Newspaper Titan

July 11, 2011
Drawing deeply on letters, diaries, newspaper articles, and family archives, Smith (Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy) captivatingly traces the rapid rise and quite sudden fall of a woman who ambitiously and with canny journalistic wiles fashioned herself into the only woman editor-in-chief of a major metropolitan newspaper. Patterson's early life resembles closely that of many of Edith Wharton's women. The product of a fashionable New England girls' school at the turn of the 20th century, Patterson was tall and graceful, with a superb figure and a biting wit. Against the objections of her family, she married Josef Gizyckli, a Polish count well connected with the imperial Russian courts, but also with a history of incurring large debts and fathering illegitimate children. After fewer than four years of marriage, Patterson fled to the south of France, still bruised from her husband's beating; it took her almost two years, and the intercession of various governments, to recover her almost four-year-old daughter whom the count had kidnapped. In 1930, Patterson began her rise in the newspaper world by taking over William Randolph Hearst's foundering Washington Herald. By the end of the 1930s, Patterson had also taken over the Washington Times, another Hearst paper, and by 1939 had merged them into the Washington Times-Herald, which with 10 editions daily cleared more than $1 million in profit yearly by 1945. Smith's absorbing biography recounts the spellbinding tale of the woman who followed the motto: "When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page."

July 1, 2011

The editor of Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (2001) returns with a thick, assiduously researched biography of Eleanor Medill "Cissy" Patterson (1881–1948), the powerful, tendentious editor of the Washington Times-Herald.

In this numbingly detailed biography, Smith gives us not just the story of her principal but her every element of her back story, and few minor characters walk her stage without major-character treatment. Patterson's story is indeed complicated, engaging and even bizarre, though it takes her more than 40 pages to arrive in the narrative. A daughter of privilege and publishing, Patterson grew up without much of an education (finishing school sufficed); married an impecunious Polish count, Josef Gizycki, who had drinking, gambling, fidelity and domestic-abuse issues; bore a daughter, Felicia, with whom she would have a long, contentious relationship; fled from the count (who hid the daughter for 18 months) and retreated back into the world of her American family, whose wealth and influence defeated the count's efforts to extract a portion of fortune for himself. Patterson would marry again, but she would also take over a struggling newspaper in Washington and convert it into an enormously profitable enterprise. She blasted away at FDR and became increasingly vindictive, mercurial and eccentric, before dying suddenly. A long, bitter battle over her complicated assets ensued. Smith seems fascinated by all the money (she frequently footnotes the estimated current value of sums made or spent by Patterson), and she seems unable to determine which biographical or contextual details are primary, secondary, tertiary or superfluous. So she includes them all, just in case.

An enormously important subject obscured in a blinding blizzard of undifferentiated fact.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2011
Cissy Medill Patterson was born into a family with printer's ink in its blood. Her grandfather was Joseph Medill, editor and owner of the Chicago Tribune; her first cousin was Tribune publisher Colonel Robert R. McCormick. She spent much of her early life as a flighty heiress, marrying a Polish count and seeking help from president-elect Taft and a slew of international lawyers and detectives to end the marriage. That would set the tone for her outlandish life, dabbling in acting, writing, and amusements before she went into the family business at the age of 49. She bought the failing Washington Herald, eventually becoming editor and publisher of the merged Washington Times-Herald, the most widely read paper in the capital. The nation's only female editor of a major newspaper, she used her wit and news platform to skewer those who displeased her, including President Roosevelt. Her sudden, untimely death set off a blaze of sensational newspaper publicity of the kind she'd promoted for 18 years in the business. Photographs enhance this incredible history of a major figure in American journalism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)