For Patty Hearst, It Was Never Difficult to Put ‘Tania’ Behind Her; for the Public, It Hasn’t Been That Easy : ‘I was a normal, jerky 19-year-old, basically. I was sitting at home, minding my own business . . . suddenly my life changed.’

She lives in a fancy suburb, drives a fancy car, serves on fancy charity committees. She has a husband, a strong marriage of nearly a decade and daughters named Gillian and Lydia. She calls herself a conservative Republican. For recreation, she loves to shop wholesale, favoring the fashions of Mary McFadden.

No, Patricia Hearst Shaw does not dwell on the events that began 14 years ago, two weeks before her 20th birthday. She apportions little time for pondering her kidnaping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, her life in hiding with the revolutionary brigade that dubbed her Tania, the bank robberies they committed or the ugly, angry words she hurled at her family.

“It’s all a long time ago,” Hearst, as she is still often known, said in an interview in the anteroom of her husband’s office here.

No Lingering Nightmares

She does not have nightmares about the SLA. She does not see a psychotherapist. In her clear, finishing school voice, the same voice that called her father Adolf and used obscenities to blast the capitalistic “pigs” on SLA tapes, she fends off questions about Myrna Lee Opshal, killed in an SLA robbery outside Sacramento.

“Those people are the ones who have to live with that,” Hearst said, referring to the handful of SLA survivors. Such violence, she said, “is what those people had committed their lives to.”

No, she is not bitter, Hearst maintains.

However, “I am still angry with the SLA.”

“Brainwashed,” by her own description and that of the legal professionals who represented her, into embracing the tenets of the SLA at the time of her kidnaping, Hearst bounced back just as quickly to the conservative philosophy of her upbringing. The urban guerrilla of 1974, pictured then toting a huge gun, wearing tight pants, a beret, a dark wig and a scowl, now graciously conducts a midday meeting in silk pants, high heels and a flower-printed jacket of the most buttery-soft suede, a gift, she explained, picked up in Italy by “one of my stepmothers.”

A Five-Year Drama

The drama of Patricia Hearst and the SLA lasted five years “almost to the day,” from the moment of her abduction just after 9 p.m. on Feb. 4, 1974, to her release from federal prison, after serving time for bank robbery and weapons violations, at 7:30 in the morning, Feb. 1, 1979.

“Now there’s been another 9 1/2 years,” Hearst said. Time enough, she said, to “go on and rebuild your life.”

But the release of the movie on Sept. 23, “Patty Hearst,” and the re-release of Hearst’s autobiography, “Patty Hearst: Her Own Story” (originally published in 1981 as “Every Secret Thing”), have thrust Hearst and her experiences back into public attention. If Hearst has, as she insists, successfully integrated her difficulties with the SLA into what is by all appearances a comfortable and affluent existence, the world at large remains fascinated by the tale of the newspaper heiress who joined forces with her captors.

“People don’t let go. They just don’t,” Hearst said. “I’ve let go a lot better than they have.”

To “borrow from literature,” Hearst said, “it is the fascination of the abomination.” Her case, she said, “is sort of ‘The Thing That Would Not Die.’ ”

At 34, Hearst seems to have grown into the suburban society matron role for which she was groomed from birth. The SLA, Maoism and the multimillion-dollar People in Need food handout program organized by her father in an attempt to gain her release seem but distant blips on her personal memory radar. Even the layout of her Berkeley apartment has faded from her recollection. She said she doubted she would recognize Steven Weed, her former fiance, if she saw him on the street.

Hearst has been married since 1979 to ex-policeman Bernard Shaw, once her bodyguard, now the director of security for the Hearst Corp. in New York. She has her causes, serving as a committee chairman for the Rita Hayworth galas for Alzheimer’s disease and working as a panel member for the Creo Society for children with AIDS.

“Those children have no one to help them,” Hearst said of the AIDS-afflicted young people. “They are poor little creatures that live out what’s left of their lives in a hospital.”

Hearst has long, honey-blond hair assisted by artful, expensive-looking highlighting. She has soft brown eyes and seems prettier, far less angular, in person than she appears in photographs. She wears a simple gold wedding band.

She also wears a Rolex wristwatch that she gazes at regularly. She has agreed to spend no more than one hour talking about her book, the movie, her life. Her conversation is crisp. Between sips of coffee from a Twinkie Donut Shoppe cup, she is eager to get on with things.

“I don’t sort of take this thing home with me,” she said. In fact, “it’s hard, because I’ve got my kids in school, and I have to go to school meetings, and then I have to do these interviews.” In some ways, she said, “it’s sort of embarrassing.”

Hearst stopped short of serving as a creative consultant to “Patty Hearst,” the Paul Shrader film that stars Natasha Richardson in the title role. “I thought it looked badly,” Hearst said.

Offered Suggestions

But she did offer suggestions, and she did lend ideas to Shrader and producer Marvin Worth.

“The movie was a strange thing,” Hearst said. “Hollywood,” as she pointed out, “could have made it any time without my permission.” Once she heard the project was in progress, “I thought, if they’re going to do it, which they will,” why not assure some personal oversight?

