I. House on the Hill
Joan Didion wrote in the titular essay from her 1979 collection, The White Album, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”[1]
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 . . .[2]
Didion was referring, of course, to the murder of twenty-six-year-old pregnant actress Sharon Tate; her houseguests, Polish actor and playboy Voytek Frykowski and his girlfriend and heiress to the Folger Coffee fortune, Abigail Folger; and Tate’s former fiancé and celebrity hairdresser, Jay Sebring. The fifth victim, Steven Parent, a bespectacled eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate and electronics geek, at 10050 Cielo Drive that night on a whim to visit the estate’s young caretaker, William Garretson, was actually the first victim, encountering the killers as he was leaving, when they emerged from the bowels of Spahn Ranch and creepy-crawled up the Tate/Polanski driveway to ignite Helter Skelter.
You know the story. The so-called Manson murders, the brainchild of a five-foot-two-inch Svengali with a God complex and Rock star aspirations who chose the location as ground zero for a psychedelic massacre because music producer Terry Melcher used to live there and he knew the layout of the house. You’ve heard that story of savagery inflicted on some of Hollywood’s grooviest beautiful people on that blistering summer night about a week before Woodstock’s festival of peace and music in New York State. The 19th Century French style cottage nestled behind a lush barrier of pines and flowering cherry trees overlooking Tinseltown in Benedict Canyon that Sharon Tate deemed her “Love House.” The word PIG scrawled in her blood on the Dutch front door. The American flag draped across the back of the sofa on which Frykowski lay in a drug-induced slumber as the killers entered the residence. The rope Manson’s right-hand man, Charles “Tex” Watson, looped over the exposed living room ceiling beams and tied around Sebring’s and Sharon Tate’s necks, like a macabre wedding band, binding her to him in that house on a hill for all eternity, rather than to her husband, film director Roman Polanksi, who was in London scouting locations for a movie at the time of the slaughter, due home the next week to await the arrival of their baby, a boy the medical examiner would remove from Sharon Tate’s womb during her autopsy and Polanski would name Paul Richard then bury with his wife.
Famed photographer Julian Wasser shot a photo for Life magazine of a grief-stricken Polanski examining the door stained with Tate’s blood a few days after Polanski’s return. “Roman asked me to take Polaroid shots of the scene as well—and give them to a psychic who could study them and find out who the killers were,”[3] Wasser said. No one knew about the Manson Family association, not even after the same motley crew who butchered Sharon Tate and her friends drove across town the very next night to 3301 Waverly Drive, another house on a hill, and stabbed to death grocery store chain president Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. The connection between the crimes was cryptic—the words Rise and Death to pigs written in the LaBiancas’ blood on the walls of their 1920s Spanish style home, Healter [sic] Skelter written in blood on their refrigerator door, a reference to the song on The Beatles’ The White Album and the name Manson had given to the apocalyptic race war he hoped the killings would inspire, out of the ashes of which he planned to emerge as a supreme leader, according to Los Angeles County district attorney’s office then-chief prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi. The signs, like flashes from a bad trip, were there, waiting to be imagined, conjured, realized. But no one saw them then, especially not the L.A.P.D. “The cops aren’t up to it,” Wasser said of the investigation. “We’ll get psychic vibrations instead. The police, the establishment, they’re not like us—we’re artistic, we’re special. We’ll do it our special way.”[4]
Wasser, the hip young artist, had a keen eye for where it was at in 1960s L.A., a special knack for capturing the zeitgeist through the lens of his camera. He had done a photo shoot for Time magazine with Joan Didion at her rented home on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, a short drive from the Tate/Polanski property in Benedict Canyon, the year before the 1969 murders. The connection smacks of six degrees of something that doesn’t quite seem like separation. The stories overlap, intermingle, border on the incestuous. Didion and Roman Polanski were godparents to the same child. Didion was socially acquainted with Tate. Didion became a confidante to Linda Kasabian, former Manson Family devotee turned star witness for the prosecution at the 1970 trial. Wasser photographed The Beatles in 1965 for Time. He did a shoot in 1963 with actor and Tate/Polanski friend Steve McQueen, who was rumored to have been invited to Cielo Drive by Jay Sebring the night of the murders but declined in favor of a tryst with a woman he’d just met. In 1977, Wasser photographed the judge during Roman Polanski’s trial for allegedly drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old model at Jack Nicholson’s secluded bachelor pad overlooking a canyon on the fabled Mulholland Drive, the L.A. home Nicholson had bought with money he’d scored from his role in 1969’s classic ode to hippie hedonism, Easy Rider, released less than a month before the Manson murders. “I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences,” Didion wrote in “The White Album” about the collision of seemingly random interactions in her own life, “but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did.”[5]
Didion’s point hits home for me now as we near the end of another tumultuous era, one rife with conspiracy theories, false narratives, a contagious killer on the rampage, and another delusional narcissist on a quixotic quest for fame and adoration masterminding chaos, empowered and emboldened by a segment of the American populace infected with a similar sophistic fatalism that created Charles Manson in the late-1960s. Fifty years after Manson convinced his disciples he was the resurrection of Jesus Christ then ordered them to go to the house where Terry Melcher used to live and kill everyone there, on a sunny August afternoon in 2019, President Donald J. Trump stood in front of a news crew, gazed into the crystalline sky, spread his arms, as if he were awaiting crucifixion, and proclaimed, “I am the chosen one.”[6]
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra.[7]
Death in one house on a hill leads to death in another house on a hill leads to . . .
