By 1969, Hell had well and truly broken loose in America.
Wilson called Manson “the Wizard.”
She won the role in a very Rosemary’s Baby-like fashion- actress Kim Novak had originally won the part but fell from a horse and couldn’t complete the film. Tate was hired to re-film her scenes.
Tate with the Sanders
Bern met actress Jean Harlow shortly before the premiere of Hell’s Angels in 1930…The two struck up a friendship and eventually began dating. They announced their engagement in June 1932 and married on July 2, 1932.
Two months after marrying Jean Harlow, on September 5, Bern was found dead from a gunshot to the head in their home on Easton Drive in Beverly Hills, California. The coroner ruled his death a suicide.
Harlow died of kidney failure during the filming of Saratoga in 1937 at the age of 26.
(The body Bern’s common-law wife Dorothy Millette) was found in the Sacramento River two days after Bern’s death. It was later determined that she had committed suicide by jumping from the Delta King steamboat.
In the November 1960 issue of Playboy, screenwriter Ben Hecht questioned the official verdict of Bern’s death, causing renewed interest in the case. Hecht suggested that Bern was murdered by an unnamed woman and that the investigation into Bern’s death was a “suicide whitewash”.
(Sebring) loved the house but was always concerned about the fact that it was supposed to be “jinxed”. He knew the stories about Paul Bern’s death but he also learned that two people had drowned in the swimming pool as well.
Unable to sleep, she lay awake in Jay’s room with all the lights on. She was very uncomfortable, although she couldn’t explain why. She felt “funny”…and was frightened by every little sound that she heard.
Suddenly, a person that she described as a “creepy little man” came into the bedroom! She was sure that this man was Paul Bern. The man ignored her though and wandered about the room, apparently looking for something. Sharon put on her robe and hurried out of the bedroom.
Sharon started down the stairs but halfway down them, froze in shock. There was a figure tied to the staircase posts at the bottom of the steps. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. However, she could clearly see that the figure’s throat had been cut. Then, the apparition vanished.
…the Polanski’s had agreed to take care of Patty Duke’s sheep dog, and the dog had a habit of getting loose. On the night of the party, the sheep dog once again bounded away, and Roman Polanski went after it.
Somewhere down the hill, Polanski encountered a group of vicious German Shepherds belonging to—as Sanders phrased it after a libel suit by DeGrimston—”English occultists who were in America to promote the end of the world.” Somehow, during his attempt to retrieve Patty Duke’s pooch, Polanski got locked in a garage trying to escape the cult’s dog pack, and managed to break a rear window out and escape up the hillside.
“One night we went to visit the Trevi Fountain, and I looked at her and had the strongest feeling she was going to die.“Another time I was looking over at her and asking her what she was thinking about, and she suddenly came out with: ‘The Devil is beautiful. Most people think he’s ugly, but he’s not.’“
I thought it weird at the time but Roman had just done the movie Rosemary’s Baby so I related it to that.“I told her she shouldn’t say things like that because it made me nervous.”
Jones was cast by director David Lean in Ryan’s Daughter (1970). … Unknown to Christopher, he was drugged during his filming of Ryan’s Daughter by Sarah Miles …which caused Christopher to believe he was having a breakdown. Jones also was involved in a car crash, not knowing he had been drugged. The director and producers never informed him of the drugging.
What the hell was wrong with these people? Seriously.
In any event, the Polanskis were allegedly part of a very wild party scene, and Tate was dragged into some rather sordid activity by Polanski:
Polanski had the professional and personal power Sharon craved and thus she was drawn into a world of frequent humiliations, subjected to his sexual proclivities that included drugs, affairs, orgies and home sex videos he shared with friends.
From Adam Gorightly’s book The Shadow Over Santa Susana:
“In Doris Day: Her Own Story, Terry Melcher was quoted that the ‘murders had something to do with the weird film Polanski had made, and the equally weird people who were hanging around the house. I knew they had been making a lot of homemade sadomasochistic-porno movies there with quite a few recognizable Hollywood faces in them.
The reason I knew was that I had gone out with a girl named Michelle Phillips, one of the Mamas and Papas, whose ex-husband, john Phillips, was the leader of the group. Michelle told me she and John had dinner one night, to discuss maybe getting back together, and afterwards he had taken her up to visit the Polanskis in my old house. Michelle said that when they arrived there, everyone in the house was busy filming an orgy and that Sharon Tate was part of it.”
Sammy Davis, Jr.- who’d have his own flirtations with the dark side- later said of the Cielo Drive scene: “Everyone there had at at one time or another been into Satanism.”
