PATTERSON LEFT THE TRIP one week early, in Ghana, pleading sickness, which was true; also true was her growing worry that, in her seven weeks’ absence from the office, Harry Guggenheim would have been unable to resist laying his heavy hand on Newsday. But the good news on her return was that Harry’s touch had been relatively light: though he had vetoed one proposal from Clurman to expand the paper’s business coverage (thinking the idea too specialized for suburban readers), in general he had left Hathway, Clurman, and Patterson’s other deputies free to do their jobs.
The bad news was that nothing much had changed in Harry’s opposition to his wife’s modus operandi, her approach to their supposedly shared business. The complaints raised in the “legal memorandum” were still on the table, had not magically disappeared while she was out of town, traveling in Africa with her friend Stevenson; in fact in some respects his antagonism had hardened. One week after her return, Patterson and Guggenheim had another sizable row, this time over another of Harry’s self-described constructive proposals: that they hire a polling and market research company, Gallup, Inc., to survey Newsday readers, by telephone or going house to house, in order to find out “in more exact, scientific fashion…what information…which stories, reports, features…our subscribers would want to read about in the newspaper.” When Patterson adamantly said no, Harry wrote plaintively to Gottlieb: “This is altogether typical of APG’s disrespect and ongoing refusal to accept businesslike proposals.” Patterson in turn scoffed and fumed in a letter to her lawyer, Louis Loeb: “HG describes himself as a newspaper publisher but clearly has no idea what an editor does…an editor is supposed to be out in front of the paper’s readers[,] not trailing behind studying poll numbers.”
As with many scuffles between husbands and wives, from a certain distance the Guggenheims’ conflict could easily be replayed as comedy. But for both of them, close up, it was often a sad and painful time, marked by sharp words and silences, by frigid meetings and heated exits (as when Patterson decamped for several weeks to the house of her friends Phyllis and Bennett Cerf of Random House), and by the shared cloud of defeat that is bound to overhang a couple communicating largely through lawyers. There were moments when a compromise appeared possible. In early October, Patterson agreed to support Harry’s “mission statement” for Newsday, and soon afterward restored his name to the masthead. But in the next breath, she gave Clurman the go-ahead to publish a political cartoon sharply making fun of President Eisenhower (for being outmaneuvered by the Soviet space program), which Harry considered both unfair and a personal insult, accusing her (via Gottlieb) of “undermining the effectiveness of the President,” and once again they were at a standoff.
Over the years, what had consistently rankled Patterson, stuck in her craw, was Harry’s dug-in-at-the-heels refusal to cede her full autonomy with Newsday—Harry the ruler of the vast Guggenheim empire; Newsday such a small piece of it to him, so huge, so everything, to her. But with time passing, with Harry’s need for control seeming only to grow stronger not weaker, Patterson could see that this problem was in some ways becoming worse; he not only seemed no closer to selling her his 2 percent, but in fact was pushing for greater control, for using his majority ownership to run the paper his way; his politics, his ideas, his Gallup polls. In early November she wrote Josephine she was “close to throwing in the towel.” Later in the month, she went down to Georgia, alone and sad, stomped around in the chill, damp beautiful woods, then typed out a draft letter of resignation from Newsday, to take effect on January 1, 1958. “Effective today,” she wrote, “I am resigning as editor & publisher of Newsday. It is the most painful announcement I have ever had to make, for Newsday has been my life’s work and I am immeasurably proud of it. But my decision has been painfully simple….We have prospered rather than suffered this far under the theory that journalistic independence and integrity precede purely business consideration….I have chosen to resign because I cannot be part of transforming a living newspaper put out by journalists into a balance-sheet controlled by businessmen.” She mailed a copy to Louis Loeb, then decided to stick around in Kingsland and wait for 1957 to run out.
A few days before the end of the year, however, she seems to have called her own bluff, phoning Louis Loeb in New York and asking if something couldn’t be worked out. Loeb promptly phoned Leo Gottlieb, who reached Harry Guggenheim in Cain Hoy. The solution that the various great minds came up with was surprisingly simple, brief, and almost anticlimactic after all the Sturm und Drang: a compromise, a peace treaty, not even put in writing or framed in legalese. In the end HG and APG ended their war on a strangely simple, two-part verbal agreement: first, that Harry Guggenheim might express his own views on the editorial page but only above his own signature; second, that at his death, his 2 percent majority would pass directly to Alicia Patterson. Not specified in the agreement, though by no means an afterthought (and generally regarded by all concerned as key to the solution), was the understanding that the young prince, Dick Clurman, would soon be gone from Newsday.