***
Snow is falling at my house on a hill on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina, the Newfound Gap vista from my deck breathtaking in the frosty morning light. The first dusting on this first day of December 2020, icy wind teasing the metal tri-colored mobile on the front porch, the mobile I’d purchased in Black Mountain thirteen years ago as a Christmas present for my then-fiancé and smuggled inside our rented cottage to wrap while he watched a Panthers game on TV with my sister’s husband and two friends, the five-month-old black and tan Chihuahua puppy he’d gotten me for my thirty-eighth birthday that November snoring on his lap. The Christmas of the mobile, our first Christmas—shortly before we married and moved into this house on a hill on the outskirts of Asheville, overlooking someone’s ramshackle farm equipment shed located at the base of the vertiginous road, my neighbor’s newly rutted gravel driveway, the result of a caravan of roofers who drive as badly as I do, the plot of rocky ground near a copse of straggly pines where the bodies of two of our three dogs and an abandoned baby bunny I found beneath a shrub are buried, and the manmade waterfall jutting toward the mouth of the pines where I scattered my husband’s ashes after he died of cancer in a hospital bed hospice had erected in our bedroom in the spring of 2014, our beloved Chihuahua snoring beside him, me holding his hand, a waning crescent moon straining through the open blinds like a beacon.
Death has violated my home, albeit in a very different guise from the one that crept into Sharon Tate’s “Love House,” disabusing me of the story we tell ourselves about the sanctity of hearth and home, the safety of the confined spaces in which we live. It’s a grossly unfair comparison, this tale of two deaths, I realize—one a surprise attack of the most shocking and brutal, an abhorrent violation of the basic social contract, the other years in the making following a terminal diagnosis and one futile attempt after another to fight the fury of a faceless assassin that dealt its final blow in the middle of the night. The pictures do not match, logical disjunctions abound. Apples and oranges. Mobiles and Dutch front doors. But in the jingle-jangle morning of December 1, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic having killed nearly three hundred-thousand Americans and President Trump, ever maskless and defiant, espousing to his followers tales of nonexistent voter fraud in cities primarily populated by people of color in an effort to suppress their voices and overturn the November election results to maintain power, the comparison makes as much sense as anything else does.
