Frankie's Place
A Love Story by Jim Sterba

Yankee Magazine
November 2003

The Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2003
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
STYLE & CULTURE; BOOK REVIEW; Rock-ribbed Maine Yankees, from an outsider's
viewpoint

Anthony Day
Frankie's Place
A Love Story
Jim Sterba
Grove Press: 274 pp., $23
*
For self-assurance, no people in modern America approach the descendants of the
old Yankee families of New England. The origins of the trade and commerce
fortunes that still support them have been worn away by time and by generations
of the agreeable embrace of Harvard and Radcliffe. Intellect and plain living --
as they conceive of it -- produce a sense of entitlement as lasting as the pink
granite of the mountains of Mount Desert Island in Maine, where many of them
have spent their summers for 150 years.
Into this self-contained world 20 years ago stepped an outsider, a reporter for
the New York Times and later for the Wall Street Journal, Jim Sterba, son of a
Michigan family from Eastern Europe, who did not know his own father and whose
early life was lonely and hard. He came to Mount Desert (pronounced "dessert")
not as a stranger but as the special friend of a woman who embodied in
antecedent and attitude the essence of New England aristocracy, Frances
"Frankie" FitzGerald.
FitzGerald, who became famous for her incandescent 1971 book on Vietnam, "Fire
in the Lake," was, as Sterba tells you in this memoir, the daughter of socialite
Marietta Peabody Tree and Desmond FitzGerald, who rose in the CIA to become head
of its clandestine operations. Her New England ancestors included Parkmans and
Endicotts. Later, asking around the island for the name of the ultimate WASP in
residence, Sterba was told, "You're living with her."
Visitors to her summer place were subjected to what Sterba calls the FitzGerald
Survival School: Daily plunges into icy Somes Sound below the house, fast
"walks" about the island, and frequent ascents of the Mount Desert mountains.
Such strenuous activities should have come as no surprise, for one of her
great-grandfathers was the Rev. Endicott Peabody, who founded and for 56 years
ruled over Groton School, the famously austere Massachusetts boarding school for
upper-class boys.
Sterba handles with sufficient aplomb the love story that is the subtitle of
"Frankie's Place." It turns out that for all the security of her position,
FitzGerald, no less then Sterba, longed for a home. As he had been farmed out to
various relatives as a child, she had been consigned in the absence of her
parents to the care of governesses. How the two, each burdened by loneliness and
the self-absorbed demands of the writer's trade, became friends, then lovers,
then husband and wife, is the reason for the book.
The rest is the regular stuff of the summer season, that is, the time spent away
from Manhattan. There are resident mice to be coped with. There is the 17-foot
Boston Whaler to be attended to. There are mushrooms to be picked and cooked.
There are the incursions of fog, which inspires Sterba to include a piece he
wrote about artificial fog and fog machines for the Wall Street Journal. There
are the weekend guests to be fed (some recipes included). There are the locals,
who dispense cracker-barrel wisdom, drop their "r"s and say "ahyup" and other
Maine expressions.
Then there is the house next door. It is introduced by the whine of chain saws
and the grinding roar of assiduous bulldozers. Into this world of deliberate
plain living in the woods, a very rich man from afar is building a very large
house, with multiple bathrooms, much imposing granite, a multiple-car garage,
and -- good Lord! -- a swimming pool!
People in Maine don't have swimming pools!
But these people will. After the vast structure with all its accouterments is
finished, its owners find they don't really have all that much time to spend in
it, so they dispose of it for a goodly sum.
This intrusive thing does not, though, seem to disturb the tranquillity of
Frankie's Place. By the end of the book, her family with which she shares the
small cedar-sided house overlooking a fiord seems to have decided not to sell it
after all. Sterba's real father unexpectedly surfaces, and father and son
reconcile, sort of. Autumn comes, and Sterba and FitzGerald leave for the New
York writers' life. You sense they will return next summer. Old New England,
crotchets and all, will endure.

