[body_image width='1000' height='913' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='manson-v-mormon-and-the-brides-of-frankenstein-body-image-1418940407.jpg' id='12608']Untitled, by Raymond Pettibon and Aïda Ruilova. Pencil, acrylic, and oil on paper
The
recent
acknowledgement by the Mormon Church
that its revered founder, Joseph Smith, had as many as 40 wives, including
teenage girls, oddly intersected with the news that the geriatric but still
notorious and imprisoned
Charlie Manson would marry a much younger woman. These
stories became an instant topic of discussion between myself and one of my
favorite writers, a fan of all things dark and damaged, Alissa Bennett. We met
on a Sunday afternoon, the Lord's day of rest, to delve into our many mutual
obsessions.
Bob Nickas: Among Joseph Smith's 40 wives there are women who were already married,
some to close associates, a 14-year-old girl, and another he wed just a day
after her 17th birthday. The church long held to the complete fiction that
Smith had only ever been married once, to his wife Emma. There's a statue of
the couple in the center of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. I guess they'll
have to make room for a much bigger memorial. And now that the cats—and the
kittens—are out of the bag, they've tried to soften the impact of a very
belated admission. They claim that Smith struggled against polygamy, that he
didn't want to take plural wives, and assented only after an angel confronted
him "with a drawn sword, threatening Joseph with destruction unless he
went forward and obeyed the commandment fully." Yet he certainly aimed to
ennoble the practice, referring to it as "celestial marriage." Where
were the parents of that just-turned 17-year-old? The mother had passed away
and Joseph sent her father off for two years on a church mission. Apparently
that angel, sent from heaven above, had also commanded Smith to rob the
proverbial cradle.
Alissa Bennett:
The fact that marriages between adults and children have historically
been sanctioned within the Mormon Church, particularly by fundamentalists, is
directly connected to an imperative. Men should maximize their reproductive
potential, and girls should be immediately sequestered by domesticity to keep
them docile and willing. The government tried to intervene in the early 1950s
when the National Guard stormed an FLDS enclave in Short Creek, Arizona, arresting
122 adults and placing the children into foster care, attempting to publicly
penalize polygamist behavior, an act that was ultimately a failure.
BN:
FLDS—the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
AB:
But it wasn't until the raid in Texas in 2008, with the arrest and
imprisonment of child rapist and FLDS leader Warren Jeffs that the group
faced any serious legal condemnation. I remember watching the ATF incinerate the
Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, on live television in 1993, and I remember
the rhetoric that suggested they were a cult posing as a religious order. The
obvious corollaries got me thinking:
How different is Warren Jeffs from David
Koresh or Charles Manson?
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(L-R) Jeffs, Koresh, Manson, Smith
BN:
Any number of cults cast themselves as religions, which exempts them from
paying taxes, and allows them to claim "religious persecution" when
they come under scrutiny or official investigation. It makes them appear more
respectable within straight society—as if the roots of so many churches weren't
riddled with con men and charlatans. Don't forget that cult is another term for
church. What Manson and Koresh had in common was a need to be on stage and
worshipped. They both sought but were denied rock stardom. Are you aware of the
long-running rumor that Manson tried out for a part on the TV show
The
Monkees
?
AB:
I'd never heard that.
BN:
It's untrue, but still believable. Manson never tried out for the show—he
was in jail at the time. The rumor was started by Davey Jones, who was one of
the Monkees. He owned up to it many years later, but by then it had been
repeated so widely that people fell for it, and still do.
AB:
Well, it seems totally plausible given that the Tate/LaBianca murders were
so thoroughly entrenched in Hollywood mythology. I remember that Manson had
flirted with Scientology at one point. It seems logical that he would
have auditioned for the original boy band.
