The Press: Sylvia & You

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(8 of 10)

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 The discovery appealed strongly to the author of two unpublished novels (she wrote one at 6; her second, a doleful affair entitled Those That Never Sing, was written during the first year of marriage).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.