My Three Fathers: And the Elegant Deceptions of My Mother, Susan Mary Alsop

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

Bill Patten grew up in the heart of privileged society to American parents—a debutante mother, a diplomatic father—stationed in Europe. Weekends away from his English boarding school were often spent at the regal country estates of important policy makers and historical figures of the mid-twentieth century. When Bill was twelve years old, his father, William Patten, died, and his mother remarried the renowned columnist Joe Alsop. Patten was swept into Washington during the Kennedy years, where he bore witness to his stepfather's legendary power-brokering, and watched a very different father figure at work.

In 1996, when he was forty-seven years old, Bill Patten learned that his biological father was not William Patten, but the noted English diplomat, Duff Cooper. In this quest to know his triumvirate of fathers, Bill Patten offers an unforgettable memoir. My Three Fathers is a search for identity—and a luscious chronicle of a fascinating, bygone era of American aristocracy.

Customer Reviews:

1 out of 5 stars

The Blood Grows Thin.... July 18, 2008
9 out of 13 found this review helpful

This memoir is documentary proof that merit trumps birth. The author's lineage - he is descended from John Jay and a clutch of American and British aristocrats - counts for very little when the story he has to tell is so thin. His ancestors are simply not interesting enough to bear the weight of so many pages of narration. What is fascinating family history within the family, does not make for compelling reading to those outside the family circle. I want to read about people who have accomplished something, whose lives are worth recording and reading, but the author's mother, grandfather, grandmother, and various fathers simply do not rise to the level of page-turning material.

3 out of 5 stars

Diminishing giants August 4, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

Don't get me wrong. I think the author is in many ways an entirely estimable fellow He had personal problems that he worked hard to overcome. He has a degree in theology. He helps prisoners
But after I read this memoir I couldn't help thinking that he had to diminish his family in order to feel better about his own life.
He grew up believing that Bill Patten, who remains something of a dim presence in this volume, was his father.
In the mid 1990s while his mother was being treated for alcoholism, she reveals to him that he is the son of Duff Cooper, a British diplomat. His stepfather is Joe Alsop, a closeted homosexual, who was a major opinion maker in Washington in the 1940s-1960s
All of these folks drank and none were models of marital rectitude Mr Patten congratulates himself on how much finer in these regards he is than those who came before him
What he doesn't dwell much on is the fact that Duff Cooper showed great courage in resigning from Neville Chamberlain's cabinet when Chamberlain came back from his talks with Hitler declaring that he had achieved "peace in our time." Duff Cooper also jollied along Charles DeGaulle following the end of the war and was the first British ambassador to Paris. Mr Patten reduces him to a sad alcoholic and notes that in his diaries Cooper determines to quit drinking and never mentions it again. That's not really true I finished the diaries about 3 weeks before I read this book and Cooper does make more of an effort to quit drinking than Mr Patten gives him credit for.
His stepfather made every effortt to provide his stepson with opportunities to learn and get ahead and the story of his career in Washington and the willingness of journalists and official Washington to ignore his sexual orientation harks back to a time when privacy was respected.
Mr Patten's mother, Susan Mary Alsop, was perhaps a wretched parent but she was a noted Washington hostess who derived her power through men which was the way one did it in her time and she did write some very fine books indeed. Her biography of Lady Sackville is riveting and well worth reading.
Did the adults in Mr Patten's life let him down? Yes. But they are being held to a standard of self-awareness that did not exist when they lived.
None of them should be writen off because they were more at ease at embassy parties than AA meetings.

5 out of 5 stars

I'm not sure if the other two reviewers (so far) ... August 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

read the same book I did. I thought Bill Patten did a wonderful job in bringing his interesting family to life by concentrating on his three "fathers". His "real" father, Duff Cooper, his "assumed" father, Bill Patten, and his "step" father, Joe Alsop. All three men were members of the WASP aristocracy, either in the US or in England, and all played important roles in both the US government or the British government in the first fifty or so years of the 20th Century.

But between all these men was one woman, Susan Mary, herself a product of the same background as the men, who married two of them and bore a child - Bill the author - to the third. Susan Mary, a seemingly cold woman, certainly nicer to her friends than her children, a rather calculating woman, more at home in London and Paris society than with her children. Maybe the coldness came from having lost a beloved older sister when she was a child. Whatever caused it, the reticence and distance she imposed on her older child was partially to blame for what seems like a life-time "search" for identity by her son.

Patten writes well and the reader can tell that he certainly seems to have gotten his life together. Maybe it took his mother's death in 2004 to put the pieces together.

5 out of 5 stars

what a life August 23, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book is a fascinating look at the world's elite and the very small circle they traveled in during the mid 20th century. The prose is excellent and the story compelling. I heartily recommend it as a great read.

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