Cultural changes flash by too quickly and imperceptibly to pinpoint. But growing up in the 1970s, I remember knowing when everything went irrevocably insane. It was when that newspaper heiress held up a bank and denounced her parents as “pigs.”
I was wrong a lot when I was a boy, but I wasn’t wrong about that. Patty Hearst was a death knell for the America I knew.
Marilyn Baker must have felt that way, too. Even while Hearst was still on the run, calling herself Tania the urban guerilla, public-television newswoman Baker collected her thoughts around this mind-bending story. The result, Exclusive!, combines a sardonic, self-important tone with an honest attempt at deciphering the Hearst riddle.
How did Hearst go from hostage to hostage-taker in just over two months? Did a privileged, plutocratic life prime her for revolt? Was she a just a prisoner of a bunch of crazies, doing what she needed to survive? Or was she emblematic of a whole society’s existential crisis?
It began with the town Hearst was kidnapped in. Baker writes:
Berkeley is a city of 10.6 square miles and 120,000 not-so-square people. It’s motherland of the University of California. World center of radical politics. Womb of campus riots of the sixties… Vortex of black power, brown power, red power, gay power, and power to the people.
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| Patricia Hearst was kidnapped from this fourplex apartment building on Benvenue Avenue in Berkeley. At the Hearst family's request, the media held off revealing she had been wearing only panties when two men and a woman dragged her into a waiting car. Image from https://www.cnn.com/shows/radical-story-patty-hearst |
Hearst shared her apartment with boyfriend Steve Weed. According to Baker, she was emerging from the shower when kidnappers burst in one quiet February night in 1974. Weed ran off, beaten with a wine bottle and covered in his own blood. Baker would not be alone in sneering at his failure to protect Patricia.
On the campus where they attended classes, Patricia and Steve were “Mr. and Mrs. Upper-Middle America,” Baker writes, their only concession to youthful rebellion being that they lived together without wedding rings. Then she was gone, shoved into a Chevy station wagon under a soiled blanket, her captors firing wildly at onlookers.
A lot to digest, and that wasn’t even the beginning of the crazy story of the group which called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. Baker notes the “crazed kill cult” had been on her radar since they murdered Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster the prior November.
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| SLA members Joseph Remiro [left] and Russell Little [right] were arrested for the murder of Marcus Foster in January 1974. Originally, the SLA planned to swap Hearst for the two prisoners. Both men were found guilty, but Little was later acquitted. Remiro today is the only SLA member still behind bars. Image from https://www.gunsamerica.com/digest/the-symbionese-liberation-army/ |
Baker describes them as “this small bunch of rejects from Berkeley’s radical movements,” mostly middle-class white women who styled themselves representatives of oppressed minorities. Their only black member, Donald DeFreeze, was declared leader; something Baker began to question when poking around a vacated SLA safe house a month prior to Hearst’s kidnapping and noticing their literature leaned feminist.
Baker, who died in 2001, knew something about women getting what they wanted. Exclusive! is at its most entertaining when it describes her own aggressiveness chasing the SLA story, both before and after Hearst’s kidnapping. Being a woman helped her gain trust from stay-at-home mothers in neighborhoods where SLA members once lived. She explains how she was supported in her work by two sons, one of whom was a member of the counter-culture who knew many Berkeley radicals.
Being on top of the story was a point of justifiable pride, a point she dwells on in the book’s foreword:
Within a week of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, I was able to report on KQED’s “Newsroom” program the names of the two men who had abducted her… And on March 22, nearly seven weeks after the kidnapping, I was the first to reveal the names and backgrounds of all the SLA members.
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| Marilyn Baker made the cover of TV Guide in June 1974 for her work following the Hearst case. "I wish to God we had that broad's connections," an FBI agent is quoted saying in the article. Later in life, she became a publicist. Image from https://oldlifemagazine.com/tv-guide-june-8-1974-marilyn-baker-of-kqed-tv-san-francisco.html |
With that opening, and with Baker featured more prominently in the book’s photographs than Hearst or any of her kidnappers, I was prepared for a bit of preening. Exclusive! is not comprehensive in form or content, published while Hearst was still on the run and missing a final resolution and Patricia’s side of the story. But Baker’s colorful, witty account makes up for these and other flaws. She tells a good story, opinions and all.
On a night out with friends, she caught sight of a passing car. Inside, she recognized SLA operative Emily Harris. After a high-speed pursuit, the vehicle stopped at a police station, its driver figuring Baker was the terrorist. Mistake explained, the driver had just one question for Baker: “Would you mind telling me which one I look like?”
Baker explains how she worked police contacts, giving them bits of what she picked up and gleaning insights in return. She enjoyed the give and take, as well as proving herself in what was seen as a man’s game.
When a landlord of an apartment unit traced from an SLA lead refused to talk, Baker recalls leaning on her: “Would you rather talk to me or to the two hundred cops who will show up if we tell them about the phone number in that unit?”
