THE LONG YEARS OF WAR placed strains on many marriages, bringing loneliness in its various manifestations to those away and those at home. While he was at Mercer Field, Harry Guggenheim by several accounts had an ongoing liaison with a young woman at the base (some said she was his driver), Kathleen Sullivan; “someone to go out dancing with” was how people phrased it at the time. If Alicia likewise had someone to dance with, there is no record of it, though the opportunities were surely all around her; among her numerous public escorts, it seemed evident to friends that she was attracted to Marquis Childs, the handsome, articulate (and married) columnist for the Washington Post, and he to her; but nothing seems to have come of it, beyond the fact that they were often in each other’s company; years later he ruefully (and perhaps awkwardly) wrote her that, had he better known her interest, he might have “tried to do something about it.”
Then in May 1945, in the final months of the war, with Germany already defeated and the United States now well in control of the Pacific, newly promoted Captain Guggenheim prepared to leave Mercer Field. However, instead of heading directly home to Alicia at Falaise, in the spirit of Odysseus he apparently decided to take the long way back, pulling strings in Washington to have himself transferred as an “observer” to the aircraft carrier USS Nehenta Bay, at the time on patrol duty near the Japanese-held Ryukyu Islands, two hundred miles from the Japanese mainland. Aboard the Nehenta Bay he was allowed to fly several sorties in the machine-gun seat of one of his Mercer Field Avenger fighter-bombers, engaged in strafing runs on Japanese ground defenses, thereby becoming the only member of the U.S. Navy to fly combat missions in both world wars. With time on his hands, in the officers’ wardroom, Captain Harry wrote several letters back to Alicia from the far Pacific, still extant with their slanted, unexpectedly boyish pencil scrawl and little blacked-out deletions by the navy’s censors; often many pages long, they’re companionable, discursive, amiably impersonal, speaking to a relationship neither deep nor shallow, neither antagonistic nor especially affectionate, and written in that perhaps universal, dissociative language of men trying to talk to women about the stuff of war without seeming to like it too much. Thus: “Calisthenics on the deck this morning, officers and men. My back’s not too hot but I’m learning how to stretch and W/O Symonds says it will improve….Later on we had gunnery practice, with and without tracers. The racket from the .50s is amazing, terrible, I think I’d be deaf without earplugs. Our ‘wing’ scored highest with the towed targets….As for what happens on deck when the planes launch, you could not imagine the sheer noise from the catapults, plus the roaring of the engines….Frankly, it’s just something that has to be seen to be believed, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Okay, general quarters has sounded, I don’t think it’s serious but I must sign off. Love, Harry.”
Harry’s long road home didn’t appreciably speed up, even after Hiroshima and the rapid Japanese surrender; he meandered back across the Pacific on the Nehenta Bay to Hawaii, from where he presumably could have returned to New York fairly directly had he so wished; months seemed to go by, with a detour to San Francisco where important persons were buzzing about, putting the finishing touches (so to speak) on what would become the United Nations. Doubtless he enjoyed the company of important persons; doubtless too he liked being a U.S. Navy captain, with his dress uniform and war record; and perhaps (though there is no telling, from the mostly bland, sightseer’s letters he wrote to Alicia from California) he had a premonition that civilian life might require adjustments from the relative harmony of being married to the U.S. Navy to being married (once more) to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim.
On her side, if Alicia was in any greater hurry for Harry to come home than he was to get there, she seems to have kept it pretty much to herself. Across the country it was a time for hundreds of thousands of sundered and separated couples to see what happened when you put both parts back together again, and with the Guggenheims there was perhaps more than the usual disconnect. On the one hand Harry Guggenheim saw himself as a returning warrior, selflessly having given his time, even risking his life above the Ryukyu Islands, and if he didn’t actually expect a band to greet his return he probably expected something more than what he got. Not that she was exactly cool to him; on the contrary, he was her husband, she was his wife, there were pleasures and benefits to be had from his reappearance. All the same, while he had been happily off in what he never would have called his own world, rather the one of serving his country, Alicia had been in her world, also more or less happily, not merely minding the store at Newsday but in the process substantially improving it: The newspaper’s circulation, around fifteen thousand at Harry’s departure, was now close to seventy-five thousand; advertising had greatly increased, both in terms of linage as well as in better-quality accounts; and editorially, thanks to Alan Hathway and his young staff, the all-important “reading look” of the paper was finally getting somewhere, growing up, less and less relying on canned wire-service bulletins and circulation stunts, more and more generating its own professional, community-related stories.
With good reason Alicia expected praise from her returning copublisher. Unfortunately Harry’s capacity for self-importance, which chronically ranged from routinely high to occasionally imperious, seemed lately stuck in the latter zone, a result perhaps of the deference he’d become used to as a navy captain, a rank he was now pleased to be known by in civilian life. Also, as Alicia’s right-hand person, Stan Peckham observed, waspishly and astutely, Harry had become accustomed not only to the hierarchy of rank but even more so to “four years immersion in the happy world of men only.” Whatever the reasons, his first postwar order of business was to get down to 120 Broadway and assert control over the family firm, Guggenheim Brothers, the giant mining concern that had been vastly profitable during the war and had been running more or less on automatic pilot under the chairmanship of his elderly uncle Solomon. Harry first persuaded Uncle Solomon to cede him the chairmanship, then went to work each morning in the large, hushed oak-paneled office, summoning reports, lawyers, accountants, and so on to bring him up to speed on the firm’s myriad far-flung investments. He also found time to move his horse-breeding and -racing operations from Falaise to Cain Hoy, where he bought six thousand more acres; to successfully lobby the Truman administration into recruiting the former Nazi rocket expert, Wernher von Braun, to run the U.S. Army’s new missile program; to serve on the planning committee for the proposed new Idlewild (later JFK) Airport; and somewhere in there he also asked his team of downtown financial analysts to take a look at his investment in Newsday.
It shouldn’t have been much of a surprise to anyone that the Guggenheim accountants didn’t altogether like what they saw, weren’t exactly thrilled, when they peered into Newsday’s ledgers. Start-ups in any business commonly present an ugly array of numbers during their first years’ outlays and losses where accountants would always prefer to see income and profits. But it was an unpleasant surprise to Alicia that her husband, walking back in the door after his moment in the military sun, his views largely shaped by Wall Street analysts, should express such sharp disapproval of the way she’d been running the business side of the paper, barely acknowledging the progress she’d made in transforming an amateurish local newssheet into “the strongest editorial voice in Nassau County,” as the respected trade journal Editor & Publisher described it earlier in the year.
At first proudly, then defensively, then with increasing anger, she tried to focus Harry’s attention on what she considered the important growth signs in the paper, leaving copies of the E&P article (with its forthright acknowledgment of “Editor Patterson’s strong guidance”) on his bedside table, at his breakfast setting, on the seat of his car. But Harry’s eyes were only on the red ink in the accounting ledgers. In vain she reminded him that, when he wanted to, he could be commonsensically accommodating to the well-known dynamics of running a money-losing operation for a while, perhaps for a long while, in hopes of achieving personal satisfaction as well as turning a profit at the end, this being his long-standing (and current) approach to horseracing. But Harry was not in a mood to dicker with those of lesser rank. “Newsday’s a business, it’s supposed to make money,” he said blandly, magisterially. They were both such stubborn creatures, though about different things.