by Alice Arlen
That month, June 1948, seemed to mark the low point in Adlai Stevenson’s quixotic bid for a mainstream political career; for on June 22, incumbent president Harry S. Truman, visiting Chicago to shore up his own election campaign, guest of honor at a well-publicized dinner for sixty “inner-circle” Democrats, pointedly arranged, or allowed, for reform candidate Stevenson to be left off the invitation list. As it happened this downdraft in Stevenson’s prospects coincided with an unexpected moment—both exhilarating and destabilizing for Patterson—when her Aunt Cissy, heaven knows for what complicated, private reasons of her own (though surely having to do with her ongoing feud with cousin Bertie McCormick), suddenly reappeared in her life, making her niece the focus of a sequence of seductive conversations and letters, impulsively promising to leave Alicia the ownership and running of the Washington Times-Herald in her will. Thus for a few odd weeks, while Stevenson’s campaign was showing signs of incipient collapse—with the candidate, publicly snubbed by the president of his own party, again gripped by pessimism and needfulness—his romantic partner and chief cheerleader seemed to have confidence to spare, doubtless much of it stemming from her natural gumption when it came to people and causes she believed in, though probably some of it just then colored by dreams of grandeur, to say nothing of fantasies of marital emancipation, put into her head by Aunt Cissy’s blandishments.
By midsummer, however, both narratives were once more on different paths. First Stevenson’s campaign began to regain traction, with the voters if not the party bosses; this most unlikely of candidates, urbane, so un-Midwestern, a kind of rumpled gentleman-scholar speechifying to a state mostly filled with farmers. Then, with Stevenson drawing bigger and bigger crowds, as he eloquently distanced himself from “the mess in Washington,” on July 22, the ever-unpredictable Cissy Patterson died suddenly, supposedly in her sleep, though such was the messy, operatic nature of her life that the circumstances of her death were long considered by those who knew her as mysterious if not downright suspicious. In any event Alicia’s fantasies were also thereby put to rest, with the reading of Cissy’s will, a 1946 document bequeathing the Times-Herald to seven employees, with no mention of her niece. For the remainder of the campaign Patterson’s and Stevenson’s roles weren’t exactly reversed: Nonetheless their correspondence from that period shows Stevenson, whether knowingly or unknowingly, changing shape as it were, from self-doubting antihero (lovelorn suitor and reluctant campaigner) to a more familiar, political type: the overbusy, self-involved candidate, preoccupied with meetings, speeches, and of course “the schedule”; and on Patterson’s side, she begins to appear more and more as another familiar figure, the woman in the shadow of the important man. By July 24 he writes her impatiently: “I don’t see the problem, why are explanations necessary? Can’t you just fly here the afternoon of the 29th, stay the night, and head west in the morning?” On August 6 she apparently met him somewhere on the campaign trail outside Springfield, but the rendezvous seems not to have been a success, with Stevenson distracted and surrounded by campaign staff. Later he sent her a rueful, ironic note: “I didn’t like Saturday night either, but at least you were there and caught a little of the panorama of these great events.” In mid-August he wrote her again, at Josephine’s ranch in Dubois, Wyoming: “I don’t like the sad note of parting and misgiving in your letter. Of course our lives are complicated, but we must look forward gaily, happily, hopefully—with thirty years to come!” In early September: “Sometimes I’d like to throw the whole damn Gov thing out the window and catch a plane to you, dream in the purple twilight, sing in the mornings.” In October: “Darling, five speeches today, 200 miles of wild motoring. Why anybody should submit to this brutality I don’t understand. I was desolate to miss your call in Peoria, and then in Danville, but I think I did well in Danville.” And then from Springfield: “The crowds are getting bigger or am I losing my eyesight? You know, I could bite your ears off, and I will. I love you utterly. P.S. I’m really afraid I’m going to be elected.”
