Kenneth Anger's crazy, gorgeous, disturbing films almost landed him in jail. The avant-garde pioneer talks Simon Hattenstone through all his demons

Wednesday 10 March 2010 21.30 GMT

'I was too smart to be involved in badness' ... Kenneth Anger. Photograph: Linda Nylind

The gallery is so tiny I think I've walked into somebody's front room. A 10-minute film plays on a loop. Weirded-out rock stars who look like Mick Jagger, or who are Mick Jagger, preen, strut and do their late-1960s satanic thing. White dots form a pyramid on a black background, naked boys lounge on a sofa, marines jump from a helicopter. There's a cat, a dog, an all-seeing Egyptian eye, people smoking dope out of a skull. A synthesiser makes an unbearable noise. There are no words, no story.

Around the screen, in London's Sprüth Magers gallery, a bunch of 21st-century trendies and stoners are watching this film, called Invocation of My Demon Brother, in awe, their ages ranging from late teens to late 80s. Next door, hallucinogenic photographs eyeball you from the wall. You walk in, you walk out – and the show's all over in a flash. It can only mean one thing. Kenneth Anger is back in town.

Anger is a Hollywood legend. He has created some of the most disturbing, gorgeous, crazy and influential films ever, even if he has yet to make a feature. This great avant-gardist is also a writer, best known for Lalaland's two most scurrilous gossip digests: Hollywood Babylon 1 and 2; the first was published in 1965, banned immediately and not published again until 1975. Among the books' more scandalous passages are allegations that Lucille Ball started Hollywood life as a prostitute; that James Dean had a "disconcerting interest" in a 12-year-old boy; and that Bette Davis killed her second husband.

We meet at a London hotel that smells of cabbage. Anger is 83 years old; his hair is jet black, his shoes red, his trousers tan. One eye is bigger than the other, and his face is unlined. He is both beautiful and grotesque: Warren Beatty meets Frankenstein's monster. Anger wasn't always an outsider. He trained as a dancer, and as a boy danced with Shirley Temple. He was handsome enough to have been a leading man. But he did not want to be part of the system. "There was a possibility of going into the industry, but there was a very unpleasant atmosphere in the early 50s, the ridiculous witch-hunt of reds. I wasn't a communist, I just found it very unpleasant." His voice is a cat's purr.

Although he made films as a boy, Anger's earliest surviving work is 1947's Fireworks. This appeared three years before Jean Genet's groundbreaking homoerotic prison masterpiece, Un Chant D'Amour. Fireworks features a young man (Anger) wet-dreaming a sequence in which he is seduced/gang-raped by a group of sailors after he tries to pick one up. As with all his films, there are no words, and the story, such as it is, has a dramatic music score. The camera lingers on his apparent erection – which turns out to be a model of an African soldier. Blood pours from his eyes as he is pulverised by the sailors, and a firework explodes from his zip. His heart is ripped apart to expose a ticking time-piece. It's not only surreal and scary, it is devastatingly beautiful.

Astonishingly, it was made in the McCarthy era. Anger was arrested on obscenity charges following its release. The case went to the California Supreme Court, which declared the film to be art. Anger made it in his parents' Beverly Hills home when they were away at an uncle's funeral. "I just put the furniture in the garden and the living room was the set. Luckily it didn't rain."

How did public screenings go? "Well, it was shown to an elite audience," Anger says. "Among the people who came was James Whale, the British director of Frankenstein, and I became friends with him. Dr Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, also came. I became friends with him, too." Did his parents see it? "Um, no. My grandmother saw it. She was like my sponsor: she bought my camera for me. She said it's terrific. She was a painter." Did he know what he was trying to do with films? "Well, I knew all about French avant garde, so I was the American avant garde."