Look out
Helter skelter, helter skelter
Helter skelter
Look out, ’cause here she comes[8]
II. Once Upon a Time
When the Manson killers arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive in the wee hours of August 9, 1969, Abigail Folger was reading a book in bed. What book? I’ve always wondered. What was the story, assuming it was a novel? Was there subtext, foreshadowing, symbolism? Did she reach the climax, or was she mired in rising action? Were there flashbacks in the pages or merely in the purple haze of her head? She and Voytek Frykowski had both taken a psychedelic amphetamine called MDA that night, per their autopsy and toxicology reports[9] which analyzed and critiqued the subtext of their bodies with Structuralist stability and privileged terms in twelve-point Courier M font, the results later deconstructed, absolutes laid waste, details embellished or depreciated, in news stories and tabloid tales featuring prurient post-mortem photographs and videos, now easily accessible online for the clinically-minded researcher and morbid gore groupie alike. It’s all very meta, even cinema verité in a way, the stories these dead told, and continue to tell, of themselves.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion asserted in “The White Album.” “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”[10]
The story my Sunday school teacher told my class about the Manson murders one brisk morning when I was in seventh grade was that the killers had cut Sharon Tate’s baby out of her womb and that the murders had been ritualistic, involving Satanic ceremony and sexual mutilation as well. I don’t recall the context for that offering, what possible connection such a gruesome, not to mention untrue, tale could have to a religious lesson befitting the United Methodist Church doctrine that would make it relevant or appropriate to tell a bunch of wide-eyed teenagers, none of whom in 1982 had ever heard of Charles Manson or Sharon Tate. Something to do with Revelation 9, the bible chapter and verse Manson thought The Beatles were referencing in the songs “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9,” perhaps. I have no idea where my teacher got her information or if she knowingly relayed a fictional account of what happened the night of August 9, 1969, in order to garner our undivided attention and perpetuate falsehoods that fit her larger narrative. The point probably intended was that the road of excess leads not to William Blake’s palace of wisdom, and certainly not to the paradise of the Judeo-Christian heaven, but rather a blood-splattered gilded house of wanton horror ironically located on a Pleasant Valley Sunday cul-de-sac in the City of Angels. Apparently, God is quite the cynic.
In any event, I was completely enthralled by the story she told us, namely the juxtaposition of the peace, love, dope ethos of the Flower Power period with the extreme violence of the crime, the intersection of the profane and spiritual in the guise of the charlatan Charles Manson and the gullibility of the hippie kids who did his bidding, the manipulation of the music of a band I’d loved since I’d seen a Dick Clark production of Birth of The Beatles on TV when I was nine or ten, about a year before John Lennon was shot and killed by a deranged fan, another brutal pop culture event that had a profound effect on the world and me.
I later learned that Roman Polanski had given his wife a Yorkie puppy she named Prudence, a nod to “Dear Prudence,” a Beatles song from The White Album, and that Prudence had been found by police in a closet in the Tate/Polanski home the morning after the murders. How was that even possible? I wonder now. A little yappy dog in a house where murder of the most unbridled sort was taking place managed to escape the fate of its owner? Surely it barked, attempted to defend her, ran out the open Dutch front door to alert the neighbors. How did it get inside a closet? Did the maniacs who stabbed a pregnant woman sixteen times and killed four others that night with equal fervor and bloodlust draw the line at animal cruelty and put the tiny critter in that closet for safekeeping during the mayhem? I’m still perplexed.
Four years ago, two young men attempted to break into my house late one winter afternoon while I was grading freshman comp essays in my study, my Chihuahua burrowed underneath an electric blanket in my lap. She sensed something was wrong before I did and scrambled to the front door, snarling and yelping, as if she was convinced an intruder was about to attempt acts of unspeakable terror on her mommy. I scooped her up and gazed through the glass door to see one of the guys standing on my porch and another lurking in the front yard, heading toward the guestroom windows, both men dressed in ominous dark-colored clothing and skullcaps. The one on the porch and I made eye contact, just for a few seconds, long enough for an awareness of the other to punctuate the moment and startle us both. I don’t know if it was his realization that someone was home (my car was parked inside the garage, the driveway vacant) or the apoplectic fit my dog was throwing, thrashing and barking in my arms, that propelled him back into the thicket that separates my sparsely populated neighborhood from a trailer park, but his buddy followed suit and they disappeared into the February dusk.
The very next morning, at the suggestion of the neighbor I’d called to come over and wait with me until police arrived, I ordered a security system, which gave me some comfort. Still, the event left me shaken. What had those men wanted? Mine is not an ostentatious house. There is little to recommend itself to thieves as a prime candidate for a big score. An easy score, maybe, as I’ve worked from home since long before the 2020 pandemic mandated it and tended to stay holed up in my study with my car hidden in the garage. There was little activity to suggest anyone was home most of the time. What were their intentions? Everything happened too quickly for me to notice if they carried weapons. Had they succeeded in entering the premises, would they have shut my ten-pound snapping Chihuahua in a closet and announced to me, as Tex Watson menacingly hissed to Voytek Frykowski when he awoke him on the sofa at Sharon Tate’s house, “I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business”?[11] Might I have met a similar fate?
