by Alice Arlen
· 70 ·
PATTERSON LEFT THE TRIP one week early, in Ghana, pleading sickness, which was true; also true was her growing worry that, in her seven weeks’ absence from the office, Harry Guggenheim would have been unable to resist laying his heavy hand on Newsday. But the good news on her return was that Harry’s touch had been relatively light: though he had vetoed one proposal from Clurman to expand the paper’s business coverage (thinking the idea too specialized for suburban readers), in general he had left Hathway, Clurman, and Patterson’s other deputies free to do their jobs.
The bad news was that nothing much had changed in Harry’s opposition to his wife’s modus operandi, her approach to their supposedly shared business. The complaints raised in the “legal memorandum” were still on the table, had not magically disappeared while she was out of town, traveling in Africa with her friend Stevenson; in fact in some respects his antagonism had hardened. One week after her return, Patterson and Guggenheim had another sizable row, this time over another of Harry’s self-described constructive proposals: that they hire a polling and market research company, Gallup, Inc., to survey Newsday readers, by telephone or going house to house, in order to find out “in more exact, scientific fashion…what information…which stories, reports, features…our subscribers would want to read about in the newspaper.” When Patterson adamantly said no, Harry wrote plaintively to Gottlieb: “This is altogether typical of APG’s disrespect and ongoing refusal to accept businesslike proposals.” Patterson in turn scoffed and fumed in a letter to her lawyer, Louis Loeb: “HG describes himself as a newspaper publisher but clearly has no idea what an editor does…an editor is supposed to be out in front of the paper’s readers[,] not trailing behind studying poll numbers.”
As with many scuffles between husbands and wives, from a certain distance the Guggenheims’ conflict could easily be replayed as comedy. But for both of them, close up, it was often a sad and painful time, marked by sharp words and silences, by frigid meetings and heated exits (as when Patterson decamped for several weeks to the house of her friends Phyllis and Bennett Cerf of Random House), and by the shared cloud of defeat that is bound to overhang a couple communicating largely through lawyers. There were moments when a compromise appeared possible. In early October, Patterson agreed to support Harry’s “mission statement” for Newsday, and soon afterward restored his name to the masthead. But in the next breath, she gave Clurman the go-ahead to publish a political cartoon sharply making fun of President Eisenhower (for being outmaneuvered by the Soviet space program), which Harry considered both unfair and a personal insult, accusing her (via Gottlieb) of “undermining the effectiveness of the President,” and once again they were at a standoff.
Over the years, what had consistently rankled Patterson, stuck in her craw, was Harry’s dug-in-at-the-heels refusal to cede her full autonomy with Newsday—Harry the ruler of the vast Guggenheim empire; Newsday such a small piece of it to him, so huge, so everything, to her. But with time passing, with Harry’s need for control seeming only to grow stronger not weaker, Patterson could see that this problem was in some ways becoming worse; he not only seemed no closer to selling her his 2 percent, but in fact was pushing for greater control, for using his majority ownership to run the paper his way; his politics, his ideas, his Gallup polls. In early November she wrote Josephine she was “close to throwing in the towel.” Later in the month, she went down to Georgia, alone and sad, stomped around in the chill, damp beautiful woods, then typed out a draft letter of resignation from Newsday, to take effect on January 1, 1958. “Effective today,” she wrote, “I am resigning as editor & publisher of Newsday. It is the most painful announcement I have ever had to make, for Newsday has been my life’s work and I am immeasurably proud of it. But my decision has been painfully simple….We have prospered rather than suffered this far under the theory that journalistic independence and integrity precede purely business consideration….I have chosen to resign because I cannot be part of transforming a living newspaper put out by journalists into a balance-sheet controlled by businessmen.” She mailed a copy to Louis Loeb, then decided to stick around in Kingsland and wait for 1957 to run out.
