The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  For almost twenty years, despite his notorious unpredictability, his surely many inconstancies, he had remained faithful in his fashion to Mary King, the very Roman Catholic mother of his now sixteen-year-old son, Jimmy, who he hoped would be accepted as a candidate for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Thus he needed to have Jimmy legitimized. He needed to be able to marry Mary King, but first of all he needed, finally, to have Alice Higinbotham agree to a divorce. The solution to these several imponderables, as it turned out, lay in the hands, and lawyerly tact, of Josephine Patterson’s new husband, Fred Reeve, a partner at the Tribune law firm in Chicago, who devised a seemingly equitable solution. All four Patterson children, Elinor, Alicia, Josephine, and Jimmy, would have equal shares in a trust, none of them would have more, none less. It goes without saying that these simple formulations were embedded in multiple pages of legal and financial stuff, with many references to something called “the Instrument,” otherwise known as the McCormick-Patterson Trust, formerly known as the Joseph Medill Trust. But in due course Alice Higinbotham Patterson signed all the pages where she was supposed to sign them, and Joseph Medill Patterson signed where he was supposed to sign; then Alice went off to Mexico to be divorced, and Patterson and Mary King at long last began to plan their wedding.

  —

  AS A CODA OF SORTS to Alice and Joe Patterson’s long, strange, tortuous marriage, so many more years apart than together, upon her return to Chicago from Mexico City, a newly divorced lady henceforth to be known as Mrs. A. H. Patterson, she read in her ex-husband’s Tribune what should have been an unsurprising announcement of his impending nuptials, with a list of expected guests, and promptly fired off a fiery starburst of a letter, and not just to anyone but to her most independent daughter, always her father’s favorite, his once-and-always pet, as she assumed, the still–Mrs. Joseph W. Brooks. “I am shocked and shaken,” wrote Alicia’s mother, “to read of your planned attendance at the June wedding festivities so brazenly announced in this morning’s paper. I find it hard to believe that you would wish to humiliate yourself, as well as me, by publicly sanctioning this disgraceful affair….It will certainly add nothing to your stature in your world or mine, besides placing you on record against me in a way that I am not likely to forget….Looking back on these difficult years, I cannot find that my demands on your loyalty have been frequent or heavy….But I am here and now putting you to the test by solemnly asking you, as I shall ask the other girls, to have nothing to do with this farce of a wedding. By your own decision I shall know where you are ranged, and what is your regard or lack of it, for me….All that now matters to me in this world is that my girls are sound and true and have ideals. If not, you may come home from the party and write my epitaph: La comédie est finie.”

  The message apparently was received. On July 2 three limousines drove up to the entrance of the Bronx County Courthouse, a nine-story, fortress-like edifice recently completed as part of the New Deal public works program, and disgorged the three more than middle-aged, surviving grandchildren of Joseph Medill: Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick, Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson, Joseph Medill Patterson, plus of course Mary King, and a small number of witnesses, all of whom, damp with the summer heat, trudged up the granite steps into the columned entrance, then up via elevators to the fourth floor, where in the splendiferous Art Deco courtroom of New York State Chief Justice Salvatore Cotillo, Patterson and his longtime companion were finally married. It was not the Roman Catholic wedding that Mary King might have wished for, since among Alice Patterson’s conditions for divorce was a stipulation that her ex-husband not be remarried in a ceremony that required a papal annulment of his previous marriage (thus delegitimizing her own children); though all the same, at last, a legal union. None of his three daughters was present, all being unavailable for various reasons. His newly legitimate son, Jimmy, was up in the Adirondacks, on the Ausable River, being taught to fly cast by his old friend, Joe Brooks. Yet another old friend, perhaps no longer quite as friendly as before those Daily News editorials, though apparently still friendly enough, took time to handwrite him a warm congratulatory letter on White House stationery, signed, “As ever, Franklin,” inviting him and his new wife to the cabinet dinner in the fall.

