Her own depression notwithstanding, Marguerite Cassini, now fifty-five, was not going to allow her sons’ occupational torpor to continue. Accordingly, she traveled to Washington, D.C., to call in a favor from Eleanor “Cissy” Medill Patterson, the Chicago newspaper heiress who herself, in a tour de force of early feminism, had used her fortune to purchase two Washington papers from William Randolph Hearst; merge them into one, The Washington Times-Herald; and run it by herself. Cissy had a private railway car, gave legendary parties, and was a stunning and stylish redhead, but her main claim to fame now was that she was a working girl. Marguerite asked her to give Igor a job.
Cissy acceded, though she didn’t hold much hope for the tryout. But Igor seized the opportunity, for it may have been his last. He got his very first scoop by discovering that Vittorio Mussolini, the cineast son of the dictator who published his own movie magazine, was visiting Chevy Chase. He tracked him down, played his Italian royalty card—not revealing his press ties—and got him to open up. The result was a big article and Igor’s first byline: Igor Loiewski-Cassini. The editor couldn’t understand the L-word and dropped it. Igor Cassini was on his way, and he never looked back.
Igor started work in 1938. A year later, despite his byline, he was languishing on the obituaries desk. Despite all his and his mother’s contacts, there was no room at the top at Cissy Patterson’s paper, which had two established society columnists covering embassy parties and the like. The ever enterprising Igor thus decided to create his own niche: the young society column, the smart junior set, of which he, in his early twenties, was a member, cutting his swath though deb-land. Cissy gave him a shot, naming the column “Petit Point,” which locals derided as “petticoat.”
Aiding Igor was his new girlfriend, a sleek titian-tressed debutante from the Middleburg, Virginia, hunt country outside the capital. Austine “Bootsie” McDonnell, the daughter of a career army officer, was Igor’s opportunity to recapture the lost love of his first Virginia belle, Archer Coke. Bootsie was great-looking, popular, and a major source of gossip; plus, she could help Igor with his accented English. However, Bootsie’s various and sundry charms made her a prime object of local desire, and the competition for her hand was more than figuratively fierce. Igor’s fatal attraction to Southern beauties proved nearly that when, in June 1939, three of his local rivals for Bootsie lay in wait for Igor outside a country club dance, beat him senseless, stripped him, and covered him with heating oil used to pave the roads. Two of the boys were the sons of a woman about whom Igor had written sarcastically in his column.
The previously unknown little foreigner suddenly became front-page news all over the country. The press romanticized the attack as “tar and feathering,” the stuff Old Virginians did to damn Yankees, “foreigners,” and other objects of their xenophobia, and sprang to Igor’s defense, elevating him from petty gossip columnist to fearless crusading journalist. Among the celebrated fellow columnists who took up his cause were Walter Winchell and Maury Paul, who then reigned supreme as Hearst’s Cholly Knickerbocker. Paul’s encomium to young Cassini concluded, “Until you find a bomb every night in your car, until people wait in the street to beat you up, until you be chased from every club and are the fear of every hostess, you will not be a newspaperman.” For now, Igor seemed like the most intrepid newsman around.
The trial, which took place in Warrenton in November 1939, pitted the Old World against the Old South. The three defendant/assailants, two Montgomerys and a Calvert, great Virginia names, were portrayed by their lawyer, a state senator of the high-bombast school, as flowers of post-Confederate manhood, heirs to the noble Old Dominion traditions of Robert E. Lee, standing up for the honor of their family and their community against this uppity foreign “count” who was now a “chitchat” columnist.
The Virginia boys were accused of such un-Leeish, loutish behavior as looting Igor’s wallet when he was being tarred, as well as threatening to castrate him. Despite the senator’s summation that Igor had not been harmed physically, only humiliated, and that the boys “had done a public service to this community,” the three were convicted of “constituting a mob” and committing assault and fined several hundred dollars. More important, the national publicity the case generated had made the copy-boy into a star.
A few months after the verdict, the woman who wrote the social column “These Charming People” for the Times-Herald married the New York Times D.C. bureau chief and stepped down. Immediately, Cissy Patterson summoned Igor Cassini to step up. She gave him the column and raised his weekly salary from $30 to $100, and he proceeded to transform the column, as he said, from “saccharin to sarcasm,” oblivious to any risks of tar and feathers.
