An old Fort Worth scandal revisited
Downtown Fort Worth, 1940
A city with a high-dollar underside
In 1940, Dial Press published a novel titled The Inheritors,written by James Young Phillips under the pseudonym of Phillip Atlee. Thestory had echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a tale ofthe daily life of over-privileged, over-indulged young men of the country clubset as they drank, chasing women, and openly scorning the capitalistic, empty lifestylethey were about to inherit. Trouble was, it is a thinly veiled picture of FortWorth and, as one reviewer claims, the River Crest Country Club crowd.
The main character is George Bellamy Jimble, III,supposedly based on Phillips himself. Phillips came from one of the staid,moneyed families who lived in a mansion by one of River Crest’s golf greens. Hisfather, Edwin Sr., made a good living as a lawyer, housed his family in thatmansion, and belonged, of course, to the country club. But he died just beforeBlack Friday, and his widow lost their fortune in the crash of 1929. She wentto work for the school district, but James and his brothers were forced into adifficult situation where they had little money and yet tried to keep up withthe lifestyle of their neighbors. It was apparently enough to jade the youngman about what was called the “dollar aristocracy” of Fort Worth—mostly the bigoil money.
Fort Worth high society erupted in indignation at the book—andtook their revenge, buying up every available copy of the book. By the time Iwas at TCU Press, few had ever heard of it. Cissy Stewart Lale, the indomitablesociety editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, told me I should read itand the press should reprint it. That never came about, but I had someinteresting correspondence with a brother of Phillips, who was deceased bythen. If I remember right, the brother was Olcutt Phillips or somethingsimilar. By then, you could hardly find a copy of the book—I think Cissy loanedme hers. I read it and wasn’t that impressed, but then I was not of the societybeing pilloried in it. I simply found all that debauchery pointless. Today, theFort Worth Public Library and TCU’s Special Collections hold copies which mayonly be read on site. I’m sure there are probably a few copies squirreled awayin some Fort Worth attics, but it is hard to find.
Phillips always claimed Fort Worth ruined his buddingwriting career, and, indeed, his career never achieved what might be seen as thepromise of that first book. He served in the Air Force in the war, lived inMexico, Burma, and the Canary Islands, did some work in Hollywood, died in 1991in Corpus Christi, and remained forever bitter about Fort Worth.
In a way, the book fared better than its author. It isincluded in selections of the best books about Texas and Fort Worth: GeorgeSessions Perry’s Roundup Time: A Collection of Southwestern Writers, A.C. Greene’s Fifty Best TexasBooks, Literary Fort Worth, thecollection that James Ward Lee and I put together.
FortWorth author E. R. Bills knows a lot more about Phllips/Atlee than I do. Indeedmuch of the above is taken from an article he wrote for Fort Worth Weekly. He points out that The Inheritors had a long tail, reachinginto many aspects of Fort Worth life, citing the Cullen Davis shootings and theLegion of Doom from Paschal High School as evidence that the aristocracycontinues. There’s much more to the story behind The Inheritors and its effect on Fort Worththan I have sketched here.
Saturday,December 2, you have a chance to hear Bills talk about the book, its author,and its city. Bills will present a program, cosponsored by the Fort WorthPublic Library and the Center for Texas Studies at TCU, at 10:30 at the SouthwestRegional Library. For more information, contact Linda Barrett (linda.barrett@fortworthtexas.gov). Seating is limited and on a first-come basis. The programwill also be available on Zoom, and Linda can give you instructions forregistering for that.
There’s a postscript to this story. In1984 a novel titled Lords of the Earth, by Patrick Anderson, has almostthe same effect. It too revealed the underside of Fort Worth’s moneyedcommunity. Heiress and artist Electra Waggoner Biggs called me late one nightto rant about “that awful book.” It seems that Fort Worth never will run out ofstories to be told—and scorned. I’m going to be glued to my computer Saturdayto hear what Mr. Bills says.