The New York Times, July 13, 2003
NEVER EAT LOBSTERS OUT OF CONTEXT

July 13, 2003
By ANTHONY BAILEY

FRANKIE'S PLACE
A Love Story.
By Jim Sterba.
273 pp. New York: Grove Press. $23.
he is ''blond, tall, beautiful, smart, famous and scary.'' That's how
James P. Sterba, newspaperman, sees Frances FitzGerald, writer (''Fire in
the Lake,'' etc.), on their first meeting, in 1982. He is shorter, awkward
and from the sticks. Her father, Desmond FitzGerald, was a
Harvard-educated lawyer of Anglo-Irish stock who became a deputy director
of central intelligence. Her mother, Marietta Peabody, was the
granddaughter of an Episcopal bishop, a New York socialite who, after
giving birth to Frankie, got divorced from FitzGerald, married a Marshall
Field heir named Ronald Tree and was appointed a United States delegate to
the United Nations.
Sterba's parents separated when he was small. He grew up for a while
without a home and later helped his mother on his stepfather's
hardscrabble Michigan farm. He made good as a student, as a gofer for
James Reston of The New York Times and as an enterprising but increasingly
disgruntled Asian correspondent for The Times. In 1982 he had just arrived
in Manhattan to write for The Wall Street Journal.
There, it's a while before Frankie and Jim, two practiced loners, click.
But they see more and more of each other and discover that they have
things in common other than Vietnam and writing prose. Still, it is a
rather Irish engagement: getting married takes them seven years.
A consummatory factor is the uninsulated Maine cabin Frankie has on Mount
Desert Island, where Jim arrives for increasingly long visits and where
eventually, every year, they spend early July to mid-October. ''Frankie's
Place'' is a fetching account of one such season. The book began, Sterba
tells us, as a collection of local recipes, big on mussels and mushrooms.
But it became a memoir -- of families, of summer life and of writing folk
and their weird habits.
Jim soon faces up to the fact that Frankie has a stubborn case of the
Protestant work ethic. Six days a week may start with a jog or swim, but
thereafter there's no play until 4 p.m. He knows she's hard at it because
of the strenuous banging from her so-called noiseless Remington
typewriter. The play is arduous, too, with de rigueur skinny-dips in
chilly Somes Sound and long hikes up Mount Desert Island's pink granite
hills. Frankie's stand against easy pleasures includes not letting
lobsters be eaten ''out of context'' -- that is, out of Maine (or even in
Maine, except on special occasions). Jim does his best to circumvent this
rule. He grins at and bears with other compulsory aspects of the
''FitzGerald Survival School.''
Although Frankie serves as the genius loci, a Celtic goddess (shades of
Maud Gonne and Mary McCarthy) who has never eaten a Big Mac, Jim comes
through as equally place-besotted. He succumbs to lovely-day temptations,
for tennis or a sail; he knows that where he is is as good as it gets. (In
one travel piece for The Journal, he urges, ''Don't go.'') Meals at home
are better than meals out, and Frankie condescends to shuck peas. The one
serious threat to the sense that all is for the best on Mount Desert comes
from within: halfway through, we learn that the house isn't entirely
Frankie's; it is also her half brother's and half sister's, and they are
thinking of selling.
Sterba handles other problems winningly. The many mice who coinhabit
Frankie's place, specifically the clothes dryer, are first met by advice
from Sun Tzu (''The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any
fighting'') because Frankie is squeamish, and then are ''K.I.A.'' by Jim
with bacon-baited traps. A new summer mansion going up next door for (the
reporter Sterba discovers) the chairman of a multinational company, with
pool, private dock and seven and a half bathrooms, involves rock-drill
noise and neighborly alarm. Frankie's 1966 Volvo, just rebuilt and parked
in Northeast Harbor, is bashed into by a prominent citizen, who denies
responsibility, although the incident is seen by two witnesses, one a
part-time policeman. Sterba pursues the case, the insurance company pays
up, but the perp gets off. Of course the main cause of stress for summer
residents is house guests, proudly invited, happily said goodbye to. By
the end of their season in paradise Frankie and Jim are ready for R & R in
peaceful Manhattan.
I was disappointed that Frankie finally gave up her Remington for a
laptop. I was pleased to learn the FitzGerald family held back from
selling their shares in the place. I have pasted in my own Maine scrapbook
Sterba's recipe for Somes Sound bouillabaisse.
Anthony Bailey's books include the memoir ''America, Lost & Found,'' the
novel ''Major Andre'' and, most recently, the biography ''Vermeer: A View
of Delft.''


