The Kidnapping of the Century: How Patty Hearst Became a Revolutionary

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Roger Rapoport will be on tour for “Searching for Patty Hearst” in California on:

January 23 at Culver City Library at 6:00 PM PST
January 25 at Culver City Library at 1:00 PM PST
January 27 at Lamanda Park Library (in Pasadena) at 1:00 PM PST

For more dates and information check: PattyHearst.com

One of the biggest stories of the twentieth century, big enough to displace Watergate from the front pages of newspapers nationwide, takes the form of a novel in an attempt to use fiction as a vehicle to expose the truth of this media spectacle. Journalist and author Roger D. Rapoport joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to discuss the case of Patty Hearst and how Rapoport’s new book, “Searching for Patty Hearst,” ventures into fiction in order to reveal the true story of how Patty Hearst wasn’t a victim in the end but was made a revolutionary.

“[T]he book attempts to give equal time to all vantage points in the story … the problem with the nonfiction accounts is no matter whose account you read, you’re only getting one side of the story, so that by fictionalizing it, I think we get much closer to a realistic picture of what actually happened in this story,” Rapoport tells Scheer. The two dive into the details of the story, including the fact that Hearst’s radicalization came largely from reflecting on her own upbringing and her family’s reaction to her kidnapping.

“[I]n ‘Searching for Patty Hearst,’ I try to deal with that, that the radicalization was the absolute failure of her family to pay the ransom,” Rapoport said.

Rapoport also mentions Scheer’s unexpected role in the Patty Hearst trial, where his interviews and writing turned out to be a major influence. “Your story was a turning point in that trial and it basically shot down [Heart’s attorney] F. Lee Bailey’s argument that she was the victim of some sort of  psychological trauma,” Rapoport told Scheer.

Rapoport goes on to explain the gaps that are often present when dissecting the Hearst story, including bias from family members, the manipulation of facts at the hands of other storytellers and other miscues. His approach to the story includes the inconvenient truths and details that may have otherwise been omitted as well as the use of fiction in order to tell a more fulfilling story and get into the heads of all the characters.

“[T]he problem with a lot of what’s been written is it pretty much mirrors what one person’s thinking… [but] by presenting all these different vantage points, I think it’s a much clearer picture of all the different things that were going on in this case.”

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Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy. 

Robert Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case, Roger Rappaport, somebody I met, oh, my goodness, well over a half century ago. I was at Ramparts and I’m not going to get into the whole thing, but he was a budding, young journalist. And somewhere after that the Patty Hearst kidnaping occurred. I just asked Max Jones, our young video producer, and he really didn’t have any recollection of it. So I guess at least for this generation, it’s not clearly imprinted on their consciousness. That was not true, obviously, 50, 40 years ago, this was a very much publicized kidnaping by a group called the SLA. Claimed to be a liberation army. It was actually a relatively small group, but it involved the heiress of what was then a well known rich family, the Hearst family, that controlled newspapers and so forth.

And I’m going to leave it up to Roger to explain why, 50 years after, we are on the anniversary. He wrote a novel. I don’t know if there are legal reasons, because you were involved in an earlier book project with her fiance who she rejected in the whole course. But why now and what are you bringing to the table that’s different? The book’s out now. You’re on a lecture tour. I’m doing this for KCRW in Santa Monica, the NPR station. You’re doing, I think, 3 or 4 appearances right around here next week. So tell us why this book and what does it tell us about the Patty Hearst case that we didn’t know before? And again, for the Max Jones’ in the audience, who don’t have much recollection, the nation was transfixed on this kidnaping.  From the New York Times to the Daily News, it was round the clock coverage. And so tell us, why should we revisit it? Why the novel form? 

Roger Rapoport Well, believe it or not, the Patty Hearst case is probably a little bit more timely today than it was in 1974. And I say that because so much of what happened then,  connects exactly to what’s going on. If you can imagine,  there was a president, in a great deal of trouble. His name was Richard Nixon. Sure everybody remembers him. And there was a war in the Middle East. There was an energy crisis. There were so many things going on with revolutionary groups. And what happened in the Patty Hearst case was an unknown group of radicals called the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had a membership of ten strong, suddenly became the most famous kidnapers, probably in American history, when they took the granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hearst, kidnaped her from her Berkeley apartment on February 4th, 1974. 

Scheer Yes. But why are you writing about it? Why the book now? 

Rapoport Well, I covered the case. 

Scheer Well, why the novel form? And was this to give you freedom to bring up issues that are legal obstacles?

Rapoport Well, I wrote a book with Patty’s fiancee, a UC Berkeley graduate student named Steve Weed. And this was after Patty was kidnaped. He was badly beaten and then during his recovery period, moved in with the Hearst family to work on the ransom attempt and subsequently,  interviewed him for New Times magazine and then wrote a book with him. Kind of the inside story of the Patty Hearst case. That book was never published because Steve was secretly rewriting every chapter I gave him each week. And then, when I was nearly done with the book, he decided to go out and publish his own version. In addition to interviewing him, I had an opportunity, after he was paroled, to interview Bill Harris, her kidnaper. I also interviewed,  doctor, Thomas Noguchi, the LA county coroner who autopsied six of the SLA members, who were involved in the kidnaping. And he gave me a lot of information about that. And also, I have a relative, Mark Brandler, who was the judge in a case in Los Angeles brought against her, for  participating in the kidnaping of a 17 year old high school student named Tom Matthews.

