Marie Mattingly Meloney

Marie Mattingly Meloney (1878–1943), who used Mrs. William B. Meloney as her professional and social name, was "one of the leading woman journalists of the United States", a magazine editor and a socialite who in the 1920s organized a fund drive to buy radium for Marie Curie and began a movement for better housing. In the 1930s she was a friend and confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt. She was nicknamed Missy.

Marie Mattingly was born in December 8, 1878, in Bardstown, Kentucky, the daughter of Cyprian Peter Mahoney, a physician, and the former Sarah Irwin, who was founder and editor of The Kentucky Magazine, "one of the first publications of literature and science to be edited by a woman." Sarah Mattingly was also the president of the Washington College for Women or Washington College for Girls in the District of Columbia from 1896 to 1899 and did research into the history of religious orders. Marie had a brother, Judge Carroll Mattingly, who died "several years" before 1934 "from injuries received in a football game during his student days at Georgetown University."

Marie was educated privately at home and was trained as a concert pianist, but a horseback accident put an end to that endeavor and she turned to journalism. She once declared: "I have been lame since 15, and had a bad lung since 17 and have done the work of three men ever since." In 1920, at the age of 42, she was described as "small, very frail, almost an invalid; a childhood accident had made her slightly lame. She had grey hair and immense, poetic black eyes set in a lovely pale face."

In 1904, she was married to William Brown Meloney IV, an editor on The New York Sun and later executive secretary to Mayor William Jay Gaynor of New York City. They had one child, also named William Brown Meloney, who became a writer and Broadway producer. The elder Meloney, who had been gassed in World War I and had the rank of major, died at the age of forty-seven on December 7, 1925, at the family country home in Pawling, New York.

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