The Merrick Connection Revisited

In my popular 2017 article “Israel, Manson, and Vampirism: The Freaky Life of Laurence Merrick”, I discussed the intriguing figure of IDF veteran, Zionist activist, stage and film director, and actors’ school proprietor Zev (or Zeev or Zehev) Lahav, who switched his name to the less ethnically obtrusive Laurence Merrick at some point after moving to California in an apparent bid to liken himself to a well-known Broadway producer, David Merrick [1]. He was also one of the founders of Independent Screen Producers, Inc., a distribution exchange “covering the 13 Western states and wholly owned by the producers.” [2] Serving as a human dot connecting Sharon Tate and the Manson Family, Merrick is surprisingly little-known – which, in itself, is worthy of note. Five years ago, with a cursory search, I was able to find comparatively little information on the Israeli enigma, but some interesting additional tidbits have come to my attention since then, perhaps justifying a second look.

Born to Ben Zeev Lahav and Zippora Raskin in 1926, Zev Lahav (Alien Registration Number 10 105 965) hailed from Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv and after arriving in America married actress Joan Huntington in December of 1956, but officially began residing “continuously” in the US in January of 1957. His petition for naturalization lists his address as 16791 NE 20th Ave., North Miami Beach, and gives his occupation as “Director of Education”. The man who would become Merrick was living at 7718 W. Norton Ave. in Los Angeles when he was naturalized in November of 1960, but he had moved to 3448 Oak Glen Dr. by 1962, when he was registered to vote as a Republican. His Social Security record indicates that he also may have used the alias Zeev Schneidnesser.

Joan Huntington

The May-July 2016 issue of Filmfax featured a useful profile, “Guess What Happened to Laurence Merrick: An Independent Director’s Offbeat Career Cut Short!” by Brett Taylor – thankfully reproduced at The Manson Family Blog. Taylor was able to speak to Merrick’s wife, who died in 2021, yielding a glimpse of Merrick’s early years in the US:

Fundraising [for Israel] in New York City, he impressed an aspiring Broadway showgirl. He had intellectual goals in mind, she only thought of show business. The dark-haired intellectual and the starry-eyed ingénue instantly fell for each other. Six decades later, Joan Huntington vividly recalls meeting the soldier she soon would marry. “He raised money for the state of Israel. Until he met me. He fascinated me. I swooned over him. He taught me little things that I didn’t know about world history. I credit him for most of the intelligence I have now. It was a natural feeling. He was Jewish, and I was Jewish, but I didn’t know there was a big difference between an Israeli Jew and an American Jew.” It wasn’t too long before they arranged to get married.[3]

“Over the years the two of them made frequent visits to his family in Israel,” he adds. “As for the Israeli army,” if Taylor and Huntington are to be believed, Merrick “never heard from them again.” [4] 

An early American mention of Merrick, who had served as a lieutenant colonel in Israel [5], occurs in a July 1960 issue of the Indianapolis National Jewish Post and Opinion. “Lahav to West Coast”, announces the brief item: “Zehev Lahav, who was education director of North Shore Jewish Center in Miami Beach, has accepted a similar position with Temple Beth El, Hollywood, Calif.” [6] Within months, he seemed to have attained a degree of prominence. In September of that year, he conducted a seminar on Zionist youth education at, ironically enough, the Ambassador Hotel, as part of the Zionist Organization of America’s Regional Convention, where presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s brother Ted would also present JFK’s positions on the Middle East [7]. Early in 1963, the B’nai B’rith Messenger takes notice of Lahav’s appointment to the faculty of the College of Jewish Studies, sponsored by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. “Born in Israel, he is the author of an Israeli bestseller on the War of Liberation [sic],” the article reveals, “and will teach a course in current Israeli literature.” [8]

Having assumed his new identity as Merrick, the Israeli next shows up as the proprietor of the recently renamed Princess Theatre (or Theater) at 870 N. Vine in Hollywood, previously operated by comedian Teddy Hart as Theatre 90, “the little theatre with BIG STARS” [9]. The B’nai B’rith Messenger of November 29, 1963 – with “Jewry Mourns Pres. Kennedy” as the front-page headline – reports that “Laurence Merrick, motion picture and stage producer, will address the Borach Weinberg Branch of the Farband Labor Zionist Order” at the Princess: “Mr. Merrick will present highlights of the Chana Senesch story and will exhibit some of the archives which he has brought here from the Chana Senesch Museum in Israel.” [10]

Chana Senesch (or Hannah Senesh or Szenes) was a Zionist commando who was captured, imprisoned, and finally executed in Hungary during the Second World War – and she served as the inspiration for a 1958 drama by Israeli playwright Aharon Megged. “Megged’s Hannah Szenes was the right play at the right time, interpreting the Holocaust in a way which would perfectly fit into the Zionist ethos,” writes Dan Laor. “As such, it was also considered worthy of cultural export: an English version of the play was staged in 1964 at the Princess Theatre in Los Angeles (under the title The Legend of Hannah Senesh)” [11], with Merrick’s wife, Joan Huntington, playing the lead. In the course of hyping Merrick’s Zionist import, entertainment columnist Barney Glazer offers a few revealing details of Mrs. Merrick’s background:

One of the two Jewish cast members, Joan Huntington, was born in Hartford, Conn. In 1939, her father took the family to Belgium where he helped Jewish refugees escape. He later wound up in North Africa with the US Army Intelligence while Joan was sent as a baby to Paris where she remained under the Nazi heel for 4½ years. After the war her parents picked her up when she was 5½. During rehearsals of The Legend of Hannah Senesh, Joan said, “This powerful drama has revived memories I never realized a child could retain.” She is now 26 [Actually, her 1934 birth would have put her closer to 30 according to the Internet Movie Database].   

After she consented to portray Hannah, Joan went to Israel where for two months she dedicated herself to research and soul proving, seeking the will from which Hannah drew strength to make her trip to immortality. In order to understand the phenomenon of Israel’s “Joan of Arc”, she even learned how to parachute.

She interviewed Hannah’s closest friends, lived with them in Hannah’s Kibbutz, Schot Yam (Water Fields), fished there and even slept in Hannah’s room. To this day, she maintains correspondence with Hannah’s mother, Mrs. Katherine Senesh, still living in Israel, “who has given me a fabulous insight into her daughter’s character and courage.”

