SAN QUENTIN, Jan. 5 — A reporter once called him “little Charlie Manson.”

He has been called much worse.

Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, a prosecutor in his 1970 murder trial, describes the 5-foot-2 Manson as a “blood-thirsty murderer” who “after 15 years in prison hasn’t changed at all.”

“He’s still going strong,” Kay says. “As long as Manson is alive, he’s a danger.”

Manson was 35 when he was sentenced to die for masterminding the 1969 murder of actress Sharon Tate and six others during a bloody two-day rampage that terrified and shocked the world. His sentence later was commuted to life in prison.

Today, at 51, his dark mane of shoulder-length hair is graying; his beard is nearly white. And he has grown soft around the middle.

During a rare recent interview, he is milking a fervent plea for ecology one minute, flailing his arms or talking about a snake around his neck the next.

Dr. Martin Blinder, a San Anselmo psychiatrist who specializes in the criminal mind, calls Manson a “third-rate charismatic individual.”

“But what distinguishes him from the hordes of other third-rate charismatic individuals running around is that Manson is crazy and evil, ” Blinder adds.

Even Charles “Tex” Watson, now serving a life sentence at the Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, for his part in the murders of Tate and the others, today refers to Manson as “the devil.”

Manson says his public image “has nothing to do with me.” He says it was created by people who needed a devil figure “so that when Charlie died, all the bad in the world would go away.”

He has his own description of himself.

“I’m a guitar, a cup of coffee, a snake, a pocketful of names and faces. I see myself in the desert as a rattle-snake, as a bird, as anything.

“You guys are stuck play-acting as humans. I don’t need to be a human. I don’t want to be anybody in particular. I already am everybody three times around the clock.”

Manson swaggers and smiles with self-confidence in a conference room at San Quentin Prison. A stringy piece of shoulder-length hair, threaded with gray, falls unattended into his eyes.

His legendary eyes have not aged despite the years. In a now sallow middle-aged face, they remain bright, black and haunting.

Almost two decades have passed with him behind bars, but images of murder and mayhem associated with Manson still persist. The fascination with his mystique is unblurred.

San Quentin officials say Manson receives a dozen letters a month from people around the world who ask for autographs, even suggest intimate interludes. And there are so many requests for interviews that San Quentin information officer Dave Langerman says he sometimes feels “like Charlie’s press agent.”

It has been years since he has walked outside the walls of prison, but Manson remains in close touch with his original associates, including Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, still serving time in a West Virginia federal prison for the 1975 attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford.

And Manson is a kind of prophet-leader for a group of people living along the Russian River in Sonoma County who call themselves “friends of Charlie.” They regularly visit him at San Quentin.

To them, he is misunderstood and unjustly persecuted. One woman in the group, who renamed herself Jewel Mansonn, says he is a genius out to save the world.

“If you love Jesus Christ, you love Charles Manson,” she says.

Manson was born “no name” to a 16-year-old prostitute. While his mother served time in prison for armed robbery, he bounced from neighbor to relative before being placed in a caretaking institution at 12. Although he tested above average in intelligence, he rejected even the basics in education and today has problems both with reading and writing.

By age 32, he had spent 17 years in institutions, charged with such things as pimping, burglary, forgery and moving stolen property across state lines.

“I never had no mother or no father,” Manson says. “All convicts have been my dad. I been raised up by men, as opposed to having a mother. And you ( might ) consider that a sad world. But I wouldn’t trade it.”

Manson is lucid one moment, incoherently jabbering the next.

They will march him back to his cell, manacles again snapped around his wrists and chained to his waist. But now he shouts, leaps from his chair in midsentence, laughs maniacally, eyes popping, and bursts into song as though transported onto a Broadway stage.

Then, quiet and in control, he fixes his familiar, haunting gaze on you and pleads with a poet’s eloquence to save the California redwoods and fight against world pollution.

Manson said he neither expects nor wants to be released.

But if it should happen, “I’d go where I can, I’d skip. I’d walk around, get my guitar. I’d put up a force field and live with horny toads and little elves. I’d live in little kiddieland.”

He would live off the land. “I got fig trees and I got pine nut forests and I got grapes and I got a little bag to keep them in and I’d sit around all day and watch you all go to work.”

Last August, security around Manson was tightened after a man scheduled to visit him attempted to walk in with a bullet in his shirt pocket. The man was arrested and Manson was moved into an isolated cell, commonly known as “the hole,” where he remains in solitary confinement. He eats in his cell and is chained when allowed outside to exercise or speak to visitors through a heavy sheet of Plexiglas.

Manson wants to be moved back to the generaI prison population where he would have more freedom “to walk around.”

And he finds it particularly frustrating that officials haven’t let him have his guitar for years for security reasons.

“I like to play my music. I am my music. But I’m not allowed to play. You see, I have this jealous snake around my neck.

“I’m not allowed to do anything … I’m not allowed to live and I’m not allowed to die. So I just sit in my cell and sing and make little dolls on a string. And I send them out to do little jobs. I give them names, I give them a little personality. I talk to them. I put little things in their hands and I send them out in truth.”

Asked what purpose the dolls serve in the world, he becomes incoherent and changes the subject :

“It’s hard to make a reality on the planet Earth,” Manson says. “If you’re the king of England, you can make up a new word but it takes 25 years for it to get down to the brains of the sheep.”

Manson’s facial expressions are a maelstrom of grimaces, grins and raised eyebrows.

He is intense and volatile. In mid-sentence, Manson suddenly springs from his chair and begins to re-enact his trial.

“Object, your honor! He didn’t file that motion properly. Stop now. Go somewhere and fall down with that lie,” he says.

Later, asked how he creates his music, he leaps to his feet, throws out his arms like Al Jolson singing “Mammy” and bursts into song:

“I just take off from the top of my mind and feel pure in my heart and know I’m way beyond time … then I think about rhyme and I skip like a little girl …”

He makes eye contact, then laughs uproariously.

“Crazy huh, Charlie crazy?’ he says. “OK. OK. I take it all back. Forget anything I said.”

While the psychiatrist who treats him at San Quentin refuses to comment on his condition, the prison officials who see Manson regularly believe his mental illness is often the masquerade of an old con.

“You overhear him talking in the visiting room and he’s very coherent and articulate,” San Quentin’s Langerman says. “But when he’s being interviewed by the media and he doesn’t want to talk about something, he just shifts into his crazy Charlie mode and off he goes.”

Manson downplays his notoriety. References to his legendary “family cults or power over others exasperates him.

“I got no Manson family, dig? I’m no leader of nobody,” he says, shrugging

“Man, you guys have got it all wrong. You’re trying to convict the last hobo just trying to hide out behind the last garbage can.”

Manson denied his part in the murders during his trial and remains adamant about it.

He insists he was in San Diego at the time of the killings.

“I even have a traffic ticket to prove it — but did anyone bother to bring that up at the trial? Did I even get to put on a defense?

“I walk on the edge of crime and outlaw. But just because I’m involved with criminals doesn’t mean that I’m out butchering people in the morning. In other words, I’ve been around killing and murderers all my life. But what someone else does is not my affair.

Manson agreed to a rare interview with the Marin Independent Journal on the condition that his chains be removed during the session, that he be allowed to get up and move freely in the area surrounding his chair, and that he be given copies of all photographs taken of him that day.

By TERESA ALLEN