How a Life Can Go So Wrong

BERKELEY —  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 recent history.

Why, almost 30 years ago, did a cluster of largely middle-class American kids glom onto Charles Manson and commit crimes, including murder, while under his thrall?

“Some people are just destined, I think,” said Fromme, who, at 49, remains Manson’s most loyal disciple, in a phone interview from federal prison in Marianna, Fla., where she is serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of President Gerald R. Ford.

But as Fromme’s unlikely and unauthorized biographer, the 32-year-old Bravin isn’t about to let it go at that.

And now his book, which Fromme read in prison, has her ruminating on the influences and events that contributed to her “destiny.”

Of course, there is another question that must be asked of Bravin, a third-year law student at UC Berkeley: What in Hades--no Satanic pun intended--possessed him to write a 400-page biography of a woman who was fading from our collective memory even before Rolling Stones tunes started showing up on Muzak?

Bravin’s eyebrow rises in the faintest possible hint of irony.

“Truman,” he says, “was taken.”

Then the first-time author tosses out other reasons--the 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 “Squeaky” based on public records, hundreds of interviews and Fromme’s own writings. His subject refused 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 the Manson “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,” says political satirist Paul Krassner, who struck up an acquaintance with Fromme after the Manson trials. With that in mind, Krassner recalls something Manson once told him: “I never picked up anybody who had not already been discarded by society.”

“He filled a void,” Krassner says. “And I think Squeaky is a reminder of that void. . . . Every cult, every gang, all the strange things people get involved in tend to be family substitutes.”

*

Thirty years after Fromme met Manson, this college town’s street corners still harbor clutches of lost-looking young people and shaggy-haired men who look as if they’ve stood glowering in the same spot for three decades. Bravin, straight-looking in a knit sweater, admits to a twinge of era envy as he strolls through the incense and B.O.-scented, stuck-in-the-’60s scene.

“Unlike the Chinese proverb, I did not live in interesting times,” he says. Rather, he sees himself as a beneficiary of the change the ‘60s engendered: “The questioning of institutions, experimentation with the social structure.”

Indeed, while Fromme’s tragic flaw might be understated as an inability to affect change through established channels, Bravin has played the post-’60s system with the finesse of Jimi Hendrix on a Stratocaster.

As a student at L.A. Unified’s Westside Alternative School in Venice in 1981, Bravin wrote a proposal to create a student position on the Los Angeles school board--then got himself elected to it. He earned a degree in ancient history at Harvard. Then, after a stint as a reporter for several newspapers, including The Times, he was admitted to Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school.

In 1996, he became a student member of the Board of Regents and stirred up the staid board with such success that few of his former colleagues recall his tenure fondly, says regent Ward Connerly, a firm Bravin supporter.

Before joining the Regents, Bravin had submitted a proposal to write a book on politics and education. Editors, he recalls, told him no one cared about that subject. But one editor suggested an alternate subject: Fromme. The historian in Bravin perked up.

The odd sweep of Fromme’s life is reflected by images on the inside covers of Bravin’s book. The final photograph--an infamous, end-of-an-era icon--shows Secret Service officers cuffing the red-haired woman after her bungled, apparently half-hearted assassination attempt on Ford in 1975.

But what makes that shot so haunting is the seldom-seen photo at the book’s beginning, of a freckle-faced Fromme beaming as she perches, in a frilly dress, atop the shoulders of boys in her childhood dance troupe.

Between those two shutter clicks, a whirlwind of history blew by.

Fromme was born in Santa Monica in 1948 to a stay-at-home mom and a father who worked as an engineer in the defense industry blossoming beside Southern California’s entertainment mills.

Her formative years in the subdivisions of Westchester and Redondo Beach 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.

At Westchester’s Orville Wright Junior High, she hung with the arts and drama crowd, including Phil Hartman, who went on to fame on “Saturday Night Live.” Their class, “the Utopians,” voted Fromme “Personality Plus.”

In high school, Fromme wrote poems for honors English classes and, Bravin writes, got her first taste of LSD. Well before that, 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 El Camino Community College and made a final stab at living at home. It didn’t work out, and that final familial failure, one year before the Summer of Love, proved pivotal, Bravin says.

“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.”

As Bravin writes the episode, a disconsolate Fromme sat slumped on a bench along the Venice boardwalk 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 “Charlie’s” budding Family, becoming, Bravin writes, his de facto second in command. Together, they rambled the West in a VW van and then a black school bus. Eventually, they slowed down, living for a while with Beach Boy 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.

Bravin quotes a Manson follower on the change that overtook the Family: “When it got evil, it got evil, like boom!”

On Aug. 8, 1969, on Manson’s orders, several Family members butchered actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, and four house guests in Tate’s Benedict Canyon home. Two nights later, Manson and some followers broke into a home in Los Feliz and killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

Fromme was not present at any of the murders. During the 10-month trial that led to the convictions of Manson and six cohorts, Fromme camped on the corner of Temple and Broadway in downtown L.A. to show her support. When the killers went to prison, Fromme went to work firing off threats and press releases trying to bring attention to the Family’s environmental agenda, which observers 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. It might be argued that the Age of Aquarius gasped its last wheezy breath at that moment, not with a bang but an impotent click.

*

Attorney Paul Fitzgerald, who represented various Manson defendants, says 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 says.

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, and says 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. 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.”

These days, Fromme tries to explain her father as the product of an increasingly stressful time, when people worked more to earn more to buy more to attain more prestige.

“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.”

Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted the Manson murder cases, says Bravin’s portrayal of Fromme is important because “the same thing could happen again. The kids are still out there,” he says. “They’re still dropping out, looking for gurus.”

Except for one brief escape in 1987, Fromme hasn’t been outside prison in 22 years. But she has an idea of what today’s young people are like.

“Some of them are world-weary already. Thirteen-year-olds are tired of it all. They don’t have much spirit. I think it’s kind of disappointing in a way, because they seem a little dead to me. They seem more cynical than I was, I think.”

Then Fromme, who is mainly pleasant and cogent, has one of the small snaps to which she is prone, a synaptic twitch that seems to span time, space and reality.

“But why are you always blaming Charlie?” she asks. “Charlie’s just one aspect of it.”

Fromme says 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, and I probably wouldn’t have been out there on the streets looking for a place to go the night I met Manson. . . . “

But they did meet, and now she recalls the plea--or threat--that she and other members of her new Family made from the corner of Temple and Broadway, 30 years ago.

“We said to the Los Angeles public, and the whole country, ‘We’re your children. Come and talk to us.’ ”