The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  In the wake of Stevenson’s defeat, Patterson, not surprised, though surely disappointed by it, had taken herself down to her hideaway in Kingsland, Georgia, there to stomp about the piney woods, maybe shoot a few quail, drive her speedboat upriver to inspect the cormorants and gators; which is where Harry Guggenheim finally reached her by telephone, after two days of leaving unreturned messages, early one November evening, around the dinner hour. Guggenheim was calling from his own decidedly more baronial establishment at Cain Hoy, roughly two hundred miles to the north, and while no record exists of who said what to whom in that exchange, a record probably wouldn’t much matter since Harry always made such a point, especially when angry, of never raising or even changing the inflection of his voice. In essence Harry’s brief message to Alicia, surely delivered in his famously, maddeningly toneless baritone was that he wished to see her and would send a little plane to bring her to Cain Hoy. Alicia’s equally brief response was that if he wished to see her badly enough, he should get in his little plane and fly down to Kingsland. Harry apparently agreed, whereupon Alicia hung up the phone, then picked it up again, called her assistant, Dottie Holdsworth, on Long Island, and begged her to hie herself down to Kingsland on the next flight.

  In the course of their marriage the Guggenheims had evolved an almost Kabuki-like choreography for their fights. Usually it was Harry who made the first move, advancing some complaint or criticism in his cold, civilized voice, which grew ever colder as it became clear that Alicia, far from volunteering to join him in his debating arena of choice, had chosen instead to toss combative, conversational hand grenades in his direction as a form of rebuttal. This seems to have been what more or less occurred in Patterson’s house by the St. Mary’s, with its faded chintz sofa, large brick fireplace (an Audubon print of wild turkeys hanging above it), with Alicia seated in her favorite armchair, one leg tucked beneath her, doubtless with an ashtray within reach, filled with half-smoked cigarettes, and a nearby tumbler of bourbon.

  On this occasion, as Dottie Holdsworth recalled, Harry’s maddening manly reasonableness came with a prepared script; she remembered him standing in front of the fireplace, reading aloud from a piece of paper, some kind of document, a list of grievances typed out earlier (perhaps by a secretary in Cain Hoy or New York, since Harry wasn’t fond of typing). As he read slowly from the list in his professorial monotone, Alicia, cast as the misbehaving student, seethed in her own kind of noisy silence, expelling puffs of smoke from her Marlboro; when he reached the issue of the Stevenson endorsement, or in his words, “your total betrayal, of both trust and policy” (about number three on his enumerated list of complaints), Patterson began growling, a low, rasping sound as Holdsworth remembered, gathering in volume; and then, as “Harry went on and on, berating her for this and that, disregarding his advice, spending too much money, but mostly about disrespect, disrespect from her, disrespect from the staff, ‘a continued campaign of disrespect by the people whose salaries I pay,’ she finally slammed her whiskey glass down on the metal tray, a loud bang, and said ‘All right, that’s it, I want a divorce!’ and probably much else since lost to recollection.” Dottie did, however, remember what Harry—now seated stiffly at the far end of the sofa—replied: “If you divorce me, you’ll lose Newsday.”

  Another feature of the Guggenheim battles was once described by the journalist Hal Burton, a frequent guest at Falaise: “Harry and Alicia could be so charming together, one of those dance teams that could do all the right steps with their eyes closed, when they wanted to…but sometimes it was hard to know what was coming next…it was like being on one of those beaches where, one moment, the water’s calm, the waves rippling quietly, then the next moment there’s this violent storm, thunder, lightning, the works, and then just as suddenly it’s over, the water’s calm again, the waves are back to rippling quietly.” This is what seemed to happen after the dramatics in Georgia; for a while all was calm again, the waves rippled quietly, life went on as if nothing had happened. Alicia joined Harry at Cain Hoy for a family Christmas, which included several of his grown children and went off without a hitch, with one of his daughters, Nancy Draper, later writing Patterson about how she “seemed so good and good-humored” with her often-difficult father.

  As the new year 1957 began, Harry had numerous irons in the fire to distract him, notably his efforts, as an important new member of the Jockey Club, to reform and revitalize New York horse racing; also his continuing challenges in trying to steer the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to completion. Patterson, too, had plenty to occupy herself with at Newsday, breaking in new editors, pushing back at New York papers trying to nudge into Long Island. But soon it became clear that this time, not far beneath the surface calm, the business-as-usual accommodations of the Guggenheim ménage, something different was going on.

