by Ron Chernow
Rockefeller seemed to believe that he could keep death at bay if he adhered to his fixed rules. Extremely finicky about diet, rest, and exercise, he reduced everything to a routine and repeated the same daily schedule, forcing other people to fall in step with his timetable. In a letter to his son, Rockefeller credited his longevity to his willingness to reject social demands. “I attribute my good condition to my almost reckless independence in determining for myself what to do and the rigid adhering to regulations which give me the maximum of rest and quiet and leisure, and I am being richly paid for it every day.”33
Part of his single-minded program for reaching one hundred was to go through life in a steady, unhurried fashion. He paced himself, husbanded his energy, and took pride in his abnormally low pulse: “That indicates a capacity for enduring and retaining one’s balance.”34 In his early years, he had struggled to master his temper and clear his mind of petty annoyances; now, he had a medical rationale for purging his system of turbulent emotions, especially anger. “It produces in the blood a lot of toxins that poison the system of the angry person. That tires him out and renders him less efficient, to say nothing of causing him to grow old and wear out before his time.”35 Worry was also to be avoided. “I am certain that worry causes a greater strain upon the nerves than hard work.”36 This outlook further encouraged him to avoid spontaneous, potentially confrontational encounters with people.
Rockefeller was partial to massage and other forms of bodily manipulation. In the early 1900s, he became a passionate devotee of osteopathy, which tries to restore the body’s structural integrity by manipulating the skeleton and muscles, and he talked Cettie and Lute into going for treatments. In one rapturous outburst in 1905, he told his son that he had profited from osteopathy while at Forest Hill and was “more grateful than I can tell you for the good health which I have and which enables me to do two or three times as much work, Mrs. Tuttle [his telegrapher] says, as I used to do when she was here before. Osteopathy! Osteopathy! Osteopathy!”37 When exponents of more advanced medicine—spurred on, ironically, by Rockefeller philanthropy—tried to enact legislation to bar osteopaths, Rockefeller rushed to the osteopaths’ defense. “I believe in osteopathy,” he instructed his secretary, “and if any of our people at 26 Broadway can say or do anything to aid the osteopaths at this time of their struggle, I should appreciate it.”38 A visit to an osteopath occasioned one of Rockefeller’s most celebrated witticisms. As the osteopath cracked his vertebrae, Rockefeller said wryly, “Listen to that, doctor. They say I control all the oil in the country and I haven’t enough even to oil my own joints.”39
In the early 1900s, the press still circulated preposterous stories of how Rockefeller could digest only milk and crackers and had a standing offer of one million dollars to anyone who could fix his stomach. The most ghoulish myth claimed that he needed mother’s milk to survive and that his caddy smuggled it to him daily in a thermos on the golf course. Thousands of letters flooded into 26 Broadway, offering remedies for stomach troubles. Rockefeller was perplexed by these weird rumors. When approaching eighty, he said wearily, “There are multitudes of people in the country today who, from these false reports, believe that I am in such a sad condition that I would give all I possess on earth to be a well man. And I know of no man in better health than I am—and so it goes.” 40 Biggar had, in fact, prescribed bread and milk for Rockefeller’s digestive troubles in the 1890s, and he continued to drink milk and cream regularly in the early 1900s, believing that “fresh milk is an excellent food for the nerves.”41 Yet as his health returned in the late 1890s, he resumed a varied menu, which he consumed slowly and in tiny portions. He had a plain but healthy diet: green peas and string beans from his garden, rice, barley water, lettuce, fish, brown bread, and baked potatoes twice a day.
