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- By Shana Ting Lipton
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- "Crucible,"
by Bobby Beausoleil, courtesy of Clair Obscur Gallery
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- The idea of art as cathartic
is not a new one. Art therapy rode a wave of popularity in the
1960's, along with other counter-culture subjects like psychedelic
drugs, the occult, Kenneth Anger, and Charles Manson. Convicted
murderer turned artist Bobby Beausoleil's strange and fascinating
life has been punctuated by all of the above. But, much to his
dismay, he is probably best known to 60's counterculture buffs
for an association with Manson. This relatively brief friendship
resulted in a murder that saw him sentenced to death, and then
ultimately to life in prison (when California repealed the Death
Penalty on February 18, 1972).
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- In July of 1969, Beausoleil
and two of Manson's girlfriends went to musician/drug dealer
Gary Hinman's house in Topanga Canyon to ask for a refund on
a mescaline deal that they had helped broker for a motorcycle
gang called The Straight Satans. The latter had complained that
the hallucinogen was no good and demanded their money back. Once
inside Hinman's house, Beausoleil and his female cohorts threatened
the musician who insisted he had no money. Beausoleil called
Manson to explain the degenerating situation. Manson in turn
showed up at the house with a knife, which he lunged at Hinman's
face. After Manson left, things got more out of control when
Hinman refused to let Beausoleil give him makeshift stitches
using dental floss, and threatened to call the authorities. That's
when Beausoleil took matters (and a knife) into his own hands
and made the panicked decision that would end his life as a free
man. He killed Gary Hinman.
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- One of the three fleeing felons
had scrawled a bloody missive on Hinman's wall. This way, authorities
might believe that the crime had been committed by the Black
Panthers, or some other radical political group. 'Political Piggies,'
it read. Beausoleil was subsequently arrested while driving one
of Hinman's vehicles. It is no coincidence that words like 'pig,'
and 'rise,' and phrases like, 'death to pigs,' and 'helter skelter,'
were also written in blood at the Tate and Labianca residences
in the wake of the infamous brutal murders. Manson Family member
Susan Atkins has claimed, in interviews, that the so-called 'Manson
murders,' which took place on August 9, 1969, were intended to
act as faux serial slayings to fool the police into thinking
Beausoleil was innocent. The killing spree--which took place
within weeks of the Beausoleil/Hinman incident--claimed the lives
of actress Sharon Tate, hair stylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress
Abigail Folger, Polanski's friend Voyteck Frykowski, Steven Parent,
and Rosemary and Leno Labianca.
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- Today, more than three decades
later, the Tate/Labianca murders have become deeply ingrained
in Southern Californians' collective unconscious-doomed to the
annals of super-real allegory. Having grown up in a canyon, with
the Polanski/Tate residence as a local monument to morbidity,
it was not the boogyman that loomed large behind my closet door,
but Charles Manson and his deranged sycophants. All those times,
I sat trembling in the car with my teen friends, I don't think
I ever made it up that hill to 10050 Cielo Drive. Nervous laughter
and screaming always preceded our fearful descent back down the
hill. A couple of us went to a school whose campus was ironically,
just a stone's throw away from Cielo.
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- I had another weird 'six degrees'
connection to Sharon Tate, via my godmother Barbara Parkins,
who had not only starred in Valley of the Dolls (1967) with her,
but also been her bridesmaid when she married Polanski in 1968.
And then there was the rumor relayed to me by a punk rock musician
I knew in the 80's, who had also attended my school. She said
that one year, Roman Polanski had shown up at school to escort
one of the girls to the prom. When I had asked my science teacher
about it, he had responded in nasal science teacher staccato,
"There was a lot of talk about that in the teachers' lounge.
He showed up wearing black leather pants." Having not actually
lived through the tumult of the era, and having grown up in LA
surrounded by magazine editors, stylists, artists, filmmakers
and musicians, all of this was good fodder for hip, dark, clever
pop cultural cocktail chatter. We were all like macabre Bavarians-land-locked,
sequestered in the hills, away from 'normal' society, telling
our dark Grimm tales of freaks in the forest stalking beautiful
princesses.
