The gist of Angela’s message was certainly theatrical: that “communication between POW Patricia Hearst and her family will come after the immediate creation of the necessary mechanisms whereby Russell Little and Joseph Remiro can communicate via live national TV with the people and the SLA concerning the full scope of their physical health and all the conditions of their confinement.” In other words, Angela sought to take the next logical step in the SLA’s obsession with the media—that prisoners in San Quentin be permitted to speak to the nation, as in an Oval Office address.
The real bombshell came in the next part of the tape. The voice was recognizably that of Patricia Hearst, with her breathy rich-girl diction, but her tone was sharper, more irritated, and the target of her ire was obvious. “Mom, Dad,” she began, “I received the message you broadcast last Sunday. It was good to hear from you after so much silence. But what you had to say sounded like you don’t care if I ever get out of here.”
Patricia’s words neatly recapitulated what she had been told daily, sometimes hourly, for the past five weeks. All the themes were there: the perfidy of the FBI; the SLA’s attraction to the media; and above all her mother and father’s stinginess with regard to the poor. “I’m beginning to feel that the FBI would rather that I get killed….The SLA are not the ones who are harming me. It’s the FBI, along with your indifference to the poor, and your failure to deal with the people and the SLA in a meaningful, fair way….I’m telling you this now because I don’t think the FBI will let any more words from me get through to the media.” This last was absurd, because the whole recording was immediately broadcast worldwide. She also took a swipe at her mother: “Mom, I can’t believe that you’ve agreed with the ‘out of my hands’ stance of Daddy’s program. I just wish that you could be stronger and pull yourself together from all these emotional outbursts.
“Whether consciously or not, the news media has been assisting the FBI for its now overt attempts to set me up for execution,” Patricia said, “first, by promoting a public image of my father as a bereaved parent who has done all he can to meet the demands of his daughter’s kidnappers, and who now awaits her supposedly long overdue release. In fact, the SLA demands have not even been approximated, and they have made it very clear that until the good faith gesture is completed, negotiations for my release will not begin. Second, the media, with cooperation from my parents, has created a public image of me as a helpless innocent girl who was supposedly abducted by two terrible blacks, escaped convicts. I’m a strong woman, and I resent being used this way.” She added, “I have been reading a book by George Jackson called ‘Blood in My Eye.’ I’m starting to understand what he means when he talks about fascism in America.”
Again, Patricia was working off an outline prepared by her captors, but her enthusiasm for the task appeared noticeably greater than in her earlier tapes. “While I have no access to ammunition, in the event of an attack by the FBI, I have been told that I will be given an issue of cyanide buckshot, in order to protect myself,” she said. “I no longer fear the SLA, because they are not the ones who want me to die. The SLA want to feed the people, and assure safety and justice for the two men at San Quentin. I realize it is the FBI who want to murder me.”
After Patricia stopped speaking, Angela took the microphone back for a moment to inform the “US government-inspected super-pigs that those you have hunted are now hunting you.” Then it was Nancy Ling’s turn to offer a revolutionary call, specifically in a female voice. “We women know the truth as it has been revealed in our own lives,” she said. “We turn our rage toward the enemy in a direct line, down the sights of our guns.” This was a first gesture toward the nascent feminist movement, and such sentiments within the SLA would become more prominent over time.
DeFreeze closed the March 9 tape recording in his usual pretentious manner. “This is General Field Marshal Cinque in command,” he intoned. “I call upon oppressed people of all colors to arm themselves in defense of their own freedom while they still have the chance.”
—
After a month in Daly City, Patricia had established some kind of relationship with virtually all members of the SLA. Angela Atwood, Nancy Ling, and Willy Wolfe were her assigned keepers, and DeFreeze and Mizmoon kept a controlling eye on her as well. Camilla Hall, the zaftig poet, was an occasional presence, flitting in and out of the house.
That left Bill and Emily Harris, the newest recruits to the SLA banner. For all his bluster and compulsive talking, Bill was baffled by the situation. Bill loved the food giveaway; it was more or less his idea, after all. But none of the others seemed interested in PIN anymore, except as a means for berating Randy Hearst. With his minuscule attention span, Bill didn’t even have the patience to read or listen to the communiqués. All he knew was that DeFreeze and the others were now talking mostly about their coming clash with the FBI. He barely knew these people, and now he was on the brink of joining them in an apocalyptic showdown with the FBI. Was that really the only way this thing could end?
Bill barely spoke to Patricia. He wanted nothing to do with her and didn’t want to get to know her and then perhaps feel sorry for her. He understood she represented the means to an end—to win the release of Little and Remiro and, as a bonus, to feed the poor people of the region. But it quickly became clear that the release was never going to happen, and the food giveaway had run its course. Hearst said he was finished throwing money at it. Now Bill thought the SLA needed an exit strategy—something other than a climactic gun battle.
Emily was closer to the radical SLA core, more willing to risk a showdown with the authorities. She didn’t have anything to do with Patricia either, but for a different reason from her husband’s. Emily had a ferocity that Bill lacked, and she was more willing to see Patricia as a potential casualty of war than as an actual human being. Taciturn where Bill was volatile, thoughtful where Bill was impulsive, Emily had a more explicitly political agenda than he did. But she, too, wondered, what was the plan? What were the next steps? Had anyone even thought about those questions?
