Her formal induction into the SLA was handled with some solemnity. The others were sitting in a circle on the floor when she was led out of the cupboard, still wearing her blindfold. ‘In the silence I heard Cin say: “The sisters and brothers have all voted for you to join this combat team.” A wave of relief spread through my body.’ Invited, after a short swearing-in ceremony, to take off her blindfold, she was dismayed by what she saw: ‘Oh God,’ she thought, ‘what a bunch of ordinary-looking, unattractive little people.’ When she was put on trial a year and a half later for her part in the first SLA bank robbery, the outcome hinged on whether or not she could realistically be said to have been brainwashed. The jury did not believe she had been, but it would be difficult to find another explanation for the fact that, having once been so contemptuous of Berkeley lefties, she should now be disappointed that her new comrades were so … weedy: ‘Their physical appearance just didn’t match my image of them as revolutionaries. I had expected them to look bigger, stronger, more commanding.’
She still had her bad, bourgeois moments: she didn’t like using the communal toothbrush and was appalled to discover that while she’d been in her cupboard, the other women had been wearing her bathrobe. (Later on, she was to see her sister on television wearing one of her old jackets – that was another bad moment.) Some of her comrades complained that she continued to ‘talk like a rich bourgeois bitch’ and it was evident from the ‘combat position’ she had been allocated in the event of an FBI raid that she was still an expendable member of the team – but by and large she felt that she had now ‘crossed over’. They kept busy, training, drafting communiqués, thinking up future ‘actions’ and berating themselves for not thinking up future ‘actions’; two people stood guard every night, guns at the ready.
At the beginning of April, they decided to rob a bank. Their preparations were meticulous: ‘I knew more about the Hibernia Bank branch at Noriega Street and 22nd Avenue,’ Patricia Hearst reports, ‘than I know about my parents’ home in Hillsborough.’ When they went to bed the night before, Cin announced that ‘he would be carrying a list of doctors, one or more of whom would be kidnapped at gunpoint to remove bullets, if need be’; and the next morning no one was allowed to have breakfast lest they were ‘gut-shot’ by the police. When it was over, Patty Hearst, who was the only one not to wear any kind of disguise, had become ‘a wanted criminal’ and, she was able to gather from what was said on the news, deeply hated by the American public. She was, she says, ‘sick to my stomach’ at seeing herself on the television screen ‘so publicly identified with the SLA’. But it doesn’t stop her noting (with a hint of pleasure?) that there was ‘a hint of awe’ in the media accounts of the robbery.
‘A team,’ it was said in the SLA, ‘operated together, succeeded or failed together, lived or died together.’ Within a few weeks of the bank robbery, the flower of the SLA was dead. Patty Hearst’s first outing after the bank was to a sports shop, where she was sent, disguised in an Afro wig, to buy some heavy socks and underwear. She went with two of her fellow soldiers, a married couple known as ‘Yolanda’ and ‘Teko’ (their real name was Harris). The revolution, the SLA were convinced, would begin that summer and they were busy preparing for it: preparing for combat (hence the need for heavy socks) and preparing for death, about which they now talked all the time. Patty Hearst may have been happy enough to practise killing other people but she found her comrades’ way of thinking about their own deaths increasingly alien: ‘Being ever practical, I could not understand why they were fighting for something which they did not believe they would live to see accomplished.’ There was an incident at the sports shop (after paying for the socks Teko tried to steal a bandolier): the three of them escaped, shielded by a hail of bullets from Patty Hearst’s gun, but they were careless and the other six members of the SLA were tracked down by the FBI in their Los Angeles safe house. Miss Hearst and her two companions took refuge in a motel next to Disneyland and watched on television the battle that was taking place between their comrades and the Los Angeles police force: nine thousand bullets were fired, the safe house went up in flames and its occupants were burned to death. None of them had even tried to escape; the coroner, a shrewd man, was to say that ‘they died compulsively.’
The three Disneyland survivors were now, Miss Hearst boasts, ‘the most wanted trio in the United States’. The Harrises briefly considered joining their comrades in death, but fortunately decided against it (‘Cin would have wanted us to live and to fight on’). When the last news bulletin was over, Teko, who had taken over as general field marshal, announced that it was time for bed. ‘Yolanda turned to me and solicitously asked “Do you want to make love with us tonight?” “No thanks,” I said and climbed into the other bed, alone.’ What had upset her most about the shoot-out was that she could so easily have been there and no one would have cared: ‘The police had not asked me, Patty Hearst, to step outside when they opened fire.’ It confirmed her in her view that ‘there was no turning back’: ‘I was a soldier in the people’s army. It was a role I had accepted in exchange for my life.’ What is extraordinary is that she hung on to that role during the 18 mostly miserable months she was to spend with the Harrises before being captured, even though there were many occasions when she could have escaped. It isn’t even clear that they would have minded being shot of her: they treated me, she says angrily, like ‘a moronic army recruit’.