It is this specific archetype, I believe, that has fostered in
many women, a psychosexual fascination with men behind bars that
borders on the fairytale-like (something resembling Beauty and
the Beast). The man represents the Id in its most extreme, beastly
and uncomely form. But he is caged so the delicate, understanding
woman is in no danger of coming into direct contact with this
creature's force brutale. She is free to gaze and admire the
beast inside-the beast inside her, inside all of us for that
matter, from a safe distance. Yet she knows that to this prisoner
of his own consciousness, she too is an archetype. She represents
the soft, understanding primal mother who will accept him, with
his boils and hunched back, gnashing his teeth, in all his rage
and deformity. I had in fact gone to a prison in Amsterdam, Holland,
back in 1999 for a tongue-in-cheek article I was writing about
the cushy and reformative Dutch prison system. But any personalization
or talk of archetypes was back-seated in favor of social politics
and odd cultural customs. As writers and journalists we sometimes
discover previously unbeknownst fascinations as they come to
us in the form of assignments and pitches.
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- Yet, I recognize having always
been attracted to a certain juxtaposition--a subtle moment of
contact between disparate forces. It is the light and the dark
of the Yin-Yang symbol before they blend into creation. It is
the moment before creation. Here sit two extreme energies-like
boxers in each respective corner of their ring about to spar
only to realize that their equally potent but opposite forces
conjoined produce something bigger then both of them. This explains
why I read two of my favorite books, almost back-to-back: Leonard
Shlain's "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess," and Gary
Lachman's "Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the
Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius." The former espoused the
soft goddess nature that an inmate might eulogize. The latter
exposed one era's bête noir-the archetypal dark force that
is only harmless when behind bars. Lachman's tome was my more
recent read; its back-of-the-book blurb asking: "How did
a decade of love and peace end in Altamont and the Manson Family
bloodbath?"
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- The book's first mention of
Bobby Beausoleil was on page 254: "And as we will see, Bobby
Beausoleil, another member of the Family convicted of murder,
starred in a early version of Anger's Lucifer Rising." The
book was intriguing on the level of encapsulating and exploring
a zeitgeist. I related strongly to it. In the previous quote,
Lachman refers to legendary cult filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Beausoleil's
meeting with the eccentric and dark Anger was perhaps his first,
'date with destiny.' For, apart from Manson, Anger was a close
second in terms of Beausoleil's infamous associations. The story
is that he was floored by the young rebel musician's lascivious
stage performance when he played with experimental band Orkustra
at The Glide Memorial Festival.
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- Anger found the attractive 19-year-old
in the parking lot, pointed at him and proclaimed, "You
are Lucifer." Rather than being an invocation into some
Satanic cult, the declaration was an invitation to play the part
of the fallen angel himself, in Anger's film, Lucifer Rising
(1972). The core concept was an empathetic reverence for the
myth of Lucifer, the highest archangel in heaven, who descended
from grace after embracing sins like pride, vanity and arrogance
and rebelling against God. Lucifer Rising imagines the 'bearer
of light's return to helm a new era.
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- Anger took his would-be Lucifer
under his wing, and the prodigal son lived rent-free with the
unlikely father twenty years his senior. The footage of Beausoleil
was eventually cut and used instead in Anger's Invocation of
my Demon Brother (1969). Inadvertently following the prodigal
son mythology, he and Anger had a falling out. During a technological
failure at a show at The Straight Theatre, a LSD scorched Anger
had a fit and blamed Beausoleil resulting in his expulsion from
the 'nest.'
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- In another case of art imitates
archetype, the 'son' did in fact 'return,' years later while
in prison. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page had been tapped
to do the soundtrack for a subsequent release of the film, but
he and Anger split off in 1976. Beausoleil seemed the logical
choice for the job. With the permission of the prison, he obtained
materials to build electronic instruments, and assembled a group
of fellow inmates at the Deuel Correctional Institution in Tracy,
Calif and formed The Freedom Orchestra. Despite his enthusiasm
and passion, the project was years in the making due to inmate
inconsistency. Finally, in 1980, Anger released a version of
Lucifer Rising that included the soundtrack.
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2 OF 3
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- Copyright © 2005
Shana Ting Lipton
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