The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  As Harry remembered what came next, he told her that if she actually wanted not merely to own a newspaper but to run one, she would have her work more than cut out for her. Or was she just another Social Register dilettante, mainly concerned about dinner menus? Throughout their stormy life together, Guggenheim, with his irritatingly precise memory, especially of occasions when he turned out to be in the right, never failed to remind Alicia that she was the one looking for negatives, looking for reasons to walk away from the little newspaper they didn’t even own yet. After their first night at Falaise as husband and wife, seemingly spent in separate bedrooms, the next morning she reached him by telephone, already in his Wall Street office, and told him, more or less contritely, that she very much wanted the newspaper. Harry told her that he had already set the signing in motion and had in fact hired a business consultant, which of course infuriated her, although as she wrote a friend, “One thing about Harry, he’s not a man who lets himself be pushed around.”

  · 36 ·

  WHEN ALICIA STARTED TO TELL her New York friends about her newspaper plans, some listened (as friends do) without listening, but many others, especially those in the media, all too quickly rejoined, “Oh, just like the Connecticut Nutmeg,” referring to the urbanely amusing, sophisticated little Lakeville, Connecticut, weekly published by the famous columnist Heywood Broun and his wife, featuring poems by Dorothy Parker and assorted contributions by the Algonquin set. But this was exactly, precisely not the direction she intended to go: a top-down, self-conscious, writerly, and inevitably money-losing entertainment for exurbanites. Even her usually savvy friend Neysa McMein thought that, when it came to naming the new paper, a cute title like “The County Irritant” would be such a giggle. Fortunately Alicia had burly, no-nonsense Max Annenberg to keep her head in the right direction, besides advising her on mundane details of circulation and machinery. She also had Harry Guggenheim’s business skills on her side, something of a mixed blessing then and evermore. On the one hand he could be good with numbers, which she knew were important, for example right at the beginning cleverly arranging (through his lawyers) to fix a purchase price with Newhouse of a modest fifty thousand dollars “for all plant and equipment”; at the same time he often drove her crazy by his preoccupation with feasibility studies, surveys of one kind and another, his “spreadsheet mania,” as she called it.

  Mostly, though, she had her own instincts and impulses. At a time when the term “market research” did not yet exist, whatever someone could figure out by nosing around, checking out stuff that made sense to check out, Alicia Guggenheim was already doing; walking the streets of Hempstead, driving the country roads, trying to figure out her potential readers: small-business owners, housewives, scallop fishermen, potato farmers. For staff, Harry had already installed the research consultant Bill Mapel as business manager; Mapel in turn had hired a personable, talkative, young ex–Foreign Service aide, Stan Peckham, whom Alicia took a liking to and made her assistant. Bit by bit things began falling into place. The seemingly intractable problem of how to get a newspaper to readers in an area where there were no newsstands and no delivery boys was solved by hiring three former newsboys from Brooklyn and Queens to come out and teach local kids the fine points of home delivery—for example, how not to just toss the paper onto the front lawn, where rain or dew would ruin it, but to walk it all the way to the front door. The more fundamental question of the actual form of the new paper, and how to print it on the old presses, took a little longer to resolve. From the start she had wanted a tabloid and asked Max Annenberg for advice; Annenberg in turn went to the horse’s mouth, to her father, who now communicating only through Annenberg, tersely advised that a tabloid could only succeed in a big city besides being entirely wrong for that part of Long Island. Still she wanted it as a tabloid, though of course the presses were a problem, designed for a conventional format. But maybe they could be rejiggered to print sideways? They could, but they would have to be taken completely apart, cleaned, repaired, rebuilt. Months went by in this fashion. Since the ancient presses were being retooled, why not the equally ancient Linotype machines? Harry huffed about all the money going out, no money coming in. Alicia commissioned the art-designer husband of a friend to come up with both a fresh typeface and a new design, aiming at something cleaner and clearer than the standard tabloid clutter of, say, the Daily News; a page with a more inviting horizontal look, wider photos, and no more “rules,” those black vertical lines between columns. Ten days from publication the new paper was still without a name, despite Stan Peckham’s countywide “Name Your Newspaper” contest; back from lunch, Bill Mapel walked into Alicia’s small makeshift office, just off the press room, and wrote one word on her memo pad: “Newsday.” “Yes, that’s it,” she said.

  —

  THE DAY AFTER LABOR DAY, September 3, 1940, so many of the new young staff, their friends, family members, various well-wishers, assorted onlookers, and so on, had all pushed their way into the new paper’s offices (which still had the look of a car dealership, without the cars) that the press foreman had to blow a whistle to clear out inessential people from the tiny composing room, where compositors were trying to set the last lines of type. “Why can’t I stay?” asked Alicia, who was wearing a new dress for the occasion. “Are you going to make up the paper?” the foreman asked her. “I don’t know how,” Alicia admitted, and backed out into the crowded newsroom. At last she was allowed in again, officially pushed the start button for the two old (and now briefly clean) Goss presses, which forthwith clanged and rumbled into action.

