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. The story had echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a tale of the daily life of over-privileged, over-indulged young men of the country club set as they drank, chasing women, and openly scorning the capitalistic, empty lifestyle they were about to inherit. Trouble was, it is a thinly veiled picture of Fort Worth 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. His father, Edwin Sr., made a good living as a lawyer, housed his family in that mansion, and belonged, of course, to the country club. But he died just before Black Friday, and his widow lost their fortune in the crash of 1929. She went to work for the school district, but James and his brothers were forced into a difficult situation where they had little money and yet tried to keep up with the lifestyle of their neighbors. It was apparently enough to jade the young man about what was called the “dollar aristocracy” of Fort Worth—mostly the big oil money.

Fort Worth high society erupted in indignation at the book—and took their revenge, buying up every available copy of the book. By the time I was at TCU Press, few had ever heard of it. Cissy Stewart Lale, the indomitable society editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, told me I should read it and the press should reprint it. That never came about, but I had some interesting correspondence with a brother of Phillips, who was deceased by then. If I remember right, the brother was Olcutt Phillips or something similar. By then, you could hardly find a copy of the book—I think Cissy loaned me hers. I read it and wasn’t that impressed, but then I was not of the society being pilloried in it. I simply found all that debauchery pointless. Today, the Fort Worth Public Library and TCU’s Special Collections hold copies which may only be read on site. I’m sure there are probably a few copies squirreled away in some Fort Worth attics, but it is hard to find.

Phillips always claimed Fort Worth ruined his budding writing career, and, indeed, his career never achieved what might be seen as the promise of that first book. He served in the Air Force in the war, lived in Mexico, Burma, and the Canary Islands, did some work in Hollywood, died in 1991 in Corpus Christi, and remained forever bitter about Fort Worth.

In a way, the book fared better than its author. It is included in selections of the best books about Texas and Fort Worth: George Sessions Perry’s Roundup Time: A Collection of Southwestern Writers, A. C. Greene’s Fifty Best Texas Books, Literary Fort Worth, the collection that James Ward Lee and I put together.

Fort Worth author E. R. Bills knows a lot more about Phllips/Atlee than I do. Indeed much of the above is taken from an article he wrote for Fort Worth Weekly. He points out that The Inheritors had a long tail, reaching into many aspects of Fort Worth life, citing the Cullen Davis shootings and the Legion of Doom from Paschal High School as evidence that the aristocracy continues. There’s much more to the story behind The Inheritors and its effect on Fort Worth than 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 Worth Public Library and the Center for Texas Studies at TCU, at 10:30 at the Southwest Regional Library. For more information, contact Linda Barrett (linda.barrett@fortworthtexas.gov). Seating is limited and on a first-come basis. The program will also be available on Zoom, and Linda can give you instructions for registering for that.

There’s a postscript to this story. In 1984 a novel titled Lords of the Earth, by Patrick Anderson, has almost the same effect. It too revealed the underside of Fort Worth’s moneyed community. Heiress and artist Electra Waggoner Biggs called me late one night to rant about “that awful book.” It seems that Fort Worth never will run out of stories to be told—and scorned. I’m going to be glued to my computer Saturday to hear what Mr. Bills says.