by Amy Ephron
Four
My Afternoon with Squeaky Fromme
It was hot and dusty and the wind was blowing through the air so slowly like the heat had even slowed the wind. The ground was dry and rocky and that sort of pink color of an abandoned Southern California ranch. There was a ramshackle structure (vaguely resembling a house) that looked as if it hadn’t had proper care for years. Some of the window frames even empty of glass. There was a barn off in the distance in a similar state of disrepair. A tumbleweed blew through that seemed almost as lonely as the ranch itself. A telephone could be heard ringing in the distance. And the sound of a young man with a Southern accent saying “Hel-lo” in an elevated pitch that signaled his awareness that there weren’t any neighbors for miles.
She was sitting on the top rail of a lodgepole fence, its wood bleached white from the sun. She was wearing shorts and a v-neck t-shirt, pale-green with capped sleeves, that was surprisingly clean, her legs almost the same color pink as the ground.
I hesitated, clear target, standing just inside the gates of the ranch, and wondered if there were eyes watching me from all around. And then I walked over to her. Her red hair was cropped, brushed off her face, and flying in different directions, almost pixielike. Her skin was freckled and her pale-green eyes, clear and intelligent. Her voice was soft and high-pitched, which wasn’t surprising given her nickname.
I was wearing jeans and sandals, my feet already dusty from the road. There was the sound of a horse in the distance and I wondered, if I’d had different shoes on, if there could have been a ride that day. But I’m not sure even I would have been brave enough to take that ride.
There were rumors around about Shorty, the ranch hand, and that he was “buried” somewhere out on the range, rumors that had been fueled by his disappearance and the discovery, a few months before my visit, of Shorty’s abandoned 1962 Mercury, with most of his possessions in the trunk and a pair of his cowboy boots that were covered in blood. (Rumors that would turn out to be true when Shorty Shea’s remains were discovered six years later, in 1977.)
This wasn’t an afternoon visit to a friend. It was an interview with Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, one of Charlie Manson’s followers. The ranch was the Spahn Ranch where the residual members of “The Family” still lived even though Charlie Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and Leslie Van Houten were already in jail, accused of the unspeakably brutal and chilling murders of Sharon Tate, Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Jay Sebring. It was 1971 and the somewhat circus-like trial was in full swing.
I’d convinced a magazine to let me come to Los Angeles to cover the trial, partly because I thought of L.A. as home and partly because it interested me. Horrified me and interested me, about the city and the culture and the prevalent and wrongheaded notion that it was okay to push the envelope and anything was okay.
In retrospect, there were those in Los Angeles who said they had seen it coming, or an incident like it coming. The climate was too loose, too experimental, too trusting, in a way, and too wild, all at the same time. Doors were left open and people were bringing strangers home off the street, inviting people they’d just met at a club back to their place for a drink or something stronger, not following my mother’s rule of “Always know a person’s first and last name.” Implicit in this rule is, be careful who you keep company with especially if you’re dancing on the edge yourself. When the rules are, anything goes, something’s bound to go wrong. But the murders were horrific and rocked L.A. to the core. The violence of the murders was beyond anything anyone had imagined. And four of the suspected murderers were women.
The one who interested me was Squeaky. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. She wasn’t under investigation for anything. She hadn’t been present at any of the murders. By all accounts, she was innocent. And one of the things I wondered was why she stayed.
I was 19 and didn’t have a very good handle on danger myself, which is why I convinced a childhood friend (who had an Italian last name and a somewhat shady past himself and wasn’t afraid of anything) to drive me out to the Spahn Ranch to interview Squeaky. We had a friend who lived at the ranch next door and neither of us realized that “next door” was a three-mile hike, at best. Nor did we expect that the fear and sense of danger would be palpable in the flat, desert air.
Squeaky jumped off the fence to greet me, landing softly almost on her toes. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had been a dancer, a professional dancer as a child, as there was an agility to the way she’d been sitting on the fence, a sort of light-as-a-feather aspect. And it went along with that self-image thing of even though she was perfectly formed that her image of herself, as is true of many dancers, was slightly skewed. All I’m saying is, she was susceptible.
There was an openness to her that was disarming, and like I said, she wasn’t under any investigation for anything, so I wondered why she stayed, which prompted me to ask her how she’d come to be there in the first place.
It was like listening to a love story that you knew was going to go wrong, like a modern-day version of a Jean Rhys story with darker undertones or a Françoise Sagan tale that wasn’t going to end up with someone crying in the back of a Jag.
Her father was abusive. I don’t remember in what way, if it was alcohol or violence or a combination of both. And, even though her decision to leave her parents’ home may well have been justified, she was clearly at a willful adolescent age. She’d had an argument with her father that left her homeless (or at least believing she was homeless), i.e., she’d left intending never to return. Witness her stubborn nature, she never did return. As she tells the story, she didn’t get very far. She didn’t have anywhere to go. She was sitting under a streetlamp, on the sidewalk in Venice, California (in those days, a shady neighborhood at best). She was reading a book when Charlie walked down the street and found her there. They started to talk and as she explained, and I sort of understood it when she said it, “Charlie was the first person who ever told me I was pretty.” She hesitated and then she added, “And so, I went with him.”
