by Ron Chernow
While Tarbell’s articles were running, Rockefeller, his wife, his son, and two of his three daughters were afflicted by serious medical problems or nervous strain. In 1903, Rockefeller had such severe bronchial troubles that he took a rest cure near San Diego. That spring, Bessie suffered the stroke or heart ailment that left her sadly demented, and the following April Charles Strong took his wife off to Cannes, where she and Junior may have consulted the same nervous-strain specialists. In April 1904, Cettie had the attack that left her semiparalyzed and from which she took two years to recover. Finally, plunged into depression after the birth of her daughter Mathilde in April 1905, Edith fled to Europe. Understandably, the Rockefellers did not wish to broadcast their misfortunes to the world. The price that the series exacted on them, like so much else, was scrupulously hidden from both the public and posterity.
The most stinging personal blow to Rockefeller was not Tarbell’s exposé of his chicanery but her defamatory portrait of his father, published in the two-part character study. Rockefeller had never dropped the pretense that his father, like his mother, was a person of sterling virtue. Even in later years, he told one of his grandsons, “I had a rich inheritance in foundation building from both my father and mother, and I reverence them, and often long to see them even though it is so many years since they passed away.”122 Now readers across the country were introduced to the protean Doc Rockefeller, snake-oil salesman, ne’er-do-well, bigamist, and absentee father. Most mortifying of all to Rockefeller, Tarbell disinterred his oldest and deepest shame: Big Bill’s rape indictment in Moravia in the late 1840s.
By this point, Rockefeller seldom had dealings with his infirm, elderly father, who was increasingly crotchety, and routed urgent queries to him via brother Frank—to whom he was not speaking either. Tarbell had stumbled upon Doc Rockefeller’s existence in serendipitous fashion. One day in April 1903, J. M. Siddall was on the phone with Rockefeller’s brother-in-law, the genial William Rudd, when Rudd let slip that William Avery Rockefeller was still alive. Perhaps Rudd did not at first perceive the magnitude of this admission. “Oh yes, the old gentleman is living. He travels about from place to place in the west. The last I knew of him was in Dakota. We don’t know where he is now.”123
Sitting there agape, Siddall could scarcely believe his ears: Scoops did not come any bigger than this. The second he got off the phone, he pounded out a typewritten report to Tarbell.
I have always supposed that Mr. Rockefeller’s father died years and years ago, and I am startled almost beyond expression to learn, as I have through the telephone within the last five minutes, that the old man is living. . . . I never in my life was more surprised. . . . I am under the impression that I have been told over and over that the old man died some years ago, and I am sure from W. C. Rudd’s attitude toward me today that there is something secret and mysterious about the thing.124
In his hands Siddall now had a thread that would lead him and then other reporters into a vast investigative maze. Through his brother, Siddall sounded out Frank Rockefeller’s secretary, who offered a helpful hint: Doc Rockefeller lived in either North or South Dakota. “He doesn’t know where and says frankly—though confidentially—that he doesn’t dare ask Frank or any members of the family,” Siddall informed Tarbell.125 This only added to the mystery: Why had Rockefeller so thoroughly expunged his father from his life? Siddall next prodded a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to ask Dr. Biggar, very casually, whether on a recent trip west with Rockefeller they had detoured to visit Doc Rockefeller. At first Biggar walked straight into the trap. “No, we didn’t go through Dakota,” he began to blurt out, then, seeing his error, clammed up.126 Siddall and Tarbell scored their biggest coup with Rockefeller’s old friend Hiram Brown, whom Tarbell had met while researching her Lincoln book. During a meandering chat at Forest Hill, Brown sounded out Rockefeller about his father, which produced the following exchange, as recorded in Tarbell’s research files:
“Well, sir, the old gentleman is on his last legs I guess. He is absolutely senile. He is living on a farm near Cedar Valley, Cedar County, Iowa. He has lost all his powers. He is ninety-three years old, you know. They say the old gentleman is so deaf that he cannot hear a word. His nieces are taking good care of him. He is living on the farm because he owns it . . . because it is the place that is most pleasing to him.”
“Well, John, what a comical, funny old fellow he is,” Brown said.
“Yes,” John replied. “They say the old gentleman lies on the bed and swears all day. I haven’t seen him since he was here three years ago.”127 This last sentence alluded to the party that John had thrown at Forest Hill for Bill and his erstwhile cronies.
