Well, I've got to hand it to ‘em - his behaviour is horrible, he’s somewhat more sexy than most movie monsters, and he is, indisputably, a vampire… as well as an invisible man to boot!
Leaving aside its modest success in living up to its unforgettable English language title however, it saddens me to report that, in most other respects, José Luis Madrid’s film is unimaginative, amateurish and astoundingly dull.
Disappointingly short on action or what most viewers would define as ‘interest’, this hum-drum tale of an atavistic bloodsucker returning from the great beyond to (oddly) strangle a bunch of women in the countryside around Stuttgart instead relies heavily on extended, procedural dialogue/investigation scenes, many of which drag on for so long that listening to the long-suffering English dubbing team desperately trying to come up with enough mindless banter to fill all the dead air becomes more entertaining than anything being enacted on the screen.
Even the frequent scenes of female nudity, which have earned the film a certain notoriety over the years, and which must have been quite risqué for some markets at the time of release, now seem laughably quaint.
Misogynistic to a fault, these diversions tend to centre around the inherently comic notion that the very first thing most women do upon returning home is take off all their clothes and look at their boobs in the mirror (just to check they’re still there, I suppose); thus making best use of those few, valuable seconds before the horrible, sexy invisible-vampire-man inevitably barges in and throttles them.
Why does the vampire become invisible, exactly? This seems to be a question whose answer is lost to the vagaries of time, but possible explanations include: a) to allow additional footage to be shot in the absence of star Waldemar Wohlfahrt, b) to assist in overcoming the technical challenges of shooting scenes in which Wohlfahrt, who also plays the great-grandson of the vampiric baron, needs to struggle with his undead forebear, or c) just for the sheer bloody-minded hell of it.
Although ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’ is not a film which could be honestly recommended to anyone on any conventional basis, it does at least present us with such a succession of oddities such as the one outlined above that it nonetheless makes for strangely compulsive viewing for… well, for me, at least. I can’t claim to speak for anyone else around here.
Not least among these eccentricities is the extraordinary presence of Wohlfahrt himself.
Later known as Wal Davis (in which capacity he stared as an extremely unlikely Maciste in two of the strangest and most elusive films Jess Franco ever made, ‘Les Glutonnes’ and ‘Maciste Contre la Reine des Amazones’ (both 1972)), Wohlfahrt is a lanky weirdo with a shock of unkempt, peroxide blonde hair, who plays the film’s ‘present day’ protagonist, Count Obelnsky, as a kind of gloomy, self-serious aristocrat who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone to spend his evenings indulging his passion for taxidermy and getting absolutely hammered on hard liquor.
This unusual characterisation becomes even stranger when one learns that ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’ was essentially a vanity project for Wohlfahrt, dreamt up to capitalise on the tabloid notoriety he’d gained after being falsely accused of a series of serial strangulation murders which took place on German highways during the 1960s. (Hence the film’s original Spanish release title, which translates as ‘Vampire of the Autobahn’.)
Although Wohlfahrt - who appears to have been some kind of roving playboy chiefly resident in the German tourist enclave of Benidorm - was acquitted of involvement in the crimes when it was proven beyond doubt that he was in Spain when several of the murders were committed, parallel charges brought against him for illegal possession of a firearm (also overturned), and pimping (for which he served a short prison sentence) suggest he was not exactly what you’d call a gentleman of good character - a suspicion borne out by his highly questionable attempts to use the publicity surrounding his arrest to launch a career in show business.
After a novelty pop single (released in Spain under the name ‘Waldemar El Vampiro’) failed to chart, Wohlfahrt appears to have turned to the film industry… which brings us to ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’.
Tastefully, the film was shot around Stuttgart, near to the locations of the real life crimes of which its star was accused, and its script is packed with references to the murders and to the details of Wohlfahrt’s highly publicised arrest… all of which proves a lot more interesting than anything which actually occurs on-screen in ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’, sad to say.
[Readers wishing to appraise themselves of the full details of this sordid affair are advised to consult either Ismael Fernandez’s booklet accompanying Mondo Macabro’s recent blu-ray release of the film, or David Flint & Adrian J. Martin’s audio commentary on the same disc.]
Meanwhile, another aspect of the film which helped to keep me engaged was its English dubbing, which is executed with a vibe of perfect, dead-pan absurdity which put me in mind of classics like ‘The Devil's Nightmare’ (1971).
This is perhaps best exemplified by the faux-British accent assigned to Count Oblensky (who has flown in from London to reclaim his ancestral seat), which has him preface every other remark with “I say..” or “Now look here..”, and also by the unfortunate decision to name the film’s vampire ‘Baron Winninger’ - invariably pronounced by the voice actors as ‘Baron Vinegar’.
Bonus points need to be awarded too for the bit where, having being asked a fairly reasonable question re: how come a coffin happens to be empty, a police detective responds, “there could be lots of reasons... why should I bother to explain? It's stupid!” A feeling keenly shared by everyone involved in the writing or translation of this film, I’m sure.
In a similar vein, I also liked Count Oblensky's weird insistence that, having taken possession of his family’s castle, he must act in strict adherence to the strange rules imposed in the will of his ancestor, who died in 1886. (I mean, who the hell does he think is going to take him to court to enforce them?)