A few days before the end of the year, however, she seems to have called her own bluff, phoning Louis Loeb in New York and asking if something couldn’t be worked out. Loeb promptly phoned Leo Gottlieb, who reached Harry Guggenheim in Cain Hoy. The solution that the various great minds came up with was surprisingly simple, brief, and almost anticlimactic after all the Sturm und Drang: a compromise, a peace treaty, not even put in writing or framed in legalese. In the end HG and APG ended their war on a strangely simple, two-part verbal agreement: first, that Harry Guggenheim might express his own views on the editorial page but only above his own signature; second, that at his death, his 2 percent majority would pass directly to Alicia Patterson. Not specified in the agreement, though by no means an afterthought (and generally regarded by all concerned as key to the solution), was the understanding that the young prince, Dick Clurman, would soon be gone from Newsday.
· 71 ·
PATTERSON TURNED FIFTY-TWO in 1958, in those days definitely middle-aged, more than middle-aged, certainly a far cry from today, when between sheer youth and senescence there appears to stretch an endless, mostly abstract zone of no age at all. In Patterson’s day a woman’s fifties was a time for “cutting back,” notably on “activities,” though in those balmy middle years of the American Century there were few fifty-two-year-old American women, at least in Patterson’s social strata, whose “activities” took them much beyond the bridge or canasta tables, or the country club, or shopping and the awkward, begirdled, high-heeled walking that went with it. As always, or whenever possible, Patterson marched herself to a different drummer. While growing up (granted, a lengthy process) as a child of privilege, she had known she was getting a free ride out there in the important world—the world of power, achievement, significance, that almost entirely male world—by hanging on to Poppa’s coattails. But over time, and with a little help from HG, she had made a place for herself in that world; she was now one of the very few women publishers, women newspaper editors, women chief executives—CEOs they soon would be called.
As such she took a growing pleasure in being “out there” in the big world, serving on boards, giving speeches, having her opinion sought and published. Equally she appeared to relish what was for her a fairly new activity: introspection, reflection, being alone with her thoughts. Increasingly she traveled south, disappearing into the riverine privacy of her woodsy acreage on the St. Mary’s, sometimes with the few friends who “got” the place, for instance George Abbott, the tall, lanky stage and film director with whom she liked to play her fiercely competitive, scramble-for-every-point brand of tennis, then shoot the breeze, drink whiskey as the sun went down. But mostly she went there on her own, happy to walk the woods for hours on end, with the company of Sunbeam, her golden Lab, trotting beside her through eye-filling stands of loblolly pine stretching in every direction; or out in the boat, usually late in the day, those flat pastel hours before sunset, humming upriver over the glassy coffee-colored water, past miles of mangrove, alligators sleeping on the banks, snakes and turtles in the shallows, keeping her sharp eyes alert for the cormorants, egrets, ospreys, blue and (ever-so-rare) white herons she loved to share the river with.
One of her friends described this period of her life as her Epictetus phase: Epictetus being the second-century Greek philosopher who evolved his own version of Stoicism, devotedly if selectively admired across the centuries by such as Marcus Aurelius, Voltaire, Matthew Arnold, J. D. Salinger. Patterson, a lifelong voracious reader (after all, expelled from boarding school at sixteen for having a forbidden copy of Anna Karenina), usually maintained a strong Pattersonian aversion to intellectual pretensions, as well as to being preached at or “improved”; nonetheless she had discovered Epictetus at the prompting of a professor friend, while sitting in at one of the early sessions of th
e Aspen Institute, and found as much to her surprise as anyone’s that the old Greek’s teachings spoke to her at a compelling level. As a result she now traveled everywhere with a volume of his Discourses near at hand, though after too many books lost or left behind en route, she eventually settled on a permanent copy she kept on the table beside her bed in Kingsland. But perhaps her attraction to Epictetus wasn’t really so unexpected; the ancient philosopher whose teachings advised against “complaining or making a public display of suffering,” who sternly described “grief and pity” as “acts of evil against the soul,” was really just another in a long line of voices she had been hearing since childhood, telling her to stop whining, toughen up, and get it together. At any event the little leather-bound volume of Epictetus’s Discourses remained with her the rest of her life, well thumbed, even underlined.
