A House Divided : Think only rich and famous families fight? Not so. Unresolved jealousy and rivalries can tear us all apart.

In Washington, D.C., members of the multimillionaire Haft family publicly aim for each other’s jugulars. In Houston, oil billionaires Lynn and Oscar Wyatt lob lawsuits at her brother, who’s already lost his shirt. In Stoneham, Mass., nine Chesterton cousins duel over who will run the huge industrial-products firm. In Louisville, Ky., the Bingham sibling rivalry simmers long after it toppled the media empire their father built.

Tales of big-time family feuds are all around us these days. But such nastiness isn’t limited to high-profile people steeped in sex, money and power. Consider the plumber whose business faltered because his son left to start a competing firm. Or the family unraveling because the father refuses to let a rebellious teen-ager back into the fold.

Except for a topcoat of glamour, experts say feuds of the rich and famous are no different than those now playing on every block. The imploding family, it seems, is an equal-opportunity phenomenon.

There’s something we all ought to know about family feuds, the specialists say: They’re never about what we think they’re about. Cases like the Hafts’, for example (in which parents battle for power, pitting their own children against each other), don’t really hinge on money or corporate mismanagement, though that’s the arena in which they’re played out.

All such feuds--whether the families are filthy rich or dirt poor--are about personal rivalries, loyalty conflicts, perceived injuries and emotional pain, and the ways we learned from our parents to deal with these issues.

When family members are in business together, says Dr. Robert Carroll, family psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at UCLA, the business provides a concrete arena for acting out hostility that might otherwise erupt only in shouting matches around the house or in heated combat on the tennis court.

A business simply adds layers of camouflage to the basic conflicts, he says, providing tangible assets over which to fight.

What’s more, people who feud are not making the independent decisions they think they are, family specialists say. Unknowingly, they’re reflecting and repeating problems of the generation that came before.

“I can bet my life on it,” says Dr. Constance Ahrons, a family therapist and associate director of the marriage and family therapy program at USC. “When a person cuts off from a close family member, we can always trace back and find other cut-offs. It’s a learned pattern of dealing with conflict and denying pain. And it’s passed from generation to generation in families. I see it over and over again.”

So what is a family, anyway?

It’s a group of people dedicated to the task of helping one another develop over time, through their commitment to each other.

That definition is from UCLA’s Carroll, who says, “Families are in the business of solving real developmental issues: how to raise children, have good relationships, earn a living, be reasonably successful in our lives. It is the family in which information on how to survive in this culture is really handed down.”

Apparently, many families nowadays aren’t handing down enough good stuff. And maybe we’re all a bit low in the commitment-to-each-other area, too, observers say. Pressed for time and money, many of us find it easier to fight than to learn to cope with each other.

Abigail Van Buren says 25% of the letters to her “Dear Abby” column are about family feuds, up considerably in the past few years. Feuds can start over any small thing, she says, but typically they feature jealousy: “When there’s one particularly adored, talented or attractive person in a family, and that person gets attention, other siblings and cousins may feel they get none.”

Rona Barrett, former gossip columnist and inveterate observer of the Hollywood social scene, says, “Feuds are all about power. One person has it; the other one wants it. And then these incredible battles erupt.” Barrett can tick off dozens of feuds, big and small, simmering around the country.

Just ask your friends, neighbors, colleagues, these observers say--and you’ll see feuds are happening everywhere.

So we asked around, and found they were right.

Author Dominick Dunne, in Los Angeles to cover the Menendez brothers trial for Vanity Fair magazine, says, “I had a thing with my own brother (author John Gregory Dunne), where we did not speak and avoided each other for 10 years.” Dunne won’t say what caused the rift, except that it had to do with the murder of his daughter in the early 1980s. “Finally, one of my own sons said it’s time this should be over. And so we met again, and never discussed what had driven us apart. I now have a wonderful relationship with my brother. It’s one of the most advanced things I’ve ever done.”

Most people apparently aren’t so advanced; their feuds are ongoing, painful and something they prefer to keep private. But with the promise that their real names would not be used, many have a tale to tell:

After graduating from college, John Jr. asked to join his father’s successful Southern California plumbing firm. Then he groused at the starting salary and refused to go out on menial jobs.

The father said, “Start at the bottom, so you’ll know the business inside out.” The son said, “Unclogging toilets and sinks is not my thing.” He wanted to do “more sophisticated work.”

After two years, John Jr. thought he knew enough. He walked out, taking his father’s customer list with him. He started his own firm, with the same name, in the same town and with almost identical trucks. Worse yet, he bribed his dad’s telephone receptionist to refer some of his father’s calls to him.

