The domestic details spring to memory. Early on the evening of February 4, 1974, in her duÂplex apartment at 2603 Benvenue in Berkeley, Patricia Campbell Hearst, age nineteen, a student of art hisÂtory at the University of California at Berkeley and a granddaughter of the late William Randolph Hearst, put on a blue terry-cloth bathrobe, heated a can of chicken-noodle soup and made tuna fish sandwiches for herself and her fiancĂ©, Steven Weed; watched âMission Impossibleâ and âThe Magicianâ on televiÂsion; cleaned up the dishes; sat down to study just as the doorbell rang; was abducted at gunpoint and held blindfolded, by three men and five women who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, for the next fifty-seven days.
From the fifty-eighth day, on which she agreed to join her captors and was photographed in front of the SLAâs cobra flag carrying a sawed-off M-1 carbine, until September 18, 1975, when she was arrested in San Francisco, Patricia Campbell Hearst participated actively in the robberies of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco and the Crocker National Bank outside Sacramento; sprayed Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles with a submachine gun to cover a comrade appreÂhended for shoplifting; and was party or witness to a number of less publicized thefts and several bombÂings, to which she would later refer as âactionsâ, or âoperationsâ.
On trial in San Francisco for the Hibernia Bank operation she appeared in court wearing frosted-white nail polish, and demonstrated for the jury the bolt action necessary to chamber an M-1. On a psychiatric test administered while she was in custody she comÂpleted the sentence âMost men ...â with the words â... are assholesâ. Seven years later she was living with the bodyguard she had married, their infant daughter, and two German shepherds âbehind locked doors in a Spanish-style house equipped with the best electronic security system availableâ, describing herÂself as âolder and wiserâ, and dedicating her account of these events, Every Secret Thing, to âMom and Dadâ.
It was a special kind of sentimental education, a public coming-of-age with an insistently literary cast to it, and it seemed at the time to offer a parable for the period. Certain of its images entered the national memory. We had Patricia Campbell Hearst in her first-communion dress, smiling, and we had Patricia Campbell Hearst in the Hibernia Bank surveillance stills, not smiling. We again had her smiling in the engagement picture, an unremarkably pretty girl in a simple dress on a sunny lawn, and we again had her not smiling in the âTaniaâ snapshot, the famous Polaroid with the M-1. We had her with her father and her sister Anne in a photograph taken at the Burlingame Country Club some months before the kidnapÂping: all three Hearsts smiling there, not only smiling but wearing leis, the father in maile and orchid leis, the daughters in pikake, that rarest and most expenÂsive kind of lei, strand after strand of tiny Arabian jasmine buds strung like ivory beads.
We had the bank of microphones in front of the Hillsborough house whenever Randolph and CatherÂine Hearst (âDadâ and âMomâ in the first spectral messages from the absent daughter, âpig Hearstsâ as the spring progressed) met the press, the potted flowers on the steps changing with the seasons, domestic upkeep intact in the face of crisis: azaleas, fuchsias, then cymbidium orchids massed for Easter. We had, early on, the ugly images of looting and smashed camÂeras and frozen turkey legs hurled through windows in West Oakland, the violent result of the Hearstsâ first attempt to meet the SLA ransom demand, and we had, on television the same night, the news that William Knowland, the former United States senator from California and the most prominent member of the family that had run Oakland for half a century, had taken the pistol he was said to carry as protection against terrorists, positioned himself on a bank of the Russian River, and blown off the top of his head.
All of these pictures told a story, taught a dramatic lesson, carrying as they did the frisson of one another, the invitation to compare and contrast. The image of Patricia Campbell Hearst on the FBI âwantedâ fliers was for example cropped from the image of the unremarkably pretty girl in the simple dress on the sunny lawn, schematic evidence that even a golden girl could be pinned in the beam of history. There was no actual connection between turkey legs thrown through winÂdows in West Oakland and William Knowland lying facedown in the Russian River, but the paradigm was manifest, one California busy being born and another busy dying. Those cymbidiums on the Hearstsâ doorÂstep in Hillsborough dissolved before our eyes into the image of a flaming palm tree in south-central Los Angeles (the model again was two Californias), the palm tree above the stucco bungalow in which Patricia Campbell Hearst was believed for a time to be burnÂing to death on live television. (Actually Patricia Campbell Hearst was in yet a third California, a motel room at Disneyland, watching the palm tree burn as we all were, on television, and it was Donald DeFreeze, Nancy Ling Perry, Angela Atwood, Patricia Soltysik, Camilla Hall, and William Wolfe, one black escaped convict and five children of the white middle class, who were dying in the stucco bungalow.)
