PATTY HEARST
A new book and TV series re-examine the publishing heiress’ case.
The story was so sensational, it could have been ripped straight out of her grandfather William Randolph Hearst’s tabloids: On Feb. 4, 1974, publishing heiress Patty Hearst, 19, was kidnapped by a ragtag band of revolutionaries called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Patty immediately became America’s most famous captive. When she declared herself a member of the group that had abducted her, she became America’s Most Wanted.
Forty years later, Patty remains a subject of worldwide interest, thanks in part to a high-profile new book, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin, and a TV miniseries in the works at CBS. “People are always fascinated by very dramatic, personal transformation,” Mary Lambeth Moore, author of Sleeping with Patty Hearst, tells Closer. “Her whole situation represented the possibility of breaking out of a life of conformity.”
Of course, Patty’s transition from a child of privilege to a beret-wearing urban guerrilla wasn’t initial- ly voluntary. After Patty was taken from her Berkeley, Calif., apartment, the SLA blindfolded her and locked her in a closet for months. Led by an ex-con named Cinque, they demanded that her family donate food to the poor. They also lectured Patty about their radical views on social injustice. “For a teenager growing up at the time it was like, ‘Wow, I don’t have to accept everything society is doing,’” says Moore. “She was every parent’s worst nightmare.”
Patty may have already been leaning in the SLA’s direction before she was taken hostage. “She was a closet radical,” biographer Brad Schreiber (Revolution’s End) tells Closer. “She was going to get married in June to [her former prep school math tutor] Steven Weed, but she criticized him to some of her friends as ‘boring.’ ”
“It’s really been, you know, quite a trip for me.”
— Patty, reflecting on her life
to Larry King in 2002