As you’d hope, the wardrobe choices sported by both Wohlfahrt and leading lady Susan Carvasal (who, as the only female character who does anything other immediately stripping and dying, is introduced way after the film’s halfway point) are frequently jaw-dropping in their gaudy splendour, and, finally, I also really enjoyed the score, which contains several memorable cues composed by Spanish film music mainstay Angel Arteaga.
Most notable of these is an absolutely delightful, somewhat Morricone-esque piece for acoustic guitar, vibraphone and shrill female vocals which plays incessantly during the second half of the film, following Carvasal’s belated arrival. It’s a real ear worm, and I’d love to be able to obtain a copy on 7” or something. (“Love theme from The Horrible Sexy Vampire”, anyone?)
And…. that’s all I got. ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’, ladies and gents. You can meet him if you wish, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. (If nothing else, the disc will look good on the shelf.)
“Tex then told Sadie to scout the house for other people. She evidently climbed up the redwood ladder to look in the loft. And then she walked to the south, toward the hallway off which were the two main bedrooms of the house. In the room on the left, Abigail Folger lay reading alone. She looked up, she saw Sadie, and Abigail waved! Waved and smiled, and Sadie smiled back and walked away. Hi death.”
- p.233
Long ago, in my late teenage years, I decided it was time for me to overcome my natural distaste for ‘true crime’ subject matter and get the full dope on this whole Manson Family business, which I kept finding fearful references to in the ‘60s counter-culture books and rock biogs that composed the bulk of my non-fiction reading at the time.
A remaindered copy of Los Angeles County Assistant D.A. & Chief Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustive 1974 book ‘Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders’ certainly did the trick with regard to nailing down the essential facts of the matter (or, the officially recorded versions thereof, at least), but at the same time, the book’s mountain of dry, forensic detail raised as many questions as it answered, particularly with regard to the aspect of the whole business that most interested me – that being, the wider cultural and sociological circumstances that allowed these insane events to transpire in the first place.
When I learned of the existence of Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’, I naturally supposed that an investigation undertaken by a member of The Fugs might shed a slightly different light on things, but sourcing a copy of Sanders’ book proved difficult at the time, and besides, I didn’t really have the stomach for reading two massive Manson tomes in quick succession.
Fast forward to 2019 however, and I’ve actually ended up with two paperback copies of ‘The Family’ (boring story not worth recounting here), so, with Charlie himself now finally six feet under and the ever-classy Quentin Tarantino apparently revving up his new, Manson-related movie for release to coincide the 50th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders… the time finally seemed nigh to actually read the damned thing. (1)
Before continuing, I should issue a disclaimer to clarify that I generally take a dim view anything which seeks to glorify and/or obsess over the activities of real life serial killers. In and of himself, Charles Manson was little more than a psychotic confidence trickster and pimp, worthy of no more interest or respect than any other creep who has ever made a career out of exploiting human misery.
What fascinates me rather is the frequently extraordinary nature of the marginal – and otherwise largely undocumented - worlds in which Manson moved, and the unique socio-cultural circumstances that allowed him to achieve such remarkable success (in psycho cult leader terms, at least) within them.
Manson’s followers have often been likened to locusts in terms of their tendency to hoover up cash, drugs, vehicles, food, crash-space and favours from anyone who gave them even the slightest opportunity to do so, but in the same way, Charlie himself strikes me as a kind of cultural locust.
In addition to his extensive and well-documented connections to the music and movie industries (which we need not reiterate here), the wider scope of Manson’s activities also seemed to encompass various other cult religious groups, assorted ‘hippie’ communities (including the core San Francisco scene centred around The Diggers, The Grateful Dead and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic), several fringe Christian churches, Scientology and its shadier off-shoots, Anton Lavey’s comical Church of Satan, certain therapy / self help institutions, behavioural/hypnosis specialists and the formative roots of California’s New Age culture, along with the world of literary science fiction, prison sub-cultures (of both racist and homosexual varieties), college students and Berkeley activist groups, pirate radio broadcasters, underground and documentary filmmakers, the world of strip clubs, go-go dancers and ‘stag films’, outlaw motorcycle gangs, desert motor-racing enthusiasts, a wide variety of drug traffickers and manufacturers, the community of stuntmen and cowboys hanging around the Spahn Ranch, and even the culture of modern day gold prospectors and wilderness homesteaders whom The Family interacted with in Death Valley.
Excepting perhaps Dennis Wilson, I’m not aware that Manson ever hung out with any surfers (his activities being primarily directed in-land), and his virulent racism prohibited him from interacting with any black, Latino or Native American sub-cultures (despite his constant bleating about “Black Panthers”, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was ever even in the same zip code as any of them) - BUT, that aside, it seems as if pretty much EVERYONE who has was cultivating a lifestyle outside of the square, mainstream norm in Southern California in the late 1960s was touched by the dirty fingers of Manson at some point, and the groups on the above list who had any credibility to begin with all found themselves degraded and damaged to some extent by the association. Meanwhile, he managed to feed something gleamed from every single one of them into the insane, indigestible gumbo of his eventual ‘Helter Skelter’ project.
II.
How did so many doors open for him? That’s the question that fascinates. Purely in terms of his attempts to infiltrate the entertainment industry, the fact that a character this unkempt, criminally-minded and evidently deranged could manoeuvre himself into a position one step removed from figures of such diverse cultural import as Doris Day, Kenneth Anger, Nancy Sinatra and Neil Young, is remarkable. Even if he’d never turned to murder, Manson's exploits as a kind of Sunset Strip Rasputin would remain intriguing to those of us with an interest in this particular historical milieu.
