by Alice Arlen
With no letters arriving from Stevenson, Patterson broke the ice late in September, writing him that she was back with Harry, though “lying low, feeling under the weather, missing more days at work than I’d like to.” He wrote back quickly, first blithely congratulating her on the restoration of the domestic status quo: “I like to think your home life is now obviously more tranquil….Maybe Harry was secretly proud of the Saturday Evening Post piece after all.” Then he addressed her mostly implicit, certainly nonspecific, admission of ill health with the faux heartiness of a football coach, as if speaking to her from a distant planet: “What collapse? I want more and exact and honest details, and at once! What were you doing, working too hard? Why would you do that? You’ve been worried? Worried about what? And what’s this talk about dieting? Since when have you become one of these women who diet? Of course I’m full of sympathy if you’re feeling poorly, but—excuse me—there is no harm in learning to act one’s age, so maybe some good will come from all this. Anyway, feel better! I’m off to speak to 300 ‘Business Professionals’ at the Gettysburg battlefield, wish me victory.”
· 59 ·
TRY AS SHE MIGHT TO GET BETTER, forcing herself to eat cooked vegetables that bored her, and vanilla ice cream ditto, the next few months were a rocky period for Patterson, who stayed haplessly under the weather, feeling tired much of the time, a new experience for her, requiring a real effort to get herself to her Newsday office, then having to leave early. As usual, Harry was largely away, once for three weeks to Chile on mining business, otherwise down at Cain Hoy tending to horse matters; when he was home (although perhaps “home” wasn’t quite the word for it: he and Alicia moved in and out of various residences, sometimes finding themselves in the same one at the same time), in his good-natured though abstracted fashion he too would urge her to get better, feel better, get needed rest and so on, and even presented her with a new diet book that was all the rage, advocating red wine and plenty of red meat.
By the turn of the New Year, however, by January 1952, it looked as if she was on the mend, beginning to feel more like her old self. Dr. Meeker complimented her on her dietary discipline, the only known cure if only people would take it seriously, while Harry took much of the credit for her recovery, on account of the red wine, red meat diet book he’d given her, which she hadn’t read or certainly followed. With a return of energy, Patterson not only took back the reins of Newsday from Alan Hathway but also resumed a more active correspondence with Adlai Stevenson, who seemed to be approaching that year’s presidential race with his by-now-customary ambivalence, finding new rationales for not running wherever he looked. Thus: “Ike would of course be a very strong candidate, extremely strong, probably unbeatable….As for me, I honestly don’t want any part of that national business.” And: “I’ve been in a fiendish travail trying to decide what to do. Commonsense and duty tell me to stick in Springfield.” And: “Every day I hear a different line as to when Ike will declare, or even if he will declare….I feel I must keep out of this thing! Besides, politics is the way to the poorhouse and I have to think about earning some money.”
In early February, Stevenson called a press conference at the Governor’s Mansion to announce definitively that he was not then, and was not about to be, a candidate for president in 1952. But a few days later the columnist Marquis Childs reported that Governor Stevenson had recently held three secret meetings with President Truman, with the predictable result that Stevenson’s face was soon on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. Alicia wrote him that he should now “forthrightly put himself forward and declare,” and soon afterward published an editorial in Newsday, stating that “General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson are both great men. If the Republicans nominate Eisenhower and the Democrats choose Stevenson, either way it will be a blessing for the nation.” Two weeks later, at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Washington, President Truman surprised everyone with his announcement that he would not seek reelection, which caused Stevenson, a prominent and visible guest at the dinner, to put his head in his hands in theatrical dismay. “I’m desperately worried about my future, have no plans, need cash in the bank” he wrote Patterson afterward, “but I’m now more than ever convinced I should stay in the Illinois job….Besides, I don’t think I have the stamina for a national campaign.”
Patterson accepted her friend’s disavowals, resigned herself to the fact of his not running, and went off to Europe to seek an interview with General Eisenhower, then in charge of NATO in Paris. She was cooling her heels in Athens, at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, waiting for a summons from Eisenhower, when Stevenson reached her with still another message of indecision: “Of course, they may want to draft me, but how can I tell them that if the Republicans nominate Taft, then yes I’ll do it, but if it’s Ike then no. That would be a deadly thing to say politically, wouldn’t it? Please advise me, promptly, promptly—Shall I say no again and more decisively? Should I keep quiet? Shall I indicate that I would accept a genuine draft? Help me, my little bird, my Maid of Athens.”
Patterson wrote him back, advising Stevenson not to shut any doors, at least none too firmly, in the matter of the upcoming race, which was apparently what he wanted to hear. “Your advice makes me feel so much better,” he replied. “You’re sweet to me, wise and understanding. I still don’t want to run but I hate to say something that will make it sound as if I deprecate the office or the duty or whatever it is.” When her summons to NATO headquarters came through, she flew back to Paris for her interview with General Eisenhower, a busy man who spent a couple of hours with the lady editor from Long Island, and about whom she wrote in Newsday: “I came away most impressed with his honesty. Here is a man incapable of double-dealing….It is such a blessed relief to see someone above the slime of our present-day politics.”