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

The Washington Post, July 18, 2003
On the Maine Coast, Tides of Contentment

By Carolyn See,
Friday, July 18, 2003; Page C04
FRANKIE'S PLACE
A Love Story
By Jim Sterba
Grove. 274 pp. $23
It's hard not to sound sappy writing about this book. On the other hand, it
would be easy to dismiss the book itself as sappy -- a bucolic memoir of two
middle-aged writers rubbing along happily together for a series of summers on
the island of Mount Desert, off the coast of Maine. "Frankie's Place" is an
understated recollection of "typing" (as Sterba's wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning
Frances FitzGerald, calls her work), hiking, swimming, doing chores, taking
turns cooking, growing increasingly irate at encroaching developers and wacky
next-door neighbors intent on building a Maine version of the Taj Mahal.
But there's a strong element of fairy tale here. Although Sterba has had an
accomplished career as a journalist with the New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal, he presents himself as an Everyman: He was poor growing up; his father
left (or was pushed out of) his life; his stepfather was a bit of a crank. So
how -- in all senses of the phrase -- did Sterba manage to get so lucky?
(Because his wife, besides having won that Pulitzer, comes from a very old and
posh American family: Frankie's mother was the socialite Marietta Tree, nee
Peabody.) Frankie grew up in castles; she's beautiful, rich and smart. And here
he is, getting to hang out with her at her summer place over a long courtship
and then a marriage, in a place that could be Eden itself.
Sterba is nothing if not reserved. He doesn't tell the reader how or why he and
his wife fell in love; instead, he makes gentle fun of the Spartan guest rooms
at Frankie's cottage. He groans mildly about the fascist exercise regimens she
puts him through. He wanders down to the local library and finds out (or lets us
find out) about the Peabody family through books instead of through her. He
never physically describes his wife and very seldom quotes her. He lets images
speak for him: At the beginning of the particular summer, he chooses to remember
how the couple would head out to Somes Sound, out in chilly nature, strip naked,
hesitate, then jump into icy coastal waters.
It's the moment before they jump that counts: Is this going to be agony or fun?
Above all, is it going to be worth it? It's a jump they repeat every day they're
in Maine, that moment -- here I go, being sappy -- of jumping away from relative
comfort into the dangerous waters of a relationship.
In "Annie Hall," the Woody Allen character famously remarks that he can't be
happy until everyone else in the world is happy (and, of course, that's not
going to happen). It's as if Sterba and FitzGerald took that equation and set it
on its head; i.e., the whole world is never going to be happy unless we get
busy, do our own part and set about creating some happiness of our own.
It's not as though they're unacquainted with the tragedies of the larger world.
FitzGerald's "Fire in the Lake" examines the debacle of America in Vietnam;
Sterba was so close to Tiananmen Square that he saw the boy standing, frail and
brave, in front of that tank. But there's another wavelength of life to be
attended to that has to do with putting together a stew with mussels you've
gathered and cleaned yourself. Or shopping for fresh vegetables. Or getting the
old car fixed up so that it turns from a jalopy into a work of art.
It would be so easy to let routine friction take over. Frankie would seem to be
rich, Sterba would seem to be not: He turns this into a joke, searching their
snobbish Swim Club for "snooty Philadelphians," finding the place filled instead
with rather decent people. He has been fleeing from parts of his own sad past
(he only hints), but he's reunited with his long-lost dad and he comes to see
that his father, too, turns out to be a decent sort. Frankie, herself, seems
chary of happiness. Again, Sterba makes a mild joke of it. She'll only serve
lobster perhaps three times a summer, and even then, skimp on the butter,
perhaps because experienced bliss inevitably leads to the possibility of its
loss.
Or maybe not. Maybe the nights and days can stretch out in continued peace.
Maybe the miscreant who dents their car will never get nabbed by the police but
maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the nouveau riche palace that someone's building
next door will ruin their paradise, or maybe it won't.
Having a little boat and naming it Scoop after the classic Evelyn Waugh novel of
journalism is nice. (Including a spoof of those crazy newspaper cablegrams that
Waugh's editor in chief tormented his foreign correspondent with is nice, too.)
Having too many fresh tomatoes around the house and finally deciding to throw
some out is splendid proof of abundance. See? It might be a sappy book. Or
"Frankie's Place" could be a complex rebuttal to the theological concept of this
Earth as a vale of tears.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company

San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 2003
REVIEWS
Whitney Pastorek
Sunday, July 27, 2003

Frankie's Place
By Jim Sterba
GROVE; 273 PAGES; $23

"Frankie's Place," the first book from longtime Wall Street Journal
correspondent Jim Sterba, brings the foggy banks of deepest Maine to a boiling
beach near you. Equal parts love letter, history lesson and cookbook, Sterba's
chronicle of one summer on Mount Desert Island is a slide show of life at its
richest. In marrying Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Frances FitzGerald, the
author inherited a cozy (although rodent-infested) cabin full of the memories
of generations, and his wonder at that good fortune hasn't abated through his
months spent at "FitzGerald Survival School": Naked swims through Somes Sound,
avoiding a couple of truly insane local dogs, even nights spent dodging
persistent mosquitoes all fill him with a passion that's contagious.
He delves into Maine history with the same relish with which he explains how
to make a truly fine wild mushroom soup, and as his tale unwinds, Sterba
explores his own history as well, reminiscing about his years growing up in
Michigan, his time as a journalist in Vietnam and the first awestruck meetings
between him and "Frankie," to whom he proposed marriage on a mountain
overlooking the island they love.
Occasionally it's unclear just who is going to be interested in, for example,
an extended accounting of local geographic features and how they got their
names, but the easygoing style of Sterba's narrative keeps the pages turning,
giving readers a sense of what it might be like to stop by for dinner at
Frankie's Place, crack open a lobster and listen to stories of a life well-
lived.
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2003