Quentin Tarantino imagined another scenario for that monstrous summer night in 1969, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, his 2019 film starring Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. (Spoiler alert) The end of the movie features Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and an invented character called Flowerchild in lieu of Linda Kasabian, who’d joined the crew that night but had not participated in the murders, arriving in Benedict Canyon to do Charles Manson’s business. For reasons irrelevant to this essay, instead of the Tate/Polanski home, they invade the house next door, owned by a fading Hollywood star, the fictional Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Unaware of the carnage about to be unleashed in his living room, Rick is engaged in that most bourgeois of Hollywood bourgeois pastimes: lounging in his pristine swimming pool slurping homemade margaritas, music blaring through his headphones. When the culprits burst through the doors, Rick’s stunt double and best friend, Cliff Booth, a role for which Brad Pitt won an Oscar for best supporting actor, is inside feeding his American pit bull terrier, innocuously named Brandy—not an easy feat given the fact that Cliff has just smoked a cigarette dipped in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Cliff’s first reaction is one of chemically-induced incredulity: “Uh, are you real?” he asks Tex with a cockeyed grin, to which a befuddled Tex snarls, “I’m as real as a donut, motherfucker.”[12] What happens next is nothing short of a cathartic inverse of Manson’s twisted vision of Helter Skelter that will satisfy the innate sense of justice in even the most ardent pacifist who recalls the true story of August 9, 1969, and the merciless brutality the actual killers showed their victims. Brandy, at Cliff’s direction, pounces on Tex, steeling her powerful jaws on his crotch, and basically castrates this symbol of perverse heteropatriarchy, who with the absent maestro Manson choreographed every nefarious movement of the women in the Family, before moving on to the Susan Atkins character, whose nose is smashed and spurting blood from the can of dog food Cliff has just thrown at her. Played largely to comedic effect, the comeuppance meted out on the fictional embodiments of real-life people who committed such animalistic crimes by an intended victim’s pet dog is irony at its most mordant and lugubriously gratifying.
In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, everyone at 10050 Cielo Drive survives the night unscathed, and everyone who attempts to fulfill Manson’s prophesy dies. Furthermore, Tarantino’s retelling of the story allows the 1960s to endure, as pregnant with possibility and Age of Aquarius optimism as Sharon Tate was the night she died. The laws of karma are obeyed; no one of any social prominence is killed; the apple cart, as it were, is not upset. These dirty hippies, as Rick Dalton refers to the intruders, are expendable, society’s deplorables who flocked to a conman like Charles Manson because he offered them another narrative, one in which they were the protagonists and establishment piggies, supercilious elites like a Hollywood starlet and a coffee heiress, were the villains. “These children that come at you with knives,” Manson said of his homicidal apostles during his testimony at the 1970 trial, “they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. Most of the people at the ranch that you call the Family were just people that you did not want . . . I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”[13] The writing was on many walls in 1969, sometimes scrawled in blood, sometimes etched in black and white, all presaging revolution or at least the ad infinitum coming of a despot.
“If God did not exist,” Peter Fonda’s Captain America reads aloud near the end of Easy Rider, a quote from Voltaire written on a New Orleans whorehouse wall, “it would be necessary to create him.”[14] But when is it necessary to destroy him? And how do you do that without destroying those of whom he is a reflection, especially now, with American families so bitterly divided over our forty-fifth president; who leads by subterfuge and braggadocio; who has convinced his followers he remains “the chosen one” even after eighty million people voted otherwise in November 2020; who says there were good people on both sides after white supremacists violently clashed with protesters at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017; who calls “the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ a ‘symbol of hate,’ a description he’s refused to use for Confederate emblems”[15]; who stokes the fear and paranoia of another group of society’s so-called “deplorables”?
How do you dismantle the counterfeit hero without igniting Helter Skelter in your very own house?
III. Cry, Baby, Cry
In my fifty-one years, I have lived in a total of seven houses, including my house on a hill on the outskirts of Asheville. I occupied my childhood home—a modest three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, twelve hundred-sixty nine square foot white ranch-style residence on Alexander Circle (no relation) in Greenville, North Carolina—the longest. Until I was six years old, I slept first in a crib then a rollaway bed in my parents’ room, my much older three siblings—two brothers and a sister—having claimed the other two bedrooms until, one by one, they left for college and I was finally able to move into a room of my own, the room in which my mother would die of cancer in 2003, and a month or so later, candles flickering amorphous shadows on the door as if they were an esoteric code, my sister, Martha, and I would consult a Ouija board about her astral whereabouts.
At twelve o’clock a meeting round the table
For a seance in the dark
With voices out of nowhere
Put on specially by the children for a lark.
Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She’s old enough to know better.