Were the activities in this circle being filmed for blackmail purposes? Were they being filmed for private collectors? Did the whole scene just too far out of hand? Gorightly:
During follow-up investigations at the Polanski residence, police discovered several films and videotapes in the main bedroom closet. Some of these films, it has been rumored, involved an elite underground Hollywood group who swapped smut of each other…
Many years after the Tate/LaBianca murders, Manson told an interviewer, “Don’t you think those people deserved to die?… They were involved in kiddie porn.” Like Manson’s Hollywood Star revelations, one must wonder about these allegations of Polanski making money from kiddie porn, as Charlie’s claims pre-date Polanski’s late 1977 rape case of an under-aged girl.
Before the murders, Manson was seen on walkthrough in the Cielo Drive property, as if casing it out. Was someone worried about their face appearing in one of those films?
At one point, two reporters approached the Manson defense team informing them that certain individuals in Hollywood were worried that the case might cause a film industry scandal. The reporters said that lots of porno -many of the hand-held, home-made variety -had been discovered during the Tate murder investigation, and that many influential people had put in pleas to the district attorney to lower the charge against Manson to manslaughter, as a way to keep him quiet.
Yet Manson was reportedly still preaching his race-war apocalypse, at least according to some of the testimony that emerged during the trial. One account had it that he took matters into his own hands, significantly with a drug-dealer:
By June, Manson was telling the Family they might have to show blacks how to start “Helter Skelter”. When Manson tasked Watson with obtaining money supposedly intended to help the Family prepare for the conflict, Watson defrauded a black drug dealer named Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe. Crowe responded with a threat to wipe out everyone at Spahn Ranch. Manson countered on July 1, 1969, by shooting Crowe at his Hollywood apartment.
Manson was himself acting on the orders of the Straight Satans outlaw biker gang (remember Harlow and Bern and Hell’s Angels?), who felt that Hinman had burned them with a bad batch of drugs.
Beausoleil was simply ordered to get the Satans’ money back from Hinman, to the amount of $1000, but was ordered to kill him when Hinman said he didn’t have the cash.
A dope dealer from Canada was punished for selling Jay Sebring bad dope. According to actor Dennis Hopper, twenty-five people were invited to watch the dealer get whipped and to participate in the whipping. They videotaped the event, as they had other events involving—again, according to Hopper—“sadism, masochism and bestiality.”
Hopper claims that LA police informed him about some of this information. The tapes have never surfaced, but rumors in the Hollywood underground have always insisted that they exist…According to Hopper, the public humiliation of the dealer took place three days before the murders at Cielo Drive, which would make it on or about August 5th.
Maury Terry raises an important point in his observation of the killings, one which cannot be easily ignored: if Helter Skelter was the true motive, then why did the killings stop after La Bianca?
There was no evidence linking the Manson clan to any of the killings; they were still in the clear on Tate and La Bianca, although Bobby Beausoleil had been picked up for the Hinman murder. They could have continued their Helter Skelter murder spree much longer before being stopped. Why only that one weekend in August? Why only the five victims at the Tate house (six, if you count Sharon Tate’s unborn son) and two at La Bianca?
The only reason that makes sense is that both murders were contract hits, and that Manson dressed it up in Helter Skelter for the benefit of his young female assassins…Helter Skelter was Manson’s “program” for the brainwashed murderers; it provided a context, and it also influenced their choice of bloody graffiti at each scene…
Hippie Commune Ruled By ‘Black Magic’
Friday, December 5th, 1969LOS ANGELES, Dec. 5 – “Black magic” …“He believes that he, and all human beings, are God” … “There is no crime, there is no sin” … “The women were the key to everything.”
Three friends of Charles M. Manson used those words Thursday to describe him and the way they say he ruled a clan of nomadic hippie-types on a commune near Death Valley.
Prosecutors say they will seek an indictment charging Manson, 36, with conspiracy to commit murder. Several members of his clan are accused of slaying actress Sharon Tate and six others.
The three friends—miner Paul Crockett, 50; guitar player Paul Watkins, 19; and Brooks Poston, 21—gave their descriptions in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“The whole thing was held together by black magic,” said Watkins, who has followed Manson since they met two years ago in the Haight-Ashbury district, then the hippie Haven in San Francisco.
“You don’t believe it? Well, it really exists, and it is powerful,” Watkins said.
“He (Manson) believes that he, and all human beings, are God and the devil at the same time. He believes all human beings are part of each other,” said Poston, a Manson follower for two years.
(O)ne loose thread in the story is the role of a mysterious English satanic cult that was active in LA in those years.
The author learned new details after working with LA private investigator Larry Larsen, a former LA County deputy who assisted the investigation into the death of Robert F. Kennedy.