The three of them still considered themselves at war, but the revolution that was to take place that summer was postponed while they lay low in rented houses in various country resorts on the East Coast which had been found for them by a radical sportswriter connected with Ramparts called Jack Scott, whom Spiro Agnew had once described as ‘an enemy of sport’. Scott’s idea was that they should raise money for the revolution by writing a book about the SLA: it was bound to be successful and a corporation could be set up in Lichtenstein so that they wouldn’t have to pay tax on the money they earned. A writer was sent to help them, whose claim to fame, according to Patty Hearst, was that he’d once been arrested in England for, as he put it, ‘shitting on a picture of the queen’. It was, like everything else that summer, a dismal business. They quarrelled with the writer, with each other, with Scott and his wife, whom Teko decided to murder, though he never got round to it.
In the fall, they went back to California and with a group of new recruits – the SLA’s status had been much enhanced by the deaths of their former comrades – resumed the normal life of revolutionaries. They robbed some banks and a woman was shot – ‘this is the murder round,’ Teko said brightly; and tried their hand at making bombs, though Teko stuffed them with so much lavatory paper they failed to go off. Patty Hearst’s own position was at last improving: she got on well with the new recruits, was invited to write a ‘position paper on the SLA version of radical feminism’ and ran her own gun classes. Presumably it was the self-confidence that followed from this which enabled her to start thinking about a return to civilian life. When she told the others that she felt like jacking it in, they were shocked. ‘You can’t do that,’ they said, or she says they said: ‘You’re a symbol of the revolution. You give the people hope.’
The issue was decided for her by the FBI, who arrested her one balmy day in the early autumn of 1975. She wasn’t at all pleased. ‘As the flash-bulbs went off in my face, I remembered the press pictures of Susan Saxe, a revolutionary who had recently been arrested, and, like her, I smiled broadly and raised a clenched fist in salute.’ It was the last thing she did to give the people hope. At first, remembering Cin’s lurid fantasies about the FBI, she refused to co-operate. When her family visited, they seemed ‘unfamiliar’, ‘as if from another world’, while they in turn hardly recognised her, ‘curled up like a foetus’, barely able to speak. As it became clear that not only was she to be prosecuted for taking part in the Hibernia Bank robbery, but that her trial was to take precedence over that of her two former comrades, withdrawal turned to sullenness
and then to outrage. She was outraged by the Federal marshals, who ‘seemed to equate fame with danger’ and dragged her about in chains; outraged by the lawyer found for her by her father – he had made his name defending My Lai’s Captain Medina and the Boston Strangler – who bungled her case, while insisting, as part of his fee, on the exclusive right to write a book about her; outraged by the judge, who gave an interview before her trial in which he boasted that he knew ‘Randy Hearst’ (which he didn’t) and wasn’t impressed by his money; outraged by the jury, who believed that her family had arranged for the press to be sitting opposite them in court in order to intimidate them; outraged by the press, ‘who behaved like sharks in a feeding frenzy’: but outraged above all at being treated like a criminal rather than as the victim of a kidnapping.
No doubt she is right to say that it all happened this way because the public was more interested in ‘an heiress’ and ‘a celebrity’ than in ‘two unknown radicals called Harris’. ‘The government had to prosecute me,’ she says, now very much the sadder and the wiser woman, ‘in order to prove that there was equal justice for all in America.’ On the other hand, it is likely that had she, at any point during her trial, condescended to say that she was sorry for what she had done, she might well not have been found guilty or, if found guilty, not been given the maximum penalty of seven years in prison. The trouble was that she didn’t feel sorry. ‘I would do it again,’ she told her interrogators. ‘It saved my life.’ It has never been in her character to apologise. In the end, celebrity brought its reward. After ‘one of the largest campaigns for clemency in the history of this country’, her sentence was commuted by the kindly Jimmy Carter.
Every Secret Thing is not an attractive book; it’s flat and it’s repetitive: but it tells a good story and has the ingredients for a better movie. It is, after all, very possible that what Patty Hearst would have said if she were more honest is that she enjoyed some of her time with the SLA, that she was captivated by Cin (or sin), that she liked being part of a gang of outlaws, that, as the prosecution alleged at her trial, there was more to her relationship with Cujo than she later wished to admit – certainly there is little about him here – but that doesn’t mean that in her heart of hearts, wherever that might be, she was determined, as the phrase once was, to overthrow the government of the United States. She is as she describes herself, ‘ever pragmatic’. Many American reviewers and some English ones came to the conclusion, after reading Patty Hearst’s book, that it could only have been written in order to make money: ‘dreamy notions’, Joan Didion says, ‘of what a Hearst might do to turn a dollar’. It may well be, however, that she just wanted to show that everything she did was right – for her.
Book reviewed:
Every Secret Thing by Patricia Hearst and Alvin Moscow
Hagiography
One evening in December 1975 David Plante called on his friend, the novelist Jean Rhys, who was staying in a hotel in South Kensington: ‘a big dreary hotel’, she said, ‘filled with old people whom they won’t allow to drink sweet vermouth’. She was sitting in what the receptionist called ‘the pink lounge’, wearing a pink hat. She was then in her eighties. He kissed her and told her she was looking marvellous. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she said. ‘I’m dying.’ After supper and a great deal of drink, they went up to her room: ‘sometimes her cane got caught between her legs and I had to straighten it.’ They drank some more and talked about her life. Five hours later, David Plante got up, took a pee and told her he had to leave. ‘“Before you go,” she said, “help me to the toilet.”’ He took her there and left her, in her pink hat, holding onto the washbasin. Sometime later she called to him.
