Titan

by Ron Chernow

  For all his financial savvy, Senior was democratically dragged down in the crash along with lesser mortals and saw his rump fortune of $25 million dwindle to a mere $7 million, prompting grandson Winthrop to exclaim, “For grandfather, that was being practically broke!”7 In 1932, in a passing, persnickety moment, Rockefeller told Debevoise that Junior should give him $3.5 million as an “equitable adjustment” for all the money he had spent on the Rockefeller family office during the previous ten years. Rockefeller soon retracted his request, but his momentary pique showed that he was unnerved by his thin cushion of cash.

  Junior also had unaccustomed money worries after the crash, as his net worth was slashed from almost $1 billion in 1929 to less than $500 million in 1934. The damage to his annual income was still more savage: From a peak of $56.7 million in the 1920s, it dropped to $16.5 million by the second year of the New Deal. Because he had made so many charitable pledges during the 1920s boom, his expenditures began to outpace his income by the early 1930s. Right before Roosevelt’s inauguration, Junior had to liquidate large positions in Standard of New Jersey and Indiana and borrow almost eight million dollars to meet prior commitments.

  Throughout the Roosevelt years, the Rockefellers struggled with an ideological dilemma. As longtime donors to Republican causes, they found much of the New Deal abominable and feared, like many other rich Americans, that Roosevelt was giving away the country. At the same time, they had a patrician sense of obligation toward the poor. While Hoover was still president, Senior and Junior gave two million dollars to the Emergency Unemployment Relief, a private charity. When Roosevelt became president in 1933, Rockefeller was nudged by his son into issuing a patriotic statement in praise of “the courage and progressive leadership of President Roosevelt.”8 (Setting an amusing example of austerity for the masses, he started to give out nickels instead of dimes.) In 1933, Junior even broadcast a radio appeal for the ultraliberal National Industrial Recovery Act. Yet despite the lip service paid to Roosevelt’s policies, the Rockefellers continued to prefer private charity to public-works programs. At Pocantico, Junior charted fifty miles of new carriage trails to create extra jobs and gave generously to the American Red Cross and other relief agencies. Senior quickly cooled on the New Deal, and when the Social Security Act was enacted in 1935 he was sure it would destroy America’s moral fiber.

  As Junior’s net worth tumbled after the crash, he began to feel the financial strain of Colonial Williamsburg and a new real-estate project in midtown Manhattan that was at first known as Metropolitan Square. With this last project, Junior became entangled in the sort of high-stakes maneuvering that had distinguished his father’s career but had played no part in his own. The genesis of the project dated back to 1928 when the Metropolitan Opera Company decided to abandon its old quarters and create a new opera house on a site owned by Columbia University between Forty-eighth and Fifty-first Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Flanked by the Sixth Avenue elevated train and studded with speakeasies, pawnshops, bars, and other such sleazy haunts, the area was an unlikely choice for an opulent new opera house. Otto Kahn, a Kuhn, Loeb partner and chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Company, convinced Junior that he could render a community service and turn a tidy profit (an irresistible combination for a Rockefeller) by leasing the surrounding parcels from Columbia and building a showcase setting for the opera. After Charles O. Heydt canvassed five real-estate experts, Junior, seized by an impulse and without consulting a lawyer, authorized Heydt to close the deal with Columbia for a lease that would cost more than three million dollars per year.

  The Metropolitan Opera could not fetch a high-enough price for its old building to construct a new one and suggested to Junior that he pay for half the cost of its new eight-million-dollar home. Feeling used and blackmailed, Junior turned them down, and when the Metropolitan Opera withdrew from the project, he was suddenly saddled with 229 shabby old brownstones amid the worsening economic environment. Without the opera, the development seemed to lose both its centerpiece and raison d’être, yet bills kept pouring in, and by the spring of 1930 Junior had paid out ten million dollars. Each year he was liable for another four million dollars in leases and taxes, and the rentals scarcely covered a tenth of that amount. One option was simply to scuttle the development. But Junior had always had a nagging sense of being patronized by the business community, and perhaps he now saw a chance for vindication, a chance to prove that he was really his father’s son. In his most audacious career decision, he decided that he would personally finance a new complex of office buildings and round up the corporate tenants himself. As he persevered, he endured gales of ridicule and was even mocked in a Broadway play, As Thousands Cheer, where the hapless Junior was depicted as trying to palm off Rockefeller Center as a birthday gift on his unsuspecting father.

