"Squeaky": An incomplete picture of a Seventies enigma

True crime author Jeff Guinn recently published a new biography about Charles Manson, who after more than 40 years since his trial for the murder of Sharon Tate and others remains a symbol of evil incarnate. Yet members of the Manson Family swore up and down that they never saw it coming, even those who did the actual killing on behalf of “Charlie” and his “helter skelter” theory of race war Armageddon.  Manson was really all about “love”—particularly to his most devoted follower, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. 

There was a time when you could never get “Squeaky” to shut-up; since her parole from prison in 2009, not a “squeak” out of her as she lives the quiet, anonymous life in Smalltown, New York. Guinn noted that one of the rare recent sightings of Fromme saw her in a car with a bumper sticker proclaiming the occupant as a “Born Again Pagan.” The old Squeaky is definitely a thing of the past; when Inside Edition caught up with her in 2010 outside a Walmart, she took a swing at a cameraman, while her tatooed beau looked like he was getting ready to "throw down." It was reported that Fromme's "boyfriend" was an ex-con himself, who had pled guilty to a manslaughter charge; both of them looked like they'd fit in quite easily with a geriatric biker gang. But if the 65 year old Fromme has changed philosophically, it has only been a matter of degree and her latest “religion.”

I was too young for the Manson case to leave an impression on me at the time it occurred, but I do remember the person who made the first attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford (followed 17 days later by middle-aged radical Sara Jane Moore). What I saw was this strange woman in a Little Red Riding Hood outfit, who added to the darkly comic proceedings by her bizarre philosophizing and uninhibited loyalty to this guy Manson who by general consensus was a man beyond the comprehension of the natural laws governing the universe. Fromme’s earnest little girl voice was oddly magnetic and repellent at the same time. 

Nevertheless, I was fascinated enough to uncover the only "exhaustive" biography on the individual in question, and approached the 1997 tome Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme by former journalist Jess Bravin with the idea that I was perfectly capable of “understanding” her. If any of the Manson women merited their own biography, it was freaky “Squeaky.” I was willing to see Fromme (correctly pronounced frum-me, something I can relate to that because my oft-mispronounced name is kit-tell—just like it is spelled) as a fellow “outsider,” except that I never sought to “fit in” any group or cult, religious or otherwise, being too cynical about human nature.

The fact of the matter is that I found this so-called biography tortured reading. To begin with, it was too “understanding” of the subject; it is one thing to pretend to know her “mind,” but it is quite another to allow it to go unremarked upon. For much of the book—particularly the first 120 pages or so “detailing” her life before the arrest of Manson and his crew—it was always “Lyn thought this” as if Fromme was actually ghost-writing this book, even though it appears the author never interviewed her personally during the research process. Although it may have been the intention to leave the impression that this was a “touched” mind at work, it failed because it was entirely too obsequious, too “fair” to Fromme, as if he was trying not to offend her. 

Fromme's story isn't advanced by portraying her as a "sympathetic" figure--which she herself would likely disapprove of--and there are entirely too many holes in the narrative. We are told that Fromme’s father was some kind of monster at home, yet we are not actually provided any evidence of this; the cold-shoulder and meanness he is said to have showed his daughter is stated as fact without the benefit of context. There is no explanation for this behavior, although it is revealed that during a certain period as a teenager she spent time in a psychiatric hospital, which the author never explores the veracity of or why. Fromme had two siblings who apparently were not interviewed to provide details of their home life; oddly, it is only said that there was friction between Fromme and her siblings.  

Thus we are supposed to believe that Fromme’s psychology was due solely to a stunted and unhappy youth, at least away from the dance troupe in which she was one of the "stars." Yet for the more discerning reader there is the question of whether Fromme was actually the cause of her own problems—particularly in light of her inconsistent behavior in and out of school and later on. Those who called themselves her friends would say during this period that they were impressed by her intelligence and “spirituality”—even to be made to feel “inferior” to her; however, others have suggested she was afflicted by schizophrenia. 

Although Fromme would later claim to be an environmentalist, in her wanderings between leaving home and meeting Manson she didn’t really believe in anything, at least not in the way the student radicals of the 1960s did. As much as some people may claim to abhor the actions of the Weather Underground, the issues that motivated their actions did resonate with many people, and from a certain perspective it did have a certain nobility of purpose. Although in her frequent expectorations to the press after the arrest of Manson she seemed fully self-possessed and committed to her “ideology,” we don’t receive that impression with Fromme. She was more likely a lost soul looking for acceptance and perhaps the affection she felt she never experienced at home, and Manson apparently also showed her a means to break away from society and reject whatever it was that was “oppressing” her. 

But back to the book. On page 71 you come across this curious passage, which illuminates the problem:

“Once, Charlie commanded a biker traveling along with them to die, and then restored him to life after he all but decomposed before their eyes. The point was not physical death—something that was just an illusion—but ego death, surrendering the lie that boundaries lay between individuals and their earth, between humans and animals, between Lyn and Charlie,” followed by some mumbo-jumbo Manson philosophizing. 