  Harry was the first to take his grievances to a lawyer, and his choice of legal counsel, Leo Gottlieb, the formidable managing partner of the prestigious Cleary Gottlieb firm, was an indication that the Guggenheims’ problems had moved beyond the dimensions of a routine marital spat. It turned out that Harry’s typewritten list of grievances had not been set aside, forgotten about; on the contrary, with the assistance of Mr. Gottlieb, his original complaints had since expanded, were now more tightly argued and translated into impressive legalese, and on April 11 were hand-delivered to Patterson in the form of a nine-page “legal memorandum.” Guggenheim’s criticisms were along two main fault lines: first, Patterson’s persistent “lack of respect” for “HG’s numerous, significant contributions to the success of Newsday,” a disrespect that took such forms as, “refusing to acknowledge HG’s importance in the presence of the staff,” and went so far as “to cause HG’s name to be removed from the masthead…without consultation or agreement”; second, Patterson’s misuse of her own editorial power, as in “APG persistently allowing her personal desires, ambitions and friendships…to influence what should be impartial editorial positions…based on sound, objective judgment.” Patterson had guessed a brickbat was coming her way, and on the advice of a friend, Lester Markel, senior editor of the New York Times, had recently hired her own lawyer, Louis Loeb, general counsel for the Times. But as luck would have it, she was already on her way out of town, far out of town, due to leave on April 13, in two days, to join Adlai Stevenson and eleven others on an eight-week tour of Africa. She had time to send HG’s sour, oppressive document over to Louis Loeb’s office, get her travel vaccinations, malaria pills, figure out what to pack and not to pack, and head for the airport.

  · 69 ·

  IT MIGHT BE SAID that Patterson had been in on the start of these airborne “fact-finding missions,” as they came to be called, when twenty long years earlier, in 1935, she’d accompanied her father in Max Beaverbrook’s chartered de Havilland on a flying tour of prewar European capitals, cooling their heels in embassies, trying to chase down Fascist bigwigs. Since then, airplanes had grown bigger, faster, could fly across oceans; aerodromes were now airports; runways no longer strips of grass, with wind socks fluttering in the breeze, but ribbons of asphalt, with new radio-based traffic controls. Patterson too was in many ways an improved version of the not-quite-educated, scrappy daughter who’d tagged along with Poppa. By now she knew a thing or two herself, in fact quite a number of things of one sort or another, and if she wasn’t quite a dominant newspaper figure of the stature of Joe Patterson or Sir Max, she was certainly an editor and publisher of substance. She was also, for better and worse, no longer the youthful, sturdy, tomboy-like female who never minded the wear and tear of travel to difficult places, no longer automatically “the girl” of the trip, the pal and pet of grown men, whose eyes she could always assume were on her even when they pretended to be looking elsewhere. This time around she was an older woman, on her own, part of a larger group, with plenty of competition for the attentions of her once-and-former suitor, the all too distractable Stevenson.

  The traveling party assembled in Lisbon, Portuga
l, where Stevenson’s friend, Marietta Tree, her husband, Sir Ronald Tree, and her smart and good-looking sixteen-year-old daughter, Frances FitzGerald, were vacationing in a rented villa. Among the others were Stevenson’s law partner, William McCormick Blair, his glamorous wife, Deeda; an African expert and diamond merchant, Maurice Tempelsman; also Stevenson’s favorite traveling companion, his pretty, lively, twenty-four-year-old daughter-in-law, Nancy Stevenson. From there they flew south in a chartered DC-4 to Johannesburg, capital of South Africa, at the time firmly in the hands of the Afrikaaners, digging themselves ever deeper into the pit of apartheid. Patterson’s account of the trip (which she later published in six installments in Newsday) spoke of the grim prisonlike atmosphere in “J-burg,” where “the black majority is confined to servitude and life in impoverished shantytowns…while the white minority is also imprisoned, in decided more comfortable fashion…behind barbed wire, in heavily guarded communities.” On the other hand, thanks to Stevenson’s presence, the American visitors were made much of by the remaining British colonists, notably Sir Harry Oppenheimer, chairman of the powerful De Beers diamond cartel, who was extravagantly hospitable to Stevenson and his friends, hosting numerous lunches and dinners, flying them for a weekend to his private game reserve, then south to the famous and notorious Kimberley mine, with its elevator drops five thousand feet beneath the surface of the earth, which Patterson insisted on riding down with Nancy Stevenson.

