I was not always a ghost. As with all ghosts, I was once a living, breathing man. I lived in the city by the bay, and in a coffeehouse I sat at the feet of the masters and listened. There was Neal Cassady and Kerouac too, and Ginsberg, who howled at the moon. They were beautiful and they were my family. Now they are all ghosts, just like me. Only difference is, I’m alive.
They were the young lions of Beat, but their time was growing short when I arrived in the city. They had been replaced by hippies, who wore bright colors and danced and did psychedelic drugs. The year was 1966, and I had decided I would be the beatniks’ biographer. I knew them all, I loved them, and I would write a book about these titans and let the world know these men, how they lived like no others, how they shook the literary world to its foundation.
And so I shadowed them everywhere and asked them everything, and their answers were the greatest education a young writer could hope to receive. Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg were my main subjects. Julie Grau, a family friend who was working as a reader at Random House and was the first to believe in me, said that I had written a classic work of nonfiction and soon my name would be known throughout the country. Unfortunately, Julie was right on both counts.
I had grown very close to my subjects. Yes, they were geniuses, but to me they were family, and so I decided to name the book My Beautiful Family.
Random House sent the advance copies out to the critics, and every single one heaped lavish praise on me. They heralded me as the next great American voice and called the book a masterpiece. I could not believe it. At twenty years of age, I was sure to become the toast of the literary world. They all agreed with Julie that my name was about to become famous. And they were right as well.
You see, my name was not Terence Keane at the time. But, oh, how I wish that this had been my real name back then. Because when my work hit the bookshelves in late November of 1969, it contained the cursed name I was given at birth, a name unknown when the book was published but widely known only days later. I will never forget the elation I felt when, early on the morning of November 29, I looked through the window of Rizzoli’s on 57th Street and saw dozens of copies of my book on prominent display. There it was.
My Beautiful Family by Charles Manson………..
On November 30, 1969, Charles Day reviewed my book in The New York Times Book Review. “I have just heard the freshest voice in the last fifty years. It belongs to a young man named Charles Manson, and in his debut work he examines the life and work of this generation’s most talented and influential writers. With his dizzying style and ‘you didn’t have to be there’ storytelling perfection, Charles Manson draws a perfectly observed portrait of the scene that produced the most famous Beat artists. Charles Manson has a reckless style, cutting and dangerous, and he is happily willing to break every convention our literary society holds sacred.
Yes, Charles Manson is dangerous, no question, but he also has a charisma that makes one forgive his savage style. I can assert without hesitation that My Beautiful Family is the best work, fiction or nonfiction, to be written in the last decade. It is a masterpiece that will live forever, and its author will be worshipped. The name Charles Manson may not be well known now, but, trust me, it soon will be.”
And it soon was. Two days after the review, the LAPD alleged that a small, clownish, deranged man had overseen an orgy of murder that had kept the nation in terror during the summer of hate in 1969. His name was Charles Manson, and he was charged with the murder of seven people. But there was an eighth victim, and his name was Charles Manson.
Not the Charles Manson who had overseen an orgy of murder that kept the nation in terror during the summer of hate in 1969—the other Charles Manson. Me. The next day, My Beautiful Family by Charles Manson was removed from every bookstore in the country. I stood with Julie Grau in Columbus Circle and watched as copy after copy of my book was thrown into a large bonfire.
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