Jeffrey Melnick - Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America’s Most Infamous Family

For my mother, who always encouraged me to read all the books I could reacheven the scary ones.

Other books by the author:

9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell,2009; Arabic translation by Azza Alkhamissy, 2010)

Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction, with Rachel Rubin (New York University Press, 2006)

Race and the Modern Artist, eds. Josef Jarab, Jeffrey Melnick and Heather Hathaway (Oxford University Press, 2003)

American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, eds. Jeffrey Melnick and Rachel Rubin (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)

Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (University Press of Mississippi, 2000)

A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Copyright 2018 by Jeffrey Melnick

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-893-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-894-1

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Creepy Crawling through the Sixties: Charles Manson and History

T he year 2019 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders that made Charles Manson a household name, and the man and his Family are still everywhere. In 2016 they were on network television with the return of Season Two of David Duchovnys Aquarius to NBCs schedule. They are at the center of Emma Clines debut novel, The Girls , which has been prominently reviewed all over the mainstream press, hitting the New York Times Best Seller list within two weeks of publication. They are in the news in the developing story of the most recent parole hearing of Family member Leslie Van Houten, a dear friend of filmmaker John Waters.

During 2016 and early 2017, Mansons presenceat once frightful and comictook on added resonance in the context of Donald Trumps campaign for, and ascension to, the presidency of the United States. Given that Manson has served for decades as a kind of shorthand for charismatic pathology, it would have been hard to resist Manson/Trump juxtapositions. So, during the campaign multiple Internet rumors about Mansons putative endorsement of the candidate circulated; more than a few compared Trump to the cult leader with respect to the power he held over his followers. In the early days of 2017, when Manson was rushed to the hospital for an undisclosed health emergency, Andy Borowitz (at the New Yorker ) and other comic writers suggested that now the president-elect would have to take the cult leaders name off his shortlist to fill the Supreme Court seat of Antonin Scalia that had been denied Merrick Garland by Republican obstructionism. Others noted similarly that when they saw Mansons name trending on social media after his health scare they at first assumed it was because Trump must have named him to a cabinet position. Most efficient of all was a widely circulated GIF that simply put video footage of Trump and Manson side by side so that viewers could observe and draw conclusions from the similarities in their exaggerated facial expressions, which often take the form of non-verbal insults.

We also find that Scott Michaels is continuing to do brisk business with his Helter Skelter van tour (part of his larger Dearly Departed tragical history business). The tour, as Michaels has explained, brings victim people and Manson People together to drive around Los Angeles and see everything from the restaurant where Sharon Tate and her friends ate their last meal to the apartment where the daughter of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca lived with her boyfriendwho, according to the tour guide, was definitely a biker, and may have been tied up with the Manson-affiliated Straight Satans club. When I took the tour it became clear to me that part of Michaelss business involves using the Manson case to entertain folks who are celebrating birthdays and other major life events.

As 2017 began, Mansons staying power was undimmed: there was a major survey of the art of Raymond Pettibon in New York featuring numerous Manson-inspired works, a heavily promoted Family documentary on ABC, early word of a new film project based on the meeting of Manson and television host Tom Snyder in 1981, and online whispers suggesting that the year might also finally bring us the long-rumored indie film project, Manson Girls . Manson was present in trailers for a narrative film Bigger Than the Beatles released in 2017 that traced out the relationship of Manson and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and in well-promoted teasers about Manson-related movies from prestige film directors Quentin Tarantino and Mary Harron.

Mansons death in November 2017 is not likely to change much about how he has operated in, and on, the American consciousness. The coverage of his demise at eighty-three did not show any indication that the volume was being turned down: the sober paper of record, the New York Times , headed its obituary with a phrase that described Manson as the Wild-Eyed Leader of a Murderous Crew. Twitter was briefly aflame with the newsand was largely taken up with baby boomers instructing millenials why they should not be commemorating the event with RIP Charles Manson. As the year ended, Manson appeared near the top of almost every list of major celebrity deaths, and rarely was he treated with anything other than the ritual horror that has so often attended mention of his name. The Times s predictably detailed coverage repeated at some length the narrative first proposed by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi at the 1970s trial, and then later codified in his 1974 book Helter Skelter, that suggested Manson directed his murderous crew to kill seven people over two nights in August 1969 as part of his evil plan to incite a race war. While Bugliosi worked hard at the trial of Manson and his followers to develop this story and never stopped working on it up until his own death in 2015, this Helter Skelter story has become much more important as a cultural script, meant to explain a good deal about the chaos of the American 1960s even if it could not necessarily hold water as a full or coherent explanation for Mansons actions. Wild-eyed also appeared in Vox s coverage of Mansons death, in a piece that also uncritically quoted Bugliosi on Mansons race-war plans and his centrality to the culture. Manson, according to the prosecutor, has become a metaphor for evil, and theres a side of human nature thats fascinated by pure unalloyed evil. Our continued investment in Manson suggests that we are taking on the role played by the talent manager Col. Tom Parker who, upon the death of Elvis Presley, was asked what he planned to do: Why, go right on managing him. There is every indication that we plan to go right on managing Manson, who shows no signs of becoming any less useful to us in death than he has been as a living presence for the past fifty years or so.