You must be able to be a kiss just a kid.

A kiss is just a kid.

A cry was a cry. Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten histories of

Hollywood's first century, part of the Panoply Network. I'm your host, Karina Longworth.

And this is part two of our ongoing series, Charles Manson's Hollywood. Last week we set the stage for this series by talking about the music and movie scenes in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and

described the murders ordered by Manson, which shook the entertainment capital to its core.

Today, we're going to take a step back,

about 35 years back, actually,

to trace Manson's life from an incredibly disadvantaged

birth through the prison system to his arrival in San Francisco

just before the summer of love to his gradual amassing of dozens of followers who ate up Manson's dogma without realizing that it was equal parts

regurgitated self-help, scyontology, and racism because they were so convinced that

career criminal Manson was something like God.

Today we'll talk about how that happened.

Tracing Manson's travels right up to the point where he and his followers descended on Hollywood.

Join us, won't you, for the story of how Charlie Manson found his family. Charles Manson was born November 12th, 1934 to Kathleen Maddox, a teenage girl who got in the habit of sneaking out to Roadhouse clubs on the Ohio border,

and who had gotten herself knocked up by a 23-year-old petty criminal named Colonel Scott.

Colonel was Scott's given name, but he let innocent girls like Kathleen think he was actually in the military. It gave him an excuse to conveniently disappear when he needed to, like when 15-year-old girls told him they were pregnant with his baby.

With her baby daddy out of the picture Kathleen confessed her situation to her mother Nancy a devoutly Christian widow.

Nancy decided that Kathleen's punishment for straying from the path

should be that she'd have to raise her child in the Nazarene Church.

Kathleen came up with a different plan. She would find herself a husband

...