Born in Chicago on November 7, 1881, ╥Cissy╙ Patterson, as she was called from girlhood (she later changed her given names from Elinor Josephine to Eleanor Medill), came of one of the great American newspaper families: her grandfather, Joseph Medill, had been editor in chief of the Chicago Tribune, her father, Robert W. Patterson, and her cousin, Robert R. McCormick, were in turn editors and publishers of it, and her brother, Joseph Medill Patterson, was publisher of the New York Daily News. Patterson, however, was slated for a career in society by her ambitious mother. After a private education at Miss Hersey╒s in Boston and Miss Porter╒s in Farmington, Connecticut, she became a most eligible debutante. She spent much time with her uncle, Robert S. McCormick, U.S. envoy in Vienna and then St. Petersburg, and in April 1904 she married an impecunious Polish nobleman, Count Josef Gizycki. But the count had other interests besides his wife, and she left him after less than four years. The count followed her, abducted their baby daughter, and initiated an international episode of the greatest interest to readers of society pages on both sides of the Atlantic. It took a year to get the baby back, with the help of the enormous Patterson and McCormick fortune, and another eight years to get a divorce, which cost, it was rumored, some half a million dollars. For some years thereafter she gave herself to travel, to rearing her daughter, who in 1925 married columnist Drew Pearson, and to writing occasional newspaper pieces. As Eleanor M. Gizycka she published two novels, Glass Houses, 1923 (French edition; English in 1926), and Fall Flight, 1928. Another marriage left her a widow in 1929, and Cissy, at forty-five, was left with her social career a disaster.
Patterson decided to try her hand at the newspaper business╤she had inherited an interest in the Tribune, but beyond membership on its board of directors had played no part in it╤and in 1930 she was engaged by her old friend William Randolph Hearst to edit the Washington Herald. (The same year she changed her name legally to Eleanor Patterson.) She was an eccentric editor in chief, often arriving at the office in riding costume or in evening clothes. She feuded with a series of city editors in the course of proving her seriousness and determination to shape her own paper. Her involvement in the Herald extended to going out on many important stories herself, usually in disguise. Her editorial style tended strongly to the personal, even idiosyncratic, and included sharp wit and vituperation among its weapons. Yet she was an early crusader for home rule for the District of Columbia and for a hot lunch program for District schoolchildren (a program she underwrote herself for a time), among other reforms. In addition, she had the family genius for circulation-building publicity. Within a few years the paper╒s circulation had more than doubled. In August 1937 she leased the Herald from Hearst, together with his evening paper, the Washington Times, and in January 1939 she bought them outright. Against her brother╒s advice she combined them into a single all-day paper with six editions, the Washington Times-Herald. By 1943 the paper had the highest circulation in Washington and was out of the red. Her paper thrived during World War II, but it became less prosperous afterward as she appeared to lose interest in it. She died at her estate near Marlboro, Maryland, on July 24, 1948. The Times-Herald was sold to Colonel Robert R. McCormick╒s Chicago Tribune, in 1949 and to the Washington Post in 1954.
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