So cry baby cry cry cry cry baby
Make your mother sigh.[16]
I waited in vain that night in my mother’s room for psychic vibrations and answers to questions I didn’t think the God I didn’t believe in was up to answering. I waited for artistic revelation. I didn’t experience anything then, not in any discernible, epiphanic sort of way. Nothing that would prepare me to encounter loss in my own home years later when my husband died. Nothing beyond the obvious existential truth that “in this light all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless,”[17] which is precisely why some people feel compelled to create a god, fall victim to a false prophet, forge connections where none exist, or if they do, the thread is tenuous and superficial. For example, my oldest sibling, Greg, once told me that when I was little and used to cry, he would play a forty-five of The Beach Boys song “Don’t Worry Baby” to soothe me. In 1968, Charles Manson and some of his Family lived in Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard mansion. It was Wilson who introduced Manson to record producer and former resident of 10050 Cielo Drive, Terry Melcher. But my connection, however nebulous, to the Manson murders story began before The Beach Boys record, before I was even born, in fact.
In late July 1969, my father packed my three siblings and my mother, who was six months pregnant with me at the time, into our white 1966 AMC Rambler and drove from Greenville, North Carolina to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dad was Assistant Dean of Student Affairs at East Carolina University then and scheduled to teach workshops on concert management and operations at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Annual Summertime Performing Arts Workshop and Training Program at Caltech. He’d decided to turn the trip into an extended cross-country family odyssey, with stops at such places as the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, etc. Why Mom agreed to embark on a road trip at that stage of her pregnancy in an unairconditioned car in the blazing summer heat with a nine-year-old, twelve-year-old, and thirteen-year-old bickering in the “way back,” I’m sure I don’t know, but by all accounts she was a trooper.
By the time they arrived at Page House Residence Hall on August 24, about thirty miles away from Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, they’d heard the news of the murders on the radio, followed the story of the discovery of the body of Steven Parent slumped over in the drivers seat of his father’s 1966 white AMC Rambler, the same make, model, color, and year of my family’s car, recoiled at the details of the callous slaying of a luminous honey-blonde actress who was heavily pregnant with her first child and whose movie director husband was responsible for the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, a disturbing tale about a pregnant woman who falls victim to a satanic cult and winds up giving birth to the son of the Devil. What my family, or anyone else, hadn’t heard was who committed such a shocking crime, and the one that followed, the next night, and why. Police had no suspects at that point, having quickly ruled out the caretaker of the Tate/Polanski property, nineteen-year-old William Garretson, who was living in the guest cottage behind the main house and claimed during interrogation he hadn’t seen or heard anything. The mystery must have haunted my mother after my father was admitted to the hospital in excruciating pain from kidney stones in the early hours of Tuesday, August 26. He passed the stone that afternoon but spent the night in the hospital, leaving Mom alone with three children and a baby bump on an otherwise empty floor in the university dormitory, over twenty-six-hundred miles away from home, a murderer—or murderers—on the loose, possibly lurking in shadowy hallways and deserted bathrooms or crouching behind a vacant residence hall room door, waiting to strike again and scribble something witchy in blood on the wall for the news media to decipher. I’m sure she was more than ready to leave La-La Land behind when Dad nosed the Rambler onto the I-210 on Thursday, August 28, heading back to their little white house not on a hill in North Carolina, the real world, where people were safe and snug in their homes and the notion of Helter Skelter was as improbable as the idea of a U.S. president failing to concede an election he so obviously lost. I wonder if she thought about Sharon Tate’s murder when she looked at the hundreds of slides Dad took on that trip, what memories they evoked when she saw my prints of some of those slides Dad made for me long after my parents divorced and he moved out of our house when I was seven. I don’t know if she read the Life magazine article about the murders with Julian Wasser’s photograph of Roman Polanski contemplating the blood-stained Dutch door, but I do know that the Sixties did not end for my mother on August 9, 1969, because for her and my family, like so many other white middle-class American families at that time—members of neither the beautiful people nor deplorables—the Sixties had never really begun. They watched the seismic culture shift unfold on their TV sets, listened to updates on the murders in Benedict Canyon on the radio, from afar in more ways than one, perplexed by the revelation that a buffoonish little man, given to histrionics and outlandish outbursts for TV cameras and trial reporters, had sold such a warped, racist, misogynistic vision of peace, love, and class and race warfare to so many young people. It didn’t seem to dawn on these WASP mothers and fathers, firmly ensconced in Leave It To Beaver-land, that those dirty hippies under Charles Manson’s control could very well have been their children who came at them with knives—in their very own homes.