  Smartly dressed for transatlantic air travel, Alicia about to board a TWA Constellation for Madrid, on her way to Africa.

  Next they flew north to Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), less visibly grim than Johannesburg, but with its own colonial disconnects: the smiling, white-uniformed face of British rule everywhere, Land Rover expeditions into more game parks and preserves, a fine polo match between two regiments of the British army, a banquet in honor of Governor Stevenson hosted by Governor General Sir Ian Smith, who toasted Stevenson as “an eloquent beacon of the rule of law,” who in turn replied, toasting Sir Ian as “a wise leader who is taking this great mixed-race nation as fast but no faster than wisdom dictates it should be taken to an eventual goal of self-rule.” Then north again in their noisy, droning DC-4, first putting down in Zanzibar on the coast; then inland, with lengthy stops in Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya, all British Crown Colonies, where more governors, high commissioners, also Anglican bishops, and endless colonial officials provided an unbroken sequence of luncheons, dinners, even a black-tie ball at Government House in Nairobi, with fox-trots and waltzes provided by an all-white British dance band flown down from Cairo. “If you stay close to the Colonial Circuit,” Patterson wrote later, “it’s easy to get the impression that Africa is populated mainly by whites who speak Oxbridge English, with a background chorus of black-skinned men and women, some of whom manage the heavy lifting in town, while others can be glimpsed out in the countryside, in the course of a carefully supervised excursion, crafting wooden statues and performing native dances.” In Kenya she wrote of her introduction, “at the hands of a well-spoken, boyish, British Army major…to several men in colorful caftans and little head caps…whom he described as lately imprisoned leaders of the Mau-Mau rebellion…who had just completed a program of ‘moral rehabilitation.’ ” In Uganda: “We were promised yesterday a meeting with three African political leaders…who showed up today, escorted by the Deputy Commissioner, each expressing gratitude to their British rulers, some of us thought in better English than employed by the Deputy Commissioner, since they had apparently been to a better English university.”

  Around the third week the group left behind the relative comforts of the chartered DC-4, and switched to ancient Chevrolets, as they continued west toward the Congo, bumping down a long unpaved road, past the Mountains of the Moon, then on even rougher roads as they made their way beneath the great tree canopies of the Ituri Rainforest. Along the way Patterson conscientiously scribbled notes about pygmy villages, more native dances, grazing elephants, a legendary French “white hunter,” in whose camp they spent the night, and whose “air of casual glamour,” as she wrote, “was somewhat offset by his having just shot himself in the foot.” By this stage of the journey Patterson was experiencing several challenges. First, she was feeling less and less well; not the usual intestinal complications of the tropics, but something unspecific, weakening, wearying, perhaps something she’d picked up, she told Nancy Stevenson, the day they’d ridden that steel-cage elevator a mile deep into the hot-cold darkness of the Kimberley mine. She was enough of a veteran traveler not to complain or look for special treatment, knowing none was available; on the contrary, as was her nature, she gamely pushed forward as if nothing was the matter, just a little tired she might say, all too aware that her younger female traveling companions were soldiering on each day—no matter the heat, insects, various discomforts—as if on holiday.

  Her other problem, more of an intermittent headwind, was surely not helped by being self-conscious about health, nor by inevitable feelings of competition brought on by daily proximity to younger women, no matter how much they may have genuinely liked and admired her. But as the trip grew longer (even though she was no stranger to long, grueling travel in difficult places), she found it harder to be the person she always liked to think she was: a good sport no matter where or what, a team player. In fact more and more she found herself at odds with the team leader, everybody’s beloved “Guv,” and while for the most part she kept her alienation to herself, offstage, nonverbal, her notebooks begin to show a barely hidden tone of criticism, a definite impatience at Stevenson’s sometimes all-too-facile balancing act, always trying to be a polite, responsive guest at the banquet tables of some of Africa’s more authoritarian colonial powers. Not that Patterson herself, in 1957, was in any vanguard of postcolonial thought, or that Stevenson, twice a presidential candidate, and while in Africa still in the public eye, had much room for maneuver. However, as she wrote in one of her notebooks: “It’s one thing to talk, with that eloquence which AES does so well, better than anyone, of the need for time in transitioning to native governance, which is obviously what our hosts so much want to hear…but do we really need to sound so agreeable, so easygoing about it, and with population ratios everywhere nearly ten-to-one in favor of the blacks…it’s hard to see where time is coming from.”

