HEARST SAGA REVISITED
Author returns to turbulent ’ 70s
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst Jeffrey Toobin Anchor
When author Jeffrey Toobin was a teenager, he lived on the very block in New York City where a fugitive Patty Hearst had hid out in the summer of 1974.
“Did you see Patty Hearst? I didn’t see Patty Hearst,” he and his family joked afterward.
But Toobin doesn’t actually have much memory of following the case in real time. In fact, it was only when he came across the apartment’s address while researching his book America Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, that Toobin remembered joking about their most wanted neighbour.
The lure of Hearst as a biographical subject for Toobin, who has also profiled former U.S. president Bill Clinton as well as O.J. Simpson (the basis for the FX series The People v. O.J. Simpson), was that her story was emblematic of the decline of the counterculture in the 1970s.
“What began as idealism for many people,” he says during an interview at his publisher’s office, “curdled into this crazy terrorism.”
Toobin began circling the subject while writing a piece for The New Yorker about the Black Guerrilla Family — a gang formed in prison in the late 1960s that was influenced by protest and revolutionary movements of the day — and became interested in the alliance between students and prisoners in the early 1970s, of which Hearst’s abductor, the Symbionese Liberation Army, was part.
Toobin was initially skeptical when his book editor suggested Hearst as a subject, but soon changed his mind when he realized that no book had seriously re-evaluated her story in decades.
For those who came of age after the mid-’70s, Patty Hearst is usually mentioned as the most famous example of Stockholm Syndrome (though she has made the news again in recent years with several wins for her breeds at the Westminster Dog Show).
The Hearst name itself has transitioned to a multinational corporate reality from its past association with individual magnates: George Hearst is, to many, a villain in HBO’s Deadwood. His son William Randolph Hearst is footnoted as a catalyst of the Spanish-American War. But at the time of her kidnapping, Patricia was indeed an “heiress,” one who would made the cover of Newsweek multiple times.
“What’s Newsweek, and what’s a cover?” Toobin jokes, before detailing how even a story as big as the Hearst kidnapping was reported in dribs and drabs due to the evening print deadlines and altogether more limited media of the day. Toobin says the live broadcast of the Los Angeles shootout between the police (including future LAPD chief Darryl Gates, later made famous by the O.J. saga), and the SLA was really the beginning of what we would consider breaking news coverage.
“In the ’ 70s, you had three 30-minute evening news shows, you had the Today Show on NBC; you didn’t even have Good Morning America. Of course you had no cable news, you had no Internet. The media universe was much smaller, and I think that contributed to less amplification of fear. You weren’t confronted with the dailiness of the threats to our safety on television, much less on a computer or on a phone.”
The irony is that there was statistically much more to fear domestically in the United States back then. A figure that Toobin confirmed again and again in his research — because it seemed so unbelievable — was that at their height, there were a thousand bombings a year in the U.S. during the 1970s.
“Can you imagine what Fox News would do with a thousand bombings a year?” he asks. Especially considering that it was the insane left and not the insane right, Toobin says, that was the real threat 40 years ago.
Via the through-narrative of the Hearst case, American Heiress broadly details just how dark a time the 1970s were in the United States, from the energy crisis to the missile gap to the threat from fringe, domestic, political terrorists.
“How many things were going wrong at the same time — it’s pretty amazing,” Toobin says. It was perhaps the nadir of what we night term the neo-liberal experiment — until today?
“It is somewhat timely but, you know, I’ve got to say — every book author wants to say his book is timely,” Toobin says.
“I mostly am interested in this story because it’s a great story, because it’s just a wild, unpredictable, crazy saga with a mystery at the heart, and that’s good enough for me.”
American Heiress is an entertaining read, full of strange intersections between people who would go on to celebrity, from Hearst herself to future Today Show host Jane Pauley, to the aforementioned Gates (the O.J. case’s Judge Lance Ito also makes an appearance), to actor Kevin Kline.
The screen star had once been in a theatre company with SLA member Angela Atwood in Indiana. He described to Toobin (in a quote that unfortunately did not make the book) what it was like to catch up on his old troupe once he left for Juilliard. “Oh what’s Angela up to?”
“Oh, Angela kidnapped Patty Hearst.”