This is day 2 of 2 of Manson murders. As I explained yesterday, the Manson murders have never really interested me. But then one of the hosts on My Favorite Murder¹ mentioned that she had read this book and found it answered a lot of questions she had after reading Helter Skelter; so I had to read that book first to put this book in context.² Yesterday, I wrote about Helter Skelter, and today, Chaos!

Here’s a little factoid I learned, while reading this book: a Helter Skelter is actually a carnival ride, kind of like a fun house, where you enter, deal with shifting floors and distorted mirrors, working your way upstairs to the top, and then taking a slide to the bottom again.³ While I was in Oslo last week⁴, we passed a holiday fair, and there on a corner was a Helter Skelter – perfect timing since I had read this book on the plane to Norway!

This is one of those books where the story of writing the book is almost as big as the story the author is writing about. So, O’Neill was a stringer for a Hollywood magazine that decided to do a retrospective at the 30 year anniversary of the murders, with the slant of how the murders changed Hollywood. He took the gig with a nice advance, and tried to get movie stars that had been around then, friends of the victims, and everyone refused to talk to him. Perhaps, the editor suggested, that is the story right there. But no, O’Neill starts doing research⁵ and begins amassing materials and anecdotes. The magazine continues paying him. He misses his deadline but every time he checks in with the editor, they’re so excited by what he’s finding, that she keeps paying him. This continues happening for, oh, a decade or two, and he never publishes his story. So then the magazine hits hard times, the editor gets fired, and he gets fired. He gets a book deal and a big advance, and continues amassing huge quantities of bankers boxes full of materials, and recordings of interviews. The publisher wakes up a decade later and wonders if the author’s ever going to make a book out of all this fascinating material, another editor gets fired, he breaks his contract, and finds a new publisher, dicks around – er, continues amassing materials for another dozen years, trying to figure out what to do with all his material and finally, finally hires a writer to help him put the book together. And then, if I am remembering accurately, he hires another writer, and finally, finally finishes the book.

But not the story.

That’s the author’s problem: he has so much material, so many rabbit trails, he’s not sure which one to follow.

Let’s see, the book starts with the author interviewing Bugliosi and Bugliosi threatening him.

Then there’s the gossip about the celebrities that own and lived in the house before and with Tate and Polanski, the (alleged) wild, drug-fueled orgies that were (allegedly) held there.

Then there was Manson and his crew and how they moved in on the Malibu mansion of Brian Wilson (yes, that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys), who supposedly spent over $100k housing them, feeding them and their drug habits, paying for the sportscar that they wrecked, and treating all of them with antibiotics for the VD’s that the gave each other, and him.

There are rumors that certain music industry producers recorded Manson’s music. (All rumors because everyone who would go on the record refused to admit that they recorded his really awful music.)

And then there’s the question of how Manson’s parole officer got his job and managed – to the surprise of all of the real parole officers that the author interviewed – to only have one, catch it, one person he was supervising: Charlie Manson.

And how Manson managed to avoid getting arrested and, if arrested, immediately released and not found in violation of his parole – and this same immunity seemed to apply to his followers.

There’s the CIA’s exploration of LSD as a mind-control drug, and the way that LSD flooded Haight-Ashbury, the role of a free clinic in the Haight – and hey, what’s Manson’s parole officer doing working there?

And then back to Bugliosi again: his mysterious behavior during the investigation, how he skated the edge of unprofessional behavior by his treatment of Susan Atkins – getting her to confess, then refusing to honor his offer to her, and then courting one of the other murderers. And then Bugliosi’s threats to the author, if he dared to publish what he had learned about Bugliosi’s behavior – and then the gossip about Bugliosi himself: how Bugliosi (allegedly) stalked his milkman because he assumed his wife was having an affair with the milkman (apparently she wasn’t); how, when the woman Bugliosi was (allegedly) having an affair with refused to have an abortion, he (allegedly) beat her into a miscarriage.

There’s so much in this book. The author keeps talking about how the materials in his home continued stacking up until it threated to crush him – and he still wasn’t sure how to weave all these threads together into a cohesive pattern so he could write the dang book. In the end, he just kind of published it all (I say, “it all” but I can’t imagine this is even 1% of what he collected).

And that’s what the book feels like.

Could he have put a through-line together? Sure, here, let me take a stab at it: Manson, through his experience with Scientology and hypnotism, moved to San Francisco and, supplied with drugs through a CIA program, began amassing followers and brain-washing them. The CIA, through its relations with the LAPD, managed to keep Manson and his “family” out of jail because they wanted to use them to discredit the protests and youth movement that were happening in opposition to the war. The CIA also supplied Manson with speed, that he administered to his crew. And the CIA also planted the idea that he was being persecuted by the Black Panthers. Meanwhile, there were all these crazy Hollywood parties, kind of the Epstein or Diddy parties of the late 60s. Manson, through his connection with Brian Wilson, managed to get himself invited – or at least find out about the parties so he could crash them – providing women and drugs.

And then the whole thing blew up – Manson reacted to the imagined threats by attacking the celebrities he had met, as well as the LaBianca’s who he may have come into conflict with when he and his gang were living next door. The CIA realized they were in trouble and pulled in some favors to cover stuff up.

Is that the way it went down? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know. Does it make more sense than the crazy story that Bugliosi claims was Manson’s motive? Just as much. And I think it explains all the games that Manson was playing with his rotating cast of lawyers.

According to the author, he tracked down a bunch of Manson’s followers – who all refused to talk to him – and they had become Born Again Christians.

Plus ca change…

Anyhow, a fun book to read. I will say that I can see why that podcaster liked it – one of the things that irks me about the podcast is that they are part of the Hollywood crowd. So I’m guessing they had heard some of these rumors and this explained filled in those gaps for them.

Worth reading? Sure! If you read Helter Skelter, you should read this, too.

Just maybe not both on an 8-hour plane ride.

1. Just realized this book was published in 2019; so I must have been listening to an old episode. ↩︎
2. Actually, after buying both books, I started reading this one first, got about half a chapter in, and had to put it down and read the other one first, because it wasn’t making sense without that context. ↩︎
3. That Beatles song make mores sense now, doesn’t it? Being younger, I had always assumed that the song came after the murders but, as it turns out, it was the other way around. Manson was obsessed with the Beatles’ music, was sure it was talking to him about the impending black-white apocalypse that he was trying to trigger with the murders. Which is why they wrote Helter Skelter on the wall of the LaBianca house. ↩︎
4. I remark casually. ↩︎
5. Gossip. ↩︎