by Alice Arlen
Stevenson replied disconsolately: “Well, maybe we are cut from different cloth as you say. I’m not resentful, don’t worry about me. Work has been my refuge for many years. My only regret is, we couldn’t talk. I tried to start that first night, and the second, but that failed. You had drunk too much, although the hours were precious for talking wisely.” He added: “I’ll make no groveling effort to mend what you call this ‘kaput’ state. I’m not a whiner, just a fool and a little sick. Maybe we’ll just be friends.” One month later Patterson was back in the Midwest, ostensibly to see Josephine, though she and Stevenson managed another rendezvous in Ivan Albright’s new studio on Ogden Avenue. Once again there seems to have been something missing. “Dearest,” he wrote her afterward. “A charming night at the Albright studio, with an early morning walk in the first whisper of spring. So grateful for those hours, though I wish some things had been better—as always, I was too harassed and tired to make the most of it, and our time is inevitably so brief.”
—
OF COURSE all this was going on while she was married to Harry Guggenheim. What of that? What of him? One answer is that he didn’t seem to know of her affair with Stevenson. Even later, when Patterson and Stevenson saw much more of each other, though presumably by then without a romantic-sexual component, Guggenheim never seems to have thought it more than a friendship, a meeting of minds. On his side, more and more, he lived a largely separate life, compartmentalized, often in South Carolina with his horses, or downtown New York at the Guggenheim offices. In public they continued to appear as husband and wife, gave and attended dinner parties, theater parties; there’s a photo from this period showing Harry, Alicia, and another couple, George and Helen Backer, at the “21” Club after some play, everyone smiling, normal, so to speak, two happy couples. But as in the Cold War taking place in the wider world, which now and then produced social situations wherein Soviet and American diplomats might be seated together, polite, affable, even superficially friendly, the Guggenheims when not on show, more often than not in private, were stuck in a chilly standoff of their own. On Patterson’s part, from her papers, from the comments of friends and family, there is a record of overt disagreements, issues, largely regarding Newsday, some of which would continue for the rest of the marriage. From Guggenheim there remains a similar record, in the form of memos and legal correspondence. As any psychiatrist or psychologist would have pointed out, however, these were only external signs, disturbances on the surface; and needless to say, no psychiatrists or psychologists were asked for their opinions.
At this moment, with Patterson, as she saw it, getting nowhere in her private life, stuck in a marriage to an imperious, disapproving husband who had gone cold on her—and with no better luck trying to distract herself in a romance with another important man, who seemed to have plenty of his own commitment problems—she now received a much-needed boost in what was for her perhaps the even more important area of her public life: Time magazine came calling, as it were, with a prominent piece about Newsday in its “Press” department. (Here is possibly as good a place as any to remind today’s reader, accustomed to the variety, multiplicity, and splintered nature of current media, that in Patterson’s time, when the word “media” didn’t exist save in Latin dictionaries, newspapers were local, television news scarcely counted, and what took the place of a national stage were a handful of dominant, widely read magazines, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Newsweek, and most consequential of all, Time.) Breezily titled “Another Patterson,” the Time piece was uniformly positive, first describing the modest origins of Newsday (“In a dim converted old garage in Hempstead, Long Island”), then noting approvingly its rags-to-riches success: “A jagged circulation graph last week snaked off its chart and up a wall. Circulation of Miss Patterson’s chatty Newsday has rocketed past 100,000, a man-sized mark for any newspaper.” As for Patterson herself, the normally critical magazine had only praise for “Alicia of the publishing Pattersons, now forty-one and nervously energetic,” barely mentioning “her third husband Harry Guggenheim, the mining scion, who has invested 750,000 Guggenheim dollars,” before continuing for the better part of a full page, spelling out Alicia’s and Newsday’s achievements: “A journalistic jackpot…brightly edited…more ads than any competing afternoon paper in Manhattan.”
Not surprisingly the publication of the Time piece did little to lift the chill from the Guggenheim marriage, with Alicia so much the focus of its spotlight, and Harry (with his moneybags) relegated to a virtual footnote, a disparity she pretended not to notice and in any case considered essentially fair. Thrilled with her new signs of acceptance by the great world, she sent off a tearsheet of the Time article to Stevenson (should he have somehow missed it), along with a warm, fond note, in which she made the mistake of sharing with him the latest of her private fantasies: that of turning Newsday into her own publishing power base, something that might be eventually solidified and extended via Josephine’s children. Stevenson acknowledged the Time piece with his own brand of self-regarding approval: “Dear one, I marvel at you more and more. What a success you’ve made in the very field where I once dreamed of working….I wonder, can love and envy meet?” Then he chided her, or so it would seem, for letting him see her larger ambitions. “But why this Napoleonic tone, ‘I’ll found an empire?’ Why must Caesar forever gather laurels to be happy? Surely, the stuff of greatness is goodness not more conquests. You may think you want to be a hard little empire-builder, but as to me I love a gentle, wise compassionate woman, not a mighty, ruthless determined conqueror.” And then adding, with his customary ambivalence: “Or do I?”
