Titan
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Rockefeller proved fatally susceptible to another fad: golf. In 1899, he was staying at a hotel in Lakewood, New Jersey, and pitching horseshoes with a friend, Elias Johnson, who praised his easy style and nearly unbeatable game. Johnson tried to persuade Rockefeller that these skills would serve him well in golf. “He would look me through with those calm, gray-blue eyes but say nothing,” said Johnson.7 Finally, he convinced Rockefeller to try a few swings on a grassy, secluded spot near their hotel. After a few tips, Johnson later recalled in an interview, Rockefeller drove three balls more than one hundred yards apiece.
“Is that all there is of it?” Rockefeller asked. “Yes, that’s all there is of it, but not one in one hundred would do the same thing you’ve done just now. They want to do too much.” His competitive urges surfacing, Rockefeller said, “Do not some players send the ball farther than that?” “Yes, but long shots come only after much practice.” 8
A photo of John D. Rockefeller taken in 1904, after alopecia had drastically altered his appearance. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Rockefeller decided to play a little prank on his wife. He had a golf pro, Joe Mitchell, come to the hotel and give him lessons on the sly. Every time the caddies saw Cettie approaching, Rockefeller scampered for cover in the bushes. Several weeks later, he said to her offhandedly that golf seemed like a very nice sport and that he might take a shot at it. He then stepped up to a tee and smacked the ball 160 yards straight down the fairway. After marveling for a moment, Cettie shook her head and said, “John, I might have known it. You do things better and more easily than anyone else.” 9
On April 2, 1899, right before his sixtieth birthday, Rockefeller played his first complete game of golf, finishing nine holes in sixty-four strokes. After this, he took up the sport with a vengeance. Not always a powerful player, he was nonetheless eerily accurate, his swing so exacting that time seemed suspended. “It was the slowest back-swing I ever saw,” said one partner. “It seemed to last for minutes.”10 Once again, Rockefeller dissected his game like a manufacturing method. Noticing that he twisted his right foot at the end of his stroke, he had his caddy nail his foot into the ground with a wire croquet wicket—a hazardous trick that he abandoned once the fault was corrected. Since he lifted his head as he shot, he hired a boy to say “Keep your head down” whenever he teed off. Rockefeller was frustrated at one point when he kept slicing his woods. To identify the source of the problem, he commissioned a Cleveland photographer to do snapshots of his swing, a time-and-motion study that enabled him to root out the troublesome flaw. Later, he had movies made of his game, which he studied intently. As part of this studious approach, he recorded all his golf scores in thick little books, with names, dates, and places included.
Rockefeller’s passion for golf was linked to his medical problems of the 1890s, which turned him into a fitness buff. “Played in moderation golf is not only a fascinating game but a valuable aid to health,” he advised friends.11 His physician and frequent golf partner Dr. Hamilton Biggar credited golf with rejuvenating Rockefeller after his near breakdown. “Since he has taken it up with such gusto there has been a marked change in his appearance,” he told a reporter. “His skin, which was formerly pallid and wrinkled, is now firm and ruddy and healthy.” 12 In later years, Rockefeller gave up walking and bicycled from hole to hole to conserve energy for the game. As an old man, he sat upright on the bike and had it pushed along by his caddy to economize further on his strength. Nothing could keep him from his morning game. If it rained or the sun was too strong, a caddy shielded him with a big black umbrella throughout. His retinue came equipped with rubbers for muddy weather, sweaters for chilly weather, and towels to dry the clubs in a drizzle.
