Men, Money, & Magic: The Biography of Dorothy Schiff, by Jeffrey Potter (Coward, McCann, 352 pp., $9.95). Men and money this book is about, but the magic is missing. It’s the life of Dorothy Schiff, four times married, often mistressed, the editor-publisher of the New York Post until she sold it with a splash to Rupert Murdoch. The author is Jeffrey Potter, but he shares that responsibility with Dorothy Schiff, who provides long sections of personal narrative that weave their way in and out of Mr. Potter’s supporting structure like Virginia creeper. The woman who almost single-handedly brought her paper through the wars that broke such giants as the Herald-Tribune, the World Telegram, and the Journal American, and who had, as we say these days, “relationships” with FDR and Max Beaverbrook, among others, must have something to recommend her. But you’d never know it from this book. Mrs. Schiff seems so determined to be honest—it may be that liberal death-wish—that the picture we get of her is of the poor little rich girl who grew into an arrogant, insensitive, often petty woman. She is perfectly beastly about herself. I suspect that Dorothy Schiff is far more interesting, far less self-pitying, far kinder in a tough-cookie way than she or her biographer will admit. What would be fun, because there’s a lot here to be mined, would be
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