Titan

by Ron Chernow

  For their honeymoon, Nelson and Tod spent two weeks in Seal Harbor, where they were attended by twenty-four servants. As a wedding gift, Junior treated them to a nine-month around-the-world trip that took on the trappings of a state visit. At each port of call, they were escorted by Standard Oil officials who introduced them to prime ministers and other dignitaries. For Nelson, the meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in India had one severe shortcoming: “He showed no interest in me whatever,” he complained.35

  During the summer of 1931, Nelson started work at 26 Broadway, where he felt crowded out by Junior’s phalanx of advisers. In an abortive venture, he launched a company for marketing merchandise and discussed the project at length with Rockefeller in Florida. “Every morning we’d take turns reading Psalms before breakfast, which consisted of floods of orange juice,” said Nelson. He made his mark by hustling tenants for Rockefeller Center and ended up as the project’s chief panjandrum. During his eventful career, he served as an assistant secretary of state for Latin America under Roosevelt and undersecretary of health, education, and welfare under Eisenhower. When sworn in as governor of New York in 1959, he took the oath of office on the Bible of his great-grandmother Eliza. After thirty years and five children, the marriage to Tod ended in divorce in 1962. When he married Margaretta “Happy” Murphy the following year, many people thought his marital history had irreparably harmed his presidential ambitions, and he had to settle for the vice presidency under Gerald Ford.

  When Laurance was born in 1910, the family chose this strange spelling of his name to honor the ailing Cettie. “This we do so as to make it as much like Laura as possible,” Junior told his mother.36 Everybody said the thin, sharp-featured Laurance looked more like Senior than any of the other children did. Bright and laconic, with an incisive wit, he also had his grandfather’s enigmatic detachment. However, he lacked the “power to concentrate on difficult and routine tasks,” as Junior said when Laurance was at the Lincoln School.37 The boy took up photography, built a wooden auto powered by a motorcycle engine, and showed a flair for gadgetry. As a philosophy major at Princeton, Laurance shed many of his boyhood religious beliefs in the face of rational scrutiny. While studying at Harvard Law School, he developed pneumonia during his first semester and had to spend the winter with Senior at Ormond Beach. Because he had qualms about the social philosophy of the law and had to struggle to get through his finals, he decided to drop out without taking his degree.

  In 1934, Laurance married Mary French in Woodstock, Vermont. A charming Vassar graduate of quiet strength, Mary was the granddaughter of Frederick Billings, a president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Mary’s brother had roomed with Nelson at Dartmouth. Laurance had his grandfather’s sound instinct for business opportunities and the same unwavering confidence in his own judgment. When he inherited Rockefeller’s New York Stock Exchange seat, he became the youngest member of the exchange. At twenty-eight, with his friend Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, Laurance joined a syndicate to buy Eastern Airlines, eventually becoming its largest shareholder. He also took a sizable stake in the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which surged ahead on the strength of aviation contracts during World War II. He was later involved in the Viking rocket and other aerospace projects, and enjoyed flying his own plane. After the family made its first trip to the Grand Tetons in the early 1920s, he became entranced by conservation no less than his father had been. “I was the youngest one there, and therefore the most impressionable,” he said. He later created vacation resorts in places of unspoiled scenery, managing them through a company called Rockresorts that eventually owned some of the world’s most gorgeous vacation spots.

  Winthrop’s life nearly started out with an embarrassing blunder. Junior and Abby were about to christen him Winthrop Aldrich Rockefeller (after Abby’s brother) when they realized what his initials would spell and scrapped the middle name. He was a chubby, maladroit boy who bore the brunt of Nelson and Laurance’s sadistic urges. When he developed kidney trouble, his two older brothers considerately reminded him that another young cousin named Winthrop had died of kidney disease.38 Abby felt protective toward her vulnerable son and once said of him, “Abuse only makes him angry and much worse, while for love and kind treatment he will do anything.” 39

  There was something ineffably sad about Winthrop’s youth. Squirming under his father’s stern rigor, he longed for escape to a less-taxing world. Easily distracted, he did poorly at Lincoln and Loomis, where he enjoyed playing practical jokes and chasing girls. A big, handsome, hulking boy—at sixteen he was six-foot-one and weighed 185 pounds—he lacked the energy and drive that came so effortlessly to his more dynamic brothers. Winthrop later admitted that as a Yale undergraduate, he had mastered only two subjects: how to smoke and how to drink. At first, he could not keep down more than three drinks without getting sick: “Unfortunately, I later got over that.”40 At Yale, he played cards and—committing one of the cardinal Rockefeller sins—began to neglect his account book. In the middle of his freshman year, Winthrop realized that his prodigality might cost him his allowance, and he negotiated a large rescue loan from Babs.

