Despite its difficult beginnings, Rockefeller Center became a universally acclaimed real estate property. The clean, bold thrust of its modernist lines and the Art Deco motif, plus its underground shopping malls, open plazas, and rooftop gardens, gave it a simple beauty, elegance, and imaginative quality that silenced even its harshest critics.
More than an architectural success, Rockefeller Center became a city planning paradigm known for maintaining the highest standards of security and cleanliness while promoting its creative design and aesthetic appeal. In many ways it is better known and more respected as a model of urban design today than it was in the decade after it was built.
HELD HOSTAGE BY A LEASE
While Rockefeller Center was a success aesthetically and architecturally, its financial viability remained uncertain for many years. The biggest problem, at least once the Depression eased and a measure of normality returned to the nation’s economic life, was the Columbia lease. Stated simply, while Father, and later my brothers and I, owned the buildings, the university owned the land. The lease provided Columbia with an unusual amount of control over a broad range of routine business activities—for example, the types of businesses that could locate in the Center and the amount of rent that could be charged. Most important, the lease prohibited Father from selling any or all of the buildings, offering outside investors a participation in the ownership, or assigning the lease itself to any other individual or corporation without Columbia’s prior agreement. Father tried to get the lease restrictions modified, but the university routinely refused his requests. Essentially, the lease held Father hostage and the next generation of the family as well. The original lease ran for twenty-four years, until 1952, with three option periods of twenty-one years each, potentially a full term of slightly less than one hundred years. However, the specific terms of the lease as well as its dollar amount were renegotiable each time it was up for renewal.
The greatest financial burden to the family was the obligation to pay the rent regardless of tenant income. The greatest financial threat to the family was Father’s personal guarantee of the lease, an obligation that passed on to my brothers and me when we bought the equity shares of the Center after World War II. In addition there were several onerous covenants. One required Father to maintain an escrow fund equal to three years of lease payments that had to be invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds, which carried a very low interest rate. Another restricted the payment of dividends until all the original debt on the Center had been paid off, an event that did not occur until 1970.
What all this meant was that during Rockefeller Center’s first five decades the family received virtually no return on the investment despite the fact that my father had poured his heart and soul—and a good portion of his fortune—into the project.
A CONTROVERSIAL MURAL
An interesting subplot to Rockefeller Center’s early history concerns the mural commissioned for the entrance lobby of the RCA Building. As part of the plan to make the Center aesthetically pleasing, a number of artists received commissions to decorate the buildings and the open spaces. Paul Manship’s golden Prometheus, which still gazes silently over the sunken plaza, was one of these works and has become a hallmark of the Center. Father was less fortunate with another selection.
In the late 1920s my mother had come to admire the work of Diego Rivera, an extremely talented Mexican painter and muralist who had studied in Paris before and during World War I and became part of Matisse’s artistic circle. Like many artists of his generation, Rivera was left-wing in his political orientation and was even a member of the Mexican Communist Party for a time.
Alfred Barr, the young director of the Museum of Modern Art, brought Rivera to Mother’s attention. Barr and Rivera had lived for a short time in the same rooming house in Moscow in 1928, and Barr was impressed by the Mexican’s talent and personality. When Barr proposed that MoMA give Rivera a one-man show in 1931, both Mother and Nelson were enthusiastic. Mother commissioned a painting from him and also bought a number of the watercolors he had done in Moscow in 1927. With this money Rivera was able to visit New York for the first time.
Mother and Nelson came to know Rivera well, and he was a frequent visitor in my parents’ home, where I met him on several occasions. He was a very imposing and charismatic figure, quite tall and weighing three hundred pounds. He spoke very little English but perfect French in addition to Spanish. On one or two occasions he brought his wife, Frida Kahlo, with him. Frida was a fascinating and exotic young woman whose artistic talents were comparable to her husband’s. Today her works command prices in the New York auction market that are even higher than those paid for Diego’s.
The MoMA show in December 1931 firmly established Rivera’s reputation in the United States. And when the time came to commission a mural for the front lobby of the RCA Building, which was just being completed, Mother and Nelson argued strongly in favor of giving it to Rivera. He submitted a sketch for consideration, and after much discussion among the architects and managing agents about Rivera’s reliability, it was approved. On the basis of this sketch a contract was drawn and signed by all parties, and Rivera agreed to a payment of $21,500 for a project that he estimated would take about three months to complete.
Rivera arrived in New York in early 1933 to start work on the fresco after a very difficult experience at the Detroit Institute of Art, where his just-completed murals were attacked as anti-Christian and anti-American by many, including Father Charles Coughlin, the famous “radio priest.”
