The Press: Sylvia & You

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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.