Merrick, a trailblazing proponent of “Holocaust” education, purports to have been harassed and threatened by “about 30 phone calls” on account of his staging of The Legend of Hannah Senesh, with Glazer relating that the defiant impresario “promptly reported the situation to the Anti-Defamation League, who extended advice, and also to the Hollywood Police Department.” “Depraved anti-Semites have been phoning director Laurence Merrick threatening to bomb the Princess Theatre,” Glazer asserts, elaborating: “the anonymous callers used vulgarities to threaten to ‘bomb your theatre Saturday night and kill all you Jew-lovers and millionaire Jews.’” “What terrifies me,” Merrick told Glazer, “is that although the theme of our play belongs to the past, I keep asking myself over and over – is it possible that these atrocities are actually taking root in the United States where Nazi groups are permitted to operate openly?” [12]

Demonstrating his versatility as a showman, the Princess had advertised a “Musical Evening with Laurence Merrick” in the pages of the Los Angeles Times in January of that same year [13]. The references to Merrick in B’nai B’rith Messenger in 1963 as a “motion picture and stage producer” and in Glazer’s 1964 column as a practitioner of “stage and motion picture direction”, however, are somewhat puzzling, given that the Israeli is not known to have released any movies until 1969. A January 1966 mention in Boxoffice finds Merrick on the verge of a change in direction. Nana, Emile Zola’s 1880 novel about a prostitute, “is to be Broadway stage-producer Laurence Merrick’s first feature film,” writes columnist Syd Cassyd, with “Joan Huntington in the title role. No starting date has been announced,” he adds [14]. Indeed, Merrick’s Nana was never mounted, but the choice of material tellingly finds him seeking to transition not only into filmmaking, but into a more salacious genre of entertainment, while still clinging to the pretext of a literary inspiration.

Toward the end of 1966, the Princess was running tawdry ads for a play called The Group, with a cartoon image of a flirtatious blonde in skin-tight clothes. “He called me his Little Lolita,” reads the caption [15]. By 1969, Merrick had entered his exploitation filmmaking phase beginning with a failed experiment Huntington describes as a “nudie cutie”: “It was housewives who were looking for men. Three girls with big boobs. That was about it. It was short and it was terrible and we never did anything with it.” [16] Next was Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? - which, Taylor points out, features “Merrick’s ‘surprise’ ending in which Claudia Barron sprouts fangs […] clearly inspired by Sharon Tate’s turn in Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers” [17] – also released in an alternate homoerotic incarnation as Dracula and the Boys, which played under the title Does Dracula Really Suck? at New York’s Park-Miller Theatre and the Park Theatre in Los Angeles, both of which specialized in homosexual hardcore fare. Disconcerting is Merrick’s concurrent attempt to attract juvenile audiences to his renamed Laurence Merrick Theater playhouse with productions of Tom Sawyer in 1969 [18] and Hansel and Gretel in 1970, promising “a musical comedy and magic show for the kids” [19] – particularly as this was the period when he was in contact with the Manson Family, with members visiting the set of his film Black Angels in 1969. Additionally, Merrick was in the process of shooting interviews with the Family – “before and after the shocking murders” – for what would become the 1973 documentary Manson [20]. Family associate Mark Rosen, also known as Mark Ross and Aesop Aquarian – not the only Jewish figure in Manson’s circles – even appears in Black Angels as “Singer”. Working as an actor and editor and helping with art direction on Black Angels, meanwhile, was Merrick’s “mysterious friend” Clancy Syrko, who “was familiar with aeronautics and claimed to work for the government, though he was not allowed to talk about his work.” [21] Curiously, the only other putative credit for the mystery man after Merrick’s Black Angels and Manson, which Syrko also edited, is voice dubbing on the 1984 English version of Tekkaman the Space Knight for anime importer William Winckler.

Clancy Syrko

How Sharon Tate entered Merrick’s orbit and came to study at his Academy of Dramatic Arts is not known, but the two doomed figures’ milieux were not so far apart. Tate, cultivated for stardom by Filmways head Martin Ransohoff, was cast in several episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, a program on which Merrick’s wife also appeared – Tate between 1963 and 1965 and Huntington in 1966 and 1968, with both actresses working for director Joseph Depew. Tate’s erstwhile lover, friend, and fellow victim Jay Sebring was Frank Sinatra’s hairstylist [22], and Huntington, who also performed under the name Joan Lahav (or Joan Lahau as the Internet Movie Database renders it), appeared in a 1961 episode of Miami Undercover directed by Sinatra Enterprises executive Howard W. Koch, a friend who, having been appointed head of production at Paramount in 1964, allowed Huntington access to the studio’s editing rooms to gain expertise [23]. In 1962 Koch produced John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, a film that employed future Rosemary’s Baby production designer and Roman Polanski associate Richard Sylbert, who helped Frankenheimer create the 1962 psychological thriller’s climactic assassination sequence. Also employed on The Manchurian Candidate was technical advisor William J. Bryan, a Los Angeles sex therapist who later would claim to have hypnotized and programmed Sirhan Sirhan [24].

Richard Sylbert

Sylbert, with Frankenheimer, would volunteer to assist the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign [25]. Tate, too, “had become very interested in the Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy,” relates The Official Sharon Tate Website: “She went to fund raising dinners in support of Kennedy and […] attended a dinner at the home of John Frankenheimer. At the dinner was Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel. Sharon was thrilled to be able to spend some time with Kennedy and felt even more convinced that he would make a wonderful president.” [26] It was Frankenheimer who would drive the presidential contender from Malibu to his fatal engagement at the Ambassador Hotel – for further discussion of Frankenheimer’s oddly intimate connection to the RFK assassination, see “JFK, RFK, John Frankenheimer, and the Mystery of Sirhan Sirhan” [27] and “52 Pick-Up and Two Dead Kennedys: The Echoes of the Shots” [28] – and the links between Tate and her circle and the RFK story would not end on June 5, 1968. The following summer, Polanski was working on a screenplay for The Day of the Dolphin, concerned with the training of a dolphin to carry out the assassination of a US president, with Polanski intending to direct the film for Kennedy-Johnson Middle East advisor and arch-Zionist Arthur Krim’s United Artists, which had previously released the similarly themed Manchurian Candidate. Polanski relinquished the project after the Tate-LaBianca murders [29], and Mike Nichols would eventually direct The Day of the Dolphin in 1973 with a different script for Avco Embassy. Interestingly attached to the realized filming, however, were Polanski’s friends and collaborators Richard and Anthea Sylbert, who contributed production and costume design.

