Why would a journalist who covered a huge story 50 years ago go back to the event and turn it into a novel?
Especially a story as enormous as the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, which tossed Watergate and a Middle East war off the front pages for weeks in 1974 and beyond.
Author, activist and filmmaker Roger D. Rapoport couldn’t let go of the complex tale, which he covered doggedly for New Times, a now defunct national biweekly newspaper.
Having maintained contact with many of the principles in the bloody and confusing saga, Rapoport has reinterpreted it in a new, years-in-the-making book, “Searching for Patty Hearst: A True Crime Novel” (Lexographic Press, $24, 332 pages). It was released Jan. 16, in time for the 50th anniversary of the Feb. 4, 1974 kidnapping.
Though the sensational event occurred a long time ago, Rapoport, a Michigan resident who is promoting the book in the Bay Area with numerous February engagements, insists the story still has legs.
“My novel explores the long-term impact of this case with a focus on many of the key players who have never had an opportunity to give voice to their side of the story,” he says.
His goal in fictionalizing is to be able to theorize and delve into motivations of the characters, whose convictions, inklings and inner conflicts are outside the parameters of journalism.
Patty Hearst was 19, living in Berkeley and engaged to her math teacher Steven Weed, when she was taken hostage by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical guerilla group.
The privileged granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst earned the world’s sympathy when she was taken from her apartment, tossed into a car trunk, then muscled into a closet. Yet soon after, the public was stunned when she accepted a gun from her captors and with an automatic weapon robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco.
Evading authorities and piling up charges, she remained on the run for months, until the FBI captured her in San Francisco in 1975.
In retelling the story, Rapoport’s intuited findings fascinate. For instance, when Randolph Hearst, head of the San Francisco Examiner, learns of his daughter’s capture, he insists on a news embargo. The novel purports the motive was to give the FBI time to track down the miscreants. But the consequences were volatile as they enrage the SLA members, who hoped the news would force a ransom. Rapoport, in the novel, creates frustrated conversations that explode at both ends among the Hearsts and the SLA.
Dramatic conflict revolves around the family’s refusal to ransom their daughter. The Hearsts believed caving on this point would incentivize other rebellious factions to more violence. Patty, however, was irate that her family would not come to her rescue, especially when her parents decided it would be a good opportunity to decamp for Desi Arnaz’s hospitality in Mexico, Rapoport writes.
Rapoport theorizes that Patty felt driven to join the revolutionaries in spirit as well as abetting their activities. And after being abducted and participating in crimes, where else could she go? he asks.
When the Hearsts refused to pay $4 million the SLA demanded, some sent money to rescue a damsel in distress. To ingratiate themselves with the public and the SLA, the Hearsts launched a free food program which was poorly administered and disastrously received.
In “Searching for Patty Hearst,” Rapoport reveals Patty’s thoughts in a letter she writes to her father: “I refuse to be a charity case. Please return all those donations. …. The people who kidnapped me only wanted to help hungry families. Your hand-picked surrogates created a riot. I’m having second thoughts about coming home. Maybe I should just stay with the SLA and join the revolution.”
After Patty was apprehended, she was sentenced to several years of prison. But with the intervention of her family’s powerful friends, she served just 22 months. Today she is a grandmother and living well.
Rapoport believes had Patty’s daughter been taken hostage, she would have produced the money to free her child. No question, he says.
As well as adding important new elements to a previously told story via historical fiction, Rapoport also makes a case for intrepid research, especially for young people in journalism, with “Searching for Patty Hearst.”
“The heart of this story is this: You have to look at all points of view, every vantage point and make up your own mind,” he says.
Roger Rapoport appears at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco; 1 p.m. Feb. 4 at the Berkeley Historical Society in Berkeley; 7 p.m. Feb. 6 at Books Inc. in Berkeley; 7 p.m. Feb. 8 at Mechanics Institute in San Francisco; 4 p.m. Feb. 11 at Book Passage in Corte Madera; 7 p.m. Feb. 13 at Green Apple Books in San Francisco and 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at Books Inc. in Mountain View. For more information, visit PattyHearst.com.