  They spent three steamy days in the Belgian Congo, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” mostly in Leopoldville, named after the late Belgian monarch famous for his hand-lopping policies, where Belgian missionaries showed off their school for native children (in one of whose classrooms, twenty or so school-uniformed young Congolese were being taught about Charlemagne), and later, where a brigade of beefy, beshorted Flemish paratroopers, with plenty of rifles and even a few howitzers for good measure, paraded in the stunning heat before Governor Stevenson and the colonial high command. Then across the famously water-hyacinth-clogged Congo River to French Equatorial Africa, and its capital, Brazzaville, where the colony’s tiny, fierce Gouverneur Général Léon Pétillon produced the finest banquet of the trip, two hundred guests, mostly European, barrels of Bélon oysters, fresh asperges, and a dance band this time flown in from Paris. As Patterson noted: “The Guv’s speech brought the house down, as expected, when he made his Father Knows Best remarks, the need to avoid chaos, not to be driven by artificial timetables…‘only you know what is best for Africa.’ ”

  While in “Brazza,” the travelers heard they had been given a much-anticipated go-ahead for a visit to Lambaréné; this being the site of the little jungle clinic on the Ogone River (four hours west, in the French colony of Gabon) where the saintly Dr. Albert Schweitzer had been ministering to the natives for close to fifty years. At the time Schweitzer enjoyed a huge, iconic, almost mystical reputation in the West as a selfless, wise, providential caregiver to Africans, a paragon of virtue as well as medicine, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Time’s “Man of the Year,” and so on. For many in the Stevenson grou
p a visit to the “great humanitarian” (as he was invariably referred to in the American press) was viewed as a highlight of the trip. The DC-4 landed downriver, on a dusty, grassy runway shared with grazing goats and scrawny cows (as young Frances FitzGerald noted in her journal), after which the travelers were driven in a couple of beaten-up trucks, plus a new Land Rover lately donated by an American philanthropist, to the doctor’s clinic.

  Once there, a couple of things became immediately evident to many in the group. First, it was indeed a little jungle clinic, nothing fancy or pretentious; a jumble of outbuildings, some of which were being used for medicine, others for chicken coops and other farmyard activities. Second, the level of medicine being practiced by the good doctor and his mostly native staff seemed astoundingly primitive; not picturesquely country-doctor primitive but often slovenly, unsanitary, in places downright filthy. Third, although Schweitzer went about in his grimy doctor’s smock, not the starched, gold-braided uniform of a colonial ruler, his attitude toward his black patients seemed painfully brusque, condescending, bordering on disdain. Patterson, along with most of her traveling companions, noticed right away the striking contrast between Lambaréné’s myth and reality, but once again Stevenson seemed to insist on seeing only what he wanted to see, trailing humbly after the great humanitarian as he made his rounds, clipboard in hand, kicking chickens out of the way in the operating room. On their last day at the clinic, Patterson finally lost it with the Guv, asking him furiously if he’d noticed anything—not only the farmyard rags all over the dispensary, the chickens in the operating room, the chicken shit all over the tables and floors, the way the saintly doctor literally pushed and shoved patients out of the way, cursing at them in German? As Patterson later remembered it, Stevenson smiled tolerantly at her, as if she were a wayward child, and then told her proudly of his “personal moment” with Schweitzer: how he and the good doctor had been deep in conversation about world peace, a subject needless to say dear to both men, when a tiny insect had landed on Stevenson’s jacket. At which point he had made, or rather had begun to make, a typical Westerner’s move to brush it off, flick it away—gnat, anopheles mosquito, what have you?—but Schweitzer had reached across and stayed his hand, remarking gravely, “All life is precious.” (Not surprisingly this same “All life is precious” insect-protection-routine of the great doctor’s turns up in numerous memoirs of Westerners in Lambaréné.) “How can you question such a man?” the Guv said to her.