Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders

by Paul Krassner

  There had been a rumor that Patty was pregnant by Cinque. Indeed, one of the first questions that Randolph Hearst asked when he met sports figure Jack Scott—who had supposedly seen Patty on the lam—was to ascertain if that rumor was true. I wrote in the Berkeley Barb: “Now, with their daughter on trial, the Hearsts have hired a lawyer who wears pancake make-up to press conferences, the better to transform a racist fear into a Caucasian alibi.”

  I received this letter by certified mail:

  Dear Sir:

  You undoubtedly did not realize that the name “Pan-Cake Make-Up is the registered trademark (U.S. Patent Office No. 350,402) of Max Factor & Co., and is not a synonym for cake make-up. The correct usage is “Pan-Cake Make-Up”, capitalized and written in just that manner, or, under circumstances such as these, where you obviously did not intend to mention a particular brand, simply cake make-up.

  We are sure that you are aware of the legal importance of protecting a trademark and trust that you will use ours properly in any future reference to our product, or, in the alternative, will use the proper generic term rather than our brand name. So that our records will be complete, we would appreciate an acknowledgment of this letter.

  Very truly yours,

  Max Factor & Co.

  D. James Pekin

  Corporate Counsel

  In response, I explained that there had been “a slight mis-understanding—what F. Lee Bailey had been wearing to all those press conferences was actually Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix—and I hope that has cleared up the matter.”

  • • •

  It was not an easy task for Examiner reporter Stephen Cook to report about the trial of his boss’s daughter, what with the boss sitting right there in the front row of the courtroom to oversee him, but he didn’t spare his employer from embarrassing testimony; and, to the Examiner’s credit, he was not censored. However, Dick Alexander, who was writing feature material on the trial for the Examiner, had his copy changed so drastically that he requested his byline be dropped.

  On the first day of the trial, he wore a tie with the legendary Fuck You emblazoning the design. Randolph Hearst chastised him for this, but Alexander continued to wear the tie. Perhaps it reminded Hearst of the time Patty screamed, “Fuck you, Daddy!” in his office. A syndicated cartoon by George Lichty—with the caption, “I don’t know whether she was brainwashed, but she should certainly have her mouth washed out with soap!”—appeared only in the first edition of the Examiner.

  The trial was also grist for the TV entertainment mill. On The Merv Griffin Show, the audience voted 70–30 that Patty was guilty as charged. On the sitcom Maude, the British maid studying for her citizenship test had to answer the question, “Who said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?” She was given a hint that the initials were P.H. She did not guess Patrick Henry, but Patty Hearst. And Johnny Carson in his opening monologue wondered whether F. Lee Bailey would get Lockheed off “for kidnapping our money.”

  Soap-opera actress Ruth Warrick, who starred in Citizen Kane, revealed that “My name was not printed in any Hearst paper for five years after that film was released. I could be the star of a movie and my name couldn’t even be mentioned in the ads in Hearst papers.”

  Patty had never seen Citizen Kane, particularly not while on the run, because it would’ve been too embarrassing to be caught with it. Throughout her trial, there was a screen set up in the court, but instead of Orson Welles, over and over and over again, like some recurring nightmare, Patty would view footage of herself helping to rob the Hibernia Bank. One witness at the bank had been convinced that it was merely an episode for the TV series, Streets of San Francisco, and that Patty was just an actress.

  Nancy Faber of People magazine became the unofficial courtroom fashion advisor. If you wanted to find out exactly what color Patty’s pantsuit was, Faber would know that it was Iranian Rust. But while Patty was wearing light-brown eye shadow, or pearl-gray nail polish to indicate that she didn’t have the hands of a criminal, the San Quentin Six were appearing before their jury each day in shackles and leg irons. Shana Alexander was the only journalist who skipped a day at the Patty Hearst trial to attend the San Quentin Six trial.

