The charges stacked up from their trips to Hawaii, where they usually did their rewrites. It was the perfect place to cogitate, undisturbed, because people in L.A. could never figure out the time difference.
To relax and plan—now that her strength was coming back—she and Dunne would take long walks on the beach—in Malibu, in Hawaii. Much more comfortable now in his skin, Dunne joked with Josh Greenfeld that one night on a beautiful beach they’d run into Jesus, and Jesus said, “I love Joan’s work!”
It may have been on a beach in Honolulu, or it may have been in a car on the way to the Honolulu airport one day, that Dunne suggested a project to his wife, “sixteen words I would often later regret,” he said.
She’d been telling him she might like to buy a house in Hawaii. What would he think of that?
What would she think of this? he said: “James Taylor and Carly Simon in a rock-and-roll version of A Star Is Born.”
Chapter Twenty-one
1
James Taylor and Carly Simon had nothing on Patty Hearst. Patty Hearst was America’s biggest rock star. Rolling Stone said so. And who was Patty Hearst? Joan Didion with a carbine.
Of course, Didion saw in the Hearst misadventure “a parable for the period,” but more than that, she saw a sister: another descendant of Western pioneers, a woman with a predilection for reinventing herself at every turn and leaving the past behind.
The facts were improbable and bizarre: On February 4, 1974, Patricia Campbell Hearst, a nineteen-year-old art history major at Berkeley, had made chicken noodle soup and tuna fish sandwiches in her duplex apartment at 2603 Benvenue Avenue. She had put on a blue bathrobe and watched a television program called The Magician with her twenty-six-year-old fiancé, a math instructor and her personal tutor, Steven Weed. At around nine P.M., a woman knocked on the door and told Hearst she’d hit a car. She asked to use the phone. Then two men, one black, one white, rushed into the apartment, beat Weed unconscious with a wine bottle, and bound and blindfolded Hearst. In the first of many details offering some credence later to conspiracy theories, the official FBI report on the kidnapping stated unequivocally that two black males hauled Hearst away; in fact, among her captors, there was only one African-American, Donald DeFreeze. Was the report mistaken? Who was this second black male? He is not mentioned again in documents outlining the case.
Before she was gagged and forced into a stolen 1964 Chevrolet Impala convertible, Hearst screamed, “Please no, not me!”
* * *
Patty Hearst was the mildly rebellious daughter of the vastly wealthy Randolph Hearst, heir to the Hearst Corporation, which owned the San Francisco Examiner as well as a chain of newspapers and magazines. Orson Welles had based the character Charles Kane on Patty’s grandfather. No reminders of the family’s Missouri heritage, its overland crossing in covered wagons, its Gold Rush and ranching successes decorated her apartment. She liked to play down her wealth with friends, talk back to her parents’ praise of free-market capitalism. She had upset her family when, unmarried, she moved in with Weed. She smoked dope recreationally and dropped acid a few times just for the hell of it. But on balance, she appeared little different from most Berkeley coeds, a slightly rougher incarnation of the girl Didion had been, of the girls Didion had interviewed for her portrait of the campus in Mademoiselle over ten years earlier: a privileged young woman who had gone off to college and found a potential husband. Since the days of the Free Speech Movement, and the national trauma of the shootings at Kent State, Berkeley had mellowed. The kiosks just outside Sather Gate advertised acupuncture and meditation rather than sit-ins and revolution, sex therapy and psychic healing rather than marches and political action. Instead of armed struggle, progressive legislation was the new catchphrase, except among certain individuals and splinter groups farther off campus; indirectly, these outliers fueled the Hearst saga—embittered Vietnam vets, drifters who had come too late to the Golden Land’s party or the anarchist rallies (all infiltrated now by police informers), escapees from the Haight, now a blasted waste, symbol of the sixties’ ruin.
