To our Military past and present thank you for our freedom!!
ROSALIE HANDLEY, 71, a six-year resident of Green Valley, and formerly of Las Vegas, Nev., lost her battle with lung cancer at St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson on Aug. 21, 2009.
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Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
My father: Charles Manson's right-hand man
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Guardian, Friday 10 August 2012 18.00 EDT
To his daughter, Paul Watkins was simply her dad. Could it really be true he was also the notorious 60s cult leader's right-hand man?
Claire Vaye Watkins… 'My sister came home crying because some kid had
been teasing her. His taunt: our father was a murderer.' Photograph:
Caroll Taveras
The first time I did my parlour trick I was in college, sitting in the attic bedroom of a friend, smoking from a filthy bong. We were semi-hardcore stoners and waffling vegetarians, flaky philosophy majors and binge drinkers and, of course, wannabe novelists. A blurb about Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming novel – Against The Day – had appeared and then disappeared from Amazon, and we were, as I remember it, speculating about the book. "It's about 9/11," someone said. "It's gotta be." We were probably listening to the Beatles because from here we got to the Manson family. My friend, the host, was orating on the topic with the bombast with which we explicated everything then, talking the Manson legend as if he'd lived it. My then boyfriend – who had some benign rivalry going with our host – knew about my salacious family history. He nudged me. He wanted me to do my parlour trick, to say, "My dad was in the Manson Family. He was Charles Manson's right-hand man."
When I didn't pipe up, my boyfriend leaned down and whispered, "Dance, monkey." It was just the kind of joke I love – quick and close to the bone.
I did dance, and have danced often since. And I am dancing now, I fear.
The dance begins in March of 1968. My father is 18 years old, bare-chested, moccasin-clad, smoking grass and playing his french horn on a ledge overlooking Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. He is a dropout, an acid head, a self-styled gypsy, a runaway. Childhood evangelism has given way to jam sessions in the Haight, and this spring these will draw him to Spahn's ranch, the movie-set commune in Los Angeles's Santa Susana Mountains, to Charles Manson, to his "family": other dropouts and acid heads and gypsies and runaways. Manson will send my father to Death Valley to prepare for Armageddon, while back in Los Angeles he will convince his tribe to murder at least nine people, among them Shorty Shea, a Spahn ranch hand, and Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, all this described in the true crime classic Helter Skelter.
Helter Skelter notes that my father will pull away from Manson in the desert, that he will testify against him, though not that he will marry, divorce, then meet the woman who will be my mother in a bar on the southernmost edge of Death Valley. They'll start a newspaper, then a chamber of commerce, then, on August 3 1990, he will die of leukaemia. I'll be six then, and I will hardly remember him.
These days I find my father where we find everything: online. Most recently, my search took me to a site called familyjams.com, "the exclusive online distributor of Charles Manson's new CD, One Mind". For $14.98 I buy not One Mind – billed as "pure Charlie, no additions, no corrections, no added opinions… all new material… songs, trance-poetry, conversations, raps, ramblings, musings and more" – but instead a CD titled Paul Watkins Reflects, June 1988.
I rip the CD on to my iPod and wheel to my father, who has appeared in the Ps between Paul Simon and the Pixies. Maybe he would have liked that, being a musician. Maybe that's where he would have been anyway, if he'd kept singing and playing music, if he hadn't had his vocal cords singed before he was slated to testify against Charlie, when the Volkswagen van he was sleeping in caught fire, was perhaps lit by Steven "Clem" Grogan, one of three Manson Family men who claimed to have undone Shorty Shea with a pipe wrench, a machete, a bayonet.
June 1988. I am four years old; my sister is coming up on three. We live in Tecopa, California, just beyond the southern rim of Death Valley, flung so far out in the Mojave desert that it's easy to imagine everyone here is running from something.
June 1988. My father is making a tape for someone who's made one for him, someone called Nick, who must have corresponded to ask about Manson, as many have before him. The recording is crackling, as though the desert wind is whipping sand across the mic, and in my headphones my father is saying, "Hello, Nick. This is Paul, Paul Watkins."
June 1988. My father thanks Nick for the concern in his voice but assures him that his cancer is not an uncomfortable topic because he's "got a good remission going". He is, he says, "in a victorious position.
"This turned out to have a really happy ending," he tells Nick. "I have this old homestead in the desert, with water, trees. I have two wonderful children, little girls, three and four. Claire and Lise. Claire is the four-year-old; Lise is the three-year-old. They're just delightful. I have a wonderful wife I'm very much in love with. Martha. That's truly a blessing. It's truly wonderful. Not that it's all, how'd you say, daisies and sunbeams, or whatever, but it is, pretty much, much of the time. And getting better all the time."
He says, "I have a really good chance of having a really wonderful life."
June 1988. My father has 25 months left to live. I am reminded once again that even the stories we call our own will slip out from under us.
