Philip and his wife voted in favor of the grant. Edgar and his wife, as expected, voted against it. The pivotal vote was then Edith’s. She voted for it, and Edgar promptly did as he had threatened—and resigned from the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund.
To say that Edgar Stern, Jr., never forgave his mother for siding with his brother would be putting it a little strongly, but it was noticed that after this episode Edgar, who had always lived near her in New Orleans, more or less permanently removed himself to Aspen.
In the years following her eightieth-birthday party at Walt Disney World, Edith Stern—who had always seemed slight and frail despite her enormous energy—became increasingly ill. Like her daughter, she seemed to lose her appetite for food, even for her favorite oysters, and her weight dropped alarmingly. She had to be forced to eat, and, in the late 1970s, she entered a hospital. From far and wide the family gathered—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grand-nephews and grandnieces, her devoted sister Marion and her brother Bill. The end, it seemed, was at hand. An intravenous device was placed directly in her heart. It failed. Sadly, the doctor informed her assembled family, “There’s nothing more we can do. She might as well go home and die there.” She was carried by ambulance back to Longue Vue, where it was assumed to be only a matter of hours.
Once home, the family resumed its vigil at her bedside to bid her goodbye, while Edith surveyed their concerned and anxious faces mutely from her pillow, her hair still dyed a vibrant red—a queen saying a last farewell to her loyal court and courtiers.
Then, as though satisfied that her deathbed scene had been a success, with all the desired effects and fuss, and with the proper attendance figures, Edith began to improve. She began to eat again. She gained weight. Soon she was up and about, rummaging through the trunks of costumes she kept upstairs for fancy dress, talking about another party. The family, suspecting that she had staged her departure from this life as effectively as she had orchestrated her famous entertainments, dispersed, feeling somehow a little cheated. When the end finally came, in the late summer of 1980 when she was eighty-five, it came quietly, in her sleep. There was no need for another scene.
In New Orleans, flags flew at half-staff. At her memorial service, held in her lovely Longue Vue, the weather was oppressively hot and humid. Just before the service, the air-conditioning system broke down, and the hundreds of perspiring guests fanned themselves with paper fans. Her son Philip remarked, “If she were still around, she would have had it fixed immediately.”
“She turned New Orleans around,” one of her old friends says. “From a sleepy, corrupt little Mississippi River town, she brought it into the twentieth century.” There were other legacies—a small but elegant collection of modern art, including a Kandinsky, a Victor Vasarely, a gallery of Barbara Hepworth works, and an exquisite collection of miniature Alexander Calder mobiles. There were her two schools, her Voter Registration Service, and innumerable lesser benefactions. Not long after her death, Philip and his wife were traveling in Israel and visited the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden. There they were surprised to find a Vasarely sculpture commissioned and donated by Edith Rosenwald Stern. Philip has no idea how many other such random gifts may turn up around the world.
One of her more important presents to New Orleans was Longue Vue itself—donated to the city, along with its magnificent gardens, and accompanied by a $5,000,000 endowment to maintain it for the public. At Longue Vue, every detail of the house and its furnishings is preserved as it was when Edith lived there. It is a museum, as it were, of a certain way of life.
She once told the writer Leon Harris, “I think that one thing we children each learned from our parents was the importance of the example we set. And I don’t mean a snobbish sort of fashion … just the opposite in fact. My mother never ceased telling us with pride about the calluses she wore on her hands as a child scrubbing floors and helping to raise her sisters and brother. And after my father made so much money and they went East, where they were entertained at the feudal estates of the Schiffs and the Strauses outside New York, my mother was more than ever resolved never to become like that, never if she had a country place to have statues or anything else she considered pompous or stiff. Mother was very naïve, but she was a very great lady—very sensitive, in the good sense of being sensitive to the feelings of others and not just her own. And when she built Ravinia, she insisted that it be kept natural, using the ravines and local flowers and only tanbark and gravel roads—nothing forbidding.”
