Sylvia & You

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The overflow crowd of 1,200 at last week's meeting of Detroit's Economic Club was thoroughly and impressively big business. Throughout the jampacked ballroom in the Veterans' Memorial Building sat many of Detroit's leading bankers, stock-and-bond men and captains of industry, including a solid phalanx from the automotive world: Chrysler Chairman L. L. ("Tex") Colbert, American Motors President George Romney, Edward N. Cole, general manager of General Motors' Chevrolet Division, and scores of others. From dozens of clear Havana cigars, as from the stacks of busy factories, smoke drifted ceilingward.

Before this capacity audience of male capitalists rose the invited speaker: a pert, brown-eyed, dark-haired Manhattan matron of 47, dressed in a tailored beige wool dress, pearls and black felt hat. With a smile, Mrs. G. Sumner Collins gently corrected Detroit Free Press Publisher John S. Knight, who in introducing her had mentioned her concern for the "belly issues" of economics. Perhaps a better expression, she suggested delicately, would be "pocketbook issues." Then, with the presidential ballots still being counted in many parts of the U.S. and with the business world understandably edgy about the prospect of a change in party administration, Mrs. Collins embarked on a knowing, rapid-fire discussion of her theme: "What's Next for Business and Investment." Said she: "One of the soundest rules I try to remember when making forecasts in the field of economics --a profession which is still far more an art than a science--is that whatever is to happen is happening already." The economy is not dominated by presidential elections, but rather by a cyclical pattern. "All this has little to do with the election of John Kennedy. It would have been the same had Richard Nixon been elected. What is to happen, in short, may well be happening now, and regardless of the election, the recession should end on schedule very soon."

As she spoke, the audience listened with attentive respect. This respect had less to do with her message than with Mrs. G. Sumner Collins herself. It was the homage from businessmen who knew that this was a woman to be reckoned with in their masculine world. For Mrs. G. Sumner Collins is professionally known as Sylvia Porter, business columnist. From Chrysler's Colbert on down. Detroit's Economic Club is well aware that more car buyers, more stock market investors and more plain everyday consumers listen to Sylvia Porter than to any other economic writer in the profession.

$250,000 a Year. Sylvia Porter is a press phenomenon. Her daily column, "Your Dollar," appears in 331 newspapers, giving her a distribution vastly wider than that of any other syndicated business columnist. Her potential readership exceeds 23 million. She appears in papers of the political left (the New York Post), of the center (the Portland Oregonian) and of the right (the Phoenix Arizona Republic); she runs in big papers (the Chicago Daily News, with 550,000 circulation) and small papers (the Fort Smith, Ark. Southwest American, with 18,000). Her column reaches into every state but New Hampshire and Alaska and goes to five countries abroad. It has made her emphatically a capitalist: Sylvia's annual income, including book royalties and the proceeds from a weekly newsletter she publishes, is more than $250,000 a year.

Columnist Porter's vast readership gives her a powerful and measurable impact. Last year, when she told her readers about the first 5% Government note issue in current history, her column helped prime a land-office rush to buy, notably in Houston ("Gimme some of those securities Sylvia Porter wrote about"), where her column had been appearing for years. Last April, when Sylvia invited readers to write to their brokers--or to the New York Stock Exchange--for assorted pamphlets on investing, 16,000 did just that.

Such impact carries her to the highest financial circles, which are understandably interested in what Sylvia is telling the rapt consumer. She has been required reading to the Secretary of the Treasury in every U.S. Administration since Franklin Roosevelt. Henry Morgenthau Jr. survived the rough edge of her tongue in 1935 to turn admirer, sent her roses on her birthday. Harry Truman's Secretary, John W. Snyder, asked for her autograph. Eisenhower's first Secretary, George M. Humphrey, mailed praise: "It is a treat to have good old Sylvia straighten people out." Incumbent Secretary Robert B. Anderson objects to any prolonged Porter absence from the capital. "When are you going to be in Washington?" he asked in a letter last year. "I haven't had the benefit of your always helpful advice for some time."

Rising with the Economy. Columnist Porter's rise to pre-eminence is paralleled --and, in part, explained--by a rising wave of popular interest in business and economic affairs. The surge picked up its momentum early in the 1950s. By then the nation's economy, having recovered from the Depression of the 1930s and the austerities of war, was reaching toward an unprecedented prosperity. Personal income was rising to new peaks. The postwar stock market was on the boom, encouraging millions of new investors to place their bets on business. Millions of other Americans, inspired by the bullish economy to test their credit, plunged in installments toward a new house, a new washing machine, a new car.

