VACAVILLE, Jul. 29 – When inmates pull a knife on a San Quentin guard, or torch tiers at Folsom, or emerge as transvestites at Soledad, the California Department of Corrections sends them to Vacaville. Backed up against the Vaca Mountains midway between San Francisco and Sacramento, the California Correctional Medical Facility (CMF), as it is called, is home to the suicidal, the schizophrenic, the acutely psychotic, the manic depressive, the flamboyantly homosexual and the transsexual. They are all here, a total of 1,450 inmates deemed unmanageable by other prisons. It’s the Grauman’s Chinese Theater of the penal world.

Eldridge Cleaver prepared for the best-seller list here in his pre-evangelist days. Donald “Cinque” deFreeze and his Black Cultural Association colleagues, some of whom eventually found their way into the Symbionese Liberation Army, scandalized the place by making love with women visitors beneath the auditorium stage.

Current inmates, such as Edmund Kemper (who killed 15 women in the Santa Cruz area) serve as clerks for group therapists helping prisoners work out their anti-social tendencies. And President Jimmy Carter’s nephew, William Spann, is building a sizable bank account by selling interviews about his robbery record.

Yet even in this celebrity atmosphere people crane for a rare glimpse of the slight, bearded man in sandals who resides on the second floor of Willis Unit. Locked into a Garbo routine, the recluse seldom emerges from his 13-square-foot cell. Taking his meals privately through a slot, skipping yard exercise, dodging efforts to move him out to the main line, Charles Milles Manson (aka The Wizard) occasionally retreats from his semi-private wing to the isolation of the prison hospital.

Shunning visitors, ducking interviews and refusing to acknowledge most mail, the most notorious mass murderer of the ‘60s won’t even participate in group therapy. He is fearful of getting thrashed again by inmates, as he was by the Folsom gang several years ago. He prefers to remain on the Willis tier, illuminated by floor-to-cieling windows at either end. Here he constructs mobiles from bits of cloth and paper, practices his guitar and listens to Tom T. Hall on radio station KRAK (Sacramento).

“Everything you want is right here,” says correctional counselor Dave Caprio, looking up from three overflowing files on the man who masterminded the strange, terrible murders of actress Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Gary Hinman and Shorty Shea. “We’ve got the psychiatric reports, the 47 disciplinary infractions, the letters from admirers and people who want to save his soul.

“How long has it been? Ten years, you’d think people would no longer care. There’ve been so many other famous cases since then. But he seems to fascinate and haunt people. You’d be amazed by the number of calls we get from teen-agers who have just finished reading ‘Helter Skelter’ and want to meet this ‘really neat’ inmate.

“Just last week I got a call from some doctor in West Virginia who wants to come out and see him. He said Charlie was an old West Virginia boy he thought maybe he could help him straighten out. Just recently a New York woman phoned to say she had a dream that Manson made a break and started going after Jews. She wanted to make sure there’s no chance he can escape.”

Sentenced to the gas chamber for his role in the murder of nine people, Manson was taken off death row in 1972 thanks to a California Supreme Court decision snuffing out capital punishment. A plebiscite reversed that verdict, but the new law is not retroactive.

For nearly a year Manson has been eligible for parole. However, the adult authority has not forgotten the advice of a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who suggested, “He should not, in the course of his life-time, be released from state prison.” Even the star inmate concurs: “People like me should not be let out.”

Since 1971 when six associates were arrested in a plot aimed at springing the pivotal man, Charles has not heard much from his extended family. A lousy correspondent, he doesn’t have any contact with Tex Watson (now at California Men’s Colony), Bobby Beausoleil (Deuel), Bruce Davis (Folsom), Squeaky Fromme (Alderson, W. Va., federal correctional institution) or Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel (California Institution for Women). Nor does he seem to nurse much hope of a reunion: “Prison is where I belong.”

The bastard son of 16-year-old Ohio prostitute, Manson has spent most of his 44 years in institutions, ever since running away from a foster home at age 8. “Reality is more than getting out of prison,” he confessed to a Vacaville reporter not long ago, in the only interview he’s given at CMF. “You’re in prison more than I’m in prison. It’s all prison. You’ve got more rules to live by than I do. I can sit down and relax. Can you?”

Vacaville has served as a psychiatric proving ground for pharmaceutical companies, and had he arrived only a few years earlier, Manson might have been a candidate for behavior modification studies. However, CMF officials are not trying to reprogram Charles Manson. “In the past,” says Mr. Caprio, sitting in an office that looks like it was designed for a high school guidance counselor, “we’d move him to a special psychiatric unit when he stopped communicating. But right now he is not in any therapy and receives no drugs. He’s sick today but that’s just a respiratory thing. Charlie’s got a fever but it is nothing serious.”

When he’s feeling better, Mr. Caprio’s prisoner likes to play his guitar. It was Alvin Karpis of the Ma Barker gang who taught him the instrument years ago at McNeil Island, Wash., penitentiary. And it was the guitar that led to Susan Atkins’ first infatuation with Manson. “He handed me the guitar and I thought, ‘I can’t play this,’ and then he said, ‘You can play that if you want to.’ … It blew my mind, because he was inside my head and I knew he was something I had been looking for … and I went down and kissed his feet.”