In a rare moment of modesty, she added, “We tried to set a pattern here, Edgar and I. We hoped to change the local way of life, but I think we failed.” She was referring, of course, to Mardi Gras, whose force in New Orleans has become as inexorable and immutable as the tides. Each year the flashy face of Carnival appears, puts on a wig and paper mask, dances drunkenly in the streets and scatters cheap trinkets and fake doubloons to the “poor.”
Edith had lived to see the Sears Tower in Chicago rise to become the tallest building in the world, but of course she could take no personal credit for that. Her greatest pride was being honored in her adopted city. Each year the New Orleans Times-Picayune presents a loving cup to the citizen deemed to have done the most for the city during the previous year; it is considered the highest honor the city can bestow. Edgar B. Stern won his loving cup in 1931, and Edith herself was given the annual award thirty-four years later. The two of them were the only his-and-hers recipients of the awards in the city’s history. The twin cups reposed on a mantel, side by side, in the drawing room at Longue Vue, and their images are embossed on Edith’s and Edgar’s respective headstones.
It must have amused Edith, in a grim way, when her son Edgar was invited, in a gesture of gratitude for his various civic services and philanthropies in New Orleans, to join the Carnival Krewe of Comus, and accepted the invitation. It was not the elite Krewe of Rex, to be sure, to which such Old Guard Christian families as the Williamses and LeGendres belonged; Comus was the next step down the ladder. It was not just that Edith despised Carnival, and all the cavorting and silliness and snobbery that the yearly rite of Fat Tuesday entails. It was simply that she would never have accepted anything second-best.
PART FOUR
The Queen of Gomorrah
12
1000 LAKE SHORE DRIVE
“All the Rockefellers are peculiar.” This was the sentiment expressed, in the summer of 1978, by a former Rockefeller-by-marriage, Mrs. Barbara Sears Rockefeller—born Jievute Paulekiute—the famous “Bobo.” The ex—Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller was referring specifically to such members of the family as her husband’s aunt Alta Rockefeller Prentice, who lived reclusively on a vast Massachusetts farm surrounded by a collection of ancient automobiles; to a cousin, Ethel Rockefeller, who changed her name to Geraldine, married Marcellus Huntley Dodge and shared a New Jersey estate with him, though in separate houses, and collected dogs; to William G. Rockefeller, a chronic alcoholic; even to her former brother-in-law Nelson Rockefeller, who had a curious fondness for fires and firemen, and coincidentally managed to be on the scene at the time of two major conflagrations, where he was able to put on a fireman’s helmet and help man the hoses—at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at his Governor’s Mansion in Albany. But the oddest Rockefeller of all was certainly Edith Rockefeller.
Edith was the second-oldest daughter of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the founder of the fortune. In her youth, Edith displayed few signs of becoming a future grande dame and social force. On the contrary, she was a demure, shy child, with pale hair done up in modest ringlets, gray eyes, a high forehead—not really pretty, but not bad-looking, either. Her favorite pastime was riding her bicycle, and her principal social activity was teaching a Sunday-school class. She was considered bookish. All this changed, however, on November 26, 1895, when she married Harold Fowler McCormick, the son of Cyrus Hall McCormick, Chicago’s “Reaper King.”
Edith’s older sister Alta had also married a
Chicagoan, Ezra Parmalee Prentice, but the Prentices had moved East. The new Mr. and Mrs. McCormick, however, announced that they would make Chicago their home, and moved into a huge, turreted stone mansion on Lake Michigan at 1000 Lake Shore Drive. Chicago was still a very young city, a creation of the railroad-building boom that had followed the Civil War, and just two years before Edith Rockefeller’s arrival it had made its first bid for greatness, and to be taken seriously as an important metropolis, with its World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the same Exposition that started Julius Rosenwald on the road to riches when his brother-in-law got the ice-cream concession. Chicago was proud of its muscular newness, and even of its growing reputation as a capital of vice and crime. Guidebooks were actually printed to direct out-of-towners to the local dens of sin—to one street where every building consisted of a saloon, and to a number of other areas devoted exclusively to prostitution.