Now, there’s been a lot written, including Patty’s own books, this book. There have been films and so on. But the reason for the novel, Bob, is that there’s so much disagreement between all the different participants that I wanted to give equal time to this story so that readers could make up their own mind about what the truth of this situation is. And that’s kind of what you’ve been doing on this show and in your entire career, which is taking one person’s word for it, always talking to all sides and making sure that the reader has an opportunity to come to their own conclusions rather than just reflecting one point of view. So the problem with a lot of what’s been written is it pretty much mirrors what one person’s thinking. And as you know, two people can be in the same room at the same time and walk away with completely different accounts. So it’s kind of what historians do and novelists do. And in the end, I think by presenting all these different vantage points, I think it’s a much clearer picture of all the different things that were going on in this case. 

Scheer So let us begin with this as a media story. I wasn’t exaggerating when I say that there was worldwide attention to this, and it had all the elements of a movie. And I guess she was an attractive heiress and she was engaged to be married and this lustrous family and so forth. And then your book, really, and your writing earlier and much  of your reporting, it started to unravel. The basic question,  yes, she was kidnaped, there’s no doubt about it. It was a movement that was somehow associated with the left, but it was kind of an oddball group of ten people who decided they were going to make an American Revolution different than what other people thought they might make, or whether of the left or the right. I remember when I first heard about it, I said, what the hell is this all about? Is this an FBI invention or something? But they did capture all this attention, and there was, again, the classic case of a victim traumatized by these dangerous radicals. Well, the story, at least as I recall, it’s a long time since I thought about it, frankly, but the main thing is the love story was very complicated from the beginning. She really wasn’t thrilled to be marrying her former college teacher at Berkeley, right? She was 16 or something when she was a student of his and they started having a relationship. Do I have that fact correct? 

Rapoport Right, so not only was he her math tutor, and not only did they begin their affair when she was a 16 year old junior at a private school, Crystal Springs, a school for girls. Her fiancé, Steve, knew the family quite well. In fact, he had flunked her sister in a math class. But they had a very close relationship. For example, when she was struggling with geometry, he actually went into the file of her teacher and stole the final, gave it to her, and then spent hours helping drilling her on the right answer. And she only got an 80% on that. That was in the book that I wrote with Steve. And these were the kinds of things that he got cold feet on. And this is what I mean when I go back to saying, when you read a self-serving, one sided view of this thing, it’s presented as nonfiction, but by strategically omitting some of the key facts,  for example, Patty liked to say, “I wish my parents would die in a plane crash.” And of course, his own history as a drug dealer at Princeton and so on. These were things that the publisher wanted, but Steve didn’t want. But more to the point, Patty realized, as they were getting closer to their wedding in June of 1974, that this wasn’t going to work. And she even was having fantasies of being kidnaped.

She told several people after that, including Tom Matthews, the young Los Angeles high school student that she kidnaped, and a psychiatrist, that she was having fantasies of being kidnaped. And so when the SLA took her, as you know from your own reporting in New Times that has been widely  referenced in books on the case, that she basically had fallen in love with one of her kidnapers and announced that publicly. And that was a key element of the trial, because when she was captured, she was actually wearing an [inaudible] necklace that became critical  to her defense mounted by F. Lee Bailey after she was arrested for a bank robbery. By the way, Patty was involved in in three major criminal cases. The first one was the robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, which, by the way, was owned by the father of a childhood friend. Then she came down to Los Angeles and was in a famous firefight battle at Mill Sporting Goods because her kidnaper, Bill Harris, was being tackled by security guards after shoplifting a bandolier. And thanks to her father, who began teaching her how to shoot when she was nine, with two guns, she fired off enough rounds for them to make a getaway. That action, plus the kidnaping of Tom Matthews, led to her indictment in Los Angeles. And then finally in Carmichael, outside Sacramento, she was the getaway driver in a holdup that left a customer dead, she was actually prosecuted in the first two cases, found guilty and sentenced to seven years in federal prison.  She plead no contest in the Los Angeles case, and the prosecutor decided to let her off because she was already in jail. And then she was released early after 22 months by Jimmy Carter when she was given clemency. 

Scheer So the interesting aspect here is at first it was presented as totally the victimization of an innocent young woman, which certainly it was, she was kidnaped. But the story then became about one of these dangerous radicals and this innocent woman. And then there was the use of the Stockholm syndrome that she was really brainwashed by them or in shock or so forth. And I remember you mentioned my connection with it, along with  Susan Lyne, who we both were working for at New Times.  We interviewed Bill and Emily Harris in LA County jail , and I really had not followed the case that much. And when we were doing the interview and it was an odd kind of interview. We did it as an “as told to,”  I said, they’re in jail and they need money for their attorney who was Lenny Weinglass. And we said, look, just give us your story, the magazine will pay for it and we won’t take any money. And, so it’s not really a hard core interview. It’s an “as told to.” They were in an obviously very dangerous position from their point of view. The lawyers weren’t going to let them talk to us. So I said, just do your story and we’ll publish it and people can make of it what they want. And that’s where this came up, about the necklace, because it was her lover that she was in love with. And that’s what Billy and Emily Harris told us. They said, this is a lot of garbage. She was one of us and she actually had fallen in love. And the proof was that they exchanged these necklaces. And then I remember at the trial, what was his name? The district attorney? 