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PATTERSON WENT TO BOTH national conventions in that summer of 1952, both held in Chicago, one after the other in sweltering July heat, both tumultuous, full-throated, in the old pretelevision mode, full of sweaty men, endless speeches, cardboard placards, bunting, straw hats, and cigars. The Republicans came first, on July 17, with their Midwestern true believers still wanly hoping for the anointing of virtuous, uncharismatic Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, though in the end glad enough to nominate the immensely popular General Ike. The Democrats assembled on July 24, with Chicago never hotter, the stench from the neighboring stockyards mingling with thick smoke from the lakeshore steel mills. Patterson, accompanied by a staff of three from Newsday, two reporters and a photographer, stayed with the rest of the press in the Blackstone Hotel, whose lobby and outside sidewalks were nearly always jammed with cheerful, chanting (“Madly for Adlai!”) Stevenson Volunteers, an expanding, mostly youthful cohort, which by now included academics, society women, and movie stars such as Lauren Bacall and Joanne Woodward. Governor Stevenson himself opened the convention with an address welcoming the delegates, who all rose to their feet the moment he appeared at the podium, cheering him noisily for close to ten minutes, so that he was forced to cut short his speech. He was nominated unanimously on the third ballot and—for a man who up to the last minute kept insisting he didn’t want the nomination—had a stirringly eloquent acceptance speech in his pocket. Patterson watched the triumphant proceedings from a folding chair in the press section in the back of the hall, but chose to skip the overcrowded reception afterward, at his friend and campaign manager William Blair’s house on Astor Street. Next morning she flew East, where two days later a semiplaintive note reached her from the new Democratic candidate: “Why didn’t you come to Bill’s house for the party? Where were you? I hoped so much for a final glimpse and word, but you were gone….Do you suppose I want this? I still refuse to believe my life is over.”
In the aftermath of both conventions, Patterson was occupied in gearing up Newsday’s political coverage, hoping that the paper with its wider circulation and heftier presence might begin to play a more serious journalistic role in the national campaign, also
in trying to resolve a more personal, though nonetheless political dilemma. Some months before, she had pledged her word to Harry Guggenheim that she would join him on Newsday’s editorial page in publicly endorsing General Eisenhower as the newspaper’s candidate for president; earlier, in Paris, she had also personally assured Eisenhower of her paper’s support in the important crossover demographic of eastern Long Island, and while General Ike sometimes gave the impression that he was above noticing or remembering such details, Patterson was fairly sure he both noticed and remembered. The fact was that, even after Stevenson’s nomination, she still favored Eisenhower for president, though mainly because she strongly believed that after twenty years of unbroken Democratic governance the country needed a change; a change in the ranks, a change at the top. As such, she wore an “I Like Ike” button to the office, authored and authorized pro-Eisenhower editorials. But increasingly her private preferences were shifting to Stevenson, so humane, eloquent, accessible; and while surely the governor was not bathed in as heroic an aura as the great war commander, she was coming to think that even the general’s bright glow had been diminished lately by his halfhearted and muddled responses to Republican witch-hunting.
Accordingly, as the end of summer unrolled, she made two personal political decisions. First she made plans to give a campaign-launching dinner for Governor Stevenson, a politician still not solidly known in the East, often brushed off as a regional, farm-state candidate; the dinner would be held at the impeccable River Club, with the guest list not limited to politicians and wealthy donors but also including that new social class of media people, prominent women as well as men. The second decision snuck up on her from the side so to speak. In mid-August a local weekly television show she was then appearing on as a panelist, Meet the Editors, began running into some of the anti-Communist, witch-hunt headwinds that just then were blowing hard across the country. One of the program’s other panelists, it turned out, an esteemed young editor named James Wechsler, had briefly joined a Communist youth organization while at college, although resigning soon afterward. As soon as this Communist taint became known, the program’s chief sponsor, a locally powerful supermarket chain, Grand Union, threatened to cancel the show and demanded Wechsler’s dismissal. Patterson requested airtime for a rebuttal, itself a spunky thing to do, given the frightened, hostile “Red Scare” temper of the times to say nothing of the fact that Grand Union was a substantial advertiser in Newsday. On the air herself, she vigorously argued against the “hasty, unexamined decision” of the censorious sponsors, describing their call for Wechsler’s dismissal as “a dreadful mistake,” thereby keeping the little program alive and setting at the time a much-admired and all-too-rare example of a publisher with something to lose, standing firm against witch-hunt hysteria.
