• The Most Grotesque Trial Of The Century

The Most Grotesque Trial Of The Century

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 19 – Charles Manson sits barefoot on a hard courtroom chair, his legs tucked under him in a yoga crouch, his face hairy and serene, like that of a road-show Mahareshi showing us how to attain an inner flowering of the spirit.

Three girls sit across the table, engaging him in light bantering conversation. They have long manes of chestnut hair, flirt with counsel and pass round a packet ot Winston cigarettes. They are dressed in baggy blue prison denim and they giggle a great deal. They are accused, with Manson, of conspiracy to murder seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, an act the Prosecutor has called “the most bizarre, savage and nightmarish in the history of crime.” Two feet away, Dave Smith, a defense lawyer, drowses gently in a chair, sleep beckoning like an opiate. He has spent the last three nights an insomniac on a narrow bunk in the Los Angeles county jail for contempt of court. He rises periodically to bemoan his lot and ask the judge to halt the trial.

“My wife does not understand English,” he complains. “The papers say I am in jail, but she thinks I am sleeping with another woman.”

To his right sits Ronald Hughes, another defense attorney, bearded like Darwin in his prime. Hughes does not say much but he passes his clients a continual stream of notes. One note he passes, when the girls get excited, reads as follows:

CRIMINAL COURTS
Rules for Defendants:
(1) Keep your effing mouth shut.
(2) Ditto.
There are no other rules.

The Manson trial is only a few days old. It could last for another six months and already it is a very far-out scene.

At one moment it succeeds in offending all the known canons of propriety and taste and the next it manages to bore everyone present into a stupor. It has moments of buffoonery, long periods of incompetence, episodes of sheer horror. Sometimes it seems to be a circus entirely surrounded by entrepreneurs.

Manson set out from the first to make a mockery of the American system of justice by deliberately hiring lawyers who would obstruct its creaking machinery. He took on as his counsel Irving Kanarek, an attorney with a reputation unmatched in Los Angeles for opaque longwinderiness, thickness of skin, the ability to exasperate and the talent to drag out legal proceedings beyond the patience of an early Christian saint.

“I seem to irritate judges,” Kanarek told me, fishing a chocolate bar out of a vending machine during an afternoon recess. “I won a case up in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and when the jury announced its verdict the judge threw me in jail.”

Kanarek is a past master of the banal, a Toscanini of tedium. His Slavic face is lowslung and melancholy, his voice a pale shade of grey. His technique during cross-examination is to drain the stamina of a witness, exhaust him through hours and days of obscurely worded questions and then, in the last numb moments of the long torture, confront him with a nasty surprise.

So far in the Manson trial, Kanarek has surpassed his own record for casting a pall of apathy over a courtroom. The prosecution presented its star witness, Mrs. Linda Kasabian, a member of Manson’s harem, who came on like Mary Poppins and told the story of the Sharon Tate murders in tones of traumatic remorse, as a sinner who had peeped into hell and repented at the eleventh hour.

It was intended to be a dramatic performance, witness speaking softly to a hushed jury of how she came face to face with the Polish playboy Voityck Frykowski, blood masking his face — “and we looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, I don’t know however long, and I said ‘Oh God. I am so sorry. Please make it stop.’ ”

Kanarek killed the performance by drowning it in jargon. He raised objection after objection in his stodgy voice, confusing – the prosecution, throwing the witness off her stride and lulling the jury into a narcotic torpor of boredom. When Kanarek’s turn came to cross-examine, his questions were so perversely constructed, such a travesty of syntax, that on the third day a prosecution lawyer jumped up and shouted: “Objection, Your Honour!! A dangling particle!”

But when Kanarek struck, he struck with cruel precision. At the end of the third day, when Mrs. Kasabian was ashen, scarcely comprehending the simplest question, he walked up to the witness stand and pushed in front of her the most shocking photograph in the possession of the court — a large full colour shot of Sharon Tate, stabbed, bleeding and naked, lying on a carpeted floor beside an American flag. The witness moaned, covered her eyes and reached a hand out hopelessly towards the judge.

