r o s e m a r y
- the connection between mia farrow, sharon tate,
charlie manson and the beatles
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Dark Side Of The 60s
[...] as it has been observed by probability
theorists, the largest
proportion of the truth arrives as a faculty of
coincidence. [...]
[...] To fully appreciate the law of synchronity --
the meaning that can
be revealed by an inadvertent encounter, or a chance
event -- it is
necessary to put aside all rational logic of reasoning
to concentrate
instead on the accidents and chances that provide new
ways of
understanding. The hazards and casualties that happen
to us are
intelligible only within a system of meaning, and
meaning is the products
not of individual minds, but of relationships. It is
this pattern of
relationships that both defines the individual and is
defined by him, and
it is this complex of affinities that perishes with
death. The law of
synchronity is grounded in this dark arrangement of
contingencies. As
Confucian scholar Wang Fu-Chih puts it, "only a man of
highest integrity
can understand this law; basing itself on its
revelation he can grasp the
symbols, and observing its small expressions, he can
understand the
auguries".
In other words, the devil is in the details.
- Brottman, pp. 33-34
1969 is remembered, not only for being the year of the
first Moon flight,
but
also for the gruesome murders committed in California
by Charles
Manson
and his bunch of crazed disciples, called the Manson
Family. For many
observers this marked the end of the 60s 'Flower
Power' and the hippie
culture of peace and love, and also the entering into
the grimmer era of
the 70s, 80s and 90s. The Manson murders also whetted
the morbid public
appetite, indicating the dark side of the 60s, which
remained there
under the decade's sunny and carefree outlook. It is
also a story of
strange coincidences and synchronities; with occult
connections and
rumours of conspiracy abounding.
'The Age of Aquarius' was the utopian project
prevailing in the minds of the youth of the 1960s.
No more society's 'games', no more 'hang-ups', no more
'Man', no more repression, no more war.
Mind-altering substances, occultism, free love and
rock music would pave the
way for the new Aquarian society, out of the grimness
and darkness of the Age of Pisces, the sinister Kali
Yuga period of the Hindus, Philip K. Dick's
'Black Iron Prison'. The hippies would embrace
both
J.R.R. Tolkien's Luddite pastoralism (where
magic was ever-present, and not yet suffocated by
the 'satanic mills' as described by William
Blake and the crude
machinery of
Industrial
era), and Marshall McLuhan's
techno-utopian 'Global Village' with its
trans-continental electronic neuro-circuitry. The time
was right for the sages, visionaries, revolutionaries,
idealists and dreamers but also for the snake-oil
merchants, sideshow hucksters, rip-off merchants,
opportunists and false prophets.
Charlie Don't Surf
Born in 1934, Charles Manson spent his first term in
reformatory school at the age of nine. By the time he
drifted to San
Francisco in 1967, Manson had spent most of his adult
life in jail, mostly
for such offences as car theft and credit-card fraud.
He also worked
some time as a pimp. He found himself in
the midst of the new 'psychedelic' culture. The
hippies of the
Haight-Asbury district took LSD, smoked pot, and
called themselves 'flower
children'. No one cared that Manson had been a
jailbird; on the contrary,
it was regarded as being greatly to his credit. Manson
was older than most
of the 'drop-outs', and girls seemed inclined to
regard him as a
father-substitute figure. Runaways began to gather
round him, and soon the
Manson menage in the Haight district seemed to be full
of emotionally
deprived girls and admiring youths (Manson seems to
have been bisexual).
If they had never read the 60s counter-culture
philosopher Herbert
Marcuse, they nevertheless practised
his idea that
sex could be used a a form of 'unrepressive
sublimation' to unfold our
higher possibilities.
By 1968,
Manson was trying hard to move into the pop music
business;
Manson's 'Family' even moved for a time into the
luxury home of a
member,
Dennis Wilson, of a successful group called The
Beach Boys,
best known for their odes to California beach life and
surfing
(later on,
Wilson claimed that he had inadvertently "founded" the
Family with
Manson). Manson lived with Dennis before the murders
for about six months.
He saw himself as a would-be singer-songwriter. He
recorded several songs
in Brian's home studio, and one of them, 'Never Learn
Not To Love'
(originally titled: 'Cease To Exist') was even
released as the B-side
of a Beach Boys single and on their album
20/20. Manson's lack
of success, though, seems to have made him
increasingly embittered. The
'family',
now numbering about thirty (and including children)
moved out to a ranch
owned by an old man named George Spahn, and
lived there in exchange
for
cleaning out the stables.
With so much drug-taking, violence was inevitable. In
July 1969, Manson
shot a black dope-dealer named Bernard Crowe in
the chest; in fact,
Crowe
recovered and decided not to go to the police. Later
that month, Manson
and his friend Bobby Beausoleil tried to
persuade another
drug-dealer,
Gary Hinman, to finance a move to Death Valley;
when Hinman
refused, he
was tortured, then stabbed to chest and left to die.
On the wall above his
body, Beausoleil wrote 'Political piggy' in blood --
intended to lead the
police to the belief that the Black Panther movement
was responsible.
Manson's plan was to cause a revolution by setting
whites against blacks
(whom he detested).
On 9 August 1969, four Manson followers -- three girls
and
a man -- drove out to a house in Benedict Canyon which
had
been earlier rented by Terry Melcher,
the
son
of Doris Day
and a man
in the pop music business (he had produced among all
bands like The Byrds)
against whom
Manson had a
grudge. Melcher was an independent producer working
with the Beatles'
Apple Records label, and the Beatle-obsessed Manson
thought he would get a
recording contract
through him. When Melcher didn't sign Manson, he
became an object of
Manson's wrath and probably Melcher was supposed to be
one of
the victims, but
Manson didn't know that Terry had split from
that house three months before. Anyway, that Hollywood
mansion at 10050
Cielo
Drive, Los Angeles, was assaulted by Manson's
disciples, who brutally
butchered a group of people, who were
spending
some time there; among them the current resident
Sharon Tate, a
film actress and the wife
of Polish film director Roman
Polanski; Tate being at the time
pregnant with
Polanski's child.
