Psyching Patty:

...some others she arrested (a curious metaphor considering late Symbionese Liberation Army...

...DON McDONAGH THE LIFE AND DEATH OF TANIA Psyching Patty gone to find suitably interesting work, her new friends, her old ones seem inSAUL MALOFF she notices, as she noticed at college, that animate as stone...

...Vassar-she would have known Patty at nations further, and hovering precariously be- though after the fact, in a desperate quest first sight...

...It is as if she was a vanities-well, perhaps just a touch...

...as a puzzle teaser than it does on stage where the empty parade The most moving of the works presented during the season of incidents is not brightened by choreographic invention...

...TIAL, to the FBI, saying she herself was ged terrorist, she was back again...

...For her, it isn't ambulance-driver had the Republic not thrown into one closet and then another, merely an interesting, even an important just then fallen, and for a fleeting mo- treated bestially...

...nor, come to that, are the fortnight...

...parents' sake and in order to avoid a and she knows she was meant for better By now her parents would hardly recforest of raised eyebows) and a summer things than tea dancess and a perfect house ognize her: no makeup or other of parties, all of them the same and all in the perfect suburb...

...she plants held a job in a nursery for black children...

...She must have been pos- in which Patty-Tania was still coming on Well, by that time, so terrified were you, sessed, she feels, assisted by time, dis- strong, as someone the pigs had better you thought the FBI and police would tance, a new life...

...In of revolutionary theater (or in that of thought to invite her, so instead she went watch i fact, by one of those freak coincidences, serious revolutionary movements) straight, but only very reluctantly and by on-thethe luck of a writer with a hot hand but which, seen in this perspective, is the the crookedest of paths, dismantling an- this tec something less than that for the unhappy family romance writ large...

...and experiencing an exOmaha in the early 1930s, a_ recent tirelessly "explaining" the Moscow citement she'd not believed possible...

...How What's even more astonishing is that never a member of anything, despite could it be otherwise...

...But by then the life-th the other forgotten names...

...nothing like the husks back home...

...which the wayward follies of youth are tion during a prison visit helped convict Those many long months on the lam folseen from the towering eminence of a Patty...

...What's truly civic affairs and the right charities...

...new maturity...

...their daughter's life is re- ligatory affairs of the period-a markable in that nothing has ever hap- longshoreman, a trade union organizer, a pened to her...

...Patty Hearst of her own feeling and thought, an aufurther information, far more than she was their only client, a girl who could tobiographical record of her changes and knows...

...No accomplished a journalist as Shana Alexknows some people who were, or proba- more fooling around, her lawyers told ander should ever have been in doubt, bly were, or who knew people who were, her...

...80NOW The key lies here: she was, she writes, 0 0 10 10 "a captive of Patty Hearst and her story i' .. I understood her because in some way she was the girl I had been, and in some HER soy way I was also her mother...

...Dad is a meat- and there, costly relics of a past never packing mogul or banker or really big in entirely foresworn...

...Without it she cal disguises, a small armory, a striking weird incandescent high must have properl could have been anyone's daughter- vocabulary and an incendiary seemed to her a bizarre episode in some- learned indeed was "anyone's daughter," as she pseudoideology, stitched-together one else's life-Tania's to be precise- larger...

...brought Jean Babilee back to a New York stage after an Novelty follows novelty inexorably, including the intrusive absence of nearly thirty years...

...The War, the manning their property line against the 'end of the Depression, first armed truce marshals, and meaning business...

...with Mel's Sporting Goods store and the the don fascination and sinister pleasure of All in all, hardly a strenuous life, and later Sacramento bank robbery, Patty, observe watching the mighty fall...

...News pink and perfectly enameled fingernails, Soviet Union in the midst of lectures on with a raised fist and upon being booked she seemed to Shana Alexander a zomBeowulf and Anglo-Saxon prosody, gave her occupation as "urban guer- bie, "dead," or, on closer scrutiny, Cromwell and the Rump Parliament...

...At intervals longer and longer, have been anybody's daughter, except responses as the drama unfolded...

...she was...

...death, forced to speak those tapes and nalistic lifetime," "a metaphor for Patty Hearst, one of the defense psy- finally to emerge as Tania at the Hibernia America," the human condition, a wellchiatrists told Shana Alexander after the under the duress of the gun-one false spring for (reckless) anthropological girl had been tried and convicted of vol- move and that was it, you won't have a speculation out of Fromm and Bachofen untarily taking part in the Hibernia bank chance to make another...

...My writing similar to what had happened to me and illustrious (or infamous) names and large own would have been the first to volun- observe my mother, and to myself and my own fortunes all that uncommon in the history leer save for the fact (I think) that nobody the rei daughter, whom I was losing now...

...I understand of his that a mother-daughter struggle was name and family fortune distinguish her conflict and taking State power within' and sp close to the core of her story, something from the others...

...Hearst...

...Gated, of altogether unexceptional of joust the "mother-daughter struggle" in order She set out to catch a teacher, and caught background, and far better company and the rest to find it, and comes up with a thundering him: Stephen Weed, some catch...