When Ida Tarbell interviewed Frank Rockefeller in 1904, he gave his own self-serving account of John and Bill’s final break. At age ninety, Bill had decided to bequeath his $87,000 in property equally among his four living children. According to Frank, John had wanted his one-quarter share plus repayment of an outstanding $35,000 loan; Bill, irate, believed that the gift should cancel out the loan. As Tarbell paraphrased Frank’s narration in a memo, “The old man was so furious that now he will not come home. He says he will not live in the same state with his son.” 128 As Tarbell peeled away bits and pieces of Bill’s clandestine life, she did not know how abominably Bill and Frank had behaved over the years, how much they had borrowed from John, nor how erroneous their tirades against him were. Tarbell was never able to track down Doc Rockefeller or figure out the riddle of his double life, but her revelation that he was still alive somewhere created a national sensation.
Among the intrigued was Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, who had inveighed against Standard Oil as the most pitiless trust. Pulitzer served his readers an incongruous mix of scabrous stories and lofty crusades against corporate abuse. “Money is the great power of today,” he declared. “Men sell their souls for it. Women sell their bodies for it.”129 He wished to purge capitalism of its vulgar excesses so that a more enlightened capitalism might flourish, and he evinced a special animus toward Rockefeller, whom he christened “the father of trusts, the king of monopolists, the czar of the oil business,” a man who “relentlessly crushes all competitors.”130 Hence the story of Doc Rockefeller— uniting, as it did, the spice of family scandal with Standard Oil’s notoriety—was a godsend. Stirring the pot, Pulitzer offered eight thousand dollars to anyone who could provide information about Rockefeller’s father, a reward that set off a nationwide manhunt.
It is a credit to Bill’s matchless duplicity that teams of reporters were immediately stymied in this search. There was also a fair bit of luck involved. When McClure’s printed a picture of Rockefeller’s father to accompany the character sketch, many Freeport, Illinois, residents were shocked to see Dr. William Levingston staring out at them. Many traits that Tarbell attributed to Doc Rockefeller sounded oddly reminiscent of their queer local resident. The editor of the Freeport Daily Bulletin contacted McClure’s to inform them that they might have mistakenly printed a picture of Dr. William Levingston. Indignant at this insinuation—and totally oblivious of the revelation implicit in the Freeport editor’s query—McClure’s wrote back and assured the editor that the photo of Rockefeller’s father was indeed authentic. Amazingly enough, the national press corps never picked up on all the rumors buzzing around Freeport, Illinois.
An impatient Pulitzer dispatched one of his star reporters, J. W. Slaght, to Cleveland, hoping for a quick solution, but two weeks later Slaght slogged back to New York, weary and dispirited. In a despairing memo to Pulitzer, he stressed the inordinate effort required to track down Rockefeller’s father and hinted that it would be thankless drudgery. He hoped that the matter would end there. “In just about time enough for the report to have reached Mr. Pulitzer I was ordered to take up the search and stay on it until I found Mr. Rockefeller, regardless of time or expense,” Slaght revealed to William O. Inglis a decade later. “It seems that the story fascinated Mr. Pulitzer—the disa
ppearance of the father of the richest man in the world, a thrilling mystery that would interest people everywhere.” 131
So thoroughly had Doc Rockefeller erased his tracks that Slaght had only one tenuous clue. During the reunion a few years earlier at Forest Hill, Big Bill had slyly told his buddies that he resided somewhere out West and shot “shirt-tail swans” in a nearby lake. Slaght consulted a naturalist who said that a wild goose nicknamed the “shirt-tail swan” abounded in parts of Alaska. Setting forth with this sketchy information and a photo of Doc Rockefeller, the miserable Slaght trekked through Alaska, tramping from lake to lake. Once he had exhausted this terrain, he heard that Bill had been sighted in Indiana and was off on another wild-goose chase. For a time, he peddled razors door-to-door, trying to pry information loose from suspicious German farmers. “I’ll bet I shaved myself ten or fifteen times a day, till my face was sore, selling the blamed razors.” 132 Even clean shaven, Slaght again came up empty-handed.
