The Brentwood of My Youth - Joan Didion’s Brentwood - Is Long Gone

Growing up in the Westside neighborhood in the late ’70s, I reveled in its affluent simplicity. Now, I hardly recognize it
By Stacie Stukin - February 19, 2020

Brentwood, like much of the best real estate in California, was once a rancho. In the 1830s, these lands with their adobe houses and cattle ranches, were bestowed upon landed gentry called Californios, descended from or married into families of Spanish-speaking settlers from Mexico and Spain who came to the Golden State a century earlier. The ranchos stretched from the oceans to the mountains, and many were originally home to the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe, whom the Catholic Church enslaved to build their missions and forced to hear their sermons.

I grew up in what was once the Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, a 33,000-acre parcel that included what would be Santa Monica, Brentwood, Mandeville Canyon, and West Los Angeles. The Tongva called this area Kuruvunga, which translates as “A Place Where We Are in the Sun,” but in the 1870s when the Californios began selling off their land grants, all that was left of the village were pottery shards and grinding stones that the earth spit out when real estate investors dug into the ground to develop the rustic canyons, mesas, and foothills verdant with oaks, sycamores, and grasses, and wildlife like coyote, snake, rabbit, and birds.

Even the roads harkened back to the Tongva; their footpath ran through the Sepulveda Basin from the city into the San Fernando Valley. Eventually, in the 1920s, it was paved, and during the following decades demand for more roadway ushered in the earthmovers. In the 1960s they tore through the mountains and gouged an 1,800-foot-wide and 260-foot-deep passage, accomplishing in 24 months what should have taken millions of years if left to natural erosion. Thus, the 405 freeway was born to transport us and, ultimately, torment us with traffic.

I tell you all this not as a history lesson but to give you context, a sense of where I come from, and how this destruction, creation, and neighborhood-building was my land, too. I played with the other children in the gullies and streams that ran behind our house way up in the hills of Mandeville Canyon. I could wake up on late spring mornings and a heavy layer of marine fog hovered in the air, creating a voile-like curtain through which I could see a family of deer grazing on our lawn. On hot summer nights as I slept, surrounded by furniture my father built, in my antique brass twin bed covered in a blue Pierre Deux coverlet, I would awaken to the high-pitched, frenzied shrieks of coyotes who stalked neighborhood pets. In the morning I might hear news of a cat that had gone missing, or even more grisly, someone down the block might discover the shredded remains of a small fluffy dog who could not outrun the pack.

Brentwood wasn’t flashy, rife with paparazzi, or selfie desperation.

 In the 1970s and 1980s, the neighborhood still felt as it was described in a 1907 Los Angeles Times advertisement that touted Brentwood as "a suburb away from the noise, dust and inharmonies of the city" and encouraged prospective residents not to miss an opportunity to live among “people of refinement" who “love Brentwood Park for its breadth of view - its variety of scene - its everlasting breezes - its naturalness." It was, and still is, an affluent neighborhood, but back then, even with Los Angeles’s debilitating smog, there was reasonably priced housing stock - newly built post-and-beam houses suited both in price and style to young couples like my parents. Some said it was the closest facsimile of Waspy Connecticut in Southern California. Women drove wood-paneled station wagons or Volvos, and there were country clubs and beach clubs that didn’t allow Jewish families like mine.

The older homes - from the 1930s housing boom - were built in traditional styles like Spanish Colonial Revival, Georgian Revival, or Tudor and attracted celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, and Gregory Peck. During my era Dustin Hoffman, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and O.J. Simpson were some of the more notable residents. It was a friendly suburb. You knew your neighbors. You saw them at the grocery store, at the candy store, and at the local pizza place. Back then if someone asked me where I lived, they’d often say, “Where’s Brentwood?" I’d explain it was between Westwood and Santa Monica, north of San Vicente Boulevard, where the coral trees with their blood-red blooms and their craggy, bent limbs line the thoroughfare.

It was a time of hands-off parenting, a feral youth with hard edges that offered an independence, a lack of supervision that had us stumbling into trouble without our parents ever being privy to the twisted plots. The dramas were tempered by a climate where gardenias flourished, only to be plucked off bushes and put in small vases bedside. The waft of the exotic scent accompanied our dreams, and the jasmine that blossomed from spring through summer, with its sweet, musky aroma, seemed an apt metaphor for our temptations and longings.