  During the 1933 summer vacation, he toiled as a roustabout in the Texas oil fields for Humble Oil, which was now owned by Jersey Standard, and he felt more at home doing manual work among these rough, simple men than he had among his Yale classmates: “That was what I had been looking for! . . . men working with their hands, producing something real. . . . I was fascinated by everything I saw—I wanted to become part of it, to do what they were doing, to prove to myself that I was as good a man as any of them.”41 If a tonic for his morale, the Texas adventure did not enhance his school performance, and he continued to favor booze and cards. At one point while Winthrop was in Texas, a New Haven publican named Curly Levine made the mistake of sending him a telegram at West Fifty-fourth Street. Junior read the message and secretly contacted Yale president James R. Angell, who informed him that Curly was mixed up with gambling and shady elements. When confronted, Winthrop broke down and confessed to his horrified parents, “Curly is a Jewish bartender in a speakeasy in New Haven where I have gotten liquor while I was at college. ” 42 In his junior year, Winthrop was expelled from college after being discovered in the shower with a young lady.

  After Yale, Winthrop resumed work for Humble Oil in the Texas fields. When he announced the news, Rockefeller, whatever his reservations, expressed pleasure at a family member being back on the Standard Oil payroll. When Winthrop visited Lakewood to tell him about Humble’s advanced production methods in Texas, the old man listened patiently, then said, “Well, brother . . . I appreciate that—but I must remind you that the important thing is the figures.”43 In his amiability, Winthrop reminded people of Rockefeller, and perhaps for that reason he was very sensitive to the contradictions of the old man’s personality: “There was always an indefinable aloofness, a detachment that I cannot describe. He was warm, human and real—his every act was an act of warmth—and yet this other quality was there.”44 The other brothers did not see this subtle discrepancy between the inner and outer man.

  For three years, Winthrop enjoyed the camaraderie of the Texas roustabouts and smoked, drank, and philandered. Winthrop was “big and broad-shouldered, like a friendly young Koala,” said one contemporary magazine writer. 45 In this schizoid existence, he worked and ate with other workers during the week and lived on seventy-five cents an hour, then dined on weekends at a country club with the company president. Winthrop welcomed his transient experience of ordinariness in Texas. As he once noted with regret, if your name is Rockefeller, “you can almost feel the prices rise when you walk into a store.”46

  Returning to New York, Winthrop trained at the Chase National Bank, worked for the Socony–Vacuum Oil Company—the former Standard Oil of New York—and served as a vice chairman of the Greater New York Fund. These jobs drew less press attention than his evening prowls through café society. As one reporter remarked, Winthrop “handled all the night life”
for the Rockefellers.47 As his drinking and womanizing crept into gossip columns, Junior scolded him, but Winthrop resented his father’s autocratic manner and attempt to perpetuate what seemed an obsolete way of life. After one quarrel, Winthrop said bitterly, “By God, if I ever have children, I’m going to talk to them, not just make an appointment to see them and then get up after five minutes to go get a haircut.”48

  In 1948, after dating actress Mary Martin, Winthrop married a voluptuous blonde named Barbara “Bobo” Sears—née Jievute Paulekiute, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. Junior and Abby boycotted the Florida wedding, and the marriage scarcely lasted the year. When Winthrop later bought a large spread, Winrock Farm, in Arkansas, Junior found one excuse after another not to visit. Much to the surprise of his family, Winthrop was elected Arkansas governor in 1966, the first Republican to manage that feat in ninety-four years.