Desperate, he turned to Frank Rockefeller, the only person in direct communication with the phantom. Bribing Frank’s secretary with candy and theater tickets, Slaght gained access to Frank, who was no less protective of his father than John was. He was quite upset by Slaght’s quest and offered a straightforward deal: If Slaght called off the search, Frank would repay him with sensational findings about his brother. To enhance the deal’s allure, Frank exhumed from his drawer an impressive manuscript, thick as a telephone directory.
After a flurry of calls to New York, the World editors agreed to terminate their search for Doc Rockefeller for sixty days if they could, in return, publish Frank’s philippic against John. Having never dealt with Frank, Slaght naively trusted him. But when the time expired, Frank would not return his calls, and Slaght had no choice but to accost him on a Cleveland street and bluntly remind him that the World had fulfilled its end of the bargain; in exchange, he demanded the manuscript. “No, sir,” Frank snapped, “not one word of it.”133 Aghast, Slaght said the World would publish the inflammatory remarks Frank had made about John in his office. “If you publish that,” retorted Frank, “I’ll kill you.”134 However much he detested John, Frank must have feared that any published comments would dry up the loans from his brothers.
In August 1907, still baffled in its search for Doc Rockefeller, the World ran the interview with Frank recorded a year and a half earlier. “My father is alive and well,” a defiant Frank was quoted as saying. “He is dependent upon no man. He would scorn the proffer of financial aid from John D. and would not take it from me. He has means of his own, ample for all his needs.” Then he openly taunted his brother for his estrangement. “Go ask John D. where our father is: tell him that I sent you and that I dare him to answer.”135 By this point, the Pulitzer reporters labored under insane pressure to come up with fresh leads. When William Randolph Hearst also threw reporters into the search, Pulitzer (who referred to Rockefeller as “Grasping” in internal coded messages) could not bear the thought of being beaten and offered a handsome cash bonus to any reporter who broke the story. To bolster the burned-out Slaght, he assigned another reporter, A. B. Macdonald of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to the chase.
Before turning to the finale of this cross-country quest, let us fill in a few blanks about Bill’s life during these past years. Too old to travel, Bill had renounced his itinerant life and mostly remained in Freeport, Illinois. As garrulous as ever, he spent his days dabbling with his guns, telling hunting stories to whoever would listen, or boasting of his big ranch and fine horses in North Dakota. When he visited Frank’s ranch, he sat on the front porch and fired at targets Frank set up for his amusement. One night in 1904, the portly, ailing Bill, then ninety-four, lowered himself into a chair but missed it. As he tried to grab something to break his fall, he broke his arm near the shoulder, an accident so severe that his survival seemed doubtful, and it became necessary to contact his next of kin. Until this time, Margaret Allen Levingston had not known that her husband was a bigamist with five children and that one of them was among the world’s richest men. A proper lady, active in the First Presbyterian Church and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she must have reeled from this revelation.
There is reason to suspect that John D. met Margaret Levingston at this time. The nurse who treated Bill, Mrs. J. B. Gingrich, told of the arrival of a mysterious visitor from the East who came by private railroad car, slipped into the house discreetly by a side door, and only entered Bill’s room after she and the doctor had left. She remembered the sound of this visitor pacing up and down an adjoining room as Bill lay in pain. One suspects that John D. was the spectral figure, since William would not have asked for these special security precautions. If it was John D., it would have been the first time he ever set eyes on the wife whose legitimacy he had never acknowledged.
