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***This is the twenty-sixth
in a never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris
Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote
that specific poem. All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end
of this piece.
Title Photo David Herrle was taken in 2012 and given copyright permission from David Herrle for this CRC Blog Post Only.
#26 Backstory of the Poem
“Devil In the Details”
By David Herrle
Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing
this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until
final form? The main purpose behind Sharon
Tate and the Daughters of Joy was to present a digressive,
part-serious/part-sarcastic metaphysical forensic about the nature of the
destruction of beauty, or about the nature of atrocity in general. So, having
sensed (and forced here and there) a contextual relationship among poor Sharon
Tate, Queen Marie Antoinette, Jack the Ripper-victim Mary Jane Kelly and, to a
lesser degree, Princess de Lamballe and Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia), I
blasted out a chopped-up disquisition on how beauty, art, envy-driven
collectivism, self-destructive democracy and sexual hang-ups swirl together on
this blood-drenched planet.
I began everything knowing that I wanted to end everything with a fantastic
redemption of Sharon Tate (and Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Voytek
Frykowski), Antoinette and Mary Kelly, effected by a meta-hero written in my
image, but with some Zorro, Scarlet Pimpernel, Charlotte Corday and Humphrey
Bogart added in. With that ultimate dramatic destination in mind, I worked out
the path to it. “The Devil in the Details” is a sort of
coincidental/contextual/interpretive frenzy of both speculation and fact
surrounding the Manson Family massacre at Roman Polanski’s Cielo Drive home in
1969.
Where
were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe
the place in great detail. Several years have passed
since that moment, but I’m fairly sure that I was probably on the ground floor
of the Cathedral of Learning on the University of Pittsburgh campus in the
Oakland area of Pittsburgh. Oakland has always been a fruitful environment for
me, and much of the Sharon Tate book
was composed there.
What
month and year did you start writing this poem? Having to guess, I’d say
sometime in mid-2012. June or July.
How
many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you
share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) This piece must’ve gone through several
iterations, mostly in the process of condensation and thematic grouping.
Probably 90 percent of my writing is done via keyboard so I can see close to
what the finished printed text will eventually look like. For me, handwriting
is mostly relegated to note taking and marginalia.
Were
there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the
final version? And can you share them with us? Many lines were cut out by the final draft (which,
really, is far from final), but, unless stuff is particularly valuable, I tend
to delete for good. (Left: David Herrle writing on his laptop in 2018. Copyright permission granted by David Herrle for this CRC Blog Post Only)
What
do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? A sense of history’s and human existence’s density
and interconnectivity, as well as the pleasurable yet problematic ease of
binding them in cute little nutshells, precious (as in affected) observations
and artistic abstractions. Like the legendary synthesization of so-called Jack
the Ripper (Right Top), “The Devil in the Details” (and the entire book it’s from) should
be taken as conglomerated facts metaphysicalized my own perspectival
obsessions. Also, in the spirit of J.L. Talmon’s (Right Middle)The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Right Bottom), I hope to show how
bloodshed, dehumanization and sadism can spring from the banal, the moral, the
utopian and the humanitarian as much as from the plainly criminal – if not
more. . Something Ben Hecht wrote in Perfidy (1961)
puts it better:
What a dire word love has been in history. It has
launched more carnage than any war
cry of the species.
For it is never love that an ideal has to offer, but love
and
death. It is always, “Love me, or I’ll kill you.”
