LOS ANGELES—America's two famous bad girls in black berets had a historic convergence here last week.

Patty Hearst and Monica Lewinsky were both privileged young Californians who got "pinned in the beam of history,"
as Joan Didion wrote of the gun-toting terrorist Tania, Patty's alter ego.

The country is now consumed with the Enron cesspool. But the starlets of two past melodramas, emblems of their
respective decades, the roiled 70's and the spoiled 90's, simultaneously resurfaced on Wednesday. One bounded
back to the scene of the crime voluntarily, if tearily; one was dragged back, fuming.

Three decades after the Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery in a Sacramento suburb, four of the former
guerrillas have been charged with the murder of a customer there — raising the prospect that Patty, who served
22 months of jail time for a different robbery, will be the key witness. Like Monica, Patty has immunity.

"I keep trying to forget these people," Patricia Hearst Shaw — now a Connecticut housewife and actress
— told Talk magazine in July 2000. "And they keep dragging me back into it!"

Patty is stalked by her past, which yanks her back to when she was kidnapped and kept in a closet for 57 days
in her blue bathrobe. Monica stalks her past, yanking us back to when she flashed her black thong.

For years, people have been complaining about the media's invasions of privacy. But the flip side is equally
disturbing — the incredible hunger that so many Americans have to have their privacy violated by the media.

We're happy to leave Monica alone, but she keeps coming back.

Worried that people do not really understand who she is and what motivated her, worried that people think she is
a dumb Valley Girl who set out to seduce a president, Monica pitched the idea of a documentary about herself
to HBO. She was paid $150,000 for her cooperation.

Wearing a black leather suit, the 27-year-old handbag entrepreneur came to a TV press tour in Pasadena to hawk the show.

Proclaiming Monica "a piece of history," HBO producers showed clips of her sitting cross-legged on a stage, a
nswering questions from college students:
Does she wish she'd dry-cleaned the dress?
Why did she confide in someone like Linda Tripp?
The usual.

She said it was "neat and special" to do the documentary.
She also said, "I would do anything to have my anonymity back."

This contradiction turned the mild- mannered TV critics into Torquemadas. They pressed Ms. Victiminsky,
as The Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes dubbed her, about why she didn't just go live her life in private.
Monica began crying and keening to the HBO producer: "You all said they'd be nice!"'

Monica's mistake is that she thinks we need more explication. Frankly, it wasn't that hard to get.
Starry-eyed young woman intoxicated by power. Powerful man intoxicated by sex. Transaction to follow.

This trite affair triggered an extraordinary Starr chamber. Monica thinks we don't appreciate that she was a victim
of an overzealous prosecutor. But we do. No one gives a hoot what's in the upcoming final report of Robert Ray,
Ken Starr's successor.

Patty Hearst's story is anything but common. She was at the heart of a genuine cultural and generational rebellion.

Unlike Monica, who works hard to stay in Manhattan's tabloid social swirl, the 47-year-old Patty went off and married
Bernie the bodyguard and had kids and got a life. Like Monica, Patty parlayed her notoriety into some celebrity plums.
She wrote a memoir, got campy parts in some John Waters movies that winked at her weird icon status and appeared
in a Nickelodeon sitcom.

Unlike Monica, Patty engenders sympathy, even though the S.L.A.'s violent spree was far more heinous than an
Oval Office tryst. Maybe that's because the whole episode began with her kidnapping, resulted in her making license
plates in jail and was capped with a last-minute pardon — in the same batch as Marc Rich's — from Monica's ex-boyfriend.

Somehow you feel that Patty, deep down, understands that she was involved in something horrifying.

While you feel that Monica, deep down, believes she was involved in something cool.