As he recuperated, Bill was often delirious, though still talkative. “Even as sick as he was he was jovial in his rational moments and in his delirium,” said Mrs. Gingrich. “He talked of his vast business interests in the East. He sang often a ditty about a frog in a well, and he sang often a lullaby which he said his mother used to sing to him when he was a baby nearly 100 years before.”136 As if shedding all the accumulated artifice of his double life, Bill’s mind frequently reverted to his early days as Doc Rockefeller in upstate New York. In the feverish mental state of his final days in early 1906, he repeatedly babbled the names of the five children from his first marriage—John, William, Frank, Lucy, and Mary Ann. And he would stare at the loyal Margaret and suddenly cry out, “You are not my wife. Where is Eliza?”137
It was to be a season full of bitter surprises for Margaret, who had been gulled by Bill’s braggadocio into thinking they were supremely wealthy. During his illness, Bill had trouble paying his medical bills and even contemplated pawning the big, gaudy diamond he had always stuck in his shirtfront. The night that Bill died, Margaret was unsure of the Rockefellers’ reaction and did not know exactly what to do. She apparently stored the body for several months at the City Cemetery, awaiting a request to have it shipped back to Cleveland. When word never came from the family, she transferred the body to the Oak Knoll section of the Oakland Cemetery. Though Bill is always said to have died on May 11, 1906, references to his estate suddenly appear in John’s papers in January 1906, suggesting that the burial may have taken place on that later date, not the death itself. Only Frank and Pierson Briggs attended the belated funeral in which Bill was entombed in a plain, unvarnished box in an unmarked grave. That Margaret was worried about her future financial state is confirmed by the fact that she paid the gravediggers three dollars, but could not afford the extra dollar for a brick vault—standard procedure at the time. It would be another five years, after Margaret’s own death, before a granite memorial bearing the Levingston name in raised lettering was finally erected on the site. Few—if any—Rockefeller descendants seem to know that William Avery Rockefeller is buried there under his assumed name.
The tangled skein of Bill’s life finally unraveled in early 1908, two years after his death, when a druggist in Madison, Wisconsin, told A. B. Macdonald that for years a friend and fellow druggist in Freeport named George Swartz had sold medical concoctions to a Dr. William Levingston. Swartz had always wondered whether the name was a fabrication, a suspicion confirmed when he saw a picture of Dr. Levingston gazing at him from Tarbell’s series. Acting on this tip, Macdonald traveled to Freeport. When he flashed a photo of Bill Rockefeller to neighbors, everybody agreed that it was Dr. Levingston. Then he rang the doorbell of a private home on West Clark Street. A refined, elderly lady in her early seventies answered, her white hair covered by a lace cap. When the reporter disclosed his mission, Margaret Allen Levingston lifted her hands and started to sob. “I have been wondering when one of you would come,” she said, sniffling. “And I have been dreading it, for I knew the secret could not be kept forever, now that my husband is dead.” When Macdonald asked whether William Avery Rockefeller and Dr. Levingston were
the same person, she replied, “Go to the other side if you want the facts.” What other side? “To John D. Rockefeller. Let him tell if he will. It is not for me to talk. I lived happily with my husband for fifty years. He was kind and true. It is all I can say or will say. I must be a true woman to the end.” 138 She furnished pictures of both herself and her husband—in fact, over the mantel Macdonald saw a crayon version of the photo of Bill he held in his hand—then told her visitor in parting, “I wish it were possible for you to leave me alone with my dead.”139
To retire any lingering doubt, Macdonald went to the local library and found an obituary notice, dated May 11, 1906, for Dr. William Levingston, who had died at age ninety-six and was listed as the oldest man in Freeport. The death notice listed his birthday as November 13, 1810—the same date as Doc Rockefeller’s—settling the great mystery. Greatly relieved, Macdonald was at last liberated from Pulitzer’s obsession.
On February 2, 1908, the nightmare that had haunted John D. Rockefeller his whole life suddenly burst forth in bold print. On its front page, the World trumpeted the headline “Secret Double Life of Rockefeller’s Father Revealed by the World.” The story received the coverage ordinarily reserved for major elections or great natural disasters, with the single column on the front page followed by an entire page inside. Nothing in the text was quite so cogent as the proof provided by two adjoining, identical photos of William Avery Rockefeller and Dr. William Levingston. The article gave a sketchy picture of his double life, his fifty-one years as a bigamist, his footloose life as a mountebank in the Dakotas, and his burial in an unmarked grave. It was a story more bizarrely implausible than anything ever invented by the tabloid press. For Big Bill, who had always wanted to be somebody important, it was a queer sort of posthumous fulfillment.
Rockefeller’s archives do not reveal a single public or private reaction to the World article. His friends never dared to elicit his response, while his family pretended that the article did not exist. There were two noteworthy public reactions. First, Frank again decided to make mischief by publicly denying that his father had been a bigamist or even that he was dead. “Like others which have preceded it, the story is an unqualified lie. The whereabouts of my father concerns no one but his immediate family and it is precisely to protect himself from being hounded by cranks and others who would break in upon the peace and quiet of his retired life that he prefers to live in such seclusion as suits his convenience.”140