Igor’s big raise impelled him to take Bootsie McDonnell off a market whose competitiveness was demonstrated by the tar affair. This time Igor was up against far bigger sharks than the local gentry. Howard Hughes himself had invited Bootsie to Hollywood and offered to put her under contract. She had already won a bit part in a big Broadway musical, Two for the Show, where Hughes discovered her. Once he learned that she had eloped with Igor, in April 1940, Hughes just as quickly undiscovered her. He never picked up her contract, and Bootsie slunk back to Georgetown, where Igor had bought them a little love nest that realtors had described to him as a “Negro shack.” He had put down $1,500 against the $5,000 price. After World War II, he would sell it for six times that.
During the war, Igor hit his stride as the bête noire of the New Deal. At one 1942 holiday event given by high financier Bernard Baruch in honor of Roosevelt right hand Harry Hopkins, a major prophet of austerity, Igor regaled his readers with the buffet of foie gras, caviar, “truite en gelée,” and “homard en aspic” devoured by such guests as Hollywood’s Darryl Zanuck and Melvyn Douglas and told them the price tag of $3,000 for the event, or as he put it, “88,200 bullets.” That particular exposé infuriated the White House so much Igor believed his subsequent draft notice was an act of retaliation. He was quickly and mysteriously reclassified 1-A (cannon fodder) after having hypochondriac-ed his way to a 4-F deferment the year before by getting wasted beyond life itself the evening before his physical.
The war was initially déjà vu to the war-weary Cassini and his endlessly displaced family, the same old same old Euro game of nations (the genocide horrors hadn’t come out yet). He was all for isolation, all for partying, all for furthering his booming career. The “Uncle Sam Wants You” notice was particularly inopportune because, just before the Hopkins scoop, Igor had gotten the chance to make the career move of a lifetime.
It was fall 1942 in Manhattan when a beautiful woman accosted Igor on Fifth Avenue and introduced herself as Lorelle Hearst, the wife of William Randolph Hearst, Jr., son of Citizen Kane himself. Hearst Sr. was still the most powerful news mogul in America. Lorelle, a Dallas actress turned war correspondent thanks to her husband’s patronage, was a huge fan of Igor’s saucy style, so huge that they began a secret affair that weekend. Between the sheets, she suggested that Igor send some of his clippings to her father-in-law, Big Bill. Maury Paul, Cholly Knickerbocker, the king of gossip, had just died in July. Wags feigned surprise that this ruthless arbiter of society even had a heart to fail, and other, more cerebral outlets, such as Time magazine, predicted the concurrent death of both “society” and the frivolous social gossip column, in the context of the deadly seriousness of the war effort at hand. Lorelle Hearst knew better. Convinced there would always be a niche for gossip, she believed that no one writing was better equipped to fill it than her bed-mate Igor Cassini.
Lorelle got her man in more ways than one. Just before Igor reported for his induction physical, he got the nod from Hearst’s Journal-American: He was tapped to become the new Cholly Knickerbocker. They agreed to hold the post open for two years, presuming he would come back alive. If he did, he had a lot to live for. His salary would be $300 a week, plus another $100 for expenses. Cissy had seemed a high roller at $100. Now Igor was moving up to starland. Mau
ry Paul himself was earning $2,000 a week when he died, the highest of any reporter in the world. All Igor had to do was survive to be able to get to that heaven.
Igor did not tell Cissy Patterson of his job offer. What if the war dragged on and he didn’t get back in time? Fortunately, he had a perfect fallback in his wife. Inspired by Igor’s success, Bootsie had decided that she, too, would like to be a gossip columnist, an Elsa Maxwell with looks. Igor thus convinced Cissy to let Bootsie realize these journalistic ambitions by taking over “These Charming People” in his absence. Theoretically, Bootsie was unaware of Igor’s job-creating affair with Lorelle Hearst. However, she claimed she was so overwhelmed with her new job that she was unable to come to New York to meet her husband on his last weekend before being shipped overseas. Igor’s mother came instead. The countess was always there for him.
