Wealth appears to be relative

To the Editor:

My wife, Frances FitzGerald, has been called a lot of things, but not until Benita Eisler’s review (Book Review, Sept. 14) of my book, “Frankie’s Place: A Love Story,” has anyone called her a woman “of inherited wealth.” And for good reason. It’s not the case.

What is true is that great fortunes were amassed on her mother’s side of the family. As I write in my book, Joseph Peabody, born in 1757, a privateer and Revolutionary War POW, built a global shipping empire. Schoonering opium between India and China, he was, perhaps, America’s pioneer drug dealer. George Peabody made a huge banking fortune in 19th century London. In 1854, he took on Junius S. Morgan as a partner and the bank evolved into J.P. Morgan and Co., but not before Peabody strayed into philanthropy. This began a long Peabody family drift into good works, religion and education. Frankie’s great-grandfather, Endicott Peabody, founded Groton School. Her grandfather became an Episcopal bishop. Her mother and uncles grew up as church mice. Frankie’s father was a government servant (in the CIA) -- not exactly a career path to riches. Her mother eventually remarried the wealthy Ronald Tree. But his fortune, which Frankie didn’t inherit, was largely dissipated in his lifetime. The very class-conscious Eisler then goes on to accuse me of betraying my poor Michigan farm-boy roots and becoming a snob by bad-mouthing our mansion-building neighbors as a “self-made CEO and his girlfriend.” This quote isn’t in the book and it is wrong. I liked him precisely because he is neither a dot-com millionaire nor Old Money. So did Frankie. “Sounds like an interesting guy,” she said.

Jim Sterba, New York City

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Benita Eisler replies:

Jim Sterba is startled to find Frances FitzGerald referred to as a woman of inherited wealth in my review of “Frankie’s Place,” but his own text provides the evidence for this conclusion: “Frankie was born in Manhattan and grew up in New York City and in England and in Barbados, in big houses with lots of servants. She was chauffeured to private day schools in Oxford and New York. She and her horse went to an exclusive boarding school. Foxcroft, in Virginia, together.”

While it’s true that any family can suffer reverses, it would be exceptional for those who, like the Peabodys, FitzGerald’s forebears on her mother’s side, amassed “great fortunes” in the 19th century, fortunes sufficient to “stray into philanthropy,” to have failed to provide similarly for their descendants. Nothing that Sterba says in his book, moreover, implies that the Peabodys were exceptions in this regard or that wealth simply disappeared with his wife’s generation. The upbringing of clergymen’s children to believe that they are “church mice” is firmly rooted in the Protestant tradition and has no bearing on the reality of the family’s finances. Real church mice rarely turn into Marietta Peabody Tree, Sterba’s mother-in-law, and more accurately described by Sterba as a “prominent and glamorous New Yorker ... and socialite who knew all the important people in the city and had friends around the world.”

As to their new unnamed neighbor, Sterba does indeed describe him as “self made”; a “managing director, chief executive officer, and chairman” of a “big natural gas corporation” who, when he departs, does so with his “girlfriend.” I used the accepted abbreviation of one of his titles (CEO) and omitted two others, but the quotes are accurate as cited. I’m glad to concede, though, that they each deserved separate quotation marks.

Sterba is absolutely correct in declaring me “very class-conscious.” Since writing a book about class in America in 1983, I’ve only become more so. How anyone in the nation we’ve now become -- with its widening extremes between rich and poor, and where lies about class, money and power issue from every politico who can buy or is given air time -- can avoid being class-conscious is a mystery to me. That class-consciousness is seen by Sterba as a bad thing is an example of the way illusions about class persist -- even among those who should know better -- as “Frankie’s Place” amply illustrates.

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To the Editor:

I’m happy to see that Richard Schickel, one of a generation of film writers and critics who keep praising the same famous names in movie history over and over, has acknowledged (albeit with some foot-dragging timidity) that Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson is worth remembering in his review (Book Review, Sept. 14) of my book.

It’s a surprising admission considering I seem to have convinced him without the use of “analytical intelligence,” armed only with an engaging story and 270 photographs. But I can see Schickel has a long way to go yet in understanding the value of remembering “the scarcely noted, long forgotten players who drifted through Anderson’s orbit.” In many cases these same people supported and enhanced the work of Chaplin and Griffith, two names that are more familiar to Mr. Schickel.

As for my preoccupation with “filmographies of movies we’ll never see,” many of them have been seen this year in Chicago, Los Angeles and Niles, but the great majority are lost forever; the only way they can be experienced at all is by reading a little bit about them. I believe in giving the reader a chance to do so. If that makes me a “film geek,” I am in good company, for like the computer “geeks” who transformed an elite and academic industry into something more useful to the public, maybe the film geeks of the world can heighten public awareness to the full spectrum of cinema before 1920, an important and fascinating era in film history.

David Kiehn, Berkeley

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Richard Schickel replies:

What I was trying politely to say, but will now say impolitely, was that Broncho Billy Anderson deserves a book that was written rather than compiled, and one that brought some semblance of critical acuity, psychological insight and historical perspective to what seems to have been -- as best we can tell, peering through the murk of Mr. Kiehn’s prose -- an interesting life.