Word: gizycka
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Washington could hardly wait for the trial of Countess Felicia Gizycka's suit to break the will of her mother, Publisher Eleanor Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald (TIME, Sept. 27). It promised to rattle many a family skeleton. But one afternoon last week just twelve days before the trial date, attorneys for the Countess summoned newsmen. They were handed an announcement of an agreement by all parties to settle out of court...
...settlement was to everybody's advantage. The seven executives who had inherited the paper from "Cissy" Patterson did not want their new regime hamstrung by months of legal wrangling. Countess Gizycka did not relish the unsavory process of trying to prove that her mother had not been of sound mind when she willed the paper to her top men. Under reported terms of the settlement Cissy Patterson's daughter will get no share of the Times-Herald, but she will get the mother's Long Island home and other personal property left her under the will...
...loan" of the paper's funds to Cissy. Concluded the Washington Daily News: "If it was a loan, the . . . executives who inherited the paper . . . could properly enter a claim against the rest of the estate." Still missing were Porter's voluminous personal papers, which Countess Felicia Gizycka, Cissy's daughter, hoped to use in her fight to break her mother's will. Times-Herald staffers were beginning to feel like characters in a whodunit. Last week they told of a circulation hustler who was a little confused about the countesses, ex-countesses and other celebrities...
...death set off a chain reaction, and a furious tug of war between claimants to the $16,500,000 Patterson estate. When the news reached Washington over the A.P., Times-Herald executives moved fast. The seven who had inherited the paper already faced a fight for it; Countess Felicia Gizycka, Mrs. Patterson's daughter, was contesting the will, charging that it had been obtained by "fraud and deceit" as Cissie Patterson was not of "sound mind" when she drafted it. (There was also talk that the seven heirs were already fighting among themselves, too.) And Porter's personal...
...told some friends of attempts to blackmail him, and he was sure he was being shadowed. Other friends of Porter said he had booked passage on the liner Media, but had canceled it on sailing day, Aug. 6. They said he would have been a star witness in Countess Gizycka's suit to break the will...