SCARRED, BUT TOGETHER AGAIN

Viewed from a distance, they make a handsome family, all dressed up and sitting together in the courtroom--as healthy and prosperous looking as when they sat proudly in the pew at the Marymount School chapel, where Patty made her first communion 13 years ago. But San Francisco Federal Judge Oliver J. Carter's paneled courtroom is no church, and Randolph and Catherine Hearst have traveled prodigious emotional distances to be at their daughter's side again. The first shock of the kidnaping, the pain of Patty's taped denunciation of her parents as "pigs," the dark hours before the charred bodies of six Symbionese Liberation Army members killed in a Los Angeles Shootout were identified, and her sudden, almost unexpected capture last September--all have left their scars on the Hearsts.

Of the two, Catherine, 57, has suffered most visibly. Once a gay and irrepressible fixture on the Bay Area social circuit, she has become a virtual recluse, communicating with old friends rarely and then only by telephone. She has been neglecting her regular monthly meetings of the University of California's board of regents, was hospitalized briefly for nervous exhaustion after the kidnaping. She has since regained at least some of her old fire--and swallowed her disapproval of Patty's freewheeling pre-S.L.A. lifestyle. Still, friends describe Catherine as intensely bitter over the "persecution" of "my little girl" by prosecutors and a disapproving public.

Randolph, 60, has quietly withdrawn from an active role in the family publishing empire--although he is still chairman of the Hearst Corp. and president of the San Francisco Examiner--and spends his days consulting with Patty's attorneys. A quiet and thoughtful man, he had been troubled even before the kidnaping by some of the social injustices decried by the S.L.A. He did not complain when the S.L.A. demanded that he dig deeply into his $2 million net worth to distribute food to the poor. But Randolph, too, is said to have grown bitter since her return--bitter at the chaos and venality surrounding the food giveaway, at the Government's insistence that his daughter is more criminal than victim, and at the suspicion that many of his friends and acquaintances consider her guilty as charged.

The Hearsts visit Patty three or four times a week, and friends say their encounters--strained and formal at first--have warmed considerably. Patty's lawyers report she was scared and aloof when she arrived at San Mateo County jail, 25 miles from the courthouse, but Sheriff John McDonald Jr. says she fell quickly into the prison's routine. "Her attitude hasn't changed," says McDonald. "She's still calm, cool and collected." She has also been suffering from menstrual problems, eats only lightly, and has dropped from 102 lbs. to 97.

Al Johnson, the lawyer who has been closer to Patty than perhaps anyone since her capture, says she has become "more alert, more conscious of the problems facing her, and more receptive at our urging that she participate in her own defense." She has been spending as much as seven hours a day with her attorneys, filling idle time watching television and reading magazines. She has free access to a telephone, and last week called F. Lee Bailey to complain about an article in the monthly skin magazine Genesis about her sex life. It was Bailey and Johnson, not her parents, who picked out the new clothes that she has been wearing at her trial.

Patty is popular among fellow prisoners, some of whom have returned to visit her after serving their time. She has been crocheting colorful shawls for her mother and some inmates, and Johnson suggested that she crochet him a ski mask--forgetting for a moment that the Carmichael, Calif., bank robbery for which she may face charges was the work of ski-masked bandits. Replied Patty, suddenly morose: "I don't think they would like that."

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