Human detritus from the hippie fallout fled into Bay Area neighborhoods and crossed the rest of the state. Groups calling themselves the Revolutionary Army and the New World Liberation Front planned bombings at the Berkeley Naval Architecture Building (this one didn’t come off) and at electrical plants and neighborhood police stations (some of these schemes did work—spectacularly). A box of See’s candy, rigged with explosives and left on Mayor Alioto’s front porch, blew part of his house away.
When apprehended, most of these “groups” turned out to be one or two addled individuals seeking publicity.
Farther south, in and around L.A., “an unusually high number of savage murders, murders no one quite understood, and the likes of which few had seen before” were taking place, wrote Didion’s friend Barry Farrell. “[D]ecapitations, dismemberments, eviscerations, and, occasionally, instances of cannibalism” were all too common. The LAPD called these incidents “overkills” and joked about the “curse of the Donner Party.” Was there something in California geography—the rumbling ground, the vast horizon, the veering hot winds—fostering madness, or was this surge of violence the predictable aftermath of too many drugs, too many destabilization attempts by police of already unstable “revolutionary” groups, too many instances of government corruption (Hearst’s papers were full of disturbing stories about the state’s grandest son, Richard Nixon, denying wrongdoing regarding a break-in at a D.C. hotel called the Watergate, rejecting duplicity in the administration’s Vietnam policy, despite mounds of evidence in the leaked Pentagon Papers).
Whatever the cause of the problem, state authorities decided the solution was crackdown and control. But here’s where the real trouble started, in the California penal empire—the “nation’s most dysfunctional prison system,” said David Talbot, a San Francisco journalist.
On March 5, 1973, the Symbionese Liberation Army, in the person of Donald DeFreeze, walked right out of Soledad Prison, an escapee in no visible hurry, undeterred by any guards, having been counseled inside on “black power” by a man with apparent ties to the CIA. Less than a year later, the SLA would pull up to Patty Hearst’s door on Benvenue Avenue.
* * *
It was a pioneer tale for the new era, and Didion was hooked.
Donald DeFreeze, she learned, was reliably reported to have been recruited by Detective Sergeant R. G. Farwell in 1967 to be an informant for the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section, later the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit. The PDIU had been established to monitor groups posing potential public danger; it would be disbanded in 1983, after more than a decade of allegedly “spying on law-abiding individuals and groups,” including the state’s attorney general, John Van de Kamp, and Jerry Brown, and engaging in “incidents of conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, false arrest, burglary and theft.” DeFreeze was well treated by this unit. He lived high, until he allegedly robbed a prostitute and was sentenced, in December 1969, to five to fifteen years in the prison at Vacaville.
There, he joined an officially sanctioned prisoner-education group, the Black Cultural Association, run by a linguistics instructor at Berkeley, Colston Westbrook, whose goal, he said, was to instill racial pride and strategies for self-help among the prisoners. Association meetings generally began with the unveiling of the tricolored Republic of New Afrika flag and black-power salutes. To outsiders, it looked suspiciously like Westbrook was training the prisoners to be revolutionaries. Later, DeFreeze denounced him, on a tape sent to San Francisco radio station KSAN, as a “government agent now working for Military Intelligence while giving assistance to the FBI.”
Though Westbrook “tried to keep his military and intelligence backgrounds hidden” while running meetings of the Black Cultural Association, wrote David Talbot, “stories circulated about the brainwashing techniques he had learned in Asia” while working for a “CIA-controlled firm,” and “how he was applying them at Vacavill
e.”
Westbrook was especially close to Donald DeFreeze. He helped DeFreeze establish his own prison course, teaching the seven principles of Kwanzaa: self-determination, production, cooperation, collective work and responsibility, faith, unity, and creativity. DeFreeze renamed himself Cinque, after Sengbe Pieh, later known as Joseph Cinqué, an African slave who had led the rebellion, in 1839, on the Amistad.
Didion was fascinated to discover that a number of white students at Berkeley with leftist political passions or a desire to play radical signed up as tutors with the Black Cultural Association. In this way, Cinque met William Wolfe, who would become Patty Hearst’s lover (“the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known,” she said) or her serial rapist, depending on who’s telling the story; he was the son of a wealthy anesthesiologist who, like Hearst, had rebelled against his family’s conservative values. He lived in a Maoist commune in Berkeley called Peking House.