Chicago boasted of being the home of the “world’s richest streetwalker,” who called herself Waterford Jack (her real name was Frances Warren) and who claimed to have worked the streets without missing a night for ten solid years until she was able to open an establishment of her own, where, after deducting her commission, she invested the earnings of her girls and helped them to become rich as well. The banks Waterford Jack used were proud to have her patronage. Down the street from Waterford Jack’s place was another celebrity in this “Gomorrah of the West,” a barkeep named Mickey Finn, whose specialty was a concoction made from raw alcohol that had been soaked in snuff, plus a secret ingredient he claimed to have obtained from a voodoo witch doctor. So powerful was his potion that, after downing it, its victims remained comatose for days, and Finn kept drugged gentlemen in stacks in his back room until they came to—usually with no recollection of what had happened to them—having been relieved meanwhile of their wallets and other valuables.
Coincidentally, the World’s Columbian Exposition also marked one of the last public functions of the great Chicago dowager Mrs. Potter Palmer, the jewel-encrusted belle of an old Kentucky family who had married one of Chicago’s richest men. Potter Palmer had started out as a dry-goods merchant, and had made himself wealthy—and popular—by initiating the uncommon practice of letting his customers take goods home from his store on approval. From laces and pinafores he had gone on into real estate, and had built the Palmer House, the city’s most luxurious hotel, which he presented to his bride as a wedding gift. For more than twenty years before Edith Rockefeller’s arrival, Bertha Palmer had been the unquestioned ruler of Chicago’s social seas. When royalty visited, a reception at Mrs. Palmer’s was a required part of the schedule. Her annual New Year’s Day party provided the only barometer in town as to who was who. Every year her guest list was scrutinized with care and some anxiety since, unlike Mrs. Astor, whose list was rigidly predictable, Bertha Palmer’s was not, and she had a way of dropping people she felt had fallen from fashion. She also ran the city’s annual Charity Ball, the principal fund-raiser for worthy causes and the “deserving” poor. Her taste in art, for its time, was avant-garde. She was among the first Americans to appreciate the Barbizon and Impressionist painters, and her collections of Monet, Degas, and Corot became the nucleus of the Chicago Institute of Art. She was also an early feminist, and at the Columbian Exposition her domain was the Woman’s Building, which she saw to it was designed by a woman architect, and which was devoted to exhibits heralding the strides of American women in science, politics, the professions, education, and the arts, as well as displays of model kitchens, nurseries, and more traditional female endeavors. After finishing her work with the Exposition, Mrs. Palmer more or less retired from the Chicago scene, and began spending more and more time at her house in Newport and in Europe. The post of Chicago’s grande dame lay open. Edith Rockefeller McCormick would step forward to fill it.
Twenty-odd years earlier, Bertha Palmer had established her social leadership by orchestrating, in Chicago, the wedding and reception of her sister Ida to Frederick Dent Grant, the son of the President of the United States. Both the President and Mrs. Grant had come out for the festivities, and were almost if not quite outshone by the beautiful hostess and her emeralds and diamonds. Edith McCormick would launch herself in Chicago in an equally dramatic fashion. The McCormicks had had, in short order, four children—John Rockefeller, Fowler, Muriel, and Mathilde—but Muriel was her mother’s clear favorite. Kindergartens and nursery schools were not common in the United States in the early 1900s—they were a European upper-crust convention—and when little Muriel McCormick reached the age of five, her mother decided to start her own school for toddlers. Edith McCormick’s kindergarten, however, was drawn along far less egalitarian lines than Edith Stern’s some two dozen years later. The McCormick classes were designed exclusively for little girls of Chicago’s upper crust, including the various McCormick relatives. (One young pupil was Felicia Gizycka, the daughter of Count Josef Gizycki and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson, a cousin by marriage.) Edith McCormick appropriated her mother-in-law’s ballroom for a classroom, hired a small staff of French teachers, and all the classes, as well as the games, were conducted in French.