Rapoport The prosecutor? Browning. 

Scheer Yeah, Browning, left the courtroom. Asked him to find something in the locker. What was she wearing when she was captured? She was wearing that necklace. 

Rapoport The necklace that had been given to her by Willie Wolfe, her lover. 

Scheer Right and then he came back into court and was sort of using and saying this was what she was wearing, as a love connection. And I had some mixed feelings about, well, yes, but was this Stockholm syndrome? And then what came out afterwards was very clearly that she believed in their message. 

Rapoport Here’s an interesting fact. On April Fool’s Day, in 1974, Patty announced that she decided to stay and fight with the SLA. And in that communique, she made it very clear that her parents had decided not to ransom her and not to pay the millions of dollars. Now, remember, this is the father that his estate, when he passed away, was $1.5 billion. So there was no question in Patty’s mind that he had the money to pay the ransom. And when she didn’t do that, her mother, they were doing press conferences pretty much every morning, on the front porch with assembled media, said that she was convinced that Patty was dead. And then they got on a plane and flew to Mexico, to spend a holiday with Desi Arnaz at his estate. So then she rejoined the University of California, Regents, where Patty was a student. So part of Patty’s motivation was that she was afraid that if she turned herself in and remember, the SLA had given her a gun and told her she could walk.

But she was afraid that the FBI and the police… she was vulnerable to them. And that was one of the reasons that she claimed that she didn’t turn herself in. Well, that fear was borne out, a little more than a month later, when six of the L.A.P.D. died in a firefight and this was on 54th Street. To this day, it was the largest firefight on American soil, 9,000 rounds were fired. So it’s understandable that she was a little nervous about turning herself in. Your story was a turning point in that trial and it basically, really shot down F. Lee Bailey’s argument, that she was the victim of some sort of  psychological trauma. And I just want to say this: when she did come back, one of the things that she didn’t do was return to Steve Weed. So clearly, there were some things in her life that didn’t change because she had denounced him in captivity and then held to that idea. So I think it’s a little difficult for a jury to look at the record. And in fact,  when the FBI agent in charge and Cesar Chavez and a lot of other people joined the committee to free Patty Hearst, the then federal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, wrote a very strong letter, to President Carter’s office, basically questioning, all these theories that she had been a victim. 

Scheer Well, in the basic sense, she was a victim, right? She was kidnaped, right? 

Rapoport But that she had been psychologically brainwashed or she was trauma bonding and all that. 

Scheer But also what comes out in your writing, your book, and that’s why it justifies consideration as a novel or admiration as a novel, it’s what a novel is supposed to do: get an inner meaning and interpersonal relations, larger truths and not be just restricted to the bare facts of, say, an investigative book or what have you. So what are the insights? I mean, clearly you discovered she had great tension with her family. The ransom amount was petty cash compared to what her father had yet he claimed he couldn’t gather the money. I mean, you just described a behavior that’s so almost inhuman. You go on with your life and go to a party in Mexico and so forth. And your daughter, you claim it to the public, is in great danger. She certainly was. I mean, she was shooting at police and everything. You could obviously get shot back and so take us into the novel. What’s the thrust of it? 

Rapoport Well, in Searching for Patty Hearst,  the story is that there were so many people that we’ve never heard from before who had a lot to say. And it’s very interesting when you look at the perspective of all the other people, particularly the kidnapers themselves, but also her other family members, and Steve Weed who, of course, I lived with for many months. He lived in my house in Berkeley. And you get the larger perspective of the FBI and the police and so on. And I think the key thing about this story is that there’s so many conflicting points of view, that it’s basically a lack of insight into what the conflict was. And essentially her lawyers, for example, tried to build this trauma theory that somehow they had psychologically manipulated her. But the reality is that they actually saw her as a liability. And this is very clear in my interview with the kidnapers themselves. And they realized that, number one, they weren’t going to get the money.

Number two, they had actually knocked Watergate off the front page, so they had become the biggest news story in the country. They knew they were vulnerable, and especially with Patty there. And when she didn’t leave and decided to embrace the revolutionary philosophy,  she was basically attacking the power structure, represented by her family. And I think, particularly for younger people, it’s important to realize that this is an unresolved story. That essentially the book attempts to give equal time to all vantage points in the story. And I think that’s what makes it valuable, because the problem with the nonfiction accounts is no matter whose account you read, you’re only getting one side of the story so that by fictionalizing it, I think we get much closer to a realistic picture of what actually happened in this story. 

Scheer And with the skills of a novelist that you bring to this book, we get into at least grasping at some truths about human nature that are not revealed in a way that would satisfy a journalist. You have to speculate. I mean, I know in my own case, I happened to work on Oliver Stone’s movie on Nixon and with my son Christopher. And we had to put in his wife because she was a major, Pat Nixon was a major force in his life. But we weren’t in their bedroom, we had to imagine a scene of what their conversation would be like and we should celebrate the freedom of a novelist. I mean, you are grasping for, a deeper truth here. So, what is it? What is your takeaway? 