September 21 was the date set for the Stevenson dinner at the River Club, a much anticipated event in that early autumn’s social schedule, certainly by Stevenson himself, who came to town with a growing entourage, already in full campaign mode yet not too busy with world affairs to try to fuss with dinner-party seating arrangements, how much time for the passing of cocktails, and whether hot or cold canapés, given the Indian summer heat. But Patterson by then more than knew how to handle such social theatrics, and what she didn’t know the River Club did. So far none of the eighty-some guests had declined, unless you counted Harry Guggenheim, who had begged off long ago, alleging pressing business in Cain Hoy, still unaware of his wife’s romantic liaison with the Illinois governor, but as a stout Republican not wishing to advance the interests of yet another talky liberal Democrat. The weather was fine, balmy, not too warm and not yet chill; everything was in readiness, the large but not too large wood-paneled dining-room, with its windows looking out on the East River, rarely more inviting, well-appointed, elegant. But Alicia Patterson now had a problem, a private difficulty. That morning in the bathroom she could see signs of bleeding, internal bleeding. She more or less willed the signs away, and for a while they seemed to disappear, but then later in the afternoon they were back, unmistakable. Even for someone who was not so closely keyed to her own body, she could tell something was wrong. But she had a dinner to give for Adlai, who needed it, who needed her to give it, to take care of him at least in this way, and so she did.
As dinners go, it was a noted dinner for its time: the big black cars turning off Fifty-Second Street into the River Club’s private courtyard; the splendid guests, rich men, heads of banks and department stores, smart powerful men from the Times and Herald Tribune, Time, the emerging television networks; smart, glamorous women, Babe Paley, Marietta Tree, Clare Luce. Stevenson was at his best, people said: eloquent in his formal remarks, personable and appealing as he made the rounds of the tables, for his hostess had cleverly left an empty chair at each table for him to drop by and visit. Patterson herself, in a grainy news photo of the evening, looked quite splendid, at least to the camera lens, in her new Mainbocher dress, those bright dark eyes, swept-back dark hair, that familiar, faintly quizzical expression on her face, whose unnatural paleness would have been hidden behind not a little makeup. Then, early next morning, without a word to anyone, she walked herself into Doctors Hospital.
· 60 ·
WHEN DOCTORS HOSPITAL originally opened its doors in 1929, it was the first of a new kind of hospital, designed specifically for the growing population of well-to-do New Yorkers who up to then were accustomed to receiving medical care at home or in small private clinics, away from the dangerously unsanitary conditions and minimal services of most hospitals for the general public. A fourteen-story, clean-lined, white brick building on fashionable East End Avenue at Eighty-Eighth Street (overlooking the mayor’s residence at Gracie Mansion and beyond that the East River), “Doctors” was known for its spacious private rooms (furnished and decorated at the level of a good hotel), its restaurant-grade kitchen and accommodating menus, and its staff of mostly Harvard-trained medical men, attended by a battalion of brisk, no-nonsense nurses, in turn supported by an army of virtual domestics who, in addition to the usual dirty work, unpacked the suitcases of patients as well as arranged meal tables with the linen cloths and silverware that patients sometimes brought with them.
Patterson, however, was in no shape to be thinking much about whether or not her room had a river view (it had) by the time she was admitted around ten in the morning; later than she intended, since despite a high fever, bleeding, and continued pain, she had insisted on personally handing to her private secretary, Dottie Holdsworth, first the key to a locked cabinet containing all her private correspondence from Stevenson and then a “last letter” she had written to him that night after the dinner, both to be hand-delivered to Stevenson in the event of her death. “When you read this,” the letter read, “I will be residing in spirit by the banks of the Black River. One day perhaps you will pass and I will turn into a breeze and kiss your nose. I’m enclosing the letters you wrote me. I think they are beautiful letters and I hope you will not destroy them. Perhaps you would consider turning them over to the Illinois Historical Society to be opened a hundred years hence when all your family have died. How wonderful it would have been if Lincoln had written Ann Rutledge and those letters had been preserved. With your sense of history please think it over. I love you so much, Alicia.”
Hospital records show that Mrs. Alicia P. Guggenheim, age forty-six, was admitted on September 22, 1952 (assigned room 1005), with a temperature of 104 degrees. The attending physician, Dr. William Rawls, noted: “Patient reports moderate to severe pain in left lower abdomen, also bleeding for 4–5 days. Patient complains when abdomen is palpitated by hand. Probable cause is inflammation of diverticulum.” But that was no more than a guess since doctors had no way of knowing what was going on inside a patient without opening them up. Well, actually, there was another way: a barium enema, which coated the insides with barium and thus could reveal anomalies on an X-ray plate. Doctor Rawls ordered a barium enema for the next day, which however didn’t work
, since “patient’s colon did not retain fluid.” He ordered another for the day after, which also didn’t work, presumably for the same reason, and called in Dr. Albert Aldridge.
Dr. Aldridge, a surgeon of some experience, first checked her earlier hospital records, then tried to talk to Patterson, whose fever was still at a high 102 degrees and was only intermittently communicative. Aldridge noted that, “In 1930 patient had an operation for an ectopic pregnancy and subsequently two more operations relating probably to tubular problems.” More significantly, he also noted that, “Eight years prior patient received an insertion of radium to relieve difficulties of menstruation on account of dysmenorrhea.” Aldridge prescribed heavy doses of a new antibiotic, Aureomycin, to lower her fever; two days later, on September 27, he performed a “diagnostic dilation and curettage.” In his notes he reported: “With great difficulty the cervical canal was dilated enough to curette the uterus, removing a large amount of soft necrotic tissue which had the typical appearance adenocarcinoma of the uterus corpus.”