THE DEVIL’S BUSINESS
On the 50th anniversary of the Tate/LaBianca murders, JAMES RILEY looks back at Charles Manson and his ‘Family’, the ‘cult of the occult’ and the end of the Sixties.
Polanski found himself caught up in speculation and scandal
Fifty years ago, Roman Polanski was enjoying the success of his Satanic horror film Rosemary’s Baby when his wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally killed by Charles Manson’s ‘Family’. JAMES RILEY examines the occult background of the Manson murders.
On 17 August 1969, filmdirector Roman Polanski arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, the palatial LA home he had shared with his wife, the actress Sharon Tate. Emotionally and psychologically, Polanski was in an extremely fragile state of mind. Just over a week earlier, on 9 August, Tate and three of her friends – the celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and actor Wojciech Frykowski – had been brutally murdered in the house. Steven Parent, a young man visiting Cielo Drive’s on-site caretaker William Garretson, was also killed. He had been shot on the driveway. Garretson alone remained unharmed, reportedly because he spent the evening in the cottage that came with his job and was thus hidden safely away from the main house.
It would be November before the murders and those of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca – killed on 10 August in nearby Los Feliz – would be connected to ‘the Family’, a communecum-cult held together by the conman, pimp, and sometime musician Charles Manson. His trial and that of ‘Family’ members Susan Atkins, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten would extend into 1971 and lead to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s true crime bestseller Helter Skelter (1974), named after the bloody writing found on the walls of the LaBianca residence. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the murders, it was Polanski who occupied the spotlight. 1
Reporters turned up en masse to Tate’s funeral in Culver City on 13 August and Polanski found himself swept up in a rumour-mill of speculation and scandal. The media were presenting him as everything from grieving husband to intended target, or even perpetrator, of the murders. It was as a response to this attention that Polanski decided to return to Cielo drive on the 17th to “set the record straight”. With him
were a writer-photographer team from Life magazine, Tommy Thompson and Julian Wasser, as well as the television psychic Peter Hurkos. Hurkos was a Dutch psychic and medium who had gained a certain degree of fame as a ‘psychic detective’ of sorts. He had previously used his purported ESP abilities to analyse the files relating to the Boston Strangler case of 1964. Hurkos had been a friend of Jay Sebring, and Sebring’s family had asked him to perform a ‘reading’ at Cielo Drive to glean information about the crime.
Hardly anything had been changed since the evening of the ninth and for Polanski 10050 Cielo Drive had become a haunted house, utterly uncanny, truly unhomely: a disturbing mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It was all there, just as he remembered it, but there were other, horrible things too: the vivid marks of murder. Worst of all, there was an overwhelming sense of absence. Tate was not there, nor were her and Polanski’s friends, nor was the child they had been expecting: Tate had been eight and a half months pregnant when she died. Weeping in the bedroom, Polanski suddenly realised this attempt at catharsis was too much, far too soon. Hurkos too, claimed to have been physically affected by the heavy atmosphere. After completing his reading, he put it to the press that Tate and her party had been killed by three men turned into “frenzied homicidal maniacs by massive doses of LSD”. It wasn’t just drugs, though. According to Hurkos, the killings “erupted during a black magic ritual known as goona-goona”. 2
Hurkos’s response to Cielo Drive was speculative, inaccurate, but not inapt when seen in the light of the details that would later emerge during the Manson trial. It was also in keeping with the wider climate of 1969. Regular FT readers will be familiar with the work of Gary Lachman whose book Turn off Your Mind (2001) looked at the resurgence of magical ideas, “all things
occultly marvellous” across the decade. 3 By 1969 and the start of the 1970s, this thinking had spread out from the counterculture, taken root within the culture at large and had, in certain quarters, veered very much towards the dark side. The Tate-LaBianca murders crystallised this mood. When Manson’s wild-eyed, intense face appeared on the cover of Life in December 1969 under the banner ‘The Love and Terror Cult’ it came to symbolise an inversion of the values which had been associated with ‘the Sixties’ and its youth-led counterculture: peace, pacifism and harmony. When he entered Cielo Drive, ‘Tex’ Watson is purported to have told a startled Frykowski that he was there to do “the Devil’s business”. For the readers of Life, Manson was the Devil-inchief, the Prince of Darkness who set the diabolical plot into action and loomed ominously over the late Sixties. He appeared to have descended on the world like the portentous enemy of the decade: an evil spirit of the age that embodied all its anxieties and worked for its downfall. 4
The crimes of the Manson Family were indeed atrocious, but what Hunter S Thompson called the “bad craziness” of the late 1960s and early 1970s was not limited to their assault on Cielo Drive. In conducting “the Devil’s business”, Manson was wilfully leading the Family towards a dark cloud, a cloud that was already forming as the decade came to an end, and which hovered particularly close to Roman Polanski.