Until then, “my best hope was that something that was not embarrassing would come out of it.” Far from embarrassed, she said she is pleased by the product, although she considers the film “very disturbing.”

On the other hand, Hearst said, “I feel kind of good about that too. I think people should be unsettled by seeing that something like this could happen to any human.”

Once the movie was under way, Hearst agreed it was a good time to retitle and reissue her autobiography. Still declaring she dislikes the publicity, Hearst said her book tells “the whole story” of what happened. The press was unfair to her throughout the SLA experience, this daughter of Hearst publishing emperor Randolph A. Hearst said, and when her book first came out, it was not afforded proper credibility.

“I feel I really got the shaft on the whole thing in terms of my reputation, the way my life was portrayed,” Hearst said.

She believes she was painted as a compliant revolutionary. In fact, said Hearst, “before all this happened I was just a normal college student,” albeit one whose grandfather bestowed on the state of California the palace and 285,000-acre compound known as San Simeon. (The Hearst family, she notes in her book, kept “about 86,000 acres” and the “A House,” one of three guest cottages, for its personal use.)

‘Utterly Apolitical’

At the time of her sophomore year as a student of art history at UC Berkeley, Hearst was living with Weed, her former prep school teacher. “Utterly apolitical,” Weed’s radical involvement began and ended in undergraduate school, Hearst said, when he once played football for the SDS in a game against the ROTC. The Berkeley campus was quiet, Hearst recounted. In her book she remembers that on the night of the kidnaping she chose not to make a souffle, or some other elegant dish as she often did, but “opened a can of chicken noodle soup and prepared some tuna fish sandwiches.”

“I was a normal, jerky 19-year-old, basically,” she said. “I was sitting at home, minding my own business, and suddenly my life changed.”

As the SLA saga unwound, the press depicted her in an unflattering manner, Hearst said. “I was very rebellious,” according to accounts in the media, she said. “I was not very bright.”

By contrast, “I think the SLA got portrayed as a group of idealistic young people.” During her own trial for bank robbery, Hearst said, “Bill and Emily Harris were appearing on the ‘Today’ show, looking like Barbie and Ken.”

Rather, Hearst contends, the Harrises and fellow members of the SLA were dangerous foot soldiers of a revolution that preached and practiced extreme violence.

“It’s hard to believe that there are people who actually think that way,” Hearst said, sounding as if she herself had never given a moment’s pause to the ideas she espoused, at least verbally, while in the company of the SLA.

“You just think of them as springing full-blown from the Earth. It took me a long time to realize they had come from some place, that they had parents and families too.”

For a moment she sounded almost incredulous. “I don’t know how they cope with being the kind of people they were,” she said.

The press also “totally manufactured” any schism between Hearst and her parents, Hearst said. While she was fomenting radical notions on tapes released by the SLA, her parents “weren’t paying attention to any of it,” she said. “They were worried for my safety.”

‘Closeted Themselves’

With good reason, according to Hearst. The “soldiers” of the SLA, she said, “lost touch with reality.” In their underground isolation, “they closeted themselves, not just me.” By the time Hearst’s blindfold was removed and she was released from the closet in which she was held for 55 days, “they had lost all touch.”

Hearst said she laughed when she read in a review of her book that she had passed up “at least three” opportunities to escape from her captors.

“Three?” she said. “There must have been 300 times I could have left. There were lots of opportunities.”

But analyzing the experience now, “with what we know about hostage situations,” Hearst contends her imprisonment was as much mental as physical.

“It wasn’t the issue of whether I could escape physically,” she said. “It was when your mind said ‘ you can’t .’ ” She believed that any moment she would be killed, either by the SLA or by law enforcement officials, she said.

“They don’t have to keep you physically chained because you are mentally chained,” she said. Having compared her experience to that of other hostages, she has concluded, “Apparently this is a common thing.”

Many people who have been held against their will say they never recover from it. But Hearst rallied quickly. She saw a therapist while she was in jail, but as soon as she was released, the love of her family and friends made further treatment unnecessary.

“Within a couple or three weeks, it was like I could be myself again,” she said.

How one overcomes such an ordeal “is just part of the person you are,” Hearst said. “Other people are just built from different stuff.”

‘Not Real Life’

Much of the success of her return to everyday life “had to do with identifying it for what it was,” Hearst said. In her case, this meant realizing that the SLA experience was “not real life.”

But people died, time elapsed. The antics of the Symbionese Liberation Army consumed the time of law enforcement personnel and newspeople alike. Hearst’s adventure cost millions of dollars, including the money her family spent to try to appease the SLA.

Hearst said she and her father had made a private settlement regarding the costs of the People in Need food program.

“We did make arrangements,” she said. The details “are between myself and my father,” Hearst added.

Her father lives in the New York area and they see each other often, Hearst said. She makes regular trips to visit friends and family in the Bay Area, but never, never goes back to Berkeley.

“There’s no reason to go back,” she said.