by Alice Arlen
Three weeks later Stevenson tried to persuade Patterson to visit him in Illinois, closer to home, though preferably not in such close, familial quarters as her brother-in-law Ivan Albright’s studio. “Besides, I’m thinking that a long evening with Ivan is a bit hard when we have so little time, then sneaking off to the Ogden studio seems so brazenly conspicuous…also the mechanics of the rendezvous, all that business with the car or cars in the morning, etc. Instead, couldn’t we just drive out to my place in Libertyville, which would be deserted since the gardener and his wife will be away for the day. Or then again, if you’d rather, we could just go to the Ogden studio, keep Libertyville for another time, please think about it.”
Such dithering and fussing apparently cooled off Alicia’s travel plans; thus another letter from Springfield: “Do you want me half as much as I miss and want you? What happened to your plan to come out here for a rendezvous? I’ve been waiting expectantly, forlornly.” In mid-November she flew to Chicago, took a little plane to Springfield, and spent one night with him in the Governor’s Mansion, which later evoked a somewhat-mixed-signal letter from the governor, combining Stevensonian misspeak (“I wonder, are you back on the job at Newsweek?”), romantic effusion (“You were so sweet to me, so special, and I am still laughing and smiling”), with perhaps an unexpected dollop of antiromantic admonition (“Please don’t leave that strong scent behind, the place reeked the next morning, the maids must have been more than a little confused”) and the newfound caution of a politician with still-larger ambitions (“Frankly, I’m beginning to worry about how secure these letters are.”)
· 56 ·
IT’S HARD ENOUGH TO GUESS, let alone know, just where Patterson thought her romance with Stevenson was eventually going to take her. She wasn’t a woman with much natural temperament for long-term planning, someone who often factored “eventually” into her decisions, least of all those of the heart. Moreover, while the first phase of the relationship was definitely physical, sexual, it also seems clear from what remains of their long correspondence, mostly in the form of Stevenson’s “collected letters” at Princeton University Library, that even when their affair was most heated, its temperature was seldom that of a Grand Passion; Patterson’s friend, Dolly Schiff, in a memoir, cattily though doubtless accurately recalled Alicia telling her that “in the bedroom Adlai lacked urgency,” which is perhaps not the worst way of putting it.
Most likely, Patterson more or less stumbled into the affair, beginning with that first sexy, talky rencontre on the lawn at Libertyville, because it was there to be stumbled into, because she was no longer young and not yet old, because she was childless, because Harry Guggenheim, once rich and charming, was now only rich and distant, because her father was dead, and the war was over, and was that all there was going to be of life and love? Then Adlai himself, though in many ways an unlikely love object, was definitely appealing, a growing source of attraction to numerous women; mostly bald, somewhat pudgy, by no means a youngster, nonetheless he was a new type of man for the mid-twentieth century, brainy, humorous, warm, attentive, at least when the needs of his own ego permitted it; and while his own romantic impulses may have tilted more to words than actions, at least there were words, words aplenty, both written and spoken, in contrast to the manly, tight-lipped, lockjaw habits of the day. Sometimes he dithered too much, sometimes he didn’t seem to know what he was saying, as in his periodic, clumsy-puppy references to Patterson as “my half-man, half-woman”; but mostly one has the feeling, reading their letters, and between the lines in their letters, that he was a man who could make her feel womanly, certainly as womanly as she had felt in a long time.
At any rate, by midsummer 1950, given the challenging circumstances of their separate lives, she and Stevenson seemed to have what might be called a nice thing going; even to the point of having droll nicknames for each other: “Dear Rat” is how she often addresses him in her letters (which his secretary remembered him rushing off to read in the privacy of the governor’s bathroom in Springfield), to which he would fondly reply, “Dear Cockroach”—as in, “the rat and the cockroach will meet in the Ambassador East, July 28, to discuss matters of mutual interest to predators of all sizes and shapes.”
