Original subtitles

- I've been an outlaw ever since I was born.

I went to reform school when I was about ten.

And I learned to box and cry,

and I learned to do all the things

that you do in reform school.

I escaped there a bunch of times and I went to prison,

and I learned everything that you do in prison.

And I talked to all the guys

and asked them everything they knew.

And they told me, sincerity and honesty will do it.

It'll trick them every time.

And then I went outside,

and all these little kids got a hold of me and aid,

"We want to stop the Vietnam War, and we want to do this."

What? there was a war? I don't know what's happening.

I've been in jail all my life.

You ever see me in vocational training? Rehabilitation?

They never planned no rehabilitation.

I sweep the floor in the kitchen,

go out and play handball.

I'm still ten years old in your world.

In your world, I'm still a kid.

- Now at this point,

we are going to leave Golden Gate Park

to go into, I think a slight sojourn

through the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco.

This is the new avant-garde

left bank area of San Francisco,

which has evolved and developed over the past number of years.

In fact, I would say that the last 18 months

has seen a tremendous increase of the so-called hippies,

who have invaded and live in this area.

It is the belief of the people

who live within the area that we, the middle class,

or the upper class, have done a very, very poor job

in running our government and our way of life.

- Haight-Ashbury is where the action is.

This is where the hippies began their march

towards flower power and the quiet revolution,

and a rallying point for the new and irreverent

way of life of those who preach the dropout gospel.

- In 1967, the American public

first becomes aware of what is described

as an aberration happening out in San Francisco.

Because San Francisco has always been

where the weirdos go.

The idea was starting to spread

among younger Americans,

casting off supposedly the conservative chains

of old American society.

This current way of life we have,

the way our parents are living is wrong.

- The Haight-Ashbury community has created the council

for a Summer of Love in San Francisco.

- We affirm life, love, peace, and self-discovery.

- People come here to love one another,

and to be in love with each other.

- I think in Charlie Manson's case,

he really suffered from a lack of love.

And then he got out in '67,

and, wow, you know, it's a cultural revolution.

I mean, it's free love,

and everybody's talking about getting rid

of your inhibitions, you know, and your fears,

and so he just grew his hair long

and started thinking about the role of a man,

you know, in this new alternative culture.

- It really was a perfect storm,

all those elements that came together,

the music, the drugs, free love and everything.

The ideology that we thought we had discovered something new,

that we, oh, we finally figured it out.

- There was a feeling of-- that we were all

brothers and sisters more than we felt before.

And that might have been enhanced by acid.

- LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.

Easy to make, incredibly potent.

A single ounce contains 300,000 doses,

each dose drastic in its effects.

- LSD is the most potent drug ever discovered.

To understand how profound it is,

you have to understand how it works in the brain.

This is the brain.

This is the white matter,

the thinking part, consciousness.

LSD comes into the brain, alters a switch,

alters the electrical patterns going into the memory circuit.

This has a very profound impact

on those neuroanatomical connections,

in which one sensory modality is translated into another.

You see the universe in a way

that you've never seen it before.

It's like having, like, a religious vision.

And you feel that you have broken on through

to the other side.

- The best, most direct, the most natural way

to find God is through chemicals,

and today, it's marijuana, LSD, peyote, mescaline,

and many other mind-expanding drugs,

for sure, coming along every month.

- Some four million Americans

are said to have taken LSD last year.

Far more than a fad, it is to some a new religion.

- It is a drug in which there is no knowledge

about the eventual harmful results.

One individual can apparently escape with no problem.

Others immediately have a great problem.

There is a residual effect that this can come back

with what might be permanent brain damage.

Anyone that would engage in this or indulge in this

is just a plain fool.

- Across the bay in Berkeley, there was student unrest.

College was the place to protest.

And of all the places that this was happening,

Berkeley was probably the greatest.

- The feeling, the passion against the war

was just ferocious.

Every night, the network leading anchor people,

giving you a death toll of the dead Americans in Vietnam.

- And the figures for last week

reflected the sharp increase in the fighting.

408 Americans were killed,

the highest number since the end

of the enemy's May offensive.

- Americans dying for who knew why.

- And this is where we find Charlie Manson moving.

He ends up in Berkeley.

And he would be perfect

fitting into the anti-war demonstrations,

to the feminists.

Except he didn't care about any god damn war overseas.

If blacks and women were oppressed,

he thought that was great.

That's the way the world's supposed to work.

Free love, that screwed him up.

How can you be a pimp if everybody

can get laid for nothing?

So Charlie's out of his element in Berkeley,

but he does home in on the one thing.

You've got young people who feel alienated.

