Thickening Plot

It was the kind of story that Eleanor Medill Patterson, who liked her news on the dramatic side, would have enjoyed telling--on someone else. Her death had plunged her Washington Times-Herald and the seven employees to whom she left it, into a confusing legal tangle, with overtones of violence.

Last week the plot thickened in the mysterious suicide of Charles B. Porter, Cissy Patterson's onetime treasurer (TIME, Sept. 27). In Manhattan, Roland de Corneille, 21-year-old divinity student, and protege of Porter, told an eye-popping tale. Porter had been offered a $50,000 bribe, said De Corneille, if he would support a phony $500,000 claim against Cissy's estate. He refused, but had told De Corneille that the bribers were trying to make him change his mind and had "threatened" him.

The claim would have been based on a "loan" of the paper's funds to Cissy. Concluded the Washington Daily News: "If it was a loan, the . . . executives who inherited the paper . . . could properly enter a claim against the rest of the estate." Still missing were Porter's voluminous personal papers, which Countess Felicia Gizycka, Cissy's daughter, hoped to use in her fight to break her mother's will. Times-Herald staffers were beginning to feel like characters in a whodunit. Last week they told of a circulation hustler who was a little confused about the countesses, ex-countesses and other celebrities in the fight over the will. In a crowded elevator he saw a Times-Herald banner headline: COUNT BERNADOTTE SLAIN. "Gripes," he breathed, "they're getting everyone on the paper!"

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