February 9, 1997

Paper Route

By NORA EPHRON

In Katharine Graham's autobiography, a small brown wren rises up to run The Washington Post

PERSONAL HISTORY

By Katharine Graham.

Illustrated. 642 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.





et us recap the story as we know it. The story of Katharine Graham is of a woman with two lives: a painfully shy little brown wren forced by tragedy to take over the family business and become one of the most powerful women of her time.

We know this because we have read what there is to read about Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, and many of us who have worked in journalism know her as well. But there is no more thrilling antidote to a well-known story than a far better version of the tale, and nothing that has been printed about Mrs. Graham is as compelling as the story she herself tells in ''Personal History,'' her riveting, moving autobiography. As I read it, I kept thinking of Henry James's ''Washington Square'' -- or rather the play based on it, ''The Heiress,'' by Ruth and Augustus Goetz -- particularly a moment when Catherine Sloper is asked by her aunt to tell her father a story she has just told with charm and animation. Faced with her disapproving father, she is paralyzed, and the story becomes pointless and boring. The effect of love on character is one of the themes of ''The Heiress,'' and it resonates throughout ''Personal History.''

In Mrs. Graham's case, the problem was not an unloving father -- her father was distant, but he eventually came to think of Kay as his favorite -- but a mother who could barely be bothered with her children. Eugene Meyer was a successful young businessman when he first spotted Agnes Ernst in a New York art gallery and vowed to marry her. He was short and rich, she was beautiful and poor. The daughter of Lutheran parents, she had been forced to spend a summer working 12-hour days after her Barnard scholarship was unexpectedly withdrawn. When she returned to school, it was reinstated; the windfall, she wrote, ''made me conceited and self-centered to an unbelievable degree. For several years to come I was in love chiefly with myself, an ecstasy that cost me and others much pain before life cured me of this intoxication.'' As her daughter dryly notes, ''Not to put too fine a point on it, life had hardly cured her of her self-absorption.''

At first Agnes did not take Meyer seriously. ''When my father appears'' in Agnes's diary, Mrs. Graham writes, ''he is described by her, with some condescension and little apparent interest, as her rich Jewish beau.'' But she married him, much to the surprise of her friends. Mrs. Graham believes that her mother ''loved my father in her own peculiar way all her life,'' but the marriage was clearly not occasioned by passion on her side. In her autobiography, Agnes Meyer wrote: ''It would have been impossible for me to marry anyone who was not well-to-do. For the only dowry I had to bring a husband were my father's debts and my own. . . . Let no one undervalue the importance of economic independence.''

In 1917 Meyer went to Washington to run the War Industries Board and his wife joined him there; amazingly, they left their four children (there were ultimately five) with a nanny and a governess in a large Fifth Avenue apartment for the next four years. Mrs. Graham writes: ''Much later, my brother . . . got very angry thinking about the separation and testily asked my mother how she could have left her children in New York for those early years. She said, 'Well, you were all in school.' But the older children were 2, 4 and 6, and I was a few months old.''



Agnes Meyer would make a wonderful comic character, particularly if you were not her child

In 1933 Eugene Meyer bought The Washington Post, and Katharine's relationship with her father deepened as they began to correspond about the newspaper; these letters, along with virtually every other scrap of paper that passed through Meyer's office, were saved by her father's assistant. One of the charms of this book is the constant sense of revelation Mrs. Graham seems to have experienced in rereading her own letters and coming to terms with the person she once was. ''Somewhat to my surprise, given that I thought of myself during this period as unsophisticated, unworldly and fairly unopinionated, I seem to have been full of independent appraisals of the paper and what it was printing,'' she writes.

Kay Meyer went to the Madeira School, where she was president of the senior class; Vassar, where she was elected to the Daisy Chain; and the University of Chicago. By graduation, she had decided to become a journalist and went off to San Francisco to cover labor for The San Francisco News before returning to a job at The Washington Post. She had become her father's ambitious daughter, but she was still very much her mother's insecure child.

''I was, I thought, realistic about my own assets and abilities,'' Mrs. Graham writes. ''I was not very pretty. I grew tall early, and therefore seemed ungainly to myself. I . . . was sure I'd never attract a man whom I would like and who would not be viewed with condescension by my parents and siblings.''

Philip Graham swept into her life in 1939 and proposed within weeks of their first date. He was a poor boy from Florida who had graduated from Harvard Law School and was clerking at the Supreme Court. ''He told me that he loved me and said we would be married and go to Florida, if I could live with only two dresses, because I had to understand that he would never take anything from my father,'' Mrs. Graham writes. ''I was incredulous -- this brilliant, charismatic, fascinating man loved me!''

