The dark side of the moon

In March 1969, Robert A. Heinlein flew with his wife Ginny to Brazil, where he had been invited to serve as a guest of honor at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro. Another passenger on their plane was the director Roman Polanski, who introduced Heinlein to his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, at a party at the French embassy a few days after their arrival. (Tate had been in Italy filming The Thirteen Chairs, her final movie role before her death, which she had taken largely out of a desire to work with Orson Welles.) On August 8, Tate and four others were murdered in Los Angeles by members of the Manson Family. Two months later, Heinlein received a letter from a woman named “Annette or Nanette or something,” who claimed that police helicopters were chasing her and her friends. Ginny was alarmed by its incoherent tone, and she told her husband to stay out of it: “Honey, this is worse than the crazy fan mail. This is absolutely insane. Don’t have anything to do with it.” Heinlein contented himself with calling the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office, which confirmed that a police action was underway. In fact, it was a joint federal, state, and county raid of the Myers and Barker Ranches, where Charles Manson and his followers had been living, as part of an investigation into an auto theft ring—their connection to the murders had not yet been established. Manson was arrested, along with two dozen others. And the woman who wrote to Heinlein was probably Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, another member of the Manson Family, who would be sentenced to life in prison for a botched assassination attempt six years later on President Gerald Ford.

On January 8, 1970, the San Francisco Herald-Examiner ran a story on the front page with the headline “Manson’s Blueprint? Claim Tate Suspect Used Science Fiction Plot.” Later that month, Time published an article, “A Martian Model,” that began:

In the psychotic mind, fact and fantasy mingle freely. The line between the real and the imagined easily blurs or disappears. Most madmen invent their own worlds. If the charges against Charles Manson, accused along with five members of his self-styled “family” of killing Sharon Tate and six other people, are true, Manson showed no powers of invention at all. In the weeks since his indictment, those connected with the case have discovered that he may have murdered by the book. The book is Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, an imaginative science-fiction novel long popular among hippies…

Not surprisingly, the Heinleins were outraged by the implication, although Robert himself was in no condition to respond—he was hospitalized with a bad case of peritonitis. In any event, the parallels between the career of Charles Manson and Heinlein’s fictional character Valentine Michael Smith were tenuous at best, and the angle was investigated by the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who dismissed it. A decade later, in a letter to the science fiction writer and Heinlein fan J. Neil Schulman, Manson stated, through another prisoner, that he had never read the book. Yet the novel was undeniably familiar to members of his circle, as it was throughout the countercultural community of the late sixties. The fact that Fromme wrote to Heinlein is revealing in itself, and Manson’s son, who was born on April 15, 1968, was named Valentine Michael by his mother.

Years earlier, Manson had been exposed—to a far more significant extent—to the work of another science fiction author. In Helter Skelter, his account of the case, Bugliosi writes of Manson’s arrival at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in 1961:

Manson gave as his claimed religion “Scientologist,” stating that he “has never settled upon a religious formula for his beliefs and is presently seeking an answer to his question in the new mental health cult known as Scientology”…Manson’s teacher, i.e. “auditor” was another convict, Lanier Rayner. Manson would later claim that while in prison he achieved Scientology’s highest level, “theta clear.”

In his own memoir, Manson writes: “A cell partner turned me on to Scientology. With him and another guy I got pretty heavy into dianetics and Scientology…There were times when I would try to sell [fellow inmate Alan Karpis] on the things I was learning through Scientology.” In total, Manson appears to have received about one hundred and fifty hours of auditing, and his yearly progress report noted: “He appears to have developed a certain amount of insight into his problems through his study of this discipline.” The following year, another report stated: “In his effort to ‘find’ himself, Manson peruses different religious philosophies, e.g. Scientology and Buddhism; however, he never remains long enough with any given teachings to reap material benefits.” In 1968, Manson visited a branch of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, where he asked the receptionist: “What do you do after ‘clear?'” But Bugliosi’s summary of the matter seems accurate enough:

Although Manson remained interested in Scientology much longer than he did in any other subject except music, it appears that…he stuck with it only as long as his enthusiasm lasted, then dropped it, extracting and retaining a number of terms and phrases (“auditing,” “cease to exist,” “coming to Now”) and some concepts (karma, reincarnation, etc.) which, perhaps fittingly, Scientology had borrowed in the first place.

So what should we make of all this? I think that there are a few relevant points here. The first is that Heinlein and Hubbard’s influence on Manson—or any of his followers, including Fromme, who had been audited as well—appears to have been marginal, and only in the sense that you could say that he was “influenced” by the Beatles. Manson was a scavenger who assembled his notions out of scraps gleaned from whatever materials were currently in vogue, and science fiction had saturated the culture to an extent that it would have been hard to avoid it entirely, particularly for someone who was actively searching for such ideas. On some level, it’s a testament to the cultural position that both Hubbard and Heinlein had attained, although it also cuts deeper than this. Manson represented the psychopathic fringe of an impulse for which science fiction and its offshoots provided a convenient vocabulary. It was an urge for personal transformation in the face of what felt like apocalyptic social change, rooted in the ideals that Campbell and his authors had defined, and which underwent several mutations in the decades since its earliest incarnation. (And it would mutate yet again. The Aum Shinrikyo cult, which was responsible for the sarin gas attacks in the Japanese subway system in 1995, borrowed elements of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy for its vision of a society of the elect that would survive the coming collapse of civilization.) It’s an aspect of the genre that takes light and dark forms, and it sometimes displays both faces simultaneously, which can lead to resistance from both sides. The Manson Family murders began with the killing of a man named Gary Hinman, who was taken hostage on July 25, 1969, a day in which the newspapers were filled with accounts of the successful splashdown of Apollo 11. The week before, at the ranch where Manson’s followers were living, a woman had remarked: “There’s somebody on the moon today.” And another replied: “They’re faking it.”