by Ron Chernow
When the injury wasn’t fatal and Bill recovered, he tried to resume the tired old charade that he was unrelated to Rockefeller, but Johnston’s hunch had now ripened into certainty, and Bill eventually gave up the game. Bill began to speak freely and often quite emotionally about his estranged son. When Johnston asked why he had concealed this relationship for so long, “he told me that the reason he kept it secret was that he found it necessary in his younger days to assume a name because he was practicing medicine without a license, he might be arrested any time, and he did not wish to disgrace the name of Rockefeller because of his children. He stuck to the name later, he said, because it was then too late to honorably take the right name.” 10 This overlooks the awkward truth that he also assumed a new name to enter into a bigamous marriage with Margaret Allen and conceal the truth from Eliza.
The stories about John D. suddenly came tumbling forth. Bill bragged about his career, always reserving a good deal of credit for himself. “He never tired of boasting to me of John D.’s cleverness and how he was too smart for any of his competitors in the business. . . . He seemed to just dote on John D. Rockefeller. He told me hundreds of anecdotes of John D.’s boyhood, of fishing and hunting with him and of his cleverness and shrewdness as a boy.”11 For all of Bill’s glaring faults, there is something touching about a father admiring his extraordinary son from afar and taking vicarious pleasure in his achievements while being pointedly excluded from his affections. John’s success provided its own tacit commentary on Bill’s employment. Where Bill had squandered his considerable talents, John had succeeded on a scale that made Bill look cheap and tawdry. Like many pathological liars, Bill’s achievements were too meager to satisfy his exaggerated need to feel important. He had never arrived at a larger vision of his own potentiality, remaining mired in the petty arts of a small-time con man.
Charles Johnston finally wearied of his escapades with Bill and opted for a legitimate career. Like any Pied Piper, Bill was upset when one of his followers no longer hearkened to his beguiling tune. As Johnston remembered: “We parted when I decided to go to college and get a medical education and a diploma. He was very indignant at that. He declared that a college education would spoil me and that his was the only method of curing diseases.” 12 Bill later recanted and helped to put his young protégé through medical school. When Johnston began practicing medicine in Chicago, Bill visited and showered him with gifts, including his gold-headed cane and his violin. In the interest of protecting his newfound respectability, Johnston kept his frontier liaison with Bill a deeply buried secret until the press forced him to come clean in 1908. By this point, the search for Doc Rockefeller had developed into a national obsession.
In March 1889, the ailing Eliza was at William’s mansion at 689 Fifth Avenue when she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right side. As she hung on for another ten days, both John and William skipped work to maintain a bedside vigil. “She knew us all,” John D. wrote of the deathbed scene to a cousin, “and did all her strength would permit to show her affection, appreciation, and Christian resignation.”13 She died quietly on March 28, age seventy-six, never having known that her husband had taken a second wife, twenty years his junior, and adopted a brand-new identity. John, William, and Frank buried their differences long enough to accompany the casket by train to Cleveland.
Whatever solace John derived from Eliza’s peaceful death was soon shattered by the events surrounding her funeral. Never accepting Bill’s double life, John had sold his father’s lot in Woodland Cemetery in 1882 so that he could be buried in “the portion for him and Mother” in the Rockefeller family plot at Lake View Cemetery. This transaction required Bill’s signature, but John’s relations with his father were so uneasy that he had to ask brother Frank and Pierson Briggs to act as intermediaries. When Doc Rockefeller predictably bridled at this slap at his second marriage, John threw up his hands in frustration. “Guess you will have to manage this matter with him,” he told Frank.14 John succeeded in making the transfer, for, as Eliza’s condition deteriorated in February 1889, he wrote to Frank and referred to “the arrangement for father and mother to be buried in that portion which we have designated as theirs.” 15 Perhaps Bill pretended to submit to this arrangement only to placate John, for he had no real intention of being buried beside Eliza or abandoning Margaret.
