Banker Bogey

THE FIRST BILLION : The Stillmans and the National City Bank--John K. Winkler--Vanguard ($2.50). Once upon a time bankers were considered the pillars of Church & State. Even 25 years ago such a word as "bankster" would have been blasphemous. But not now. For these onetime gods of the U. S. scene twilight has come. If keepers of other people's money continue to lose caste at the present rate, "banker"' may some day be an insult. And some future Lytton Strachey will have a gay time humanizing the pre-1929 financiers to less than lifesize. Such a student of the period will list in his bibliography this lurid sketch of Author Winkler's on the Stillman family and what was once their National City Bank. A garish specimen of the oleographic school of portraiture, The First Billion, in spite of its crude perspective and uncertain line, has enough factual force to make a simple reader's flesh creep. At the other extreme from eulogy, it contains about as little of the blood of human likeness. Author Winkler's unretouched journalese is no more sensitive a medium than newsprint, but today's banker-conscious readers may consider the style and the subject well matched. A protracted Sunday-supplement feature story. The First Billion casts the late James Stillman for the No. 1 role, with his son. James, his daughter-in-law, "Fin." Frank Vanderlip and Charles E. Mitchell in minor parts. Though Biographer Winkler cannot make Banker Stillman out a double-dyed, red-handed villain, he does succeed in conveying the impression that he was cold as a fish, unlovable, cautious, secretive, able. As Winkler tells it. the precocious but well-boosted rise of James Stillman from Manhattan cotton broker to president of the National City Bank reads like an Alger success-story. Once in control of the bank, Stillman determined to make it Manhattan's biggest. In two years he ran up its deposits from 12 to 30 million, by the simple expedient (according to Winkler) of quadrupling its gold re serve. The other secret of his success was caution: he made his piles not by financial forays but by carrying a flag of truce. A year after his death (1918) the National City Bank had ballooned to billion-dollar size. Stillman's only intimate was Lawyer John W. Sterling, crotchety bachelor who carried punctuality to the split second, fussiness to the point of boycotting his club for exactly one week when anything gave him the slightest offense there. Stillman's own peculiarities were unlovable. He sometimes shaved three times a day, rarely spoke at his excessively formal dinner table, kept the chef in a cold sweat by rating the percentage of his approval on each item of the menu. The Author. John Kennedy Winkler, born in Camden, S. C. 43 years ago, moved to Manhattan, went to high school there, got a job with the New York American when he was 18. Unlike most newsmen, he worked for the same paper for 16 years. Unlike most Hearstmen, he dared to write up his famed boss (after he had left the American) in a series for The New Yorker, later expanded and published as W. R. Hearst, An American Phenomenon. Winkler was a star reporter before he was 21. A free-lance for the last ten years, he has withdrawn to artist-haunted Westport, Conn., where he keeps bachelor house, dabbles in gardening, plays good enough tennis to trounce his neighbor. New York Herald Tribune Columnist Franklin P. Adams. His publishers consider him one of their best-looking authors. Though he has already published five books (others: Woodrow Wilson, John D., A Portrait in Oils, Morgan the Magnificent, Incredible Carnegie), the melodies of the city desk still throb inside his head, with the result that Author Winkler's journalese is indistinguishable from the guarded patois written in Hearstpapers all over the U. S. In The First Billion he writes of Stanford White's "mortal death," burlesques Stillman, himself and the English language in the same breath: "Something about the repose, the quiet self-mastery of cows subdued the demon in his own breast. He passed hours photographing his placid animals."

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