by Ron Chernow
If Rockefeller had hoped that Harold would rescue Edith from this life, he was soon disabused as his son-in-law was sucked into the vortex of the Zurich group with its quasi-religious intensity. Returning to Switzerland in September 1914, Harold grew so entranced by Jung that he decided to stay and resigned as treasurer of International Harvester, ceding control to brother Cyrus while remaining a board member. He knew that such an abrupt change required some explaining. “I am trying to learn to think, for I have always had a superabundance of ‘feelings’—With Edith it’s just exactly the other way,” he reported to Rockefeller.30 Having grown up with both a mentally ill brother and sister, Harold was quick to brood about any deviant behavior in his children, especially the impetuous, twelve-year-old Muriel, who had started analysis with Jung that summer. The following year, Edith announced to her son, “Fowler, this question of analytical psychology is a very important one,” and he, too, was herded into analysis with a Jung associate.31
By October 1914, Edith had graduated from straight analysis with Jung and started a course of supplementary study. As Harold reported to his now-restive father-in-law, “She studies astronomy, biology and history, and music. She does not go to see Dr. Jung anymore.”32 Whatever patience Rockefeller had shown began to evaporate in early 1915 when Edith failed to attend the wedding of Harold’s brother Cyrus in February and did not come to Cettie’s funeral service in March—despite Harold’s talk about all the progress she had made. Rockefeller began to grumble that Edith and Harold were “banqueting” in Switzerland, forcing Harold into extended self-defense: “This is not a tabernacle of joy,” he told Rockefeller, “but a shrine to which seekers only address themselves, and it is in this spirit that I have postponed again my sailing and that Edith still finds herself held.”33 By this point, Harold had adopted Jung as his guru as well, accompanying him on mountain walks and idealizing him as being “as nearly perfect to my mind as a man can be.”34 This all sounds rather starry-eyed given Jung’s limited success with Edith. In a letter to his mother, Harold admitted that Edith was still prey to agoraphobia, had not left the hotel grounds for almost a year, and could not travel on a train for more than twenty minutes—hardly a glowing testimonial to Jung’s method.
What complicated relations between Rockefeller and Edith was that in working with Jung, she was trying to extirpate the cool, controlling nature she had internalized from her father. Jung classified Harold as too extroverted and Edith, like her father, as too introverted. As Harold told Rockefeller, “In Edith, Father, I see the near counterpart of your personality. I think she is more like you than any other of your children all attributes considered. . . . She has your purpose and tenacity without one little diminution.” 35 Precisely for that reason, Edith knew the little devices by which her father cunningly walled himself off from people. As she wrote to her father after Cettie’s death, “There is warmth and love in your heart when we can get through all the outside barriers which you have thrown up to protect yourself—your own self—from the world.” 36 On another occasion, she repeated this leitmotif. “I wish sometimes that you would let me get near to you . . . so that your heart would feel the warmth of a simple human sort.”37
Such straight talk probably made Rockefeller squirm. The human psyche was a boggy, fetid terrain that he never cared to explore, and he had spent a lifetime trying to conceal his motives and emotions. He had been largely insulated from criticism within his own family, and Edith was the first child to press him, however gingerly, on taboo topics. It is testimony to his fatherly love that, despite his complete bafflement about her exile, he tried to respond to Edith with patient sympathy. To her plea for greater closeness, he replied, “I can think of nothing which I would more devoutly desire than that we should be constantly drawn closer and closer together, to the end that we may be of the greatest assistance to each other, not only, but to the dear ones so near and so dear to us.”38 For the most part, he was too shrewd to try to induce outright guilt in Edith about her stay overseas and simply said how much he missed her and that he knew her absence must be for the best.
In 1915, Jung recommended that his followers read Friedrich Nietzsche, especially The Will to Power, and Edith and Harold sent a copy to Rockefeller to promote self-awareness. “It cites the theory,” Harold explained excitedly, “you exemplify the practice.”39 One can only picture Rockefeller’s puzzlement as he thumbed these pages. “I’m sure the book will prove very interesting reading, though it may be far beyond me,” Rockefeller replied. “I keep to a simple philosophy and almost primitive ideas of living.”40 In a later letter to Rockefeller— having clearly forgotten the earlier one—Harold explained that Nietzsche was attempting to show how some people need to impose their wills on others. Yet for all their efforts to enlighten him, Harold and Edith never made much progress with Rockefeller, who was comfortable with himself and lived quite nicely with his own repressions.
