Women on the Manson Women
A nuanced tale of cults and white supremacy; a case for prison abolition; and the importance of the female gaze
I do not know when I first learned about Charles Manson, the Manson Family, or the Tate-LaBianca murders. It was probably in the context of The Beatles and listening to The White Album for the first time. It was probably my father who would have said something like, “That’s the song [“Helter Skelter”] that psycho Charles Manson said told him to kill people.”
There were still a lot of contexts missing from that revelation. I did not know about the individuals who actually committed the murders—Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and Leslie Van Houten—or that what Charles Manson claimed “Helter Skelter” described was an impending race war.
I do remember the first time that I was intrigued by the Manson Family, and was intrigued particularly by Patricia Krenwinkel, who I knew nothing about. The late true crime writer Michelle McNamara (I’ll Be Gone in the Dark) had a website called True Crime Diary, where she covered both breaking stories and cold cases. In September 2012, she posted an blog called “#bloodbath: how social media might have changed one of history's most infamous crime sprees”. McNamara makes an argument that does not entirely hold water (more on that later), but it did introduce me to the concepts of cults and grooming, and put me in Krenwinkel’s shoes. I felt a lot of sympathy for her—not a common sentiment, I would later learn.
The Tate-LaBianca murders, which took place during August 8–10, 1969, had their 50th anniversary in 2019. Unsurprisingly, a lot of new media about Charles Manson and the murders cropped up around then, but there’s never been a shortage of content about this Baby Boomer boogeyman. And there are many ways to look at the Manson Women through these examples. Are they villains? Are they victims? Are they both? And in any case, were these white women down to do whatever in service of a white supremacist? Let us take a look.
Michelle McNamara’s blog is a What If scenario, placing the murders in the modern era. It starts by walking us through the first set of murders, but where the various neighbors/witnesses have social media and can verify with each other that there is something bad happening at 10050 Cielo Drive. Then, McNamara posits:
Social media, had it existed, would have changed the way we learned about what happened on August 9, 1969. But, more controversially, I want to suggest that the existence of social media might have helped to avert what are now known as “the Manson murders” altogether.
McNamara then gives more context on Charles Manson and how he formed his cult of devoted followers, noting that he targeted damaged people, most of whom were young women. She profiles Patricia Krenwinkel, explaining why she made such a good mark for Manson:
Take Patricia Krenwinkel, who, as a chubby teenager with an endocrine condition that produced excess facial and body hair, grew up in Southern California, an outcast amongst the trim, blonde, hairless goddesses. When she was 17 her parents split. She knocked around aimlessly for a while. One night at her half-sister’s Manhattan Beach apartment Krenwinkel met Manson. They had sex that night. He told her she was beautiful. That word, long hoped for, awakened in Krenwinkel a hypnotic devotion.
McNamara then lays out her hypothesis: the advent of the internet and social media has fundamentally changed the nature of social isolation, and therefore would rob Charles Manson of his unique ability to hypnotize these lost souls. People like Krenwinkel would have other outlets to build her self-esteem. People like Manson would have to peddle his philosophy in competition with so many other streams of information and might not be able to cut through the noise.
McNamara wrote this in 2012. That was before Gamergate (2014) proved that that the internet could be a breeding ground for abusive behavior directed at women who fall outside cisnormative beauty standards and dare to build their self-esteem online. That was before the NXIVM cult reached mainstream infamy (2018) and proved that charismatic men could still find ways to seduce vulnerable women who later become accomplices to terrible crimes. I do still really like this blog for its humanization of Krenwinkel, but the final paragraph—which imagines that Manson does not successfully recruit Krenwinkel due to a combination of his sketchy Myspace profile and other social media distractions—is pure fantasy.
What If scenarios seem to be popular for Manson-related media (and yes, we will get to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). The 2018 film Charlie Says, written by Guinevere Turner and directed by Mary Harron, ends with a small What If/wish fulfillment fantasy. In an earlier scene, Leslie Van Houten (Hannah Murray) is asked by a biker acquaintance of the Family to leave Spahn Ranch with him, sensing that Charlie (Matt Smith) is bad news. She refuses. The scene plays again at the end of the film, but this time Leslie goes with the biker, never having taken part in the murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
While this scene struck the wrong chord with a few reviewers, feeling it was giving Leslie a catharsis she didn’t deserve, or somehow suggesting she was ultimately innocent, I am compelled by writer Sara Century’s interpretation of the scene:
[The Manson women] are not innocent, but Charlie Says never asserts that they are. By showing us a crucial moment in which Van Houten could have left the Ranch forever, it only further implicates her via the act of empathizing. (link)
In this view, the scene is not a happy conclusion for Leslie, but a reckoning with the choices she did make.