  Like Winthrop, David was pudgy as a child but was spared the rough attention of his older brothers. Like a miniature banker, he moved with serene self-confidence and punctiliously kept his account books. Smart, docile, and cherubically round-faced, he was adored by Rockefeller, who loved to croon carols with him at The Casements. As Rockefeller told his son after one of David’s holiday visits, “He is a worthy son of worthy parents, and his grandfather dotes on him.”49 David reciprocated the affection, calling his grandfather “the least dour man I’ve ever known, constantly smiling, joking, and telling shaggy dog stories.”50 Senior once told John Yordi that David was the grandchild who most resembled him.

  As the youngest son, David was solitary, yet he compensated for this by creating a self-contained world, collecting butterflies, moths, beetles, and grasshoppers. (Eventually, he developed a world-famous trove of forty thousand beetles.) By the time he graduated from the Lincoln School, he was, like Rockefeller, outwardly genial and inwardly reserved. Steady and methodical, he experienced no scandals or crises at Harvard, graduating cum laude in 1936 after having written his senior thesis on Fabian socialism. After a postgraduate year at Harvard and another at the London School of Economics, he completed a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago. Though his thesis, “Unused Resources and Economic Waste,” dealt with issues of corporate concentration that had preoccupied his grandfather, David arrived at free-market conclusions and criticized monopolies as counterproductive. While paying tribute to Standard Oil for imposing order on an anarchic industry, he agreed with the court’s 1911 decision to break up the trust. As he later argued, “Some units [of Standard Oil] are now bigger and better than grandfather could ever have imagined even the whole company would be.”51 This preference for neoclassical economics reflected changes both in the Rockefeller family and in the American business community.

  Upon leaving Chicago, David worked for eighteen months as an unpaid secretary to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York. He had the wisdom to marry a feisty, red-blooded woman, Margaret “Peggy” McGrath, who complemented his more detached personality. She came from a comfortable but not blue-ribbon family and had little tolerance for grandiosity like Nelson’s. With a sometimes fiery temper and activist bent, she donated her time to worthwhile causes, including saving the Maine shoreline, raising cattle, and working on behalf of farmland conservation. David dedicated his career to the Chase Manhattan Bank, rising to the chairman’s post and becoming an eminent, peripatetic international banker. As he told an interviewer, he was “the first member of the family since Grandfather who has had a regular job in a company and has devoted a major part of his time to being in business.” 52

  CHAPTER 35

  See You in Heaven

  The world’s richest man never lost the thrifty boyhood habits that had made him the nonpareil of American business. One day at Ormond Beach, he was studying the blazing hearth when he turned to Michael, the butler, and asked, “How long are those sticks of wood?” Fourteen inches, Michael replied. “Do you think they would do just as well if they were cut twelve inches in length?” Michael conceded this was possible. “Then the next time the wood is being sawed have it made twelve inches in length.” 1 Since twelve inches gave sufficient light and heat at less expense, it became the new household standard. His frugality was deeply rooted. One Christmas, he was delighted when his son gave him two dozen golf balls and some fountain pens—his idea of wonderfully practical gifts.

  Rockefeller had now lived so long and grown so famous that a number of promoters sought to cash in on his fame. In 1930, Sarah S. Dennen, secretary of the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce in Brooklyn, New York, tracked down the Richford house in which the titan had been born. Wind now blew through the chinks of this tottering clapboard dwelling. She had a vision of sudden riches: She would dismantle the house and ship it to Coney Island, where an estimated five million annual paying customers would tour this new shrine of American capitalism. Cringing at the thought, Rockefeller took legal steps to stop the commercialization of his name. After Dennen had bought and dismembered the structure, Rockefeller’s lawyers marshaled state and local authorities to prevent the house from moving over public highways; the heap of numbered planks made it only as far as Binghamton.

  During the Wall Street boom of the 1920s, Rockefeller took a guilty thrill in playing the stock market, despite Junior’s reproaches. If his son was present when somebody alluded to his trading, Rockefeller, like a naughty child, would shift the subject. As the market surged, he jovially passed out dollar bills as bull-market dividends to companions. After breakfast, he often announced, “Well, I guess I’ll see what I can do to keep the wolf away from the door,” then scurried over to his office to get fresh quotes by telephone or telegraph.2 When the market either swooped or soared, a messenger tracked Rockefeller down on the golf course to deliver a folded sheet with share prices. Aside from cash, railroad securities, U.S. bonds, and Wall Street loans, Rockefeller retained most of his money in Standard Oil companies and could quote the precise number of shares he held in each of his stocks, even when they ran to five digits.

