Francis Herman Pencovic was born in San Francisco in 1911, the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrant and a Mormon woman from Utah. He came of age in tough times, hoboing across America during the Great Depression. He rode the rails and did odd jobs and occasionally found himself in jail, charged with larceny or vagrancy. Once a vaguely threatening letter he'd written to FDR caused him to be scrutinized by the authorities.
By 1937, he'd married, had two sons and found steady work in the shipyards of Oakland. But he was arrested again and spent some time in a mental hospital. His wife divorced him and he joined the Army. He surfaced in Salt Lake City in 1946. He married for a second time.
It was around then he found his calling. "I may as well say it: I am Christ. I am the new messiah," he said. He claimed to have recently returned from the planet Neophrates, from which he had led a rocket convoy.
On these tenets he founded his religion, which he called WKFL Fountains of the World (WKFL stands for Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith and Love) and established a compound in the Simi Hills north of Los Angeles, just down the road from a old ranch that hired itself out for movie shoots.
Pencovic changed his named to Krishna Venta and grew his beard and hair to appear more Christlike. He and his followers -- there were hundreds -- wore robes and went barefoot.
They were a curious group, but not particularly sinister -- to join, one had to voluntarily surrender all one's worldly goods to the group, but most of them were so poor that hardly mattered. They drew national attention in July 1949, when an airliner crashed near their commune. The Fountains of the World rescued and attended the survivors.
They did good works, fought forest fires, fed the homeless.
And then, one day in 1958, two disgruntled former members returned to the commune with high explosives strapped to their bodies. They alleged that Krishna had embezzled funds and slept with their wives. They blew themselves up, killing Krishna and eight of his followers, including an infant.
Yet the death of Krishna did not signal the death of the cult; Fountains of the World limped on for another 20 years. Some of its members defected to Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. One member started a UFO cult and moved to Sedona, Ariz.
In early 1968, a scruffy little ex-con with a disconcerting gaze showed up at Fountains of the World with his coterie of compliant young women and a few young men. It wasn't long before he made an unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the group.
Rebuffed, Charles Manson and his Family moved a little ways down the road, to an old ranch that hired itself out as a location for movie shoots.
The 80-year-old proprietor, a former circus performer named George Spahn, had fallen on hard times. His once thriving business was on life support; his main source of income was renting out horses for kids to ride. While his estranged wife still lived on the property and managed day-to-day business affairs, George was blind and lonely. He offered free lodging to any stunt performer or ranch hand who'd help out around the place and keep him company.
Manson was happy to oblige. He assigned Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme to be Spahn's "eyes" and "wife."
Though she was only 20 years old, Michele Morgan had already established herself as a movie star in her native France when she emigrated to Hollywood, just ahead of the 1940 German invasion. RKO Radio Pictures immediately signed her to a contract, hoping they had secured the services of a young Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich.
Morgan never quite broke through with American audiences (she was cast as Ilsa in Casablanca, but negotiations between RKO and Warner Bros. broke down and Ingrid Bergman got the role) and returned to France after the war to enjoy a long and storied career.
But Morgan did leave an indelible mark on Hollywood in the form of the house she had built on a 3.3-acre plateau above Benedict Canyon, looking south over Beverly Hills with a view stretching from downtown L.A. to the Pacific Ocean. Designed by architect Robert Byrd, a pioneer of indoor-outdoor living, its rustic rooms seemed to flow out onto patios and decks.
Located at the end of a gently curving cul-de-sac, the single-story shake-roofed structure was meant to evoke a French country house with beamed ceilings and whimsical windows. A similarly styled 2,000 square-foot guest room was separated from the 3,200 square-foot main quarters by a swimming pool. There was a wishing well on the property and what was advertised as an enchanted woodland garden.
Morgan reportedly paid $32,000 for the house, which was given the address 10050 Cielo Drive.
In 1945, when she returned home to France, she sold it to a Beverly Hills doctor who rented it out to high-profile guests. Lillian Gish lived there for a while. So did the Baroness de Rothschild.
Rudolph Altobelli, a Hollywood agent whose client list included Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, bought the house in 1963, and continued the practice of renting it out to the rich and famous, many of whom were his clients. Fonda, Dyan Cannon, Cary Grant, and Samantha Eggar all lived in that house.
In 1966, Terry Melcher, producer of The Byrds' first two albums, moved into the house with girlfriend Candice Bergen and musician Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders. Melcher, son of singer/actress Doris Day, was an important figure in the development of Southern California rock. He had scored a couple of minor hits as half of the vocal duo Bruce & Terry (Melcher's partner Bruce Johnston would later join the Beach Boys) and as an uncredited "ghost singer" on the Ripchords hit "Hey Little Cobra." More importantly, he knew people -- he'd put Van Dyke Parks together with Brian Wilson. He was a genuine industry insider.
