Fifty years ago, a young woman was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of revolutionaries willing to kill for gentle causes. For weeks, she recorded strident, sarcastic messages at her captors’ bidding, messages that bewildered and disturbed their intended audience. In time, she was taught the group’s thinking, given a nom de guerre (Tania), and handed a sawed-off carbine. She waved it around to help the SLA rob a bank—and later sprayed bullets from a machine gun to help them escape arrest. Of her own volition, she hid out with them for nearly a year. Public response swung from warm concern to fury.
I was too young to make sense of any of this, but the name still fizzes in my memory. In two years, Patty Hearst made the cover of Newsweek seven times. In the initial rush of sympathy, one man offered to go hungry until she was returned; another offered to give up his salary to feed the poor and thus placate her kidnappers. Strange allies surfaced, among them cult leader Jim Jones, the Moonies, and later, Charles Manson. When she turned fugitive, reports of sightings poured into the FBI.
How many nineteen-year-olds have the power to rivet a nation? As the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, who created the world’s largest media empire, Patty was bound to get ink. Her dad loved her spirit and hoped she would rule the Hearst empire someday. But subtract the lineage, and she was unexceptional. Bright when she was interested in the topic, but not a navel gazer. Rebellious in cute ways (she once told a nun at her boarding school to go to hell) but too absorbed in her art history courses even to follow, let alone engage with, political issues. Pundits described her as a blank slate—though who is not, at nineteen?
In the initial rush of sympathy, one man offered to go hungry until she was returned; another offered to give up his salary to feed the poor and thus placate her kidnappers. Strange allies surfaced, among them cult leader Jim Jones, the Moonies, and later, Charles Manson.
That blankness allowed the country to superimpose archetypes. Patty Hearst was a rich man’s lost daughter, a damsel tied to the railroad tracks. Two months later, she was Helen of Troy. For young people, she became a transgressive idol, a young woman with the courage to break away from privilege and propriety. For nervous parents, she was a warning siren. For the FBI, she was a likely traitor and a pain in the ass.
This was the nation’s first political kidnapping, and the simultaneous celebrity and nonentity, radical symbolism and girlish innocence, fascinated people. In the seventies, young women were still meant to be ingenues, soft pretty creatures who absorbed the opinions of their menfolk. Who was Patty Hearst really, the country wondered, forgetting that maybe she was not yet sure herself. Could she have been brainwashed? Could she have been converted?
What people were really asking was, could they?
• • •
The seventies were a weird time. Years of prosperity squealed to a halt, and inflation, recession, and an oil embargo began to shrink the middle class that had kept the economy stable. Seven years younger than Patty, I remember worrying desperately about litter, pollution, and overpopulation. Though hippie culture was fading, teenagers would never again be the earnest, conscientious kids idealized in the fifties. The revolution—all the revolutions—were fizzling, but the ash of suspicion had not been swept from the streets. Cops were now pigs, not protectors; radicals were exploding bombs willy-nilly; and the president of the country was a scheming villain.
Instead of braving tear gas to protest, people sank into self-absorption, finding Themselves with psychic healing, sex therapy, and dream control, or getting swept into the intense groupthink of Scientology and EST. The Exorcist (1973) and later, Sybil (1976), fired the collective imagination, hinting that the self was not so stable. It could be stolen by cults, possessed by demons, split into shards. Identity, once dictated by society, was fragmenting fast.
Enter Patty Hearst, who had either lost herself, found herself, or played a series of parts that obscured her real self. On February 4, 1974, she was living with Steven Weed, a young math teacher doing graduate work in philosophy. They had fallen in love when she transferred to her fifth private high school after a series of clashes with strict nuns. Crystal Springs School for Girls was looser and more progressive, and Weed was on the faculty. Patty was seventeen and he was twenty-three when they began sleeping together. Her parents fretted that he was “a gold-digger.” For Patty, he was mainly boring, once the thrill wore off.
