Coke and connoisseurship
Evelyn Joll
HENRY CLAY FRICK: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT by Martha Frick Symington Sanger Abbeville/John Murray, £35, pp. 599 enry Clay Frick was born in 1849 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, His parents were poor and the boy was sickly, subject throughout his life to bouts of inflammato- ry rheumatism which laid him low, often for several months. But he was ambitibus and foresaw the importance of coke to the steel industry. He borrowed money from the Mellon Bank to purchase 50 coke ovens which, by 1879, had increased to 1,000, employing as many men. He moved to Pittsburgh and had made a million dollars by the time he was 30.
He began to enjoy his wealth, travelling to Europe with three others, including Andrew Mellon, a lifelong friend, and then, in 1818, he married Adelaide Childs, a Pittsburgh girl. On their honeymoon they met Andrew Carnegie, then on the verge of becoming America's most famous industri- alist. The two became partners, Carnegie telling his mother, 'It will be a great thing for Mr Frick,' to which she replied in a strong Scottish accent, 'But what will it do for oos?'
Adelaide produced a son, Childs, in 1883, followed by two daughters, Martha, in 1885, and Helen in 1888. Martha became the apple of her father's eye but, aged two, unobserved by anyone, she swal- lowed a pin which, over two years later, came out of her side leaving a periotoneal abscess in its wake. For the next 18 months Martha grew gradually iller, the victim of some abysmally inept medical diagnosis, and finally died just before her sixth birth- day.
Martha's death devastated Frick, his grief compounded by guilt at having been away from home so much during her last weeks due to a strike at the coke works. Frick finally broke the 15-week strike by evicting strikers from company housing and replacing them with immigrant workers, but worse was to follow in 1892 in the Carnegie steel mills at Homestead. Carnegie, generally placatory, was as usual in Scotland for the summer, so Frick was left to tackle the unions alone. He built a fence round the mill and, on 30 June, he closed the plant and locked almost 4,000 men out of their jobs. He then hired 300 men from Pinkertons to take over the mill, sending them by river at night. However, they were spotted by the strikers' patrols and, after a gun battle, the Pinkertons men surrendered; they were marched to the jail, pelted on their way with rocks by the strik- ers' wives. Order was only restored when 8,500 troops arrived at Homestead.
On 25 July a Lithuanian strike supporter, Alexander Berkman, decided to assassinate Frick. He had no trouble at all getting into Frick's office on a Saturday afternoon, where he shot Frick twice, both times in the neck. A colleague of Frick's grappled with Berkman and so did Frick himself, whom Berkman then stabbed three times with a dagger before being overpowered. Frick then managed to send his mother a telegram, 'Was shot twice but not danger- ously,' before doctors arrived to remove the bullets, one by now lodged near his spine. Saturated in blood, he was then taken to hospital where he was not expect- ed to live. He survived, however, his atti- tude remaining unchanged towards the strikers who, through lack of money, capit- ulated on 18 November. Afterwards, a dead striker's mother said of Frick, 'There is no more sensibility in that man than a toad.' The quite excellent account of the Homestead strike is the best thing in the book.
Frick had begun to buy pictures as early as 1881, mostly of minor importance, and only two of 54 items acquired before 1898 remain today in the collection. But from 1898-1918 he bought the majority of the pictures, including many masterpieces, that stamp him as a great collector. The author, Frick's great-granddaughter, seems con- vinced that he bought pictures largely because they reminded him of people, places or incidents in his life. She juxtapos- es photographs with paintings which, in the case of a few portraits, seem plausible but, in many others, are wholly unconvincing, although the 200 colour plates used to sup- port her case are a great bonus.
All these new treasures were to be housed in 1 East 70th Street, which Frick acquired in 1912. In the same year Carnegie, with whom Frick had quarrelled many years before, sent an emissary suggesting they should let bygones be bygones, to which Frick, as implacable as ever, replied angrily that he 'would see Carnegie in Hell, which is where we are both going'.
Frick died in December 1919 on the same day as Renoir. He left five-sixths of his enormous fortune to various charitable institutions, but his family were still handsomely provided for, especially Helen, who was then dubbed 'America's Richest Bachelor Girl'.
The book does not end with Frick's death but continues for another 127 pages. However, with Frick gone, the narrative falters so that, on balance, this lengthy extension seems mistaken. It amounts to a condensed biography of Helen from 1919 until her death, aged 96, in 1984. She never married and was as strong-willed as her father. During this time some great pic- tures were added to • the collection, but Helen failed to persuade the other trustees to buy the Wilton Diptych, now in Trafal- gar Square.
The Frick Museum finally opened to the public in December 1935. This was still in the Depression, so that, fearing 'the possi- ble anger of the working class and their resentment at Frick's name', a police bomb squad, 50 detectives and numerous guards were on duty at the preview party. Fortu- nately, all passed off peacefully and the museum is now universally admired as one of the greatest treasures of America, a monument to a man as hard as the steel that made his fortune but gifted with an unerring eye for quality.
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