Igor went to Europe aboard the Mauretania, which had been converted into a cattle-car troop ship whose D-deck, where he was billeted, he compared to “slow death in the Lincoln Tunnel, worse than any battle I later had to cover.” That kind of hyperbole was what had won him the job as Cholly. After experiencing the buzz bombs of besieged London, he was sent to liberated Paris and found, as only Igor could find, a luxe apartment in the seizième arrondissement as his army digs. In Paris, in addition to a plum flat, he got a plum job, assigned to put his writerly skills to use on Warweek, the magazine component of Stars and Stripes, the official army newspaper.
Although he served with distinction and won several battle stars, the isolationist Igor still felt weird about being at war, fighting on the side of the Russian Communists who had ruined his family’s life, fighting against his Italian countrymen. Because of his European roots and anti-FDR politics, not to mention his curious draft reclassification, Igor suspected that Washington was somehow out to get him. That suspicion exploded into paranoia when, after the German surrender, he was reassigned to the Pacific theater, an extension of his tour of duty that would have cost him his Cholly future. Back in D.C. en route to Japan, Igor checked in to Walter Reed Army Medical Center complaining of “battle fatigue.” Its chief manifestation, Igor told the doctors, was impotence. The doctors bought the pitch, and Igor got his discharge and his new identity as Cholly.
Igor summarized his new target as what he called “the Spotlighted Creatures,” the prototype of which was none other than his brother. Oleg, growing more handsome and rakish as he aged, in the last five years had married, in succession, the gorgeous cough-syrup heiress Merry Fahrney, then the even more gorgeous movie star Gene Tierney. Oleg was now part of the Hollywood firmament, just as Igor was a key part of the Fifth Estate, a member of a gossipocracy led by Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan in New York, and Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons on the Cinema Coast. There, Oleg had had his own dustup with Hopper, who insinuated that he was a gigolo and called his mustache a symbol of his European immorality. Oleg sent her a famous telegram—“O.K., Hedda, you shave yours, I’ll shave mine”—which forever short-circuited her vitriol toward him.
Igor hit the press running. His Oleg-showbiz inside track notwithstanding, he began his Cholly life focusing on the Newport/Hamptons/Manhattan/Palm Beach corridor, playing to the New Yorkers who were his core readers by profiling the leading members of the Social Register. Time, his nemesis, was not on his side, catching out “Eager Igor” for basically cribbing verbatim all his material from a scholarly book, The Saga of American Society, as well as recycling such hackneyed Maury Paul column-isms as “Reno-vation” and “Longuyland.” Igor was impervious to any criticism. Seeing himself in print was the best revenge.
To be close to the action, Igor moved to New York, where Bootsie, who kept Igor’s old column in Washington, would visit him on weekends. Igor’s Manhattan circuit, aside from the endless charity balls, was a relatively tight one, controlled by great patrons. There were two restaurants, Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon and Gene Cavallero’s Colony, and two nightclubs, John Perona’s El Morocco and Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, the latter the pinnacle of pinnacles where Winchell, the capo di tutti capi of gossip, held court in the Cub Room. Despite their opposite political inclinations, Winchell left and Cassini right, Winchell had a soft spot for Igor, thinking him more of a court jester than a rival for his throne, and tolerated his presence in their fraternity of vipers.
With Bootsie away, Ghighi would play, finding that the power of his column was definitely an aphrodisiac, just as it had been to Lorelle Hearst. But turnabout was foul play when, in 1947, Bootsie left Igor for his new boss, William Randolph Hearst, Jr. Hearst forsook his unfaithful Lorelle for Bootsie, giving the latter the ultimate gift for a columnist: He syndicated her Washington column in dozens of Hearst newspapers. But Hearst never dreamed of firing his new wife’s ex. Igor was too good a Cholly to let go. Besides, there seemed to be no hard feelings. Love conquers all except circulation.
Igor salved whatever romantic wounds he had by remarrying the next year to Elizabeth Darrah Waters, a Grace Kelly–ish nineteen-year-old society girl from horsey Bedford, New York. In Time’s announcement of the nuptials, it continued to trash Igor, describing Darrah, who attended the Art Students League, as a “stately blonde” but her spouse as a “the squealy Hearst chitchatterer.” Again, Igor loved being in Time, then at the height of its Lucean prestige. Forget the “squealy,” he was Mighty Mouse. He even became friends with pompous Henry Luce’s viciously witty wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who was as right-wing as Igor and Cissy Patterson and cottoned to the columnist’s politics. Igor often wrote up journalism’s first couple, referring to them as “Arsenic and Old Luce.” Cholly gave as good as he got.
