Vintage Didion Read Free

during the few days I attended the trial. “I don’t remember.” “I suppose so.” Had there not been, the prosecutor asked one day, telephones in the motels in which she had stayed when she drove across the country with Jack Scott? I recall Patricia Hearst looking at him as if she thought him deranged. I recall Randolph Hearst looking at the floor. I recall Catherine Hearst arranging a Galanos jacket over the back of her seat.
    “Yes, I’m sure,” their daughter said.
    Where, the prosecutor asked, were these motels?
    “One was … I think …” Patricia Hearst paused, and then: “Cheyenne? Wyoming?” She pronounced the names as if they were foreign, exotic, information registered and jettisoned. One of these motels had been in Nevada, the place from which the Hearst money originally came: the heiress pronounced the name Nevahda , like a foreigner.
    In Every Secret Thing as at her trial, she seemed to project an emotional distance, a peculiar combination of passivity and pragmatic recklessness (“I had crossed over. And I would have to make the best of it… to live from day to day, to do whatever they said, to play my part, and to pray that I would survive”) that many people found inexplicable and irritating. In 1982 as in 1976, she spoke only abstractly about why , but quite specifically about how . “I could not believe that I had actually fired that submachine gun,” she said of the incident in which she shot up Crenshaw Boulevard, but here was how she did it: “I kept my finger pressed on the trigger until the entire clip of thirty shots had been fired…. I then reached for my own weapon, the semiautomatic carbine. I got off three more shots….”
    And, after her book as after her trial, the questions raised were not exactly about her veracity but about her authenticity, her general intention, about whether she was, as the assistant prosecutor put it during the trial, “for real.” This was necessarily a vain line of inquiry (whether or not she “loved” William Wolfe was the actual point on which the trial came to turn), and one that encouraged a curious rhetorical regression among the inquisitors. “Why did she choose to write this book?” Mark Starr asked about Every Secret Thing in Newsweek , and then answered himself: “Possibly she has inherited her family’s journalistic sense of what will sell.” “The rich get richer,” Jane Alpert concluded in New York magazine. “Patty,” Ted Morgan observed in the New York Times Book Review , “is now, thanks to the proceeds of her book, reverting to a more traditional family pursuit, capital formation.”
    These were dreamy notions of what a Hearst might do to turn a dollar, but they reflected a larger dissatisfaction, a conviction that the Hearst in question was telling less than the whole story, “leaving something out,” although what the something might have been, given the doggedly detailed account offered in Every Secret Thing , would be hard to define. If “questions still linger,” as they did for Newsweek , those questions were not about how to lace a bullet with cyanide: the way the SLA did it was to drill into the lead tip to a point just short of the gunpower, dip the tiny hole in a mound of cyanide crystals, and seal it with paraffin. If Every Secret Thing “creates more puzzles than it solves,” as it did for Jane Alpert, those questions were not about how to make a pipe bomb: the trick here was to pack enough gunpowder into the pipe for a big bang and still leave sufficient oxygen for ignition, a problem, as Patricia Hearst saw it, of “devising the proper proportions of gunpowder, length of pipe and toaster wire, minus Teko’s precious toilet paper.” “Teko,” or Bill Harris, insisted on packing his bombs with toilet paper, and, when one of them failed to explode under a police car in the Mission District, reacted with “one of his worst temper tantrums.” Many reporters later found Bill and Emily Harris the