Patricia was alive only because of several improbable twists of fate. If, back in San Francisco, Cinque had not assigned Patricia to the same team as Bill and Emily…If Bill weren’t going stir-crazy in the Eighty-Fourth Street house and thus volunteered to run errands…If DeFreeze had accepted Mizmoon’s recommendation that Angela, rather than Patricia, join the Harrises on the errands in Inglewood…If Bill hadn’t been caught stealing the bandolier at Mel’s, causing the split with the other comrades…If the other comrades had met up at the drive-in, as planned, and persuaded Bill, Emily, and Patricia to rejoin them…If the comrades had all stuck together, as they had done from hideout to hideout, month after month, then Bill, Emily, and Patricia would also have been inside the house on Fifty-Fourth Street. And they would all be dead.
So Patricia, in the grip of a cold fury, wanted revenge, even more than her remaining captors turned colleagues. She lived off cigarettes and snacks. Days and nights of hiding in grimy motels and squalid apartments gave her a sickly pallor, but adversity, for the woman called Tania, made her stronger. In this, there was, despite everything, a hint of her former life. In Hillsborough, and on the many stops on her academic journey, she sensed that she could shape the world to her liking. Then or later, Patricia was not one to be thwarted. So when the LAPD had thwarted her in the most public and gruesome way, she vowed, in the irrational cadence of the SLA, that they would pay.
The Harrises had no similar expectations. Emily was nearly catatonic with grief and fear; Bill was in a state of garrulous paralysis. He was a great one for jabbering about how he was going to commit acts of violence, but he had never followed through. Bill never fired a gun at anyone (not even in Vietnam). So even though their political fanaticism exceeded hers, they told Patricia to stand down. There would be no retaliatory, and suicidal, raid against the police. Bill and Emily were hardly experienced or competent revolutionaries, but they had lived among radicals and rebels long enough to expect that the police—the man—was always going to strike back. That’s what happened. It was time now to regroup. It had never been more difficult to answer the paradigmatic question for the SLA: What now?
—
For one thing, there was no SLA, not anymore. Joe Remiro and Russ Little were locked up in San Quentin, awaiting trial for the murder of Marcus Foster. DeFreeze, Mizmoon, Nancy Ling, Atwood, Wolfe, and Hall were dead. For the moment, even Bill and Emily recognized the absurdity of suggesting that the two of them and Patricia amounted to an “army” of any kind. They were fully in survival mode. The revolution would have to wait.
After watching the shoot-out, on May 17, the trio spent the weekend in the motel by Disneyland. Then, with their finances dwindling, they fled south about fifteen miles to the sleepy little city of Costa Mesa. They found a dingy residential motel and rented a room with a hot plate and a black-and-white television for $40 a week. Together, on the following Tuesday, they watched the L.A. district attorney announce that he had brought charges against the three of them for kidnapping (of Tom Matthews), armed robbery, assault to commit murder, and a variety of other charges.
Bill, Emily, and Patricia were the most wanted criminals in the United States, and they were stuck, without allies, in Orange County, which was then the citadel of California conservatism. The Bay Area called out to them. Of course, they had no real idea what they would do there, but there had to be more options, and more friends, than in Ronald Reagan’s Southern California.
They waited until Memorial Day, May 27, to make their getaway so they could disappear into holiday traffic for the nine-hour journey to San Francisco. They were still driving the barely functioning 1964 Plymouth Valiant, which they had purchased with the $250 they had stolen from Frank Sutter, their last carjacking victim. For the journey north, Patricia assumed her customary position in the backseat, under a blanket. Bill had lost his sidearm in the confrontation at Mel’s, so he took Patricia’s .38. A red satchel held the rest of their weapons.
Somehow the car limped all the way to San Francisco. Emily drove to Broderick Street, on the edge of the Haight-Ashbury district, which had, like the counterculture, degenerated into a crime-ravaged ruin. There the car died. The three of them got out and pushed the vehicle to a service station, where Bill put down a deposit for repairs. He returned to find Emily and Patricia waiting on a park bench. At that moment, this heiress to millions and her two friends had a total of $5 among them.