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| Patricia Hearst poses for an SLA photo, announcing that she has joined their side. Behind her is the SLA seven-headed cobra emblem. Baker posits that the sniper scope-like object attached to her weapon is nothing more than a common flashlight. Image from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Symbionese-Liberation-Army |
While Baker got what she wanted, that lead, like many others, proved futile. For months, the SLA dodged a police dragnet, releasing tapes on which Hearst championed their cause. In Baker’s mind, the SLA enjoyed relative anonymity in the lower-class neighborhoods they hid out in, as well as press coverage that, with the lonely exception of Baker herself, treated them with kid gloves:
The SLA was being accorded the ceremony befitting a respectable political party. Somewhere along the line everyone had forgotten or overlooked the murdered Marcus Foster.
Foster, Oakland’s first black schools chief, was murdered because he supported student photo ID cards to keep drug dealers off school campuses. Shooting him was an unpopular way to make a debut.
The SLA claimed Foster was murdered for aligning with a racist power structure. But who were the real racists? Back in that vacated safe house, Baker recalls finding a supply of make-up and a book about disguising faces to take on other racial identities. She recalled descriptions of Foster’s “dark-complexioned” killers and put it together:
They were white. White killers painting black pancake makeup on their faces, drawing in the black eyebrows, turning themselves into a blackface masquerade to murder the black educator.
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| After failing to get Remiro and Little released, the SLA demanded the Hearsts feed the Bay Area's poor for their daughter's return. The family complied, but the result, seen above as it occurred at San Francisco's Hunters Point neighborhood, proved a mess. The SLA then reneged. Photo by Anthony Camerano/AP from https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/fall-2014-radicals/death-fascist-insect-looking-back-40-years-does-sla-make-any |
The 44-year-old Baker analyzes the SLA members, drawing conclusions filtered through an upbringing a generation removed from theirs: Camilla [Hall] was born March 24, 1945 in Minnesota, and how different her life and death might have been if she had found a diet that worked.
Hall, Baker adds, was notable among the SLA members for a kindly disposition, but she was too gullible for the company she kept.
Patricia Soltysik, Hall’s lover, is described by Baker as “the SLA’s leader and brain trust,” a dubious distinction given their bumbling reputation. Willie Wolfe was a rich kid, unfocused and lazy; while Nancy Ling Perry was a high-school cheerleader and Goldwater Republican until Berkeley warped her into the SLA’s firebrand. Meanwhile DeFreeze spent his time contently cooking meals for Soltysik when he wasn’t playing leader for the tape recorder.
Kidnapping Hearst was their ticket to fame. Getting her to participate in a bank robbery was how they punched it, four minutes inside the Hibernia Bank in west-central San Francisco with “Tania” in front of the security cameras pointing a gun at terrified customers.
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| April 15, 1974. Patricia Soltysik holds a bag containing over $10,000 in cash while Donald DeFreeze (in hat) and Patricia Hearst (in wig) look on, in footage from the Hibernia Bank job. Patricia later claimed she held an empty weapon and was coerced by the others. Image from https://symbioneseliberationarmy.weebly.com/hibernia-bank-robbery.html |
Was Hearst on board with the SLA, as she claimed on tapes? Hearst herself now says she was a victim of rape and closet confinement. But her voice on those recordings suggests another possibility, of someone who wanted in on the struggle. Baker notes a bitterly angry tone in Hearst’s voice, and connects it to the discontent around her:
I stared ahead, trying to place the fury in Patty’s voice. It had a familiar ring to it. It was the voice of a woman furious over wasted years.
Baker’s account halts after a fiery siege in Los Angeles that led to the deaths of all but three SLA fugitives: Harris, her husband Bill, and Hearst. Because Baker’s public-television station, KQED, couldn’t afford to fly a camera crew downstate, she had to watch the battle unfold on TV.
The book runs out of steam after that, Hearst and the Harrises still on the loose, people cheering the SLA like a baseball team, posters reading “We Love You Tania” on the streets of San Francisco. “In death, the SLA got what they never had in life – followers,” Baker notes.
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| After she was recovered alive in 1975, Hearst was convicted of the Hibernia Bank robbery, but released in 1979. Some agree with Hearst that she was a victim of brainwashing under duress. Others see a genuine radical convert who only disowned the SLA for show. Image from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-3790937/Kidnapped-heiress-Patty-Hearst-claims-forced-gun-toting-bank-robbing-terrorist-courts-gripping-new-biography-weren-t-sure.html |
Baker makes clear several times her disapproval for the SLA, telling the reader she was on the side of the Hearst parents and the establishment, even to the point of registering her disgust with the rest of the media.
Regarding Hearst, Baker adopts the attitude many would, that she had genuinely bought into the SLA agenda, noting how she mourned her captor Willie Wolfe as “the gentlest, most beautiful man” she had known on a tape she released after the L. A. siege. “So it had been love that had turned pretty Patty Hearst into a terrorist,” Baker concludes.
Radicalized romantic, or shell-shocked rape victim? I see room for both views, while Baker (at least in 1974) favored the former. But Exclusive! goes some ways to defining the generation gap at the heart of the matter, and a sense of what it was like to be there when America went nuts.
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