Memoir is the meaning-making genre, and meaning-making is a specious, slippery project, a dance I distrust. The back flap of my father's own Manson family memoir promises the impossible, in bold black type: "It can be explained. I can explain it…" I can tell you that my father might have been a great musician if Clem Grogan hadn't tried to burn him alive. Or I can tell you that he would have become a great musician if I hadn't been born. There's no one reason he found himself high and hiking up Topanga Canyon, no one reason why he agreed when a slight, shirtless guy with a guitar said, "Won't you stay and make music with us?"
I believe this, yet I do look for my father in the artefacts of the Manson Family, a violent, misogynistic, drug-hazed milieu often and aptly described as "random" and "senseless". Apparently my father was a meaning-maker, too. He tells Nick, "Cancer served me very well. It was… like God grabbed me by the neck and said, 'You want to look at your life and, uh, get it back in the productive mode? You want to really live it, or do you want to continue to rape, pillage and plunder?'
"Not that I was out raping, pillaging and plundering," he says. "But in a sense, yes, there is that element there, the element of subjugating the women in my life, there's the element of not being able to be happy, of not being able to be happy having children."
Twenty-five months later, he died, and after there lingered something magnetic about the father we never knew. He pulled us to him. As soon as she could leave Nevada, my sister Lise moved to San Francisco, moved unknowingly into an apartment above the intersection where my father was dropped off when he first hitchhiked to that city as a teenager. I moved to West LA, where I could have driven to Spahn's ranch, or the guesthouse in Trancas Canyon where he died, but never did.
I did go to a party in Venice Beach, to a bungalow near the ocean with bougainvillaea shading the walk, the fire in the pit out back ringed by balding men playing guitar and hand-drumming. It was the kind of scene with white women dancing barefoot in the living room, sloshing red wine on the wood floors, the kind of scene where someone, somewhere is always jangling a tambourine. The occasion was the birthday of an old friend of my father, someone who said she had been there when he died. It's not that I don't believe her, exactly, but that so many people have told me they were there when he died that the dim bedroom of that Trancas guesthouse is stuffed with people, ringed with folks pressed shoulder to shoulder, the bed a stage.
Where was I the moment he died? Take the sliding glass door out to the yard. I am with my sister, swimming naked in a defunct Jacuzzi filled with cold water from a hose. I am counting underwater somersaults.
In Venice, the birthday girl was fucked up and so was I. When she saw me she led me into her bedroom and asked me to lay with her. I did, and there she wept, saying, "You look just like your dad." And though I don't particularly look like him, I wept, too.
After my father died, he became a benevolent deity. He was pure, he was a good guy, all he did was love us. So say his brother and sisters, so say his friends and everyone who knew him when I did not. Nearly everything dark or complicated I've learned about him, I've learned from books.
I was 10 years old when I read that my father was "a good-looking youth with a way with women, had been Manson's chief procurer of young girls". My sister came home from school crying because some kid had been teasing her. His taunt was that our father was a murderer for Charles Manson. We didn't know about Charlie yet, but for me the words "Charles Manson" had somehow already been imbued with evil. When our mother came home from work, we asked her about it and she said, "Yes, he was in the Manson Family. And no, he didn't kill anyone." She pointed us to Helter Skelter, which had been on a bookshelf in our family room all along. My sister found him in the index:
Watkins, Paul, 311, 313, 316-32, 335, 343, 366, 373-74, 384, 388, 391, 440, 465, 479, 481, 485, 498, 502, 512, 513, 551, 590, 599, 603, 610, 630, 642, 664-65
Lise skimmed his entries and, satisfied that our father had not killed anyone, we went on with our lives. It wasn't traumatic. It wasn't a moment of revelation. Our father was still dead and we were still left with a scrim of memories so thin we sometimes had no memories at all.
I was 20 years old when I read my father's account of fellating Charles Manson. I was living with friends in Reno in a neighbourhood dotted with halfway houses. I was sleeping around, cheating on boyfriends I didn't have the courage to leave. I took men I hardly knew down to my room in the basement, where I had a bed, a heap of clothes and a heap of books, among them my father's pulpy tell-all, My Life With Charles Manson. The book has all the gritty anecdotes requisite of its genre and I would read them, nights I was alone: longing accounts of acid trips at Spahn's, Charlie's violent and portentous outbursts, "times when we'd take a little orgy contingent to Dennis Wilson's house just to blow the minds of his 'hip' guests".
One night, my father writes, Charlie brought "a new girl named Darcy" to lie between them on the floor of Spahn's saloon. In the candlelight Charlie asked Darcy whether she "felt the cosmic vibes that night". Then he asked her for a blow job. After a bit, Charlie said, "Hey, Paul… show this girl how to give head, will ya." And Paul did, because he wanted to "please Charlie". Later he calls this "my sexual number with Charlie".
This passage stayed with me, not because it revealed the way I'd been convincing myself I wanted to do things I didn't want to do – I'd go on with that for years – but because it was so starkly not something a daughter should know about her father. That passage made him real for me. Which is to say he became, finally, a little bit human.
Though I have only ghosts of memories of him, I have always associated my father with great affection. I recall him being lenient and adoring and fun. I think I can remember manipulating him with his own kindness. I have no reason to doubt he was as good a man as his loved ones say he was. But from my iPod he reminds me, "Life doesn't lend itself to being easily defined. There's always more. There's always more to learn. There definitely is mystery and magic, and this is a matter of fact…[Life] is in fact a wonderful and wide, wide thing. I am an avid lover of life. I suppose that's what's gotten me into so much trouble."