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/uVpIJS_ej2g' width='640' height='360'][youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/8I0v2bVX8j4' width='640' height='480']
BN:
Manson had musical aspirations. He hoped to get a record released with
the help of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, to whom he had attached himself,
like a barnacle at the bottom of a sailboat. Manson had an overblown sense of
his meager talents and believed that he would be bigger than the Beatles. John
Lennon once said that as far as young people were concerned, the Beatles were
bigger than Jesus, to whom Manson, having assembled his devout Family, was
sometimes compared. In his delusions of grandeur, Manson would be bigger than
both the Beatles and Jesus. One of his songs, "Cease to Exist," was
actually recorded by the Beach Boys in '68, although the title was changed—it
became "Never Learn Not to Love"—and the phrase was altered to the
more palatable "Cease to Resist." When Manson found out that his
lyrics had been re-written and the song was credited solely to Wilson, he
threatened to kill him. That was pretty much the end of Manson's time in the
music industry, and possibly the beginning of his deadly equation: if you can't
be famous, kill famous. When you say that the murders were entrenched in the
Hollywood myth, I'm reminded that Manson, had he not been caught, might have
orchestrated even more gruesome mayhem—drenched in celebrity blood. If you can believe
the jailbird singing of Susan Atkins, there was a movie star "death
list" that included Frank Sinatra, who was to have been skinned alive
while his own songs played in the background. Take your pick:
"Witchcraft," "That Old Black Magic," "Strangers in
the Night." And if you can even begin to fathom the horrifying second act,
"The Family would then make purses out of his skin and sell them in hippie
shops."
1
AB:
"Strangers In the Night," for sure. Who else was on the
"death list"?
BN:
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Steve McQueen, who carried a gun
for protection, and even had it on him at Sharon Tate's funeral. Now, had
Manson and Koresh achieved any acclaim for their music, a lot of people might
be alive today. Sharon Tate's baby would now be 45, and it's possible that
Roman Polanski wouldn't be a wanted fugitive from American justice. For Manson
and Koresh, if they couldn't be rock stars, they would be gods of another kind.
Adoring fans can be manufactured. You assemble and brainwash your fan club, a
cult, and settle for being their hero. You rule a little world of your own, and
everyone does what they're told.
[body_image width='1000' height='497' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='manson-v-mormon-and-the-brides-of-frankenstein-body-image-1418942655.jpg' id='12616'](L) David Koresh playing guitar, (R) Behold Thy Mother, a book by Lois Roden
In
this respect it's worth going back in time to Joseph Smith. You can connect
Manson to an age-old American tradition of systematically using and abusing the
so-called second sex, turning them into pliable groupies, a harem that's
subservient to its lord and master. Joseph Smith was born a dozen years after
the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's
A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman
, a book I'm sure he never read. For the Smiths and the Mansons of
this world, women have no rights. Even their children are the property of the
father. And although cults are usually run by men, when Koresh first joined the
Davidians in the early 80s, they were led by Lois Roden.
AB:
What's interesting is that Roden had a pretty progressive organization
going for a while. Her ministry was oriented around the belief that the Holy
Spirit was a feminine presence. She was in her mid 70s when Koresh announced
that God had sent him a message that he and Roden were meant to produce a child
who would ultimately be "the chosen one." He was able to convince her
to cede control to him with this insane fallacy! It reminds me of Thomas Mann's
book
The Black Swan, with the idea that a woman's sense of her ultimate
value is linked to her reproductive capabilities. This relates to groupies and
the kind of power connected to ruling a stable of attentive, obedient women—via
ministry, fan club, and so on—and the pervasive notion that posits the female
body as the ultimate vessel of immortality. Logically, this should lend itself
to a theology that valorizes women, but that's never what happens. Did Manson
have any children? I'm waiting for an E! True Hollywood
Where Are They
Now?
special. Where the fuck are they now?
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BN:
Well, he had a son with his first wife, Rosalie, whom he married when she
was 15. The boy, born in 1956, Charles Manson Jr., later changed his name to
Jay White, and ended up taking his own life in '93, possibly the result of
marriage trouble, a separation, or divorce. Manson had another son in 1963 with
his second wife, Leona Rae, named Charles Luther Manson, who all but
disappeared from view—and can you blame him? Leona Rae had worked the streets
for Charlie, and he only married her after being arrested for transporting
women over state lines for the purpose of prostitution. As his wife, she
couldn't testify against him. But you're probably wondering, as most do, about
any children Manson may have fathered within the Family prior to the murders.
That would be his son Valentine Michael Manson, born in 1968, and known in his
infancy as Pooh Bear. His mother, Mary Brunner, was Manson's first and possibly
most devoted follower. He named the baby after the character in the novel
Stranger
in a Strange Land
, one of his favorite books. That character is a human
raised by Martians, which may have parallels with a child raised by hippies on
LSD who are alienated both psychologically and physically from society. There
was no stranger land than America at the end of the 60s, which Manson fully
exploited to his advantage. Here, I'm reminded of a particularly Mansonian line
from Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein: "If I cannot inspire love, I will
cause fear!"
