End Game: Inside Story
Lipez, Richard
END GAME Inside Story RICHARD LIPEZ There have been conflicting accounts of where Patricia Hearst was and what she was doing during the nineteen months she was missing. Rolling Stone presents one...
...Some witnesses were touched, others faintly amused, but none doubted the sincerity of the young woman's conversion...
...She was enjoying a drink with some of the State House boys down at Micky O's Tavern, and they all kept glancing in a funny way at her banana daiquiri...
...The renegades then took time off from their desperate flight to pilot a raft down the Mississippi from Hannibal, Missouri, to New Orleans...
...In the fall of 1974, the Harrises laid low while Patty ran for the Massachusetts state legislature under the pseudonym of George X. McGuinness, winning a hard-fought three-way race with a plurality of 42 per cent...
...She cried out, "Capitalists are a bunch of silly billies...
...On Interstate 64, the revolutionaries got a lift from FBI Director Clarence Kelly, who was driving back to Kansas City to take part in the St...
...Patrick's day parade...
...The revolutionaries attempted to shoplift three surf boards from a sporting goods store...
...Rolling Stone presents one version, the San Francisco Examiner offers a completely different story...
...Safely back on the road again, the runaways relaxed...
...The three of them headed east, touring national parks along the way and registering in motels as Tony Orlando and Dawn...
...By the end of that "in many ways idyllic" summer, the desperadoes had earned enough money for three plane tickets to Algeria...
...The three of them started hitchhiking back to San Francisco, holding up a cardboard sign that read "Palo Alto via Denver...
...Later that day, on the beach at San Clemente, the fugitives met a wanly smiling man wearing a blue suit and gray tie...
...I can now report with certainty that Patty joined the Symbionese Liberation Army shortly after her kidnapping when she was informed by the SLA that the Easter Bunny did not exist...
...Jeepers, it was a real close call," she said later...
...They returned to the United States almost immediately, however, because "the food over there was real spicy...
...The working conditions were pretty depressing, but the pay wasn't too bad and the job provided an effective cover...
...So, in February 1975, Patricia Hearst resigned from the legislature and for three months she wrote a column for the Boston Hearst newspaper under the nom de plume John Foster Dulles...
...At that highly dramatic moment, the young heiress broke down completely...
...Kelly said, "That sounds real nice, honey...
...They bought a TWA three-cities-for-the-price-of-one ticket, and took a circuitous route back to San Francisco (where Patty had a dental appointment on September 5...
...They all spent the summer of 1974 on a small farm in Ohio, where they sold snap beans, kohlrabi, and pickling cukes at a roadside stand...
...After several weeks in Los Angeles, where she just barely escaped getting caught in the big shoot-out ("I'm gonna scoot down to the drug store for some eye shadow"), Patty joined "that nice young couple" she had recently met, Bill and Emily Harris...
...Along the big river, they encountered a pair of con men named The King and The Duke, who turned out to be FBI informers...
...Patty spent much of the next two weeks crouched inside a cello case...
...Why don't we just use my daddy's Master Charge card...
...But she soon became weary of the Beacon Hill hurly-burly, and at one point her true identity was nearly uncovered...
...Back in Los Angeles, the Harrises were getting itchy for some action and wanted to blow up an electrical substation, but the surfing conditions were looking so good that Patty persuaded them to postpone the SLA's fall offensive so that they could all "bop out to the beach" for a few days...
...Richard Lipez, a columnist for the Amherst Record in Massachusetts, contributes the ' 'End Game' 'feature on this page every month...
...After a few days of surfing, and a week of golf and tennis at La Costa, it was, alas, time to head back to San Francisco, where—as everyone knows by now—Patricia Hearst was spotted and captured when she attempted to donate an out-of-style Che Guevara bush jacket to a Junior League thrift shop...
...The fugitives just barely escaped capture and had to be hidden by a member of the Shreveport Scherzos, a radical string quartet...
...They went skiing at Aspen (on the slopes, Patty once nearly collided with President Ford—"Nice to see you," he said to her), took the jungle cruise at Disneyland, and went on "The Price Is Right," where Patty won a fur coat, a toaster oven, and a Thompson submachine gun...
...Patty told Kelly her name was Moira McLanahan, and said she was majoring in botany...
...Nice to see you," he said to Patty as he autographed her surf board (and she signed his gray tie, "Love V xxxxxx from Tania H...
...I have finally pieced together the true facts, mainly from information provided by Patty's astrologer (or tax consultant), a man (or woman) in Boise, Idaho, whose initials are J.B.N, (or possibly K.R.F...
...Patty was soon bored with her job, though, so she rejoined the Harrises in New York, where Emily had just published a book of feminist haiku, and Bill was taking a course in photography at the New School...
...It turned out, though, that the surf boards were too bulky to be concealed, so Patty said, "Hey, gosh...
Vol. 40 • January 1976 • No. 1
