could do that. and that is what lincoln is all about in his mobilizing the north in the civil war the last best hope that could we survive because the world was already back monarchical. the police and the third was a new empire in france there were no democracies left so lincoln was appealing to that dream we had to keep the whole life so that's been part of our history from the beginning. next on book tv amanda smith recounts the life of cissy patterson the 20th century first female publisher and editor-in-chief of a metropolitan daily newspaper. this is about 45 minutes.

[applause] >> thank you very much. if it's all right with you i thought i would read from a few passages from the book and explain to do a little bit more about who cissy patterson was and then i would be happy to take questions. it opens with of the family motto when your grandmother gets raped put it on the front page which is their editorial standard. our patience of talks come to a breaking point he bellowed in the frenzied crescendo of his address on december 11th, 1941 to read a plan prepared by president roosevelt has been revealed in the united states and then continued according to which his intention was to attack germany by 1943 if all the resources of the disposal of the united states with his declaration of war that afternoon hitler did not a week in the sleeping american giant.

rather the ferry to the first fateful step of the retribution after discovering it's still the preparations for battle. and for several years they've reached berlin suggesting that franklin delano roosevelt was perhaps less committed to american neutrality in the face of the conflicts raging across the globe than he professed to be. having long suspected the, quote, insane and despicable president of the united states of promoting, quote, though hatred and mongering throughout the world hitler had recently been presented with what he took to be reviewed and approved his mistrust had been justified. it wasn't allin questioning the sincerity of the president's long expressed unwillingness to untangle the united states abroad. a week before the german declaration of the war to galvanize isolationist sentiment nationwide to of the most administration members of the press had jointly published in the respected chicago and washington, d.c. newspapers

would appear to be confirmation of their own fear that president roosevelt was as they put it lobbying the united states into war with germany. the monumental scope of only consisted of excerpts of the top-secret rainbow five plan, the joint estimate that the united states would be ready to launch its attack on germany by july, 1943 but perhaps even more damning a copy of the president's own letter ordering the assessment the german embassy wasted no time to win a copy of these astounding revelations to berlin across the stories publication in washington. december 4th 1941 a week later hitler was brought that despite his peacemaking efforts the recently published proof of roosevelt sneaking belligerence towards germany left him no alternative but to declare war of the united states and december 14th 1941 the high command would present with its radical strategic reassessments based likewise what it described

as the anglo-saxon world plans which became known for publication of the "the washington times" herald november 1946 nearly half a day after the "the washington times" herald rainbow fifer innovations have been cabled to berlin the weekly magazine would venture one day the movies will doubtless get around to the fabulous life of patterson. earlier that fall eleanor patterson had been elected to fill the void left by the death of her brother. after watching the daily news in 1919, joe paterson had made it not only the united states first tabloid but the newspaper with the largest daily circulation of any tabloid or broad sheet in the united states and the largest sunday circulation of any in the world. the trees of the late publisher sister hadn't been an exclusively sentimental one. in her right eleanor patterson was owner and publisher of the most widely read a daily in the nation's capital.

the "the washington times" herald called by many both inside and out of the profession the damnedest newspaper ever to hit the streets. according to the popular journalistic axiom the pattersons' like their cousin colonel rutherford mccormick. their grandfather, the abolitionist joseph medill had been editor-in-chief and eventual principal owner of "the chicago tribune" from the years immediately preceding the civil war until his death in 1899. by the mid 1940's under nearly three decades of colonel mccormick sanctimonious antiroosevelt and isolationist direction the tribune had grown into the most widely read newspaper in the midwest and widely circulated full-size in the nation. eleanor medill patterson as both the giunta stand the only girl of her generation among the blaze had been her grandfather's darling. as such she inherited the disproportionate share of the company's stock and considerable fortune. bypassing eleanor roosevelt and

truman and clare boothe luce, dorothy schiff, emily post and a free of a prominent american woman of the 1940's. weekly contended that with her patrimony, her own attainments in her latest accolade, quote, cissy patterson, nobody calls her eleanor, is probably the most powerful woman in america. they added and perhaps the most heated. so cissy patterson was, as i said, the daughter rough chicago, and she was born in 81 and as a woman born in the late century she had no expectation of getting a job or going into the family business at the tribune, and so she did what the young heiress is typically the turn of the century, and she made one of the then fashionable so-called international matches in her case with a very handsome but sort of dubious count who was an ethnic poles who had