Before finding Darrah, Igor had flaunted his masculinity and soothed his ego—wounded from the loss of Bootsie—by stepping up his already formidable round of affairs, often with characters in his column. His weakness for Southern belles was augmented by an equal new weakness for big Swedes, who also tended to be carrying on with Cholly mainstays like Gianni Agnelli and Joe Kennedy. One such flame was Hjördis Genberg, a fashion model whom Igor first met at El Morocco on her honeymoon with a rich Stockholm industrialist. Honeymoons were no impediment to Igor, who invited her husband to play tennis in Palm Beach while making a big play for Hjördis off the court. They had a yearlong affair, during which Igor made the huge mistake of showing her off to his new best friend, Joe Kennedy. Old Joe exercised the droit du seigneur, having no compunction about acing Ghighi out and setting Hjördis up. But then Hjördis met David Niven. Neither Joe, having sold RKO decades before and with no Hollywood trump to play, nor Igor, whose column plugs were hardly the stuff of model dreams, was any match for movie star Niven, whom Hjördis married in 1948.
Igor had every reason to try to placate the ever powerful Joe Kennedy, sexually or otherwise, for in an early 1946 column, he had so offended the former SEC chairman and ambassador to Britain that Kennedy had called the boss of bosses, William Randolph Hearst himself, Senior not Junior, to get Igor fired. Cholly had reported that Joe’s daughter Kathleen or “Kick,” whose English husband, a marquess, had been killed in action during the war, was considering abandoning her Catholicism to marry a duke. Her late husband also was a Protestant, for whom Kick did not convert. But as Igor typically and cattily pointed out, a duke was higher than a marquess and worth switching for. Ironically, Kick used to work for Cissy Patterson alongside Igor as a society columnist for the Times-Herald. Neither the Igor-rumored conversion nor the marriage took place, but Kick did begin another romance with an earl (lower than a marquess), in which the only conversion that came up was Joe Kennedy’s desire to convert Igor to the ranks of the unemployed.
To save his skin and his job, Igor gathered up Bootsie (this was before their split) and made a pilgrimage to San Simeon to meet, knees trembling, with the eightysomething Hearst. The chief, as Hearst was known, didn’t break Igor’s kneecaps, as Igor had feared. Conversely, encouraged by his mistress Marion Davies, who had taken to Igor, the chief raised his columnist’s salary to $50
0 a week. And the next year, when Igor finally encountered Joe Kennedy on a Palm Beach golf course, Joe, all hail-fellow-well-met, never mentioned the column that had so enraged him. Joe’s son John had been elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, and Joe wanted him to get the best press that money could buy. Years later, Igor would recount Joe’s retort to comments how JFK barely squeaked by Nixon: “Did you expect me to pay for a landslide?” It was the beginning of a genuine friendship and a symbiosis with those who would soon become America’s royal family. Coincidentally, the same year Igor met Joe, 1947, Igor had discovered Joe’s future daughter-in-law, at age eighteen at a Newport debutante ball, at least a year before she would meet Jack Kennedy on a train from Washington to New York. Igor trumpeted his find:
This year, for the first time since our predecessor selected Brenda Frazier as the Queen of Glamour, we are ready to name the No. 1 Deb of the Year and the nine runners-up. Queen Deb of the Year is Jacqueline Bouvier, a regal debutante who has classic features and the daintiness of Dresden porcelain … Her family is strictly “Old Guard.”
Through Joe Kennedy, Igor soon met Kennedy’s new Palm Beach neighbors, the Charles B. Wrightsmans, who recently had purchased the oceanfront villa of Mona (Mrs. Harrison) Williams, once named the best-dressed woman in the world, courtesy of her public-utilities billionaire husband, who had such an eye for fashion that he’d had an affair with Coco Chanel, who dressed Mona. “I bought her taste,” Wrightsman candidly admitted to Igor.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 6