When Eliza’s death seemed imminent, Frank alerted John that their father was suffering from asthma and would not attend the funeral service, to be held at John’s old Euclid Avenue house. Something snapped in John when his father thus offended his mother’s memory, and he decided to kill him off, at least symbolically. The day before the funeral, he paid a visit to the Reverend George T. Dowling of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, who would officiate at Eliza’s burial and deliver the oration. As someone who later discussed this meeting with Dowling recalled, “The most interesting fact I got from him was the pains John D. Rockefeller took to have it announced that his mother died a widow. Among other things he told of the years of widowhood and her faithfulness to the memory of her departed husband.”16 That this story was gathered by Rockefeller’s official biographer, William O. Inglis, only adds to its credibility.
Eliza’s sons and grandsons served as pallbearers at the funeral, and John read the final chapter of Proverbs, while Bill was conspicuously absent among the mourners. Eliza’s death certificate kept up the fiction that she was a widow. After the funeral, John was still fuming over his father’s absence and for weeks insisted that Bill should come to Cleveland to pay his last respects at the gravesite. On April 18, 1889, he told Bill’s brother Egbert, in an unaccustomed show of open wrath, that “if he does not soon come, we shall go for him.”17 Eliza’s death, far from putting the whole situation to rest, only inflamed John’s feelings anew, complicating his stormy relationship with his father.
That October, in apparent reprisal for his father’s failure to attend, John made him sell his Park River ranch, which had now outlived its usefulness as a possible path to rehabilitation. On these transfer documents, John again forced his father to write his real name, “William Avery Rockefeller, widower of Cleveland,” so as to keep the money from Margaret.18 Determined to mete out further punishment, John pushed his father to sell all his western property, move back east, and abandon Margaret Allen altogether, but Bill would not leave Park River. He bought new property nearby and until 1897 continued to spend summers there and winters with Margaret in Freeport.
Six months after Eliza’s funeral, Bill had the cheek to arrive in Cleveland, unannounced, his health suddenly and miraculously restored. It was probably this visit that sealed John’s decision to sell the ranch in North Dakota. Apparently bent upon patching up relations with John and William, Bill prevailed upon Egbert, an upstate New York farmer, to accompany him on a trip to Manhattan in October 1890. The image of these two hillbillies in the big city measures the extraordinary distance that John and William had traveled from their small-town origins. Maintaining his civility, John gave them a tour of 26 Broadway and took them to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The sixteen-year-old Junior whimsically narrated these events to a girlfriend in a letter; emerging from the cavernous church, Egbert turned to his hosts and said, “Well, that do beat all I ever see.”19 Even though Egbert was extremely close to Bill, John’s children had never met this folksy old character before and were entranced by him. As Junior wrote,
Uncle is a farmer from Oswego, New York, and has only been to the city once, and then on business, so that he knew nothing about the life that is led here and he has been most interested to ride in the park and see all the fine carriages and horses besides the many other sights of interest to one only accustomed to country life. He is such a dear, simple minded old man and is so appreciative of anything done for him that it is a great pleasure to make his visit as enjoyable as possible. Grandfather said to me the other day when we were driving together, “Uncle Bert is so happily disappointed in your family and Uncle Will’s.” I said why how
do you mean. “Well,” said he, “he told me that he supposed you would be stiff and high minded and hardly pay any attention to an old country man like him, and he is so delighted to find you all so social and entertaining.” And, he said, “he does enjoy everything he sees here so much, why he talks to me until nearly eleven o’clock every night, telling me all about it.”20
John suspected that this would be his aging father’s last East Coast visit, though Bill continued to show up in Cleveland, often escorted by Uncle Egbert. In the acrimonious style that marked all their business dealings, John continued to wrangle with his father about money matters. In 1881, he had advanced him money to enlarge Eliza’s Cheshire Street house, the one John had built as an adolescent under Bill’s intermittent supervision. Even though Bill had decamped, John had allowed him to retain a share in the house, leaving open the possibility of the penitent’s eventual return. For this loan, John had charged—but never collected—6 percent interest. Around 1900, John told his ninety-year-old father that he would cancel his claim to the accumulated interest if Bill signed over his interest in the property to his granddaughters. It was yet another round in his never-ending quest to prevent Margaret Allen from inheriting a penny of Rockefeller money.
