The Press: Sylvia & You

• Share

(6 of 10)

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 3½ 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."