Rapoport So the real challenge that faces every storyteller and historian is getting inside people’s heads and stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, and to make some informed estimate of their motives and intention. Now, that’s not me talking, that’s Michael Frayn, who wrote the play Copenhagen and many other great works of fiction. And he said when all internal evidence has been mastered, the only way to the protagonist’s head is through the imagination. And I want to add this point, Bob, because I think you nailed it. Patty had a great battle, significant battle with Paul Schrader, who did the film version of her books. So let’s assume that everything in her book, even though she wasn’t present for a lot of the things she talks about, but let’s assume that her reporting, in a 400 page book, is 100% believable. So here’s Paul Schrader writing the end of her book, and he writes a scene at the end with her father. And Patty looks at him and says, but that didn’t happen, that’s not true. You’re inventing dialog there. You’re fictionalizing my nonfiction story, right? And Schrader says, well, what you wrote doesn’t really work. Patty, we’ve got to reach the audience. So that’s a good example of how nonfiction reaches a limit. There’s a limit, even in Patty’s own quote true story even if you buy the whole thing. 

Scheer No, but that’s different. I mean, let me just stop there. I mean, if you are presenting a nonfiction work, you can’t, you have no right to invent dialogue. In anybody’s movie where they don’t make that claim and clearly you’re not in the bedroom taping conversation between the future president and his wife, you have a certain license to imagine the discussion. It’s not claiming to be a nonfiction work. I actually find this example you just offered as shocking, that she actually said it didn’t happen. 

Rapoport Patty wasn’t buying it. She was really upset by it. But, you know, guess what? He owned the rights to her book, and legally, he was within his power to do exactly that. And in Searching for Patty Hearst, I try to deal with this question of Willie Wolfe and the Olmec necklace that you talk about. What happened that made her decide not just to stay with these guys, but to fall in love with one of the kidnapers, one of the people that had taken her away from this life, and it sounds like when you look at the story fairly, that she had some misgivings, obviously, about getting married to Steve Weed, but also about her family and basically she, at one point, told her father, “You know, dad, nobody under 80 reads the San Francisco Examiner.” And so she had a lot of issues, particularly with her mother. There’s a great story that Steve told me that I’m sure he left out of his book but they went to Atlanta on a roots tour. And she was using the N-word everywhere they went, you know “N that and n that,” and then they got to a black neighborhood, and there were no street signs. And she said, well, “N-people don’t need street signs.” It’s an example of what she was horrified by. And by the way, even though Cesar Chavez wrote a letter on her behalf to help get her sentence commuted, she had actually walked through United Farm worker picket lines in Berkeley at Safeway. So, she was not exactly a radical before she was kidnaped. 

Scheer But that was a message that the American media just wouldn’t go near, that maybe this was a repudiation of the power elite, which is, after all, at Berkeley that was a live part of the culture, whether she was an exponent of it or not, she wasn’t the only heiress or heir who rebelled. I mean you had people in the Rockefeller family, for instance,  and probably in a more considered and informed way, there was definitely the case of Abby Rockefeller. But you had plenty of people showing up at a place like Berkeley, which, in spite of being a public institution, was an elite institution and was difficult to get into, and had a lot of respect, a lot of Nobel Prize winners. And yet,  people coming from more privileged backgrounds were rejecting the dominant culture. Partially because of all that had happened with Vietnam and so forth, even though this was a bit later. So let me ask you, by the way, I actually was impressed with Bill and Emily Harris when I interviewed them. I didn’t think they were wacko. I thought they were thoughtful people.  I didn’t support what they did but they certainly made a case and they felt very strongly that Patty Hearst was being manipulated by F. Lee Bailey, by her lawyer, by her family. And they claimed to be shocked that she would betray the person that they had come to know in this situation. That she was, they claimed, an active agent and in fact, in some ways pushing things more than they were necessarily comfortable with. 

Rapoport Well, when I interviewed Bill Harris. And, by the way, I was in touch with him today. And he basically said to me in my interview that Patty was an ideal heiress, a perfect symbol of the ruling class. And what plutocrat wouldn’t want to quickly ransom their daughter from a gang of revolutionaries on the eve of a society wedding. But Patty, basically, I think, was radicalized. Not so much because she was brainwashed or a victim of the Stockholm syndrome, which, by the way, was a term that was invented after the event that triggered it, it was before she was kidnaped, but the psychological word, psycho-syndrome was created in 1975. So Bailey was a little bit ahead of the psychiatrist. But Patty said it should be obvious that people who don’t even care about their own children couldn’t possibly care about anyone else’s. The things that are precious to these people are their money and power, and they will never willingly surrender either.

So the way that I think Patty became so radicalized was she was just listening to what her parents were saying and she was shocked by the fact that they didn’t want to ransom her and that they were just leaving her hanging. So I think her view that… You know, one thing I’ve learned, and she actually said it’s a one of our communiques, is that the corporate ruling class will do anything in their power in order to maintain their position of control for the masses, even if that means sacrificing one of their own. Now, that wasn’t scripted by an SLA member, that wasn’t brainwashing. That was, I believe, Patty’s thinking in that moment, because, remember, she had come from this family,  where every, every situation, the children were bubble wrapped, they didn’t have to worry about this. So they weren’t radicals looking in from the outside trying to imagine what the power structure was like. Patty had lived it for her whole life. So I think that was a significant influence. And in the book, in Searching for Patty Hearst, I try to deal with that, that the radicalization was the absolute failure of her family to pay the ransom. And I have to say Patty is a proud grandmother. I believe that if today, somebody tried to ransom one of her grandchildren, she would pay the ransom. 