THE ROSEMARY’S BABY CURSE
In 1969 Polanski was best known for the Satanic horror film Rosemary’s Baby (1968). He had previously made The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), during the filming of which he had met Sharon Tate. Vampire Killers did not lack the bleakness of earlier Polanski features like Repulsion (1965), but it was Rosemary’s Baby that – in a thoroughly domestic manner – took his vision to apocalyptic levels. Based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and featuring Mia Farrow as the young New Yorker Rosemary Woodhouse, the film charts her nightmarish pregnancy in the shadow of an occult conspiracy emanating from the city’s Bramford Building. The film takes place very specifically between 1965 and 1966 with Polanski taking care to bookend the plot with two actual events: the visit of Pope Paul VI to New York on 4 October 1965 and the publication of Time magazine’s controversial cover feature ‘Is God Dead?’ on 8 April 1966. Rosemary’s pregnancy and the eventual birth of Satan’s son on Earth thus take place between the first papal visit to America and the widespread circulation of an article detailing the struggle of theologians to keep religious worship relevant in the modern world. It is as if religious authority weakens as the birth approaches. Unsurprisingly, the film generated criticism from the Christian right and Polanski was also mindful of its pull in the other direction. When he was interviewed by the LAPD in the aftermath of Tate’s death, he suggested that ‘witchcraft’ might well have been a motive in the murder. Polanski thought he could have been the target of a group fixated on the occult themes of the film.
The alleged ‘curse’ of Rosemary’s Baby further cemented this link between cinema and Satan. William Castle, the film’s producer and Hollywood’s grand master of lurid and ‘outlandish’ publicity, claimed that soon after the completion of the film, a series of tragedies affected those involved. There was some truth in this. In April 1969 composer Krysztof Komeda succumbed to an aneurysm following a head injury he received in late 1968. At the same time, Castle was hospitalised with kidney failure. Soon after, he heard about Tate’s murder and went on to claim that the entire production of Rosemary’s Baby and its aftermath was “controlled by some unexplainable force”. Polanski was more sceptical. Witchcraft (in some form) might have been a motivating factor in the deaths at Cielo Drive, but he did not admit to a belief in it. Either way,
both accounts aligned Rosemary’s Baby with a deep sense of misfortune. Whether through coincidence or diabolical conspiracy, bad things seemed to happen to those who worked on the film, and its growing legend carried a clear, cautionary message. As Nikolas Schreck put it: “Anyone who dares to make a film about the Devil is asking for trouble”.
It was not all William Castle’s fault, though. Anton LaVey, High Priest of the Church of Satan, the religious organisation he founded in San Francisco in 1966, merrily allowed the rumour to circulate that, at Polanski’s request, he had acted as a consultant to the production. He also claimed that he appeared in Rosemary’s Baby – as the Devil, no less. In the film’s infamous dream/ rape sequence, in which Satan impregnates Rosemary, the audience is given only a glimpse of an unearthly, beast-like figure. According to LaVey, he was the one wearing the costume – an assertion that Clay Tanner, the actor who actually wore the outfit on set and performed the scene with Mia Farrow, would dispute. 5
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the weird aura of Rosemary’s Baby fed into the popularity of the Church of Satan. Here was a horror film that gave the source of its ‘evil’ a certain mystique. Bad things happened, but the perpetrators ultimately found success rather than punishment, divine, diabolic or otherwise. The film’s Satanists were affluent, cultured practitioners who suggested that with the right exercise of the will one could achieve wealth, status and power. What LaVey offered was a ready-made belief system that reflected this worldview and, ever the opportunist, he pushed ahead with the publication of The Satanic Bible (1969) to capitalise on the film’s success. Standing with his doctrinal text in hand, LaVey was ready and waiting to welcome those prepared to follow the path marked out by Rosemary’s
“Anyone who dares make a film about the Devil is asking for trouble”
Baby and its mythology: a step across the line from the fiction of Satanism to its ‘reality’.
Although it grew in the wake of Polanski’s film, the Church of Satan was also born out of, and tapped into, what the writer Nat Freedland called America’s late Sixties “occult explosion”. Equally reflected in and fostered by the mainstream success of Rosemary’s Baby, this revival of interest in tarot cards, astrology, paganism and other such topics was supported by the appearance of magazines like Man, Myth and Magic (1970-72) and Coven 13 (1969-74). Books by and about Aleister Crowley, practical magick and folk-beliefs were easily available, and an increasing number of head shops were becoming occult dispensaries that supplied suburban witches with crystals, wands and black candles. At the same time, a slew of post-Rosemary occult thrillers like The Deathmaster (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) and William Friedkin’s allpervasive The Exorcist (1973) installed the Devil as the ubiquitous face of horror in the early Seventies. Meanwhile, records by bands like The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Black Sabbath, Jacula, and Coven ensured that ideas of the occult, however hazily defined, were no longer confined to the shadows.