It would appear that Rivera decided to use the Rockefeller Center mural to make a strong political statement. Mankind at the Crossroads, as Rivera titled the work, was filled with contrasting images drawn from the Marxist canon: class conflict, oppression, and war as the theme on the “capitalist” side of the fresco; peace, cooperation, and human solidarity on the “communist” side. The solution to these conflicts, at least in Rivera’s view, would come from the application of science and technology for the benefit of all. He filled the fresco with microscopes, telescopes, movie screens, and gigantic gears and levers to underline his point. When the mural was almost finished, he added a prominent and quite unmistakable portrait of Lenin joining hands with workers from around the world. This idyllic and somewhat fanciful grouping was balanced by a deftly done scene on the “capitalist” side of well-dressed men and women dancing, playing cards, and drinking martinis, all positioned under a microscope examining a slide filled with viruses of “social” diseases. The backdrop for this was a scene of policemen beating workers while Catholic priests and Protestant ministers looked on approvingly.
It was quite brilliantly executed but not appropriate for the lobby of the RCA Building. Nelson tried to persuade Rivera to eliminate, at the very least, the portrait of Lenin. But the artist refused to change anything, saying that rather than mutilate his great work he would have the whole mural destroyed! Nelson pointed out that he had not been commissioned to paint communist propaganda and that, based on the original, much less provocative sketch, there was no reason to accept the work as finally executed. In the end, when no compromise could be reached, Rivera was paid in full and dismissed. An attempt was made to remove and preserve the fresco, but it proved impossible, and this work of art had to be destroyed.
In the late 1930s, Rivera reproduced the mural, with more than a few embellishments, including a portrait of Father drinking a martini with a group of “painted ladies.” This mural is prominently located on the central staircase of the Palacio de Belles Artes in Mexico City. In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Rivera’s mural, there were expressions of outrage from the arts community in New York, Mexico, and elsewhere. They accused the family of committing a sacrilege against art and of violating Rivera’s freedom of expression. In the view of artists and liberal thinkers more generally, the fact that the artist was guilty of deceit, meanness, and publicly insulting a family that had befriended him and helped promote his career seemed not to matter.
*
BICYCLING THROUGH BRITAIN
While I was aware of Father’s worries about Rockefeller Center, as a teenager I had other interests and concerns. I graduated from the Lincoln School in June 1932, and as a graduation present I set off on a bicycle trip in the British Isles with a school friend, Winston Garth, and a French theological student and tutor, Oswald Gockler. The trip was inspired by tales Father had recounted to me of a similar trip he had taken in England when he was about the same age.
We sailed tourist class on a Cunard liner to Southampton and then went by train to London. We had no sooner arrived at our hotel than the telephone rang and a very English voice announced that she was the Marchioness of Crewe, that she and her husband, the Marquis, had just returned from New York where they had taken part with my parents in the dedication of the British Empire Building in Rockefeller Center. My parents had told them of our proposed bicycle trip, and she was calling to say that on that very evening the Duke of York—who later became King George VI—was giving a dinner dance at Saint James’s Palace and that I was invited to attend with her. The event was in honor of his brother, the Prince of Wales—who would, of course, succeed to the throne within a few years as King Edward VIII and then abdicate—and other members of the Royal Family. Dinner would be at 8:30, white tie and tails. I should pick her up at 8:00.
I was stunned and nervously replied that I had no evening clothes with me and could not possibly attend, to which the Marchioness replied with authority that this was a royal invitation I could not refuse. I mumbled something to the effect that I would see what I could do and hung up, looking petrified at my friend Win who had not been invited.
Fortunately, my aunt Lucy was in town, so I called her in desperation. She said it was a great opportunity and that I should go. I should call the concierge about renting evening clothes and get the hotel to order a Daimler with a liveried chauffeur in which to fetch Lady Crewe. My day was ruined, but I followed instructions and arrived on time to pick up the Marchioness, only to find when I appeared at Crewe House, her grand mansion in Mayfair, that I was to ride with her in her Rolls-Royce. My Daimler could follow.
Saint James’s Palace is a sixteenth-century stone structure at the end of St. James’s Street, facing out on Green Park and Pall Mall. For centuries it has served as the residence of senior members of the Royal Family. On our arrival we were greeted by Coldstream Guards standing rigidly erect with their red jackets and high beaver shakos, an imposing beginning for the evening.
We entered the palace and proceeded down long corridors paneled in dark wood. Kings and queens from the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties peered down at us from the walls as we walked slowly toward the great drawing room to be presented together.