grown up in vienna and whose ancestral states were in ukraine she had been warned by her family has one of her mother's friends put it an infamous bad egg. she turned out to be worse. she lived in the so-called castles in ukraine which were in need of repair and the ear is in hopes she would provide the funds to do that, and allow him to buy a pack of hounds to create an english style foxhound at his place among other things. finally her parents cut them off and refuse to give more money and that is when a bridge in turkey became violent and beating souci up and she finally left him just shy of their fourth anniversary and she took their two and a half-year-old daughter with her account followed eventually and in

effect kid not to the little girl and held her for ransom for two years until she was almost four. in the meantime, the pattersons if their cousins the mccormicks or well-connected. her uncle, cissy's kunkel had been the american ambassador in st. petersburg and vienna and as a result he had connections at the russian court and so, the family was able to prevail upon the president taft and the republican friends and the tsar of russia to put pressure on the return of the child eventually. she came home with her daughter and after going through a lot of trouble and enduring a lot of anxiety, spending a lot of money to get the little girl back, cissy and affected toward her and group neglected and cared for by nannies one of whom actually abused her and cissy by that point becomes sort of notorious. she tried her hand at acting for weigel in lake forest where they

went to live and gave that up for writing novels and wrote to quite successful novelist wrote about an american girl who marries a russian, but she ended up giving up writing novels because she wanted to be in the newspaper business so her family hadn't given much of a chance to do that in the meantime her brother joe paterson who went on to found the new york daily news and her cousin bart mccormick had come to the floor of "the chicago tribune" and cissy's i don't imagine i could tell chicagoans anything they haven't heard about colonel mccormick but joe paterson may be less familiar figure although he seemed to be the heir to a large newspaper fortune he was at the turn of the century and an avowed socialist and a member of the socialist executive although

he was still an avid poet player he had been estranged from his family but came back into the tribune folded and when he and his cousin ran the tribune, a lot of innovations that hadn't previously been seen in the journalistic history so i will read you a little bit about their collaboration. in the year 1909i was accustomed to the chicago affleck's club and we would take a plunge in the swimming the tank. one day a friend told me there was a man in the heart room intoxicated signing checks. the clubs on approach to be noted in the newspaper treasurer who rob patterson, cissy and joe's for one of the editors of the tribune replaced with his nephew. february, 1909 as joseph olver republican party began its loudest commemoration of the

lincoln's birth during which would crowned solve the world's greatest newspaper, joe paterson began to outgrow his extreme views had been welcomed back into the tribune folds of the secretary. march 1911 the competition between the local morning papers to vault into a series of bloody skirmishes on the streets of chicago the board of directors named joe paterson the chairman and burt mccormick voted out of the district presidency by democratic landslide acting president and chief executive officer. in 1914 they became the papers joined publishers codify in the the shared responsibility for the tribune with a written so called ironbound agreement lasting until we are both dead. they are diametrically opposed out looks notwithstanding this almost unprecedented personal and journalistic collaboration between the patterson and mccormack would prove to be surprisingly harmonious for a decade and a half. if infant his genius is hereditary, burt mccormack

would later reflect with characteristic humor of the, i got it from the mccormick side. none of them new defense from a lawn mower. in their ascendancy at the tribune they played to the respective strengths to understand why people behave as though they do, why they laugh and cry and hate and love and why they buy some newspapers and ignore others as his daughter alisa went on to publish long island newsday put it joe paterson revolutionized the content of his father's dream while bush mccormick launched a commensurate technical and mechanical metamorphosis and initiated the process of vertical integration. to descend, burt began acquiring huge tracts of timberland in eastern canada constricted paper mills in quebec and ontario and assemble a fleet of vessels to transport the nearly dry newsprint through the great lakes to the tribune press in chicago. under joe's tenure the tribune's features advice, health, beauty and child rearing and columns, crime and divorce reporting and

color comic strips expanded and flourished. he demonstrated particular affinity for the comments and contra aid to the creation of a member of the tribune's most popular sunday offerings. now lee patterson, joe and sissy's mother refrained don't be such a dump so familiar throughout their childhood would lend the name to the street that sent me smith created and whose advent joe paterson had overseen. the back alley automotive tanker they witnessed during the ongoing wandering throughout the working-class chicago prompted him to suggest gasoline alley strip to the cartoonist ranking leader the gasoline alley's main character found on the doorstep would grow to adulthood and old age over the decades almost in real time before the reader's eyes. the serialized escapades of paterson's other children and later their younger siblings the working girl detective tracy and little orphan annie attracted