The only person who ever told me about the trouble was my mum. She could be frank about him but elliptically so, as in, "Your Uncle John is a pain in the ass. Your dad was just like him." But now she is gone, too.
She called me once, my mother, when I was in college. She'd just slit her wrists with a steak knife and was, in her mind, dying. "I just want to say goodbye," she said. Then, "I miss your dad."
"Well, you're not going to join him," I said. "If you kill yourself, you're going to hell, right?"
Sorrow had fatigued us, and we were falling back on a lazy cosmology neither of us believed in.
"Then I'll see him there," she said.
By this point in my life my mother had to work to shock me, but this did it. "You think Dad's in hell?"
She laughed at my naivety. "Sweetheart, he was Charles Manson's number one procurer of young girls."
With my mum gone, there's no one to challenge our family mythology, and I sometimes fear my father has become our own private Christ. One meaning I can make here is that Charlie is, in a labyrinthine way, the only one willing to disclose my father's flaws. So in this way I have become grateful to Helter Skelter and familyjams.com. I am, perhaps, grateful even to Charlie. Because I, too, have raped, pillaged and plundered. Because I, too, have spent much of my short life doubting whether I am capable of being happy. Because I am 28 years old and an orphan, and I often feel as alone as that word suggests. And from my iPod crackles a bit of comfort. From my iPod my father is saying to Nick, to Charlie, to me, "There's nothing wrong with not knowing who you are."
The Guardian, Friday 10 August 2012 18.00 EDT
To his daughter, Paul Watkins was simply her dad. Could it really be true he was also the notorious 60s cult leader's right-hand man?
The first time I did my parlour trick I was in college, sitting in the attic bedroom of a friend, smoking from a filthy bong. We were semi-hardcore stoners and waffling vegetarians, flaky philosophy majors and binge drinkers and, of course, wannabe novelists. A blurb about Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming novel – Against The Day – had appeared and then disappeared from Amazon, and we were, as I remember it, speculating about the book. "It's about 9/11," someone said. "It's gotta be." We were probably listening to the Beatles because from here we got to the Manson family. My friend, the host, was orating on the topic with the bombast with which we explicated everything then, talking the Manson legend as if he'd lived it. My then boyfriend – who had some benign rivalry going with our host – knew about my salacious family history. He nudged me. He wanted me to do my parlour trick, to say, "My dad was in the Manson Family. He was Charles Manson's right-hand man."
When I didn't pipe up, my boyfriend leaned down and whispered, "Dance, monkey." It was just the kind of joke I love – quick and close to the bone.
I did dance, and have danced often since. And I am dancing now, I fear.
The dance begins in March of 1968. My father is 18 years old, bare-chested, moccasin-clad, smoking grass and playing his french horn on a ledge overlooking Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. He is a dropout, an acid head, a self-styled gypsy, a runaway. Childhood evangelism has given way to jam sessions in the Haight, and this spring these will draw him to Spahn's ranch, the movie-set commune in Los Angeles's Santa Susana Mountains, to Charles Manson, to his "family": other dropouts and acid heads and gypsies and runaways. Manson will send my father to Death Valley to prepare for Armageddon, while back in Los Angeles he will convince his tribe to murder at least nine people, among them Shorty Shea, a Spahn ranch hand, and Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, all this described in the true crime classic Helter Skelter.
Helter Skelter notes that my father will pull away from Manson in the desert, that he will testify against him, though not that he will marry, divorce, then meet the woman who will be my mother in a bar on the southernmost edge of Death Valley. They'll start a newspaper, then a chamber of commerce, then, on August 3 1990, he will die of leukaemia. I'll be six then, and I will hardly remember him.
These days I find my father where we find everything: online. Most recently, my search took me to a site called familyjams.com, "the exclusive online distributor of Charles Manson's new CD, One Mind". For $14.98 I buy not One Mind – billed as "pure Charlie, no additions, no corrections, no added opinions… all new material… songs, trance-poetry, conversations, raps, ramblings, musings and more" – but instead a CD titled Paul Watkins Reflects, June 1988.
I rip the CD on to my iPod and wheel to my father, who has appeared in the Ps between Paul Simon and the Pixies. Maybe he would have liked that, being a musician. Maybe that's where he would have been anyway, if he'd kept singing and playing music, if he hadn't had his vocal cords singed before he was slated to testify against Charlie, when the Volkswagen van he was sleeping in caught fire, was perhaps lit by Steven "Clem" Grogan, one of three Manson Family men who claimed to have undone Shorty Shea with a pipe wrench, a machete, a bayonet.
June 1988. I am four years old; my sister is coming up on three. We live in Tecopa, California, just beyond the southern rim of Death Valley, flung so far out in the Mojave desert that it's easy to imagine everyone here is running from something.
