American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Hearst’s politics began in a populist mode, and he won two terms as a Democratic congressman from New York. His journalistic and political ascendancy was such that he sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1904. And though his political ambitions were never fully realized, he kept buying up newspapers around the country, eventually accumulating more than two dozen. Still, the Chief’s journalistic heyday was relatively brief, lasting only until the Depression, when changing tastes, as well as economic conditions, thwarted his plans to expand further. By World War II, the Hearst papers, like the Chief himself, had shed their populist spirit and settled into a hard-core conservatism. In any event, by that point Hearst was at least as well-known for his scandalous personal life as for his newspapers.

  In 1897, Hearst, then thirty-four, became infatuated with a teenage vaudeville dancer named Millicent Willson. He courted her for six years, and they married in 1903. She bore him five sons over the next decade, including in 1915 the twins David and Randy, Patricia’s father. Shortly after their birth, the Chief met an eighteen-year-old Broadway chorus girl named Marion Davies, and he began pursuing her with the same kind of ardor he brought to his journalistic crusades. Hearst used his newspapers’ columns to promote Davies’s show business career, and they soon commenced a public romance that would endure for the remainder of their lives. Millicent refused to give Hearst a divorce, and Hearst refused to leave Davies. The standoff lasted for decades.

  The five Hearst boys grew up amid the icy feud between their parents. For the most part, they lived in their mother’s apartment in Manhattan, though their real homes were the boarding schools to which they were all shipped at early ages. The boys also visited their father and Davies in California, first in their mansion in Beverly Hills and then in the vast castle the Chief built on his mother’s land at San Simeon. Hearst (and Phoebe) ultimately quadrupled his landownership, to about 270,000 acres, and hired the architect Julia Morgan to design more than a dozen buildings on the property. The castle itself, with 127 rooms, soars above the California coastline, and its twin towers are international landmarks. (Among other features, Hearst also built the world’s largest private zoo at San Simeon.) Perhaps most remarkably, San Simeon might not even have been the Chief’s favorite residence. Near the Oregon border, Hearst lavished attention on another remarkable estate called Wyntoon. This Bavarian-themed hunting and fishing resort was every bit as lavish as San Simeon and a great deal more private.

  The Chief did his best to promote Davies as a movie star, which her talents failed to justify, and the couple became known for the lavish parties on their estates. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Hearst boys grew up rich in financial resources but otherwise impoverished. None of them flourished. All five did poorly in school, and not one graduated from college. The Chief and Davies were serious alcoholics, and all five sons were problem drinkers, of varying severity. Randy emulated his father by attending Harvard without graduating. As the Chief’s biographer David Nasaw wrote, “The boys, following in their father’s footsteps, continually ran into debt and called on their parents to bail them out. This they did, as had Phoebe before them, but never without complaining.”

  After Randy’s ignominious departure from Harvard, the Chief gave him a sinecure as an assistant to the publisher of the Hearst paper in Atlanta. There Randy fell for the most socially prominent debutante in the city—Catherine Campbell, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a telephone company executive. They married in 1938, in what was described as Atlanta’s wedding of the year, which included nine bridesmaids and fifteen groomsmen. The ceremony was Catholic, and Randy, who had been a nonobservant Presbyterian, became a nonobservant Catholic in deference to his bride.

  Trauma visited the young couple almost immediately. Catherine became pregnant soon after the wedding and gave birth to a daughter, also named Catherine, in 1939. Much later, the elder Catherine would describe her daughter’s medical issues in veiled terms. In Patricia’s criminal trial, Catherine testified that her eldest daughter “has a shortage of hemoglobin” and was subject to ear infections. This might have been true, but it obscured the larger truth that young Catherine was mentally disabled, a matter of some shame in that less enlightened era. The tragedy turned the child’s mother ever more deeply to her Catholic faith. It also led to a ten-year gap between Catherine and the next child, Virginia, born in 1949. Another significant gap followed, until she had three more daughters in quick succession: Patricia Campbell Hearst, on February 20, 1954, followed by Anne in 1956, and Victoria in 1957.