At the time Polanski was in London, but Sharon Tate
had
three guests to supper, two men and a woman.
Afterwards they took MDA, a
psychedelic drug, and went into various states of
dissociation (Tate was
not under influence because of her pregnancy). As the
Manson Family members entered the drive, they
encountered a youth who had
been visiting the houseboy; he was shot in the head.
Then they went
into the house and killed Sharon Tate and her three
guests. The men were
shot, the women stabbed to death. The next morning, a
maid ran
screaming into the street after finding
the actress and four others slaughtered in a grotesque
scene. The
word 'Pig', written with Tate's blood, was found from
the murder scene.
Bodies were scattered about the lush green estate.
Sharon Tate, who was 8
1/2 months pregnant, had been stabbed to death, then
hung from a rafter in
the living room. Also slain were Abigail
Folger, heiress to the
Folger
coffee fortune; Wojciech (Voytek) Frykowski, a
Polish friend of
Polanski's; Jay Sebring, hairdresser to the
stars; and Steven
Parent, a
young man shot while leaving the cottage of his
friend, the caretaker.
The murders created the sensation Manson had hoped
for; the following day,
the 'family' watched the television news-casts with
satisfaction. By that
evening, every gun and guard dog in the Los Angeles
area had been bought
by frantic householders. Manson decided to strike
again while the iron was
hot. That evening, after taking LSD, he led six
followers to a house in
the affluent Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, the
home of a supermarket
owner, Leno LaBianca and his wife
Rosemary. Manson walked
into their
bedroom with a gun and tied them up, then sent in
three followers, who
stabbed the LaBiancas to death. They wrote 'Death to
pigs' in blood on a
door, and 'Helter Skelter', Manson's code word for the
revolt that would
occur when the alarmed whites rose up against the
blacks.
But the rising failed to occur; Los Angeles was too
accustomed to mass
murder to over-react. In the following month, the
'family' moved out to
the remote Death Valley. When Manson set on fire a
bulldozer belonging to
the State rangers, the police raided the ranch and
arrested all the
hippies. And after more than a month in jail, a family
member named
Susan
Atkins, who had taken part in both sets of
murders, told her cell-mate
about the killings, and word leaked back to the
police.
Charlie Guenther was the man who really
broke the Manson
case. He
worked the Gary Hinman job for Los Angeles Sheriff's
Homicide and busted
Manson acolytes Mary Brunner and Bobby
Beausoleil, who had written
'Pig' and 'Political Piggy' on Hinman's walls after
they killed him;
similar slogans were scrawled at the Tate-LaBianca
crime scenes. Guenther
went to LAPD and laid out the Hinman murder. Brunner
and Beausoleil were
in custody during the Tate-LaBianca time frame.
Guenther told the LAPD to
check out their friends at the Spahn Movie Ranch. The
LAPD ignored
Guenther's advice. They solved Tate-LaBianca by fluke
luck several
months
later.
The trial that followed was one of the longest and
most expensive in Los
Angeles history. Vincent Bugliosi, the
prosecutor -- who later
wrote the book Helter Skelter -- called the
killings "probably the
most bizarre mass murder case we've ever had in
America." Charles Manson
did his best to turn it into an indictment of
society and his judges, explaining that the murders
had been committed out
of love. Asked if she thought the killing of eight
people was unimportant,
Susan Atkins retorted by asking whether the killing of
thousands with
napalm was important. In her memoir, "Headline
Justice," reporter Theo
Wilson recalled a 10-month
trial with "testimony that went from horrifying to
ludicrous ... witnesses
with names like 'Lotsapoppa, Snake and Ouisch' ...
threats of
self-immolation
and other destruction ... a defense attorney
disappearing, his drowned
undiscovered until many months later on the very day
that the defendants
received death sentences from the jury."
Manson's three women co-defendants, Susan Atkins,
Leslie Van Houten
and
Patricia Krenwinkel, were convicted with him
after taking the stand
and
attempting to absolve him by admitting their own
deadly deeds. Another
defendant, Charles "Tex" Watson, was found
guilty in a separate
trial.
Their
death sentences were commuted to life when the death
penalty was briefly
outlawed in America in 1972.
President Nixon had denounced Manson even
before
he and
his five co-defendants had been found guilty, and
predictably, Manson
became
a hero of the West Coast 'underground' network. But
the trial had the
effect
of convincing the rest of the world that the whole
movement of social
revolt was a form of mindless emotionalism whose
arguments defied logic;
it produced, in fact, precisely the kind of revulsion
against the left
that the McCarthy witch hunts had created
against the right in the
50s. A suitable scapegoat is always needed, and in
America, at least, the
Manson family had discredited 'revolution', as the
writer Colin
Wilson concludes.
Web of Coincidences
One aspect of Manson's philosophy especially puzzled
me: his strange attitude
toward fear. He not only preached that fear was
beautiful, he often told
the Family that they should live in a constant state
of fear. What did he
mean by that? [ ... ]
To Charlie fear was the same thing as awareness [ ...
] The more fear
you have, the more awareness, hence the more love.
When you're really
afraid, you come to "Now". And when you are at Now,
you are totally
conscious.
Manson claimed that children were more aware than
adults, because they
were naturally afraid. But animals were even more
aware than people, he
said, because they always live at Now. The coyote was
the most aware
creature there was, Manson maintained, because he was
completely paranoid.
Being frightened of everything he missed nothing.
- Bugliosi: p. 320
As most people know, the star of Roman Polanski's 1968
horror classic
Rosemary's
Baby, Mia Farrow, is the ex-Mrs.