Customers are confused. Parents and son do not speak. No one can say where or how it will end.

Roger, a Whittier security executive, fumes about the daughter to whom he does not speak. When Roger divorced, he says he continued to pay his child’s expenses: braces, clothes, camps, high school and college tuitions. He felt very close to her, he says. But the mother married a very rich man, and while Roger struggled to pay for basics, the stepfather lavished the girl with luxuries: a horse, riding lessons, jewelry, front-row concert tickets.

When the daughter told Roger she was getting married, he assumed he’d pay for the wedding and walk her down the aisle. She said no, her stepfather would do that because “he’s done so much for me.” Roger hasn’t spoken to her since. He received a wedding invitation, but did not respond or send a gift. His daughter called twice, but both times Roger hung up. “That chapter is closed in my life,” he says. “It’s like I never had a child.”

Marcy, a Pasadena housekeeper, now cares for a 16-year-old niece whose antics have split the family. “She ran around with the wrong crowd at 14,” Marcy says. “My brother and his wife asked her to stop, but she got worse.”

On the advice of their priest, the girl’s parents grounded her for three months. This so enraged the teen that she called a hot line and fabricated a tale of child abuse. “The authorities swooped down, took her and the two younger children away, and began to investigate,” Marcy says. There was no evidence of abuse, and the girl soon admitted she’d made it up.

The kids were sent back home, but the father kicked out the troublemaker, sending her to live with relatives. She’s bounced around ever since. The girl’s mother and sisters want her back; the father refuses. “It’s breaking up that marriage,” Marcy says. “I, myself, have stopped talking to him because I think he should take her back and get some family counseling.”

Mark, a Los Angeles writer, says “a delicate family situation” is breaking his father’s heart. Mark gets along with his two younger sisters and with his older brother--but the sisters will not speak to the older brother, and not even at Christmas does the father see all his children happily gathered under one roof. “The older my dad gets, the more sad he is about the feud--but nobody except me seems to care,” Mark says.

What happened? “My mother, a devout Catholic, hated my brother’s girlfriend, even called her a whore because they lived together before they tied the knot. Then my mother died. We got together a few times, but my brother’s wife bad-mouths my mother and my sisters won’t stand for that. So they stopped talking. I call them all every week, trying to make peace for our father’s sake. But it just doesn’t work.”

And, in one small town, a family-owned bank has come between a man and his mother.

“My father started the bank, then committed suicide while I was (in college.) My mother stepped in to fill the breach, but asked me to come home and take over. I did, but she refused any transfer of power. So I quit after two years to enter graduate school. She begged me to come back as president. I fell for it. I computerized all the systems, persuaded her to go with MasterCard and Visa. I did the work, she took the credit.

“After about 20 years, the town started giving me awards and recognition. That made her mad, so she convinced the board of directors to oust me. She didn’t want people to think I was the mastermind. I have not worked in the five years since. The townspeople think I must have done something wrong. My wife, our four kids--we’re all basket cases. This is her bank, mind you, and I am her only son. I am almost 50 years old, and she still pretends I’ll someday take over. She’s power-crazy and I hate her. I also hate myself, because I let her ruin my life.”

Dr. Fred Gottlieb, a family psychiatrist and professor of clinical psychiatry at UCLA, says, “Love between family members is not automatic. Closeness can cause either love or hate.”

The tricky task in families, he thinks, is for boundaries to be maintained. “Young people need to grow up to be independent, to have boundaries on which parents do not intrude. They need to be apart from, yet also a part of, the family. The dilemma for both parents and young people is how to maintain those boundaries affectionately.” When this is not understood, he says, is when you get a cut-off, where one party doesn’t talk to another.

And what about sisters and brothers who feud? “The generic parental fantasy is that we will treat all our kids equally, all with fairness. But that doesn’t mean we will treat them identically,” Gottlieb says. Adults understand this, children do not. “The child’s perception is that different treatment is, per se, unequal treatment.” And inequalities perceived by a child, whether real or imagined, can cause rivalries way into adulthood.

Some parents are so enmeshed in marital problems, Gottlieb says, that they use kids as either weapons or allies in battles with a spouse. Little kids even volunteer to be used in these fights, he adds, knowing that if they entertain or comfort an upset parent, it will bring them closer to that parent.

Neither parents nor children are bad guys because of this, Gottlieb says. “It’s called circular causality, in which the family perpetuates a pattern together. It’s the music of the family, to which everybody dances.”