On November 6, 1948, in the national elections that returned President Truman to the White House, though by only a narrow margin, Adlai Ewing Stevenson was elected governor of Illinois, and by a vote of such landslide proportions that it propelled him from dark horse to the very front of his party. In her role as editor of a newspaper with growing national ambitions, Patterson went out to Chicago for election day, ending up at Stevenson headquarters on the night of his triumph; though such were the crowds, and such was his victory, that she couldn’t get close enough to congratulate him, and returned home the following morning, with the proverbial mixed feelings. Sometime on the same day, clearly no longer Hamlet, not quite Caesar, Stevenson sent her a message at Falaise: “I carried Illinois by 565,000 at least, probably more, 515,000 ahead of Truman. Never anything like it in history. Now, I’m really in trouble.” Then adding: “I know you were here, I think I saw you amid that fantastic frenzy. Don’t worry, there are years and years ahead of us.” There’s no question that Patterson was pleased at Stevenson’s win, seeing that she’d been behind him from the beginning, trying her best to keep him in the game despite his own ambivalence and occasional downright reluctance. But she was also a fast learner able to note the shift in wind, the change in temperature; much of her life she’d been in the shadow of self-preoccupied men, and while happy for Adlai in his new role as conquering hero, she was realist enough to parse the casual words “I think I saw you” and decide it was time, if not to be moving on, at least to keep moving; who knows, maybe a bit of both.
· 52 ·
WHERE SHE WENT WAS GERMANY, or West Germany as it was then known, much in the news on account of the Berlin airlift, the latest and most dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in what was only recently coming to be called the Cold War. Her trip was obviously not a last-minute affair, given the need for the many visas and military permits required for travel on a European continent still rubble strewn, impoverished, and filled with occupying troops of the victorious Allied powers. In fact she had signed on for it only a few weeks before, briskly informing Harry (who seemed to be spending more and more time at Cain Hoy, at his new stables) by one of those memos with which they increasingly communicated; Harry had also replied by memo, “Good luck,” and maybe something else of a similar bland, disconnected nature—who knew what he was really thinking, probably about horses. Even so, she had left any final decision about going to how Adlai’s election night played out; mightn’t he need her at his side in defeat, wouldn’t he want her close by in victory? As it turned out, not so much, neither.
Accordingly, on the afternoon of November 6, 1948, Patterson boarded the still stately Queen Elizabeth, largest and fastest of the prewar Cunard fleet (finally back in service after its wartime troopship duties) for the four-and-a-half-day run across the choppy, windblown North Atlantic; she was traveling light for a Cunard passenger, only one manageable suitcase. Apparently not traveling so light was her journalistic companion, Dorothy “Dolly” Schiff, the regal, tart-tongued publisher of the then relatively influential New York Post, who, as Alicia remembered, “changed her clothes four times a day in keeping with First Class trans-Atlantic tradition.”
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BRIEFLY DESCRIBED, the Berlin airlift was the hastily improvised response by American and British forces in West Germany to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s sudden decision to block all road and rail access to Berlin from the West, in effect to isolate West Berlin and its citizens from food and fuel supplies, something he could do because Berlin (then divided by postwar agreement into French, British, U.S., and Soviet zones) lay three hundred miles within Soviet-occupied East Germany. Stalin was essentially daring the United States and Britain to go to war in order to keep two million West Berliners, their recent enemies, supplied with food, medicine, and above all coal for the winter. It was estimated that a minimum of five thousand tons overall were needed per day; Stalin’s harsh gamble had been on the impossibil
ity of funneling such tonnage into West Berlin by air, given the lack of suitable transport aircraft, the primitive nature of both instrument flying and ground controls, and the predictably threatening and impenetrable European winter weather.
Against these odds the airlift’s planes and pilots, called into service on an emergency basis, had so far been holding their own: Two hundred C-54s were flown to the U.S. Air Force base at Wiesbaden, outside Frankfurt, from bases as far away as Hawaii; recently discharged air force pilots were ordered back into uniform; and a never-before-attempted experiment in massive airborne logistics was somehow set in motion, with workhorse, twin-propeller passenger aircraft, crammed with coal and foodstuffs, now flying at three-minute intervals along the narrow, three-hundred-mile-long air corridor through the Soviet zone, often buzzed and fired upon by Soviet fighter planes, before coming in, literally just above the rooftops of West Berlin, to land on the short, bumpy runway at Tempelhof Airport. By mid-November, however, the weather was becoming even more dangerous than the Soviet fighters (who seemed to be trying to intimidate rather than shoot down the airlift pilots); on a recent “Black Friday,” four C-54s had crashed, either from lightning, fog, or engine failure, with all their crews killed.