Woody
Allen (and the ex-Mrs. Frank Sinatra).
There's
a connection to her and the 1967 film Valley
of the Dolls,
starring Sharon Tate (who had also been in Polanski's
vampire spoof
Dance of the Vampires the same year) -- one of
Tate's co-stars
in the film, Barbara
Parkins, was best known from TV's soap opera
Peyton Place, which
had made
Mia Farrow famous. (At some point, Farrow allegedly
feared she would be
the next victim of the murder spree.)
So, if we look closely, we'll find a connection
between Peyton
Place, Valley of the Dolls, Rosemary's
Baby and Charles
Manson!
Then to
The Beatles: 'Helter Skelter' and 'Piggies' were some
songs off The
Beatles' White
Album (1968), which
inspired the murder spree of the Manson Family, who
slaughtered Sharon
Tate, who was the
wife of Roman Polanski, who directed Rosemary's
Baby. (Manson
and his followers believed the songs held in them some
hidden messages,
specifically meant for the Family.) Furthermore,
as peculiar coincidences go, The Beatles had Mia
Farrow as one of
their companions on their famous 1968 excursion to
India, and John
Lennon of The Beatles wrote
'Dear Prudence' (also a song on White Album)
for
Mia Farrow's younger sister Prudence Farrow (on
a lighter note,
"Prudence" was also the name of puppy Polanski gave to
Sharon Tate).
Sadie Mae
Glutz was the alias given to the Family member
Susan Atkins by
Manson even before the appearance of the
White Album song
'Sexy Sadie' -- which
was directed toward The Beatles' one-time guru
Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi, with
whom they felt disappointed. Ironically, also
Sadie/Susan would let
Manson down by carelessly talking about the murders to
her cellmates,
which was eventually used as a proof in the trial.
It is claimed that
at a party in California in 1973,
Lennon
went
berserk, hurling a
chair
out the window, smashing mirrors, heaving a TV against
the wall, and
screaming nonsense about
Roman Polanski being to blame. And
to give a sinister end to the story filled with
synchronities (allegedly
Lennon and Ono had
their own interest in the occult), John Lennon
was shot in 1980 in front of the Dakota Building
(picture on the right) in
New York -- which was
used when filming Rosemary's Baby. Also,
Rosemary
LaBianca was
another victim of Manson's murder spree, which in
press would later
be called the Tate-LaBianca murders. Mark
Chapman was the name of Lennon's killer --
Winifred Chapman was
the maid who had first found the bodies at 10050 Cielo
Drive.
The Beatles members had frequented London's Indica
Books and Gallery
(this is where Lennon met Yoko Ono),
which
opened in 1966, where also Roman Polanski and Sharon
Tate visited as
regular guests -- the film-maker then
directing in England Dance of the Vampires
(a.k.a. The
Fearless Vampire Killers, 1967), with his
future wife starring.
Thematically, there are some similarities between
Dance of the
Vampires
and Rosemary's Baby, which seem all the more
significant in the
aftermath
of what happened. In the former film, the suckers of
blood are triumphant
in the end, spreading evil to the whole world after
heroes have failed to
stop them; in the latter, the ultimate purpose of all
diabolic rites is
achived -- the Devil is come among us. In the former
film, Polanski's
character Alfred is -- even more chillingly in the
light of history --
late to save Sharon Tate's Sarah from the vampires; in
the latter, Guy
Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) is willing to
sacrifice his wife, Mia
Farrow's
Rosemary, to give birth to the Devil, and in the
process gain worldly
success himself. In Dance of the Vampires, the
community of
vampires gains
victory; in Rosemary's Baby, the coven of
witches and Satanists
celebrate
their Year One by the birth of Devil's offspring.
Furthermore, it should be noted that Krzysztof
Komeda, who composed
music for
Rosemary's Baby, died soon afterwards in
curious circumstances
because of
the head injuries received during a drinking binge,
adding to all
notoriety gained by Polanski's 1968 film.
1966: Year
One
1966 seems to be a crucial year in this story. In
March of that year, John
Lennon gave his interview to a British journalist, the
Stateside results
of which
seemed to be somewhat unfortunate for the Beatle. When
syndicated to the
USA that summer, this statement given in the interview
by Lennon
infuriated the
conservative religious right: "Christianity will go.
It will vanish and
shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right, and I
will be proved right.
We [The Beatles] are more popular than Jesus now; I
don't know which will
go first -- rock'n'roll or Christianity. Jesus was all
right, but his
disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting
it that ruins it for
me." In the South, where rock'n'roll had exploded with
Elvis during
the previous decade, mass burnings of Beatles records
ensued.
In April 8, 1966,
the Time magazine had published its famous "Is
God
Dead?" issue, also featured in Ira Levin's
original book of
Rosemary's Baby and the film. The question
appeared on the cover
of the magazine in bold red letters on a
jet black
background. (In 1882
Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science
had a character
called "the
madman"
running through the marketplace shouting "God is
dead!", but in the book,
no one took the madman seriously.) The Time
magazine article
reported that a group of young
theologians
calling themselves Christian atheists, led by
Thomas J. J. Altizer
at
Emory University, had claimed God was dead. As was the
case with
US reactions to Lennon's Jesus statement, this hit a
cultural nerve and
in an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show
Altizer was greeted by
shouts
of "Kill him! Kill him!" (Altizer continued to develop
an
increasingly apocalyptic theology but did not receive
a grant or much
attention since 1966.)
As is fitting, Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded
The Church
of Satan (which ideology was somehow Nietzschean with
all its elitist
"superman" overtones) in that same year 1966, appears
uncredited as an
actor and a "technical adviser"
on Rosemary's Baby -- a film which theme
is
connected closely with Satanism. LaVey had launched
his Church of
Satan on Walpurgisnacht, 30 April, 1966.