Scheer If you thought you get the child back that anybody would do that. Let me ask you a question, though. The SLA, which was unknown at the time and was a very small group, was also made a mass media caricature of just crazed people. But she fell in love with one of them, and I remember being in the jail talking to Bill and Emily Harris, they were quite reasonable people. And they had some real background, education. And then they had decided to get involved in this. It’s not the first time,  people go off the deep end on the basis of some other ideas of justice or what have you. I really clearly remember Emily Harris being very upset about the fact that he was a worthwhile person and that there’s a reason Patty Hearst would fall in love with him, maybe as compared to her designated fiancé and so forth, that there was some idealism here. And that the mass media never accepted for a second. What do your researches show? 

Rapoport So Willie Wolfe, when she was kidnaped, when she was blindfolded in a closet, was reading her Marx’s dialectical materialism and radicalizing her. And then they took the blindfold off in the closet in Daly City. He continued to read to her, and they read books together and so forth. And basically, he was talking about his own journey, his own radicalization, and trying to encourage Patty to understand that she had a role to play in helping people realize the class structure in America and the control that they had. And she had been having her own doubts. Steve was a bit of a gold digger, and he wanted to basically become a Hearst.

Scheer This is the fiancé, people forget the characters here, right? 

Rapoport He was her fiancé. Yeah and he was bringing over rugs that they had gotten in a deep discount from the family castle and went to and up north. They had gone swimming at San Simeon and so on. And his infatuation with the Hearst family and their incredible wealth, I think really turned her off. And Willie Wolfe was basically trying to explain to her how this system that didn’t really reflect reality had to change and the SLA started a free food program, which didn’t work out at all and so on. So I think he radicalized her and I think out of that friendship, the relationship grew. And in my book, I have a whole section about Emily and Willie. Well, he’s a key character in the book, and I try to go into that relationship in a way that I think offers some understanding of where Patty was coming from, which, by the way, she doesn’t really do in her own book. 

Scheer Yeah, I think that’s a major contribution, frankly, because people get swept up in history. And then depending on where you stand, you’ll have a stereotype of them that allows you to not have an influence on your own life, you know. Anybody swept up. Thomas Jefferson, was he this greater idealist, was he this exploiter, a slave, you go down the list. And the mass media, and this was a feeding frenzy on the ground level, the kidnaping, and there was certainly no inclination to see the kidnapers as political actors or human beings or whatever. Cinque, I believe, was his name, was the leader of the group, and he was just made into some weird character. I remember just the reporting of it was, what to call it, minimalist. Okay, well they were thugs, crazies. 

Rapoport Here’s an example. So F. Lee Bailey literally buys the book rights to Patty’s story. 

Scheer You have to tell who these people are.

Rapoport He was her defense attorney. 

Scheer And he was world famous. And as you point out, he was incompetent.

Rapoport Right. He was best known for handling the Boston Strangler case and in fact, brought the Boston Strangler psychiatrist to San Francisco to interview Patty. And he built this whole case that she’d been brainwashed and so on. And then, as your reporting showed, on this Olmec necklace, which became central to the prosecution of the case. It wasn’t quite so simple. And their journalists who had painted this damsel in distress captivity narrative around Patty. And then suddenly one day woke up to find out that she committed, been an armed robber in a bank,  suddenly there was a lot of explaining that had to happen. And what you did as a journalist is you didn’t just take Bill Harris’s word for it. You actually wrote information that the prosecutor used to find out that, yes, indeed, when she was captured, she was wearing a necklace from her SLA lover when she claimed that she had been raped by this guy, right?

So now all of that information is called into question by your own reporting. And it was central to the case. So this is basically what historians do, is they basically sift through all the evidence and then, as you did, provided the prosecutor with a fact. And he documented it by going into the locker and finding her belongings and pulling that necklace out and showing it to the jury. And lo and behold, all these reporters who were reporting the F. Lee Bailey side of the story, when, remember, he has a conflict of interest here because he got a signed release from Patty saying that she won’t publish a book for 18 months so that he can be first with his book and he got a big contract with Putnam. And that book, by the way, was canceled after he lost the case. So in my book, in Searching for Patty Hearst, I talk about this. I try to explain that you can’t just go in and say that it’s simply a case of brainwashing or that just she was guilty from the beginning. You have to look at all sides and I think that’s important to younger people. 

Scheer We’re doing this because we both feel this story is relevant to our understanding of not only that period of history, a very stormy period going through the 60s into the 70s but also how mass media works. There was a feeding frenzy, I really can’t even describe it. I mean, the lust for this story, the elements, the rich princess, the kidnaping, the racial component. All of that led to an incredible distortion of reality at every point. Your choosing the novel form is a legitimate dismissal or recognition of the limits of so-called objective journalism. Maybe it’s the limits of also nonfiction because so much gets lost and by the way, you keep saying I did this. I did it with  Susan Lyne, who was a young person then and not from a wealthy family, but from an upper class, New England family. And she went on to do Premier magazine and have a great career.