More pertinently, Ed Sanders has indicated that Tate’s murder may have been carried out as part of the cover-up of the truth of the RFK assassination, revealing in Sharon Tate: A Life that Sirhan was reported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have been “attending parties on behalf of the Satanist English cult [the Process Church], including one at Sharon Tate’s place.” Sanders points to a possible motivation starkly at odds with Vincent Bugliosi’s propagation of the legend of Charles Manson’s apocalyptic “Helter Skelter” war: “INS criminal investigator Richard Smith’s report stated that an LA law enforcement agency had a female informant who averred that the English Satanist group had commissioned Manson to kill Sharon Tate,” Sanders writes: “The reason for the contract […] was ‘something that she unfortunately overheard that she was not supposed to overhear either in regards to Sirhan Sirhan or about Sirhan Sirhan.’” [30]

Former intelligence officer Emile Zola Berman contributed to Sirhan Sirhan's "defense" along with Grant Cooper, who also represented CIA mobster Johnny Roselli 

Long suspected of having been an intelligence front of some sort, the Scientology-offshoot Process Church was founded by Scottish prostitute Mary Ann MacLean and her husband, Robert Moor, who assumed the name Robert de Grimston in 1965, the year the pair launched their cult. The following year they established a presence at 2 Balfour Place in London’s ritzy Mayfair section, after which the group shifted into a peripatetic phase, wandering from one country to another. In 1967, “Robert and Mary Ann set off on their travels through the Middle East in April, arriving in Israel in May,” according to Timothy Wyllie’s book Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment [31]. The two leaders “took off with a couple of the inner circle for travels in Greece, Israel, Egypt and around the Mediterranean,” Wyllie writes: “With their penchant for secrecy, the Omega [i.e., the cult’s leadership] made sure no one beneath the rank of Master knew of this trip.” [32]

“In late 1967 the Process spores spewed out to America,” Sanders writes in The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion [33]. They established themselves in New Orleans – interestingly, during the period when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was conducting his investigation and prosecution of Clay Shaw as a conspirator in the John F. Kennedy assassination – and were incorporated as the Process Church of the Final Judgment in what Sanders calls a “non-profit religious scam” at 1205 Royal St. [34]. “They talked about the Gray Forces of moderation which needed to be annihilated” and left town reportedly after having “encountered trouble with the local authorities in New Orleans.” [35] The incorporation papers for the Process Church of the Final Judgment had been drawn up by local operative Tommy Baumler [36], “an attorney who had worked for [Oswald handler Guy] Banister as one of his student spies.” [37] Kerry Thornley, an extremely shady Oswald-connected character who was investigated by Garrison, claimed in an interview not long before he died that “one common thread […] runs through all this [assassination] stuff and that’s an organization that was organized shortly after Kennedy’s death and that was the Process Church,” which, in Thornley’s account, “tried to frame me in New Orleans for something I didn’t do, which had been my actual participation in the assassination, which I didn’t realize until later. They were involved in [Robert?] Kennedy’s death somehow, I believe.” [38]

“One night in early March 1968, De Grimston called from Los Angeles and gave the Process two days to pack up and come to Los Angeles,” launching “a convoy of seven Process automobiles containing thirty people and fourteen Alsatian dogs […]” – three months before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. According to Sanders, LA real estate mogul Artie Aaron (whose name Sanders gives as Aarons) made a large house at 1882 Cochrane available to the Process Church in exchange for “repairs and small construction jobs at the various properties” Aaron owned [39]. “It is possible that the Process had a baleful influence on Sirhan Sirhan since Sirhan is known, in the spring of ’68, to have frequented clubs in Hollywood in the same turf as the Process was proselytizing,” Sanders continues:

Sirhan was very involved in occult pursuits. He has talked several times subsequent to Robert Kennedy’s death about an occult group from London which he knew about and which he really wanted to go to London to see.

There was one Process member named Lloyd who was working as a chef for one of the large Los Angeles hotels, either the Ambassador or the Sheraton. […]

It is probably a coincidence that Sirhan seems to have visited a friend who worked in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel the day before he [is alleged to have] shot Senator Kennedy. [40]

MacLean’s group would rebrand as the Foundation Faith of the Millennium in the seventies, employing an embellished Magen David as an emblem. “As a Jew, the Star of David made me feel safe,” confesses Ruth Strassberg, who belonged to the cult [41]. As an informative epilogue to the story of the Process Church, it may help to corroborate the group’s posited role as an intelligence asset to note that lawyer John Markham, who served as an agent for the Process and its successor entity during the seventies [42], would go on to serve as an assistant US attorney at the Department of Justice, in which capacity he would conduct a prosecution of eccentric anti-Zionist political figure Lyndon LaRouche for fraud in 1988, publicly ridiculing “defense claims that LaRouche was a target of infiltration by the FBI and the CIA, which is prohibited by law from spying domestically.” [43] “The defense successfully compelled the FBI to declassify documents that disclosed that three intelligence operatives had been directed by high-level officials in the FBI and CIA to infiltrate the LaRouche organization,” recounts Ron Christenson’s book Political Trials in History: “One such memo was from retired Maj. Gen. Richard Secord to Lt. Col. Oliver North” [44].

Three LAPD detectives assigned to the Tate-LaBianca case – Sgt. Frank Patchett, Sgt. Michael McGann, and Sgt. Manuel “Chick” Gutierrez – had recently served as part of Special Unit Senator (SUS), tasked with investigating the RFK assassination [45]. “SUS members predominantly came from military backgrounds,” observes Lisa Pease: “Charles Higbie, who controlled a good portion of the investigation, had been in the Marine Corps for five years and in Intelligence” in the USMC Reserve. Moreover:

Frank Patchett, the man who turned the Kennedy “head bullet” over to DeWayne Wolfer after it had taken a trip to Washington with an FBI man, had spent four years in the Navy, where his specialty was Cryptography. The Navy and Marines figured prominently in the background of a good many of the SUS investigators. The editor of the SUS Final Report, however, had spent eight years of active duty with the Air Force, as a Squadron Commander and Electronics Officer.

Evelle J. Younger

LA County District Attorney Evelle J. Younger, who oversaw the RFK and Tate-LaBianca cases, “had been one of [J. Edgar] Hoover’s top agents before he left the FBI to join the Counterintelligence unit of the Far East branch of the OSS,” Pease notes [46], and rose to the rank of major general in the Air Force Reserve according to a profile in the Metropolitan News-Enterprise [47]. The SUS investigation, in Pease’s estimation, constituted a cover-up “controlled primarily by a few key LAPD officers and the DA.” It may or may not be relevant that Sgt. “Chick” Gutierrez, who reportedly “had privately voiced doubts about the police conclusion” that Sirhan Sirhan was the lone gunman, “died in 1972 at the young age of forty.” [48]

SUS operative Sgt. Frank Patchett made himself particularly useful in obfuscating the facts in the RFK assassination: “from giving rehearsed, staged ‘answers’ on direct examination, to almost babbling, extemporaneous dubious explanations of those ‘answers’ on cross-examination,” David Manning relates: “He became unable to utter clear and precise statements”, and he was crucially unforthcoming on the details of the struggle with Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel pantry after the shots had been fired [49]. Funnily enough, forming part of the “swarm of men” that “descended upon Sirhan, surrounding him” so that they “formed a barricade around Sirhan, one holding his head, another with a finger in the trigger to prevent additional shots, another grabbing Sirhan in a crushing bear hug” [50], was George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review, which had been founded as a front for CIA activities [51]. Plimpton would reward the Patchett family for Sgt. Patchett’s services when he launched the literary career of now-famous novelist Ann Patchett, Frank Patchett’s daughter, publishing her short story “All Little Colored Children Should Play the Harmonica” in a 1984 issue of The Paris Review – before Patchett had even graduated from college.

