The New York Herald-Times, May 29, 1922

TIT AND TATTLE, BY PATTY CAKE

At last! It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for, dear readers: the opening of the latest and greatest Trial of the Century, and I don’t mind telling you it’s as hot as blazes inside this undersized Connecticut courtroom. You’re much better off reading about it from the comfort of your own armchair, believe me. Oh, the suffering I endure on the sacred altar of journalism.

And now, after all these months of fuss and hysteria and delectable details—the Patent King, his beautiful heiress daughters, the downstairs tenant, the kitchen-maid-cum-tearful-Scarsdale-housewife and her munificent husband, the turret window, the missing gardener, the exact length and serration of the blade used to murder the victim—here we all sit, waving our makeshift fans before our perspiring faces, and it turns out these mythical figures are human after all! The Patent King is smaller than you’d think. He doesn’t say a word, sitting stiff as a wire by the side of the defense counsel, and the daughters huddle next to each other in the front row, so pale and haggard that their much-ballyhooed beauty is, I’m afraid, purely conjecture.

A number of well-known society figures populate the benches around me. Chief among them is that perennial mainstay of the social calendar—and this column, naturally—the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, Long Island, as exquisitely dressed (and as exquisitely fashioned) as ever. I’ve had the privilege of visiting Windermere, the Marshall family estate down there by the shore, and I admire Mrs. Marshall’s fortitude in enduring this untoward inferno when she might be reclining among the dunes, or riding her famous jumper, Tiptoe, around the ring at Lake Agawam.

The reason for Mrs. Marshall’s sacrifice is quite clear, however. He sits by her side, and he’s a fine specimen of manhood, as judged by the expert eye of yours truly. Mr. Octavian Rofrano will soon figure as one of the key witnesses in this case, and given his newfound fame and undoubted allurements, I don’t blame Mrs. Marshall in the least for her vigilant oversight of his person, though I can’t help wondering what poor old Mr. Marshall thinks of all this devotion.

So much for the man on Mrs. Marshall’s left side. To her right sits another well-known Manhattan Thoroughbred: none other than the lady’s brother, Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner, famed bachelor-about-town and not so far past his considerable prime to lay claim—so rumor has it, anyway—to the lesser of the two Patent Princesses. As to whether rumor has their engagement right, neither principal is talking, and I certainly don’t see a ring glittering on the telltale finger. So, as always, I’ll let you decide the truth for yourselves, dear ones.

As for me? Hold on to your hats. I’ve got the Trial of the Century to watch, if I don’t melt away into the benches by the end of the morning.