Few cases in the history of American crime can have been more picked over than that of Patty Hearst, the heiress who was kidnapped in 1974 by the ramshackle revolutionary outfit known as the Symbionese Liberation Army: by my count, there are already more than a dozen nonfiction books about her, not to mention two novels, her own memoir, a feature film, several documentaries, numerous academic papers and – the eyes widen – two porn movies. Why, you might wonder, would anyone want to go there again? At the beginning of his book, Jeffrey Toobin justifies his decision to revisit the story by insisting that he regards it as a “trailer for the modern world”. Not only did the kidnapping “illuminate” the future of the media and celebrity culture; it also helped to tilt the politics of the US rightwards, a state of affairs that has continued ever since. But as he also notes, it was nevertheless an “anomalous event”, and in the end, it’s this freakish singularity that his narrative drives home. Forget context. Never has a battier story been told with so straight a face.
When 19-year-old student Patricia Hearst was kidnapped on the night of 4 February, she was living quietly in a duplex apartment in Berkeley, California, with Steven Weed, her fiance and former high school teacher. Her life changed in the course of a few moments. One minute, this moderately rebellious but highly privileged granddaughter of media magnate William Randolph Hearst (famously the inspiration for Citizen Kane) was playing house with Weed, the next, she was a prisoner, albeit one who would be treated, or so her captors said, according to the “Geneva convention”. (Weed was well named: having told the armed invaders to take whatever they wanted, he fled the scene; later, while Patty was still missing, he would give disloyal interviews about the Hearsts to the press.)
The SLA released a statement saying it would only release her if her father distributed food parcels worth $70 to all Californians who were on welfare, a demand that would cost him several million dollars. Amazingly, Randolph Hearst set about doing this, much to the disgust of Ronald Reagan, the governor of California. But it was no good. The SLA’s verbose recorded statements were soon to be enlivened by the flat, patrician sound of his daughter’s voice, informing the world that she had joined the SLA and would henceforth be known as Tania.
Everyone knows what happened next. Seventy days after she was taken, Hearst was caught on the security cameras of the bank she and her new comrades were robbing, carrying her gun with what looked like utmost professionalism. Soon after this, the SLA, its newest recruit now on the FBI’s most wanted list, fled San Francisco. Having separated into two groups, Donald DeFreeze, its de facto leader, and five others subsequently died in the course of a shootout with police that went out live on TV. The rest of the SLA, which now comprised only Hearst and a married couple, Bill and Emily Harris, then headed east, to a Pennsylvania farmhouse whose rent was being paid by a journalist called Jack Scott, who hoped to persuade them to write a book about their experiences.
Bored and broke, another robbery followed, during which a customer, Myrna Opsahl, was shot dead by Emily Harris. The group also indulged in a little cack-handed bombing, their devices made according to the instructions in The Anarchist Cookbook. By this point, however, Hearst had a lover, Steve Soliah, who was loosely aligned with the group through his sister Kathy, and when he returned to his decorating business in San Francisco, Hearst joined him. There, she devoted herself to feminist study groups, wearing a curly wig by way of a disguise. It wasn’t until 18 September 1975 that the bungling FBI finally came to arrest her. Caught at last, she peed herself in fright.
Toobin has written a strangely uninvolving book; certainly, it’s less gripping than The Run of His Life, his bestselling account of the trial of OJ Simpson. Was Hearst, as her lawyers would claim, a victim of the SLA, one who acted under duress, or was she a true convert to its programme of violence? This is not a question he is able conclusively to answer, though the ease with which she returned to being a Hearst once in custody is striking (she was nothing, it seems to me, if not a pragmatist). Unwilling to speculate where he cannot be sure of the facts – Hearst, now a society matron with a passion for dog shows, did not co-operate with him – his narrative sometimes wants for drama, though he is good on the course of her trial, during which, pleading the fifth amendment, she refused to answer no fewer than 42 questions from the prosecution (it was in part thanks to this that she was found guilty of armed robbery, though her seven-year sentence would be commuted by President Carter after just 22 months).
Even so, the smaller, odder details do stick in the mind. Murderous as it was, when the SLA leapt unsteadily into the febrile realm of the 70s counterculture, its aims uncertain and its politics dumb, it was already beyond parody. As I read Toobin’s account of Hearst’s early days in captivity, when its members spent hours reading Marxist tracts to her, all I could think was that at least her excruciating boredom might somehow have contrived to cancel out her terror. There is something almost Pooterish about the SLA’s mostly middle-class members, with their enthusiasm for calisthenics and their silly phrase-making (“death to the fascist insect”). As a group, they were united as much by their loathing of their daddies – boo hoo – as by their politics.
How pathetic it is that Hearst and the Harrises watched the shootout in which DeFreeze and the others died in a motel room in Disneyland, Anaheim, where the sight of Cinderella’s castle reputedly filled Patty with melancholy; how comical it is that they met their latest saviour, Kathy Soliah, at a drive-in cinema, where her car was parked in a section where a soft porn film called Teacher’s Pet was playing (elsewhere, Toobin notes, people were enjoying The Sting). Of course there’s no comfort in any of this for the families of those they killed and injured in their stupid quest for fame and notoriety. But as I ponder Hearst’s presidential pardon, an exceptional gift that eventually arrived courtesy of her privilege and a departing Bill Clinton, somehow it does make me feel better that the record can’t ever be entirely wiped clean.
• American Heiress: The Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin is published by Profile Books (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
