Toronto Star
There's no use going looking for 10050 Cielo Dr. any more. It's gone, razed more than a decade ago. On the rough, tumbling northern slope of the San Fernando Valley's western edge, north of Beverly Hills, the house that stands there now shows a different address.
But that hasn't stopped legions of gawkers from rubbernecking their way up the scrubby valley wall along Cielo Dr., spectrally still and remote. It is a macabre pilgrimage, to the place where, 40 years ago tomorrow, a generation's defining criminal atrocity took place.
Four decades later, the multiple murders of actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant at the time; her former fiancé, hairstylist Jay Sebring; Voytek Frykowski, a friend of Tate's husband, director Roman Polanski; and Abigail Folger, the Folger's Coffee heiress, still resonate with a grim, consuming clarity.
Feel-good nostalgia tells us that 1969 was the height of the hippie, warm-fuzzy era of peace and love, and that this week's other 40th anniversary, of the Woodstock music festival, was its pinnacle: A moment where individualism, non-conformity and the creative impulse reigned, where repression was challenged and, in many ways, fell.
But that's rose-coloured hindsight of a fractious time that unleashed demons as much as it seeded naïve idealism. The Cielo Dr. killings, and the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Feliz a day later, were as much a product of those times. No one embodies this dark flowering more than the murderers' puppetmaster, Charles Manson. And his stamp on the culture is arguably deeper and more lasting than Woodstock's.
Part of it, surely, is the extremeness of the violence, executed with a cool sense of purpose – 102 stab wounds inflicted on the four victims in the house plus Steven Parent, an 18-year-old delivery boy shot dead in the driveway on his way home as the killers made their way to the house.
The next night, the killing continued, this time in the hills of Los Feliz, where Leon and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered in much the same way, stabbed with a knife and fork. Leon's stomach had carved on it the word "WAR."
But just as horrifying as the brutal nature of the crimes were the killers themselves: Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins – long-haired flower children, and proverbial "good kids," for the most part; Watson was an A student and high-school star athlete; Krenwinkel the daughter of an insurance executive and an actual choirgirl.
But Manson, their patriarch and orchestrator of the murders, looms huge over them all, and the entire counterculture generation.
The killings were a perplexing infusion of revulsion in what was, by now, a waning countercultural movement: The Manson "family," as they called themselves, were hippies, for all appearances – charter members of the peace and love generation, which met violence with sit-ins, and guns with flowers. They were political and anti-establishment, as were so many of their generation. They were indulgent users of drugs like marijuana and LSD. They lived on a commune, the Spahn Ranch, and were, by many eyewitness accounts, practitioners of "free love."
But when their time came in court, the world was shocked to see the women, in hippie garb, holding hands and singing, ridiculing prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, laughing at his accounts of their crimes.
"The mantra of the era was `peace, love and sharing,'" says Bugliosi. "Prior to (the Manson case), people just didn't identify hippies with violence. Then the Manson family comes along, looking like hippies, but being mass murderers. And that shocked America: How could this be?"
Trying to derive meaning from seemingly random acts orchestrated by a pyschopath is dangerous territory. But there's little question that the murders, both at the time and in hindsight, cast a pall over the counterculture. Violence in America was nothing new; neither was murder, nor were high-profile cases. But brutal, unjustifiable violence from within, committed in its name? This was something new.
A week after the murders, Woodstock took place in upstate New York, swelling spontaneously to a half-million kids listening to acts like Country Joe and the Fish, Santana and Jimi Hendrix. But it was revelry cast in dark shadow.
"The first thing to recognize is that the past and history are different," says John Storey, a cultural historian in the U.K. and the author of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. "The struggle over the meaning of the '60s, for example, changes on whether we highlight Woodstock or Manson. This, in simplified form, could be said to be the difference between those who view the '60s and its legacy as positive or negative."
Meanwhile, the counterculture – to the conservative establishment at the time, not much more threatening than a bunch of lazy, misguided kids who needed to grow up – was morphing quickly from social revolution into fashion trend and marketing opportunity.
Earlier festivals, like The Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967, were free; later that year, the Monterey Pop Festival was intended to raise money for free clinics (though the $500,000 it raised mysteriously disappeared).
By Woodstock, the naive sheen had dulled. "The real thing Woodstock accomplished," Bill Graham, the former manager of Jefferson Airplane, told Storey, "was that it told people rock was big business."
If Woodstock was the beginning of the end, then the murder indictments on Dec. 8, 1969, of Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and two other family members, Linda Kasabian and Leslie Van Houten, were to many its grim, undeniable conclusion.
