by Ron Chernow
Instead of honoring or even gratifying this unusual request, Rockefeller played the proud philistine and turned it down cold. But Junior was now past forty and would not simply let the matter drop, as he would have in the past. In an anguished letter, he vented his frustrations:
I have never squandered money on horses, yachts, automobiles or other foolish extravagances. A fondness for these porcelains is my only hobby—the only thing on which I have cared to spend money. I have found their study a great recreation and diversion, and I have become very fond of them. This hobby, while a costly one, is quiet and unostentatious and not sensational. 7
Faced with this unprecedented revolt against his judgment, Rockefeller not only had the good sense to relent but gave his son the money outright. Deeply touched, Junior responded with profuse, breast-beating gratitude. “I am fully conscious of the fact that I am in no sense worthy of such munificence on your part,” he wrote his father. “Nothing that I have ever done or could do will make me worthy.”8 When Junior received the porcelains at West Fifty-fourth Street, he sat down on the floor and rolled them about, fondly studying them and searching for cracks or marks of repair. Had Junior not established at this point his right to collect art, free of parental interference, he might never have been emboldened to create The Cloisters or Colonial Williamsburg. To demonstrate that his new interest was not frivolous, Junior developed great expertise on Chinese porcelains and put together one of the outstanding collections in private hands.
The friction over the Chinese porcelains highlighted Rockefeller’s pressing need to make some final disposition of his fortune. Even though Junior had a net worth of about $20 million in early 1917, it was not generating much income. He had received large blocks of stock in American Linseed and Colorado Fuel and Iron, but the latter paid little or nothing in dividends and had only ensnared him in controversy. He also owned real estate in Cleveland and New York plus railroad and gas bonds. Junior’s combined salary and allowance provided him with several hundred thousand dollars a year—which was a fantastic sum for any ordinary mortal but small beer for the son of the world’s richest man.
It was likely the Ludlow Massacre that convinced Rockefeller that his son had the fortitude to manage the family affairs. “There was reason for Grandfather to feel uncertain in terms of how much Father could handle until Ludlow came along,” David Rockefeller later observed. “I think it was a searing but very much of a learning experience for him as well as one that toughened him.”9 Rockefeller’s decision to transfer the money was probably clinched in 1916 and 1917 when the federal government twice boosted inheritance taxes. Characteristically, Rockefeller had waited a long time to decide to transfer his money to his son, but once he began to strip himself of wealth, he acted with electrifying speed, as if pleased by this act of renunciation. On March 13, 1917, he gave his son 20,000 shares of Standard Oil of Indiana, inaugurating the biggest intrafamily transfer of money in history. On July 10, 1918, he gave 166,072 shares of Standard Oil of California; two weeks later came large blocks of stock in Atlantic Refining and Vacuum Oil. On February 6, 1919, Junior received 50,000 shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey, followed by another 50,000 shares on November 20. In 1920, Rockefeller bequeathed thick heaps of New York City and Liberty Bonds. These transfers occurred without poetry or preamble, accompanied only by terse, businesslike notes. For example, on February 17, 1920, Rockefeller wrote: “Dear Son: I am this day giving you $65,000,000 par value of United States Government First Liberty Loan 3½% bonds. Affectionately, Father.”10
In possession of these miraculous gifts, Junior was left staggered, dazed, speechless. Before 1917, Rockefeller had given $275 million to charity and $35 million to his children. (In November 1917, he estimated that if he had kept and invested all his money until that time, he would have been worth $3 billion, or well in excess of $30 billion today. That would have put Rockefeller second only to William Henry Gates III, with $40 billion, among the billionaires listed by Forbes magazine in its 1997 ranking of the richest Americans.11) Between 1917 and 1922, he gave away another $200 million to charity and $475 million to his children, with almost all of the latter going to Junior. A profound dichotomy now opened in the Rockefeller family between the dutiful son and the wayward daughters and sons-in-law—a dichotomy so deep that the world would think of Junior’s descendants alone as the real Rockefellers. (Of course, they also had the Rockefeller name.) By keeping the fortune in one compact mass, Rockefeller enabled his son to magnify its impact. The poor little rich boy was now the planet’s foremost heir. Within the space of five years, Junior’s net worth soared from $20 million to about $500 million—more than the $447 million that his father had given to the Rockefeller Institute, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial combined—and equivalent to $4.4 billion today. Thus, for all their public-spirited generosity, the Rockefellers still retained control over a great deal of the fortune, though much of it would be distributed to deserving parties over time. After disbursing so much, Rockefeller left himself with pocket change—somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty to twenty-five million dollars—for playing the stock market.