And happily, as the back cover blurb for Panther’s UK paperback of ‘The Family’ strongly implies, these wider connections between Manson and the cultures he managed to infiltrate is very much the subject that Sanders gets stuck into herein, striking an extremely precarious balance between credibility and sensationalism in the process.
At the outset, I was slightly worried that, given his own sub-cultural affiliations, Sanders may have been tempted to take a more sympathetic line on Manson and his cronies than Bugliosi, but rest assured, he goes even harder on them than the Chief Prosecutor, if such is possible, with his pejorative-heavy descriptions of the Family members betraying the anger of a man who has seen the public image of the movement he tied himself to warped and discredited by the actions of a bunch of kill-crazy goons.
As anyone who taken even the slightest interest in this stuff will be aware, attempting to research the wider activities of the Manson Family is liable to lead one pretty quickly into a bottomless Death Valley black hole of mis/disinformation, rife with missing links, random dead ends and irresolvable contradictions. For each verifiable fact that can be established about The Family, there are a thousand rumours, exaggerations and outright lies to contend with.
As Sanders outlines in his introduction, his method for dealing with this was basically to trawl through the testimony of anyone and everyone who interacted with The Family and proved willing to talk about the matter (indeed, the author implies that his hippie/yippie ‘cred’ allowed him access to deeper sources than the authorities were able to tap), and then to cross-reference these interviews against a map and timeline outlining (as far as is possible) the locations and activities of the killers, their associates and (where relevant) their victims. Basically it seems, everything that proved both interesting and not verifiably untrue made it into the book, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.
As we’ll discuss below, Sanders’ excursions into the further realms of speculation got him into no small amount of trouble, and the accuracy of more or less everything he throws into ‘The Family’ remains open to question, but, when you’re dealing with a set of witnesses who were likely various combinations of stoned, mentally ill, terrified, brain-washed and self-interested at the time of their testimony, I’d argue that he was probably right to retain as many of the “apparently”s, “allegedly”s and “it is reported that..”s as possible.
I do wish that Sanders had been a bit more forthcoming about his sources, and a bit more circumspect about the wilder rumours he offers up as ‘fact’, but at the same time, when it comes to defining the contours of the vast psychic maelstrom emanating from the undeniably grim realities of Hollywood, August 1969, I tend to think there is probably just as much value in hearing what people were saying about the events in their immediate aftermath, as in the cold hard facts themselves – and, so long as you can take him with a generous pinch of salt, Sanders’ book certainly provides an invaluable record of the former.
III.
“It seems strange that all of a sudden they got in to wearing black capes. The girls made Charlie one that reached to the floor. With a flourish Manson tried it on, remarking how no one for sure now could see him when he creepy-crawled. Mary Brunner had a black cape. Sadie had a cape. Squeeky, according to Danny DeCarlo, used to dye clothing black in a pot in the Spahn Ranch kitchen.”
- p. 185
If nothing else, the version of Charlie presented here was certainly industrious. Whereas you’d naturally expect a messianic cult leader to express hostility toward competing gurus, Manson, in keeping with his locust-like M.O., often seems to have actively encouraged the crossover of personnel and ideas between his ‘Family’ and various other groupings of fringe whackos, and Sanders’ book is particularly strong when it comes to making the case that the Mansonites were not an isolated phenomenon, but merely the most high profile symptom of a entire network of similarly demented (and potentially dangerous) groups who seemed to flourishing on the far outskirts of American society.
It is reported, for instance, that in 1968 Manson was present as a “guest of honour” at a bizarre trial / exorcism rite undertaken by some kind of homosexual “death cult” operating out of a commune house (the Waller Street Ashram, otherwise known as the “Devil House”) in Haight Ashbury. During this alleged event, a young man identified only as “Pussycat” – the former lover of the cult’s boss, one Father P., who is later said to have visited Manson at Spahn Ranch - was put through a series of gruelling ordeals to try to save him from a supposed demonic possession orchestrated by a deserter from the group. “Poor Pussycat,” quoth Sanders. (2)
The author also spends a full chapter outlining the eye-opening history of an outfit known as the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O., an illegitimate off-shoot from the branch of the famed Crowleyite magickal order, which seems to have mutated by the late ‘60s into a controlling personality cult masterminded by a woman named Jean Brayton, the wife of a USC philosophy lecturer.
Like The Family, The Solar Lodge made their home on a remote desert ranch, and there seems to have been a clear crossover of ideas (and, Sanders implies, personnel) between Brayton’s group and the Mansonites. Brayton is reported for instance to have also preached a gospel of hard-line racism, predicting the approach of an apocalyptic race war and telling her followers they would need to hide-out in underground caverns to survive the resulting carnage (sound familiar?).
The control Brayton and her husband exercised over their followers seems to have been even more sadistic and authoritarian than that practiced by Manson, but, thankfully, The Solar Lodge was put on ice in July 1969, when their leadership was arrested en masse on child abuse charges, after some horse traders who had visited their ranch called the police, having observed what investigating officers later confirmed to be a six-year-old boy chained up in a six foot square wooden crate and left exposed to the desert sun – which gives us some insight into the kind of outfit these particular creepos were really operating.