  A rhetorical question had been asked of the press: “How can you justify extensive coverage of Patty Hearst and say little, if anything, about the San Quentin Six, in which the state has admitted not having any real evidence?” KQED interviewed media folks, who rationalized that they were only giving the public what it wanted.

  But when you had a TV program like Mowgli’s Brothers, an animated cartoon based on Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in which an abandoned baby is adopted by a couple of compassionate wolves who talk to him—and right there in the middle there’s a commercial with Tony the Tiger telling young viewers that they should eat Frosted Flakes—was that not a form of brainwashing? The San Quentin Six were to Patty Hearst as ginseng root was to Frosted Flakes.

  John Lester of KPIX became the media advisor for the Hearst family when Patty was abducted. He warned Randolph Hearst that when he stepped through his front door he would be appearing on international television and therefore it would be important not to pick his nose. So, just before he opened the door, Hearst would call out, “Hey, John—look!”

  Lester would look, and Hearst would proceed to stick his index finger up his right nostril, eliciting a horrified laugh from his media advisor. Then Hearst would walk out with Catherine wearing a black dress and mournfully greet the press. On the inside of the door, there was a sign that warned “Don’t Pick Your Nose!”

  Patty’s parents were there on view when the jury was selected, although the press was excluded. But how could the judge be sure that Randolph Hearst wouldn’t leak the story to his own paper? And so they sat in the front row of the courtroom each day, that protective image of media royalty continuing to lurk behind Princess Patty in the subconscious memory of the jurors.

  What was really on trial was this royal nuclear family—the floor sample of a consumer unit that also served as the original source of authority. If Patty had not “belonged” to her parents, why would anybody want to kidnap her? And if the princess had lived her pre-kidnap life inside the safety of a castle, then how could any nasty old SLA manage to get her?

  The message of this trial was clear: Destroy the seeds of rebellion in your children or we shall have it done for you. In the courtroom, spectators with binoculars focused on Patty and her parents, who were busy pretending that they weren’t being watched for reactions. They had become a captive audience by being forced to listen in public to a tape-recorded communiqué from their princess, abdicating her right to the throne:

  Mom, Dad, I would like to comment on your efforts to supposedly secure my safety. The [food] giveaway was a sham … You were playing games—stalling for time—which the FBI was using in their attempts to assassinate me and the SLA elements which guarded me …

  I have been given the choice of, one, being released in a safe area or, two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army … I have chosen to stay and fight …

  I want you to tell the people the truth. Tell them how the law-and-order programs are just a means to remove so-called violent—meaning aware—individuals from the community in order to facilitate the controlled removal of unneeded labor forces in this country, in the same way that Hitler controlled the removal of the Jews from Germany.

  I should have known that if you and the rest of the corporate state were willing to do this to millions of people to maintain power and to serve your needs, you would also kill me if necessary to serve those same needs. How long will it take before white people in this country understand that whatever happens to a black child happens sooner or later to a white child? How long will it be before we all understand that we must fight for our freedom?

  At the end of the tape, Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze came on with a triple death threat, especially to one Colston Westbrook, whom he accused of being “a government agent now working f
or military intelligence while giving assistance to the FBI.” This communiqué was originally sent to San Francisco radio station KSAN. News director David McQueen checked with a Justice Department source, who confirmed Westbrook’s employment by the CIA.

  Conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell traced Westbrook’s activities from 1962, when he was a CIA advisor to the South Korean CIA, through 1969, when he provided logistical support in Vietnam for the CIA’s Phoenix program. His job was the indoctrination of assassination and terrorist cadres.

  After seven years in Asia, he was brought home in 1970, along with the war, and assigned to run the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville Prison, where he became the control officer for DeFreeze, who had worked as a police informer from 1967 to 1969 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  If DeFreeze was a double agent, then the SLA was a Frankenstein monster, turning against its creator by becoming in reality what had been orchestrated only as a media image. When he snitched on his keepers, he signed the death warrant of the SLA. They were burned alive in a Los Angeles safe-house during a shootout with police. When Cinque’s charred remains were sent to his family in Cleveland, they couldn’t help but notice that he had been decapitated. It was as if the CIA had said, literally, “Bring me the head of Donald DeFreeze!”