They don't feel like they belong.

Mary Brunner's a librarian in Berkeley.

She's out of place there.

Instead of wearing sort of the hippie garb,

she's wearing blouses buttoned up to the neck.

She's from the Midwest.

Charlie can tell she's uncomfortable.

When he meets her, she's walking her dog.

And Charlie makes inroads with her by fussing over the pet.

They start talking,

he's using all the Dale Carnegie techniques.

They're becoming friends,

and Charlie just happens to mention

he doesn't have any place to stay right now.

Mary says, as he knew she would,

"Well, you can stay at my place for a couple nights."

Once he's there, he goes about talking his way into her bed.

Then Mary gets the idea this is a love affair.

It's her and Charlie.

So she's gonna work and make the money,

and Charlie will go out during the day

and work on his music and do Charlie things.

She soon sees that he's bringing girls back,

but he's telling her, "But you can't get upset about this.

"Nobody's body is their own.

We're just--we're just doing the natural thing."

She gradually sees she's gonna have to share Charlie.

- Charlie Manson came to the Haight-Ashbury

during that transitional period,

when things were getting, you know, harder and meaner.

Charlie took LSD.

He'd become part of that culture.

- So I went down and I looked around and I said,

"Hey, this is love here."

All I want is the little girls.

They picked me up, 16-year-old kid.

I said, "Where you sleep?"

He says, "Wherever I lay down."

I said, "Well, don't you have to have an apartment?"

And he said, "No, I sleep in the park."

I said, "How do you do that?" He said, "Sleeping bag."

I said, "Is that right? What do you eat?"

He said, "Food."

I said, "Man, where do you get it?"

He said, "Wherever I can."

I said, "Don't you have a job?"

And he laughed at me and said, "No, we're now the Diggers."

- The Diggers, adopting the name

of a Christian society of Cromwellian England,

are the conscience of the hippies,

who find dirt and disorder appealing,

and only work when they must.

- A group of compatible hippies,

sharing their rice and beans,

and hepatitis and venereal disease.

- The diggers decided to feed the street kids.

We had to wind up sending our women

holding babies to the farmer's market,

and the old Italians would give them

all the day-old food right that day.

And that night, anyone who showed up with a bowl

and a spoon could get fed.

We set up free stores which had clothes, tools,

televisions, bicycles, everything worked.

And the supposition was, why do you want to get a job

and become an employee to make the money to be a consumer?

We'll give you the shit. Now what do you want to do?

What are you gonna do with your life?

These were America's children.

And they were runaways,

because a lot of the people who came back

from World War II had PTSD,

and it was undiagnosed.

And they were drinking themselves into coma,

they were beating their kids or beating their wives.

In the '50s, it was not a lot of fun for a lot of people.

And I think the kids who left those families,

they were looking for something,

because life wasn't working.

And they were looking for guidance

wherever they could find it.

And anybody with a lot of charisma

and the ability to rap could swing somebody.

- ♪ Your home is where you're happy ♪

♪ It's not where you're not free ♪

- Everybody's talking to gurus,

great philosophers who can teach you how to live,

if only you will follow them.

And in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park,

any time of the day or night,

there's dozens of people proclaiming themselves gurus.

- We're lost in a beautiful energy, an energy of life.

- Charlie is not some great philosopher.

But from his pimp days,

he knows how to recognize kids,

particularly young girls, that might be seduced

in the right ways if only he can learn them.

And so, he hangs around Golden Gate Park listening to gurus.

- ...might kill a fly.

And we love all that energy,

we'll love life so much that we'll never die,

because you'll be so sure that you're part of God.

- The standard message that all of these gurus said

was society is corrupt.

You need to drop out of society

and become involved in this alternate reality.

- Drop out of high school, drop out of college.

Drop out of graduate school.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

- These gurus, however,

controlled the ultimate reality.

- Don't think in right and wrong, just think in truth.

All the answers are there. There are no big answers.

All the big colleges that we've been building,

that's taking people the other way.

The smartest people in the world

are really the most cut off.

It's the common people, man, with soul.

- Charlie used a combination of sort of psychological ploys.

Your families don't understand you.

I'm the only one that loves you.

Come with me and be part of a real family.

Judicious use of drugs,

making sure that the kids were high a lot of the time.

And he gradually started a little group,

beginning with Mary Brunner, adding Lynette Fromme,

who was a runaway that he met in Venice, California.

Patricia Krenwinkel, a sad sort of case

who was living in a sort of chaotic situation

with her sister

and was met and seduced by Charlie.

