Titan
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In the spring of 1926, when Junior decided to speak at the Hampton Institute, Goodwin saw a chance to waylay him to Williamsburg. When John Jr. and Abby arrived, he took them about town, a clinging, heavy-breathing cicerone. At one point Junior asked innocently whether plans existed to preserve the old buildings; at this, the minister must have seen a ray of divine sunlight. As he sheepishly said, “I found it exceedingly hard at the time not to burst forth in the presence of Mr. Rockefeller into unfolding my cherished dream.”30 He soon swamped Junior with artistic renderings of how the restored town might look.
When Junior consented to underwrite the project the following year, he estimated it would cost five million dollars and he faced the familiar dilemma of buying up land without triggering a real-estate boom. With the Rockefeller involvement concealed, Goodwin referred to his patron by the code name “Mr. David.” As lawyers, real-estate agents, and property owners flocked to Goodwin’s office in suspicious numbers, the rumor mill churned with guesses about the project’s rich backer: Henry Ford, George Eastman, J. P. Morgan, Jr., and Otto Kahn were all mentioned. When this speculation grew counterproductive, Goodwin gathered the local citizenry and announced, “It is now my very great privilege and pleasure to announce that the donors of the money to restore Williamsburg are Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of New York.”31
As always, the Rockefeller method was to start slowly, test the concept, and then expand. True to this approach, Junior planned to redo one building at a time. He never dreamed he would resurrect the whole town, but the idea of meticulously restoring the past cast a potent spell over his mind, and he became fantastically engrossed in the most minuscule details. As he told his subordinates, “No scholar must ever be able to come to us and say we have made a mistake.”32 At one point, the resident architect reminded Junior that everything wasn’t spotless in the eighteenth century. “But Mr. Rockefeller did not like that at all,” he recalled. “He wanted everything to be perfect.”33 Junior had a special affinity with this lovingly retrieved world. “I really belong in Williamsburg,” he once said. He and Abby bought an elm-shaded manor house, Bassett Hall, where they spent two months each year and where Abby created a firstrate collection of American folk art.34
As a form of recreation rich in social value, Colonial Williamsburg captivated Junior and grew into such a passion that he eventually spent fifty-five million dollars on it. “I gave more time, thought, and attention to Williamsburg than I did to any other project I ever undertook—far more than I gave to Rockefeller Center. . . . The more I did the more complete the project became and the greater my interest became.”35 Senior never discussed Colonial Williamsburg with his son and, in solipsistic fashion, tended to edit out of his mind what he himself had not originated, even though Junior’s projects were perpetuating his legacy and enormously enhancing the Rockefeller image. Nevertheless, when Junior was later honored by the Virginia legislature, he became choked up and departed from his prepared text to say, “How I wish my father were here! I am only the son.”36 Such self-abnegation had become a habit—never mind that John D. had ignored the project. In 1934, President Roosevelt opened Colonial Williamsburg to the public.
Another project conceived in an analogous spirit was The Cloisters museum, which reflected Junior’s long-standing interest in medieval art, with its hierarchy, exacting craftsmanship, and strong spiritual content. His West Fifty-fourth Street home was decorated with gorgeous medieval tapestries, including the Hunt of the Unicorn, and his collection expanded after William Welles Bosworth introduced him to a highly romantic sculptor named George Grey Barnard. Barnard traveled through France and Italy each summer, scooping up Gothic statues and other medieval treasures and bearing his trophies back to New York. The Cluny Museum in Paris gave Barnard the idea for a medieval museum in upper Manhattan which came to be known as The Cloisters (later the Barnard Cloisters). In 1914, this one-man museum opened on Fort Washington Avenue in a small brick building. Barnard created for visitors a full-blown medieval fantasy: Robed figures would lead visitors through a shadowy, churchlike interior perfumed with incense and echoing with medieval chants. By the time Barnard put up his entire collection for sale in the 1920s, Junior had already purchased one hundred Gothic pieces from him, storing most of them in delivery tunnels at Pocantico.37 The Metropolitan Museum of Art took the entire collection, with money provided by Rockefeller.