  Consider the revelations of Wayne Lewis in August 1975. He claimed to have been an undercover agent for the FBI, a fact verified by FBI director Clarence Kelley. Surfacing at a press conference in Los Angeles, Lewis spewed forth a veritable conveyor belt of conspiratorial charges: that DeFreeze was an FBI informer; that he was killed not by the SWAT team but by an FBI agent because he had become “uncontrollable”; that the FBI then wanted Lewis to infiltrate the SLA; that the FBI had undercover agents in other underground guerrilla groups; that the FBI knew where Patty Hearst was but let her remain free so it could build up its files of potential subversives.

  At one point, the FBI declared itself to have made 27,000 checks into the whereabouts of Patty Hearst. It was simultaneously proclaimed by the FDA that there were 25,000 brands of laxative on the market. That meant one catharsis for each FBI investigation, with a couple of thousand potential loose shits remaining to smear across “No Left Turn” signs. Patty had become a vehicle for repressive action on the right and for wishful thinking on the left.

  • • •

  A three-month-old baby, whose mother wanted to expose her to the process of justice, was being breast-fed in the back of the courtroom while Patty Hearst testified that she had been raped in a closet by the lover she had once described as “the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”

  Now, prosecutor James Browning was cross-examining her.

  “Did you, in fact, have a strong feeling for Willie Wolfe?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “As a matter of fact, were you in love with him?”

  “No.”

  A little later, Browning asked if it had been “forcible rape.”

  “Excuse me?

  “Did you struggle or submit?”

  “I didn’t resist. I was afraid.”

  Browning walked into the trap: “I thought you said you had strong feelings for him?”

  “I did,” Patty replied triumphantly. “I couldn’t stand him.”

  It sure seemed fake. Yet there was this letter-to-the-editor of the Berkeley Barb:

  Only a woman knows that the sex act, no matter how gentle, becomes rape if she is an unwilling partner. Her soul, as well as her body, is scarred. The gentleness of Willie Wolfe does not preclude rape. Rape, in this instance, was dependent upon Patricia Hearst’s state of mind, not Willie Wolfe’s. We must all remember that only Patty knows what she felt; and if we refuse to believe her, there can be no justice.

  Patty also said that her intercourse with Cinque was “without affection.”

  The SLA women insisted they were not “mindless cunts enslaved by big black penises.”

  “You need seven inches,” a reporter was explaining, “for a byline in Newsweek.”

  “Patty Frigid After DeFreeze,” stated a headline that was set in type but not used in the Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus newspaper.

  “Hearst Blows Weed,” stated a later headline that was used in the Daily Californian.

  “Is the government saying,” objected F. Lee Bailey, “that everyone who smokes grass is a bank robber?”

  Oh, that’s right, this was a bank-robbery trial, wasn’t it?

  “Were you acting the part of a bank robber?” Browning asked Patty.

  “I was doing exactly what I had to do. I just wanted to get out of that bank. I was just supposed to be in there to get my picture taken, mostly.”

  Ulysses Hall testified that after the robbery, he managed to speak on the phone with his former prison mate, Cinque, who told him that the SLA members didn’t trust Patty’s decision to join them. Conversely, she didn’t trust their offer of a “choice,” since they all realized that she’d be able to identify them if she went free—and so they made her prove herself by “fronting her off” at the bank with Cinque’s gun pointed at her head. Out of the closet, into the bank!

  Patty testified that Patricia Soltysik kicked her because she wasn’t enthusiastic enough at a dress rehearsal, and that Cinque warned her that if she messed up in any way, she’d be killed. Before the trial, prosecutor Browning had admitted that it was “clear from the photographs she may have been acting under duress.” And during the trial, Bailey, with only fifteen minutes to go before weekend recess, brought out the government’s suppression of photos showing Camilla Hall also pointing her gun at Patty in the bank.

