Tania’s World: The Inside Story of the Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Part Two: People in Need

Randolph Hearst was stunned. “Damnit! You went ahead without even talking to me. I can’t believe it!” His wife Catherine stared defiantly. The SLA had threatened to kill their 19-year-old daughter if Mrs. Hearst accepted an appointment to the University of California Board of Regents. On the afternoon of March 13th, 1974, then-governor Ronald Reagan phoned her with an offer.

“I can hold your appointment until this is all over,” Reagan said. “I don’t want to pressure you one way or the other. Do what you think is best for Patty.”

Catherine refused. “I don’t want it held up. I’ll take it right now. I’m not going to give in to a bunch of hoodlums.”

Randy (as he is called by his friends and employees), president of the San Francisco Examiner, the youngest son of William Randolph Hearst, heard about it on the radio. He confronted her late that night at their Hillsborough mansion: Patty’s life was at stake. Catherine was adamant; she knew the stakes and she had done the right thing.

Randolph Hearst swore at her and stalked out. At the SLA’s San Francisco hideout 20 miles north, Patty also heard the radio broadcast. It was the final evidence that her parents had abandoned her. It became the pivotal moment in her change from a Hearst to Tania.

Catherine had never forgiven Patricia for leaving Sunday mass, forsaking the Burlingame Country Club and moving in with Steven Weed, her one-time prep school tutor whom Catherine considered a charmless gold digger. It was Randy who indulged Patricia; he had been wrong to pay for her living with Weed then, and he was wrong now. It was his fault more than anyone’s: If Patty had not been let loose in the radical life of Berkeley, none of this would have happened.

Patty was his favorite daughter. She was known as “Randy’s spoiled brat.” From the beginning he had been willing to reach an accord with the SLA. He set up the $2 million food giveaway over Catherine’s objections. He liked the agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office and often invited him into the mansion for drinks. But he had little faith that the FBI could find his daughter … or bring her back alive.

With his political clout and the family fortune, he felt better equipped to find Patty himself. His daughter was apparently in the hands of radicals; so he tried to hire the left. He put the aging dean of San Francisco’s left-wing lawyers on a $50,000 retainer and recruited Sara Jane Moore because she hung around political activists.

Hearst wanted to handle the negotiations personally. In Berkeley’s radical circles the word went out: For the right information Randolph Hearst was willing to pay a handsome finder’s fee.

I

Steve Soliah took only a passing interest in the SLA. He spent his days painting houses and reserved his evenings for partying with friends and playing his guitar to tunes like the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” Becoming Patty’s lover never crossed his mind.

But like many Berkeley people, Steve knew some of Patty’s kidnappers secondhand. A good friend had once roomed with Patricia “Mizmoon” Soltysik, and his older sister, Kathy, had waited tables with Angela Atwood.

Then on May 17th, 1974, Los Angeles police surrounded a grubby bungalow where the SLA was holed up. As the news spread through Berkeley, several friends and neighbors gathered with Steve in front of a black-and-white television set at the old house he shared with friends near the University of California campus. Mizmoon’s former roommate arrived and slumped into a chair, her face averted so she couldn’t see the flames searing across the screen. But she could hear the barking of police gunfire long after there was no answer from the bungalow.

Steve moved next to her and tried to comfort her. He was 26 years old and had been living in the Berkeley area for three years. But this was the first time he’d felt sympathy for people he regarded as violent revolutionaries.

“I feel sick,” he said, flicking off the TV.

Kathy Soliah, a year older than Steve, felt a more personal outrage. Her good friend Angela Atwood was dead in the ashes, her body so burned that identification had to be based on her dental records. Kathy had met Angela a year before when both auditioned for roles in a local theatrical production of Hedda Gabler. Angela then had helped her get a waitress job at the Great Electric Underground restaurant in the basement of the San Francisco Bank of America world headquarters building. They had quit their jobs together after the restaurant manager refused to alter uniforms they felt were demeaning.

In the days following the L.A. shootout an anger welled up in the coffeehouses and communes of Berkeley. Many radicals initially had shunned comment about the SLA because of its violent tactics and because of suspicions that SLA leader Donald DeFreeze was a police agent. Now they spoke up at rallies that eulogized the six dead SLA soldiers as heroes in a progressive cause. Randolph Hearst saw the shifting mood and remarked acidly that, had the police not overreacted, the SLA members “wouldn’t have been martyrs but would have been seen as dingbats.”

Kathy Soliah was among those most affected by the shootout. At a memorial rally for the SLA on June 2nd, Kathy pledged solidarity with the group.

The Soliahs had grown up in Palmdale, a small town near Los Angeles, where their father coached the high-school football team and taught civics. Steve had played football under his father, then had become a track star and a sociology major at Humboldt State University in Northern California. Kathy had graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and taught English at a private school. Both Steve and Kathy moved to Berkeley in 1971.

The two were close and liked to do things together. Steve felt protective toward his sister, whose blonde-haired good looks sometimes brought abuse from untoward strangers. When a man assaulted Kathy as she walked to a nearby liquor store one night a few weeks after the memorial rally, Steve heard her screams and came running out of the house. The man fled in a car but Steve, a burly guy, grabbed the car door and was dragged half a block before he let go.