Remembering the Great Sylvia Porter

Remembering the Great Sylvia Porter

BY WARREN BOROSON

A new book about Sylvia Porter has come out, and no one can accuse the author of trying to whitewash Sylvia. (The book, subtitled “America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist,” was written by Tracy Lucht, a journalism teacher.)

     Sylvia, Lucht writes, was stingy, contradictory, untruthful, and almost always fighting with the people she worked with. An especially recurrent criticism in the book: Other people wrote many of her columns and her books.  Writes Lucht, “Porter took credit for a lot of work she did not do, and she was less than generous toward those who worked for her.”

    I was among them. I wrote a half-dozen of Sylvia’s columns, along with some of her tax books. (On their inside cover it says, “Prepared with the editorial assistance of Warren Boroson.”)

     Someone at the book’s publsher phoned me.

   “Has Miss Porter read and approved the book?” 

    Me, my voice filled with contempt: “Sylvia doesn’t…read…her books.”

     I also worked at her magazine. And it was I who first said that half of America read Sylvia’s columns, and the other half wrote them. (But I don’t hold it against her that I received little credit. I wrote financial stuff for Louis Rukeyser, too, and got little or no credit.)

    

 Working at Sylvia Porter’s Magazine was fun. Sylvia herself almost never visited, and by coincidence on my very first day there was an annual picnic. The entire staff picked up an all-paid-for lunch at a fancy restaurant and dined on the grass in Central Park. We called it “Picnic in the Park Without Sylvia.”     

   Still, Sylvia deserves credit for almost single-handedly inventing writing about personal financial—and led the way for women to enter the higher ranks of financial journalism. (In fact, her original columns didn’t even reveal that she was a woman: She used just her initials.) Writes Lucht,  “A large number of personal financial journalists today are women—so many, in fact, that one has to wonder whether personal finance has become a pink ghetto.”    
    Not only that, but Sylvia was incorruptible. As Lucht notes, at one time writers at The Wall Street Journal and the Daily News were actually paid to tout stocks. Not Sylvia….

   I once wangled an an interview with Peter Lynch, who ran Fidelity Magellan, one of history’s great mutual funds. At the time, Fidelity bought most of the ads in Sylvia Porter’s Financial Magazine. Lynch, after the interview, told me he would love to have Sylvia praise his new book, so more women might read it. So I asked Sylvia. No, she said flatly. She doesn’t endorse books. Did I  mention that Fidelity bought most of the ads in Sylvia’s magazine?

    It’s important to acknowedhge that there were two Sylvias. Sylvia One was the young, assertive, Phi Beta Kappa college graduate, sharp as a tack. Sylvia Two, the older woman I worked for, was as sharp as a wet noodle. Sometimes she embarrassed herself when she appeared on TV programs. She had become, not to put too fine a point about it, somewhat batty.

    She could also be difficult.

    “Warren, your columns are lovely. Just lovely,” she purred to me on the phone.

    Pause. Then she decided that she had gone too far.

    “But you’ll just have to do better!”

    She customarily read through the galleys of Sylvia Porter’s Magazine. One time, she had come upon an article claiming that a certain new safe was so easy to open that Larry, Curley, and Moe could do it.

   She phoned me. “Who the hell are  Larry, Curley, and Moe?”

  But she let the Three Stooges go through.

  She  hired me after I had visited her at her estate in Pound Ridge, New York. I was working at a superboring doctors’ financial magazine in New Jersey at the time, desperate to escape. Visiting Sylvia, I brought along a recording of Jussi Bjoerlng singing “Sylvia” and a bouquet of flowers. And when she told me, sharply, “I want someone who knows the difference between semicolons from colons,” I replied confidently, “I’m an authority on colons and semicolons. “

    I once said to her, You should write a book about mutual funds.

   Said she, “I HATE mutual funds.”

  I almost fainted. Later, I learned that she must have meant closed-end funds, which fell into the pits in 1929.

  She would phone me at the office. “This is…SYLVIA PORTER!!!” she would begin.

 When you work for Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance Magazine, and you heard that, naturally, you jump out of your seat.

    But, as I said, she had integrity. At a dinner at her place, her husband said, “I don’t care what I do for a living, so long as I get paid well.” Sylvia, almost to herself, said quietly, “I don’t  feel that way.”

     Sylvia Porter’s Magazine—despite such splendid people as Pat Estess and Greg Daugherty—gave up the ghost after the stock market crash of 1987, when Fidelity pulled all of its advertising. And today hardly anyone but the elderly recognize Sylvia’s name. But at one time she was a powerhouse. Her columns appeared in 500 newspapers. Presidents Ford and Kennedy and Johnson communicated with her. Johnson even offered her a job as president of the Export-Import Bank. 

    As for the new book about Sylvia, it does a good job. The author’s last lines are memorable: “It is not difficult to grasp her importance. One only has to visit the personal finance section of a bookstore and imagine that, in the beginning, there was only Sylvia.”