Backward-Facing Man

I first met Patricia Campbell Hearst at a summer camp for girls when we were fourteen. Our mothers had been sorority sisters in the late forties, although, technically, neither was in college at the time. Finishing school would be a more accurate term for it, yet it hardly matters to the story I'm about to tell.

Catherine Campbell was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, a world of debutantes and huge colonial houses with Corinthian columns, part of a white aristocracy, which only two generations earlier had owned slaves. It was the middle of World War II, two years before Catherine met her husband, Randy, the youngest son of William Randolph Hearst. My own mother, Agnes Rittenhouse, had been sent away to boarding school by her parents in Philadelphia because of a persistent interest she'd taken in a roguish fellow named Edward Prescott, my dad.

Over the next forty years, the two maintained a long-distance friendship in hundreds of letters they wrote each other, recording the events of their lives, describing in longhand their courtships and marriages, the houses they decorated, gossip about their neighbors, and, later, the accomplishments of their children. In the letters, they held close their disappointments, their quiet struggles with depression and substance abuse, their husbands' occasional infidelities and their eventual divorces.
I remember the scent of her stationery on the antique rolltop in my mother's bedroom mingling with my own curiosity to discover how joyful or wretched a woman's life could become. That one summer, Patty and I talked about our parents and boys and sex and babies whenever we got a private moment: awake in our bunks; standing side by side in lineup; sitting in a canoe near boys' camp, the low rumble of the engine and the smell of diesel fuel wafting toward us in the early autumn breezes through the white pines, the scent and sally of manhood.

Though we would have bristled at the suggestion, we were miniature versions of our mothers, living in that impossibly dry heat of our parents' unlived lives. In that single season, fired up by adolescence—raw and incredulous—we shared every thought, every emotion, every perception we had about the world. All the while, dark hints of what would happen spread over us like the shadow of an angry giant—our fathers' departures, our mothers' illnesses, our siblings' infirmities, our ambivalence about success and love and fairy-tale endings, even Patty's monstrous ordeal.

At the end of the camp, we were wrenched apart—her to the suburbs of San Francisco and me to Center City, Philadelphia, and, within a few months, we completely lost touch. The next summer, I went to Ocean City, New Jersey, and advanced my study of boys, while Patty stayed home and took riding lessons with her sisters. After that, my life was so crowded with crushes and rumors and adventures with new best friends, I thought about Patty only once before the kidnapping.

It was Thanksgiving, 1973. I was a freshman, home from college. My mother had just received one of Aunt Catherine's letters. “Winnie, you remember Patricia Hearst, don't you, dear?” We were in the kitchen. “She's going to marry her math teacher.” I was nineteen, the age when parental comparisons to others elicit only hostility. It was my first year away from home, away from my parents' anger and the burden of the stultifying reputation of my family as a pillar of Philadelphia society. I remember for the first time feeling free and hopeful about my future, as yet unburdened by the conditions of my trust fund and the knowledge that the road to addiction that my father, my brother, and I would each travel is a highway, with few places to stop, pull over, or get off until it dead ends.

Had my mother and I actually finished our conversation that night, I might have told her that math teachers and marriage were of no interest to me, that I wanted nothing to do with careers, husbands, or babies, that it was my first year in college and I was just discovering drugs and Hemingway, Lawrence, and Forster. “I am a writer,” I would have snapped, had I cared enough to say anything at all.

Three months later, there wasn't an adult in the world who hadn't heard about Patty's abduction. In New York City, where I was in school, Patty's image as an urban guerrilla was everywhere—on newsstands and telephone poles, on huge screens in department store windows and in Times Square. She was the topic of conversation between parents and children, husbands and wives, colleagues at work in subways, and strangers in coffee shops. There were sightings and tips, news flashes and documentaries about her childhood, interviews with teachers and old friends, urgent pleas from her grief-stricken parents and Steve Weed, Patty's jilted fiancé. Over the next twenty months, the nation watched, fascinated as my one-time best friend converted to radicalism, robbed a bank, became a fugitive, and, a year later, was captured, put on trial, convicted, and sent away to prison.

It turned out that everything Catherine Hearst told my mother about Patty was false. She didn't love her math teacher, and she only studied art history because she was bored out of her skull listening to her fiancé talk about philosophy. Much later, I came to understand that until her kidnapping, Patty was struggling with many of the same issues I was struggling with, including how to escape from under the long shadow of a prominent family, into the far more alluring glow of the counterculture.

After college, I went to graduate school in Iowa and then moved back to Manhattan, settling in a studio apartment in the East Village. After her release from federal prison, Patty married her bodyguard, Bernard Shaw, moved east, and became something of a celebrity, acting in several of John Waters's movies. I drifted between writing poems, composing songs, performing in a punk rock band, and waitressing on Wall Street. That same year my mother developed emphysema, and my father ran off with his secretary, drinking and gambling away most of his considerable fortune in Atlantic City.

After a two-year affair with coke, my brother entered rehab in Florida. When he emerged, he married the woman who led his twelve-step group and took over an investment company that my uncle Jack had started. I did my own little dance with coke and weed, balancing the two perfectly for a while, before falling in love with speedballs and downers, burning out my metabolism, and most likely depleting my lifetime reserve of seratonin. Though my brother kept asking me to, returning to Philly would have been painful. The waters had long ago covered over the place where my childhood had been.

I sent poems and short stories to literary magazines and wrote lyrics for a punk rock band. I lived on fast food and stayed up all night at places like Max's Kansas City and CBGB, fancying myself to be part of the downtown scene. Mornings, with the garment district trucks rumbling by, I'd take a couple Valium or a phenobarbital, pull the shades down, and wait for sleep. The day I turned thirty, I got a call from a man at the Glendale Trust Company who told me if I could provide proof of full-time employment, annual payments from my trust fund would begin. “They're rather large,” he said, sounding a bit uncomfortable. It was a turning point. By then, my dreams had fizzled. When I wasn't manic about a new song or a hot new band forming, I was strung out, overwrought, and sleep starved. I was tired of waitressing and biding my time until we, meaning whatever drug-addicted temperamental musician I was working with, got a record deal.

