Philip Ziegler

Strength in numbers

My Three Fathers, by Bill Patten<br /> <br type="_moz" />

issue 15 November 2008

My Three Fathers, by Bill Patten

The mother to match Bill Patten’s three fathers was Susan Mary Jay. The Jays were cosmopolitan and very grand: they sent their sons to Eton and hobnobbed with the likes of the Mouchys and Boni de Castellane. They would have considered their fellow-Americans of The Ambassadors or Portrait of a Lady dowdily provincial. When Susan Mary took up with Bill Patten senior it was felt that she was marrying, not beneath her socially, since Patten was connected with all the right people, but beneath what should have been her aspirations. Patten, affable, intelligent, a victim of asthma and almost entirely without ambition, could not provide either the glamour or the stature which a Jay might legitimately expect.

Through family connections Patten found himself attached to the American Foreign Service and, in 1945, posted to Paris.

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