The Press: Alicia in Wonderland

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The Chicago Tribune’s Robert Rutherford (“Bert”) McCormick called her “the ablest woman publisher this country has ever had.” She won the Pulitzer Prize for stories that sent a racketeering labor leader to jail and helped to force a Republican national committeeman’s resignation. She thinks the New York Times is the greatest paper in the world, but resents “trying to find a good murder buried on page 47.”

She is Alicia Patterson, 47, editor and publisher of Long Island’s tabloid Newsday (circ. 209,677), the fastest-growing and the most profitable big daily paper started in the U.S. in the last 20 years. A child of the famed Patterson-McCormick publishing dynasty, she is, nevertheless, cut from different cloth than her late, copper-haired, copper-tongued aunt, Cissy Patterson, who, as boss of the Washington Times-Herald, once confessed: “The trouble with me is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch.”

She practices the same brand of personal journalism that her irascible and admiring cousin Bert carries to an extreme, although she disagrees with him on almost every political issue. Most important of all, she has a touch of the journalistic genius of her late father, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, the nonconformist millionaire, who founded the New York Daily News, made it the biggest and one of the best-edited papers in the U.S., and became the father of tabloid journalism in America.

The New Journalism. In creating her own highly successful Newsday, Alicia Patterson has also created a new form of U.S. journalism. It is as perfectly in step with the new trend in American life—the flight to the suburbs—as tabloids were to the jazz-happy ’20s. When she launched Newsday on alligator-shaped Long Island in 1940, Publisher Patterson set out to violate every canon of sedate, well-mannered and deadly dull suburban journalism. Instead of loading her paper with name-dropping personal columns, handouts, accounts of tea parties and bake sales and local news that would offend no one, Newsday ran sprightly and irreverent stories, headlined everything from PROTECTED GAMBLING IN SUFFOLK COUNTY to SOCIALITE TOSSED INTO CELL.

The paper covered community news with all the curiosity, but none of the taboos, of small-town dailies. It also covered national and international news, but never let its readers forget what part their own neighbors were playing in it. The local angle was stretched to cover the world. When Andrei Vishinsky, who lived in Glen Cove with other members of the Russian U.N. delegation, left New York on the same ship with Long Island’s Episcopalian bishop, Newsday jauntily captioned its pictures: “Two Long Islanders Leave for Europe.”

Newsday looks like no other U.S. daily. It has only three columns instead of the usual five-column tabloid format, and the first and last pages have only two wide columns, usually filled with national and international news. (“We try to make it read as easily as a magazine.” says Alicia.) In between is a whopping filling of local news, features, comics, first-rate picture spreads, and page after page of solid advertisements. Its 68-to-128 page issues carry more advertising linage than any other New York daily. Long Island housewives must have it to shop, just as their husbands must read it for news and gossip of county government in their own backyard. To many Long Islanders it is almost as indispensable as their commutation tickets or their cars. Says Alicia: “We’re a big-city paper that just happens to be published in the suburbs.”

The New Long Island. The tradition-shattering Newsday is perfectly suited to the Alice-in-Wonderland change that has transformed Long Island since Newsday started. Rarely has the flight to suburbia been greater. A 120-mile-long island with an old tradition, where many descendants of the original settlers in 1636 still live on their pioneering ancestors’ farms, it once took pride largely in its fine potatoes, seafood, and the ducks it raised. Its North Shore was the rustic playground of America’s wealthy, e.g., the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Whitneys and Roosevelts, who lived in vast 40-50 room homes hidden on 500,-acre estates dotted with polo fields, stables and swimming pools. And to many an inhabitant of the sleepy hamlets, Manhattan was as far away as the moon—and visited about as often.

But with World War II, heavy taxes and housing shortages, Long Island was transformed. Many of the big estates were broken up, given away to charitable institutions, or sold for taxes. (The Russians picked up George Dupont Pratt’s manor house for about $120,000 for their U.S. staff.) Light manufacturing companies and airplane plants (e.g., Grumman and Republic spread over the potato fields and turned out plastics, electronic devices, and some of the world’s best warplanes.