· 72 ·
AND THEN THERE WAS the trip to Russia, another Stevenson adventure. This was Russia aka the Soviet Union, still secretive, hostile, seemingly as dangerous in its post-Stalin period as before. Ostensibly Stevenson was going there for lawyerly reasons, his trip underwritten by a new client, William Benton of Encyclopaedia Britannica, with the quixotic purpose of negotiating copyright agreements with the chronically uncooperative Soviets. But the Guv was still the country’s most prominent Democrat, still a potential candidate for president two short years away in 1960; and the Cold War remained the nation’s leading political issue. What better way of showing presidential leadership mettle than by journeying to the den of the Russian bear, being photographed with their scowling, enigmatic leaders and peace-desiring citizens?
Patterson and Stevenson by then seem to have traveled a long road from lovers to friends, with various detours and stumbles along the way. If she had irritated him on the African trip, he didn’t seem to have noticed, and maybe he hadn’t. When he first told her about the Russian expedition, hoping she would come along, she quickly wrote to Bill Blair, who as usual was in charge of the details, promising “at all times to be modest, amiable and prompt…causing not the slightest difficulty to anyone” if invited, which she was. Since departure was scheduled for late summer, she brought along her seventeen-year-old niece, Alice Albright. Stevenson took two of his sons, Borden and John Fell. Others were Bill Blair; Ruth Field, the widow of Chicago Sun-Times publisher, Marshall Field, and her daughter Fiona; Richard Tucker, a RAND Corporation Soviet analyst, listed as translator.
For anyone with a sense of history, to say nothing of a nose for news, this was an inherently dramatic time to be visiting the Dark Continent of the Soviet empire. A new premier had lately been installed in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev, alternately bellicose and loosely populist, but still a cipher to the West, his every statement and gesture much debated by Sovietologists. Eight months before the Soviets had surprised everyone, not least the Eisenhower administration, by launching the world’s first space satellite, the famous Sputnik. There being no direct, or even indirect, airline flights between the United States and USSR, the Stevenson group flew to London, then Helsinki, then into Leningrad, where they were met at the airport by a cortege of Soviet officials and conveyed in tanklike ZIS limousines into the former czarist capital, which Patterson had last visited in 1938 with her father, in the depths of the Stalin era.
The scarcity of airline flights to the USSR was a logical result of the scarcity of tourists, which in turn was due to the almost-congenital Soviet hostility to visitors. It was pointedly difficult to obtain a visa to visit, and once there the government made normal tourism nearly impossible: no wandering around on one’s own, no random photography. Patterson had her own ostensible mission on the trip, to write a series of reports on “Life in the USSR,” to be published and syndicated by Newsday; accordingly she’d thought up a clever way around Soviet censorship, by giving her young niece a tiny camera for the express purpose of snapping under-the-radar pictures of, who knows, secret military stuff, prisons, new space satellites. True, the government minders were everywhere, in the guise of Intourist guides, hotel clerks, even the grim old female “concierges” on every hotel floor, who wrote down in ledgers, like Dickensian bookkeepers, who was arriving, leaving, which room, exactly when, and so on. Unsurprisingly these same minders kept the visiting Americans on rigid, well-defined sightseeing routes, day by day a wearying round of museums, public parks, public buildings in general, especially schools, given that Minister Stevenson was so interested in education.
After Leningrad the group was taken, in the shabby, dusty, almost pleasurable overnight sleeper, to Moscow, where they were installed in the grimy marble splendor of the old Hotel Metropol: the same “concierges” on all the floors, the same ledgers; downstairs, a huge, empty dining room with dim lighting, two waiters in frayed jackets, and impressive, old-fashioned menus, though with most of the items crossed out. In the morning the American visitors would be summoned to the lobby by a new set of identical dark-suited Intourist guides, and led like reluctant children (though too well-mannered to show their reluctance) on a new circuit of museums, more parks, of course more schools, also a puppet version of the Nutcracker ballet and a circus, as Patterson later described it, “with many many bears.”
