Tree, Marietta Peabody, 1917-1991

Mary Endicott Tree, known as Marietta, was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on April 12, 1917, the daughter of Malcolm and Mary (Parkman) Peabody. In 1925, her family moved to suburban Philadelphia, where her father served as rector of St. Paul's Church, and Tree went to Shady Hill Country Day School, followed by St. Timothy's, a boarding school in Maryland and a year at a finishing school in Italy. She then attended the University of Pennsylvania before marrying Desmond FitzGerald, a lawyer and conservative Republican, and moving with him to New York City in 1939. A daughter, Frances, was born in 1940. (In 1973, Frances FitzGerald won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.) Desmond FitzGerald enlisted in the Army in 1942 and the war years, combined with her husband's absence, proved to be a formative time for Tree.

Deeply interested in politics and social issues, she volunteered with Nelson Rockefeller's Hospitality Committee for New York City's Office of Inter-American Affairs, and also worked with Dorothy Paley, William Paley's first wife, to establish a nursery school in Harlem and to found Sydenham Hospital, the first multi-racial hospital in the United States. Her paid jobs during this time included work as a researcher for the Inter-American Commercial Arbitration Association and, beginning in 1943, for Life magazine. At Life she shared an office with Earl Brown, an African American writer who spurred her interest in the civil rights movement; this interest lasted for the rest of her life. She also joined the Newspaper Guild, becoming a shop steward. Throughout this period, Tree met vast numbers of public figures, ranging from world leaders like Jan Masaryk to Hollywood figures such as John Huston, who wanted to marry her and who became a lifelong friend. (In 1960, Tree played a brief scene opposite Clark Gable in Huston's film The Misfits and she also had a small role in Huston's son Tony's film Mr. North .)

...