My parents disapproved of such opulent displays, especially because of the liquor that was in abundant supply even during Prohibition. Many rumors circulated about the high society of Bar Harbor; it was even whispered that Mr. Kent kept a mistress! Of course, I was too young for most of this and heard about it primarily from my brothers.
Father spent much of his time during the summers riding horses and driving carriages along the fifty-five miles of carriage roads he had built on land he owned as well as within Acadia National Park. They were marvels of engineering and meticulous planning, and provided spectacular views of the ocean, mountains, lakes, and forests.
Father didn’t like sailing and rarely ventured out on the water. He preferred outdoor activities on the ground: horseback riding, carriage driving, and long walks through the woods. This was a great disappointment to Mother who had been raised on Narragansett Bay among a family of sailors. Eventually Father bought a beautiful thirty-six-foot racing sloop, an “R” boat named the Jack Tar, undoubtedly as a concession to my older brothers. Being the youngest, I didn’t get much sailing time on it, although when I was seventeen, a friend and I sailed one hundred miles east to Saint Andrews in New Brunswick across the treacherous waters of Passamaquoddy Bay. Jack Tar had no engine, so Captain Oscar Bulger, who worked for the family for many years, followed along in his lobster boat in case two very inexperienced sailors got into real trouble.
I have always loved Maine, but I now realize that I felt a certain sense of isolation during my summers there. There was a large household of servants, tutors, and governesses, but because everything was available at the Eyrie, I never took tennis lessons at the club or went to a sailing class at the Northeast Harbor Yacht Club with other children. I never became part of a group as most children did whose parents summered at Seal Harbor. At the time I am not sure I realized what I was missing. I liked the series of French tutors whom Father had selected to be our companions, and they did their best to keep me entertained, but they were hardly substitutes for the companionship of children my own age.
I do fondly remember my nurses—governesses, really—who took me under their protective wings. My first was Atta Albertson—for some reason I called her “Babe”—who was with me until I was ten years old. She had served as a nurse with the U.S. Army in the Philippines during World War I, and I remember hearing about the delectable qualities of mangoes for the first time from her. Many years later on my first trip to Asia I tried them, and they have become my favorite fruit. After Babe came Florence Scales, whom I called “Puss”; one of the kindest, sweetest ladies imaginable, she would read to me as I worked on my beetle collection.
My sister’s companion, Regina DeParmant, a Russian aristocrat whose family had fled the Revolution, was beautiful with dark hair and eyes; she spoke exquisite French but could barely get by in English. She was very kind and would often play a board game with me called Peggaty, at which I was very good, or thought I was, because she would usually let me win.
SIX DIFFERENT PERSONALITIES
My siblings viewed me as being far too young to be worth playing with. The eldest, my sister Abby, whom we called Babs, was twelve years older than me. When I was a young child, she was already a debutante, out every night until early morning; once or twice I remember her getting home as I was strapping on my roller skates and heading off for school. John, two and a half years younger than Babs, was next in line and already in long pants—literally; we all wore knickerbockers and long socks until well into our teens—so I also considered him almost part of the adult world. Nelson and Laurance were also quite a bit older, seven and five years, respectively, and Win, the closest to me in age, was my senior by three years.
It’s interesting how very different siblings can be despite the similarities of their upbringing and genetic inheritance. The two oldest, Babs and John, bore the brunt of Father’s own severe upbringing and personal rigidity.
From my earliest memory Babs had already entered her rebellious phase, which in one way or another lasted most of her life. Father clearly wanted his first child to be a devout Christian woman and to do things he felt a well-brought-up lady should do. He truly adored Babs, but in his eagerness to have her become a paragon of modesty and charity, he badgered her constantly with lectures on good behavior and the obligations of wealth. Babs would have none of it. If Father wanted her to do something, she would refuse or do the opposite. For instance, Father strongly disapproved of alcohol and tobacco, and offered each of us $2,500 if we didn’t smoke before the age of twenty-one, and another $2,500 if we made it all the way to twenty-five. This was not an insignificant sum, either, considering the size of the allowances we received. I don’t think Babs even tried. She smoked as ostentatiously as possible in front of our parents.
Babs was most adamant in her refusal to give money to charity. Grandfather and Father expected all of us to follow their example and encouraged us to contribute 10 percent of our allowances to church and other charitable causes. In the beginning these were very small amounts—only a few dollars a month—but Father saw this practice as an essential part of our moral and civic education. Babs refused to give a cent, as a way of showing her independence. She suffered for it financially because Father was less generous to her than he was to his five sons.
The rebellion was not a happy one on either side. Father was distressed by her behavior and hurt by her animosity toward him. For Babs, life just became more and more difficult. One episode when she was in her early twenties had a lasting impact on her life. She was ticketed for speeding in her Stutz convertible and was terrified at what Father might say when he found out about it. Her fiancé, Dave Milton, was an attorney and tried to get the ticket “fixed” through a judge he knew. The press picked this up, and the story appeared on the front page of the tabloids for several days. My parents were upset, but my sister even more so. In the end, seeing her real distress, Father was understanding of her plight and did not react as she had feared. But from that day forward she was terrified of public notoriety. She retreated into herself and ceased being the gay, fun-loving party-goer she had been.
