Was Beach Boy Dennis Wilson friends with Charles Manson?
In 1968, Dennis Wilson was enjoying life as the playboy drummer of The Beach Boys, driving along the Southern Californian coast in his sports cars with a luxury mansion on Sunset Boulevard. One spring evening, he picked up two young girls hitchhiking in Malibu. Within two years, one of them would be convicted of murder.
The girls were Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey of the Manson Family, a strange cult built around a petty criminal styling himself as a psychedelic guru who had recently moved south from San Francisco. Wilson later invited the girls back to his mansion, and before long, ten others, including cult leader Charles Manson himself, had effectively moved in.
Young women in the Family became Wilson’s live-in servants. They doted on his every need in exchange for the free use of his house, his cars, and his money, as well as copious amounts of drugs and medicine for their sexually transmitted infections.
According to Beach Boys singer Mike Love in his autobiography Good Vibrations, “Dennis was all too happy to allow Manson and his girls to move in, use his charge cards, take his clothes, eat his food, even drive his Mercedes. Manson, after all, had something for Dennis: a stable of young women who catered to his every desire.”
But it wasn’t just the girls in the Manson Family that Wilson had fallen for. He was also under the spell of the man himself. He told Rave magazine in a 1968 interview, “Sometimes Charlie Manson, who’s a friend of mine, says he’s god and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry.” Wilson was impressed by Manson’s pseudo-philosophical pretensions and claims of musical talent.
He justified the damage Manson and his followers were doing to his property and his bank account by ascribing it to the principle of free love and anti-materialistic sentiments. And he even gave Manson the ear of famed music producer and Beach Boys associate Terry Melcher.
But was Manson really a friend?
Once Manson found his way into Wilson’s musical world, it became clear that he wasn’t all he claimed. As Wilson would later observe, “He had not a musical bone in his body”.
Manson did contribute towards a song Wilson penned for The Beach Boys called ‘Never Learn Not to Love’, but that was as far as his music career went. He played an audition for Melcher, who turned him down.
Meanwhile, Wilson was growing afraid that his house was no longer under his control. The Manson Family had taken over every part of it and were collectively tripping on acid for days on end.
Wilson actually moved out of the mansion and went to stay with a friend before having Manson’s cult forcibly removed at the end of his lease. In return, Manson left Wilson a bullet with his housekeeper. He threatened Mike Love, too, calling him up and telling him, “Prepare to die, pig”. And the cult leader went looking for Melcher at his former home, 10050 Cielo Drive.
It was this address which proved to be the location for the most grisly murders in Hollywood history. On August 8th, 1969, Manson instructed his followers to murder everyone at the house, including actor Sharon Tate, her friends and her staff. Dennis Wilson had long since cut ties with the Manson Family.
Yet the Beach Boy later claimed to know Manson’s motivation for his crimes. Whether the two were ever really friends is a different matter. But Wilson certainly seemed to think they were, less than a year before the Manson murders took place.
