Marie Mattingly Meloney (December 8, 1878 – June 23, 1943), who used Mrs. William B. Meloney as her professional and social name, was "one of the leading woman journalists of the United States","Mrs. W.B. Meloney, Noted Editor, Dies", The New York Times, June 24, 1943 a magazine editor and a socialite who in the 1920s organized a fund drive to buy radium for Marie Curie and began a movement for better housing. In the 1930s, nicknamed Missy, she was a friend and confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt."Knapp's Week", Time, February 25, 1935"Knapp's Week", Time, February 25, 1935, on SpoonerCentral.com
Biography Personal life Marie Mattingly was born on December 8, 1878, in Bardstown, Kentucky, the daughter of Cyprian Peter Mattingly, a physician, and his third wife, the former Sarah Irwin (1852–1934), an educationist and journalist who was the founding editor of The Kentucky Magazine, "one of the first publications of literature and science to be edited by a woman". Sarah Irwin Mattingly joined the faculty of the Washington College for Girls in 1891, and later became the school's president, serving until the school closed in 1896. Marie Mattingly had an elder brother, Judge Carroll Mattingly, who died "several years" before 1934 "from injuries received in a football game in his student days at Georgetown University"."Mrs. Mattingly, 82, Educator, Is Dead", The New York Times, January 7, 1934
Marie was educated privately at home and was trained as a concert pianist, but a horseback accident put an end to that endeavor and she turned to journalism. She once declared: "I have been lame since 15, and had a bad lung since 17 and have done the work of three men ever since".
In 1920, at the age of 42, she was described as "small, very frail, almost an invalid; a childhood accident had made her slightly lame. She had grey hair and immense, poetic black eyes set in a lovely pale face".
In 1904, she married William Brown Meloney IV, an editor on The New York Sun and later executive secretary to Mayor William Jay Gaynor of New York City. They had one child, William Brown Meloney V, who became a writer and Broadway producer.
The elder Meloney, who had been gassed in World War I and had the rank of major, died at age 47 on December 7, 1925, at the family country home in Pawling, New York."Major W.B. Meloney Dies; Victim of War", The New York Times, December 8, 1925
After a month-long bout of influenza, Marie Meloney died June 23, 1943, in the same house on South Quaker Hill in Pawling. The month of her death Time magazine described her as "fine lace made of cable wire"."The Press: This Week's Spirit", Time, June 14, 1943 After a procession from the residence of her son at 7 Washington Square North, New York City,Funeral notice, The New York Times, June 25, 1943 a requiem mass was recited for her on June 25 in St. Patrick's Cathedral, by Monsignor John J. Casey. Former U.S. President Herbert Hoover was an honorary pallbearer, as were Owen D. Young, former head of the General Electric Company; James A. Farley, chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, and David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America. Among the five hundred mourners were Bishop John F. O'Hara, military delegate of the Armed Forces of the United States; Mrs. Hoover, playwright Channing Pollock and novelist Fannie Hurst. Burial followed in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City."Prominent Persons Attend Meloney Rites", Poughkeepsie New Yorker, June 27, 1943, page 1 Registration is required to access this site.
Journalism Mattingly was just fifteen years old when she worked on The Washington Post, and at age sixteen "helped cover a Republican National Convention for the New York World"."The Press: Herald-Tribune's Lady", Time, October 8, 1934 She was eighteen years old when she became a correspondent for The Denver Post in Washington, D.C. She was "one of the first women accredited to a seat in the Senate press gallery".Ann M. Lewicki, "Marie Sklodowska Curie in America, 1921", Radiology, May 2002 In November 1899, she scored a journalistic coup when she discovered, quite by chance, the unannounced wedding of Admiral George Dewey."Marie Mattingly Meloney," Encyclopædia Britannica
She then joined the staff of The New York Sun, where she wrote the "Men About Town" column. She also worked for the New York World. She edited Woman's Magazine and was associate editor of Everybody's Magazine.
By the early 1920s, Meloney, by then married, was editor of The Delineator magazine, a women's publication owned by George W. Wilder.Blanche Halbert, editor, The Better Homes Manual, posted at chestofbooks.com In 1926, the magazine merged with another Butterick Publishing Company publication, The Designer, with Meloney continuing at the helm."Butterick Magazines to Merge", The New York Times, June 17, 1926
In 1927, Meloney was editor of the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune."Meloney-Symons", The New York Times, March 6, 1927 Beginning in 1930, she was the organizer of the annual Herald Tribune Forum on Current Problems, which highlighted noted people as speakers. In 1935, she contributed a chapter to an antiwar book, Why Wars Must Cease, published by the Macmillan Company.Florence Finch Kelly "A Women's Symposium Against War", The New York Times, January 20, 1935.