Some famous Chuch members were,
among all, Sammy Davis Jr., and there has been
some talk of Jayne
Mansfield's connection with LaVey, which has
been subsequently
denied by all parties concerned. There were also LaVey
connections to
the Family members, especially Susan Atkins,
who had
worked previously as a go-go dancer at LaVey's Topless
Witches Review show
as... "Sharon King".
The Beatles and "The Aquarian Conspiracy"
The first United States-grown rock group of that
[psychedelic] type, the
Grateful Dead, was generated as a British intelligence
operation by the
Occult Bureau of [Aldous] Huxley and [Gregory] Bateson
out of the Palo
Alto Veteran's Hospital where they were doing LSD and
related experiments.
- Why would British intelligence want to put out a
rock group?
This is part of the Satanism business. Call it the
counterculture. Call it
the Dionysius model of the counterculture. Rock
[music] is essentially a
revival of the ancient Dionysic, Bacchic rituals. Lots
of people for long
periods of time in that kind of particular rhythmic
ritual which was
probably struck upon empirically many thousands of
years ago for this type
of cult. It does have a relationship to the Alpha
rhythms of the brain. It
does produce these sorts of states. If combined with a
little alcohol and
more, shall we say, mood shaping substances, with
youth, with funny sex,
this does produce a profound change of a
countercultural type.
Another word for it: New Age. The longer term: Age of
Aquarius. People
were experimenting with various utopian models,
constructing small groups
experimentally which were considered New Age types.
- Lyndon
LaRouche on
the 60's counter-culture, rock music, LSD and the
occult (see also this...)
It's understandable that the whole 1960s cultural
upheaval was to cause
worry among the more conservative commentators, who
didn't understand the
new sounds, styles and ideas, and greeted them as the
heralds of
something more sinister than merely as some passing
fashions or fads.
Such conspiracy buffs as John Coleman (in his
Conspirator's
Hierachy - The Committee of 300) and Lyndon
LaRouche, quoted above, go as far as to claim that
"Beatlemania" and
the
subsequent rise of countercultural rock movement were
in fact meticulously
constructed by Tavistock Institute, a cover
organisation of British
intelligence service MI6, as to subvert American
culture and institutions.
This whole affair would be a part of the larger
countercultural "Aquarian
Conspiracy" instilled in Britain against America...
Coleman goes as far as to confuse music of The Beatles
with the "atonal"
12-tone music of 1920s German composers like Arnold
Schönberg,
and claims
that
the acclaimed cultural critic Theodor Adorno
actually wrote the
lyrics
for The Beatles! The next quote is
probably the most telling of Coleman's
attitudes towards the whole rock music culture:
Following the Beatles, who incidentally were put
together by the Tavistock
Institute, came other "Made in England" rock groups,
who, like the
Beatles, had Theo Adorno write their cult lyrics and
compose all the
"music." I hate to use these beautiful words in the
context of
"Beatlemania"; it reminds me of how wrongly the word
"lover" is used when
referring to the filthy interaction between two
homosexuals writhing in
pigswill. To call "rock" music, is an insult, likewise
the language used
in "rock lyrics."
- Dr. John Coleman: Conspirator's
Hierachy - The Committee of 300
If you hate The Beatles, popular music and youth
culture, fair enough,
but at least get your facts right.
To have some counter-balance here, the writer Alex
Constantine
claims in his
Covert War Against Rock that rock artists with
connections to
counterculture, such as Lennon, were systematically
harassed and
persecuted by US authorities and covert operations
like COINTELPRO and
Operation CHAOS. So, both right-wing and left-wing
conspiracy fans would
indeed have a field day with this case.
Manson's Influences?
Manson is known to have dabbled with Scientology, but
it
seems his involvement has been brief. Vincent
Bugliosi claims also that his teachings had some
surprising similarities
to those of The Process Church of the Final Judgment,
the notorious occult
sect of Robert de
Grimston.
In 1963, Grimston, then known as Robert Moore and
Mary
Ann Lean had met at the Hubbard Institute of
Scientology, on Fitzroy
Street, London. Both were training to be "auditors".
They married soon
after, and in 1964 left Scientology to set up their
own system,
Compulsions Analysis. They also adopted the name de
Grimston. In 1966 (the
same year LaVey also inaugurated his Church of Satan
in San Francisco),
the cult decamped to
Xtul, Mexico, on the north coast of Yucatan. There
they apparently
discovered Satan. Returning to London in 1967 and
funded by a member's
inheritance, they turned their Mayfair mansion into a
Satanic palace, with
all-night coffee bar, movie house and book store,
where they sold issues
of their magazine, The Process, devoted to
Hitler, Satan and gore.
Processeans went around in black capes, turtlenecks
and silver crosses.
They held telepathy classes and preached the coming
apocalypse. They
approached pop musicians as possible converts. Mick
Jagger's
then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull posed in the
infamous 'Fear'
issue of The Process magazine in 1967. The
legendary bandleader
Graham
Bond got also involved with The Process and died
in mysterious
circumstances under a tube at
Finsbury Park station. Late '67 The Process hit the
States, in LA sidling
up to members of the West Coast rock establishment --
and Charlie Manson.
"Learn to love fear" was one Process teaching. "Soror
H"
wrote
in a Process newsletter from London: "Manson was
clever in his choice of
beliefs: the whole Beatles Helter Skelter thing was,
of course, a model to
instill the PROCESS into his followers, who were more
likely to respond to
such 'turned-on' symbols than the more traditional
ones. The whole thing
was a scam; a guru trick, but Manson's intention was
to open up the occult
centres of perception by a unique pop-based outlook
influenced primarily
by the PROCESS." Later on, it was denied, though, that
Manson would ever
have been an actual Process member, but it's possible
the Church's
teachings may have influenced him. It has to be
remembered, though, that
the late
1960s spawned various occult and "satanic" cults of
which The Process and
LaVey's Church of Satan were just some examples.