All these millions needed a plainspoken, clearly articulate guide to the intricacies of the U.S. dollar. Sylvia Porter became that guide. She did not create the surge of interest in business reporting, but she had seen it coming. "I had always assumed that people were interested in economic affairs, just as I was," she says. "My assumption was justified. The times caught up with me. I was ready. I was there."

She was there not only at the right time and place, but in the right way. Then, and even now, the business sections of the daily press offered only meager nourishment for the millions of newly curious. They abounded in the dullest kind of copy: earnings reports, production indexes, commodity prices and stock charts, most of it in the strange and mystifying currency of the marketplace: "economic parity," "discretionary income." "price-earnings ratio," "net free reserves."

Against this backdrop of "bafflegab," as Sylvia calls anything the reader cannot be expected to digest without help, her column stood out in bold and refreshing relief. For years she had been explaining the meaning of economics in terms that anyone could understand. Since no one else was doing it, Sylvia had the field to herself. As James A. Wechsler, editor of her base paper, the New York Post, has said: "Sylvia walked into a vacuum."

Aimed at Everybody. Sylvia asks the reader to come equipped with nothing more than an interest in a basic commodity: money. She supplies the rest, in a pattern so skillfully simple, informal and clear that it slides readily even into the nonexpert mind. "Increasing productivity" turns into "a bigger output per man per hour." "Discount rate" becomes "borrowing rate." Rather than indulge in bafflegab, Sylvia takes a paragraph to explain the jargon.

The Porter reader is invitingly and inevitably addressed as "you." This means everybody: "Just consider these facts and you'll grasp the deep personal meaning of this to you--whoever you are, wherever you are." If the "you" is fissionable, Sylvia splits it: "you, the small business man" and "you, the consumer," to quote two salutations joined in one recent Porter column. "You" also is highly possessive: it is "your recession," "your cost of living," "your pocketbook," and, of course, "your dollar."

Brightening the Dull. Through the densest economic thicket Sylvia blazes a simple trail. "You wouldn't by any chance have $460 tucked away in your pocketbook or wallet or lying around the house this minute, would you?" she once asked in her column. "As a typical American family, that's the astounding total you're now supposed to be holding in CASH. The statistics are indisputable, unassailable." After this arresting lead, guaranteed to nail the typical American reader, she led a quick tour of a difficult subject: a report on the national currency hoard.

With equal effect, she dips into her own experience to make points. "One of America's leading dermatologists simplified my life and slashed my personal budget a few months ago," she confided in a column last September. In the chatty paragraph that followed, Sylvia admitted a feminine partiality for expensive face creams ("I won't confess to myself, much less to you, what I was spending"), but said she had given them up when a skin specialist assured her that nothing, but nothing, beats common soap. This little white lie (in private fact, she still dabs on assorted costly ointments, pays 75-c- a cake for Elizabeth Arden soap) had its purpose. It was Sylvia's way of backing into a survey of the billion-dollar cosmetic industry so stuporously dull that few readers would have bothered to read it in the raw.

Eye-Dropper Economics? In her very simplicity of approach Sylvia Porter detractors are wont to see superficiality. Their principal objection is that she is not worth reading by anyone who has gone beyond the kindergarten economics level. "Economics by the eye-dropper." sneers a teacher of economics at NewYork University.

Many other Porter critics, especially among businessmen who profess not to read her, apparently hold the view of Britain's renowned 18th century lexicographer and epigrammatist, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who felt that women ought to know better than to invade a male province and could only succeed there as a freak. "Sir," said Johnson, "a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Spotting Trends. The fact is that as a business columnist, Sylvia Porter can more than hold her own in a predominantly male field. Even her critics acknowledge her perception. Says the chief of research for a topflight economic agency in Washington: "She is watched, more than read, because she is perceptive, and we want to know what is on her mind."

Sometimes her crystal ball is as cloudy as anyone else's--together with most forecasters, she missed the 1960 steel picture, for example, inaccurately predicted record profits. But Sylvia has no equal at reducing vital but complex subjects, such as the Federal Reserve System, to manageable size. She is sometimes miles ahead of the competition in spotting trends: she was one of the first to see the business recession of 1958, made a splash by spotting the travail of Miami's resort-hotel business.

Far from disputing her critics, Sylvia is unabashedly inclined to agree with them. "Let's face it," she says of her column, "it's not deathless prose. Sometimes I look at all that stuff and say, 'How am I getting away with it?' But it was the best I could do that day." She does not try to compete with the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin's able Joseph A. Livingston, a polished and savvy economics columnist who is far more widely quoted on Wall Street than Sylvia, even though his 87-paper syndication does not include New York City. If some say she is no profound economic thinker, so does Sylvia: "I am not and should not be considered an economist." She knows what she is: Everyman's guide to the business world. "You could be the best of everything." says Sylvia, "and if nobody bothered to read you, what the hell?"