November 1965: actor and gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan with 
his wife, Nancy, and son Ronnie in their Brentwood living room

"Meet at the top of Capri." It was a vague direction, but we knew where to go since some of the neighborhood boys, scions of Dohenys, had taken us there. They blasted Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin from the Alpine stereo so we could hear the guitar riffs over the rev of the engine in their Shelby Mustang. They must have figured out the Ronald Reagan house was empty, as the family had put it up for sale when they moved to Washington to become the 40th first family.

At the time I didn't realize the Reagan house, built in 1957 on a bluff high in the Santa Monica Mountains, had been called "the house of the future." It wasn't the traditional home you'd imagine that the Reagans might occupy. Instead, the spiffy Midcentury Modern, 5,000-square-foot ranch-style home, with its sweeping vista from city to sea, satisfied the actors' desire for a view and an octagon-shaped pool. When it was built, Reagan hosted the General Electric Theater, a weekly CBS science series that reached 25 million viewers, making it one of the most popular shows on TV, and General Electric had outfitted the home with every kind of electrical innovation.

On several episodes the Reagans hosted the show at home. Nancy Reagan spoke highly of the "electric servants" in her kitchen that she said, "make mommy's work easier"; the best coffee Ronnie ever tasted; and ovens with timers and temperature controls that prevented her soufflés from exploding.

As Nancy ground the residue of her soufflé dinners down the garbage disposal, Reagan traveled the country as a GE spokesperson, giving him the national exposure that not only boosted his political career but helped convince him to change his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. His message was one of deregulation and advocacy for free enterprise, a stance that landed him in the California statehouse and then in the White House.

When Reagan was elected president in 1980, I was a junior in high school and didn't care about and could not anticipate his impact. I had no inkling that during college I would be riveted by the televised Iran-contra congressional hearings of National Security Council aide Oliver North, who facilitated a scheme where profits of secret weapon sales to Iran were diverted to arm the anti-Sandinista contras in Nicaragua - a tale of gun running and drug trafficking that seemed more movie plot than political reality. I did not yet know the impact of HIV on my friends and a whole generation of talented men who would be lost to us. I couldn't imagine that Reagan would never say the word "AIDS" until 1987, let alone fund any significant research. And I could not anticipate that Nancy Reagan, who had become known for her red dresses and a predilection for astrologers, would proffer ironic glee with her preposterous Just Say No anti-drug campaign in 1986. After all, the road to the Reagans' home was where we went to party.

We'd drive down Sunset Boulevard, then turn north up Capri until we hit a dark dirt road. We were drunk or high on weed, or both. Sometimes cocaine was involved or quaaludes - the latter didn't appeal to me, just made my legs wobble and didn't offer the consciousness shift I craved: an urge to feel something different than the confines of convention, a comforting obliteration. One particular night I drove up the dark, windy road with a girlfriend. We arrived at the fire road adjacent to the house, which was just a shadow in the distance. We parked the car on the plateau that opened to a wide expanse. We were on top of our world. The city lights below, the stars above, and the cool air, but not so cold that we needed jackets over our jumpsuits in some shade of neon and lips most likely adorned with Revlon Cherries in the Snow. We opened the sunroof, left the car doors open, and cranked the volume of a cassette mixtape. The B-52s, "Planet Claire." Our alienated anthem. The Pretenders, "Precious." We yelled "Fuck off!" into the night.

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in 1972

On August 19, 1970, prosecutors in the Sharon Tate murder trial called Timothy Ireland to the stand. He was the first witness after former Charles Manson follower Linda Kasabian, who cooperated with the prosecution, and concluded 18 days of testimony. During the trial, Kasabian wore at least one dress purchased for her by Joan Didion at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills. The writer developed a relationship with the Manson follower after visiting her at the Sybil Brand Institute for women while reporting on the brutal murders. On this Wednesday, Kasabian wore her hair in pigtails and a long-sleeved orange dress and moccasins.