Now, having established “mon lycée,” as she understandably called it, she began to make a series of spectacular public appearances. Though Edith McCormick’s collection of jewels was not as large as Mrs. Potter Palmer’s, it included certain single pieces that were considered beyond price. There was, for example, one necklace, specially assembled by Cartier, which was composed of ten large emeralds spaced along a rope of 1,657 diamonds. Another necklace was fabricated, reportedly, from the Russian crown jewels—twenty-three large pearls, twenty-one large diamonds of various sizes and shapes, plus a hundred “lesser” diamonds. One long rope of perfectly matched pearls had cost $2,000,000. Though she had taught Sunday school as a young woman, she detested hymns; she had, she said, been forced to sing them so often as a child by her pious Baptist father. But she loved opera, and selected the Chicago Opera Company for her special patronage. She would arrive at the opera in her plum-colored Rolls Royce driven by a chauffeur in a plum-colored uniform, in her jewels, and wearing her famous ermine cape composed of 275 skins which fell like a tent around her. News that Mrs. McCormick was planning to attend the opera was enough to guarantee a sold-out performance. A small woman, she was particularly proud of her little feet and slender ankles. When she was helped from her car, she was always careful to flash a glimpse of ankle, around one of which she often wore a gold bracelet—a fashion touch previously unheard of in Chicago.
The McCormick dinners at 1000 Lake Shore Drive were more like state occasions than parties. And no wonder. Mrs. McCormick demanded that menus and place cards be printed in French for every meal, including breakfast. For formal dinners, the menus and place cards were engraved in gold. Seated dinners for two hundred or more were commonplace, with a footman stationed behind every other chair. Four butlers were required to serve a simple luncheon for two. For large gatherings, guests might be served on the golden service which Napoleon had given his sister Pauline. It consisted of over a thousand pieces containing over 11,000 ounces of gold.* It was said of Edith McCormick that “she taught Chicago how to wear and to own a dress suit.” Still, for all their opulence, there was not much merriment at Edith McCormick’s parties, and at her first formal dinner in Chicago she noticed this, recalling later, “My party was not very well under way before I noticed a certain lack of spontaneity that had marked the other dinners I had attended. The gaiety seemed forced and formal.” She asked her husband why this might have been, and he told her, “My dear, don’t you realize that these red-blooded young Chicagoans are used to having their liquor? They simply must have their cocktails, their wine, their highballs and cordials.” But this was too much for Edith. She might have rebelled against her teetotaling father in hymn singing, but she would not break her girlhood pledge to him never to drink or serve alcohol in her home. Though her husband and (privately) her guests continued
to complain, evenings at the McCormicks’ remained relentlessly sober.
There was intoxication of sorts, of course, to be gained from viewing the furnishings of 1000 Lake Shore Drive itself, which Edith had assembled to recall the days of the French royal court. This was due in part to the fact that one of Edith’s odd beliefs was that she was descended from the noble de La Rochefoucauld family of France. Though the Rockefellers had originally come from Germany, Edith saw the name Rockefeller as a kind of corruption of Rochefoucauld, and occasionally signed her letters “Edith de La Rockefeller.” (Edith also believed that she was the reincarnation of the child bride of King Tutankhamun.)
Certainly the house contained many splendid things. One rug had been the gift of the Shah of Persia to the Winter Palace of the Tsars of Russia at St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great. Later, it had been presented to the Emperor of Austria in gratitude for the Austrians’ aid to Russia. When it eventually made its way to a London auction house, Edith bought it for $185,000. In the large room which Edith called the Empire Room, there were four of Napoleon’s royal chairs, two marked with the crest and initial “N” and two marked with “B” for Bonaparte. On the fourth floor of the house was a 15,000-volume library of rare books. One book alone was valued at $30,000. There was an Histoire Héliodore worth $6,000, a Pâtissier François dated 1655, and an illuminated Byzantine manuscript of the New Testament in Greek valued at $14,000. And there was much, much more. In her Aubusson-carpeted bedroom, Edith McCormick slept in an oversized gilded Louis XVI bed, and on her dressing table reposed a long gold box with the initials “M.L.” emblazoned on its top in diamonds, said to have been a gift from Napoleon to the Empress Marie Louise. The various halls and sitting rooms were filled with Buddhas from Chinese temples, tapestries from Brussels, and old English silver pieces dating back to the time of Oliver Cromwell.
The Grandes Dames Page 14