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  After a few years in Los Angeles, Randy and Catherine Hearst and their five daughters settled into a château-style mansion in Hillsborough, the toniest of the San Francisco suburbs. The Chief, who died in 1951, despaired about the business acumen of his sons, so he took steps to make sure that they would enjoy comfortable livings while preventing them from tampering with his beloved newspapers. According to the terms of the trust that established the management structure of the Hearst Corporation, the five sons and their heirs could never control more than five of the thirteen seats on the Hearst board. In 1965, Randy was named chairman of the executive committee of the Hearst Corporation, and in the early 1970s he was also designated the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner. Neither title meant much. Professional managers ran the corporation and the newspapers.

  Randy Hearst dedicated his life to leisure—shooting deer near San Simeon, trolling for sailfish off Mexico, duck hunting anywhere fowl might be found. Closer to home, he played tennis and swam at the Burlingame Country Club. He spoke in a plummy diction that seemed old-fashioned even at the time. (A loose woman was a “Sally Roundheels,” and he was forever freshening drinks with “just a splash” of one spirit or another.) Like many sons of volatile fathers, Randy erred on the side of emotional restraint. There was a formality about him, but a decency, too. He lived surrounded by retainers—from newspaper reporters to domestic servants—and he might not have regarded them precisely as equals, but he treated everyone well and inspired a kind of loyalty.

  His wife, Catherine Hearst, was another matter altogether. In fairness, Randy left to Catherine (and a succession of governesses) the real work of raising five daughters, and Catherine struggled more than most with what was called, in her era, the generation gap. Her rules—no blue jeans on visits to San Francisco!—drew eye rolls from her daughters. Catherine’s Catholic faith was deep and real and shared by no one else in the household. She sent all five daughters to Catholic schools, which they all fled, sooner rather than later. She insisted on the completion of academic work and met resistance from her daughters from their earliest school days. (Academic distinction did not run in the family. As noted above, none of the five sons of William Randolph Hearst graduated from college, and only one of the five daughters of Randy and Catherine Hearst, Virginia, graduated from college.)

  The Chief had become a thoroughgoing reactionary by the time he died, but Randy inherited none of the hard edges of his father’s politics. He was a Republican, to be sure, but his passions ran more to sport than to the ballot box. Randy’s charitable obligations were conventional but numerous and heartfelt; indeed, on the night Patricia was kidnapped, he and Catherine were in Washington at a function for a foundation, which Randy chaired, to bring high school students to visit the U.S. Senate. Catherine, on the other hand, had harsher political views and a perfect outlet for them, too. In 1956, Governor Goodwin J. Knight, a Republican, appointed Catherine to the Board of Regents of the University of California. It was a measure of the Hearsts’ influence, and Phoebe Hearst’s legacy, that Catherine was chosen, because she had neither attended school in California nor graduated from any college at all. But as the student protests began at Berkeley and elsewhere, Catherine became known as a fierce hard-liner and a strong ally of Governor Ronald Reagan’s. (As Patricia later observed, “My father is a registered Republican who always votes Democrat. My mother is a registered Democrat who always votes Republican.”) In he
r family and on campus, Catherine’s mission was the same: impose discipline.

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  Her most notable failure on that score was with her middle daughter. By the standards of the day, Patricia Hearst’s teenage rebellions were modest, but they were real. She was not her mother’s daughter.

  Of all the Hearst daughters, Patricia rejected Catholic school, and the Catholic faith, the fastest. She was sent away to Convent of the Sacred Heart when she was just ten, and the lesson she learned best there was how to provoke the nuns. As Patricia later recalled, one nun had a practice of leaning over students and yelling directly in their faces. “When she did this to me one day, the idea flashed in my mind that I could make her stop by shocking her,” she recalled. “So when she paused for breath, I very deliberately said, ‘Oh, go to hell!’ It worked, stopped her cold.” Patricia started high school at Santa Catalina School, another Catholic boarding school about a hundred miles south of Hillsborough, and she loathed it there as well.