AB:
Mary Shelley, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who died just days
after giving birth to her.
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(L) Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, published by Simon & Schuster. (R) Charles Manson, age 5
BN:
I've seen an interview with Michael Brunner when he was in his mid 20s,
and he seems relatively well-adjusted, having been raised by his maternal
grandparents in a stable home environment. What underlies your question is a
suspicion that Manson's offspring may conform to our notion of "the bad
seed," a child innately born bad. But it's Manson who was the monster—born
to a delinquent teenage mother who was criminally-minded, abandoned by the
child's biological father, almost indifferent to her own baby. Manson claims
that she once traded him for a pitcher of beer. Now before you start feeling
sorry for his child self, keep in mind that Manson was a sociopath from a young
age. Everything that made him the devil that he became was firmly in place by
the time he entered school. According to Jeff Guinn, who wrote
Manson: The
Life and Times of Charles Manson
, six-year-old Charlie had been bullied by
a boy at school, and somehow convinced a group of girls to beat him up. When
this was discovered and Charlie was called into the principal's office, he
insisted that the girls had done what they wanted, that he hadn't told them to
do anything. Sounds eerily similar to what would happen 30 years later.
AB:
What an incredibly prescient detail. A Child Army, Crusaders for The
Family! It dovetails nicely with something you brought up earlier, which is
that there is a profound difference in how Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle
and Leslie Van Houten are remembered for their roles in the Tate/LaBianca murders
and how Manson is. A lot of this stems from the fact that violence committed by
women is often positioned as being borne of errant, and often romantic,
devotion.
BN:
In this culture, murderous women are, to apply Wollstonecraft's equation,
"objects of pity bordering on contempt," yet it's contempt that
prevails. Perhaps the greatest punishment for the Manson girls is the charade
of continuously bringing them before parole boards who would never in a million
years release them. For these women, an extreme fidelity to Manson—being under
his control and doing whatever they were told—and the endless prison sentences
it brought them, can be summed up in the age-old vow: "Til death do us
part."
[body_image width='961' height='469' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='manson-v-mormon-and-the-brides-of-frankenstein-body-image-1418943112.jpg' id='12619'](L) W.I.T.C.H. Bridal Fair poster, (R) S.C.U.M. Manifesto by Valerie Solanis
AB:
The romantic view posits a woman's actions as being a matter of hysteria
or psychosis or weakness of will rather than choice, a classic hangover from
the 19th century. I'm reminded of W.I.T.C.H.—the Women's International
Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell. They staged a number of theatrical public interventions
that incorporated witch costumes and the chanting of hexes, playing on the
popular belief that women who engage in political activity are inherently crazy
and sexless. They were primarily active in '68 and '69, long after the Summer
of Love had grown cold.
BN:
When I think of protestors as crazy and sexless, I see those dumpy,
bloated guys who are on the front lines of anti-abortion rallies. I mean, who
wants to have a child with one of them? Maybe they go to these rallies to meet
women? My favorite protest by W.I.T.C.H. was the one in New York in '69, when
they descended upon a bridal fair to "confront the whoremakers." They
wore black veils and chanted, "Here come the slaves, off to their
graves." Of course if you're talking about whoremakers, look no further
than Joseph Smith and Charlie Manson. Both believed that women were to be
completely subservient to men. But Manson, the one-time petty pimp, routinely
turned girls out from The Family to make money, to manipulate producers into
offering a record contract, to win over bikers. For Manson, the sexual
liberation of the '60s allowed him to con women into carnal exploitation.
Support the power of pussy? Charlie's unspoken motto was
exploit the
power of pussy. I'm reminded of a contemporary to Manson and W.I.T.C.H.—Valerie
Solanas—who claimed that a man will "swim a river of snot, wade
nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy
awaiting him." Manson would have readily agreed with her. This comes from
Solanas's
S.C.U.M. Manifesto of 1967. The Society For Cutting Up Men.
Too bad she couldn't have rallied a few hardcore recruits and headed west.
Today we might alternately decode S.C.U.M. as The Society For Cutting Up
Manson.
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AB:
In
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir very convincingly argues
that masculine anxiety is largely rooted in a fear of female biological
activity—menstruation, lactation, and ovulation—all bound linguistically to the
idea of a Dionysian swamp, a hidden recess of fluids that, if women's bodies
are not carefully policed, threatens to take down the whole system. It's
interesting that Solanas upended this by co-opting that fear and representing
it as legitimately threatening in a totally animal way.
