Patricia Campbell Hearst told us in Every Secret Thing that the place the Hearsts called Wyntoon was “a mystical land,” “fantastic, otherworldly,” “even more than San Simeon,” which was in turn “so emotionally moving that it is still beyond my powers of description.” That first Maybeck castle on the McCloud River was seen by most Californians only in photographs, and yet, before it burned in 1933, to be replaced by a compound of rather more playful Julia Morgan chalets (“Cinderella House,” “Angel House,” “Brown Bear House”), Phoebe Hearst’s gothic Wyntoon and her son’s baroque San Simeon seemed between them to embody certain opposing impulses in the local consciousness: northern and southern, wilderness sanctified and wilderness banished, the aggrandizement of nature and the aggrandizement of self. Wyntoon had mists, and allusions to the infinite, great trunks of trees left to rot where they fell, a wild river, barbaric fireplaces. San Simeon, swimming in sunlight and the here and now, had two swimming pools, and a zoo.
It was a family in which the romantic impulse would seem to have dimmed. Patricia Campbell Hearst told us that she “grew up in an atmosphere of clear blue skies, bright sunshine, rambling open spaces, long green lawns, large comfortable houses, country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts and riding horses.” At the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park she told a nun to “go to hell,” and thought herself “quite courageous, although very stupid.” At Santa Catalina in Monterey she and Patricia Tobin, whose family founded one of the banks the SLA would later rob, skipped Benediction, and received “a load of demerits.” Her father taught her to shoot, duck hunting. Her mother did not allow her to wear jeans into San Francisco. These were inheritors who tended to keep their names out of the paper, to exhibit not much interest in the world at large (“Who the hell is this guy again?” Randolph Hearst asked Steven Weed when the latter suggested trying to approach the SLA through Regis Debray, and then, when told, said, “We need a goddamn South American revolutionary mixed up in this thing like a hole in the head”), and to regard most forms of distinction with the reflexive distrust of the country club.
Yet if the Hearsts were no longer a particularly arresting California family, they remained embedded in the symbolic content of the place, and for a Hearst to be kidnapped from Berkeley, the very citadel of Phoebe Hearst’s aspiration, was California as opera. “My thoughts at this time were focused on the single issue of survival,” the heiress to Wyntoon and San Simeon told us about the fifty-seven days she spent in the closet. “Concerns over love and marriage, family life, friends, human relationships, my whole previous life, had really become, in SLA terms, bourgeois luxuries.”
This abrupt sloughing of the past has, to the California ear, a distant echo, and the echo is of emigrant diaries. “Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can,” one of the surviving children of the Donner Party concluded her account of that crossing. “Don’t worry about it,” the author of Every Secret Thing reported having told herself in the closet after her first sexual encounter with a member of the SLA. “Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings — they’re no help at all.” At the time Patricia Campbell Hearst was on trial in San Francisco, a number of psychiatrists were brought in to try to plumb what seemed to some an unsoundable depth in the narrative, that moment at which the victim binds over her fate to her captors. “She experienced what I call the death anxiety and the breaking point,” Robert Jay Lifton, who was one of these psychiatrists, said. “Her external points of reference for maintenance of her personality had disappeared,” Louis Jolyon West, another of the psychiatrists, said. Those were two ways of looking at it, and another was that Patricia Campbell Hearst had cut her losses and headed west, as her great-grandfather had before her.
The story she told in 1982 in Every Secret Thing was received, in the main, querulously, just as it had been when she told it during The United States of America v. Patricia Campbell Hearst, the 1976 proceeding during which she was tried for and convicted of the armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank (one count), and (the second count) the use of a weapon during the commission of a felony. Laconic, slightly ironic, resistant not only to the prosecution but to her own defense, Patricia Hearst was not, on trial in San Francisco, a conventionally ingratiating personality. “I don’t know,” I recall her saying over and over again during the few days I attended the trial. “I don’t remember.” “I suppose so.” Had there not been, the prosecutor asked one day, telephones in the motels in which she had stayed when she drove across the country with Jack Scott? I recall Patricia Hearst looking at him as if she thought him deranged. I recall Randolph Hearst looking at the floor. I recall Catherine Hearst arranging a Galanos jacket over the back of her seat.
“Yes, I’m sure,” their daughter said.
Where, the prosecutor asked, were these motels?
“One was … I think …” Patricia Hearst paused, and then: “Cheyenne? Wyoming?” She pronounced the names as if they were foreign, exotic, information registered and jettisoned. One of these motels had been in Nevada, the place from which the Hearst money originally came: the heiress pronounced the name Nevahda, like a foreigner.
In Every Secret Thing as at her trial, she seemed to project an emotional distance, a peculiar combination of passivity and pragmatic recklessness (“I had crossed over. And I would have to make the best of it… to live from day to day, to do whatever they said, to play my part, and to pray that I would survive”) that many people found inexplicable and irritating. In 1982 as in 1976, she spoke only abstractly about why, but quite specifically about how. “I could not believe that I had actually fired that submachine gun,” she said of the incident in which she shot up Crenshaw Boulevard, but here was how she did it: “I kept my finger pressed on the trigger until the entire clip of thirty shots had been fired…. I then reached for my own weapon, the semiautomatic carbine. I got off three more shots….”
And, after her book as after her trial, the questions raised were not exactly about her veracity but about her authenticity, her general intention, about whether she was, as the assistant prosecutor put it during the trial, “for real.” This was necessarily a vain line of inquiry (whether or not she “loved” William Wolfe was the actual point on which the trial came to turn), and one that encouraged a curious rhetorical regression among the inquisitors. “Why did she choose to write this book?” Mark Starr asked about Every Secret Thing in Newsweek, and then answered himself: “Possibly she has inherited her family’s journalistic sense of what will sell.” “The rich get richer,” Jane Alpert concluded in New York magazine. “Patty,” Ted Morgan observed in the New York Times Book Review, “is now, thanks to the proceeds of her book, reverting to a more traditional family pursuit, capital formation.”