  As might be expected, Junior suffered dreadful tension and insomnia over the midtown project. “I walk the floor nights,” he told architect Wallace Harrison, “wondering where I’m going to get the money to build these buildings.”9 A novel situation for a Rockefeller, indeed. In the spring of 1931, recognizing the telltale symptoms, doctors advised him to take a vacation with Abby in Arizona. At the Arizona Inn in Tucson, a lady sitting at a nearby table in the restaurant waved to Junior, and only later did he discover that it was Ida Tarbell. By the 1920s, her famous history of the Standard Oil Company could be found only in secondhand bookstores, and when reissued in 1925 it failed to sell.

  Returning to New York, Junior endured a debilitating case of shingles, which the doctors blamed on nervous exhaustion. He was also suffering such frequent colds that tests were performed at the Rockefeller Institute to see whether a serum could be developed from his germs that might prevent future colds. Despite his medical problems, Junior displayed a new toughness in dealing with the midtown complex. First, he had to settle the vexed question of a name to supersede the now obsolete Metropolitan Square. Like his father, Junior hesitated to employ the Rockefeller name, but a team of advisers, from Ivy Lee to son Nelson to managing agent John Todd, convinced him that “Rockefeller Center” would be the most potent marketing tool—an indication of how far the family image had advanced since the dark days of the muckrakers. To lend the complex a forward-looking image, the managers decided to create a “radio city” as its linchpin. In July 1931, after RCA, NBC, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) agreed to lease one million square feet of office space for $3 million a year, Junior broke ground on the first of fourteen projected buildings.

  Junior supervised Rockefeller Center with a command he had never shown before in any moneymaking venture. Each morning, he arrived at work by eight o’clock, a golden five-foot ruler wedged into his back pocket. Taking huge blueprints off the table, he would unroll them on the floor and crawl about, taking measurements with his ruler. Construction during the Depression had distinct advantages, most notably in lower costs for labor and building materials, and Rockefeller Center provided work for 75,000 unionized building workers.

  From the outset, Junior told John Todd that the cluster of buildings had to be architecturally distinguished and harmonious. Wallace Harrison, who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and his colleagues turned to European modernism to endow Rockefeller Center with a sleek, futuristic look. Junior’s one—and quite major—concession to contemporary taste had a canny commercial rationale behind it. Had the design of the complex been stodgy and old-fashioned, it would have undercut the Radio City marketing approach and the technologically advanced aura of the project. Ornamented with Art Deco motifs, the tapered towers of Indiana limestone, steel, glass, and masonry shot 850 feet into the air yet were spaced widely enough to create an airy sensation at plaza level. Though critics eventually labeled Rockefeller Center the world’s finest skyscraper ensemble, they almost universally carped at it at its inception.

  To lend added artistic distinction to the project, Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint a mural for the prestige spot in the RCA Building lobby. Desp
ite his left-wing politics, Abby had bought Rivera’s watercolors, exhibited his frescoes at MoMA, and invited him and his wife, Frida Kahlo, to 10 West Fifty-fourth Street. Nelson negotiated the coveted commission, and the Rockefeller Center overseers chose a suitably momentous and ostensibly noncontroversial theme: “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.”10 In the spring of 1933, Rivera began to sketch his vision of capitalist society as a diseased world of brutalized workers and scrofulous, card-playing capitalists, contrasting it with a hopeful, revolutionary world, symbolized by red flags and crowned by Lenin’s saintly visage. His wife and assistants begged him to delete the head of the Bolshevik leader, but Rivera was determined to épater les bourgeois, and the press gloated over the Rockefeller predicament. “Rivera Perpetrates Scenes of Communist Activity for R.C.A. Walls—and Rockefeller Foots the Bill,” one paper said.11 After Rivera refused to delete Lenin’s head, he was paid in full and dismissed from the job. He had told Nelson that he preferred the destruction of his piece to any tampering with it, and his mural was in fact reluctantly dismantled. “The picture was obscene and, in the judgment of Rockefeller Center, an offense to good taste,” Junior hastily explained to his father. “It was for this reason primarily that Rockefeller Center decided to destroy it.”12

