The Forgotten Life of "The Most Hated Woman in America”: Cissy Patterson (Documentary)

Описание: This in-depth, full-length documentary explores how Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson, granddaughter of Lincoln kingmaker Joseph Medill, survived an abusive Polish count who kidnapped her daughter, became America's first major female newspaper publisher at 49 with no experience, built Washington's largest paper while feuding with presidents and rivals, then died mysteriously in 1948 the night before changing her will, only to have her empire absorbed by the Washington Post and her name erased from history.

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Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson died mysteriously on July 24, 1948, at her Dower House estate outside Marlboro, Maryland, found by stepdaughter Halle Schlesinger sprawled across her bed the night before a scheduled meeting with her lawyer to change her will.

Born November 7, 1881, as Eleanor Josephine Patterson in Chicago, she was granddaughter of Joseph Medill, who acquired the struggling Chicago Tribune and helped secure Abraham Lincoln's Republican nomination through strategic convention maneuvering.

Her grandfather Medill personally lobbied for Chicago to host the Republican convention, packed galleries with Lincoln supporters, and convinced Ohio delegates to switch from Salmon Chase to Lincoln during the critical third ballot.

Cissy's parents built a 91-room Stanford White-designed mansion on North Astor Street and a $200,000 Beaux Arts mansion at 15 Dupont Circle that she called "the movie palace."

Around 1901, she met Count Josef Gizycki at a Vienna horse race—a charming but broke Polish nobleman with gambling problems, illegitimate children, and estates "as destitute as they were remote."

After marrying April 14, 1904, at the Dupont Circle mansion, the Count abandoned her at the reception, taking her to his dilapidated "castle" at Blansko where unpaid peasant children served as servants.

The Count told her "You have no money, you have no children, you have no sense" before beating her during a 1908 quarrel in France, prompting her escape by sleigh to the Russian border with baby daughter Felicia.

In retaliation, Gizycki kidnapped Felicia from a London park in 1908, demanding up to $1 million ransom while hiding her in an Austrian convent beyond American legal reach.

President-elect William Howard Taft wrote directly to Tsar Nicholas II requesting the child's return, leading to Gizycki's arrest and Felicia's release after an 18-month international ordeal.

As one of Washington's "Three Graces" alongside Alice Roosevelt and Marguerite Cassini, Cissy conducted affairs including with Nicholas Longworth, Alice's husband and House Speaker, whom Alice once caught with Cissy in an upstairs bathroom.

In 1925, she married Harvard-educated lawyer Elmer Schlesinger, retreating to her Jackson Hole ranch until his 1929 heart attack death left her widowed again at 47.

On August 1, 1930, despite never holding a job, 49-year-old Cissy took charge of William Randolph Hearst's failing Washington Herald, which was running fifth in a six-paper market.

She revolutionized the paper with local writers, Page Three gossip sections, Paris fashion cables, and so many female reporters that Time magazine mockingly called it "Cissy's Henhouse."

Her journalism was intensely personal: she rang Al Capone's doorbell for interviews, disguised herself as "Maude Martin" to report from Salvation Army shelters, and told an armed fired editor "You don't have the guts" when he threatened to kill her.

Within six years, circulation doubled to 120,000, and by 1939 she owned both the Herald and Washington Times, merging them into the Times-Herald with 10 editions published every 24 hours.

Her feud with Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer was vicious, including sending him a pound of raw meat with the note "So as not to disappoint you"—a Shylock reference targeting the Jewish publisher.

Along with brother Joseph Medill Patterson (New York Daily News founder) and cousin Robert McCormick (Chicago Tribune), they controlled such vast readership that FDR labeled them the "McCormick-Patterson Axis."

Three days before Pearl Harbor, the Times-Herald and Tribune simultaneously published Rainbow Five, America's top-secret 350-page Victory Program detailing plans for 10 million troops and a 1943 European invasion.

Secretary of War Stimson called it the most "unpatriotic" publication imaginable, while Representative Elmer Holland accused the Pattersons of being "America's Number One and Number Two exponents of the Nazi propaganda line."

By 1946, Collier's Weekly declared her "probably the most powerful woman in America. And perhaps the most hated" for building the capital's largest newspaper while feuding with presidents and rivals.