By the next day, it was clear that the morale of the defense was sagging. Kanarek once all was pandemonium. The decorum of the trial, always tenuous, began to crumble. The prosecution spoke into a gaggle of microphones, expounding on the dastardly conduct of the defense and describing the witness, prone under a cold compress, in an upstairs room.

The defense blinked at a battery of television lamps and accused the prosecution of incompetence. The showing of the photograph was a legitimate courtroom manoeuvre designed to test whether Mrs. Kasabian had been an accomplice, had been present at the murder of Sharon Tate. “Her gasp of horror,” said defense lawyer Paul Fitzgerald, “may in fact have been a shock of recognition.”

“My God,” said an onlooker. “He thinks he’s Perry Mason. He wants a confession on the witness stand.”

The court recessed, but out in the corridors more forced the trembling Mrs. Kasabian to: confront a horror photograph, this time of Mr. Frykowski, stabbed 51 times and hideously mutilated. She looked directly at the three girls, clients of the defense attorneys and mouthed the words: “How could you do it?” It was a moment of the utmost drama and a gleam of sympathy for the distracted witness could be detected in the eyes of some members of the jury.

In the recess Dave Shinn, the attorney for Susan Atkins, strode up to Kanarek and, blowing smoke in his face, asked if he was now working for the prosecution. An NBC television artist, white with fury, accosted Kanarek a few moments later and called him “obtuse and sadistic.”

Over lunch at the Steakhouse, a nearby restaurant crawling with lawyers and journalists, one member of the defense was heard to remark that Kanarek had taken leave of his senses.

In the milling corridors of the courthouse, it seems that everyone has taken leave of his senses. Students seeking admission to the public gallery are searched for concealed weapons by burly sheriffs, spreadeagled against the wall and every intimate inch of their anatomy probed with expert, impersonal hands.

Docile girls and ragged young studs, the remnant of Charles Manson’s desert commune, drift in every day to sit on tables, wet nurse infants, munch on nougat from the vending machines and give discreet publicity to a new pop record by the defendants’ friends and soon to be released. On rare occasions you can see Joan Didion, a fashionable California novelist who is writing the authorized biography of Linda Kasabian, and a plenipotentiary from Life magazine, which is serializing it.

The television crews prowl the nether recesses of the corridors and are thrown a warm body, usually a defense lawyer, three times a day, although Judge Charles Older, a stickler for courtroom etiquette, has forbidden anyone concerned with the case to discuss its inner workings in the presence of the media.

One slow, morning an almost inarticulate youth was hauled in front of the cameras, an anonymous, long-whiskered child of the woods who informed us that Mrs. Kasabian was an angel and Charles Manson “is the devil working in the present day.”

“What in the world did you bring him out for?” I asked Ronald Goodman, one of Mrs. Kasabian’s attorneys. “Oh, I was opposed to it,” Mr. Goodman said sheepishly. “But the cameras are hungry for news. You have to give them something.”

The truth is that Charles Manson was a child of the media and a prisoner of publicity from the day his story broke. As long ago as last December Life magazine spoke of his “blithe and gory crimes.” Manson, said Life, “attuned his concepts of villainy to the childish yearnings of his hippie converts, to their weaknesses and catch-words, their fragmentary sense of religion and enchantment with drugs and idleness, and immersed them in his own ego and his idiotic visions of the Apocalypse.”

A woman journalist for a California newspaper habitually refers to Manson, in print, as “a wolf pack killer.”

President Nixon protested too late about the glamorization of Charles Manson. The freedom of the American Press has made him into a lead player in the teenage psychodrama: he has long ago ceased to be anything as uncomplicated as a defendant in a court of law.

By JEREMY CAMPBELL

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