Larsen had been informed through associates that the English satanic group had recruited Charles Manson to murder Tate because of information she had learned about RFK’s assassination.
The contention is that members of the English cult had invited Sirhan Sirhan to LA parties and one such party took place at Sharon Tate’s residence, where sexual and ritualistic rites occurred – along with heavy drug use.
According to an Immigration and Naturalization Service report, the English Satanist group had commissioned Manson to kill Sharon because of ‘something that she unfortunately overheard that she was not supposed to overhear either in regards to Sirhan Sirhan or about Sirhan Sirhan’.
Whether or not Sharon knew something about the Robert Kennedy assassination remains unanswered.
In Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi recounted how Manson had been bragging about a relationship with The Process, until one day he was paid a visit in jail by two brethren of the church, “Father John” and “Brother Matthew.” After their departure, Manson seems to have clammed up for good about The Process, and since then has made no further comments.
Maury Terry, The Ultimate Evil:
A jailed Manson killer told me Charlie’s ‘family’ met Process leaders at the ‘Spiral Staircase’ house (the Process headquarters) near Los Angeles in 1968. Manson himself confirmed this statement in his autobiography. In a clear reference to the English group, he wrote that he met individuals who worshiped ‘multiple devils’ (there).
In “The Death” issue of Process from 1971, a brief article by Charles Manson appeared, entitled “Pseudo-profundity in Death,” which Charlie penned during the course of the Tate/LaBianca trial. In this article, Manson described death as “total awareness … Coming to Now … and Peace from this world’s madness and paradise in my own self.”
This was not a news piece- this was a commissioned article. Meaning the Process hired Manson to write the piece, meaning they had contact with him while he was in prison.
So what is it then? Were the killings mere drug hits or were they meant to trigger a race war? Or were they ordered by an “apocalyptic English satanist cult” with links to mind control and the RFK assassination?
Or what if it was all three?
ISLAND HOPPING
Great effort is now being made to rehabilitate the Process Church and attack their critics (like Sanders), but what if the Church were just another front for more troubling activities, including drugs, mind control and political extremism?
What if the Church’s congregants had no idea what other players were actually doing behind the curtains while they went about their zany cultic business?
Perhaps we’ll never know.
But we should look at their travels in 1966 anyway. They apparently went from Nassau to the Yucatan Peninsula to New Orleans.
That’s a very interesting path indeed.
First Nassau. From a 1981 Christian Science Monitor article entitled “Bahamas: an island paradise for drug traffickers”:
Tainted cash flowing in from drugs smuggling has permeated every sector of the economy.
The story is much the same in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, where many new commercial ventures funded by drug money are changing the face of the inner city.
Then Yucatan. From a STRATFOR report on drug cartels in Mexico:
While some South American drugs come into Mexico on land at the Guatemalan border, most are shipped via air or boat along two main routes. The first route enters the Yucatan Peninsula by either remote airstrips or the port of Cancun and then goes across the border into Texas by land, air or sea along the Gulf of Mexico.
“As a port city, New Orleans was a gateway for drug smuggling well into the 20th century, and the city’s historic tolerance for gambling, drinking and other behaviors proved conducive to drug dealing and addiction,” state museum historian Karen Leathem said.
What exactly were this English cult — who’d later set up branches in other cities like Boston and San Francisco– doing, hopping around these smuggling hotspots like that?
And why exactly would get mixed up with all these apparent drug hits in Los Angeles?
I guess we’ll never know.
According to the INS report, this “English satanic group” purportedly took out a contract with Manson to kill Sharon Tate because of something she overheard at these parties regarding Sirhan Sirhan.
Weird, wacky stuff.
THE WHOLE OF THE LAW
As it happened, there’d be no Thelemic solidarity once the Solar Lodge scandals hit the wires. Especially not when the magic “Manson” word was uttered:”OTO leader Grady) McMurtry promptly informed on Brayton to the FBI, almost certainly to avoid his own affairs being investigated too closely.
Reports of the Family’s involvement with the Solar Lodge came in from other sources as well: (Ed) Sanders reported that at least five separate sources informed him that Manson was involved with the Solar Temple Lodge…Sander’s also claimed that a house owned by Brayton at 1251 West Thirtieth Street in Los Angeles was supposedly frequented by Manson. [In fact, it was Manson ‘Family’ member Tex Watson, not Charles Manson.
The group subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic view of the world precipitated by race wars… The Riverside O.T.O., like the Manson Family, used drugs, sex, psycho-drama and fear to tear down the mind of the initiate and rebuild it according to the desires of the cult’s inner-circle.