Golf made Rockefeller a more gregarious person, bringing out a bonhomie that had been stifled during the Standard Oil years. For a man who shrank from intimate discussion, golf provided an ideal way to socialize in a highly structured, risk-free environment from ten-fifteen to twelve each morning. As soon as he arrived, he would clown around, setting a tone of genial banter, and people responded in kind. He hummed hymns or popular songs, told humorous anecdotes, or even read short poems of his own composition. One of his favorite gags involved an eminent minister who liked to cheat at golf; an adroit mimic, Rockefeller aped the divine giving the ball a secret little kick behind a tree stump. Golf brought out a native drollery that he had never allowed to flower before. “We should not rejoice in the downfall of others,” he wrote his daughter Bessie, “but I slaughtered four men at golf on Saturday last. . . . This was very wrong, and of course I will never do it again.”13
Rockefeller established various taboos on the course, including that no business or charitable bequests should ever be discussed. People who flouted these rules were never invited back, and Rockefeller was extremely uncompromising on the subject. He wanted to keep things on a superficial, slightly unreal level and ward off any serious discussion. In this way, he could be with people yet surrounded by his own ring of silence, an isolated figure amid the crowd, setting the terms of social intercourse.
Despite his unmatched place in America’s urban and industrial growth, Rockefeller remained a country boy at heart and now receded further from the city. Perhaps as a legacy of his upstate boyhood, he was drawn to hilltop houses with spacious water views. Seeking an escape from Manhattan, he was especially attracted to the Hudson River, on which William had built his thousand-acre manor. John D. was moved by the river’s beauty and majestic shoreline, flanked by rolling farmland and picturesque villages. When land prices plunged during the 1893 panic, he bought four hundred acres in the Pocantico Hills of North Tarrytown, just south of Rockwood Hall. Though he considered establishing a weekend house or summer hideaway, he had no exact plan. “As I stated to you before coming,” he wrote to Cettie in early September 1893, “I have no scheme whatever in reference to this new property on the Hudson, further than to own it and let the future determine how [we] wish to use it.” 14
Rockefeller was drawn to the spot by natural beauty, not elegant neighbors. “He chose the site of his house on Pocantico Hills for its glorious view of the Hudson and the Catskills, one of the most magnificent landscapes in America,” reported Gates, who accompanied him on the first trip.15 The property included a jagged ridge called Kykuit Hill—pronounced kye-cut and derived from the Dutch word for lookout—which enjoyed splendid views of the river and distant Palisades. As at Forest Hill, Rockefeller simply took the furnished house that came with the property, a modest frame structure with wide verandas known as the Parsons-Wentworth House. As was his wont, he kept remodeling the house over the years, enlarging a room here, making one more comfortable there. It was his own Walden, a place where “fine views invest the soul and where we can live simply and quietly.”16
By 1900, Rockefeller had acquired 1,600 acres and eventually the Pocantico Hills estate expanded to 3,000 acres, threaded by dozens of miles of winding roads and bridle paths. Rockefeller could tolerate extravagance as long as the style was understated and did not trumpet his wealth too loudly. He avoided a gaudy residence and had no desire to impress other people. If anything, he craved seclusion. At one point, Rockefeller decided that he had to purchase a small corner property owned by Thomas Birdsall. He offered an excellent purchase price and said he would buy a nearby strip of land to which Birdsall could move his house. When Birdsall refused, Rockefeller ordered his superintendent to surround the offending property with the largest cedar trees he could find, casting the house into perpetual gloom. Birdsall caved in.
Almost as soon as he caught the golf fever in 1899, Rockefeller laid out four holes at Pocantico. “Mother and Father crazy over golf,” Junior told a college chum in 1900. “Father plays from four to six hours a day, and Mother several hours.”17 William Tucker, a golf pro from nearby Ardsley, coached Rockefeller regularly. By 1901, the titan hired a golf architect, William Dunn, to plot a twelve-hole course, and he also had a nine-hole course designed for Fores
t Hill. Gamely trying to please his father, Junior took lessons for a year, but he was not cut out for competitive games and favored the more solitary pleasure of horseback riding.
