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ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1931, Alicia Patterson and Joe Brooks were married in the Broadway Tabernacle, at Ninety-Third Street and Broadway, one of the few New York churches in which divorced persons were allowed to remarry. With a seating capacity of 2,500, it was a large edifice for a small, private ceremony. On Alicia’s side of the aisle were her father and her sisters, Elinor and Josephine, Aunt Florence representing her mother, and a scattering of friends. On Joe’s side there were also friends, though no family. After the wedding the couple flew off (literally, with Brooks at the controls of a two-engine Bellanca on loan from the manufacturer) for a week’s honeymoon on Sea Island, Georgia, where Alicia let her new husband teach her the finer points of shooting quail; at the end of the week they flew west to Chicago for a little teatime reception in Alice Patterson’s apartment, which didn’t go too badly, all things considered. On the way back, however, poor Joe Brooks had another of his aerial misadventures, which once again got into the papers. “Honeymooners Escape Death In Plane Crash,” the New York American announced on its front page. “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Brooks narrowly escaped death today in negotiating the last leg from Chicago to New York of an extended wedding trip by air….Mrs. Brooks suffered a wrenched knee. Her husband was at the controls when the motor stalled, and he was forced to land in a hayfield where the plane struck the ground.” In fairness, despite appearances to the contrary, Brooks was an accomplished aviator; careful, experienced, not at all accident prone like his father-in-law. Flying in those days was inherently hazardous, with weather predictions being mostly guesswork and equipment giving out without warning. All the same, it was not a propitious way to start a marriage.

A flying honeymoon to Georgia, with husband Joe Brooks and hunting dogs.

In hindsight, had any of the principals known what Dr. Meeker at Doctors Hospital seems to have known, or guessed, two years earlier—when he noted on Alicia’s chart that, because of her ectopic pregnancy with Simpson she was unlikely to have children—who can tell how the story would have played out, or whether there would have been that particular story in the first place? Alicia and Joe Brooks were in so many ways such an unlikely couple, neither one of them a fully developed person, this regardless of his age and seemingly greater worldliness, her appearance of youthful savvy and confidence. Doubtless her father and mother, each in their own way, somehow assumed there would be children, family stuff, so as to give structure to the marriage, settle her down (as they were always trying to settle her down), and in the process justifying their own stage-managing of their daughter’s life. It also probably didn’t help that both Alicia and Brooks required such extensive financial propping up by Patterson, who paid the rent on a new apartment, between Madison and Park on Eighty-Fourth Street, and increasingly subsidized Brooks’s faltering insurance business with referrals from the Daily News.

From the start there was an oddness to the Brooks’s marriage, a surface brightness with evidence of trouble underneath that calls to mind short stories of the period, early John O’Hara, for example, with their wry and rueful scenes of 1920s people adrift in the increasingly unforgiving atmosphere of the 1930s. Each weekday morning, wearing his Brooks Brothers suit, a leather briefcase at the end of a long arm, Joe Brooks would take the bus down to Forty-Second Street, then walk to his one-room office down the street from the new Daily News building, where he’d shuffle papers for a few hours, try to hold out into the afternoon should any calls come in from up the street, but then usually head up to the Racquet Club at Fifty-Third Street for a game of squash (another sport at which he excelled), a late lunch at the “big table,” convivial, boozy, for Joe Brooks was always a favorite, followed by a few hours of backgammon in the game room, playing for sizable stakes with the rich men who loved Joe Brooks too, and who he always hoped would throw a little business his way. For her part Alicia did her best, at least at first, to play the dutiful wife, although dutifulness was never her strong suit and her experience of wifeliness was limited. Her father thought she should get a job, and she knew he was right; he was always right except when he wasn’t. But she didn’t want to be writing advertising copy for department stores at the Lasker Advertising Agency, which was the job he found for her.

Sisters Josephine and Alicia, New York, 1930.

What Alicia probably wanted then as much as anything—what in her primal, unexamined way must have been the underlying goal in marrying Joe Brooks—Joe Patterson’s great and good friend, a man closer to her father’s age than to her own (to say nothing of what the two men shared in friends and life experiences), was not only her father’s approval, but that by doing so she might finally secure a safe harbor close to her charismatic, elusive parent. Joe Patterson, however, was rarely a safe man to be around, even when he tried to be one, which wasn’t often. Right then, as the early months of 1932 unfolded, Patterson was in the throes of a substantial struggle, trying to get his fellow Grotonian Franklin D. Roosevelt (an underclassman he hadn’t much liked at the time) elected to the Presidency. Financially he was one of the biggest backers of Governor Roosevelt’s national campaign. Editorially he had been early and enthusiastic in committing the Daily News in support of Roosevelt’s call for “a New Deal,” a stance that put him in conflict with most other newspaper publishers, and more particularly with his archconservative cousin Robert McCormick, publisher of the Daily News’s parent, the Chicago Tribune. It wasn’t as if he had nothing to do with Alicia and her husband; as all three of them knew though rarely spoke about, he paid most of their bills; at least somebody in his office paid them, wrote the checks. But Patterson apparently didn’t see himself in a position, or perhaps in a mood, to do much fathering just then, at least not of a twenty-six-year-old married daughter. Besides, he was also now the father of a small boy, whose unmarried Catholic mother kept his feet pretty close to the fire. One weekend in April, Brooks and Alicia had driven up for dinner with Joe Patterson, in his new modernist house above the Hudson, where Alicia had been more or less quietly furious at finding Mary King holding down the distaff end of the table, with her father interested only in talking about son Jimmy’s baseball exploits.