It should be noted however that, despite the publicity surrounding this ‘boy in the box’ case, Sanders’ claims regarding Manson’s connections with the Solar Lodge seem never to have been verified elsewhere. A brief web search reveals that the Braytons – who were soon back on the street and heading up another neo-Crowleyite religious order after initially fleeing to Mexico to avoid the child abuse charges – actually initiated legal action against Sanders in 1973, reaching an out of court settlement which ensured that the entire chapter related to the Solar Lodge was excised from future editions of ‘The Family’. Presumably, Panther’s UK paperback, dated that year, must have made it to the printers shortly before this agreement came into effect. Lucky me! (3)
In parallel with the Solar Lodge, Sanders also raises the spectre of a particularly shady motorcycle gang known as the Satan’s Slaves, whose members are alleged to have provided the connecting tissue between the Solar Lodge, the Mansonites, the Ku Klux Klan and something the author refers to as the “Kirke Order of Dog Blood” (seriously, don’t ask). (4)
“There are subjects associated with the Manson case that are so soaked in evil that the mere knowing of them is like a nightmare,” Sanders states later in the book, kicking off a chapter in which he addresses rumours of unidentified Satanic groups (presumably, but not definitively, connected to the quasi-mythical Kirke mob referenced above) carrying out animal sacrifice / blood-drinking / orgy rituals on several remote West Coast beaches in 1968-69. Pretty hair-raising stuff.
Sanders goes on to print verbatim the transcript of an interview with a young male Manson Family hanger on, who claims to have been present at the Spahn Ranch when a set of films – apparently made by another cult group – were screened, depicting both the killing of domestic animals and the apparent decapitation of a human female, carried out in ritual circumstances on a nocturnal beach.
To be honest, the interviewee sounds pretty out of it, but Sanders insists that the information he provided on other subjects proved reliable, so – make of this what you will. As far as I’m aware, nothing concrete on any of this has ever come to light in subsequent decades, so by this stage, it’s nothing more than another sinister, apocryphal underground legend to add to the ever-growing bonfire of such, any grain of truth lost in a long-forgotten vortex of misfiled missing persons reports and blighted, undocumented lives.
In fact, Sanders seems to have had a real bee in his bonnet about the possibly that The Family may have filmed some of their own crimes (presumably using the equipment they stole from a CBS outside broadcast truck in early ’69?), repeatedly hinting that certain “uptight persons” are holding back information from him on this subject to protect their own skins. Whoever these “persons” were, they must have done a pretty good job, because again, fifty years on, this hypothetical footage remains elusive, insofar as I’m aware. (5)
Amid all this shady occult networking, I was surprised to note that Sanders’ book entirely overlooks Manson’s widely documented connections to that most infamous of Scientology spin-offs, The Process Church of the Final Judgement. The details of Manson’s interactions with The Process Church became public knowledge so early in the game that they even made it into New English Library’s otherwise largely fictitious Manson book (which I wrote about here), so it seemed surprising to me that Sanders would have ignored such a rich vein of High Weirdness.
Well, guess what – the first edition copy of ‘The Family’ consulted by writer John Anthony Day for this review, published in The Harvard Crimson magazine in 1971, apparently contained an extensive (indeed, the reviewer claims, excessive) amount of information concerning Manson’s connections to The Process. But, Day also notes that Robert De Grimston, founder of the Process Church, had launched a $1.5 million lawsuit against Sanders and his U.S. publishers. So, consulting the entirely Process-free 1973 U.K. paperback, we can probably guess how that worked out. (6)
IV.
Sanders’ narrative becomes even sketchier, and even more queasy, when he occasionally turns his attention to the wider scope of The Manson Family’s crimes – unsolved category. Basically this consists of a grim run down of unsolved killings (primarily rape-murders of young women, with a weirdo/mutilation element) which were committed during 1968-69, at points when Sanders’ research leads him to believe that members of The Family were in the immediate vicinity.
As you can well imagine, reading capsule summaries of these cold cases – each of them a potential mini-Black Dahlia, just waiting for the True Crime podcasters to descend – is a grim business, and I’m actually not sure which possibility is more disturbing to contemplate; that Tex, Clem, Charlie and the gang were occasionally enjoying a brutal “boy’s night out” as they drifted hither and yon across the West Coast, or alternatively, that these killings actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the easy scapegoat of Satanic psycho-hippies, instead simply representing yr average, run-of-the-mill crime stats for a large American state over a two year period, the faceless perpetrators simply blending back into the mainstream ebb-and-flow of society and keeping their heads down. (7)
Of all the legally dubious claims contained within ‘The Family’ however, Sanders perhaps sails closest to the wind when he isuggests a connection between Charles Manson and the Esalen Institute, a storied and influential spa resort and spiritual / therapeutic retreat based in Big Sur, which survives to this day.
These claims centre around the admittedly intriguing fact that, a week prior to the Tate-LaBianca killings, Manson seems to have jumped behind the wheel of a stolen Hostess Twinkie bakery truck and spent a weekend tooling around the Big Sur area – entirely on his own, unusually, although he did manage to recruit a new Family member / sex slave / punching bag (a pregnant seventeen-year-old named Stephanie) along the way.
Sanders believes that Manson travelled to Big Sur to visit Esalen, and indeed, various rumours to this effect swirl about the lower depths of online Manson-ology. This is significant due to the fact that Cielo Drive murder victim Abigail Folger was a frequent visitor to the Institute, and Sharon Tate may or may not have also attended at some point.