And then his first real find, Susan Atkins,

who Charlie particularly cherished

because she was a very attractive girl,

and he could use her as sort of sexual bait

to try to get men into his group.

- He went in, gave him LSD, had sex with the girls,

talked about this alternate vision was the real vision,

and Charlie was the master.

But he also took LSD

and had this altered consciousness experience

and believed his philosophy.

- There was a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury

for the hippies who were sick

and didn't have hospitals to go to.

- Greg, come on over here.

- Bad drug trips led many in the Haight

to Dr. David Smith's free clinic for treatment.

- One thing that people don't realize is that

the Haight-Ashbury is a symptom, not a cause.

- The clinic opened in June of '67.

I think we saw 25,000 patients the first year.

And into that scene came the Manson Family.

Their place where they lived

was right around the block on Cole Street,

just two blocks from our clinic.

Manson was a fairly well-known individual.

When they came to our clinic in '67

for medical reasons, it was really interesting,

almost creepy how much control he had over them.

But if you see something creepy in a weird environment,

you don't think it's that weird.

What I heard was that he was recruiting

in the neighborhood,

but there was a lot of recruitment going on

by a number of different people.

It was kind of like competing cults.

- That was a problem for Charlie, because essentially,

he's competing with all the other gurus.

So he had to set up something that was different.

Charlie still wanted to be a rock and roll star,

and intended to make that happen.

- By the time he spent a couple of months

in San Francisco, he had his little entourage.

Charlie loaded his girls in the bus,

and off he went on his merry way

from San Francisco down to L.A.

- KHJ Weather.

- Look for sunny skies today with a high of 95 downtown,

up to 105 in the valleys,

and 80 at the beaches, light to moderate smog.

- No two people are alike and no two communities either,

but the people and the community of Topanga Canyon

are even more different than most.

- Everybody up here has kind of got

an individualistic trip going, you know?

They like to get out in the sunshine

and take off their clothes,

and groove with the trees, and paint their paintings,

and vote for Goldwater if they want to.

- I mean, you can't really help

but be on a good trip up here,

because it's so beautiful.

The true hippies are the people

that just live the way that life is really meant to be

without really materialistic things,

and they're very happy.

They get along very well without any money.

Well, sometimes it gets kind of rough.

- Hippie tribes gather 20,000 strong for a love-in.

The new waves come bearing beads and blossoms and bells,

looking for new experience and new magic.

- When my parents starting tuning on and tuning in,

at the same time,

there started to be a group of people

that would go to Griffith Park,

and, you know, with tie-dyed shirts and flags and drums.

They called it a be-in, so people would just go and be.

And my dad and a couple of the guys

decided that they were gonna do the drop out thing,

and got bread trucks, converted them campers,

and we had a big yard sale and sold everything,

and in September, we went on down the road.

And we ended up at the Hog Farm,

this commune.

It really was a hog farm.

They painted the pigs, they rode the pigs.

There was no electricity.

My dad put a big geodesic dome on the hill,

and they would have these "om" circles.

And there was lots of characters.

It wasn't too many days later that the leader,

Hugh Romney, and his wife Bonnie Jean,

came and had a little talk with me,

letting me know that they were uncomfortable

with my being there because I was jailbait.

I was a sexually active, you know, 14-year-old,

so they arranged for friends to come and talk me

into going to live with them, which I did.

And they invited me to come along with them to this party

at the spiral staircase house

to meet this groovy guy and his girls.

These girls started coming over.

"Diane, Diane, you're here.

Charlie, Diane's here," you know?

You know, and he was in the circle playing music,

and he got up and offered me his root beer

and gave me a big hug,

and, you know, "Come, join us in the circle.

We've been waiting for you."

Charlie did take me to the bus that night

and made love to me in a way

that I had never experienced it before,

and made me really feel very, you know, womanly.

I felt totally accepted and totally loved and adored,

and it was really magical.

It just all ended up seeming,

you know, like providence or something.

- Paul Watkins showed up at the house in Topanga

where he was told he could get good weed.

And knocked at the door,

and suddenly these half-naked girls said, "Hi, come in."

And he thought, well, this is rather interesting.

And he went in, he got his weed, and he met Manson.

Paul was good-looking, very easy to talk to.

So he became Manson's chief recruiter for young women.

And he'd go out and pick up hitchhikers

and bring them back again.

Because Watkins looked very young,

Manson suggested that he get himself some kind of fake ID

and then enroll in high school,

where he could actually look

at possible contenders for the Family.

And the girls brought in

Angela Lansbury's daughter, Deidre.

And Deidre, for one period of time,

did get enamored with the Manson Family

and allowed them to use her credit card.