The answer, in short, was no. DeFreeze regarded the March 9 tape, starring the indignant voice of Patricia Hearst, as a triumph. Everything else would have to wait. And as the SLA stumbled into an uncertain future, there was another issue threatening the fragile equilibrium at 37 Northridge Drive: sex.
9
THE BIRTH OF TANIA
At first, Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping was reported as a story largely outside the political tumult of the 1970s. The press and the public appeared to regard the crime through the prism of celebrity rather than politics. The kidnapping was so sensational and aberrational that it existed apart from the other conflicts that were convulsing the country. It was a story for tabloid newspapers (which still existed in large numbers in those days), for People (which published its first issue the month after the kidnapping), and for Newsweek (which put Patricia on the cover seven times). For these outlets, any political implications were secondary to the drama of an heiress in captivity.
In any case, the SLA was a political orphan; even the radical Left never wanted to be represented by these irrational outlaws. At a time when politically motivated bombings were commonplace, the embrace by the SLA of assassination and kidnapping marked them as too crazy even for their putative allies in the counterculture. Because of the murder of Marcus Foster, the SLA was already a pariah in the Bay Area, scorned by the Black Panthers and other stalwarts of the movement. Even the Weather Underground, which could usually be counted on to embrace the most extreme and violent revolutionary forces in the country, couldn’t bring itself to muster any enthusiasm for the SLA. Following the kidnapping, Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the Weather Underground (who at the time was a fugitive on the FBI’s most wanted list), issued a communiqué stating, “We do not comprehend the execution of Marcus Foster and respond very soberly to the death of a black person who is not a recognized enemy of the people.” Still, Dohrn expressed a kind of grudging respec
t for the kidnapping itself. While calling for no harm to come to Hearst, she said, “We must acknowledge that this audacious intervention has carried forward the basic public questions and starkly dramatized what many have come to understand through their own experience: It will be necessary to organize and to destroy this racist and cruel system.”
As it turned out, though, the kidnapping became emblematic of the political evolution of the country during the 1970s—in precisely the opposite way that the SLA intended. Far from setting off a foco-style Marxist rebellion among the proletariat, the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst fueled the backlash against the Left. And paradoxically, the target of that backlash was the Hearst family as much as the SLA.
Randy Hearst was never known for strong political views—Catherine was the real conservative in the family—but he was the one who took the lead in responding to the kidnappers. His only priority was to save his daughter’s life. And if that meant trying to negotiate with the kidnappers and meeting some of their demands, he resolved to do so with alacrity. But from the beginning, Randy’s conciliatory press conferences drew a hostile reaction from the ascendant conservative movement and its tough-on-crime leadership. Ten days after the kidnapping, William Saxbe, the attorney general whom President Nixon installed after Elliot Richardson and his deputy resigned in the Saturday Night Massacre, opened a news conference by denouncing Hearst’s plan to offer concessions to the kidnappers. This was also when Saxbe said the FBI might try to free Patricia. A policy of avoiding confrontation, he said, would amount to a “dereliction of duty.”
Randy Hearst responded fiercely to the attorney general’s broadside. “Mr. Saxbe is not the father of Patricia,” he said in another driveway press conference. “I’m going to do what I can to get her out…and to make a statement that you’re going to bust in and shoot the place up…is damn near irresponsible.” In this way, the Hearsts became the symbol of the overly lenient parents of the era and a counterpoint to the Republican administration’s voice of discipline and order.
It was left to Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, to distill the change in mood. As a member of the Board of Regents for the state’s universities, Catherine Hearst had been Reagan’s staunch ally in his crackdown on student activists across the state; still, the governor believed that the family was becoming weak in the face of the threats to Patricia. Reagan expressed disgust with the Hearsts’ concessions to the criminals in a characteristically pungent way. For starters, he said his administration would remain committed to the prosecutions of Little and Remiro. But Reagan’s most memorable statement came just after the People in Need food distribution began. On March 6, Reagan was the guest speaker in Washington at a private luncheon of the Bull Elephants, a club of influential Republicans. Asked about the PIN program, he said, “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.” A shocked congressional aide leaked the remark to a reporter. The governor dismissed his quip as a joke, but as usual Reagan had tapped into a powerful stream of public sentiment. With a single remark, Reagan managed to convey disgust with the freeloaders in the ghetto as well as their indulgent benefactors in the suburbs. In the dangerous and disorderly aftermath of the 1960s, the country was full of people who were repelled by the radical criminal element and anyone, including Patricia’s terrified parents, who pampered the lawbreakers.
Reagan’s comment about the food giveaway (even in the unlikely event it really was a joke) would reverberate until Patricia was freed. Reagan understood the desire for a strong hand in a nation losing its grip. To a growing conservative audience, the People in Need program stood for a shiftless and lazy underclass that preferred handouts to hard work. To Reagan and his supporters, the Hearsts were a family that displayed weakness rather than strength in a crisis. And as Patricia’s taped words became more supportive of her captors, she too became anathema to what was then known as the silent majority. A strong and honorable woman held firm in the face of adversity, but one who embraced the illicit and licentious values of the SLA, even under pressure, deserved no sympathy.