Housing developments such as Levittown sprang up so fast that local census takers lost count. In the last five years alone, 4,000 new businesses have been started, 150,000 new houses built. Along the Atlantic Ocean shore, Jones Beach, probably the finest public beach in the world, became the bath club of millions of New Yorkers.

In Long Island Sound the great yachts gave way to swarms of small boats, clustering about famed Manhasset and Seawanhaka yacht clubs. In a desolate area of scrub pine in the middle of the island, the Government opened an atomic laboratory, Brookhaven.

The old still rubs shoulders with the new. At Southampton the great houses of Henry Ford II, National Steel’s Ernest Weir, Henry F. du Pont, line the dunes only four miles from a reservation for the Shinnecock Indians. And at night the lights of motorists sometimes flash on startled deer. But the wilds of Long Island are fast becoming citified. While 70,650 commute in and out of New York every day, the island no longer regards itself merely as Manhattan’s bedroom. Only one-third of the working inhabitants commute, v. about two-thirds before the war. Long Island is now a living room; the majority of its inhabitants work there, shop there and play there—and have cut their ties to New York, which Newsday once suggested should be turned into a “bird sanctuary.” Thus they look to a local paper for their news. They find it in their own big-city daily—Newsday.

Voice of the Drone. Alicia Patterson would never have started Newsday if she had listened to her father’s advice. In 1939. when she told him she wanted to start her own daily, he told her flatly that Long Island would “never take a tabloid.” But Captain Patterson reckoned without the independent ways and newspapering flair that he himself had instilled in his daughter. She was born and lived amidst a family turmoil and intellectual ferment that never subsided. In 1906, the year Alicia was born, her father, who had been working as a reporter on his family’s Chicago Tribune, announced that he was a drone and had been converted to socialism (“I have an income of between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. I produce nothing —am doing no work”). He had already decided that the Trib was no place for him, and for several years refused to work for the paper. On his 400-acre Libertyville (Ill.) estate, he affected shabbiness, wrote “proletarian” plays and socialist tracts. But he concentrated on raising his daughter Alicia in just the way he would have liked to raise the son he did not have.

When Alicia was four, he shipped her off to Berlin to live with a German family and learn their language. She learned it so well that when he went to retrieve her she could no longer speak English. For a governess she had a Christian Scientist, who taught Alicia to ignore pain. Alicia was started on tough, character-building exercises. She was forced to climb up to a 12-ft. diving board at the family swimming pool, stay there until she got up her nerve to dive off. Then her father made her dive over and over again, “to see what stuff she was made of.”

Keep Her Moving. Alicia rode the countryside in her pony cart, played such tomboy tricks as tossing rotten apples at passing cars and leaving dead cats on swank doorsteps. When her father sent her away to be educated, she was expelled from two of the world’s fanciest finishing schools: 1) Maryland’s St. Timothy’s, for “general obstreperousness” and reading after hours “unauthorized books” that her father had sent her; 2) Rome’s Miss Risser’s, for borrowing the headmistress’ car and chauffeur.

More proud than angry at this show of fiery family spirit, Captain Patterson kept her in Europe with her mother, younger sister Josephine and a tutor. Alicia slipped the leash, dressed up in her mother’s clothes to keep a date with a handsome young Italian. In despair her mother cabled Chicago, received a simple reply from Captain Joe: KEEP ALICIA MOVING.

In the following years she rarely moved any place without her father. Although Captain Patterson was busy editing the Trib and making plans for the News, he taught her to ride and shoot. “But the best thing about him,” says Alicia, “was his wonderful curiosity and interest. He taught me to see things and to be curious.” In place of college he loaded her with books, often asked her at dinner about Gibbon, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Thackeray. Instead of settling graciously into Chicago high society after her coming-out party in 1925, she followed him to New York City, where he had launched the tabloid Daily News six years earlier.

She took up flying with him, received her pilot’s license the same day he did. She got a job on his paper as a reporter. On one of her first assignments she was sent out to interview the wife of the “most henpecked man in New York,” was tossed down a flight of tenement stairs by a burly housewife who fitted the description. When she mixed up the names in a divorce case and the paper lost a libel suit, Alicia quit the paper. She joined the staff of Liberty (also owned by her family), changed her name to Agnes Homberg, went to work as a store detective, magazine salesman and cashier, so that she could gather material for articles on “How to Get a Job Without Experience.”

