Manson’s Rustic Canyon Retreat

By MATTHEW MEYER | Reporter

Serial criminal, cult leader, murderer and cultural fixation Charles Manson died at age 83 last month, leaving a Palisadian footnote in the obituary of one of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century.

In the spring of 1968, a little more than a year before he orchestrated a bizarre and horrifying string of murders in Los Angeles, Manson was roaming the West Coast in a school bus full of followers commonly known as the Manson Family.

On a stop in Los Angeles, two of the group’s female members were picked up hitchhiking by Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys drummer and a Pacific Palisades resident.

As the story goes, Wilson and the girls headed back to his Rustic Canyon home at 14400 Sunset Blvd., where they spent some time before Wilson headed back out.

When he returned home late that night, Manson was in the house with about a dozen, mostly female guests. In his usual seductive way, Manson backed his way in to an indefinite stay at the sprawling estate.

It was already a storied property—the nearly three-acre Rustic Canyon lot was originally home to American humorist Will Rogers, where he enjoyed a log cabin home set amid the rolling hills.

It made an idyllic headquarters for Manson and his Family as the cult leader palled around with Wilson, who was later deeply troubled by the brief relationship.

Things started amicably enough: “I live with 17 girls,” Wilson bragged to Record Mirror in 1968.

But the relationship soured as Manson’s financial manipulation grew to a tipping point.

Bandmate Mike Love’s memoir details an escalating set of expenses that Wilson provided for the Family, from food and transportation to thousands of dollars in penicillin shots to treat gonorrhea.

And then there were spats over Manson’s musical aspirations, with the cult leader threatening Wilson over what he said were un-credited contributions to songs of the era.

Eventually, Wilson abandoned the property, leaving the Manson Family to face eviction. They later abandoned the estate themselves, migrating to Spahn Ranch above Chatsworth.

The lot’s curious history ends its Manson chapter there and twists onward, with stints of inhabitance by the Hormel family—the manufacturing heirs of Spam—and even Chabad of Pacific Palisades, who once set up a summer camp on the estate.

“The Hormel family owned the property. They lived there for a while, but it was vacant and they graciously allowed us to use it for a summer,” Rabbi Zushe Cunin recently explained to Jewish Journal.

“Spiritually there were all kinds of energy going through that property,” he continued. “The idea is, when you feel weird negative energy, there is also the potential for positive energy. It is up to us to redirect the energy.”

Cunin told the Journal that before Chabad used the property, they carried a Torah around the grounds and affixed mezuzahs on doorposts in an effort to cleanse the space.

Today they host Camp Gan Israel on the grounds of the Jewish Community Center on Sunset.

Just down the road, 14400 Sunset Blvd. still sits, last sold in March 2003 for a little over $1 million to a group generically dubbed 14400 West, LLC.

It carries the dark legacy of Manson, forever placing Pacific Palisades, however briefly, in the winding and deeply strange tale of one of America’s most infamous murderers.

Casey P. Smith contributed to this report.