But then her mother, Angela,

was worried about her daughter getting into drugs.

She immediately grabbed her and sent her to Ireland.

Bobby "Cupid" Beausoleil.

A good-looking guy called Cupid,

because he was a conquering hero with the girls.

Son of a milkman in Santa Barbara,

troubled kid, went to reform school,

decided he was going to become a musician.

- Beausoleil is a couple things

that Charlie wants to be and is not.

First of all, he's extremely good-looking,

and he's got good-looking women following him.

And Charlie doesn't have that.

Second, Beausoleil is a better musician than Charlie.

And he and Charlie even decided

to be in a band together,

and they played a couple gigs,

and Charlie couldn't keep up with Bobby,

and Bobby knew it.

But they both could be of use to each other.

- Charlie was a guy who marched to his own drummer,

literally.

When Charlie played music,

his tempo and his rhythmic structure would shift,

and he would do it deliberately.

He didn't want to be in regimented time.

He had an aversion to, you know,

any sort of regimentation, and no doubt that had to do

with having come out of an environment in prison

where a lot of things were regimented.

- The music scene had primarily

been in New York City for rock and roll

during the '50s and the early '60s,

and it shifted to the west coast in 1964

when the Beatles came out,

because Capitol Records, their label,

was near the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

And Phil Spector had been making records in L.A.

for a few years,

and also the Beach Boys became,

like, the most popular band in America at that time.

The Beach Boys were like the only American group

that kind of kept up with the Beatles.

There was even a friendly rivalry between them.

And then Dick Clark moved "American Bandstand"

out to the west coast.

Rock and roll was displacing movies

as the most exciting thing happening in Hollywood

during the middle '60s.

The Sunset Strip was sort of like downtown

for this burgeoning rock and roll scene.

In 1964, the Whisky a Go Go opened.

And before you know it, the Whisky a Go Go

has got all the great groups,

like Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention,

and Jim Morrison and his group, The Doors,

and Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young and Stephen Stills,

and Love with Arthur Lee

and all his wild, psychedelic things.

And eventually, Led Zeppelin would play there,

and Cream would play there, and all the biggest groups.

- The Whisky a Go Go had female deejays

spinning records between the groups.

They were in a glass booth above the dance floor,

and they would dance to the records.

One of the deejays, Joanie Labine,

designed a fringe dress based on the flappers of the '20s,

and paired it with white go-go boots.

Producers hung out at the Whisky a Go Go too.

Terry Melcher was a producer at Columbia Records.

Melcher came from Hollywood royalty.

He was Doris Day's son, and was good friends

with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys,

and he was working with some of

the most influential bands of the time.

- ♪ Eight miles high

♪ And when you touch down

- His main group was The Byrds.

Their anti-establishment and socially conscious lyrics

became a new type of rock and roll,

because everybody had bonded together through rock and roll

as kids in the '50s, but during the '60s,

they were dealing with the Vietnam War, civil rights,

and the larger threat of nuclear weapons.

So the music began to reflect that.

All the groups that broke on the Sunset Strip in 1965

and 1966 were getting huge.

So producers like Terry Melcher

were looking for new artists.

And on to that scene comes Charlie,

looking for a record deal.

- Manson made it clear in his last years in prison

that his goal was to be a professional musician.

The last couple years of his sentence,

he meets Phil Kaufman.

Phil is in for a marijuana bust.

- I was walking in the yard,

and there was this guy playing a guitar, you know,

and he's singing his song, he was singing...

♪ The shadow of your smile

You know, a very popular song,

and I thought he was quite good.

I asked him what's going on and he said,

"You know, I write songs,

and, you know, I'm gonna be out of here soon."

- Phil knew some people in L.A.

who were in the music business.

To Manson, that made Phil the perfect best friend

he'd ever known.

- Phil had given him the name of Gary Stromberg,

who was a music producer at Universal Studios in L.A.,

and Stromberg invites him into the office

to record a demo disc.

- Hi, Charlie, baby.

Okay. - Let's see.

- Do whatever you feel like, man.

- Yeah.

If I can make myself nervous,

I should be able to make myself un-nervous.

It makes sense that it works both ways there.

Let's see.

♪ I once knew a man

♪ So loved he was to be

♪ Now is forever lasting constant in the mind ♪

♪ Illusions with memories scheming and alive ♪

♪ In the mind all the time ♪

♪ One and one are one if you find ♪

- He brought the girls, the Family with him,

who have no musical talent,

and they got to play drums and beat sticks,

and, you know, impossible to record.

And they dismissed him.

They wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

- ♪ He is your love

- When I got out, this fellow I knew named Harold True

took me to this house in Topanga Canyon.

It was an abandoned house

with no electricity and no plumbing.

The first time that I actually met the girls,

and it was all huggy-kissy,

"Phil, oh, Phil. Hello, Phil!

Welcome, Phil." I said, "Whoa."

I just got out of prison.

There's sex, and there's food,

and there's hanging out with girls,

and it was just an idyllic situation.

We all took acid a lot, did a lot of that.

And Charlie's music became his drug of choice

to entice people.

When a new girl would come, everybody'd sit around.

He'd play his guitar and play his song,

"Look at your Game Girl."

- ♪ Look at your game girl

♪ What a mad delusion

♪ Living in that confusion

♪ Frustration and doubt

♪ Can you ever live without the game ♪

- You could see where it would be an enticement, you know?

A girl lost, these people are all over her, hugging her,

kissing her, combing her hair, and Charlie's singing to her.

You know, it seemed like a good deal.

- ♪ Sad game

- I lived with Harold True,

and when Phil got out of prison,

we invited him to live with us up Los Feliz, on Waverly.

The house is on a hill,

and the front lawn is covered by hedges,

so you can't really see until you get up there.

And I look over, and I see all these fairies

dancing on the front lawn.

So Harold used to like to bring home

the freaky freaks for our entertainment.

So I thought this is another crew

that Harold found and brought home,

but it turned out to be Charlie and all his girls.

- Harold True had a nice house,

and we went over there and partied.

He had always lots of grass, and sometimes he had some acid.

And we'd just spend the night,

or a couple nights there at his house,

and he was just a friend of Charlie's.

- Oh, I thought Charlie was just a great conman,

a P.T. Barnum.

I got the impression that he picked up

a lot of things made from different people

in Haight-Ashbury or around there and down.

And then he put them in his repertoire.

- One day we ended up on Leo Carrillo,

Sycamore Canyon area,

and we were gonna go farther in the woods,

but the bus got bogged down in the mud or something,

and we couldn't go any further.

And we stopped in the woods somewhere,

and we stayed there for a while.

One night, the police came, and they arrested us all,

and, you know, there was an article in the paper

about the nine nude hippies that they found.

I mean, we were sleeping in sleeping bags,

and we slept in the nude, so yeah, we were nude,

you know, when they arrested us.

So we put our clothes on and for some reason I had,

like, four tabs of acid, you know, in my pocket.

And so I'd always heard, oh, if you get busted,

swallow it, right?

So I took four tabs of acid.

And they took us to Ventura County Jail,

and it ended up being a good trip.

Every Beatles song that I'd ever heard

just came flowing out of my mouth,

and so I had everybody singing all the Beatles songs.

We were only there for one night.

We went to court the next day, and they released us all.

It was a trespassing charge.

And I think it was shortly after that

that they found Spahn Ranch.

Experimental Band's

- ♪ San Francisco--

♪ In L.A., no one's on the street ♪

♪ Let's go off on our own in the country ♪

♪ All our friends will be there ♪

♪ No one will give us a hard time ♪

♪ We can make it alone

♪ In the country

- Spahn Ranch was out that long road out Topanga.

It was dusty, it was dirty.

There we oak trees, there was a little stream,

and there was these funky old buildings,

and the sets, the saloon,

and the sheriff's office, and all this stuff.

It really felt like another world up there,

on the edge of the San Fernando Valley and L.A.

It was perfect.

It was really fantasyland, and just fit right in.

- Charlie introduced us to the joys

of dumpster diving behind the grocery stores.

We had our favorite ones, because they had better food

that they threw out that was still good.

Charlie would tell us that needing food

was just, like, our imagination.

Air and water was enough.

Then there was always, like, the evening get-together.

Drugs were being smoked and taken.

- Charlie builds a bonfire out in the middle of the yard,

and he gets a guitar,

and has everybody smoke marijuana,

and gets them all stoned, and then they sing songs.

One of Charlie's basic creeds is that there is no crime,

there is no sin, that it's all just a game.

And Charlie considers himself to be Jesus,

the second coming of Christ.

And he told me that I had to be me before I could be him,

because he was a reflection of me,

and he was only what I saw in myself.

And that I was supposed to give up my world

so that I could have his,

and that by giving up, God would come through me,

and I would just be a hole in the infinite,

as he says he is.

- Thank you. Hey, all right.

- Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

- In 1968, all of a sudden,

Beach Boys find themselves out of sync with the times.

- Thank you.

- The perception of them in the public was,

you know, they're not part of the counterculture

on progressive rock radio.