In the early 1900s, portly tycoons such as Morgan incarnated the robust prosperity of the era, while Rockefeller weighed in at a lean 165 pounds. Still the ascetic Protestant, he decried overeating, warning that it caused more sickness than did any other cause. He never ate hot food, waited for dishes to cool, and encouraged guests to start without him. Food was fuel for Rockefeller, not a source of sensual pleasure. “He could not understand why anyone would eat a piece of candy, if that piece of candy were not good for him, just because that person liked candy,” Junior explained.42 Once, in an uncharacteristic moment, he had a craving for ice cream and humbly asked Dr. Moeller for a waiver from his prohibition against eating it. “If I had a license from you to eat a very little ice cream occasionally it would be a special dispensation which I would much appreciate, but, you are the Doctor,” he said meekly.43
Rockefeller’s most distinctive piece of medical advice—and the eternal bane of his dinner guests—was that people should chew each bite ten times before swallowing. So conscientiously did he adhere to this practice that he even advised people to chew liquids, which he would swirl around in his mouth. He would still be eating a half hour after other guests had finished. To promote digestion, he also thought it important to linger at the table for an hour or so after dinner. To pass the time, he played a parlor game with guests called Numerica, a form of competitive solitaire. Since, as a Baptist, he could not play cards, he had square counters made to replace the poker decks that were ordinarily used. Any number of guests could play, and Rockefeller distributed a dime to the winner, nickels to the losers. The game required a certain agility with figures, and Rockefeller grew so proficient from incessant practice that he tended to award himself the dime.
For Americans of a later day, John D. Rockefeller was etched in their minds as a bald, wizened man, a desiccated fossil. Yet before his health troubles of the early 1890s, the few reporters who penetrated his inner sanctum were struck by his youthful demeanor. His correspondence does show that his problem with hair loss began earlier than previously imagined; in 1886, at age forty-seven, he was already ordering bottles of hair restorative. In 1893, Rockefeller’s hair loss, or alopecia, suddenly worsened as he struggled with digestive problems and fretted over the University of Chicago finances.
Generalized alopecia, or total loss of body hair, has been attributed to many causes, ranging from genetic factors to severe stress, but remarkably little is known for certain. For Rockefeller, the onset of the disease coincided with his breakdown of the early 1890s. In 1901, the symptoms worsened markedly, with Cettie recording in a memo book that in March of that year “John’s moustache began to fall out, and all the hair on his body had followed by August.”44
The change in his appearance was startling: He suddenly looked old, puffy, stooped—all but unrecognizable. He seemed to age a generation. Without hair, his facial imperfections grew more pronounced: The skin appeared parchment dry, his lips too thin, his head large and bumpy. Soon after losing his hair, Rockefeller went to a dinner thrown by J. P. Morgan (one of the few public dinners he ever attended) and sat down next to a mystified Charles Schwab, the new president of U.S. Steel. “I see you don’t know me, Charley,” said Rockefeller. “I am Mr. Rockefeller.”45
Coming on the eve of the muckraking era, Rockefeller’s alopecia had a devastating effect on his image: It made him look like a hairless ogre, stripped of all youth, warmth, and attractiveness, and this played powerfully on people’s imaginations. For a time, he wore a black skullcap, giving him the impressively gaunt physiognomy of a Renaissance prelate. One French writer wrote that “under his silk skull-cap he seems like an old monk of the inquisition such as one sees in the Spanish picture galleries.” 46
The alopecia dealt a blow to Rockefeller’s morale—the psychological effect is crushing for most people—and he dabbled restlessly in remedies. Biggar started him on a hair-restoration regimen in which he took phosphorus six days a week and sulfur on the seventh. When such remedies failed, Rockefeller decided to buy a wig. Self-conscious at first and reluctant to wear it, he tested it one Sunday at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. Before the service, he stood in the pastor’s office, nervously adjusti
ng it and telling a listener what an ordeal it would be to wear it in the church. When the wig met with a good reception, he was almost boyishly elated. Soon, he grew to love this wig, telling daughter Edith, “I sleep in it and play golf, and I am surprised that I went so long without it, and think I made a great mistake in doing so.”47 He became so fond of wigs that he started to wear rotating wigs of different lengths to give the impression of his hair growing then being cut. He even had wigs styled for different occasions: golf, church, short walks, and so on. For all his wealth, however, Rockefeller could never find the ideal wig. Starting out with a fashionable wig maker on the rue Castiglione in Paris, he grew disillusioned when springs in the framework pushed up through the hair. He then switched to a Cleveland wig maker whose product had another maddening defect: The foundation fabric would shrink, making the wig suddenly slide across his bald pate. What God had taken away, it seems, could never be perfectly restored.
