92 together in news reports. Both Sharon Tate and Rosemary Woodhouse were white, blonde, pregnant newlyweds. Both were tortured by a cult. The head of the Church of Satan, with which Manson was affiliated, played the role of the devil in the rape scene in Polanski’s film.47 There were fundamental, irreconcilable differences between the film, the Manson case, and its representation in the news, but their striking resemblances to one another stemmed from shared and intimate ties to the same expanding commercial media enterprise, increasingly owned by the same corporations, even in the late 1960s. Manson’s homicidal anger partly resulted from his frustrated ambitions in the music industry. After record producer Terry Melcher failed to honor a scheduled meeting with Manson and his followers, who hoped to record an album, Manson ordered his group to kill everyone at Melcher’s old house, where Tate and Polanski, a powerful and recognizable Hollywood couple, resided.

The Manson murders demonstrated that similarities between reality and contemporary fiction were pliable, easily exploited, and profitable, especially when reported live on local and national news. Despite the fact that Manson was not present when his followers killed Tate and six others in her Hollywood Hills neighborhood, he became the living embodiment of evil, an example cited by emerging political pro-family groups, including evangelicals, of the hedonistic excesses of sixties liberalism. Manson was used as a means of reinstating early Cold War nuclear family values after young people began flagrantly rejecting them in the 1960s. As an eccentric cult leader remorselessly tied to brutal crimes, he served as an example of the devastating personal repercussions that came from straying beyond the limits of the 1950s middle-class suburban ideal in which he was raised.

He also eventually supplied a means of testing one’s Christian faith. In a tale of forgiveness that was an important component of the era’s conservative evangelical doctrine, a 1989

47 Adam Gorightly, The Shadow over Santa Susanna: Black Magic, Mind Control & the Manson Family Mythos (New York: Creation, 2009), 50.