Post Toastie
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
Post Toastie Before Katharine Graham, there was Dorothy Schiff of the Post. BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN Up to the 1960s New York City boasted seven English language major dailies: the New York...
...The rest were “broadsheets,” the much larger format...
...Hook told him that he couldn’t dance at two weddings, and asked him to make a choice...
...She refused to let new mothers work parttime...
...The Lady Upstairs tells of Schiff ’s friendship—if not more—with Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she often visited at his homes in Hyde Park and Warm Springs...
...Six pieces ran, and the last one was a critical look at phony weekly supermarket specials...
...Nissenson credits Sann with saving Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...A year earlier, Thackrey had supported Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential race, a candidacy actively and openly supported by the Communist party...
...He chose the Stalinist conclave...
...The anti-Soviet intelligentsia, like Schiff and James Wechsler, were prepared to test their anti-Communist political convictions against the elite defenders of Alger Hiss...
...The author does not explain what there was to fear...
...Schiff killed the remaining seven installments, and Marilyn Nissenson, who obviously lacks a sense of humor, writes that “Dorothy was fearless in pursuit of new advertisers...
...the paper, but it was an uphill battle for the liberal Post...
...Hearst’s Journal-American had a circulation of almost 800,000...
...By the mid-1950s, the Post’s circulation, 420,000, had peaked...
...Compared with the city room fl oors of the Times, the Herald Tribune, and the World-Telegram, which I knew from personal observation, the Post’s was a slum tenement...
...Schiff was a sharp-tongued wit, according to Gloria Steinem...
...Schiff was a tallish, attractive woman with great legs, which she delighted in showing off...
...We will never know the exact nature of their friendship...
...At that point a local supermarket chain pulled its fullpage ads...
...But nobody paid any attention to the name change, and Delancey Street it remains to this day...
...When asked whether the crippled FDR could be sexually active, the doctor replied: “Don’t forget, only his legs are paralyzed...
...But she caved when one of her reporters came up with a series of 13 articles about New York supermarkets and how some of them short-weighted their customers or violated city ordinances...
...In fact, when a Post advertising salesman once asked a department store executive why he wasn’t advertising in the Post, the executive famously replied, “Because your readers are our shoplifters...
...Only three metropolitan dailies have survived into the new century: the Times, the Daily News, and the Post...
...I have a large apartment...
...Threats of a lawsuit forced the Times to retract the “expos...
...They were also willing to accept liberal accusations of red-baiting...
...They move in and they move out...
...Dorothy Schiff (1903-1989) was the owner and publisher of the Post for 37 years before it was sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1977 for $30 million...
...The Post at one point was delivering its Wall Street closing edition to newsstands by subway in order to catch the Grand Central and Penn Station commuters...
...I would say that the survival of the New York Post is a miracle, and that Dorothy Schiff, the millionaire descendant of a wealthy German-Jewish immigrant banker family, is the reason...
...When the Newspaper Guild threatened to strike, she countered with her threat that, if they did, she would close the paper for good...
...Her grandfather, Jacob Schiff, was so important a New York banker that the boulevard-wide Delancey Street on the Lower East Side was renamed Schiff Parkway...
...It was a staggering revelation of how removed from the real world she was...
...Hard to say...
...Thackrey had absolutely no idea what New York’s intellectual wars were about...
...Afternoon papers printed in downtown Manhattan were having trouble delivering their closing Wall Street editions uptown because of traffi c jams...
...Why such a drop...
...She dressed to kill...
...Was Schiff a nut case...
...Marilyn Nissenson cites Ted Morgan, another biographer, as her source for Schiff’s conversation with FDR’s physician...
...Few cities have been as fortunate as New York—or, more specifi cally, the borough of Manhattan—in their competitive newspapers...
...Give me your chauffeur, your cook, and your nursemaid and maybe I wouldn’t have such a problem...
...Theodore W. Kheel, the famed labor mediator, watched her toughing it out during a Newspaper Guild dispute with the New York publishers...
...Intelligent though she was, Schiff was blind to the problems of women on the news staff with children...
...In 1960, the Post’s circulation, 335,000, was down 25 percent...
...The Post at that point was the only surviving afternoon daily in New York, and she was one of the few women publishers of an important American newspaper...
...Her marriage to Ted Thackrey, a newspaperman who became editor of the Post, would be evidence for an affi rmative answer...
...One of those reporters recalls: “Dolly had the nerve to tell us, ‘I raised three children and worked full time.’ Well, sure...
...In the interests of full disclosure: In my youth I was a campus correspondent for the Post, earlier a copy boy at the Herald Tribune, and later a contributor to the New York Times Magazine...
...Thackrey’s opportunistic politics doomed his future, as far as Schiff was concerned, and in April 1949, Schiff fi red him as editor and publisher and, fi nally, as husband...
...BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN Up to the 1960s New York City boasted seven English language major dailies: the New York Times and its rival, the Herald Tribune, and the New York Post, the Daily Mirror, the Daily News, the Journal-American, and the World-Telegram...
...the New York World had gone out of business in 1931...
...Nissenson describes a conversation about marriage in which Steinem told the thrice-wed Schiff that she, Steinem, couldn’t marry because it would mean moving into the same apartment and “putting all your books and records together...
...Wechsler, a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy, wrote a powerful defense of anticommunism in his Age of Suspicion, and Schiff gave Wechsler her full support...
...In the early spring of 1949, when the philosopher Sidney Hook organized a protest against the Stalinist Stockholm Peace Appeal’s mass meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Thackrey accepted an invitation to speak at the conference, and then asked to be allowed to address the Hook meeting...
...And The Lady Upstairs tells a fascinating story about a woman who was fortunate and gutsy enough to smash the glass ceiling...
...In any case, the New York Times published a front-page story on May 27, 1976, under the headline “Dorothy Schiff Tells of Affair with Roosevelt...
...None of this appeared in Schiff ’s authorized biography by Jeffrey Potter (Men, Money & Magic), and the situation got even more complicated when the Times picked up the publisher’s press release hinting that Schiff had had an affair with FDR in the 1930s...
...In an inelegant turn of phrase, he described Dorothy Schiff as “the only publisher in New York with balls...
...Here I would like to offer from memory a two-word description of the Post’s dark, dirty, and gloomy city room fl oor, then located near the confl uence of the Hudson and East River waterfronts...
...The Schiff era included a major battle in the 1950s between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet intellectuals in the opinion business...
...True...
...To which Schiff merrily replied, “Well, my dear, that’s the difference between you and me...
...The Post, the News, and the Mirror were tabloids...
...The Lady Upstairs tells why the Post was able to survive, even though it was regarded with disdain by advertisers...
...Working for her were three of the most talented journalists in the country: James A. Wechsler, editor of the editorial page, columnist Murray Kempton, and Paul Sann, the managing editor...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 7