As a boy, Junior had frequently taken horseback rides along the Hudson to a high, wooded point that enthralled him. Even then he had vowed that he would someday buy the land and give it to the city. Now such an opportunity presented itself. Having bought the Cornelius Billings estate and other parcels near Barnard’s museum, he offered them to the city for a park. Five years later, the city accepted this gift for a new Fort Tryon Park and honored Junior’s proviso that four elevated acres be set aside for a new museum, The Cloisters, to house the medieval art collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
As with Colonial Williamsburg, Junior loved the demanding scholarship that went along with the creation of the medieval museum. He paid for a building that ingeniously blended cloisters from five French monasteries as well as many pieces that he had previously bought from Barnard. As he was reviewing plans for The Cloisters one day, he noticed a room marked “Tapestries” and asked James Rorimer, the curator, what he had in mind. “Oh, something like the Unicorn Tapestries,” Rorimer said airily. Junior grimaced. But, in an act of supreme sacrifice, he eventually parted with his precious tapestries. By the time the Cloisters opened in 1938, Junior had donated or underwritten the cost of more than 90 percent of the art displayed.
The greatest friction between Junior and Abby arose over the subject of modern art, which exposed fundamental differences in their personalities. Junior seemed to be unnerved by the outlaw, bohemian side of modern art, its free experimentation with form and content. While he was stubbornly mired in the past, as if escaping the strife associated with his father’s career and the Ludlow Massacre, Abby embraced change and responded to the freedom and spontaneity of the new European art. She was enamored of German Expressionist paintings, with their bold colors, grotesque themes, and nightmarish sensuality. When she began to collect such works, Junior found them raw and harshly unappealing. Banishing the forbidden art to an upper-floor gallery at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, he often struck a patronizing tone when talking about Abby’s picture collection. “These were strange, irresponsible objects that she was bringing into his home,” said their son Laurance. “He did not approve of them.”38
Many things about modern art—including the sometimes garish colors, dreamlike imagery, and violent or distorted forms—disconcerted this inhibited man. “I am interested in beauty and by and large I do not find beauty in modern art,” Junior said, preferring the classic beauty of, say, Chinese porcelains. “I find instead a desire for self-expression, as if the artist were saying, ‘I’m free, bound by no forms, and art is what flows out of me.’ ”39 Junior must have identified the freedom inherent in modern pictures with Abby’s emancipation in collecting them, for otherwise it is hard to account for his vehement resistance to her avocation. Frustrated by her husband’s hopelessly blinkered vision, Abby found compensation in her sons, especially Nelson, who shared her love of these threatening objects.
For once heedless of her husband’s wishes, Abby joined with Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Sullivan in 1929 to found the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which provided an outlet for the talents of many wealthy New York women. It was a brave act at a time when most Americans still sneered at such artistic innovation. At first, the museum rented gallery space in the Heckscher Building before moving to a West Fifty-third Street house owned by the Rockefellers. Even as the museum grew in popularity, Junior kept up his deprecating tone. “I showed Papa the pictures and the gallery today,” Abby wrote to Nelson, “and he thinks that they are terrible beyond words, so I am somewhat depressed tonight.”40 Filling the breach left by his father, Nelson was named chairma
n of the museum’s Junior Advisory Committee in 1930—he was only twenty-two and still in his last semester at Dartmouth—and ended up as its president.
Notwithstanding his hatred of modern art, Junior became the museum’s chief benefactor, donating a total of six million dollars in endowment grants and land. So considerable was the Rockefeller largesse behind MoMA that one historian has written that “since the beginning” it has “been a Rockefeller responsibility, a protectorate, one might almost say.” 41 Modern art nevertheless remained contentious at home. Distressed that her budget allowed her to buy just one small Matisse painting and drawing, Abby instructed an intermediary, “Please tell him [Matisse] the only reason I have no more is my inability to acquire them.”42 To remedy this, Abby invited Matisse to dinner in December 1930 and the French master grew impatient that someone of Junior’s cultural attainments could be so insensitive to the beauty of Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, and Braque. One editor present, Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair, registered Junior’s tactful response, saying that “the philanthropist, who had listened very politely, regretted quite as politely, and in the most polished French, that he must still appear adamant. Then, with an engaging burst of confidence, he added that Mr. Matisse must not altogether despair, because, though he might still seem to be stone, he suspected that Mrs. Rockefeller, thanks to her very special gifts of persuasion, would eventually wear him down to the consistency of jelly.”43 Unfortunately, this charm was strictly for public consumption and Junior kept up his stony obduracy.
