Eleanor Josephine Medill "Cissy" Patterson, Countess Gizycki (November 7, 1881 – July 24, 1948) was an American journalist and newspaper editor, publisher and owner. She was one of the first women to head a major daily newspaper, the Washington Times-Herald in Washington, D.C.
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Early life
Elinor Josephine Patterson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 7, 1881, to the daughter of Robert and Elinor "Nellie" (née Medill) Patterson. She changed the spelling of her first name to "Eleanor" as an adult, but was mostly known as "Cissy". Her grandfather, Joseph Medill, was mayor of Chicago and owned the Chicago Tribune, which later passed into the hands of another Medill grandchild, her first cousin Colonel Robert R. McCormick. Cissy's older brother, who for a time was also involved in the Tribune, Joseph Medill Patterson, was the founder of the New York Daily News.
Education and marriage
She was educated at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, graduating in 1901. When her uncle Robert S. McCormick was named ambassador to Austria-Hungary, she accompanied him and his wife, Cissy's maternal aunt Kate, to Vienna. There, she met Count Josef Gizycki and fell in love with him, a romance not interrupted even by her return to America, where she lived in Washington, D.C. In Washington, she was a leading light in society, where the press labeled Alice Roosevelt (daughter of Theodore), Marguerite Cassini (daughter of Arthur Cassini, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and mother of Oleg Cassini), and Cissy the "Three Graces." Count Gizycki came to America, and they were married in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1904, despite her family's objections.
A daughter was born to them on September 3, 1905, and was named Felicia Leonora (1905–1999). Cissy went with the Count to his home, a vast feudal manor in Russian Poland. Their family life did not go well. They separated and rejoined several times, but Cissy eventually set herself on leaving. She took their child, hiding her in a house near London, but the Count pursued her and kidnapped their daughter, hiding her in an Austrian convent. Cissy filed for divorce, which took thirteen years to obtain.
Business dealings and social life
After her experience abroad, she moved to Lake Forest, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, but she returned to Washington in 1913. In 1920, her brother Joseph finally succumbed to his sister's pleas and allowed her to write for his New York Daily News, founded the previous year. She also worked for William Randolph Hearst. She published two novels, romans à clef, Glass Houses (1926) and Fall Flight (1928), part of her feud with former friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth. In 1925, Eleanor married Elmer Schlesinger, a New York lawyer. He died four years later, and in 1930, Mrs. Schlesinger legally changed her name to Mrs. Eleanor Medill Patterson.
Patterson tried to buy Hearst's two Washington D.C. papers, the morning Washington Herald and the evening Washington Times. However, Hearst hated to sell anything, even when he needed the money. Although he had never made money from his Washington papers, he refused to give up the prestige of owning papers in the capital. However, Hearst agreed to make Patterson the papers' editor at the urging of his editor Arthur Brisbane.
"...And Cissy, although she had no education to speak of and she had very little journalistic experience, seemed to have some of that gift. One of the things she did when William Randolph Hearst allowed her to run his Washington Herald, which was running fifth in a six-paper market in 1930, she immediately started making changes, the kind of changes that her brother would have made. She added a lot of local features, a lot of local color. She hired a lot of local writers, rather than use the, as she put it, “canned stuff” that came off the Hearst wires." - Amanda Smith, 2011
"She revitalized the paper and promptly changed the Times from a staid and plodding publication to one more vitally interested in the most tawdry murders to women’s issues and society columns. The addition of coverage of much of Washington’s glittering society appealed to women readers, as did articles on food and fashion. Cissy hired several women to write for the Times and her changes had the effect of propelling the Washington Herald to one of the leading newspapers in Washington, D. C. It wasn’t long before Cissy Patterson had doubled the circulation of the Herald, a feat William Randolph Hearst himself had not been able to accomplish." - Ray Hill, The Knoxville Focus
Family difficulties
She feuded with her daughter Felicia, who publicly "divorced" her in 1945, and with her former son-in-law, Drew Pearson, by whom she had a granddaughter, Ellen Cameron Pearson Arnold (1926–2010). An alcoholic for most of her adult life, she died of a heart attack at age 66 at Mount Airy. She left the paper to seven of her editors, who sold it to her cousin Colonel McCormick within the year. He held onto the paper for five years, and although he seemed close to returning it to profitability for several years, it eventually proved too significant a financial drain. After sounding out several other publishers quietly, McCormick opted to sell the paper to the rival Post, which promptly closed it.
As Countess Gizycki, Patterson was a frequent visitor to her ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the 1920s, where Donald Hough records an unexpected aspect of her personality: the ability to speak effectively to horses in language worthy of a native cowboy. The Flat Creek Ranch is now on the National Register of Historic Places.