Bill remembered that a gay couple who had been his and Emily’s upstairs neighbors back in Bloomington had a house nearby, on Oak Street.
Bill knocked on the door, and his old friend Mark blanched at the sight of the criminal.
“What are you doing here?” Mark said. “The FBI was just here yesterday, asking about you!” Agents were tracking down virtually everyone the Harrises had ever known.
Terrified, Mark agreed to let the trio stay for one night in a basement storage space that had once been a coal bin. Mark threw some blankets down the stairs, and they slept on the bare concrete floor. Every time it seemed that their accommodations could not get any worse, they found a new low. In the morning, Mark sent them on their way with $50 in cash. They spent the next night in a motel near downtown, and then Bill decided they needed a more permanent base. He sent Emily off to Oakland to find an inconspicuous pad in the neighborhood where Peking House had been. Their car was still in the shop, so they made their way to Oakland by bus—with the duffel bag full of clanking weapons at their feet. Patricia was still wearing her fluffy curly wig, but now she had freckles, too, courtesy of a makeup pencil donated by the gay couple.
Their new apartment was on Walnut Street in Oakland, and their arrival marked a turning point in Patricia’s association with the Harrises. Everyone in the SLA had been treating Patricia as a comrade since the bank robbery in April; she had her own weapons and responsibilities like everyone else. But the Walnut Street apartment was the first time Bill and Emily left Patricia alone. When the Harrises went on errands, or jogging (they were early adopters of that fad), Patricia had the apartment to herself and could come and go as she pleased. “I was being left alone for hours, sometimes for most of the day,” she later wrote. “I suppose I could have walked out of the apartment and away from it all. But I didn’t. It simply never occurred to me. My fear of the police outweighed my hatred for the SLA.” Whether or not Patricia hated the SLA at that point, she behaved like what she was—a fugitive. Through the following months, Patricia would make the same choice again and again—to remain with her comrades and to avoid law enforcement. She recognized that police officers who once might have seen themselves as her rescuers were now her pursuers, and she never tried to persuade them that she still needed saving.
Still, tensions were high among the three survivors. Bill and Emily fought all the time, as they usually did, and Patricia sulked and brooded. Rejected sexually by Emily in Oakland, Bill turned to Patricia, who, as she recalled, complied uncomplainingly. Still, the sexual energy of the SLA members dropped precipitously. The struggle for survival trumped the quest for satisfaction. And money, far more than sex, remained their principal preoccupation. Emily spent most of the cash from their gay friend on the security deposit for the Oakland apartment, and the rest went for cigarettes and food—beans, mostly. Bill talked about robbing another bank, mugging a prosperous-looking man on the street, or purse snatching. But it was just talk. By June 3, they were again down to about $20. Fortunately, they could still afford a newspaper, which informed them of a startling event that had taken place the previous day.
—
By the time the comrades were killed in Los Angeles, the SLA had become accustomed to its isolation within the counterculture. The murder of Marcus Foster marked them as irrational and untrustworthy. Most groups and individuals on the left wanted nothing to do with the “army.” This repudiation from their nominal peers first became evident during the food giveaway, when even hard-core activists like the Black Panthers refused to participate in any activity initia
ted by the SLA. In response, the comrades nursed grudges against these groups and individuals like Angela Davis and Jane Fonda who spoke out against the SLA’s tactics. By June, Bill and Emily took a perverse sort of pleasure in their lonely stand against what they regarded as the weak-willed counterculture establishment. They fought on alone, though it was never clear to what end.
Therefore it was a considerable surprise when Bill, Emily, and Patricia received a rare message of solidarity from fellow outlaws on May 31. A bomb went off at the Los Angeles office of the California attorney general. (There were no injuries.) The Weather Underground took responsibility and in a communiqué dedicated the attack to “our sisters and brothers” in the SLA. The gesture was encouraging, but irrelevant to the trio’s everyday struggles. The Harrises didn’t know anyone among the Weathermen, and they had no way of contacting them for support, leaving them still stuck in dismal isolation.
