Overview

The Lady Upstairs is the dramatic story of Dorothy Schiff--liberal activist, society stalwart, and the most dynamic female newspaper publisher of her day. From 1939 until 1976 she owned and guided the New York Post , the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the United States. Dolly, as she was called, made the Post one of the most dedicated supporters of New Deal liberalism in the country, while simultaneously maintaining its distinct personality as a chatty, parochial, New York tabloid.
Unfazed by political or personal controversy, Schiff backed editorial writers like James Wechsler and Max Lerner and reporters like Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill. Under her guidance the Post broke the story of Richard Nixon's slush fund. It helped bring down such icons of the day as Joseph McCarthy, Walter Winchell, and Robert Moses. It supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War. Although Dolly seldom appeared in the newsroom, she approved and commented on every major story and every minor column in the paper, until eventually selling it to Rupert Murdoch.
Dolly's private life could have been a staple of the Post 's society gossip columns. Endlessly flirtatious, she married four times and had extramarital romances with, among others, Franklin Roosevelt and Max Beaverbrook. She was a friend of national politicians such as Adlai Stevenson, the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, and Nelson Rockefeller. Born into a staunchly Republican German-Jewish banking family, she used her inheritance to further causes of the political left. She used her charm and her social connections in the service of her paper, which was the center of her life.
The Lady Upstairs is the portrait of a unique life and a crucial era in American history.

Marilyn Nissenson, a veteran journalist, moved to New York after college. She remembers reading The New York Times for news coverage and Dolly Schiff's Post for everything else. The Lady Upstairs is the dramatic story of Dorothy Schiff--liberal activist, society stalwart, and the most dynamic female newspaper publisher of her day. From 1939 until 1976 she owned and guided the New York Post, the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the United States. Dolly, as she was called, made the Post one of the most dedicated supporters of New Deal liberalism in the country, while simultaneously maintaining its distinct personality as a chatty, parochial, New York tabloid. Unfazed by political or personal controversy, Schiff backed editorial writers like James Wechsler and Max Lerner and reporters like Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill. Under her guidance the Post broke the story of Richard Nixon's slush fund. It helped bring down such icons of the day as Joseph McCarthy, Walter Winchell, and Robert Moses. It supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War. Although Dolly seldom appeared in the newsroom, she approved and commented on every major story and every minor column in the paper, until eventually selling it to Rupert Murdoch. Dolly's private life could have been a staple of the Post 's society gossip columns. Endlessly flirtatious, she married four times and had extra-marital romances with, among others, Franklin Roosevelt and Max Beaverbrook. She was a friend of national politicians such as Adlai Stevenson, the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, and Nelson Rockefeller. Born into a staunchly Republican German-Jewish banking family, she used her inheritance to further causes of the political left. She used her charm and her social connections in the service of her paper, which was the center of her life.
The Lady Upstairs is the portrait of a unique life and a crucial era in American history. Schiff's life and complicated character have all the promising elements of a terrific biography. While not exactly 'a gay byproduct of female emancipation, wearing the pants and using the vote, ' as Kenneth Tynan wrote of Katharine Hepburn, Schiff was much too fond of showing off her legs--she was certainly a pioneer, a complex woman who was both flirt and boss, frosty heiress and labor champion; though she rejected the feminist label, she strongly believed in the relationship between work and human integrity, hiring more women than the other newspaper bosses of her day . . . She was a skinflint in a fur coat, a cloistered snob with common tastes. She once served Ed Koch a dry tuna sandwich. She once assigned an investigative article about hard-boiled eggs. All these eccentric tidbits are included in The Lady Upstairs, a scrupulously researched book that fairly spills with archival material and personal testimony. --Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
It is a tribute to the judgment, research, intelligence, and elegant prose of Marilyn Nissenson that although I disagree with some of her political assumptions, I find her portrait of Dorothy Schiff accurate, nuanced, compelling, and a pleasure to read. --Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus, The Nation
In this first book, Nissenson, a producer of TV documentaries, coaxes out the contradictions of pioneering newspaper woman Dolly Schiff, who owned and published the New York Post from 1939 to 1976, when she sold to Rupert Murdoch. Peppering her historical research with incisive family testimony, personal notes, professional epistles and combative newspaper editorials, the author paints Schiff as profoundly human in her distinctive paradoxes. Her liberal politics evinced a strong connection to the plight of common folk, though she remained cold and aloof to her newspaper underlings. She was a visionary socialite who poured millions of her own inheritance into the tabloid, while serving powerful politicians meager tuna-fish sandwiches and steaming off unused postage stamps to be recycled. She championed women's rights, but never considered herself a feminist. Contradictions aside, her shrewd management and endless personal financial commitment transformed the Post into a profit-generating enterprise as well as a bastion of New Deal liberalism. A consummate flirt, she devoured and discarded husbands at an alarming rate, and Nissenson brings new light to the legend of Schiff's extramarital affair with FDR with suggestive details but no definitive answers. At times this biography reads like a perfunctory tour guide through the touchstones of 20th-century American history, but Schiff's character brims with spunk and surprise along the way. -- Publishers Weekly

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