In a front-page essay reviewing two books, entitled Dynasts of the Daily Press, Joseph Epstein quotes the countess, great-granddaughter of Joseph Medill, whose only flaw in his otherwise perfect game plan was his children. He had no sons but three daughters, one of whom died young. The surviving daughters, Katherine and Elinor, he described as “the worst two she-devils in all Chicago.” His great-granddaughter Felicia Gizycka claimed that this was the bowdlerized description and that what he had actually said was “the two biggest bitches in Christendom.”
This obituary from the Tuesday, 18 May 1999 edition of the UK's Independent, perfectly displays a style that no US newspaper would dare use.
It was also a custom of the era to view American heiresses as the easiest method to restore European aristocratic fortunes and Cissy was pursued by an impoverished nobleman, Count Josef Gizycki, a hard-drinking ladies' man with a bankrupt estate in Russian Poland. Cissy fell for dashing Count "Gigi" and, despite pleas from her family, married him. No sooner did she reach his dilapidated, freezing "castle" in Narvosielica than she realised her mistake; he told her bluntly that they had sex only to make a child and so that he could gain her $30,000 a year income. In 1905 that child, Felicia, was born whilst the Count was away whoring.
Epstein writes: Cissy, after a wretched marriage to a Russian-Polish aristocrat named Josef Gizycki — he disappeared on her on their wedding night, drank heavily, beat her and absconded with their daughter, Felicia — flounced about Washington as the Countess Gizycka, a social butterfly with the fangs of a viper.
No whoring allowed in the New York Times, or, at least, on its printed and web pages.
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