In 1917, Rockefeller formed special trusts at the Equitable Trust for Alta and Edith, depositing twelve million dollars apiece in their accounts ($140 million apiece today) and terminating their allowances. This money, if more than enough to make them comfortable for life, seemed a bagatelle beside Junior’s cache. In defending this blatant imbalance, Junior later argued that his father had favored him because he could “carry on his philanthropic and charitable work in the same spirit which had activated him, and . . . anything he gave me would be administered with the same sense of duty and stewardship which impelled his giving.”12 In a way that would have been impossible for Alta and Edith, Junior adopted his father’s principles and functioned as his surrogate. Rockefeller told his son, “What a providence that your life should have been spared to take up the responsibilities as I lay them down!”13 Rockefeller was increasingly buoyed by the admiration of this son who viewed him as a heroic figure in business and philanthropy. As he told Inglis, “I really think I could not have had so good and true a son as he is if I had been half so bad as the prejudiced and interested ‘historian’ [Tarbell] would seek to make me out.”14 For Rockefeller, only a good tree brought forth good fruit, and Junior’s virtue was therefore incontrovertible proof of his own.
By the time that Junior inherited his golden treasury, he and Abby had brought forth a large, energetic family of six children, having added Laurance (1910), Winthrop (1912), and David (1915). After Laurance’s birth, Junior and Abby decided that 13 West Fifty-fourth Street could not accommodate this growing tribe, and in 1911 they bought the property at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street. Having finished with Kykuit, William Welles Bosworth—the landscape architect whom John senior found so infuriatingly extravagant—constructed a nine-story mansion for the younger Rockefellers that resembled a miniature city. Lavishly appointed with a rooftop squash court and playground, an art gallery, a music room, two drawing rooms, and an infirmary, it was one of New York’s largest private residences. The family occupied the new domicile beginning in September 1913.
To escape the sultry Manhattan summers, Junior and Abby began to spend summers on Mount Desert Island in Maine in 1908. A favorite getaway of the rich since the 1880s, it was now colonized by several Rockefeller intimates, including Charles Eliot, Simon Flexner, and Christian Herter. John and Abby were so enchanted by the island’s rocky, rugged beauty that in 1910 they bought a hilltop house called the Eyrie in Seal Harbor on the quieter southern side of the island. Set on a granite bluff overlooking the harbor, the Eyrie was a heavily gabled, Tudor-style cottage in the same sense that Newport mansions were cottages—that is, it was a colossal affair. Starting with the original 65 rooms, Junior expanded the place to palatial scope until it contained 107 rooms, 44 fireplaces, 22 bathrooms, and 2,280 windows.
When Junior a
nd Abby first visited Mount Desert Island, it was a pristine place that still banned autos, and they could explore any number of wild, unspoiled places on foot or horseback. Junior took special delight in constructing carriage roads on his property. During these Maine summers, he developed a special feeling for wilderness, which inspired in him feelings of religious awe and perhaps memories of the lakes and ravines of his Forest Hill boyhood. For a man sorely taxed by responsibility, these solitary haunts refreshed an overburdened mind.