June 1988. My father is making a tape for someone who's made one for him, someone called Nick, who must have corresponded to ask about Manson, as many have before him. The recording is crackling, as though the desert wind is whipping sand across the mic, and in my headphones my father is saying, "Hello, Nick. This is Paul, Paul Watkins."
June 1988. My father thanks Nick for the concern in his voice but assures him that his cancer is not an uncomfortable topic because he's "got a good remission going". He is, he says, "in a victorious position.
"This turned out to have a really happy ending," he tells Nick. "I have this old homestead in the desert, with water, trees. I have two wonderful children, little girls, three and four. Claire and Lise. Claire is the four-year-old; Lise is the three-year-old. They're just delightful. I have a wonderful wife I'm very much in love with. Martha. That's truly a blessing. It's truly wonderful. Not that it's all, how'd you say, daisies and sunbeams, or whatever, but it is, pretty much, much of the time. And getting better all the time."
He says, "I have a really good chance of having a really wonderful life."
Memoir is the meaning-making genre, and meaning-making is a specious, slippery project, a dance I distrust. The back flap of my father's own Manson family memoir promises the impossible, in bold black type: "It can be explained. I can explain it…" I can tell you that my father might have been a great musician if Clem Grogan hadn't tried to burn him alive. Or I can tell you that he would have become a great musician if I hadn't been born. There's no one reason he found himself high and hiking up Topanga Canyon, no one reason why he agreed when a slight, shirtless guy with a guitar said, "Won't you stay and make music with us?"
I believe this, yet I do look for my father in the artefacts of the Manson Family, a violent, misogynistic, drug-hazed milieu often and aptly described as "random" and "senseless". Apparently my father was a meaning-maker, too. He tells Nick, "Cancer served me very well. It was… like God grabbed me by the neck and said, 'You want to look at your life and, uh, get it back in the productive mode? You want to really live it, or do you want to continue to rape, pillage and plunder?'
"Not that I was out raping, pillaging and plundering," he says. "But in a sense, yes, there is that element there, the element of subjugating the women in my life, there's the element of not being able to be happy, of not being able to be happy having children."
Twenty-five months later, he died, and after there lingered something magnetic about the father we never knew. He pulled us to him. As soon as she could leave Nevada, my sister Lise moved to San Francisco, moved unknowingly into an apartment above the intersection where my father was dropped off when he first hitchhiked to that city as a teenager. I moved to West LA, where I could have driven to Spahn's ranch, or the guesthouse in Trancas Canyon where he died, but never did.
I did go to a party in Venice Beach, to a bungalow near the ocean with bougainvillaea shading the walk, the fire in the pit out back ringed by balding men playing guitar and hand-drumming. It was the kind of scene with white women dancing barefoot in the living room, sloshing red wine on the wood floors, the kind of scene where someone, somewhere is always jangling a tambourine. The occasion was the birthday of an old friend of my father, someone who said she had been there when he died. It's not that I don't believe her, exactly, but that so many people have told me they were there when he died that the dim bedroom of that Trancas guesthouse is stuffed with people, ringed with folks pressed shoulder to shoulder, the bed a stage.
Where was I the moment he died? Take the sliding glass door out to the yard. I am with my sister, swimming naked in a defunct Jacuzzi filled with cold water from a hose. I am counting underwater somersaults.
In Venice, the birthday girl was fucked up and so was I. When she saw me she led me into her bedroom and asked me to lay with her. I did, and there she wept, saying, "You look just like your dad." And though I don't particularly look like him, I wept, too.
After my father died, he became a benevolent deity. He was pure, he was a good guy, all he did was love us. So say his brother and sisters, so say his friends and everyone who knew him when I did not. Nearly everything dark or complicated I've learned about him, I've learned from books.
I was 10 years old when I read that my father was "a good-looking youth with a way with women, had been Manson's chief procurer of young girls". My sister came home from school crying because some kid had been teasing her. His taunt was that our father was a murderer for Charles Manson. We didn't know about Charlie yet, but for me the words "Charles Manson" had somehow already been imbued with evil. When our mother came home from work, we asked her about it and she said, "Yes, he was in the Manson Family. And no, he didn't kill anyone." She pointed us to Helter Skelter, which had been on a bookshelf in our family room all along. My sister found him in the index:
Watkins, Paul, 311, 313, 316-32, 335, 343, 366, 373-74, 384, 388, 391, 440, 465, 479, 481, 485, 498, 502, 512, 513, 551, 590, 599, 603, 610, 630, 642, 664-65
Lise skimmed his entries and, satisfied that our father had not killed anyone, we went on with our lives. It wasn't traumatic. It wasn't a moment of revelation. Our father was still dead and we were still left with a scrim of memories so thin we sometimes had no memories at all.
I was 20 years old when I read my father's account of fellating Charles Manson. I was living with friends in Reno in a neighbourhood dotted with halfway houses. I was sleeping around, cheating on boyfriends I didn't have the courage to leave. I took men I hardly knew down to my room in the basement, where I had a bed, a heap of clothes and a heap of books, among them my father's pulpy tell-all, My Life With Charles Manson. The book has all the gritty anecdotes requisite of its genre and I would read them, nights I was alone: longing accounts of acid trips at Spahn's, Charlie's violent and portentous outbursts, "times when we'd take a little orgy contingent to Dennis Wilson's house just to blow the minds of his 'hip' guests".
