 |
LYNETTE "SQUEAKY" FROMME
|
|
From the Tampa Tribune, December 5, 1997:
Manson's Loyal Disciple
Bob Sipchen
Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, jailed for trying to assassinate President Ford, remains a follower of the man they called "the gardener," Charles Manson.
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Jess Bravin and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme never met, never talked and view each other across a cultural chasm once called "the generation gap."
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."
Of course, there is another question that had to be asked of Bravin, a third-year law student at the University of California, Berkeley: What possessed him to write a 400-page biography of a woman who was fading from collective memory even before Rolling Stones tunes started showing up as Muzak?
Bravin's eyebrow rose with a hint of irony.
"Truman," he replied, "was taken."
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).
Bravin wrote the book based on public records, hundreds of interviews and his subject's own writings. Fromme declined to communicate with him.
Now, however, she gives his effort generally good marks.
"I liked this book better than others," she said last week, the 22nd anniversary of her conviction. "But I can't say I entirely like it because I would edit out about 50 pages ... anything sappy, unnecessary, cliched, untrue. ... A lot of the early neighborhood stuff, the "darling,' "infectious smile,' "spunky, bouncing girl,' cootchy-coo stuff."
Longtime observers of Manson's "family," on the other hand, say it's Bravin's insight into Fromme's childhood that makes the most pragmatic and sobering case for renewed interest.
"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.
In 1967, Fromme enrolled in community college and made a final try at living at home. It didn't work out, and that final familial failure, the year of the Summer of Love, proved pivotal, Bravin said.
"She's confronting the universal issues of coming of age against this fantastic experimental background and happens to meet exactly the wrong person at exactly the wrong moment in history," he said.
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.
Fromme joined his budding "family," Bravin writes, becoming a de facto second in command. Together, they rambled the West in a Volkswagen van and then a black school bus. Eventually, they slowed down, living for a while with the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson and later at the Spahn Ranch in the San Fernando Valley and at a desert compound, where they ripped about in dune buggies, preparing for the political-environmental apocalypse to come.
Helter Skelter, they called it.
On Manson's orders, Aug. 8, 1969, several "family" members butchered actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and four house guests in Tate's Benedict Canyon home. Two nights later, Manson and followers broke into a home in Los Angeles and killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
Fromme was not present at any of the murders. But during the 10-month trial that led to the convictions of Manson and six cohorts, she camped in front of the courthouse in Los Angeles to show her support.
When the killers went to prison, Fromme went to work firing off threats and news releases trying to bring attention to her group's environmental agenda, which many tended to dismiss as fuzzy if not delusional.
Frustrated, in 1975 Fromme burst through a crowd gathered at the Capitol in Sacramento, where Ford had come to speak. The gun she flashed was loaded, but there was no round in the firing chamber.
Attorney Paul Fitzgerald, who represented various Manson defendants, said he was "blown away" by the scope and detail of Bravin's book. He says he is particularly impressed that Bravin made progress on the riddle with which Fitzgerald has grappled for decades: "How do you get innocent little girls to kill?"
"The book, although it doesn't explicitly set out to answer that question, shows you in the person of Lynette Fromme the kind of vessel into which a charismatic leader pours the poison, so to speak," Fitzgerald 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."
|
|
|