On February 4, 1974, she heated up Campbell’s chicken soup and made tuna sandwiches for dinner, and they watched Mission: Impossible. The doorbell rang. A woman apologized in a rush, saying she had backed into Patty’s beloved MG and could she use their phone?
The woman was Angela Atwood, a professional actress who was outdoing her own recent performance as Hedda Gabler. As she distracted the young couple, two men burst through the door. “Where’s the safe?” the leader kept asking, assuming a Hearst was bound to own one. Weed managed to run away; Patty tried but was caught and shoved into the trunk of the Impala they had just stolen.
Americans listened avidly to the taped messages Cinque forced Patty to record, followed the FBI hunt, read every article about the trial. Was she faking her conversion? Could they count on their own values, and those they were inculcating in their children, to endure under duress?
As a kid, I imagined the Symbionese Liberation Army as exotic, maybe from Indonesia. In reality, it was a handful of mostly White, upper-middle-class, well-educated young Americans. Their leader, Donald DeFreeze, aka Cinque, was Black, an escaped convict who burned with an idiosyncratic philosophy. Loosely Marxist and enamored of military discipline, he wanted to end racism, monogamy, the prison system, and “all the other institutions that have made and sustained capitalism.”
Americans listened avidly to the taped messages Cinque forced Patty to record, followed the FBI hunt, read every article about the trial. Was she faking her conversion? Could they count on their own values, and those they were inculcating in their children, to endure under duress? Just how malleable was identity? And when did someone cease to be responsible for who they were?
Half a century later, we can add a few questions. What causes a nation to turn on someone for whom they once prayed? And how different would our response be today?
• • •
In the early weeks, Patty as helpless victim was the scenario the public instinctively believed. They intuited exactly the sort of experience she would later describe in her memoir, Every Secret Thing. Confined in closets for the first fifty-seven days, all she knew was what they told her and what she could feel: the closet walls, soundproofed with tacked-up shag carpet; the thin foam mat where she lay sleepless and wept into her blindfold; the terror. She was a bourgeois, she overheard her captors say with a sneer; her death would be no loss. She made herself small and docile—the Patty the nuns had always wanted—and set out to prove herself an ally.
She played her role a little too well. People gasped in shock when she recorded, with increasing confidence and sarcasm, tapes calling her father, Randolph Apperson Hearst, a corporate liar. Was there a little satisfaction in this? Her messages also mocked her ever-proper, devout mother: “Mom, I can’t believe that you’ve agreed with the ‘out of my hands’ stance of Daddy’s program. I just wish that you could be stronger and pull yourself together from all these emotional outbursts.” To me, that sounds like a mother’s scold tossed back at her….
Patty was a complicated blend of entitlement and mischief, strong will and conditioned prissiness. She could not be a hippie, she had once announced, because hippies were too filthy. Extroverted and needy, she was perhaps less able to tolerate solitude than someone with a strong inner world. Her fiancé said that when he studied into the wee hours, she would sit up with him, groggy, wrapped in a blanket. If he came to bed to read, she would say, “Give me a leg,” and fall asleep with her arms wrapped around his knee. The closet’s lonely silence would have only fed her terror.
Patty became a good soldier. “The media, with cooperation from my parents, has created a public image of me as a helpless innocent girl who was supposedly abducted by two terrible blacks,” she said pointedly on one of the recordings. I remember how those news reports vibrated from our boxy, staticky, rabbit-eared TV: the grownups’ tension, my own sense that she was exotic, evil, almost alien.
Hypervigilant, she began to recognize voices, even welcome their arrival at the closet door. Bits of kindness, however grudging, steadied her, and as time passed, there were small privileges—use of the communal toothbrush; a chance to wash herself. Relief folded into the fear. She was, after all, still alive. If she could just make them like her….
She had given up hope for a fairy-tale rescue. She carefully read the literature Cinque fed her—Marx, Engels, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and the SLA Codes of War, which declared that any SLA soldier not performing their duty could be killed immediately.
