Isegoria

Marc Andreessen recently commented on the popularity of psychedelics in Silicon Valley:

Charles Manson’s cult introduction method was daily dosing of LSD and speed. Today we do that to ourselves with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA, nitrous and Adderall.

This reminded me that Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties happened to be on sale — and I decided it was worth $4.99 to me to have a digital copy, since the audiobook didn’t lend itself to highlighting and sharing.

I was never particularly interested in the Manson murders, but enough different people had recommended the book that I gave it a go, and the story is even weirder than I’d imagined.

First, it was an odd time:

Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity.

Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.

This passed me by when I was just listening to it, but reading it I realized I’d never heard of Zager and Evans or their number-one song:

If you go back and revisit the Top 40 from each year, it’s fascinating how many hits have disappeared down the memory hole.

The murderers were an unlikely bunch:

Late that night at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a man and three women got in a beat-up yellow 1959 Ford and headed toward Beverly Hills. A ranch hand heard one of the women say, “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”

The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”

Huddled beside her in the back of the car—they’d torn out the seats to accommodate more food from the Dumpster dives they often went on—was Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink heavily. One day in 1967, she’d left her car in a parking lot, failed to collect the two paychecks from her job at an insurance company, and disappeared.

In the passenger seat was Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire. She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married; the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid, and moved to Los Angeles. She sometimes introduced herself as “Yana the witch.”

And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys — a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.

That night in the Ford, all four were dressed in black from head to toe. None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch — whose mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows — the Family had assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement rejection of conventional morality. More than anything, they lived according to the whims of their leader, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Milles Manson, who had commanded them to take their trip that night.

They all seemed to have developed drug problems before Manson took them to the next level.

I wouldn’t expect any of them to be any good at violence, except Tex.

Another detail that passed me by while listening was the name of the film Roman Polanski was working on overseas when his wife was murdered:

The four arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.

That is perhaps the most late-60s, early-70s movie imaginable — and it did get made a few years later, directed by Mike Nichols and starring George C. Scott.

The attack is premeditated:

Watson scaled a pole to sever the phone lines to the house. He’d been here before, and he knew where to find them right away. There was an electric gate leading to the driveway, but instead of activating it, the four elected to jump over an embankment and drop onto the main property. All of them were carrying buck knives; Watson also had a .22 Buntline revolver.

I had assumed that the .22 revolver was a small gun, but I looked up what a Buntline revolver was, and it is not small gun:

The Colt Buntline Special was a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N. Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. […] Lake described them as extra-long Colt Single Action Army revolvers, with a 12-inch (300 mm)-long barrel, and stated that Buntline presented them to five lawmen in thanks for their help in contributing local color to his western yarns.

In Tombstone, Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) carries a Colt Buntline Special.

The murder weapon was apparently missing its trigger guard:

So many details don’t make sense to me:

At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who’d been visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse to sell him a clock radio. He was sitting in his dad’s white Rambler, having already rolled his window down to activate the gate control. Watson approached the driver’s side and pointed the revolver at his face. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything!” Parent screamed, raising his arm to protect himself. Watson slashed his left hand with the knife, slicing through the strap of his wristwatch. Then he shot Parent four times, in his arm, his left cheek, and twice in the chest. Parent died instantly, his blood beginning to pool in the car.

Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them.

Visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse, after midnight, to sell him a clock radio?

I’m curious how Tex cocked the hammer on that single-action revolver, with a buck knife in his left hand, because that first victim might have had a chance to get away with survivable injuries if he’d just floored it before taking all four shots.

Even if you’re in a nice neighborhood, you might want to lock all your doors and windows:

Finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a long horizontal slit in a window screen outside the dining room and gained entry to the house; he went to the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. In the living room, the three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”

This is where Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood diverges drastically from what happened in our timeline. Hollywood stuntman and tough guy Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), while high as a kite, just handles it:

What really happened does share a few elements:

Now, rubbing his eyes to make out the figures clad in black and standing over him, Frykowski stretched his arms and, apparently mistaking them for friends, asked, “What time is it?”

Watson trained his gun on Frykowski and said, “Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.”

Frykowski stiffened, the gravity of the situation beginning to seize him. “Who are you,” he asked, “and what are you doing here?”

“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.

In a linen closet, Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house, looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.

If this were fiction, I’d be baffled that the author threw the Folger’s coffee heiress into the story — but it gets weirder:

She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy, famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number.

On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d recently filmed her biggest role to date, in The Thirteen Chairs, and her manager had promised she’d be a star someday. Born in Dallas, Tate was the daughter of an army officer, and she grew up in cities scattered across the globe. Her beauty was such that she’d apparently stopped traffic, literally, on her first visit to New York. She’d been a homecoming queen and a prom queen; even at six months old, she’d won a Miss Tiny Tot contest in Texas.

The Thirteen Chairs (French: 12 + 1; Italian: Una su 13) was released posthumously:

You really, really don’t want to find yourself taking orders from deranged criminals:

In their shock and confusion, they offered the intruders money and whatever they wanted, begging them not to hurt anyone. Watson ordered the three who’d come from the bedrooms to lie facedown on their stomachs in front of the fireplace. Tate began to cry; Watson told her to shut up. Taking a long rope, he tied Sebring’s hands behind his back and ran a length around his neck. He looped the rope around Tate’s neck next, and then Folger’s, throwing the final length over a beam in the ceiling.

Sebring struggled to his feet and protested — couldn’t this man see that Tate was pregnant? He tried to move toward Tate, and Watson shot him, puncturing a lung. Sebring crumpled onto the zebra-skin rug by the fireplace. Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all the lights.

Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?”

“You’re all going to die,” Watson said.

Frykowski had managed to free his hands. He lurched toward Atkins, attempting to disarm her, but she forced her knife into his legs, stabbing him constantly as they rolled across the living room floor, a tangle of limbs glinting with steel. He pulled her long hair. His blood was spraying everywhere, and he’d been stabbed more than half a dozen times, but Frykowski staggered to his feet. Atkins had lost her knife, so he made a run for the front door and, with Atkins still pummeling him, got as far as the lawn. Watson halted him with two bullets and then tackled him to the ground, pounding the butt of his gun against the back of his head again and again, with such force that the right grip shattered, and Frykowski’s skull cracked.

I would expect a guy who’d survived the war in Poland to put up a fight. I’m assuming the 10-day mescaline trip left him impaired.

Inside, Tate was sobbing. Then Folger, who’d lifted the noose from her neck, ran down the hall and out of the house through a side door. She was halfway across the front lawn, her nightgown flowing behind her like an apparition, when Krenwinkel caught up to her and brought her knife down, stabbing her twenty-eight times. Watson joined in and Folger went limp, saying, “I give up. I’m already dead. Take me.”

Drenched in blood and their own sweat, the two killers rose to see Frykowski, yet again, on his feet stumbling toward them. Soon they were stabbing him with the same mechanical precision, forcing steel through flesh, bone, and cartilage. The coroner tallied fifty-one stab wounds on the Pole, plus thirteen blows to the head and two bullet wounds.

[…]

Watson came back inside and ordered Atkins to kill her. Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said.

“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.” She stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined in. The pair stabbed her sixteen times until she cried out for her mother and died.

Atkins dipped her fingers into one of Tate’s wounds and tasted her blood. It was “warm, sticky, and nice,” she’d recall later. “To taste death and yet give life,” she said, “wow, what a trick.” She soaked a towel in Tate’s blood and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to “write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.”

[…]

When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly.

Beyond gruesome.

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