...The poet, whose name is presided, Shana Alexander tells us, over of the trial...

...in the frenzies of turbulent times, her ers when the FBI hero leveled his gun at When she at length appeared in court, head stuffed with ideas acquired at that her) and that she saw the world from a wan, sallow, shrunken (she had been college, from those erstwhile friends and "revolutionary feminist perspective" menstruating, we learn, almost without teachers who somehow managed to make and didn't care who knew it...

...government prosecutors...

...There are the obinsurance...

...She may have sympathized with Freeze) aside, the Army consisted of five has nov greatly accomplished lady and the la- the effort of some co-workers to organize other young women and two young men One of mentable Mrs...

...She matters...

...opinion and take it seriously...

...The community than Weed and his friends readers truism or platitude, rather like the de- idea of marrying him appears to have could provide, almost a sort of David F fense psychiatrists who found exactly the been Mummy's resolve to make an hon- homecoming after years of wandering in narrativ syndrome they were looking for, which est woman of her wanton, "strong- the desert...

...you didn't think, you *Anyone's Daughter: The Times and Trials of ended, the role discarded and she was acted, as good soldiers do...

...who was soon to betroth herself to a cop, 1960s s course, was the essential element...

...brightest, liveliest, most interesting Soon, she is doing as they dothe landscape of American radical and intense people are boycotting circulating petitions, attending endless history loosely conceived, she Japanese goods or collecting money for meetings, rallies, demonstrations, colcame from her home in Des Moines or the Spanish Loyalists or talking union (or lecting funds...

...poet she met at a fundraising party who At college she hears about the Nazis instead of actually going to Spain with and the Rhineland, or about Franco and the Lincoln Brigade, as he'd seriously Spain, or about many millions of unem- considered doing, decided to make of his ployed and literal starvation-about art a weapon and drive it into the throat of foreclosures in the countryside near Des the Fascist beast...

...pathetic imagination...

...Mother is 'ac- called chic lumpen proletarian enlivened tive in the Junior League and the more perhaps by an imaginative splash here appealing charities...

...The state- Patty Hearst, by Shana Alexander, Viking, $14.95, secure in her prison cell and back in the ments you made to the Matthews boy 562 pp...

...Alexander knew a union in a department store and briefly all of them white, middle class, edu- trying t neither of the Hearst women...

...way...

...Anybody's daughter...

...Its austerity tended to make the rest of dream figure as in the original, she leaves him for a reversal the season vapid by comparison...

...When two men visit her better get herself another boy...

...or whoever her SLA ghostwriter might catch-phrases and slogans from here and and the persons who shared and touched ers, espy have been) said in the ` Tania Interview" there and everywhere, perfectly suited to it so unreal and fantastical she could journali that proved to be an important element those who would rather scream than never possibly have addressed them as unconsc leading to conviction...

...SAY, FOR THE SAKE of placing her in the...

...Nothing happens in her or insurance, thinks she broods too much or what else she might be...

...Tania was as much interested in the minute turnings house in the suburbs, she provides dead, as if she'd never been...

...That was the famous conversation lowing the incineration in Los Angeles...

...life in woman, in the midst of the trial Alexan- A less likely candidate for the role of If Shana Alexander had put in time on Village, der's own deeply troubled daughter (an Tania can scarcely be imagined, that's the Left-say, at her old school towner., adopted one, to complicate matters even the point about the Tanias and Ulrikas...

...At graduate of an expensive boarding school Trials to unbelievers...

...Charles Garry his reset Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moose, Enter the SLA, equipped with dashing later told her that Patty was "a cold, I've kn Camilla Hall, Angela Atwood or any of uniforms, make-believe names, theatri calculating bitch...

...Her essential story think-and above all an irresistible pro- sister and brother...

...people solicit her nevertheless gracefully endured for her for art...

...the old Hearst columnist...

...Only the ramparts, .routing the pigs in the final emblem of his, I suppose, love...

...If she had it in her ness and the strength of her very thick, storming sonnet-sequence long since head, he told her, to jump up and down in richly detailed, lively account of the long abandoned, is now himself a rising man the courtroom and shout slogans, she had ordeal...

...and if she had known her she CBS ? tween her divorced parents) ran away for something, we're inclined to make would not have been stunned, as if by Newsw from her New England boarding-school...

...Looking back, she not mess with, telling her dazzled friend shoot to kill on sight, or the Harrises hardly recognizes the girl...

...Her rilla," a nice, pedantic distinction...

...that has a soupcon of shock value but little else...

...Unabashedly sentimental, she is in real estate...

...texture and analytic penetration...

...deprivation, an altered perspective Trish Tobin, daughter of Hibernia's pres- Duress again-the Harrises were right amounting to a sudden flash of insight by ident, the girl whose recorded conversa- there, in spirit if not always in the flesh...

...A smartly and through a large pipe frame and Miss Dethy was innocently dressed young woman, Judith Jameson, is surprised by a man, extravagant in her suppleness...

...Al Johnson, Bailey's co-counsel, even for a while, during the earlier stages listed below...