Patty became a good soldier. “The media, with cooperation from my parents, has created a public image of me as a helpless innocent girl who was supposedly abducted by two terrible blacks,” she said pointedly on one of the recordings. I remember how those news reports vibrated from our boxy, staticky, rabbit-eared TV: the grownups’ tension, my own sense that she was exotic, evil, almost alien.
No. She was only, for a sheltered child of privilege, remarkably adaptable. She had made herself into a housewife for Steve Weed. Now she was playing a revolutionary.
• • •
Patty had always taken her cue from what presented itself in the moment, not from abstract principles and ideals. Now, focused by adrenaline, she listened closely to her captors. Her father would not pay to feed poor people in order to save her, she was informed. The FBI routinely rounded up and killed Black children. Her fiancé was a male chauvinist pig who only wanted her as chattel. One by one, the SLA yanked away everyone and everything she trusted, until all she had left was this weird new life.
“Look at her, the fancy, la-di-da lady, a real Marie Antoinette,” said Cinque. “Listen, if you gotta go pee, say, ‘I gotta go pee’; if you gotta take a shit, say, ‘I gotta take a shit.’ That’s the way poor people talk.” SLA members smashed the old propriety, ripped away privacy, forced sex, and mocked her squeamishness.
Patty’s captors talked about the injustice of the criminal justice system; about urban poverty and malnutrition; about the exploitation and oppression of the poor, Blacks, Hispanics, women, and servants; about the way people were lulled into compliance. Slowly, they reshaped her reality, gave her their language. Cinque warned her not to even think about rescue, because he was afraid brain waves could be read. Besides, there was no going back. Her family had given up on her. The SLA had convinced her that they were vast and powerful—and she had seen their Death List.
When her captors finally removed her blindfold, she was disappointed by their ordinariness.
She was warmed, however, by the camaraderie. No longer isolated and criticized, she had won the approval of these people who once rolled their eyes at her red fingernail polish and brushed her off as a useful but weak, spoiled irritant.
Few people are as magnetic as those who start out disliking us, then change their minds. What better proof of worth? But for Americans whose world was black-and-white, filled with people who were either Good or Bad, Patty’s receptivity was tough to fathom. She must be either Good or Bad.
She was neither. The country was shaking with deep tremors, and she had one foot on either side of the fault line. What better way to free yourself from midcentury money than to become an outlaw? An aura of romance swirled outside the bounds. Stepping over that line, writes historian Elizabeth Grace Hale, became a way for “middle-class whites to cut themselves free of their own social origins and their own histories.” They “imagined people living on the margins, without economic or political or social privilege, as possessing something vital, some essential quality that had somehow been lost from their own lives.”
• • •
Patty Hearst in 2001 (Shutterstock)
Growing up in a conservative family in the sixties was like riding in a glassed-in popemobile, chaos all around you. Patty had described her Catholic boarding school as a medieval dungeon. She switched (or tactful headmistresses thought it best that she switch) to another school, then another and another. When she moved in with Steve Weed, she found herself constrained yet again, this time by an arrogant fiancé who told her what to study, rolled his eyes at her opinions, and mocked her attempts to cook for him. And now here she was, imprisoned for real.
She did her strategic best. But when she told the nation that she had joined the SLA and her new name was Tania, all those “God Bless Patty” yard signs were yanked from the zoysia. Two months after the kidnapping, security cameras showed her brandishing a sawed-off carbine while her new friends robbed the Hibernia Bank. People felt betrayed, and they forgot all about the consequences of coercion and fear. “I think the moment of truth has long since passed for Patricia Hearst,” snapped California’s attorney general. In May, when she picked up a machine gun to rescue two SLA members after they were stopped for shoplifting, media and law enforcement agreed that there was no longer room for debate.
• • •
Patty’s fear of the FBI confounded Middle America. To the average citizen, the FBI was handsome Efram Zimbalist on TV—a clean-cut, stalwart protector. Few noticed, or minded, two years earlier, when documents were released showing that “the bureau was monitoring, disrupting, and neutralizing left-wing activists.”