A private investigator named Lake Headley, trying to piece together the SLA story, claimed that among Cinque’s visitor-tutors at Vacaville were Patricia Soltysik, a former student-body treasurer at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California; Nancy Ling Perry, a former Goldwater supporter disillusioned by the JFK assassination, Vietnam, and the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.; and Patty Hearst, using a fake ID with the name Mary Alice Siems.
What is certain is that Hearst made at least passing contact with Nancy Ling Perry. Perry sold fruit juice every day at the Fruity Rudy stand on Telegraph Avenue. Hearst bought from her. So did Sara Davidson. The whole community knew her, Didion learned from Davidson: She was a “kind, honest person with strong humanist convictions.”
In December 1972, Cinque was abruptly transferred to Soledad Prison in the Central California coastal farming country. Westbrook followed him there, teaching community relations to the prison guards. Cinque’s fellow prisoners didn’t trust him; he seemed strangely cozy with the prison officials, and they all assumed he was a snitch. Unconfirmed reports said Hearst visited him. Cinque’s Kwanzaa-based principles had now become the revolutionary platform of what he called the Symbionese Liberation Army: “[T]he name ‘symbionese’ is taken from the word symbiosis and we define its meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony,” he wrote in a dense manifesto.
According to Lake Headley’s report on the group, while Cinque was in Soledad, “[d]iscussions were held between Patricia Campbell Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army concerning a kidnapping—not her own.”
This allegation encouraged conspiracy theorists to interpret Hearst’s cry at the moment of her abduction—“Please no, not me!”—as an expression of irritated surprise, as in, It’s supposed to be someone else! What are you doing?
In March 1973, Cinque was made late-night boiler attendant at a remote section of the prison grounds near the area where Colston Westbrook always taught his class. One night, a guard dropped Cinque off at the boiler and drove away. Cinque scaled a small, unguarded fence and made his way up Highway 101. Prison officials were slow to respond, and in the coming days they did little to track him down. Cinque sought refuge with William Wolfe and his cohorts in Peking House. There, he brought his army of white radicals together in preparation for the “Declaration of Revolutionary War & The Symbionese Program.” He fashioned a flag featuring a seven-headed cobra, an ancient symbol signifying “God and life” and representing the seven Kwanzaa principles, he said—though it actually appears to have been lifted from the cover of a Jimi Hendrix album.
* * *
Cinque approached most of the radical groups in the Bay Area, offering himself as a revolutionary “hit man.” No one trusted him. The Black Panthers accused Cinque of secretly working for the government, stirring up “hatred, fear and disunity in the black community.”
The Reverend Jim Jones of the San Francisco’s Peoples Temple, a fast-talking figure of great interest to Didion, was caught on tape by an FBI bug saying he had it on good authority that Cinque “was palsy-walsy with everybody in the glass house”—that is, he was inside the Establishment. (Eventually, some journalists suspected Jones, too, of being a government informant.)
Soon after the SLA had run off with Patty Hearst, with or without her cooperation, Cinque issued a public demand: Randolph Hearst must sponsor a massive food giveaway to the city’s poor, he said—his daughter’s “health” depended on it. Hastily, Colston Westbrook arranged a press conference on the Berkeley campus to read an open letter to Cinque, complimenting him on his “brilliant” political strategy but urging him not to harm Hearst in any way. At one point, he made a reference to Cinque’s “leader,” as if he and Cinque both followed orders from some other superior. Later, he shrugged this off, but he never really explained it. The radical community assumed Westbrook was sending his protégé a coded message.
If this was the case, then Cinque chose this moment to break publicly with his mentor. He warned Westbrook he’d be “shot on sight.”
Didion followed the inside story intensely through the reporting of Sara Davidson, Barry Farrell, and other journalist friends. The food giveaway further revealed to them all the SLA’s divisive effect. Leftist groups suspicious of Cinque, refusing to sanction the effort, could be accused of turning their backs on the poor, the very people they claimed to fight for; extremists who did support the program might gain some official respectability, and move closer to the political mainstream.