Increasingly, Edith saw in Jungian psychology a mystic path as well as a therapeutic method. “You on your path have your philosophy and your religion which guide you,” she wrote to Rockefeller in words that would have sounded blasphemous to him. “I on my path have my philosophy and my religion which guide me.”41 Edith wanted to use the Rockefeller fortune to proselytize for Jung, and she bristled that her father demoted her and Alta to a subordinate status behind Junior. With a protofeminist consciousness, she resented the flagrant inequality in the treatment of the son and daughters. In September 1915, she told Rockefeller of her wish to help with his philanthropies. “It is beautiful and enveloping work and John is privileged in a way which Alta and I as yet have not had the opportunity of being. I am sure that as women we are serious minded and earnest and deeply interested in mankind.”42 When this produced no effect, Edith upped the pressure in January 1916. “As a woman of forty-three I should like to have more money to help with. . . . I am worthy of more confidence on your part.”43 Rockefeller was not exactly punishing his daughter—he was sending her $2,500 monthly and had already given her and Harold more than $2 million in gifts—but his favoritism toward his son was clear.
What Edith could not admit was that she argued from a weak position. She had cut herself off from her family, skipped her mother’s funeral, often showed little interest in her children, had crippling phobias, and had no immediate plans to return to the United States. She was a spendthrift with a habit of running up debt, which would have only deepened her father’s doubts about her ability to manage money. As Rockefeller said, citing her stay abroad, he regretted that he could not be “more familiar with your benevolences as I have been with John and Alta in respect to their contributions to good causes. This contact and the more intimate knowledge of all that they are doing in this regard has afforded me much pleasure.”44 Eventually, he doubled Edith’s monthly allowance to $5,000 but went no further for the moment.
That Edith wanted additional money to advance the cause of Jungian analysis became clear in 1916 when she put up $120,000—$80,000 of it borrowed—to rent and renovate a posh Zurich mansion for a new Psychological Club, complete with a library, restaurant, recreation rooms, and guest rooms. The intention was to have a place where analysts and patients could socialize and listen to lectures. When the setting proved too costly, the club moved to more modest quarters on the Gemeindestrasse. Edith also sponsored translations of Jung’s work into English that significantly expanded his influence. Disturbed by this largesse, Rockefeller demanded that Edith send him a list of her chief charitable benefactions. In her reply, she showed that her gift to Jung far surpassed her donations to her two other main causes: the John McCormick Institution of Infectious Diseases and the Chicago Opera Company.
Upon learning of Edith’s contribution for the Psychological Club, Freud, who had since broken with his heretical disciple, greeted the news with a sneer. “So Swiss ethics have finally made their sought-after contact with American money.”45 It is easy to understand Freud’s cynicism. After her gift for the Psychological Cl
ub, Edith was suddenly allowed by Jung to graduate from an analysand with unusually intractable problems to the role of analyst. That Jung had allowed the phobic Edith to function as an analyst raises some profound questions about Jung’s judgment. By the following year, Edith wrote to her father, “I am teaching six hours a day besides my own studies.”46
Edith was also subsidizing writers and musicians. Her most important patronage was of James Joyce, who had found sanctuary in neutral Zurich during the war. In February 1918, Edith set up a bank account for the financially beleaguered Joyce that allowed him to withdraw a thousand francs monthly. Eager to thank his anonymous patron, Joyce managed to ascertain her identity. When Joyce met Edith, she said to him, “I know you are a great artist” then bubbled over with talk about Jungian analysis.47 In her typical domineering fashion, Edith decided that Joyce should undergo analysis with Jung and she would pay for it. Possibly because he spurned this offer, Joyce found his credit line abruptly terminated after eighteen months. The author did not welcome the volte-face. As Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann observed, “It is unlikely that Joyce would allow [Edith] to escape scot-free from artistic punishment; and in the Circe episode of Ulysses, Mrs. Mervyn Talboys, the society woman with a riding crop and a sadistic bent, may owe something to Edith Rockefeller McCormick, a noted horsewoman.” 48 Even Joyce’s wife, Nora, made Edith the butt of ribald jokes, wondering what kind of sumptuous underwear the rich American woman wore.