In 1916, President Wilson created the Sieur de Monts National Monument on the island, which became Lafayette National Park in 1919—the first national park created in the East—and then was renamed Acadia National Park in 1929. To serve the cause of conservation, Junior not only donated thousands of wilderness acres to the park but personally charted fifty-seven miles of auto-free carriage roads (engineers calculated the grades), studded with charming stone bridges and gatehouses that blended seamlessly into the scenery. From his father, he had learned the art of opening vistas and making the roads as unobtrusive as possible. While some environmental purists faulted Junior for tampering with nature, he had a democratic vision of how the parks might be of use to ordinary people. Whereas he often seemed wearily dutiful at philanthropic board meetings, he showed an undisguised zest for scenic preservation. It was an early sign of what became a continuing interest: preserving ancient beauty from the encroachments of modern life. At the same time, he tried, whenever possible, to retreat from the chaos of modern urban life into the peace and dignity of an uncorrupted rural past.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, unlike her husband, was attuned to the modern, the daring, and the spontaneous. “Mother would love to have an idea and say, ‘Let’s go do it,’ ” said her son David. “She enjoyed the unexpected very much.”15 She could be satirical or flippant and admired the saucy young flappers of the 1920s. “I love to see the old hypocrisies being shattered,” she said.16 Never fearful or inhibited, she was pleased by impulsive behavior and once said of her grandchildren, “I love even their naughtiness, their funny wants and their plots to get them, which I can see lurking in their minds.” 17 Such an attitude perplexed Junior, who was irritated by the high jinks of small children.
Though she adhered to her father’s economic conservatism, Abby helped to broaden the political spectrum for the Rockefeller family. She was a liberal Republican who supported Planned Parenthood, the United Jewish Appeal, and the League of Nations. After the Ludlow Massacre, to improve labor relations, she contributed up to a third of the annual budget of the National Women’s Trade Union League. In the 1920s, she also teamed up with Standard Oil of New Jersey to create a community center, the Bayway Community Cottage, for refinery workers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and frequently stopped by its baby clinic. After one trip, she told her daughter Babs, “I held twenty-five naked, squirming babies today in our new baby clinic at Bayway, some of them took the occasion to drench me thoroughly. Most of them were fat, rosy, and cheerful, but once in a while they all began to howl at once. I had a wonderful time.”18 She was the major benefactor of the Grace Dodge Hotel in Washington, D.C., a 350-room hotel for professional women operated by the YWCA and staffed entirely by women, down to the bellhops and elevator operators.
Abby was vocal in her passion for social justice, and this had a lasting influence on her descendants. While staying with Senior at Ormond Beach in 1923, she wrote a letter to her three oldest sons that throbbed with outrage at discrimination. “It is to the everlasting disgrace of the United States that horrible lynchings and brutal race riots frequently occur in our midst. The social ostracism of the Jews is less barbaric, but . . . causes cruel injustice. . . . I long to have our family stand firmly for what is best and highest in life.”19 Though Junior subscribed to many of Abby’s views, he was guided more by abstract codes of conduct than visceral sympathy with the oppressed.
Abby made sure that her children did not flaunt their wealth, and she turned down one son who wanted extra travel money in college by telling him, “The boys who cannot afford to go away will feel restless and envious.”20 Constantly vigilant against the disfiguring effects of wealth, she lectured Laurance when he was only thirteen on the perils of having too much money: “It makes life too easy; people become self-indulgent and selfish and cruel.” 21 Abby once told Nelson, “I am sure that too much money makes people stupid, dull, unseeing and uninteresting. Be careful.” 22 During World War I, Abby directed five hundred workers of the Red Cross auxiliary that operated out of 4 West Fifty-fourth Street, which Senior had obligingly vacated to aid the war effort. She stationed her white-uniformed children in the basement to roll bandages and had them tend victory gardens at Pocantico.
