Thomas Phipps

Television playwright and 'devilishly debonair' brother of Joyce Grenfell

Thomas Wilton Phipps, writer: born New York 30 November 1913; married 1936 Betty Brooks (one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1939), 1940 Donrue Leyton (marriage dissolved 1945), 1949 Mary Cheseboro (one son, one daughter); died Southampton, New York 20 February 2003.

Thomas Phipps was a successful television playwright in the 1950s golden era of American television, and his screenplays for the cinema include A Yank at Eton. He was the brother of the entertainer Joyce Grenfell.

Phipps was born in Manhattan in 1913, a descendant of governors of Bombay, Gold Coast and Mississippi. His father was the British architect Paul Phipps, who trained under Edwin Lutyens. His mother was Nora, the youngest of the Virginian Langhorne sisters who included Irene, wife of the American artist Charles Dana Gibson, and Nancy Astor. On the outbreak of the First World War, the family moved back to England. Tommy spent much of his childhood with his Astor cousins at Cliveden, on the River Thames in Buckinghamshire.

The Phipps family was part of wealthy Bohemian Chelsea. His grandmother Jessie Phipps was John Singer Sargent's cousin, a friend of Henry James and the first woman London county councillor. When Tommy was six, his sister Joyce bought him a silk top hat for sixpence at the Chelsea Theatrical Garden Party and Ivor Novello and Noël Coward came to tea.

When Phipps ran away from Highfield prep school, in Hampshire, the local stationmaster recognised his school cap and sent him straight back. Once, when he was at Eton, his aunt Nancy took him out to tea with Charlie Chaplin and Mahatma Gandhi. He left at 17 to join his mother in America; she had married Lefty Flynn, a silent film star. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Intimate Strangers" was a thinly veiled account of their elopement. Phipps dismissed her claim that she had had a fling with Fitzgerald while she was helping him to dry out.

Phipps's first car was given him by Henry Ford, whom he had met at Cliveden. Living in Manhattan in the 1930s he wrote for The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair and enjoyed life with friends such as David Niven and Hedy Lamarr. Phipps was so good-looking that his photograph was always included with his stories.

Returning to London in 1936 with his Texan first wife, Betty Brooks, he worked for the Daily Express and then Warner Brothers. In 1940, back in America, he joined the team in Hollywood writing Broadway Melody of 1940 starring Fred Astaire. He also co-wrote the screenplay for A Yank at Eton (1942), starring Mickey Rooney.

When the Second World War broke out, Phipps became an American citizen and joined the US Army in 1942. He rose to major during the liberation of Europe and returned to report on the Nuremberg trials. His first two marriages did not last but, when in 1949 he met the beautiful fashion model Mary Cheseboro, he knew it was forever and he settled down.

The writer Tom Wolfe recalls,

Tommy was known as a devilishly debonair and handsome man and a famous wit in New York and Southampton [on Long Island]. He and Mary were as dashing a couple as New York ever knew, astonishingly glamorous.

Tommy was one of the major playwrights during the golden era of American television. In the 1950s the networks put on live plays, serious drama and sophisticated comedies, by authors as opposed to the contemporary script donkey. He was a master of story structure and helped me a lot in that area in writing fiction.

By 1957 Phipps had written more than 60 hour-length television plays and was the first writer to be given a contract for a whole series of original dramas.

His stage play Four Winds opened on Broadway in 1957. Based on his observations of his rich relations, it starred Anne Todd and the young Robert Hardy. Competition that season included West Side Story and, despite excellent reviews, it lasted only a few weeks. Another stage play started in Boston and was pulled the night before it was due to move to Broadway. He soon gave up his writing career.

When Phipps's two children were born, their aunt Joyce Grenfell engaged for them an English nanny called Constance Hardy. She stayed for seven years and instilled in them the "English nanny discipline" that Grenfell so approved of. Whenever she worked in America, she always arranged to spend time with the Phipps family. More successful than her younger brother, she shared her good fortune with new clothes, school fees and holidays in Europe. She became a surrogate mother to his first son and his daughter when they lived, on separate occasions, in England.

In the 1960s, Phipps worked on the joint development programme for Greece and Turkey, and as a consultant to Nato parliamentarians. As a director of the International Crisis Committee, he planned programmes for refugees in Calcutta during the India-Pakistan war.

After the Phippses moved to Long Island in 1978 he played a lot of golf. One day he invited some visiting friends to play on one of Southampton's exclusive golf courses. His friend Anthony Drexel Duke recalls:

At the last minute the club president, a man named Macdougall or some such Scottish name, refused to allow them on to the course. Tommy said, "Let me handle it." Twenty minutes later he came out of Macdougall's office smiling, and everyone was welcomed to the first tee. "How did you do it?" I asked. Tommy replied, "I asked him if he came from the same family of Macdougalls as the great Angus Macdougall, hero of the Scottish War of Independence. He said, 'Indeed, I do', and things progressed from there." "How on earth did you know about Angus Macdougall?" I asked him. "I didn't," said Tommy. "I made up the name. The war, too."

Like his more famous sister, Tommy Phipps was punctual, amusing, a loyal friend, with a great sense of humour. In her 1976 autobiography, Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure, Grenfell wrote: "I find him good company; loyal and handsome; and he has an ageless charm."

Janie Hampton