Into a New Era, Kicking and Screaming

It’s impossible to measure a “generation” anymore; the cycle winds tighter and tighter. Once, it was biological, 20, 25 years. Then it was “the Me Generation,” the time for a trend to run its course. Now it’s the turnaround time for a dead style like platform shoes to be nostalgically resurrected for a fresh and gullible market.

One true generation ago--25 years this week--Patty Hearst, granddaughter of California power ranger William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped, carried screaming from her Berkeley apartment and into the night, into pop culture legend.

Back in Washington, D.C., officialdom was busy beavering away at Richard Nixon’s high crimes, building to the moment six months ahead when he would give up the game and the White House. But in Nixon’s native state, other matters were afoot.

The kidnappers called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, for symbiosis, disparate organisms working in harmony. Was this, then, Middle America’s nightmare come knocking at last--The Revolution, black men and white, women and men, grade school and grad school, prison and country club, all allied?

As it turned out, no. Only a last gasp, played out in the tragedy and farce of a muddled Marxist dogma of benevolence and violence and a firefight finish in a foxhole bungalow in South-Central L.A.

And moving chameleon-like through the age was Patricia Hearst: the rebel deb cohabiting with her counterculture fiance . . . the maiden stolen away by sinister forces . . . the revolutionary emergent, joining her captors . . . the underground guerrilla and FBI poster girl . . . the prodigal daughter restored and un-brainwashed . . . the convicted bank robber freed by presidential fiat . . . the talk-show guest and actor in John Waters’ movies . . . the charity maven modeling on a Paris runway for a good cause. All her story lacked was her own line of designer housewares. As the dying mother of writer John Gregory Dunne told her son, “There’s one good thing I can say about dying: I won’t have to hear about Patty Hearst and Richard Nixon anymore.”

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I was almost Patty’s age, also in college, and an intern here, at a newspaper competing with one of her grandfather’s. I did junior reporter duties, interviewing SLA members’ parents and friends, retrieving an audiotape that a mysterious caller said was from the SLA (it wasn’t), and finally, the day of the shootout, starting work at 6 a.m. in linen suit and high heels (my big Friday night turned out bigger than I’d expected), tracking the cops from abandoned SLA safe houses to 54th Street, the site of the shootout.

In the 18 months between her kidnap and arrest, I found myself explaining to older colleagues about Kent State and Vietnam and Soledad and why perfectly comfortable middle-class kids might find their perfect comforts unsettling and unsatisfying. That 18 months set some precedents and altered some perceptions:

* After the SLA demanded that its polemics be printed and aired in full “or else,” the news media decided they would not become a second hostage and refused, setting a standard that has resonated up through the Unabomber case.

* Home truths about segregation hit home. The mixed-race SLA, which had holed up unnoticed in integrated Bay Area neighborhoods, stood out in South-Central like a hippo in a duck pond. All those “white girls with guns” fatally blew the SLA’s cover.

* In the cocktail-hour, live-TV urban gunfight on May 17, 1974, some 9,000 rounds were exchanged. Six SLA members died shooting. Critics declared that the SWAT team, which cut its teeth that day, wouldn’t have done the same in a prosperous white neighborhood.

* Thomas Noguchi, the “coroner to the stars,” phoned Patty’s tycoon father to assure him personally that his daughter was not among the dead; other SLA parents had to learn of their children’s deaths from Noguchi’s press conference. That, and his mistaken “psychological autopsy” of the SLA leader, were more steppingstones on the path that led to his demotion.

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A month after Patty was kidnapped, People magazine debuted. A month after she was caught, “Saturday Night Live” went on the air. She was the first moving target of the new multimedia army of occupation. Her Kodak moments were as manifold as the SLA’s seven-headed cobra emblem: Patty the T-shirt, Patty the comedy sketch, Patty the opera, Patty the major motion picture.

I think now, as I did not then, of the luxury of growing up in private. Patty Hearst became the poster girl for the new generation, for every generation since, that has not.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.