Patterson and Schiff had been running into bad weather themselves since leaving the ship at Cherbourg, from where they first took a brief working detour out to Normandy, whose little towns were still in ruins from the war, and whose rainswept beaches were still littered with abandoned barriers and machinery left over from D-day. Patterson, at least, was working, researching the first of eight articles she would eventually publish in Newsday; Dolly Schiff found roughing it in a no-star Normandy inn more of a challenge, but brightened up when they reached Paris. Three days later, the two women were out at Orly Airport, standing in a fog so thick that no planes were flying, or even visible on the runway; save one, a little C-47 with U.S. Air Force markings, from which a young air force captain was walking toward them. “Captain Blevins said the ceiling was down to 250 feet,” Alicia reported, “and that we should leave sooner than later. I asked him if he thought he could pull it off, since 250 feet means close to flying blind. ‘If we leave now,’ he said. And so we did.” What she didn’t mention in her piece was that the “we” no longer included Dolly Schiff (who in her memoir described Alicia as “the most fearless woman” she had known), who took a taxi back to Paris and the Ritz.
After five hours in the air with Capt. Blevins, Patterson arrived in Frankfurt, literally dropping out of a hole in the omnipresent fog to land at another closed-down airfield, where she was met by a one-man welcoming committee: Larry Rue, bluff, good-natured, wisecracking, an archetypal foreign correspondent of the old school, who had been assigned to shepherd two women VIPs through the various layers of Air Force bureaucracy and briefings. On seeing only one woman coming toward him out of the misty drizzle, he told Patterson he could see she was the “kind of gal who didn’t mind flying in the kind of weather when even the birds are walking.” For her part, Patterson recognized in Larry Rue a kindred spirit, a fellow rule breaker, and having little patience herself for official briefings and meet-and-greets, she prevailed on him to stick close and show her the real thing, life in the occupied zone, unfiltered by official public relations. Thus, instead of regimented tours and speeches from information officers, she and Larry Rue hung out for days together, drinking with other reporters at Frankfurt bars, playing poker with airlift pilots at the Wiesbaden airbase, walking the streets of the rubble-strewn city, with its haggard, hungry citizens, housewives doubling as prostitutes. The night before she was scheduled to ride an airlift aircraft into Berlin, the weather closed in once again, and two planes crashed and burned over at Gatow field in the British zone. She let Larry Rue drive her through the backstreets to a “seedy nightclub in what seemed like the catacombs of the ruined city…, where Dutch musicians were playing American jazz, you could buy a bottle of something like champagne for twelve cents American, and women danced together like they meant it.” She sent her mother a prewar postcard (a view of the Rhine) with a daughterly greeting, bought a card for Adlai but never got around to sending it.
When the weather finally lifted, she (with Larry Rue occupying the seat reserved for Dolly Schiff) took off from Wiesbaden on a C-54 laden with sacks of flour and coal, flying low over the gray countryside as they were handed off eastward from one control tower to another, the C-54’s pilot asking Alicia with her husky, female voice to radio in the plane’s position, thus getting a rise out of the air controllers. “Once in the Soviet zone,” she wrote, “everyone tightened up, no more joking, as we droned slowly eastward, a few thousand feet above Soviet airfields, soldiers clearly visible at the anti-aircraft gun batteries, dozens of fighter planes lined up beside the runways.” Eventually, they crossed without incident into West Berlin airspace, descending still lower, “low enough so that you could actually look into apartment rooms, see people in the windows waving,” until landing with a crunch on the steel-mesh airstrip at Tempelhof.