But on June 3, the newspaper said that the previous day, unbeknownst to the trio, there had been a rally of commemoration and support for the SLA members killed by the police. It took place in what was dubbed Ho Chi Minh Park, near the Cal campus, in Berkeley. (Willard Park was the official name.)
By Berkeley standards, the rally was modest, drawing perhaps four hundred people, and it featured none of the big names or organizations active in the Bay Area. It did, however, include some of the people who genuinely knew and cared about the departed comrades—as they illustrated with their stage decoration. The front of the small speaker’s platform was lined with bottles of Akadama plum wine, in commemoration of the general field marshal’s favorite beverage.
There was one principal speaker on the occasion—Kathy Soliah (pronounced SOUL-ee-ah, with emphasis on the first syllable). Soliah was long and lean, and she possessed the long straight hair and tinted aviator glasses that were the signature of glamorous counterculture figures like Gloria Steinem, whom Soliah resembled. She came by her dramatic presence honestly, because she was an actress, which was how Bill and Emily knew her. Kathy Soliah was Angela Atwood’s best friend. They both had leading roles in the local production of Hedda Gabler, and they worked together as waitresses at the Great Electric Underground in downtown San Francisco. Both were fired there, after protesting demeaning treatment from their bosses. In politics and life, Kathy and Angela were soul mates, and Kathy Soliah came to Berkeley on June 2 to mourn the loss of her friends and comrades.
“When I first met her,” Soliah told the crowd about Angela Atwood (Gelina), “she wasn’t very political, but she was always on the right side.” Later, she realized that Atwood had gone underground with her comrades in the SLA. “Angela, Camilla, Mizmoon and Fahizah [Nancy Ling] were among the first to fight so righteously for their beliefs and to die for what they believed in.” She went on, “Cinque, Willie, Camilla, Mizmoon and Fahizah were viciously attacked and murdered by five hundred pigs in LA while the whole nation watched. I believe that Gelina and her comrades fought until the last minute. And though I would like to have her here with me right now, I know that she lived and she died happy. I am so very proud of her.”
Soliah had a message, too, for Bill, Emily, and Patricia, the survivors. “SLA soldiers, although I know it’s not necessary to say, keep fighting. I’m with you. And we are with you.” Gazing out at the crowd, Soliah said, “I am a soldier of the SLA.”
Reading Soliah’s remarks in the newspaper, Bill saw a route to salvation.
—
Kathy Soliah was born twenty-seven years earlier and raised in Minnesota, and her background resembled those of the other women comrades. Her family moved when she was young to Palmdale, California, which was still a small desert town and not yet part of the greater sprawl of Los Angeles. She belonged to the pep squad for the football team, but her real passion was the stage, and she played leading roles in school plays throughout high school. Her father was a gym teacher as well as a football and track coach at the high school, and his prize pupil was his son Steve, Kathy’s younger brother. The intertwined fates of Kathy, Steve, and Josephine Soliah, the baby of the family, would be a major theme of the post–May 17 SLA.
In the late 1960s, Kathy went to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the political culture was less famous than the one at Berkeley but every bit as extreme and volatile. There she met and fell in love with a fellow student named Jim Kilgore, who was an accomplished athlete, an aspiring sportswriter, and a budding revolutionary. The couple moved to Berkeley, where they were soon joined by Steve Soliah, who ran track in college and bonded with Jim over their love of sports. For a time in the early 1970s, Kathy, Steve, and Jim Kilgore lived together.
The Soliah siblings and Jim Kilgore were more than friends. Along with a handful of others, they were, in the argot of the era, a cell. Their group was known to some as the Revolutionary Army, but it never had a formal name, like the Weather Underground; still, their chosen form of political expression was the same—to set off explosives, after working hours, in symbolically resonant locations around California. In an era when there were dozens of bombings a year in the state alone, this kind of behavior was less aberrational than it appears today, if not less dangerous. This cell emerged from the same aggressive, frustrated corner of the counterculture as the SLA, and they expressed themselves in similarly theatrical terms. In other words, the alliance between the Revolutionary Army and the surviving SLA members was a natural one.
