Felicia Gizycka was born in 1905 to Count Josef Gizycki and his wife, Countess Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson. Her early years were colored by her father’s kidnapping of her and her mother’s aloofness. Her adult life was one of “international flapper,” failed romances, and writing. From her parents to her choices in romantic partners, Felicia’s story exhibits hallmarks of 20th century life. Today the American Heritage Center is excited to share her and her mother’s story.
Felicia’s story begins with her mother, Cissy, who was the granddaughter of Chicago Tribune powerhouse Joseph Medill. Cissy’s mother, Elinor “Nellie” Patterson was the second born daughter, who married Robert Patterson.
Born in November 1881, Cissy’s childhood was one of privilege. She was educated at Miss Porter’s school in Farmington, Connecticut- preparing for her eventual role as wife and mother. But Cissy had a stubborn, independent streak that had her mother in fits and made her a darling of her grandfather.
Cissy, like many other young women of her social class, came with a sizable dowry – one that would draw attention from various suitors. Prime among them were Nicholas Longworth (the future husband of Alice Roosevelt, who was the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and one of Cissy’s friends and enemies) and Count Josef Gizycki.
Cissy’s romance with Count Gizycki reflects the same story as other heiresses of her time, the so-called “Dollar Princesses,” who left the United States and married aristocracy elsewhere. Cissy’s count was impoverished, his estates in Russian Poland as destitute as they were remote. Josef had a gambling problem, creating debts that had Cissy’s dowry catching his eye.
The pair first met when Cissy traveled abroad with her aunt and uncle, who was the ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and later Russia. They met at a horse race and maintained correspondence even after Cissy returned to the United States. He asked for her hand, multiple times, and finally traveled to America himself in 1904 to push the issue. He was unpopular with her family, thanks to his reputation, but she came with a $30,000 a year income that her destitute gambling fiancé needed. They were finally wed in April of 1904, and that is where Cissy’s fairytale ended.
They traveled to Josef’s remote, barren estates in Russian Poland, and upon arriving home, the count told his new bride that he only married her for her dowry and to beget a legitimate child. In 1905, the couple welcomed that child, Felicia, but family life was never smooth for the small family. Josef was abusive, when he wasn’t out sleeping with other women. He and Cissy separated and rejoined many times before she decided to leave him. This time, still bruised and battered from her husband, and with the help of servants, Cissy and her daughter attempted to flee to London, and from there, America.
But Josef was not so willing to let his legitimate heir, or his wife, go. He followed them and kidnapped Felicia from a London park, disguised in goggles and a fur coat, and took her to an Austrian convent. This was a deliberate choice on Josef’s part – Europe did not recognize divorce, so it would take the order of the Tsar to return Felicia to her mother. However, the count was unlucky.
The Patterson family happened to be friends with then President-elect Taft, who agreed to intercede in the matter for the family. Felicia settled in Vienna, waiting for the debacle to end, while Taft wrote a personal letter to Tsar Nicholas II asking him to return Felicia to her mother. When the count returned to his estate, he was arrested by the Tsar and ordered to return Felicia to her mother.
The scandal had become international news in the interim; newspapers dubbed the child “the Little Countess Felicia” in their stories and inflamed the pressure on all parties involved.1 Amidst rumors of a $500,000 ransom in the same newspapers, Felicia was returned to her mother’s hotel suite in Vienna. Felicia never saw her father again, and after eighteen months, she was returned to her mother and together they left for the United States. For the rest of her childhood, Felicia was accompanied by a private detective after her father’s actions. It took her mother thirteen years to obtain a divorce from the Count, and it would only be recognized in the United States, as Europe didn’t support the idea of divorce.
Cissy and Felica settled close to other Patterson family members in Lake Forest, Illinois; however, the family had many residences, and Cissy also purchased homes of her own over the course of Felica’s childhood, including Flat Creek Ranch in Jackson, Wyoming. Other homes included the Patterson mansion in Washington D.C. – 15 Dupont Circle, a Long Island estate, and Mount Airy Mansion in Washington D.C.
Cissy returned to Washington D.C. in 1913, and by 1920 her brother caved to her pleas to allow her to work for his paper The New York Daily News. She also got a job working for William Randolph Hearst, the man from whom she would eventually purchase both the Washington Herald, and the Washington Times papers. She would go on to combine them and turn them into one of the most successful dailies in the capital. But her familial life was far less smooth.
Tension between mother and daughter grew early and followed them both through the rest of their lives. Felicia was raised mostly by servants and was just as stubborn and independent as her mother before her. Mother and daughter quarreled often, and Cissy was prone to ignoring the similarities between herself as a child and her daughter – choosing to blame her daughter’s willfulness on the “Polish” side. As for Felicia, she grew up rotating between her family’s many estates and properties. She spoke multiple languages from an early age, including some French learned in the convent, German, Russian, and English (though not as well).
By the time she reached young adulthood, Felicia was as prone to dramatics as her mother had been before her. She ran away from the ranch in Wyoming, allegedly riding a horse down a canyon, taking money from her account before leaving, and traveling first to Salt Lake and then on to San Diego. There Felicia was able to live undetected for four months, working as a waitress and living in a rooming house.
It was not Cissy that followed her daughter to California and attempted to bring her home. Rather, it was a suitor that Felicia had already rebuffed once, calling him a bore. That suitor was Andrew “Drew” Pearson. Felicia had no interest in marriage and family life, but eventually Drew was able to convince her. He did so by telling her they could try marriage for three years and if she didn’t like it, they could divorce after the three-year mark. It worked, and the couple was wed in 1925 in Long Beach, California, before they returned east.