One night, my father writes, Charlie brought "a new girl named Darcy" to lie between them on the floor of Spahn's saloon. In the candlelight Charlie asked Darcy whether she "felt the cosmic vibes that night". Then he asked her for a blow job. After a bit, Charlie said, "Hey, Paul… show this girl how to give head, will ya." And Paul did, because he wanted to "please Charlie". Later he calls this "my sexual number with Charlie".
This passage stayed with me, not because it revealed the way I'd been convincing myself I wanted to do things I didn't want to do – I'd go on with that for years – but because it was so starkly not something a daughter should know about her father. That passage made him real for me. Which is to say he became, finally, a little bit human.
Though I have only ghosts of memories of him, I have always associated my father with great affection. I recall him being lenient and adoring and fun. I think I can remember manipulating him with his own kindness. I have no reason to doubt he was as good a man as his loved ones say he was. But from my iPod he reminds me, "Life doesn't lend itself to being easily defined. There's always more. There's always more to learn. There definitely is mystery and magic, and this is a matter of fact…[Life] is in fact a wonderful and wide, wide thing. I am an avid lover of life. I suppose that's what's gotten me into so much trouble."
The only person who ever told me about the trouble was my mum. She could be frank about him but elliptically so, as in, "Your Uncle John is a pain in the ass. Your dad was just like him." But now she is gone, too.
She called me once, my mother, when I was in college. She'd just slit her wrists with a steak knife and was, in her mind, dying. "I just want to say goodbye," she said. Then, "I miss your dad."
"Well, you're not going to join him," I said. "If you kill yourself, you're going to hell, right?"
Sorrow had fatigued us, and we were falling back on a lazy cosmology neither of us believed in.
"Then I'll see him there," she said.
By this point in my life my mother had to work to shock me, but this did it. "You think Dad's in hell?"
She laughed at my naivety. "Sweetheart, he was Charles Manson's number one procurer of young girls."
With my mum gone, there's no one to challenge our family mythology, and I sometimes fear my father has become our own private Christ. One meaning I can make here is that Charlie is, in a labyrinthine way, the only one willing to disclose my father's flaws. So in this way I have become grateful to Helter Skelter and familyjams.com. I am, perhaps, grateful even to Charlie. Because I, too, have raped, pillaged and plundered. Because I, too, have spent much of my short life doubting whether I am capable of being happy. Because I am 28 years old and an orphan, and I often feel as alone as that word suggests. And from my iPod crackles a bit of comfort. From my iPod my father is saying to Nick, to Charlie, to me, "There's nothing wrong with not knowing who you are."
Monday, September 9, 2013
Front Page: Headlines from the Los Angeles Times
Anyhow, for your viewing pleasure, here are some of the covers relevant to our discussion that were included in 280 pages culled from editions published between 1881-1987:
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Oh, To Emulate Charles Manson
"Charles Manson has almost the same birth sign as me. He has about five signs in Scorpio and I have about four," the Jefferson Airplane singer told the San Francisco Chronicle. "So I'm real close to being Charles. Except I can't think of anybody I care enough about to kill. I'd rather keep them alive and torture them."
Taken from THIS ARTICLE
Friday, September 6, 2013
LAPD/Sorry About That Jack Webb
This is an article from the May 1970 issue of Scanlan's. While Charles Manson is mentioned a couple of times in the article it is not about him but rather about the dirty shenanigans Los Angeles law enforcement was perpetuating in the same time period. It is no wonder that Sharon's father, PJ Tate, felt he had to do some investigating of his own to try to discover his daughter's killer. It's a heavy reading assignment for the weekend but well worth the read.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Film Reviews
FILM THREAT #16 1988
THOU SHALL NOT KILL.... EXCEPT (1986) The best action feature based on the Manson murders, writer-producer Scott Spiegel, who co-wrote EVIL DEAD 2 mixes a little humor into it. Three Stooges antics meet great sleaze and gore. Directed by Josh Becker with Sami Raimi as the cult leader, Manson and his gang have to fight off a group of Rambo-esque marines just back from Vietnam. surely this is the most entertaining. Recently available on video from Prism Entertainment/Film World Distributors.
When Charles Manson and various Family members landed in jail, they left behind more than just a coroner's nightmare and a hefty dose of public outcry. Movie exploitation has never known grace, and Manson's was a story of seemingly endless cinematic possibilities. His life sentence may end soon as the pseudo-Christ has recently become plagued with cancer. Here we present the most complete filmography of Manson influenced films.
MANSON (1974) is still banned in California, Robert Hendrickson's and Laurence Merrick's objective documentary is somewhat preoccupied with the Family more so than Manson himself. Various free members talk openly about the goals and structure of the Family in between Charlie stalking the courthouses. There are brief home-movie excerpts taken on Spahn Ranch, mostly shots of horseback riding and partying. Towards the end a miniscule excerpt from an interview with Manson by Jerry Rubin is added, if just to fulfill the title's promise. Those who have read "Helter Skelter" or "The Family" will get a refresher course here; others, however, might get a jolt. Film was released on a limited run in
New York with Polanski's "Macbeth". Music by Paul Watkins and Brooks Posten. Available on World Wide Video.
