About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
Joan Whitney Payson, who devoted her life to civic causes, racing stables and her beloved New York Mets, died yesterday morning at New York Hospital. She was 72 years old.
Mrs. Payson, the principal owner of the city’s National League baseball team, was the third major figure in New York baseball to die within a week. Casey Stengel, former manager of the Yankees and Mets, died on Monday, and Larry MacPhail, a former co‐owner of the Yankees, died Wednesday. Mrs. Payson, an invalid for several years, entered the hospital in mid‐June after having suffered a stroke.
Mrs. Payson was a merry, cherubic woman who inherited $100‐million in the nineteentwenties and lived in royal splendor. But she did it with a casual air and an almost childlike glee—as the mistress of the Greentree racing stable, owner of the Mets, director of art galleries here and in Florida, financial angel of stage plays and hospitals and the matron of half a dozen homes from Saratoga Springs, N. Y., to Hobe Sound, Fla.
She was a familiar figure sitting in the front box to the right of the Mets dugout wearing a floppy hat or a blue and orange baseball cap. She became the team’s cheerleader and patron. When she traveled, she often went in regal trappings in her personal Pullman car, accompanied by, two or three dachshunds, and she made certain that the Mets’ insignia had been sewn on almost everything in sight.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
She Knew the Score
She even kept score in a personalized code that led the veteran baseball man George Weiss to shrug and say, “I can’t understand any of it.” When people asked how large were her shareholdings in the Mets, she replied with a kind of innocent wonder: “Oh I have no idea. I think it’s 80 or 85 per cent.” And in the bleak days when Casey Stengel was coaching and adding his soaring syntax to the Mets’ losing cause, she observed anxiously, “If only I knew what he was talking about.”
On crucial plays, she would avert her eyes in fear for her “boys.” But her patience and her investment were rewarded in 1969 when the Mets, 100‐to1 shots, rose from ninth place in the National League to win the pennant and the World Series. And then, with feeling, she remarked: “In the old days, it wasn’t funny, the way people, think. It broke our hearts.”
In 1973, with Mrs. Payson again in attendance, the Mets went to the World Series a second time, but lost to the Oakland A’s.
She inherited the spirit for her life style and the money to sustain it from a family with a long tradition of public involvement. Born here Feb. 5, 1903, she was the daughter of Helen Hay Whitney, whose father, John Hay, was an aide to Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State for William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Sister of Publisher
Her father was Payne Whitney, a man who paid $2,041,951 in income taxes in 1924, a time when income taxes were slight. Only Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller paid more that year, which was the year Joan Whitney was married to Charles Shipman Payson, an industrialist from an old family in Portland, Me. Three years later, Payne Whitney died, leaving an estate that was calculated at a quarter of a billion dollars.
Her brother, John Hay (Jock) Whitney, whom she joined in many family enterprises, became publisher of The New York Herald Tribune, Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, co‐owner of the Greentree Stable and the financial backer of the film “Gone With the Wind.”
Joan Whitney followed this tradition of public involvement after studying at Miss Chapin’s Classes here, Barnard College and Brown’s Business College. She became a director of the New York Hospital, St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla., and the North Shore Hospital, Manhasset, which she and her brother founded on the original Whitney estate on Long Island. She was also a trustee of the United Hospital Fund and the Lighthouse for the Blind.
In the Depression years, she contributed $50,000 to the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee, and later financed and directed the Children’s World Center at the New York World’s Fair. She also became a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an owner of the Palm Beach Gallery and the Country Life Gallery in Locust Valley, L.I. And she filled her homes with masterpieces by Goya, Matisse, Cézanne, El Greco, Toulouse‐Lautrec and Corot.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Joan and Jock Whitney also inherited their zest for the sporting life from their mother, “the first lady of the turf,” who had adapted the pink and black Greentree colors from a favorite tea gown.
During the summer, the family divided its time between race track and hall park, and Joan grew up as a stanch National League fan after years of watching John McGraw prowl the Giants’ dugout at the Polo Grounds.
