CHARLIE IN HOLLYWOOD

In the fall of 1974, I moved into a condominium with my mother in Chatsworth, California. It was a hop and a skip from lovely Chatsworth Park, but I soon became enamored with a more dubious landmark of the northwest San Fernando Valley town: the Spahn Ranch, once the hideout for the Manson Family. I was 10, but strangely obsessed the the murders masterminded by Charles Manson. I wrote fifth-grade book reports about Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter and plowed through Ed Sanders' The Family before the onset of puberty. I guess I wasn't much different from other curious post-sixties kids.

I was alive and living in Venice when the murders took place, but I have no memory of them. (The first real "event" I remember consciously was the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, largely because they shut my elementary school for several days in its wake). To me, the 1969 Manson killings were amorphous drama that I couldn't get enough of. I never had a real concept of the utter fear that gripped the city in the wake of the murders.

The seventies were kind of a golden age for grisly murder in L.A. There was the freeway killer, and I believe Richard Ramierez got going back then. My only real connection was knowing a girl in junior high school whose sister was murdered by the Hillside Strangler, but I never spoke with her about it. What could you say?

As I've gotten older my obsession with serial killers has (luckily) abated, but I recently interviewed someone who was at the center of the world that was shattered when Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkle, Susan Atkins, and Leslie Van Houten burst into the home on Cielo Drive in August of 1969. She told me she had been with the eight-months-pregnant Sharon Tate three days before her murder -- shopping for wallpaper for Tate's baby's room. She said Tate snuck a cigarette, though she knew husband Roman Polanski would be mad. She said she knew everybody inside that house. For months after the murders, she told me, she carried a gun in her purse.

I can't even begin to imagine experiencing something like that -- the fear that so many endured in the aftermath of those murders. Even now, nearly four decades later, the mere mention of it provokes a shower of tears. My heart goes out to her.

More than Altamont, more than Chicago in '68, the Manson killings put an end to the sixties, to whatever hippie idealism existed. And it seems like it's a story that will likely never be fully uncovered. There seems to be an unspoken verbal blackout when it comes to this topic. People who knew the victims, who lived in that gilded world of the young hip Hollywood aristocracy, those in the straight rock and roll world who were exposed to Manson the musician. They've been mum for nearly 40 years. Some, like Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson, took their stories -- and their fear -- to their graves. I wonder if we'll ever know the truth about the extent to which Manson infiltrated Hollywood.