The Manson Family lives in
your neighborhood, Jim Jones lives right next door to you, and salvation
doesn’t lie in art or literature. Far from it, for many artists and writers
have been devils. Manson’s groupies were
worse than Manson, just as the members of the Peoples Temple were worse than Jim
Jones himself, just as any dictator’s minions are worse than the dictator. (Left Top: Charles Manson Mug Shot 1969; Left Bottom: Jim Jones the day he and his victims died)
Finally, one of my premises
is “Sin is in the eye.” Envy, covetousness and lust are gateways to crimes,
particularly carnal ones. I doubt that a blind-from-birth person can sin, or
they rarely do. Frustration with different kinds of beauty can very quickly
lead to the drive to mar or erase those beautiful things if they can’t be
properly obtained, or if they spark too much contrast between them and the
would-be destroyer. (Right: The Eye attributed to Salvador Dali)
Which
part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? Everything in the book is emotional to different degrees, but, obviously,
this part is extremely emotional, especially since it’s put through the voice
of a semi-autobiographical narrator who has allowed the thematic outrage of the
entire book to reach a fever pitch (which is certainly even higher in an
earlier piece about the reprehensible French Revolution called “Rise,
Antoinette! Rise, Antoinette!” (Left Top) In his pacifist song, “Everywhere,” Billy
Bragg sang, “Over here, over there, it's the same everywhere/A boy cries
out for his mama before he dies for his home.” Those lines always obliterate
me, and my soft spot for the age-old phenomenon of mothers being in dying
thoughts and on dying breaths is expressed here, overlapping Truman Capote’s
and Sharon Tate’s (Left Bottom) respective pitiful final utterances:
Truman’s third-to-last dying words, as Joanne
Carson — yes, Johnny Carson’s wife — claims, were “Mama, mama.” (Sharon’s last
words were “Mother, mother.”)
Has
this poem been published before? And if so where? Only in Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy,
put out by Time Being Books in 2013, which was a follow-up to my Abyssinia,
Jill Rush (2010).
Anything
you would like to add? Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake.”
The Devil in the Details
My whole
life has been decided by fate.
- Sharon
Tate
Fate
happens.
-
Aristotle Onassis
It’s bad enough that
Anton LaVey (Left Top), founder of the Church of Satan, played the Devil in Roman
Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (Left MIddle), but
Manson’s association with Thelemite/Aleister Crowley crony/Church member
Kenneth Anger (Left Bottom), filmmaker of Lucifer
Rising and Invocation (of My Demon
Brother), added to Sharon Tate portraying the ravishing but Satanic Odile
de Caray (Right Top) in J. Thompson’s (Right Middle) Eye of the
Devil (Right Bottom), makes Salem’s past witch paranoia seem sober, especially when you
know that Manson-fan Bobby Beausoleil (Bottom First) played the role of Lucifer in Rising (Bottom Second) (the original prospect, a
five-year-old boy, had died after falling through a skylight — not
unlike how
the film’s luminous namesake fell from Paradise). Bobby, who knifed Manson
Family friend Gary Hinman, sociology Ph.D hopeful and peace-loving Buddhist, to
death and left a bloody “paw” print because Charlie Manson needed to implicate
the Black Panthers because he mistakenly thought (or pretended) they were after
him for shooting “Lotsapoppa” Crowe (Bottom Third), a drug dealer who’d been ripped off by Tex
Watson (Bottom Fourth) and mistaken as a Panther. Bobby, who Truman Capote called a
“Forty-second Street Lucifer,” who jammed in a rock band called Love, whose
surname means “beautiful sun” in French.
Gary Hinman, (Left Top) that credulous,
idealistic wimp, bled to death while chanting “I devote myself to the Lotus
Sutra of the Wonderful Law” before his Buddha shrine, while losing his life at
peacenik hippies’ hands, living the death that Beast Crowley’s Madame Blavatsky (Left Middle) promised: the iron justice of the Law of Karma, delivering the same jaw punch
that Marquis de Condorcet (Left Third) must have felt when his beloved French Revolution
sentenced him to the guillotine — though he wrote praises to humanity’s
“limitless perfectibility” until he died in prison while waiting for his turn
at the chopping block.
Sharon, staying over at
former-fiance Jay Sebring’s (Right Top) 9860 Easton Drive (Right Middle) (once home to Jean Harlow, whose
hubby Paul Bern (Right Bottom), an MGM producer, shot himself in the head — or so it goes),
awoke to hallucinate a “creepy little man” near her bed and fled to the
stairway where she saw another man with a gashed throat tied to the post. The
future blabs itself to us non-stop in the present, people, and if we’d just
shut up and listen, we won’t be so surprised when our respective Reapers
interrupt our silly paths and say, “Fini,
your best-laid schemes, mice.”