The suggestion of a tangible connection between Manson and his future victims is chilling enough in itself, but once again, Sanders over-plays his hand by stating, apparently apropos of nothing, that both Folger and Tate were present at Esalen on the same weekend that Manson allegedly visited – a suggestion which I’m sure is contradicted by the official record, if not elsewhere in this very book.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Esalen Institute have spent the past fifty years vigorously denying that Manson ever came anywhere near them (their statements on the matter have been pretty weird and contradictory however, but.. that’s another story), and indeed, Sanders reports that a cast iron veil of secrecy hangs over the whole affair, even stating that representatives of the Institute have issued what he describes as a “veiled snuff threat” against him, should he persist in pursuing the matter.
Was there another, subsequent edition of ‘The Family’ with the references to Esalen also redacted? I wouldn’t be surprised. (8)
Exactly how many re-drafts did the text of this book go through to avoid legal action, I wonder? Three, four? I mean, I’m guessing the Kirke Order of Dogs Blood were unlikely to put a call through to their lawyers, but even so, if Sanders took some of the stuff he reports here remotely seriously, he must have spent a few years in fear of waking up some dark night with the smell of axle grease in his nostrils and a curved blade pressed to his throat.
V.
“There was one heavy problem facing Helter Skelter. By early 1969, the West Valley Station of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had in use Bell-65 two-man helicopters with powerful searchlights installed that could light up a city block from 1000 feet in the air. Manson had various plans to deal with these helicopters. One was to attack the helicopter with magic. Another method was to thwart the helicopters at night by taping the headlights of the dune-buggy battalion with black tape, leaving only a small slit to allow a thin ray of light to escape, hopefully undetectable from the air.”
- p. 124
There is much more I could go on to say about other aspects of ‘The Family’; there is so much rich, soggy flesh here to pile onto the bones of the crazed milieu Manson and his followers operated within. Not least, the significant portion of the book which Sanders devotes to outlining the vast auto-theft / dune buggy manufacturing ring orchestrated by the Mansonites during their final months of freedom - an operation which proved necessary simply to keep the cult’s membership mobile and maintain supply lines across the incredibly inhospitable terrain which Charlie seemed increasingly fixated on forcing his followers to inhabit.
As is implied by the book’s memorable sub-title, Sanders details Manson’s apparent dream of drilling his Family into a unit of full on, ‘Road Warrior’ style desert outlaws, undertaking armed raids on the small towns bordering the Death Valley national monument, carrying off food and women like some kind of motorized neo-vikings, and bamboozling the cops from their impenetrable network of underground hidey-holes.
Even if they’d been left to their own devices however, the chances of The Family achieving this level of self-sufficient barbarity seems remote. Another thing that becomes clear from Sanders’ book is that, far from their rep as ruthless killers, these hapless hippies – many of them nursing either young children or severe mental illness by the time Helter Skelter took hold – were simply not prepared for the hardship of the desert.
As food and shelter became scarce, as Charlie became more violent and demanding, and as lines of communication between various outposts started to fray, The Family’s vital biker allies disappeared, and tertiary family members began drifting away at a steady rate, several of them walking vast distances across the desert in the search of help.
When a combination of armed police units and National Park officials finally began carrying out raids and pulling the Mansonites into custody on grand theft auto and arson charges in September/October 1969, the roving miscreants are reported to have been in an appalling physical condition, riddled with sores and parasites and caked in mud to protect themselves from the sun, the girls having tonsured and shaved their hair into bizarre, Mohawk-ish arrangements….. a far cry from the heady days of '68, when Gregg Jakobson and his fellow “golden penetrators” would cruise over to the group’s latest Hollywood hang-out to enjoy a few sexual favours in exchange for vague promises of booking Manson in for another studio session.
Where might this trip have ended, if the authorities hadn’t moved in to put a stop to it? Would the whitened bones of The Family’s hardcore members and assigned assassins now be buried in the sands of some distant canyon, as survivors of the nastier end of biker/field hippie sub-culture mutter darkly of their legend, and probable fate?
God knows, it certainly would have saved the State of California a lot of time and effort, and given a few generations of “transgressive culture” assholes and neo-nazis one less incarcerated icon to look up to.
Crazy, man. Crazy.
A song for the closing credits:
----
(1) I was initially shocked to hear that Tarantino (and, more to the point, the studio marketing bods backing him up) had decided to tie-in the release of their new movie with the anniversary of – uh - *a mass murder*, but cooled down after reflecting on Jello Biafra’s memorable answer to a question re: whether a Dead Kennedys concert on the anniversary of JFK’s shooting was in good taste: “well, the assassination wasn’t very tasteful either”.
(2)It is interesting to note that, despite his racism, misogyny and relentless enthusiasm for heterosexual congress, Manson never seems to have espoused any homophobic sentiments, having spent much of his of early life exploring the “other side of the tracks” whilst incarcerated.
(3)Those wishing to journey further down the Brayton / Solar Lodge rabbit hole are advised to begin here.
(4)Trying to google up some info on the Satan’s Slaves who were active in California in the mid/late ‘60s turns up practically nothing, beyond the knowledge that dozens of other motorcycle clubs have used the same name over the years (most prominently in the U.K.), and a reference to a California-based gang bearing that name who were “patched over” by (ie, incorporated into) The Hell’s Angels in 1978.
(5)Adult film fans with a stronger stomach for research than myself may wish to take note of the following paragraph, from p. 126: “Around this time [January 1969] Charlie and the girls made a pornographic movie by the swimming pool at 2600 Nicholas Canyon Road in the hills above Malibu. The producer, according to Los Angeles homicide officers, was Marvin Miller.” Your safety filter-free search engine of choice awaits.