HELTER SKELTER (1976) was a natural for film after the success of the book. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), TV grabbed up the rights and the result may be the grand daddy of 70's play-it-safe exploitation, a truly ridiculous film made compelling by over-dramatization in the wrong places, stereotypical characterizations, and an awful fake Beatles soundtrack. Following the book straight, as TV allows, the dons a sterile (albeit opinionated, re: con) view and turns Manson into a caricature of Menace. Steve Railsback as Manson gives a glassy eyed performance of Peter Lorre on mescaline. As Susan Atkins, Nancy Wolfe chews the scenery via catatonic dementia that reaches the cosmos of pop entertainment. Suffering from a logbook of facts, dates, figures, places and people serving as its scenario, the film rarely breathes life or depth into the most obvious places. George DiCenzo, for example, plays the straight role of Bugliosi as a grey-area, a navel picking nimrod who'd never be invited to anyone's party. Key Video version runs 120 minutes; original TV version clocks in at 194 minutes.
FRINGE MANSONESQUE EFFORTS:
BEYOND VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) Russ Meyer and co-author Roger Ebert were not entirely influenced by the Manson case for their screenplay of the comedic, in-name only sequel to Jacqueline Susann's trashy novel. Their script covers all exploitable angles- quite successfully. The character Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell (played by john LaZar) is a wild illusion of Manson, while the murders in the film smack of tabloid sensationalism. More interesting is the film as a whole, perhaps the biggest, brashest, most colorful and expensive exploitation film ever made, thanks to 20th Century Fox giving Meyer artistic freedom on the basis of his past films (notably Vixen and Cherry, Harry and Raquel).
HELTER SKELTER (1976) was a natural for film after the success of the book. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), TV grabbed up the rights and the result may be the grand daddy of 70's play-it-safe exploitation, a truly ridiculous film made compelling by over-dramatization in the wrong places, stereotypical characterizations, and an awful fake Beatles soundtrack. Following the book straight, as TV allows, the dons a sterile (albeit opinionated, re: con) view and turns Manson into a caricature of Menace. Steve Railsback as Manson gives a glassy eyed performance of Peter Lorre on mescaline. As Susan Atkins, Nancy Wolfe chews the scenery via catatonic dementia that reaches the cosmos of pop entertainment. Suffering from a logbook of facts, dates, figures, places and people serving as its scenario, the film rarely breathes life or depth into the most obvious places. George DiCenzo, for example, plays the straight role of Bugliosi as a grey-area, a navel picking nimrod who'd never be invited to anyone's party. Key Video version runs 120 minutes; original TV version clocks in at 194 minutes.
FRINGE MANSONESQUE EFFORTS:
BEYOND VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) Russ Meyer and co-author Roger Ebert were not entirely influenced by the Manson case for their screenplay of the comedic, in-name only sequel to Jacqueline Susann's trashy novel. Their script covers all exploitable angles- quite successfully. The character Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell (played by john LaZar) is a wild illusion of Manson, while the murders in the film smack of tabloid sensationalism. More interesting is the film as a whole, perhaps the biggest, brashest, most colorful and expensive exploitation film ever made, thanks to 20th Century Fox giving Meyer artistic freedom on the basis of his past films (notably Vixen and Cherry, Harry and Raquel).
I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1971) Amazing, plenty weird effort from writer/director David Durston (Stigma) and producer (Grimm's Fairy Tales For Adults). "Satan was an acid head!" exclaims the leader of a hippie-devil-cult before sending a dog to the slaughter. His troupe, residing in the woods od upstate New York, are an eye sore for the locals. After the youths pester an old man, his grandson injects the blood for a rabid dog into their food. The devil worshipers start foaming at the mouth, take over the town and kill anyone in sight. One girl turns into a rabid nymphomaniac, is laid by a few dozen hard-hats who, in turn, become rabid killers, too. Not to be missed.
THE DEATHMASTER (1978) Robert Quarry, late of the Count Yorga films, stars as a Manson-type guru to hippie following. Basically a tired vampire flick. 1950's screen idol Ray Danton directs.
BLUE SUNSHINE (1978) Stanford University radicals are bummed out when the acid they just swallowed fails to take effect. 10 years later they're middle class stiffs with homes and families and insurance premiums, and WHAM!, the supercharged, delay-reaction LSD goes full throttle. Paying homage to the Family's Yul Brenner phase, the victims lose all their hair, then go on a bloodlust/killing spree. Writer/director Jeff Leiberman creates a good atmosphere in this staple of late night TV. Leiberman also makes a terrific worm-conquest film called Squirm. Zalman King stars with Robert Walden (of TV's Lou Grant), Mark Goddard (Lost in Space, General Hospital), and Alice Ghostley (Bewitched).