I didn’t ask her about the murders. That was off-limits as the trial was ongoing. But she did say they thought the whole thing was a sham, that there was no way Charlie could get a fair trial, and that the Helter Skelter theory was sort of ridiculous. There were a lot of us covering the trial who agreed with her about the Helter Skelter theory. The idea that Charlie Manson had somehow been hypnotized by the Beatles’ song and that the murders were an attempt to create a race war in Los Angeles seemed a little far-fetched. There were rumors of more logical explanations—a drug deal gone bad, prior relationships between the victims and their attackers. But since Charlie hadn’t been at any of the murders, the prosecutor had to come up with a “conspiracy” theory in order to convict him, which was sort of brilliant on the prosecutor’s part and so “out there” that it was sort of astonishing that it worked. I’m not saying any of them were innocent. There was no question they were guilty. Except for Squeaky. And I just couldn’t figure out why she stayed. It was clear whatever train she’d been on had definitely derailed, and if you were fortunate enough to be able to jump off without even a scratch, why not take the jump?
A logical explanation for this would be that she was dumb. But she was smart and well-read and soft-spoken. She was, however, under the influence of someone who was arguably the head of a cult or a “family” as they called themselves. If they’d been a Mormon family (i.e., polygamists instead of murderers),
the state might have intervened and social workers would have been in evidence, but there was a kind of hands-off attitude around the state and aid was not in the equation. Stockholm Syndrome might have applied but that’s not very sympathetic in our society either as, a few years later, Patty Hearst, after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, would be convicted for bank robbery and spend two years in jail before she was pardoned by President Carter. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here by speaking about Squeaky Fromme and presidents.
We had a strange talk about ecology that was way ahead of its time, about waste and our dependence on oil and corporate greed, but there was an undercurrent of anger to it that was surprising in its conviction and, as I later realized, a precursor of what was to come.
There was a look of sadness somewhere between her eyes and her cheekbones—that I don’t think Charlie had initially put there—that had been there for some time, and might be always. So even though Charlie told her she was pretty, she was smart enough (and insecure enough) to think that that meant in Charlie’s eyes she was, but maybe not in anyone else’s, and that was why she stayed. She was definitely in need of an intervention. But the problem was, there wasn’t anyone there to intervene.
I wanted to tell her to come with me, now. Get in the car and leave. The problem was Tex Watson, who would be charged six weeks later and jailed for the murders of the LaBiancas and later convicted. His booming Southern voice could still be heard from somewhere inside the house, engaged now, in a heated argument with someone on the other end of the phone. And I thought if I convinced her to come with me, Tex would probably come after her. And me, for taking her with me. And there was the specter of Shorty Shea’s body buried somewhere out on the range.
Clem was circling around the barn now, eyeing us from a distance. Steve “Clem” Grogan, whose other nickname was “Scramblehead.” And the courthouse rumor (which would turn out to be true) was that he was about to be arrested for the murder of Shorty Shea. Clem walked over and asked if I wanted to have sex with him. I gave him one of those looks you give people in a situation like that, sort of quizzical, one of those, “You are kidding, aren’t you?” looks, softened by a smile because he sort of scared me. Even my Italian friend was getting nervous, now. I looked around at the ranch, isolated, abandoned, like a dead zone that had somehow closed itself off from any existing society. I cut the interview with Squeaky short and we got in the car and left.
But I kept hoping that she’d come to her senses, stop trying to be the spokesman for a cause that didn’t make any sense at all, and I couldn’t get over how strange it was that a chance encounter on a street corner had changed her life inalterably.
Six weeks later, Charlie showed up in court with an X carved into his forehead, some metaphorical statement that he had been X’d out of society. The next day Squeaky showed up on the courthouse steps with an X carved into her forehead, too, and I knew that she was lost—that there would be no turning back—and that any chance she had for a normal life no longer existed.
Four years later, in 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme would point a .45 Colt semiautomatic pistol at President Gerald Ford, in a bizarre assassination attempt for what she claimed were ecological reasons, made even stranger by the fact that there were no bullets in the gun. But the psychological underpinnings of the statement that she made in court resonates with me still. “I stood up and waved a gun,” she said, “for a reason. I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy water and respect for creatures and creation.”
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was sentenced to life in prison for the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford and was released on parole in 2009.
Charles Manson was denied parole for the tenth time in 2008. He refused to go to his parole hearing.
Five
Champagne by the Case
I have a theory that single women who buy champagne by the case rarely end well.
Disclaimer: I’ve been known to make generalizations based on a case study of four.
Honey Hathaway was the first single woman I knew who bought champagne by the case (except for a random movie star friend of my mother’s). In Honey’s case, it was Cristal. And let me say, right from the start, that I don’t actually know what happened to Honey, which leads me to my second theory that I’ve never tested but always believed—that in some way, the U.S.A. could be a perfect place to hide, just vanish, set up another identity and carry on.