  AP starts the first Newsday press run, September 1940.

  “It was just a horror,” one of the original staffers recalled in Robert F. Keeler’s fine book, Newsday. In a newspaper of only thirty pages, all too many came out ink stained and muddy. Worse still, on the very first page, two photos were printed with their captions transposed. With the presses still running, many of the staff wandered down Hempstead’s Main Street to the Anchor Inn where they had too many drinks and took bets as to whether or not the newspaper would last out the week. On Alicia’s instructions, but without really looking at the paper, Stan Peckham had taken one of the very first copies straight into New York, hand-delivering it to Joseph Patterson’s office; unfortunately it was a copy with numerous pages barely legible, except of course for one clear headline about President Roosevelt’s decision to send fifty destroyers to Britain, a subject that Patterson had been fiercely editorializing against in recent weeks. Whatever the reason, Patterson’s response to his daughter’s first newspaper was minimal, perfunctory: “Thank you for the paper, JMP.” Alicia herself owned up to a sloppy debut. “I’m afraid it looks like hell,” she said of her just-born Newsday. Then she took a page from an editorial her father had once written, after the first error-strewn issue of the Daily News, and published an apology in the next day’s paper, an edition happily containing only two or three small errors. She compared Newsday to a badly behaved child at its first public appearance, promising to make it up to her readers, and concluded with a rough paraphrase of her favorite heroine’s parting words in Gone With the Wind: “Tomorrow will be another Newsday.”

  · 37 ·

  HERE’S ANOTHER OLD PHOTOGRAPH, not quite so antique as some of the others, neither crumbly or much faded, a five-by- seven black-and-white glossy: four people standing in front of a plate-glass window, two men, two women, none looking too happy or unhappy for that matter. On the back of the photo, there’s a typewritten caption on a strip of paper: “Visitors to Newsday, Sept. 27, 1940: J. M. Patterson, Editor, N.Y. Daily News; Mrs. J. M. Patterson; Harry Guggenheim, Alicia P. Guggenheim, co-Publishers, Newsday.” At the left of the quartet, almost as if trying to wander out of the frame, stands Joe Patterson, wearing a serious dark suit, though one that looks as if he had slept in it, which somewhat offsets the seriousness. He’s still tall, but his shoulders are stooped, and his face is rumpled like his clothes. Hard to read his expression, maybe just
the expression of a busy man who never did like being photographed. Beside him is his long-suffering second wife, Mary King, tall for a woman of her time, quite fine in a simple dress, also dark, an appropriate hat perched atop her head. Unlike her husband, who seems to think that if he looks away from the camera he won’t be noticed, Mary King, a resolute Catholic girl from Oak Park, Illinois, stares right into the lens.

  Somewhere close to the middle of the picture, although also seeming to wish she were somewhere else, is copublisher Alicia P. Guggenheim, arms crossed in front of her, clutching a handbag as if for dear life, wearing what must have started out that morning as a nice print dress, perhaps even a designer dress, something by Claire McCardell, her then-favorite designer. (Harry Guggenheim, unlike previous husbands, took an interest in what she wore, liked her to dress well, which she wasn’t opposed to doing, circumstances permitting.) And then, more or less on her left but in fact somewhat to the rear of the group, stands copublisher Harry F. Guggenheim himself, definitely as tall as his father-in-law, in fact just then probably taller without the slumping shoulders. No dark business suit for him, he’s wearing maybe beige or light gray, with one of his signature bow ties, and a tight seigneurial smile, the only one in the group with one of those on his face. There’s no record of what anyone said at this conclave; it certainly didn’t last very long, an hour and a half perhaps, time for the foursome to wander through the cramped offices, make small talk with staffers. Patterson was persuaded to pose beside one of the presses, which he did, looking as if he’d never seen one before. Alicia had spent weeks on the phone with her father’s secretary trying to arrange this visit; in a way she knew better, she was all too conscious of his almost palpable lack of support for her venture, the nearly total absence of encouragement, the uncomfortable gulf that had arisen between them. On the other hand he was the one she’d done all this for: how could he not know that? Alicia’s friend Janet Hauck (wife of the art designer), remembered that some well-meaning staff person asked Patterson if he wasn’t pleased, or thrilled, or something, that his daughter was following in his footsteps, at which point Patterson turned to his wife and said they should be going. It might have been right after that exchange, or lack of it, that the photograph on the sidewalk outside was taken.

  · 38 ·

  A NOTE ABOUT Joe Patterson’s evolving (or devolving) politics: While Alicia (and Harry) were launching their little Hempstead daily, the wider world, especially the world across the Atlantic, was in an awful mess, and a mess that was only getting worse. Earlier, in June, France had fallen to Hitler’s armies; by late summer the Battle of Britain was taking place in the skies over southern England, with Edward R. Murrow broadcasting his rallying, sympathetic radio commentaries, which began “This is London,” back to a mostly East coast audience. Joe Patterson, alas, was not a fan of Murrow or his broadcasts. “The man employs a fine, upperclass, baritone voice, trying his best to persuade farmers, factory workers, ordinary Americans to come and fight Great Britain’s war,” read one of his increasingly sour Daily News editorials, perhaps not actually written by the editor but certainly approved by him.

