OUTSIDE of its famous first line — “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” — “The White Album” is most often cited in retellings of the era’s most notorious crime story. The “murder of five” to which Didion alludes in the essay’s first paragraph is the grisly killing that rocked Hollywood and the world. On Aug. 8, 1969, the group was killed by followers of Manson, who convinced them to do it in part by claiming that the White Album was the Beatles’ apocalyptic message to Manson and his followers. Didion picked up on the detail, never mentioning it in the essay, and used it for her title.
One victim, the actress Sharon Tate, was married to Roman Polanski, and at the time of the murders, Tate was in their home, located at 10050 Cielo Drive, around seven or eight miles from Didion’s house. Polanski was in London. Tate was eight months pregnant with their baby. The grisly details of the murders have passed into legend — stabbing, screaming, no interest in cries for mercy. Didion would later remember the week as if it was from a horror film: “I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full,” she writes. The next day, the Manson family would murder Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, a middle-class couple who managed grocery stores, two people about as far away from Sharon Tate’s world as you could imagine. Nothing made sense.
What happened next was a laboratory study in how we tell ourselves stories to make sense of the madness. According to many retellings, half of Hollywood claimed that they were actually invited over to the Tate-Polanski house the night of the murders, but had chosen not to attend, and wow, what luck for them, if not for poor Sharon and the rest. Didion would discover later that on the night of the LaBianca murders, Manson and his acolytes were driving along Franklin Avenue, where Didion lived with her family, looking for a place to hit. It really could have been them.
More stories would emerge as the Manson family was brought to trial, more ways to string the events together into a script. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, trying to build a lurid and prosecutable case, seized on a motive that was bound to entrance the nation. Manson, he said, was a lifelong Beatles fan, and also an entrenched racist who believed a race war was coming. He convinced his followers — mostly young women whose use of LSD and other drugs had left them very suggestible — that they would escape the coming war by moving out to the desert and finding the “Bottomless Pit,” in which they could hide until the war ended. Black men, Manson said, would inevitably win that war, since he said that they were physically stronger, but then the family would emerge and overpower them. The war would be called “Helter Skelter,” and Manson told the family that the Beatles had been singing about it on the White Album, and were trying to contact him for instructions about how to survive it. (Helter Skelter was in fact the name of the kind of ride you’d find in a small amusement fair in England.)