Not only the images but the voice told a story, the voice on the tapes, the depressed voice with the CaliÂfornia inflection, the voice that trailed off, now almost inaudible, then a hint of whine, a schoolgirlâs sarcasm, a voice every parent recognized: Mom, Dad. Iâm OK. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they washed them up. . . . I just hope youâll do what they say, Dad. . . . If you can get the food thing organized before the nineteenth then thatâs OK. . . . Whatever you come up with is basically OK, it was never intended that you feed the whole state. . . . I am here because I am a member of a ruling-class family and I think you can begin to see the analogy. . . . People should stop acting like Iâm dead, Mom should get out of her black dress, that doesnât help at all. . . . Mom, Dad . . . I donât believe youâre doing all you can . . . Mom, Dad . . . Iâm starting to think that no one is concerned about me anymore. . . . And then: Greetings to the people. This is Tania.
Patricia Campbell Hearstâs great-grandfather had arrived in California by foot in 1850, unschooled, unÂmarried, thirty years old with few graces and no prosÂpects, a Missouri farmerâs son who would spend his thirties scratching around El Dorado and Nevada and Sacramento counties looking for a stake. In 1859 he found one, and at his death in 1891 George Hearst could leave the schoolteacher he had married in 1862 a fortune taken from the ground, the continuing proÂceeds from the most productive mines of the period, the Ophir in Nevada, the Homestake in South DaÂkota, the Ontario in Utah, the Anaconda in Montana, the San Luis in Mexico. The widow, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, a tiny, strong-minded woman then only forty-eight years old, took this apparently artesian inÂcome and financed her only child in the publishing empire he wanted, underwrote a surprising amount of the campus where her great-granddaughter would be enrolled at the time she was kidnapped, and built for herself, on sixty-seven thousand acres on the McCloud River in Siskiyou County, the original Wyntoon, a quarried-lava castle of which its architect, Bernard Maybeck, said simply: âHere you can reach all that is within you.â
The extent to which certain places dominate the California imagination is apprehended, even by Californians, only dimly. Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the roÂmance of emigration, the radical abandonment of esÂtablished attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery. Yosemite, for example, remains what Kevin Starr has called âone of the primary California symbols, a fixed factor of identity for all those who sought a primarily Californian aestheticâ. Both the community of and the coastline at Carmel have a symbolic meaning lost to the contemporary visitor, a lingering allusion to art as freedom, freedom as craft, the âbohemianâ pantheism of the early twentieth century. The Golden Gate Bridge, referring as it does to both the infinite and technology, suggests, to the Californian, a quite comÂplex representation of landâs end, and also of its beginÂning.
Patricia Campbell Hearst told us in Every Secret Thing that the place the Hearsts called Wyntoon was âa mystical landâ, âfantastic, otherworldlyâ, âeven more than San Simeonâ, which was in turn âso emoÂtionally moving that it is still beyond my powers of descriptionâ. That first Maybeck castle on the McCloud River was seen by most Californians only in photographs, and yet, before it burned in 1933, to be replaced by a compound of rather more playful Julia Morgan chalets (âCinderella Houseâ, âAngel Houseâ, âBrown Bear Houseâ), Phoebe Hearstâs gothic Wyntoon and her sonâs baroque San Simeon seemed beÂtween them to embody certain opposing impulses in the local consciousness: northern and southern, wilÂderness sanctified and wilderness banished, the agÂgrandizement of nature and the aggrandizement of self. Wyntoon had mists, and allusions to the infinite, great trunks of trees left to rot where they fell, a wild river, barbaric fireplaces. San Simeon, swimming in sunlight and the here and now, had two swimming pools, and a zoo.
It was a family in which the romantic impulse would seem to have dimmed. Patricia Campbell Hearst told us that she âgrew up in an atmosphere of clear blue skies, bright sunshine, rambling open spaces, long green lawns, large comfortable houses, country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts and riding horsesâ. At the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park she told a nun to âgo to hellâ, and thought herself âquite courageous, although very stupidâ. At Santa Catalina in Monterey she and PatriÂcia Tobin, whose family founded one of the banks the SLA would later rob, skipped Benediction, and reÂceived âa load of demeritsâ. Her father taught her to shoot, duck hunting. Her mother did not allow her to wear jeans into San Francisco. These were inheritors who tended to keep their names out of the paper, to exhibit not much interest in the world at large (âWho the hell is this guy again?â Randolph Hearst asked Steven Weed when the latter suggested trying to apÂproach the SLA through Regis Debray, and then, when told, said, âWe need a goddamn South AmeriÂcan revolutionary mixed up in this thing like a hole in the headâ), and to regard most forms of distinction with the reflexive distrust of the country club.