Six-packs, scorpions, swastikas

Anger was born Kenneth Anglemeyer in 1927. His father worked for Douglas Aircraft and his brother went into the airforce, but it was his grandmother who was his inspiration. She took him to exhibitions, introduced him to art and film. At Beverly Hills High school, he remembers looking out of the window watching The Song of Bernadette being made at 20th Century Fox next door. He was friends with Harry Brand Jr, son of Fox's head of publicity. They would swap Hollywood gossip during break.

In his teens, he founded his own film society to screen obscure European movies. By the time of Fireworks, Kenneth Anglemeyer had disappeared. The sole opening credit reads: "A film by Anger." Was it a name that reflected how he felt? "I just condensed my name," he says. "I knew it would be like a label, a logo. It's easy to remember."

It is Anger's use of music as a substitute for dialogue that marks him out from other film-makers of his time. He set 1954's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, inspired by Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, to Janácek's Glagolitic Mass. His most famous film, Scorpio Rising (another sadomasochistic montage of bikers, beatings, six-packs, scorpions and swastikas), has possibly the greatest pop soundtrack in movie history: Fools Rush In, My Boyfriend's Back, Blue Velvet, Hit the Road Jack, He's a Rebel. Scorpio Rising would later encourage Martin Scorsese (in Mean Streets) and David Lynch (in Blue Velvet) to use pop songs to help tell a story.

Lucifer Rising, a celebration of pagan ritual featuring Marianne Faithfull, had a soundtrack written from prison by Bobby Beausoleil, a convicted murderer and an associate of the Manson family. Wasn't Beausoleil a boyfriend of his? "He was a friend. We lived together." Has he known a lot of bad boys? "I seem to be attracted to bad boys, but I never let it go too far. In other words, there's always, 'OK, it's time for me to move out.'" I ask Anger if he was a bad boy. He smiles. "I was a smart boy. Too smart to be involved in badness." He has always preferred badness by association.

Anger was also a friend of Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in the 1960s. Is he a satanist? "No, I am not a satanist. I am a pagan. Satanism is another thing." But, I say, people look at your dystopian films, with their myriad references to the devil, and assume you are a devil-worshipper. "Well, I can't help what people see in them," he says. Were you playing with ideas or was it your belief system? "Well, I suppose, a belief." In what? "Underneath it all is an appreciation of nature."

In Lucifer Rising, Faithfull plays Lilith, a demon. It was Anger's most expensive film because it involved a trip to Egypt. "I said to Marianne Faithfull, don't bring any drugs because they'll execute you. So she hid her heroin in her makeup box underneath her face powder. I think she was powdering her face with heroin."

'Hollywood is a dried-out prune'

Anger often found it hard to finance his films. This is where the Hollywood Babylon books came in useful. Although it took him years to get them past the lawyers, they became bestsellers. Many of their stories are still disputed. For years, we have been waiting for Hollywood Babylon 3. Anger says it is written, but it's on hold. "The main reason I didn't bring it out was that I had a whole section on Tom Cruise and the Scientologists. I'm not a friend of the Scientologists." He says today's Holly-wood is a dried-out prune of a place, its stars not even worth gossiping about. "I covered most of the people who were interesting to me in the first two books."

Not only is Anger still filming in his 80s, he tells me he is in the middle of a purple patch, having recently made a number of shorts: one about military uniforms called Uniform Attraction; another about football warmups called Foreplay; and a third, Elliott's Suicide, about his friend, singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, who killed himself in 2003 at the age of 34. "He stabbed himself in the heart after a quarrel with his girlfriend. It's the most ridiculous reason to kill yourself."

Although Smith's songs feature in Elliott's Suicide, it is a film without dialogue. After all, why change a winning formula? Actually, there is one thing I have always wondered: does Anger ever watch, say, Lucifer Rising and wonder what the hell it's all about? He smiles for a long time, casting his mind back over all those years, all those films. "They are close to being dreams – and in dreams, you don't have to analyse what everything means."