Cinque’s paranoia, then, was not entirely irrational. And when you are forced to hide out in close quarters with terrified people, contagion is inevitable.
From the SLA’s perspective, and by then Patty’s, the fear was confirmed when six of the SLA members died. Police had their hideout surrounded, and Cinque and his followers opened fire. The return volley set off the explosives he loved to stockpile.
“To the disappointment of both the police and spectators, Tania’s body wasn’t found in the rubble,” wrote the Berkeley Barb. “The police were disappointed because she was fast becoming a dangerous, elusive, and identifiable revolutionary symbol.”
Patty had been away from the house with SLA members Emily and Bill Harris. Bill would later tell author and historian Gregory Cumming that after the shootout, they wanted to get rid of her—she was a liability. But Patty attached herself to them with the tiny teeth of Velcro, and together, they evaded arrest for the next year.
Few people are as magnetic as those who start out disliking us, then change their minds. What better proof of worth? But for Americans whose world was black-and-white, filled with people who were either Good or Bad, Patty’s receptivity was tough to fathom. She must be either Good or Bad.
“I felt I owed them something, something like loyalty,” she wrote later. “Telephoning my parents or my sisters was out of the question. I thought they had given up on me.”
She had stepped outside the magic circle of privilege and protection, and she was now, officially, a lost cause. Reports of sightings poured into the FBI, not in concern but because people wanted her caught. They wanted answers and closure—how dare she run? Quietly, her father withdrew the reward money he had pledged, reasoning that she could have escaped by now if she wanted to.
I think of all those families that spend years hunting for a runaway child, searching the streets and prisons and shelters. The families who spend a fortune they do not have on detectives and psychologists, hoping to extricate a loved one from a cult. “She may not want to come back,” Patty’s father said with a shrug. Stung, no doubt, by the perceived betrayal.
When she was finally arrested, she flashed a militant clenched fist as she had seen other revolutionaries do. Asked her profession, she replied with her trademark sarcasm: “Urban guerilla.”
She weighed only eighty-seven pounds, and tests showed an eighteen-point drop in her IQ. Nonetheless, the headlines took a skeptical tone: “Doctor Calls Miss Hearst Willing Bandit”; “Miss Hearst Seen As Eager Convert”; “Patricia Hearst Says She ‘Just Plain Couldn’t Flee Her Captors.’”
Even leftists sympathetic to the SLA’s causes abandoned Patty after they heard the conspiracy theories. Most sprang from prison informants who said Patty had slept with Cinque on incognito prison visits before the kidnapping. Others said Patty had collaborated in planning the kidnapping—but with her sisters as the victims, not herself. The theories got interesting, though, when they suggested that the SLA might have been—initially—encouraged by the feds.
Law enforcement did show a remarkable leniency toward Cinque. Between 1965 and 1969, he was arrested for nine different crimes, including possession of explosives and a cache of weapons. Charges were consistently dropped or suspended. According to Pulitzer-winning journalist Les Payne, who hung with the SLA to research a book, Cinque was an informant during that period for the Los Angeles Police Department. The officer he reported to was put in charge of the Public Disorder Unit. Its job? Use undercover officers to infiltrate activist groups.
In 1970, Cinque was finally convicted and sentenced, after a bank theft and gun battle that would have been hard to ignore. In prison, he was allowed to set up his own program, a spinoff from the prison’s Black Cultural Association that would grow into the SLA.
The FBI file on Patty Hearst’s kidnapping has forty-two parts, only twelve of them declassified, each with seven hundred or more pages, tons of pages missing and the remaining pages so heavily redacted, you are often lucky to see two words in a twenty-word sentence.
Young White students from UC-Berkeley made prison visits through the Black Cultural Association. Those visits were organized by Colston Westbrook, a Black grad student with an interesting past. After a stint for a CIA contractor in Vietnam, he had returned to the United States at the height of the CIA’s Operation CHAOS—which secretly surveilled and infiltrated radical groups—and had gone to work for the Los Angeles Police Department. Have you started circling and drawing arrows yet? He left the LAPD to go to grad school at UC Berkeley, where he started coordinating BCA visits.
