Marietta Peabody Tree (17 April, 1917 - 15 August, 1991) was an American socialite and political supporter, who represented the USA on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, appointed under the administration of John F Kennedy.
"All women should go to Marietta Tree School" proclaimed George Goodman, the economist.[1]
Mary Endicott Peabody was the only daughter of the rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and his Christian wife. Her grandfather was the Rev. Endicott Peabody, founder and first headmaster of Groton School where her four brothers were educated.[2]
Although born into one of the oldest families in America, Marietta's parents were relatively poor, as well as being followers of the Episcopal Church as opposed to the mainly Roman Catholic residents of Lawrence. Marietta's mother Mary was an extensive charity worker, and encouraged her daughter to get involved with the community.
Marietta attended St. Timothy's School, where she excelled in athletics above studies. An effervescent, leggy blonde, Marietta was an accomplished flirt and irresistible to men from an early age.[3] On graduation she undertook a grand tour of Europe and finishing school in Florence, Italy to avoid college;[4] and when asked to predict her own future, she wrote down: "Parties, people, and politics."[5]
Her father insisted unlike many society girls of the time that she attend college, and she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1936. Although she withdrew from the Class of 1940 without a degree,[6] in later interviews, she often remarked: "I'll never stop being grateful to my father for forcing me to go to college. It changed my life."[7] In 1964 she was presented with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, and in 1971 with an honorary Bachelor of Arts.[8]
On graduation, Marietta was courted by Harvard law graduate and registered New York lawyer Desmond Fitzgerald. The couple married on September 2, 1939, and Marietta gave birth to a daughter Frances FitzGerald. Marietta began a career as a fact checker, and latterly writer for "Time" magazine. At night she partied with the Astors, Paleys, and Warburgs; describing these years as: "a fever of happiness."[9]
Her ardent liberal Democratic party views clashed with the Republican party views of her husband, and created tensions in the marriage. After America entered the Second World War in December 1940, Marietta accepted a post as part of the American delegation assisting the British Ministry of Information.
When Fitzgerald left New York to fulfil a role in the war effort, Marietta started a passionate and intense affair with the film director John Huston.[10] Rumours and historians suggest that Marietta was the only woman Huston ever truely loved, and one weekend their love making activity broke a friends bed. When FitzGerald returned from his duties before the end of the war, Huston returned to Hollywood, California to await the promised divorce at Marietta's request.[11]
Although contemplating marriage with Huston, Marietta and FitzGerald were invited to Barbados by a colleague from the British Ministry of Information. Ronald Tree was then a dollar billionaire, whose mother was the daughter of retail magnate Marshall Field; while he himself was the then MP for Harborough, Leicestershire and friend of Winston Churchill. Although both were married, Marietta and Tree began an affair.[12]
Although Tree was bisexual and twenty years older than Marietta,[13] at the end of World War Two, Tree and Peabody divorced their respective partners, and then married on July 26, 1947. Marietta moved into Tree's home, Ditchley Park, but found herself bored with English country life. Tree and most of his friends were Conservatives, and Democrat Marietta again found herself politically isolated.
Recognising his wife's unhappiness, and for the first time in his life short of money, Tree sold Ditchley and agreed to return to New York with Marietta, her daughter Frances Fitzgerald and their own daughter Penelope (b. 1949),[14] and his butler Collins.[15][16]
Marietta immediately joined the Lexington Democratic Club, and two years later was elected the county chairwoman. She was elected to the Democratic State Committee in 1954.
In 1952, Marietta became involved in the Presidential election campaign of Adlai Stevenson. After his defeat, the pair became constant companions and lovers, but Ronald Tree was unfazed by this an even invited Stevenson to the couples houses in New York, Barbados and London. Marietta and Stevenson developed code names for each other - Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, and Mr. and Mrs. Richardson - and arranged trysts at various friends' houses that they considered safe.
Marietta was part of Stevenson's unsuccessful 1956 Presidential campaign, and in light of his return to a legal career the pair continued their affair but became slightly more distant. Stevenson also took other lovers to keep Marietta on edge, frequently disclosing his encounters by stockpiling in a drawer by his bed a number of poems and meditations of love that he would send, and receive, from various women.[17]
This encouraged Marietta's earlier lover, the film director John Huston, who even gave her a role in his 1960 movie "The Misfits." But she was devoted to Stevenson, and although she refused to divorce Tree, she gladly accepted John F Kennedy's offer of becoming the American representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, aptly appointed under Stevenson as the head of the American delegation.[18]
On 14 July, 1965 Marietta and Stevenson were walking in London when Adlai suffered a heart attack, and later died at St. George's Hospital. That night in her diary, Marietta wrote: "Adlai is dead. We were together."[19]
Frances "Frankie" FitzGerald became a noted journalist and historian, while Penelope Tree became a fashion model who was arrested in 1972 on drug charges. Virtually estranged from each other, Ronald Tree died of a stroke on July 14, 1976 in London, while Marietta was in New York.
Ronald left Marietta with little money, and she was forced to sell much of the couples property assets to remain financially stable. Marietta started an affair with English architect Richard Llewelyn-Davies, and financed the married man's business expansion into the United States. But Davies died suddenly, and Marietta was forced to cover some of the estate's debts.[20]
Marietta through her connections was able to obtain some well paid directorships, including the boards of CBS, Pan Am, and Lend Lease of Australia. She also served as womens trustee on the board of the University of Pennsylvania.[21] These positions and incomes enabled her to not only support herself, but resist calls from her later publishing and political community lovers to write her memoirs, including lover Eben Pyne.
A few weeks before he died of emphysema on August 28, 1987, Marietta visited John Huston in hospital in Middletown, Rhode Island and his electrocardiogram "started jumping with excitement as soon as she entered the room." She was, his friends maintained, the only woman he ever really loved.[22] Her friends in the 1980s included Donald Trump and President Ronald and Nancy Reagan, the later for which she was criticized in the Democratic party,[23] whom she worked for until in 1990 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
She fought the disease hard, including undertaking a double mastectomy, and told her friends she was suffering from influenza.[24] Marietta died on August 15, 1991, at her home in New York. Her ashes were buried by her daughters with her 1991 red leather diary attached to the urn.[25]