Ireland was the afternoon witness. A graduate student employed by the Westlake School for Girls, he was hired to supervise a “sleep-out” on the campus tucked in the wealthy residential enclave of Holmby Hills. In the early morning hours of August 9, 1969, he heard something. According to the police report, “Between 0100 and 0130 Mr. Ireland was awake, alert and watching the sleeping children. He heard a male voice from what seemed to him a long distance away to the north or northeast shout, 'Oh, God, no. Stop. Stop. Oh, God, no, don’t.' Ireland said that the scream persisted for approximately 10 seconds. The male voice was clear and he did not notice an accent.” During the trial Ireland said he got in his car to search for the source of the screams and found nothing. On cross-examination, Manson’s lawyer asked him if he documented what he heard. He replied, "No sir. You don't forget things like that."

Westlake School for Girls

I attended the Westlake School for Girls from 1976 to 1982. I discovered the Manson connection when I read my parents' paperback copy of the book Helter Skelter by the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. I quickly found Ireland's story on page four, a scene setter with the ominous proviso: "The canyons above Hollywood and Beverly Hills play tricks with sounds. A noise clearly audible a mile away may be indistinguishable at a few hundred feet."

The site of the murder on Cielo Drive was about a mile from the bucolic campus. From the center of campus, if you looked up toward the hills to the north, you could see the homes lining the ridge of Benedict Canyon near Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski's house.

The Spanish Colonial Revival campus—built in the 1920s by architects Arthur Kelly and Joe Estep, the same men who designed the nearby Playboy Mansion—was a single-sex education Shangri-la with rolling lawns, flowers, and a maypole that was paraded out every spring so we could dance around the phallus and weave colorful ribbon patterns as we celebrated the pagan rite of spring. We wore uniforms—gray skirts, white oxford long-sleeved shirts, and navy-and-white saddle shoes with pink-eraser-colored soles. My classmates included the daughters of influential Angelenos like Tom Snyder (the talk show host who famously interviewed Manson in 1981), philanthropists, and real estate magnates like Helen and Peter Bing, the daughters of Carole Burnett and Peter Fonda, and Didion and John Gregory Dunne's daughter, Quintana.

The Los Angeles of my high school years was the L.A. of American Gigolo, with muted pastel interiors that retained the character of a city built with a panoply of styles, where you could get anywhere in 20 minutes by car. Yet, percolating beneath Richard Gere's sleek Armani wardrobe and the glamour of Lauren Hutton's trench coat and her burgundy Bottega Veneta clutch, there was an underlying darkness, a roughness. It seemed all was not well. We were a generation of divorce. Some of us were neglected or had parents who were alcoholic or whose alcohol we drank. During the week we did our homework, sometimes up to three hours a night. And despite the English teacher who failed me on every paper I wrote, I persisted. I scribbled observations in journals, on scraps of paper, in frantic letters to friends and boyfriends.

Writer Stacie Stukin (sitting) with friends
on New Year’s Eve in the 1980s

Although I was burdened by a feeling of never quite connecting, being an outsider who preferred detachment to real engagement did not mean I wasn't inspired by my privileged education. At the time, I did not understand the nature of that privilege or how, later in life, it would impact how others viewed me. Back then, we slogged through Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, read Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, replete with maypole dancing, and when we discussed Kafka's The Hunger Artist, I was moved by the idea that one could be so compelled to create that dying for art was a reasonable option. Here was the proudly feminist English teacher, who taught us about the ERA and that women made 70 cents to every dollar men earned, and when she assigned Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, she read aloud the part of Stanley Kowalski, lumbering across the classroom as she bellowed his lines in order to teach us the difference between consent and rape. We read the poems of Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson and learned that a woman's voice is something to be valued even when society might not agree.

But such academic conceits were not always so simple. We had a whisper network. We knew which adults really wanted to hear us and help us develop our voices. And we knew who did not, like the teacher who continuously failed me. Was she angry at my privilege? Did she sense my predilection toward masochism? I perceived this as my hill to climb, to prove that all I wanted was to be a writer and all she wanted to do was tear that dream from me.

I write this not to perpetuate a grudge. I'm more interested in the determination it ignited, the weakness and strength I explored, and the will I developed to push back against obstacles that were not mine alone. I took solace in knowing I was not her only victim. Once, Quintana Dunne turned in an assignment only to have the teacher insist that her mother, Didion, had written the paper. Word traveled. Phone calls were made. Parent-teacher conferences commenced. We knew the teacher picked targets to belittle, and we speculated she just wanted an opportunity to engage with Didion since we had heard her praise the slight woman wearing dark sunglasses and a camel coat whom we sometimes saw on campus.

