Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (10 page)

Just before Rosalie deserted him, Charlie was transferred to Terminal Island’s minimum security cells in a separate prison building. It was a clear signal that he could expect imminent release after his parole hearing on April 22, 1957, but Charlie, stunned by Rosalie’s desertion, exhibited one of his periodic lapses of patience and self-control.
On April 10 he was caught in the prison parking lot wearing civilian clothes and trying to hotwire a car. Twelve days later his near-certain parole was denied, and five years’ additional probation were tacked on to his original three-year prison sentence.

Terminal Island officials didn’t give up on Charlie. He’d scored 121 on an IQ test when he’d arrived at the prison, which placed him in the “high normal” range. His subpar reading skills and primitive, chicken-scratch handwriting indicated lack of educational opportunity, not ability. As it happened, Terminal Island had a wide variety of self-improvement courses available to inmates, the result of
a nationwide penal system overhaul intended to prepare prisoners for success in the outside world. In the 1940s and early 1950s prison focus was on punishment; by 1957 it was rehabilitation. At Terminal Island, inmates could work toward high school diplomas, learn car repair or machine shop skills, or even be tutored in how to apply for jobs. Charlie, still just twenty-two, spurned all of these opportunities but one. In another decade it would become fashionable for young people to seek out and follow gurus, spiritual advisors who would lead them on the path to enlightenment. To date at Terminal Island, Charlie’s unofficial tutors had been pimps, and he eagerly absorbed what they had to teach him. But now, Charlie latched on to someone whose wisdom would guide many of his future acts—a man who though they never met became Charlie Manson’s personal guru.

Born on a Missouri farm in 1888, Dale Carnegie was a successful
salesman before developing self-help instruction that emphasized ways to win over individuals and audiences. Initially, Carnegie targeted his how-to lectures and print publications toward businessmen, offering lessons in effective public speaking and product sales. But in 1936
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, aimed at a general audience, became a massive best-seller (five million copies) and made Carnegie one of the most famous men in America. He founded the Dale Carnegie Institute. Crowds flocked to its programs. Carnegie never claimed there was anything unique about the techniques he proselytized; his gift was gathering all the best methods of influencing others and relating them in easy-to-understand, one-step-at-a-time instruction. Those who couldn’t attend Carnegie classes in person received instruction through correspondence courses, and by 1957 Carnegie’s reach even extended to classes conducted in selected prisons. Terminal Island was one of them.

The Dale Carnegie course was one of Terminal Island’s most popular programs for its convicts. There was a waiting list of prisoners who wanted to enroll. Class was limited to twenty-five or thirty inmates, and instruction lasted about four months. As a relatively new inmate, and one with an escape attempt already on his record, Charlie ranked low among applicants. But prison officials believed that Dale Carnegie’s positive outlook on life might be just what moody, erratic Charlie needed. He was jumped ahead of everyone else and enrolled in the course. Besides lectures, class members were expected to read
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, study several pamphlets (probably including
Effective Speaking and Human Relations
and an early edition of
How to Remember Names
), and occasionally turn in written assignments. Charlie had always evinced limited reading skills, but in this Carnegie class he proved that he could not only read but fully comprehend printed material if he was sufficiently engaged, and if instructors were helpful enough. Virtually every word in the Carnegie publications resonated with Charlie. For the first time in his life he was considered an outstanding pupil.

The first pages of
How to Win Friends
seemed to formally codify all the instinctive ways Charlie had manipulated people since childhood.
It was as though Dale Carnegie not only read Charlie’s mind, but recruited him as a disciple by elaborating on Charlie’s own thoughts.

“Everything you or I do springs from two motives: The sex urge and the desire to be great.”

“Begin in a friendly way.”

“The only way on earth to influence the other fellow is to talk about what he wants and show him how to get it.”

“Make the other person feel important.”

“The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.”

“You have to use showmanship. The movies do it. Radio does it. And you will have to do it if you want attention. . . . Dramatize your ideas.”

