Decades On
An old story:
Jess Bravin and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme never met....Yet each is intrigued with a question about the same strange moment in history.
Why, almost 30 years ago, did a cluster of largely middle-class kids glom onto Charles Manson and commit crimes, including murder, under his thrall?
"Some people are just destined, I think," said Fromme, who, at 49, remains Manson's most loyal disciple. She spoke in a recent telephone interview from Florida, where she's serving a life sentence in federal prison in Marianna for trying to assassinate President Ford.
Bravin isn't about to let it go at that, however.
As Fromme's unlikely and unauthorized biographer, the 32-year-old law student has written a book that includes her ruminations on influences and events contributing to her "destiny."...
Then the first-time author tossed out other reasons—the recent California Heaven's Gate suicides among them—to explain why people should care about the story he tells in "Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme" (St. Martin's Press)....
"I think the most important thing is to try to understand why somebody like [Fromme] is susceptible to the kind of control that Manson exerted," said political satirist Paul Krassner, who struck up an acquaintance with Fromme after the Manson trials.
With that in mind, Krassner recalled something Manson once told him: "I never picked up anybody who had not already been discarded by society."
Fromme was born in Santa Monica in 1948 to a stay-at-home mother and a father who was an engineer in the defense industry blossoming beside the entertainment mills of Southern California.
Her formative years had the patina of postwar, middle-class bliss. As a star of the Lariats amateur dance troupe, she toured nationwide, brushing with celebrity on Dinah Shore's and Art Linkletter's TV shows and giving command performances for the likes of Annette Funicello at Walt Disney's ranch.
In junior high, Fromme was voted "Personality Plus." In high school, she wrote poems for honors English classes—and, Bravin writes, got her first taste of LSD.
Well before the dabbling in illegal drugs, though, her demeanor had begun showing traces of the increasingly troubled home life that sometimes landed her on the street....
As Bravin writes the episode, a disconsolate Fromme sat slumped on a bench along the boardwalk in Venice when a voice asked, "What's the problem?"
"What she beheld," Bravin writes, "was an unkempt, elflike man in a cap, sporting a two-day beard and a whiff of body odor, or possibly whiskey."
The man told the waif that in Haight-Ashbury, people called him "the gardener."
"I tend to all the flower children," Charles Manson said....
Though objective, nonjudgmental reportage, Bravin suggests the complexity of influences that shaped Fromme—extensive drug use and possible mental breakdown among them. But the book also points to a prime mover in the form of Fromme's father.
Although she vehemently denies Bravin's implication that her father sexually and physically abused her—saying that on the whole her childhood was happy—Fromme acknowledges the damage inflicted upon her by the first man in her life.
"He was emotionally abusive," she said. "He refused his attention. He refused to have even a conversation, and I didn't understand what I had done wrong. ... He began cutting me off at the age of 13, and that was it. We didn't speak for five years. He wouldn't let me in the same room with him.
"I think now that I had just grown up, and he was angry about it. When men are busy and working, or maybe women too, they can lose track of their children and turn around to find that they've missed the whole childhood and the kid now belongs to high school and other friends."
Fromme maintains she still loves Manson. She acknowledges, though, that under different circumstances, her path and his might never have crossed; her "destiny" might have been different.
"If my father had understood himself, he would have known how to talk to me," she said, "and I probably wouldn't have been out there on the streets looking for a place to go the night I met Manson."
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