Rich Man's Man

Hardly had the dust settled from the Manhattan opening of the new Frick Art Reference Library fortnight ago (TIME, Jan. 21) than the donor found herself last week deeply involved in hot and noisy litigation. James Howard Bridge, a white-haired Briton of 77, was suing Miss Helen Clay Frick for slander & libel, asking $250,000 damages. In White Plains, N. Y. a Supreme Court jury sat down to hear the evidence. Its nub was that Defendant Frick had ruined Plaintiff Bridge's career as an art expert by writing in 1931 that he had never been curator of her father's art collection, that the book on the Frick collection which he was trying to sell was "full of inaccuracies and adds nothing to art connoisseurship."

James Howard Bridge arrived in the U. S. in 1884, with good references. He had been private secretary to the late great Herbert Spencer. He got himself a job as "literary assistant" to Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie passed his "literary assistant" on to his onetime business partner, Henry Clay Frick, and James Howard Bridge acted as a Frick secretary for two years. In 1914 he was put in charge of the Frick pictures, exactly in what capacity being one of the turning points of last week's trial. In November 1928, nine years after Mr. Frick's death, he received a letter from Miss Frick reading: "My mother and I have decided that it is desirable to us to dispense with your services."

Mr. Bridge admitted on the stand last week that he had received since that time more than $50,000 from Miss Frick, but maintained that this money was due him for a block of Cerro de Pasco copper stock held in his name by the elder Frick. Never once did Defendant Frick appear in court. Newshawks were not surprised, for no rich woman has ever fought publicity so long or so successfully. Blonde, thin, freckled and 44, Helen Clay Frick inherited her father's executive ability.

Welfare work was her first passion. Almost as soon as she got out of Spence School she made her father buy an old house near his summer place at Prides Crossing, Mass., as a vacation home for Boston factory girls, among whom Daughter Helen organized clubs known as The True Blue Girls. During and after the War she took boatloads of supplies and clothing to France. Lately she has made the Frick Art Library and the Frick Museum her career. Because she felt that the elderly Bridge, whom she described as "somebody hired to show people through the galleries," was not qualified to be curator of the Frick collection as a public museum, she fired him, felt that she had done her duty by Mr. Bridge by the $50,000 payments.

"Mr. Frick and I often took long walks together," said James Howard Bridge last week, "I have the greatest respect for his memory -- with qualifications." Those qualifications Mr. Bridge set forth in his book called Millionaires and Grub Street (1931): "Mr. Frick was a man who would give $500,000 for a painting but would haggle over the price of repairing an antique chair. ... He had a psychosis of unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth. . . . He had implied mental deficiency and an atrophied sense of humor." "The arrogance of Mrs. Frick," said Plaintiff Bridge on the stand, "was conscious. ... I once had a request from a member of the English nobility to see an oil painting of his grandfather by Law rence which he had sold to Mr. Frick by the gentleman's uncle, and it was my shameful duty to inform the nobleman that Mrs. Frick would not let him see the painting which was only two feet away on the other side of a door."

One thing the trial did produce last week was Mr. Bridge's estimate of the value of the Frick collection which the public is still unable to see. Unwilling to say what the collection might be worth today, he insisted that on his dismissal in 1928 it amounted to $26,305,000.

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