Doubtless emboldened by the Time piece (surely read by everyone who mattered to her), she resumed her never really kaput affair with Stevenson, thereby continuing an energetically complicated life, as editor and copublisher of Newsday, as Harry Guggenheim’s wife, and when the opportunity presented, finding the time and place to meet with her harried epistolary lover, although more and more of those meetings had been turning into near-misses. For instance, in April, at the National Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, she and Stevenson had taken rooms at the same hotel, the Hay-Statler, but they scarcely saw each other, were never alone for more than an hour, with Stevenson on the phone for most it; much of the time he was both surrounded by staff and waiting for a summons to the White House and a private meeting with President Truman, who was briskly encouraging to the new governor, and whom Stevenson then infuriated with his talky unwillingness to declare himself an outright candidate for the presidential race in 1952.
In mid-July, Adlai and Alicia were both briefly in the same city, this time Chicago, but once again they somehow couldn’t manage a rendezvous, with her waiting at Josephine’s for a summons, with him always running late in his official duties, finally sending an aide with a note of apology that he was “unavoidably committed” to visiting a National Guard camp in Wisconsin. She sent word back, calling him “an egotistical stinker,” to which he replied, “If I was, forgive me. I do so love you, my wild bird.” No better luck awaited her, and them, in the matter of a proposed reunion out in Wyoming around Labor Day. She was scheduled to visit Josephine at her ranch near Dubois; he was planning a trip with his three sons to Jackson Hole. They had exchanged several letters on the subject, with Stevenson telling her he would get out there early, a few days before his boys’ arrival; accordingly she went early herself, not to Josephine’s but by prearrangement, so she thought, to a guest ranch near Jackson, where she waited in vain for him to show. Days later, back at Josephine’s, she got another apology, full of cheery fondness, saying he had “no gift for Rocky Mountain geography,” which she figured might almost be true.
· 54 ·
NOT THAT THE GUGGENHEIMS could never agree on anything. Theirs was a not-insubstantial ménage, after all, and much had to be agreed on, day by day, one way or another, the easy way or the hard way. Take Newsday’s move into its new building: a definitely substantial, t
hirty-thousand-square-foot, all-white rectilinear structure built largely of concrete blocks, situated roughly two miles from the original Hempstead car dealership showroom in the town of Garden City. The need for a larger building had existed pretty much from the beginning, or soon afterward, as new hiring and lack of office space quickly resulted in reporters and editors being pushed out of the newsroom and squeezed into the nearby composing room, elbow to elbow with the compositors and type trays. Patterson had long argued for something roomier, more like a real newspaper, but Harry Guggenheim was both mindful of the paper’s losses and less confident of its future than his wife, and argued just as forcefully against what he called “premature expansion” and construction costs. The “new building” thus remained for years a subject of abstract yearning and frustration on Alicia’s part, while with Harry it was one of the many aspects of “sound business principles” on which he felt impelled to hold the line. Both parties knew their own positions were flawed, that the opposing arguments had merit, but each spouse (or copublisher) was stubborn, liked to be right, hated to be wrong, thus the problem kept being pushed into the future.
What changed the situation was another casual conversation between Patterson and the architect Albert Wood, the man who during the war had clued her in on the new technology of affordable housing, which in turn had resulted in Newsday being an early responder to Long Island’s postwar building and population boom. In the intervening years Patterson and Wood became friends, at least tennis friends, with Wood one of the regulars who dropped by late Sunday mornings, in good weather, when the Guggenheims took to their court, not far from the water’s edge, above the seawall. (A sidebar note about tennis, a sport both Guggenheims enjoyed, at least in their own fashion: Harry of course had played since boyhood, schooled by the best instructors; indeed he had been good enough at college to earn a coveted “blue” at Cambridge, and played conscientiously ever since, even during the war at Mercer Field. Alicia had come later to the game, taking it up only after marriage to Joe Brooks, himself a star in college, and while never a natural on the court, she made up for her lack of style with plenty of unladylike hustle, and the determination never to lose a point she didn’t have to. In the romantic early days of her marriage to Guggenheim, they often played singles together, but she got tired of losing and he grew bored with winning; they then switched to doubles, at first on the same side of the net, husband and wife as partners, requiring teamwork and no muttering at each other, which proved challenging; then across the net from each other, husband and wife as opponents—though that was difficult too, sometimes dangerous.) Over time it became more or less understood that, while Mr. and Mrs. Guggenheim enjoyed a few sets of tennis on a Sunday morning, their preferred mode of play was neither side by side nor across the net from each other, but at different times and with other partners, or as now and then happened, at different times with the same partner. That was the case with easygoing Al Wood, not quite as good as Harry, a little better than Alicia, who enjoyed dropping by on a Sunday and playing with either one. It was after one such workout, he and Alicia sitting together at one of the courtside tables, that Wood mentioned that construction was nearly finished on the new office he was building for his architecture firm in nearby Port Washington: a new kind of concrete-block structure: simple, stylish, and surprisingly inexpensive.