"A Non-Woman." Staying on top in a man's game has not been easy. In the process Sylvia makes such a heavy emotional investment in her job that she sometimes seems to have very little left for the other content of life. "Sylvia's a non-woman," observes one of her editors with ruthless candor. "It's her glands that are interesting." On the job or off,

Sylvia's nerves twang like a steel guitar. She bites her fingernails, is constitutionally incapable of sitting still. Existing in a chronic state of tension, she smokes Kent cigarettes, one after another, gulps Scotch raw in man-sized quantities, pursues an elusive slumber with sleeping pills or murder mysteries.

Although she can be perfectly charming, Sylvia's temper is never more than just under control. Several years ago in Denver, as dinner guest of honor at the Denver Country Club, Sylvia flared at some remark from a table companion, took off her cartwheel hat and skimmed it savagely into space. Amid an awed hush, the hat described a trajectory that sailed it safely past the maze of table crystal, diners, waiters and chandeliers to come to roost on an empty chair.

"Lovable, Cantankerous." In private life Mrs. G. Sumner Collins, wife of the promotion director for Hearst newspapers, dominates her household without even pretending an interest in domesticity. In the Collins' ten-room (including three baths) apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue in downtown Manhattan, or on their 31-acre wooded estate in Pound Ridge, N.Y., Husband Sumner, 56, has learned from repeated experience that it is wise to lose some of the arguments. During the 1948 presidential campaign, Collins, a conservative Republican, and his wife, an intensely liberal Democrat, hardly spoke to each other. Sylvia still cherishes a loving note of surrender that her husband sent her in 1955, after one of their major arguments; in it he called her his "lovable, beautiful, hopped-up, cantankerous, tempestuous" little dear.

The apartment maid has been fired so many times that it has become a ritual. Even the Collins' daughter, Cris, has learned to be wary during "Mama's thinking moments"--the oppressive periods when Sylvia is having difficulty with a story. "I think that's a ridiculous present," snapped Sylvia last week, on the occasion of her daughter's eleventh birthday, when Cris proudly exhibited a life-sized doll, the gift of a friend. "You never wanted dolls before, and you're too old for dolls." At this uncharitable observation, Cris was on the threshold of tears--where she was shortly joined by her mother.

Mother's Drive. "All along the line since I can remember," says Sylvia Porter, "there's been a drive." The second child and only daughter of Rose and Louis Feldman, Russian-Jewish immigrants, Sylvia was born in Patchogue, L.I., on June 18, 1913. The family life in Brooklyn, where Dr. Feldman later moved his general medical practice, was comfortably and securely middle class, with intellectual overtones. A classical violinist, Dr. Feldman regularly serenaded his two children, Sylvia and John, and escorted them both to concerts. "We were taught to respect culture not as a status symbol, but as an everyday part of living, like eating or breathing," recalls John, now 49 and an ear-nose-throat specialist in San Diego. "We were a talking family.

We talked from morning till night. And we were a family that didn't think it was unfeminine for a girl to think. If anything, we rather thought that intelligence added to womanliness."

This lesson was drummed into Sylvia at a tender age by her mother, whose regular education stopped at high school and whose dream of being a career woman had been frustrated by marriage at 18. "I distinctly remember Mother saying to me, 'You're going to have a career,' " says Sylvia today.

While her grade school chums were reading The Bobsey Twins at the Seashore, Sylvia was reading Greek and Roman history. The sudden death of her father, of a heart attack, when Sylvia was twelve, only cemented her resolution to be Somebody. Inexorably, the laws of economics closed in on Dr. Feldman's survivors. Left alone to raise her children on not quite enough money, his widow of necessity made successive excursions into business: as the proprietor of a dry-cleaning emporium, as a real estate saleswoman, and finally as a successful milliner. Eager to come to her mother's aid, Sylvia raced through grammar school with such velocity that she left part of it behind: from sixth grade she was skipped directly into Brooklyn's James Madison High School. This she conquered, with straight A's, in 3 1/2 years.

Nor did she lose pace or urgency at Hunter College in midtown Manhattan. Mrs. Herman Weiss of Los Angeles, a Hunter classmate, vividly and somewhat enviously recalls Sylvia using the 15-minute breaks between classes to charge through her assignments: "She would sit down and glance over the textbook or whatever outside reading there was--and in a few minutes she would be better prepared than the rest of us could be if we'd studied all night."

