A willowy, fine-boned beauty, Tree was among the last of a species: the patrician-activist committed to what used to be known, among other proper Puritans, as “the higher life.” Daughter of an Episcopal bishop (Malcolm Peabody), sister of a governor of Massachusetts (Endicott Peabody), wife of a British multimillionaire (Ronald Tree), mother of a famous model (Penelope Tree) and of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Frances FitzGerald), she seemed remarkably attuned to the dispossessed. “When you hear their problems you tend to identify,” she once said of impoverished blacks. Coming from the mistress of well-staffed households in four countries, such sentiments smack mightily of limousine liberalism. But Tree came through, toiling for civil-rights groups and helping found the nation’s first interracial volunteer hospital.
After discovering Democratic politics while a researcher at Life magazine, she became a close aide to Adlai Stevenson during his two presidential runs. Tree was with Stevenson when he suffered a fatal collapse on a London sidewalk. She raced into a hotel for a blanket and a glass of water, then gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “Nobody close to me had ever died before,” she told a reporter. In 1961 she became the first American woman to serve as a delegate to the United Nations, later joining an urban-planning firm along with the boards of CBS and Pan Am.
The bishop’s daughter had-and was-enormous fun. She got kissed by Clark Gable in his opening scene in “The Misfits.” The film’s director, John Huston, reportedly regarded her as his greatest love. Tree presided over a renowned political salon at her 20-room Manhattan town house, bringing together candidates, precinct workers and journalists with names like Murrow, Reston and Luce. She gave her only bad performance in “The Female Line,” a 1979 documentary about her family. Lolling on the terrace of her lush Barbados estate, prattling with locked jaw about the quality of life, she seemed bogus and a little silly. Those who knew her best knew better.
No one who attended one of Tree’s eclectically cast dinner parties ever forgot its hostess. Former NEWSWEEK editor Osborn Elliott recalls that she would prod guests to engage in what she called “gencon”-general conversation. “You’d be allowed to talk to your table partner on each side for just a few courses. Then she’d announce, ‘Let’s have gencon,’ and we’d all talk about a problem of the day.” Another friend, former assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke, says Tree had “an absolutely limitless quest for knowledge. She was graceful and witty, with a wide-ranging intellect. She did enormous good.” Susan Mary Alsop, the widow of Joseph Alsop, says simply: “She was the best friend I’ve ever had.”
During her last years, Tree worked with community groups to improve New York City. British journalist Gavin Young, a frequent guest at her home, speculates that Tree “wouldn’t have minded being mayor of New York.” If so, it may have been the only goal that eluded her. In a rare moment of complaint, she told an interviewer: “Before I was 15 I almost died of boredom.” This time, of course, she was overstating. There were very few afflictions capable of bringing down Marietta Tree. Boredom was never one of them.
