Charles Manson and his followers settled in at the Spahn Ranch, in Los Angeles County, in the summer of 1968. After the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969, when followers killed seven people in the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, group members drifted away from the ranch. Some, including Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Catherine Share and Patricia Krenwinkle, continued to be devoted to Manson, long after his conviction and incarceration. Another member, Linda Kasabian, testified against Manson and was instrumental in securing a murder conviction against him.

Our scene begins on August 9, 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca killings, and two years after Charles Manson’s death of respiratory failure and colon cancer, age 83.

From a payphone outside a Save-a-Lot, in Marcy, New York, Squeaky Fromme is speaking to Catherine Share, who’s at a friend’s house outside Dallas. Squeaky is bundled up in a coat, her red hair whipping around her face. Even at age 70, she’s recognizable as the waif who pulled a gun on President Gerald Ford.

Catherine, 75, sits on a comfortable sofa, dressed in an embroidered blouse and mid-length skirt that bespeaks middle-class respectability, stylish silver hair framing her face. She wears light makeup, soft pink nail polish.

Squeaky fishes through a canvas bag, finds some change, sorts through it, deposits coins. Her voice is heard through static:

SQUEAKY
People walk around dead, Gypsy. They think they’re alive but they’re dead. You touch them, they’re cold. We were alive to the birds, the air, you and I. Trees recognize us when we walk by.

The phone goes dead.

CATHERINE
You there?

Squeaky’s voice is heard through static:

SQUEAKY
(aside)
You can’t use nickels and dimes in phones these days.

She deposits two quarters.

CATHERINE
Hello— Hello—

SQUEAKY
Charlie—he resisted the things that were destructive to the environment. Who gets to say right and wrong, you know—

CATHERINE
My parents were resistance fighters, you know.

SQUEAKY
To what?

CATHERINE
You kidding, Squeaky?

SQUEAKY
I’m not.

CATHERINE
I was born in France. My father was Hungarian, a violin player. Budapest Symphony. The SS would’ve yanked his teeth out, cut his and my mother’s genitals before they shot them. I carved an X on my forehead because of Charlie.

SQUEAKY
All the girls did X’s.

CATHERINE
Then Charlie did the swastika.

SQUEAKY
Yeah.

CATHERINE
Would I have done it if he asked? A Jew?

SQUEAKY
It’s just a symbol, Gypsy.

Catherine traces the space between her eyes where the X used to be. She looks in a mirror, applies some lipstick. Her friend signals to ask if she needs a drink. Catherine declines.

CATHERINE
I don’t have a single picture of them.

SQUEAKY
I threw away all the pictures of my parents a long time ago. Good riddance.

CATHERINE
I used to try playing Bartok Violin Concerto No. 2 that my father used to play. It’s extremely difficult.

Catherine plays air violin. A beep is heard on the phone. Catherine looks at it, presses a button. Her friend leans over and demonstrates. Another voice is heard:

VOICE
An inmate is calling with a prepaid card from the California Institution for Women. Will you accept the charges?

Call is from Patricia Krenwinkle (Big Patty, Katie).

CATHERINE
Yes. Yes. Patty. Katie.

PATRICIA
Squeaky? Gypsy?

SQUEAKY
We’re here. We’re here.

PATRICIA
How’s the weather?

SQUEAKY
Since when do you talk about weather.

PATRICIA
Just talking.

SQUEAKY
Remember the weather hitchhiking down Alameda Boulevard, Pacific Coast Highway, the old lemon groves, Katie—

PATRICIA
Our voices filled the canyons.

CATHERINE
(singing a Charles Manson tune) When I was a little boy
I used to hang my feet In the muddy waters
That run through your streams Get on home, get on home
Come on home little children, come on home

Patricia and Squeaky join in, their voices rising in girlish melancholy choir. It stops abruptly.

SQUEAKY
Those songs are still in the canyons.

CATHERINE
You know, you lie out there in the sun, all the colors washed away, these lizards and coyotes and scorpions turning into symbols. Hopalong Cassidy comes riding out of the heat coming off the dirt road, and you’re tripping your brains out.

CATHERINE
Remember Clayton Moore that time?

PATRICIA
Oh yeah, yeah.

CATHERINE
Supposedly they did some shooting there. The actual Lone Ranger.

