Another stay-at-home mother
Wow, does time pass.
Yesterday in my post about Romney’s smarts, I wrote that in the photo of the young Romneys with their matching fisherman knit sweaters, Ann had “a bit of a Patty Hearst vibe going.”
That sparked a bit of reminiscence. It was in 1974, almost forty years ago (!!), that the Patty Hearst story unfolded with her kidnapping, although it wasn’t until 1975 that she was arrested, and 1976 till her trial began. I only vaguely recalled that her sentence had been commuted by Jimmy Carter and she was released early, and then finally pardoned by Bill Clinton, although I’d written about the Hearst story a few years ago here and here, at fairly great length.
I did remember that Patty had married her bodyguard Bernard Shaw, and gone on to live life as a mostly non-celebrity wife and mother (and Ronald Reagan admirer?) in the posher suburbs of New York. But I wondered what’s been going on with her lately, and when I searched I discovered that, in a rather remarkable achievement under the circumstances, she and her husband are still married. Their two daughters are all grown up.
Here’s one of them, highly successful model Lydia Hearst. She’s got a bit of a Patty Hearst vibe going, too, although far more glam:
Here’s more about Lydia, who led a rather unusual childhood that included her using the name “Shaw” rather than her given “Hearst-Shaw,” for security reasons. Unlike her mother, she doesn’t seem to shy away from the spotlight.
I’ve always defended Patty Hearst, as you can see if you read my posts on the subject (and before you take issue with me on that in the comments section here, please actually read them). It seemed clear to me she was a young and vulnerable kidnap victim trying to survive in a terrible and terrifying situation, who’d been brainwashed and then had also observed the country turn against her. Her life subsequent to her release has borne that out; she’s shown no indication whatsoever of radical or violent views.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Patty Hearst story is the length of her marriage to her ex-bodyguard Shaw, who in 2007 was reported to be the head of security for the Hearst Corporation. One wouldn’t have necessarily predicted the endurance of their bond. But part of the key may be this, which I wrote a couple of years ago:
My guess is that her husband (and former bodyguard) represents a figure of great stability and support to her, a person who bridges her former trauma and her present calm. It’s no accident she married her bodyguard, I would guess; he may have represented the one person able to protect her.
Because, when one actually thinks about it, no one else who should have protected her was able to do so: not her parents, not her boyfriend at the time, not the police, not the court system, not the expert witnesses, and not her lawyer (the best money could buy). In the end, she had to learn the hard lessons herself”“and one of those lessons was that many will never forgive her for what she did. But I think she’s at peace even with that.
This isn’t about Patty Hearst but did want to say that the tax code makes it very difficult for a married couple with a higher earner and a lower earner to fare well.The lower wage earner is often put in a position that it really is just not worth it-ask me how I know as a part time nurse!
Also a story that seems to be developing that i would keep your eyes out for is the laying off and “early retirement options” of hospital employees.Crozer health system (Chester PA right outside of Philly)just put in offers to cut 500 people(to close out 350 full time positions).I can guarentee you that most of those are female employees.It is a direct result in the changes of Medicare only paying for observations and 23 hourpost op stays and then paying the hospital significantly less.I predict that the cutbacks will only get worse since one of the ways for paying for health care is to just pay the hospitals less or of course my favorite not at all -for the emergency room visits that hospitals must provide by law but since many medicaid patients abuse this(someone has to pay attention to me)some of the states just won’t pay!This is the second hospital in a month that I have seen cutting staff-both for revenue reasons.
I doubt that these stories will be making the national press so I would watch locally.
I too defend Patty Hearst. We’re in good company, Neo. John Wayne came to her defense early on.
Charle:
I didn’t remember that about Wayne, but I can tell you I defended her early on, too. In my earlier post, I described it this way:
(I misspelled my own name in my first comment. Sheesh.)
Yes, those were strange times. Not that things are any less strange now.