Outside of this fantasy sequence, Charlie Says is far more interested in reality. The film plays out in two timelines: a chronological one that starts with Leslie, Susan Atkins (Marianne Rendón) and Patricia Krenwinkel (Sosie Bacon) at the California Institution of Women, and a non-linear one showing life with Manson through Leslie’s eyes. In both timelines, the bond of sisterhood is a key element. In prison, Karlene Faith (Merritt Weaver) teaches classes to the Manson women, who are not allowed to be integrated into the general prison population. She gives them copies of feminist texts like Sisterhood is Powerful and Our Bodies, Ourselves, hoping this will free them of what she sees as Charlie’s brainwashing. The film’s title, Charlie Says, comes from the fact that the women will often begin a sentence that way to contradict whatever Karlene is telling them about the civil rights movement or other mass social developments.
Karlene, who was a real activist and scholar that agitated for their eventual release from prison, is right that the Manson women suffered from what writer Jeffrey Melnick describes as “patriarchal control in ways that often got hidden under layers of social experimentation”, but it’s also worth noting that Charlie Says depicts the intense female bonds between the Manson women, and asks us to consider the importance of that particular sisterhood. Director Mary Harron says:
The biggest emotional bond with [Leslie] in the cult was her relationship with Pat [Krenwinkel], and the bonds between the women were extremely strong, and that was another thing — as much as Manson — keeping them there. (link)
Other reviewers noticed this as well. Harriet Fletcher writes:
When you strip away Manson’s toxic presence, what emerges from these scenes at the ranch is the genuine friendships between the women. Their bond is more than circumstantial, it is a bond of blood, flesh and family. A member of the Family (Mary) gives birth with an army of supporters around her, holding her hands and mopping her brow. One woman even bites through the umbilical cord with her teeth. (link)
My favorite summation of this theme is from Joey Keogh:
Charlie Says is a film about female solidarity in even the harshest circumstances… (link)
Keogh’s articulation is great because it gestures to the messiness around this narrative. On the one hand, it is especially important to consider that young, vulnerable women who might have a hard enough time leaving an abusive relationship on their own would be compelled to stay and help protect each other. On the other hand, that protective bond does not excuse the murder of people who had nothing to do with the circumstance. It also points to how radical Karlene Faith was, who insisted on solidarity with the Manson women even as most of the prison staff and society at large had written them off. I again turn to Jeffrey Melnick, writing about work of Faith and the Santa Cruz Women’s Prison Project:
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. (link)
This indifference to the humanity of the Manson women, along with the sensationalism of their crimes, is what Harron’s film is trying to counter. Your mileage may vary on how well it succeeds. The murders themselves are not fully shown, and while this seems like a clear case of trying to avoid exploitation, some reviewers felt this whitewashed the women’s crimes. Other reviewers felt that the women themselves, and why they did what they did, were still unknowable.
I perhaps had an unusual advantage when I watched Charlie Says, since I already felt fairly connected to Leslie Van Houten after listening to her speak in an episode of the podcast Ear Hustle. I wrote briefly about this in my 2021 round-up, but to recap: Ear Hustle is a podcast about life during and after incarceration. It is co-hosted by Earlonne Woods, who was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison during the first few years of the show until his sentence was commuted by California Governor Jerry Brown (this will be important later), and Nigel Poor, an artist who volunteers at San Quentin.
In the episode where Woods and Poor talk to Van Houten, the sheer length of Van Houten’s incarceration is given context. Of all the people they have talked to on the show in 60 episodes, she has been in prison the longest—through ten different presidents! Poor later says to Woods:
E, it’s weird; I’ve met so many guys in San Quentin who’ve served less time for murder. In fact, some of them have been on our show.
The episode also supplies context for Van Houten’s life before Manson, and her life in prison as she began to break away from Manson’s hold and own up to the murders. Instead of a generic portrait of a troubled teen runaway, we learn that Van Houten got pregnant at 17 and was coerced by her mother into getting an illegal abortion, which Van Houten did not want to do. There was an unspoken hurt that Van Houten could not express to her mother:
She was not aware of how much damage it had done to me.