Sharon and faithless but
genius Roman Polanski, survivor of proto-Manson Hitler and director of Repulsion (starring Tate-level beauty
Catherine Deneuve and lots of knife/blunt-force violence), of Knife in the Water, of Cul-de-sac (starring Deneuve’s sister,
in an isolated castle atop a mountain), moved to one of Rudi Altobelli’s (Right First) properties, the former residence of big stars such as Michele Morgan (Right Second), Lillian
Gish (Right Third) and Cary Grant (Right Fourth) and last lived in by Candice Bergen and Terry Melcher (Right Fifth)
(Doris Day’s son): 10050 Cielo Drive (Sharon called it “the love house”), high
up in Benedict Canyon, L.A., like an isolated castle atop a mountain,
overlooking Babylon. Cielo means “heaven.” (So much for foreshadowing.)
Terry
Melcher left his pet cats behind when he and Bergen moved, so kind-hearted
Sharon made sure to feed them and their descendants — twenty-six cats in all —
daily. (She was butchered to death at age 26.) Melcher: the dork who bagged
model/Abbie Hoffman-groupie Bergen and produced the Beach Boys, the band that
starred Dennis Wilson (in 1971 Left Second) , who was Melcher’s ride back from a tour of the Mansons’
Spahn Ranch commune — a ride back to Cielo Drive (Left First), a ride including none other
than Charlie Manson, who rapped his knuckles on the front door of that same
house a year later, after Melcher and Wilson flaked on a recording promise, and
was told by guest Shahrokh Hatami (Left Third) to “take the back alley” after assuring him
that Melcher didn’t live there anymore, so he tried the guest house where
Altobelli (who later sued the Tate estate for the carnage-caused property
damage) slammed the door in his face. Sharon saw Manson (and he saw her, imprisoned her image in his eyes, for sin is in the eye), and
she asked Altobelli if “that creepy-looking guy came back” on a later plane
trip. (Don’t forget the “creepy little man” at Easton Drive, Sharon!)
Remember Beausoleil,
Satan role-player and Love guitarist? He was imprisoned for the Hinman murder,
and Charlie, scared that he’d roll over on him to make a deal, needed to pin
Hinman on the Black Panthers to exculpate Beausoleil: hence — Susan Atkins (Left Top) was
later adamant about this — the Tate/LaBianca murders (Left Middle) were born. Beausoleil told
Truman Capote in a San Quentin interview that Sharon and gang pissed off people
with bad dope deals and were far from innocent. Voytek alone probably had more
avengers after him than can be counted on two hands. (This is why Sharon’s
father, Paul, (Left Bottom) questioned folks such as
Mama Cass (Right Top), druggie Steve McQueen (Right Bottom) and
drug-pal Billy Doyle.) Bobby bullshitted that “everything that happens is
good,” and when Capote asked him if that included war, starvation, pain and
cruelty, Beausoleil, Love’s “beautiful sun,” said, “Whatever happens, happens.
It’s all good.”
