The Huntress Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL J. ARLEN

  Say Goodbye to Sam

  The Camera Age

  Thirty Seconds

  The View from Highway 1

  Passage to Ararat

  Exiles

  An American Verdict

  Living-Room War

  ALSO BY ALICE ARLEN

  Cissy Patterson

  Copyright © 2016 by Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All of the images in this book are courtesy of a family collection, with exception of the article and photographs on this page, which is copyright © 1951 SEPS, licensed by Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, Indiana. all rights reserved, and the image on this page, which is from Time magazine, September 23, 1954, copyright © 1954 Time, Inc. Used under license.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Arlen, Alice, 1940–2016. Arlen, Michael J.

  Title: The huntress : the adventures, escapades, and triumphs of Alicia Patterson: aviatrix, sportswoman, journalist, publisher / Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen.

  Description: New York : Pantheon, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015048178. ISBN 978-1-101-87113-3 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-101-87114-0 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Patterson, Alicia, 1906–1963. Women publishers—United States—Biography. Women journalists—United States—Biography. Newsday (Hempstead, N.Y.)—History. Women air pilots—United States—Biography. Women adventurers—United States—Biography. Horsemen and horsewomen—United States—Biography. BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/General. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Editors, Journalists, Publishers. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Women.

  Classification: LCC CT275.P417 A75 2016. DDC070.5092/273—dc23. LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2015048178

  ebook ISBN 9781101871140

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover images: Alicia Patterson, in 1943. Reproduced from Hofstra University Special Collections. All other photographs, courtesy of a family collection.

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Michael J. Arlen and Also by Alice Arlen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Epilogue

  Authors’ Note

  Bibliography

  About the Authors

  PROLOGUE

  OLD SCRAPBOOKS HAVE AN ENTROPY of their own, especially when it comes to newspaper clippings, whose newsprint, often dry as parchment, threatens to crumble at a touch, and whose faded photos (none too well-defined to begin with) seem to be reaching out to contemporary eyes like faint light from an ancient starburst. This old scrapbook, the one under observation, with its worn blue leather cover, has had its contents protected after a fashion with filmy shields of what must have been a new product at the time, cellophane; though after the passage of 112 years, cellophane or no, the unravelings of time have barely been slowed, let alone arrested. Today the columns of print are hazy on the page; the figures in the ancient photographs stare out from their stiff poses (in their now “historical” costumes) as if from a long-vanished country.

  The newspaper thus preserved is Hearst’s Chicago Morning American, and the date is November 20, 1902. On this news-filled day—which apparently also provided readers with such stories as “Two Saloons Blown Up, Many Dead”; “College Students March to Protest Vaccinations”; “Remorseless Convict Hanged”; and (not without interest) “40,000 Troops Mass on Canadian Border”—the American’s major story begins on page 1 with a hefty four-column headline, then spreads out inside to cover most of five other pages. The headline (a bit on the wordy side, in the style of the day) reads as follows: “Higinbotham-Patterson Wedding Acme of Elegant Simplicity.” Several subheadlines follow in a similar vein: “Social Event of the Year”; “Rare Taste Displayed”; “Bishop Addresses Throng.” Also on the first page, an artist’s sketch of “The Bride at Church” extends across several columns and down below the fold, causing the report of the Canadian invasion to be cut short. Inside, beginning on page 3, are many related features, long and short, furnishing additional wedding information: Most but not all the bridesmaids wore plumes of mauve feathers; the ceremony was performed at an hour (4:00 p.m.) only lately made fashionable in New York City; the procession of carriages arriving at Grace Church had caused a complete shutdown of Wabash Avenue. Elsewhere there are profiles of the seven ushers (“mostly Yale men with an affiliation to Scroll and Key”); individual portrait photos of each bridesmaid; and a complete list of all six hundred guests—a list heavy with the names of Gilded Age great families of Chicago such as Armour, Swift, Pullman, McCormick, and Field—plus a special section devoted to “Members of the Smart Set of the Eastern Cities” who had traveled west to grace Grace Church with their presence.

