ANOTHER BIG MEDIA SPLASH came in the Saturday Evening Post, one of the few remaining giants of print, with close to five million in biweekly circulation. The five-thousand-word piece, a profile in the form of an extended interview, was written by an old friend, the journalist Hal Burton, and titled, This Is the Life I Love, “by Alicia Patterson as told to Hal Burton.” There she is, in a large black-and-white photo, on one of the magazine’s outsize pages: eyeglasses slightly askew atop her head, flecks of gray in her hair, furrows on her forehead; a smart inquisitive face, maybe a bit worn and wary, dark eyes staring right back at the reader.
In long columns of text, the story she told was casual, confident, an often surprisingly personal account of her life as she then seemed (or chose) to remember it, going back to early times, childhood; which, as we have seen, had actually played out in the shadow of alienated, warring parents, with a succession of nannies, mam’selles, Fräuleins, shifting domiciles, to say nothing of being shipped back and forth across the wide Atlantic, installed in pensions, hotels, boarding schools, institutions of lower and medium learning, Berlin, Lausanne, Rome; all of which jumbled, tumbled narrative she now breezily replayed for the benefit of Hal Burton as a mostly picaresque fable, with her own long-gone, youthful self reimagined as a kind of ugly-duckling antiheroine (“As a child I was not attractive, my hair a mess, my face often sulky”), a trial and burden to both parents and teachers (“I was rarely on time, had no patience for schoolrooms, schoolwork…don’t know why anyone put up with me”). Of her early adult years, during which she had excelled as a horsewoman, big-game hunter, and pioneer aviatrix, she now wrote dismissively: “My specialty was little more than making a business out of pleasure, my days filled with pointless preoccupations.” In six pages of print her mother received but a single mention: “Alice Higinbotham, whose father was president of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.” Sister Elinor was remembered for her “cold, withdrawn beauty and lovely hair”; though more kindly treated was sister Josephine (“We are as close as sisters can be”), also second husband, Joe Brooks, described as “a big-hearted aviator and all-around sportsman…who taught me much about the natural world.” Not surprisingly the major focus of the article was on Newsday, its humble origins and hard-won successes. For the umpteenth time she described the little Hempstead car dealership, the cramped offices, the youthful staff, the bumptious pranks; the lengthy learning curve from amateurishness to scrappy journalism to substantial investigative exposés, in turn leading to awards, prizes, serious circulation numbers.
She was characteristically generous in praise of her staff, finding time and space to honor by name the contributions not only of top editors but also her business manager, comptroller, advertising manager, and even typographical designer. But once again, as if some bad magic stayed her hand whenever the opportunity arose to extend a comparable accolade to her copublisher and husband, to share parenting honors, so to speak, she simply couldn’t or wouldn’t get beyond a chilly muttering of faint praise; as in, “my husband Harry F. Guggenheim, a businessman and philanthropist, who believes everybody should have a job.” More interesting, considering the bleak estrangement that once existed between Alicia and Joe Patterson at his death, was the warmth and intensity with which she now remembered her father: “A wonderful guy, big-hearted, tough, and born to understand what makes people tick; why they laugh and cry and hate and love, and why they buy some newspapers but ignore others,” she told Hal Burton. “I gladly admit it, living up to Father, getting his praise, in whatever ways it sometimes came, was always my greatest ambition…being his companion was my only real education.”
But along with these testaments of daughterly love, there was now a new note, a perhaps belated acknowledgment of a more problematic dimension to their intense relationship. “When I wasn’t in trouble on my own,” she recalled, “I seem to remember Father was usually brewing some up for me. Long after I had grown up, you could say that he continued to exert an almost hypnotic influence over me…and I would have died rather than fail him.” Then she recounted the dangerous fishing trip she had made with him to Panama in 1929, when Joe Patterson (who knew she was recovering from surgery) had pushed her beyond her physical limits to the point of serious internal injury. “I sometimes wonder,” she now wrote, with an almost childlike bewilderment, “if it might have been possible that Father felt an ambivalence towards me, a mixture of love as well as hate which somehow made him want to push my nervous system to the snapping point?” But even with that open-ended question on the page, she was still Poppa’s girl (Who else’s could she be?) and quickly backed away from where those thoughts might take her. “All I know,” she briskly concluded, “is that it was Father who taught me to be unafraid, not an easy lesson to teach a scatterbrained girl.” And not for the first time she retold the old family story about the Spartan boy and the fox—his story.