prophet had already forecast that the murders would start in the summer of 1969, but as the summer went on, it looked as though the "prophet" was wrong. "The only thing blackie knows is what whitey has told him," he said to one of his followers just before the murders. "I’m going to have to show him how to do it." After the LaBianca murder, one of Manson’s girls, Linda Kasabian, was told to take Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet and credit cards and leave them in the ladies room of a gas station in an area heavily populated by blacks. That way, when, theoretically, the credit cards would be used by some black woman, it would appear that blacks were responsible for the LaBianca deaths. However, the credit cards were never used or turned in to the authorities.
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| Sandra Good, Ruth Moorehouse & Lynette Fromme sitting outside the L.A. courthouse | The Manson girls shave their heads after the verdicts |
