Books: Pip's Portrait

J. PIERPONT MORGAN: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT—Herbert L. Satterlee—Macmillan ($3.75).

The elder J. (for John) Pierpont Morgan distrusted newspapermen, avoided "magazine men," and there is no record of his having high regard for any writers except the dead. Unlike the Rockefellers, the Morgans nave not gone in for personal pressagentry; neither have they unbosomed themselves to historians. Consequently, the chief books on the elder Morgan, able in other respects, are either obscure or theatrical on the interesting question of how Morgan felt about being Morgan, boy and man.

Herbert Livingston Satterlee's intimate portrait replaces the spotlight with genteel daylight. A Manhattan lawyer now growing venerable, Satterlee knew the Morgans when they were neighbors of the Satterlee family at Highland Falls on the Hudson in the '80s and '90s. He married Louisa Morgan, the eldest daughter, in 1900, and was a close friend and business aide of his father-in-law until his death in Rome in March 1913. Satterlee's 583-page book, now published after 26 years, is astonishingly complete, high-minded, reverent, and occasionally ingenuous or supercilious enough to transfix non-Union Club readers.

"When little Pierpont came into the world [in 1837] there were a great many business troubles," writes Mr. Satterlee gravely. Not greatly troubled was the well-to-do Morgan family of Hartford, Conn., though little Pierpont's grandfather, red-nosed, craggy-faced Abolitionist Preacher John Pierpont of Boston, had fights with some of his non-Abolitionist parishioners. In his school days "Pip" was a fun-loving, feverish, arrogant character with a temper and a direct, wide-open gaze. He and Joe Wheeler, later a Confederate cavalry leader, risked their necks and expulsion to carve their initials on the school belfry. While Father Junius Morgan was becoming a rich merchant banker in Boston and London, Pierpont went to school at Vevey, Switzerland ("makes fun of things," noted the schoolmaster); later to the University of Gottingen, where he proved himself a born mathematician, fond of fine clothing and the fair sex. "No one ever enjoyed shopping more than he did, at any age. . . ."