BN:
She also insisted that to call man an animal was insulting—to animals.
AB:
It strangely reminds me of a tract allegedly written by Joseph Smith
himself, called
The Peace Maker. It's not particularly long, but it
works exclusively to extoll the virtues of polygamist living with a strangely
carnal bend. One memorable line states: "Here, the wife is pronounced the husband's
property, as much so as his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, or his
horse." Have you ever looked at the family trees of people in the FLDS?
It's like tracing the patri-lineage in puppy-mill animal husbandry. This
reference to farm animals suggests a call to enforce that bizarrely Christian
paradigm of woman as a fucking and lactating sow. There is a strong commonality
between Manson and Smith where belief and sex coincide and cannot be separated.
Mormons literally think that God wants as much reproduction as possible, not
only to multiply and replenish the Earth, but believing that if they're
righteous enough they will create and populate their own worlds, with Adams and
Eves on all of them. This concept is exaggerated within the fundamentalist arm
of the religion, wherein disgraced or excommunicated men are subject to having
their wives and children removed as property, and then re-designated to the
household of another man.
BN:
The author of
The Peace Maker was Udney Hay Jacob, and its
publisher was Joseph Smith. In the book
Under the Banner of Heaven, John
Krakauer affirms that it was conceived and set into motion by Smith. This gave
him an opportunity he had long waited for—to bring the notion of polygamy
before his followers and see how it might be accepted. Unfortunately, it went
down very badly, forcing Smith to claim that he hadn't been aware of its
content—an absolutely baldfaced lie. It was published in 1842, and by then he
had secretly been taking plural wives for almost ten years. What's really
incredible is that shortly before Joseph Smith was killed, his wife Emma
confronted him with his ongoing infidelity, insisting that if he didn't give up
these women she was entitled to another husband. This defiance took a lot of
nerve on her part, and you can imagine it was the last thing he expected to
hear. Smith's so-called, self-serving revelation, dictated by him
word-for-word, at one point states: "And if he have ten virgins given unto
him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they
are given unto him; therefore he is justified ..." Not only does Smith want
women plural and with total immunity, he wants virgins, which suggests young
girls, pure and ripe for the picking. If only every run-of-the-mill cheater might
blessedly receive a commandment from God, that he was bound to take plural
wives and their daughters, granddaughters, and the babysitter ...
AB:
Take the baby too!
BN:
... but no, a mere mortal has to stick his tail between his legs and more
or less behave. The divining rod of a self-proclaimed Prophet lets him follow
the scent in every direction. That title,
The Peace Maker, it's not
about sowing the seeds of harmony.
[body_image width='1003' height='462' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='manson-v-mormon-and-the-brides-of-frankenstein-body-image-1418945625.jpg' id='12629'](L) Vincent Price as Joseph Smith, in Brigham Young (1940), (R) Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
AB:
You know that I'm an avid consumer of crime programs like
Dateline,
48 Hours, and 20/20. These shows often report on FLDS runaways and
the systems that are in place to help them assimilate into 21st century
American society, a kind of underground railroad for religiously oppressed
white people. When you listen to these young women describe their lives within
the confines of the church, there is nothing that could be remotely considered
harmonious. They talk about rape and incest and the complete absence of agency,
the absolute fear of domestic bondage that they feel from early adolescence,
and abuse not only at the hands of their father-husbands, but by other wives in
the household who are not their mothers. I recently saw one that dealt with
secret prescription drug abuse among Mormon women, which is becoming rapidly
more prevalent. They talked a lot about how exhausting it is to "keep
sweet," how difficult it is having to pretend all the time. It's just
another type of violence.
BN:
The meaning of "keep sweet" has changed over time. For Rulon
Jeffs, the father of Warren Jeffs, it meant that "the Holy Spirit of the
Lord ... must be a permanent thing in our very nature, and a part of our
character." For his son, "If you are keeping sweet no matter what,
you are a person ready to give up your own will and just obey the priesthood
over you." The original message is clearly directed at all followers, but
it later becomes a warning to women and girls, and not to "keep
sweet" so much as to keep silent.
