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THE TIME STORY CAME OUT on September 13, with Patterson’s face—handsome, self-possessed, attractively weathered—right there on the cover of two million magazines, above the terse caption, “Publisher Patterson.” Inside a lengthy four-thousand-word profile was everything its subject might have wished for: “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 in the 20’s.” Time described Patterson as having “a touch of the journalistic genius of her late father, Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson,” and someone who, “set out to violate every canon of sedate, well-mannered and deadly dull suburban journalism.” It traced her life story in attentive detail, approvingly noting her expulsions from “two of the world’s fanciest finishing schools for general obstreperousness.” It recounted Alicia’s long, tomboyish, hot-and-cold relationship with her father, and placed her squarely in the Joseph Medill newspaper dynasty, making sure to explain that, “On national and international affairs Newsday smashes every Patterson-McCormick political tradition. Newsday is as liberal and internationalist as the family’s Chicago Tribune is hidebound and isolationist.”

Time’s densely written, admiring narrative made appropriate mention of Alan Hathway (“balding former News staffer with a police reporter’s instincts”) and several other Newsday personnel. The name of Harry Guggenheim, however, was harder to find, not impossible; he appeared briefly, in what might be called cameo roles, as rich husband (“the mining and mineral heir”) and dour, de facto owner, lacking everything but a green eyeshade, “who keeps tight control over the paper’s finances.” But if Patterson’s presence on the cover and in the text of the hugely prestigious newsmagazine, might fairly be described as something of a star turn, then Harry Guggenheim’s role was barely a speaking part, little more than a walk-on. Patterson received an early copy of the magazine, hot off the presses, hand-delivered at ten at night, courtesy of Dick Clurman. She read and reread it for hours, falling asleep close to dawn. Then later the next day she flew off to Paris, by prearranged plan, to join her mother for a few days. Apparently one morning, the two of them were walking down the rue Saint-Honoré, and there at a newsstand kiosk was a display of Time, with “Publisher Patterson” on the cover; indeed it seemed to be at all the kiosks, everywhere in Paris. It often took a lot to please Alice Patterson, especially when it came to her second daughter, but as Alicia remembered, even she was pleased by this.

An even bigger splash, the 1954 Time cover.