Her Father’s Choice. Though she worked at learning journalism, she disappointed her father; he did not think she had a real flair for newspapering. He gave her a job reviewing books at $50 a week. But her restless, roving curiosity kept her trying new things. She racked up a series of women’s flying records, went wild-boar hunting in India, fished for salmon in Norway, rode to hounds with some of the best English packs, tracked wild game in Indo-China. After every adventure she returned to her father’s side, where she could not help being fascinated by his curiosity and inspired by his energy.

Captain Patterson also decided when she should marry. With typical strong-mindedness he virtually picked her husband, James Simpson Jr., now a director of Chicago’s Marshall Field & Co. She agreed to stay married at least a year. When the year was up, she invited some friends to her home, but when the guests arrived a servant told them: “Mrs. Simpson has left.” Later, they found she had left for good.

In 1931 she married another man of her father’s choice, popular Joseph W. Brooks, flyer, All-America football player (Colgate, 1909-11) and a captain in World War I’s famed Rainbow Division. The marriage lasted only eight years, possibly, friends say, because even in its happiest days Alicia was still closer to her father than to her husband. Wherever he went—to visit Britain’s Lord Beaverbrook, to roam New York’s subways or to inspect the drought areas of the Southwest—she went along. Childless, and with little to occupy her but New York’s fast social life, she regularly did the rounds of raucous nightclubs and the more discreet Park Avenue and Long Island parties.

At several parties she met Harry Frank Guggenheim, former ambassador to Cuba, mining and minerals heir and head of two of his family’s multi-million-dollar foundations. Although her father had still not forgiven her for divorcing Brooks, and had no affection for Harry Guggenheim, she married him nonetheless in 1939. He found a remedy for his wife’s restlessness right away. “Everybody,” said Harry Guggenheim, “ought to have a job. People who make a business of pleasure are seldom happy.” A year after they were married, he set his words into action by putting up about $70,000 to start Newsday on Long Island, an area whose potential growth he had measured through an elaborate survey. “I’ve always had a passion to own a newspaper,” says Publisher Patterson gratefully. “Harry pushed me into it.”

No Comics. Her father refused to help her with the new paper. When she asked him for the right to use such famed News comic strips as Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie, he answered: “If you think you’re going to get our comic strips for use within our circulation area, you’re crazy.” In a drafty Hempstead garage she set up shop, using an old press and six Linotype machines bought for $50,000 from a defunct daily. As her first issue of 15,000 papers rolled off the press, a staffer came up to his ink-smeared boss and said that the paper looked “pretty good.” With a dissatisfaction that has always driven her to do better, Publisher Patterson answered: “I’m afraid it looks like hell.”

She began working round the clock to make it look better. Publisher Patterson felt sure that Long Islanders would take to her tabloid because they were, in the main, transplanted New Yorkers who had made her father’s paper the most successful daily in the U.S. Crimped by wartime newsprint shortages, she tossed out advertising so that she could use scarce newsprint to circulate more copies of her paper. Under Managing Editor Alan Hathway, 48, a balding former News staffer with a police reporter’s instincts, Newsday kept attracting new readers with breezy, irreverent, tabloid-style stories. “There’s just as much sin in a choir loft as in a nightclub,” says Hathway, “and we went out to find it.” Although Publisher Patterson never expected Newsday to climb above 30,000, within two years it had passed its only competitor, the Nassau daily Review-Star, which for 20 years had a virtual monopoly in the western part of Long Island. (Last year Newsday put the Review-Star out of business entirely.) Before Newsday turned into the black in 1947, it had taken about $750,000 of Harry Guggenheim’s money.

Editorial Crisscross. Newsday’s plain-spoken editorials are as lively as its news coverage. Although the paper has supported every Republican presidential candidate since 1944, it fights more than helps the solidly entrenched, autocratic local Republican machine. Republican Congressman W. Kingsland Macy was elected by a huge 49,388 margin in 1948. But after he had a falling-out with New York’s Governor Tom Dewey and Newsday went after him for his “dictatorship” and “boss rule,” he was defeated next term by a Democrat. (Macy railed against the “sneering, snarling sheet . . . the dregs of the newspaper profession.”)