Kenneth Anger is at Sprüth Magers, London W1, until 27 March. Then touring. Anger appears in person tomorrow at Tyneside cinema, Gateshead. Details: avfestival.co.uk

WIKIPEDIA: The Process, or in full, The Process Church of the Final Judgment, commonly known by non-members as the Process Church, was a religious group that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, founded by the Englishman Robert DeGrimston (originally, Robert Moor) and Mary Ann MacLean. It originally developed as a splinter client cult group from Scientology,^[1] so that they were declared “suppressive persons” by L. Ron Hubbard in December 1965. In 1966 the members of the group underwent a social implosion and moved to Xtul on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, where they developed processean theology (which differs from, and is unrelated to process theology). They later established a base of operations in the United States in New Orleans.

They were often viewed as Satanic on the grounds that they worshipped both Christ and Satan. Their belief is that Satan will become reconciled to Christ, and together will come at the end of the world to judge humanity, Christ to judge and Satan to execute judgment. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor of the Charles Manson Family trial comments in his book Helter Skelter that there may be evidence Manson borrowed philosophically from the Process Church, and that representatives of the Church visited him in jail after his arrest. According to one of these representatives, the purpose of the visit was to interview Manson about whether he had ever had any contact with Church members or ever received any literature about the Church. MORE

EDITOR’S NOTE: Earlier this week we called up former Process Church member Timothy Wyllie who just published a tell-all book about his experience in the cult called Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story Of The Process Church Of The Final Judgement (he will be speaking tonight at Germ Bookstore Saturday at 7 PM) and tried to separate the facts from the myths about the Process Church.

PHAWKER: My knowledge of the Process Church is fairly limited, but I’ve always been curious, more so interested, at how everything is always so darkly hinted at, but never fully explained. A good place to start is if you could summarize, in your own words, what the Process Church was, as well as its belief system.

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Well it started in the mid 60’s, around ‘64 as a kind of psychotherapy system. Gradually people gathered around the two founders of the group Robert DeGrimston and Mary Ann. As we gradually started to dig deeper into the psychological and spiritual nature, two things happened at the same time. We started wanting to be together more and come together as a community, and at the same time, we started becoming less psychological, but more spiritual orientated. This was all in London. In about ‘67 we left London and wanted to start a community on the island somewhere. And we wanted to buy and island, and of course we couldn’t buy an island. [chuckles] We ultimately moved to Mexico, and on the Yucatan Peninsula, we had the first seminal formative aspect of what we were into. We spent nine months on a very deserted little peninsula in the Yucatan. Then we went back to London and established a very large headquarters there, and after that, we started moving out into Europe and America. When we came to America in about ‘68, we incorporated a church at that point, and it spread through the next ten years or so all throughout America. We had members in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Miami. In 1974, the two founders split up and the name was changed to The Foundation. We operated as the Foundation for about four or five years, and, in 1977, I left, as well as about a third of the group. Some of them went back, and then the group left New York and went around the southwest before settling in Utah. They were part of the group, but they now run quite a large organization that takes care of animals who are hurt. On one hand, it’s great work, but on the other, it’s not quite the vision we had back in the 60’s where we wanted to change the world.

PHAWKER: In broad strokes, can you give us an understanding of the belief system?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: We did have a very complex belief system. It was rather informal, because as we became more spiritually orientated, we did get in touch with the inner aspects of ourselves, as well as what’s going on in the universe. We were basically in contact with something we call “The Beings”. We didn’t know what they were, but they seemed to be guiding us, and we felt they were responsible for small miracles, like when a fish washed up and we hadn’t eaten for three days. That then developed into a much more formal theology which we incorporated into the church, and what we had previously regarded as psychological archetypes got turned into a sort of theological framework. We had the authoritarian archetype that became Jehovah . We had the more easygoing archetype that became the Lucifer. We had the more fiery archetype which became Satan. Finally we had the archetype to bring them all together, which would be the Christ. So we had these four different archetypes, which then became this theological matrix. I, personally, have never really bought into the theological aspect of everything. I know the psychological aspects are very helpful and useful in life, but I didn’t really buy, as much as other people did, the theological structure.