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER (1969) An embryonic version of Lucifer Rising (1974/82), both made by Kenneth Anger. Bobby Beausoleil stars as Lucifer in this colorful fairy-tale set in the outer limits of ordinary narrative. In 1967, the footage for Lucifer Rising was stolen by Beausoleil; legend has it the film was handed over to Manson, who, with Beausoleil, proceeded to bury it in the desert. Shot in San Francisco; 11 minutes, music by Mick Jagger.
MANSON FAMILY MOVIES (1984) The video box claims "The Manson Family has rumored to have filmed their activities. This is what those films, The Family movies, may have looked like."
The key word here is may. Manson Family Movies is nothing more than poorly done super 8 that is almost unwatchable. Over quoted John Waters however, has this to say, "Manson Family Movies is a primitive, obsessional, fetishistic tribute to mayhem, murder and madness. Enough to appall even the most jaded VCR." The company that distributes this vid, AES-NIHIL carries many other Manson related items including audio tapes, video tapes, articles and interviews. AES-NIHIL Productions.Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Shahrokh Hatami - Sharon Tate's Personal Photographer
Hatami – known primarily by this single professional byline – started as a writer for a major newspaper in Tehran, switching to photography in 1950. He then worked briefly as the Tehran correspondent for the Black Star Agency. Life magazine published his coverage of the overthrow of democratically elected PM Mohammed Mossadegh and the restoration to power of the Shah in 1953. Twenty-five years later, Hatami shot dramatic images of street fighting during the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, which overthrew the Shah. His daring coverage of this popular revolution has been acquired by the Library of Congress, an honored privilege for any photographer.
Hatami counted among his friends President’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Jordan’s King Hussein, and Saudi King Faicsal, along with various other Syrian and Lebanese political figures.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Hatami was a freelancer in Europe and the Middle East, with many of his pictures appearing in Paris-Match and other leading magazines. Eventually he won the confidence of the notoriously inaccessible Grande Dame of couture, Coco Chanel, and as a close personal friend, produced many unique behind-the-scenes images. Hatami also captured classic fashion magazine covers and celebrity portraits, including intimate shots of Elizabeth Taylor, Ursula Andress, Julie Christie, Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and innumerable other American and European personalities.
Hatami eventually branched out into motion pictures, working as a special magazine photographer on the sets of Woody Allen’s What’s New Pussycat?, Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mepris, Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, Casino Royal, Doctor Zhivago, Rosemary’s Baby and 1965′s A Countess from Hong Kong – starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, and directed by Charlie Chaplin in what became his final feature film direction.
It was on the set of Rosemary’s Baby that Hatami became close with Mia Farrow. Hatami directed and produced a documentary called Mia and Roman, which can be viewed as an added feature on the DVD version of the now-classic horror film, Rosemary’s Baby. Hatami also knew Sharon Tate intimately and affectionately prior to her becoming Mrs. Polanski. Hatami’s odyssey concerning Sharon Tate’s murder is well documented online.
Fueled by sheer will and perseverance, not to mention a very seductive charm, Hatami was able to capture previously impenetrable worlds with his lens. This carried over into the world stage. His presence during the Israel/Egypt peace talks in 1977-1978, his shots of Egyptian President Anwar Al Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, his legendary plane trip with the Ayatollah Khomeini upon his return to Iran in February 1979. Hatami’s colorful life has taken him across Africa and the Middle East, to penthouses and parties in Paris, London, New York and Hollywood. This is testament to an artist whose photo archive covers the last half of the 20th century and is now focusing in earnest on the new millennium.
Besides working in the political, film and fashion arenas, Hatami is highly regarded for his early and extremely rare color photos of the Beatles at the legendary Cavern Club in 1963. Sent to Liverpool by Paris Match magazine to cover the Beatlemania phenomenon, he managed to gain access backstage and captured these amazing images of the Fab Four, with three of the most significant guitars in rock history: John and his six-string Rickenbacker that he painted black, Paul with his legendary Hofner bass, and George with his Gretsch Country Gentleman.
Monday, September 2, 2013
People passing through our lives: Rosalie Willis and Jay White
From 1978 to 1980 I lived in Mt. Vernon, Illinois and worked with Rosalie ("Rosy") at a Holiday Inn. She was a waitress, I was a cook. She was a wonderful, warm, friendly person. When I found out about her past with Charlie I was blown away. Their son, Charlie Jr. came to visit her and I met him several times before I knew about her past. His eyes scared the hell out me! They were just like his dad's. When Rosy told me the story I damned near fell off of my chair. Jay, as he called himself then, was one the spookiest people I have ever met. I am sorry to hear of his suicide and of Rosy's passing. May they both rest in peace.
Let me start by saying that I stumbled upon your site totally by accident and was shocked to hear of both of their passing. Like I said, I had worked with Rosy for about a year and a half before I found out about her and Charles Sr.
She and I were both working at a Holiday Inn in Mt. Vernon, IL and she was remarried and the step mother to a friend I had met after moving there. She truly was a sweetheart, very kind with a wonderful sense of humor. I loved working with her. In the early spring of 1978 Rosy told me that her son from her first marriage was coming to visit her and about a week later she introduced me to "Jay" as he called himself then. I just assumed that his last name was Willis.