So they're all struggling.

- Dennis, of course, I mean, he was drinking,

and he was not really in control of himself.

And somehow, he picked up Charles Manson's girls.

- Ella Jo Bailey and Patricia Krenwinkel,

they were hitchhiking,

and Dennis Wilson picked them up

and took them to his home.

He just said, you know,

"My house is your house" kind of thing.

And they took him literally.

Later on, he went to a recording session.

- He came back at 2:00 in the morning

and discovered that there was a bus parked in his driveway.

And guess who greeted him at the front door of his mansion?

Manson kissed Dennis Wilson's feet,

and Dennis thought, oh, this is cool.

And he told him to stay, and they stayed,

and they provided Dennis and anybody else

who came to Dennis's house with a ready supply of drugs,

a ready supply of sex if they wanted it,

and Dennis thought he was in Nirvana.

- Dennis was rather a quiet individual,

and he also had an affinity for finding the waifs

and people that seemed to be misfits.

They would all seem to find him.

Charlie was able to manipulate him.

Dennis was enamored with him

and kind of took him under his wing.

- Dennis Wilson liked to tell his pals,

come along to my house to see Manson

and these scantily-clad young women do their thing.

It was a free show, and a freaky show,

and Charlie had a captive audience

at Dennis Wilson's house.

A lot of people had to sit there

and listen to Manson perform.

- One day, Tex Watson, he's out hitchhiking,

and is picked up by a guy he doesn't know,

but it turns out to be Dennis Wilson.

Wilson takes Tex to his house, and there's people there.

It's Charlie and the girls.

And by God, Tex, in his dope-addled brain,

wants nothing more than to be

an acolyte of this guy, Charlie,

who's got girls that will do anything he tells them to do.

Whatever Tex dreamed about finding in California,

this was it.

Growing up, Tex Watson was your quintessential

Texas country good ol' boy.

He lived in a little tiny town in east Texas.

He was the kid that everybody else

thought was gonna do great things.

- He once taught Sunday school in this church,

and he worked behind his father's

country store counter across the street.

He was the kind of boy a community like Copeville

could be proud of.

- Charles was above average, very definitely so.

He excelled in football and basketball and track.

He was well-liked by the student body,

and he was very active in all kinds

of extracurricular activities, you see.

- He was one of the few who went off to college.

But once he was there, he discovered drugs,

and forgot about class.

And Tex then announces he's going to Hollywood.

He's working in a wig shop, sleeping on the floor,

and smoking dope wherever he can get it.

Charlie went through a series of people

who were really Charlie's, you know, group captain.

And Tex very much wanted to be that man.

Charlie knew that in Watson, he had a piece of clay

he could mold however he wanted

whenever he felt like it.

- I was living with Bobby in our teepee in Topanga Canyon.

I like to take walks by myself,

and I met up with Paul Watkins.

He actually just handed me a joint,

and I took a couple drags.

And he said, do you want to see a really pretty place?

And I said, sure.

So we went to a waterfall and a pond,

and we went skinny dipping, and we ended up having sex.

About three days later,

here comes a car with an old, scruffy cowboy,

and two girls up front, and two girls in back.

And Bobby goes over to him like he knows him,

and this cowboy says, "Hey, do you want to

go swimming at Dennis Wilson's house?"

So I get into the car, and we're driving,

and this old cowboy is checking me out

in the rearview mirror, and no one else is talking.

And every time he says something,

they kind of giggle, like a little acidy giggle.

We go into the Pacific Palisades.

He said, "Do you like the Beach Boys?"

I said, well, not really.

He laughed, and everybody kind of giggled.

So we pull up to a gate, and he puts in a code.

After we pull in, this cowboy turns around,

looks and me and said, "This is your dream, girl,

so now you can start living it."

I walk in,

and there's beautiful young people everywhere.

And in walks the rock star

with freshly-washed chestnut hair,

good-looking, cleft in his chin,

dreamy eyes, in a silk robe

and silk harem-looking pants.

I found out later they were made

with Dennis Wilson's sheets.

He looked totally different, but I knew it was the cowboy.

And he goes, "Hi, I'm Charlie Manson."

- ♪ There's a time for living ♪

♪ The time keeps on flying

♪ Look at your game girl

- And then the very first song that Charlie sang was

"Look at Your Game Girl."

And the words were just hitting me here,

like, was I playing a game?

Are my feelings real?

And it just really...

...got to me. It really got to me.

And I think I was drawn in not only with the music,

but with feeling of belonging.

At the end, I said, "You know what? I'm staying."

