The Last Love Song (61 page)

Distribution centers were established, including a former Del Monte banana-processing plant on Mission Creek. The SLA asked the Black Panthers and the United Farm Workers to help move the food, but both refused, the Panthers claiming they wouldn't support the SLA's “extortion,” and the farmworkers puzzled that Cinque had also asked the Safeway food chain to participate in the scheme. The farmworkers were leading a boycott against Safeway as part of the ongoing grape strikes.

On February 22, near riots occurred at the churches and distribution centers offering food. Hundreds of people, mostly black women, many with babies in their arms (reinforcing entrenched stereotypes of the poor), lined up and were jostled by gangs openly stealing the crates. Workers, panicked among shoving crowds, tossed boxes off the backs of moving trucks, injuring several people. High-end grocery chains had sold Hearst tainted food—“75% slop”—at inflated prices. The crowds claimed it was inedible; angry young men hurled frozen turkey legs through plate-glass windows. The SLA issued a statement calling the food “hog feed.”

Governor Reagan, observing the long lines of poor women on television, said, “It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism.” He said those who took the food were in danger of having their welfare checks cut off.

The SLA released a tape of Patty Hearst expressing disappointment in her father, saying she didn't believe he was making a good-faith effort to get her back.

Just two months later, on April 3, the SLA distributed a photograph of Hearst with her hair cropped short, wearing a beret, and standing, legs spread, holding an M1 carbine in her hands, in front of a banner with a seven-headed cobra. The image was powerful and stylish: Irving Penn on an acid-laced martini.

Her taped message said she had joined the SLA: “I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia…” She also stated, “One thing I learned is that the corporate ruling class will do anything in their power in order to maintain their position of control over the masses, even if this means the sacrifice of one of their own.”

The Hearst family claimed she had been brainwashed.

Photos of the gun-toting girl appeared all over the Berkeley campus, saying “We love you Tania.”

At first, sorting through the images, suspicions, and contradictory reports regarding Patty Hearst, Didion saw it all as evidence of “one California busy being born and another busy dying.”

She saw in the young woman a fellow beneficiary (or romantic victim) of a family always “looking for a stake” in the Golden Land, claiming and then radically abandoning one perceived treasure after another.

Seven-headed cobra.

Mommy's snake book.

*   *   *

On October 20, 1975, Jann Wenner, the editor of
Rolling Stone
—who had asked both Didion and Dunne to cover the Patty Hearst trial for the magazine—received what surely must have been one of the strangest proposals he had ever seen from an author. In the course of two single-spaced typed pages, Didion listed for him, in a long vertical column, all the things that interested her about Hearst's capture and trial, none of which, at first blush, seemed to have anything to do with Patricia Campbell Hearst. These included Grace Cathedral, Francis Ford Coppola, the opening of the opera, the great fire and earthquake, the tea garden in Golden Gate Park, the I. Magnin children's department, the Spinsters, the Bachelors (philanthropic organizations in San Francisco), and the “weddings of my cousins.”

Didion remembered being blindfolded during her induction into the Mañana Club as an adolescent, and being harangued by the governor's daughter. Was Patty Hearst's experience, her fear, her social terror, in any way similar to hers?

She conceded that Wenner would probably want a more investigative and fast-breaking report on the Hearst story, but her interest was in California life as revealed and exposed by the events. She said she and her husband would probably do the reporting together but that she would write the piece because he was working on a book (
True Confessions
—also based on a legendary California crime saga).

On the same day Didion sent this letter to Wenner, her agent, Lois Wallace, wrote James Silberman at Random House, pitching a nonfiction book by Didion on the “California experience,” based on the notes she would make for
Rolling Stone
on the Patty Hearst trial. Wallace said Didion had long wanted to write a history of California; she had proposed a book called
Fairy Tales
to FSG on the subject, but she had abandoned it because she didn't want it to be “autobiographical” and she couldn't find the proper frame.

Tania was now her way in.

“The Patty Hearst trial is one in which the history of California is called as a character witness,” Wallace wrote. The Western “mentality” is “what has produced Joan's family, the Huntingtons, the Nolans, and the Hearsts.”

The “events of [the] trial [will] bring the forces about which Joan has wanted to write into dramatic play.”

*   *   *

How could a daughter of luxury turn into a bank-robbing guerilla doll?

What makes Iago evil?

Narratives emerged, on air and in print, to try to explain this latest California quake. Since the JFK killing, conspiracy theories had become a dominant narrative mode in America, and gained particular traction in the West, in the wave of mass slaughters à la Manson, the revolutionary bombings, the savage murders in the canyons and the hills, the incidents of cannibalism.

One of the most popular radio shows in San Francisco during this period was
Dialogue Conspiracy
on KLRB-FM, hosted by Mae Brussell, the daughter of a Beverly Hills rabbi and the granddaughter of the founder of the I. Magnin department stores (among Didion's favorite spots to shop). Profoundly disturbed by the Kennedy assassination, Brussell read all twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report, concluded it was a government whitewash of a widespread high-level plot, and became a dedicated conspiracy researcher. What made her so compelling, and her theories hard to dismiss, was her thoroughness, her reasonable tone, and her close reading skills, certainly on a par with anyone who had come out of the Berkeley English Department.

When asked, “Who is the SLA and why did they kidnap Patty Hearst?,” Brussell replied that Cinque was the nation's first black Lee Harvey Oswald, a patsy trained and motivated by the government to stir up radical groups, giving authorities an excuse to (at the very least) expand domestic spying and (at most) impose martial law. This view was shared, of course, by most of California's radical groups, and by Lake Headley, whose private investigations into the SLA led him to conclude that Cinque had turned against his government trainers, signing his death warrant. “He'll be killed, probably in a shootout,” Headley said: They can't allow him to talk. Of course, this is precisely what happened.

