PATRICIA BEARD

Patricia Beard, journalist and biographer, is the author of Growing Up Republican, a biography of Christine Todd Whitman, the first woman governor of New Jersey. Her latest book, Blue Blood and Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley opens the long-closed doors of this elite bastion of Wall Street, and tells the story of the unprecedented power struggle at Morgan Stanley. It weaves the history of the House of Morgan with the fight for dominance between two competing business cultures, the gentlemanly attitude handed down from the days of J.P. Morgan, and an “every man for himself” model of contemporary corporate business.

Beard has been the editor-at-large of Elle magazine (U.S.), former features editor of Town & Country, and has written political and Hollywood cover stories, and stories about social trends, for many major American magazines. Her specialty is the inside world of privilege in the United States, England, and France, from the Gilded Age to the present.

Beard’s book, After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905 is the preeminent story of the first great fight for control of a major corporation in the 20^th century. James Hazen Hyde, the glamorous young heir to the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Insurance company gave the great Gilded Age ball that started the trouble in 1905. The story features such Wall Street tycoons as J. P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, and others who tried to wrest the company from Hyde. In 1905 this was “the story of the year,” covered in 115 front-page articles in the New York Times alone. After the Ball was praised by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Barrons, USA Today, the Daily News, Forbes, and others.

After conducting hundreds of interviews and reflecting on her own experiences, Beard explored the relationships between daughters and their aging mothers in, Good Daughters (1999). She edited, The Voice of the Wild (1992), an anthology of stories about the dramatic convergence of humans and animals, and was also commissioned to write two family histories: Charles S. Whitman: Governor of New York 1915-1918 (1998), and The Sayles Family in America: 1620-1920.

Beard received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College. She now lives in Dutchess County, New York with her husband, David J. Braga. Her son and daughter also live in New York, and she has two grandchildren.

Praise for Patricia Beard’s Blue Blood and Mutiny:

"In Blue Blood and Mutiny, Patricia Beard presents an engaging narrative... evokes the privileged set of a Fitzgerald novel...enlivened by accounts of the group's behind-the-scenes maneuvering...this tale of subjugation has a certain Shakespearean quality, and in Ms. Beard's telling it also offers glimpses into the gilded lives of Wall Street kings..."

-Wall Street Journal