Later, setting the stage for why she would abandon her old family for The Manson Family, she says:
…because of my feeling that Mom had totally turned on me…I was very receptive to letting go of the institutions that we were raised on.
When Van Houten was in prison she reconnected with her mom:
My mom, she's a very loving person, but she also was very clear on what I was facing for the rest of my life. And at one point when I began to try to find ways to make myself a victim, she was very clear: ‘You put yourself here and you’re going to need to figure out how you're going to live with it.’
Throughout the episode, Van Houten brings up the LaBianca family. In receiving the dedicated support of her own mother, she acknowledges that she robbed the LaBianca children of that opportunity, and that she must hold those two things as equally important.
Van Houten expected to be in prison her entire life, after repeated denials from the parole board. In April 2016, she was finally granted parole. However, California Governor Jerry Brown (remember him?) reversed the parole board’s decision. Van Houten continues to be granted parole and continues to have it reversed by California’s Governor (currently Gavin Newsom). On the feeling of being granted parole for the first time, Van Houten says:
The greatest affirmation I ever had was when the board finally found me suitable. That was an outside affirmation. The board after close to twenty-some hearings to say, ‘We recognize who you are today’ was just amazing. And I think they were very courageous people to do that. It was more the recognition of who I have become. And that meant absolutely everything to me. It came with the recognition that I am not my past… that I've worked very hard and just having an acknowledged, it made me I think more self-assured. My voice became stronger after that.
I could hop on a soap box about prison abolition now, but we can save that for another day. Instead, I will put forward the theory that podcasts are really the way to go when it comes to telling the Manson women’s story, because Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This and its 2015 miniseries Charles Manson’s Hollywood still is the definitive exploration of the Manson story, in my opinion.
Longworth’s exploration of the Manson story is through the lens of the classic narrative of an outsider coming to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. Manson was a musician, and he wanted other people to hear his music. He charmed the likes of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and record producer Terry Melcher, but those dreams of getting a record deal were dashed when it became clear to Melcher and others that Manson’s charisma did not translate to the recording studio. The music career didn’t pan out, but of course Manson did achieve worldwide fame in the end.
Longworth’s podcast is notable to me for several reasons. She thoroughly details how Manson developed his manipulation techniques—borrowing from pimps, Scientology, and the self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is crucial to demystifying his reputation as a uniquely evil mastermind, while also supplying concrete possibilities for how he got Family members to do his bidding. Describing Manson’s early lessons from pimps he met, Longworth says:
The trick, he learned, was to pick girls who had self-esteem issues…These girls would become completely dependent on a man who gave them just a little bit of encouragement and affection, and they could also take the beatings that you’d need to give them every now and then to remind them that they were essentially worthless, and thus desperately in need of your affection. This cycle could keep going indefinitely, as long as you made sure to then take them and keep them away from any family or friends who might give them a reality check.
Manson did brutalize the women who followed him, particularly Mary Brunner, the first member of the Manson Family. As Longworth describes:
It didn’t always feel so magical: Charlie would take out his frustrations on Mary, often leaving her with a black eye. Mary’s bruises were a reminder to the other girls what would happen if they made Charlie angry.
To briefly return to Leslie Van Houten’s testimony on Ear Hustle, she described what it was like to have Manson contact her in prison, long after she had renounced him, and how it felt abusive:
Nigel: How did it feel when you got a letter from him?
Leslie: It was really awful… and creepy. And I believe I turned it over to the investigators in the prison. [Nigel affirms] I wasn't gonna… it wasn't okay, you know.
Nigel: No [meant as an affirmation to Leslie’s statement]
Leslie: And it wasn't okay that made it through the system. And to me…
Nigel: It just reminds me of when someone's in an abusive relationship and a person shows up at their house, it's such an invasion. Like something you thought you got away from. [Leslie affirms]
Longworth also constantly reminds the listener of Manson’s virulent racism, something that often gets overlooked in re-tellings of the murders. Cult leaders rely on isolationist tactics to keep their members in the fold, and Manson’s version of this involved not allowing his Family access to newspapers or radio. Since he controlled the flow of information, Manson told the Family that they needed to hide from the rest of the world because soon Black Americans were going to massacre every White American. If you stuck with Manson, you’d be safe. Black people, according to Manson, were too stupid to run a functioning society, so the Family would emerge from hiding and take over and re-enslave the Black population. Manson’s racism and abuse are included in a few scenes in Charlie Says, but Charles Manson’s Hollywood gives both aspects a fuller interrogation.