  Patricia lived for summers, when she could revel in the joys of San Simeon and Wyntoon and in the company of her father and their three dogs, Whiskey, Pablo, and Mike. Patricia was an athletic kid, and the vast play spaces of her many homes (and country club) appealed to her. At twelve, she was the only daughter who took up Randy’s invitation to learn to shoot. They went duck hunting together, and the education proved useful in a way that surely neither could have imagined at the time.

  Patricia took an early interest in boys, which was distressing to her mother but typical for the times. She had her first real boyfriend at fifteen, and when she moved to Crystal Springs the following year, she made a determined play for a hot young teacher named Steven Weed. “He was everything a high school girl could want: a college graduate, an older man, so mature, so experienced, so sophisticated,” she said later. “I suppose I threw myself at him, but I hope not in any obvious way.”

  Weed took her attention as his due, for he had an imperious style for a man in his early twenties. He was determined to prove that he would not be intimidated by the Hearsts, even as he nearly became a member of the family. For example, as his relationship with Patricia ripened, Weed flunked Vicki Hearst in his math class, even though she was a borderline student. He enjoyed his role as Patricia’s tutor in life, and for a time anyway she reveled in the attention of an older man. Of course, the attraction itself was a form of rebellion for Patricia—in light of the differences in their ages and status and the forbidden nature of student-teacher contact. Considering the basis of their relationship—which would be seen as outrageous, if not unlawful, at a later time—the Hearsts were tolerant of Steve. (They couldn’t stand his mustache, however, and their first gift to him was a razor.) Still, in light of the Hearst family tradition of older men courting teenage girls, they were hardly in a position to complain.

  As Patricia moved toward her college years, her relationship with her mother deteriorated. Catherine wanted Patricia to be a debutante; Patricia refused. Catherine wanted Patricia to break it off with Steve; Patricia moved in with him instead. Catherine wanted Patricia to go to Stanford; Patricia decided to follow Steve to Berkeley. With time to kill before she started classes at Cal, Patricia even took a job as a clerk at Capwell’s, an Oakland department store, in a brief foray to see how the other half lived. There, she had a modest political awakening as she saw how the store made many of her colleagues work off the clock, keeping their hours down, so they would not be eligible for benefits.

  Patricia and Steve Weed lived modestly on Steve’s $650 per month teaching stipend and Patricia’s $300 per month allowance. Steve had enjoyed long weekends at the family compounds at San Simeon and Wyntoon, but during the school year he preferred to stay closer to home. Those festive outings yielded to somber evenings with his fellow graduate students, which bored Patricia to tears, sometimes literally. One rare dinner where Patricia actually showed some interest in the conversation involved Errol Morris, another graduate student in Steve’s program, who was also starting to display the eclectic interests that would later make him a celebrated documentarian. As it happened, shortly before this dinner, Morris had gone to Wisconsin to interview Ed Gein, a notorious serial killer and grave robber. This story of life’s dark side interested Patricia a great deal more than the dreary academic politics that her boyfriend preferred to discuss.

  Some of Weed’s friends called him Mr. Spock, after the Star Trek character, because of his austere, highly logical personality. (He was a teaching assistant in a logic class at the university.) Reflecting later on Patricia’s personality, he expressed himself more like a professor than the boyfriend of a nineteen-year-old: “She judged things as they arose in the concrete, not along any systematic lines of principle.” In short order, this side of his personality began to grate on Patricia. Once, during a dispute at the dinner table, he picked Patricia up and deposited her outside their front door, until he decided she had cooled off enough to be readmitted to their home. During another fight in the car, he pulled over to the side of the road and said, “If you don’t like it, you can get out and walk home.” Patricia almost did, until she realized it was her car.

