120 VANITY FAIR SEPTEMBER 2019
addition to its
67,000 books and 120 defense serial and
journal periodicals, there are exhibition
areas, a sophisticated theater with a state-
of-the-art production studio—three-time
Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson recently
spoke—and the Coleman T. Holt Oral His-
tory Room, where veterans are invited to
tell their stories. First Lieutenant Holt was a
Tuskegee Airman who became a lawyer and
activist in Chicago. A plaque on the window
notes that the history room was a gift of Kar-
en Pritzker, one of Jennifer’s sisters.
In an anonymous storage room, Pritz-
ker finds her old M8 bayonet, which she
unsheathes and cheerfully passes to me, its
lethal blade clearly still quite serviceable. She
regales me with a tale of a Cold War–era mis-
sion she took part in while stationed near the
Fulda Gap in Germany, which was thought
to be a possible route for a Soviet invasion.
“I think it’s declassified. I guess they won’t
lock me up with Chelsea Manning for telling
you,” she chuckles.
Down the hall in the rare-books room,
there is a dog-eared volume of Naval Cus-
toms: Traditions and Usage. The copy is not
particularly old or rare, but on the inside
cover “340 Wellington Avenue” is written
in script. The book, says Pritzker, belonged
to her uncle Jay when he enlisted in 1942—it
“helped Ensign Pritzker not make a jerk of
himself in the wardroom.” After the war, Jay
gave the copy to Jennifer’s father, Robert, as
a sort of managerial touchstone in his Elyria,
Ohio, rocket-building factory.
“It’s kind of why we are here today. It’s
indicative of the relationship between the
military and civilian communities, with two
brothers on either side, each one in their own
way providing an essential service to the
armed forces,” says Pritzker. “The purpose
of this place is to explain how a democracy
sustains a military force to carry out policy.
This country spends $700 billion a year on
defense. As a citizen you have a right, and
an obligation, to understand where it goes.”
The museum’s CEO, Rob Havers, later
underscores that the PMML is “decidedly
nonpartisan” in its efforts to “combine mili-
tary history with contemporary thinking.”
Also in the records room are the discharge
papers from Michael Reese Hospital for
Naphtali, dated 1881. “One of the doctors
took a liking to him, burned his suit, gave
him new clothes and a dollar to launch his
business career, which for him meant buy-
ing a stack of newspapers and a shoeshine
kit,” Jennifer explains. “Eventually, he taught
himself English, studied pharmacy, gradu-
ated from law school. So, I’m three genera-
tions away from a refugee charity patient
with nothing but the clothes on his back,
escaping a pogrom in the czar’s empire.”
Naphtali’s three sons joined his law firm.
His middle son, Abram, known as A.N., grad-
uated from Harvard Law School and began to
move the family into investing. A.N.’s three
sons, Jay, Robert (Jennifer’s father), and
Donald, ran with that. They bought hun-
dreds of companies under the umbrella of
their holding company, the Marmon Group,
which began to boom in the 1960s. By 2000,
it was making $6 billion a year.
Most of the family wealth went into
trusts. From time to time, money would be
disbursed to family members “to meet their
reasonable needs,” as Suzanna Andrews
wrote in “Shattered Dynasty,” an account
in the May 2003 issue of Vanity Fair of the
epic family battle that erupted after Jay died
in 1999 and some family members drafted
a confidential plan to break up the fortune.
According to that plan, 10 fourth-generation
cousins would each receive $1.4 billion: Jay’s
four surviving children; Donald’s three chil-
dren; and Robert’s eldest three children
(Jennifer, Linda, and Karen) from his first
marriage, to Audrey, which ended in 1979.
An 11th share would go to Nick, a third-gener-
ation nephew of A.N. An explosive challenge
to this plan arose from Jennifer’s younger
half-siblings, Liesel, now 35, and Matthew,
37, the offspring of Robert’s second mar-
riage, to Irene Dryburgh, which ended in a
bitter divorce in 1991. (Robert subsequently
married Sao Mayari Sargent, with whom he
had no children, before he died in 2011 at
85.) Liesel and Matthew were shortchanged
in this distribution plan, which resulted in a
lawsuit that dragged on for years before a set-
tlement was reached around 2005, by which
they received about $500 million apiece. The
others got their distributions as planned.
Today, the cousins are all said to be back
on amicable terms. Certainly, they’re faring
well financially. According to recent Forbes
reports, Jennifer and Nick, for example, are
each now worth around $2 billion, while
J.B.’s fortune is pegged at $3.2 billion (he was
an early investor in Facebook). The richest
Pritzker of all is Jennifer’s Connecticut-
based little sister, Karen, 61, with $5.1 bil-
lion. With her husband, Michael Vlock, she
bought big into Apple, among other smart
investments. (Vlock, with whom Karen has
four children, died in 2017.)
Outside of finance and politics, the Pritz-
kers have distinguished themselves in otherfields. Jean (“Gigi”), 57, has produced films,
including Drive and The Way Way Back. Kar-
en and Jennifer’s sister, Linda, 66, is a Jung-
ian psychotherapist and an ordained lama
in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition who also
goes by the name Lama Tsomo. A divorced
mother of three, she speaks fluent Tibetan
and is an author, teacher, and cofounder
of the Namchak Foundation, based on her
ranch in Missoula, Montana.
“There’s one rule in the Pritzker family:
Whatever you do, do it well,” says Chicago
socialite and novelist Sugar Rautbord, who
has been a family friend for decades. “So, it’s
a hard family to be happy in. The expecta-
tions are high—Olympian.” At the same time,
the Pritzkers have eschewed conspicuous
consumption. “Jay used to say, ‘We’re rich
socialists.’ They don’t run around in jewels
and sables,” says Rautbord. “They hate being
on the Forbes list.”One aspect of being on that list rankles
Jennifer particularly. “Forbes gave me a
‘self-made rating’ of 1,” she scoffs. (“A
1 indicates the fortune was completely
inherited, while a 10 is for a Horatio Alger–
esque journey,” says the magazine.) “I don’t
know anybody else listed in Forbes who went
from private to lieutenant colonel. Army
promotion boards could care less what your
net worth is. You have to perform to certain
standards to get in and to stay in.”
Clearly, military service helped Pritzker
forge her sense of self-worth.
“In my youth, I had some trouble find-
ing myself,” she continues. “It took me five
years to get through high school, with a 1.9
GPA.” After attending Francis W. Parker,
one of Chicago’s elite private schools, class
of 1968, Pritzker wandered around for six
years, driving trucks in Arkansas for one of
her father’s companies, then riding the rails
out West like a Dust Bowl hobo before spend-
ing nine months working on a kibbutz in
two different locations in Israel. Being there
during the outbreak of the 1973 Yom Kippur
War was enlightening. “Within 72 hours, 80
percent of the men of military age had gone
into combat. I wanted to fight.”
Pritzker returned home and enlisted in
the Army in February 1974, serving with the
82nd Airborne Division. Wanting to become
an officer, Pritzker took a leave in 1978 to
obtain the required bachelor’s degree, enroll-
ing at Loyola University in Chicago through
the ROTC program, and sailed through in
two years with a 3.6 GPA. Pritzker’s mother,
Audrey, was a fellow student, finally getting
her degree after being “a busy mom,” Jenni-
fer explained last year when she announced
a $10 million donation to Loyola in Audrey’s
honor. (Two years after her divorce from
Robert, Audrey married Albert B. Ratner,
a prominent real estate developer, and
moved with him to Cleveland, where theyCONTINUED FROM PAGE 105
Pritzker’s Politics