As for the murders themselves, Longworth does not explicitly say why she thinks they happened, but she gives the listener plenty of clues. Consider that 10050 Cielo Drive is where Terry Melcher, the record producer who spurned Manson, used to live before Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate moved in. Consider that Charles Manson tried to murder Bernard Crowe, a Black drug dealer, shortly before the Tate-LaBianca murders.
In Joan Didion’s famous essay The White Album, where she recalls, among other things, interviewing Manson Family member Linda Kasabian, she wrote:
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.
Did Didion find such a lesson in the Tate-LaBianca murders? A more famous quote from this essay reads:
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
The tension that I believe Didion is referring to is a combination of the political unrest and social experimentation brewing throughout the decade. The paranoia is that it was all bit Too Much. You could read Didion as saying that the Tate-LaBianca murders burst the bubble of all that political unrest and social experimentation and was an example of how it had all gone Too Far. Longworth, instead of regurgitating the story of Manson as countercultural boogeyman, places him in a specific context. The murders probably happened for a number of reasons, but they were all specific to Manson and not to hippies, free love, or the countercultural movement in general.
Speaking of generalities vs. specificities, we must talk about the elephant in the room: Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Spoilers incoming.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood can be loosely understood as the third part of Tarantino’s trilogy of alternate history revenge flicks. Inglorious Basterds is an alternate history where the entire Nazi leadership, including Adolf Hitler, is assassinated by Jewish people years before the actual end of World War II. Django Unchained is an alternate history where a formerly enslaved Black man, Django, rescues his wife and massacres the entire White population on the plantation where she is being held with no consequences. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an alternate history where the Tate-LaBianca murders don’t happen and instead…three brainwashed and drug-addled White youths are viciously murdered by two White Hollywood performers.
In terms of scale, it is clearly the smallest Wrong that Tarantino is trying to Right in the three films. Instead of revenge on an oppressive institution (Nazi Germany, American slavery), this is revenge on three murderers whose relative political capital is not extraordinarily high. More than that, it’s an act of revenge for a murder that explicitly does not happen in this film; unlike the Nazis and the slaveowners, Tex Watson (Austin Butler), Patricia Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty), and Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison) have not, to our knowledge, committed a crime. Sure, their intention was to attack Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) …and that hints at my third problem with this set-up.
In Tarantino’s other films, the Wronged Party—Jewish people, Black Americans—got to dish out the revenge. Surely the more thematically resonant thing to do would be to have Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) dispatch the would-be murderers herself. Or how about instead of attempting to murder strangers, Watson, Krenwinkel, and Atkins could realize how Manson (Damon Herriman) has mistreated them and kill him instead? But Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not actually that interested in the Mansons, or in Sharon Tate as more than just a symbol. As I summed it up after watching the movie:
So why am I talking about this movie? This essay is called “Women on the Manson Women”, is it not? Well, what’s it like to be a woman watching a Manson woman get butchered?
Melissa Tamminga is a film programmer and writer who wrote a brilliant review/critique/analysis/exorcism of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for Seattle Screen Scene. The entire piece is worth a read, and it goes into great depth about the film’s portrayal of Sharon Tate, of gender roles, of nostalgia, and the simultaneous presence and absence of race and racism in the narrative. That is all beyond the scope of this essay. What I want to focus on is Tamminga’s examination of how the Manson women are portrayed and how the on-screen violence against them feels.
Tamminga first talks about the Manson women as the foil to Tate, who in the film is a beatific angel. The Manson women are the whores to Tate’s Madonna. Tamminga goes on:
But a few things make such a good/bad binary troubling. The first is that Charles Manson himself is almost wholly removed from the film. We see him once, moving as a reminder of the looming threat through the Polanski property, and we learn that the Manson family members who eventually invade Rick’s house are there under orders from Manson, but the film itself does not really give a context for Manson, for teenage runaways, and the cultish thrall he held over those at Spahn Ranch. We cannot, certainly, in any way excuse the real-life murderers for what they did to Sharon Tate and her friends, but the film is distinctly pointed in the way it focuses on the Manson women, not Manson himself.