SQUEAKY
Charlie didn’t like it one bit.

CATHERINE
Clayton Moore was wearing the mask when he came to the ranch. A weirdo among weirdos. We were all wearing Indian costumes, tripping. Tex asked why he wasn’t in black and white. Clayton Moore said the Lone Ranger was in color one year. No, it was black and white, Tex said. Only we lived in color, Tex said. He’s talking to the Lone Ranger, who’s wearing this mask. We’re wearing our Indian costumes. That’s fucked up. Tex wanted to kill him too. Tex used to wear real six-shooters around.

SQUEAKY
He would have.

PATRICIA
He showed him a knife.

SQUEAKY
What did he do?

PATRICIA
He laughed. Clayton Moore laughed.

SQUEAKY
Wrong thing.

PATRICIA
He would have killed him. Tex. One more second. Then Clayton Moore drove off in his silver car. Hi ho, Silver.

SQUEAKY
Clayton Moore was lucky to get away with his life.

PATRICIA
Tex took a shot at the Lone Ranger’s car with his six-shooter. Remember?

CATHERINE
It got so, I don’t know, after a while the sex got spoiled. It got all mixed up with who wanted to fuck who. A bourgeois nightmare. Possessiveness. You don’t want to fuck the guy who wants to fuck you. It got sometimes where you wanted to leave. I didn’t trust myself to be who I was. I had to be someone someone wanted me to be.

SQUEAKY
Charlie was tender. People don’t know. He was a tender lover. His body like a snake’s.

CATHERINE
Your breasts felt like they were having their own orgasm.

SQUEAKY
Charlie was real.

CATHERINE
Charlie was a salesman, parody of a traveling door-to-door guy. A petty crook. A parody of Christ, playing parody crucifixion back of Incase Place.

PATRICIA
We bought everything in his travel case.

CATHERINE
Are we really talking about that?

PATRICIA
Let’s not.

CATHERINE
Could have been any one of us got picked.

SQUEAKY
When are you free? My parents had disowned me, so I disowned them.

CATHERINE
My parents committed suicide in a cellar in Auvergne as the SS was closing in on them.

SQUEAKY
You don’t have to live your life the way people say. Live the way the universe tells you, why don’t you.

CATHERINE
We wanted to get caught, you know.

SQUEAKY
Don’t be ridiculous.

CATHERINE
Charlie knew it. After a while we didn’t want to live lives of resistance. We were tired of it.

PATRICIA
Tex was the one who lived it. He was a killer inside. The rest were only on the outside.

SQUEAKY
That’s a lie, Katie. Nobody put that knife in your hand. You put a knife in your hand. No one made you chase that woman into the yard, no one held your hand while you stuck a fork in her belly. Over and over. No one made you go the next night, scribbling the walls with blood.

CATHERINE
Well, maybe no Tex, no dead Sharon Tate. No dead LaBiancas. He strung Sharon and the hair stylist together. Tex shot the kid in the car. Sometimes I can’t remember the names of all the others.

SQUEAKY
My mind wasn’t controlled. No way.

PATRICIA
I was in a daze.

SQUEAKY
Well, my mind and body were clear.

PATRICIA
Well, after the LaBianca thing, we hitchhiked and got picked up by a real nice couple. Sort of like the LaBiancas. Chatty. The woman had chipped fingernail polish and one eye bluer than the other. We took a wrong turn, and everybody laughed. Tex would’ve killed them. Taken their car. Leslie was asleep in the back seat. Tex was the one who tied up everybody both nights: Sharon, the LaBiancas. Tex climbed the pole, cut the wires. Tex killed em.

SQUEAKY
We were fighting a war to save trees, oceans, ground. Who sent all those kids to be killed in Vietnam? What was that about?

PATRICIA
That’s stupid.

CATHERINE
Is it? An acid trip, religion, an orgy, has to climax. Living in the desert, wandering around looking for holes in the universe, eventually you’ve got to find a real hole.

SQUEAKY
Or give up, you’re saying.

The phone goes silent. At her friend’s house, Catherine presses a button on the phone. We see a woman calling from a cellphone in her truck, driving backwoods trails in Maine. Her voice cuts in and out. Linda Kasabian.

LINDA
Well, well—

SQUEAKY
I don’t need to talk to that woman.