We read The White Album because we were obsessed with Jim Morrison and titillated by Didion's repeated reference to Morrison's black vinyl pants, worn without underwear. Like the Doors, we took acid to open our doors of perception. We read William Blake and Aldous Huxley, too. That was our privilege. To read poetry, trip on LSD, and wander the Sunset Strip, past the Whisky a Go Go with the soundtrack of “L.A. Woman” in our heads as we made our way down toward Santa Monica Boulevard to Duke's Coffee Shop in the Tropicana Motel, the very place where Morrison had hung out. And like the children we were, we sat at the counter and ordered cinnamon toast.

We were self-assured teenagers, perhaps entitled, but we had our own sense of justice. We knew the teacher was wrong. We believed Quintana. We understood this was her burden, to be the child of two famous writers. We had our own burdens so we had faith in each other. We had to. We were raising ourselves and each other, forging a path toward adulthood. We had things to say. And our privileged education had taught us that our ideas mattered, that our voices should be heard.

Duke's Coffee Shop

At 12:10 a.m. on June 13, 1994, Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were found murdered in Brentwood. The bodies were slashed, the scene was bloody, and it seemed the only witness was Nicole's dog, Kato, an Akita who was found howling as he roamed the neighborhood with bloody paws. If only the dog could talk, they said.

At the time of the murders, I had long since moved out of my parents' house, and any evidence of the nostalgia of my childhood had disappeared. It was excavated out of existence when the local grocery store became a Whole Foods, and when the scene of the crime on Bundy Drive became a tourist attraction.

I rarely return to Brentwood. My parents have passed away, and it is now home to Gwyneth and Reese, and while that level of fame always existed, it was not flashy, rife with paparazzi, or selfie desperation. Teslas with winged doors and $150,000 Mercedes G-Wagons with tinted windows did not hog the road or cut you off with bold lane changes.

The house that Didion and Dunne lived in was torn down soon after they sold it in 1988.

The iconic coral trees are dying. There is a campaign to save them. They are old and have fallen victim to borers—insect eggs that hatch into larvae, which burrow deep into the branches and kill them. The residential streets, once lined with majestic front yards giving view to the traditional architecture, are now walls of security gates and tall hedges to prevent gawkers from seeing McMansions in the form of steroidal Cape Cods or modern boxes that look more like hotels than homes.

The house that Didion and Dunne lived in with Quintana was torn down soon after they sold it in 1988. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion describes driving by the property and discovering only a chimney standing on an empty lot. She recalls how the real estate agent had asked her and Dunne to inscribe copies of the books they'd written in the house because it would be meaningful to the buyers. "When we saw the flattened lot from the car, Quintana, in the back seat, burst into tears," she writes. "My first reaction was fury. I wanted the books back."

My childhood home still stands. I can see it on Google maps, pixelated but still recognizable. Reagan's house was torn down to make way for a Spanish-style manse; O.J. Simpson's house was demolished, too. But in what was once the heart of the Tongva village, Kuruvunga, a natural hot spring surrounded by native plants still flows. It's one of the tribe's last remaining historical landmarks, a sacred site, a place where we are all in the sun.

Link to original article

Keeping Faith with the Manson Women

By Jeffrey Melnick August 1, 2018

Every August since 1969, we, as a culture, have taken a deep breath and tried to figure out how we are going to live with Charles Manson. This year marks the first time that we will manage this reckoning without the "wild-eyed leader of a murderous crew," as his Times obituary described him, in the world. The news of two major motion pictures about the Manson family—one directed by Quentin Tarantino and the other by Mary Harron—suggests that we retain our taste for Manson art. These cultural creations range from serious, book-length investigations and extended musical works to seemingly thoughtless shout-outs, which individually serve to undercut Manson's scariness but collectively underscore the cult leader's centrality to American conceptions of race, class, sexuality, and family. Signs of Manson and his followers are far-flung and include writing in blood on the wall, the trope of the sexy-weird female hippie, and charismatic men with beards and "Southern" accents. Every year, we add to this of stock of sounds, images, and stories, as we continue to absorb the Manson-family trauma.

