Introduction

 

Society Divas

Patricia Campbell Hearst

The year 1974 was a time of great social change in America. The Vietnam war was drawing to a conclusion, the nation watched daily as the president was forced out of the White House, and the boundaries of cinema propriety were being broken down by films like "The Exorcist" and "Last Tango In Paris". It was against this backdrop that Patricia Hearst, nicknamed Patty by all of her family and friends, stole the stage; and in one fell swoop was transformed from quiet, mousy newspaper heiress and Berkeley University good girl into Tania! debutante terrorist.

Patty was an unlikely choice to become a revolutionary guerilla. Born into the fabled newspaper family, her grandfather was William Randolph Hearst, owner of the largest newspaper chain in the country and model for Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane". As a child, she spent many happy holidays at his house at San Simeon, the only authentic Palace in America. Growing up in this wealthy, traditional family, Patty was obviously very conservative in her views, and not very exposed to the ways of the world. It was this very naivete which compelled her to study at Berkeley, hotbed of political activism in the 1960s. She felt that this was precisely the exposure she needed in order to broaden her limited horizons. Little did she know that her horizons would be broadened further than she could ever have imagined.

Upon enrolling in University, Patty instinctively chose to live in a modest apartment near the campus, in order to better fit in with her peers. While studying quietly at home on February 4, 1974, Patty and boyfriend Steve Weed were startled by a noise. Suddenly, several men with guns broke through the door, overpowering the couple and carrying a screaming, helpless Patty into the night. She was forced into the trunk of a car and brought to a shabby apartment in San Francisco, where she was promptly locked into a closet. For Patty, the nightmare and media storm had just begun.

Though she didn't know it at the time, locked as she was in the closet, she had been abducted by the Simbionese Liberation Army, a disaffected radical group on the fringes of society, of which no one had heard before. After fruitless attempts on the part of the Authorities to locate the nation of Simbia on the map, it was determined that they were actually an organization concerned with changing the government of America, and spotlighting the woes of the poor. A young media heiress was the perfect target to publicize their existence.

Patty was kept in her closet for several weeks, taken out only to be indoctrinated in the ways of the SLA, and to undergo sexual exploitation on the part of the soldiers. As has been previously stated, Patty was a naive young girl, from a sheltered background. These harsh new experiences quickly had the intended effect, and Patty soon began to assimilate the ideas of this group.

While all this was going on, the SLA had made many demands of the Hearst family, asking, in effect, that they bankrupt themselves to save the poor. After intense negotiations lasting several days, the Hearst's agreed to begin massive food giveaway programs across the nation. This would be the first step in acquiring Patty's release.

As it turned out, the first of the planned series of giveaways was an utter fiasco. Early one morning, several large freight trucks pulled into a parking lot in Oakland, filled to the brim with various surplus dairy products that the would have been destroyed if not for this. When the poor who had gathered - thousands of them - saw all that milk and cheese available for the taking, they erupted in a mania that will not soon be seen again. Indeed, the Great Oakland Cheese Riots, as they came to be called, are still recalled with anxiety by city officials who would prefer to forget.

With the collapse of the negotiations, Patty's family were expecting the worst; and they were not disappointed. Soon after, they and the nation were startled to see Patty with a machine gun, robbing a San Francisco bank. Security cameras documented that Patty was a perpetrator, and not a helpless victim being used as a shield. The following day, posters of Tania! - as Patty now preferred to be called - appeared, standing in front of a Simbionese Revolutionary flag and holding a gun like somebody who meant business. Her new look was splashed across the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast, though it must be said that the Hearst papers were rather subdued. Always the first to report a mere whisper of scandal, they were strangely silent on this occasion.

Tania! issued a statement saying that she had embraced the values of the revolutionary forces, and condemned her family for the bourgeois values that they upheld and forced upon a helpless country. Her family, once so concerned for her safe return, could not now be blamed for feeling somewhat betrayed. After all, it was their bourgeois money that had afforded her a University education in the first place. If not for them, this little kidnapping would never have occurred at all. Tania would never have been born, and Patty would be a waitress in Small Town America. Though the damage to their social prestige was considerable, it is a tribute to their power that they were not scrapped from the Blue Book altogether. Boyfriend Steve could be forgiven for thinking that he had never really known this woman at all, whom he had thought he'd loved so deeply. Naturally, the marriage plans were postponed.

At this point, all anyone wanted was for Patty to come to her senses and return home, if only so that the media attention would stop. The scandal had reached epic proportions, and Tania! bulletins were issued daily. As would later happen to Elvis, Tania! was spotted everywhere - though the leads never amounted to anything. A nationwide manhunt was mounted, and posters of Tania! and her companions were plastered to post office walls in every state.

Tania! and her newfound friends went underground for several months, and the media attention began to ebb. They thought they were safe at last to emerge from total isolation. This miscalculation would prove to be their undoing.

Acting on a tip, the police surrounded a house in Los Angeles, where the terrorists were hiding, and a shootout began that was televised nationally. Several members of the SLA were killed. Patty and the surviving members were now on the run, and returned to San Francisco. It was not long after this that she was apprehended, along with almost all of the other revolutionaries.

Safely back in the bosom of her family, Tania! disappeared, and Patty quickly recanted her revolutionary rhetoric. It would seem that the fragile young heiress had been brainwashed into joining this anti-establishment cult; once she returned to her family, the brainwashing was immediately reversed. One imagines she felt quite like Dorothy, returning to the safety of Kansas after her adventures in Oz.

Despite her recanting and cooperation, and the desperate pleas of her mother, Patty, as she was now calling herself again, was tried and convicted for the bank robbery. After all, though this may have been just another "The Rich Are Different" story, somebody had actually died. Patty went to prison.

Always an optimist, plucky Patty thrived in prison. She used the time to complete her studies, while her mother persuaded President Carter to commute her sentence. Upon leaving prison, she returned home, and lived quietly for a time, before marrying her bodyguard and starting a family of her own.

Time has been kind to Patty, in large part due to her sense of humor about her experiences. In the late '90s, she again raised eyebrows by appearing in John Water's film, "Serial Mom". In it, she portrays a juror who is murdered for wearing white shoes after Labor Day - something Patty herself would never now do, but of which Tania! would heartily approve.

(Written by Jeff Woloson)

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Society Divas