  · 33 ·

  SOME YEARS BEFORE, near the beginning of her marriage to Brooks, Alicia and Joe—probably in one of the little planes he used to rent or borrow—had been flying south from Hilton Head, past the Sea Islands, low above the inland waterway; just north of the Florida line she’d spotted what turned out to be the St. Mary’s River, with its brown-black water, wild, cypress- and mangrove-lined riverbanks, its shorebirds taking flight as they flew over, its look of wilderness and mystery. Sometime later, visiting friends in south Georgia, she’d driven back down to the area and entered a low, Depression-era bid for a parcel of empty land on the St. Mary’s, a dozen miles or so from the little town of Kingsland. In due course, after the sale closed, she put up, as she described it, a small house with a big fireplace, with a fine view of the river, and a great live oak out in front. Sometimes she and Brooks went down together to hunt quail and partridge in the woods, but mostly she was there alone; it was her retreat, her hideaway. During the many months that lapsed between her leaving Brooks and marrying Harry Guggenheim—almost a year’s time, in fact—what with Harry’s own uncontested divorce also having to make its way through the courts, what with Joe Brooks’s unmitigated heavy sadness at being left, what with her father’s fury at Guggenheim, what with the unpleasant melodrama of his remarriage, what with her mother’s everlasting hurt, her sister Josephine not speaking to her, and so on, and so on, Alicia tried hard to keep out of sight; hiding out in a manner of speaking, both in her little St. Mary’s place, as well as at Harry Guggenheim’s altogether different, immensely grand South Carolina plantation, Cain Hoy. At the time, there were many friends of hers, not only critical of Alicia for leaving Joe Brooks but more than a little puzzled at her selection of Guggenheim. There was the Guggenheim fortune, of course, though that had been off-limits to his other wives. In so many ways they seemed such an unlikely couple: he such a cool, austere, almost mandarin figure, even older than Brooks; she an erratic, rough-and-tumble Midwesterner, hot tempered, fond of impulse. All true enough, and inevitably fault lines would appear in what was never exactly a marriage made in heaven. But right then, while they waited for legal permission to wed, such differences between them only seemed to add fuel to an already sexually heated, very definitely mutual attraction. Then, too, there was Harry’s coolheaded—and to her immensely gratifying—appraisal of her ambitiousness and brains. She had “unusual intelligence,” he told her, and appeared to mean it. Nobody had ever told her that before. What’s more, he added, she was obviously capable of doing something on her own, something more than writing freelance journalism or comic-strip text, something substantial, something true to her background, for instance running a small newspaper on her own. As it turned out, just what she’d been thinking.

  · 34 ·

  IN MIDSUMMER 1939 the town of Roswell, New Mexico, was a quiet agricultural community in the southeastern part of the state, with a population of about twelve thousand, mostly farmers, sheep and cattle ranchers, and several hundred “lungers,” the name for tuberculosis patients from the East who were trying to recover in the dry air. A photograph from the period shows Roswell’s Main Street in the movie-set stillness of a placid, mildly prosperous, prewar American small town: dry-goods and drugstores, a cinema, two five-and-dime stores, and a line of Model A Fords and Studebakers parked diagonally against the sidewalk. Flat grassland, semidesert extended roughly seventy-five miles on all sides; hazily visible against the western horizon were the twelve-thousand-foot peaks of the Sacramento Mountains, the southernmost reach of the Rockies. The most substantial institution in the area was the New Mexico Military Institute, about twenty miles west of town. Farther west was the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation, home so to speak for the few hund
red survivors of the several Apache tribes that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had terrorized Mexicans, Spaniards, Americans, and one another. And three miles north of Roswell, at the end of a dirt road, was an unremarkable fifteen-acre property called the Mescalero Ranch, its ranch house a many-roomed, somewhat rundown adobe structure, surrounded by several outbuildings, sheds, and a slowly pumping artesian well, which was where Harry Guggenheim brought his new wife, now Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, on their honeymoon, soon after they were married by a justice of the peace in Jacksonville, Florida; the two of them flying west in a chartered plane to the little Roswell airport, where they were met by the owner of the Mescalero Ranch, Dr. Robert H. Goddard.