Jay was tall, well-built with shoulder length dark brown hair. He was friendly but a bit distant and very articulate. I actually would not have given him a second thought were it not for his eyes. They were large, deep set and disturbing but I just couldn't put my finger on why I found them disturbing. I finally asked her stepson about Jay and just casually said that he had the creepiest set of eyes that I had ever seen. He just kind of smirked, looked at me at said, "You don't know who he is, do you?". And then he dropped the bomb on me, Rosy's first husband was Charles Manson. I thought he was kidding until he told me to go talk to Rosy if I didn't believe him. And then I thought about Jay's eyes again. The chill that ran up my spine was unbelievable. A couple of days later I took Rosy to lunch and actually managed to scare up the courage to ask her. She opened up to me very freely and I sat across from her like a deer in headlights. What she told me stopped me in my tracks.
With that, I have to say what she told me does not exactly jive with a lot of the information I have read on line. According to Rosy she met Charles Sr. when she was still a teenager and that she knew about his past criminal record but thought that she could change him. She said that they started a relationship and soon got married. She said that the Charles Manson that she married was not the monster that broke into the headlines 15 years later. She also said that contrary to the story that she left him after they arrived in California was not true. According to her after they left Ohio he informed her in Oklahoma that the car they were driving was stolen and that she got out of the car at a gas station with her suitcase and let him continue on his own. She said she spent several days there waiting for her family to send her bus fare to get back home and that she had not yet told Charles Sr. that she was pregnant. She also said that after she got out in Oklahoma that she had no real further contact with him and filed for divorce after returning home. It wasn't until his arrest for the murders that she had any idea where he was or what he had been up to. By that time Rosy had gone on with her life. Yes, she was shocked but she felt that she was not in any way connected to him anymore.
Jay seemed to be a different case though. In an odd way he seemed to get kind of kick out of letting people know who his father was. Everybody started cutting him a really wide berth but Rosy was the one who seemed to pay the brunt of it. I watched people at the hotel who had worked with her for years just distance themselves very quickly as though she was the one who had done something wrong. Thanks to Jay word spread pretty quickly and Rosy became an outcast of sorts. My heart went out to her and just a handful of us stood by her side. Within just a couple of months she quit. I moved soon after ward and lost contact with her.
From what I have found out on line, Jay visited, or at least attempted to visit his father in prison and from what I have heard those attempts did not go well. I really can't imagine that they would have.
Again, Rosy was a treasure and I am glad that I got to know her. Jay, at the time, had some issues and I can understand why. It seems he may have tried to reconcile some of those things but it appears as though he just wasn't able to. I am sad to hear of their passing and I hope that they are both at peace.
Matt, thank you for letting me share this. I have not talked about this experience in decades. It still amazes me what is capable of passing through our lives.
Kindly contributed by Mango Man
DebS here-
I certainly appreciate Mango Man sharing the story that Rosalie told him, however I think it was just that, a story. Official records do not bear out what Rosalie told Mango Man. Giving Rosalie the benefit of the doubt I'm hoping that she was just trying to distance herself and her loved ones from Charles Manson.
Charles M Manson (Jr.) was born in California.
Apparently, according to my sources, Rosalie did separate from Charlie a couple of months before Charles Jr. was born. Rosalie filed for divorce, in California, from Charlie July 9, 1957 and the divorce was final Sept. 10, 1958, she was granted custody of Charles Jr. While Charlie was in prison Rosalie hooked up with a man named Jack White. She and Jack had son Jesse White before her divorce from Charles was final. They had another son the following year. Both of the White boys were born in California.
Rosalie and her then husband Jack White moved to Cadiz OH in the early 1960's to be near Rosalie's family. In 1965 Rosalie and Jack divorced. Rosalie stayed in Ohio and Jack went to Texas.
On Jan. 3, 1971 Jack and Rosalie's youngest son Jed was killed by an accidental shotgun blast at age 11.
On August 23, 1986 Rosalie and Jack's oldest son, Jesse, died of an overdose in Houston Texas.
Rosalie had married two more times after she divorced Jack White, the first ending in divorce and the second when she was widowed. She did not have anymore children. She spent the last six years of her life living near Tucson AZ and died August 21, 2009.
She was a member of the Green Valley Elks, San Ignacio Golf Club and the Canoa Hills Women’s Golf Assoc. as well as a former member of the Country Club of Green Valley and the Elks bowling league.
She enjoyed playing golf, bowling, dancing, playing cards, slot machines and spending time with her family.
Rosalie is survived by her loving companion Dr. Milton G. Mooney; brother Clarence (Buster) Willis; sisters Eileen Bradley, Maryann Horton and Amy Mulvey; daughter-in-law Elizabeth Whitlock; grandson Paul White; stepdaughters Laura Walker and Charlene Vinyard; and stepson Smokey Joe Handley.
She was preceded in death by her husband Jack Handley; and sons Jay, Jesse and Jed White.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 31, 2009, at the Green Valley Elks Lodge.
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