But I remember both of us going and it was very weird to go into the jail. And amazingly enough, in those days in the jail, they pointed out female guards who had short skirts, kind of a provocation, in a way. I mean, the whole thing was so bizarre, so media oriented. People knew they were going to be on film or interview. It was all part of theater and the fact is well intentioned people often, can be led astray by their passions, their commitments, and then do horrible or bizarre things. History is full of these examples, and there was no inclination to actually examine, not only the kidnapers and the victim who then became part of their group. There was no real interest in the very thing that you are now exploring 50 years later. The complexity of human motivation and is relation to history and its relation to celebrity culture. Remember, there’s a whole bunch of people around this thing, including athletes and so forth. I mean, you should spell out, for people who don’t know it, this was showbiz at a high level. 

Rapoport So there’s nothing that can build circulation faster than a damsel in distress captivity narrative. Some of the first bestsellers in this country,  were captivity narratives; these are, women being captured by minorities,  beginning with Mary Rawlinson, who was minister’s wife who wrote up a book about 12 days of captivity with a Native American tribe and all the way up through the Hearst empire, where William Randolph Hearst, who was a great fictionalizer on his newspaper front pages sent a reporter to Cuba to liberate a young woman and then bring her home and then write a big story about her captivity in Cuba. So this was one of the ways that the hill’s empire was built. And to flip that narrative, and to suddenly have it be about a Hearst member. And now the Hearst family is thinking, oh my God, all the consultants and Governor Reagan and so on are telling us not to ransom her because then guess what? There might be other family members, endangered. And in fact, their fears were not unfounded. During the trial that we’ve been talking about,  Casa de sole, which, by the way, you can see on a San Simeon tour, was firebombed.

And this is the castle where the Hearst family hung out when they visited. So they had a larger problem of what the impact would be on the company and the extended family, so to speak. So all these all this ambiguity about her case and the vested interests that the media had in,  basically her decision to join the SLA, basically is what happens when you depend entirely on the recollections of the participants. So in your own case, Bob, that physical evidence kind of trumped a lot of the questions and actually influenced the jury. So in other words, you aren’t just depending on the words of the participants involved, you actually had an object that she was photographed wearing when she was kidnaped. So that’s the beauty of  fiction, it’s the cross-checking that’s involved. You mentioned Emily Harris. She has a major chapter in, um, in the book “Searching for Patty Hearst.” And her side of the story, is absolutely fascinating, what she thinks really happened and what was motivating all this. 

Scheer Tell us. 

Rapoport Well, basically what she told you in jail is what what what this character says in searching for Patty Hearst, she says, Patty really did decide that she didn’t want to go home because she didn’t want to marry Steve Weed. And frankly, she was embarrassed by her family’s behavior, by the fact that this billionaire family wouldn’t put up a relatively small amount of money in the context of their wealth, to liberate their own daughter. She was horrified by that. Harris speaks to that point. 

Scheer You know, it’s interesting your reporting going back. You did excellent reporting on this case from the beginning because you actually did it by, what’s the old expression, wearing out your shoe leather? You were on the scene. You found the people. I mean I followed your work at the time, and believe it or not, I didn’t cover this as a journalist. I stumbled into it with Susan Lyne.  We were working for, well, New Times, as you wrote, it was an independent publication. And Lenny Weinglass was a brilliant attorney and with the Chicago seven case, you know, really terrific human being. And he’s the one that said these people have a story, Bill and Emily Harris, that’s not being told. And also they needed some money for their legal defense. And so really what we did was go in with our listening ears open. It wasn’t like some big investigative piece. And we asked them human questions: how did this happen? What is this all about? And frankly, I had been turned off by the whole thing because it was such a media swarming around this. And I thought, wait a minute. This is a small group of people. They decided to do something I thought was nutty and what do I have to get drawn into it? That was sort of my take, I can’t speak for Susan Lyne, but basically, what I was shocked to find is that Bill and Emily Harris,  were thoughtful people, and they had brains and they had knowledge and they had reasons for why they were doing this. And then when they brought up the big contradiction in the whole media coverage, which was, who is Patty Hearst?

And it all squared with what we could learn of the facts. Yes, she was on her own. Yes, she had many opportunities to leave. Yes, she seemed to be gung ho in these ways. So, yes, the only reporting we did was to check this story against all the available accounts. And it rang true as far as Patty’s connection to the group. And it’s really not, at the time, if you think about the whole Che Guevara mythology, you know, Guevara was originally from rich, good family in Argentina. He was a medical doctor. He had choices in life and he decided to do something. And you could say it looked a little bit wacko, that you’re going to overthrow the whole international economic order by going to Africa, by going to Bolivia. But it became the center of a certain idealism. I think this SLA group had these ideas floating around and it was really quite a shock to be in jail, interviewing people who were being just attacked and dismissed in the media as just nutcases and you suddenly talking to an intelligent human being. I remember talking to Bill Harris once after he got out. He was working on legal reform and trying to get a fair trial for people and so forth. And so that was a big shock to me as a journalist. They weren’t nutcases, these two people, and they had a story to tell. And that’s when Susan and I decided with New Times that it can’t be Q&A like I’m doing now with you, because I can push back and you’re not on trial and your lawyer doesn’t have to be consulted because the lawyer was not present. And so let it be their story, as I told to. And that’s really what it was. And it turned out, as you point out, they provided the key evidence. Well, alerted the prosecutor that was in his own locker, evidence locker that they hadn’t checked out. 

