Always a rotten apple
A new book on Charles Manson says the murderer was set on the road to evil from an early age
Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson
by Jeff Guinn
Simon & Schuster
4.5 stars
Little Charlie Manson was a disagreeable child," Jeff Guinn writes in Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, an otherwise brawny, deep-digging biography of the killer that's much more riveting than might be expected.
It's no surprise that the Manson story no longer commands much attention. What a difference more than four decades make. Guinn is fascinating in his use of hindsight, and it allows him a more probing view of his subject than earlier biographers had.
A lot of the mystical aura surrounding the killer was less real than imagined by a terrified populace and titillated press
The book's essential question is articulated in this opening quotation about the 1960s, which he attributes to Tom Hayden: "Over and over it came down to that question - what was reality in an unreal time?"
On the evidence of Manson, a lot of the mystical aura surrounding the killer was less real than imagined by a terrified populace and titillated press corps. But Guinn doesn't buy any cultist mumbo-jumbo. The cover of Manson pointedly features a photo of its subject not as Crazy Charlie, as he sometimes called himself, but as a smiling, suit-wearing, precocious little crook in his pimply years.
Guinn's main thesis is that Manson was a lifelong social predator: "There was nothing mystical or heroic about Charlie - he was an opportunistic sociopath." And in 1967, when he walked out of prison at 32 and began trolling for acolytes in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the culture of national upheaval "made it possible for him to bloom in full, malignant flower". Among the sources for Guinn's account are Manson's sister and his first cousin, and he has even found a schoolmate to describe the abusive teacher who treated Manson harshly in the first grade. By that point, he had already seen his wilful teenage mother sent to prison for her role in a robbery (the assault weapon: a ketchup bottle); she had singled out the victim, she said, because he "had too much money for one man".
Were the seeds of the Manson Family's savage Tate-LaBianca murders sown this early? Guinn thinks so. His punchy style renders the mother's first crime as "an impetuous decision that would affect - and cost - lives over the next three-quarters of a century".