The Crash's Impetus. In 1929, during Sylvia's freshman year, her life took an important new direction. By no coincidence, this was the year of the great October crash of the stock market, in which millions of dollars literally vanished in a day. Among the millions were some $30,000 that Mrs. Feldman had risked from her profits as a milliner. "It took a while for the pinch to really hurt," says Sylvia, "but when the roof fell in, I was appalled--and fascinated. How could something like that happen? How could so much money just disappear? I was damned curious." Sylvia decided to find out for herself.

Until then a history major, she switched to economics the following year, pursued the subject with an obsession that earned her a Phi Beta Kappa key as a junior, every cash prize open to economics students ("I went out for them because we needed the money") and graduation magna cum laude in 3 1/2 years. But Sylvia was not around to collect her diploma. "The point is the winning, the achievement," says Sylvia. "Being there didn't matter. I had no compulsion to say, 'Look at me.' "

Appointing her mother as her stand-in at the graduation exercises, Sylvia dashed off on a shoestring motor tour of the country with seven young men. One of them was her husband, Reed Porter, a tall, blond budding financier whom Sylvia had met on a subway in her junior year at Hunter. She was 18. "Instead of having an affair," says Sylvia now, "we got married. It was a nice marriage, but it was meaningless." The Porters were amicably divorced in 1941.

Beckoning Wall Street. From graduation on, Sylvia's destiny was never in much doubt, at least to her. She tried selling magazines for a while, signed up as an Arthur Murray dance instructor, but these were only diversions. All the while, her sights were set on Wall Street, and one July day in the Depression year of 1932, this symbolical world beckoned. Or rather, Sylvia beckoned it.

Sipping coffee and reading the business section of the Times in an Automat at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, she came upon an ad announcing the opening of a new investment-counseling firm, Glass & Krey, just up the street. Sylvia made the trip over in such a hurry that her Phi Beta Kappa key was still swinging like a pendulum on her bosom when she arrived at the desk of Arthur William Glass. The sight of the pendant transfixed him. "I've always wanted to hire someone with one of those," he murmured before Sylvia could open her mouth. "What can you do?"

Hired at $20 a week, Sylvia got a cram course in the gold market. One night in 1933, dining with Glass at a restaurant in Central Park, Sylvia got to debating with her boss the possibility of the U.S.'s going off the gold standard. Glass took Sylvia home at 10 p.m., then called at midnight, instructing her to show up at the office next day packed for a week's trip. Next morning, with the help of Western Union boys, Sylvia left for Bermuda with suitcases that Glass had turned over to her containing $175,000 in gold coins--weighing more than 500 Ibs. When she got to Bermuda there was a cable from Glass awaiting her: THE EXPECTED HAS HAPPENED. Acting upon instructions, she converted the gold into British pounds and the pounds to United Kingdom bonds--which, on her return to New York, Glass cashed in for a tidy week's profit of more than $85,000.

"I Could Write." For the next few years, jumping restlessly from job to job, Sylvia accumulated other sorts of experience. At H. M. Gartley & Co., she learned how to plot and predict business cycles; at the brokerage firm of Charles E. Quincey & Co. she did early spadework in Government bonds--a subject on which she is an acknowledged authority today.

These stints were all to a purpose. Freelancing in odd moments for the slender journals circulated around Wall Street, e.g., the Magazine of Wall Street, the Commercial & Financial Chronicle, Sylvia made an important discovery: "I discovered that I could write about this financial stuff." The discovery appealed strongly to the author of two unpublished novels (she wrote one at 6; her second, a doleful affair entitled Those That Never Sing, was written during the first year of marriage). In 1935, at the ripe age of 22, she felt mature enough to storm the barricades of the big-time press.

"I Was a Freak." The invasion was a success. Undismayed by a rash of male rebuffs ("We have never hired a woman in the financial department," said the Associated Press coldly, "and we never will"), Sylvia persisted, talked the New York Post into letting her contribute an occasional column at space rates. For the sake of appearance, Sylvia was disguised as a male--or a neuter--under the byline S. F. Porter. As a Post staffer, this masquerade hardly served her in public. "Everywhere I went I was a freak," she says. "The Post had to be careful where it sent me."

She had many ropes to learn. "In those days," she recalls, "I would read what the opposition papers got out, and I'd say to myself, 'What I'm doing just isn't good enough.' " Covering a bankers' convention early in her Post career, she froze at the dreadful prospect of phoning in her first deadline story, was gallantly rescued by a New York Timesman who dictated her story for her.