If I might, I’d like to share my Patty Hearst story:
My first wife looked a lot like Patty Hearst. A lot. When the Patty Hearst story first unfolded, before her capture, I was stationed in Monterey, CA at the main computer center for the Naval Weather Service.
I’d gotten off mid-watch, and woke up in the afternoon. My wife was out. I turned on the TV and all of Monterey was in a tizzy because Patty Hearst had been spotted downtown.
When my wife returned I asked her if she’d been downtown. She told me yes. When I told her that people had thought they’d seen Patty Hearst there her eyes got very big.
We decided we’d dine in and go to the club on base instead of the dinner plans we’d made for a restaurant downtown.
No point in pulling the tiger’s tail.
Good stuff, Neo. I agree with you on Patty. 38-years this May 17th on the L.A. shootout which killed Cinque and five other SLA members. Weird alignment of the planets, God’s protective will thing that Patty wasn’t at the East L.A. house when the carnage happened. So glad that the girl has had a good, solid, quiet life for most of the years since. I looked up Wendy Yoshimura and see that she, as well, has led a quiet, responsible life since getting out of prison. Has a studio in Oakland and is a water colorist of some talent.
My then wife sat in out L.A. living room that Thursday evening watching the broadcast. Two days later I turned 30. WOW.
Patty Hearst … hmm, that takes me back. I lived two blocks up the street from her in Berkeley. Caused quite a little kerfuffle when she was kidnapped, and God knows that that neighborhood, which included People’s Park and Telegraph Avenue (site of all the riots), was accustomed to kerfuffles.
Jeez. People who insist that Basic Training is brainwashing can’t figure that being in Cinque’s grasp is the same???
I was stationed at Mare Island in Vallejo at the time. I was quite taken by what I believed Patty Hearst must be like and even fantasized (hey, I was 18) about rescuing her from her captors.
That her boyfriends name was “Weed” told me she was hooked up with the wrong dude anyway.
I am pleasantly surprised to read how her life turned out.
My daughter and her oldest shared a school in the 80s/90s and I was at a couple of dinner parties with the Shaws. They seemed like a nice couple with perhaps a slight penchant of a concern with security.
I note today that Lydia, the younger, is running along the celebrity trail but seems to have fallen a bit off the pace né¸w that her purported “relationship” with the somewhat more elderly Jeff Goldblum has, I think, gone off the rails.
http://www.observer.com/2010/12/who-will-jeff-goldblum-play-in-girlfriend-lydia-hearsts-new-lohaninspired-film/
I was on the distant edges of some of the ’60/’70’s stuff. I knew even then as the story exploded that Patty Hearst should have never, ever been prosecuted. Should never, ever have spent a minute in jail. Should never, ever have been treated like she was treated. Pre- or post- …it was a train wreck.
She was rescued.
And then punished.
Jeezus.
My belief in American justice took a decided turn for the cynical worse then.
I noticed and cheered all those years later when Clinton gave her a full pardon (it raised my estimation of Clinton more than a notch or three); though – as I hadn’t followed it by then in years …it was just too …disheartening – I was shocked that she hadn’t been given that – legal – relief from the highest, years – and administrations – previous (one of the few good things entirely correct things Jimmy Carter did was commute her sentence …and alas, Ronnie: you could have, and should have, done the right thing, as you must have known).
I was always glad that she had the money to live a quiet life and out of the public eye, after being victimized, tortured, used, and then subjected to grave injustice (by petty political opportunists IMO); I’d thought it a small thing at best, wealth, generally, to the positive development of character …but in her case, a palliative that I’m sure was barely enough recompense for a bewildered young women who must have thought that life and society had entirely and unfairly turned against her.
…and a high regard for the man who had come to know her more than anyone, and had married her.
Nothing in her starred, cosseted young life could have prepared her.
My own black thoughts to this day are vindictive gladness in the knowing comfort that “Field Marshall Cinque” daily roasts in the arms of blackest, deepest tortures of Hell. Burn, Donald DeFreeze you evil bastard, burn.