Wherever Stevenson showed his face in Russia, his vigilant hosts made sure he was greeted as a visiting dignitary of great stature, the opposition presidential candidate who had campaigned in favor of fewer H-bombs and missiles, greater trust in the USSR, and as such was fawned and fussed over by layers of Soviet officialdom. Stevenson, for his part, tried to tread a careful path between being a responsive visitor, willing to listen to his hosts (in contrast to the belligerent, hectoring, nonlistening of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles), and appearing as yet another Democrat soft on Communism, his every public outing and statement closely witnessed by the sizable cadre of Moscow-based Western journalists and photographers, who clearly had nothing better to do. But even the Guv’s well-honed gifts for being a polite guest—sometimes no matter the circumstances or context (as in colonial Africa)—were put to the test by the clumsily primitive Soviet propaganda machine. For instance, on most every visit to schools, museums, innumerable “institutes,” Stevenson and his traveling companions would be greeted, on the sidewalk and in the street, by placard-waving throngs of obviously government-hired “welcoming citizens,” chanting slogans of peace and opposition to “U.S. warmongering.” After a while the normally mild-mannered Stevenson began ordering his driver to drive right through the crowds, scattering the “Greeting Committees,” with their identical placards and sullen singsong, as Patterson wrote, “in a decidedly illiberal Cossack manner.”
In her own responses to what she saw in the USSR, Patterson didn’t exactly switch roles with Stevenson, who as a presidential candidate, twice opposing Eisenhower, had argued for greater trust of the Soviet Union. Patterson never shared the Guv’s predilection for trusting the Soviets, for unilateral disarmament, for what she once described as a “too gentlemanly disposition to compromise when there were no other gentlemen in the room,” all of which struck her as dangerous. But in her growing disappointment with the conservative anti-Communist obsessions of the Eisenhower administration, she had developed her own aversion to what she saw as a mostly knee-jerk, anti-Soviet state of mind that seemed fast becoming conventional in the American mainstream.
Thus, in the five long articles on her Russian trip she published in Newsday, she took a forthright and for the time fairly original line on life in the Soviet state, describing, along with reports of shortages and Soviet obduracy, the many improvements she had noticed since her last visit in 1938. For instance: “The Iron Curtain was officially named in 1950, but it was never so heavy as in the grim years of Stalin’s long reign of terror….Today, consumer goods are scarce, shoppers have to line up for groceries…but gone too are the liquidations, purges, those many visible signs of overt brutality….It is only a visitor’s observation but I would say that pervasive fear has been gradually replaced by wariness, skepticism, d
istrust…which is an improvement.” She also went counter to the prevailing habit of belittling Soviet achievements by writing at length about recent Soviet advances in science and technology, as well as about expanding opportunities for women in the USSR. “In Russia,” she noted, “where medical care is universal, free, though still backward…an impressive sixty percent of the doctors are women,” adding tartly, “although when it comes to large numbers, America still remains statistically well ahead in…juvenile delinquency and high-school dropouts.”
As with the African tour, the Russian trip was long and grueling, covering enormous distances (fifteen thousand miles overall), many time zones, in primitively equipped, comfort-free Aeroflot aircraft, whose perverse schedules invariably required them to depart at one or two in the morning. Mindful of her last experience, Patterson made it a point not to show fatigue even when she felt it, to move briskly, to keep her shoulders back, to be the first one down in the lobby for the morning tour, the first one in the dining room at mealtime. All the same it was a tough slog, even for a student of Epictetus, with nonstop travel, dawn-to-dusk sightseeing; not made any easier by the fact that, in the third week, Stevenson and the other men were whisked away by Soviet officials, flown several thousand miles eastward for a special tour of exotic, seldom-visited Tashkent and Uzbekistan, remote, predominantly Muslim provinces, deemed too genderically sensitive for visitation by American females. As a poor consolation, Patterson, her niece Alice, Ruth Field and daughter Fiona were packed off to cool their heels (and warm their skins) in the Black Sea town of Sochi, one of the new “workers’ paradise” resorts, with its pebbly shoreline and beefy, white-skinned, sunbathing Russians, where the American women attempted to negotiate the challenges of nudist and seminudist beaches, with varying success.