Jim Jones seized the moment to curry favor with the San Francisco community and its political leaders. Just ten days after Hearst’s abduction, he went on a local radio station to say the Peoples Temple would offer two thousand dollars to help free her—and then he offered himself and other Peoples Temple members as hostages in exchange for Hearst. The Hearst family and the SLA rejected his gesture.
California welfare officials estimated that a food distribution effort matching the SLA’s vision would cost around $400 million. Randolph Hearst pulled together two million dollars from the Hearst Foundation and his private coffers—after being snubbed by the city’s business leaders, the Red Cross, the United Way, and the Bank of America, which offered a loan even Hearst could not repay.
Distribution centers were established, including a former Del Monte banana-processing plant on Mission Creek. The SLA asked the Black Panthers and the United Farm Workers to help move the food, but both refused, the Panthers claiming they wouldn’t support the SLA’s “extortion,” and the farmworkers puzzled that Cinque had also asked the Safeway food chain to participate in the scheme. The farmworkers were leading a boycott against Safeway as part of the ongoing grape strikes.
On February 22, near riots occurred at the churches and distribution centers offering food. Hundreds of people, mostly black women, many with babies in their arms (reinforcing entrenched stereotypes of the poor), lined up and were jostled by gangs openly stealing the crates. Workers, panicked among shoving crowds, tossed boxes off the backs of moving trucks, injuring several people. High-end grocery chains had sold Hearst tainted food—“75% slop”—at inflated prices. The crowds claimed it was inedible; angry young men hurled frozen turkey legs through plate-glass windows. The SLA issued a statement calling the food “hog feed.”
Governor Reagan, observing the long lines of poor women on television, said, “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.” He said those who took the food were in danger of having their welfare checks cut off.
The SLA released a tape of Patty Hearst expressing disappointment in her father, saying she didn’t believe he was making a good-faith effort to get her back.
Just two months later, on April 3, the SLA distributed a photograph of Hearst with her hair cropped short, wearing a beret, and standing, legs spread, holding an M1 carbine in her hands, in front of a banner with a seven-headed cobra. The image was powerful and stylish: Irving Penn on an acid-laced martini.
Her taped message said she had joined the SLA: “I have been given the name Tania after a c
omrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia…” She also stated, “One thing I learned is that the corporate ruling class will do anything in their power in order to maintain their position of control over the masses, even if this means the sacrifice of one of their own.”
The Hearst family claimed she had been brainwashed.
Photos of the gun-toting girl appeared all over the Berkeley campus, saying “We love you Tania.”
At first, sorting through the images, suspicions, and contradictory reports regarding Patty Hearst, Didion saw it all as evidence of “one California busy being born and another busy dying.”
She saw in the young woman a fellow beneficiary (or romantic victim) of a family always “looking for a stake” in the Golden Land, claiming and then radically abandoning one perceived treasure after another.
Seven-headed cobra.
Mommy’s snake book.
* * *
On October 20, 1975, Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone—who had asked both Didion and Dunne to cover the Patty Hearst trial for the magazine—received what surely must have been one of the strangest proposals he had ever seen from an author. In the course of two single-spaced typed pages, Didion listed for him, in a long vertical column, all the things that interested her about Hearst’s capture and trial, none of which, at first blush, seemed to have anything to do with Patricia Campbell Hearst. These included Grace Cathedral, Francis Ford Coppola, the opening of the opera, the great fire and earthquake, the tea garden in Golden Gate Park, the I. Magnin children’s department, the Spinsters, the Bachelors (philanthropic organizations in San Francisco), and the “weddings of my cousins.”
Didion remembered being blindfolded during her induction into the Mañana Club as an adolescent, and being harangued by the governor’s daughter. Was Patty Hearst’s experience, her fear, her social terror, in any way similar to hers?
The Last Love Song Page 45