How to Brainwash an Heiress

26 Saturday 13 August 2016 The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph Saturday 13 August 2016 27 BOOKS Defiant: Emily Hearst. Previously, the group had Emotionless: the SLA leaked this Harris and Hearst released a photo of her wearing a image of Patty Hearst in captivity (with sunglasses) beret and clutching a machine gun raise their fists – but that could have been taken grade gas masks. Some 5,300 rounds as they leave San under duress. She had also been were fired into the building and 83 Francisco’s caught on security camera taking tear gas canisters before the house Federal Building part in a bank robbery; again, that caught fire. Those who survived after their might have been coerced. But on the shooting perished in the arraignment, May 16, she had been left alone in flames. A crowd of 4,000 watched 1976 the van while the shoplifter and his from behind police barriers and, wife – Bill and Emily Harris of the thanks to a local news station’s SLA – went to buy supplies. The fancy camera, it was also one of the key was in the ignition. Hearst first breaking news stories could have driven home, or to broadcast live on American TV. hospital, or to the police. Instead, she stayed and helped shoot her earst, who had not been at supposed captors to freedom. H the hideout, was eventually There was no doubt. Patty Hearst arrested in September 1975. How to had joined the SLA. Her celebrity lawyer, F Lee Bailey, Unpicking all of the competing argued that she had been evidence is tricky business but brainwashed, a term recently Toobin does it with characteristic coined to explain behaviour by brainwash clarity. He trained as a lawyer at certain American prisoners during Harvard before moving into a the Korean War. Although the career as a journalist with The New hostage situation that gave rise to Yorker. He has written books about the concept of Stockholm syndrome an heiress the most contentious legal cases of had taken place in 1973, it was not recent years, the most famous of yet common psychiatric currency. which is The Run of His Life (1997), Toobin is rightly sceptical of about the OJ Simpson trial, which retrospective diagnoses that try to was recently adapted into a exculpate Hearst. He patiently lays successful miniseries. out damning evidence of her For Toobin this is more of a complicity in a number of crimes. historical project. He paints the She has since become convinced of Paranoid revolutionary or just a backdrop to the Hearst affair as a her own innocence, successfully “hallucinogenic moment” in securing a presidential pardon great pretender? Duncan White is still American history: the OPEC oil from Bill Clinton. “Rarely have the crisis, gas rationing, wild inflation, benefits of wealth, power and perplexed by Patty Hearst’s blank gaze rising unemployment, the Black renown been as clear as they were Panthers, the Watergate scandal. in the aftermath of Patricia’s Wielding the submachine gun was San Francisco, intoxicated by conviction,” Toobin writes. AMERICAN HEIRESS the most sought-after woman in idealism in the late Sixties, was Although his scepticism is Jeffrey Toobin America: Patty Hearst, now suffering from a sound, Toobin still can’t get granddaughter of the newspaper countercultural hangover. Random satisfactorily to the bottom of what 384PP, DOUBLEDAY, tycoon William Randolph Hearst. white people were being shot motivated Hearst. He suggests that £21.85 Three months previously, this down in the street in what became she acted with rational self- listless 19-year-old student trapped known as the Zebra murders, while interest, which would help explain in a tedious relationship had been the Zodiac serial killer taunted law why she ditched her zealous kidnapped by a gang of bedsit enforcement with cryptic letters. political convictions so quickly ÌÌÌÌÌ radicals from her flat in Berkeley. Amid all this, the SLA seemed a after her arrest, effectively n May 16 1974, She was stuffed into the boot of a ridiculous organisation: half- becoming an FBI informant. But Tony Shepherd, car and driven to a hideout where digested Marxism mixed up with ARCHIVE BETTMANN there was nothing rational at play an assistant at she was kept in a closet for several the paranoid fantasies and when she fired her machine gun at Mel’s Sporting weeks. What happened next is grandiose delusions of their leader, dropouts as his followers. They supposed complicity with the too long. To these ascendant Mel’s Sporting Goods, or when she O Goods in Los contested: Hearst later maintained Donald DeFreeze, a former convict. stitched themselves a flag with a establishment. They used bullets conservatives, Patty Hearst chose to keep on living as an Angeles, saw a that she only joined the He wanted to lead a black seven-headed