  With the completion of the RCA Building in 1933, Junior moved the Rockefeller family offices from 26 Broadway to the fifty-sixth floor of the new skyscraper. Henceforth, room 5600 would be the seat of the Rockefeller empire, with several hundred employees. Nelson, who was still in his twenties, got a real-estate license and soon became a frenetic salesman for empty office space at Rockefeller Center. To woo tenants, he offered attractive rents and agreed to assume their old leases. Several companies in the Rockefeller fold—including Standard Oil of New Jersey, Socony–Vacuum, Standard Oil of California, and Chase National Bank—took space in the new midtown complex. In 1938, the first year it turned a profit, Nelson was named president of Rockefeller Center. By the time Junior hammered in the last of some ten million rivets in 1939, he had transformed the project from the butt of malicious jokes into one of the Depression’s outstanding business triumphs.

  Even as his son created one city in midtown Manhattan and re-created another in Williamsburg, Virginia, Rockefeller remained curiously indifferent toward the urban complex that would so lastingly perpetuate his name. Amazingly enough, he probably never set foot in Rockefeller Center. “He wasn’t interested in things of that sort,” said Junior, “and I don’t think we ever discussed Williamsburg and seldom discussed Rockefeller Center. . . . He was broad-minded and tolerant but this kind of thing didn’t enter his life. He might conceivably have asked about questions of financing or labor troubles at Rockefeller Center or Williamsburg, but that would be the only type of question that he would be interested in.”13 Senior might have followed its progress more closely than Junior realized, for Nelson remembered him waking from a nap, motioning him over to his Morris chair, and firing penetrating, detailed questions about the midtown project. Nevertheless, absorbed with his own creations, Rockefeller tended to screen out his son’s accomplishments and overlook what he himself had not initiated. For all that, Junior remained slavishly devoted to his father. A wire that he sent on the eve of a visit seems to sum up this reverence: “Am not coming because I think you need me but because I know I need you.”14

  In his nineties, Rockefeller radiated the cheer of an elder statesman. The spindly little man weighed less than one hundred pounds and looked as if he had been shrunk by a witch doctor. He was scarcely affected by the recrudescence of Rockefeller-baiting books that appeared in the left-wing atmosphere of the Depression. In such polemics as The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson, critics returned to the view popularized by Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell that Rockefeller had been the greatest corporate brigand of his day and owed his success to his ruthlessness and dishonesty, not to his business acumen. Yet this resurgence of old resentments was short-lived. The surge of patriotic feeling that accompanied World War II led to a renewed appreciation of the iron men of American industry who had bequeathed such military might to the country—a view very much in evidence in the authorized two-volume biography of Rockefeller that was published by Columbia University historian Allan Nevins in 1940 and in revised form in 1953. Rockefeller was always either lionized or vandalized according to the temper of the times.

  Still vigorous, Rockefeller could send a golf ball sailing 165 yards down the fairway. In 1930, he marched through six holes in twenty-five shots. Then, his strength began to wane, and he gradually had to curtail his game. With typical precision, he reduced his number of daily holes from six to four to two; after contracting a severe cold in 1932, he had to abandon golf altogether. The ninety-three-year-old Rockefeller bounced back from this ill health with renewed good humor. One paper reported, “He was so delighted to be out in the warm sunshine again that once he stopped and sang a hymn as he gazed with twinkling eyes at the myriad of brilliant flowers and shrubs.” 15 He reiterated his wish to live to one hundred, viewing it as God’s final verdict on his life. “Many folks believe I’ve done much harm in the world,” he told Ormond Beach’s mayor, George N. Rigby, “but on the other hand I’ve tried to do what good I could and I really would like to live to be a hundred.”16 As Rigby described it, Rockefeller grew even more detached from material things as he approached the end of life:

  I recall one day we were sitting on his front porch at Ormond watching a most elaborate yacht winding its way down the Halifax River toward Palm Beach. He expressed his wonder at the possible pleasure a man could get out of such show and pretension. Then, after a moment or two, the whole expression of his face changed and he asked enthusiastically, “Wasn’t that a beautiful rain we had last night?”17

  Rockefeller’s improbable love affair with the movie camera flourished. In 1930, he was invited to attend festivities in Cleveland to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Standard Oil of Ohio. Too frail to go, he agreed to shoot a newsreel that would be shown at the celebration. Sitting on his sunlit porch as the cameras rolled, Rockefeller delivered a congratulatory message in a thin voice. “And the gesture of his removing his glasses when he finished reading and turned to regard me where I stood behind the camera revealed a natural actor,” said his handpicked cameraman, Curt Engelbrecht. Two weeks later, when a Standard of Ohio executive flew down to Ormond Beach, Rockefeller was shot playing golf and greeting the executive as his plane alighted on the green. Showing surprising spunk, the ninety-one-year-old Rockefeller boarded the airplane and was eager to fly off, cameras rolling, when his vigilant valet, John Yordi, called off the flight as subjecting him to too much excitement. In a compromise, the monoplane taxied up and down the runway, with Rockefeller inside waving to the cameras. “You make me feel like a movie actor,” Rockefeller told Engelbrecht.

  Though free of self-pity, Rockefeller often seemed forlorn in the 1930s. Too proud to plead for visits from descendants, he dropped hints and tactful suggestions that he would like to see them more, but this did not seem to work. He craved some human warmth that he never fully got from his own family or perhaps had never really allowed to flower. Engelbrecht noted Rockefeller’s strange fascination with a little girl named Lucille, who was the daughter of his chauffeur, Vincent Frasca.

  She somehow filled a tremendous gap for him, and it may be safely asserted that he demonstrated an affection for her that he was never known to manifest for one of his own blood. Never a day passed but she paid a visit to him or he came looking for her. In her presence everything else was forgotten. She was a charm for him. He talked with her and told her stories. His face brightened to her responses, and his eyes warmed in his glances in her direction. 18

  As the Depression progressed, Junior found himself in the same uncomfortable position that his father had been in a generation before: His children were restive and wanted him to make some final disposition of his money. It infuriated
them that they were now married grown-ups still living on allowances who had to go hat in hand to father for a new car or trip abroad. In May 1933, Junior heard the first murmurs of outright rebellion when his children complained in a collective letter that too much of their time with him was taken up with money squabbles that jeopardized family relations, and they petitioned him for larger allowances. To mollify his mutinous offspring, Junior gave his three oldest children—Babs, John III, and Nelson—200,000 shares of Socony– Vacuum apiece, providing each with about $3.2 million.

  The following year, Congress sharply boosted tax schedules. Rates jumped for the top income bracket from 55 to 63 percent, while the estate tax soared from 45 to 60 percent for estates valued beyond $50 million and the gift tax rose from 33 to 45 percent for sums beyond $10 million. Junior decided to set up trusts for his wife and children before the steeper gift tax took effect at year’s end. To safeguard this money, which would be managed by the trust department of the Chase National Bank, he stipulated that the children could draw income, but that principal withdrawals had to be approved by trustees. (Junior made an invidious exception for Abby and Babs, who could not touch principal under any circumstances.) Since the trustees included such intimates of Junior as Raymond Fosdick, Tom Debevoise, and Winthrop Aldrich, he did not forfeit total control. The largest single trust went to Abby, who received $18.3 million and the full freedom to purchase modern art with her income. Babs, John III, and Nelson got $12 million apiece and Laurance, Winthrop, and David smaller amounts. The following year, Junior added money to these last three accounts to equalize the trusts.