  Tall and thin, but with stooped shoulders that made him seem smaller, with a broad forehead, completely bald head and dark piercing eyes, Robert Hutchings Goddard had for the previous two decades been the most famous (and most elusive) scientist in America. More widely reported on than Thomas Edison, better known to the public than Albert Einstein, Goddard’s specialty was rockets; in the press he was known as “The Rocket Man,” sometimes “The Rocketeer.” As a boy, reading Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, he dreamed of sending a projectile to the moon or Mars. As a physics student at Clark University in Massachusetts he began a mathematical study of the possibilities of using rocket power “as a means of escaping the Earth’s attraction.” Then in 1919, as a junior physics instructor at Clark, he published a groundbreaking paper in the obscure Smithsonian Miscellany, essentially proving that a rocket carrying scientific instruments might be able to escape Earth’s gravity. The paper was dry, academic, mostly filled with calculations and equations, and would likely have never gained public notice save for its final paragraphs, in which, almost as an afterthought, he suggested that such a rocket, properly fired, might “reach an infinite distance,” and “conceivably make impact with the dark side of the Moon.” With those final conjectural paragraphs, Goddard’s life changed, for the better and the worse. On the one hand his mathematics and theories caught the attention of scientists and research institutes across the nation; on the other hand, his speculations about space travel and moon landings provoked both widespread coverage and ridicule in the press, with the result that actual funding grew hard to come by. Fortunately two of the more important figures in American aviation development soon came to his rescue. First, Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, aviation hero and advocate of “air power,” heard about Goddard’s difficulties pursuing his research, and brought the problem to the attention of his friend Harry Guggenheim; Guggenheim in turn agreed to have the Guggenheim Aeronautical Foundation become Goddard’s primary support, financing his research as well as his move to New Mexico where he could experiment with rockets, away from the public eye.

  Out at the Mescalero Ranch the newlyweds were treated with a mixture of deference and distractedness by Goddard when he was around; although for two days he remained mainly out of sight in one or another of the shacklike research buildings, from where the sounds of welding and hammering could be heard starting at sunup. Then, late one afternoon the banging and hammering stopped; at dawn the next day, with the air chill and the moon still high in the clear sky, Dr. Goddard and his crew, plus Harry and Alicia, also a young man just arrived with a cardboard box of high-altitude-measuring equipment, all of them now bumping along in a variety of vehicles, drove thirty miles north into the desert, with Dr. Goddard himself in his old Ford truck, hauling an eighteen-foot rocket strapped to a John Deere gurney. In due course, in the rising heat of midmorning, the rocket was unloaded, laboriously positioned upright in an obviously homemade wooden frame, repositioned again, repositioned several times more. Two car batteries were produced, wires strung between the rocket (which had “Nell” hand-lettered in black paint on its side, this being the name of Mrs. Goddard) and the batteries. At a technician’s direction, everybody stepped back about one hundred feet. Goddard began to turn dials on a gray metal box. Shortly a faint clicking sound could be heard from somewhere out front, perhaps from the box, perhaps from the rocket, a sequence of clicking sounds. And then, not right away but fairly soon, a loud roaring noise came from the direction of the rocket, then more noise, then flames and smoke, and the rocket began to rise slowly, beautifully, quite straight, but then not so straight, but then straight again, higher and higher. At about 2,250 feet (as was later calculated by the young man with the measuring equipment) the rocket began to yaw, just a little, then much more, finally veering sharply off course, smoke still pouring from its tail, flying more or less horizontally but then angling down toward the ground, which it slammed into a few miles away.

  This was the ninth test of Goddard’s L-series design, and as was the case with many of his tests, it was neither a success nor a total failure. There would be another test in a few days, and so Harry and Alicia decided to spend the waiting time camping in the mountains, fishing for rainbow in the Ruidosa River, which originated high in the Sacramento range, then dramatically plunged six thousand feet in about twenty miles. They returned to the Mescalero Ranch happy and grimy, in time for the next test, which fizzled completely. The problem was, Harry explained to Alicia, who liked to learn, and was thrilled to be so close to such exciting science, that Dr. Goddard, brilliant scientist though he was, kept needlessly complicating his designs, paying far too much attention to steering and balance, to gyroscopes and movable vanes, and far too little to altitude, to just getting the damned thing up there. Harry also spent a lot of time at a table in the ranch kitchen, poring over Goddard’s financial ledgers, expense vouchers, budgetary outlays, in a word: spreadsheets. As Alicia remembered it, she had never before seen a man read spreadsheets with an attention bordering on pleasure. Harry in fact was at his table inside, and she was outside having a smoke, when the messenger appeared who was going to change her life for a second time in less than a week, literally a messenger: a man from the Western Union office in Roswell, driving a beat-up car, with a telegram in his hand that he took into the house. The telegram was for Harry but he brought it out and handed it to Alicia. SUITABLE NEWSPAPER PROPERTY AVAILABLE, the telegram read. NEED RESPONSE SOONEST. It was signed MAX.

