I've been reading the Stephen Davis biography of Jim Morrison, who could perhaps be described as a mixed-up kid who was hard to love who grew up into a seriously messed up adult who was even harder to love - a sociopathic high-IQ intellectual genius, yes, but otherwise a bit of a waste of space. Maybe if he'd lived it might have evened out, especially as it was obvious the Doors weren't going to last very much longer and the shark-jumping moment was looming on the horizon - take him out of the public eye and allow him to sink into obscurity, and who knows?
Anyway... Morrison did hang around with people who were on the fringes of the Manson Family (Davis tells an unedifying story of a group of Family members who turned up at a Doors recording sesssion, invited by Morrison, and behaved extremely badly), and Morrison himself was questioned by police after the Sharon Tate thing; no suggestion he did meet Manson or interact with him (but there are lots of "lost weekends" in the Morrison story).
What brings the association to mind is the photo of Charles M which appears on page 35 of this FT: at first I thought it was Jim Morrison in his bearded and unkempt 1970-71 "LA Woman" period. It isn't, of course; the man seen here is older and more raddled. But the resemblence gets you, at first glance.
The thought is - what saved Jim Morrison when he was behaving appalingly badly, thoughtlessly, narcissistically, and basically trampling on people - was his presence, charm, charisma, his ability to hold a room and get people onside regardless of what stinking thing he'd done to them and for them to allow it because they were clearly in the presence of greatness and genius and they were lesser creations. What if Charles Manson had the same drive and characteristics - but because he wasn't as blessed with looks and genius, he had a far smaller stage to express his own personality on? A sort of poundshop Jim Morrison who really went to the bad?
Davis does tell a story of Jim Morrison returning to LA after a "lost weekend" where he admitted he'd been roaming in the desert outside LA, hitching rides, bumming around, hookin' up with "some people"... the friend he was confiding to noticed Morrison seemed shaken up, not his usual detached self, as if something had really got through to him - Jim Morrison seemed oddly subdued, even guilty. Eventually Morrison admitted he and the people he'd hooked up with had "killed this guy and buried him out in the desert, man" - but he refused to say any more than that and changed the subject. The friend, who knew Morrison well enough, knew he had a habit of making up totally untrue tales on the spur of the moment and watching how people responded. But this didn't feel like the usual Jim Morrison-as-Walter-Mitty.... Morrison never referred to this again, and the tale is left hanging with no further reference. (This was maybe a month or two before the Tate-LaBianca murders. oddly coincidental).