LOS ANGELES - When Patty Hearst made her stunning transformation from society heiress to urban terrorist in the mid-1970s, she described her family as "capitalist pigs" and urged them to redistribute their ill-gotten millions to the poor.
Now, a society heiress once again, she is embracing her family with open arms just as her guerrilla past is rushing to catch up with her.
A United States cable station has announced she would be conducting guided tours of Hearst Castle - the extravagant Californian dream mansion built by her grandfather, the press magnate William Randolph Hearst - for a two-part television special to be aired early next year.
That will coincide with the start of a trial in Los Angeles which promises to re-examine the whole sordid history of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that abducted then recruited Hearst in 1974.
Although she will be a prosecution witness not a defendant, the trial is likely to raise many old questions about how willingly she went along with the SLA's string of bank robberies, kidnappings and murders.
Having long since served her own jail time, she has complained bitterly about being called to testify against her erstwhile comrade-in-arms, Sara Jane Olson, and has spent the past few months honing her image as a socialite and housewife.
Hearst Castle, on a central California clifftop, was the model for Xanadu in Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane - a vast expression of egocentric opulence on the outside concealing a great spiritual emptiness within.
Viewers next northern spring will thus be presented with a bizarre choice of imagery: on the news channels, Hearst as the gun-toting class warrior known by the nom de guerre Tania, and on cable, the perfumed, middle-aged daughter of wealth talking about her grandfather's passion for European art and architecture.
Ostensibly, the trial is about the attempted bombing of two police cars in 1975, but the prosecution has filed more than 15,000 pages of papers and issued subpoenas obliging Hearst and others to testify.
- INDEPENDENT
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