Rapoport So everyone has a convincing and believable story until you start cross-checking and talk to other people who were also in the room. And then you get both sides. And that’s kind of where F. Lee Bailey fell down. He didn’t do his homework. And having worked with you at Ramparts and also reported on this story at New Times and having spent a lot of time with Bill Harris at coffee shops in Oakland after he was paroled, not in jail, I was able to come to the same conclusion that you did, that Bill Harris had a very interesting story about what life with Patty was like. And all of that is in my book. The full text of that interview is blended into this fictional book. So that is actually the one section of the book that is verbatim from my interview with Bill Harris. And his point was that if Patty was acting, she was doing a hell of a job. And believe me, when John Waters cast her in his various movies and when she started writing fiction and became an actress, she was doing a pretty good job. So if she was playing them along, then how do you explain the fact that for a long period of time, not only was she able to walk, but when she was captured, she was living with the Harrises. The SLA didn’t even have her under their control in any way. So it’s a little difficult to explain, the jury just simply didn’t buy it. And in the other case in Los Angeles, where she actually did participate in the kidnaping, she played no contest.

And in the third case in Sacramento, which was dropped after the initial attempt to convict Steven Soliah one of the previous ones fell through, and then,  was picked up again in the, in the 90s. There was a civil case against the people in that bank robbery brought by the family of the woman bringing in a church collection into that bike in Carmichael. And that case was settled out of court. Patty was one of the people that was being threatened with a civil claim by the deceased woman’s family, and there was a major six figure settlement in that case. And Randy Hearst, who didn’t want a ransom his daughter, paid a significant sum in that settlement. And she was never prosecuted, in the case. So, I mean, these are facts, not conjecture. But what they all add up to is what you’ve been talking about, that there is a credible story. There is another side to this. And in the book, in “Searching for Patty Hearst,” I do my best to try to tell her side and the other side so that as you as you say it’s one thing to be a kidnap victim, it’s another thing to run with your kidnapers, rob a bank, kidnap a young child. And by the way, Tom Matthews, said that she was a wonderful kidnaper. She kept patting him on the back, she gave him a big kiss just before they freed him. And he said he thought one of the reasons why she was so compassionate toward him after they carjacked them and kidnaped him, was that she knew what it felt like to be kidnaped. 

Scheer You know, it’s interesting because a lot of bad stuff is done by people who claim to be well intentioned if they are officially connected with governments and use of official government equipment. And of course, there’s a whole industry to explain that. Why you blow up citizens or why you did this or that and  so forth. But the interesting thing about your book and your commitment to this story is you, and this much I know about your work, want to get it right. And the whole problem with journalism being the first draft of history is journalists are not inclined to reexamine that first draft. And so here you have this bizarre situation where thousands of journalists, I don’t know the number. I mean, when I say feeding frenzy, they were coming from the most obscure countries and so forth to write about this and to cover it. It was kind of the flowering of mass media, television and everything, and had all the ingredients. And then just in an absolute drop off of curiosity about what happened. So it then lingers as a mythology of, yes, there were these crazy revolutionaries, they could destroy the tranquility of a well established family and just rip people out of the fabric of society and brainwash them and so forth. And fortunately, this young woman didn’t serve that time. So,  maybe justice prevailed. But what you do with your novel, I think, as I’ve been saying it since the opening. So it’s kind of a sales pitch.  What you have shown, and why doing it in novel form, are the limits of traditional journalism.  And I think it should you should boast about it rather than be inclined to be defensive. I’m not saying you are, but… 

Rapoport In fairness to the story,  we’re talking about it 50 years later. And, Bob, I wrote an entire book with the man who lived with her for three years, her fiancee. Who knew the family, who actually was with the family while the FBI was sleeping in a bedroom in the Hearst home. They were there 24/7. In another bedroom, in the same house was Steve Weed. How close can you get to the ransom effort? I mean, he drank with Patty’s family. He taught her sisters. There was no one who knew this story better than Steve Weed. And I have to say, from a firsthand account, when he started saying to me, well, he didn’t want to get into all the intimate details of their life together, which is what the publisher wanted, that pretty much underscores the problem with nonfiction. And that book, when he was rewriting it and wanting to cut stuff out, it left me very uncomfortable. And there is a limit to nonfiction. And the great thing about fiction is it answers the central question, which is what could have possibly motivated her to fall in love with one of her kidnapers? Why didn’t she go home? Why did why was she involved in driving a getaway car after a woman had been killed, an innocent woman had been killed in a bank robbery? What could have possibly driven her to these actions? And the novel attempts to tell it, in part, from her side.

