Manson's True Talent Was Capturing Our Imaginiation

“All of us are excited by what we most deplore,” Martin Amis wrote in the London Review of Books in 1980, reviewing Joan Didion's The White Album. In the title piece in that collection, Didion's second, the essayist recalls sitting in her sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills on August 9, 1969, when the phone rang. The friend on the line had heard that across town there had been a spate of murders at a house rented by the director Roman Polanski, on Cielo Drive. Early reports were frenzied, shocking, lurid, and incorrect. “I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly,” Didion writes, “and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”