Stone Scoop

In San Francisco, where news swirls across town faster than the fog, the word was out: Rolling Stone (circ. 410,000) was on to something big. Editors of the counterculture's bible were not answering the phones in their Bay Area homes. Uniformed guards were posted at the biweekly's St. Louis printing plant. Randolph Hearst ordered a reporter at his San Francisco Examiner to find out whether the magazine's rumored scoop had anything to do with his daughter Patty. Rolling Stone Founder and Publisher Jann Wenner, 29, told the reporter no and branded the talk as empty gossip.

Wenner lied. In a 13,000-word article by Associate Editor Howard Kohn and Freelancer David Weir, the magazine last week printed Part 1 of the first comprehensive and convincing account of Patty Hearst's life on the lam. The story, which the writers claim they got from three sources they would not reveal even if threatened with jail, said among other things that the heiress was driven across the country at least twice by Sports Activist Jack Scott (see THE NATION). Indeed, Scott figures so heavily in the detailed narrative that he appears to be its prime source.

Scott, who is hiding out with his wife Micki, phoned Examiner Reporter Larry Kramer last week to denounce the Rolling Stone piece as a "crass, sensationalized attempt to discredit Patty Hearst and her defense." He did not dispute the story but insisted that Kohn and Weir got their information while working as investigators for Scott's former defense attorney, Michael Kennedy. If that is true, then Kohn and Weir would be guilty of a clear breach of journalistic ethics.

False Report. Kohn and Weir are not just any run-of-the-city-room journalists. Kohn, 28, once a prizewinning investigative reporter for the Detroit Free Press, was fired by the paper in 1973 for fabricating a story about his own alleged kidnaping; he pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of filing a false police report and was given six months' probation. Weir, 28, feature editor of a slick investigative magazine called Sun-Dance before its demise in 1972, wrote the article that exposed Acid King Timothy Leary as a police informer, discrediting him in the eyes of his counterculture admirers. Scott fears that Weir is now trying to undermine Patty's credibility, just in case she starts testifying against her fellow revolutionaries.

Jack Scott may have his own credibility problems. TIME has learned that Scott approached Kohn and Weir last Memorial Day weekend and asked them to help him write a book and a magazine article about Patty and the S.L.A. The trio negotiated with McGraw-Hill Editor John Simon for a contract, but Simon's bosses rejected their price--a $100,000 to $200,000 advance--as excessive, and had doubts about the reliability of their information. Scott, Kohn and Weir then went to work on the Rolling Stone article, for which the magazine offered Scott as much as $7,500. Sometime last month the trio had a falling out and the collaboration ended. It is not clear whether Scott ever was paid--some of those involved in the negotiations say that he finally refused any remuneration--but federal officials are investigating the possibility that Patty Hearst received some of the $7,500.

Late last week Scott denied those disclosures, again by telephone. "Micki and I have absolutely not been working with Howard Kohn and David Weir on any story of the nature that was published in Rolling Stone," he told TIME.

"At no time did we ever discuss any financial arrangements with them about the publication of an article in Rolling Stone." He did, however, admit that a book project was discussed and later abandoned.

Meanwhile, as Scott battled with Kohn and Weir, Rolling Stone was not exactly suffering. The magazine enjoyed its richest publicity harvest since it sprang full-blown from the brow of Wenner in 1967, and an extra printing of 125,000 copies of the Hearst issue was selling fast.

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