I found a job with a company that made precision ball bearings, whose founders hated each other so vehemently that every employee had to declare their devotion to one and then suffer banishment from the other. In between answering the phone, I wrote complex technical descriptions of products for their catalog—a tedious and unaesthetic compendium of line drawings and grainy photographs—but in keeping with his promise, the man from Glendale Trust wired me $500,000 two weeks later. In my drug-addled state, keeping normal hours was impossible. During my second month, the brother I had aligned myself with gave me an unpaid month off so I could go to the Betty Ford Clinic, and when I returned, I was clean. Against everyone's advice, I kept the same friends, went to the same shitty showcases and art openings, and lived
in the same squalid apartment, rationalizing that all this would inspire me to keep writing. Only it didn't.

In April 1996 my mother died. I knew her health had deteriorated, but I kept putting off visiting until it was too late. By then, she'd moved in with my brother and sister-in-law, who orchestrated a rotation of nurses who fed and bathed her, answered the phone, sent letters until she was no longer able to dictate, preparing her for what was, by all accounts, a painful way to leave this world. By the time my brother called and told me, she was beyond my reach in a haze of medication, hooked up to a respirator and sleeping in an oxygen tent.

The day she died, I carried several cartons of my most outrageous clothes to a thrift store and gave away my foldout couch. I put a folder of rejection slips and my journals into a suitcase and lugged it to the curb, where I waited for my brother's black BMW to whisk me back to Philadelphia. As soon as we crossed over from Jersey, I felt an odd release. My father had disgraced himself. Now, with my mother gone, I could finally declare defeat and return from exile without shame. As soon as I got home, my brother told me that as far as he was concerned, I could stay in the Prescott cottage in Merion as long as I liked.

Much to my surprise, the day before the funeral the Hearsts arrived. There was Aunt Catherine, a brittle-looking wisp of a woman hanging on to Patty's husband's arm, and my old camp friend, fuller in the face and heavier. As they stood side by side, I could see the resemblance between mother and daughter—their small frames, smooth pale foreheads, mouths turned down, and shoulders hunched as if they'd spent their lives avoiding things that had been hurled at them from behind.

The Hearst-Shaws lived just outside one of Connecticut's toniest towns, a place with high-end retail stores and trendy restaurants where beautiful people of all ages hurry from Pilates to therapy. Patty described it as a place where people shopped like it was always Christmas. Like most suburbanites of my generation, Patty spent her life shuttling her kids around, except she did it in a van that had been fitted with bulletproof windows, a communications center, and a satellite tracking system.

Once everyone left, Patty got her mother settled in the sunroom with a glass of sherry and sent Bernard out to pick up Chinese. She confided
that although her husband was steady and dependable, he was a far cry from the men we dreamed about thirty years ago. The man who marries money works hard for every cent. Bernie had come along when the Hearst family was vulnerable, putting aside his meager career aspirations to become Patty's husband. A few years after they were married, he was made head of security for the Hearst Corporation.

It's a strange thing when the parent you most struggle with dies. You look around and you realize that the one who resembled you most, genetically, physically, psychologically, and temperamentally is gone, and you're completely, existentially alone. If nothing else, you stop performing. You give up trying to prove things. You do things you might not have done before. That night, Patty was attentive and kind. She went out of her way to keep my spirits up. As I went through my mother's closet, she recited lines from the play I'd written at Camp Tidewater. She insisted I tell her the names of any magazine or chap-book where my poems or stories had appeared. We saw each other like we were fourteen years old.

It was obvious that I needed a change. I'd come to detest the bearing company and I'd outgrown my cynical Lower East Side self. It was painfully clear that I hadn't achieved a whit of recognition as a writer, and with a fellow trust fund friend, it was unnecessary to pretend that without a job I'd starve. I was forty-two, with no husband, no kid, no career, and no significant artistic output to show for myself. Patty declared it was time for me to do some serious writing.

The following morning, Catherine Hearst, Bernard Shaw, and my friend, the heiress turned actress, went directly from the Four Seasons Hotel to the funeral, dressed to the nines, and stood in the rain with the rest of us. Before leaving, Patty took my hand and told me that she'd already talked to her agent and that she wanted us to do a book together. In the cemetery parking lot, with Bernard behind the wheel of the van and her mother staring straight ahead, she pitched me like a Hollywood agent.

The plot was simple. Her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst—tycoon, flaneur, would-be politician, and the father of modern journalism—would reflect on meetings he'd had with world leaders on the eve of World War II. Patty believed we could reconstruct them,
along with bromides from his diary, and create a kind of faux journal, a series of observations and made-up conversations with his minions that could have taken place aboard an elegant ocean liner in the late 1930s. “You'll come to Connecticut,” she said, rain streaming from her umbrella. “I'll get his journals. Permissions will be no problem.” I must have looked less than enthusiastic. “Historical fiction,” she said confidently, as if that would elevate her proposition to art. Bernie tapped the horn lightly, and Patty leaned forward, kissing me on the cheek.

I remember watching the van disappear. There was nothing really to think about. Aside from a few punk demos and some pathetic short stories that a classmate of mine had published in a postgraduate chap-book, I'd been completely without success in my avocation. I accepted the next morning, calling in my resignation to the bearing company, watering the plants in my mother's cottage, and taking my old Corolla to an Audi dealership on the Main Line. By dinnertime, I was driving a cobalt blue coupe up the Merritt Parkway.