Anyone's Daughter
Alexander, Shana
ANYONE'S DAUGHTER Shana Alexander / Random House / $14.95 Michiko Kakutani The case had every sensationalistic detail upon which William Randolph Hearst built his multimillion-dollar newspaper...
...AS far as Mrs.Alexander is concerned, members of the monied set are so selfish, so corrupt, so entirely inured to the feelings of their children, the poor, and practically everyone else, that it's entirely understandable that their sons and daughters would run off to become terrorists...
...Alexander, in her simple-minded egalitarianism, actually applauds the goals of that band of revolutionaries...
...Patty was my story," explains Mrs...
...Alexander wasted 546 pages reaching such an absurd and uncharitable conclusion...
...The Patty Hearst case became a media free-for-all...
...it was unpleasant in particular when she showed no awareness that had she not opted to join the SLA, had she not decided to play 'girl guerilla,' the TV barbecue would never have happened...
...stead, she has rather artlessly embroidered the Hearst story with her own tiresome and altogether predictable meditations on America...
...Six people were burned alive because Patty had joined them...
...Every participant in the trial, from Steven Weed to Mizmoon's sister to F. Lee Bailey, has weighed in-cashed in might be more precise-with an account of the story...
...Instead, cliches, embarrassing attempts at anthropology, and facile commentary abound...
...We get no sense of Catherine Hearst beyond the two-dimensional portrait of a rich bitch given by Mrs...
...Using the eight-week trial for the Hibernia bank robbery as a kind of armature for Anyone's Daughter...
...Alexander rehashes all the familiar details and ambiguities of the case: Bailey's defense that Patty Hearst was a victim subjected to inhumanities unheard of outside North Vietnamese POW camps and terrorized into following the orders of her captors...
...Her composure, her beauty, her wealth-all are held against her...
...Alexander's snide descriptions: Catherine Hearst powdering her nose, Catherine Hearst as the belle of Atlanta, Catherine Hearst as "the Platonic ideal of Lana Turner made flesh...
...They live on a level of coarse resentment...
...Alexander, "anyone's daughter...
...This, of course, is exactly what the SLA would have us believe, and Mrs...
...The thing is, Patty wasn't anyone's daughter...
...And now Shana Alexander, that spigot of liberalism on "Sixty Minutes," has produced her own lengthy exegesis of the case...
...President Carter acted compassionately in granting Patty Hearst clemency last February...
...It shows...
...A girl of 19 with no political savvy, no particular spiritual resources, she was subjected to a regimen as harsh as those that broke trained military men in prisoner-of-war camps...
...For some reason, she has chosen a fish metaphor: Patty is the mermaid surrounded by Bailey the shark, prosectuor Browning the pipefish, and other assorted sea creatures...
...The members of the SLA were driven to their acts of violence, she maintains, by the "longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind...
...A person in her position has scant business making moral judgments...
...She even draws an analogy between Patty's kidnapping and the old slave system: The "republic already included a large and permanently kidnapped population: the cargo of the slave traders, the kidnapped sons and daughters of Africa...
...And they were...
...But because the girl at the center of it all happened to be Hearst's granddaughter, she ended up spending 22 months in prison, sentenced not so much for a simple bank robbery as for being a member of a wealthy and publicized family...
...It felt as if a light bulb had switched on over my head, the way they used to in comic strips I understood her because in some way she was the girl I had been and in some way I was also her mother...
...Anyone's Daughter, in fact, is partisan and subjective throughout...
...Small wonder that she did as her kidnappers directed...
...Alexander stuck to an orchestration of the trial, she might have succeeded in creating an efficient, if not inspiring, summation of a difficult case...
...InMichiko Kakutani is a writer living in New York...
...Alexander rattles on, declaring that "power, rampant free enterprise, wealth and pleasure [are] largely male values" and that Catherine Hearst is intent on putting her daughter through the ordeal of a trial simply to save the family name...
...She implicates Nixon, the CIA, the FBI, Vietnam, and Watergate in creating a climate that led to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst...
...Patty's statement [on CBS television after her release] that the SLA members who were burned up in Los Angeles 'got exactly what they deserved' released me from this girl at last," she writes in the last chapter...
...Had Mrs...
...She manages to compare California's prison system to the Gulag Archipelago, and the SLA's paranoia to Nixon's...
...Such maundering is served up with neither grace nor ingenuity...
...I understood that a mother-daughter struggle was close to the core of her story...
...And yet Mrs...
...Alexander could not even persuade Patty's mother to talk to her...
...they are a brutish and dim people...
...Above all, Patty is, to Mrs...
...Alexander argues that Patty voluntarily joined the SLA to rebel against her parents, that, in fact, anyone's child might feel compelled to become a terrorist given the current state of affairs in America...
...Alexander in the preface...
...and the prosecution's argument that she was a "rebel without a cause," an adventuress disenchanted with her family who voluntarily adopted the aims and means of the Symbionese Liberation Army...
...As Tania saw it," she writes, "the objectives of the SLA were admirable...
...Quoting the Tania interview, "We could be anyone's daughter, son, wife, husband, lover, neighbor, friend," she comments, ''Whoever composed those lines, there was a far wider truth to them than straight America cared to admit...
...ANYONE'S DAUGHTER Shana Alexander / Random House / $14.95 Michiko Kakutani The case had every sensationalistic detail upon which William Randolph Hearst built his multimillion-dollar newspaper empire: a beautiful heiress, a kidnapping at gunpoint, sexual intimidation, racial and class warfare, terrorism, an FBI chase, and a melodramatic trial...
...The rest of us can only regret that Mrs...
...She was William Randolph Hearst's granddaughter-which is why she was kidnapped and why, ultimately, she was sentenced...
...Alexander similarly dismisses the residents of Hillsborough, the suburb where the Hearsts live, as "a vanished social 'missing link' between the bog and the bourse, surviving behind the high hibiscus hedges of darkest country club country...
...That is a sentiment the two remaining SLA members, William and Emily Harris, would no doubt applaud...
...But Patty did not run off to sign up with the SLA: She was brutally seized and locked in a closet for two months where she was starved, sexually assaulted, and threatened with death if she did not obey her captors...
...The same cannot be said of Mrs...
...When Patty is not making "helpless fish gestures," she is alternately "a fairy princess," "a modern witch," "the nation's first existential heroine ," " the first big time all-American girl," "Persephone," "Eurydice," "Ondine," "a Borgia queen,11 "Sleeping Beauty," "Our Lady of the Sorrows," "a Madonna dolo-rosa," and "an Italinatc image of agony...
...Her descriptions of this melodrama's leading characters are also awkward...
Vol. 12 • August 1979 • No. 8