Why didn’t she go home when she could have could have done that? And I think that’s the great advantage of fiction is you can get beyond these limitations of simply having to say he said, she said. And I think the beauty of this story is that it addresses your central point. Don’t just read something in a newspaper or watch something on television and say, okay, yeah, that’s what happened. Go get the other side. And you’ve been doing that your whole life. And the Olmec necklace story is one that I think perfectly tells. Okay, so Bill Harris says one side, Patty Harris has another. The lawyer is trying to write a bestselling book because he cut his fee to get the book rights after Patty agreed to stall her own book. So he’s got a hidden agenda. Well, the prosecutor can spend all day listening to these different depositions. But the fact is, she was wearing her boyfriend’s necklace when she was captured. I mean, that says it all. And that’s why journalism is so encumbered and unfortunately you triggered that event. And I like to think that in a fictional story, we deal head on with that. Now, I want to mention something about my appearances. I am, beginning on the 23rd, of January, at 6:00, I’m going to be at the Culver City Library, and again on the 25th, I’m going to be at the same Culver City library at 1:00. And then on the 27th, I’m going to be at the Lamanda Park Library, in Pasadena, on the 27th at 1:00. And at those events, we’ll have an opportunity to talk about some of the key points that you made. And this is the beginning of a tour that’s leading up north and three of our events are actually,  in the shadow of San Simeon. And then I’m going up to Northern California in Sacramento. And during this tour, a number of people connected to the case are going to be involved. Not at every event, but we expect to have some people who have a direct… Reporters who covered and so forth will be there. 

Scheer Uh, okay. So and we’ll put that in with the introduction or try to list it and keep us informed. I love the fact that you are standing journalism on its head. And the appeal of journalism is, of course, the now moment, the gotcha story and everything else. The limits of journalism is reflection. Gathering all the evidence, as you say, challenging it from all different sides. Let’s hear a tribute to fiction now. And as I said before in my encounter with Oliver Stone’s movie on  Nixon, which was not well received by the media, I thought Oliver Stone should be applauded because he got an insight into Nixon in that movie, which now, when people look at his movie,  they say, wow and it’s funny because I actually interviewed Nixon at one point before Oliver made that movie, but this is one reason I was a consultant on it and that is Nixon. If you really wanted to see a Richard Nixon again, a very complex, very complex figure. Yes, he was a mass murderer and the bombings of Cambodia and everything else. On the other hand, he brought us this opening to China and to the Cold War and my last advertisement for,  I’m not a fiction writer, so I’m embracing what you did here. The fact is Oliver, provides the best insight, that I know of, to Richard Nixon. And to this day, I can’t have an intelligent conversation with anybody about Nixon. 

No, he’s totally evil or he’s this. Well, come on. This guy by today’s standard was actually domestically pretty progressive, guaranteed annual income, he actually embraced. And so,  again, I think you’ve written probably, I mean, no question, the most important book about the whole Patty Hearst episode. You’re the human being who knows the most about the case,  covered it most consistently. And maybe you couldn’t have written this book without the vantage point of a half century, that’s the occasion for its publication now. But really, I would begin any consideration of the Patty Hearst case, which is a media story, a story of how the truth does or does not come out. And by the way, what I think one great strength of your approach is this story about class. And we have an idea in this country, we’re supposed to ignore class and and the Hearst family they’re either virtuous or something else, but the idea that they could be dysfunctional, that they can be torn apart, that they could be hypocritical even about their own daughter, that’s an important part of your real account, isn’t it? 

Rapoport Right. So when her mother is wandering around Atlanta, visiting her childhood things and throwing out the N-word, and then she gets kidnaped by a black man and a group of white radicals, and the black guy gives her a gun. He said you can leave if you want, she said. No, I want to stay and fight and he hands are a gun. That has a little bit of a shift in her perspective, here’s her mother saying, who was a University of California Regent, using racist slang against black people. And then this black guy gives her a gun, it does change your perspective a little bit.

Especially when your dad was a billionaire and part of a billionaire family doesn’t want to ransom you. That that might have a little bit of a little bit of an impact on you. And remember, as you were saying about Nixon, what do people know about William Randolph Hearst, your grandfather? Two things. They know San Simeon, and they know Citizen Kane, a fictional portrayal of his life. And that that segues right back to what you’re saying about Nixon. You’ll learn more about William Randolph Hearst and how this family happened from that fictional account, than you will from any book ever written about him, that’s the story.

Scheer Okay, so let’s end on this note. Check it out. Go hear Roger Rappaport speak. You’ll be in many other cities. I’ll try to put an addendum next to a write up of this. 

Rapoport Right. It’s  PattyHearst.com, our website has the full event schedule beginning in Culver City on,  January 23rd. PattyHearst.com. 

Scheer Okay, there it is. I want to thank you for taking the time to do this and also for sticking with the story. There’s a lot of these kind of stories that just get pegged at a certain time and generally reflect more ignorance than insight. You’ve done the opposite, you devoted a good part of your life to trying to get this right, and that’s not the only thing you’ve devoted yourself to, but I think hats off to you. I also want to thank Laura Kondourajian,  and Christopher Ho at KCRW for putting these shows up, posting them. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, for pushing me to do this. We had some logistical problems, I’m so happy we did do it. I want to thank Diego Ramos for writing the intro and Max Jones for putting this up on video. And I want to thank the J.K.W Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a writer, a public personality, intellectual, what have you, for doing exactly what Roger said, examine it from all sides. Question, challenge, and particularly coming from a prominent family, challenging your own family and your own class. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. See you next week.

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