Loose Diamonds (3 page)

Three

Expensive Shoes

I
remember my shoes, the red patent leather Mary Janes I talked my mother into buying when I started preschool at that stuffy private place called Isabelle Buckley’s (now The Buckley School), which had a dress code. It was the shoes that got me thrown out of school the first time, for breaking the dress code, which called for a black, navy-blue, or gray skirt or jumper with a regulation white shirt and navy-blue or black shoes with laces. Okay, the first time I was thrown out of school I was four. In all fairness, I waited 11 years to get thrown out again.

That was also the year of my first crush—on Lenny Footlick—who, I discovered when I went to his birthday party, was some kind of piano prodigy or else he was just precocious and well-trained as even to my untrained ear, he sounded proficient but wildly untalented. Okay, I was a little precocious, too. Midway through that forced recital, I lost my crush. He wore a suit to his birthday party so he clearly belonged at the Isabelle Buckley School, unlike some of us who were just attending preschool and moving on. I wore my red patent leather Mary Janes to Lenny Footlick’s birthday party.

They remind me of the Maud Frizon pink lizard-skin Mary Janes I had no business buying 15 years later, as they were ridiculously expensive for flats, although no one had yet declared that you ought not to be buying lizard. I don’t remember who I had a crush on then.

But I blame my mother because in one of her more contradictory moments (as she insisted we take typing and shorthand so we had something to fall back on), she had somehow impressed on me that you must always buy expensive shoes. Implicit in this, which she repeated more than once, was a threat that somehow your feet would suffer if you didn’t. I don’t know what that means, that your arches would fall or the ridiculously high instep (which made buying anything but expensive shoes fairly impractical to begin with) would somehow disappear. Or if it was just another superstition, like putting a hat on the bed, which meant, in the theater, that you’d have a flop, or if a spoon falls, someone’s about to arrive, or if a knife falls, trouble’s coming.

Trouble was coming but it was hard to see it when I was five.

As opposed to a year later when it was evident, at least to those of us inside, that my mother’s complex (albeit fragile) but until then reliable response system was about to become unstable. Did it turn on a dime? I don’t know. Was there a defining moment—like an incident that causes post-traumatic stress disorder—or just a series of events that collected: an affair of my father’s, a play that wasn’t a hit, the loss of a loved one?

It ran counter to everything she’d told us, those kind of upbeat missives about being strong and pulling yourself up after a fall—“Everything’s copy,” “Learn to cope.” Good advice, though, as events aren’t always controllable.

On the surface everything seemed fine. Soft-boiled eggs were served in egg cups. Mommy’s saccharine still stored on the lazy Susan in a slim silver Tiffany’s box that I still have. The Wedgwood china still showed up at dinner along with sterling silver flatware on which their initials were engraved. The fresh and always in abundance Belgian chocolates in a covered Baccarat crystal dish on the coffee table in the living room were available at any time. The condiments, jam, ketchup, mustard, all displayed in an appropriate china dish. No store-bought cartons were allowed on her table.

It wasn’t a disorder (at least, I didn’t think so at the time), it was Mommy’s sense of elegance and style. But I wonder, now, if it was the last façade of appearances as the fashionable suits and high heels were gradually replaced by red stretch pants and strange sparkly harlequin slippers and prone became her position of choice.

I remember walking up Third Avenue when I was 17 and seeing someone who looked like my mom ducking into a somewhat seedy bar alone. I no longer lived at home and I hadn’t seen her for a week or so. It couldn’t be her? Could it? It was just someone who looked like her. But I realized when I looked in the window and saw her sitting at the bar, as she lit a cigarette and ordered a drink, that it was my mother in a place where her shoes had no business being, at all.

Four

My Afternoon with
Squeaky Fromme

I
t 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.