  As to the principals in this grand event, the bride and groom, they are more than amply celebrated on the broad bleached pages of the Morning American. Alice Higinbotham, the bride, portrayed in numerous photos in addition to the artist’s sketch, invariably described as beautiful, elegant, comely, and of course radiant, with her “dark hair and laughing eyes,” is seemingly already well-known to many Chicagoans as the daughter of Rachel and Harlow Higinbotham—himself the former president of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (with its Venetian lagoons, gorillas fro
m Africa, and thrilling Ferris wheel—the fabulous “White City” on the Midway), and before that the shrewd finance executive who led the remarkable retail expansion of Marshall Field & Company.

  The Chicago Morning American’s front-page account of Alice Higinbotham’s wedding to Joseph Medill Patterson, 1902.

  On an inside page, in a decorously gossipy feature attributed to “the Bystander,” one of the bridesmaids, Miss Kate Lancaster, recalled the “charming story” of Alice’s adventure, or misadventure, one winter’s night two years before while iceboating on a moonlit Wisconsin lake with “some college fellows.” An unexpected gap in the ice had caused the boat to overturn, spilling eighteen-year-old Alice into the freezing water; although she herself was tiny, weighing next to nothing, her soggy fur coat and boots made it impossible for her companions to pull her out. But little Alice had gamely shouted that she would “hold on and stick it out,” and this she had done for close to twenty minutes in frozen Lake Geneva, until the college men returned with ropes and hauled her to safety, later much praising her for her “pluck and grit.” According to “the Bystander,” this story had almost certainly reached the ears of the future groom (a young man “much drawn to derring-do”), who had spent the better part of the next year “in romantic pursuit” of Alice Higinbotham—literally a pursuit: she being whisked off by her family to view the cherry blossoms in Japan; he contriving to intercept the returning travelers in California—before finally obtaining her and her parents’ consent to an engagement.

  A grainy photograph on page 4 shows Joe Patterson surrounded by his seven ushers. He is tall for his time (six feet even; taller than the others, with the exception of his cousin Robert McCormick, who is six feet four), and broad shouldered, doubtless from his years on the Yale crew. On the whole he seems a fine-looking young man, with brownish hair, a wide forehead, and a somewhat indecipherable or indeterminate expression, which might be simple optimism or youthful wariness: hard to tell since the primitive nature of the old engravings doesn’t permit much nuance or show of personality. On that November afternoon in 1902, Patterson is twenty-three years old, barely two years out of college—not so youthful as he would be considered now but none too old either. At the groom’s “farewell dinner,” according to the American, one of the ushers toasted “Joe Pat’s restless energy—or was it energetic restlessness?” Another spoke of his “Rough-Rider spirit,” referring to his unsuccessful attempt to join Col. Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Rider” regiment in the summer of his freshman year; alluding also to a subsequent summer spent “rough-necking on a ranch in Wyoming” (during which time he’d apparently befriended another restless young man, the outlaw Butch Cassidy); and one year later to his going even farther afield, across the wide Pacific to China, then in the throes of the Boxer Rebellion. For at the age of twenty Joe Pat had somehow made his way inland, not as far as “the palace of the Manchu Empress in Peking” as the American playfully averred, but nonetheless as far as the fighting at Tientsin, tagging along with a company of U.S. Marines, after which he’d sent back dispatches to Chicago newspapers, notably the American and the Chicago Tribune—the last described as “a publication where the correspondent was not entirely unknown.”