  Partial to old habits, Rockefeller continued to trade by buying each time a stock declined an eighth of a point or selling on each eighth-point rise. Having relinquished most of his money to Junior, he often borrowed up to twenty million dollars to execute these transactions and occasionally cadged loans from his son. “John,” he said to him one day, “I’ve been following the stock market carefully. I think that if I had a little money, I could use it to make some more. Do you believe you could lend me several hundred thousand dollars?” “Well father,” said Junior wryly, “do you think you are old enough to use it wisely?” 3

  The Rockefellers fared handsomely in the effervescent market of the Roaring Twenties. As the market soared, Junior more than doubled the $450 million he had received, and his assets approached the billion-dollar mark. When the market crashed in October 1929, the Rockefellers were caught by surprise. Ivy Lee convinced Junior of the publicity value of a calming statement from his father. After buying a million shares of Standard of New Jersey, Rockefeller issued a press release that had been scripted by Lee: “These are days when many are discouraged. In the ninety years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned, and will again.” In his peroration, he said, “Believing that the fundamental conditions of the country are sound, my son and I have been purchasing sound common stocks for some days.”4 When the comedian Eddie Cantor was informed that the Rockefellers had resumed buying stocks, he responded with the wisecrack, “Sure, who else had any money left?”5

  After the crash, Junior and Tom Debevoise worried about the financial health of the Equitable Trust, which had operated under Rockefeller control since 1911. They plucked Abby’s brother, Winthrop Aldrich, from the law firm of Murray, Aldrich, and Webb and placed him in charge of the Equitable. A few months later, Aldrich orchestrated a merger with Chase National, creating the world’s largest bank and one henceforth referred to as “the Rockefeller Bank”—even though the descendants of James Stillman and William Rock
efeller steered the rival National City Bank. Some years later, Aldrich also effected a merger of his old law firm with that of Bert Milbank (Junior’s old friend from the Browning School) to form the firm known today as Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, which would be closely associated with the Rockefellers.

  A poetic picture of John D. Rockefeller taken on his ninety-first birthday at Pocantico Hills, July 8, 1930. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

  Junior was dispatched to Chicago to salvage what he could from the wreckage of Edith’s business affairs—which did not endear him to Edith, who saw this as more high-handed meddling. At Junior’s behest, she moved from her Lake Shore mansion into a suite at the Drake Hotel, where she was provided with a family allowance. Then, in early 1930, she was diagnosed with cancer in her right breast and underwent a mastectomy and radiation therapy. While convalescing, she tried to stave off bankruptcy by selling her pearls and emeralds to Cartier for nearly one million dollars, begging Junior for a million-dollar loan for her real-estate business, and asking her father to buy the Villa Turicum for more than two million dollars. Having had more than enough, Rockefeller declined to advance her additional money.

  In 1932, after she developed a chronic cough, doctors found a dark spot on Edith’s lower ribs; she tried, to no avail, to cure this cancer through psychological techniques. Until the end, she promised that she would try to see her father, but these ritual assertions had become a polite fiction between them. Her children and even her ex-husband, Harold, made repeated visits to her bedside. On August 25, 1932, Edith died in her suite at the Drake Hotel. For all her unconventional ideas, Edith had never renounced the possibility that Harold would leave Ganna Walska and return; like an old-fashioned wife, she had long kept his room at 1000 Lake Shore Drive untouched, with the furniture unchanged and his clothes hanging in the closet. It was a strange clutch of pallbearers who carried her coffin to the grave: Harold, Fowler, Junior, and Edwin Krenn. When Junior tried to exclude Krenn from the funeral, Harold, in deference to Edith, overrode his objections. In her will, Edith left more money to Krenn— five-twelfths of her estate—than to any of her three children. The Rockefeller lawyers furiously battled the bequest to Krenn until he capitulated and settled for a $24,000 annuity for life. At the news of her death, James Joyce struck a belated note of forgiveness. “I’m sorry to learn of the death of Mrs. McCormick,” he told a friend. “She was very kind to me at a difficult moment and was a woman of considerable distinction.”6