PHAWKER: Now when did all the regalia come into line? When did you start wearing the black robes and strange medallions, and giving each other names like Father Michah and Brother Ely?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Pretty much as we formally became a church. Before that we probably had names. It’s a thing with people when they join religious groups, if you have a different name, it mostly fuels a different aspect of their personalities. All the rings and all that, though, came out of when we became the church.

PHAWKER: What role did the use of psychedelic drugs play in the evolution of all of this, if any?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: It didn’t play any part in this, which is interesting. I had done psychedelics before I joined, so I had dabbled in that area, but Mary Ann was very much against psychedelics. So no, it wasn’t at all inspired by drugs, but the magazines that were launched under my responsibility have been perceived as psychedelically orientated, but of course they weren’t. However, in many ways, my experience with psychedelics before I joined allowed me that kind of access for a more easygoing and more open style than some of the others.

PHAWKER: You mentioned the magazines and graphically, they’re beautiful. Explain the premise and the purpose they served. Each one was a themed issue: love, sex, fear and death?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Absolutely, and we ended up with another seven or eight different topics as well, but we thought that those four would be the best title for the book.  The fundamental principle behind them was the resolution of opposites. What we looked at, we would take a subject like death, and look at the positive viewpoint and the negative viewpoint. Now this was misinterpreted in the death issue. I think some people’s way of thinking made a serious error by going and interviewing Charles Manson in jail — because after all, who would know better than Charlie [chuckles] –  which was, of course, a mistake since Manson was already falsely associated with us, but we had nothing to do with him at any point.

PHAWKER: Explain that, there was a chapter in Sanders’ book about the Manson family that implicated the Process Church somehow? Then there was a lawsuit and he was forced to remove that segment from the book?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Actually, we did sue them and they did settle out of court and remove that chapter. The problem came when they did the English edition of it. They put the chapter back in, so we had to do another court case in England. And, of course, England is very different from America. The judge was very very conservative, and also Robert and Mary Ann made a tremendous error of judgment of not handling it themselves but sending intermediaries instead. We lost that case. It’s a strange one, we never had anything to do with Manson, and he knew it too. The subtext, which is actually more interesting, was that Scientology material was found at Spahn Ranch, and also Manson had made several statements about Scientology prior to that. [The Scientologists], of course, didn’t want anyone to know what was happening, so they had a press conference and said it was us, the Process.

PHAWKER: I was going to ask you, since the founders of the church had split off from Scientology and were declared ’suppressives’ initially by L. Ron Hubbard, which is tantamount to heretic, was the Process Church constantly harassed by the Scientologists?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: I wouldn’t say constant. It’s quite hard to pin down exactly, for instance I was one of the directors up in Toronto and we had to deal with things like 200 pizzas arriving at our front door that nobody had ordered or a ton of sand on the front lawn. Now I can’t prove that the Scientologists did this, but I can’t imagine anybody else who would have done that. But on the whole, no, we didn’t get too much harassment from them.

PHAWKER: At its peak how big was the church and how many members were there, and where did the funding come from?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: The funding actually came from magazine sales. The magazine at its prime had a circulation of about 200,000. We also had alot of different programs. We had coffeehouse shows, but it was always a struggle with money.

PHAWKER: What was the connection with the Alsatian dogs you guys used to walk around with?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Just that we loved them. Mary Ann really wasn’t fond of children, and she gave me my dog, Ishmael, and I think she just loved to give people dogs. We all loved German Shepherds. We could have other animals as well, but German Shepherds were the ones we really loved.

PHAWKER: Why was Sanders so opposed to the Process Church?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: I don’t know that he was opposed to the Process Church. What happened is that he was writing this book, and he was trying to find some way of justifying how Manson could arrive at the way he was. I think he just picked on us because of a number of unfortunate coincidences. I think he just got into a state where he thought he could get away with it. He may have thought he was doing something good in exposing Satanism.

