After graduating from Bethesda -Chevy Chase High School 1943, she joined the Washington Star Newspaper, as a copy girl. Over the next 30 years she was the dicationist who filed the story when the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Unfamiliar with the term “atom,” she simply wrote “Adam” bomb. She covered White House events and interviewed countless celebrities including Rosy Greer (his shoulders were so wide he had to go sideways through a door), Clark Gable, Tony Curtis (who answered the hotel door wrapped in a towel), became the “TEEN” Editor, under a pen name Fifi Gorska, for a section dedicated to 13-19-year olds, a novelty for the late 1950s and 60s.
Carl Bernstein was her copy boy before rising to Deep Throat fame. Newspaper lunches at Harrigan's in DC consisted of martinis and splitting a roast beef sandwich 4 ways before returning to make a deadline. In 1951, she married a Polish Count Julian Gorski, whom she met covering Washington, D.C., Police Hqs and died in 1995. She spent most of her life in Washington, D.C., and Munich, Germany prior to retiring to Tahoe City in 1985.
I will always remember her as Fifi. She was my first editor when I began writing the Top Tunes column in the Teen section. She let me "do my thing." RIP Fifi.
ReplyDeleteMichael Oberman