  Patterson was even less a fan of the man he had once, and even lately, admired: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was campaigning in the fall of 1940 for an unprecedented third term, and campaigning to a great extent on his repeated promise to “keep us out of war.” Patterson couldn’t stand it that the president, whom he had done so much to support with his enormous Daily News readership (and early, too, when he needed it, before his popularity hardened into iconic statuary) was obviously bent on taking the country once more into a European war. Worse still, as Patterson saw it—one Old Grotonian critiquing another for not “playing fair”—he wasn’t being straight about it but trying to sneak the country into war under the cover of unavoidably antineutralist policies, such as the proposed Lend-Lease agreements with Britain. As he continued to berate the president in print throughout the 1940 campaign, Patterson seems to have assumed that his own patriotic credentials were unassailable: he was a combat veteran of the Great War, widely referred to as Captain Patterson, someone whom FDR himself, as recently as 1938, had briefly talked with as to his becoming secretary of the Navy, an offer Patterson had politely declined. That was one mistake; another was less understandable: Patterson seems also to have assumed that his long-standing political differences with, and editorial independence from, his ultraconservative cousin, Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, along with his own self-described seriousness about foreign policy, somehow immunized him from being lumped together by an embattled and angry White House with McCormick—often derisively referred to by the president as “Colonel McCosmic”—and the rest of the isolationist horde.

  —

  IN THE COURSE of that same 1940 presidential campaign, it turned out that Alicia and her new husband were having their own political differences. Her deputy Stan Peckham described a meeting one afternoon in her “library” at Falaise, a little downstairs room she had been allowed by Harry to decorate as she pleased, in this instance nothing medieval, mostly comfortable chintz. He and Alicia had been working on a forthcoming Newsday editorial, one strongly endorsing FDR, when Harry Guggenheim appeared. “I think he was surprised to see me there,” Peckham remembered, “as if I belonged in Hempstead and not at Falaise. But then he started reading the editorial, and you could see there was a problem. I forget exactly what was said, and I tried at first to leave seeing there was going to be a row. I think she reminded him they had an agreement. What agreement? he might have said. It was one of those times. But it was true, she was Editor and so she had the right to set editorial policy. Newspaper people know that, but Harry wasn’t a newspaper person, then or ever. He figured he was the owner, it was his money, really his paper, and it would reflect his views. In they end, they worked something out. I think it was something her father had devised when he and McCormick were disagreeing in the Tribune years ago. She and Harry wrote “His” and “Hers” editorials, running side by side. That was for the 1940 election. She really wanted Roosevelt, Harry hated him and wanted Wendell Wilkie [sic]. I guess we all know how that worked out.”

  · 39 ·

  ALICIA’S FIRST YEAR OF MARRIAGE to Harry Guggenheim coincided more or less with her first year running Newsday, both activities that might be loosely grouped under the well-worn heading, works in progress. With Harry she soon figured out what was, and perhaps especially what wasn’t, expected of her in the managing of households. He (and thus they) had a big apartment at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, Falaise on Long Island’s North Shore, and Cain Hoy in South Carolina, and Harry as always took care of all the major stuff, certainly hiring staff and paying bills; which in some ways was a relief after the Joe Brooks years, when it was never clear who was doing what (with the answer being usually nobody, unless it was her father), although sometimes Harry’s obsessiveness (his attention to detail, as he would phrase it) could make things pretty weird. Alicia was supposed to be Mrs. Guggenheim, his wife, his hostess, and on the whole she rather liked that; she liked people, she liked going out or staying in, and got on well with all the staff. She also deployed her natural friendliness, her connective skills, on Harry’s family, with fairly satisfying results; she had good relations with Harry’s widowed mother, Gertrude, a sometimes-difficult old lady who lived half a mile or so from Falaise in a quasi-Irish castle of her own, and also with two of his grown children from his first marriage.

  With Newsday for perhaps the first time in her life she settled in, or perhaps settled down, making a serious attempt to master processes, details, the nuts and bolts of the newspaper business. Most days she rose at six to get from Sands Point to Hempstead by seven, and even earlier when she was coming from Manhattan. At the paper she fidgeted for a while over her office, where it should be; at first she found it hard to be confined to the windowless executive cubicle she’d either chosen or accepted; instead (as she knew her father had once done) she
moved her chair into the newsroom, where she preferred to hang out, sometimes into the press room where she knew she got in the way, and sometimes she’d get in her car and spend whole days following advertising salesmen on their calls, trying to get an understanding of what their routines were like, what they were up against. She also made an effort to stay close to her growing gang of newsboys, the paper’s visible point of contact with subscribers; she praised them, organized contests, handed out special Newsday T-shirts, this before the world had generally come to appreciate the marketing appeal of the humble T-shirt.