PHAWKER: Even though Satanic themes played a role in the cosmology of the Process Church, it was something wholly different from the Church of Satan?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Yes, oh yes. First of all there is already a Church of Satan, and it’s not like we were focusing only on Satan. What we were looking at was the nature of the prophecies. We were going back to the Christian evolution of our prime enemy, where Satan is the prime enemy, and you should love Satan. Not in a sense worshiping, but in a sense of understanding and comprehending. There is polarity in the universe. Everything has polarity, and to demonize the other the way the Christian church has demonized Satan. It’s madness, because by rejecting this aspect, we are harming ourselves because we don’t learn.

PHAWKER: And at its peak, how many members were there in the church?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: At its peak, I would imagine there were between 150 to 200 people in the community itself — we made it very difficult to get into the community. It would take up to two years and we would insist that they give up everything, all their money, become celibate and then work entirely for us. I would say, probably at its prime, we might have had a couple thousand people who were following in one way or another. The magazine actually influenced a large number of people . It was an interesting enough magazine to get people interested in the community.

PHAWKER: What was the affiliation with Kenneth Anger and Mick Jagger?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Kenneth Anger never really had any association with us. We showed his film at one point. Mick Jagger, we had interviewed him for one of the early magazines. We were in London, and he was just someone I knew. We used to go to the same dealer, Michael Hollingshead.

PHAWKER: That’s the guy that was almost singlehandedly responsible for bringing LSD to Britain! So why did you leave the Process Church and when was that?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: I left in 1977. To answer that, I would have to talk on a number of levels. At the most basic level, I felt I had done what I had to do. I became director of the headquarters, and was involved in the whole operation. I did that for a couple of years. Then, I just felt that I had done my thing there and I was ready to move along. Things had been changing anyways in the Process foundation. I’m very lucky in a sense of being able to take along with me, since I had the magazine, a sense of leadership. I gotalot out of it, it was a very valuable experience for me. Not sure if I would do it again though.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk about your life after the Process, you’ve spent the last 30 years researching “non-human” intelligence?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: That’s right, dolphins. I got very involved in dolphin research for a period. Then I kind of moved over to the angelic realm, which we actually touched on in the foundation; i was probably a little cynical about it. I had a near death experience in 1973 and angels pulled me back. I was strapped to a machine and healed. I had the actual experience of witnessing angels, which was an especially profound experience, but for a few years I kind of pushed it to the back of my mind, trying to cope with the reality of it. Then in 1981 I came across a situation with a young man in Toronto that the angels were channeling through him. We did some work on that and that formed the basis for my first book. I kind of continued on that, and got into more extraterrestrial research, and I’ve had a few extraterrestrial events in my life. So all that formed the basis of the three books I’d been writing on non human intelligence. Then I have a book coming out next April which is about the return of the Rainbow serpent. It’s a cosmic myth which appears to examine the serpent in the Garden of Eden. What was it doing there and where did it come from? It wasn’t just a manifestation of Satan.

PHAWKER:  Did you say you had a number of extraterrestial experiences?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: I have had a number in my life, yes.

PHAWKER: You live in New Mexico, correct?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: I do, yes.

PHAWKER: These were in New Mexico?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: One happened in New Mexico, one happened in New York. I’ve had about five or six; two really profound with contact, and one of which I wrote about in my book. What about you, are you plugged into that circuit?

PHAWKER: Oh, I’m interested. I’ve never had an extraterrestial experience, but I’m interested in all of these things outside our mainstream belief systems and divergent opinions about the nature of reality.