Candace Reos, a former member of the Solar Lodge, was questioned by the police in 1969. She stated that Brayton practised thought-control on the Lodge’s members; one member, she remembered, was ordered to curb his sexual desires by cutting his wrists every time he was aroused. Mrs. Reos told the police that when she herself became pregnant, Brayton was outraged, and told Reos that she would have to train herself to hate the unborn child.
Reos went on that the children of the group’s forty-three members were kept apart from their parents, and received special “training” that was given in “very severe tones.” She added that “there was a lot of spanking involved, and a lot of being enclosed in dark rooms.” The teacher’s punishments “left welts”, and the Order parents themselves were sometimes ordered to beat their own children.
Or perhaps the not-so-grand tradition: a 1970 TV movie called Ritual of Evil, that I previously reviewed on the Satellite.
(I)ts plot is ripe with parallels to the Manson Family case, though none of the details that people might normally focus on. Instead, it seems to be encoding details about Sharon Tate, the Process Church and the bad news party scene on Cielo Drive, all those details that didn’t begin to surface until Ed Sanders’ muckracking expose, The Family was published in 1971, a year after this film aired.
In Ritual, a rich young woman named Aline Wiley is discovered dead on a beach, and investigation into her apparent suicide reveals that a satanic cult called Capricorn has been making the rounds in LA, spicing up the orgy scene with mock human sacrifices and black masses. At first suspicion falls on a folk singer (played by Georg Stanford Brown) who is lodging on the Wiley estate, especially since he recently spent time in prison on a drug rap.
But Sorrell soon learns that Aline was mixed up with Capricorn and used to bring hippies to her parties (read: orgies) and subject them to nasty, satanically-tinged S/M games. These games then climax in the ritual sacrifice of a poor bearded hippie- that is to say, a Charles Manson-lookalike as sacrificial lamb (patsy?)- and Aline’s own death.
All of the mayhem is orchestrated by other parties, however, who use these dabblers and hippie wastrels as puppets. Oddly familiar somehow…
The patsy angle is only reinforced by the appearance of several Manson Oswalds. Whoever wrote this thing knew their Weirdness. And their semiotics: naming a satanic cult “Capricorn” would do nicely if you wanted to create a Process Church analog, considering that they worshiped Christ and Satan in equal measure. Christ was born in the sign of Capricorn.
Several details pop out at you while watching Ritual of Evil.
• First of all, the actress who plays the Sharon Tate character is in fact a dead ringer for Sharon Tate. Her name is odd- Aline. But if we scroll back up to Tate’s involvement in Eye of the Devil we remember Alex and Maxine Sanders’ involvement in that film.
AL-ex and max-INE= ALINE. Get it?
So we’re not only are told this is Sharon Tate, we’re told what she was up to and why she was up to it. The sacrifice here is an obvious reference to the beating of the Strip drug dealer and other sicko games Tate presided over.
Bear in mind this aired six months after the murders.
• Secondly, there’s a washed-up female screen star running around the house in question (which is actually a fabulous beachfront property in Malibu). This is an obvious (and unkind) reference to Doris Day, whose son Terry Melcher was renting the house on Cielo.
• There’s some genuine occultism dropped into the script, some Book of the Law and call outs to Astarte and other figures you wouldn’t hear cited in your usual dopey Hollywood Satanist potboiler.
The Proce…sorry, Capricorn is presented an organization with a decadent but essentially harmless front and a much more serious and diabolical force operating behind the scenes. And as the public would only find out much later about the Process, the male leader of Capricorn is a poseur and a buffoon and the real power lies with its female leader.
Fascinating. What did these producers know about the Process and the party scene at Cielo? Were they trying to tell us something about it here?
• Just in case you didn’t get the hint they actually were talking about the Process here, they include a subplot about a German Shepherd that’s used in “Capricorn’s” rituals.
………..
The writer seems to have read Passport to Magonia; the Jourdan character takes a Jungian-type approach to the cultic activities, and there’s even an older, more mystical Aime Michel-type character who is used for expositional purposes.
Ritual of Evil aired in February of 1970. Think about that for a moment.
What does this mean?
Given the time it takes to write, prepare and produce even a made-for-TV move, it means it must have been written before Charles Manson and the rest of his family had been arrested for the Tate-LaBianca murders.
It may have been written before the murders themselves.
Telling tales out of school indeed.
Since one of the Mansons in the film was a “sacrificial lamb” for the Proc…er, Capricorn’s black mass, what does that tell us about lifetime loser Charles Manson, who had once begged the authorities to keep him in prison because he didn’t know how to live on the outside?
What ritual is the film’s title referring to exactly?