This may seem really “out there,” but this is typical reading for the first 120 or so pages of the book, when it is short on verifiable fact and long on mind-reading, or at least Fromme’s mind. When something is meant to be satirical, you have to provide clues within the prose that lets the reader in on the “joke.” Now, replace “Charlie” with “Jesus” and you’ll have a few hundred million people in the world who would call you an unbelieving heretic or worse if you say it was really just a “joke.” Perhaps Manson and the biker were in cahoots to “fool” observers into seeing what Manson wished them to see (as a “joke” or for a “fee”). But if the point is that Fromme really did see Manson as “Jesus Christ” and chose to see what she wanted to see through this prism, we should at least be warned of this with a dose of sarcasm. If this is what she saw, it would strongly suggest that she was suffering from some mental illness—or trying very, very hard to persuade us why she was so devoted to Manson. 

But this all speculation that we are not invited to participate in; the reader thinks “This is weird. Does the author think we’re stupid or something to believe this really happened?” It doesn’t help that the author rarely directly quotes Fromme in this section of the book, and when he does it is often in a “stream of consciousness” mode that is hard to take seriously, or has the suspicious feeling of being complete fiction. The tone is so sympathetic not only Fromme, but to Manson; by the time you realize something is seriously amiss (the actual murders come out of the blue and mentioned seemingly in passing), you wonder “Why did I never see this coming? How is what became before supposed to make sense of what has happened now?”

This is obviously not your typical biography. The first part of the book is told in a way that Fromme obviously would have approved—provided you didn’t care to know all the “details.” As mentioned before, we are told that Fromme’s father was some sort of cruel person, yet do we really know this? Fromme’s friends admit that they never actually saw anything other than a man who was taciturn and intimidating; maybe he was a mean-spirited, but the reason why he refused to speak to her for a time may have been due to his daughter’s single-minded and argumentative nature and refusal to conform to acceptable behavior. In fact, Fromme was an intelligent, vocal, outgoing, opinionated and sometimes conceited person—hardly someone who was supposedly “beaten down.” In fact, Fromme's often  frustrating and contrary behavior at her later trial was probably a good indication of what she was like as a youth.

Since what we are told in the beginning is clearly self-serving in nature, there is little contextual matter to make sense of what comes later. As noted before, that context could have been provided if the author chose to do more “digging” into Fromme's psyche. During the last year or so of high school she seems to have been a frequent truant. But was she? The author alludes to the issues at home, but later her father told reporters that Fromme had been under psychiatric care during that period. If the author had set out to write a straightforward biography intent on getting to the “bottom” of Fromme, he would have investigated this claim; surely there were evaluations on record kept by the hospital and psychiatrists who examined her. What did they say about her? It is clear that she later had a “problem” with dealing with reality, and there must have been some evidence of this potential. Compounding this failing, her friends and acquaintances who did contribute to the book were not required to offer any observations or speculation about Fromme that would cast her in negative light.

To do so would mean writing an entirely different book. After all, we are being asked to “understand” Fromme, and not judge her as a psychologically “touched” person who eventually became lucid (but still “touched”) in television interviews after spending a few years in prison to “dwell” on her life and the course it took, like the other incarcerated Manson women. To Fromme’s credit, only later when it was required of her did she hypocritically distance herself from Manson; otherwise she remained a staunch defender of the “positive” aspects of Manson’s “teachings.”

Only after the arrest of “Charlie” and his gang of killers does the book take a slight change of tone; “Charlie” becomes Charles Manson, although “Lyn” remains Lyn (from pre-Manson “Lynette”). I suppose this is supposed to signify that she was still the same pure, devoted but misled girl. Since readers wouldn’t tolerate more pie-in-the-sky fantasia when there was a lot of blood on people’s hands—after all, this is supposed to be a “nonfiction” exercise, and Fromme did at least for a time defend the murders even in prison—the author had no choice but to adhere to facts. Where before there was only hearsay, self-serving anecdotes and uninvestigated leads that stopped far short of “explaining” the real Fromme, there are many people who still have vivid memories of the murders and the Manson literature is extensive, topped by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s bestselling memoir Helter Skelter. Still, one gets the feeling that the author has done a considerable amount of editing for Fromme's benefit--even soft-pedaling the remaining members of the "Family" allying themselves for a time with the white supremacist gang Aryan Brotherhood.

The media was also far more diligent in trying to get to the bottom of this goofy-looking woman with the girlish voice after she at least went through the motions of trying to assassinate a president. This self-proclaimed tree-hugger—who also made acquaintances uncomfortable with her freely-expressed racial beliefs—was becoming less a sympathetic figure than a borderline psychotic, albeit an “entertaining” one. Guinn writes that Manson seemed genuinely surprised at the assassination attempt; after all, Fromme was his main support on the outside, and now she was going to prison for a long time.  A raid of her apartment found “threatening materials intended for mailing to corporate executives,” and more evidence of her unsettled personality was her attack on another inmate with a claw hammer, “screaming” that the object of her ire was a “white middle class rich bitch and doesn’t deserve to live.”

After 400 pages, Squeaky doesn’t really answer the questions we want to know about her. A book that purports for much of its length to see the world through her eyes is a major conceit. Admittedly, it might have made for disturbing reading had the author actually used her own words; TIME only consented to publish a page or two worth of Fromme’s unpublished “memoir,” judging it a rather hopeless mishmash of rationalizations to explain away what can’t be done so rationally. But as even Bugliosi admitted, Fromme was probably the least untruthful and hypocritical of the Manson Family women, which still makes her the most promising avenue to understand the Manson “mystique” that was “only” at its most repellant in its final denouement of blood.  That doesn’t make her more sympathetic, of course—just more disturbing.