Three years later, Cinque was somehow allowed to escape. The SLA gathered around him and hardened into a militant group.
The FBI file on Patty Hearst’s kidnapping has forty-two parts, only twelve of them declassified, each with seven hundred or more pages, tons of pages missing and the remaining pages so heavily redacted, you are often lucky to see two words in a twenty-word sentence. The conspiracy theory about Westbrook can be reconstructed there, but with zero proof. And the crazier theory about a prior connection between Hearst and the SLA? It struck me as ludicrous—until I read that one of the SLA leaders worked at Fruity Rudy, a popular stand on campus. She and Patty could have known one another. Patty could have, unlikely as it seems, linked arms with the SLA from the start.
Weirdly, I find the possibility comforting. It would mean that she was not terrified; that she believed in what she was doing. So, I suppose, did the CIA and the LAPD, but their spy games may have unleashed more than they planned. A former (albeit disgruntled) FBI agent reportedly identified Cinque as a runaway agent who had to be eliminated. And Westbrook wound up on the SLA’s Death List.
• • •
Half a year before the Hearst kidnapping, four employees of a Stockholm bank were held captive for six days. Occasional acts of sympathy and kindness reassured the hostages, who decided they were in more danger from the police than from their captors. “When he treated us well,” said the male hostage, “we could think of him as an emergency God.” One of the women remembered how they slept “like tired moths,” and their breathing fell into a rhythm. “We were in the vault in order to breathe together, to survive. Whoever threatened that world was our enemy.”
Hearst developed the same sense. At a drive-in with the Harrises, waiting to rendezvous with the others, she realized she had felt safer when they were all together in their hideout.
Three days after her arrest, she wrote to a comrade: “As long as we stay strong the free those pigs can’t fuck with us. they can imprison our bodies but not our hearts & minds. I look forward to a lifetime of struggle—there will be a revolution in Amerikkka and we’ll be helping to make it.” This does not sound like the drug-induced haze she was telling police she had lived in, unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. She had tried on another self—and she had yet to unzip it.
In our era of personas, screen names, and avatars, the notion of trying on a different self does not feel as alien as it did then. Nor does placating your captors. But Patti’s attorney, the legendary F. Lee Bailey, made Stockholm Syndrome implicit in his defense at trial. He also tried to insist that she had been brainwashed—until she testified that she did not think so, and he hurriedly downshifted to “thought control.”
• • •
Stockholm Syndrome was implicit in the defense arguments at Patty’s trial. Her attorney, the legendary F. Lee Bailey, also tried to insist that she had been brainwashed—until she testified that she did not think so. He hurriedly downshifted to “thought control.”
Patty remained her own worst enemy, refusing to show emotion during her trial. Jurors found her listless and robotic. “I was determined not to put on a ‘show’ for the audience,” she wrote later. “Bailey and Johnson wanted emotional outbursts, but they were not going to get them from me.”
Her stubbornness puzzles me. Had stoicism been her coping style for so long that she had lost access to feeling, or was this her natural inclination? “I did not want my mind probed by a bunch of headshrinkers,” she wrote. “My fear, no doubt, was based upon my family’s disdain of psychiatry to resolve personal problems.”
She could not avoid the psychiatrists assigned to examine her pre-trial, however. One emphasized, over her protests, that she had been “a very unhappy girl” before the kidnapping, eager to rebel.
Only an unhappy girl would rebel. The happy passivity expected of women in the Valium-soaked fifties lingered as an ideal. Liberation was tempered. Young women were told, in a throaty Lauren Bacall voice, that they could bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. They were still not allowed to defy bosses, parents, husbands, social norms, or the men who personified the law.
“If I made any public statement at all it would be from a ‘revolutionary feminist perspective,’” Patty told a friend who visited her in prison.
I doubt that would have played well.