Credible reports in mainstream newspapers, including Hearst's, listing activities of the CIA's Operation CHAOS (illegal covert actions aimed at neutralizing groups and individuals deemed a threat to national security), lent credence to Brussell's suspicions, even the most outlandish, as when, for example, she claimed that the death of every major rock star—Jim, Jimi, Janis, Cass—could be traced to the CIA's determination to eradicate “an art form that has been … one of the most important cultural revolutions in history.”

In the end, Didion, tracing her own distant connections, attended the Patty Hearst trial for only a few days.

Yet again she postponed her book on the “California experience”; finally, it would take the death of her parents, her freedom from
their
views of the state, to give her the confidence she needed to approach the material properly.

But she
did
write an essay on Hearst, “Girl of the Golden West.” The title was an obvious play on her earlier Lucille Miller piece about Western romance and the violence it can spawn. It was not an attempt to answer the “Why” of Patricia Hearst; instead, it said the “Here and Now” of her was inevitable: her “abrupt sloughing of the past has, to the California ear, a distant echo, and the echo is of emigrant diaries. ‘Don't let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can,' one of the surviving children of the Donner Party concluded her account of that crossing.” Didion would repeat this quote in
Where I Was From.
For her, Hearst's statements—“Don't examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings—they're no help at all”—proved that “Patricia Campbell Hearst had cut her losses and headed west, as her great-grandfather had before her.”

At her trial, where she was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison, Hearst “seemed to project an emotional distance, a peculiar combination of passivity and pragmatic restlessness,” Didion said. (Hearst's prison term was commuted by Jimmy Carter; years later, she was pardoned by Bill Clinton.) Didion knew
she
exhibited Hearst's qualities, just as she shared the young woman's family background. Perhaps the similarities were
so
close, she could penetrate no further beyond stitching general connections.

“Girl of the Golden West” is not one of Didion's finest performances. It concludes with a shrug (“This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on
why
”). The essay expresses an uncharacteristic faith in coincidence: Didion “happened” to keep an issue of
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
recounting the end of the trial, she said; one day, many years later, she thumbed through the paper to find, as well, an article on a “minister … compared at one point to Cesar Chavez, [who] was responsible, according to the writer, for a ‘mind-boggling' range of social service programs … [T]he minister of course was the Reverend Jim Jones.”

Didion makes nothing of this coincidence. She mentions it only to illustrate the insanity of San Francisco in the mid-1970s. If the Mae Brussells were suspicious of the world, and constructed narratives to explain it, Didion was suspicious of the narratives we use to explain the world. In her writings of the 1980s, on Miami and El Salvador, she would walk a little closer to Brussell's side of the street (by then, she would see, for example, that Operation CHAOS began with CIA debriefings of disgruntled refugees from Castro's Cuba who were seeking revenge and perhaps retribution from an American president they perceived as a traitor) but for now, “I never ask” would be Didion's pat answer.

2

In considering—and not quite hitting—the
real
story of Patty Hearst, Didion felt sure the periphery was the key. She looked for an out-of-the-way anecdote, seemingly insignificant, channeling all of California; the pioneer experience in its modern manifestations; the historical imperative; the chain of forces shaping Tania: a verbal image as immediately impactful as the spread legs, the carbine, and the cobra.

She was after this same effect in
Play It As It Lays,
a “fast novel,” a method of presentation allowing us to perceive Maria in a flash.

A snake book.

A poetic impulse, surpassing narrative.

Somewhere on the edge of the story.

She remembered an anecdote that Lewis Lapham of
Harper's
magazine told her. He'd heard that Abigail Folger had been called home by her family to attend a wedding rehearsal dinner a year before she became one of the victims in the house on Cielo Drive. She was twenty-one at the time. She showed up late at the rehearsal, stoned and wearing an inappropriate dress, trying to remember what she had to do to be a daughter.

Didion thought this the best story she'd heard about the Manson case—perhaps the very best story about the 1960s.

*   *   *

Not quite hitting it.

Along with the usual challenges of thinking straight, composing carefully and well, she faced certain off-the-page impediments to her writing during this period. In the summer of 1973, Henry Robbins had a heart attack. At forty-five, his life had started to unravel. In the spring of that year, FSG had made him editor in chief. One of his first acts was to sign Didion for a nonfiction book, with an advance of sixty thousand dollars, payable in two installments. Presumably, this was the ill-fated
Fairy Tales,
which not even Patty Hearst could save.

From the stress or the headiness of his new position, Robbins had more arguments with his colleagues. He began an affair with a publicist in the office. He told friends his wife had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was difficult to live with. By this point, his two children were attending private schools; his $25,000-a-year salary wouldn't stretch. As an independent—and during a publishing downturn—FSG was strapped. In fact, Roger Straus ordered a salary freeze and threatened pay cuts for the company's top officers. He pressured his editors to drop their “marginal titles” and pursue “Godfather type-book[s].” This raised Robbins's hackles even further.

As he lay in the hospital following his heart attack, doctors told his girlfriend he was “touch and go.” Once he recovered, he told buddies his illness had “frightened the whiskers” off him. He “had to try a new life.”

Dick Snyder, the head of Simon & Schuster, got wind of Robbins's restlessness and made him an offer. S&S was still retooling after the departure of Robert Gottlieb, who'd taken Joseph Heller and his best literary authors to Knopf. Snyder said he'd make Robbins an executive editor and vice president, and he'd almost double his salary. Robbins knew Snyder cared little for literature; he was a far more commercial and unabashedly crass businessman than Roger Straus, but in the end, Robbins said, “[f]inancial considerations are very important.” With a bottle of champagne delivered to his house, wrapped in best wishes from S&S, the deal was settled.