cobra and signed off laced with cyanide. symbolised a spoilt generation. “urban guerrilla”, in her words, for customer hiding something Symbionese Liberation Army, as revolutionary movement but could their communiqués: DEATH TO Hearst’s father, Randy, initially After shooting up Mel’s Sporting more than a year afterwards. inside his jacket. A trained cop, the gang called themselves, only muster white middle-class THE FASCIST INSECT THAT tried to meet the demands of the Goods, Hearst and the Harrises left The enigma of Patty Hearst is all Shepherd tackled the shoplifter because she was raped, threatened PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE SLA by running a food giveaway. an unpaid parking ticket in the van there in the photograph of her with as he tried to flee. The store and feared for her life, but PEOPLE. But despite their But when it was clear that his when they ditched it, which led the beret and gun. Her stance is manager and several passers-by members of the SLA said she joined The SLA seemed posturing, the SLA were a daughter had joined the SLA, his To order this FBI to the SLA hideout. What engaged, but her face is devoid of piled on. Without warning, a the organisation willingly and all ridiculous, with dangerous crowd. Before sympathy evaporated. California book from the followed was the “biggest police affect. Although there is so much burst of gunfire came from a van sex was consensual. kidnapping Hearst, they had had just elected Ronald Reagan as Telegraph for gun battle ever to take place on that is obviously compelling about parked across the street, In American Heiress, Jeffrey their slogan ‘Death murdered Marcus Foster, a popular governor and there was a growing £18.99 plus American soil”. The six other the Hearst saga, the hardest thing to shattering the storefront window Toobin argues that the shoot-out African-American school feeling that the hippie Haight- £1.99 p&p call members of the SLA were heavily forget is the puzzle of what was but, incredibly, killing no one. “marked the crossroads” for to the fascist insect’ superintendent in Oakland, for his Ashbury crowd had been indulged 0844 871 1515 armed and equipped with military- happening behind those blank eyes. the SAS selection process, had and called “the Lawrence of “mostly worrying, or cross, or at timing that Keggie felt “keenly and My dad, Lawrence of Burma borrowed Tom’s name and Burma” in 1945 Indian newspapers. her ‘wits’ end’”. Crossness turned selfishly”. Then, in his attic, she invented a heroic identity. Tom left the Army in 1958, and to rage, rage to breakdown. In found diaries, letters, cassette Soon after, the real Tom’s own in a matter of weeks had moved his passages almost too painful to read, tapes – that became the starting identity began to fragment. In second wife Jane and their young Keggie describes her mother’s point of Dadland. Here was the 2003, after the death of his third children to a small house in violent rants at her children; her youthful life she had known only in wife, he started to lose his memory. Fareham, Hampshire, and invited persecution of her father-in-law – part – the time in which, perhaps, Even as a child, his daughter writes his widowed father to live with “throwing bricks through his he was most fully himself: “If As a war hero’s memory faded, his daughter pieced in this powerful memoir, she had them. It was the start of the half- window… his Waterford crystal France was his pupation, Burma is together the secrets of his past. By Jane Shilling recognised his world as “a place decade left unrecorded by Tom’s smashed; his grandfather clock his imago, breaking out to realise where you never quite knew obituaries, and the beginning of heaved over”. In 1974 she was his full potential.” international bestseller. By what where you were”. But this was a the end of their family’s happiness. admitted to a local mental hospital. The clouding of Tom’s mind DADLAND seemed at the time a curious different kind of not-knowing. “Dad’s glory days are over,” Keggie never eclipsed his charm. To the by Keggie Carew coincidence, Keggie Carew’s father Many of us find it difficult to records in the historic present that he recovered, eventually, but end, he saw the world from a point was also called Tom Carew. He, imagine our parents’ lives before she uses interchangeably with the S the family was fractured of view entirely his own: “If I left 432PP, CHATTO & too, had a background in special we existed. For Carew and her past tense. The effect, at first beyond repair. Tom had an here, I’d only be in another here,” WINDUS, £16.99, EBOOK operations, having worked for SOE three siblings, the mystery of disconcerting, has a breathless affair and, after his divorce from he remarked.

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