Zeena, Le Dossier Manson tries to put some truth in a story which is rather based on myths and fantasies than on what really happened. Can you clear up for us the myth about the relationships between the Manson family and the Church of Satan? Were they just at the same place at the same moment or were there much more intimate connections between the two?
Zeena : The story of how there came to be a perceived connection between Manson, Polanski, and The Church of Satan could be a book in itself. And although I’m centrally positioned with all the data to pen such a volume, I have no interest in that endeavor so this answer will have to suffice.
It's well known that my father hired Susan Atkins as a stripper for his Witch's Review night club act in San Francisco. Bobby Beausoleil's involvement with Kenneth Anger, who was very enmeshed in my family's lives at the same time, has also been well documented. But those two drifted into my family’s orbit independent of each other. And these brief connections were made before Atkins and Beausoleil even met Manson. Even when the news of Beausoleil’s murder of Hinman reached us, which came to us personally via Anger, we had no knowledge of the name "Manson". Only when the news broke about Susan Atkins’s involvement in the Hinman and Tate murders did we recognize Atkins and first heard media talk of her supposed "guru". But we just assumed she was the type of drifter there were so many of in the 60's that got "passed around" from one group to the next, looking for a leader.
After the media depicted Manson as a "satanic" cult leader, The Church of Satan, with its then very "law and order" and pro-Hollywood public image as counter-culture to the counter-culture stance needed to take a hard-line opposition to the murders and the so-called Manson Family. There was also the fear that someone might leak the fact that Susan Atkins had been directly associated with a Church of Satan event, which would’ve been a public relations disaster at the height of LaVey's popularity. So, LaVey granted numerous interviews in part to take the opportunity to do damage control to avoid guilt-by-association media accusations. Many of his early 70s interviews in my files underscore the difference between what he thought the Manson Family, and even the victims - who he also disliked for their "hippie aesthetic" - represented as opposed to the Church of Satan ideology. Even during Manson's trial, one of the Manson girls wrote a standard form letter asking The Church of Satan for help for his case. My mother filed it away, never to speak of it again until she met Nikolas many years later and gave him a photocopy of it. But to her it was just something to be filed away under "nut cases" - "do not respond", which certainly makes it clear there was no prior connection between the two groups.
Without a doubt, the media’s inaccurate portrayal of the Tate-LaBianca murders as ”ritual” and the Manson "Family" as a satanic cult directly led to satanism as we experienced it from being thought of as a "fun cocktail party", a devilish Playboy-After-Dark, to something dangerous that needed to be stamped out. By the early '70's, by the time Helter Skelter came out, there was a marked shift in the difficulties The Church of Satan had to deal with both publicly and privately in terms of daily harassment and vandalism to our home, death threats, letter bombs, telephone abuse, murderous stalking, kidnapping, murder and rape threats against my sister and me, and accusations of sacrifice, murder, and what later became the full-blown '80s "satanic panic".
So it went without saying that after 1969 The Church of Satan's party-line, for its own survival, was to distance itself from anything to do at all with Manson and his associates. This was a firm Edict passed down from the Black Pope himself. No, I'm not joking, it was deadly serious. In interviews, we were not to even suggest flirting with the very idea of an association with the Manson Family. My father’s cover-up of his having known Susan Atkins succeeded until she let the cat out of the bag in her autobiography, which led to a new wave of problems for The Church of Satan. You’ll notice that even in some of my own interviews as High Priestess of the Church of Satan prior to meeting Nikolas I dutifully maintain my father's party-line about that topic. That’s how firmly The Church of Satan was Anti-Manson.
Until 1988 when Nikolas contacted LaVey to interview him for a book he was doing on satanism in general. When my father saw the treatment Nikolas gave a notorious reviled character like Manson in The Manson File and noticed the media attention it got, I watched LaVey's attitude about Manson change over night. Old LaVeyan satanism's ego stepped in and thought, "If he can do that for Manson, what could he do for ME???" LaVey promptly presented Nikolas with a bright red membership card to The Church of Satan and proclaimed him an "Agent" which basically meant, "I'm flattering you into wanting to write The LaVey File." I was living in Los Angeles at the time and heard from my father about this writer who came to interview him, who'd written a book on Manson. In the past year, I'd already begun to notice that Manson and I were always on the same T.V. shows together, and wondered if Manson wasn’t being as falsely portrayed by the media as I was. Gradually, I began to back off of our party-line about Manson and just leave it out of my interviews. But when my own father who was so rabidly hostile to Manson called me in Los Angeles and told me I've got to see this guy Nikolas on an upcoming TV interview promoting his The Manson File, I thought my father had gone senile. You can imagine after the previous years hearing this sudden turnaround in attitude about Manson and how shocked I was. This was totally against everything he stood for. But anything to get a similar book about himself which might rehabilitate his image too.
There was absolutely NO public connection between The Church of Satan and Manson until 1988 when I was invited to perform at the 8-8-88 rally as the High Priestess of the Church of Satan. By the way, there’ve been numerous reports that Anton LaVey either attended that rally or performed at that rally. Let's set that record straight once and for all. He wasn't there at all that night in any way whatsoever.
After Nikolas completed Charles Manson Superstar, LaVey's insistence on a similar documentary about himself, as with The Manson File, grew even more emphatic. I'll allow Nikolas to describe the details in another forum. Briefly, video footage was shot and the beginning of a Video Werewolf documentary like Charles Manson Superstar for LaVey was begun. But LaVey made the conditions so intolerable that Nikolas put an end to the production. In short, Manson was more professional and easier to work with than LaVey. Now, twenty years later, the historical background is long covered up. People would like to conveniently forget that I've got documentation. We find extremes on all ends claiming wildly differing versions of revisionist Manson/Church of Satan history. On one extreme we find the very squeamish Church of Latter-Day Saint LaVey who believe that "Manson = Nikolas Schreck" so there can be no mention of anything to do with Manson whatsoever. On the other extreme, you've got fantasists like my very own mentally challenged offspring, who ignorantly spout whatever pops into their heads to whomever holds a microphone in front of them, without a clue about what they're talking about. People like this, whose need for attention is so out of control will babble anything, no matter how ludicrous. My estranged son for example is quoted by credulous "authors" and "journalists" as saying that Manson actually co-founded The Church of Satan with LaVey, Susan Atkins, Bobby Beausoleil et al. And the pea-brain journalists never question if this fantastic cast of characters he describes makes any sense, but report it as fact. Nor do they do just a little extra fact checking. They might learn that Manson couldn't possibly have helped found The Church of Satan in 1966 while incarcerated at Terminal Island Prison! Nor could Susan Atkins since she wasn't yet employed by LaVey in 1966 but a little too busy with two boyfriends on a cross-country robbery spree. This sort of rewriting of history is at the other extreme of the squeamish but rather of anything goes, make it up as you will.
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