Chapter Seven, “How to Get Co-Operation,” contained advice that Charlie adopted as the most vital tool in his manipulative arsenal:
“Let the other fellow feel that the idea is his.”
Later, when police, judges, and juries struggled to understand how Charlie Manson was able to convince others to carry out his criminal directives, they could have found the answer there in
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Over half a century later Phil Kaufman, who knew Manson in prison and later in Los Angeles, remembered, “That was Charlie’s big trick. He’d decide what he wanted [someone] to do and then talk about it so the girl or whoever would think that she thought of it and it was her idea. I saw him do it all the time. I mean, it was constant. It was where he got his power over [gullible] people.”

Charlie’s instructors in Terminal Island’s Dale Carnegie course were surprised when their star pupil quit before completing the four-month program. But once he felt that he’d learned what he needed, Charlie had no further interest in sitting in a classroom. He was ready to move on.

Charlie spent the rest of his time at Terminal Island thinking about what he would do next—thanks to all he gleaned from imprisoned pimps and Dale Carnegie, he had a plan. To keep in decent physical shape he boxed and played in pickup basketball games. Charlie was a good athlete. For recreation he played his guitar; Frankie Laine’s songs were still his favorites. Above all, Charlie stayed out of trouble. Like every other federal prison, Terminal Island was overcrowded and it was standard procedure to grant early parole to inmates who behaved. On September 30, 1958,
Charlie was released after serving two years and five months of his original three-year sentence.

As a condition of his release, Charlie was required to report regularly to a parole officer. He stated that he planned to live with his mother in her Los Angeles apartment.
Kathleen had some doubts about how well that arrangement would work, but she also felt obligated to try to help her son build a new, law-abiding life. She was still separated from Lewis, though his pleas for reconciliation moved her and Kathleen was thinking about trying with him again. If she reunited with her estranged husband, Charlie would have to live somewhere else—he and Lewis could never get along. But in the meantime, Kathleen told Charlie that he could stay with her.

Charlie also had to demonstrate to his parole officer that he could find and maintain gainful employment. The finding part didn’t prove difficult—lots of menial jobs were available in Los Angeles—but keeping a steady job seemed beyond him.
In rapid order Charlie worked as a bus-boy, a bartender, a gas station attendant, and a frozen food locker clerk. Getting fired on a regular basis didn’t really bother him; the idea was to be working somewhere that the parole officer could check when Charlie went in to see him. All the while, Charlie was setting himself up to make a full-time living in the business that he now believed was his natural calling.

Charlie’s career as a pimp got off to a slow start. Judy and Flo, the first two girls he recruited, didn’t last long on the streets. Little is known about them besides that Judy’s father complained about Charlie to the cops, and that was the last thing Charlie needed. If he hadn’t understood it before, he made it a rule afterward—none of his women were allowed to maintain close ties to their families, except in cases like Flo’s, since she regularly got money from her parents. Charlie moved out of his mother’s apartment—Kathleen had a pretty good idea of what he was up to, and she didn’t approve. Instead Charlie took up residence with another pimp, who unfortunately for Charlie was being covertly monitored by the FBI. Federal agents shared Charlie’s new address and apparent wrongdoing with his parole officer, who called Charlie in. He denied everything but wasn’t convincing. Charlie’s next court report noted that “This certainly
is a very shaky probationer and it seems just a matter of time before he gets in further trouble.”

Charlie may have envisioned pimping out dozens of high-dollar girls in Los Angeles and living in relative luxury on their earnings, but the hard truth was that he found it impossible to scrape together even a modest living from the pittance his limited, ever-changing lineup brought in. He fell back on his old criminal habits, though not for very long. On May 1, 1959, just seven months after he’d been paroled from Terminal Island,
Charlie was arrested for attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check for $37.50 at a Ralph’s supermarket. He told the L.A. cops who picked him up that he’d stolen the check from a mailbox, meaning he’d committed two federal offenses. The police turned him over to the Secret Service; when a pair of federal agents questioned Charlie, they showed him the check and formally asked if he’d forged the signature on it. Charlie tried to outfox them; a post-interrogation report noted, “The check itself has disappeared; [the agents] feel certain [the] subject took it off [the] table and swallowed it when they momentarily turned their backs.” Unfortunately for Charlie, the Ralph’s clerk, the arresting L.A. policemen, and the federal agents all testified that they’d seen the check and his forged signature on the back of it. The case against him proceeded.