(6)It seems ironic in the extreme that De Grimston should have filed for defamation against Sanders in the same year that The Process Church’s official magazine proudly published an article dictated by Manson from his prison cell, but Jesus/God/Lucifer/Satan moves in mysterious ways I suppose.
(7)The timeframe of Sanders’ book, it should be noted, discounts the inclusion of the several rather more compelling “officially unsolved” murder cases which sprang up in parallel with the trial of Manson and his co-defendants during 1970, including the violent death of at least one woman who severed ties with the remnants of The Family, and the mysterious disappearance of a controversial and reportedly incompetent attorney who for a time was representing several of the Mansonites in court… until he reportedly went on a camping holiday and never returned, delaying the trial for several weeks as a result. But, this isn’t a True Crime blog, so I’ll shut up now, and let you investigate further, should you wish to.
(8)If you’ve somehow found your way out of the other internet wormholes I’ve dumped on you so far in this post, take a leap into this one for everything you need to know re: Manson and Esalen. My own takeaway is that, compared to a lot of these rumours, the kernel of this one actually seems pretty plausible.
I mean, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that Charlie may have called on the Institute, either to try to connive his way in as a guest lecturer/visiting guru, or to audition for someone involved in organising Esalen’s annual folk festival, and that he may have subsequently kept quiet about it to salve his ego after the Institute - known for its tight security and elitest attitude - presumably just told him to get lost. From there, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that, in the depths of his enraged, stoned/paranoid mind, he might have pegged the Esalen crowd as the same “type” he encountered when he scoped out 10050 Cielo Drive in search of Terry Melcher? And, a week later, Helter Skelter time? We will likely never know, but hey - it’s a theory. What’s that? Oh yeah, NOT A TRUE CRIME BLOG. Sorry.
If I approached New English Library’s cash-in Patty Hearst book expecting the same kind of questionable laffs I extracted from their cash-in Manson book, disappointment was soon the result.
Perhaps having learned a thing or two since they entrusted their earlier true crime opus to a pseudonymous London-based hack channelling a fictitious Californian hipster, NEL instead assigned this gig to David Boulton, a legit journalist and broadcaster whose achievements to this date had included a book about Conscientious Objectors during the First World War and a history of the Ulster Volunteer Force.
As such, ‘The Making of Tania’ presents what I am inclined to believe is a fairly sober and credible overview of the facts as they stood at the time of writing, largely avoiding the kind of sensationalism I was expecting (and, to be honest, quite looking forward to), and resorting to speculation only when gaps in the factual narrative make it unavoidable.
Above all, Boulton’s book serves to remind us that, extraordinary though the Hearst case may seem when viewed at a distance, the deeper one digs into the details, the more senseless and depressing the events surrounding Patty’s kidnapping in February 1974 become. Tapping into the very dankest corners of America’s pre-Watergate darkness, it is a story that leaves almost everyone involved looking irresponsible, ineffectual and ultimately idiotic.
One of the most interesting aspects of reading a factual account written so soon after the events described is the huge holes that remain in the centre of the narrative Boulton builds from the sources available to him (holes that to a certain extent remain unfilled, or at least bitterly contested, to this day).
At the time of writing, the majority of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s core members were already dead, and the survivors (including Patty/Tania) were on the run, their whereabouts unknown. Unsurprisingly, none of them had stopped to give any interviews.
Whilst the SLA’s movements and activities could be pieced together with a reasonable degree of accuracy (more thanks to the efforts of the media than the police, it seems), the details of what actually transpired within the group – their personal relationships, the balance of power, decision-making processes, and the means by which the members (most of them fairly comfortable, educated, white twenty-somethings lest we forget) ended up being driven to such an extreme degree of fanaticism – all of these things were (and to a significant extent, still are) a complete unknown.
Although a substantial amount of space in the book is taken up with reproducing the SLA’s assorted communiqués and tape transcripts in full, this feels less like an easy way to fill pages, and more like a necessary decision on Boulton’s part. After all, these unedifying diatribes – so charmless, hypocritical and sickeningly self-congratulatory you’re forced to wonder how their authors could possibly have taken them seriously – represent the only insights we have into the thought processes of the people who are ostensibly the “main characters” of our story.
One can easily imagine the frustration that legitimate activists working for left-wing/socialist causes must have felt when these ridiculous, gun-toting bozos suddenly came out of nowhere to instantly dominate all media coverage of progressive politics, but, they could hopefully at least take some succour from the fact that the SLA saga also served to show the USA’s state and federal law enforcement agencies at their absolute worst.
Repeatedly, the authorities’ failure to properly secure crime scenes or follow up evidence led to them missing easy chances to apprehend SLA members (potentially without bloodshed), and, when they did eventually catch up with them – in a casual rooming house in Compton, South Central L.A. in which the bulk of the group had inexplicably taken up residence, apparently without making the slightest effort to disguise their identity – the resulting confrontation was handled appallingly by both the LAPD and FBI.
That no innocent bystanders were killed as the cops opened up with automatic weapons, smoke bombs and hand grenades in a heavily populated urban area, without even bothering to make certain that the buildings in front of them were free of civilians, is little short of a miracle. (Astonishingly, Boulton reports that at one point they were moments away from opening fire on the wrong house, until a passing child(!) informed them that the “white girls with guns” were actually behind them, on the other side of the street.) Would the Feds have behaved like this had the SLA chosen a more affluent white neighbourhood for their showdown? You tell me.