Edith certainly had her ridiculous aspects. She was an unlikely cross between the grande bourgeoise and the impractical bohemian, a dreamer caught up in the cultlike atmosphere of Jung’s practice. Yet in the Rockefeller family, she was a pioneer, the first to peer into the mysteries of human nature and confront social inhibitions and moral restraints that had long been held sacrosanct by the family.
It seemed at first that the mutual interest in psychoanalysis might bridge the temperamental divide between Edith and Harold. He was patient, compassionate, and eager to see his wife freed from the demons that beset her. “I must tell you in a word how lovely Edith is developing,” a rhapsodic Harold wrote to his mother in September 1917. “You would not know her.” 49 Indeed, Edith seemed to be thriving in Zurich, her caseload of patients growing. “New patients are coming to me all the time and I have had some fifty cases now,” she told her father in 1919. “I hear in a year twelve thousand dreams.”50 This pleasant interlude might have lasted forever if Harold had not been named president of International Harvester in 1918, pulling him back into the workaday world of Chicago.
Psychoanalysis had stimulated both Edith and Harold to experiment freely with their lives. Like other novices, Edith converted Jungian analysis into a license for wildly uninhibited behavior. Jung himself did not believe in or practice monogamy. “Ammann,” Edith told her chauffeur, “if your unconscious causes you to love several women, you need not feel any guilt. . . . Psychoanalysis will conquer all.”51 She posted Emma, her private secretary, at the threshold of her hotel suite to safeguard her trysts. One day, Harold showed up without warning and brushed past Emma before she could stop him. A startled Edith began to shout, “Harold, I . . . shan’t have it. You’re not to come to my rooms without first having Emma announce you.”52 Now that Harold and Edith lived far apart, each had numerous opportunities for escapades.
Edith’s liaisons managed to skirt scandal until a young Austrian named Edwin Krenn came onto the scene. A man of shadowy antecedents—Edith described him as the son of a famous European painter—he was short, blond, chubby, and always foppishly attired. When he arrived in Switzerland and entered analysis with Edith, he did not have any apparent means of support. Edith not only financed him but helped him to obtain Swiss citizenship. She was convinced that he was an architect of genius, and they became constant companions, driving together in the afternoons, attending theater in the evening, then retiring to her hotel suite for private dinners. According to Emile Ammann, Jung warned her of the scandal that might erupt from this love affair. “This is my problem,” Edith replied curtly, “and I can do what I please.”53
Alone in Chicago, Harold was highly susceptible to alluring women. Since he and Edith had recently made a five-year commitment to support the Chicago Opera Company, many pretty, aspiring singers passed his way. In September 1919, when the Chicago Opera performed in New York, a Polish singer named Ganna Walska tracked him down at the Plaza Hotel. Even though he was now balding and pudgy, Walska claimed that she swooned over his “wonderful boyish blue eyes.”54 A voluptuous woman with a hypnotic gaze, Walska wore ponderous jewelry and oversized hats and fancied herself a femme fatale; much like Edwin Krenn, she was a gold digger who wrapped herself in a cloud of exotic mystery.