Communications between John and his father were routinely routed through Frank or William. As John wrote to Frank in a typical letter in 1898, “I enclose a letter to Father, as I have not his address.” 21 Despite the chronic friction between them, Big Bill continued to borrow money from his son and by the end of the century still had a $64,000 loan outstanding—more than $1 million in today’s money. This dependency grated on Bill, as was evident in September 1902, when John and Frank hosted a daylong party for their father at Forest Hill, gathering up his cronies from Strongsville days. Though he put on his finest duds—a broadcloth coat with silk lapels, a silk hat tilted at a jaunty angle, and a blazing diamond in his shirtfront—Bill was now a bloated 250 pounds. At ninety-two, he was gouty, rheumatic, asthmatic, hard of hearing, nearly blind, cantankerous, and unsteady on his feet. For all that, when they held a turkey shoot in his honor, Bill won hands down. The guests spent much time reminiscing and were doubled over with laughter as Bill told his salty tales. Later, when asked where he lived, he grew extremely coy; pressed, he raised his hand, saying, “No, no, boys; that’s one thing I shall not tell. ”22 He did drop two hints, however: that he lived somewhere out west and that he shot “shirt-tail swans” on a nearby lake—trivial details that sparked one of the great wild-goose chases in journalism history.
What makes the Forest Hill reunion so fascinating is that outsiders had an unusual chance to observe relations between John and his father. From his constant trips to Kansas, it was clear that Bill felt warmly toward Frank, but the tension between Bill and John was palpable. The old man seemed to delight in embarrassing his son before their guests. At one point, Bill was sitting on the lawn, holding court, when John approached quietly. “Here comes Johnnie,” Bill taunted him. “I suppose he is a good Baptist, but look out how you trade with him.”23 Later, he told John that if he didn’t pay him fifty cents for every squirrel on the place, he would “shoot every damn one of them.”24 Everybody but John seemed to enjoy the humor. To John’s extreme discomfort, Bill launched into a long string of bawdy stories, narrated with all the brio he could muster. In a revealing moment, John tried to slip away so that he would not have to hear his father’s remarks, but Bill grabbed his son and made him stand and listen to these ribald jokes. At the end of the day, while John tried to recover from this public humiliation, Frank and Bill took a long, sentimental drive through the Cleveland streets.
The tense relations between John and his father were paralleled by increasing rancor between John and his malcontent brother Frank, who was always maddened by his success. As a vast discrepancy in wealth arose between him and his two brothers, Frank tried to redress the imbalance by gambling, only to stumble into fresh fiascoes and exacerbate his reliance on them. Whenever he attempted to emulate John’s business flair, he acted in a dangerously capricious fashion, and his subsequent failures further infuriated him against his brother. As he waded into commercial blunders and rash speculations, his dark side acquired a pathological intensity, with one observer depicting Frank as “hot-tempered and vindictive. . . . Sometimes I have thought that he was insane. He was a very violent man. Perhaps brooding over some wrong, real or imaginary, had upset his mind.”25
Aware of the problems his legendary stature caused Frank, John felt acutely the difference in their fortunes and wanted to find a place in business for Frank, but he couldn’t countenance his methods and was offended by his public tirades against him. In the late 1870s, Frank was a partner in the rival Cleveland refinery Pioneer Oil Works, and John classified his brother among the blackmailers who tried to unload their antiquated refineries on him at extortionate prices. “He and others were up to such schemes all the time till they got their property sold out at the price they wanted—schemes of blackmail!”26 John labored tirelessly to win control of Pioneer Oil Works and, instead of snuffing it out, favored its discreet absorption by Standard Oil. Using William as an intermediary—there were times when John and Frank did not speak—he offered Frank lucrative deals in which the trust would refine Pioneer’s oil. While Frank thought he was negotiating only with William, John secretly monitored their exchanges and dictated letters sent under William’s signature. The genial William was also the front man for large loans that Frank might have spurned if offered directly by John. In the end, Frank negotiated an advantageous deal in which Standard Oil would market Pioneer’s surplus oil whenever Pioneer lacked enough customers—a one-sided deal John would have approved only out of fraternal sentiment. Instead of showing gratitude, Frank rewarded John by trying to steal away Standard Oil customers and raiding territories it controlled.