On national and international affairs Newsday smashes every Patterson-McCormick political tradition. On the wall of her office Publisher Patterson keeps Walt Whitman’s advice: “Be radical! Be radical! Be not too damn radical!” and the paper follows the dictum. Newsday is as liberal and internationalist as the family’s Chicago Tribune is hidebound and isolationist. When the Chicago Tribune and Daily News said that 80% of the people in the U.S. were against getting into World War II, Newsday bellowed: “Figures don’t lie—but liars sometimes figure.” The paper’s editorials freely crisscross party lines. During the Truman Administration. Newsday attacked the Fair Deal as “too much government.” But it has blasted the Eisenhower Congress for “insufficient” social legislation and “restrictive” international trade policies. Although the paper complained that the U.S. did not fight “to win” in Korea, it has come out for recognition of Red China as a “political reality.” Newsday unalterably opposes Joe McCarthy. “I’m not a radical.” says Publisher Patterson. “I’m not a liberal. I’m me.”-

Biggest Adventure. Alicia lets very little interfere with her work on the paper. “Until she started Newsday,” says one of her closest friends. “Alicia was floundering from one adventure to the next. There’s no doubt now what’s the biggest adventure of her life.” She still rides (sometimes on one of three horses, named Newsboy, Copyboy, Alicia P.), shoots, plays tennis and chess (“I like to win”). But these take little of her time. Her real fun is her newspaper.

Every day, in her small office down the hall from the city room, she meets with Editorial Writer Mark Ethridge Jr., 30, son of the Louisville Courier-Journal’s publisher, plans the next day’s editorials and maps out the cartoons. No detail in the paper escapes her eye. Her face, which falls into a half-sullen mask in repose, lights up whenever she sees something in the paper that displeases or pleases her. But she is seldom satisfied for long. Barely two months after the paper won its Pulitzer Prize, she chewed out the staff in a memo pointing out that Newsday was “in danger of becoming big-shot—the most loathsome of all states of mind.” But Newsday’s top staffers have learned that there is more sound than fury in her occasional outbursts, are not afraid to get into rousing battles with her over issues on which they disagree.

One S.O.B. Her husband. Captain (U.S.N.R.) Harry Guggenheim, 64, still holds 51% of Newsday’s stock (Publisher Patterson holds the other 49%). By weekly visits to Newsday’s offices, he keeps tight control over the paper’s finances. “Every good organization,” says he. “has to have one s.o.b. At Newsday, that’s me.” In the early tug of war between Co-Owner Guggenheim, who wanted the paper to save money, and “Miss P.,” who, in the words of one staffer, “would spend every nickel if it meant getting a good story,” four general managers fled in haste or were fired. Explains one ex-general manager: “I couldn’t stand it. It was like being nibbled to death by ducks.”

Once, in the heat of battle between the co-owners, Alicia fixed her husband with a glare and challenged: “You have 51% of the stock. You can fire me any time you want.” But now Harry Guggenheim sticks to the balance sheets and lets his wife run the paper. Under her and Managing Editor Hathway, a young (average age: 28), 100-man editorial staff puts out four editions a day, sometimes pock-marked with sloppy writing. New staffers, often with little experience, are dropped into the hustling city room, where they are left to sink or swim. Publisher Patterson tries to make sure her editors know what she wants. Once when an excited editor, chafing under her prodding, angrily asked just what it was she did want in Newsday, she shouted out a half-serious tabloid for mula: “Dogs! Cats! Murders!”

