Who is Lynnette (“Squeaky,” “Red”) Fromme and why can she still attract public attention? The initial answer, of course, is her association with the world’s most notorious criminal, Charles Manson.
Lynnette Fromme and Charles Manson were together for only two years when they were abruptly separated by the latter’s arrest for his part in the brutal Tate-LaBianca mass murders. Squeaky, as Fromme is usually called, was not among the killers. But the hoopla surrounding Manson’s supposed domination of his homicidal hippie “Family,” together with the cartoonish Helter Skelter motive presented in court and in the best-selling book of the same name, secured Charles Manson a permanent place in the halls of infamy.
Even a quarter century after the fact, Manson’s pic is dug out of journalist’s files on days when real news is slow. When “A Current Affair” devoted a half-hour to a Manson retrospective a few years ago, Fromme was briefly interviewed and professed her continuing love for Manson. She said, “If they would just put us together, even if it was in a cage, I wouldn’t care.” The wish is rather humble. As well as perfectly futile.
Why is Fromme so grotesque? She is not a “real” assassin. In her own famous words, the gun she pointed at President Ford “didn’t go off.” Indeed, her supposed attempt on his life may well have been intended to fail.
Fromme’s true significance is obscured by her association with the self-indulgence of the “sex and drug cult” 60s. Her devotion to Charles Manson has been, of necessity, an awesomely chaste one. Waiting for decades, and waiting in vain, for the man she loves, Squeaky Fromme has lived out one of the primal myths of Western civilization. She is the modern world’s Penelope. Perhaps it says something about our era that this Penelope appears to the general public as a monster, rather than a saint, of faithfulness.