—
Perhaps the clearest symbol of how far the SLA lived from conventional American morality was this: just about the only people in the SLA who were not sleeping together were the ones who were married to each other, Bill and Emily Harris.
“Bill and I have quit our jobs and moved with people who are serious about destroying and building,” Emily wrote to her parents in Illinois. “I can no longer relate to the aspirations you have for creating a comfortable life for yourselves because they ignore the tortured lives that others lead in an attempt to survive.” A man she had met during her prison visits had opened her eyes. “One person in particular—a beautiful black man—has conveyed to me the torture of being black in this country and of being poor.” Emily’s transformation was personal as much as political. “Bill and I have changed our relationship so that it no longer confines us, and I am enjoying relationships with other men. I am in love with the black man I referred to earlier and that love is very beautiful and fulfilling.”
Bill had a very different view of Emily’s love affair with the prisoner (which was consummated, like many in those days, in visiting areas of the correctional institution). The relationship infuriated him, and the coldness between them persisted in the close confines in Daly City. Still, between the Harrises and the half a dozen other comrades, most of the sexual permutations were tried at one point or another. DeFreeze lived first with Mizmoon, then Nancy Ling, and then both of them. In Daly City, Ling, the former sex worker, announced that she had embraced celibacy, though she occasionally slept with Bill. Camilla was still devoted to Mizmoon, who sometimes reciprocated. Once, amid the tense waiting for something to break in the standoff over Patricia, there was a four-way romp in the bathtub involving DeFreeze, Angela, Bill, and Emily. Only Willy Wolfe, the awkward New Englander, was too shy to join in the collective high jinks.
For the SLA, there was a political theory underlying the sexual dynamics of the group. They believed that sex was a basic human need, like food or shelter. Like those other necessities, sex should be shared in an egalitarian manner. This was especially true in a safe house, where it was impractical for the comrades to circulate normally in the broader society. Later, in an interview he prepared when he was still on the run, Bill Harris explained the concept this way:
You can’t just let people drop by a safe house to socialize. So far as sex was concerned, we had to get all of our sexual and personal needs met by comrades within the cell. Everyone realized that at this time there was no room for exclusive relationships because each of us had to help the other comrades meet their sexual needs and maintain harmony within the cell. We wanted to learn to love each other on an equal basis and on many levels, including sexually. We tried not to focus on just one or two people who we might have subjectively liked best. We had a need to develop collectively and sex was just one of them.
This, in any event, was the theory. Predictably, the sexual merry-go-round had failed to maintain harmony within the house. Sexual tensions and rivalries among the comrades were epidemic, especially in the claustrophobic confines of 37 Northridge Drive. And these pressures were layered on top of the fear of an FBI raid and the uncertainty about what to do with Patricia. As with economics, a sexuality based on sharing worked a lot better in theory than in practice. (In one way, the SLA departed from the norms of the counterculture. None of them used drugs after Patricia was kidnapped, though DeFreeze was devoted to his wine. This abstemiousness was due more to lack of funds than to moral qualms.)
The SLA’s putatively egalitarian approach to sex involved group discussions on the subject. The agenda sometimes included who was sleeping with whom and who wanted to sleep with whom. On one occasion, about a month into Patricia’s captivity, Angela went to the group to report on a request. Patricia wanted to have sex with Willy Wolfe. Should the comrades allow it?
—
To a great extent, the facts surrounding the kidnappin
g of Patricia Hearst are undisputed. There is almost no disagreement about what happened when she was removed from her home or when she was confined to the closet in Daly City. The question of the relationship between Patricia and Willy Wolfe is another matter entirely. On this issue, Patricia’s version and that of the surviving members of the SLA are in irreconcilable conflict.
According to the SLA, the issue first arose during a conversation between Angela and Patricia. Angela asked Patricia if she ever got horny. Patricia replied that she did. Angela then asked whether she was interested in anyone among the comrades. Yes, said Patricia, she wanted Cujo—that is, Willy Wolfe.
In keeping with the SLA practice for decisions affecting the group, Angela brought the issue to the comrades for discussion. Five of the eight comrades in the Daly City house were women, and they shared a feminist sensibility; they deplored rape and embraced sexual self-determination for women. But the group, including the women, split on the question of whether Patricia and Willy should sleep together. Angela and Nancy Ling were closest to the two and watched the relationship between them develop. They said it was up to Patricia and Willy to decide whether they wanted to have sex, and it was not the group’s function to interfere with their choice. The other two couples (Bill and Emily Harris and Mizmoon and Camilla Hall) were opposed. They made an obvious point: the only reason that Patricia was among them was that she had been kidnapped. They said that even if the sex with Willy was consensual, the group was leaving itself open for Patricia to charge later that she had been assaulted. DeFreeze sided with Angela and Ling, so that very evening Willy went into the closet for his first assignation with Patricia.
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst Page 13