Likewise, the six SLA members within the house may have been armed, dangerous and deluded individuals, culpable for any number of crimes including several murders, but they did not deserve to die like dogs - shot down as they tried to flee, or left to suffocate in the basement of a burning building. Whilst I have limited sympathy for their half-baked ideology and misguided activities, the descriptions herein of their final minutes are enough to make any reader feel sick to the stomach.
I’d like to think I’m not the kind of person to automatically criticise law enforcement agencies without good reason, but reading Boulton’s note that the charred body of Camilla Hall – shot in the head by a police marksman - was found next to the skeletal remains of the Siamese kitten that had accompanied her since her pre-SLA days as a Berkeley drop-out, led me to share the anger of the Compton resident who subsequently spray-painted a perfect, elliptical epitaph on the side of a building overlooking the smouldering ruins: “IT TOOK 500 COPS…” .
Meanwhile, the evidence Boulton presents regarding Donald DeFreeze – aka ‘General Field Marshall Cinque’, de facto leader of the SLA – vis-a-vis the possibility that he was working as a paid informant and agent provocateur for a (no pun intended) “black ops” unit within the CIA right up to (and even beyond) his suspiciously hassle-free ‘escape’ from Soledad prison in 1973, is extremely compelling.
I’m not sure what info has come to light on this in subsequent years, and I’m aware that relying on a single source for something like this is always a mistake (particularly when the source in question is a 40+ year old New English Library paperback), but again, this is an instance in which the facts seem to speak for themselves.
DeFreeze was unaccountably acquitted of serious criminal charges (all involving firearms) on half a dozen occasions during his time in LA, and, when he finally ended up behind bars, he was allowed to practically walk out of a disused wing of Soledad, after Vacaville prison’s anarchic ‘Black Cultural Association’ programme had allowed him to establish personal connections with the unaffiliated Berkeley ‘radicals’ with whom we would later go on to form the SLA.
Again, you can do the math. Could this ‘wild card’ police operative – already noted for his schizophrenic tendencies and dangerous obsession with guns and explosives – have slipped his handlers and gone off-piste only when he realised the fun he could have leading a cabal of machine gun-toting white chicks, provided he could keep his “political” bullshit flowing well enough for them to buy him as a revolutionary Black Power guru..?
Thanks to the gusto of the police gunmen in Compton, we will never know whether or not ‘Field Marshall Cinque’ genuinely believed in the revolutionary ideals he espoused via the SLA’s propaganda, and, in fairness, Boulton doesn’t extend his speculation quite as far as I have in the preceding paragraph. But, it is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that DeFreeze was deliberately placed within the initially harmless Berkeley milieu in order to inform on and incriminate its occupants... thus potentially making this whole sorry mess just another gift to the people, courtesy of the paranoid excesses that predominated within US law enforcement during the final years of J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI.
Surprisingly, about the only person to emerge from Boulton’s book with any dignity at all is Patty’s father, Randolph Heart (the fourth son of William Randolph Hearst). Following his daughter’s kidnapping, Hearst went to great lengths to arrange meetings with representatives of organisations affiliated with the SLA, and announced, apparently in earnest, that his view of the world had been changed as a result of these discussions. He implemented the SLA’s demands for a vast public food programme about as well as he could within the prohibitive timeframe and guidelines the kidnappers had outlined, eventually sinking so much money into it that the solvency of his business empire was put in jeopardy, and he enraged the editorial staff of his newspapers by ordering them to re-print the SLA’s monotonous tracts in full, as they had demanded.
For these efforts, Hearst received nothing but abuse from all quarters, including from his own daughter. Given his impossible situation, one can hardly blame him for effectively washing his hands of Patty’s fate following the Compton blood-bath, and withdrawing from the public eye insofar as was possible. For this of course, he received yet more abuse – all of which leaves me feeling rather sorry for the poor guy, regardless of his nominally unsympathetic status as the multi-millionaire son of a notorious tyrant.
All of which, I realise, tells you very little about the aesthetic or editorial policy of New English Library, which is what I instigated this series of posts in order to discuss. But what can I say – as an example of no nonsense, long form journalism, ‘The Making of Tania’ proved an unexpectedly engaging read, blowing the dust off a series of now-historical events that I was broadly aware of, but had never really taken the time to read up on in this level of detail.
I hope I won’t need to derail this weblog into factual/, ‘true crime’ territory too often – rest assured, no icky serial killer fascination is forthcoming - but, like the Manson murders a few years earlier, the Hearst/SLA saga is a tale that has entirely transcended it’s historical context, becoming a key ingredient in the stew of the crazy culture that BITR exists to celebrate, and as such I find that freshening up my knowledge of the genuine article every now and then proves quite rewarding.
N.B. – I’m unsure whether or not this Pan edition actually dates from 1957 – only the copyright / first publication date is given. Given the Pan catalogue number (G327) I’m guessing 1959/60-ish.
Since I last shared some Pan paperback covers here in 2016, I’ve been fortunate enough to add some really great new Pans to my collection, particularly with regard to the imprint’s always interesting crime list. So, the next few weeks seems as good a time as any to share them with you. Expect a new post every few days.