In 1920, the two McCormick daughters, alarmed by their mother’s affair with Edwin Krenn, pleaded with Harold to come to Zurich at once. By this point, Harold was already smitten with Walska and had little incentive to terminate the match, but he perhaps went to Switzerland, in part, because of Rockefeller’s concern about the perilous state of Edith’s finances. Bent upon showing that she possessed her father’s business flair, she had blundered into one catastrophic deal after another. In late 1919, a German scientist had come to Switzerland peddling a secret process for hardening wood, which was supposed to make it usable for everything from railroad ties to telegraph poles. Even Jung initially encouraged Edith in the venture. She set up a company, appointed herself board chairman, and invested $100,000, promising to boost that amount to $1 million. Rockefeller pleaded with Harold to stop her. “I am opposed to Edith having anything to do with the project at all. I fear that it will result in great loss and trouble. I most earnestly entreat her to discontinue this not only but not to engage in any business schemes.”55 There was a touch of the willful adolescent about Edith, chafing at daddy’s authority, and Rockefeller’s intervention probably backfired. He quickly proved to be prescient: After the German scientist left Switzerland, Edith could not reproduce his results, and eventually she had to write off a $340,000 investment. Edith also piled up staggering debts to support the Chicago Opera and gave a $300,000 piece of property to Cook County for a zoo; Harold, Rockefeller, and Junior first learned of this last act of munificence in the morning papers. By early 1920, Edith’s debts had ballooned to $812,000, and her father was obliged to tide her over with a transfer of Standard Oil of New Jersey stock.
However sharp Rockefeller was in criticizing her finances, he was even more concerned about his daughter’s negligence as a mother, especially toward his favorite grandson, Fowler. As lovingly as he could, he prodded Edith to devote more time to her children. As he told her in April 1921:
Edith dear, the financial question, while important, is not important when compared to the other question—the great question of your being present with your children. And how sadly they need your presence, and how very solicitous we are all for them! In this connection I may add that you could have been a great comfort and help to your mother and me. But this sinks into insignificance also, when we consider the dear children. . . . I am not lecturing. I am not scolding. I love you, Edith dear; and I am still hoping.56
By late August 1921, Edith had sufficiently overcome her travel phobia that she was able to book passage for America, where she planned to visit her father upon arrival. She had not set eyes on him for eight years, yet when she docked in New York, she told him that she wanted to bring along two companions: Edwin Krenn and his old boarding-school chum, Edward Dato. Properly offended—and possibly privy to rumors about Edith’s affair—Rockefeller insisted upon seeing Edith alone. She grudgingly agreed to venture to Lakewood alone to see him. It took ten years for Edith to explain to her father why she never arrived on the agreed day. “When I got to the ferry, a terrific thunder storm broke the terrible heat and my nerves which had been sorely tried by the difficult divorce conditions of my arrival in New York added to the treatment of my children, broke down and I was forced to turn back instead of going to you.”57 This was as clo
se as father and daughter came to seeing each other during the last nineteen years of Edith’s life. Despite eight years of intensive study with Jung, Edith still could not fully conquer her travel phobia, at least when it came to seeing her father.
A month after Edith returned to Chicago, Harold filed for divorce. Like her father, Edith harbored hopes for a reconciliation, but Harold had the stronger legal case: His lawyer, Paul Cravath, had brought over from Europe a witness who had apparently observed Edith’s infidelities. This unidentified witness was convincing enough that Alta suggested that her sister make an early settlement. By Christmas, Edith was forced to sign a harsh divorce settlement, stipulating that she would receive no alimony and would pay Harold $2.7 million for their homes, plunging her further into debt. (In 1922, Edith still owed $726,000 to the banks, despite having received more than $14 million from her father over the years.) As if to register sympathy for his son-in-law, Rockefeller sent Harold a $1,000 Christmas check even as his daughter was signing the punitive papers. Though Edith pressed him to cut off communications, Rockefeller stayed in touch with Harold, but they saw each other less frequently as time passed.
Upon returning to Chicago, Edith planned to establish a center for Jungian psychology, possibly housed in the Villa Turicum. Not particularly modest about her aspirations, she explained, “It was pointed out to me that, psychologically, Chicago will be the greatest center in the world. That is why I have come back to live.”58 Before long, Edith attracted one hundred patients to her private practice, many of them socialites enticed by the Rockefeller and McCormick names. Perpetuating her interests in astrology and the occult, she paid fantastic sums for horoscopes and hosted occasional séances; at one session, she swooned into a trance then announced that she was the reincarnated spirit of Tutankhamen’s child bride. Also feeding the curiosity of prospective patients was Edith’s rumored liaison with Krenn. As in Zurich, they made daily rounds together: They lunched together, then shared language tutors, followed by late-afternoon tea and evening movies. Some observers thought Krenn might be involved in a homosexual affair with Dato, although it is impossible to verify the truth of these assertions.