August, 1969, of course, is when members of Manson's Los Angeles-based commune killed Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent at the home of Tate and Roman Polanski, in Benedict Canyon, and then killed Rosemary and Leno LaBianca the following night, in Los Feliz. I won't recount the details of the gruesome murders; perhaps you've read the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's true-crime bible "Helter Skelter," from 1974, or seen the television miniseries based on it. Even if you haven't, you probably know the basic details of the crime—the feral hippies, the messages left behind, the off-the-hook race-war motive that Bugliosi developed almost immediately after being assigned to the case and that he convinced so many of us was Manson's true animus. The Tate-LaBianca murders, as the novelist Zachary Lazar has suggested, very quickly moved into the realm of what he calls "contemporary folklore." For decades, we have used the Manson family and its crimes to indict the putative excesses of the counterculture.

I want to borrow from some of the enormous cultural power that Manson has accrued to call attention to the life and work of another key figure in the history of the "family," who also died last year: Karlene Faith. Faith's name probably won't ring loud bells, if any at all. She was a radical-feminist criminologist who spent her career as a teacher and a researcher at Simon Fraser University, in Canada. In 1972, while a graduate student in the history-of-consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Faith co-founded the Santa Cruz Women's Prison Project. Through this group, Faith came into close contact with three of the Manson "girls": Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten.

The fact that these young women are so often called "girls"—in historical narratives, in film, and in fiction—begins to hint at our confusion regarding who they were and how they lived. There was a complex array of women who came to be known as the Manson girls: some were exploited and abused minors, but others seem to have exercised a fair amount of power in the family. The "girls" were vulnerable runaways, pragmatic sister-wives, and terrifying tricksters. But, in the wider culture, the women got treated most frequently as objects of prurient male interest. Thomas Pynchon, in his novel "Inherent Vice," imagines the appeal that the Manson women hold for his character Doc, and to so many other men: "Submissive, brainwashed, horny little teeners . . . who do exactly what you want before you even know what that is. You don't even have to say a word out loud, they get it all by ESP."

The coalition of feminists associated with the Santa Cruz Prison Project treated the women of the Manson family like active subjects—as people who could liberate themselves. The Santa Cruz radicals were there at the invitation of Virginia Carlson, the warden of the California Institution for Women, where Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten were imprisoned in the Special Security Unit. These feminists were enacting a profound form of rehabilitative practice. Soon after the end of the trial, the women (and some men) of the Santa Cruz group recognized that the three convicted women would need to see themselves as belonging to a different community—a new family of sorts—that was rooted both in the individual dignity of each woman and in the power of collective support and education. Prison administrators approved a program to raise the consciousness of the imprisoned women according to feminist principles. More than forty years after the experiment was devised and implemented, it is still more than a little shocking that it was approved.

Carlson had to have known that members of the Manson family had been taken up by a range of observers with problematic motives: from Bernardine Dohrn rhetorically offering the family the Weather Underground stamp of approval to Joan Didion shopping for dresses (literally) at I. Magnin to help make sure Linda Kasabian would be ready for her closeup at the trial, it did not take long for an appealing outlaw aura to develop around this hardscrabble bunch. David Felton, who co-wrote, with David Dalton, Rolling Stone's cover story on Manson, in 1970, told me that he and Dalton were prepared to greet Manson as some kind of organic rebel, when they made their trip to interview him in jail. Then they actually met him.

But the Santa Cruz collective, with its commitment to radical social change, seems to have remained untouched by celebrity worship. Karlene Faith was a central figure in this effort and wrote about it in detail in her book "The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten," from 2001, and in a monograph on women's confinement and resistance. For years, Faith embodied restraint, keeping a low profile in her work with the Manson women. Susan Atkins, for her part, was not shy about promoting the importance of Faith's work. Atkins, in her autobiography, writes with deep gratitude about Faith, whom she refers to as a "light in the darkness." Building on the women's-studies curriculum that Faith and her collaborators brought to the Special Security Unit, Atkins was able to develop a new sense of how she had "walked into" her own oppression. Through the intervention of Faith and the other feminists, Atkins experienced a revolution in her mind: "Suddenly I found myself free."