For the time being, in fact, the two sometime lovers, sometime pals, seemed to have found what might be called a working balance between their public and private lives. Patterson remained fully engaged with Newsday, her spirits revitalized by her special friendship with Stevenson, her marriage to the geographically and emotionally distant Harry Guggenheim seemingly one of those facts of life to be lived with, not especially gratifying and yet not worth the sizable problems that would inevitably come with trying to exit it. Stevenson, for his part, while no longer married, thus single and visibly available (“eligible,” as people said), seemed content to stick close to the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield, “learning the ropes as a novice Gov needs to do,” as he told Patterson, all the while keeping a circumspect social profile, with his sister, Buffie Ives, acting as hostess at official functions. When anyone raised the question of larger, presidential ambitions, as when a Newsday reporter asked him, during his earlier tour of the building, if he was considering throwing his obviously new hat (bought the day before with Patterson) into the ring, “the Governor laughed heartily and called the idea absurd.”
By then it was widely expected that hugely popular Dwight D. Eisenhower was going to run and prove unbeatable. Patterson herself had been an Eisenhower fan as far back as her 1946 Libertyville meeting with Stevenson, when she and Adlai had talked about General Ike as an almost ideal candidate; on her trip to Europe for the Berlin airlift, the only piece of clothing she’d bought overseas, and brought back with her, was an army-issue “Eisenhower” jacket.
Alicia as Company Wife, with Harry on the 1951 tour of Guggenheim copper mines in Chile.
What might be wrong with this picture, with this happy balancing act, with this more or less agreeable status quo? Of course, the immediate answer is that there’s no such thing in nature as a status quo; neither Patterson nor Stevenson were exactly stationary figures, either in their own lives or in relation to each other. While Stevenson repeatedly insisted, and with what was becoming his signature, eloquent humility, that he didn’t want to run for the presidency, had no larger ambitions than continuing to serve his constituents as governor, as it turned out, and as his posthumous papers make eminently clear, what he really meant was that he didn’t want to run for the presidency in 1952, against a war-hero general, although he had every intention of running in 1956. In other words, while Governor Stevenson, in lovelorn-suitor mode, might talk and write to Patterson of love and kisses and the hope of years together (and in some part of him might actually mean it), with each passing month, his alter ego, Adlai Stevenson, aspiring Democratic presidential candidate, though still largely under wraps, was making it ever less likely that such dreams might be delivered on. As for Patterson, her own command of the status quo was no better; no matter what temporary calm, ease, moments of accommodation might descend on the Guggenheim marriage, no matter how a commonsense, logical, businesslike view of Newsday’s provenance might suggest that Alicia’s glass, with a 49 percent ownership stake, was if not precisely half full, then full enough to warrant giving the issue a rest, this seemed to be the very thing she just couldn’t do. Thus, with Harry’s pride and self-regard still smarting from the dismissive, almost condescending way he’d been treated in Time’s piece on Newsday, with no contradiction from his wife, either in print or in private, Patterson seemed to double down on showing the world who really ran the show at their jointly owned paper. She not only signed on for a major profile about herself in the widely read, mass-circulation Saturday Evening Post, but invited the writer, veteran Post journalist Charles Wertenbaker, down to her place in Georgia, where for several days she charmed and dazzled him; with the predictable result that when the lengthy, vivid, entertaining Post profile (“The Case of the Hot-Tempered Publisher”) appeared, i
t was mostly a three-thousand-word rave on the subject of Alicia Patterson (accompanied by numerous glamorous photos of Alicia and her friends), barely mentioned Harry at all, and drove him to fury.
The Guggenheims had fought before, about all kinds of matters, but the heated arguments, as well as the cold hard feelings, especially on Harry Guggenheim’s part, provoked by the Post piece, seemed this time to reach a new level. For weeks that summer they battled over the ownership issue, that crucial 2 percent majority, which Harry now was less than ever of a mind to hand over to his wife, for all her angry insistence that she was doing all the work, that it was her paper in every important way but legal. One afternoon in late August, as her deputy Stan Peckham remembered it, she was in her office at Newsday finishing things up for the week; that evening, she was supposed to be giving a dinner party for some of Harry’s business associates at Falaise. Instead, telling no one (save Peckham) what she was doing or where she was going, she simply left, flew the coop, literally, in a series of planes, to the relative sanctuary of Josephine’s ranch in Dubois, Wyoming. From there, she wrote Stevenson that she’d left Harry, was willing to give up Newsday, and would be waiting there to hear from him.
National recognition for AP and Newsday; Harry was none too thrilled.