Stanton LaVey (Left-Top), son of
Anton, called Manson “our own messiah” and told Marlin Marynick (Left-Bottom) that nothing
was random in the murders by the Family — down to the very time. “Tex did not
make a mistake,” Manson said. “There’s no such thing in my kingdom.” Filmmaker
and
Kenneth Anger-pal John Aes-Nihil (Right Top) rejects coincidence, that the Manson and
Tate circles were familiar (“everyone knew each other”), celebs slummed with
hippie bums: porous Cielo having been a laxly public party pad and who knows
what else (Dennis Hopper (Right Middle) claimed S&M). Gregg Jakobson (Right Bottom), Dennis Wilson friend
and Manson admirer, let Family member Dean Morehouse (Bottom Left) (father of Ruth Ann
Morehouse (Bottom Right), Family member who loafed on Temple and Broadway with
“Squeaky”
Fromme (Left Top), Sandra Good (Left Bottom), Bobby Beausoleil’s buddy “Gypsy” Share, et al, during the Tate/LaBianca trial) stay at the house between Melcher/Bergen and
Polanski/Tate. Bums such as Tom Harrigan (Right Top) and Pic Dawson (Right Bottom) (bestie with Mama Cass
and drug dealer to both Voytek and Sebring) were regular partiers there. And
guess who swam in Cielo’s kidney-shaped pool? Susan Atkins, the Manson girl who
would be tempted to cut the living fetus out of Sharon’s corpse’s belly,
who
said the bliss of stabbing and stabbing was orgasmic (Anton LaVey guessed that
the crime was “a lust murder,” that the knives imitated sex), who dipped a
towel in Sharon’s blood and wrote “PIG” on Cielo’s front door (with Roman Polanski. Bottom Image attributed to Life Reporter and novelist Thomas Thompson. Fair Use) because Charlie
said to “leave a sign,” “something witchy.” Oh, they were in their wits and had
volition, because Charlie wanted the deed to be deliberate, and, since (like
antichrists Bormann and Himmler) they were worse than their master, their
alleged dissociativity was due to bloodlust in human sharks driven wild by
human chum.
Yes, Manson didn’t point
to Cielo on some roulette wheel, but ordered Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia
Krenwinkel (Left Top) and Linda Kasabian (Left Bottom) to do the devil’s business “where Terry Melcher
used to live.” Not much different from Hitler’s (Right Top) international tantrum born from
interminable frustration, mediocrity, post-war shame and the back-stabbing
Versailles Treaty (Right Middle). Once an obscure loser in a Munich crowd then making Neville
Chamberlain (Right Bottom) his Brit bitch in the same city twenty-four years later, every
sleepless naught remedied by infinite war, impotent rage channeled into
blitzkrieg, gas, ovens. Or, for you vampiric literati, “Take the back alley” is like young Thomas Sutpen being
told by the house negro to go to the back door in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: that discovery of
shame fuelling his lifelong (and thwarted) ambition and his regular scraps
between “wild negroes” — as if lacerating the memory of that humiliating day.
Finding his Fifteen
Minutes between the Yippies and the Yuppies, Manson, lord of what he dubbed the
Slippies, took Abbie Hoffman’s (Left First) outrageous admonishments to the next — actual —
level, as director John Waters (Left Second) observed. Waters, who dedicated Pink Flamingos (Left Third) to “Sadie, Kate and Les”
(Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten) (Left Fourth), had drag-hag Divine
refer to Sharon in Multiple Maniacs
and dedicated Female Troubles to Tex
Watson. Charlie went back to the Polanski house to assess the success of the
killing floor. Imagine the car taking them higher and higher, toward the
literal and figurative mansion on the hill, up and up: the low places rising
like backed-up sewage to the high places. Ascend, scum! Thrust
yourselves up,
crustaceans! Rise, rise like the bone-turned-weapon from the world’s first
murderer in Kubrick’s 2001 (Bottom), rabble!
Rise, rise, lowlifes! Crawl from the obscure streets, the anonymous desert,
storm the palace and slay the Queen and her privileged court!
Was Roman mixed up in
some occult soul-selling? Did he portray key elements of his wife’s bloody
future in a cinematic past? For instance, filming Rosemary’s Baby at The Dakota (Left Top), the place where John Lennon was
gunned down by Satanic Mark Chapman (John Hinckley’s (Bottom Far Left) unwitting mentor). The
Beatles (Bottom Middle), Manson claimed — oh, he didn’t believe his own bullshit! — used their White Album (Far Right) to subliminally endorse
Helter Skelter, the ultimate race war in which blackie would rise up and
slaughter whitey en masse until “blackie” fucked it up — as “blackie” always
does — and the savior Mansons would crawl up from the Bottomless Pit to grab
the reins and make it work — as whitey always does. According to Charlie.