It was Arthur Brown who declared himself “the God of Hell-fire” at the start of his 1968 single “Fire” before treating the British audience of Top of the Pops to the spectacle of him dancing with his head in flames. Brown would have been the perfect support act for Coven, who included the track “Satanic Mass” on their debut album, Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls (1969). Presented as “the first Black Mass to be recorded, either in written words or in audio”, it was the real deal, according to the band, “as authentic as hundreds of hours of research in every known source can make it”. As such, it was potentially just as harmful to the health of the listener as Rosemary’s Baby was to those within range of its ‘curse’. The band “did not recommend” the track to “anyone who has not thoroughly studied Black Magic and is aware of the risks and dangers involved”.
This ‘phenomenon’, as Freeland puts it, invited the usual polarised responses. In his study The Occult Explosion in America (1972), Freeland cites the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, who regarded the post-war popularity of astrology as a positive shift in the cultural landscape. It demonstrated how a “tight, bureaucratic society” could still find itself “fascinated with slipstream knowledge” – that which “doesn’t fit”. On the other hand, the clergyman William Sloane Coffin made a similar point about “America’s renewed interest in occultism”, but came to a far more negative conclusion, offering it as a “beautiful example of lobotomised passivity” that results from the “alienating influence of modernity”. Summarising the debate, Freedland argued that whatever the assessment of public commentators, there was an overriding value connected to popular occultism: it had quickly proved to be “fashionably commercial”. As Time magazine put it in their March 1969 cover story, ‘The Cult of the Occult’, by the late Sixties it was estimated that this ‘niche’ interest had grown into something approaching a million-dollar ‘industry’. 6
THE ‘OCCULT EXPLOSION’
Charles Manson and the Family emerged out of this post-war interest in ‘slipstream knowledge’. Manson arrived in San Francisco in March 1967, having been in jail since 1961 on charges relating to prior parole violations and trafficking across state lines. While inside, Manson, the thief, hustler, conman and pimp, came under the sway of the usual prison influences, but he also read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), learnt about L Ron Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology from his cellmate Lanier Ramer, and saw The Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. When he arrived in San Francisco’s growing countercultural enclave of Haight-Ashbury (see FT356:4047), Manson would have benefitted from its crashpads, street charity and legal clinics, but he also would have been able to bask in the harmonious sense of good will and positive energy as the area transformed into the symbolic capital of the Summer of Love. He looked the part; he carried – along with practically every other new arrival – a guitar on which he played his own songs, and with a headful of The Beatles, Heinlein and Hubbard, he quickly tuned into the Haight’s wavelength. With its communes, its cosmic mysticism, its emphasis on free sex and its clear desire to challenge the social mores of the day, Stranger in a Strange Land already had its place in the countercultural mindset when Manson arrived. Indeed, one of Heinlein’s Martian coinages, the verb ‘grok’, meaning to know or to understand something to the point of absorption, had by 1967 become part of what Jay Stevens has called the “hippie sprecht”. This “charged code” helped to mark out one’s membership of the counterculture while also succinctly expressing its key ideas. Manson grokked the Haight and the Haight grokked him back. 7
At the same time, artists like the filmmaker and magician Kenneth Anger (see FT231:51-52) were making grand claims about the historical significance of Haight-Ashbury and the community it supported. Anger saw the growth of the postwar counterculture as marking an epochal change in human culture, a transition to what he termed – following Aleister Crowley – the ‘Aeon of Horus’, a spiritual period defined by the “crowned and conquering child”. Others dubbed this paradigm shift the coming of the Age of Aquarius. Although Anton LaVey had little respect for his neighbours in the Haight, the seemingly passive and sheep-like ‘hippies’, the Church of Satan followed a similar tack. For LaVey, Satan was not a deity who demanded worship so much as an aspect of one’s personality that required acknowledgement. “Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence!” he preached from the pages of The Satanic Bible, “vital existence, instead of
spiritual pipe dreams!... undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!” LaVey’s Satanism encouraged a focus on the self, the exercise of individual desires in the absence of a Christian morality that pushes the guilt-ridden worshipper towards humility, piety and subservience to a higher authority. LaVey had no interest in the communality of the stereotypical San Franciscan counterculture but just like the hippies who gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In in January 1967, the Church of Satan was stepping away from the expected conventions of American Society. 8
Writing in The Family (1971), his early account of the Manson case, Ed Sanders suggested that the tendrils of an occult conspiracy connected Manson, the Church of Satan and other groups like the Process Church of the Final Judgement (see FT134:34-39). These zones did overlap within the intense bubble of 1960s San Francisco: in 1966 Susan Atkins was a go-go dancer in a Witches’ Sabbat-themed revue show organised by Anton LaVey; as he was gathering together the embryonic Family in 1967, Manson lived in Haight Ashbury close to the Process Church’s San Francisco chapterhouse; and Family member Bobby Beausoleil was a close associate of Kenneth Anger, having starred in the first version of Anger’s occult-epic Lucifer Rising. That said, such links are rather more coincidental than actively conspiratorial. The ‘web’, as it were, of associations that surround Manson and the Family speak less of a grand project with sinister intent and more to the fact that parallel, occasionally intersecting, groups proliferated in the mid to late 1960s. 9
America’s ‘Occult Explosion’ was a typical
“Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence!” LaVey preached
marker of a culture in transition. In the 1960s America was still finding its feet in the post-war landscape. Its youth culture was coalescing into a distinct demographic and the old institutions of government, family, church and employment were losing their potency. It is not surprising that significant numbers would look elsewhere for a sense of direction and personal validation. Esoteric ideas have a habit of blossoming in so-called secular societies when established structures begin to lose their grip. In the case of Charles Manson, though, while he couched the inner life of the Family in these ideas, his overall intentions had little to do with empowering his followers. Rather, he worked by imposing his will over them.