Honey was also the first 23-year-old woman I knew who owned her own house. Big house. Spanish. With a step-down living room and a formal dining room and a sweeping staircase that would do Scarlett O’Hara proud. The rest of us all rented, lived in somebody’s poolhouse, had a roommate or an apartment on Fountain. Honey immediately painted the Spanish tiles in the entryway and on the staircase black, giving it an even more dramatic effect. (I would like to add that she did this herself in short shorts and tennis shoes with an electric sander and a paintbrush, down on her knees, crawling around half the time, which was impressive in itself.)
The street that she lived on had no name. It was a small cul-de-sac off Benedict with three houses on it, hidden in the front by a Buckminster Fuller domelike structure that blocked any view of what was behind. It probably had a Benedict Canyon address but since it was hidden by the street and you were more than likely to drive right by it without even knowing it was there, we took to calling the street “No Name Street” and named the house that, as well.
My friend Lisa, who is a casting director and terribly practical, thinks Honey moved to Los Angeles because she had a dream but it was a little difficult to put your finger on exactly what her dream was. I think Honey moved to Los Angeles because she needed a fresh start, a place where she had a little less history and a little more room to carry on. In some way, she needed a place to hide. And “No Name Street” was a perfect place to hide, for a while anyway.
Honey was gorgeous, in an old-fashioned sultry kind of way, deep-blue eyes, dark lashes, soft, curly dark hair, and her figure was a little round, not the least bit anorexic like the rest of us. She was full of useful (or useless) homilies like “Never sleep on your back. Gravity pulls down, you know.” She said it with such certainty that you were certain she was right. But then what side were you supposed to sleep on? Facedown. That didn’t make any sense either. She was a big proponent of some kind of horse shot (no clue what it really was), dispensed at a clinic in Switzerland, something to do with anti-aging and this was the late ’70s and she was in her 20s.
I wonder what she looks like now and whether there might not have been some kind of adverse health effect from what must have been a version of a growth (or female) hormone before its time.
There was a lot of speculation about whether Honey was an heiress because someone had to be paying for the mortgage and the trips to Switzerland, not to mention the champagne. She’d moved from Atlanta, but she was born in a small town in Texas. She once told me that the only oil in the town she was born in was at the gas station on the corner. There was something about the way she said it that made me believe she’d been raised dirt poor. But, like I said, none of us could really tell. And to my knowledge, neither of her parents ever showed up on her doorstep and she never went to visit them.
My friend Lisa thinks that Honey got by on looks. I don’t really think that’s true as Honey perfected other things, too. She was endlessly amusing, almost as if it was a honed skill, but she also got the joke if there was one in the room. She knew how to flirt, as if it, too, was a practiced trait. She always kept the table set, so to speak, just in case anybody dropped in. And she was g
ame for practically anything. You couldn’t help but feel she had her passport on her at all times just in case anyone made an offer that she couldn’t refuse. But I think what Lisa means is that Honey didn’t really have any aspirations. Almost everyone else who moved to L.A. had a goal—they wanted to act or direct or write or work at a studio—and Honey didn’t seem to have a definable goal. She had a dream but like I said, it was a little hard to put your finger on exactly what the dream was. Well, not that hard, really. I think Honey was looking for a husband. But the rest of us were all pursuing careers and wild nights on the side, boyfriends, certainly, but marriage wasn’t really in our sight line just yet, so I think we missed the signs. But if she was looking for a husband, she was going about it in a very strange way. She was a little rock and roll, a little Southern, a little old school, if those three things aren’t a contradiction in terms, but Honey, in many ways, was a contradiction in terms. And one couldn’t help feeling that the sort of Southern hospitality and rhythm she lived by were from another time.
The same could be said for Honey’s friend Shannon who arrived from Nashville shortly after Honey did and took up permanent residence in one of the guestrooms at “No Name Street.” Shannon was really striking. She was 6’1” and a runner, with light blond hair and perfect cheekbones and dark-green eyes that were a perfect match to the golden tan she seemed to have been born with, as tanning booths weren’t in the lexicon and none of us ever saw her lie in the sun. Shannon was in her early 20s, too, but she was already divorced and clearly a little shaken from the whole experience. She was guarded, to say the least, or at least that was the public face she put on. She was also born again. Her husband, apparently, had been quite religious. And even though she’d gotten away from him and clearly abandoned the notion of “no sex before marriage,” she kept a little “breadbox” in the kitchen with many slips of paper on which were printed daily psalms that she would pass out religiously if anyone appeared at the door who was the least bit despondent . . . “The Lord upholdeth all that Fall.” “The Lord is thy keeper: The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.” It was catching. One almost wanted a psalm (sort of like a weird lottery card with psychic possibilities) to be handed to you every time you walked in the door. Or not . . . It was sort of strange and contrary to the caviar and champagne lifestyle at “No Name Street.” I should also add that none of the rest of us were really religious (and most of us weren’t Christian), so what felt like an anomaly to me may have been perfectly normal in Minnesota or Louisiana or Texas. Certainly getting “born again” was gaining popularity in the rock and roll world and even Bob Dylan was getting “dipped in the swimming pool.” But Shannon Reed’s reliance on the “Daily Promise Box” was a portent of what was to come . . .