Porter v. Morgenthau. Sylvia learned fast. Her column not only made the easiest reading in any Manhattan paper's business section, but ran high in shock value in an otherwise pallid field. "I worked up a daily fury about some economic injustice because there were so many of them," Sylvia says. Only a few months after turning journalist, her fury fell on no less a figure than Treasury Secretary Morgenthau.

"Is it obstinacy, stupidity or sheer ill advice?" she cried in the American Banker, a normally undisputatious periodical that also ran her articles. "What is behind the actions of this Secretary who, every summer, seems to lapse into disharmony with the Government bond market?" When Morgenthau demanded to meet the author of these impudent words, the Banker was understandably reluctant to present him with a female financial writer hardly out of her teens. The journal politely refused, in a letter that offered no clue as to her gender. Morgenthau found out anyway, dropped the matter--and eventually turned into a Sylvia Porter fan.

Unveiling a Woman. On other such coups, notably a Scribner's Magazine article that goaded the U.S. Treasury Department into breaking up a Government-bond racket that S. F. Porter exposed, Sylvia showed such flair that the Post ultimately decided her sex had become an asset. "I believe very definitely that the time has come for us to make capital of the fact that S. F. Porter is a woman," wrote T. O. Thackrey, then editor of the Post, in a 1942 memo to the staff. The public unveiling--a full byline accompanied by a winsome half-column photograph--brought an odd sort of celebrity: one longtime column correspondent moodily addressed his next letter to "Darling" instead of "Dear Mr. Porter." From the U.S. Senate floor, in 1942, Colorado's Edwin Johnson branded her "the biggest liar in the United States" after a rash of Porter attacks on his silver policy. As the only lady business columnist in harness, she was in steady vogue as a lecturer. "After all, our second choice," wrote the executive secretary of the Massachusetts Bankers Association to Sylvia's lecture agency, "would not have the allure and woo-woo of Miss Porter."

Success has only accelerated the drive of a driven woman to stay where fate--with a considerable assist from Sylvia Porter--has landed her. In 1944, with some help from her second husband, Sumner Collins, whom she had married the year before, she started a weekly newsletter on Government bonds. Called Reporting on Governments, it circulates (at $60 a year) to a blue-chip clientele of 2,500 bankers, economists and securities dealers, who consider it must reading. In recent years she has had effective assistance in this from Joseph Slevin, who also writes finance from Washington for the New York Herald Tribune.

The militant crusader of 22 has vanished in the resounding success of 47. Anxious to lose none of her enormous--and enormously variegated--syndication,

Columnist Porter maintains a political neutrality so absolute that few of her readers realize she was a fervent Kennedy fan. She hustles unashamedly for more papers. On one visit to Dallas, she went up to Times Herald Executive Editor Felix McKnight, tore a dollar bill in two and gave him half. Recalls McKnight: "She said to me, 'I'll give you the other half when you take my column.' And she did, too."

Momentum. With Sylvia Porter, "your dollar" comes first. Every column she has written is carefully scrapbooked. Rising about 8:30 in the morning, Sylvia speeds husband and daughter goodbye with a kiss-kiss; by 8:50, sipping coffee in her bedroom and nervously smoking, she is deep in the business section of the Times and all of the Wall Street Journal. ("Here I don't read; I study.") In 20 taut minutes, a mind that can sponge whole columns at a glance has trapped all that Sylvia needs.

As often as lunch is lunch, it is a business interview: "It's hello and right down to it." By 2:30, Sylvia is in her cubbyhole office at the Post (next to that of Gossipist Leonard Lyons). Her back to the filing cabinets full of background material (which she never uses), she whacks away against a 5:30 deadline. Deadline is sometimes missed in the agony of indecision. Last week Sylvia was working ahead in preparation for a planned vacation with Sumner. But even vacations are no particular rest. On a brief winter idyl in the Bahamas, sunning herself near a Detroit executive who did not recognize her, Sylvia picked up a chance remark about an impending Ford stock sale that made front pages all over the U.S.

This kind of momentum is probably what it takes to stay abreast of a business world whose unpredictability and changes Sylvia Porter understands as well as any observer. Her whole philosophy, in fact, is based on momentum. "There are two ways of looking at today's economic society," she says. "One is to preserve what you have. The other is to say, 'This won't do at all.' In recent years, we've only been protecting. You can't have a dynamic society and sit. We are supposed to have a competitive system. We're just paying lip service to it if we start crying tears when it is competitive. Let's be competitive." This is precisely what Business Columnist Sylvia Porter has been doing all her life.

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