Which was why Charles Manson wanted to meet him and why, in the summer of 1968, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson introduced Melcher to Manson.
The recently divorced Wilson had apparently picked up some of Charlie's girls while they were hitchhiking; a couple of nights later he returned home to find a school bus parked in front of his Sunset Boulevard house. Manson greeted him and shared his drugs and women; Wilson opened up his home to the Family.
Sometime that summer, Brian and Dennis Wilson allegedly cut nearly an album's worth of material with Manson.
Understandably, those recordings have never been released. (Though it's likely they share some material with the infamous Lie: The Love and Terror Cult, the album Manson and members of the family cut in 1967 and 1968 that was released during Manson's trial.) It stands to reason the Wilsons were impressed with Manson's songs. So was Neil Young. They thought Melcher should hear him, that maybe he could help Manson get a record deal.
Melcher listened, and thought about it. But something about Manson seemed off. One story is that he saw him beat up a drunk at the Spahn ranch. More likely he just didn't like the skinny fellow's vibe.
Melcher, Wilson and Manson spent a lot of time together in 1968; Mike Love, in his 2016 memoir Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, remembers that Dennis was pushing his "inexplicable" friend on a lot of Beach Boys' associates. He suggests that Melcher was humoring Dennis when he allowed Manson to audition several times. After one session at the Spahn ranch, Love writes, Melcher finally told Manson he wasn't going to be able to sign him.
"Manson wouldn't stand for it," Love writes. "Consumed by rage and seeking revenge against a corrupt society, he convinced his followers that the apocalypse was coming in a bloody race war, at the end of which he and his disciples would take over."
Maybe Love is wrong in theorizing that Melcher's brushoff set the Manson Family murder rampage in motion, but Melcher did move out of 10050 Cielo Drive shortly after Wilson, with Manson in the car, dropped him off after a night of clubbing. He moved into a house in Malibu owned by his mother.
"The move was no accident, " Love writes. "Terry, Doris' only child, was extremely close to his mom. He had told her about Manson -- about some of his scary antics, his brandishing of knives, his zombie followers -- and that Manson had been to the house on Cielo, and she insisted he move out."
Seven months later, on Aug. 9, 1969, several Manson Family members murdered 8-months-pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four other victims at 10050 Cielo Drive. The following night, they killed Rosemary and Leno LaBianca at their home a few miles away.
Melcher, who died in 2012, always believed he was Manson's intended victim that night, that the others were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there's evidence that Manson not only knew that Melcher had moved, but that he knew his new address. (Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi rejected Melcher's revenge theory.)
The party line was that Manson was trying to jump-start what he saw as an inevitable race war by slaughtering wealthy white people and blaming blacks -- ushering in the great Helter Skelter. Messiahs don't settle scores like petty gangsters, they wreck worlds not upper-middle-class lives.
I lived on the edge of the California desert in those days; friends of mine rode horses at Spahn ranch. (So did actor Bryan Cranston -- he tells a story about seeing creepy Charlie helping out there). Later during the trial my father said he thought he had seen some of the Manson women hitchhiking a few times; he'd never stopped to pick them up but he had considered it. It seemed so close to us; evil creepy crawling in from the bleached eerie emptiness of the desert.
Lying awake at night and hearing phantom radio, I think of Manson and understand why fairy tales and ghost stories persist.
There's always a new Manson, just like there's always a new Elvis, a new Marilyn, a new JFK. He's an American type, a role -- like Iago -- into which actors will forever be attempted to step.
Australian Damon Herriman plays him in the new Quentin Tarantino movie Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood; he also played the character in the Netflix series Mindhunter. Matt Smith of The Crown and Doctor Who plays Manson in Mary Harron's Charlie Says, just released on home video. Chris Hemsworth played a Manson-like character in 2018's Bad Times at the El Royale. Dozens of actors have portrayed Manson, or characters inspired by Manson, in the 50 years since Manson instructed Tex Watson to take Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian and Patricia Krenwinkel to "that house where Melcher used to live," and "totally destroy everyone," to make it "as gruesome as you can."
I walked up Cielo Drive to look at the house once; it was before 1994, when Marilyn Manson bought and turned it into Pig Studio, before Sharon Tate's sister shamed him and he closed the place and moved his gear to New Orleans. You couldn't see much from the road. You can't see anything now; they tore it down and built a new house, with a new address.
It is hard to know charisma through photographs; there's nothing about Manson that impresses us unless it's the uncanny way he has of looking different in every photograph.
A "changeling," Bugliosi called him in his book. There are many Mansons. He is multitudes; an American Rasputin, indelible as a scar.
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Style on 07/28/2019