Something was obviously
in the air...
The CIA Connection?
Operation CHAOS, launched in 1968, was the Central
Intelligence Agency's
response to civil unrest and cultural upheaval. The
targets of CHAOS -- as
was also the case with FBI's COINTELPRO -- were the
political dissidents
such as the Black Panthers, politically active hippies
and public figures
such as rock musicians, and the "restless" youth in
general.
The use of informants and provocateurs was part of a
massive sub
rosa campaign to subvert the forces of dissent in
the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Joining in the CIA and and the FBI in
this effort was an
alphabet soup of federal agencies: the Internal
Revenue Servive (IRS), the
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the
National Security
Agency (NSA), the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the
Department of Health,
Education and Welfare (HWW), the intelligence
divisions of all the
military services, and numerous local police forces.
Over a quarter of a
million Americans were under "active surveillance"
during this period, and
dossiers were kept on the lawful political activities
and personal lives
of millions more. Those affiliated with black
militant, antiwar, and New
Left groups were prime targets of dirty ticks and
other underhanded
tactics designed to stir up factionalism and
"neutralize" political
activists.
The CIA had
studied the effects of LSD since the 1950's as means
of mind control and
"unconventional warfare". It was the medical tests
conducted by the Agency
that first launched LSD into the youth counterculture,
through such
enthusiastic advocates as Timothy Leary and
Ken Kesey. And
consequently,
what could be better "human guinea pig farm" for the
CIA than
Haight-Ashbury, the epicentre of 60s psychedelic
counterculture?
It is suggested that Manson had contacts with the
Haight-Ashbury Free
Clinic's personnel who conducted government-backed
tests on human
behaviour, one of them Roger Smith, Manson's
parole officer when he
was
released in prison March 1967. Also Dr. David
Smith of the Clinic,
according to Vincent Bugliosi in Helter
Skelter, "got to know the
[Manson]
group through his work in the Haight-Ashbury Free
Clinic". LSD was
instrumental in Manson's power trip and "guru" trip,
for his followers to
slavishly follow Manson's murderous instructions.
Mid-summer of 1969, one month before the Family
massacres, Operation CHAOS
went into the most tight security mode -- just another
coincidence? To
what extent were the CIA aware of Manson's plans?
Manson had had contacts with his victims beforehand.
He had met
Abigail "Gibby" Folger, the wealthy coffee heiress
found dead at Cielo
Drive, at the home of the Mamas and Papas member
Cass
Elliot (who had also been approached by The
Process). Folger doled out
cash to Manson on occasion, then stopped; the
result of which was that Manson turned against her.
When Manson lived in
San Francisco, Folger loaned $10,000 to the Straight
Theater at Haight and
Cole Streets. Manson then lived on Cole Street, on the
same block as the
Process Church. Folger also funded Timothy Leary, the
underground
film-maker Kenneth Anger, and the
Process
Church
in the establishment of the "Himalayan Academy", not
far from the Esalen
Institute; Manson being a hanger-on at the Himalayan
Foundation (a covert
CIA lab?), where he in fact first time may have
encountered The Process.
Earlier in the summer of 1969, Abigail Folger had
retreated to Big Sur, on
the California
coast, at The Esalen Institute, a place for intense
psychotherapy for the
wealthy. She had registered as a volunteer social
worker for the Los
Angeles County Welfare Department. In 1968, Folger
attended
fundraisers set up by her mother to aid the
Haight-Asbury Medical
Clinic around the same time many of the Manson family
women were
being treated there. Despite all her good-doing (or
probably because
of their burden) Abigail Folger had somehow fallen
into the darker
side of the jetset
life. She was, more involved in the drug culture that
was becoming more
prevalent, undoubtedly from her association with
Wojciech Frykowski, who
was heavily into drugs at the time of murders.
The weekend
she was in residence, Charles Manson was an invited
guest.
Lucifer Rising
The
underground
film director Kenneth
Anger was Anton
Szandor LaVey's one-time associate and a devotee of
the infamous
early 20th-century occultist
Aleister
Crowley (whose portrait had appeared on the
cover of The
Beatles 1967 album, among the celebrities appearing
with Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band).
Anger himself makes another
interesting late-60's occult connection -- also with
his close dealings
with The Beatles' biggest "rivals", The Rolling Stones
-- and would
later write in his
notorious Hollywood Babylon:
The '69 Tate massacre was not Old Hollywood. What
befell the red house on
Cielo Drive resembled the devastation caused by a jet
plane crash: the
Bad Ship Lollipop piloted by Uncle Sugar. Charlie
Manson -- deus
ex-garbage can. Wasted lives makes waste, not
tragedy. This was the
Benedict Canyon where [the "Golden Age" Hollywood film
actor] Paul Bern
shot himself; his noble shade now has mixed company.
Actually, Kenneth Anger plays a part in this story.
Anger's
one-time lover,
musician, hippie,
bisexual rogue and the future-devotee of Manson, Bobby
"Cupid" Beausoleil
had been
a guitarist
in an early line-up of Arthur Lee's Love.
1967, Anger lived with Beausoleil in San Francisco in
an old house
where Russian Embassy had previously resided. There
they devoted
themselves to some
hands-on experience of Crowley's so-called "magick" --
a
practice Beausoleil may have put to unsavoury use as a
henchman
for Manson, when he murdered Gary Hinman at the start
of the
Family's spree.
Beausoleil was supposed to perform at San Francisco's
Straight as lead
guitarist in the September 21, 1967 celebration of
"The Equinox of the
Gods" with his band, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz. The
11-piece
rock ensemble (11 is a powerful number in Crowley's
cabalistic system,
symbolising the double phallus of homoerotic sex
magic) was formed by
Kenneth Anger to create
the soundtrack for his forthcoming occult film: Anger
planned to film
the
event as
the focal set piece of his Lucifer
Rising, where
Beausoleil was going to play the lead. Lucifer
Rising was supposed
to depict the downfall, in Crowleyan terms, of the
oppressive Aeon of
Osiris
(or Christian era), and the movement into the Aeon of
Horus (or Lucifer)
--
the Crowley-Anger version of the Age of Aquarius,
supposedly.