Before Rockefeller’s hair fell out, people noted the contrast between him and his often sickly wife. Then, overnight, the alopecia seemed to equalize their ages. John and Cettie had enjoyed a happy marriage, if one constrained by formality. Whether playing with the children or golfing with cronies, John was capable of a certain hilarity—he could kick up his heels and have fun. Cettie— gentle, sweet, charming—remained immured in her cloistered world of religion and clung to her belief in John as a superman. One observer described Cettie as “a dignified, simple-minded, elderly lady, pleasant faced, soft spoken, entirely without ostentation” for whom John “was still her hero after all the years.”48 As reformers branded her hero a corporate malefactor, she found a necessary sanctuary in Christianity, her mind soaring to serene religious heights far above the din of political strife.
It is hard to date with precision Cettie’s transformation from an alert, capable woman into a professional invalid. She had never had a strong constitution: As early as the 1880s, Junior had taken care of many household tasks, such as buying carpets and overseeing repairs, because his mother lacked the strength. By the early 1890s, she complained of “a general state of prostration.”49 John had always confided in her about business and in 1893 was still sending her detailed reports about Mesabi ore. Then, abruptly, in the mid-1890s, his letters to her became empty and platitudinous, stuffed with bland descriptions of weather, garden walks, or golf, and they remained so for twenty years. It is hard to avoid the impression that he was deliberately tiptoeing around unpleasant subjects out of respect for her delicate medical state.
Cettie suffered from so many strange symptoms and vague ailments as to defy precise medical diagnosis. She complained in the 1890s of asthma and colitis, as well as sporadic problems with her eyes and spine. For her intestinal troubles, doctors ordered her to cut out fruits and vegetables in favor of a diet rich in milk, cream, butter, and eggs. At first, despite her problems, she was not bedridden. She and John took long drives before lunch, and around 1900 she often sneaked in several holes of afternoon golf. Then, in April 1904, at the height of the publication of Ida Tarbell’s series in McClure’s Magazine, she had an attack, perhaps a mild stroke, that left her nearly paralyzed. As she told her diary, “Dr. Allen says it will take two years of the most quiet living to be myself again. This I accept and shall gain daily feeling thankful that it is no worse.”50 John took her to Forest Hill, where she sunned on the porch and listened to him read aloud daily portions from With God in the World by Bishop Brent. She never entirely recuperated.
The image of Cettie projected by her family was invariably that of the stoic mother. “Everything which came to her, she accepted,” her daughter Edith once wrote, “and she bore her frailty of body with uncomplaining patience.”51 Outsiders, however, saw less of this patient nobility. Where she had always been considerate with servants, she now became finicky and demanding. “Her hot milk must be brought to her at 11 o’clock each morning,” one of Rockefeller’s secretaries, H. V. Sims, recalled. “The little napkin which went with it must be inserted by the maid between the 4th finger and the little finger—or all was wrong.”52 She would ask nurses to extract shawls from the middle of a tall stack without disturbing the others. Everybody crept on eggshells around her.
John learned to coax and humor her to get his way. The nurses often wilted in the stifling heat that Cettie demanded and were afraid to open the window. John would waltz in and say, “Mother, don’t you think you should have the window open just so much?” He would spread his fingers slightly apart. When she replied, “Very well, John, if you think so,” he signaled the nurses, when she wasn’t looking, to open it far more. 53 John treated his wife tenderly, but his behavior now became largely ceremonious. If she stayed up too late with guests, he would slip his hand through her arm and announce, “This is good night, as it is Mother’s bedtime.”54
In a 1905 portrait of her by Arthur Ferraris, which shows her in a lovely black dress with her hair swept up and holding a prayer book, she seems despondent but still sensitive and wise. She clung ever more assertively to religion and wrote to her children in the elevated language of sermons, telling Junior as he was about to embark on a trip that she was “blessed of God above so many mothers, in my children, my precious jewels—loaned me for a season to be handed back when the call comes.”55 On his twenty-first birthday, she congratulated her son thus: “You can celebrate your birthday in no better way, whether at home or not, than by such earnest work as I know you are giving, for God and the saving of the souls of your fellow students.”56 It never seemed to dawn on her to encourage her children to have a good time.
