Patty Hearst's dog wins at Westminster

Maria Puente | USA TODAY

Is there anybody in American culture who's undergone more image changes than Patty Hearst?

The millionaire heiress-turned-college-student. The kidnap-victim-turned-terrorist bank robber. The defiant revolutionary-turned-unjustly-convicted prisoner. The pardoned convict-turned-suburban mom. The New York socialite-turned-movie star.

And now, another new Patty Hearst: She's a winner at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in New York, the annual doggie extravaganza that is America's second-oldest sporting event after the Kentucky Derby.

Now 61 and known as Patricia Hearst-Shaw, she's a co-owner of a shih tzu called Rocket, an adorable puff of a pooch who was picked as the top toy dog at Madison Square Garden on Monday.

Some people could barely believe it.

Hearst-Shaw was as unruffled as she has always been ever since she first hit the headlines in 1974.

"People move on," she told reporters, smiling at Rocket. "I guess people somehow imagine you don't evolve in your life. I have grown daughters and granddaughters and other things that normal people have."

Maybe so, but normal isn't the word normally associated with Patty Hearst.

The granddaughter of newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst, she was a student at the University of California at Berkeley (where streets bear her family name) in 1974 when she was kidnapped by a gang of wack-job radical terrorists called the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Soon, she was calling herself "Tania" and seen brandishing a semiautomatic rifle while robbing a California bank with the gang (two people were wounded). Soon, the group's poster showed "Tania/Patty" holding a machine gun.

The FBI shifted from calling her a kidnap victim to calling her a "common criminal." For more than a year she and the SLA were fugitives, with the search for them followed avidly around the country.

The rest of the gang ended up dead in a fiery shootout in Los Angeles. When she was arrested in San Francisco in September 1975, Hearst called herself an "urban guerrilla." She was tried, defended herself as a raped-and-brainwashed victim of terrorists, but was convicted of bank robbery and a weapons charge and spent almost two years in prison.

President Carter commuted her sentence to time served in 1979, and President Clinton issued her a pardon in 2001.

When she got out, she married her bodyguard, Bernard Shaw, moved to suburban Connecticut, and had two kids. She wrote a memoir, was active in social and charity circles in New York, and then turned up in TV roles and in two John Waters films, Cry-Baby and Serial Mom, in the 1990s.

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For the past 10 years, she's been involved in the dog-show world. She's one of Rocket's three co-owners but she's mostly worked with French bulldogs; one of them won an award ribbon earlier on Monday.

Rocket will be one of seven in the championship ring Tuesday night when best-in-show is chosen.

Dog-lover she may be now, but her two daughters own cats.

"I don't know what I did wrong," she said.

Contributing: The Associated Press