I opened the door a little, imagining, perhaps, that if I opened it only a little, only a little would have happened. I saw Jean, her head with the battered hat leaning to the side, her feet with the knickers about her ankles, just off the floor, stuck in the toilet. I had, I immediately realised, forgotten to lower the seat … I stepped into the puddle of pee all around the toilet, put my arms around her, and lifted her.
‘I’ll try to walk,’ she said when he offered to carry her to her bed. So he propped her up against a wall and ‘took off her sopping knickers’. When he got her onto the bed, he rang Sonia Orwell, who arrived to take charge of the situation: ‘For God’s sake, David,’ Mrs Orwell said, ‘don’t you know when someone’s drunk?’
A few days later, he again visited Jean Rhys, who in the meantime had been moved by Mrs Orwell to another hotel, one which no doubt allowed its guests to drink sweet vermouth. She was feeling better. ‘Now, David,’ she said, ‘if that ever happens to you with a lady again, don’t get into a panic. You put the lady on her bed, cover her, put a glass of water and a sleeping pill on the bedside table, turn the lights down very low, adjust your tie before you leave so you’ll look smart, say at reception that the lady is resting, and when you tell the story afterwards, you make it funny.’
David Plante has little trouble making his stories funny: he could probably have made them even funnier had he wanted to, but telling funny stories about your friends is a tricky business if you intend to go on having friends; and on the evidence of this book, Plante, an American novelist who lives in England, has quite a busy social life. Sonia Orwell once said to him that the life he led was ‘very chic’: too chic, she thought, for a writer. But he has got his own back on her now. Difficult Women is a memoir of three women whom it was once very chic to be friends with, and the one whom it was most chic to be friends with was Mrs Orwell, though she told Plante that in Paris she knew some ‘very very ordinary’ people. It’s an unflattering book, especially in its account of her, but whether Plante has any sense that he might have betrayed their friendship is hard to determine since, while making her sound entirely unlovable, he keeps telling us how much he loved her.
Jean Rhys died in 1979; Sonia Orwell, George Orwell’s widow, a year later. Plante’s third subject is Germaine Greer, who, as well as being a friend with a house near his in Italy, was his colleague for a term at the University of Tulsa (‘from Tulsa I wrote letters to Sonia, one long one about Germaine Greer’). Of these women, Germaine Greer seems to have been the one he liked best, but now she thinks him ‘a creep’ for having written this book. Former friends of the other two will have worse things to say of him: indeed, some pretty hard things have already been said by people who didn’t know either of them, and it seems possible that a lot of dinner parties of the kind he describes will now be taking place without him. As a foreigner, Plante claims in self-defence, he is unable to grasp the distinctions the English make between public and private life – which sounds convenient but could, I suppose, be true. No one who records everything he sees his friends do and hears them say does so without malice, yet something besides malice must have prompted Plante to write up his diary for publication, especially as he can’t make his friends look silly without looking pretty silly himself.
Mrs Orwell, being a sociable woman, gave a great many dinner parties (‘Sonia is knowledgable about and gives a lot of attention to her cooking, which is mostly French’). He didn’t enjoy these parties. ‘I would get home from an evening of being victimised, angry and depressed, and swear I’d never see Sonia again. The next morning, however, I’d ring her to say what a lovely dinner party … and how I longed to see her again.’ Plante, of course, is a snob for whom there was pleasure in the thought of being an intimate of the well-connected Orwell, or a personal friend of Jean Rhys or a close companion of the electrifying Greer; and pleasure, too, in being the kind of nice young man who can get on with everyone, however rich and famous. He is also a homosexual, though he doesn’t precisely say so; and he has a weakness for unaccommodating women – the kind actors call ‘outrageous’. He often refers to this weakness in explaining his affection for these ‘difficult’ women but says little to elucidate it. ‘You could jump to a Freudian conclusion that this had to do with my mother,’ he said in an interview. And then added: ‘But I absolutel
y reject that.’
It may be that ‘difficult women’ are a luxury that straight men can’t afford in their lives. But if there is some truth in this (men who have to live with women, if they have any sense, must prefer them to be easy-going), there is none in its converse: lesbians don’t sing any songs in praise of difficult men. It would be against their code of honour to do so, and quite unnecessary since heterosexual women do it all the time. Given that the history of the world can in a sense be seen as a history of the difficult men who have run it, it seems appropriate to register a protest against Plante’s title. No one has yet written a book about three moderately famous men who happened to have known each other and called it ‘Difficult Men’. (Or even ‘Nice Men: A Memoir of Three’.) Still, there’s no sense in being curmudgeonly, or in pretending that there’s no such thing as a difficult woman – the chances are that if you aren’t ‘difficult’ no one will write a book about you. Plante is very good at describing some of the ways in which women can make life hard, while insinuating that no merit attaches to being friends with someone it’s easy to be friends with. ‘Difficult women’, it turns out, can make you like yourself better for liking them.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 11