She had him drive her there that afternoon for a look, and decided it was exactly what she wanted for Newsday. She went home and told Harry, who automatically vetoed the idea: Not necessary, bound to cost too much, Al Wood was a visionary, visionaries rarely paid attention to the bottom line. But Patterson persisted, though avoiding the spoken word, which usually led to arguments, frustration, and defeat. Instead she communicated with her self-described eminently rational husband entirely through memos, sent to him at his Wall Street office. Among other things, she reminded him that their current building had so little heat in winter that pressmen were forced to wear overcoats and hats indoors; that summer’s warmth required installing lawn sprinklers on the roof, resulting in leaks and little cooling. She sent him lengthy, single-spaced, cost estimates on the economics of concrete-block construction, on real estate values, heating oil consumption, newsprint trucking, and so on; sometimes she sent the same memos more than once. For a while Harry successfully defended his hold-the-line position with his own memos, austere and impenetrable. But then, as the paper started to cut its losses, in fact turned profitable, his tone shifted, becoming more conciliatory, less automatically negative, until one day a memo from 120 Broadway arrived at Patterson’s Newsday office suggesting that his copublisher begin looking around for a building site.
As it happened, she had already found one, with the assistance of the helpful Wood: ten acres just outside the nearby town of Garden City, right next to a railroad spur, which could be used for offloading rolls of newsprint. After a flurry of still more businesslike-sounding memos from Hempstead to 120 Broadway, Harry gave another qualified assent, provided half the ten-acre site could be sold right away to defray the cost of purchase. Patterson soon bought the ten acres, sold off five, submitted plans for the new building. But Harry grew cautious once again, fired off a Polonius-level memo on the perils of rushing; instead of constructing the new building all at once, which might in certain ways be sensible, even commonsensical, certainly convenient, but would require a sizable outlay up-front, even more Guggenheim cash to be advanced, on top of Guggenheim money already advanced, the majority owner proposed, or rather insisted, that the new Newsday building be constructed sequentially, piecemeal, in three stages, each stage to be financed from current operations.
And so it was. Patterson and her staff described the resulting, mostly cheerful, chaos as their Pony Express era: Since the first stage of construction included the pressroom, this meant that Newsday’s presses were now in Garden City, two miles from the main office, which was still in Hempstead; thus, the Hempstead staff first had to write and edit each day’s copy, set it in type, make a cardboard mat from the type tray, roll up the mat, place it in a special cylindrical container, and frantically drive with each container in the back of a beat-up, army-surplus jeep, two miles through the placid tree-lined streets of Garden City, in time to make the press-run deadline. This eccentric system persisted for eighteen months, and was only somewhat improved when the composing-room section of the new building was allowed to be built; by then all the so-called mechanical parts of the newspaper were in Garden City, but of course everything and everyone else—reporters, editors, and advertising people—were still in Hempstead. At last, three years later, the go-ahead for building the last stage, Newsday’s newsroom and editorial offices, was authorized by Mr. Guggenheim from 120 Broadway; which meant that Mrs. Guggenheim and her staff were finally once again under the same roof. Not surprisingly, when Newsday’s impressive modernist new Garden City building was officially opened on May 7, 1949, it was already running out of space.
· 55 ·
IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME that Alicia and Adlai’s hot-and-cold romance, affair, mutual entanglement, lately much on the cool side, began once again to warm up; one factor promoting greater rapprochement was Stevenson’s finally consummated divorce from Ellen, a bright, difficult woman with “mood problems,” who had grown increasingly unstable and vindictive toward her soon-to-be-ex-husband, among other things making unfounded charges of homosexuality that his political enemies would feed on for years; another was Governor Stevenson’s growing national prominence (as the Democratic Party’s new alternative to President Truman’s old-style “crony politics”), which now brought him East on a regular basis. “I do wish you wouldn’t write me such sharp imperious notes,” he wrote Patterson in October 1949, on his way to New York to give an important speech at the United Nations introducing the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. “I can’t get out of the Rockford bridge dedication here until 4 pm on Friday, then I must be in Conn. by noon Saturday, getting to NY on Sunday, maybe by early afternoon. Where w
ill you be? Where do I go from LaGuardia? Will you be able to meet me, and wouldn’t it be better on Long Island where we could spend some of Monday in the autumn sun?”
As it turned out, this potentially overcomplicated rendezvous turned into one of their more satisfactory reunions, combining moments of intimacy with a breezy, almost reckless disregard for appearances. Not only did Patterson take her friend, the governor of Illinois, on a public tour of the new Newsday building, but with Harry Guggenheim down at Cain Hoy, she invited Stevenson to spend the night at Falaise, the next day took him into New York in her car to the UN, where she sat in the gallery listening to his speech, after which she joined him at a big lunch in the UN dining room. “I enjoyed our Monday very specially,” he wrote her when he was back in Springfield. “Wasn’t it fun having lunch at the U.N. and all the rest? I thought we were more relaxed and natural. Also, I’m marveling over Newsday and what you’ve done there in just a few years. You’re certainly a remarkable young lady. How can you be so many things at once, lovely and feminine, brisk and businesslike—wise and strong and mine? I am praying that my visit to Falaise did not aggravate your situation in any way. By the way I took your suggestion and went to Brooks Brothers for a new homburg and if it looks like Hell it’s your fault—but now I’m dreaming of what we had, and of you my love.”