"Is Charles Manson a hippie?" asked Rolling Stone in one cover story. "The '60s abruptly ended on August 9, 1969," the date of the murders on Cielo Dr., wrote Joan Didion in her 1979 collection of personal essays on life in the '60s, The White Album.
That was a philosophical take. At the time, others were more practical, driven by fear. In the October 1969 issue of Los Angeles magazine, spurred by the Manson family murders, Myron Roberts wrote an alarmist indictment of a generation run wild, fuelled by drugs, lax morals and a loss of standards.
He chided Life magazine's special edition on Woodstock for making it "a cultural event of monumental import, just behind Genesis and landing on the moon." Woodstock was lauded for being civil, to which Roberts wrote that "no one stopped to ask why the absence of violence at a large, public gathering of the young should be considered more remarkable than the fact that the fans who go to football games ... do not customarily tear up the stadium or attack one another."
He then compared Woodstock to "another youth festival – the Nuremberg Rallies – where Hitler, Goebbels & Co. were the featured group and the multitudes of fans were stoned on slogans, not grass." Not finished yet, he concluded the article with a practical guide to "protecting yourself from `freaky' crime" – meaning drug-induced, of course, perpetuated by a darkening culture of hippiedom.
And this was before any of the Manson crew had been caught. When Manson, looking beatific, long hair and beard flowing, was arrested, the dark side of the era had a face. And when the grisly details of the murders came out, the death knell for the counterculture was sounding loud and clear.
It is, by now, a gruesome litany: Manson was obsessed with the Beatles, who were central to the countercultural movement. The White Album in particular. He believed they were sending him messages, enlisting him to start a revolution. The song "Helter Skelter" became, for him, a command to start a race war between blacks and whites; "Piggies," ridiculing the British upper classes eating "with forks and knives," was for Manson an invitation to wipe out the wealthy ("what they need's a damn good whacking," the song went).
The Tate house was chosen over an old grudge that had nothing to do with Tate or any of the other victims. Manson, an aspiring songwriter, had auditioned there for producer Terry Melcher when he lived there with his then-girlfriend, Candice Bergen. Melcher, after witnessing Manson in a frenzied fight one night, broke off ties, which infuriated Manson.
The night of the murders, when the family members arrived, Parent was rolling down the driveway. Watson shot him dead at the wheel. He then cut the phone line, and the three made for the house.
Slitting a screen, the threesome slipped inside. Tate, Sebring and Folger, thinking they were being robbed, were tied by the neck with a rope, which was flung over a support beam in the living room. They asked what would happen to them. "You're all going to die," Watson said calmly. Panic took hold.
Frykowski got loose and burst outside, screaming for help. Watson stabbed him 51 times. Inside, Tate, Sebring and Folger struggled to get free. The stabbing, 102 wounds altogether, came in a flurry. Tate, who was eight months pregnant, begged to be allowed to have her baby. Atkins stabbed her 16 times. In custody, she told Bugliosi that she told Tate, before she killed her: "Bitch, you're going to die. I don't have any mercy on you." When she was done, she wrote "PIG" in Tate's blood, before taking a shower and leaving the scene.
The next night, the Manson family, this time joined by Kasabian, Van Houten and Manson himself, went looking for more victims. They chose the LaBianca house at random.
"If you were white and appeared financially well-off, you qualified to be murdered," Bugliosi said. The killers used knives and forks – an apparent reference to the Beatles song – and left the LaBiancas butchered in their home, but not before raiding their refrigerator and showering.The fallout was severe. Once the Manson family was revealed, the establishment's dim view of counterculture turned rabid and extreme. Even Polanski himself was implicated.
"In their rush to assess what had happened, some of the mainstream press brought the nature of Roman Polanski's movies into the nature of the crime and held (his) movies responsible," Warren Beatty told Los Angeles magazine recently. "Roman was a total innocent. Neither his life nor his movies had anything to do with this. But because he'd made Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby he was made to seem responsible."
For some, the counterculture was already teetering under the weight of its own portent. Indulgent and hedonistic, it had become bloated and without focus – a set of superficial trends, not a social revolution. The Manson crimes represented a shocking extreme to a culture that was becoming increasingly incoherent.
"What struck me about the Manson murders was how at the moment they happened, it seemed as if they were inevitable," Didion said, during an interview at the National Book Awards. "It seemed as if we had been moving toward that moment for about a year."
Bugliosi had no such sense at the time. "I'm not a sociologist. I was just trying one murder case after another," he says. "But looking back, it seems to be the consensus of many that the Manson case sounded a death knell for hippies and everything they symbolically represented."
High above the San Fernando Valley, on Cielo Dr., the quiet absence of No. 10050 says much the same thing.
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