In November 1992, I sat in the back of a Graveline Tours (now Dearly Departed) converted hearse on Benedict Canyon Road and gazed at Sharon Tate’s love house on a hill, barely visible from such a distance. I’d been living for the last ten or eleven months in the Bay Area, working for a small publishing company, my first “real job” after finishing my undergrad at East Carolina University the previous year, but I’d decided to return to North Carolina and go to grad school. I missed my mother. I felt like I was unmoored and floundering so far from home, in a land that wasn’t mine, although I’d felt an affinity for it since falling in love with the 1960s California music scene and learning of the strange connection my family had with the Manson murders. Ultimately, the Golden State wasn’t a good fit for me at that point in my life. I realized that I could easily become a prime candidate for the likes of someone like Charles Manson to scoop up if I didn’t get my footing soon. I needed to go home and take stock. But first, I wanted to see the place where the tragedy that ended the Sixties for people like Joan Didion occurred, and Benedict Canyon Road was as close as Graveline Tours was willing to get.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was renting the property at 10050 Cielo Drive in 1992 and eventually recorded the album The Downward Spiral in a studio he constructed in the living room. When he moved out in 1993, he took the Dutch front door with him. The next year, the house was demolished and later replaced with a much larger Mediterranean-style mansion and the street address number changed to 10066 (the street address number of the LaBiancas’ house at 3301 Waverly Drive was also changed, to 3311), as if changing one minor detail in the story would somehow alter the outcome, or at least the legacy. Yes, this terrible thing happened, but technically speaking not here, and come to think of it, if it technically didn’t happen here at this address, then did it really happen after all?
At the 1970 trial, Charles Manson said on the stand that “Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast. If you can’t see the confusion coming down around you fast, you can call it what you wish. . . . Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things? Is that a conspiracy? . . . It’s not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says, ‘Rise,’ it says ‘Kill.’ ”[18]
In other words, I’m not responsible, your honor.
Charles Manson died in prison on November 19, 2017. Except for Susan Atkins, who died in prison on September 24, 2009, the rest of the Family members responsible for the murder of Sharon Tate, et al, are still incarcerated and eligible for parole. All that remains of the house on a hill at 10050 Cielo Drive is a door and a meticulous recreation of the property in Quentin Tarantino’s movie, a compelling story that offers a glimpse of what might have been had one little detail been different, a Hollywood fantasy that serves as a cautionary tale gone unheeded. Even now.
***
In November 2016, Donald J. Trump became the forty-fifth president of the United States, winning three hundred-and six electoral votes. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over two million. She conceded the election less than twenty-four hours after the writing was clearly on the wall: “We must accept this result,” she told her supporters.[19]
At a press conference on Friday, March 13, 2020, President Trump told a reporter who asked if he felt culpable for the administration’s lagging response to the coronavirus pandemic, “ ‘I don’t take responsibility at all.’ ”[20]
On April 17, 2020, President Trump vociferously encouraged protests in states with strict coronavirus restrictions in a manic tweetstorm: “ ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ and ‘LIBERATE MINNESOTA!’—two states whose Democratic governors have imposed strict social distancing restrictions.”[21]
On June 2, 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, an African American man, by a white police officer and the ensuing protests and riots that erupted worldwide, the National Guard pepper sprayed and beat peaceful protesters outside the White House so that President Trump, in a show of law and order and bogus piety, could walk to St. John’s Church for a photo opt of him holding a bible (upside down) in front of the house of God.
In October 2020, thirteen suspects, some of whom were part of a right-wing anti-government extremist group, were arrested for plotting to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a frequent target of President Trump’s for her strict coronavirus lockdown restrictions. “ ‘Have one person go to her house. Knock on the door and when she answers it just cap her,’ one of the men said in an encrypted group chat, according to the F.B.I.”[22] Days later, Trump’s response to the plot was to join his followers at a rally in a rousing chant of “Lock her up!”
Shortly before ten p.m. on December 5, 2020, nearly two dozen protesters, some of them brandishing guns, gathered outside Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s house as she was about to watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas with her four-year-old. The group, Trump supporters who believed Trump’s baseless claim that the election had been stolen from him, began yelling obscenities and threats until authorities arrived and dispersed the mob.