Cettie’s invalidism must have tormented Rockefeller. Since his boyhood, he had felt a particular affinity for women and taken special delight in their company. He would not have contemplated extramarital affairs, as other moguls might have done. He stayed loyal to Cettie and his Baptist upbringing, and he always had the specter of Big Bill before his eyes to remind him of the extreme perils of philandering. He had long lived with the knowledge of man’s sinful nature. As long as Cettie was alive, so far as we can tell, he kept his amorous impulses in check and remained a model paterfamilias.
The Rockefellers found it difficult to confront the infirmities of both the mind and flesh. A whole world of forbidden, subversive feelings simply did not exist for them. If you averted your eyes from unpleasant things, they seemed to believe, they would lose their sting. For this reason, the story of the eldest Rockefeller daughter, Bessie, has long been an impenetrable mystery.
After Charles Strong had married Bessie in 1889, he taught briefly at Clark University and then became an associate professor of philosophy at the new University of Chicago in 1892. While Charles had ambivalent feelings toward his father-in-law, he never hesitated to exploit his connections and largesse. In 1895, the Strongs had to abandon Chicago, owing to Bessie’s poor health. As Charles informed his Harvard mentor, William James, his wife’s health was “still so delicate that it seems unwise to expose her to the inclemencies of the Chicago climate, and the result is that I find myself permanently settled in New York.”57 So that Charles could write his treatises and live with Bessie in New York, Rockefeller gave him a thousand-dollar subsidy for a year’s work. When Bessie gave birth to a daughter, Margaret, at Pocantico in 1897, Rockefeller declared a holiday for workmen on his estate.
Since Charles had become a freethinker, Rockefeller might have feared for the immortal soul of his granddaughter. “Charles would tell Margaret, ‘There is no God,’ ” Margaret’s daughter would recall. “Both mother and father concurred and agreed not to contaminate her with uncertain belief.”58 Perhaps aware of this indoctrination, Rockefeller was eager to keep the Strongs in New York. He had Junior approach Seth Low, the president of Columbia College, about endowing a professorship in psychology for Charles, who increasingly studied both psychology and philosophy in his work. Junior suggested that it would be more gracious to endow the chair and then let the college voluntarily appoint him, rather than to demean Charles by creatin
g a chair expressly for him. Senior followed this advice and, after making sure that Columbia would give him the chair, gave the school a $100,000 endowment, effectively buying his son-in-law’s job at considerable expense.
For a time in the early 1900s, Rockefeller saw a lot of Charles and Bessie, thanks in part to his newfound passion for golf. Desperate for a place where he could extend Pocantico’s limited golf season, he found it in the tony resort of Lakewood, New Jersey, where George Gould and other rich residents played polo, attended tea parties, rode to hounds, and held cotillions. Rockefeller began buying property there in May 1901, and a year later a dreamlike opportunity appeared. The Ocean County Hunt and Country Club decided to merge with another club and abandon its clubhouse, which was surrounded by a golf course set amid seventy-five acres of spruce, fir, pine, and hemlock. Only eight or nine miles from the sea, this flat, sandy country had “delicious, dry air,” Rockefeller told a friend, and would permit him to golf nearly ten months a year.59 The big, rambling, three-story wooden clubhouse—which Rockefeller always called Golf House—had striped awnings and a glass-sheltered porch that gave a view of sheep browsing on the lawn. This hideaway could be reached only by a twisting road of crushed bluestone that ran through dense woods—perfect for security purposes. Expanding the house and adding acreage, Rockefeller transplanted thousands of trees from Pocantico to this new estate. Rockefeller loved his new, relaxed place. “I believe I have recovered my health,” he wrote to a friend from Lakewood in 1903. “I feel better now than I have felt in years. . . . I believe the improvement in my condition is due to my newly acquired habit of playing golf.” 60