LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 – The first thing former Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten did after she bailed out of jail a month ago was “go to the ocean and look into the distance without a wire fence between me and there.”

That is what she told reporters Wednesday in her first public appearance since her friends and family posted $200,000 bond to gain her freedom for the first time in eight years.

The occasion Wednesday was a brief court appearance at the downtown Criminal Courts Building, where her attorney, Maxwell Keith, successfully sought a brief postponement of her third trial for the 1969 murders of grocery chain operator Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.

After Keith told Superior Court Judge Gordon Ringer that his law practice “calendar was in a terrible mess,” the judge moved the trial date from Feb. 2 to Feb. 21 but said it was the last delay he would grant.

Keith earlier had explained that after Miss Van Houten’s three-month-long second trial ended with a hung jury last fall, he had begun a lengthy federal-court trial and thus needed additional time to prepare.

In talking to newsmen before and after Wednesday’s court session, the onetime Monrovia High school homecoming princess was initially nervous but amiable, gaining some self-assurance as she went along.

Is she optimistic about the outcome of the third trial?

“No, I don’t allow myself to think that way,” she said. “I just don’t know how it is going to come out this time.”

Miss Van Houten, now 28, was convicted along with Manson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel of first-degree murder in a 1971 trial. But while the conviction of the others was upheld, the state Court of Appeal ordered a new trial for her on grounds that stemmed from the disappearance of her first attorney, Ronald Hughes, midway in the initial proceeding. Hughes was later found dead. How did she feel when her second trial ended with the jury “hopelessly deadlocked” at seven votes for first-degree murder and five for manslaughter?

“I felt exhausted and down,” she replied, adding that it is still very hard for her not to still be “down” as she faces a new proceeding.

To fight that feeling, she said, she has been visiting friends and family “up and down the coast.” She is very careful to not reveal where or with whom she has been staying since she was released from jail.

Has anybody recognized her since she has been free?

“No, but I’ve been a little careful where I go. Like when I go to a McDonald’s, I stay in the car and somebody else goes in to get the hamburgers,” she said.

What has been the most difficult thing to adjust to since she’s been on her own?

“Planning my own time. After all this time in prison or jail, it seems strange to be able to decide for myself what I can do each day,” she explained.

She said she has been so busy “catching up on lost time” with her family and friends she has not taken time to go to the movies or other entertainment outlets.

“But I really want to see ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ she said, referring to the movie in which actor John Travolta is a disco dancer.

“Back before all this happened to me, I was into disco dancing myself,” she said.

One of those friends she has seen in the past month is a “boyfriend who lives out of state.”

“We have been able to spend a few days together,” she said with a shy smile.

She steadfastly refused to say anything that might identify the man.

“I don’t want to embarrass any of the people around me,” she added.

What about the reports that she raised the bail money by receiving a large advance on a book she plans to write?

“It just isn’t true,” she replied. “Friends, my family, friends of friends and friends of the family got that money together. There was no money taken as an advance from a publisher.”

But she conceded she may write a book in the future. To the apparent amazement of the newsmen who swarmed around her, she said that book will not be about her life with the Manson “family.”

“That would not contribute anything to anything or anybody,” she said, even though a reporter noted, “It would be very lucrative.”

What she is thinking about, she said, is writing a book focusing on her experiences in prison.

“I am not sure I’ll ever be skilled enough to do it,” she said, “but I’d like to do something to somehow make the prison system better from both the public’s and the prisoner’s point of view.

“There really is a need to change things from the ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude that now exists because it ends up too often as a waste of the taxpayers’ money,” she said.

She hopes to further her education, whether she does it in prison if she is again convicted of first-degree murder or as a regular coed should there be some other verdict.

“In prison they have a system for pursuing a college education and I’ll use it,” she said. “I think I’ll try to pursue a degree in literature, because I’m very interested in writing. But I’d like also to take some courses that have to do with the correctional system because of my own experience in it.”

Even though she was editor of the prison newspaper at the California Institute for Women at Frontera the year before last, she said Wednesday she does not aspire to work in the news media.

“My talents, I hope, fall more into fiction form, like writing plays. I’m really good at dialogue,” she said.

But for now, the third trial lies ahead.

“It’s hard to focus on the future because of it,” she said. “I yearn for it to be over and for society to let me be the person I am today, not that person who was with the Manson family, who was a stranger even to me.”

By BILL FARR