and held a loyal affectionate and ever-growing falling. joe patterson attempted push tribune to a comprehensive magazine to such a wide and observing variety of the reading materials that eventually its leadership would meet with their publications. the tribune began paying the highest journalistic summaries and offering the unprecedented benefits of medical insurance, liberal sick leave, credit, death and it's, pensions and dental care to its employees. to streamline the day-to-day decision making and operations the cousins split their editorial duties within the pri tempered socialists operating in the role on a monthly basis and the conservative cousin. only love and war would threaten their ongoing success. so, with burt and joanne is bigger business cissy decided she wanted to go into publishing too but there was no out what to do that one of the tribune's great rivals was of course william randolph hearst and when

he made his first incursions' to the midwest and the result was bloody. people died in the circulation war of the 1910 and the adjuster who was to cissy's am i delahunt and i think probably very irritating to her brother and cousin offered her the chance to start writing for the newspaper and then he gave her the chance to edit the washington herald which was running fifth in the sixth paper of the washington market in the late 1920's. so cissy had had a number of boyfriends after her second marriage several of whom were her legendary newspaperman. walter how we was one in particular a very colorful character who is the model for

the main character in the play the front page and others. one of them a lieutenant who was famous for creating a huge circulation gains so with the help of her brother and cousin and hearst and another of the deputies a columnist called arthur brisbane who is often credited or faulted with creating the journalism she took the helm of the herald in august of 1930. during her tenure when she first arrived in the city room it was filled with sort of old curmudgeons who were skeptical to say the least about the arrival of a woman at the helm, and i think that hearst's attitude towards it was maybe it will work and if nothing else it is a publicity stunt to have a

woman editor a major metropolitan newspaper. and was sometimes said in the press of the time that cissy was the first woman editor of the major metropolitan newspaper in history that wasn't actually the case although there haven't been any women at the helm of american newspapers for so long that i guess they had been forgotten about at that point and cissy was reported to be the first one. so cissy started up and started making changes to the formula one of which was to try to focus on local news which hearst resisted but she gradually did and one focus of her life in washington is that she had been very social and knew a lot of gossip so she initiated a lot of gossip columns and she also would -- somebody like in the the other day when i was talking to them to the sort of 1930's

equivalent to blogging but she would often use a front-page signed editorial box to the herald most of the time to attack somebody she was angry at, one of whom was her old girlfriend enemy teddy roosevelt's daughter. and of the effective box editorials of hers and the general changes to the paper was that within six years she doubled the paper's circulation and had made it by far the leading paper in d.c.. at the same time, william randolph hearst was starting to go to bankruptcy and cissy happened to have a lot of cash on hand, and with the mystery is, marion davies, they loaned about a million dollars to meet payroll on the next week and that sort of indented him to her and when he said financial

advisers were trying to unload the newspapers which was understandably very upsetting he didn't tend to want to part with them and needless to say the newspapers are not for sale in any sense, but his economic reality forced him to sell and so, cissy bald not only the herald, the paper she had been editing but also the evening paper, the "the washington times" and merged them in 1939 and one reporter described the merger as electric and that washington went for the product like a trout four of smadi and so one of the interesting things about cissy's times harold this was the paper described as the damnedest paper to hit the streets she had the bright idea to first of all make a very locally focused paper also to use the irresistible elements of the tribune and the new york daily news syndicate alongside

the hurston ticket items and so she had taken these two elements usually at odds or if not at war and put them side by side and created her own sword of the irresistible mix that to the washingtonians of the time was a sort of guilty pleasure. people might not admit that they read it, but the circulation statistics don't why and was by far the leading people throughout the end of the new deal and right through the war until your death in 1948. so, this is a small description of what she did at the times herald. although cissy patterson's shared the isolationism of the of the family papers prompting charges of the existing mccormick patterson access from both rival press outlets and the roosevelt and administration it did not share the ownership structure where is

the tribune company owned both "the chicago tribune" and the new york daily news cissy owned the times herald. in many regards the paper's success was a direct result of the corporate structure or lack of it. so the proprietor the tempestuous redhead who according to one veteran reporter sported an equally read pedicure and a temper to match had no board of directors camano trustees or stockholders to scramble with or holder content. as her editor put it, she owned the herald and, "exactly the same way in the legal sense as she on her clothes and houses. shelia that way to mecca and we risked the entire property and her very stubborn and neck. as publishers she enjoyed none of the protections that the corporation of the paper would have afforded. the times herald would the capitol is bigger market not only in circulation and in revenues but also the number and size of the judgments rendered against.