To make ends meet, Kilgore and Steve Soliah worked as housepainters for a company run by a recent Cal grad named Michael Bortin. Kilgore and Bortin filled a Berkeley garage with bomb-making material, and one of their confederates later admitted that the group had set off about a dozen bombs in 1971 and 1972, albeit without causing casualties. Their partner in this project was another young radical named Willie Brandt. His girlfriend, Wendy Yoshimura, rented their bomb-making facility for them.
Kathy Soliah’s friendship with Angela Atwood connected the two groups most directly, but the radical world was small enough that there were other points of overlap. (For example, Kathy Soliah had taken gun training from Joe Remiro.) It was thus no surprise that Kathy—a performer as well as a radical—would take it upon herself to star in a public memorial to the lost soldiers of the SLA and to cheer on the survivors. Similarly, it was understandable that the Harrises would look to Kathy to throw them a lifeline.
—
Emily still had Kathy Soliah’s address, so she just showed up there one day, disguised in a gray wig. Kathy wasn’t home, but Emily was directed to a bookstore where Kathy worked. There, Emily made eye contact and passed Kathy a note, which said, “Meet me at the church.” Twenty minutes later, the two women fell into each other’s arms.
Kathy telephoned her boyfriend, Jim Kilgore, and he collected all the cash he could find—several hundred dollars—which she turned over to Emily. Kathy said her younger sister Josephine would provide another cash infusion from her savings account. On that first day, Kathy gave Emily enough money for Bill to retrieve their car from the repair shop in San Francisco.
The next night, Kathy and Jim Kilgore arranged to meet Bill, Emily, and Patricia at a drive-in theater in Oakland, where The Sting was playing. Emily, Patricia, and Kathy convened in the women’s bathroom and later reassembled in Kathy’s car, which was parked in a section of the theater where a soft-core porn film called Teacher’s Pet was running. Kathy took the lead in the conversation, telling the three fugitives of her love for Angela and her grief at her death. To the amazement of the Harrises, Kathy produced $1,500, which she said came from Josephine Soliah’s savings account. Kathy told them too about her brother Steve, who was also living in Berkeley at the time, though he was not yet cognizant of Kathy’s discovery of the SLA survivors. “He’s more of a hippie than into politics,” Kathy said, “so I’m not sure I should tell him.”
Their alliance cemented over the soft moans coming from the speaker, the two cells agreed to keep in touch. The alliance revived Bill’s spirits, and he began t
o think about an SLA revival, even with their diminished numbers. It galled him that the police were gloating about the conflagration in Los Angeles. Obsessed as always with public relations, Bill wanted to tell the world that the SLA was still alive, regardless of whether that was actually true. So after they received the cash from the Soliahs, Bill and Emily had one more request for Kathy—for a tape recorder.
—
Like approximately no one else on earth, Bill thought the world needed to hear what the surviving members of the SLA thought about the deaths of their comrades. While sequestered in the apartment in Oakland, he and Emily and Patricia sketched out a communiqué that would commemorate the departed and announce, with considerable exaggeration, the continued existence of the SLA. They wanted a tape recorder so they could deliver the audio of their message to a radio station. Kathy provided the machine.
Bill did most of the talking, giving a droning recapitulation of the themes in DeFreeze’s communiqués. In typical fashion, he spun the calamity of May 17 as a heroic stand and gave his tiny remnant a new name in the process. “This is Teko speaking,” he said. “Yolanda, Tania and I extend profound feelings of revolutionary love and solidarity” to their allies. “The Malcolm X Combat unit of the Symbionese Liberation Army left the San Francisco Bay Area in a successful effort to break a massive pig encirclement.” Nursing a guilty conscience about starting the fiasco by shoplifting at Mel’s, Harris lied about what happened. “A pig-agent clerk named Tony Shepard, attempting to show his allegiance to his reactionary white bosses, falsely accused me of shoplifting,” he said. “It was impossible to allow a verifying search by a store security guard because I was armed, and therefore we were forced to fight our way out of the situation.”
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst Page 22
