PLEASANTON, Jan. 28 — We’ve become friends of a sort, Lynette Fromme and I, in the few months we’ve been writing and talking to each other.

I was there, outside the capitol building in Sacramento, the day three years ago when she pulled a gun on then President Gerald Ford.

The story I would write in a hotel room in the ragged slice of time between the incident and deadline described the panic set off by this white-faced woman in a flaming red turban and robe who had roamed crowded sidewalks in the hot still air asking bystanders, “Is he coming?” moments before Ford walked across the capitol grounds.

Of the stream of letters we’ve exchanged, mine was first. I wrote it shortly after she was transferred from a prison in West Virginia to the federal correctional institute here. I wasn’t sure what to say.

Lynette, Squeaky, Ms. Fromme… Which of these was appropriate? Let’s just talk, I wrote. Nothing heavy. Not about Sacramento. Just about anything on your mind. Could we set up an interview?

The answers would come soon enough.

“Red,” she wrote in an early letter, was the name Charles Manson had selected for her, one of his original followers, the one who had remained fiercely loyal to him for so long.

“Manson named us and other family women in colors representing the air, water, earth, wild-life and things we all need for survival,” she explained.

This was the undercurrent of all the letters. Some were as brief as a phrase: “Got your letter. Haven’t had time to answer it.” Others went on for pages. They were written articulately in a clean delicate script that looked as if it belonged in a schoolgirl’s notebook.

She was curious about the origin of my surname and asked if there were any oak trees left in Oakland. She wanted a subscription to the newspaper. She’d consider an interview.

In a phone conversation later, she said the interview probably was a bad idea. Time would be limited and she wouldn’t be able to talk freely. We decided instead to keep writing.

“We are keeping up on the little told man-created disasters involving the pollution of air, water and earth,” she wrote in one letter. “You may wonder if there is an end to it, or you may not care. When you want to know how to survive you will ask Manson.”

The “we” referred to herself and Sandra Good, another Manson follower imprisoned at Pleasanton for making telephone threats and conspiring to mail threatening letters to corporate officials. “Blue” was the name Manson bestowed on Good.

I took the “you” as a sort of universal reference to those outside — not so much outside of prison as outside of Lynette Fromme’s private world.

Even behind bars, hers is a world still dominated by Manson and his preachings of a coming revolution which only his “family” would survive.

“Manson is the realest soul your eyes could behold,” she wrote in a long, angry letter. “And he is the only one with the mind to see beyond the fears into order for life on Earth. Until you. see him, the last, as yourself, your whole world will fall to anarchy because none of you are sure. Your faith and trust is in your money. Your economy is unstable and falling.”

And from another letter penned in red:

“Air and water are natural simple things immediately necessary to all. It is the arrogance and complexes of small minds that sit squarely on top of these necessities and smother future survival in a useless system that whirlpools, sucking everyone down the drain to death.

“Our Manson family is no part of that. Whether we have to stay in prison for the rest of our lives we will not approve of a system that does not work.”

By RICK MALASPINA