she paid this of her own pocket as she did the liabilities the paper's debt incurred of the course of doing business. the district of columbia from the 1940's are as much a testament to the attitude towards the formation as to the zeal of her truck drivers and circulation hustlers completing their appointed rounds would defer or whomever might stand in their way. other vehicles and elderly pedestrians your children. in her constant efforts to keep the printer tannin and to boost circulation cissy devised duty count contests and giveaways and publicity stunts. the current system's several members of the personal staff began writing for the paper. a column boast written in a southern dialect appeared under the byline of the cook rebecca an antecedent against oprah in that way. to the arena of astonishment of the group the column penned by the neighbor and sometimes more manager wrote a christmas proved to be extremely popular in the

capitol situated as it was between the maryland and virginia horse country. it was her own journalistic contributions that gave the paper much of this janaria is a bite and leadership. she continued to indulge her peaks in print by attacking old friends who had fallen away. likewise as her patience with the new deal and franklin roosevelt or friend particularly as american intervention into the european war appeared increasingly likely few members of the administration attempted the excoriation. so cissy, up until low war had been like her brother, joe paterson, very enthusiastic about the new deal and actually her brother had gone to the extreme of pledging on the day that roosevelt was inaugurated not to write any criticism of out the administration for a year and a renewed that a year later and continued for another year. the rationale being that roosevelt faced unprecedented difficulties coming into office

but over the course of the 1930's cissy began to grow sort of suspicious of the new deal and both patterson began to fear that roosevelt was may be less neutral with regard to american intervention abroad than he claimed to be publicly, and they became vocal and vitriolic opposed to the administration in late 1941, and after pearl harbor neither paperback down and attacked the administration all the way through the war. at the same time cissy was undergoing personal struggles. her daughter who had been kidnapped as a child had become estranged from her and at the same time cissy was under attack all over the country

particularly on the floor of the congress where the various congressmen and senators she felt could attack her with impunity because you can't be sued for libel or slander on the floor of the congress. so at the same time cissy's former son-in-law, her daughters ex-husband was a famous political columnist called drew pearson who had supported roosevelt through the war and fell out with but he and his new wife basically formed the only family that she managed to hold onto and so she was very much alone at that point and seemed to have begun to drink more according to reports that her friends made or gave, and the paper reflected the sand at the same time cissy seems to have fallen in with a very colorful and peculiar character in

washington during the war a white russian immigrant doctor. it seems his credentials were not quite right to practice in the united states but he had a practice that seemed to revolve and the wheat loss or to feel better or to sleep and he became an can do a lot of her famous parties and one might from exhaustion and she had heart trouble throughout her life she fell face down in her suit and her staff didn't know who to call. her doctors had been mobilized or were too old to serve and so they were out of town. it was summer so they called in a doctor who promptly moved into mur house and declared she had had a heart attack and wouldn't let anyone else see her and at the same time began giving her

large doses of various narcotics and kept her in a twilight state most of the summer of 43. when cissy came through she noticed scribbled letters to various friends to come and save her but they were always thrown out by the doctor and cissy's great complaint is that he had drunk and all of her pre-war champagne once she had emerged from her stupor. so any one of the friends finally got the message and managed to get her out and she had something of a nervous breakdown in the meantime but she recuperated and went on but the attacks continued and she became increasingly paranoid and frightened and rightly so it seems in many regards because a bomb was thrown through the front door of the times herald at one point and she had been a famous leedy marksman in her early life. she's a very avid to rancher in the 1910s and twenties and it was said she was probably the