Babs was intelligent, capable, and beautiful, but after that event life never seemed to work for her. She loved to travel, but the most trivial inconveniences or delays overwhelmed her; she was upset if the bathwater wasn’t the right temperature or if meals weren’t served precisely on time or if she had not brought just the right clothes for the weather or a dinner party. As a result she could think of nothing else and viewed all her trips as failures. It was as if her rebellion had been turned inward, where the struggle would continue, forever unresolved.
When I was ten and Babs twenty-two, she married Dave Milton. His family had been friends of our family both in Seal Harbor and in Pocantico. At first she saw marriage as a way to escape from Father, and while she attended major family events and kept in touch with Mother, she lived a very separate life.
John, of course, had the name. He was John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the eldest son and the heir apparent. Of all the children, John was the most like Father in personality; he was hardworking and conscientious, and had a strong sense of duty. But Father’s standards were so high and exacting that John could never hope to win any final or complete approval from him. Every achievement or success was taken for granted—that’s how a Rockefeller should behave, after all—and, furthermore, one should be careful not to get a swelled head about it and think you’re superior. Since perfection was the norm, all John could do was fail. Though probably not articulated in words, Father’s response always made him feel he should be able to do better.
It’s not surprising that John had a “nervous disposition.” He was extremely shy and awkward in social situations, so self-conscious that he would agonize for days over things he had said or thoughts he was thinking. He was, like Father, something of a hypochondriac, always concerned about his health and plagued throughout his childhood by a series of allergies and illnesses, though none of them was serious. Pe
rhaps because he was so much like Father, John was destined to have, apart from Babs, the greatest conflict with him, but that would not come out in the open for a number of years.
John and Abby took opposite approaches in dealing with Father. Abby rebelled and tried to be in every way as different as possible; John, especially in his youth, tried to please Father, to be everything he could ask for, to be as good, dutiful, and giving as Father wanted him to be. In some ways it was just as futile. While at Princeton, John asked Father if he could bring a car down for use during prom week. Father acceded to his wish but expressed deep disapproval. Characteristically, Father elevated what was a simple and almost classic request from a son to his father—to use the family car—into an opportunity to teach a moral lesson. He said that in his own college days he had not had a horse because he did not want to be different from the other boys, and he stressed the valuable “democratic” role John would play by “getting along without a car when others were having them.” John wrote back that he felt there was a limit to the sacrifice Rockefellers ought to feel it their duty to make to promote the democratic spirit. It was as close to sarcasm as John ever allowed himself to get, and in fact he ended the letter with an apology.
It can’t have been easy for John, either, to have Nelson always nipping at his heels. Nelson was the first in my generation to test successfully the limits of Father’s precepts on the proper way to raise children.
The contrast between John and Nelson was dramatic. Where John was painfully shy and self-conscious, Nelson was sociable and outgoing and loved to be the center of attention. The duties and obligations that weighed John down seemed to roll off Nelson easily. It was as if Nelson had looked at Babs and John and decided he wasn’t going to make either of their mistakes in his relations with Father—there would be no futile rebellion and no slavish subordination to the Rockefeller image. If he broke the rules, as Babs did, it wouldn’t be done ostentatiously to anger Father but to have fun, get away with it, or secure some important result. If, like John, he was setting out to please Father, it was to achieve a clear and calculated objective—to get what he wanted—and he often succeeded.
Nelson was named for Mother’s father, Senator Nelson Aldrich. But even though Nelson admired both grandfathers, he thought it significant that he had been born on Grandfather Rockefeller’s birthday. He let one infer from this coincidence that he was the true Rockefeller standard-bearer. Yet his own career more closely paralleled that of Grandfather Aldrich, the career politician. In any case, Nelson was politically astute, even wily, within the family. He was a natural leader and radiated self-confidence. The burdens of duty, as defined by Father, did not weigh him down, and he seemed to relish being a member of a prominent family. He was also the mischievous one in the family; he surreptitiously shot rubber bands at the rest of us during our morning prayers and was not the slightest bit concerned when Father reprimanded him.
I idolized Nelson. In a household full of duties and constraints, Nelson knew how to have fun and acted as if the constraints were only minor obstacles that could be easily avoided. Most of the time he miraculously escaped serious discipline, and even the punishments that were meted out to him never really seemed to stick, because Mother enjoyed his liveliness and independence and, perhaps, in the secret and subtle ways that mothers can, encouraged his jaunty misbehavior. On the rare occasions when he took notice of my existence and asked me to join one of his adventures, my life was immediately transformed into something larger, better, and more exciting.