Kathleen was shaken by Charlie’s latest misadventure. She wasn’t surprised that he’d tried his hand at pimping—he always seemed able to make girls do whatever he wanted—but it seemed as though her son was destined to be a career criminal. Summer 1959 was a hard time for Kathleen. On July 19, Nancy Maddox died back in West Virginia. Kathleen’s own experience with Charlie had taught her how much a child’s criminal behavior could hurt a parent, and she deeply regretted the pain she had caused her mother. There was no way now to make up for it; all Kathleen could do was to continue supporting Charlie in his time of trouble, since she felt responsible for the bad way he’d turned out.

In mid-September, nineteen-year-old Leona Rae Musser met with Charlie’s probation officer and informed him that she was pregnant with Charlie’s baby. She pleaded for the charges against Charlie to be dismissed; then she and Charlie would get married and he would go straight. Leona wasn’t pregnant; she was working for Charlie as a prostitute. But
she managed to elicit sympathy from the parole officer and the court. A deal was struck: Charlie would plead guilty to forging the check, and the mail theft charge would be dropped. Charlie was sent back to Dr. Edwin McNiel, who’d examined him four years earlier after his arrest for car theft. Dr. McNiel’s latest opinion was that Charlie was a terrible risk for probation and should be returned to prison, but at his trial in September Leona made another tearful plea and swayed the judge. Charlie received a ten-year suspended sentence and remained on probation.

The close call didn’t faze him; he continued pimping out Leona and whatever other girls he could attract to his stable. Even though everything in his criminal past indicated otherwise, Charlie always believed that he was never going to be caught again.
In December he tried to expand his territory, driving Leona and another girl from California to New Mexico to turn tricks in Lordsburg. They were arrested there, and Charlie faced fresh federal charges of violating the Mann Act, which prohibited transporting women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. Charlie tried to thwart investigators by marrying Leona; wives could not be forced to testify against their husbands. Though she’d fibbed about it six months earlier, now Leona really was pregnant with Charlie’s child. While the FBI prepared its case, Charlie carried on with his lawbreaking ways. He didn’t limit his criminal activities to running prostitutes. By the end of the year he’d been arrested twice more by the LAPD for grand theft auto and use of stolen credit cards. Both of those charges were dropped for lack of evidence, but the Mann Act violation was about to be brought before a federal grand jury. Charlie didn’t wait around to be indicted; he skipped town.

In his absence, Leona looked out for her own best interests. In mid-pregnancy and eager to avoid a prison sentence of her own, she told the federal grand jury in Los Angeles that Charlie had indeed taken her from California to New Mexico to turn tricks. Her testimony guaranteed that Charlie would return to prison. After the grand jury formally indicted him, Charlie’s previous ten-year probation for treasury check forgery was revoked and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. On June 1 he was picked up in Laredo, Texas, and extradited to California. Three weeks later in a Los Angeles court, Charlie was sentenced to serve out his ten-year
check forgery sentence in the United States Penitentiary on McNeil Island in Washington’s Puget Sound. A decade of hard time in prison was the last thing that Charlie wanted. He appealed the revocation of his suspended sentence and was held in the Los Angeles County jail while the appeal was pending. He got some good news in July—the Mann Act charge was dropped, probably because it was so certain that Charlie was in line for a lengthy sentence anyway. The inevitable bad news followed; though Charlie and his assigned public defenders managed to string out the process for almost a year, in June 1961 the appeal was denied and Charlie was transferred to McNeil Island. He was just twenty-six, but counting reform schools he had already been in some form of custody or on probation for almost fourteen years.