PLEASANTON, Jan. 29 — Even if it means spending the rest of her life in prison, Lynette Fromme vows undying loyalty to Charles Manson and the special world he envisions for his “family.”

“I’m basically scheduled to go to the parole board in 1985, but I don’t want out unless he’s out,” she told me in a telephone conversation. “We put ourselves in here and we are working for a better world. We’re working for a new system.”

The young woman Manson named “Red” is serving a life sentence at the federal correctional institute here for the attempted assassination of former President Gerald Ford in Sacramento three years ago.

Fromme and I have exchanged letters and talked on the phone during the past few months. My letter was first. I explained that I was there that day in Sacramento, covering Ford’s visit, and asked if we could talk, not about that in particular but rather about anything on her mind.

“The outside world looks down upon prisoners,” she said in one lengthy letter, neatly handwritten like the others.

“You speedy people who are so much smarter and better than people in prisons may think you are accomplishing something. A look from afar shows you as circles of confusion all going nowhere but deeper in hell.

“You run to this and run to that, buy it, try it and get fat, diet and look in endless books. I could make it all rhyme but it doesn’t. It ends abruptly, non-poetically, strained and whimpering — unless you are willing to turn your mind to air, water and the land’s natural balance and to do everything and give everything to serve it. That’s Manson.”

She said her room at the campus-like prison measures about eight by 12 feet. In it she keeps flowers, National Geographic magazines, wildlife pictures, pens, paper, needles and thread and “a closet full of clothes.” There is a desk and padded chair, a sink with a mirror above it and blinds on the windows.

“By all standards it is a civilized place to live. My windows look out on a small house on a hill. I can see the sun set from here. I enjoy some of the little things about living here. There are obvious things I don’t like but it is a tolerable condition.”

One thing she dislikes is being separated from Manson. In one of her letters, she enclosed a copy of a typewritten request to prison officials at Vacaville to see Manson. It is a request — a demand, rather — she has made many times and no doubt will make again and again.

“I met Manson in 1967, got busted with him and 25 others in 1969, knelt on the corner almost two years during their trials, ran all the circles I was directed to by the California Department of Corrections in order to get to communicate and visit with him and was denied.”

In capital letters she added: “I’ve waited eight years while you and others like you used him as an excuse to treat prisoners bad. I watched the lawyers and newspapers lie and sell us and now you say that we can’t talk because the public believes the lies told about us.

“You like to think of yourselves as having human concern but your human concern seems to run short when your ego gets assaulted. If you didn’t put yourselves between what I know as my only family, you wouldn’t get hit.

“Pick on somebody bigger for a change — like General Motors, Allied Chemical and other corporations that have their filthy hands in every clean spot on earth where the labor is cheap.”

If Lynette Fromme has anything to say to those of us outside prison and outside the world she strives to achieve through continuing fidelity to Manson and his ideas, she says it in the final paragraph of that letter to Manson’s keepers:

“On your dying day you will hear us — you and everyone else who thought that they were so much bigger and better than their own concern and survival.”

By RICK MALASPINA