Overriding Junior’s objections, Abby served as MoMA’s first treasurer and gave the museum its first fund for acquiring art. She was a blithe, energetic, ubiquitous figure in the museum’s maiden years. All this prodigious work only alienated Junior further, a disapproval so noticeable to the young director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., that he once told Abby, “Remember me cordially to Mr. Rockefeller (who I find hard to forgive his granite indifference to what interests you so much).”44 Philip Johnson was no less scornful: “He was a bulldog, a very strong man, one who would say, ‘As my wife you can do this and not that.’ ”45 Since Abby’s involvement with MoMA coincided with the years in which her children graduated from college, married, and started jobs, it grated on Junior that he could not now have his wife all to himself. “We children, who had been his competition, were on our own now—presumably our needs were no longer a threat to him,” said David. “But here was the museum, more complex than ever, demanding her energy, and it rankled.”46 Having bequeathed a stunning 181 artworks to MoMA in 1935 alone, Abby attained a new celebrity status and was featured on the January 1936 cover of Time magazine, which named her “the outstanding individual patron of living artists in the U.S.”47
Abby’s work gave the family an important presence in art patronage that it had largely lacked to date because of Senior’s conspicuous indifference to painting, inherited by his son. However much he inwardly writhed with displeasure, Junior kept the money spigot open. After Lillie Bliss died in 1931, her collection came up for sale—brimming with twenty-four Cézannes, nine Seurats, eight Degases, and so on. She had left it to the museum with the proviso that it have an endowment fund sufficient to ensure its permanence; Junior gave $200,000 and Nelson $100,000. In 1935, to encompass this swelling collection, the trustees voted for a new building to be fashioned by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone in the International Style. For the site, the Rockefellers provided land on both West Fifty-third Street and West Fifty-fourth Street and contributed 60 percent of the building-fund money. The homes of Senior and Junior were razed to make way for the museum and the adjoining Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. In early 1938, Junior and Abby moved into a new apartment at 740 Park Avenue. For Junior, it must have been the ultimate affront that his nine-story mansion had been demolished to make way for modern art.
A soaring nocturnal vision of Rockefeller Center. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
CHAPTER 34
Heirs
Senior’s worst forebodings about the fates of his grandchildren seemed to materialize during the 1920s, especially with the McCormicks. He had long doted on his grandson Fowler, who had become a friend, acolyte, and traveling companion of Carl Jung, whom he lauded as a “God figure” in his life.1 Having weaned Fowler away from conventional mores, Jung might have inadvertently prepared the ground for Fowler’s unorthodox marriage. In 1921, the tabloid press feasted on the racy divorce of James Stillman, Jr., and Anne “Fifi” Stillman. Fifi—a striking redhead with a flirtatious manner and volatile temper—was a siren to young men, and Fowler became smitten with her when he roomed with her son Bud at Princeton. Scenting danger, Edith warned her father in 1922, “There is always a pitfall for a rich young man in a much older, designing and fascinating woman.”2 To Rockefeller’s horror, Fowler later married Fifi, a divorcée who was eighteen years his senior and had four children. Although he occasionally received the couple (who remained childless), Rockefeller was heartsick over the match and doubtless blamed Edith’s self-absorption for her children’s troubles.
Beautiful and temperamental, Edith’s daughter Muriel had her mother’s headstrong nature. When Rockefeller sent her a birthday check in 1922, she mailed it right back, professing outrage that he would express his “loving feeling in such a materialistical manner.”3 Since her parents were leading patrons of the opera, Muriel decided to become a diva and appeared with her mother at a fund-raising luncheon. “Following the luncheon,” reported one Chicago paper, “after the coffee had been drunk and the men guests were lighting up their cigars, Miss McCormick drew a slender ebony cigarette holder and cigarette from her gold mesh bag and joined the smokes.”4 Adopting the stage name of Nawanna Micor, Muriel studied opera with Ganna Walska, acted briefly on the New York stage, and even tried her luck in Hollywood before turning to interior decorating and marrying Elisha D. Hubbard, the son of a former bank president.