In 1935, she continued with the Herald Tribune as editor of the new This Week magazine, which took the place of the former Sunday supplement and was eventually syndicated across the United States to a total of six million readers. Time magazine noted seven years later that "Meloney, 59, tiny, fragile, grey-haired ... edits the magazine from her suite in the Waldorf-Astoria"."Different This Week", Time Magazine, January 5, 1942
As a journalist, Meloney traveled widely in search of news and ... interviewed Benito Mussolini four times and once turned down an interview with Adolf Hitler. The German dictator had broken an interview appointment with Mrs. Meloney. When an emissary attempted to arrange another, she sent word to the Fuehrer that she was no longer interested.
Upon her death, the New York Times commented in an editorial:Mrs. William Brown Meloney, whose deeply regretted death was announced yesterday, was one of the pioneers of the triumph of women in the newspaper field. Toward the end of the last century she was a reporter in Washington at 16. It is even now a charming sight; in those days it must have been a strange sight, this young girl surveying the unkempt proceedings of Congress and the delirium of national conventions. She was a leader as well as a precursor. ... To common sense and judgment she added imagination. Some instinct in her reached out and told her what people wanted."Mrs. William Brown Meloney", The New York Times, June 25, 1943
Summary of her magazine career Reporter, Washington Post, 1895 Washington bureau, Denver Post, 1897–99 Reporter, New York World, 1900 Reporter, New York Sun, 1901–04 Editor, Woman's Magazine, 1914–20 Associate editor, Everybody's magazine, 1917–20 Editor, The Delineator, 1920–26 or 1921–26 Editor, Sunday Magazine of the New York Herald Tribune, 1926–1934The source actually says "1926–1943" Editor, This Week magazine, 1934–1943Columbia University archival collections
Radium campaign In 1920, as editor of The Delineator, Meloney was granted a rare interview with radium pioneer Marie Curie in her laboratory in Paris. Meloney later wrote about her visit:In her introduction to the book Pierre Curie, published in 1923 and cited by Ann M. Lewicki in her magazine article
The door opened and I saw a pale, timid little woman [Curie] in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon. Her kind, patient, beautiful face had the detached expression of a scholar. Suddenly I felt like an intruder. My timidity exceeded her own. I had been a trained interrogator for twenty years, but I could not ask a single question of this gentle woman in a black cotton dress. I tried to explain that American women were interested in her great work, and found myself apologising for intruding upon her precious time.
Dr. Ann M. Lewicki, who called Meloney a "trailblazing woman in a man's world of journalism", wrote in Radiology magazine:
During this first meeting, Mrs. Meloney learned that what Marie wanted most at this point in her life was some additional radium so that she could continue her laboratory research. She who had discovered radium, who had freely shared all information about the extraction process, and who had given radium away so that cancer patients could be treated, found herself without the financial means to acquire the expensive substance. Mrs. Meloney made a promise to Marie . . . to correct this injustice and to obtain for her the 1 g of radium that Marie requested.
The price for one gram of radium in 1920 was $100,000, and Meloney conducted a nationwide campaign that succeeded in raising the money, "primarily by means of small donations and the help of many women throughout the country". Meloney also persuaded the shy Marie Curie "to travel to the United States to receive the gift". But before she would agree, it is said that Meloney "wrested from editors across the country a promise to suppress" any coverage of a reputed affair that Curie had, after the death of her husband, with noted French physicist Paul Langevin. Curie made the trip in spring 1921, accompanied by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg, and she and her two daughters, Irène and Ève, were met at the New York dock by a retinue of journalists, including twenty-six photographers. After a whirlwind of public appearances, Meloney and Curie traveled together to Washington, D.C., to receive the radium from President Warren G. Harding. The evening before the presentation, however, Curie balked when she discovered that the gift deed had been made personally to her: She insisted that it be redrawn so the gift from the people of the United States must instead "belong to science . . . I want to make it a gift to my laboratory". She asked Meloney: "Can we call in a lawyer?" And a "man of law, discovered with some difficulty at this late hour, drew up the additional paper with Marie. She signed it at once". The radium was presented to her in a lead-lined mahogany box on Friday, May 20, 1921, by Harding, with Meloney in attendance.These events are also described in the forward that Meloney wrote for Marie Curie's book, Pierre Curie (1923) New York:Macmillan.
In October 1929, Curie returned to the United States for another tour and, accompanied by Meloney, for a few days in the White House with President Herbert Hoover,"Madam Curie at White House", The New York Times, October 30, 1929 She stayed with Meloney when she was in New York and was ill part of this time. Curie spent her sixty-second birthday with Meloney and motored with her in Central Park, and then they visited the J.P. Morgan Library."Hail Mme. Curie at 62", The New York Times, November 8, 1929
Meloney also "arranged for Curie to write an autobiographical work for an American publisher. The book would provide royalty income over the years"."Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity," American Institute of Physics Researcher Lewicki opined that the retiring Curie and the outgoing Meloney "were rather different in temperament. Yet, they were able to connect even at their first meeting and forge a friendship for the remainder of their lives. . . . [Meloney's] boundless energy and selfless desire to help personified to the Curies [Marie and her daughters] the best of the American spirit".
Better Homes campaign