NO REGRETS: The Life of Marietta Tree
By Caroline Seebohm
Simon & Schuster, 447 pages, $27.50
She was the mistress of Adlai Stevenson and the wife of a grandson of Marshall Field. John Huston fell in love with her; Bill Paley cherished her as a friend. Her beauty, wealth, charm and pedigree (she was the child of two great New England dynasties) assured her a spot at the top of American society. For nearly half a century, from World War II, when she burst onto New York’s social scene, until her death from breast cancer in 1991, Marietta Tree was endlessly photographed and written up in the gossip columns.
Unlike the activities of Jackie Onassis or Pamela Harriman, those other goddesses of the Cold War era, Tree’s glamorous endeavors were tied to public service. She was “a Patrician with a Mission,” as one newspaper announced, raising money for grass-roots political organizations, fighting for civil rights for blacks and, as the U.S. representative to the United Nation’s Human Rights Commission, working to end the abuses of corrupt foreign regimes.
Underneath this admirable facade, however, was an insecure, emotionally remote woman who, as Caroline Seebohm writes in her new biography, “No Regrets: The Life of Marietta Tree,” could never resolve the deep contradictions in her nature between “party girl joie de vivre and serious intellectual aspirations.” As a result, Seebohm relates, Tree never developed the discipline and focus that might have led to real accomplishment. Instead, she flitted from one cause to another and was consistently outshone by the women closest to her.
Though Tree prided herself on her liberal politics, her mother, Mary Parkman, who was once arrested with a group of blacks at an all-white luncheonette, was the family’s true activist. Intellectually, Tree could never compete with her elder daughter, Frances FitzGerald, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for “Fire in the Lake,” a history of the Vietnam War. Even in the style department, Tree’s blond voluptuousness paled next to the distinctive features of her sultry younger daughter, Vogue model Penelope Tree.
“No Regrets” offers an intriguing glimpse of a very particular and lost way of life–of English castles overflowing with servants and chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces, of dancing all night at El Morocco and long weekends in tropical mansions. Drawing on letters given to her by Tree’s daughters, Seebohm also reveals new details about Tree’s relationship with Stevenson, particularly the sadness and frustration underlying their bond.
But the book is marred by cliche-ridden prose, and it reads as though written quickly, before the author had fully grappled with her material. The result is an unbalanced portrait that gives little sense of Tree’s legendary allure–that ephemeral combination of charm, personality and looks that led economist George W. Goodman to declare, “all women should go to Marietta Tree school.”
Instead, we get Tree’s flaws, and there were many. The picture that emerges is of an immature, restless woman, a faithless wife and neglectful mother, who never stopped rebelling against her own parents. Her father, Malcolm Peabody, rector of St. Paul’s Church in Chestnut Hill, Pa., was a paragon of chilly WASP reserve. Her mother, Mary Parkman, who once gave away a Degas because it depicted a woman’s decolletage, was strict and puritanical.
Tree escaped her parents’ rectitude by marrying Desmond FitzGerald, a Manhattan lawyer seven years her senior. After “Desie” went to war in 1942, Marietta embarked on a frenetic social life of parties and fashionable charity work. She became a member of one of Nelson Rockefeller’s charitable committees. She befriended columnist Elsa Maxwell and built social connections with New York’s best families.
Then, in 1943, she got a job as a Life magazine researcher, joining the newspaper guild and becoming a shop steward for her floor. She also had an affair with John Huston, whom she’d met at a dinner party at the 21 Club. Through it all, Tree had little time for her daughter Frankie (as Frances, born in 1940, was known), abandoning the little girl to nannies and even failing to show up for one of her birthday parties.
After the war, in 1947, Marietta left her husband for Ronald Lambert Tree, an Englishman whose maternal grandfather was Marshall Field. Ronnie was 20 years older than Tree and immensely rich. Another attraction was his connections to the most aristocratic families in England. The marriage gave Tree access to the funds she needed to fuel her social ambitions and produced her daughter, Penelope. But the couple were never close and for much of their marriage led separate lives.
In the early ’50s, Ronnie Tree introduced his wife to Adlai Stevenson, who sparked her interest in Democratic politics. She joined New York’s Lexington Democratic Club, winning a seat as a county committeewoman for the district, and in 1954 she was elected to the Democratic State Committee, a position of “more style than substance, but which required attendance at national Democratic party meetings and representation on local party platforms,” Seebohm writes.
Tree was thrilled “by her sudden proximity to the candidate,” and the couple began an affair. After John F. Kennedy was elected president, Stevenson was passed over as secretary of state in favor of Dean Rusk and was offered instead the ambassadorship to the UN. Once there, he recommended Tree to be the U.S. representative to the UN’s Human Rights Commission, a job she performed enthusiastically. They traveled together frequently on UN business and entertained in her lavish East 79th Street townhouse. They talked of marriage. But Stevenson never would give up his other girlfriends, and Tree couldn’t live without her husband’s money. (Ronnie Tree, who continued to pay his wife’s bills, spent most of his time at his mansion in Barbados.)
“I intend to get power through connection with a man,” the teenage Marietta had confided once to a friend. She succeeded to an extent, though her career as a courtesan was hobbled, Seebohm writes, by a lack of interest in sex. It also was hindered by Tree’s strong drive for independence. She never fit the ’50s mold of womanly subservience and was devastated when her psychiatrist deplored her “overinterest in politics” as a compensation for her lack of femininity.
Yet it was only toward the end of her life, after her husband’s death in 1975, that Tree had to face the full responsibilities of adult life. With Ronnie’s trust income gone, she was forced to move out of her townhouse, give up her chauffeur and get a job. She landed the chairmanship of the Citizens Committee of New York, founded by Jacob Javits during the city’s 1975 financial crisis to help poverty-stricken families. She also had her face lifted (twice) and continued to date. Even after a mastectomy in 1981, she remained brightly optimistic–a tall woman who strode into board meetings wearing a blond wig and impressing everyone with her high-spiritedness and charm.
Seebohm sympathetically conveys Tree’s last months. And, indeed, in the final pages of the book we get the most fully rounded picture of Tree, with her determination to keep up appearances, to maintain her activities as long as possible and not give in to the illness that eventually killed her. She worked hard to be cheerful and useful, a patrician with a mission to the end.
