cover image The Lady Upstairs: Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post

The Lady Upstairs: Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post

Marilyn Nissenson, . . St. Martin's, $27.95 (500pp) ISBN 978-0-312-31310-4

In this first book, Nissenson, a producer of TV documentaries, coaxes out the contradictions of pioneering newspaper woman Dolly Schiff, who owned and published the New York Post from 1939 to 1976, when she sold to Rupert Murdoch. Peppering her historical research with incisive family testimony, personal notes, professional epistles and combative newspaper editorials, the author paints Schiff as profoundly human in her distinctive paradoxes. Her liberal politics evinced a strong connection to the plight of common folk, though she remained cold and aloof to her newspaper underlings. She was a visionary socialite who poured millions of her own inheritance into the tabloid, while serving powerful politicians meager tuna-fish sandwiches and steaming off unused postage stamps to be recycled. She championed women's rights, but never considered herself a feminist. Contradictions aside, her shrewd management and endless personal financial commitment transformed the Post into a profit-generating enterprise as well as a bastion of New Deal liberalism. A consummate flirt, she devoured and discarded husbands at an alarming rate, and Nissenson brings new light to the legend of Schiff's extramarital affair with FDR with suggestive details but no definitive answers. At times this biography reads like a perfunctory tour guide through the touchstones of 20th-century American history, but Schiff's character brims with spunk and surprise along the way. (Apr. 5)