Business: Field from Glore

On Sept. 28, 1943 Marshall Field III will be 50. When that day comes the handsome, affable grandson of Chicago’s greatest merchant will inherit the bulk of the $140,000,000 fortune his grandfather founded in drygoods and grounded in real estate. But Marshall Field III will not have to wait nine years to become a millionaire because he was 40 times a millionaire when he was a schoolboy. Since then bright, popular, progressive Marshall III has done many things of which frosty old Grandfather Field, who stuck to store-keeping and detested sidelines, would not have approved.

Chicagoans first began to like Marshall III in 1917 when, after spending most of his youth at Eton and Cambridge, he returned to enlist as a buck private in the U. S. Army. They liked him even more when he returned from France a cavalry captain and, despite unlimited capital and numerous business opportunities, went to work as a bond salesman and bookkeeper’s apprentice at Lee, Higginson & Co. Later Salesman Field opened an investment business of his own and still later joined forces with two young investment bankers named Charles F. Glore and Pierce C. Ward. By 1926 the firm of Marshall Field, Glore, Ward & Co. had become Field, Glore & Co. and Marshall Field had deserted Chicago for New York to plunge into a bewildering array of social activities.

He bought a 2,000-acre estate at Lloyd’s Neck on Long Island. There he built a magnificent Georgian mansion overlooking Long Island Sound, a Georgian stable embellished with scrollwork, numerous cottages and barns, a 20-car garage, a power plant. He collected paintings. He kept prize Guernsey cows. He contributed to the Republican Party. He became a director of Columbia Gas & Electric Corp. and a dozen other companies. He helped support the Field Museum in Chicago. His grandfather’s estate, of which he is one of the trustees, spent $4,000,000 building low-cost apartments on Chicago’s Blackhawk Street.

In 1930 his first wife divorced him in Reno. He gave her a $1,000,000-a-year income and custody of their three children. Two weeks later Marshall Field married Mrs. Audrey James Coats, socialite god-daughter of King Edward VII, widow of a British Army captain. Last October she, too, flew to Reno. That same week the wifeless multimillionaire gallantly shouldered the responsibility for topnotch U. S. music by accepting the presidency of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, personally contributed large sums to its deflated exchequer. Marshall Field was active in the management of his grandfather’s store only when he sat down to board meetings as a director. If he could be said to work for a living at all, that work was done at Field, Glore & Co.

Suddenly last week Banker Field announced that he would withdraw from Field, Glore, retire from investment banking this month. When a friend telephoned to ask whether the threat of increased taxes had influenced his decision. Banker Field replied: “Well, what would you do if you were in my position?” To others he explained that he was leaving to devote more time to his “many outside activities.” Field, Glore & Co. will continue to use Banker Field’s name, will be managed chiefly by Partner Glore.