Rockefeller received more warmth from her sister, Mathilde, a bright, winning young woman and the only McCormick child exempted from analysis with Jung. Fearful that Mathilde would fall prey to some scoundrel in Switzerland, Rockefeller told her: “We want you all to be true Americans and to love your own country and not to be enamored with the allurements that come especially to our American girls sometimes by the fortune hunters of the world.” 5 Rockefeller had the talents of a sibyl in these matters. In 1922, Mathilde, seventeen, decided to marry her Swiss riding master, a forty-five-year-old widower named Max Oser. Having paid for Mathilde’s expensive riding lessons, Edith felt betrayed and was sure the treacherous Oser was out to bilk them. As she told her father, Oser had only taken an interest in Mathilde because she was “the daughter of wealthy parents and the granddaughter of the wealthiest man in the world. As we unfortunately all too well know, all of the children are flattered and toadied to by people of none too worthy characters, who hope thereby to get money from them.”6
Forgetting her own recent escapades, Edith mounted her high horse and sounded like a conservative, self-righteous mother, suggesting that Rockefeller withhold money from his grandchildren to make it “less possible for them to be taken in by swindlers and by evil minded people.”7 “We have our sorrows,” Rockefeller replied to Edith. “How thankful I am that dear mother is spared them.”8 He was sufficiently swayed by Edith’s argument that he discontinued many of the annual gifts he had routinely been making to his grandchildren.
Refusing to accept the match with Oser, Edith attempted to scare the daylights out of Mathilde, telling her that the twenty-six-year age difference between her McCormick grandparents had yielded a terrible legacy of mental illness among their seven children. “Two died young and two are insane,” she pleaded with her daughter. “Do you not see how unjust it is to bring children into the world doomed to insanity?”9 Not relenting after Mathilde’s marriage in 1923, Edith refused to see Max Oser or even her own grandchildren for many years. When the couple visited America in 1929 in an attempt to close this breach,
Edith told Mathilde that she still had no desire to see her grandchildren. “Children really aren’t at all important,” she informed her daughter, “they’re just necessary for procreation.”10 Edith grew so spiteful that when Mathilde and Max planned to visit Senior, Edith telegrammed ahead to her father: “I would appreciate very much if you did not receive the fortune hunter Mr. Oser in your home.”11 About to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, Rockefeller was in no mood to snub a beloved granddaughter, so he graciously received Max, Mathilde, and their children at Lakewood. Rockefeller even slipped into a confidant’s role with Mathilde, who poured out her troubles about Edith. After being reviled as a robber baron for so many decades, he enjoyed playing the sage, soft-shoe grandfather.
Rockefeller continued to feel highly protective toward his granddaughter Margaret, who reminded everybody of Bessie as she grew up, making her an object of special concern. She had grown up in a lonely, bookish atmosphere with her father, Charles Strong, who kept Margaret away from America—to Rockefeller’s everlasting dismay. Paralyzed from the waist down by a tumor on his spine, Charles was confined to a wheelchair cushioned with a rubber pillow, and this made his life only more cerebral. While staying in his Paris apartment or his villa at Fiesole, Charles and his close friend George Santayana shared a paternal solicitude toward Margaret, who was always encircled by suitors. Her marital plans provided grist for speculation between these two weighty philosophers.
It was Santayana, not Strong, who gave away the bride when Margaret married the fashionable George de Cuevas in a Paris church in 1927; Margaret thought that her father would disapprove and got married while he was out of town. After her solitary, repressed home environment, Margaret was swept up in de Cuevas’s warmth, spontaneity, and charm. Almost invariably labeled a Spanish nobleman, de Cuevas was neither Spanish nor noble but the scion of a Chilean banking family that was richer in land than cash, and he was clever in plotting ways to remedy that deficiency.