About a week after the Manson Family’s arrests, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Manson appeared wild-eyed on the cover of Life magazine, looking like a modern-day Rasputin:
Inside the issue, the “Manson women,” many of them barely teenagers, posed with babies slung over their slender shoulders. They spoke of their love and undying support for “Charlie,” whom they deemed the second coming of Christ and Satan in one.
Life still hosts a gallery of images, including that cover:
The underground press supported Manson:
People thought he was innocent, that his status as a left-leaning communard had been overblown. Tuesday’s Child, an L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists, named Manson their “man of the year.” Some didn’t even care if he was behind the murders. Bernardine Dohrn, of the Weather Underground, put it most outrageously: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”
An L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists?
The trial became a spectacle:
On the very first day of the trial, Manson showed up at the courthouse with an X carved into his forehead, the wound so fresh it was still bleeding. The next day, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten arrived with their own bloody Xs. The women skipped down the courtroom hallways, three abreast, holding hands, singing nursery rhymes that Manson had written. They laughed at the photographers who jostled to get their pictures. During the trial, if Manson took umbrage at something, they took umbrage, too, mimicking his profanity, his expressions, his outbursts.
[…]
Things were no more orderly outside the courtroom, where, at the corner of Temple and Grand, members of the Family gathered each morning to hold sidewalk vigils. Barefoot and belligerent, they sat in wide circles, singing songs in praise of their leader. The women suckled newborns. The men laughed and ran their fingers through their long, unwashed hair. All had followed Manson’s lead and cut Xs into their foreheads, distributing typewritten statements explaining that the self-mutilation symbolized their “X-ing” themselves “out of society.”
That Life gallery includes some later photos, too:
This seems like an opportune moment to mention Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, by Dave McGowan.
Thanks, military intelligence.
Interesting. I just ran across the McGowan book a few days ago. Have read Chaos twice. I think it’s terrific. In my book Intelligence I have a Tom O’Neil-like journalist finally get confirmation of Manson’s contacts with shadowy USG types, rather than the uncertainty that he acknowledges in the book. I sent him the section and he said he enjoyed his fictional success. He also said he may have another book’s worth of material, focusing on the Hollywood scene around the time (I haven’t seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet but apparently Tarantino is also an admirer of the Chaos book).
Neovictorian, you wrote a fictional book about a real journalist you know?
I would love to see a follow-up book about the Hollywood scene, because it increasingly looks like it was worse than anyone could have imagined.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has an odd concept — what if the Manson murderers entered a tough guy’s house instead? — but it’s certainly worth your time.
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has an odd concept — what if the Manson murderers entered a tough guy’s house instead?”
Why odd? “A sudden and acute failure of the victim selection process” happens now and then.
What would be curious is how this could turn, considering how US New Left usually acts in such cases and that Manson indeed had support.
The dark comedy potential of such a turn is obvious, too. Though for the best effect it should be someone like Stallone having punched one of these hippies «out the back of a homicide investigation, and through three appellate courts»©Howard Tayler.
Or even better, some peaceful Soviet athlete innocently visiting a friendly stunt actor in the place that only by pure geographical coincidence had anything to do with US military intelligence.