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Joan Didion Knew the Stories We’d Tell About the Manson Murders

Movies|Joan Didion Knew the Stories We’d Tell About the Manson Murders

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/movies/joan-didion-manson-murders-netflix.html

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Didion’s influential account of the era, “The White Album,” captures the ripples of terror provoked by the 1969 murders.

The author Joan Didion stands in front of a crowd, wearing white tights, a scarf and a jacket and holding a purse.

By Alissa Wilkinson

This article is an adapted excerpt from “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,” by Alissa Wilkinson for Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Published March 5, 2025Updated March 6, 2025, 10:52 a.m. ET

Few true crime villains dominate American imaginations as fiercely as Charles Manson and his “family” of lost youths. The story has everything: a wild-eyed mastermind who was also a failed rocker; a coterie of emaciated, beautiful women; the death of a gorgeous pregnant actress and her friends; strange links to the Beatles; a feeling that this murder was either random, or an indication that hell had broken loose on earth.

Plus, the public has always had the nagging sense that there was more to the story than anyone was letting on. It was just too Satanic-seeming. Too weird.

So no wonder the 1969 murders have been an ongoing source of fascination. In just the past few years, Quentin Tarantino’s film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story: Cult” and Emma Cline’s novel “The Girls” have become bona fide hits by reimagining the murders. Manson has turned up as a character in shows like “Aquarius,” “Mindhunter” and “Charlie Says.” The journalist Tom O’Neill’s gobsmacking book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A. and the Secret History of the Sixties,” from 2019, chronicled the author’s decades-long investigation into the case, with results that upend most of what we think we know. And now it’s a Netflix documentary from the director Errol Morris.

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A still from “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” a Netflix documentary by Errol Morris.Credit...Netflix

Somehow, this case keeps surprising us. But one person who regarded it without shock — as if it was the inevitable conclusion of a panicked era — was Joan Didion, who was living and working in Hollywood when the murders occurred. In her 1978 essay “The White Album,” regarded as a seminal account of the era, she writes about the ripples of terror the murders provoked. “These early reports were garbled and contradictory,” with different numbers of victims and explanations of what happened, Didion writes. “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969, with its highs and lows, its muddled impressions and half-understood headlines. Cause and effect seemed to be breaking apart. In some respects this was simply the inevitable result of a country becoming saturated in images because they had a screen at home. A movie theater was a place to go if you wanted to see a whole story, beginning to end. But a TV you could turn on and off, and you never knew what would be there when you turned it on again. You might see images from My Lai, the funeral of a slain politician, pop versions of cowboys on “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza," smiling tap dancers on a variety show, some comedian or singer from your youth in a different setting than you remembered. It mirrored the neurons of a disturbed mind, firing at random.