Another intelligence-linked figure who played a bit part in the Manson saga is public relations specialist Ed Butler, who “eerily presaged” Assistant DA Vincent Bugliosi’s narrative of a “Helter Skelter” race-war motive when he published an article titled “Did Hate Kill Tate?” not long after the Tate-LaBianca murders (various sources give different months for the appearance of “Did Hate Kill Tate?”, with The Manson Family Blog giving August 1969 [52], Mae Brussell giving October 1969 [53], and another source indicating that this was a headline on newsstands in December 1969 [54]). Butler was a New Orleans native and alumnus of the Army Force Management School at Fort Belvoir in Virginia who worked in advertising, took an interest in “psycho-politics”, and wrote in 1960 of “how a spirit of crisis had to be created” to combat communism. Among those Butler “recruited in New Orleans to help finance his propaganda efforts,” James DiEugenio reveals, was Clay Shaw, and Butler also “engaged […] Guy Banister, who was Oswald’s handler in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.” Butler was “in communication with people like Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, and Ed Lansdale, the legendary psy-ops master within the Agency,” DiEugenio goes on, and “a CIA contact sheet with Butler contains the comment that he was ‘a very cooperative contact and has always welcomed an opportunity to assist the CIA.’” Butler was active in helping to establish Oswald’s reputation as a Marxist fanatic in New Orleans media prior to the JFK assassination and “wrote a book in 1968 entitled Revolution is My Profession in which he attacked as communist infiltrators those whose tactics have ‘been to try to link the CIA with all sorts of crime, especially President Kennedy's assassination.’” Following RFK’s assassination, Butler even attempted “to sell the idea that Sirhan […] had been a disciple of Stalin.” [55] Is it possible that, in setting the tone for the public’s understanding of the Tate-LaBianca murders, Butler was only continuing his work as a Kennedy assassination disinformation specialist?

Gene Gutowski, Simon Hesera, Roman Polanski, Henri Sera, Brian Morris, Shahrokh Hatami, and Sharon Tate

Vincent Bugliosi, who more than any other figure helped to shape the Manson mythos, exhibited a complete disregard for ethics in his handling of the Tate-LaBianca case and coerced testimony from Sharon Tate’s friend, the Iranian photographer Shahrokh Hatami, for just one example of his unprofessional conduct. “His successful prosecution of Tate/LaBianca vaulted assistant DA Vincent Bugliosi into the stratosphere of celebrity attorneys,” DiEugenio summarizes:

It also made him a wealthy man and gave him an almost automatic TV/radio platform nearly until the end of his days: one from which he could pontificate on a variety of legal issues. That wealth and position was largely due to the book he co-wrote on Tate/LaBianca with established author Curt Gentry. Published in 1974, it was titled Helter Skelter and it eventually became the number one best-selling true crime book. […] Those sales were greatly augmented by a two-part TV film that aired in April of 1976. That dual airing set records as far as ratings for a TV film at the time. [56]

The 1976 Helter Skelter movie that boosted Bugliosi’s book sales was produced by Merv Adelson’s Lorimar Television for CBS. Adelson was a business partner of Las Vegas organized crime notable Moe Dalitz [57], who “in 1983 […] was honored by the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith with its prestigious ‘Torch of Liberty Award’,” notes Michael Collins Piper in his book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy: “Evidently the ADL did not see any problem with giving its highest honor to one of the top leaders of organized crime. Dalitz’s service to the cause of Israel was apparently deemed more significant than his activities in the underworld,” Piper continues. “And Dalitz was indeed an active supporter of Israel’s cause” and “the key mid-West contact for the Sonneborn Institute – the Israeli arms smuggling entity” [58] that “provided the Jewish Haganah, and later the Irgun, in Palestine with arms and money” during the forties [59].

The platform Bugliosi attained through his Tate-LaBianca celebrity was one he would more than once exploit to defend the finding of Lyndon Johnson’s Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. In 1986, Bugliosi lent his talents to the TV docudrama On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald, in which a “jury of real Texans […] voted to convict Oswald” [60], and in 2007 he published Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. If Bugliosi’s career is considered as, in part, a decades-spanning contribution to the project of propping up the establishment by reinforcing its narrative of the JFK assassination – efforts for which he was compensated with several book and movie deals – then might not the case that established his popular reputation have signified his initial demonstration of his commitment to this cause? After leaving the LA County DA’s office in 1972, Bugliosi was welcomed by the Beverly Hills law practice of Robert Steinberg. Melvin Belli, notable for having represented Jack Ruby, “said Steinberg worked in his Los Angeles office for 10 years until about 1975,” according to a 1983 UPI profile of Steinberg, then embroiled in a White House sex tape scandal. “Belli described him as ‘very reliable’.” [61]

Robert Hendrickson

Robert Hendrickson, Merrick’s collaborator on the 1973 Manson documentary – a production with which the prosecutor cooperated and in which he appears onscreen – stated in a 2012 interview that Bugliosi, Merrick, and Joan Huntington “all became close friends”, which invites speculation as to whether Merrick suggested or helped to shape Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter” legend or if the premise of Merrick’s Black Angels movie furnished the inspiration for Bugliosi’s narrative. It was Merrick, Hendrickson reveals, who “arranged access for Manson to grab the newspaper and show the jury the headline, ‘Manson Guilty Nixon Declares’,” arguing that “Merrick was also being sucked into being, not just a filmmaker, but also a participant in a historical event.” [62] Was Merrick, in helping to shape the public perception of the Tate-LaBianca killings, playing a part in the cover-up of the RFK assassination – perhaps as an agent of the state of Israel?

Actor and acting coach Eric Morris, who partnered with colleague Curt Conway in renting space at Merrick’s theater to teach classes, relates an anecdote suggesting that Merrick was not above engaging in espionage of a petty and ham-fisted sort. “Laurence was a little below average in height, with black hair that was receding in front and a bald pate at the crown,” Morris recalls in his book My Hollywood Stories in a chapter titled “Is There a Definition for Evil?”:

His eyes were dark brown, which made it difficult to see the pupils, and, wherever he was, they darted around as if searching for something. He leaned forward when he walked, giving the impression that he was stoop shouldered. He spoke English with an Israeli accent and always very rapidly, as if he was afraid of being interrupted or challenged.

