RB: Perry Smith? And what’s his name—Dick Hickock? Well, once they hit the end of the rope, I guess they don’t feel anything.
TC: So we’re told. But after the drop, they go on living—fifteen, twenty minutes. Struggling. Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life. I couldn’t help it, I vomited.
RB: Maybe you’re not so cool, huh? You seem cool. So, did Sirhan beef about being kept in Special Security?
TC: Sort of. He’s lonesome. He wants to mix with the other prisoners, join the general population.
RB: He don’t know what’s good for him. Outside, somebody’d snuff him for sure.
TC: Why?
RB: For the same reason he snuffed Kennedy. Recognition. Half the people who snuff people, that’s what they want: recognition. Get their picture in the paper.
TC: That’s not why you killed Gary Hinman.
RB: (Silence)
TC: That was because you and Manson wanted Hinman to give you money and his car, and when he wouldn’t—well …
RB: (Silence)
TC: I was thinking. I know Sirhan, and I knew Robert Kennedy. I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that—one person knowing all four of those men—must be astounding.
RB: Oswald? You knew Oswald? Really?
TC: I met him in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper correspondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I’d mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square. The Metropole has a big gloomy lobby full of shadows and dead palm trees. And there he was, sitting in the dark under a dead palm tree. Thin and pale, thin-lipped, starved-looking. He was wearing chinos and tennis shoes and a lumberjack shirt. And right away he was angry—he was grinding his teeth, and his eyes were jumping every which way. He was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians—he was mad at them because they wouldn’t let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn’t think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassination when I saw his picture flashed on television.
RB: Does that make you the only one that knew both of them, Oswald and Kennedy?
TC: No. There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. in Moscow. She knew Kennedy, and she met Oswald around the same time I did. But I can tell you something else almost as curious. About some of those people your friends murdered.
RB: (Silence)
TC: I knew them. At least, out of the five people killed in the Tate house that night, I knew four of them. I’d met Sharon Tate at the Cannes Film Festival. Jay Sebring cut my hair a couple of times. I’d had lunch once in San Francisco with Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Frykowski. In other words, I’d known them independently of each other. And yet one night there they were, all gathered together in the same house waiting for your friends to arrive. Quite a coincidence.
RB (lights a cigarette; smiles): Know what I’d say? I’d say you’re not such a lucky guy to know. Shit. Listen to that. Moan, moan. I’m cold. You cold?
TC: Why don’t you put on your shirt?
RB: (Silence)
TC: It’s odd about tattoos. I’ve talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide—multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominator I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed. Richard Speck. York and Latham. Smith and Hickock.
RB: I’ll put on my sweater.
TC: If you weren’t here, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be, doing anything you wanted to do, where would you be and what would you be doing?
RB: Tripping. Out on my Honda chugging along the Coast road, the fast curves, the waves and the water, plenty of sun. Out of San Fran, headed Mendocino way, riding through the redwoods. I’d be making love. I’d be on the beach by a bonfire making love. I’d be making music and balling and sucking some great Acapulco weed and watching the sun go down. Throw some driftwood on the fire. Good gash, good hash, just tripping right along.
TC: You can get hash in here.
RB: And everything else. Any kind of dope—for a price. There are dudes in here on everything but roller skates.
TC: Is that what your life was like before you were arrested? Just tripping? Didn’t you ever have a job?
RB: Once in a while. I played guitar in a couple of bars.
TC: I understand you were quite a cocksman. The ruler of a virtual seraglio. How many children have you fathered?
RB: (Silence—but shrugs, grins, smokes)
TC: I’m surprised you have a guitar. Some prisons don’t allow it because the strings can be detached and used as weapons. A garrote. How long have you been playing?
RB: Oh, since I was a kid. I was one of those Hollywood kids. I was in a couple of movies. But my folks were against it. They’re real straight people. Anyway, I never cared about the acting part. I just wanted to write music and play it and sing.
TC: But what about the film you made with Kenneth Anger— Lucifer Rising?
RB: Yeah.
TC: How did you get along with Anger?
RB: Okay.
TC: Then why does Kenneth Anger wear a picture locket on a chain around his neck? On one side of the locket there is a picture of you; on the other there is an image of a frog with an inscription: “Bobby Beausoleil changed into a frog by Kenneth Anger.” A voodoo amulet, so to say. A curse he put on you because you’re supposed to have ripped him off. Left in the middle of the night with his car—and a few other things.
RB (narrowed eyes): Did he tell you that?
TC: No, I’ve never met him. But I was told it by a number of other people.
RB (reaches for guitar, tunes it, strums it, sings): “This is my song, this is my song, this is my dark song, my dark song …” Everybody always wants to know how I got together with Manson. It was through our music. He plays some, too. One night I was driving around with a bunch of my ladies. Well, we came to this old roadhouse, beer place, with a lot of cars outside. So we went inside, and there was Charlie with some of his ladies. We all got to talking, played some together; the next day Charlie came to see me in my van, and we all, his people and my people, ended up camping out together. Brothers and sisters. A family.
TC: Did you see Manson as a leader? Did you feel influenced by him right away?
RB: Hell, no. He had his people, I had mine. If anybody was influenced, it was him. By me.
TC: Yes, he was attracted to you. Infatuated. Or so he says. You seem to have had that effect on a lot of people, men and women.
RB: Whatever happens, happens. It’s all good.
TC: Do you consider killing innocent people a good thing?
RB: Who said they were innocent?
TC: Well, we’ll return to that. But for now: What is your own sense of morality? How do you differentiate between good and bad?
RB: Good and bad? It’s all good. If it happens, it’s got to be good. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. It’s just the way life flows. Moves together. I move with it. I don’t question it.
TC: In other words, you don’t question the act of murder. You consider it “good” because it “happens.” Justifiable.
RB: I have my own justice. I live by my own law, you know. I don’t respect the laws of this society. Because society doesn’t respect its own laws. I make my own laws and live by them. I have my own sense of justice.
TC: And what is your sense of justice?
RB: I believe that what goes around comes around. What goes up comes down. That’s how life flows, and I flow with it.
TC: You’re not making much sense—at least to me. And I don’t think you’re stupid. Let’s try again. In your opinion, it’s all right that Manson sent Tex Watson and those girls into that house to slaughter total strangers, innocent people—
RB: I said: Who says they were innocent? They burned people on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they’d tell you the truth.
TC: The truth is, the Lo Biancos and Sharon Tate and her friends were killed to protect you. Their deaths were directly linked to the Gary Hinman murder.
RB: I hear you. I hear where you’re coming from.
TC: Those were all imitations of the Hinman murder—to prove that you couldn’t have killed Hinman. And thereby get you out of jail.
RB: To get me out of jail. (He nods, smiles, sighs—complimented) None of that came out at any of the trials. The girls got on the stand and tried to really tell how it all