However, Bobby
Beausoleil
vanished before the evening was through, stealing
Anger's van and several
cans of film containing practically the entire master
rushes of the film,
1600 feet of
footage.
Furious, the occultist Anger was promptly hexing
Beausoleil with the
deadly "curse of the toad". Oblivious, Beausoleil sped
off towards LA, but
his car broke down just outside an isolated ranch in
the middle of the
Californian desert. There, Bobby was met by a bevy of
spaced-out hippie
chicks who invited him to stay. He willingly accepted
their hospitality
and that of the ranch's owner -- Charlie Manson. The
rest is, as
they say, history.
Anger would create out of the material he had
remaining from Lucifer
Rising
another short of his, Invocation of My Demon
Brother (1969), where
also
Anger's friend Anton Szandor LaVey appeared. For
Invocation Mick
Jagger created some eerie drony sounds with a Moog
synthesizer. In the
film Anger uses superimposed footage such as magical
symbols and
talismans projected onto actors, spliced and repeated
footage of
soldiers leaping out helicopters in Vietnam to create
a backdrop of
violence and chaos, and the shots of the Rolling
Stones performing in
London's Hyde Park. Towards the end of the film Mick
Jagger is seen
holding a child. Bobby Beausoleil's eyes are
superimposed on its face,
then on the faces of Keith Richards and Anita
Pallenberg, thus forming a
kind of rock'n'roll pentagram. In a final puff of
smoke a voodoo doll
appears holding a sign that reads: "ZAP YOU'RE
PREGNANT -- THAT'S
WITCHCRAFT".
Invocation of
My Demon
Brother: Kenneth Anger as The Magus, Anton
Szandor LaVey as Satan. From the same film: Bobby
Beausoleil as Lucifer.
Kenneth
Anger and the Stones members had met in London 1967.
Author Tony
Sanchez, one of the group's friends, describes
that Rolling Stones'
Mick
Jagger and Keith Richards (who attended
Polanski's and Tate's
wedding in 1967), and
their girlfriends Marianne Faithfull and Anita
Pallenberg,
"listened
spellbound as Anger turned them on to Aleister
Crowley's powers and
ideas". Anger had wanted to cast for Lucifer
Rising Mick Jagger as
Lucifer and Keith Richards as
Beelzebub, but the Stones
weren't
keen on the idea.
Anger claims Jagger
agreed at first, then changed his mind.
Anita Pallenberg had met the Rolling Stones in 1965.
She immediately
began sexual relations with three out of the five
members of the group.
Anger, commenting on Anita, said, "I believe that
Anita is, for want of a
better word, a witch.... The occult unit within the
Stones was Keith and
Anita.... and Brian Jones. You see, Brian was a
witch too."
Anger says Jones had a
third nipple, on his inner thigh; the extra nipple
traditionally
considered a certain sign of being a
witch.
Sanchez writes of Anita Pallenberg in his book, Up
And Down With
The Rolling Stones,' "She was obsessed with black
magic and began to
carry
a string of garlic with her
everywhere
-- even to be --
to ward off
vampires. She also had a strange mysterious old shaker
for holy water
which she used for some of her rituals. Her ceremonies
became increasingly
secret, and she warned me never to interrupt her when
she was working on a
spell." He continues, "In her bedroom she kept a huge,
ornate carved
chest, which she guarded so jealously that I assumed
it was her drug
stash. The house was empty one day, and I decided to
take a peep inside.
The drawers were filled with scraps of bone, wrinkled
skin and fur from
some strange animals."
In 1967, the Rolling Stones released an album
titled Their Satanic Majesties
Request. The next year they would follow with
'Sympathy For The
Devil', a key track on their Let It Bleed
album, inspired by
Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and
Margarita, and
probably
by
their deals with Kenneth Anger.
Later on, the Stones members' relations with Anger
turned sore. Keith
Richards and Anita Pallenberg were due to be wed by
Kenneth Anger in a
dawn ceremony on Hampstead Heath, until one morning
when Richards came
downstairs to find that the front doors of his house
had been taken off
their hinges, painted gold and then replaced.
Convinced there was no way
Anger could have got into the house to do this,
Richards called off the
ceremony, though Anger later claimed that Richards
knew all along and had
even given him keys. Jagger also became reticient,
burning all his occult
books.
Ironically, it was Bobby Beausoleil who would
eventually
compose
music for the later version of Lucifer Rising
(which premiered
not earlier than 1980, starring Marianne Faithfull),
while in prison for
Manson
murders, after Kenneth Anger had fallen off with Led
Zeppelin's Jimmy
Page,
who was supposed to score the film. Talk about the
power of forgiveness on
the part of Anger...
Sharon Tate Meets the Ghost of Paul Bern
The supernatural trappings of this story certainly
don't stop here.
Kenneth Anger tells in his Hollywood Babylon
about the
1932 suicide of movie agent Paul Bern,
Hollywood's "Father
Confessor". Bern's
compassionate nature had earned him this title, and
may have well been one
of era's famous film star Jean Harlow's reasons
for marrying this
physically unprepossessing intellectual, twenty-two
years her senior. Bern
was studio boss Irving Thalberg's assistant at
MGM and had been
instrumental in bringing Harlow to the Culver City
factory.
The odd couple was married on July 2, 1932. Two months
later, on
September 5, 1932, the butler found Bern's body in his
wife's all-white
bedroom in their benedict Canyon Mansion. He had shot
himself. He was
nude, sprawled in front of a full-length mirror,
drenched in Jean's
favourite perfume, Mitsuoko, shot through the head by
a .38 pistol which
lay by his side. Jean Harlow was visiting her mother
at a time.