- ♪ Sad game

- Charlie was very charismatic,

and he had this uncanny ability to read people

and immediately know what our weaknesses were

and what we needed,

and he would become that person and fulfill that.

- And he would tell us, "I don't think at all.

So when I get a thought, it doesn't come from me."

We took that to think it comes from, like, a god.

So we just thought he was the closest thing

to being the one,

and we all wanted to be not only like Charlie,

we wanted to be Charlie.

We wanted to have no thoughts, no cares,

and be able to be a conduit to truth coming from on high.

- What struck me is how excited they were,

when Manson kind of gave them the entre

into Dennis Wilson's house.

I mean, they were these young kids who, all of a sudden,

were hobnobbing with Dennis Wilson,

and all these people, the Mamas and the Papas,

and Dean Martin's daughter.

They thought this was heaven.

Terry Melcher, Gregg Jakobson,

and Dennis Wilson were all bosom buddies.

These young men, all good-looking,

still needed a little extra pizzazz to their lives.

So anybody with a rough reputation

might have been adopted into the scene.

And Manson was incredible in the way

he was able to put a magic spell on all these guys

who were fascinated by this odd character.

- We were at the Whisky one night.

There was a table at the Whisky

that was reserved for the music people.

I was with Terry, I think,

and Dennis had come in with Charlie,

and Lou Adler was there.

There were a lot of people at the table.

And all of a sudden, there's like

almost a commotion on the dance floor.

And I finally stood up on the booth, and I'm looking.

I said, "Hey, you guys, you have to see this."

And it was Charlie in the middle of the dance floor

at the Whisky, and he was going off.

I swear to this day that there was electricity

coming off the guy's head, and he cleared the floor.

I mean, he was in a zone, and he was just out there,

arms, legs, head, hair, spittle.

It wasn't rehearsed or planned,

but that's Charlie.

The Beach Boys had formed their own record label,

Brother Records, and Dennis thought Charlie

could potentially be one of the artists.

They did try working with him,

and they did try making something happen with him.

Brian Wilson had a studio in his home.

- We went to Brian Wilson's to do a recording,

or a session that they were gonna record, maybe a demo.

I think it was like Nancy Pittman and I,

and we didn't have bathing suits,

so, you know, we were swimming in the pool nude,

and I think Brian's wife was there.

And she, you know, she wasn't happy about us being there.

- Stephen Desper is the recording guy

at Brian Wilson's house.

- Charlie was not going to be produced.

He wasn't.

He had no idea what recording sessions were about,

how to make records.

He took it all very personally,

and he was not a professional artist.

- After about an hour and an argument,

Desper throws his hands up, and they all leave.

- We were swimming in the pool,

and Charlie comes out.

"Girls, get your clothes on. We're leaving."

The way he said it, it was abrupt,

and the way we pulled out, there was squealing brakes

and, you know, acceleration.

He was mad.

Summer was coming to an end.

I think it was September now,

and Dennis was gonna go away for two weeks on the road.

He says, "Gregg," he says, "Can you get me out of here?"

He says, "Can you find a house for me?"

And I found a house on the way to Malibu

on the Coast Highway.

And the whole idea was to not

let the girls and Charlie know.

He was really trying to divorce himself from that.

He was really done with it.

- Direct from our newsroom in Washington, in color,

this is the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite."

- Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King,

the apostle of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement,

has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

- 1968 was a horrible year.

There was the Vietnam War, which was raging.

- Do you think it's worth it?

- Yeah, I don't know.

They say we're fighting for something, I don't know.

all: Hell no, we won't go! Hell no, we won't go!

- The protests got violent.

The cops got violent with the protesters.

- All of it began the first time some of you

who know better let young people think

that they have the right to choose the laws

they would obey as long as they were doing it

in the name of social protest.

- In '67, '68,

there's racial unrest between blacks and whites.

There were race riots in every major American city.

- Channel Five will present a documentary account

of the violence and insurrection

that has torn this great city asunder for the past five days.

- The Watts riot of '65 was one of the earliest riots.

This one came out of a police encounter

that went terribly wrong

between a paramilitary organization called the LAPD

and the African-American community.

The LAPD was one that prided themselves on their investment

in tactical equipment

that was most appropriate for warzones.

They were there to enforce order like an occupying force.

That meant there were all sorts of moments

in which police brutality became just the way of life.

This time there was pushback.

It went on for several days.

The National Guard was called out.

- Cameraman Ed Clark, who's just returned from the area,

would you tell it how it was tonight compared to last night?

- Well, Stan, in my 15 years in the news business,

this is undoubtedly the worst thing I think I've ever seen.

Well, I can honestly say that I was scared to death.