Manson often claimed to have magical powers. His followers, many of whom were young women in their late teens and early twenties, spoke of Rasputin-like hypnotic abilities. When, in mid-1969, he attempted to move the Family deeper into Death Valley to an isolated spot known as Barker Ranch, Manson came up against one Paul Crockett, a thoughtful prospector well versed in religious philosophy. Crockett attempted to “de-program” some of the Family but he felt the gravitational pull of Manson’s influence. As he explained to Vincent Bugliosi, Crockett believed the intensity of Manson’s control “was all part of the occult”. 10 In reality, Manson was a shrewd manipulator who used a combination of flattery, persuasion and force to gain people’s confidence, then their obedience. His repeated riff was that the Family were the “garbage people”, the misfits whom everyone – except Manson – had abandoned. They were special to him, but only because society had deemed them worthless. Having established this ‘Us and Them’ mentality, it was easy for Manson to add to the mix his pseudo-religious misanthropy. When ‘Helter Skelter’ came, Manson would preach, and the world crumbled, it would be the Family who would take control of the kingdom. Provided, of course that they stayed loyal to Manson in the meantime.
That Manson’s apocalyptic sermonising eventually led to the Tate-LaBianca atrocities makes it easy to condemn such cultish activities. The strange and terrible saga of the ‘Love and Terror Cult’ seems to make clear in retrospect where all this fascination with the esoteric was heading. However, Manson was not interested in exploring esoteric pursuits out of curiosity or the desire for knowledge, ‘forbidden’ or otherwise. From the start, his interest was focused on the exercise of power. He was keen to open the minds of his followers, but only to then step in and dominate their thinking. Elsewhere, within the occult scene of the 1960s, one could find committed and sensitive refusals of such authority. For those attracted to the ‘cult of the occult’, the Devil’s business was an invitation to step away from the crowd and explore a sense of individual self-reliance. Charles Manson spoke about these ideas, but only came to exemplify the authority, cruelty and violence of the ‘straight’ world at its worst.
In the 50 years since the Tate-LaBianca murders a wealth of books and commentaries have speculated upon Manson’s mindset and his place within the culture at large. It was Roman Polanski, however, who offered one of the most immediate and insightful responses to the case. His first film after Tate’s death was an adaption of Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy Macbeth (1971). With its three Weird Sisters, the film is saturated with magic, but the witches are not the source of the terrible events. All the malevolence and chaos come from Macbeth himself: it is his obsessive power trip that maps out a path to oblivion.
NOTES
1 Simon Wells, Charles Manson: Coming Down Fast (Hodder, 2009), pp280-283.
2 Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (WW Norton, 1974), p76.
3 Gary Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind (Disinformation, 2001), p6.
4 Wells, p239.
5 Nikolas Schreck, The Satanic Screen (Creation, 2000), pp137-9.
6 Nat Freedland, The Occult Explosion in America (Michael Joseph, 1972), p14.
7 Wells, pp33-4; Jay Stevens, ‘Night Thoughts About the Sixties’, in Peter O Whitmer and Bruce Van-Wyngarden, Aquarius Revisited (Citadel, 1991), ppiii–vi.
8 Gavin Baddeley, Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Plexus, 1999), pp6678.
9 Ed Sanders, The Family (EP Dutton, 1971).
10 Bugliosi, p315.
Adapted and extracted from James Riley, The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties, 2019. Out now from Icon Books.
✒ JAMES RILEY is Fellow of English Literature at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He works on modern and contemporary literature and is the author of the blog Residual Noise.