"Charlie tricked us. He tricked all of us girls, and then he tricked some guys. They say he's a con-man, a devil. And that he is."
So begin the recollections of "Squeaky" Fromme, who, like so many others in the Manson gang, wrote her rambling memoirs and harbored vague hopes of getting them published as a book. TIME has obtained part of a neatly typed manuscript that is a sometimes semiliterate mixture of blissful and tawdry. It is laced with descriptions of sexual activity and full of almost self-consciously repeated Freudian cliches about rebelliousness against parents along with a yearning to be dominated by a strong father figure. Apart from her contradictory beginning, Squeaky Fromme most of all expresses her adulation of Charles Manson and describes his perverse attraction. Excerpts:
We all came from houses with doors, doors that were to be closed when there were things going on that we weren't supposed to see, and when our pants were down. Making love was never shown to us. It was explained, as if a chore and a duty, hidden behind those doors. And little by little, action by action, we learned not to believe in anything, and that the word "love" was not understandable, so therefore, not to be discussed often. In essence, we learned all the guilt, the heavy guilt, that makes bad out of feeling good.
Out from under we popped, to get away from those doors, and the chore of it, and find something exciting, and do something that felt good.
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My father had kicked me out of his house at the height of an argument over an opinion difference. He had become so enraged. He told me never to come back, and that was all the severance it took. I had no place to go. I stuck out my thumb on a freeway entrance, going through all my tears to Venice, where I remembered beatniks lived. Afraid, with all my books, my dictionary, my eye makeup clutched to me, I sat on a bench staring at the ocean.
Suddenly, an elfish, dirty-looking creature in a little cap hopped over the low wall grinning, saying "What's the problem?" He was either old, or very young. I couldn't tell. He had a two-day beard and reminded me of a fancy bum−rather elegant, but my fear was up.
"How did you know?" I started to say, and he smiled really bright, and I had the strangest feeling that he knew my thoughts.
"Up in the Haight [San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury] I'm called the gardener," he said. "I tend to all the flower children." My mind was struck with the thought... that a gardener plants seeds, and I became more afraid and clenched my legs together. "It's alright," he told me, and I could feel in his voice that it was. He had the most delicate, quick motion, like magic, as if glided along by air, and a smile that went from warm daddy to twinkely devil. I couldn't tell what he was.
I was enchanted and afraid all at once, and I put my head down and wished he would go away, and when I looked up, really he was gone! And I turned my head, wanting to talk to him now with urgency. And as soon as I turned back around, there he was again, sitting on the wall, grinning at me. I had only conceived of such things in fairy tales.