While Manson’s singing wasn’t good enough to land a recording contract with Universal (it has been suggested that record producer Terry Melcher’s refusal to sign Charlie was the impluse for the slaughter) it helped him attract the kind of young people who got off on murdering pregnant movie stars. Charlie continues to insist that these angels and henchmen were not his satanic agents. “He’s always telling me he didn’t kill anyone, that there was no family or conspiracy,” says Mr. Caprio. “But I think he’s just being modest.”

Short-tempered, Manson has committed 46 violations of prison regulations over the last few years. Many of these infractions involved conservative hair and dress regulations, recently relaxed. On several occasions he has fought with inmates and assaulted guards. The most recent incident occurred last year when he took a swing at a CMF officer who wouldn’t let him sweep up the tier (a coveted form of prison exercise). “Why did you lie to me?” Manson screamed. The guard tried to press assault charges, but the Solano County district attorney saw no point in prosecuting.

Nor do prison psychiatrists encourage Manson to try work therapy. Making three-ring binders, growing fruit, etching or testing new deodorants to see if they are allergenic don’t appeal to the man who periodically shouts, “Die, die, die” at his keepers.

A non-reader, Manson has not even been about to push ahead his request for a new trial. “He asked me to get some of his papers together,” says Mr. Caprio, “but when I brought him copies he just kind of shrugged and told me, ‘You do everything.’ He’s always talking about getting out and going back to Death Valley. But I don’t think he believes he’s ever going to be released.”

Prison psychiatrists who’ve had a chance to put Manson through Rorschach tests find his view of the world distorted.

One report reads: “He has above average intelligence and the drawings seem to point to schizophrenia. This doesn’t mean his entire performance was schizophrenic. He appears to be in partial but fluctuating remission. When he is in total remission one would guess that Charles would come across as a passive-aggressive personality with paranoid tendencies. He’s an individual who literally opens up in an institution. He has grown up in prison and in some ways is a product of his environment. He was intelligent, talkative, had a good sense of humor and was a very likable guy.”

Not allowed to wear his hair long and have a beard, Manson is nearly always dressed in jeans and a light blue shirt. He remains on generally good terms with fellow inmates, and he occasionally answers mail from old friends.

Usually these responses are drafted by neighbors, whom he rewards with mobiles. But he recently suspended this practice after learning that some of his buddies were turning around and selling the creations at a considerable profit. Periodically Charlie complains that other second floor inmates are “driving me crazy” and asks to be shifted down to the first floor of Willis or to the psychiatric observation unit.

When you look closely at Manson these days it’s still possible to make out the letter “x” he carved in his forehead during his trial. This engraving, later made into a swastika and copied by his women followers, gives him instant identity whenever he must move outside the safety of his cell, a status he resents.

“I haven’t sought all this publicity,” he says, perhaps referring to authors now driving around in Rolls-Royces thanks to the instant marketability of his family saga. “I don’t even have a television set.”

A while back Manson had a TV set given him by a friend. He enjoyed the soap operas and sports until the day he smashed the TV in a rage. Instead of seeking a replacement, he decided to remain content with his radio. Will he ever sell his memoirs to finance a video cassette deck or expensive Christmas presents for his friends? “Money isn’t important,” says Manson. “I don’t need anything here.”

Manson believes that at least in part his reign of terror was the result of too many years behind bars, an itinerary that began at the Gibault School for Boys in 1947. By the age of 32 Manson had spent 20 years in institutions, convicted of burglary, car theft, forgery and procuring.

His auditory and visual hallucinations now charted by staff psychiatrists can be characterized as the by-product of what one tails “the extreme sensory deprivation of prison life.” His paranoia can be attributed to all those years of round-the-clock surveillance. And his upside-down view of life may well be the byproduct of simply trying to survive among the demented and deranged.

Still, it was prison that taught Manson the verbal skills that became his greatest asset on the outside. In intelligence tests he consistently scored highest in “word meaning” categories, and his IQ was once measured at 121 — well above average. Keenly aware of how to use people, he was able to infiltrate a stratum of society, such as Bel Air where Sharon Tate lived, that likes to consider itself secure from outside agitators.

Much of what Manson accomplished between his release from Terminal Island in March 1967 and his arrest in November 1969 reads like an issue of Playboy edited by Joseph Conrad. One of the reasons the police had trouble breaking the case was their refusal to believe that all these murders could have been engineered by a grade-school dropout.

Buying gas with Terry Melcher’s credit card, plotting scripts for Universal, making love three times a day with nymphettes at Spahn Movie Ranch outside Los Angeles, garnishing hamburgers with LSD, swimming in Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s Brentwood pool, dressing in the star’s stage wardrobe and giving away his gold records all helped Charlie transform the California dream into insomnia.

While Manson’s nuclear family now appears to be just so much spent fuel there is always a chance his minstrels and waifs could regroup. Whenever correctional officials seek a budget increase, a brief reference to Charlie undercuts the opposition of fiscal conservatives. Liberal candidates always qualify their remarks about prison reform with the suggestion that mercy not be extended to this satanic figure. Even deep in the wilderness the state’s new rural pioneers arm themselves against the rise of another Manson clan. People worry about this man the way they worry about cancer and earthquakes.

Charlie himself considers this an overreaction. He believes the real enemy lies deep in the heart of corporate society. In the midst of putting together a cloth octopus he harangues about people “slashing the forests. It’s the system that’s corrupt. I’m innocent. I don’t believe in killing people. Anyone who knows me realizes that.”

By ROGER RAPOPORT