Virginia Carlson, the prison warden, must have been some kind of feminist herself. According to Faith, Carlson wanted to "raise the women's consciousness to a point where they would be able to think clearly for themselves, and recognize how deeply their subordination and rote obedience to Manson had degraded their humanity." From 1972 to 1976, Carlson invited "carloads of graduate student instructors, professors, law students, artists, performers and community activists from throughout the state" to "corrections valley," where they came to teach a curriculum that included studies of women and the law, ethnic studies, creative writing, and radical psychology. (Carlson did pause the program briefly in its first year, after Faith ended a letter to one imprisoned woman with the word "venceremos," meaning "we will overcome." Carlson may have approved of the general goal of consciousness raising, but aligning this closely with Che Guevera was too much.) According to Faith's account, the volunteers were especially affected by the work they did in the Special Security Unit with Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten. Here they met "three young, attractive, intelligent and unexpectedly endearing and vulnerable women," who appear to have thrown themselves into their studies with great energy. Faith and the others were moved, especially, by the talent that the women displayed in handicrafts and singing (apparently they sang a beautiful, close-harmony version of Buck Owens's "Cryin' Time").

The conversations that took place among the jailed women and their visitors seem to have been wide-ranging and lasting in impact. In addition to the regular instructors, the prisoners had visits from a number of key figures from the emerging "women's music" scene, including Meg Christian, June Millington, Holly Near, and Linda Tillery. They learned about poetry from Judy Grahn and took seminars with the radical writer Paul Krassner and with scholars who spoke on politics, the blues, and women's history. This was not "deprogramming," as it came to be familiarly called in the nineteen-seventies, but, rather, an acknowledgment that a holistic political, social, and cultural education was the most powerful tool to help transform Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten back into the "independent, promising young people" they had been before being turned into, as Faith put it, "obedient disciples who lost their ability to think for themselves."

In our current era of mass incarceration, it is crucial to remember the example of the Santa Cruz collective. These radicals never lost sight of how the prison system itself was at the root of the whole tragedy. Faith was aware that Manson's patriarchal "dogma was an inventory of the flaws of the society that rejected him and infantilized him as a prisoner without choice or responsibility." Aside from the Santa Cruz feminists, very few in the world of politics, journalism, academia, or popular culture have worried much about the intellectual or emotional well-being of the Manson women. Though Atkins underwent a religious conversion and attracted the notice of some who were putatively interested in her soul, for the most part, these women have never been the object of much public concern—not when they were vulnerable young women and not now, when they are elderly prisoners. (Atkins died in 2009.) The filmmaker John Waters is atypical, to say the least, in his decades-long advocacy of parole for his friend Leslie Van Houten.

Harron's film on the Manson family is due out later this year, and it is, at least in part, based on the work that Faith published in "The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten." This surprised me: not only is the book a sober, theory-driven work, but when I corresponded with Faith, in 2014, she made it clear that she took seriously her commitment to protect Van Houten's privacy. She told me that since publishing the book she has been regularly contacted by "people (usually men, often lawyers) who want to make contact with her, or who want my/her help with a planned film, theatre piece etc." "I reply briefly," she continued, "and turn down all requests." I'm not sure what made her say yes to Harron, but, whatever the provenance of the movie, it gives me hope that we might develop a more enlightened approach to the incarcerated women of the Manson family. With empathy for the surviving family members and friends of those murdered in August of 1969, I hope more of us will join John Waters and a handful of others in agitating for the parole of Van Houten and Krenwinkel. Not only have they paid their debt in time served, but, thanks to Faith, her Santa Cruz colleagues, and themselves, they were rehabilitated a long time ago.

This essay is adapted from Jeffrey Melnick's book "Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family."

Jeffrey Melnick is a professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Read more »

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Book: The White Album - by Joan Didion

The White Album is an autobiographical literary essay detailing loosely related events in the author's life in the 1960s, primarily in Los Angeles. In the course of describing her ongoing psychological difficulties, Didion discusses Black Panther Party meetings, drug-related experiences, a Doors recording session, various other interactions with LA musicians and cultural figures.

Didion also discisses several prison meetings with Linda Kasabian, who at the time was testifying against Manson, Krenwinkel, Atkins and Van Houten for the TLB murders. Apparently, Sharon had been an acquaintance of Didion's. The murder trial cast a cloud of fear over Hollywood that seemed to propel many of Didion's insights. The impression conveyed is one of a city and nation pervaded by paranoia and detachment.

The book is available at Amazon.com

Thanks to Suze for the tip.