I always feel ambivalent about visiting
the sites of murders, death houses, scenes of long ago violent crimes. Partly it’s because of my inherent squeamishness. If there actually is some remaining malevolent
aura there, I’d rather not be around it.
And just as important, I don’t want to revel in and be entertained by the deaths of others, nor
to make light of pain, whether that of victims or survivors.
Yet I know one can protest too much about
these things. There’s no denying the frisson that comes with walking through,
say, Dealey Plaza in Dallas, or for that matter past the Bloody Tower in
London. I think the frisson is
imaginative rather than supernatural, but nonetheless real for that. One way or another a kind of shamanism is
involved, raising the spirits of the dead, but equally a kind of dubious
tourism is involved too
I don’t feel a whole let less ambivalent,
though in a different way, about visiting the homes where my “heroes” once
lived, even if I seem to have done plenty of it. In recent years I’ve found myself visiting JG
Ballard’s house in Shepperton, HG Wells’s in Woking, Raymond Chandler’s many
Los Angeles homes.
Of course when I say “visiting” I simply mean
that I walked down the street and stood around outside the building. I don’t go in for knocking on doors to interview
the current inhabitants, although I know some who do. My friend Anthony Miller, aka the Dark Sage of Sawtelle, recounts disturbing the tenants of Thomas Pynchon’s old apartment in
Manhattan Beach, and found the occupant, a surferish dude, amazingly hospitable. He invited him and let him look around. A Swiss film crew had been there not long
before, the one that made Thomas
Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P.
The objection here is not that it’s
intrusive, but rather that it’s no big deal.
These are homes much like any other.
Everybody lives somewhere, lives don’t vary nearly as much as some
people like to think, and houses and appartments are not always totally fascinating. And in my experience there’s seldom any kind
of lingering aura, even if there may occasionally be a plaque.
Having said all that, and with all my
reservations, when I recently connected a couple of dots of information than
had been floating in my head for a while, and realized that the childhood home
of Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, was in the same street where the
Manson murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianco took place, well, you couldn’t
call yourself a psychogeographer if you didn’t take a walk down that street,
could you?
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band were
really the first act that completely excited me in my difficult but dull
youth. They seemed subversive, poetic,
avant-garde, extremely cool – all the things I wanted to be. These days it seems to me that there were times
when Beefheart put rather too much effort into buffing his image as the
unschooled, sui generis genius born out of nothing, but I’ve had a few decades
to think about that. At the time the freaky
image was part of the attraction, and no doubt in some sense necessary for the
grand project.
Of course we also tended to think he was
some crazy guy straight out of the Mojave desert: we knew that he came from
Lancaster where he was best friends, later less so, with Frank Zappa. But before he was a desert rat he lived in
Los Angeles, at 3467 Waverly Drive, in the northeast corner of Los Feliz, a thoroughly
pleasant suburban enclave right below Griffith Park; a great place to bring up
kids then and now, you might think.
We also know that while he was at that
address he was schooled, at least to the extent of attending art classes at the
Griffith Park Zoo, where he was taught by a Portuguese artist named Agostinho Rodrigues. When he was
10 years old Little Don Vliet (he wasn’t even van Vliet at that time, much less
the Captain) won first prize in a 1951 sculpture competition run by the parks
and recreation department, and made it into the local paper with his model of a
polar bear. The contest was monthly, and
I don’t know how big the class it was, so winning it may not have been the
greatest honor, though his polar bear looks just fine.
There are a few pictures of the lad from
this period but I’ve never seen any of the family’s house, so I don’t know if
the current 3467 Waverly Drive looks anything like the way it did back in
1951. As far as that goes, I don’t know whether
Don’s parents had the whole house or just part of it. I’d assume the latter. In the current configuration 3467 is the right
half of the house, 3469 is the left half, and I think there are more than two dwellings
in there. When you peer round the side
it looks as though the building’s been extended to make a small apartment block,
though I’d guess the changes have been made post-1951.
Waverley Drive is a long street but the young
Don surely walked its length, in which case he’d have gone right past the LaBianca
house. At that time it would have been
owned by the previous LaBianca generation, Antonio, who founded Gateway Markets and the State Wholesale
Grocery Company. It wasn’t till 1968
that the son Leon, who by then was running the family business, bought the house from his mother and moved in
with Rosemary his second wife.
Photographs of the couple suggest they weren’t
much influenced by alternative culture, but Lord knows there were some
divergent energies abroad in Los Angeles at the time. Even in this quiet suburban enclave, the LaBiancas’
neighbor, one Harold True, had thrown an “LSD party”, and some of the Manson
family attended. The day after they’d
committed the Tate murders up on Cielo Drive, Manson instructed his followers to
kill again. They might easily have
selected a different house and different victims, and if things had played out
just a little differently the LaBiancas wouldn’t even have been home. They they’d been to pick up Rosemary’s
daughter Suzanne from Lake Isabella and had thought of staying there overnight
but decided to come back late Saturday night rather than the following morning.
Manson had found the Tate killings needlessly
chaotic, and to show his followers how it was done, he went into the house and
tied up the LaBiancas with the minimum of fuss, so that the killings could be
done in a nice orderly fashion. I’ve
done my best not to become a Manson obsessive, but if you need a full account
of the events, I reckon Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter
Skelter is still the best.
Photographs from the time show the La
Bianca house to have been remarkably accessible and vulnerable – a long straight
driveway, no gates, the house visible and inviting at the top of the hill, yet a
fair way from the street.
Some things are noticeably different at
the house these days; the street number’s been changed for one thing, though
that’s hardly bought them much privacy.
There’s now a gate across the entrance to the property, and you can see
that a large separate garage with a second curving driveway has been built
between the house and the street, at the very least providing protection from
prying eyes, though not inevitably from Google.
It still looks like a very nice house in a
very nice neighborhood. Would I
personally want to live in it, given its history? I suppose not, but if there price was right;
everything’s negotiable.
Charles Manson famously said to an interviewer:
My eyes are cameras. My mind is
tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no
censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So...know
that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out
there among you.
Captain Beefheart once sang:
my
baby walked just like she did
walking
on hard-boiled eggs with a --
there's
a --
she
can steal them
-
oh, I
ain't blue no more, I said
lord,
Words
to live by.