Katharine Graham with Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

The Grahams became a popular young couple, the center of Washington social life, and eventually, as Graham took over The Post and expanded its holdings to include television stations and Newsweek, he became a player in Washington politics as well. His wife receded and became a dutiful helpmate, exhilarated by the whirlwind of excitement her husband generated.

''Phil was the fizz in our lives,'' she writes, as she struggles even now to understand the marriage. ''His wit, great energy, soaring imagination and fervent desire for excellence . . . were so strong that I ignored the fact that he was frequently using that wit at my expense.'' He criticized her clothes. She put on a few pounds and he began to call her Porky. He ''gradually undermined my self-confidence almost entirely,'' she writes. ''I ceased talking much at all.'' When Eugene Meyer passed voting control of Washington Post stock to his son-in-law, Mrs. Graham writes, she didn't even think to object.

In 1957, Graham had the first of his nervous breakdowns -- he was manic-depressive -- and his wife nursed him through it; ironically, she writes, his dependence on her brought them closer together. They told no one. Phil Graham recovered and began to swing back and forth -- periods of deep gloom followed periods of exuberance and wild spending. He exploded with anger at longtime associates, used foul language and was abusive to his wife. In late 1962 he met a young woman and decided he was in love with her.

On Christmas Eve, 1962, ''the world I had known and loved ended for me,'' Mrs. Graham writes. ''The phone rang and I picked it up, not realizing that Phil, too, had picked it up, in his dressing room, with the door shut. I heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain. I waited until he had hung up and went right in and asked him if what I had surmised was true. He said it was.''



Kay Graham has lived in a world so circumscribed that her candor and forthrightness are all the more affecting.

One day she was walking with the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson's wife, Luvie, and talking about holding on to the newspaper until her sons were old enough to run it: ''I recall Luvie firmly and distinctly saying, 'Don't be silly, dear. You can do it.'

'' 'Me?' I exclaimed. 'That's impossible. I couldn't possibly do it.' . . .

'' 'Of course you can do it,' she maintained. . . . 'You've got all those genes. . . . You've just been pushed down so far you don't recognize what you can do.' ''

Phil Graham returned to his wife; a few weeks later, on a weekend pass from a sanitarium, he shot himself. A month later his widow was elected president of the Washington Post Company. Like a diligent schoolgirl, she set about to learn the business. She saw herself as an interim manager; instead, she fell in love with her job. She hired Ben Bradlee to run The Post, and the newspaper finally became first-rate, fighting (along with The New York Times) for the right to print the Pentagon Papers and winning a Pulitzer Prize for its legendary Watergate coverage.

All this is fascinating stuff, but as a former Newsweek mail girl who was told when I applied for a job that women did not become writers at the magazine, I was even more fascinated by Katharine Graham's recounting of her own gradual coming to terms with feminism.

Two factors she cites as crucial: her dawning sense of condescension from male colleagues (many of them her employees) and her long talks with Gloria Steinem. One click of recognition, fittingly enough, came at a Washington dinner party after she had been running The Post for 10 years. She was at Joseph Alsop's, where, as usual, the women were expected to retreat from the table while the men discussed politics over brandy and cigars.

''Something snapped,'' Mrs. Graham writes. ''I realized that I had worked all day, participated in an editorial-issue lunch and was not only deeply involved in but was actually interested in what was going on in the world. Yet I was being asked to spend up to an hour waiting to rejoin the men.'' She told Alsop that ''I was sure he would understand if I quietly left when the women were dismissed.'' The archaic custom ended at Alsop's that night -- and everywhere else in Washington shortly thereafter.

(Mrs. Graham is extremely circumspect about her romantic life in the years since her husband's death. I had to read page 378 several times, and I'm still not sure, but I think she's saying that she had sex with Adlai Stevenson the night before he dropped dead on the street in London. On the other hand, there may be some other reason why he left his tie and glasses in her room.)

''I have tried to be frank and honest while honoring privacy,'' Mrs. Graham writes in the preface. This is a tricky balancing act, but she pulls it off. In the process, she manages to rewrite the story of her life in such a way that no one will ever be able to boil it down to a sentence, but I'll give it a try: Katharine Graham turns out to have had not two lives but four, and the story of her journey from daughter to wife to widow to woman parallels to a surprising degree the history of women in this century. It's also a wonderful book.

Nora Ephron is the co-author and director of the recent film "Michael."

More on Katharine Graham

From the Archives of The New York Times

Graham Defends The Washington Post Company, Nov. 21, 1969

Publisher Katharine Graham Takes a Classified Ad, April 21, 1974

Graham on Investigative Reporting, Dec. 2, 1974

Katharine Graham to Step Aside as Publisher of Washington Post, Jan. 10, 1979