When I got back from India in April 1969, I knew instantly everything had changed. A ’60s commando with a backpack, I could feel it even before I got out of Kennedy Airport: an aura of resentment, a light smog of paranoia, a lurch in the American vibe I’d left the year before when everything seemed possible even if it wasn’t quite real.
In my naivete, I hadn’t foreseen that among the possibilities was Charles Manson.
For the moment, I puzzled over the new American flag decals I saw on car windows—America had never been a flag-waving country, and these flags seemed to be flying as much out of rage as pride.
The next day I heard the Beatles’ White Album, which stymied me with its moments of chaos and aggression. Think of “Helter Skelter,” which became not just a theme song but a political philosophy for Manson and his Los Angeles slaughter. On the surface, the words are a sort of love song, but the music has all the grace of a car crusher. What were the Beatles telling us?
There had been craziness before I left: the Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam protests, the riot at the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. But they had all felt unreal, accidents amid the natural summers of love, the communes, the wondrous music, the mystical enlightenment in pills, the children with names like Morning Moon.
But that April, the older bits of craziness seemed not accidental but byproducts of something that had been building for years. Bummer, as we’d say back then, a bummer with inevitabilities such as Manson or others like him.
Southern California was their place. I already knew about the evil that lurked there the way it lurks in all lotus lands. (Don’t camp in the canyons, man.)
It turned out later that year we were witnessing another tragedy of the Rousseauian legacy, another twitch in the corpse of the French Revolution and the belief that we had to destroy civilization in order to save it. Acid heads had become politicians, freaks became criminals, self-pity became paranoia. As Manson would say, “Total paranoia is total awareness.”
The final Aquarian apocalypse would happen in December at a rock concert at Altamont Speedway where the Hells Angels beat people with pool cues and stabbed a fan to death during a set by the Rolling Stones. The Stones had seemed to think they could get away with just showing “Sympathy for the Devil,” but the devil will have his due.
In August, the agent of the archfiend was Manson with his charisma and appeal to helter-skelter hybristophiliacs, bad girls from good families who found sexual arousal in crime, outrage, and horror.
There’s a banality here: The agent could have been anyone, when you consider that Manson was a 5-feet-2, semi-literate jail-raped punk still dreaming of becoming a rock star in his mid-30s in a city where, as Dionne Warwick sang in 1968:
Manson had the knack of appealing to Hollywood celebrities. Back then, madness seemed like a kind of super-truth and so he bore an air of prophecy. Imagine his bitterness when they did his music career no good at all. He turned to the ultimate banality of the age: revolution. Manson took “Helter Skelter” and other Beatles songs as the foretelling of a race war soon to come. He predicted that the blacks would kill all the whites, then find they were unable to govern themselves.
Manson and his “Family” would arise from hideouts in Death Valley and take power. All he had to do was get the race war started.
He ordered his followers to go on a killing spree, leaving fake clues that the killers were black militants. The most famous of their victims was the impossibly beautiful Sharon Tate, eight-months pregnant and the wife of Roman Polanski (living now in Europe to avoid charges of raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old in Los Angeles).
In that summer of 1969, there was the vast but momentary promise of Woodstock, a music festival, all peace and love. Joni Mitchell compared it to Eden.
The bible was The Whole Earth Catalog, which preached the odd combination of communes and rugged individualism. Its opening line and motto was “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Did the editor, Stewart Brand, hear the echo of the serpent tempting Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit? Ye shall be as gods.
In prison, Manson retained his fascination. Women sent him love letters; writers turned out endless books. There were movies, even an opera.
I suspect that the fascination springs from our deep suspicion that innate depravity explains us better than Rousseauian liberation. Civilization’s job is suppressing that depravity, but the ’60s presented a cadre of liberationists who set out to suppress civilization. Therefore Manson. Therefore Altamont, et al. The depravity doctrine has been banned and buried by liberal intelligentsia who believe in perfectibility and don’t, apparently, read newspapers.
Given the number of headlines about Manson’s death at 83 in a prison hospital on November 19, you can see that the fascination lives on. One of Manson’s women, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, had not taken part in the murders but years later, still a Manson devotee, she’d make up for it by trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Keep the faith, baby.
Henry Allen won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000. His new book is Where We Lived, a chronicle of family houses and their inhabitants since 1557.