Merrick’s ambition for success and visibility in the business bordered on psychosis, as he did everything possible to attain his goal. Many of those things were morally and ethically outrageous, and possibly illegal. He had visited Curt’s class a number of times and ultimately observed one of mine. From that moment on he was obsessed with wooing me away from Curt and having me teach for himself. He had an office behind his theater, next to which was a little one-room attachment. Since our theater had limited space to work in, I had rented that room to teach private lessons. Merrick approached me almost every day to convince me to leave Curt and come to work with him, although I always told him that I was happy where I was. He even said that he would talk to Curt if I was afraid to do it.

After using the space for a couple of weeks, I noticed that the mirror on the wall that connected to Merrick’s office had a section at the top that was separate from the rest. It seemed that a five-inch section had been added at the top of the original mirror. It was obviously a two-way mirror. In fact, if you looked through it closely, you could see into Merrick’s office. After inspecting it carefully, I discovered a hidden microphone tucked in behind the glass. Since I had a list of students scheduled that day, I continued to teach the private lessons. Every time someone entered, I heard Merrick move a chair in his office close to the mirror on the other side. I gave each of my students a little note I had written that cautioned him or her not to reveal anything private in the session, adding that I would explain later. At the end of the day I left in a huff, pounded on the wall of Merrick’s office, and walked down the street. He sent his nephew after me to find out what was wrong. I stopped, told his nephew what I had discovered, and indicated that I was going to report it to the police. It was one of the most despicable things I had ever experienced from another human being.

Eric Morris

“I never encountered Merrick again,” Morris writes, “but I heard numerous accounts of his actions with other people” – and the interactions seem to have been decidedly negative. “I was told that someone had gone into the dining room of Schwab’s Pharmacy (an actor’s hangout) and announced that Laurence Merrick had been shot and killed, and that the whole place had erupted in a gigantic cheer,” he remembers: “People were on their feet shouting approval of his demise.” [63] Circus performer Joe Wood, who had been a student at Merrick’s school, complains in his book Funnymen that Merrick lied “to us and Uncle Sam” and that that he “was a rip-off artist and paid the ultimate price.” [64]

Morris, despite boasting of having “a memory like a steel trap that stores everything”, unfortunately recalls some details less than accurately. For example, he claims that Merrick “was shot by someone while sitting behind his desk in that office” [65], whereas eyewitnesses reported that killer Dennis Mignano waited for Merrick in the parking lot and shot him before the impresario entered his office [66]. Additionally, Morris confuses dates. He writes, for instance, in his 2007 book The Diary of a Professional Experiencer that, “In 1969 I landed a very nice role” in a two-part episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre: “It was called ‘Strategy of Terror’ and it was about Middle-European assassins who had come over to America to kill a high official in the UN.” [67] Kraft Suspense Theatre actually ran from 1963 to 1965, and Morris is remembering the two-part 1965 episode “In Darkness, Waiting”, which was later reedited as the 1969 movie Strategy of Terror.

Possibly crucial to understanding Merrick’s behavior toward Morris, in view of Merrick’s entanglement with the Manson Family during the filming of Black Angels, is Morris’s acquaintance with Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring. Morris relates that Tate sought his assistance in achieving a convincing performance of fright, having been referred to him by Jack Nicholson, whom Morris also knew. “I finally told her she was beautiful and had the face of an angel, and I asked how she would feel if someone cut her face to pieces,” Morris says, expressing regret for what next occurred:

I told her that I had a very sharp knife in my pocket and that I was going to disfigure her for life. I put my hand in my pocket, where there was no knife, and began to advance towards her. Her face went white, all the blood drained from her head, and she started to scream with the most terrifying terror I had ever seen. I quickly removed my hand from my pocket, threw both hands in the air and embraced her, whispering into her ear that I would never hurt her and that I had just been exploring a choice she might use for the film. She calmed down but held onto me for several minutes. […] I think she was probably in the early stages of pregnancy but hadn’t yet begun to show. [68]

Morris, owing to his failings of memory and occupation as a professional faker, is not an entirely reliable narrator of events. His recollections are, however, of interest. “Jack was well acquainted with Rudy Altobelli and Stuart Cohen, the pair who rented to the Polanskis the estate up on Cielo Drive,” reveals Nicolson biographer Dennis McDougal [69]. Nicholson, who would go on to star in Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown and purports to have sent Tate to Morris, “was fascinated by Manson’s persona and the crazy way he looked,” according to biographer Marc Eliot. “And when Charles Manson went on trial for the murders in 1970, Nicholson attended the proceedings virtually every day” [70] – which would have placed him in proximity to Merrick, who “goes to the courtroom and gets statements from Manson personally,” as Syd Cassyd relates in a 1970 Boxoffice column [71]. It was also at Nicholson’s home that Polanski drugged and raped thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey.

Another celebrity presenting a busy node of intersections is Warren Beatty, who worked for John Frankenheimer in 1962’s All Fall Down, met with John F. Kennedy (and turned down the chance to portray him in 1963’s PT-109) [72], was part of the Hollywood contingent that attached itself to the Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign along with Frankenheimer and Sylbert [73], had his hair styled by Jay Sebring [74], was friends with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, and joined Yul Brynner and Peter Sellers in offering a reward of $25,000 for information about the Tate-LaBianca murders [75] – in addition to being alleged to have been in contact with the Process Church in 1968 [76]. He also boasted during the seventies of having “fucked Jackie O.” [77]. Beatty would appear in two key films inspired by the Kennedy and Tate-LaBianca nexuses: the 1974 conspiracy thriller The Parallax View, based on a novel by OSS veteran Loren Singer and echoing the RFK assassination, and the Sebring-inspired 1975 film Shampoo, with Sylbert as production designer. Shampoo, which opens and closes with music by the Beach Boys, who intersect with Manson through Dennis Wilson, also features Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas in a cameo – which could be interpreted as malevolent casting owing to assertions that she had had a fling with Polanski shortly before Tate’s murder [78] and that the Manson Family bus was “often” spotted parked outside the home of John and Michelle Phillips [79]. “The day of the killings,” writes Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Polanski “was in London with Beatty and Sylbert. He got on the next flight back to Los Angeles.” [80] In his biography of Beatty, Biskind has the actor making the following statement:

Roman did a press conference at the Beverly Wilshire, so everybody came up to my place beforehand. Then he went down to talk to the reporters, and told them he hadn’t killed his wife. They were dubious. It was impossible to escape it in this town, even if you were not friends with the people involved. The original version of Shampoo was strongly influenced by the killings. The story was stretched out over a period of months, got into drug running, and was headed towards an apocalyptic ending. [81]