“Mother used to take me to the ball park all the time,” she recalled. “We would even go to Brooklyn when the Giants were playing there. She was the greatest ??an around. Once she wanted to vote for Joe Dimaggio in a box‐top contest. I didn’t know about it, but she told the cook to feed our children Wheaties and save the box tops for her.”
In later years, Joah Payson might start an afternoon at the track, then drive in her green Bentley to the stadium for the late innings of the ball game. Of she would sit in her box at Belmont Park with a transitor radio pressed to her ear to follow the progress of the baseball game. Or, when traveling abroad, she would receive regular communiqués from the family chauffeur onhits, runs and errors.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Atone time or another, while the Greentree colors were being carried by Tom Fool and other champions, she bestowed baseball names on her horses—Hall or Fame, Jolly Roger, Shut Out, One‐Hitter, Third League and even Gashouse Gang, in tribute to the rollicking St. Louis Cardinals of the nineteen‐thirties.
A Chance Remark
“When Mrs. Payne Whitney died,” recalled Jahn Gayer, who started training Greentree horses in 1930, “Mrs. Payson and her brother combined all their horses. Until then, they each had stables of their own, but they pooled everything, She didn’t know as much as her brother about the details, but she was a terrific fan.
“Once she went down to Kentucky for the Derby and came back with two or three pages of suggested names for horses. We sent them to the Jockey Club, which keeps a file of about 300,000 names that are not eligible because they’ve already been used. And we found that only one of her names was eligible. But she never let her interest fade.
Mrs. Payson cheerfully fol lowed the superstitions of sports and the theater, too. No hats were allowed on beds, fingers were crossed and uncrossed constantly, and if she happened to be eating chocolate bars or ice cream when her team was winning, she kept eating them until the team tad cooled off.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
For years she was a minority stockholder in the Giants, who left her in an emotional lurch in 1957 by quitting New York for San Francisco. She tried to thwart the switch, offering to buy the club, and after all her maneuvers had failed she flew to San Francisco to attend the opening game.
Then one day in Florida, she met a stockbroker named M. Donald Grant and, she later recalled:
“We started talking baseball. He said he always had wanted to run a team, and I said I always had wanted to. It was just one of those things you say at a dinner party.”
But in 1961, when the National League expanded from 8 teams to 10, the chance remark came true. Mrs. Payson financed the new team that was established in New York, hired George Weiss and Casey Stengel on the rebound from the Yankees and put Mr. Grant in charge as chairman of the board. At first, she wanted to name the team the Meadowlarks, but was persuaded to call them the Mets—the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York.
Her initial investment totaled something like $3.75‐million and probably spiraled to $5‐million. But, even though the Mets lost 737 games in seven years and became the Keystone Kops of baseball, she never lost her spirit or her affection for them.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Mrs. Payson’s family feelings toward the Mets reflected a style of living that prevailed in her homes: an apartment in Manhattan; the “main house” in Manhasset, L.I.; a place in Mr. Payson’s hometown of Portland; another in Hobe Sound, where they spent 2½ months a year; the Greentree farm in Kentucky, and “my mother’s house” in Saratoga, where they went each August.
The Paysons’ first child John Carroll Payson, enlisted in the Army in 1944 as an infantryman and, at the age of 18, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.
Survivors besides Mr. Payson include another son John and three daughters. Lady Weidenfeld of London; Payne Middleton of Rome and Lorinda de Roulet of New York.
The Paytons were a close family, given to frequent visits with pets, bicycles, canasta and bridge games and gin rummy with sliding stakes. Through it all, Joan Payson reigned with joy and pathos as she did over the Mets and her horses, with a lack of pretension that evoked this description from Frank Sullivan, the writer, who was her neighbor at Saratoga Springs:
“I always liked her, esipecially since the hot August Saturday when I spotted her lined up in a long queue at one of the cashier’s windows, waiting to cash her $2 ticket just as though she didn’t have all those millions. A simple, generous woman with no swank.”
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
At Belmont Park yesterday, the flag in the infield was flown at half‐staff in her memory. A Greentree Stable entry in the first race, Cloud Castle, was scratched when news of Mrs. Payson’s death came.