At some point, Rockefeller decided that he had to play golf daily at Pocantico. In early December 1904, after four inches of snow had fallen on Westchester County, Elias Johnson was taken aback to receive a call from Rockefeller, inviting him up for a foursome. When Johnson objected that they could not possibly play in the snow, Rockefeller said, “Just come up and see.” Even as they spoke, a team of workmen with horses and snowplows were assiduously clearing snow from five fairways and putting greens; the next morning, Johnson found a shimmering green course, carved from a wintry landscape. “We never had a finer game,” said Johnson.18 Rockefeller played in all kinds of weather. “Yesterday morning I played with the thermometer at 20 in the shade,” he boasted to a niece in 1904. “It was cold indeed on these Pocantico Hills, but a good thing for my health.”19 To keep his partners warm, he distributed paper vests, which became a trademark gift.
Golf was his greatest indulgence. A full-time crew at Pocantico was charged with keeping the greens clear, and they were often out in the early morning, wiping dew from the grass with special mowers, rollers, and bamboo poles. An account book from early 1906 shows that Rockefeller spent $525,211.47 on personal expenses during the previous year, devoting an astounding $27,537.80—or $450,000 in 1996 dollars—to golf.20
Another rich man might have turned to his estate for rest, but for Rockefeller much of the charm lay in the construction and heavy labor. At first, he had the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park and many other parks, do the landscaping at Pocantico. Then, he took this work in hand himself, relegating outside firms to advisory roles and building a surveying tower to help him lay out the gardens. Rockefeller had a flair for landscape design and delighted in transplanting trees as tall as ninety feet. By the 1920s, he had some of the world’s largest nurseries at Pocantico, where he planted as many as ten thousand young trees at a time, selling some of them at a profit.
Rockefeller belied Thorstein Veblen’s generalization that rich men possessed “an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labor,” for he always believed in the dignity of manual labor.21 Along with his son, he laid out sinuous trails and framed striking vistas, leading the work gangs himself. “How many miles of roads I have laid out in my time,” he reflected, “I can hardly compute, but I have often kept at it until I was exhausted. While surveying roads, I have run the lines until darkness made it impossible to see the little stakes and flags.” 22 He became so skillful that he built roads without an engineer. “I am thinking of moving that hillock,” he would say, quickly sizing up the volume of material involved. “Offhand, I would say there are just about 650,000 cubic feet of dirt here.”23
As at Standard Oil, Rockefeller was a paternalistic boss at home. Among his three hundred mostly black and Italian workmen he outlawed profanity and even tried to purchase and shut down Tarrytown’s lone tavern. Though he was exacting and did not pay high salaries, he never yelled at his employees and dealt with them in a patient, considerate manner, occasionally inviting them to sit by the fire for a chat.
Rockefeller’s absorption in his estates might well have stemmed from his fear of the general public and preference for staying in a protected home environment. As one early biographer noted, “Universally execrated, broken physically and nervously, he was forced almost three decades ago to retreat behind stone walls, barbed wire fences, grilled iron gates.” 24 He preferred to socialize on home turf, where guests had to conform to his rules and his timetable. He was also concerned about terrorist acts. In early 1892, George Rogers told Cettie that he had just gotten a letter signed “Justice or Extermination,” which warned that a packaged bomb was on the way.25 Such threats posed a dilemma for Rockefeller in fashioning his estates, for he wanted to keep his lands open to the public. He finally decided to protect himself by having a secure, private core of four to five hundred acres, including the family houses and golf course, ringed by fences and manned by watchmen. The public was allowed to wander through the rest of the estate, provided that they brought no cars. For decades, Pocantico was a hiker’s and rider’s paradise, making the Rockefeller domain at once exclusive and democratic.