· 57 ·
JOSEPHINE AND IVAN ALBRIGHT’S RANCH was up in the Wind River valley of western Wyoming, eleven hundred high-country acres, at an elevation of 7,800 feet, wedged against the national forest: simple Western cabins, a dozen horses with a handsome, working barn, corrals, pastureland, cottonwoods, also much sagebrush and semidesert, with a little creek running down through the property, feeding into the trout-happy Wind River three miles below. Alicia had been visiting her younger sister in Wyoming since Josephine bought the ranch in 1946, just before she married Ivan Albright, and it had quickly become her second-favorite destination to escape to, after her place on the St. Mary’s in Georgia, which while appealingly remote and wild, grew oppressively hot and humid in summer. By contrast, western Wyoming, up in the Wind River Range, near the tiny horse-and-cow town of Dubois, was dry, dusty, blazing with sun and also wild. (It might be said that both sisters identified with their father’s affinity for the raw, rough-and-tumble extremes of nature.) At the Albrights’ Three Spear Ranch (the name referred to their cattle brand) Patterson had her own cabin (“Alicia’s cabin”) out in back, right up against the forest, facing a steep, narrow canyon, home to mountain lions, lynx, huge owls, and much else. She and Josephine were both light-handed, confident riders, skilled on Western terrain, and daily went for long rides together, wearing matching black Stetsons, across the dry, rolling hills above the ranch. She also kept a fly rod at the ranch, and when she tired of the tumult of Josephine’s four children she took herself down to the river and rarely came back without a catch.
And for all those weeks of bright, dry, high summer in the mountains, she waited to hear from Stevenson.
—
AS IT TURNED OUT, the first of the several disappointments that Adlai visited on Alicia that August was one she never knew about; for while at the time she was still the special object of Stevenson’s affections, she was no longer the only object. As his political star began rising, both in Illinois and the East, he soon became the willing recipient of attentions from politicians as well as many women, some of them no more than would-be party givers, campaign donors; others, such as Dorothy Fosdick, a well born political consultant, unmarried, in her thirties, who began visiting Stevenson in the Governor’s Mansion, showing up with him at events in place of Buffie Ives; also “close,” definitely on the inside track, was Jane Dick (wife of Edison Dick, an important Chicago businessman and Stevenson supporter), who seems to have moved into the role of leading, on-the-spot confidante to the ever-needful governor; in fact she was the person he immediately rushed to with Patterson’s letter, unexpectedly announcing her decision to leave Harry Guggenheim.
Dick seems to have been equal to the task. “The more I think about the letter from A the more I think you’ll have to be very wary and more forthright than is your natural wont,” she quickly replied to Stevenson. “I like her as a friend, I like her loyalty (to everyone but her husband!). I admire her incisive mind and her point of view about many things, but to say that she is temperamentally unstable, self-centered and demanding puts it very mildly. Qualities that may be interesting, amusing, even appealing in a friend are not those which work out in a more intimate relationship. Anyway, just remember: Beware and Be Firm!”
Granted that a Stevenson-Patterson union of any serious kind was almost surely a terrible idea, as likely as not to self-combust in moments, or certainly in months, given the egos and temperamental differences of the principals; granted, too, that Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, surely no lovelorn, star-crossed ingenue herself, could scarcely have picked a more unlikely rescuer, a man less prone to swift, life-changing decisions, to leaping tall buildings and all the rest of it, than the portly, meditative, preternaturally ambivalent Adlai Ewing Stevenson. All the same, with Patterson, his all-too-recent object of all manner of endearments, affections, protestations of eternal love, and the like, sitting out there on a figurative rock in Wyoming, day after day after day, waiting for a sign, Governor Stevenson’s painfully slow-in-arriving reply, itself a textbook mixture of faux astonishment, huffy-puffy concern, and classic male downshifting, came as severe disappointment. “Your message from Wyoming is much to my surprise,” he finally wrote her, in a letter that took ten days to get to Dubois, “and I am sorely distressed by the turn of events. I was under the impression that things were going better with you and Harry….I understand the Sat. Eve Post blowup was difficult but it sounded like a not too abnormal fit of jealousy on HG’s part. What I suggest is deliberation, moderation. Certainly to seek a divorce impetuously would be, I believe, a great mistake and should be your last resort.” And so on, and so on. “Remember,” he added, in case she might have forgotten, “you have your child to think about…Newsday.”
