LOS ANGELES, Feb. 20 – “You want to know what a ‘real’ woman is?” Charles Manson, accused mastermind behind the Tate and LaBianca killings asks.

“A real woman is like this: She’ll tell you she loves you and will do anything for you. OK. Tell her if she really loves you to go out and get you another woman — one who’s prettier than she is.

“If she really loves you she’ll do it — for the simple reason she wants to please you, and if that’s what it takes — another woman, prettier, well OK.

“That’s the kind of girls I had at the ranch.”

Manson, short, skinny, but with a magnetic personality that has attracted scores of young girls into his fold, is accused of using hypnotic persuasion to get five members of his hippie clan to kill actress Sharon Tate and six others.

He denies it — and he denies using hypnotic-persuasion.

“I can’t even spell hypnotic,” he laughs.

But of the charges — of his court appearances — of his many motion denials — he doesn’t laugh.

“They’ve made up their mind I’m the one they’re going to send to the gas chamber. I’m a political pawn…with my long hair…I’m a perfect scapegoat.”

But, adds the articulate cultist, the courts…the district attorney…the police “really have nothing on me.”

Manson spoke from jail in Los Angeles where he is attempting to prepare his own defense, acting as his own attorney.

The district attorney’s case is based on the testimony of Susan Atkins, one of Manson’s nomadic “family” whose appearance before the County Grand Jury led to the charges against the cult leader and five others, including the informant.

Manson, in the past has said the girl is “reconsidering” because she had been “forced to tell the story because they (district attorney’s men) threatened her baby.”

“Even in the Grand Jury transcript,” says the thin, hollow-eyed Manson, “she said she felt she ‘dreamed’ I went into the LaBianca house. She was flashing back — she was on an acid (LSD) trip.

“She says I told them to do what Tex (Charles Watson, now awaiting extradition in Texas) told them to do.

“I’ve always told people to do what they want to do — not what other people want them to do.”

“They lock out truth, love, because it is foreign to what they were brought up to believe. People offer advice, crumbs from their blinded minds, saying ‘be like I am’. But people lock their minds, barring the real truth that you have to become one with one, with all, in love, through love. In love we are one, together; you are me and I am you. When you get there, the past and the future become no longer important, and ‘now’ can finally be.

“All there is is ‘now’ and ‘here’.”

What brought Charlie “here and now” began when he last got out of prison:

“After l got out the last time, I found that people walked around with their minds locked up. If I went into a bar or something, they would look at me with my long hair, different clothing than theirs, and sort of reject me because I didn’t fit their pattern. It was like I was a stranger in town.

“Then I made it to Haight-Ashbury. Man! All those beautiful people there. There was no rejection, just plain acceptance of me — as I was, for what I was.

“Instead of smallness, meanness and rejection, I found love, and I loved those people there. No one cared if my hair was longer than theirs, or I didn’t dress like they did. It didn’t make any difference, because all of us there dig each other, love each other. There’s no stigma because we’re different.”

It is because of this ‘difference’ – between him and the establishment — that he is in jail accused of murder, he says.

“It’s not me that’s on trial here — I’m just a symbol. They’re making up their minds now what to do with me. It’s like that judge entering a ‘not guilty’ plea for me.

“It’s insanity for that man to plead for me.”

“Is he going to go to the gas chamber for me”

By MARY NEISWENDER