by Alice Arlen
· 49 ·
A NOTE ABOUT Newsday and Long Island’s building boom: In hindsight it might look as if the great “population explosion” that spread like a tsunami over Long Island’s Nassau County after the war had an inevitability about it that only required the people and institutions already on the ground to sit back and ride the wave. But whereas postwar population growth might have been a good bet to make, almost a sure thing, the specific areas to benefit were not so obvious to predict. Back in the middle of the war, with victory still far away, Alicia had written a nervily prescient editorial: “During the postwar period, we will undoubtedly see a big increase in our population. Men coming home from the war to new wives and new babies will want to settle down in the country, so that their children may play on the grass instead of the pavements of New York.” In many ways, certainly viewed from today, this might be considered a normal, even plausible assumption. However, in May 1943, the date of the editorial, the economics and basic practices of the real estate market were quite different from what they became. As far as anyone knew, the war had only interrupted the Great Depression, when only the well-off lived in suburbs, when attractive land close by the city was expensive, and more significantly: Should you have land and wish to build on it, there were still the time-honored constraints of homebuilding, which is to say, houses were built of usually expensive materials, and always, as if by law, one at a time.
Alicia had missed or skipped college, depending on one’s point of view; perhaps because of this seeming lack of higher learning (as it was termed) or perhaps in spite of it, she liked to worry at matters she found interesting, poke around them, try to find a way in with improvisation, common sense, the wit God gave a flea, as she sometimes put it. Thus it was with her intuitive notion about the upcoming need for postwar housing, for new communities where young parents of what much later would be called “the baby boom” could hatch and rear those babies. As it happened, she sometimes played tennis with a Long Island neighbor, a man named Albert Wood, a semiretired architect, who before the war had designed some of the first mass-produced worker housing for the Ford Motor Company out in Michigan. Wood was proud of his designs, and happily told her about the even newer modular, concrete-block construction coming into use during the war; economic building techniques, he said, that might potentially be combined with New Deal federal housing programs already on the books, thereby bringing home-buying costs within the range of ordinary citizens. Armed with Al Wood’s insights and information, Alicia persuaded her reluctant managing editor, Alan Hathway, to assign one of the paper’s fledgling women reporters to put together an ambitious five-part series on the unglamorous subject of the postwar possibilities for affordable housing in Nassau County. On the surface hard-boiled, skeptical of his boss’s “do-gooding” projects and even ornery about following them up, Hathway was nonetheless a quick study, with an eye for opportunities great and small. He not only published Newsday’s anticipatory housing series (in September 1944, when the war finally seemed winnable), but was probably one of the few who read it attentively enough to be on the lookout for how to do something about it when the time came.
Thus evolved Newsday’s venturesome “collaboration” with the maverick homebuilder Bill Levitt: during the war a builder of barracks for the navy, after war’s end an ambitious and visionary prophet of affordable mass housing, an industry that didn’t really yet exist, an idea that still conjured up a vista of shacks, tenements, and the impecunious tenants who usually went with them. Levitt, however, was both salesman and a serious student of the new house-building technologies. His plan was to build simple, sturdy, wood-frame houses out of prefabricated modular components; then, with new techniques of pouring cement, fasten them to standardized cement-floor slabs, thus no basements but with all the new electric appliances. Moreover, he could build them by the hundreds, by the thousands; in theory the more houses he built the cheaper they would be to construct and purchase. The problem was, where to build them? Traditional communities were aghast; mass-produced housing seemed crass, lacking in the aesthetics of homeyness, almost un-American. Levitt found opposition nearly everywhere, from zoning boards, newspapers, all the usual guardians of value. Out in quiescent, semiverdant Nassau County, however, Patterson and Hathway saw in their own backyard both an appetite for new houses, as well as what might be called an oversupply of small farms and potato fields, few of them doing much better than breaking even in the postwar world of agribusiness. It seemed an easy call, having Newsday in its editorials support Levitt, who in turn would fill the underpopulated region with up-to-date affordable houses, not tenements, not apartment blocks, but individual homes, which would in turn attract families, all potential Newsday subscribers.
Patterson and Hathway pushed hard for Levitt; others pushed back just as hard against the interloper, with his newfangled ideas, wanting to bring crowds of new people from who knows where into places that had done quite well without them, thank you very much. The elite, culture-conscious New York papers, the Herald Tribune and Times, outdid themselves in decrying the threat of “urban sprawl” in Nassau County, an area presumably sanctified to potato fields and moribund communities. Newsday’s copublisher, Harry Guggenheim, also joined the opposition, at least in the privacy of Falaise, his tastebuds in recoil at the notion of dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands, of new houses, all in a row, all alike, his sense of authority repeatedly affronted by his scrappy, culturally insensitive wife, to say nothing of her appalling, insufficiently subordinate managing editor Hathway, whom he tried to persuade her to fire numerous times, without success. In the end, by June 1947, ground was being broken for Levitt’s first development, the first of his many Levittowns, which helped usher in a new era of homebuilding and home ownership across the country. Nassau County started filling up, coming alive. By 1949 Newsday’s circulation had reached 125,000, no small potatoes, and showed few signs of slowing.
