Jock, the Life and Times of John Hay Whitney

Born into one of America's wealthiest families, John Hay Whitney went on to become one of the most distinguished and versatile men of the twentieth century. As biographer E. J. Kahn, Jr., reveals, Whitney's life reads like a Who's Who of significant people and events of our time. The tone for Jock Whitney's life really was set two years before his birth. Attending his parents' wedding in 1902 were President Roosevelt, his cabinet, the Justices of the Supreme Court, the nation's ranking military and naval officers, and the entire diplomatic corps. The bride was the daughter of the Secretary of State, and the bridegroom was the son of President Cleveland's Secretary of the Navy and was believed to be a more or less direct descendant of William the Conqueror. When Jock Whitney's father died in 1927, his net worth was computed at $179,000,000 - the largest estate that had ever been appraised in the history oof the United States. Overnight Jock Whitney, at the age of twenty-two, was transformed from being the son of a very rich man into being a very rich man himself. Although a pudgy and awkward boy who stuttered, Whitney developed into an emulated man who brought patrician quality and flair to an amazing diversity of worlds: to cafe society as a redoubtable playboy and squire of Tallulah Bankhead, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Crawford; to sports as a polo player who appeared on the cover of Time and as a stable owner who raced horses on a prodigious scale; to family life as the husband of the era's great beauties, the second being Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, F.D.R.'s favorite daughter-in-law; to Hollywood as the producer with David O. Selznick of Gone With the Wind, A Star is Born, and Rebecca; to Broadway as the backer of Life with Father and A Streetcar Named Desire; to the arts as a collector and as president and trustee of the Museum of Modern Art; to World War II as a volunteer and as a German prisoner of war who made a dramatic escape from a moving train; to politics as an early supporter of Eisenhower and later as a close friend of the President; to diplomacy as Ambassador to the Court of St. James during a troubled period in Anglo-American relations; to education as Yale's Senior Fellow; to philanthropy as an innovator; to investment as the founder of one of the earliest and most experimental venture-capital firms; to journalism as the publisher who battled valiantly to save the troubled New York Heralt Tribune. All his life Whitney pursued excellence, and now excellence, in the form of the distinguished New York writer E. J. Kahn Jr., has pursued Whitney in this full-sized biography. --- from book's dustjacket