· 56 ·

IT’S HARD ENOUGH TO GUESS, let alone know, just where Patterson thought her romance with Stevenson was eventually going to take her. She wasn’t a woman with much natural temperament for long-term planning, someone who often factored “eventually” into her decisions, least of all those of the heart. Moreover, while the first phase of the relationship was definitely physical, sexual, it also seems clear from what remains of their long correspondence, mostly in the form of Stevenson’s “collected letters” at Princeton University Library, that even when their affair was most heated, its temperature was seldom that of a Grand Passion; Patterson’s friend, Dolly Schiff, in a memoir, cattily though doubtless accurately recalled Alicia telling her that “in the bedroom Adlai lacked urgency,” which is perhaps not the worst way of putting it.

Most likely, Patterson more or less stumbled into the affair, beginning with that first sexy, talky rencontre on the lawn at Libertyville, because it was there to be stumbled into, because she was no longer young and not yet old, because she was childless, because Harry Guggenheim, once rich and charming, was now only rich and distant, because her father was dead, and the war was over, and was that all there was going to be of life and love? Then Adlai himself, though in many ways an unlikely love object, was definitely appealing, a growing source of attraction to numerous women; mostly bald, somewhat pudgy, by no means a youngster, nonetheless he was a new type of man for the mid-twentieth century, brainy, humorous, warm, attentive, at least when the needs of his own ego permitted it; and while his own romantic impulses may have tilted more to words than actions, at least there were words, words aplenty, both written and spoken, in contrast to the manly, tight-lipped, lockjaw habits of the day. Sometimes he dithered too much, sometimes he didn’t seem to know what he was saying, as in his periodic, clumsy-puppy references to Patterson as “my half-man, half-woman”; but mostly one has the feeling, reading their letters, and between the lines in their letters, that he was a man who could make her feel womanly, certainly as womanly as she had felt in a long time.

At any rate, by midsummer 1950, given the challenging circumstances of their separate lives, she and Stevenson seemed to have what might be called a nice thing going; even to the point of having droll nicknames for each other: “Dear Rat” is how she often addresses him in her letters (which his secretary remembered him rushing off to read in the privacy of the governor’s bathroom in Springfield), to which he would fondly reply, “Dear Cockroach”—as in, “the rat and the cockroach will meet in the Ambassador East, July 28, to discuss matters of mutual interest to predators of all sizes and shapes.”

For the time being, in fact, the two sometime lovers, sometime pals, seemed to have found what might be called a working balance between their public and private lives. Patterson remained fully engaged with Newsday, her spirits revitalized by her special friendship with Stevenson, her marriage to the geographically and emotionally distant Harry Guggenheim seemingly one of those facts of life to be lived with, not especially gratifying and yet not worth the sizable problems that would inevitably come with trying to exit it. Stevenson, for his part, while no longer married, thus single and visibly available (“eligible,” as people said), seemed content to stick close to the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield, “learning the ropes as a novice Gov needs to do,” as he told Patterson, all the while keeping a circumspect social profile, with his sister, Buffie Ives, acting as hostess at official functions. When anyone raised the question of larger, presidential ambitions, as when a Newsday reporter asked him, during his earlier tour of the building, if he was considering throwing his obviously new hat (bought the day before with Patterson) into the ring, “the Governor laughed heartily and called the idea absurd.”

By then it was widely expected that hugely popular Dwight D. Eisenhower was going to run and prove unbeatable. Patterson herself had been an Eisenhower fan as far back as her 1946 Libertyville meeting with Stevenson, when she and Adlai had talked about General Ike as an almost ideal candidate; on her trip to Europe for the Berlin airlift, the only piece of clothing she’d bought overseas, and brought back with her, was an army-issue “Eisenhower” jacket.

Alicia as Company Wife, with Harry on the 1951 tour of Guggenheim copper mines in Chile.

What might be wrong with this picture, with this happy balancing act, with this more or less agreeable status quo? Of course, the immediate answer is that there’s no such thing in nature as a status quo; neither Patterson nor Stevenson were exactly stationary figures, either in their own lives or in relation to each other. While Stevenson repeatedly insisted, and with what was becoming his signature, eloquent humility, that he didn’t want to run for the presidency, had no larger ambitions than continuing to serve his constituents as governor, as it turned out, and as his posthumous papers make eminently clear, what he really meant was that he didn’t want to run for the presidency in 1952, against a war-hero general, although he had every intention of running in 1956. In other words, while Governor Stevenson, in lovelorn-suitor mode, might talk and write to Patterson of love and kisses and the hope of years together (and in some part of him might actually mean it), with each passing month, his alter ego, Adlai Stevenson, aspiring Democratic presidential candidate, though still largely under wraps, was making it ever less likely that such dreams might be delivered on. As for Patterson, her own command of the status quo was no better; no matter what temporary calm, ease, moments of accommodation might descend on the Guggenheim marriage, no matter how a commonsense, logical, businesslike view of Newsday’s provenance might suggest that Alicia’s glass, with a 49 percent ownership stake, was if not precisely half full, then full enough to warrant giving the issue a rest, this seemed to be the very thing she just couldn’t do. Thus, with Harry’s pride and self-regard still smarting from the dismissive, almost condescending way he’d been treated in Time’s piece on Newsday, with no contradiction from his wife, either in print or in private, Patterson seemed to double down on showing the world who really ran the show at their jointly owned paper. She not only signed on for a major profile about herself in the widely read, mass-circulation Saturday Evening Post, but invited the writer, veteran Post journalist Charles Wertenbaker, down to her place in Georgia, where for several days she charmed and dazzled him; with the predictable result that when the lengthy, vivid, entertaining Post profile (“The Case of the Hot-Tempered Publisher”) appeared, it was mostly a three-thousand-word rave on the subject of Alicia Patterson (accompanied by numerous glamorous photos of Alicia and her friends), barely mentioned Harry at all, and drove him to fury.

The Guggenheims had fought before, about all kinds of matters, but the heated arguments, as well as the cold hard feelings, especially on Harry Guggenheim’s part, provoked by the Post piece, seemed this time to reach a new level. For weeks that summer they battled over the ownership issue, that crucial 2 percent majority, which Harry now was less than ever of a mind to hand over to his wife, for all her angry insistence that she was doing all the work, that it was her paper in every important way but legal. One afternoon in late August, as her deputy Stan Peckham remembered it, she was in her office at Newsday finishing things up for the week; that evening, she was supposed to be giving a dinner party for some of Harry’s business associates at Falaise. Instead, telling no one (save Peckham) what she was doing or where she was going, she simply left, flew the coop, literally, in a series of planes, to the relative sanctuary of Josephine’s ranch in Dubois, Wyoming. From there, she wrote Stevenson that she’d left Harry, was willing to give up Newsday, and would be waiting there to hear from him.

National recognition for AP and Newsday; Harry was none too thrilled.