  NOTE: While the prewar U.S. military and scientific establishments remained unconvinced by, in fact scarcely interested in, Robert Goddard’s pioneering rocket launches in the New Mexico desert, Nazi Germany’s scientists paid closer attention, and incorporated much of his research, especially as to steering and balance, in their increasingly dangerous V-1 and V-2 rockets. A further irony: At the conclusion of World War II it was Harry Guggenheim’s Aeronautical Foundation that did much to help in bringing Nazi rocket expert Wernher von Braun to America, where his U.S.-made rockets in due course became the foundation for both our defense and space programs.

  · 35 ·

  THE “MAX” WHO SIGNED THE TELEGRAM was a noteworthy newspaper figure in his own right: Max Annenberg, one of the original Chicago Tribune tough-guy circulation warriors, who had come East to help Joe Patterson start the Daily News, and now, with a kind of emeritus standing, didn’t mind brooking Patterson’s disfavor by helping his little daughter scout newspaper properties. What he’d found was not so much a newspaper as a defunct auto-dealership, in the small Long Island town of Hempstead, in whose garage a little Newhouse shopping sheet had just ceased publication after only eight days in business: Samuel Newhouse, owner of an upstate chain of papers already burdened by labor strikes, apparently hadn’t thought the location worth the trouble, even though he’d already moved in some old presses.

  No sooner returned from the New Mexico desert to the Norman grandeur of Falaise than Harry and Alicia made the drive from Sands Point, away from the green lawns of the North Shore, out across the drab no-man’s-land of mid-Island, past car repair shops, billboards, sunbaked acres of potato fields, down Hempstead’s Main Street, with its sleepy small-town look, to the empty, plate-glass-windowed car dealership. What Harry noticed was the length of the drive: twenty-eight minutes, which h
e’d precisely timed with a stopwatch he’d brought along for the purpose; as he declared, a manageable commute. What Alicia noticed was that Harry, her about-to-be copublisher, didn’t seem to have registered that the two presses were not only old but weren’t at all suited to a tabloid format; that there was no space for a proper city room; that the setup seemed to limit them to a smaller-than-five-thousand print run, in other words one of those then-fashionable, cute little country weeklies she wouldn’t be caught dead publishing.

  According to reports, the Guggenheims had their first sizable fight that night, by no means Alicia’s first evening at Falaise but her first as the new wife, both of them seated together in evening clothes on the double divan, itself perfectly positioned on the incomparable Falaise veranda, looking out over Long Island Sound and the distant lights of Connecticut. Just finished was a superb dinner, prepared by Harry’s great French chef, appearing as if out of nowhere; in due course a silver tray of liqueurs passed by Harry’s butler of many years, Walter Moulton, or rather “Walter,” whom Alicia normally liked; this was followed by the ritual of Harry’s cigars: the proffered little cedar box of Cuban Upmanns, the process of selecting just the right one, then Walter, at his side again, to snip off the end of it with what seemed to be a gold-plated cigar snipper. Whenever Alicia felt threatened or anxious, she had a habit of tucking her knees underneath her, as if she were a cat considering her prey. “Tell me, Harry,” she remembered saying, or something like it, doubtless in the teasy, husky voice she often adopted at these moments, and then proceeded to inquire blandly as to whether Harry was harboring any thoughts, any thoughts at all, about a future role for her in the running of Falaise? Or perhaps instead she was supposed to be content as a sort of Daphne du Maurier heroine (Rebecca was a current bestseller), as the charmingly copeless and self-effacing wife of the lord of the manor, whom the staff might casually ignore as they chose?