The couple lived in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., where Felicia worked as a film reviewer for the Washington Post, and her husband continued to build his own journalism career. In 1926 the couple welcomed their daughter Ellen Pearson. Felicia, at exactly three years, told Pearson that she wanted a divorce, and in 1928 they divorced. The Patterson family curse of tension between mother and daughter struck again – Felicia and her daughter had a tension-filled relationship, like her own with her mother.
After her divorce, Felicia lived life as an “international flapper.” She roamed the globe, drinking and writing – both fiction and journalism. Like her mother, Felicia was a writer by trade but not necessarily by training or education. And, like her mother, she published two novels in her life. The first in 1932 –The House of Violence, and the second in 1939 – Flower of Smoke. Her first piece of fiction had been published in the Liberty magazine run by her uncle, and she would continue to publish short stories. She also worked in the journalism trade, like many other family members, writing film reviews and for a time Paris restaurant reviews.
Cissy often helped her daughter gain writing opportunities, or they came from other members of the family, but she also bemoaned her daughter’s romantic tendencies. Felicia’s mother often had to bail her out of romantic entanglements as Felicia seemed to fall in and out of love easily and often. Like her mother before her, she was even briefly courted by a Polish count of her own, but his suit was rejected by the family when he asked for a $1 million dollar dowry.
Instead, Felicia’s second husband was an Englishman. Dudley de Lavigne was an English insurance broker (who was broke) and a part of the Prince of Wales’s social circle. They were married and divorced in 1934. Felicia had not even notified her mother about the marriage prior to Cissy receiving the announcement. But she still sent her lawyer to help her daughter with the divorce suit later that same year.
However, relations between mother and daughter eroded further after Felicia’s 1939 novel was published. It was autobiographical, and the descriptions of a “heartless socialite mother” in the story were unflattering and infuriated her mother.2 By 1945, relations between mother and daughter were so bad that Felicia publicly “divorced” her mother. Cissy offered Felicia a floor of the Washington House, but Felicia denied the offer, instead choosing to live off on inheritance from a grandmother and her writing.
By the time her mother died in 1948, Cissy’s will had been reworked dozens of times. She was a bit obsessed with her own demise and spoke of it often at dinner parties and other social gatherings. In those varied iterations, Felicia’s inheritance had changed drastically. Cissy’s estate was estimated at around $16 million in 1948, and there were varied interested parties to see who would end up with what of that vast sum.
In the 1924 version of her mother’s will, Cissy called her a “beloved daughter” and Felicia was her sole heir. By 1948, Cissy had drastically “reduced” her daughter’s inheritance. Felicia was not left her mother’s newspapers, or even a stake in them; rather she was left household goods, artwork, clothing and jewelry, properties in North Dakota, and the Long Island estate.
Felicia decided to challenge her mother’s will, as she had been all but disinherited. Her ensuing legal battle was carried out with the help of her ex-husband, Drew Pearson. He became involved himself because of the chance his daughter would inherit nothing if he didn’t intervene. He and Cissy Patterson had their own contentious relationship and had often made pointed barbs in their newspaper writings against one another. And for Felicia, she was once again featured in numerous newspapers with the legal battle, all of whom covered the drama readily. By the end of the suit, Felicia walked away with a lump sum of $400,000 tax-free (more than $5 million in today’s dollars). At 44 years old Felicia had become wealthy in her own right and was free of her mother.
Her mother’s newspapers went to seven stakeholders, as had been slated to in the original 1948 version of her will. In less than a year, Cissy’s empire began to crumble. Within the same year, the stakeholders sold the paper to her cousin, Colonel McCormick. Her cousin would sell off the paper in five years to the competing Washington Post, who promptly closed it.
After her mother’s death, Felicia continued writing, moving mostly between New Canaan, Connecticut, and Wyoming. In 1958, Felicia married for the third time. Her new husband, John Kennedy Magruder, was a landscape architect who also ran the Alcoholics Anonymous Men’s Home in Alexandria, Virginia. This marriage, like the two before it, ended in divorce. However, Felica kept her husband’s name, writing under both, for the rest of her life.
In 1995, Felicia moved for the final time from New Canaan to Laramie, Wyoming, where her daughter Ellen had married local attorney George Arnold. She moved into a retirement community and lived the rest of her life there. She died on February 26, 1999, at ninety-three years old. Most of her life had been defined by her relationship with her mother, or with her romances. Her relationships were all built on the same foundation as the one with her mother. Felicia once said, “I spent so much time hating my mother. How could I ever really love anyone else?”3
The Felicia Gizycka papers were donated to the American Heritage Center in 2024, and though the collection is small, it drew interest from members of the staff, including myself. I was drawn to this story, both for its reflections of 20th century hallmarks, as well as for the seemingly dramatic narrative that made up Felicia’s life. Discovering her ties to many important members of the press in the 20th century, as well as her family connections to the state of Wyoming has been a fun challenge. It has re-inspired a love of research and 20th century American history.
Post contributed by AHC Processing Archivist Brittany Heye.
- “Felicia Magruder.” 1999. SFGATE. April 6, 1999. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Felicia-Magruder-2937990.php.
- Dannatt, Adrian. 1999. “Obituary: Countess Felicia Gizycka | the Independent.” The Independent. May 17, 1999. https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/obituary-countess-felicia-gizycka-1094303.html.
- Ibid.
Sources also include Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson by Amanda Smith published by Knopf in 2011.