Polanski’s next project after his wife’s murder was 1970’s A Day at the Beach, which utilized Polanski’s script but ended up being helmed by obscure commercial director Simon Hesera [82], whose only other credit at the Internet Movie Database is a 1972 documentary, Ben-Gurion Remembers, which was scripted by Michael Bar-Zohar, who had recently served as a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Defense [83]. A Day at the Beach was produced by Polanski benefactor Gene Gutowski, who also facilitated the making of Polanski’s films Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, The Fearless Vampire Killers, and The Pianist. Gutowski, like Polanski, was born in Poland, and after surviving the chaos of the Second World War he hustled in a US counterintelligence post where his ostensible purpose was “tracking down Nazis in postwar Germany.” [84] “From 1945 to 1947 I was a young counterintelligence agent in Garmisch, working hard, doing a good job and behaving badly,” he gloated in 1997 [85]. In his memoir With Balls and Chutzpah: A Story of Survival, Gutowski relates how he “quietly established a network of friends and informers” – which is to say, spies – in the POW and displaced persons camps and enjoyed a pleasantly gangsterish lifestyle, operating as part of what he describes as a “Jewish black market DP community” [86].

Gene Gutowski and Roman Polanski

Appropriately enough, Gutowski’s career in the entertainment industry began in the fifties with work as a production supervisor on several episodes of the Raymond Massey TV series I Spy. It was in 1963 that Gutowski met Polanski, connecting the young director with smut film producers Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser and setting him up in a stylish apartment in London where he could move in the circles of Playboy executive Victor Lownes, Warren Beatty, and Richard Sylbert [87]. As a 1973 Internal Revenue Service investigation inadvertently uncovered, Castle Bank & Trust in the Bahamas, where Playboy honcho Hugh Hefner kept money, was a CIA front operation where other depositors included the aforementioned Moe Dalitz. “Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Enterprises, like the other fronts which banked with Castle Bank & Trust of Nassau, is a CIA-sponsored business concern,” asserts Andrea Nolen, reasonably speculating that the Agency “probably collected useful sexual information […] through Hefner and his partners” [88] – further contributing to the circumstantial case for Polanski having been fairly intimately entangled with an international intelligence milieu. Among Polanski benefactor Gutowski’s other friends was Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi of Iran-Contra infamy. “With my good manners, social graces, knowledge of languages and of world history and politics, I was for many years Adnan Khashoggi’s favourite companion, one he would often consult on many business and private issues,” Gutowski writes in With Balls and Chutzpah [89]. “I was invited to most of his dinners and parties and at the same time AK took me along to many of his high-level business meetings introducing me as his ‘adviser’,” he further reveals: “Though a Saudi, he was totally free of anti-Semitic prejudices and continually dealt with Jews on a social, business and political basis, befriending Shimon Peres, with whom he met frequently.” [90]

Polanski, meanwhile, is one of the “closest friends” of Israeli spy and film producer Arnon Milchan, who funded Polanski’s 1981 production of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus in Warsaw “as an ideological expression, and an act of subversion against the Communist regime,” relate Milchan’s biographers Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, with Polanski funneling the play’s proceeds “to the Solidarity movement for the purchase of anything that they needed to support the revolution at its most critical moment.” [91] It was Peres, Gutowski’s acquaintance through Khashoggi, who had recruited Milchan and initiated him into the world of Israeli nuclear skullduggery. “Peres had negotiated with France to build a full-scale Marcoule G2 nuclear reactor in Israel,” write Doron and Gelman: “The reactor was completed and went critical in 1962, became operational in 1963, and it had produced its first nuclear weapon by 1967.” [92]

President Kennedy, though accessed and influenced by pro-Israel zealots like United Artists head and Democratic Party Finance Chairman Arthur Krim, was less than fully compliant with Zionist imperatives. “The Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations maintained close relations with Israel, extending economic aid to the new state, although they did not see it as a principal element in their regional policies and did not approve of all of its actions,” summarizes Rashid Khalidi:

Eisenhower had forced Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai and the Gaza Strip after the 1956 Suez War, and later Kennedy tried and failed to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s Kennedy came to see Arab nationalism and Egypt’s Nasser as a bulwark against communism, which was the prime American concern in the Middle East. […]

With Kennedy’s assassination and the advent of the Johnson administration […] new elements intervened.

Kennedy “demonstrated a reasonably good grasp of the facts and a skeptical assessment of the main arguments of both sides in the [Arab-Israeli] conflict. This skepticism,” Khalidi contends, “made Kennedy less susceptible than most American politicians to the pressures applied by Israel’s supporters.” Johnson’s “strong affinity with Zionism and Israel,” contrarily, “was reflected in his circle of close friends and advisors […] devoted backers of the Jewish state whose sympathies had to some extent been held in check by Kennedy.” [93] “President Kennedy made a concerted effort to incorporate a settlement of the refugee issue as a key component of an overall peace plan,” points out Walter Hixson: “Kennedy hoped that his decision to begin to sell Israel advanced US weaponry, which started with Hawk missiles in 1962, would incentivize Israel to compromise on the refugees and other issues, including nuclear non-proliferation. This exercise in wishful thinking,” however, “ran into an iron wall of opposition erected by Israel and AIPAC” – the powerful pro-Israel lobby group incorporated in 1963 [94]. With Kennedy’s assassination, an important obstacle to Israel’s realization of the status of a nuclear power had been removed, the road also being cleared for the conquests of 1967. The prospect of a Robert F. Kennedy presidency represented a source of grave uncertainty for the forces that had required his brother’s removal. During RFK’s tenure as Attorney General, the Department of Justice had sought to require Israel’s lobbyists to register as foreign agents [95] – rendering somewhat ironic the putative motive for Sirhan Sirhan, who supposedly was “motivated by Kennedy’s support for Israel.” [96] Tate, had she become aware of any of the many inconvenient details surrounding RFK’s assassination and expressed any misgivings or demonstrated herself to be indiscreet, might thereby have signed her own death warrant.