The butler did not notify the police but phoned MGM
instead. Soon Louis
B. Mayer and Thalberg were on the scene. Mayer
found a suicide note on
top of Harlow's vanity table. It seems Bern had a
sexual problem and that
he had
tried to effect intercourse by artifical means, with a
realistic phony
phallus. Despite Mayer's initial attempts to hide
Bern's note, he turned
it over to the police by the insistence of his studio
publicist. The next
day Bern's first wife, a blonde would-be starlet
Dorothy Millette
drowned herself in the Sacramento River. Later on,
there was some
speculation that Paul Bern's death might have been a
murder.
By 1966, Bern and Harlow's Benedict Canyon mansion at
Easton
Drive had ended up to
Jay Sebring, the "hairstylist to stars", who was an
ex-boyfriend of Sharon
Tate's
and one of Cielo Drive's
1969 fellow murder victims. Tate was house-sitting
this same residence
one night while Sebring was away for business.
She was awakened by an intruder in the bedroom.
Tate later told columnist
Dick Kleiner, "I saw this creepy little man. He
looked like all the
descriptions I have ever read of Paul Bern." The ghost
began to run around
the room haphazardly, clumsily bumping into furniture
and cursing loudly,
while blood spurted from the hole in his head.
Frightened, Tate hurried downstairs only to be
confronted by the
horrifying
apparition of someone bound to the newel post, with
his throat
slashed. Tate later said that she somehow knew that
the mutilated figure
was Sebring. Then, the apparition vanished.
In 1969, when they were found, Tate and Sebring's
bodies were bound by a
nylon rope hanging from a roof beam. Sharon Tate had
unknowingly seen a
vision of her fate in 1966.
All Of Them
Witches
As for Roman Polanski, Mikita Brottman's
Hollywood Hex accounts how less than a year
after his eight-months
pregnant wife was knifed to death by the Manson
Family, Polanski commenced
filming William Shakespeare’s bloodiest play,
Macbeth
(1971). Notoriously, there's been talk of the
"Macbeth's curse",
misfortunes that have reportedly happened during the
theatrical
productions of this play. (The theory goes that
Shakespeare included
actual black magic spells in the incantations of the
play's weird sisters.
Those who appear in the play or those who mention the
play's name within
the confines of a theater, other than on the stage,
risk having these
evils brought down on them.) While the filming
proceeded smoothly for the
most part, eerie parallels between the screenplay and
the Manson murders
first raised eyebrows among the crew and, later, among
critics. We are
reminded how Sharon Tate, was hanged before being
stabbed to death, and
how that image (a body thrashing at the end of a rope)
became a dominant
visual motif in the movie. The famous "out damn’d
spots" scene in which
Lady Macbeth tries to expunge the blood on her hands
also takes on
double-meaning when we read that Manson’s followers
tried to wash their
own blood-stained hands at a near-by garden hose
minutes after murdering
Polanski’s wife. There are countless other parallels:
the notion of a
fetus being "untimely ripped from his mother’s womb";
the description of
small children being massacred (which Polanski
visualizes with copious
blood); and ultimately, Shakespeare’s description of
Scotland as a
lacerated woman and "each day a gash / Is added to her
wounds."
Brottman claims that Polanski’s macabre vision of
Macbeth owes its
existence to Charlie Manson. One is the product of the
other. Or perhaps,
and this is the heart of the argument, they are both
products of each
other. They both come from some strange well of
supernaturalism. And, as
Brottman suggests, their ultra-violent images
intertwine until we can’t
tell them apart. When actor Terence Baylor as
MacDuff was supposed
describe the death of his wife and child, Polanski
instructed him, "You’ll
do it this way. I know."
The Age Of Aquarius Turns
Into The Age Of Antichrist
Anton Szandor LaVey claimed to have
cast a venomous curse on the hippie culture he
loathed. This happened in a
ceremony entitled 'The Rising Forth', which took place
on that same
fateful night of 8 August 1969. A black-clad group
gathered in a
candle-lit chamber to launch this hex with the words:
"Beware, you
psychedelic vermin! Your smug pomposity with its thin
disguise of
tolerance will serve you no longer! We know your mark
and recognise it
well. We walk the night as the villains no longer! Our
steeds await and
their eyes are ablaze with the fires of Hell!"
Woodstock in August 1969
had almost coincided with Manson murders that LaVey
claimed this magical
working had triggered.
Also the arrest of Family
members in late took
place about the same time with the disastrous Rolling
Stones outdoor
concert of Altamont in 6 December 1969, which, with
the death toll of
three and over a hundred injured, marked for many the
end of the era of
peace and love. The Hell's Angels were hired to act as
"security", but
finally it was the audience who needed security from
the rampaging Angels,
who kept assaulting crowd members. As the Stones
launched into their
song, 'Under My Thumb, audience member Meredith
Hunter pulled a gun;
the Angels claim he aimed it at Jagger, wearing
sorcerer's robes with the
Greek letter Omega (the last letter in Greek alphabet,
meaning also "the
end") adorned over it; others claimed Hunter was
defending himself from
the Angels. Within moments Hunter was swamped by
Angels, who stabbed and
kicked him to death. The Stones stopped playing,
Jagger -- unaware of
what had just happened -- remarking: "‘Something very
funny always happens
when we start that number".
David Dalton wrote on Manson:
When you need a
monster one will appear. The one thing that most
determines the way we
think about Manson was his timing. He is a demon of
the Zeitgeist,
immaculate in his terror and confusion. Appearing with
almost supernatural
precision in the last months of the '60s, he seemed to
call into question
everything about the counterculture. His malign
arrival synchronised so
perfectly with America's nervous breakdown that is
hard not to bestow
occult meanings on him.
