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Books: Family Feud HOUSE OF DREAMS

4 minute read
James Kelly

Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but few families have had their woes so publicly aired as the Binghams of Kentucky. For nearly seven decades, the Bingham clan owned and ran a media plantation that eventually included the Louisville Times and Courier-Journal, a local TV station and two radio stations. Famous in their own state, the Binghams were something less than household names around the country. But then came that chilly January day in 1986 when the 79-year-old patriarch, Barry Bingham Sr., announced that he was selling the business because of incessant bickering among his son and two daughters. The long-ticking Bingham tensions exploded into print, with reporters (who, truth be told, relish stories about the troubled lives of newspaper barons) relating every sad fact.

Or so it seemed at the time. Now Marie Brenner, a seasoned magazine profiler of the privileged, shows just how much we did not know about the Binghams. (Brenner is not the family’s only biographer; The Binghams of Louisville, by David Leon Chandler, was published in December, and another book, by New York Times Reporter Alex S. Jones and TIME Associate Editor Susan Tifft, is due next year.) House of Dreams can be read in several ways: as a love story between Barry Bingham Sr. and his wife Mary, as a guide to how not to rear children, as a cautionary tale about self-deception. But most of all, House of Dreams is an appalling chronicle of how cruelly relatives can treat one another.

The Bingham saga spans several generations, but Barry Sr. and his wife dominate the pages. Mary, a Southern girl poor in finances but rich in snobbish pretense, met Barry when they were students at Radcliffe and Harvard. She saw in him the perfect Kentucky gentleman who could make her dreams of genteel grandeur come true. “Like Barry,” Brenner writes, “she . . . had grown up with the same hard lessons of vanquished pride, the specter of Civil War memorials, geriatric veterans invited for Sunday dinner, and the endless parades of cripples . . . celebrating another battle of the Lost Cause.”

The Bingham fortune, in fact, was newly minted, and under suspicious circumstances at that. After Barry’s mother died, his father married Mary Lily Flagler, 49, the widow of Standard Oil Tycoon Henry Flagler and reputedly the country’s richest woman. An alcoholic who may have been addicted to morphine, Flagler died less than a year later. Flagler’s relatives suspected foul play, but Brenner argues persuasively that the only certainty is that Bingham was “dangerously irresponsible toward a very sick woman.”

With his $5 million inheritance, the widower Bingham bought the Louisville Courier-Journal, but it was under his son’s stewardship that the paper developed a liberal editorial voice and worked its way onto the short list of the country’s best newspapers. Though Mary wrote some of the editorials, she did not always practice enlightened attitudes at home; infuriated after discovering that a black youngster had used the family swimming pool, she had the water drained. Intent on imbuing her children with proper manners and noblesse oblige, she ended up attempting to run their lives. Her husband, meanwhile, remained aloof from the children. As one son put it, “My father loves humanity in general and no one in particular.”

Brenner contends that the love between the parents was so encompassing that no child could share in it. Tragedy only drew the two closer together: two sons, including the eldest and heir apparent, were killed in freakish accidents. Though Barry Sr. turned over the paper to Barry Jr., he never fully relinquished control. The father insisted that his two daughters become directors, which only sowed further dissension.

Brenner wisely refrains from ascribing the family’s final crack-up to a single cause. Perhaps Barry Sr. wanted his empire to die before he did; perhaps his children wanted to win their parents’ attention by forcing them to destroy their legacy. Even after the family holdings were sold for more than $400 million, the squabbling continued. Brenner weaves a superior melodrama, but House of Dreams is not likely to elicit tears and sympathy. If the Binghams are different from you and me, it is not because they have more money; it is because they are more spoiled.

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