- And these are roving mobs of mostly teenagers,

would you say?

- No, I wouldn't say they're all teenagers.

No, sir, they're not teenagers.

There are adults as well.

I mean, there's everything down there.

There are men, there are women, there are children,

and very frankly, if you're white, you are in trouble.

- In the aftermath of it, there was an effort to address

some of the reasons why Watts was such a tinderbox.

But because of the continuing segregation,

continuing deprivation, but most importantly,

continuing hostility from the police,

by '68, black people had had enough.

- And that the only course for the negroes

is to bring about

a final, violent, apocalyptic confrontation

of black and white.

- They not gonna fight down here no more.

You know where they going? They after the white people.

They're gonna caravan out in everywhere else

the white man is supposed to stay.

They gonna do the white man in.

- Something like it happened

in 76 American cities this summer.

We saw soldiers patrolling our streets.

We saw stores and houses in our neighborhoods

that looked as if they'd been hit by bombs.

Next summer, it could look like this

in the downtown sections of our city.

It could look like this in the neighborhood where you live.

The simple fact is this:

We're in the worst crisis we have known since the Civil War,

and time is running short to try to find some answers to it.

- If the extremists can divide the rest us

into two hostile camps,

all of our hopes for the future will be lost.

- What has been going on within the United States

over the period of the last three years,

the divisions, the violence, we can start to work together,

and I intend to make that my basis for running

over the period of the next few months.

all: Revolution has come.

all: Off the pigs!

- The majority of white people

associated rising demands of African-Americans

with such a deep threat to the social order

that some actually thought that

the rise of the Black Panthers

was a precursor to the arrival of the Antichrist.

- The Second Amendment of the Constitution

guarantees the citizen

a right to bear arms on public property.

- Taking advantage of a law

which authorized the carrying of visible arms,

patrols of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

cruised in the ghetto following police cars.

As soon as a black is arrested,

they check the procedure,

making sure the law is observed,

and that their brother knows his rights.

As a result, the police hate them,

and the black community admires them.

- We have to understand that we're talking about

our survival and nothing else,

whether or not this beautiful race of people

is gonna survive on the Earth,

that's what we're talking about.

- How many white folks you kill today?

- There's this sense that everything

is about to break loose.

Something big is about to happen.

- A doctor, we need a doctor right here at the microphone,

please, immediately.

- A few months after Martin Luther King was assassinated,

heir apparent to the White House,

Bobby Kennedy was murdered

in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.

And then you have all these runaway children

that are the product of this chaos,

all the lies, hypocrisy,

and they're of course attracted

to somebody like Charlie,

who said society needed to change.

And also, it's extremely empowering to them to hear

that they are going to be part of the wheels of change.

all: Revolution has come.

all: Off the pigs!

- Manson's response was to try to start the ultimate race war.

all: Time to pick up the gun.

all: Off the pigs!

- ♪ Cease to exist

- I heard there was a song that Dennis and Charlie

had been working on,

and that it was gonna go on one of the albums.

- ♪ I'm your kind

♪ Oh your kind and I can see

♪ Never had a lesson I ever learned ♪

- The Beach Boys did take

one of Charlie Manson's song ideas,

"Cease to Exist."

- And they turned it into a Beach Boys song called

"Never Learn Not to Love."

- ♪ Never had a lesson I ever learned ♪

- And Dennis took the songwriting credit,

but it was written by Charles Manson.

- ♪ Learn not to love you

- Charlie had signed away his right to the writer's royalty,

and Dennis also changed it around,

which really angered Charlie.

- You're stealing my music every day.

You're writing my songs, you're playing my game.

- Charlie really thought that he had been taken advantage of

or cheated, or something had been taken away from him.

- He was angry, angry at Dennis,

and Dennis knew he was very angry at him,

because Charlie sent a bullet to Dennis

and said, "This is for you,

and there's other bullets where this comes from."

- Dennis was aware enough of what Charlie was capable of,

which is why he slept with a gun under his pillow.

- When I come up with a song and they change the words,

I say don't change the words.

If you change the words,

my shadows are running fast, man.

- ♪ Once I was blind but now I see ♪

♪ Now that you're in love with me ♪

♪ You made a believer out of me babe ♪

♪ You made a believer out of me ♪

♪ I doo right, yoo doo right

♪ Doo right, yoo doo right

♪ When they ask what's wrong you say okay ♪

♪ I'm in love with my girl, and she 's away ♪

♪ Once I was blind, now I can see ♪

♪ Now that you're in love with me ♪

♪ You made a believer out of me, babe ♪

- Greg, move your head.