Tamminga points out that in a crucial scene that takes place at Spahn Ranch, there is an impression that the Manson women are in charge, giving orders to the men around them. While the women Family members certainly outnumbered the men, a film like Charlie Says and Karina Longworth’s Charles Manson’s Hollywood make it clear that the Manson Family was still patriarchal in its structure. One example: women had to prepare the meals but were not allowed to eat until the men had their fill. Tarantino completely ignores/alters this reality in his presentation, presumably to make the women even more menacing.
At the outset of her piece, Tamminga made it clear that her first reaction to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was one of anger and nausea. Those feelings have to do with the way the fictional Krenwinkel and Atkins are dispatched in the film’s climax:
I thought initially the anger and nausea had specifically to do with the violence inflicted on women in the film, the two Manson girls. I do think that might be part of it. Even with the intellectual, history-linked knowledge that “these would have been the horrible women that murdered Sharon Tate,” the film itself hadn’t really established these particular girls as especially vile. They looked like teenagers to me, and I wasn’t satisfied with having to fill in the blanks from history and read villainy into them, as it were. For all we know, at that point in this story, they hadn’t murdered anyone yet; they were, initially, only holding knives, and the brutal battering Cliff gives seemed grotesquely out-sized and sadistic, relative to Cliff’s stuntman abilities and their small teenage bodies. He could have disarmed them, surely, after getting the gun from Tex, without bashing their faces in.
Tamminga then hypothesizes that it is not solely the violence against Krenwinkel and Atkins on screen that affected her, but the violence in conjunction with the minimizing of Manson’s role and the film’s regressive views about race and gender. This film does not Right a great historical Wrong the way that Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained attempt to do, because its heroes have a lot more in common with the racist, misogynist Manson than the film wants to admit.
Leading into her deep dive on the climax, Tamminga suggests that there should be some kind of catharsis in seeing Tate’s murderers brutally murdered if you keep in mind the real historical context and not the universe the film has set up (she later clarifies that she is against vigilantism and she herself would find no catharsis). I would argue that there is no catharsis even with the historical context. Even murderers deserve a chance at a better fate. I cannot enjoy Tarantino’s film because I plainly believe that Patricia Krenwinkel (currently age 74) and Leslie Van Houten (currently age 72) deserve to be paroled. I urge people to question what retribution in the form of lifelong incarceration or an eye-for-an-eye onscreen butchering really does for the world.
In closing, I want to circle back to Charles Manson and white supremacy. Manson’s followers, including the Manson women, were complicit in his anti-Black racism, and this complicity is still underexplored, both in fiction and in the testimony of the women themselves. Karlene Faith, the activist and scholar featured in Charlie Says, did write a book that the film is partially based upon: The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten. I have not had a chance to read it, so it is possible this subject might be explored there. Certainly, in the interviews with Krenwinkel and Van Houten that are available, there is not a lot of specific pushback about Manson’s racism. This is true even of ex-Family members who weren’t part of the murders. In a Los Angeles Times oral history, Barbara Hoyt describes learning about Helter Skelter this way:
When I joined the Family, the first thing they asked me was if I had heard the Beatles’ White Album and knew about Helter Skelter. Susan Atkins—Sadie—was the one who told me about it. She told me Helter Skelter was coming. She said the blacks were going to rise against the whites, but the Family would escape it. They were building dune buggies with fur seats and gun mounts. They were making clothes out of hides. It was like they were all pioneers. I thought, “Wow! This is fun. It’s like camping.” (link)
As I conclude this essay, I now find myself questioning why it is so easy for me to have empathy for the Manson women. I am a White woman in a white supremacist society that tends to go a lot easier on White women than people of color. To bring up one last quote from Tamminga:
If, as a white woman, I can attain this ideal womanhood, I will be worshiped, the narrative goes. The ideal is dangled as a tantalizing possibility, and in a patriarchal world that does not often offer real power or agency, being worshiped as an idol and finding some affirmation in white male patriarchy — from those who have power — is the next best thing, even if it means agreeing to be an object and even if it means joining in the oppression of others, e.g. Black people, indigenous people, people of color.
Still, I do believe I can hold empathy for multiple people at the same time. I just have to keep track of who I am holding it for, and why.