Portraits and Observations (52 page)

“But Mr. MacBride succeeded.”

“If he hadn’t, I doubt that I’d be here abusing your hospitality.”

“Nothing would have happened. We are not a violent people.”

“Please. I’m not suggesting we were in any danger. It was just—well, part of the fun.”

“Absinthe?
Un peu
?”

“A mite. Thank you.”

The hummingbird returns.

“Your friend, the composer?”

“Marc Blitzstein.”

“I’ve been thinking. He came here once to dinner. Madame Derain brought him. And Lord Snowdon was here that evening.
With his uncle, the Englishman who built all those houses on Mustique—”

“Oliver Messel.”

“
Oui. Oui
. It was while my husband was still alive. My husband had a fine ear for music. He asked your friend to play the piano. He played some German songs.” She is standing now, moving to and fro, and I am aware of how exquisite her figure is, how ethereal it seems silhouetted inside a frail green lace Parisian dress. “I remember that, yet I can’t recall how he died. Who killed him?”

All the while the black mirror has been lying in my lap, and once more my eyes seek its depths. Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.

“Two sailors.”

“From here? Martinique?”

“No. Two Portuguese sailors off a ship that was in harbor. He met them in a bar. He was here working on an opera, and he’d rented a house. He took them home with him—”

“I
do
remember. They robbed him and beat him to death. It was dreadful. An appalling tragedy.”

“A tragic accident.” The black mirror mocks me: Why did you say that? It wasn’t an accident.

“But our police caught those sailors. They were tried and sentenced and sent to prison in Guiana. I wonder if they are still there. I might ask Paulot. He would know. After all, he is the First President of the Court of Appeals.”

“It really doesn’t matter.”

“Not matter! Those wretches ought to have been guillotined.”

“No. But I wouldn’t mind seeing them at work in the fields in Haiti, picking bugs off coffee plants.”

Raising my eyes from the mirror’s demonic shine, I notice my hostess has momentarily retreated from the terrace into her shadowy salon. A piano chord echoes, and another. Madame is toying with the same tune. Soon the music lovers assemble, chameleons scarlet, green, lavender, an audience that, lined out on the floor of the terra-cotta terrace, resembles a written arrangement of musical notes. A Mozartean mosaic.

Scene:
A cell in a maximum-security cell block at San Quentin Prison in California. The cell is furnished with a single cot, and its permanent occupant, Robert Beausoleil, and his visitor are required to sit on it in rather cramped positions. The cell is neat, uncluttered; a well-waxed guitar stands in one corner. But it is late on a winter afternoon, and in the air lingers a chill, even a hint of mist, as though fog from San Francisco Bay had infiltrated the prison itself.

Despite the chill, Beausoleil is shirtless, wearing only a pair of prison-issue denim trousers, and it is clear that he is satisfied with his appearance, his body particularly, which is lithe, feline, in well-toned shape considering that he has been incarcerated more than a decade. His chest and arms are a panorama of tattooed emblems: feisty dragons, coiled chrysanthemums, uncoiled serpents. He is thought by some to be exceptionally good-looking; he is, but in a rather hustlerish camp-macho style. Not surprisingly, he worked as an actor as a child and appeared in several Hollywood films; later,
as a very young man, he was for a while the protégé of Kenneth Anger, the experimental film-maker (
Scorpio Rising
) and author (
Hollywood Babylon
); indeed, Anger cast him in the title role of
Lucifer Rising
, an unfinished film.

Robert Beausoleil, who is now thirty-one, is the real mystery figure of the Charles Manson cult; more to the point—and it’s a point that has never been clearly brought forth in accounts of that tribe—he is the key to the mystery of the homicidal escapades of the so-called Manson family, notably the Sharon Tate–LaBianca murders.

It all began with the murder of Gary Hinman, a middle-aged professional musician who had befriended various members of the Manson brethren and who, unfortunately for him, lived alone in a small isolated house in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles County. Hinman had been tied up and tortured for several days (among other indignities, one of his ears had been severed) before his throat had been mercifully and lastingly slashed. When Hinman’s body, bloated and abuzz with August flies, was discovered, police found bloody graffiti on the walls of his modest house (“Death to Pigs!”)—graffiti similar to the sort soon to be found in the households of Miss Tate and Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca.

However, just a few days prior to the Tate–LaBianca slayings, Robert Beausoleil, caught driving a car that had been the property of the victim, was under arrest and in jail, accused of having murdered the helpless Mr. Hinman. It was then that Manson and his chums, in the hopes of freeing Beausoleil, conceived the notion of committing a series of homicides similar to the Hinman affair; if Beausoleil was still incarcerated at the time of these killings, then how could he be guilty of the Hinman atrocity? Or so the Manson brood reasoned. That is to say, it was out of devotion to “Bobby” Beausoleil that Tex Watson and those cutthroat young ladies, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Hooten, sallied forth on their satanic errands.

RB:
Strange. Beausoleil. That’s French. My name is French. It means Beautiful Sun. Fuck. Nobody sees much sun inside this resort. Listen to the foghorns. Like train whistles. Moan, moan. And they’re worse in the summer. Maybe it must be there’s more fog in summer than in winter. Weather. Fuck it, I’m not going anywhere. But just listen. Moan, moan. So what’ve you been up to today?

TC:
Just around. Had a little talk with Sirhan.