· 50 ·
SOON AFTER SISTER JOSEPHINE married the artist Ivan Albright, in the summer of 1946, the Albrights moved into a larger house on Chicago’s Near North side, though they still kept the smaller apartment they had been renting on State Street—one floor in an old brownstone, which Ivan now used as his studio and which Alicia began to borrow for her romantic liaisons with Adlai Stevenson. Albright kept several easels plus various painting materials tumultuously deployed about the living room (where he was in the process of painting his Self-Portrait with Easel, now part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago), but this was the phase of Alicia and Adlai’s long relationship when they least had need of a living room, being more than content to spend afternoons in the bedroom at the back of the house.
This was a time when Stevenson seemed almost immobilized by both professional and marital indecision. True, Patterson herself was increasingly at odds with Harry Guggenheim, often fighting with him, sometimes noisily, sometimes silently, mostly over Newsday, although doubtless there were plenty of other bones of contention; also, according to various observers, for reasons never made explicit, he and she were in a period of being sexually “off” each other, to the extent of keeping separate bedrooms, certainly one reason she was happy to have a physical connection with someone she found as appealing as Adlai Stevenson. Even so, she was by no means at the point of flying the coop, leaving Newsday, Falaise, her marriage, perhaps all the more so given her paramour’s apparent lack of direction, traction, something solid at his base.
Not that he lacked for ideas, or ambition for that matter, which was surely one of his early attractions for Patterson, an ambitious woman who prized ambition in others. Back on her mother’s lawn in Libertyville, he’d spoken of wanting to break away from his stodgy lawyer’s job in Chicago, with no real financial rewards to speak of, above all little sense of larger purpose. At the time he had talked of partnering with a group of liberal Chicago businessmen to buy the struggling Chicago Daily News; then, as plans for the newspaper consortium foundered, he swi
tched aspirations, first toward a job in the State Department, which at least would return him to Washington, where he’d worked during the war; next, to Illinois politics, specifically to one of the state’s Senate seats coming up for contest in next year’s elections, perhaps a more visible way of getting back to Washington and the national stage. He’d made it clear to Patterson that he wanted a place in national politics, also that he was being blocked by two powerful forces: one being his wife, Ellen, a forceful and volatile woman, from a still-important Chicago family, who made no secret of her dislike for politics and unwillingness to return to Washington; the second being the Illinois Democratic Party, under the thumb of its chairman, Col. Jake Arvey, which was open to him as candidate for governor, a job he didn’t want, but opposed to him running for the Senate.
Stevenson and Patterson probably managed no more than two or three rendezvous in Albright’s studio during the fall of 1947, but corresponded frequently, with Stevenson unburdening himself as to career insecurities, marital guilt, all-around ambivalence, and with Patterson affectionately and commonsensically supplying the direction and confidence he seemed to expect her to provide. More than once she wrote him, “If you want to play an important role you have to make up your mind.” More than once he wrote her back, “Of course I know how right you are,” and then once again declared himself unable to make a decision. In November 1947 Jake Arvey renewed his call for Stevenson to run for governor, setting an end-of-the-year deadline for his acceptance, and took the unusual step of paying a personal call on Ellen Stevenson to gain her approval, which she gave with reluctance, finding the relative quiet of nearby Springfield, Illinois, slightly more palatable than the noise and wickedness of Washington. Stevenson passed all this along in letters to Alicia, accompanied with expressions of eternal love (“I dream of when we can be together always”), also paragraphs of reasons as to why he couldn’t possibly run for governor, or if he ran why he couldn’t win, or should he win, why he couldn’t conceivably spend six years in Springfield. In December, the week before Christmas, Alicia reappeared in Chicago, ostensibly to see her mother and Josephine’s family, though in the process managing a brief meeting with Stevenson. Make sure you go to see Arvey before the deadline, she told her waffling friend (who also wanted advice on Christmas presents for his children) before herself returning East. On December 30 Stevenson, bundled in overcoat and snow boots, made his way to Colonel Arvey’s office in the Loop and agreed to have his name entered as Democratic Party candidate for governor in the 1948 elections.
Alicia, sister Josephine, and Janet Hauck try to push their speedboat away from the bank of the St. Mary’s River, Georgia.
As a dark-horse reform candidate, Adlai Stevenson won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in March 1948, helped by voter backlash against an unpopular president, Harry Truman, and stories of “Washington corruption.” Then, before resuming his campaign in earnest he made a quick trip south, ostensibly to visit his sister, Buffie Ives, in North Carolina, but with a tacked-on three-day detour to the little airport in Jacksonville, Florida: There he was met by Patterson’s Georgia estate manager, Nub Colson, and driven north thirty miles, past piney woods and hand-lettered billboards advertising pecan pies and alligator exhibits, across the state line into Georgia; then another dozen miles deeper into the backwoods, past scrubland, scrawny trees, primitive shacks, and finally up a sandy, dirt road to Patterson’s riverside retreat: a one-story, soft-spoken, gray cypress main house, not too small, not too grand, with expressive shrimp-pink shutters looking out on the black, fast-flowing St. Mary’s River, a tennis court was hidden behind thick bamboo, a little boathouse at the river’s edge; in front of the house, along the riverbank, stretched a rough wide lawn, with three magnolia trees and a huge live oak, Spanish moss hanging from its branches.