The Beatles (who hail
from Liverpool, home of the famous art gallery, Tate Liverpool (Right), of all names)
probably
stayed at 10050 Cielo Drive back when Melcher and Bergen lived there
(Lennon conflated it with Doris Days’ pad since Melcher was her son). The band
might have known Ken Anger and been courted by or involved in The Process, the
occult church that gave Manson the Bottomless Pit idea and the melding of Jehovah,
Lucifer and Jesus, the church that might’ve inspired Sirhan Sirhan (Left Top) to kill
Bobby Kennedy (Left on the cover of Life Magazine commemorating his death), brother-in-law and lover to Jackie O (Left with Ari on their wedding day), whose look-alike
“cameoed” in Rosemary’s Baby’s
Satanic rape scene (when Rosemary was impregnated by hell’s seed) and married
criminal/Kennedy-nemesis Ari Onassis (who cursed Camelot at a Haitian voodoo
ceremony — not knowing that Bobby coincidentally owned an Onassis voodoo doll).
“Then have your
killing,” Jehovah declares in The Process’ Robert DeGrimston’s (Right Top and Right Bottom is the logo of the church DeGrimston founded) Jehovah on WAR (“WAR”: what Patricia
Krenwinkel carved into victim Leno LaBianca’s fat belly the night after the
Cielo Drive massacre). Sirhan Sirhan was imprisoned at San Quentin (Left Top) while Bobby
Beausoleil was there and spoke to
ever-curious Truman Capote, who wrote In Cold Blood (Left Bottom)— which Sirhan claimed
inspired him to self-entrance via mirror-gazing as one of the killers in the
book had done — and saw Theosophical fingerprints at the crime scene. Truman’s
third-to-last dying words, as Joanne Carson (Bottom Left) — yes, Johnny Carson’s wife —
claims, were “Mama, mama.” (Sharon’s last words were “Mother, mother.”) Imagine
the grief of Doris Tate, Sharon’s mother (Bottom Right), when she heard the grisly news of her
daughter’s death. Doris, who, worried sick over her daughter’s relocation to
L.A., told her psychologist that she felt that Sharon would be attacked or
murdered over there. Her fear came true in a nightmare about a cowboy pointing
two guns at her and Sharon in the Cielo living room and announcing, “Today you
will die.” Dream-Doris fled but realized that Dream-Sharon couldn’t escape the
mad cowboy and had been murdered on the couch.
Nine Inch Nails (Right Top) founder
Trent Reznor (Right Bottom) lived in the Polanski house and named his recording studio Pig,
after the bloody word Atkins left on the door (the door he later relocated to
his new Nothing Studios), and a sign on the door read “COME IN HERE AND BE
KILLED” the night of his housewarming party, which was attended by Butthole
Surfers’ lead singer, Gibby Haynes, whose first name is eerily the same as
murder victim Abigail “Gibby” Folger. What was recorded at the Pig studio?
Marilyn Manson’s (Bottom Far Left Manson perfroming at Ntohing Studios) (ahem!) Portrait of an
American Family (Bottom Middle) and Nine Inch Nails’ Downward
Spiral (Bottom Far Right)albums.
The Mansons (such a
warped portrait of an American family) had lived in a Topanga County house they
called the Spiral Staircase (Left Top) (which shares the title of a Robert Siodmak (Left Bottom) film
about a woman-terrorizing serial killer), a place probably once owned by a
Church of Satan disciple, but they relocated to George Spahn’s ranch (Bottom One and Two), which had
been used as a town set for King Vidor’s Duel
in the Sun (Bottom Three and Four, a film starring Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten and — can you
guess? — Lillian Gish, one of the many former celebrity residents of 10050
Cielo Drive.