best woman in the united states and was a very avid game hunter at one point and she had given all that death but she was still a good marksman and so she started keeping loaded firearms in her purse and her car and her night table and she hired armed guards to sit out of her bedroom door when she slept, and at the same time she began to worry about her mortality and started the buttonholing people at parties come somebody she had taken a liking to and would say i keep remaking my will and i don't know what to do if my newspaper i fought with my daughter i don't know i will give it to her because we don't speak any more but she might say i like you and maybe i will give you my paper and she told this to be enough people and also told people she decided at one point to leave the paper and what was radical and unprecedented request in the course of american history she wanted to leave the paper not to

any member of her family has was traditionally the case, but she wanted to leave it instead to her executive staff who had run the paper with her and to allow them to divided equally among themselves. as time wore on she began to grow suspicious of her executive staff and started announcing at parties that she intended to not give it to them and she started telling people publicly also she was going to change her well and she made an appointment with her lawyer for the night of july 24th, 1948 or july 25th, and on the night of july 24th, she was at her country house outside of washington in the maryland countryside and everything seemed to be as usual. at this point she had a large pack of poodles who by all accounts were ferocious and badly trained and they protected her but people were apparently

terrified of them. they were unruly and at about 1:00 in the morning she handed the polls of to the armed by the outside her door and said i'm going to bed don't put the dogs back in after you go out and her latest made remember that all through that might the polls started pounding and it didn't stop until the morning and the next morning one of cissy's editors began calling and said i need her comments can you forget back to me and the staff understandably was too afraid to go into her bedroom to wake her up. she was famous partly for her kind of off with their heads attitude towards human-resources and nobody wanted to go and we corrupt if it wasn't absolutely necessary, so the hours went by and finally the butler went in and discovered that she had died during the night. cissy was somebody who as you

might be able to tell is one of those people who created controversy and upset wherever she went, and there was the case even when she was incapacitated for example when the doctor came to her house but also after her death and the story of what happened with her will is an extraordinary one and its own right. her daughter that she had been estranged from came back not having seen cissy in three or four years and said well, you know, i think my mother wanted to be cremated so she had the body cremated and then in a memoir she left behind she said only after i did that did i realize there would be no way to do an autopsy and what if she had been murdered. cissy had been buttonholing people telling them i might leave you my newspaper. she also began saying if i die under strange circumstances it is my cousin colonel mccormick. he wants my newspaper and colonel mccormick happened to be conveniently absent in paris

of the time she died but there's a story told a time that when he got the call that cissy had died he sang a little song and said i'm the last leaf on the trees of the bader challenged the will of the end it's a long story so i will go into the great detail a cure but she did manage to secure or to get the agreement to testify from one of cissy's former secretaries and former treasurer that cissy had been the victim of coercion and fraud and of sound mind for the probate and as felicia put it succinctly i think she said on the day that i actually officially brought suit both of my witnesses committed suicide under peculiar circumstances and

in both instances these suicides whether they were suicide or not has never been clear, but in both instances the suicide belongings and papers had been rifled through and it seems documents have been taken and what happens to those are what was in them and nobody knows at this point. but in any case cissy was an amazing life but a very troubled one in a lot of ways and it made for great newspaper reporting. there was some asian "time" magazine gave a hint saying that was the kind of story she would have loved to tell on someone else. i'm not sure that assessment in the end was a very fair one because the family's editorial model was if your grandmother gets raped put it on the page. a lot of rolled reporting staff said that when the cover the

story of her death and the fight they played it up just the way she would have wanted. and anyway, thank you for coming tonight. if i can answer any questions please let me know. [applause] >> what made you choose her as a subject? i don't think that she is as well known these days as she was maybe 40, 50 years ago so what compelled you to occur as the subject? the question is not compelled me to pick cissy as a subject. and the letters of joseph kennedy. in doing the work for that i got really interested in the better known isolationists, john mccormick, randall walled off hurst and there were others less well known now, but that's a

very colorful and kind of outlandish group of people, and of that group, cissy was by far the most colorful and outlandish i often felt like him to her because all roads lead to cissy and on the other side of that was two of my mother's sisters had worked for cissy so i always heard about this publisher in d.c. and i always had the impression she was a sort of socialite who got a newspaper and had a mark but when i started digging deeper i looked up at the circulation statistics and one thing people don't tend to mention is the times herald and before that when she ran it for hearst it had before the latest leadership of any paper in d.c. and it struck me there was an interesting thing that whatever else he said about her both papers were doing very