• • •
Like the country itself, the expert witnesses were divided. What swung the jury was a trinket.
The Harrises said Patty was in love with SLA member Willie Wolfe, aka Cujo. She claimed to hate him and said he had forced sex on her. But she also said he had made “what I thought at the time was the first gesture of friendship I had received at their hands.” He had draped a rope necklace “he had braided and waxed himself” around her neck. From it hung a small stone sculpture he told her was pre-Columbian, his most cherished possession, an Olmec monkey more than 2,500 years old. An archaeologist friend had given him two, and he wore the other around his neck.
That monkey—which was, in fact, a cheap tourist memento—was still in her purse when she was arrested, sixteen months after Cujo’s death.
A paralegal assistant scribbled in a note to the prosecutor, “No woman would carry around a memento from a man who raped her and couldn’t stand for over a year!” A juror later said that “everyone’s heart went out to” Patty at first, but the monkey shifted the mood. “That was what changed my mind,” said another juror. “I really saw how much she was lying.”
But was she? Patty was an art history major who had grown up surrounded by treasures. If she believed Wolfe’s declaration that the monkey was ancient, a valuable archaeological find? “To almost everyone else the conclusion was that I had lied when I testified that I had believed Cujo,” she wrote. “No one considered that Cujo had lied to me.” Nor did anyone consider how easy it might be for a powerless young woman to fall in love with someone who seemed like an ally.
According to historian Rick Perlstein, “The defense psychiatrists offered up what was essentially a left-wing view of the self—as plastic, protean, moldable—and of human beings as the product of their environment, not quite responsible for their individual decisions and acts.” The prosecution, meanwhile, came down hard on personal responsibility, especially for the indulged children of the rich.
Unfortunately, there were times Bailey seemed to agree with the prosecution. In closing, he admitted that he, too, was offended when Patty insulted her parents, on tape, and called them pigs. “The whole country was split up, we were all angry at her.” Trial strategy, no doubt—but still. The best he could do as a summary statement was “Patricia Hearst is not a bad girl.”
• • •
It is impossible to strip class from Patty Hearst’s story, impossible to strip her race or gender or set the events in a different decade. This was the seventies. The civil rights struggle had made racism unfashionable, but old tropes about Black men despoiling White women stuck like glue. Patty was described as kidnapped “half-naked and screaming.” (She was wearing a bathrobe and was, by other reports, stoic). Seeing no progress early on, U.S. Rep. Bob Sikes demanded to know if the FBI intended to wait until Patty Hearst “has a houseful of kids by the people she has taken up with.” The unofficial FBI title for the campaign to recover Patty Hearst was “Hersnatch.” In court, a witness described a photo of Patty with her “little fist up like so.” Tiny class markers, soaked in schadenfreude, slipped into the media coverage: “The wealthy couple have sat on the hard oak benches” every court day, wrote a New York Times reporter. Patty was described as having a faint voice, one “with the same refined, airy softness as that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.” A childhood friend (they met at a country club, it was carefully noted) assured the jury that until her kidnapping, Patty had no political or feminist views. She was a good girl.
But what if good girls contained bad girls, and years of careful training could snap in a heartbeat?
• • •
Fifty years after Patty’s highly publicized, world-famous kidnapping, we still have no idea what really happened. Not because there are such juicy conspiracy theories, or because the FBI files were redacted, but because we never really got to know her.
In her memoir she is so blunt that you are surprised and thrilled by her candor—and realize only later that you have learned very little. Her descriptions of her relationships with her father, mother, and sisters could be notes for a TV show about any family. Nor is there anything about her parents’ marriage, strained by her kidnapping and about to end in divorce. You can finish the autobiography with no clue how she really felt about either parent, her sisters, or herself.
For an impulsive young woman who had already lived at the extremes of privilege and pain, Patty was remarkably dispassionate. Even in the safety of retrospect, she voices little outrage and offers scant reflection about her captors’ beliefs or her own. Instead, she boasts about how she toughened up, got fit and strong, and did weapons drills. Rather than let us know her at last, she is keeping the slate blank, washed clean of accusations but offering no insight as replacement.