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Good, it’s a very good time to start tuning in. I just got an e-mail from a friend of mine, well known in the new age circuit, and he’s really quite concerned about what’s happening

PHAWKER: Really, you think something’s about to happen?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Really. I’m starting to think that this 2012 thing has got a lot of juice in it. Really if you look at the state of the world, it’s all kind of collapsing at the same time within a four or five year framework. I have no idea what the 2012 thing means or what will happen, but I have the real sense that there is going to be some sort of singularity. This planet is much more loved by the extraterrestials than the people who live on it. They don’t want to see it destroyed, they don’t want to see it ravaged. I think there’s going to be a lot of action in the near future.

PHAWKER: So what is your plan for 2012?

TIMOTHY WYLLIE: Oh I’ll just be sitting around.

 

 Timothy Wyllie will be speaking about his book Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story Of The Process Church Of The Final Judgement at Germ Bookstore Saturday at 7 PM

US Editor

Published: 23 Nov 2009

LIKE many adopted children, Matthew Roberts set about finding his biological parents with a mix of nerves and excitement.

In particular, he hoped that discovering his father's identity would help him to work out what made him the man he had become.

But nothing could have prepared him for being told his dad was... serial killer CHARLES MANSON.

 

Warped ... Charles Manson now

 

Over a five-week period in the summer of 1969, Manson and his Family of commune followers committed a series of nine gruesome murders. Victims included pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski.

Matthew, 41 - who bears a haunting resemblance to his father - sank into depression after discovering his identity.

He has since been in contact with his dad in a series of letters to his California prison and Manson has replied - each time chillingly signing off with a swastika.

Now Matthew, who was given up for adoption as a baby, has told of his horror at finding out he was the son of a monster.

 

Poison pen ... letter from Manson to Matthew

 

He says: "I didn't want to believe it. I was frightened and angry. It's like finding out that Adolf Hitler is your father.

"I'm a peaceful person - trapped in the face of a monster."

Matthew grew up in Rockford, Illinois, and didn't know he was adopted until his sister told him when he was ten.

He loved his adoptive parents but always knew he was different. He says: "My parents were great people, but very conservative.

"They were products of the Fifties and I didn't relate to them. My biological parents were products of the Sixties and I take on a lot more of those characteristics."

He also reveals his adoptive father tried to discourage him from getting in contact with Manson, telling him: "Nothing good will come from this."

Letters

Matthew, who now lives in Los Angeles, began investigating his family history 12 years ago when he contacted a social services agency who located his mother, Terry, in Wisconsin.

He wrote to her straight away and their early exchanges will be familiar to adopted children everywhere.

 

Map ... Los Angeles

 

She confirmed she was his mum and told him she had named him Lawrence Alexander - and that she would tell him his last name in time.

The jigsaw of his life was beginning to take shape but it was still missing a crucial piece - his father.

Terry remained tight-lipped about his identity but after Matthew pressed her for details in a string of letters, she eventually revealed the awful truth.

She said she met commune leader Manson in 1967 - two years before the infamous "Manson Family" murders in Los Angeles for which he is still in jail at the age of 75.

But back in 1967, Terry had been one of many who were transfixed by Manson's charms.

Her father had tried to chase him away when he met Terry, calling him a "white-trash biker bandit" but she found him charismatic and hypnotizing.

 

So she hopped on a bus with his Family and ended up in San Francisco. There she claims she was raped by Manson in a drug-fuelled orgy, after which she returned home and Matthew was born on March 22, 1968.

 

Cult HQ ... ranch near Death Valley where Manson Family gathered

 

Terry always believed Manson was the father of the baby she gave up for adoption. And after seeing a picture of Matthew, her worst nightmare was confirmed.

For he is the spitting image of Manson, with the same nose, mouth, eyes and large forehead. They even have the same thick, arched eyebrows and long, thick, dark hair.

Like his father, Matthew is a songwriter and poet. He is even worried that he may have inherited his father's schizophrenia.

Matthew, now working as a DJ, recalls hearing mum Terry's bombshell: "She even said, 'You look just like him'.

