How did a scruffy nut-job who’d spent half his life in prison score so many chicks? In all his photos from the 1960’s he looks like a deranged homeless person. I see guys like him wandering the streets of L.A. and none of them seem to have even ONE girlfriend, let alone a whole harem willing to wait on them hand-and-foot and commit murder on demand. What was Charlie’s appeal?
Dude, it was the 1960s. EVERYBODY looked liked a homeless person, and the deranged ones were sexy.
“Deranged homeless person” was the cool look back in the late 60s and early 70s. Being revolutionary or counterculture was “in”. Want to score with chicks? Protest something. Didn’t matter what you protested as long as you protested. Do drugs. Speak about the evils of “Tricky Dick” (Nixon). Play that evil rock and roll music. Get into black magic. Be pro-nature. Burn flags. Protest the war. Go streaking. The idea was that the clean cut Kennedy era types were ruining the country.
If you were a leader of rebels (like Manson) you were really cool.
What defines cool? To you a scruffy hippie full of crazy ideas is repellent, to others it is not.
I was just in the Wicker park neighborhood and witnessed a hipster ‘homeless’ woman with a dog putting up a sign and begging for change. In less than 15 minutes there were a half dozen other scruffy people like her, chatting, laughing, socializing. I think youre wrong to think these people dont have some kind of allure. There’s something about dropping out or taking to the road that we find as romantic and empowering.
Crazy attracts crazy.
There’s no accounting for taste when it comes to attraction, and people have a way of focusing on qualities and characteristics they find attractive, while ignoring the rest. When you look at Manson you see a “scruffy nut-job.” Someone else might see just the right color of eyes or tone of voice.
Charlie was tapping each and every one of them multiple times a day. The sheer ability to do that is an attraction in itself, I would think.
Some of his recordings had some charismatic, psychedic appeal.
Even if he didn’t have any real chance of developing an actual career, there are plenty of no-hopers that still manage to attract groupies.
Prison is a master’s course in how to fuck with the weak.
Yeah, his songs weren’t going to make him famous, but he was still good enough to impress Dennis Wilson. The Beach Boys actually recorded an arrangement of something he wrote. Also, Look at Your Game is still pretty well known in folk circles.
He’s crazy like a fox. A master manipulator of the naive and credulous.
There are many clips of him on YouTube, including Geraldo’s interview. A sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogrVrIAtFY8
He really does have a creepy charisma. Most people wouldn’t get involved. But there are always a few who will fall for it, and that’s all he needs.
Although it’s been debunked, the rumour that Manson auditioned for the Monkees may also have played a role in 1968/69, when Manson was gathering his Family.
“Hey, babe–you know I was almost a Monkee?”
“Look at Your Game” was covered by Guns 'n Roses.
The babes can’t ignore his jaunty gait. Gotta admit, dudes gotta jaunty gait.
You could just as well ask how did “Squeaky” Fromme manage to attract Charles Manson.
Whenever you read a list of what women find attractive “confidence” rates at no.1 or very close thereto. Manson had confidence that was literally and metaphorically off the scale. By literally, I mean he had confidence to a degree that was beyond “very very confident” and into “confident beyond rationality”. Nonetheless, confidence is confidence and I suspect this would be very attractive to some women.
I read an interview once by a writer who was covering the Manson Family and the weird rumors of strange stuff was going on at the ranch. She met them at a party. She took a drink of something that was probably drug laced. She wrote that it took everything she could muster to not go along with them to the desert. Heavy focus and concentration may have changed her life.
Manson also was a master manipulator. He could pick out kids that felt estranged from society and he had a great line of BS. He was on your side against the people who did not understand them. His psychology was tuned very well.
And, there were a boatload of people (especially, teenage girls) who fit that profile in San Francisco in the late 1960’s. Young girls would become estranged from their families, run away (think of the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home), gravitate to the West Coast, and run into Manson when they were desperate for a father figure with all of the answers.
Manson had studied Scientology and “The Process” (a less successful 1960’s cult-religion) while in prison and well and truly mastered their techniques. He was gifted with a charismatic voice and eyes–even in photographs, his eyes rivet your attention and even prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi admitted that Manson could really turn on the charm.
Manson recognized that his age and appearance were a off-putting at first. He recruited a Midnight Cowboy-ish stud, Bobby Beausoleil, to make the initial approach. Once Beausoleil had recruited girls to the ranch, Manson would turn on the charm, distribute the drugs, play the rock and roll, organize the sex, and begin re-programming the girls into his cult.
I don’t really care about his chick appeal: How does a crazy man get people to do his killing for him?
Get other crazy people, who are more easily manipulated. Most of the people Manson recruited were a little on the mentally unstable side already, and some were criminals already, too - with a strong personality like Manson to lead them, he could get them to do whatever he wanted.