On December 12, 2020, The New York Times ran the following headline after the Supreme Court ruled not to overturn election results in Texas and protests broke out in several major cities in the country: “4 Stabbed and One Shot as Trump Supporters and Opponents Clash.”[23]
The violence continued the next night, when pro-Trump protesters, including members of the Proud Boys, the alt-right self-described “western chauvinists” group President Trump told to “stand back and stand by”[24] at the first Presidential debate in September, tore down a Black Lives Matter sign from the Asbury United Methodist Church, the oldest Black church in Washington, D.C., that is still on its original site, and set it on fire.
I am reminded of Joan Didion as I write these words, “The White Album,” what she wrote about first hearing the news of the Manson murders the morning after in August 1969: “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”[25]
The tension is still waiting to be broken, the paranoia yet unfulfilled.
[1] Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 47.
[2] The Beatles. “Revolution 9.” The White Album, EMI, 1968.
[3] Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. “Julian Wasser’s Best Shot: Roman Polanski at the Scene of the Manson Family Killings, 1969.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 10 July 2014, 01.59 EDT, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/10/julian-wasser-my-best-shot-photography-manson-murders.
[4] Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. “Julian Wasser’s Best Shot: Roman Polanski at the Scene of the Manson Family Killings, 1969.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 10 July 2014, 01.59 EDT, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/10/julian-wasser-my-best-shot-photography-manson-murders.
[5] Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 45.
[6] Cillizza, Chris. “Yes, Donald Trump Really Believes He Is ‘the Chosen One’.” CNN, Cable News Network, 24 Aug. 2019, 3:08 PM ET, www.cnn.com/2019/08/21/politics/donald-trump-chosen-one/index.html.
[7] The Beatles. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” The White Album, EMI, 1968.
[8] The Beatles. “Helter Skelter.” The White Album, EMI, 1968.
[9] See Frykowski’s and Folger’s complete autopsy/toxicology reports: http://murderpedia.org/male.M//images/manson-charles/wojciech-frykowski-autopsy.pdf http://www.autopsyfiles.org/reports/Other/manson%20murders/folger,%20abigail_report.pdf
[10] Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 11.
[11] Bugliosi, Vincent, and Curt Gentry. Helter Skelter. Bantam Books, 1988, p. 237.
[12] Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Sony Pictures, 2019. Film.
[13] Bugliosi, Vincent, and Curt Gentry. Helter Skelter. Bantam Books, 1988. 525-526.
[14] Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969. Film.
[15] Liptak, Kevin, and Kristen Holmes. “Trump Calls Black Lives Matter a ‘Symbol of Hate’ as He Digs in on Race.” CNN, Cable News Network, 1 July 2020, 4:32 PM ET, www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/politics/donald-trump-black-lives-matter-confederate-race/index.html.
[16] The Beatles. “Cry, Baby, Cry.” The White Album, EMI, 1968.
[17] Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 44.
[18] Bugliosi, Vincent, and Curt Gentry. Helter Skelter. Bantam Books, 1988. 528.
[19] Holpuch, Amanda, and Tom McCarthy. “Hillary Clinton Concedes Presidential Election to Donald Trump: ‘We Must Accept This Result’.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Nov. 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/hillary-clinton-concedes-election-donald-trump-speech.
[20] Oprysko, Caitlin.“‘I Don’t Take Responsibility at All’: Trump Deflects Blame for Coronavirus Testing Fumble.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 13 Mar. 2020, 06:32 PM EDT, www.politico.com/news/2020/03/13/trump-coronavirus-testing-128971.
[21] Shear, Michael D., and Sarah Mervosh. “Trump Encourages Protest Against Governors Who Have Imposed Virus Restrictions.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-governors.html.
[22] Bogel-burroughs, Nicholas. “What We Know About the Alleged Plot to Kidnap Michigan’s Governor.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Oct. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/us/michigan-militia-whitmer.html?auth=login-facebook.
[23] Fuchs, Hailey, et al. “4 Stabbed and One Shot as Trump Supporters and Opponents Clash.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 Dec. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/us/4-stabbed-and-one-shot-as-trump-supporters-and-opponents-clash.html.
[24] Collins, Ben, and Brandy Zadrozny. “Proud Boys Celebrate after Trump’s Debate Callout.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 29 Sept. 2020, 11:12 PM EDT, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/proud-boys-celebrate-after-trump-s-debate-call-out-n1241512.
[25] Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 42.