  Still, their relationship moved forward on a kind of automatic pilot. They became engaged through a sort of osmosis rather than an actual proposal. They notified Patricia’s parents without ceremony. One night at dinner with Randy and Catherine, Patricia mentioned their plan to marry while Steve was in the bathroom. Catherine was from the old school when it came to publicity for the family; she believed that a woman’s name should be mentioned in the newspaper three times: when she is born, when she dies, and when she gets married. But she made an exception and decided that the engagement (and the looming end to their sinful living arrangements) should be announced posthaste. This quaint society tradition would have unexpected consequences.

  Randy summoned an Examiner photographer to the estate in Hillsborough, and Patricia and Steve (sporting a fresh haircut and his only blazer) posed in front of the fireplace. Patricia smiled; Steve barely grinned. Hearsts were always big news in California, so the story ran not only in the Examiner but also in the rival San Francisco Chronicle. On December 19, 1973, under the headline “Patricia Hearst to Marry,” the Chronicle story began, “Mr. and Mrs. Randolph A. Hearst of Hillsborough have announced the engagement of their daughter Patricia Campbell Hearst to Steven Andrew Weed.” The next three paragraphs summarized the pedigrees of the betrothed, and then the story concluded,

  Patricia graduated from Crystal Springs School, studied at Menlo College, and is a junior in art history at UC-Berkeley.

  The young people plan to be married early next summer.

  The wedding was set, very tentatively, for June 29, 1974.

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  On the night of February 4, as the vintage convertible crawled through the darkened streets near campus, Patricia could only reflect bitterly on her fiancé. Take anything you want, he had said. They sure had. They had taken her. And Steve, who was supposed to be her protector, had run away.

  Then, after a few minutes, and less than a mile of driving, the traffic disappeared, and the caravan slowed to a halt at a clearing on a quiet street called Tanglewood. Someone popped the trunk, and Patricia, with some help, extricated herself. The residential street was only a little brighter than the interior of the trunk. Patricia saw some hedges and wondered if she could make a break for it. But she was surrounded by eight people; she couldn’t outrun them all. It was clear that a diminutive black man was in charge, for he was the one who said, “How the fuck did she get untied?” His subordinates shrugged. Patricia pleaded to be let go. Within a moment, a blanket was tossed over her head, and she was bundled into the back of the station wagon. (Benenson was left on the floor of his convertible and told not to call the police.)

  “Shut your mouth, bitch,” the black man said to Patricia, “or I’m going to blow your fucking head off.”

  Within seconds, they were moving again, but for Patricia, being in the back o
f the station wagon was better than being in the trunk of the convertible. Now she could hear what they all were saying, including how the others addressed their leader as Sin. Sin? He actually called himself Sin? These people, she thought, were really evil incarnate.

  3

  THE SLA

  Before the night was out, Patricia learned that the leader’s name was not Sin but Cin. That was short for his adopted name of Cinque M’tume, a combination of the Swahili words for “prophet” and the number five, which was the assigned name of the African chief who led the slave revolt aboard the ship Amistad in 1839. Patricia also learned that Cin had taken a title too: general field marshal in the United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Still later, Patricia would discover that he was born Donald DeFreeze and that the grandeur of his pretensions existed in inverse proportion to the shabby realities of his actual existence.

  DeFreeze was thirty and the oldest of Patricia’s captors. Born in Cleveland, the first among eight children, he was apparently loathed from birth by his father. Cin later said that his father broke his arms, as punishments, on three occasions. He dropped out of school at fourteen and escaped his father by fleeing to Buffalo. There DeFreeze was promptly arrested several times, including for car theft, and before he was eighteen, he endured about two and a half years in a state reform school.

  DeFreeze spent the 1960s in a nomadic journey around North America—Buffalo, Newark, back to Cleveland, Canada—until ultimately he made his way to Los Angeles. When he was eighteen, DeFreeze met Gloria Thomas, who was twenty-three and already the mother of three, and the couple soon married. Their union was fraught. They had three children together, though DeFreeze later said he thought only two of them were his. Their separations were frequent and lengthy; their reunions, tempestuous. DeFreeze worked occasionally as a housepainter. His most enduring attachment was to the Akadama brand of plum wine, which he drank incessantly.