"I'm not nuts but I've got a little bit of it. It's scary and upsetting. If I get worked up, my eyes get really big and that's really freaked some people out before.

 

Bad sign ... another note from the killer

Splash News

 

"I've tried to tone that down quite a bit. I don't like having that effect on people.

"I don't even like the fact that I'm big. It makes me even scarier. My hero is Gandhi. I'm an extremely non-violent, peaceful person and a vegetarian.

"I don't even kill bugs. I've had long hair all my life. I could make it go away, but I can't let the world and their fears change me." After discovering the truth, it took Matthew five years to pluck up the courage to write to his father at Corcoran State Prison in California.

Manson replied to Matthew's letter straight away and has since sent him a string of ten handwritten notes and postcards signed with the wartime Nazi symbol.

Hobo

Matthew says: "He sends me weird stuff and always signs it with his swastika. At first I was stunned and depressed. I wasn't able to speak for a day. I remember not being able to eat."

 

According to Matthew, the letters mainly rambled and said "crazy things" but Manson did confirm he could be his father.

In one twisted letter he wrote: "The truth is the truth. The truth hurts."

In another note Manson talked about meeting Matthew's mother. He wrote: "I remember her. We came back to LA on the super-cheap train."

And Manson - who grew up without a father figure - even compared his childhood to Matthew's.

He said: "You got the same father I got. A hobo just left on the midnight train and died, lost at sea." Then in a postcard two years ago, addressed to Matthew's birth name Lawrence Alexander, Manson sent his son his prison phone number.

But Matthew has never made the call to his dad.

He says: "There's always a subconscious block.

"What I'm worried about is that you think you're going to meet your birth mother or father and they're going to love you and welcome you with open arms. But he's not that kind of person."

Despite Manson's evil actions, Matthew confesses he now battles confused emotions towards his biological father.

He says: "If I did talk to Charlie on the phone, I would say, 'I truly understand what it's like to be you, more than anyone could ever imagine on so many levels'.

"He's my biological father - I can't help but have some kind of emotional connection. That's the hardest thing of all - feeling love for a monster who raped my mother.

"I don't want to love him, but I don't want to hate him either."

Due Process

New York

10.12.09

 

Left: A view of the service. Right: Genesis P-Orridge. (All photos: Ryan McNamara)

LEGEND HAS IT that a young L. Ron Hubbard once bragged to his friends that he was going to start a religion and make a million dollars. We all know how that went. Less known is a far smaller rogue offshoot of Scientology that exerted disproportionate influence on late-1960s and early-’70s bohemian culture in London, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and other epicenters of radical chic: the Process Church of the Final Judgment, or, simply, the Process.

Formed in 1963 in London by two disenchanted Scientologists—Mary Ann MacLean, a former call girl from Glasgow, and Robert DeGrimston, a well-educated Englishman of more noble birth—the group made unauthorized use of Hubbard’s “E-meter” to identify and exorcise compulsions and complexes. By 1966, the tightly knit group began to believe they were in touch with “Higher Beings” and decamped to an abandoned salt mine in Xtul, Mexico, where the last-minute diversion of a powerful hurricane confirmed to the couple’s followers that they were indeed connected to divine forces.

Returning to England, the Processeans (named after their “processing” of one another during their encounter-group days) quickly attracted the attention of the hipoisie of Swinging London, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull most famously. (It’s likely that the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request and “Sympathy for the Devil” were inspired by Jagger’s flirtation with the Process.) As with any successful cult or totalitarian state, aesthetics were key to their appeal. The Process Church regularly published a truly bizarre, groundbreaking magazine—full of lurid, hand-cut four-color collage graphics and baffling yet seductive apocalypse-theology writings by DeGrimston—with blunt issue titles like “Sex,” “Fear,” “Love,” and “Death.” Church members would sell the magazines in the street dressed in full-length black robes bearing the Process logo, originally four thick lines inside a circle intersecting to form a small square at the center, later the same pattern composed of four trumpet bells. Routinely condemned as diabolical Satanists, blamed for the Manson Family and the Son of Sam, and assumed to have high-level connections to the intelligence community, the Process Church also had a formative influence on Funkadelic’s George Clinton (who reproduced DeGrimston’s writings inside his band’s album covers) and Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV ringleader Genesis P-Orridge.

