Bobby Beausoleil has a Facebook fan page. And a website where you can go to buy his music and his artwork.
I'm not stunned by this, or even outraged. If we're going to keep people in prison for 50 years I suppose we should at least allow them the opportunity to communicate with the outside world, and if someone wants to buy some of Beausoleil's art--which is created entirely with materials available at the prison commissary, "primarily paper and colored pencils ... occasionally pastel crayons"--then I don't know why they shouldn't do that. If you want a greeting card designed by an associate of the Manson family, capitalism insists it's your right to buy one.
It just feels weird know that there are people who don't recognize Beausoleil's name or know what he did. And that's all right, for it was a long time ago and a long way away and it is only a quirk of fate that had my 10-year-old self living in southern California when the Manson cultists came creepy-crawling out of the desert and murdered those rich people in Benedict Canyon.
The story that's usually told is that Charlie Manson, who'd set himself up as some kind of Svengali pickup artist (at one time he had 18 women living with him in San Francisco shortly after he was released from prison in 1967; some Internet wag marveled at this, seeing how he couldn't get a woman "to drive him to work"), wanted to bring about Helter Skelter, a race war that would lead to a power vacuum. Manson believed blacks would triumph, in part because liberal whites would split with racist whites and ultimately be unable to govern themselves. Then Manson and his followers would emerge from their hole under Death Valley to rule the land. And be bigger than the Beatles.
That's no crazier than some other messianic political theories I've heard. And remember Manson also dabbled in Scientology.
But the real motive for what have come to be known as the Tate-LaBianca murders may have been more prosaic. Beausoleil has said Manson ordered them in an effort to confuse the police after Beausoleil's arrest for the murder of music teacher Gary Hinman. Beausoleil and Manson girls Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins went to Hinman's house in Topanga Canyon to extort money from him. Maybe Manson thought Hinman had just inherited some money; Beausoleil once said it was because Hinman had sold him some bad drugs that he'd subsequently sold to a motorcycle gang called the Straight Satans.
Anyway, after holding Hinman captive for two days, Charlie showed up to slash Hinman's ear with a sword, then Beausoleil stabbed him to death, allegedly while Hinman was chanting a Buddhist prayer, which lends a grim resonance to The Ride Out of Bardo painting featured on Beausoleil's website. A couple of weeks later police arrested Beausoleil, who was found sleeping in Hinman's broken-down Fiat with the murder weapon in the wheel well.
Beausoleil contends that Manson commenced Helter Skelter because he wanted the police to believe Hinman's murderers were still alive. And they may have chosen the house at 10050 Cielo Drive because that's where Manson had met former tenant Terry Melcher (Doris Day's son), a music producer who'd worked with the Beach Boys and had expressed some professional interest in Manson. While plans for Melcher to record Manson and to produce a documentary about the family had fallen through, Manson almost certainly knew Melcher had already moved. He was just familiar with its layout.
Movie star Sharon Tate, coffee heir Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old student who'd stopped by to visit a friend living in the guest house, were just unlucky. The killers wrote "pig" on the wall in blood.
Manson thought they were sloppy. He sent them out again to do a better job.
It was in December 1969 when they were indicted and their pictures strewn across the front page of the local newspaper. (The sheriff had suspected them of vandalism in Death Valley; when he raided their commune he'd found a stolen car. It took a couple of jailhouse snitches to build a case on them.)
My father used to see them, the trashy kids hitchhiking in from the desert--presumably from the Barker Ranch, he later decided--into Los Angeles. He thought about picking them up, and maybe once or twice he did, because that was something people still did for each other at the tag end of the 1960s in southern California. Especially in the morning, if they looked like they were heading for work, which they may have been.
He remembered seeing Charlie, the little dude with the crazy eyes, on the side of the road with his girls. The closest thing we have to an embodiment of evil.
Last week the Los Angeles Times ran an opinion column with a terrible click-bait headline: "The human side of Charles Manson." I don't think much about how to attract clicks but that had to be a mistake; the visceral reaction to the headline had to have kept people from reading it. But it made a relevant point.
Charles Manson was not a monster; he was a human being corrupted and degraded by the parts of the world with which he came in contact. Any number of things might have saved him--the Beach Boys' Mike Love said he thought if Manson had ever gotten a real shot in the music business he might have made it. Al Lewis, who played Grampa Munster on TV, used to let Manson babysit his kids.
"He was a nice guy, when I knew him," Lewis said.
The qualifer says it all. You never knew him, Al.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 11/26/2017