An incorrigible ingrate, Frank wanted to have it both ways: to be heavily indebted to his brothers yet operate free of their control. He asked John to become his banker then expected leniency from him. He took several gigantic loans from John and William—some as large as $80,000—with all too predictable results. When Frank piled up staggering losses in private oil speculations, Colonel Payne reported to John in 1882: “Confidentially— it is reported that Frank has lost very largely in his operations at Chicago—it is put as high as $100,000.”27 When Frank’s health broke under the strain, John tried, to no avail, to wean him away from gambling.
Trying to equalize his status with his brothers, Frank lived on a lavish scale that far outstripped his income. He later bought a beautiful country home in Wickliffe, Ohio, seven miles from Forest Hill, complete with 160 acres of barns, paddocks, and a racetrack. He trained fine racehorses, raised Shetland ponies and prize cattle, and stocked a hunting preserve with deer, bear, foxes, and squirrels. Nothing pleased Frank more than to dust off his Civil War uniform on patriotic holidays and strut around his property with fellow veterans, perhaps to remind John and William that they hadn’t flocked to the Union banner.
On his travels, Big Bill had spotted a large tract of cheap land in Belvidere, Kansas, west of Wichita, which Frank turned into an 8,000-acre ranch. When he first bought the property, it was remote from railroads, and he could graze his buffalo herd, pedigreed horses, and shorthorn cattle on vast, unfenced plains. Not surprisingly, John and William carried the ranch mortgage and financed additional land purchases. Then the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad inaugurated service to the area, fresh settlers swarmed in, and the free range shrank for cattlemen. Where Frank’s livestock had been able to forage for ten miles to the east and twenty-eight miles to the north, now they could go just two miles to the east and four miles to the north. This ruined the ranch for breeding beef, and Frank tried futilely to sell the depreciated property.
Striking a familiar whining note, Frank told John, “I can’t understand why this vein of ill luck & misfortune holds to me in every piece of property I have.”28 At such moments, he dropped the bravad
o and showed almost abject gratitude to his brothers, now signing a written agreement to end his speculations. As he reassured John, “I take this opportunity of thanking you & Will for your great kindness to me, & agree not to enter any new business of any kind, without first conferring with you.”29 Instead of chiding him, John steadily advanced more money in 1884, retired his debts, provided income for his family, and rallied his bruised spirits, saying, “Keep a stiff upper lip, clean up as you go, and the skies will brighten by and bye.”30
That year, Frank rewarded John’s generosity by again testifying against Standard Oil in congressional testimony, charging it with accepting huge railroad rebates. With Frank, John tried to show a preacher’s patience, yet he was caught on the horns of a dilemma: If he showed generosity toward Frank, it deepened his brother’s dependence and bred anger; if he didn’t give him money, Frank threw a tantrum. His brother’s two-faced behavior rankled, causing John to exclaim in later life: “My poor brother! He has had his day. I pulled him up four times out of bankruptcy.”31
Oppressed by debts from oil speculation and ranching, Frank could no longer contribute capital to Pioneer Oil Works, and the firm shut down. His partner, J. W. Fawcett, pleaded with John D. to buy the firm, but Standard already had excess Cleveland refining capacity. After a brief fling as a stockbroker, in 1886 Frank was appointed a second vice president of Standard Oil of Ohio, a post created for him by his brother. For all his sermonizing about John, Frank gladly took advantage of nepotism and, once on the trust’s payroll, had no scruples about enforcing policies he had recently excoriated. When competition loomed up in Michigan, he reveled in stamping it out and proudly wired John that “our idea . . . to wipe out all M[ichigan] companies completed—doing the business in the name of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio.”32 He bullied Cleveland refiners who requested higher refining allotments from Standard Oil—much as he had tried to do for Pioneer Oil Works. And he wasn’t above milking his position for personal gain. After visiting the new oil boomtown of Lima in 1886, he wrote to John, “Lima, Ohio, is a very pretty town of 12,000 inhabitants and it seems very natural that the oil interest there and the building of a refinery would create quite a boom in real-estate.”33 He had the effrontery to ask John for money for his real-estate speculation in the city—which would only drive up the price of land Standard Oil was trying to buy.