Merrick’s own dramatic and “apocalyptic ending”, to borrow Beatty’s description of the original vision for Shampoo, has an unusual and possibly fanciful connection to the JFK assassination, as well. Dennis Mignano, the bizarre assassin who took Merrick’s life in January of 1977, exhibited “a kind of magical thinking” in Merrick chronicler Brett Taylor’s words. In 1981 Mignano turned himself in “because he hoped the authorities would listen to his story about a vast criminal conspiracy. ‘He hexed me,’ Mignano told the cops.” Taylor muses: “Was it somehow related to his [i.e., Merrick’s] work on behalf of Israel? Did the killer have an anti-Semitic bias?” [97] The question of whether the shooting was related to Merrick’s Zionist activities or possible espionage is not an unserious one:

Dennis Mignano was four years old when he was enlisted to be in a magic act, thanks to friends of his parents. The vanishing illusion made such a powerful impression on the child’s mind that he grew up obsessed with magic and precognition. He felt surrounded by people who made strange predictions, often concerning a man being shot in a car, which he later concluded was a forewarning of the Kennedy assassination. His mind was further strained by unfortunate events. In high school, his house burned down. His cousin was murdered. His sister hung out with biker clubs like the Hell’s Angels and Gypsy Jokers and, when she was murdered, he believed her unsolved death was connected to these groups. He was convinced that these predictions he’d been told indicated a shadowy connection between the JFK slaying, the Manson murders, and the [1978] Mob robbery of the Lufthansa freight storage at the JFK airport. [98]

Mignano’s military background and odd behavior prompt the inevitable question of whether he was just a random insane person or, like Sirhan Sirhan or Marcus Wayne Chenault [99], someone whose connections and usefulness point toward a method behind the madness. Whatever the case, Laurence Merrick had cast his final hex, many of his secrets going to the grave with him.  

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Morris, Eric. The Diary of a Professional Experiencer: An Autobiographical Journey into the Evolution of an Acting System. Los Angeles, CA: Ermor Enterprises, 2007, p. 274.

[2] “Experimental ISPI Exchange Is Formed”. Boxoffice (July 23, 1973), p. W-1.

[3] Taylor, Brett. “Guess What Happened to Laurence Merrick: An Independent Director’s Offbeat Career Cut Short!” Filmfax no. 144 (May-July 2016), p. 86.

[4] Ibid., p. 87.

[5] Cassyd, Syd. “Backstage”. Boxoffice (November 2, 1970), p. W-2.

[6] “Lahav to West Coast”. National Jewish Post and Opinion (July 22, 1960), p. 14.

[7] “ZOA Regional Convention to Start Tonight”. B’nai B’rith Messenger (September 9, 1960), pp. 1-2.

[8] “College of Jewish Studies Enrollment Begins Tuesday”. B’nai B’rith Messenger (January 25, 1963), p. 9.

[9] “‘The Country Girl’ to Open Hart’s New Theatre 90”. B’nai B’rith Messenger (February 10, 1961), p. 8.

[10] “Chana Senesch Theme at Weinberg Branch; Merrick to Sueak [sic]”. B’nai B’rith Messenger (November 29, 1963), p. 10.

[11] Laor, Dan. “Theatrical Interpretation of the Shoah: Image and Counter-Image”, in Schumacher, Claude, Ed. Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 100.

[12] Glazer, Barney. “Barney Glazer’s Hollywood”. The Jewish Post (May 14, 1964), p. 11.

[13] “This Week’s Calendar”. Los Angeles Times (January 12, 1964).

[14] Cassyd, Syd. “Backstage”. Boxoffice (January 3, 1966), p. W-2.

[15] “Discount Theatre Tickets”. Studio Magazine (September 1966), p. 26.

[16] Taylor, Brett. “Guess What Happened to Laurence Merrick: An Independent Director’s Offbeat Career Cut Short!” Filmfax no. 144 (May-July 2016), p. 87.

[17] Ibid., p. 90.

[18] “Theater”. Coast FM & Fine Arts (August 1969), p. 9.

[19] “Theater”. Coast FM & Fine Arts (May 1970), p. 19.

[20] Thomas, Bryan. “Black and White Biker Gangs Battle for Turf in Laurence Merrick’s Black Angels”. Night Flight (November 25, 2016): https://web.archive.org/web/20170516111342/http://nightflight.com/black-angels-laurence-merricks-1970-biker-flick-is-simply-jam-packed-with-absurdities-semi-authenticities-and-some-ass-kickin-action/

[21] Taylor, Brett. “Guess What Happened to Laurence Merrick: An Independent Director’s Offbeat Career Cut Short!” Filmfax no. 144 (May-July 2016), p. 90.

[22] Valenti, Lauren. “Remembering Jay Sebring, Hollywood’s First Celebrity Hairstylist”. Vogue (September 22, 2020): https://archive.ph/kDUth

[23] Taylor, Brett. “Guess What Happened to Laurence Merrick: An Independent Director’s Offbeat Career Cut Short!” Filmfax no. 144 (May-July 2016), p. 90.

[24] Ayton, Mel. The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, pp. 6-7.

[25] Sanders, Ed. Sharon Tate: A Life. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2015, p. 94.

[26] https://archive.ph/IH4AF

[27] K., Rainer Chlodwig von. “JFK, RFK, John Frankenheimer, and the Mystery of Sirhan Sirhan”. Esoteric Brezhnevism (April 14, 2018): https://rainercvk.blogspot.com/2020/08/jfk-rfk-john-frankenheimer-and-mystery.html

[28] K., Rainer Chlodwig von. “52 Pick-Up and Two Dead Kennedys: The Echoes of the Shots”. Ideological Content Analysis (May 9, 2022): https://icareviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/09/52-pick-up-and-two-dead-kennedys-the-echoes-of-the-shots/

[29] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Dolphin

[30] Sanders, Ed. Sharon Tate: A Life. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2015, p. 266.

[31] Wyllie, Timothy. Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2022, pp. 23-24.

[32] Ibid., p. 61.

[33] Sanders, Ed. The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. New York, NY: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1971, p. 79.

[34] Ibid., p. 81.

[35] Ibid., pp. 81-82.

[36] Wyllie, Timothy. Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2022, p. 78.

[37] DiEugenio, James. “Alecia Long Lays an Egg”. Kennedys and King (October 30, 2021): https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/alecia-long-lays-an-egg

[38] https://archive.ph/BGWPG

[39] Sanders, Ed. The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. New York, NY: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1971, p. 82.

[40] Ibid., p. 87.

[41] Wyllie, Timothy. Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2022, p. 172.

[42] White, Carol. “John Markham, Devil’s Advocate”. Executive Intelligence Review vol. 16, no. 33 (August 18, 1989), p. 66.

[43] King, John. “Declassified Documents Indicate CIA, FBI Infiltrated LaRouche Groups”. Associated Press (March 10, 1988): https://archive.ph/UveUR

[44] Christenson, Ron, Ed. Political Trials in History: From Antiquity to the Present. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991, p. 246.