AB:
Silence is an edict built into Mormonism from its inception. Insulation
is the primary mechanism of all cults, right? But Mormonism is such a
specifically American religion, and given the romanticization of what this
country was founded on—insurrection and individualism—it's relatively easy to
construct a series of Us-versus-Them binaries that ultimately serve a
separatist sub-narrative in ways that are profoundly political. This explains
the sort of dropout culture that Warren Jeffs has taken to its absolute limits.
He continues to issue increasingly insane religious premonitions and edicts
from his jail cell. In 2012, he received a message from "God" that
only 15 men in the Boulder City FLDS enclave would be allowed to have sex
with the women of the group. Sex could only be for the purpose of procreation,
and the act must be witnessed, start to finish, by two other men.
BN:
Anyone listening in now is likely wondering, what exactly are the links
between Manson and the Mormons? And what are these two tripping out on?
Well,
back when little Charlie was being taken care of by his grandmother, she tried
to set him on the right path, which included dragging him along to the church
of the Nazarenes in McMechen, West Virginia. They were fundamentalists, and
believed that women are intended to serve and be subservient to men. This was
ingrained in Manson from an early age. Now, children can be very adept at
getting parents and guardians—and other children—to do what they want, but
Manson made a lifetime career out of it. He was a user and a master
manipulator. When he was in prison at Terminal Island outside of L.A. he
learned how to control women from older inmates who had been pimps. You
alternately dole out love and beatings, adoration and degradation, and you turn
them out to earn money, never allowing them to have any. This limits their
means of escape. Within the Family, Manson held onto the IDs and driver's
licenses of his followers, lest they try to run away. The Mormon "keep
sweet" can be translated into the criminal/Manson everyday in no uncertain
terms: "Do as you're told. Or else." You don't need to alienate the
rights of women if those rights are nearly non-existent. When one of the
craziest of the Manson girls, Susan Atkins, was briefly talked into cutting a
deal to save her own skin, she spoke of Manson's hold on the Family, and
claimed, "We belong to him, not to ourselves." And don't forget that
central line in "Cease to Exist," when Manson sang, "Submission
is a gift, give it to your brother."
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Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff in Bride Of Frankenstein, 1935. (Photo by Universal/Getty Images)
AB:
"Here come the slaves ..."
BN:
Enter the brides of Frankenstein, stage left.
AB:
Interesting how in both of these instances sex is turned into a mechanism
of capital and volume: women's bodies are expected to be fruitful, to generate
material goods, be those goods monetary revenue or enough offspring to populate
a private planet. Belong to Manson and you will fuck for life. Belong to FLDS
and you will fuck for the afterlife.
BN:
There's a big difference between Mormons and fundamentalists, and yet
they share the same fundamental philosophy in terms of their history, and that
history is violent. Blood Atonement—the sacred oath of vengeance. Manson would
have understood that all too well. And appearances can be deceiving. After he
got out of prison and encountered the hippies, Manson grew his hair long and
seemed to be one of them. He didn't hide the fact that he served time. This
gave him even more credibility as someone who had stood up to "the
man." With the Mormons, the squeaky clean image that many of us have,
particularly since Mitt Romney ran for president and they were more visible and
under scrutiny, is like much of reality in this country, a surface that reveals
very little of its interior drive and its ulterior motives. Imagine if Romney
had ever crossed paths with Squeaky Fromme. It's worth noting as well that
Utah, basically a Mormon state, has the most subscribers of paid internet porn,
and the highest incidence of fraud and white collar crime in the country.
AB:
Smith got his taste for leading people on when he became involved in what
was then referred to as "money digging"—hunting for buried treasure.
He would put a stone into a hat and stare at it until he received a vision that
told him where to dig, a practice he was eventually prosecuted for because he
conned a lot of people out of their money even though he never unearthed any.
After his visitations from the prophet Moroni—which, not coincidentally,
involved the discovery and subsequent loss of a religious text engraved on gold
plates—he was able to play off the economic desperation of the times and
establish a following. He began moving Westward as the gold rush was getting
underway. Both Manson and Smith were very lucky in their timing. Periods of
national violence and spiritual longing compel people to seek a community in
which they can participate and feel safe.
BN:
By the late 1840s Smith had been killed and Brigham Young was leading the
Mormons, and he didn't want his followers running off to prospect. Many did
anyway, and they were referred to as Gold Missionaries. As the Mormons
relentlessly go out in search of new converts to expand and enrich their
church, this is exactly what they are today.
