Patricia Hearts: 'It has turned into my trial' - News about religious cults and sects

Patricia Hearst is on stage in west Hollywood, demonstrating how she helped to rob the Hibernia bank in San Francisco 27 years ago. The audience is spellbound, recalling the moment when the young heiress, who had been kidnapped by an urban guerrilla group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, was captured on film taking part in a daylight robbery that sent shock waves across the US.

This is not the real Patricia Hearst, however, but one of Los Angeles's brightest young comedians and actors, Mona Mansour, starring in her one-woman show, Me and the SLA. It is a tour de force in which Mansour takes on the persona of herself as a seven-year-old girl who witnesses the Hibernia robbery, then runs off and joins the SLA, sharing a closet with Patty Hearst and living on the run. During the performance, Mansour reads out a letter from the Hearst family lawyers, warning her not to stage the show or to face a lawsuit. It transpires that she has been fascinated by the case ever since it happened and she was a seven-year-old who fantasised about helping poor Patty and having her as a friend.

The real Patricia Hearst will shortly be performing in LA, not on stage but as prosecution witness in the trial of Sarah Jane Olson. A former associate of the SLA, she was arrested in 1999 in St Paul, Minnesota, after more than two decades of living on the run as a respectable doctor's wife and - as the press likes to portray her - a "soccer mom".

The real Hearst will certainly be asked in detail about that strange period in her life so carefully conjured up on stage in Me and the SLA. After the show, Mansour says that she had contacted the Hearst family lawyers to let them know she was planning to do the show and they had been very relaxed about it. Perhaps, after more than a quarter of a century, Patricia Hearst has reconciled herself to people's fantasies about her.
There will be fewer laughs when the case of Olson, who changed her name from Kathleen Soliah, finally gets under way after many delays. Olson had managed to disappear into quiet suburban anonymity, bringing up her three daughters with her wealthy surgeon husband, acting in the local dramatic society and doing good works through her local church. Had the FBI not supplied her photograph for a special edition of the television programme America's Most Wanted, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Hearst kidnapping, she would still be going quietly about her life. She is out on $1m bail now, has written a cookbook to raise funds for her defence and has had to tell her daughters about her outlaw past. A student radical, she had joined the SLA after her friend, Angela Atwood, had been one of the six SLA members who died in a blazing house following a gunfight with the LA police.
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The expected highlight of the case, however, will undoubtedly be the evidence of Hearst, forced by subpoena to relive that time of her life when she was taken at gunpoint from her home in Berkeley in 1974 and forced to join up with a group that lived out mad fantasies of revolution. She was held in a closet for more than 50 days, given gun training and the "revolutionary" name Tania, and learned the SLA's memorable slogan: "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."

Hearst was present for the Hibernia robbery, carried out to garner funds and publicity for the SLA, but was not with the core of the group when they died in the LA blaze. She was arrested in San Francisco in 1975, jailed for seven years and freed 23 months later, after Jimmy Carter, then US president, commuted her sentence on the grounds that she had been forced into the SLA. President Clinton finally pardoned her on his final day in office, an act that passed almost unnoticed amid the fuss generated by his other acts of clemency.

What has happened to Hearst in the time between being hoisted off campus as a privileged young student to her status now as an independent movie diva and gay icon is, in its way, every bit as revolutionary as what the SLA was preaching. The Patricia Hearst who is now familiar to fans of the radical film-maker John Waters is very different from the Patty Hearst who so terrified the parents of America in 1974. The new one is blonde and smiling, the latter was dark-haired, beret-wearing and, understandably, grim-faced.

Hearst appears in Waters's film Cecil B Demented, just released on video, playing a role that must be as close to postmodern edge as you can get without falling over the other side. The story is of the kidnap of pampered actress Holly Whitlock (played by Melanie Griffith) by a group of independent guerrilla film-makers whose slogan is "bad movies must be avenged". Holly resists the kidnappers at first but then becomes part of the gang, shooting it out with the best of them. Hearst plays the tearful mother of one of the kidnappers, the mild-mannered young Fidget, and appears on television with her very straight husband, trying to talk reason to her wayward boy. In the course of all the mayhem, a policeman is shot. Hearst's part mirrors that played by her own mother, who also made tearful appearances on television during her daughter's time with the SLA.
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Her autobiography, Every Secret Thing, published after her release in 1982, took its title from Ecclesiastes 12:14: "For God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing whether it be good or whether it be evil."

Olson, now 54, is charged with conspiring to murder, in connection with a plot to plant nailbombs under police cars in LA. No one died in that attempt but a woman was murdered during a bank robbery in Sacramento in which Olson is alleged to have taken part. In Every Secret Thing, Hearst puts Olson at the scene, but does not make her responsible for the shooting of Myrna Lee Opshal, the woman who died.

Olson has not been charged with that murder, though the son of the dead woman, Jon Opshal, has urged that she should be prosecuted and the new Los Angeles district attorney wants to see the case re-examined. Olson contests the Hearst version. She told a gathering to raise funds for her defence in San Francisco: "Her version has been enshrined as the undisputed truth - until my trial."

Hearst, meanwhile, does not see it as Olson's trial. In her only interview about the case, last year with Talk, which is part-owned by the Hearst family, she said: "It has turned into my trial. And I am not going to play dead any more. I keep trying to forget these people and they keep dragging me back into it."

Of Olson, she said: "She had been leading such a quiet life. I heard about her reading to the blind and all. I thought, well, she's probably a lot nicer than I am. Who knows? But I have had to live my entire life in the public eye because of her actions and ... the rest of the SLA. And I just didn't feel sorry for her. She was just getting a good dollop of it. It's no fun, is it? But now I wish they'd never found her."
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The trial will also be a strange time for the other surviving former members of the SLA. They, too, have gone in different directions since 1974. Bill Harris was jailed for eight years for SLA-related crimes and is now a legal investigator in San Francisco. Emily Harris was also jailed for eight years and now works in the computer business in LA. Jack Scott, the sports journalist who helped the surviving members of the SLA when they were on the run, died last year. James Kilgore is still on the run.
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