As it happened, the one person in Alicia’s life who stepped up to the mark just then was Harry Guggenheim. He didn’t know about the Stevenson romance, and he may well have been imperially clueless as to the extent of Alicia’s alienation. But he knew his wife had flown the coop, and he knew where she’d gone, and so when time passed and she didn’t return, he took a commercial flight to Denver, then chartered a little single-engine Cessna, flew north over the mountains, and up the Wind River valley until he found Dubois (pop: 650), and the alkali flats outside town that served as a landing strip. A cowboy who worked for Josephine, Georgie Conwell, and Josephine’s ten-year-old daughter (a coauthor of this narrative) were on hand to meet Mr. Guggenheim when he clambered out of the little plane, in an elegant summer suit and Panama hat, peering up into the blazing Wyoming sun. But Harry seemed in good humor from the flight, cheerfully unfazed by Conwell’s down-home greeting: “I never met a Jew before, but you look okay to me.” Up at the Albright ranch his runaway wife met him with the brisk suggestion that he unpack the fly rod he’d brought with him, get into some real clothes, and come down to the river with her and do some fishing, which he did. The Guggenheims stayed another two days at the ranch, both of them squeezed into “Alicia’s cabin,” and then flew back East together, back to the substantial and surely complicated coop she’d tried—though perhaps not all that hard—to fly away from.
· 58 ·
NOW, IF THIS BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE, about an actual person, were instead one of those novels that people rightly love to read, populated by characters who plausibly dot their i’s, reassuringly hit their marks, whose comings together (and flyings apart) are accompanied by satisfying, resonant, make-no-mistake-about-it chords, then this might be one of those moments, an inflection point where, for example, our heroine’s recent travails lead to a timely spurt of self-knowledge and shall we say personal growth, with the additional happy possibility that these two lives, husband and wife, that had been sadly, even pointlessly
diverging, will slide back together like tectonic plates, to a comfortable, earthquake-free resting place. In other words, how satisfying it would be to write that at this time Alicia Patterson and Harry Guggenheim returned together, from the clarity of blue, cloudless, Western skies, with restored intimacy, revived fondness, a renewed sense of shared purpose, four shoulders to the wheel. But this was, alas, real life, and Alicia P. and Harry G. by then were pretty much who and what they were; no worse than, but certainly no better than, their own, albeit remarkable, quite particular natures; which is probably why, on their return, as soon as they practicably could, each went off to his (or her) own office, back to her (and his) own bedroom.
Alicia Patterson had lived her life thus far (as so many did in those days) determinedly not admitting hurt, whether emotional or physical, either to herself or to anyone else. Sadness, loss, pain and so on—these were all grouped under the derisive catchphrase, “hurty feelings,” and were to be laughed away or not admitted to in the first instance. One upside to all this stoicism or denial or sadness aversion was that recovery from reverses often took place, or seemed to take place, with amazing rapidity. Didn’t Patterson grieve, a little or a lot, over her failed “elopement” with Stevenson? Wasn’t she sad or furious, or both, that he had responded so feebly, so minimally, had left her standing alone at the bus stop? Surely all of the above; and yet life moved on, new days began, there was always so much to do.
But there was also an obvious downside to this bravura tactic of getting on with it, of not boring other people with one’s problems. Ever since her long-ago “air cruise” expedition with Poppa to the Caribbean, with its problematic, physically demanding, fishing adventure on the Chagres dam, Patterson had been bothered by abdominal pains, which is to say she was sometimes made uncomfortable, sometimes severely stricken. For most of her life she had the temperament, or fierceness, to shake off pain, by an act of will it seems, especially these kinds of pain: female pain, a woman’s body’s pain—another sign of women’s weakness. But then there were the moments, more and more lately, and perhaps it was just a mark of age that she took them seriously at all, when she hurt enough to finally get herself to a doctor: in this case to kindly, avuncular Dr. Harold Meeker (once her father’s physician, one of the best) who had treated her years before, and who now, on her return from Wyoming, examined her the way doctors did in those days before scans and imaging; in other words with naked eye, with one hand in a rubber glove, and found nothing. Probably ulcers, he told her (and so noted in his file), and sent her off with a handwritten diet that advised against “ham, pork, bacon, raw fruit or vegetables,” instead recommending “chicken, lamb, beef (no more than twice a week), well-cooked vegetables and vanilla ice cream.”