[45] http://www.cielodrive.com/updates/the-al-springer-november-1969-parker-center-interviews-tape-four/

[46] Pease, Lisa. “Sirhan and the RFK Assassination, Part II: Rubik’s Cube”. Kennedys and King (June 15, 1998): https://www.kennedysandking.com/robert-f-kennedy-articles/sirhan-and-the-rfk-assassination-part-ii-rubik-s-cube

[47] Grace, Roger M. “Evelle J. Younger: Related to Wild West Outlaws and to Nation’s Founding Fathers”. Metropolitan News-Enterprise (September 17, 2008): https://archive.ph/dA2fa

[48] Pease, Lisa. “Sirhan and the RFK Assassination, Part II: Rubik’s Cube”. Kennedys and King (June 15, 1998): https://www.kennedysandking.com/robert-f-kennedy-articles/sirhan-and-the-rfk-assassination-part-ii-rubik-s-cube

[49] Manning, David. “The Nearness of History: Scott Enyart vs. LAPD on the RFK Photos”. Probe (November-December 1996): https://www.kennedysandking.com/robert-f-kennedy-articles/the-nearness-of-history-scott-enyart-vs-lapd-on-the-rfk-photos

[50] Pease, Lisa. “Sirhan Sirhan and the RFK Assassination: Part I: The Grand Illusion”. Probe (March-April 1998), p. 10.

[51] Whitney, Joel. Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers. New York, NY: OR Books, 2016, pp. 1-2.

[52] Starviego. “Was the CIA behind TLB?”. The Manson Family Blog (February 26, 2018): https://www.mansonblog.com/2018/02/was-cia-behind-tlb.html

[53] https://archive.ph/9KKan

[54] Kane, Peter E. Murder, Courts, and the Press: Issues in Free Press/Fair Trial. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 26-27.

[55] DiEugenio, James. “Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare”. Kennedys and King (January 10, 2004): https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/ed-butler-expert-in-propaganda-and-psychological-warfare

[56] DiEugenio, James. “Vincent Bugliosi, Tom O’Neill, Quentin Tarantino, and Tate/LaBianca, Part 1”. Kennedys and King (August 15, 2019): https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/vincent-bugliosi-tom-o-neill-quentin-tarantino-and-tate-labianca-part-1

[57] Bauder, Don. “La Costa’s Merv Adelson Admits Mob Ties”. San Diego Reader (January 31, 2013): https://archive.ph/wtyUq

[58] Piper, Michael Collins. Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy. Washington, DC: The Center for Historical Review, 2000, p. 128.

[59] Ibid., pp. 86-87.

[60] Lindley, Robin. “Why Vincent Bugliosi Is So Sure Oswald Alone Killed JFK (Interview)”. History News Network (2007): https://archive.ph/hIJx2

[61] “Personality Spotlight: Robert Steinberg: ‘Sex Tape’ Attorney”. UPI (July 12, 1983): https://archive.ph/CbWig

[62] Dannelley, Ronnie. “Interview with Robert Hendrickson”. Ear Candy Mag (June 2012): https://archive.ph/sAcY6

[63] Morris, Eric. My Hollywood Stories. Los Angeles, CA: Ermor Enterprises, 2014, pp. 33-35.

[64] Wood, Joe. Funnymen: Life and Times on the Greatest Show on Earth. Pittsburgh, PA: RoseDog Books, 2010, p. 5.

[65] Morris, Eric. My Hollywood Stories. Los Angeles, CA: Ermor Enterprises, 2014, p. 35.

[66] “Hollywood Producer Killed, Thought at First to Be Acting”. [Ellensburg] Daily Record (January 27, 1977), p. 8.

[67] Morris, Eric. The Diary of a Professional Experiencer: An Autobiographical Journey into the Evolution of an Acting System. Los Angeles, CA: Ermor Enterprises, 2007, p. 285.

[68] Ibid., pp. 283-284.

[69] McDougal, Dennis. Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2008, p. 109.

[70] Carey, Matt. “You Don’t Know Jack (Nicholson)”. CNN (November 8, 2013): https://archive.ph/mv5dP

[71] Cassyd, Syd. “Backstage”. Boxoffice (November 2, 1970), p. W-2.

[72] Johnson, Ted. “Making of John F. Kennedy Biopic PT-109 Was Hardly Smooth Sailing”. Variety (August 16, 2013): https://archive.ph/3byI7

[73] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071970/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv

[74] Valenti, Lauren. “Remembering Jay Sebring, Hollywood’s First Celebrity Hairstylist”. Vogue (September 22, 2020): https://archive.ph/kDUth

[75] “Beatty Relives Manson Agony”. Page Six (July 3, 2009): https://archive.ph/2eb7I

[76] Sanders, Ed. The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. New York, NY: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1971, p. 86.

[77] Biskind, Peter. Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2010, p. 258.

[78] Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1998, p. 78.

[79] Jolly, Nathan. “Charles Manson and Mamas and the Papas: Manson and the Musical World, Part Three”. The Brag (November 21, 2017): https://archive.ph/vvOb2

[80] Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1998, p. 78.

[81] Biskind, Peter. Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2010, p. 145.

[82] Ayscough, Suzan. “Polanski Pic Found in Par Vault”. Variety (February 11, 1993): https://archive.ph/B3PMj

[83] Yanko, Adir. “Israeli Author Receives Prestigious Bulgarian Award”. Ynet News (July 13, 2018): https://archive.ph/xCd8h

[84] Gera, Vanessa. “New Film Tells Holocaust Story of Polanski Producer”. The Times of Israel (October 18, 2014): https://archive.ph/CJvWV

[85] “A More Tolerant Time: Letters to the Editor”. International Herald Tribune (June 25, 1997): https://archive.ph/wB1Go

[86] Gutowski, Gene. With Balls and Chutzpah: A Story of Survival. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2011, pp. 147-150.

[87] Ain-Krupa, Julia. Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010, p. 40.

[88] Nolen, Andrea. “Do You Have a Key to the Playboy Mansion?” A.Nolen (February 10, 2015): https://web.archive.org/web/20150212012053/http:/anolen.com/

[89] Gutowski, Gene. With Balls and Chutzpah: A Story of Survival. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2011, p. 280.

[90] Ibid., p. 291.

[91] Doron, Meir; and Joseph Gelman. Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan. Lynbrook, NY: Gefen Books, 2011, pp. 141-142.

[92] Ibid., pp. 41-42.

[93] Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2020, pp. 102-103.

[94] Hixson, Walter. “From Right of Return to Right to Starve and Kill”. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (July 30, 2019): https://www.wrmea.org/2019-august-september/from-right-of-return-to-right-to-starve-and-kill.html

[95] https://www.israellobby.org/azcdoj/

[96] Troy, Gil. “Understanding RFK’s Assassination as Palestinian Terror”. The Jerusalem Post (June 5, 2013): https://archive.ph/wip/GBxSD

[97] Taylor, Brett. “Guess What Happened to Laurence Merrick: An Independent Director’s Offbeat Career Cut Short!” Filmfax no. 144 (May-July 2016), p. 93.

[98] Ibid., p. 92.

[99] Judge, John. “The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre”. Ratville Times (1985): https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/Jonestown.html#p7