As I’ve observed in the past, these books remain cheap and easy to find, without too much of a cult cache or a collector’s market sniffing around them, but nonetheless they are frequently things of beauty – none more so than this wonderfully atmospheric cover by Dave Tayler. (Source.)
The silky light and shade here reminds me of a golden age Hollywood movie poster more than anything, and, needless to say, the book itself sounds like a fascinating read too – I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck into it at some point (perhaps during a future trip to Paris, fingers crossed).
"It happens. It has happened. It will happen again. The West has its spaces -- wide-open spaces. The fuzz can't be everywhere. The nearest police station could be a hundred miles away. A fire only shows for a few miles. Sound only travels a short distance before erasing itself in the atmosphere. […] Across the canyon, in the other hills, another group played out the last rites of a witchcraft ceremony -- and the orgy prepared to cut loose."
- p. 126
Following on from the Manson-ite speculations contained in my review of The Dunwich Horror earlier this month, not to mention the recent announcement that Quentin Tarantino intends to make a new Charles Manson movie (reaching cinemas in time for that all important 50th anniversary, no doubt), this feels like as good a moment as any to pull this one off the shelf and give it a quick once over.
New English Library hold a well-deserved reputation as the sleaziest of UK paperback imprints, but even so, they really outdid themselves here with an example of pulp non-fiction at it’s most crassly exploitative, complete with an unaccredited publicity shot of the recently murdered Sharon Tate gracing the back cover.
Predictably enough, searching online for info pertaining to one ‘James Taylor’ who “tried to found his own religion” in “the ‘golden land’ of California” yields little, but regardless, we can assume that the whole ‘religion’ thing didn’t work out too well for the mysterious Mr Taylor, as the early months of 1970 seem to have found him taking a deep breath and banging out no less than 127 pages of prose for NEL, armed with nothing more than a few newspaper articles, a passable command of contemporary hipster patter and a vague memory of watching some horror movies.
As a result, I think we can safely claim that ‘Satan’s Slaves’ was one of the first (if not THE first) “Manson books” to hit shelves anywhere in the world – an achievement only slightly undermined by the fact that it is utter bollocks.
That’s not to say of course that it is anything less than a wholly enjoyable read for those of us inclined to read such a thing in the first place. Writing in a free-flowing, gonzo style that allows him to leave narrative strands hanging whenever he feels like it and switch subjects on a dime, Taylor initially sets out his stall with a bunch of vague “L.A. – city of evil” / Hollywood Babylon type think-piece blather, before giving a general “overview for the squares” of the expansion of California’s 1960s counter-culture from it’s Beat Generation origins through to the glory days of Haight/Sunset decadence.
Taylor then moves on to a few case histories of earlier L.A.-based religious hucksters (Father Riker, L. Ron Hubbard, Sister Aimee McPherson), all related with the “insider gossip” curled lip sneer of a mid-century tabloid expose. Adding to the general tabloid vibe, the author also throws in some
great, entirely arbitrary, chapter headings like ‘NO HALO FOR SATAN’ and
‘INTERCULTIC BATTLEGROUND’, which I enjoyed. He also goes into great detail concerning the careers of certain cult leaders and religious organisations (eg, the ‘Bakar Ifna Temple’, ‘Charles Irish’) whose activities remain so thoroughly underground that a google search turns up nothing except references to this book.
More parochially, the supposedly California-dwelling Taylor also finds time to criticise the ‘blundering’ attitude of Britain’s Labour government in reforming the trade unions, and complains that the MBEs awarded to The Beatles are “little short of bribery”, for some reason.
Charles Manson himself fades in and out of the book’s digressive flow, with the paucity of concrete info available to Taylor at the time of writing sometimes becoming painfully clear. [Although the month of this book’s publication in 1970 is unknown to me, the author mentions several times that a date for the Family’s forthcoming trial – which began in June of that year – had not been set whilst he was writing.]
Interestingly, Taylor does reference the alleged connection between Manson and The Process Church of the Final Judgement, demonstrating that this idea (now a ubiquitous part of the mythos surrounding Manson) was already common currency even this early in the game. He also speculates, apropos of nothing, that Manson might have picked up some of his mystical hoo-doo by “meeting a Scientologist in prison”, so… there ya go.
Happily, when rehashing the available press cuttings starts to run thin, Taylor wisely decides to take off into the realms of pure fantasy, penning a number of lengthy, entirely fictional fantasias of Death Valley orgies and Satanic invocations whose blood-curdling content could have fitted right into some post-Manson hippie horror movie of the ‘Werewolves on Wheels’ / ‘I Drink Your Blood’ variety. At some point in proceedings, the author even seems to drift into an assumption that Manson and his followers were actual, card-carrying Satanists (see caption on the photo above), and he also alleges that Manson personally ordered the slayings of at least twenty five people in the Los Angeles area.
Needless to say, if you dig the particular aesthetic of this cultural moment, and if the extreme bad taste of the whole venture doesn’t put you off, ‘Satan’s Slave’ proves an absolute hoot, best enjoyed as a piece of somewhat factually-influenced pulp fiction. [UPDATE: according to this paragraph in Tony Allen’s ‘Brit Pulp! The Fast and Furious Stories from the Literary Underground’ (Sceptre / 1999), ‘Satan’s Slaves’ was actually the work of frequently pseudonymous NEL scribe James Moffat, best-known for writing the ‘Skinhead’ series and various other young adult books under the name ‘Richard Allen’.]