Yet if the Hearsts were no longer a particularly arresting California family, they remained embedded in the symbolic content of the place, and for a Hearst to be kidnapped from Berkeley, the very citadel of Phoebe Hearstâs aspiration, was California as opera. âMy thoughts at this time were focused on the single issue of survival,â the heiress to Wyntoon and San Simeon told us about the fifty-seven days she spent in the closet. âConcerns over love and marriage, family life, friends, human relationships, my whole previous life, had really become, in SLA terms, bourgeois luxÂuries.â
This abrupt sloughing of the past has, to the California ear, a distant echo, and the echo is of emigrant diaries. âDonât let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can,â one of the surviving children of the Donner Party concluded her account of that crossing. âDonât worry about it,â the author of Every Secret Thing reÂported having told herself in the closet after her first sexual encounter with a member of the SLA. âDonât examine your feelings. Never examine your feelingsâtheyâre no help at all.â At the time Patricia CampÂbell Hearst was on trial in San Francisco, a number of psychiatrists were brought in to try to plumb what seemed to some an unsoundable depth in the narraÂtive, that moment at which the victim binds over her fate to her captors. âShe experienced what I call the death anxiety and the breaking point,â Robert Jay Lifton, who was one of these psychiatrists, said. âHer external points of reference for maintenance of her personality had disappeared,â Louis Jolyon West, anÂother of the psychiatrists, said. Those were two ways of looking at it, and another was that Patricia CampÂbell Hearst had cut her losses and headed west, as her great-grandfather had before her.
The story she told in 1982 in Every Secret Thing was received, in the main, querulously, just as it had been when she told it during The United States of America v. Patricia Campbell Hearst, the 1976 proceeding during which she was tried for and convicted of the armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank (one count) and (the second count), the use of a weapon during the comÂmission of a felony. Laconic, slightly ironic, resistant not only to the prosecution but to her own defense, Patricia Hearst was not, on trial in San Francisco, a conventionally ingratiating personality. âI donât know,â I recall her saying over and over again during the few days I attended the trial. âI donât remember.â âI suppose so.â Had there not been, the prosecutor asked one day, telephones in the motels in which she had stayed when she drove across the country with Jack Scott? I recall Patricia Hearst looking at him as if she thought him deranged. I recall Randolph Hearst looking at the floor. I recall Catherine Hearst arrangÂing a Galanos jacket over the back of her seat.
âYes, Iâm sure,â their daughter said.
Where, the prosecutor asked, were these motels?
âOne was . . . I think . . .â Patricia Hearst paused, and then: âCheyenne? Wyoming?â She pronounced the names as if they were foreign, exotic, information registered and jettisoned. One of these motels had been in Nevada, the place from which the Hearst money originally came: the heiress pronounced the name Nevahda, like a foreigner.
In Every Secret Thing as at her trial, she seemed to project an emotional distance, a peculiar combination of passivity and pragmatic recklessness (âI had crossed over. And I would have to make the best of it ... to live from day to day, to do whatever they said, to play my part, and to pray that I would surviveâ) that many people found inexplicable and irritating. In 1982 as in 1976, she spoke only abstractly about why, but quite specifically about how. âI could not believe that I had actually fired that submachine gun,â she said of the incident in which she shot up Crenshaw Boulevard, but here was how she did it: âI kept my finger pressed on the trigger until the entire clip of thirty shots had been fired. ... I then reached for my own weapon, the semiautomatic carbine. I got off three more shots ...â
And, after her book as after her trial, the questions raised were not exactly about her veracity but about her authenticity, her general intention, about whether she was, as the assistant prosecutor put it during the trial, âfor realâ. This was necessarily a vain line of inquiry (whether or not she âlovedâ William Wolfe was the actual point on which the trial came to turn), and one that encouraged a curious rhetorical regression among the inquisitors. âWhy did she choose to write this book?â Mark Starr asked about Every Secret Thing in Newsweek, and then answered himself: âPosÂsibly she has inherited her familyâs journalistic sense of what will sell.â âThe rich get richer,â Jane Alpert concluded in New York magazine. âPatty,â Ted MorÂgan observed in the New York Times Book Review, âis now, thanks to the proceeds of her book, reverting to a more traditional family pursuit, capital formation.â
These were dreamy notions of what a Hearst might do to turn a dollar, but they reflected a larger dissatisfaction, a conviction that the Hearst in question was telling less than the whole story, âleaving something outâ, although what the something might have been, given the doggedly detailed account offered in Every Secret Thing, would be hard to define. If âquestions still lingerâ, as they did for Newsweek, those questions were not about how to lace a bullet with cyanide: the way the SLA did it was to drill into the lead tip to a point just short of the gunpowder, dip the tiny hole in a mound of cyanide crystals, and seal it with parÂaffin. If Every Secret Thing âcreates more puzzles than it solvesâ, as it did for Jane Alpert, those questions were not about how to make a pipe bomb: the trick here was to pack enough gunpowder into the pipe for a big bang and still leave sufficient oxygen for ignition, a problem, as Patricia Hearst saw it, of âdevising the proper proportions of gunpowder, length of pipe and toaster wire, minus Tekoâs precious toilet paperâ. âTekoâ, or Bill Harris, insisted on packing his bombs with toilet paper, and, when one of them failed to explode under a police car in the Mission District, reacted with âone of his worst temper tantrumsâ. Many reporters later found Bill and Emily Harris the appealing defendants that Patricia Hearst never was, but Every Secret Thing presented a convincing case for their being, as the author put it, not only âunattracÂtiveâ but, her most pejorative adjective, âincompeÂtentâ.
As notes from the underground go...