In Washington

One day last fortnight Eleanor ("Cissie") Patterson was reading an early edition of her Washington Times-Herald. She called her office. Said Cissie: "Martha Blair bores me -- kill the column." So pressmen ripped open the forms, jerked out These Charming People by Martha Blair, a column about Washington's social stratosphere.

Martha Blair's copy for next day was already written. Meanwhile, volatile Cissie Patterson had suffered a change of heart: the column stood. But Martha Blair (who is also the wife of the New York Times's Arthur Krock) had had enough of Cissie's whims.

Though she had counted on the $100 a week she got from the Times-Herald to help put her two sons (by a previous marriage) through college, Martha Blair handed in her resignation. Cissie Patterson accepted it.

Next day there came to Martha Blair a hot tip for anybody's society column: two onetime members of Washington's diplomatic set had become engaged in London.

Martha called up Eugene Meyer (no friend of Cissie Patterson), who owns the Washington Post. Gleefully the Post printed on its own society page: "Mrs. Charlotte B. Nast, Ian Wilson-Young to wed -- Mrs. Arthur Krock receives word of betrothal in London. . . ."

For a couple of days Martha Blair handed free stories to the Post. Then, having shown Cissie Patterson who could get the news, she subsided. To her friends she said: "Now that I've got all the vixen out of me, I'm through." Mrs. Patterson's friends said that Cissie was amused.

The charming Mrs. Krock and the intense Mrs. Patterson had met socially several times last week since they parted professionally. There were no eruptions. Some of her friends thought they heard Mrs. Krock say one evening: "Well, thank God, I've still got Arthur Krock!"

The New York Times pays Pundit Krock over $25,000 a year, so Martha Blair can get along without her job. The Times-Herald supports so many female reporters, columnists, critics that Washington newsmen call it "Cissie Patterson's henhouse." Cissie has a weakness for firing her columnists in a fit of temper, then hiring them back at a bigger salary. By week's end, knowing her own failing, Mrs. Patterson had fled to Nassau.

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