RB
(laughs): Sirhan
B
. Sirhan. I knew him when they had me up on the Row. He’s a sick guy. He don’t belong here. He ought to be in Atascadero. Want some gum? Yeah, well, you seem to know your way around here pretty good. I was watching you out on the yard. I was surprised the warden lets you walk around the yard by yourself. Somebody might cut you.

TC:
Why?

RB:
For the hell of it. But you’ve been here a lot, huh? Some of the guys were telling me.

TC:
Maybe half a dozen times on different research projects.

RB:
There’s just one thing here I’ve never seen. But I’d like to see that little apple-green room. When they railroaded me on that Hinman deal and I got the death sentence, well, they had me up on the Row a good spell. Right up to when the court abolished the death penalty. So I used to wonder about the little green room.

TC:
Actually, it’s more like three rooms.

RB:
I thought it was a little round room with a sort of glass-sealed igloo hut set in the center. With windows in the igloo so the witnesses standing outside can see the guys choking to death on that peach perfume.

TC:
Yes, that’s the gas-chamber room. But when the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a “holding” room that adjoins the witness room. There are two
cells in this “holding” room, two, in case it’s a double execution. They’re ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execution in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards. But the interesting thing I discovered was that there’s a
third
room in this little suite. It’s behind a closed door right next to the “holding” cell. I just opened the door and walked in and none of the guards that were with me tried to stop me. And it was the most haunting room I’ve ever seen. Because you know what’s in it? All the leftovers, all the paraphernalia that the different condemned men had had with them in the “holding” cells. Books. Bibles and Western paperbacks and Erle Stanley Gardner, James Bond. Old brown newspapers. Some of them twenty years old. Unfinished crossword puzzles. Unfinished letters. Sweetheart snapshots. Dim, crumbling little Kodak children. Pathetic.

RB:
You ever seen a guy gassed?

TC:
Once. But he made it look like a lark. He was happy to go, he wanted to get it over with; he sat down in that chair like he was going to the dentist to have his teeth cleaned. But in Kansas, I saw two men hanged.

RB:
Perry Smith? And what’s his name—Dick Hickock? Well, once they hit the end of the rope, I guess they don’t feel anything.

TC:
So we’re told. But after the drop, they go on living—fifteen, twenty minutes. Struggling. Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life. I couldn’t help it, I vomited.

RB:
Maybe you’re not so cool, huh? You seem cool. So, did Sirhan beef about being kept in Special Security?

TC:
Sort of. He’s lonesome. He wants to mix with the other prisoners, join the general population.

RB:
He don’t know what’s good for him. Outside, somebody’d snuff him for sure.

TC:
Why?

RB:
For the same reason he snuffed Kennedy. Recognition. Half the people who snuff people, that’s what they want: recognition. Get their picture in the paper.

TC:
That’s not why you killed Gary Hinman.

RB:
(Silence)

TC:
That was because you and Manson wanted Hinman to give you money and his car, and when he wouldn’t—well …

RB:
(Silence)

TC:
I was thinking. I know Sirhan, and I knew Robert Kennedy. I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that—one person knowing all four of those men—must be astounding.

RB:
Oswald? You knew Oswald? Really?

TC:
I met him in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper correspondent, and when he came by to pick me up, he asked me if I’d mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square. The Metropole has a big gloomy lobby full of shadows and dead palm trees. And there he was, sitting in the dark under a dead palm tree. Thin and pale, thin-lipped, starved-looking. He was wearing chinos and tennis shoes and a lumberjack shirt. And right away he was angry—he was grinding his teeth, and his eyes were jumping every which way. He was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians—he was mad at them because they wouldn’t let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn’t think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later.
Not until after the assassination when I saw his picture flashed on television.

RB:
Does that make you the only one that knew both of them, Oswald and Kennedy?

TC:
No. There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. in Moscow. She knew Kennedy, and she met Oswald around the same time I did. But I can tell you something else almost as curious. About some of those people your friends murdered.

RB:
(Silence)

TC:
I knew them. At least, out of the five people killed in the Tate house that night, I knew four of them. I’d met Sharon Tate at the Cannes Film Festival. Jay Sebring cut my hair a couple of times. I’d had lunch once in San Francisco with Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Frykowski. In other words, I’d known them independently of each other. And yet one night there they were, all gathered together in the same house waiting for your friends to arrive. Quite a coincidence.

RB
(lights a cigarette; smiles): Know what I’d say? I’d say you’re not such a lucky guy to know. Shit. Listen to that. Moan, moan. I’m cold. You cold?

TC:
Why don’t you put on your shirt?

RB:
(Silence)

TC:
It’s odd about tattoos. I’ve talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide—multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominator I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed. Richard Speck. York and Latham. Smith and Hickock.

RB:
I’ll put on my sweater.

TC:
If you weren’t here, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be, doing anything you wanted to do, where would you be and what would you be doing?

RB:
Tripping. Out on my Honda chugging along the Coast road, the fast curves, the waves and the water, plenty of sun. Out of San Fran, headed Mendocino way, riding through the redwoods. I’d be making love. I’d be on the beach by a bonfire making love. I’d be making music and balling and sucking some great Acapulco weed and watching the sun go down. Throw some driftwood on the fire. Good gash, good hash, just tripping right along.