 

Left: Process magazine designer Timothy Wyllie. Right: Event organizer Jodi Wille.

So what the hell was I doing at Anthology Film Archives on a Sunday night for a Processean “Sabbath Assembly Ritual and Salon” in 2009? Well, partly to see what all the fuss was about back in the day and partly because the magazine was a fascinating high-water mark of DIY publishing. Hosted by Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey, who first heard of the Process while researching his book Apocalypse Culture, and “starring” Ms. (née Mr.) P-Orridge, Process magazine designer Timothy Wyllie, and the Sabbath Assembly Band, the first half of the sold-out evening was a reverent re-creation of a Process service, with prayers, songs, chants, declarations, convocations, prophecies, etc. The surprisingly young crowd, composed of ex-hippies, goths, hipsters, and Process veterans, was rapt as Genesis led the service and the youthful band—a talented acid-folk combo fronted by two female singers (Jex Thoth and Sophie Gontier) and a striking male falsetto (Lichens’s Robert Lowe)—performed Process “hymns” with high sincerity.

After the service, Parfrey ascended the stage, described his past research into the Process, and showed a fragment of a film in progress about the Church by Skinny Puppy member William Morrison. Parfrey then introduced Wyllie himself, who is the partial author of the new book Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Tall, slim, and with long white hair, Wyllie has the air of an English aristocrat who somewhere along the way fell into a vat of LSD. One of the many rumors dispelled during the second half, however, was that Processeans (like Scientologists) abhorred drugs and that MacLean would banish any member caught using them. Hearing this, Parfrey quipped, “Tim is the most psychedelic person I know.” “I made up for it afterward,” Wyllie explained with a wink.

Other tidbits from Tim included the revelation that while DeGrimston was the scribe and spokesperson of the Process, MacLean really called the shots (“It was a matriarchal cult”); that they declared themselves a church for tax purposes; and that MacLean died of emphysema and DeGrimston now works for Verizon.

 

Left: Image of a design from Process. Right: Jodi Wille with Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey.

Process editor Malachi McCormick chimed in from the audience and was invited onstage. Long-winded and rambling, McCormick took a dimmer view of his former gurus, claiming that MacLean and DeGrimston exploited church members for personal gain. Genesis followed, defending DeGrimston’s writings and recalling that Psychic TV was an effort to honor those “scriptures” while eschewing the rigidly hierarchical power structure the Process ultimately became. Other lower-level former Processeans in the audience said that it didn’t matter whether the Church was a con, as some of the best years of their lives were spent living in Process communes and selling magazines in the snow.

Finally, McCormick attempted to clear up the biggest misconception about the church: that Charles Manson was directly influenced by the Process. This rumor was propagated by Ed Sanders’s sprawling Manson tome, The Family, which included a chapter on the Process that the church successfully sued to have excised from the American edition of the book. (It remained in the UK edition.) As McCormick explained, when Manson was in prison in the mid-’60s, his cellmate was a con man who also happened to be a Scientologist. When Manson was released, he went to the Celebrity Center to join Hubbard’s organization and was rejected. McCormick claimed that it was the Church of Scientology that spread the rumor about Manson’s Process connections after the murders because MacLean and DeGrimston had “stolen the tech” (the E-meter) and were considered apostates by Hubbard.

Comforted by this knowledge, I went outside into the East Village night, thinking about Satanists, Scientologists, and the end of The End. 2012 is around the corner, but somehow I suspect it will be 1969 all over again.

— Andrew Hultkrans

Sounds like fun if you're around LA on 23rd (yes, I know) of August...