Spoilt little rich girl, or treacherous terrorist?
MARCUS BERKMANN
REMEMBER Patty Hearst? I do, absolutely vividly. She was kidnapped in 1974 by a shambolic outfit of losers, fantasists and psychopaths known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
Patricia was a 19-year-old student at Berkeley in California, living with a postgraduate who had the extraordinary name of Steven Weed. One evening, the SLA knocked on the door, rushed in and captured her, locking her in the boot of their stolen car. Weed, fulfilling his name’s promise, ran away.
But, as Jeffrey Toobin emphasises throughout, these were very different times. It was the era of Watergate, of Vietnam, of the brutal, violent, drug-crazed hangover from the hippyish Sixties. America was a pot perpetually on the verge of boiling over.
The SLA — named after the word symbiosis — pretended to be the Western branch of a much larger organisation, but there seems to have been only about eight or nine of them at any one time. Its leader, Donald DeFreeze, was an escaped prisoner who appointed himself General Field Marshal Cinque, and sat in his room drinking plum wine all day. Most of the others were politicised former students with varying levels of mental illness, but they were exceptionally wellarmed. When a policeman stopped their cars for any reason, there would be an enormous gun battle and someone would end up in jail.
Patricia was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the billionaire press baron whose life inspired the film Citizen Kane. But the kidnappers had not done their research — Hearst hadn’t left much money to his five sons for fear they would drink it all. When the SLA asked for tens of millions of pounds, Patricia’s father, Randy, simply didn’t have it. So she sat in a cupboard for many weeks, talking to her kidnappers and gradually finding that she had more in common with them than she had ever imagined.
Two months later, Patty was revealed as the newest recruit of the SLA. Taking part in a bank hold-up, she shouted: ‘First person puts up his head, I’ll blow his mother-f***ing head off!’
Toobin writes: ‘Patricia later asserted that her passion for joining was a subterfuge, because she truly believed that the real choice was join or die. But the SLA saw only a woman on fire with revolutionary passion.’
It all ended in tears, with most of the SLA killed in a shootout and the last three of them on the run for a year or more. When they were finally arrested, Patty claimed she had been forced to do bad things, which didn’t go down very well with the other survivors.
But money talks, or in this case screams and shouts. Patty had her prison sentence commuted by President Carter, and was eventually pardoned by President Clinton.
She lives quietly with her dogs now, and declined to help Toobin with his book.
This story has been told many times before, but even when you know exactly what’s going to happen, it’s a curiously gripping tale.