As a child, Patty had suffered severe chronic pain. She learned to take the pain out of her leg and put it in her head, where she could control it. As a captive, she needed to separate from her past in the same way. And when anything disturbed her, she called on another early lesson: her parents’ relentless dinner-table lectures about propriety had trained her “to tune out while seeming to participate.”
For an impulsive young woman who had already lived at the extremes of privilege and pain, Patty was remarkably dispassionate. Even in the safety of retrospect, she voices little outrage and offers scant reflection about her captors’ beliefs or her own.
She had been raised with every advantage, yet tightly controlled. When she was kidnapped, her limbs bound in even tighter constraint, “a great sense of relief swept over me,” she wrote. Later, when she was locked up in the San Mateo County Jail, she soon found it “familiar as home.” And when she was finally free, she immediately fell in love with the solid, conservative married man who was hired to be her bodyguard.
She was ambivalent, to say the least, about freedom.
So is this country.
• • •
The jury convicted Patty, and the judge sentenced her to seven years in prison. Three years later, in 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence to time served. Released, she promptly married the bodyguard, Bernard Shaw, who had dissolved his marriage in anticipation. They had two kids and lived as a sweet little family in New Hampshire.
Other than a few forays into John Waters films, a guest stint on Veronica Mars, a voice part on Frasier, and a few victorious laps at the Westminster Dog Show, Patricia Shaw keeps herself to herself, avoiding publicity. When her toy shih tzu and French bulldog won prizes, she allowed a quick interview. “People move on,” she said. “I guess people somehow imagine you don’t evolve in your life. I have grown daughters and granddaughters and other things that normal people have.”
The country never caught up. Can you imagine the whispers in the crowd? Was that Patty Hearst? She cringes at the diminutive “Patty,” saying only her father called her that. But so did the zillions of reporters and citizens who could not quite transition to “Tania.” She will never be Patricia to us. The normalcy of her life as a suburban wife and mother bores us; we prefer the old mystery, the exotic drama and danger. But we (who are, after all, entitled to nothing) receive only hints at her real self. The touch of naïve pride, for example, when she assumes that Waters cast her because she was not a diva. He cast her—can there be any doubt?—because she was Patty Hearst: the perfect weapon, charged and skewed in advance, to satirize the American suburbs.
Patty Hearst with film director John Waters in 2004 (Shutterstock)
Fifty years on, we are again living in a nation split by ideology and uncertain about the future. A triumphant fist still holds iconic power. Half the country is again desperate to hold tight to familiar norms, while the other half is still rethinking gender and critiquing capitalism. Yet many of the old questions about Patty Hearst now feel like false dichotomies.
People wrote of “the two faces of Patty Hearst” and demanded to know which one was real, never dreaming they could be two narratives of a single self. They were desperate to know if Patty’s “conversion” was rooted in fear, coercion, or collaboration. Was she forced into sex or willing? Today we know that even the sincerest overture is exploitive if one person is held captive, and that coercion is easier to bear if you persuade yourself to be willing. We also know that the mind is less loyal than we want it to be. Children will cleave to their abuser; adults will defend a partner who smashes their face in. Young people caught up in a cult have to be extracted and “deprogrammed.” Under duress, identity slides into gray areas, places where we become whoever we need to be in that moment.
Patty had no fixed, stable self to start with. She was a teenager and a bit of a chameleon, good at acting a part, calculating and capable of detachment. A survivor, not a damsel in distress. Had she tried to escape, people would have continued to love her, dead or alive. Surviving the way she did only made her seem dangerous.
Forget the lurid drama of syndromes. Fear is sufficient explanation. Fear can inhibit someone’s actions, shrink the future they imagine for themselves, alter their sense of self, teach them manipulation, distort their innermost thoughts, and force them to perform a role 24/7. We soothe ourselves by underestimating its power.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