For years I worked as a
proofreader, a research librarian, a technical writer, even a caregiver. For
over 15 years I’ve produced the writing/art site SubtleTea, and I also maintain Bookolage,
a site featuring reviews of new books. I also do some freelance writing/editing/manuscript
consultation. Married, children, do crossword puzzles, crush on Miss Piggy. (Right- David Herrle in 2018. Copyright permission granted by David Herrle for this CRC Blog Post Only)
BACKSTORY OF THE POEM
LINKS
001 December 29, 2017
Margo
Berdeshevksy’s “12-24”
002 January 08, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “82 Miles From the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake
Café”
003 January 12, 2018
Barbara
Crooker’s “Orange”
004 January 22, 2018
Sonia
Saikaley’s “Modern Matsushima”
005 January 29, 2018
Ellen
Foos’s “Side Yard”
006 February 03, 2018
Susan
Sundwall’s “The Ringmaster”
007 February 09, 2018
Leslea
Newman’s “That Night”
008 February 17, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher “June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”
009 February 24, 2018
Charles
Clifford Brooks III “The Gift of the Year With Granny”
010 March 03, 2018
Scott
Thomas Outlar’s “The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”
011 March 10, 2018
Anya
Francesca Jenkins’s “After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
012 March 17, 2018
Angela
Narciso Torres’s “What I Learned This Week”
013 March 24, 2018
Jan
Steckel’s “Holiday On ICE”
014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim
Honjo’s “Colors”
015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn
Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”
016 April 27, 2018
Beth
Copeland’s “Reliquary”
017 May 12, 2018
Marlon
L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”
018 May 25, 2018
Juliet
Cook’s “ARTERIAL DISCOMBOBULATION”
019 June 09, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “Stiletto Killer. . . A Surmise”
020 June 16, 2018
Charles
Rammelkamp’s “At Last I Can Start Suffering”
021 July 05, 2018
Marla
Shaw O’Neill’s “Wind Chimes”
022 July 13, 2018
Julia Gordon-Bramer’s
“Studying Ariel”
023 July 20, 2018
Bill Yarrow’s “Jesus
Zombie”
024 July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag
2016”
025 August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s “It is only
Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”
026 August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In
the Details”
Finally, one of my premises
is “Sin is in the eye.” Envy, covetousness and lust are gateways to crimes,
particularly carnal ones. I doubt that a blind-from-birth person can sin, or
they rarely do. Frustration with different kinds of beauty can very quickly
lead to the drive to mar or erase those beautiful things if they can’t be
properly obtained, or if they spark too much contrast between them and the
would-be destroyer. (Right: The Eye attributed to Salvador Dali)
Sharon, staying over at
former-fiance Jay Sebring’s (Right Top) 9860 Easton Drive (Right Middle) (once home to Jean Harlow, whose
hubby Paul Bern (Right Bottom), an MGM producer, shot himself in the head — or so it goes),
awoke to hallucinate a “creepy little man” near her bed and fled to the
stairway where she saw another man with a gashed throat tied to the post. The
future blabs itself to us non-stop in the present, people, and if we’d just
shut up and listen, we won’t be so surprised when our respective Reapers
interrupt our silly paths and say, “Fini,
your best-laid schemes, mice.”
The Beatles (who hail
from Liverpool, home of the famous art gallery, Tate Liverpool (Right), of all names)
probably 
“Then have your
killing,” Jehovah declares in The Process’ Robert DeGrimston’s (Right Top and Right Bottom is the logo of the church DeGrimston founded) Jehovah on WAR (“WAR”: what Patricia
Krenwinkel carved into victim Leno LaBianca’s fat belly the night after the
Cielo Drive massacre). Sirhan Sirhan was imprisoned at San Quentin (Left Top) while Bobby
Beausoleil was there and spoke to 
For years I worked as a
proofreader, a research librarian, a technical writer, even a caregiver. For
over 15 years I’ve produced the writing/art site SubtleTea, and I also maintain Bookolage,
a site featuring reviews of new books. I also do some freelance writing/editing/manuscript
consultation. Married, children, do crossword puzzles, crush on Miss Piggy. (Right- David Herrle in 2018. Copyright permission granted by David Herrle for this CRC Blog Post Only)