badly before the fourth and fifth in a six paper market. she made them by far the leading paper and that struck me as interesting. and if you look to the history of the ownership of the papers, some of the most important, some of the most successful american publishers of the 20th century so on the papers of this plant, william randolph hearst for example had it before cissy after she died cissy mikey would have been horrified to discover colonel mccormick bought the paper from her executives, but the executives sold it because even though they were sticking to her formulas, circulation just seemed to drop a very quickly, and she had been running it in the back qtr executive staff couldn't maintain that so mccormick bought it and tried to squeeze it in which didn't go over and washington very well. and then finally it was sold to

the post in 1954 and through the watergate era "the washington post" was published as "the washington post" in large type and in smaller type and the diminishing tide over the course of time the times herald and it just sort of wasted away like that but she struck me as a really interesting woman who to go from being called probably the most powerful and the most hated woman in the united states in 1946 to be forgotten those struck me as amazing so that's how i got interested in her. >> i've read the works of ralf martin and i'm going with cissy's life and what really most intrigued me about the similarities between her and the

daughter -- >> alisa or felicia? >> i meant to say felicia they are very the billion and stubborn, no one can push them around. they both have great wanderlust, trouble over the country in europe, they both married a very impoverished european aristocrats and then soon divorced and they both became novelists and had a strange relationships with their daughters. they were both alcoholics in the very promiscuous and i just wonder to what extent both of them having an greenup in environment they were deprived of any kind of motherly affection predisposes them to have that same kind of faith in

their lives and they just try to like overcompensate for the way that they were emotionally crippled in that respect. >> i think that that is -- uniques some really good point. felicia was an amazing woman and i don't know how well known is but one avenue that her story in the book took me down is that she was a little girl who was kidnapped and then her mother ignored her more or less when she came home to america. but not surprisingly, felicia went on to have issues with a drinking and actually ended up becoming the sixth woman ever to join a a and i didn't realize it went that far back but felicia's life was an extraordinary one. it was very comfortable in the luxurious at times but then as she put it divorced herself from

her mother and renounced any claim. her mother had an been giving it kind of a gigantic allowance although she was in her 30s by then. she cut it off and picked herself up and burned her own of living as a writer and kept -- stayed sober until the end of her life in 1999 to rebut to me one of the interesting things about her childhood is in a way it was if possible even more emotionally impoverished and cissy's didn't have time for children. and felicia's caisse. i read a lot of modernist theory

about children and emotional development of children. i don't think anyone could argue it is devastating to be taken away from anybody of the age of two half and then be returned at the age of four. so felicia started life with a particular deficit and i came to really like her in the course of writing the book dynodes mabey oh-la-la the objective but she was a real extraordinary woman and it is an amazing thing to pick yourself up and start afresh and, you know, turn over a new leaf like that but to do it at the time when people didn't acknowledge alcoholism come period you inherit from your ancestors is an amazing thing and in some ways yes she had a difficult relationship

with her daughter, but she did manage to get herself of that to some degree in this extraordinary. her daughter who died did she leave any errors, errors do you know? >> i don't know about her situation. >> did she marry or have children do you know? >> yes, a couple times, and she has, let's see, two sons and a daughter for still living. spriggs she does have errors then. >> do you know them? you know a lot about them. >> i do have a family connection but that's another story. i can give you ever contact information i have that is of help. anybody else?

>> could you comment on the story? >> the question is to ask me to comment on the capone story, which is a story that cissy wrote early on in her publishing venture for hearst. shortly after she took control of herald she stopped in miami. i don't know why miami was on the way from washington to california, but she wanted to go into dr. by capone's house and so she did and lo and behold he was standing outside so she jumped out and wanted to be a good reporter and said mr. capone, my brother owns the new york daily news and he was not impressed by that but it turns out he was proud of his house and so he offered to show her around.

so in she went, and she wrote very -- how she went in to capone's house and was anxious and the heavy iron gate closed behind her and rocked and then she -- she showed her around the pool and i guess he had a little compound in the middle of it was the pool and there were colonnades and arches and there was this unobtrusive but still menacing figure working under the columns to protect capone and they had a sort of extraordinary conversation, where, you know, cissy had been a socialite before she took up publishing and she said, you know, the butler came in rushing a drink and cissy added i wish i could get that sort of service from my staff. then she talkd