In running their various households, Abby often chafed at Junior’s niggardly style but submitted for the sake of marital harmony. She waited until the January white sales to buy new linen, and when the children went off to school, she had to telephone them clandestinely from the bathroom, since her husband considered these calls superfluous luxuries. One son observed pointedly, “His calls were business and therefore justifiable, hers were personal, and possibly frivolous. ”23
If John junior and Abby had a marriage of passionate intensity, it was because his buttoned-down life required one great release. He beamed in her presence, could not take his eyes off her. “I never knew a man more completely attached to the woman he married,” said Tom Pyle, the game warden at Pocantico. “When they were grandparents, in the latter quarter of their lives, he still treated her with the adoration and devotion of a young lover.”24 Many people found something unhealthy about his constant need for her, which one daughter-in-law later said “seemed almost primitive and uncontrollable.”25 Even when traveling, Junior hovered over her with a proprietary air, refusing to share her company with others. Once when they were away, Abby wrote to a son, “Your father is afraid that I shall become intimate with too many people and will want to talk to them, so generally we eat in what I call the old people’s dining room where he feels I am safer.”26
Even at home, Junior tried to monopolize Abby, and he cast a jealous eye on his six children as potential competitors for her time. Always warm and natural with the children, Abby did not abandon their upbringing to servants and governesses. She played cards with them, read to them, took afternoon tea with them, and tucked them into bed at night. A convivial lady married to a professional homebody, she followed the example of countless other women in her position and tried to shape her sons into model husbands, devoid of the faults of her own husband. Junior, perhaps subconsciously, saw her attention to the children as time stolen from him, and this could make him seem to be a grouchy, schoolmasterish father. “We grew up realizing that we had to compete with Father for her time and attention,” his son David said. “He expected her to be available when he needed her and his needs seemed insatiable.”27
Whatever its drawbacks, it was generally a happy marriage. While they would have bruising quarrels over modern art, they were devoted to each other and shared many pleasures, including theater, concerts, and film as well as walking, riding, and driving. After evenings out, they loved to return home and sip hot chocolate in the intimacy of Junior’s dressing room. During these cozy moments before bed, they practiced the latest dance steps learned from their Arthur Murray teachers, read aloud from a Victorian novel, or sat back and listened to music on the Victrola. Whatever her frustrations with her husband, Abby thought him a man of sterling probity whom she respected as well as loved. As she once wrote, “I feel sorry for all the women in the world who haven’t as good husbands as I have.” 28 And for Junior, Abby added many brilliant colors to the palette of what might otherwise have been a monochromatic life.
For the six Rockefeller children, their grandfather was a boon companion whom they remembered in various guises: as a wit, a clown, an ace raconteur, a frisky codger on the golf course, a cracker-barrel philosopher. Already in his eighties when some of them entered their teens, he seemed a spry fe
llow who joined readily in their games, whether playing hide-and-seek in the shrubbery or bounding across the room in blindman’s buff. He was probably no less colorful a specimen for his descendants than Devil Bill had been to his grandchildren. Like his siblings, John III remembered grandfather’s playfulness: “A very wonderful person with a sense of humor; he loved to tell jokes, starting out with something serious. He was warm, friendly, and accessible, and he never preached.”29
Junior taught his children to venerate their grandfather, and as they grew up they were slightly astounded to discover that this jolly old eccentric had pulled off one of the biggest feats in business history. From an early age, they were aware that unusual controversy attached to the family name, since reporters and photographers were constantly caught vaulting the Pocantico fences. On May Day 1919, during a reign of anarchist terror, Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Jr., and other prominent Americans were sent letter bombs that were intercepted by the post office, yet no special guards were posted at Kykuit. “We always had to live with the fear that something would happen to the children,” Junior said, and he adopted a policy of never permitting them to have their pictures taken by strangers, lest it give ideas to terrorists or criminals.30 He kept them out of the papers so assiduously that they remained faceless to the general public until they entered college. Sometimes, after receiving menacing calls, the children were shadowed by guards.
On Sundays, the six grandchildren often strode from Abeyton Lodge over to Kykuit to dine with grandfather, the five boys wearing mandatory uniforms of stiff Eton collars, dark coats, and pin-striped pants. Like a pastor receiving his flock, Rockefeller greeted each grandson as “Brother.” Seated at the head of the table, he spouted tales from his past and mimicked people, gesturing with a spotless white napkin. The grandchildren whooped at his deadpan humor. The contrast between the lighthearted Senior, who seemed so relaxed, and his intense, edgy son probably did not help Junior with his children.