  What the Hearst editors saw no need to explain—what most readers of any Chicago newspaper in those days already knew—was that young Joe Patterson was the son of Robert Wilson Patterson, editor of the Chicago Tribune, the most prosperous newspaper in the country; moreover, perhaps of greater local consequence, on his mother’s side he was the grandson of the redoubtable Joseph Medill, founder and owner of the Tribune; early antislavery voice in the Republican Party, one of the original “Lincoln men” in Illinois, and while two years dead still venerated as one of the early titans of Chicago. In other words Joseph Medill Patterson right then is very much a young prince of the city, whether he wishes to be or no; and possibly any ambivalence on his smooth face derives from his somehow knowing this while at the same time not quite knowing what it means.

  Finally, after many column inches, the American’s Homeric account of the great wedding concludes with a description of Alice Higinbotham Patterson’s reappearance, at the finale of her parents’ “chrysanthemum-strewn reception,” in her “dark-blue cloth traveling gown and sable-trimmed cloak and hat,” bound with her husband for a brief honeymoon in Thomasville, Georgia, after which, it is reported, the couple will return, not to Chicago but to the state capital in Springfield, where “Mr. Patterson will attend to his new duties in the State legislature.” Today’s reader, peering in from modern times, looks perhaps sentimentally for a photo, portrait, artist’s sketch of the bride and groom in the process of shape-shifting into husband and wife, about to step into the future. But amid this cornucopia of wedding pictures on these old pages, there seems to be none—none at all—showing the two principals actually together in the same frame, as it were.

  · 1 ·

  IT WOULD LIKELY BE UNFAIR and uncharitable (though maybe temptingly ironic) to suggest that Joe Patterson and Alice Higinbotham’s brilliant wedding represented the high point in their marriage. For one thing, most marriages—even the discordant and implausible ones, even those that in hindsight might seem challenged from the beginning—are surely voyages with many stops and starts, surprises, sideline excursions, and not all of them unpleasing. For instance, years later a middle-aged Joe Patterson recalled for his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Alicia, that on their Georgia honeymoon his young wife had been “good in the hay,” a snippet of information that, among other things, gives some notion of the oddly familiar relationship that came to evolve between father and daughter.

  On the other hand, on the subject of that same honeymoon—two young people alone together for the first time, at a resort in the piney woods of Georgia—what the bride mostly remembered (not being one to chat easily with daughters, or anyone else, about “the hay”) was the impatience and disapproval of her new husband. “He liked it that I rode,” she once told her youngest daughter, Josephine, “but he was down on me for not shooting although I just didn’t like to. And he was always scolding me for fussing with my hair and trying to get dressed properly.” More tellingly she could sense that he was already becoming bored with her company. In fact, soon after their return he was writing glumly to his mother to the effect that Alice, “in spite of three years at Miss Porter’s School,” appeared to know little more than “how to read and speak a little in the French language”; indeed, save for “her interest in the decorative arts,” he continued, his new wife knew little “in the way of History or Politics”—a deficiency, he said, he was doing his best to remedy by compiling a reading list for her.

  In January of next year, as planned, the Pattersons settled into a modest apartment near the railroad tracks in Springfield, then a town of some forty thousand, embedded in the great, flat downstate prairie, far from the familiar sophistications of Chicago. Alice worked at learning to keep house with the help of a Swedish farm girl, who did most of the heavy lifting in an era of washtubs, laundry lines, and weighty hand irons, to say nothing of the chores and crafts of the kitchen. In her free time she tried to get through her mountain of wedding thank-you letters, and wrote almost daily to her mother, who remained doggedly skeptical of the Swedish girl’s domestic skills. “Inger prepared a fine breakfast for Joe,” Alice declared in one letter, “using fresh eggs obtained from her cousin, although J. was as usual in a great rush to get to his office.” Joe Patterson’s office was a half mile away in the statehouse, where he was just then the youngest member of the Illinois legislature—a Republican assemblyman from Chicago’s Eighth District: a job he’d strenuously campaigned for in the months before his wedding, having come to the conclusion that he could accomplish more in politics than he could as a lowly reporter on the Chicago Tribune in the shadow of his august father.