  Moreover, in a scene right out of Blow-Up or an aspirin commercial, a “scientific laboratory” had used a digital computer “to filter out the grain without changing the content,” then scanned the photos with a laser beam, all to indicate that Patty had opened her mouth in surprise and recoiled in horror at the firing of shots in the bank, and that it was merely a shadow that made her look as if she were smiling during the robbery, although Cinque had given her strict orders to smile whenever she met anyone who was supposed to know she was Tania, because the original image of Patty, the one that was disseminated around the world, showed her smiling broadly.

  No wonder KQED’s courtroom artist Rosalie Ritz was approached by a promoter willing to pay her to design a Patty doll with a complete change of clothes so it could be turned into a Tania doll.

  It did not come out in the testimony of Louis “Jolly” West that he had once killed an elephant with an overdose of LSD—which United Press correspondent Don Thackrey called “Pachydermicide”—nor that Dr. West had once spent eight straight hours in John Lilly’s sensory deprivation tank.

  According to Kayo Hallinan, Patty “hated” West because she was aware of the fascistic implications of his proposed UCLA Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, which would practice what it preached against—violence—in the form of electrode implantation and aversion therapy. Obviously, then, some kind of coercive persuasion must have been used to get her to talk to him. Perhaps she had been reduced to a state of infantile helplessness—once again.

  A letter from a prisoner in the San Mateo Jail:

  I was coming out of the doctor’s office when I saw Tania being taken out the front door. The guards had cleared the hallways of all prisoners and it was by mistake that I was let out at that time by the jail nurse. Tania was taken out by one female and three males. When I called to her I was dragged out of the hallway. Our comrade was exhausted and frightened, lethargic in her movements and appeared drugged. While I was in the doctor’s office, I had noticed a 3-by-5 manila envelope—the type used to hold medications given to prisoners—which had written on it, “Hearst.” There is little doubt she is being drugged.

  The Associated Press reported that “a source close to the specialists conducting the examination … said that the dosages of ‘anti-psychotic drugs’ listed on Miss H
earst’s medical report would themselves cause lethargy and disorientation.” Would she eventually emerge from the psychiatric kidnapping only to proclaim, as she had previously done on an SLA communiqué, “I have not been brainwashed, drugged, tortured or hypnotized in any way”?

  F. Lee Bailey put Patty on the witness stand. He asked her what Cinque had done on one occasion to show his disapproval.

  “He pinched me.”

  “Where?”

  “My breasts”—pause—“and down—”

  “Your private parts as well?”

  “Yes.”

  Then Browning cross-examined Patty:

  “Did he pinch one or both of your breasts?”

  “I really don’t remember.”

  “Was it under your clothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “In both places?”

  “Pardon me, I don’t think that the other was under my clothing.”

  “All right, your breasts he pinched by touching your skin. The pubic area, he didn’t touch your skin. Is that true?”

  “That’s right.”

  Good Lord, this was supposed to be the Trial of the Century, and the government was busy trying to find out whether Cinque got bare tit.

  Bailey fought unsuccessfully to have Patty testify about the bombing of the Hearst castle, so that the jury would know she was still, indirectly, afraid of SLA members Bill and Emily Harris. But, once more, Patty tricked Browning during cross-examination. He was asking why she hadn’t taken advantage of opportunities to phone for help.

  “It wasn’t possible for me to call,” she explained, “because I couldn’t do it, and I was afraid of the FBI.”

  Browning was certainly not going to disagree with Bailey’s contention that Patty suffered from “a misperception about the viciousness of the FBI,” so he asked Patty if it had occurred to her to turn the Harrises in.

  “I was afraid. They aren’t the only people like that running around … There were many others who could’ve picked up right where they left off.”