The idea was that he was merely a projection
of our darkest thoughts is a card he played
ruthlessly. He endlessly toyed
with the idea that he was just a mirror, a
materialisation. Manson's
cobbling together of hippy philosophy -- apocalyptic
prophecy, Zen
paradox, radical politics, pop occultism, acid logic,
hipster jargon --
was seamless and so mesmerising that any challenge
would ricochet back on
you.
The canonization
of Manson by certain
segments of the counterculture was a measure of how
desperate and bitter
people had become in the final days of the 1960s.
Tuesday's Child,
an underground paper in Los Angeles, named him Man of
the Year and ran his
picture with the word "hippie" as the caption. The
Weathermen went a step
further by lauding Manson as a heroic, acid-ripped
street figher who offed
some "rich honky pigs"; the Weatherpeople proclaimed
1970 "The Year of the
Fork", after the instrument of LaBiancas' slaughter.
Vincent Bugliosi goes as far as to compare
Charlie Manson to Adolf
Hitler (known also for his occult interests); it
is known that
Manson himself was fascinated with Hitler and the
Third Reich.
What made
both Hitler and Manson (morbidly) intriguing was the
inexplicable and
hypnotic -- if not downright demonic -- charisma, and
the influence they
exerted over their followers. In a typical twist,
Manson compared
his position to that of the
US President, who
sent young Americans to be killed in Vietnam. Unlike
in other known case
histories of
serial
killers, who mostly were loners acting individually,
Manson knew how to
delegate.
Family Legacy
There are also some bizarre afterwords to this story,
as the popular
culture's infatuation with Manson still goes on.
Trent Reznor, the main man of the industrial
dance act Nine Inch
Nails, claimed that he had -- totally without his
knowing, he insisted --
rented
the same Cielo Drive mansion (which address had now,
for understandable
reasons, been changed) to record NIN's 1994 album
Downward
Spiral, whose many songs, such as Piggies and
March of the
Pigs, were closely entangled around Manson mythology.
Furthermore, Reznor claimed, many freak occurrences
happened during
the recording of album, such as various electric
devices turning on
and off without any visible reason; strange dark
figures seen on the
surveillance monitors, and other classic haunted house
phenomena
detected. Was
this just a sick publicity stunt from Reznor, trying
to milk on
Manson's popular counter-culture status, or was
there actually some truth
behind these claims; this probably can't be said for
sure.
Later,
Reznor produced in the very same Hollywood Hills house
another
shock-horror rock band, which called themselves
Marilyn Manson
-- that was also the artist name of their flamboyant
leader, one
Brian Warner, who, suitably, had once been
Anton Szandor LaVey's
pupil...
Nowadays the ex-Cielo Drive 10050 mansion has been
totally
demolished, with a new construction all over the site.
The address
is now 10066.
As for Charles Manson, now in California's Corcoran
State Prison, he
is still said to get four fan letters a day; more mail
than any prisoner
in the United States.
Recommended reading
"Democracy's
Baby", an essay by Jason Wynd (sadly
offline now) tells one
version of what might
have
happened: was the Manson case just an intricate
Manchurian
Candidate or even a Kennedy assassination-type of
plot to put an
end to the 60's counter-culture by demonising hippy?
Or was even more
involved there?
Conspiracy theories abound: it was just too convenient
for the Nixon
regime -- let's get
a gang of crazed hippies on LSD to murder a bunch of
Hollywood
celebrities, add
some Beatles quotes in the whole messy soup (remember
Lennon's
anti-establishment stance),
and voilá: you have successfully discredited the whole
1960s
counterculture.
And to think of all supernatural and occult
connections of this story --
is
there
really some of kind of curse or just
bad karma? There are just too many strange
coincidences around.
One thing that is
sure is that the investigations will
go on at the pHinnWeb Bunker...
Bibliography:
Kenneth Anger: Hollywood Babylon. (New
York: Dell, 1975)
Gavin Baddeley: Lucifer Rising. Sin, Devil
Worship &
Rock'n'Roll. (London: Plexus Books, 1999)
Mikita Brottman: Hollywood Hex -
An Illustrated History of Cursed Movies. Creation
Cinema Collection
#13. (London: Creation Books, 1999)
Vincent Bugliosi,
Curt Gentry: Helter Skelter. The True Story of the
Manson Murders.
(New
York: WW Norton & Co, 1974/1994)
Ivan Butler: The Cinema of Roman Polanski.
(London/New York:
Zwemmer-Barnes, 1969)
Alex Constantine: The Covert War Against Rock:
What You Don't
Know
About the Deaths of Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur,
Michael Hutchence, Brian
Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Phil Ochs, Bob Marley, Peter
Tosh, John Lennon, The
Notorious B.I.G. (Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000).
David Dalton: Pleased To Meet You... Mojo,
September 1999, p. 76.
Erik Davis: TechGnosis:
Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in
the Age of Information. (San Francisco: Harmony
Books, 1998)
James Ellroy: My Dark Places (London:
Century Books/Random
House, 1996)
Mia Farrow: What Falls Away: A Memoir
(New York: Bantam,
1997)
Simon Goddard: Luck of the Devil -- Kenneth
Anger. Uncut,
January 2002, p. 108.
Gary Valentine (a.k.a. Lachman): Season of the
Witch. Mojo,
September
1999, pp. 78-89.
Gary Valentine Lachman: Turn Off Your Mind.
The Mystic Sixties and
the
Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.
(London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001; ISBN: 0283063661.)
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain: Acid Dreams.
The Complete Social
History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties and Beyond.
(New York: Grove
Press, 1985 & 1992).
Edwin Pouncey: Industrial Light and Magick.
The Wire,
September 2004, p. 34.
Colin Wilson: A Criminal History of
Mankind
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984/1990), pp. 625-630