...Touron, and in turn surprises him by revealing herself in tion, restraint and a spareness in decor, one prop and a few an identical flower costume...

...Babilee looked absolutely splendid, clambering about roles, was finessed into a cocktail party irrelevancy...

...raped, threatened re- event...

...Just before the kidnapping she had standing regarding possible future prose- ment in ness, for years the national pastime, in settled, resentfully, into the housewifely cutions, for example those having to do friend part, one suspects, because of the grisly role of cooking for Weed and his friends...

...And she would have heard the better " happened to be, wonder of wonders, willed" girl...

...Now you just listen to of her subject, more nearly personal idengirl who burned with ardor and might this, they as good as told her, and listen tification than detached though symhave gone to Spain as a nurse or good...

...She that she was plenty "pissed-off" at being would get you, or sympathizers of the didn't do those things...

...Therein, lies both the weaklisted below, his revolutionary, heaven- the demise of Tania...

...her name-following her season went to dress in the going style of what might be Vassar, say, or Radcliffe...

...You were kidnapped, brutally...

...There was, however, live" ni appears ten thousands times over in the gram for crushing the infamy, liberating by way of reminder, that little stone his anal: annals in the sixties and seventies of this, women, convicts, blacks, the poor and monkey which Willie ("Cujo") Wolfe news at or for that matter the last century, in this oppressed everywhere, storming the had given her for a necklace as an extensic and a dozen other countries...

...the prospect may have in- laughter of the gods when, in exchange the real their professional specialties...

...it's the trial of the decade, the ment she still feels something like awe, peatedly with grave bodily harm and century, "the news event of my jourthrough a haze of cocktails...

...with- More like a void...

...Later, and then reconciliation with her family, a in New York or Boston, where she has new job, the discovery that things are not Commonweal: 372 so bad after all, a quickened taste for the real world of her parents, her sisters, the when you and the Harrises commancomfies and goodies of life after long egregious F. Lee Bailey, her best friend deered his vehicle and held him hostage...

...The name, of little enough to show for nineteen years...

...compared with hair worn severely no-nonsense-a distinguishable one from another only by manner that becomes her charmingly...

...Many of them are last she has entered History, is marveland, following her social debut (about attractive, passionate people, burning ously alive and fully living the life of her which she had some misgivings but :With a holy fire-for ideas, for justice, time...

...John, and urges her to become active in polite least, was something...

...cient institutions as she went...

...Pure and unverifiable) notions of prehistorical famous Tania, "was a goddam blob": reflex-you were a trained soldier at that's what was left of her when the play combat readiness...

...Nothing...

...and that, at face," remarked Adela Rogers St...

...The work had movement invenMr...

...and (discredited or at least unsupported robbery as the gun-brandishing world- Mel's Sporting Goods store...

...Instead of being abandoned by a simple black curtains...

...her deathly wearying, and awkward boys void waiting to be filled...

...or, as her principal sang and sang and sang like a bird to the Newswe out it, Patty might just as well have been psychiatric scenarist put it, a "blob...

...22 June 1979: 373 matriarchal society-and all the while " 0 curiously void of historical and political 0e...

...In part even to this day, she recalls, generally on that she happened to be Randolph she is a victim of her hectic appropriation long rainy Sunday afternoons, the wild Hearst's daughter...

...In Then, as . suddenly as she had astonishing is not that the jury refused to 1950, give or take a year or two, she metamorphosed from William Randolph believe the defense but that anyone writes a letter, marked CONFIDEN- Hearst's granddaughter into the bewig- should ever have thought they might...

...Moines and Omaha and armed farmers And then it was all over...

...Bedid-a troubled, confused kid caught up that she in literal truth had wet her draw- sides, where would you have gone...

...Playtime was over, so shrewd, experienced, knowing and what they may have heard, though she the real world wore a grim aspect...

...much of little or nothing: She had a strik- blinding illumination, when a prosecu- Nobod though apart from the fact that we are ing penchant for getting kicked out of lion psychiatrist pointed out the interest- particip given a few fleeting glimpses of Alexan- schools and once flatly instructed a ing moral arithmetic that, General Field out hov der's imperious mother, there is no other teacher-nun to go to hell, in so many Marshal Cinque M'Tume (Donald De tional i significant similarity between that words...

...That was the letup for a year), though bedizened by reference to Franco and Hitler and the girl who saluted the Six O'Clock...

...Ever...

...In her he rediscovers man's playground rather than an edifice of high art...

...Life" was a duet contrasting partnering attempts of the gentlemen subscribers of the Jockey his measured and mature acrobatic strength and Catherine Club, that gave the old Paris Opera the reputation of a rich Dethy's fluid young dancer's movement...

...At the "embalmed," as if for immortality in husband, a rising young man in banking moment she didn't appear to know who Forest Lawn...

...his own youthful dedication and they dash off impetuously As "Petrouchka" was transformed into a cartoon of the after having been cast as natural antagonists by the chasm of original so "Spectre de la rose," another of Nijinsky's key age...

...duced her suicidal thoughts, small won- for promises of gentle and kindly under- Strail Psyching Patty was everybody's busi- der...