Laurance—the unusual spelling is because he was named after our grandmother Laura—was the philosopher and the creative one. Quiet like John and a bit detached, he was less shy and more venturesome. When he was at Princeton and roomed with a rather fast crowd, he told me that he believed in trying anything once. He was quick and witty, but not an especially good student. His natural charm and whimsical manner made him very attractive to girls, to whom he warmly responded. As a young man, however, he searched endlessly for the right road to follow in life. Later on he became a highly successful venture capitalist as well as a conservationist. His interest in unconventional ideas never diminished.
Nelson and Laurance formed an inseparable team, and they remained uniquely close within the family throughout their adult lives. Nelson, as the more aggressive and outgoing of the two, was invariably the ringleader in their exploits, but Laurance, in his more quiet and engaging way, would keep his end up. Zane Grey’s western novels were their favorites, and they emulated characters from these stories in their behavior. As a result Nelson took to calling Laurance “Bill,” because that sounded more Wild West than Laurance, and he continued calling him that until the day he died.
Even as a young boy Laurance showed evidence of his later financial acumen. He and Nelson bought several pairs of rabbits from the Rockefeller Institute, bred them at Pocantico, and then sold back the offspring for a handsome profit. A few years later the two of them, with some help from John, built a log cabin as their secret hiding place in the woods near Mother’s garden in Maine. It was built with logs from trees they chopped down and dragged to the site with a pony. It was quite skillfully done, though I only saw the cabin as an adult because they had strictly forbidden Win and me from going anywhere near it, and I was sufficiently intimidated by their warning that I never attempted to find it until years later.
Winthrop faced an unusually difficult situation within the family. Nelson and Laurance were a club to which he wasn’t invited. I, three years his junior, was a club he didn’t want to join. He was teased unmercifully by them and gave me full measure of the grief they inflicted on him. Win did not have a particularly happy childhood. He was, as was I, somewhat overweight and awkward, and received a great deal of ridicule from Nelson and Laurance, who gave him the nickname Pudgy. Once Nelson coaxed Win onto a seesaw, and when he was high in the air, jumped off, sending poor Win crashing to the ground. Win picked up a pitchfork and chased Nelson, fully intending, I’m sure, to skewer him if Father hadn’t intervened.
Later in life, after Win had been governor of Arkansas for two terms and was suffering from chronic alcoholism, Nelson made some gestures of support, but Win saw them as halfhearted and very belated. Win was deeply embittered about the condescending treatment he felt he had always received from Nelson.
As the youngest I received the special attention of my Mother, but there were fewer compensations for Win. Win had exceptional natural qualities of leadership, which he demonstrated during his distinguished military service in the war and later during his political career in Arkansas. But he was never comfortable with his social and intellectual peers. He spent much of his time with fair-weather friends, who looked up to him because of his money and position. He hated school and was actually somewhat relieved when he was expelled from Yale during his junior year. Win was restless, iconoclastic, and full of energy. I think he desperately craved Father’s approval, but his academic failures and undisciplined comportment with friends of whom my parents did not approve meant that Father rarely granted him the acceptance and approval he sought.
As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual, even exceptional family, but the effect was different on each of us. For some it was a burden, for others an opportunity. Mother and Father cared for each of us deeply, wanted the best for us, and tried to show us, each in his or her own way, the kind of life they thought would be most fulfilling. Mother was a remarkable woman whose elegant style and gracious behavior affected everyone, especially her children, in a positive way. Father was a more austere and certainly a more awesome figure. However, much of what I learned about myself and my family’s traditions came as a result of his efforts to expose me to the special travails associated with the Rockefeller name and the realities of the world I would inevitably inherit. His accomplishments were an inspiration to me.
CHAPTER 4
TRAVELS
Father, busy as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller
Institute, as well as many other activities, was a somewhat remote figure to me and my siblings. Virtually the only opportunity we had to see his less formal side was on the many memorable trips we took with him during our childhood years. These early trips, as much as my formal education, helped develop the interests I would pursue and the man I would become.
The trips—four of which I will allude to here—were not typical family vacations. We traveled from the down-at-the-heels town of Williamsburg in Virginia to the towering Grand Tetons in Wyoming and from the resplendent palace of the Sun King at Versailles to the banks of the upper Nile in Nubia. They were extraordinary adventures, which gave me an insight into the values that motivated Father to make philanthropic gifts, not always as part of a grand design but spontaneously, because there were opportunities to do things that needed to be done. These trips also planted the seeds of my own later passion for travel and international affairs.
LIFE SAVERS AND HERSHEY BARS
Father understood that children become restless, especially on long automobile trips, and invariably brought along Life Savers, Hershey bars, and other goodies, which he doled out at appropriate moments along the way. He also used the trips as a means of teaching us how to travel. He showed us that by packing a bag neatly we could fit in more clothes than if we simply threw them in a jumble. He taught us to fold suit jackets so that they would not be rumpled when we took them out of the bag. He assigned each of us jobs, such as seeing that the luggage was distributed to the proper rooms when we arrived at a hotel and tipping the baggage carriers, the doormen, and others who helped us along the way. The older children handled paying the hotel bills.
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