AB:
It's the fastest growing religion in the world.
[body_image width='1000' height='625' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='manson-v-mormon-and-the-brides-of-frankenstein-body-image-1418945167.jpg' id='12628']Mountain Meadows Massacre, from The Life and Confession of John D. Lee, Barclay & Co. published 1877
BN:
Another commonality between Manson and the Mormon church is that they
brought their followers out to the desert, to get beyond the reach of the
federal government and law enforcement. Manson and the Mormons both considered
blacks to be inferior. It's quite possible that Mormons believed that everyone
was inferior to them. Do they still believe this? After all, they are the
Saints. Manson wanted to start a race war and have it blamed on the Black
Panthers. When Mormons slaughtered an estimated 120 people traveling through
Utah by wagon train in 1857, including scores of women and children—the
infamous Mountain Meadow massacre—they laid the blame on the Piute indians. Not
only had they lured the Piutes into joining them in their dirty work, some of
the Mormons who led the attack were disguised as indians. Here I can't help but
picture Manson dressed in his buckskin outfit. In 1969 it was "blame the
Panthers." In 1857, in a scheme worthy of Manson himself, it was blame the
Piutes.
AB:
This feeds right back into Otherness: do not trust the other, because
whether they are black men or a country full of heathens they will lead us down
the path to ruin. Manson and Joseph Smith assembled their ministries from a
cast of misfits who related deeply to having been disenfranchised. We know that
Manson looked for runaways and outcasts with tenuous family anchors, people
with a profound desire to be included in something—anything—that made them feel
socially and emotionally unified. Manson himself had this need.
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(L) How to Win Friends and Influence People, (R) Tex Watson's map of the Spahn Ranch
BN:
When he was in prison, the only time Charlie made any effort to better
himself was when he took the Dale Carnegie course based on the book,
How to
Win Friends and Influence People
. With good-time Charlie Manson this might
have been re-written as
How to Kill Friends and Manipulate Your Flock.
His followers were under the influence—in more ways than one.
AB:
The idea of appearance as a malleable asset reminds me of theater, in the
way that an audience is able to buy into and commit to a fiction because in the
dark we're more easily convinced that what we're seeing on stage is real.
Reality within the worlds of both Manson and Mormonism only remains intact if
the fourth wall isn't breached. Once again, the importance of separation and
isolation for cults. Particularly interesting when you think about the fact
that Spahn Ranch, where the Manson Family lived, was an old movie lot. There
were horses and a barn, a bunkhouse, a saloon, even a killer named Tex.
BN:
Almost everyone in the Family was given a stage name. They were
characters, they had parts to play. LSD amplified a kind of method acting—a
method to their madness. And the movie in which they were trapped was, of
course, a Western.
AB:
And the sunset they were riding into was blood red.
[body_image width='800' height='513' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='manson-v-mormon-and-the-brides-of-frankenstein-body-image-1418945075.jpg' id='12627'] Illustration by Norman Sanders, 1958
BN: Here in the present, the theater/fiction you imagine actually exists.
There's a rather successful play called
The Book of Mormon. But
something tells me that it doesn't include a scene of the Mountain Meadow
massacre. All singing, all dancing, all slaughter! The horrible description of
the killing of the women and children that you'll find in the book
Under
the Banner of Heaven
almost sounds like the Tate murders: "Painted
Saints and Piutes rushed upon these victims with guns and knives and began
shooting and bludgeoning them to death and slashing their throats." From
eyewitness accounts, the Mormons were even more savage than the indians. The
frenzy of Blood Atonement must be equivalent to a few tabs of acid and a line
of speed. Maybe Manson's story will make it onto the stage one day.
AB:
There are still people shaving their heads and carving Xs into their
foreheads. Incarceration be damned, the beat goes on.
BN:
Even though California abolished the death penalty after Manson was
convicted, they might have made an exception in his case. He should have been
the last one sent to the gas chamber. How symbolic that would have been. But
no, he keeps on living as some sort of endless act of spite. And the Manson
musical gets a perfectly scripted happy ending. Manson, who at 80 years old is
doing life in prison, marries one last time, and gets another little stab at
happiness. But at 26, isn't she a little old for him?
AB:
Trust me, at 80, beggars can't be choosers.
note:
1.
"Charles Manson and the Manson Family," Marilyn Bardsley, on Crime
Library: Criminal Minds and Methods,
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorio...
