Cissie and Drew

Pugnacious, pug-nosed Publisher Eleanor ("Cissie") Patterson, whose Washington Times-Herald is sometimes referred to as "The Hen House," last week wound up one of her mussiest barnyard fights. In a front-page box she announced that she had got rid of Columnists Pearson & Allen (Washington Merry-Go-Round) because they had made "poisonous attempts" to "smear" General MacArthur.

The Pearson & Allen version was quite different: in February they had given Cissie six months' notice that they were canceling their contract with her; the MacArthur issue was trumped up and not the whole truth; the start of their fight with her occurred because "we did not believe that the President wanted Pearl Harbor" in order to get the U.S. into war. They drafted an ad giving their side of the story, but other Washington publishers, chary of stepping on a colleague's toes, would not publish it.

Cissie Patterson's feud with Pearson & Allen was more complex and fiercer than the others in which she often engages. She has close family and professional ties with Columnist Drew Pearson. He is her ex-son-in-law and father of her only granddaughter Ellen, now 15, in whose favor Cissie was said to have drawn a will leaving her fortune (about $40,000,000) and the Times-Herald.

Columnist Pearson, the more politic of the Pearson & Allen team, had long made himself agreeable to Publisher Patterson. He brought her their column--generally believed to be one of her paper's best circulation-pullers--in 1934 for $100 a week. (Cissie liked its pro-New Deal slant then.) To please her he even went so far as to judge Times-Herald beauty contests.

When, after Pearl Harbor, the Merry-Go-Round column went after the isolationist press, Cissie began to cool toward Pearson & Allen. This spring she fired Pearson's present wife, Luvie Moore, a member of the Times-Herald staff who had been one of her close friends. She also fired Drew's brother Leon, a Times-Herald columnist. Adding insult to injury, she hired Luvie's former husband George Abell, the one man Drew and Luvie can not abide.

When Pearson & Allen asked her to cancel their contract, Cissie countered by yanking their column out of its spot opposite the editorial page, pushed it back among the want ads, chopped it up, some days dropped it altogether.

Fortnight ago she published a box quoting allegedly derogatory remarks (but omitting numerous praises of MacArthur) which have appeared in Merry-Go-Round in recent years, accusing Pearson & Allen of "false and sneering innuendo ... to smear the reputation of a great man. . . ." The Merry-Go-Round will probably soon appear in Eugene Meyer's Washington Post.

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