Adlai Stevenson was an interesting man of his time, indeed more interesting than most, on the whole easier with women than with men, though even with the women he favored he could be variously and unpredictably charming or obtuse. In the course of their long friendship, he and Alicia were all too often out of step with each other, driving each other crazy. But over that long weekend, in the warm, moist air of southern Georgia, they appeared to have been truly close, in sync, simply happy together, as they all too rarely managed to be afterward. It probably helped that she was in a position and mood to be the strong one, reassuring, confident, seemingly invulnerable. And for her it doubtless added to a sense of the rightness of the moment that Stevenson was so tribally familiar, another Midwesterner, but not like all the others, the hardheaded, stuffy narrow-minded businessmen she wanted to leave behind when she came East so many years ago. Stevenson had a sense of humor, he had read the right books, he knew how to talk, he was both sexy and comfortable, unlike, for example, the cosmopolitan exotic she was married to, Harry Guggenheim.
She and Adlai took long walks together in the surrounding woods, went bird-watching (which she was good at), shot some quail (which she was even better at, certainly better than Stevenson, who was “loose” with his gun). One long afternoon she took out her speedy little Chris-Craft from the boathouse and drove him upriver, skimming over the surprisingly deep, mostly coffee-colored (from the tannic acid in the leaves) water; egrets and cormorants along the banks; also alligators and water moccasins; not a house or human in sight for endless miles. Later they sat together in front of the great brick fireplace, drinking corn liquor (made from a still on the premises), with ice from the icehouse in the woods, followed by a dinner of quail (feathers and buckshot removed) and pecan pie; and on the evidence of subsequent correspondence exchanged, swept along by the romantic conspiratorial haze of the moment, they seemed to have talked of a future that looked to be unfolding for both of them, she with her newspaper, he with his as-yet-indeterminate career in politics; a future admittedly full of problems but also possibilities.
On his return flight to Chicago, Stevenson wrote a letter to Patterson, already back at Falaise, full of the boyish enthusiasm of a not-altogether-worldly man, who clearly had not had such a good time in years, or ever: “I hope you don’t mind my happy idiocy…or the abandoned way I shed my shackles and float away half conscious, dreaming dreams and seeing visions, and like a wraith you’re always dancing in front of me, beckoning me on….How I enjoyed my little walk hand-in-hand down Tobacco Road. I can still see you, striding in that solid straight-legged way along the bank and through the pines….For the moment I’ll have to resist the awful temptation to sweep you up into a soft white ball, that magically unfolds into a sharp savage little tigress…at least until I’m very much alone, and the hour is late and the night is still.” And finally: “I hope you will come out to Libertyville this summer. I want you to know the boys, I want them to grow to love you like their father does. (Of course I also want you to know Ellen better). You can probably help me a lot in that direction, not that you are good but because you are wise.”
—
SOME WEEKS LATER a stream of letters began arriving at Falaise, postmarked from stops along the less-than-glamorous campaign trail of a little-known candidate crisscrossing the Illinois hinterland. From Urbana: “I wonder what the hell I’m doing and why, and then I think of you and that you think it’s good and worthwhile and wouldn’t love me if I didn’t make this effort.” From Champaign: “Surely there’s nothing we can’t do if we want to enough and are wise enough….Each night, all night I’m tormented by memories and moonlight. I’ll hope for a letter from you soon, an adolescent letter if you are still feeling adolescent.” And from Galesburg: “Just to say good night, my sweet. Tonight like all nights I miss you, and wonder what you are doing. How you look, what you are thinking. Sometimes this whole Gov business seems a bit of a dream to me, but I suppose it’s real enough and I should keep at it….Have I told you that I love you more than yesterday, though less than I will tomorrow.”
· 51 ·
IN EARLY JUNE 1948, Patterson returned to her mother’s old house in Libertyv
ille, not quite one year since her lawn-party meeting with Adlai Stevenson. This time the occasion was more muted, an end of something not a beginning: Alice Patterson in fact was giving away the family house, donating it to a Catholic convent as a way of escaping heavy postwar taxes. Alicia made the trip ostensibly to show support, also to choose some of her parents’ old English furniture for herself, but there were other compensations; after much fussing and back-and-forthing, Stevenson had arranged to take a weekend break from his campaign, and the two were able to spend some time together in his own conveniently empty house, ten minutes’ drive down the old county road from her mother’s. By Sunday night, when she was gone, on her way back East, and he was temporarily alone, seated on the little balcony outside his (and of course Ellen’s) bedroom, he wrote her another of his effusive, lovelorn letters; “My dear, I’m still dreaming of Saturday, when you were sitting right here, your back to the sunset, never more beautiful, your lovely hair piled high on your trim little head, pouring out your heart….This week I’ve been speaking to grandstands at county fairs and I wish, wish, wish this ordeal was finished and we could be together….When are you coming here again? Why do you always drive reason away?”