In Berlin once again Larry Rue got Patterson away from her air force minders, who wanted to keep her in the sterile safety of the U.S. official compound, “with its award-winning, Best in Europe, recreation center, as if one had come all this way to get an American-style chocolate milkshake.” Rue commandeered a car and took her on an eye-opening drive into areas of the city that few American visitors saw, a Berlin before “Berlin noir” became the name for a movie genre. “The face of the Berliner,” Alicia wrote, and was in fact one of the first to write, “is the most terrible part of Berlin, even more terrible than the ruins. It is a dead face and the eyes are dead eyes.” She wrote of groups of families camped out in abandoned mansions, of buildings without heat, of a city without light, since lacking coal there was not enough electricity for more than two hours each day. One afternoon, in one of those happenstances with which life abounds, she found herself standing in a part of the city that seemed dreamily familiar, almost surely one of those lovely, impressive, tree-lined streets where she had once walked as a child, clutching Poppa’s hand, back in October 1910: “The buildings might have withstood time, they were built beautifully, to last. But wars, dictators, the march of armies trump good architecture…today block after block of those once beautiful houses, built to last beyond the imperial Kaisers, remain like disemboweled honeycombs, like ghosts, one with only a single wall standing, on which six carved marble cherubs were still dancing, holding their garlands.”
Patterson didn’t think of herself as a writer; the simpler skills of a reporter were what she aspired to; nonetheless, her airlift pieces had range and eloquence as well as information. She spent no more than three days in the haunted strangeness of Berlin, then rode another air force C-54 back to Frankfurt, “squeezed in with forty sacks of coal,” and then home, to a more familiar though hard-to-manage planet. Months later, when she was back at Falaise, Larry Rue, then somewhere in North Africa, wrote her a long letter, many pages, single-spaced, fulsome and awkward as a schoolboy’s, recalling her “rare beauty,” “amazing pluck,” “all-out adorableness,” much else besides, concluding with the triste lament that he wished they had “been closer than a brush of fingertips at parting.” In due course she sent him copies of her Newsday pieces, with a friendly thank-you for his help, but she never knew whether he got them or not; he was someone who always moved around so much.
· 53 ·
THAT WINTER, 1948, when she got back to Long Island, and to her little office in freezing Hempstead, her desk and nearby floor littered with the spiral notebooks from which she was trying to winnow the resulting articles, she also found waiting for her a half dozen or so letters from the new governor of Illinois, some short, some longer, all handwritten on official stationery, and each pretty much a complaint of one sort or another. Mostly about her absence: “It’s been six ghastly weeks since you went away, leaving me here…what could be so fascinating in the ruins of the Third Reich?” Some about his new job: “Wha
t could I have been thinking of? This job is murder…a funereal mound of details, appointments, official appearances.” Some about his marriage: “Ellen of course is no help…hates it here, can’t say I blame her.” Patterson, however, was not in a mood to take up the relationship where she had left off, as a mere sounding board for Stevenson’s moods and needs. In her first reply, a mostly news-filled letter about her experiences overseas, with pointed casualness she dropped in the admission that she had “tried to fall in love” during her trip overseas. Stevenson wrote her back in immediate anguish: “I’ve read your letter again and again. Frankly, it makes me a little sick. Oh ye of little faith! ‘I tried to fall in love in Berlin.’ How can you think such things, let alone try to put them into action? I need understanding and encouragement but clearly have none.”
A few weeks later, in February 1949, she made a fence-mending expedition to snowbound Springfield, spending at least part of a weekend in the Governor’s Mansion itself, with apparently mixed results, owing to an all-too-predictable combination of factors. As governor, Stevenson’s time was even less his own, besides which he felt aggrieved, distracted, expecting Alicia to play the role of accommodating girlfriend, not asking too much of him, in bed and elsewhere. Patterson, for her part, had issues of her own, was taking risks all over the place, and doubtless was hoping for some heat as well as talk from her supposedly lovelorn suitor. When she returned to New York, she wrote him what was supposed to be a ground-clearing letter, saying that her idea of a love affair was more “committed” than his, that since they were “cut from different cloth” they should end their relationship. “I have never loved anyone before,” she wrote, “but now all I’ve known of love and genuine interest is kaput.”