Newsday staffers, who have voted against the Newspaper Guild, are paid at about the national Guild scale plus a bonus of close to 6% every year. “To prevent office politics.” all five of Newsday’s top executives (Managing Editor Hathway; Ad Manager Ernest Levy, 55; Business Manager Harold Ferguson, 47; Production Manager Allan Woods, 41; Circulation Manager Jack Mullen, 43) get the same salary. Since 85% of its circulation is home-delivered, Newsday has one of the largest forces of carrier boys (3,000) in the U.S. The paper paternally treats the most enterprising ones royally to new bikes, merit badges, T-shirts (emblazoned with the gold Pulitzer Prize emblem). On rainy days many a carrier in a well-heeled family enlists the aid of his mother, and as a result, Newsday is often delivered in station wagons and Cadillac convertibles. The paper sends some of the boys to summer camp, holds pep rallies where they chant such songs (to the tune of Stouthearted Men) as “Newsday is ever/The one whose endeavor/Will give you the best you can read …”

Another World. Outside her office Publisher Patterson shifts effortlessly to another world. In fashionable Sands Point she is Mrs. Guggenheim to the six servants who staff the 30-room Norman chateau, Falaise, overlooking Long Island Sound. Her husband built it as a showplace in 1923, imported bricks from Belgium, hand-carved doors from Italy and Spain, and filled it with, a museum-like array of fine statues, paintings, tapestries, chandeliers and silver. Publisher Patterson is too busy for household affairs, lets her secretary and servants manage Falaise. Evenings, she and her husband often entertain such close friends as Broadway Producer George Abbott (who boards her ferocious bull terrier, Butcher Boy, because Harry Guggenheim will not allow him in the house), Lieut. General Jimmy Doolittle, Katharine Cornell and her husband Producer Guthrie McClintic, Publisher Bennett Cerf and his wife, Brigadier General Charles A. Lindbergh (who last time brought his own camping cot because he wanted to sleep outdoors), and occasionally, her attractive older sister Elinor, who once played in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle. With her guests Publisher Patterson rarely talks about herself, has a reporter’s knack of drawing them out with penetrating questions while she stays in the background storing up information.

Every morning at 8 she breakfasts in bed, reads the New York papers before driving her Oldsmobile coupe 15 miles to her Newsday office. Winters, the Guggenheims move to their town house on Manhattan’s East Side, and Alicia changes her Olds for a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. At least once a year she goes off alone to her six-room Georgia house near the Okefenokee Swamp, where she calmly shoos water moccasins into the water “because they can’t bite from there.” Every summer Publisher Patterson visits her sister Josephine Patterson Albright* at her ranch in Dubois, Wyo., largely so that she can be with her sister’s two eldest children, Alice, 13, and Joe, 17, who she hopes will run Newsday some day.

Next Step? As the brightest star in the Patterson-McCormick publishing galaxy, Alicia Patterson is often the center of widespread newspaper speculation. Does she want one day to take over her father’s News or her cousin Bert’s Chicago Tribune? Alicia Patterson answers flatly no. But the question is kept alive by newsmen who feel that Publisher Patterson’s touch is what is needed to cure the circulation troubles that both these papers have been having in the past five years (TIME, Feb. 15). However, despite Colonel McCormick’s admiration for her, there is little chance that he would ever leave her control of the Trib. The best guess is that the Colonel will not leave the paper to any single person but to a committee of trustees composed of his wife Maryland, 57, other members of his family, and some of the paper’s highest executives.

As for the News, when Alicia’s father died in 1946, he mistakenly rated her newspaper ability so low that he virtually froze her out of the paper. Instead of arranging his estate so that she would one day control it, he gave control to a trusteeship of his second wife Mary King, the News woman’s editor, and to two of the paper’s top executives. Alicia was bitterly disappointed not to be given an important voice in the News management, was left with less than 3% of the outstanding stock in the Tribune Co. (which owns both papers) and sits quietly on the News’s board of directors. But for Publisher Patterson the bitterness of the disappointment has long since been soothed by the success of her own paper. Says she: “My father taught me that newspapering is an end in itself. I find Newsday a most important and satisfying end.”

*In the middle of the 1952 presidential cam lisher paign, Patterson although threw a Newsday large supported dinner Ike, party Pub for her old Chicago friend, Adlai Stevenson.

*Staunchly Republican Harry Guggenheim, who was unable to attend, wired his wife: TELL ADLAI HOW SORRY I AM NOT TO BE ABLE TO HIM DINE WITH ANYWHERE HIM. I EVEN WOULD IN LIKE THE TO WHITE DINE HOUSE WITH IF WE ARE BOTH GUESTS OF IKE. -Wife of Chicago Artist Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (TIME, Aug. 9).