The Countess' Cut

Washington could hardly wait for the trial of Countess Felicia Gizycka's suit to break the will of her mother, Publisher Eleanor Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald (TIME, Sept. 27). It promised to rattle many a family skeleton. But one afternoon last week just twelve days before the trial date, attorneys for the Countess summoned newsmen. They were handed an announcement of an agreement by all parties to settle out of court.

The settlement was to everybody's advantage. The seven executives who had inherited the paper from "Cissy" Patterson did not want their new regime hamstrung by months of legal wrangling. Countess Gizycka did not relish the unsavory process of trying to prove that her mother had not been of sound mind when she willed the paper to her top men. Under reported terms of the settlement Cissy Patterson's daughter will get no share of the Times-Herald, but she will get the mother's Long Island home and other personal property left her under the will. She had also been willed a $25,000 annual income. Instead, she will take a tax-paid lump sum of around $400,000. Otherwise, as her attorneys had already told the court, federal taxes alone might eat up two-thirds of the $16,500,000 estate. There might be nothing left to pay either charitable bequests or Countess Gizycka's annual income.

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