Manson in The Own Words, by Charles Manson as told to Nuel Emmons (256 pages, Grove Press, $16.95)

Every year a man with a swastika cut into his brow just above his eyes appears before the California parole board and petitions to be set free, and every year he is turned down.

That man is Charles Manson, once one of America’s prime symbols of evil. There was even a feeble joke a few years ago: Let Manson out and there won’t be so many people trying to move to the sunny climes of California.

That was awhile ago, and now not so much is made of Manson, whose image as a target of fear and loathing is on the wane. He has written his apologia, an “as told to” production in association with Nuel Emmons, who met Manson in prison in the 1950s. Grove Press, the home of Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, has decided to publish it.

I had not thought much about Manson since one of his followers, Squeaky Fromme, tried to kill President Ford in 1975 and I acquired some of his then recent letters to his disciples to see whether there were any hints at such an action.

Also around that time someone had sent me a rotting cow tongue in the mail, and I suspected the M group. From newspaper articles I knew he’d had a fairly tough time in prison; a few years ago, someone tried to kill him with poisoned Tang, and a Hare Krishna adept also tried to kill him after an argument about religion.

Nevertheless, I was looking forward to a good read, hoping that the grace of almost 20 years in captivity would lead to a detailed account that would tie up some of the many loose ends in this sordid murder case. The time frame, after all, was well established, first in my book, The Family, and later by Vince Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. All Manson would have had to do was correct mistakes and fill in the gaps.

This, unfortunately, is not what he has created, although there are some interesting sections about his childhood and early experiences in jail. His feelings of inferiority, his seething anger that he was never given a chance, never accepted, always slighted and persecuted — all come forth from his childhood.

You don’t have to approve of his later deeds to realize that Manson had a despicable upbringing. He was born in November 1934 to a 15-year-old mother, and his father quickly disappeared. His mother moved around, often leaving him with relatives. He blames much of it on Mom. Mom was promiscuous, he says, and wanted thrills.

In a scene right out of a Thomas Hardy novel, he claims Mom once sold him for a pitcher of beer, requiring his uncle to search a few days until he could retrieve him from the purchaser.

To please a boyfriend, Mom placed him in a home for boys in Terre Haute, Ind., in 1947. He was 12. He kept trying to escape and began a life of petty theft. In ’48 he was sent to a reformatory. Three years later he escaped, stole a car and got caught in Utah after only two weeks of freedom. He was then sent to the National Training School for Boys in Washington. He was upset that Mom never tried to get him paroled in her custody.

At age 20, he was at last let loose. He married the next year, in ’55, and became a burglar, traveling with his pregnant wife in a stolen ’51 Merc to Los Angeles. He left his wife in the care of his mom, then residing in LA, and roamed around, getting caught in Indianapolis. In 1956 he was sent to the federal penitentiary, where he at last decided to learn a trade — as a pimp.

He wanted the respect on the street, the flashy clothes, the ornate autos, the perfume, the power over others. Released from the slams in 1958, Manson realized his goal in Los Angeles. He was arrested again after a couple of years, and sent in 1961 to McNeil Island prison in Washington, where he acquired a passion for music. He learned the guitar and discovered skills at songwriting. He had a pleasing voice and hoped for success as a professional when released.

Manson was let out in early 1967, just in time for flower power, love-ins, LSD, psychedelic music, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War and turn on/tune in/drop out. He seems to have had parole officers who were understanding, because almost at once he began a roaming life, attracting young women, and later young men, to follow him. Their travel was very ’60s-ish, in crowded vans and converted school buses with mattresses, guitars, psychedelic tapestries and constant apprehension about clap.

He suffered one of those I-am-Jesus experiences on LSD at a Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco. Such an experience was not that unusual in those years. Someone could write a book about such cases, perhaps called The Thousand Jesuses of Acidland.

In those gullible years, attracting young disciples was a cinch. You could have painted a piece of limestone with blue house paint and placed it in a storefront window, calling it the Church of the Blue Rock, and the converts would have flocked. As for sex, in San Francisco of 1967 a guy with a guitar could just stay more or less shackled around the clock to a bed and make out with a sequential array of hundreds, probably thousands, of lovers.

His religious beliefs helped his cause. He specialized in superstitious sociopaths. There’s nothing quite like making love with a guy she believes to be Jesus to cement a gullible young woman’s affections.

Accordingly, there’s an abundance of ink devoted to sex, expertly recalled, in Manson’s tale. And that points out a flaw in the book: his selective memory. Whereas he can remember exact details of sexual encounters, he is vague about important aspects of the murders he helped commit.

He speaks very little about his relationship with devil worship, which was mixed into his peculiar brand of Christianity. He hints he came into contact with occult blood-drinkers and those who sacrificed animals while living near Los Angeles, in Topanga Canyon, at a place called the Spiral Staircase. It’s an example of downplayed vagueness, and he says he only watched and listened.

A good part of his allure was his singing and songs. He constantly tried to promote himself with producers and record companies and seemed always on the verge of getting an album out. One executive, Terry Melcher, actually produced a session for him. Melcher lived in the house later occupied by Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski.

In early 1968 Manson and family started living at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a run-down cowboy town used for movies where you also could rent horses. The ranch was on the edge of LA in the San Fernando Valley, and Manson and his 20 or so devotees more or less took over the ranch, except for a spell when they moved to an extremely removed ranch in the mountains above Death Valley.