LINDA
Squeaky—

SQUEAKY
Judas.

LINDA
I just wanted to talk to Catherine and Katie.

CATHERINE
Hush. For god’s sake—

LINDA
I was just looking for some place to set my head down back then.

PATRICIA
We were all lonely, Linda.

LINDA
Yeah.

PATRICIA
Charlie happened to saunter down Ventura Boulevard, a nothing little twerp, trying to fit in, trying to create himself, but he felt our loneliness. He played it that way. It was our own loneliness that drove us to madness and despond. I felt it in my intestines, my neck muscles, my vagina—loneliness, I was desperate to be part of the jumble, the singing, the disorder, the smells of hamburgers coming from the pavement, but I was nothing. Instead in my loneliness and wantingness I became a monster, or someone acting like being a monster could bring love to the world. I was chosen to kill, and that’s what I did so I’d know how to be loving. All our loneliness was unquenchable. That’s what you try to explain but can’t.

CATHERINE
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Katie.

PATRICIA
Am I? Every night for 17,634 nights, I climb into a bunk, pull a blanket over myself, try to claim a sliver of sky, and shiver myself to a sleep that never really comes, paying for trying not to be lonely. I deserve it. I do. But Gypsy—you go to a nice house, call your children on the telephone like a mother nothing un-mother-like ever happened to, go to your pretty church, drive a pretty car, like nothing happened. Like you never showed your beautiful tits in that movie, never cut an X on your forehead, never shot up a Western Surplus store to get a couple hundred rifles to hijack a plane and kill a passenger an hour till Charlie got out.

CATHERINE
I was the driver.

PATRICIA
You would have killed Barbara in Hawaii too. You know it. Maybe Clayton Moore. But it so happened you’re where you are. No offense. Seriously. You’re still me with another ending.

LINDA
Did it ever occur to you Charlie knew who had it in them? You? Me?

CATHERINE
Or he walked by, eeny, meeny, miney, moe.

SQUEAKY
We all had it. Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.

LINDA
Because is the question and the answer.

SQUEAKY
Linda. Can you please stop talking nonsense please?

CATHERINE
We were dancers and beauty queens and daughters of spacemen and violin players and nuns and students and mothers— That’s what we were. Was it because? Because because was only so much of it. Charlie gave his little Dale Carnegie patter to every pretty girl with dirty feet and stringy hair sitting at a bus stop on Melrose Avenue. Strummed his guitar. He cast a wide net. It wasn’t us just because— How many dirty lonely kids were on Melrose and Vine in 1968? Hitchhiking the PCH?

LINDA
I was nothing. Twenty years old, divorced a couple times, one kid, another in the oven. Twenty years old. I would have ended up a file clerk or checkout in a pet store. Gypsy brought me to the ranch in July, and one month later Wojciech Frykowski crumpled down on Roman Polanski’s lawn in front of me, gurgling, his eyes like dried up fruit, you know like comes in a plastic bag. His fingernails with someone’s skin under them. He was handsome, more delicate than in pictures. Tex stabbed him a hundred times. I watched.

CATHERINE
There was meaning— There had to have been. It’s too much to think otherwise.

LINDA
What’s meaning supposed to mean?

A disembodied voice comes on the line.

VOICE
The inmate has five minutes.

PATRICIA
I got out of nun school in Alabama, and was crashing with my sister in Manhattan Beach, till I met Squeaky at a bus stop. She went by Lynette then. Lynette. Me and Charlie and Lynette were crashing in Topanga Canyon, and sometimes drove out into the desert in Charlie’s black bus. Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona. Shoplifting Twinkies and keychains with names of the tourist on them, tripping and playing guitars and tambourines. The first morning I slept at the ranch I woke up with someone’s arms around me. I didn’t care whose. I turned over and kissed her, and touched her hair. My mouth was dry from the dust, but hers was like an oasis, it tasted like Wrigley’s. We made love on the boxspring while someone cooked breakfast on a hotplate, and dogs trotted in and out and we flicked off the flies. I didn’t know whose mouth it was, but it knew me, it knew everything I was thinking and wanted from life, and nothing else mattered except that it kept on kissing me. It belonged to me, and there was a voice as soft as music you don’t know where it’s coming from in the night.