In retirement, Rockefeller subordinated many things to the overriding goal of longevity. “I hope you will take good care of your health,” he once told Junior. “This is a religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.”26 His Baptist avoidance of tobacco or alcohol made him a natural advocate of abstemious living, and he was convinced that virtuous habits were medicinal. “I enjoy the best of health,” he said in later years. “What a compensation for the loss of the theaters, the clubs, the dinners, the dissipations which ruined the health of many of my acquaintances long, long years ago. . . . I was satisfied with cold water and skimmed milk, and enjoyed my sleep. What a pity that more men did not enjoy these simple things!”27
Rockefeller’s boon companion was Dr. Hamilton F. Biggar. They had met in the 1870s in the early days on Euclid Avenue when Rockefeller, playing blindman’s buff with the children, was dashing madly about the parlor and ran smack into a doorway; Dr. Biggar came to stitch the wound and remained in the family bosom. Born in Canada, Biggar moved to Cleveland after the Civil War and became a leading figure in the increasingly popular field of homeopathic medicine. He rose to professor of anatomy and clinical surgery in the local Homeopathic Hospital College and counted William McKinley and Mark Hanna among his patients. Founded by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) and prevalent in nineteenth-century America, homeopathy cured disease by using minute amounts of substances that in larger doses might cause the disease. At Biggar’s behest, Rockefeller served as a vice president and trustee of the Homeopathic Hospital College, providing money for land, building, and instruction. It was a striking paradox that the philanthropist who would create the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and did more than anyone else to advance scientific medicine in the twentieth century was emotionally wedded to traditional remedies. Rockefeller sometimes smoked mullein leaves in a clay pipe to heal respiratory problems and never lost a residual suspicion of medical doctors. “The doctor came to see me today,” he once reported to his son. “He wouldn’t give me the medicine I wanted, and I wouldn’t take the medicine he prescribed, but we had a lovely talk.”28
Portly, tall, and round-faced, given to derby hats and watch chains, Dr. Biggar shared Rockefeller’s love of yarns and dry wisecracks and they took pleasure in good-naturedly ribbing each other. Since Biggar dressed in a more dapper fashion than his rich friend, many people imagined that he was the titan when they traveled together. More than anybody, Dr. Biggar brought out Rockefeller’s amiability, as reflected in his description of Rockefeller: “He has a keen sense of humor, is fond of jokes, sharp in repartee, an entertaining conversationalist and a gracious listener.”29
Not everybody was enamored of Dr. Biggar. As Rockefeller’s official doctor, issuing medical bulletins to the press, he struck some as pompous and self-serving. Some physicians even thought him a charlatan with a good bedside manner. One such doubter was Harvard president Charles Eliot, who told Frederick Gates that most Harvard doctors considered Biggar inept. In 1901, according to Eliot, when Biggar had a physical breakdown, Rockefeller paid his expenses for a European trip to recuperate. While he was away, Rockefeller had a renewed attack of hydrocele, an accumulation of serous fluid, which Biggar had pronounced incurable. Rockefeller summoned a doctor from the Harvard Medical School “who not only promptly relieved him of present pain but in a month effected a permanent cure, which Mr. Rockefeller had been led to believe was not possible,” Eliot told Gates nine years later. 30 After that, Rockefeller consulted other doctors, especially an elderly German named Dr. Henry N. Moeller, but Biggar was often at his side and had a continuing influence on his views.
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sp; By the early 1900s, Dr. Biggar frequently prophesied in the press that Rockefeller would live to one hundred (which doubtless endeared him to his patron), and he became such a zealous spokesman for Rockefeller’s health principles that it became hard to tell where Biggar ended and Rockefeller began. In 1907, Biggar stated his foolproof rules for long life: “At fifty the American businessman should cease to worry, eschew liquor and tobacco and make play in ‘God’s out of doors’ his chief aim in life.” 31 As time passed, Biggar added an admonition to rise from the table a little bit hungry, while Rockefeller laid additional stress on nine hours of daily sleep, including a long siesta after lunch.
There are hints that Rockefeller had a more than ordinary dread of death. Years later, he was playing a golf foursome at Ormond Beach, Florida, when one partner, a Mr. Harvey, thought he had a severe attack of indigestion. Rockefeller took his arm and uttered consoling words before Harvey crumpled to the ground from a heart attack. Doctors were summoned while Harvey was carried inside, where he died thirty minutes later. Rockefeller, so compassionate at first, unceremoniously fled the scene. As one golfing partner recalled, “Mr. Rockefeller turned away and walked rapidly to his car and drove off. I always felt that he did not want to witness death.”32 Nowhere in his voluminous records does he ever even remotely discuss death.