Money was a big problem. The food bill alone was considerable. So a wide variety of criminal activities commenced — drug dealing, credit card theft and stealing cars. Some of his group got into porn movies and, some say, other kinds of films involving real blood.

He expanded the stolen car ring with the assistance of several bike gangs, the sort that have Satan mentioned on their colors. They specialized in stripping down Porsches and other high-end vehicles and turning them into dune buggies. Some were painted black and kept for use in what he believed would be desert warfare with militant blacks.

His world view was becoming more and more grotesque. He said that he had found an underground river and huge caverns beneath Death Valley where they were going to be able to live. The blacks, his rap went, were going to rise up, kill the whites and conquer America, after which M. and group would emerge from their underground city in dark dune buggies and take over.

Manson shot a black dope dealer in 1969, using the same gun that later was used in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Manson thought the man had died, but actually he survived. It happened that a Black Panther also was shot about the same time, and somehow Manson came to believe that the man he shot was the Black Panther.

This caused immense fear. Surely, he reasoned, the Panthers would raid the Spahn Ranch, so he set up guard roosts, armed his followers and waited for the black battalions. Terry Melcher heard about the shooting and called off any more recording sessions.

Things got freakier and freakier. In July of ’69 some of his group were trying to shake down an acquaintance, Gary Hinman, for money, and they killed him. To blame the murder on the Panthers, someone wrote in blood on the wall above the body, “Political Piggy.” As it turned out, one Manson follower, Bob Beausoleil, was arrested for the murder.

Manson’s memory is much too sketchy here, but he confirms that they plotted further murders involving writing in blood so as to make the police think Hinman’s killer was still at large.

He sent a few of his trusted followers out to kill the night of Aug. 8, 1969. They went to the
home of Sharon Tate, who was nine months pregnant, and Roman Polanski, who was away. Killed were Tate; Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune; hair stylist Jay Sebring; writer Voytek Frykowski; and a visitor, Steven Parent.

From Manson’s book one ghastly new detail is now laid before us: He visited the crime scene after the murders.

While covering the murder trial in 1970, I acquired a large blueprint of Sharon Tate’s house and grounds, prepared by police, on which was noted every smear of blood, and blood type, found at the scene.

From three of the defendants I knew fairly exactly what had occurred, and their accounts did not square with the blood. I also had a list of all the fingerprints found in the house, and was intrigued by some unidentified prints found on the window of the first story nursery, which had just been painted that day.

For example, there was a pool of blood on the front porch, matching Sharon Tate’s, and there was a bloody young woman’s footprint on the walkway, not matching any victim or defendant. Jay Sebring’s blood also was found on the porch, yet at no time did either go onto the porch.

I asked one of the attorneys to ask Manson whether he had gone to the house after the murders, and I was told he had said yes, “I wanted to see what my children had done.” He later denied it, but now describes it in his book.

He went with a companion around 4 a.m. “I’d had thoughts,” he writes, “of creating a scene more in keeping with a black-against-white retaliation, but in looking around, I lost the heart to carry out my plans. The two of us took towels and wiped every place a fingerprint could have been left. I then placed the towel I was using over the head of the man inside the room.”

There had been talk of stringing up victims with rope, so perhaps Manson and his assistant moved the two victims to the porch to do so, but changed his mind, and carried them back. I always wondered whether others also visited the house, entering by the nursery window, leaving their prints. The identity of the person who went with Manson to the house is not known.

The next night Manson himself led a kill crew forth, and they murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, again writing with blood. Stupidity became a factor. Manson wanted to leave a billfold belonging to one of the victims in a black neighborhood, and had it placed in a service station restroom. But it was placed in a white neighborhood, and it wasn’t found for months.

A few months later they were arrested. There was a famous trial where virtually every seat was filled with press from around the world.

Manson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life after the Supreme Court death penalty decision. He’s still there, and now sends us a book that can only be described as creepy. It’s the sort of creepy to which qualifying adjectives can’t be attached. It’s just creepy.

And he has the fame for which he always hungered. The letters of fascination keep pouring in, we’re told. But it’s a creepy fame. There’s a peculiar type of female who becomes attracted to criminals. I recall the glassy-eyed damzels at the trial who flirted with Manson’s attorney to get close to the action. Even the Boston Strangler had fans.

At age 52, Manson is beginning to look like a scorched old rockabilly performer, with his pompadourish hair. One of the avowed purposes of this book is to dispel his image as the pied piper of death. That it does, but at the same time it brings forth a piper’s tune that seems to play to him alone, exposing him as a tormented psychopath with a terrifying and disjointed inner schizo rage — particularly against women.

When I read his book, I recalled his testimony in November of 1970. There was one particular statement that seemed to sum him up. He was addressing either the judge or the prosecuting attorney. “I don’t dislike you,” he said. “I cannot dislike you; I am you. You are my blood. You are my brother. That is why I don’t fight you.”

In the very next sentence he continued: “If I could I would jerk this microphone off and beat your brains out with it because that is what you deserve, that is what you deserve.”

There have been at least 10 books and three films based on the Manson group, and there will be more, for there are still gaping holes in the chronology and history of this outlaw band. Sex, gore and weird sociology will always attract the cash-paying customer. As a police officer says in Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “One’s file, you know, is never quite complete; a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all the participants are dead.”

But the question whether a reader should pay $16.95 for this book is troubling. Perhaps a check in the same amount might more appropriately be spent on helping the homeless get through the winter, or sent to farm families in distress or to any other organization devoted to the relief of suffering. For this book will not relieve anyone’s suffering.

By ED SANDERS