I was received with great courtesy by the Duke and Duchess of York, who made a real effort to make me feel comfortable. But small talk with a seventeen-year-old American boy did not come easily for them, and the conversation was difficult for me. Lady Crewe introduced me to the other “royals” present that night and to a bewildering variety of dukes, earls, and countesses. The only other American present was Lady Nancy Astor, the wife of Lord Waldorf Astor and herself a viscountess. Lady Astor, the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons, was a formidable intellectual who presided over the somewhat notorious Cliveden Set, which would later be accused of pro-German sympathies. She, too, did her best to put me at ease, but after a few embarrassing pauses, Lady Crewe whisked me off to meet her brother, Lord Rosebery, whose father had been prime minister in the 1890s.
Before I left—alone in my rented Daimler—Lord Rosebery invited my two friends and me to spend a night with him in his castle in the north of England. Our visit gave me my first exposure to the formalities of an English country estate with its hierarchy of servants headed by an all-powerful Jeeves-like butler who unpacked our saddlebags filled with dirty clothes as if we were British royalty.
The bicycle trip was a great adventure and quite unlike my brief and unexpected introduction to the Royal Family. We covered a considerable part of Britain, from Cornwall in the southwest to the Highlands of northern Scotland, stopping mostly in small inns along the way. We interspersed a few days of bicycle riding with train rides to the next area we wanted to visit. In those days this was easy to do since trains were run very informally. One bought a ticket for a seat and another for the bicycle. When the train pulled into the station, one simply put the bicycle in the baggage car and found a seat in a passenger car. There was no red tape, and no one ever thought of the possibility of the bicycle’s being stolen.
We had no letters of introduction and relied on our guidebooks for modestly priced places to stay. In Scotland, however, we visited our Lincoln School classmate Donald Barrow, whose father managed Skibo Castle, Andrew Carnegie’s estate near the northern tip of Scotland. Our hostess was Mrs. Carnegie, a friend of my parents and the widow of the great industrialist and philanthropist who had been a friend of my grandfather’s.
Altogether we bicycled some six hundred miles and covered a good deal more ground by train. It was a wonderful learning experience—far away from Rockefeller Center and Father’s troubles—and left me with a lasting affection for the United Kingdom and fit and ready for my freshman year at Harvard.
*Among the architects was the young Wallace K. Harrison, and the principal builder, the man who really built Rockefeller Center, was John R. Todd, grandfather of Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey.
*In a project filled with ironies, this was a rather intriguing one. Father disapproved of mass popular entertainment. A few years earlier there had been a bit of a family crisis over whether or not to buy a radio. Father was adamantly opposed but eventually agreed to buy one on the conditions that the instrument would be played quietly and would not be placed in the main sitting room of the 54th Street house.
*Perhaps Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the last word on this controversy. He noted at a dinner in Washington soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union that it was a shame the mural had been destroyed because the almost complete eradication of monuments to Communist leaders throughout the Soviet Union and the old Eastern Bloc might have left it the only remaining image of Lenin anywhere in the world!
CHAPTER 6
HARVARD
Mother strongly influenced my choice of colleges. Father had deliberately avoided stating a preference to any of his sons, believing the choice should be ours alone and refusing to influence our decisions in any way. The result was that, somewhat to his disappointment, none of us attended his alma mater, Brown. Mother, on the other hand, wanted one of us to go to Harvard. Her favorite brother, Winthrop Aldrich, was a Harvard man, and she hoped one of us would follow in his footsteps. My brothers had attended other colleges, so I was her last hope, and although she put no overt pressure on me, her quiet persuasion influenced me greatly.
Although I entered college at seventeen, this was not due to academic brilliance. I entered first grade at Lincoln when I was five—a year earlier than most—because all my brothers were in school and I didn’t like being left alone at home. Lincoln’s strong focus on individual development allowed me to keep up with my class, and I graduated at the age of sixteen. What Lincoln had not taught me was disciplined work habits, and it had done a poor job of teaching me reading, spelling, and grammar, although my dyslexia certainly played a role in that also. This made my first year at Harvard a bit of a grind, but I did manage to attain a B average by diligently applying myself to my studies. Academically, the year was not a serious problem for me.
SOCIALLY AWKWARD
It was socially that I felt like a misfit. I was not only a year younger than most of my classmates, but I had grown up in a protected environment and was unsophisticated and ill at ease with my contemporaries. My brothers had largely ignored me, so most of my social interaction had been with adults. In fact, I was far more comfortable talking with public figures or famous artists than I was with people of my own age.
I entered Harvard with eleven hundred other men, of whom only two had been classmates at Lincoln, and neither was a close friend. I lived in a single room on the fourth floor of Thayer Hall, the oldest freshman dormitory in Harvard Yard, and took my meals in the Union, located across Plimpton Street from the Widener Library. Wandering around the yard, in classes, and at meals in the Union, I came into contact with many boys from elite prep schools, such as Groton, Saint Mark’s, and Saint Paul’s. They all seemed to be my antithesis: good-looking, athletic, self-confident, and smartly dressed in Harris tweed jackets and gray flannel trousers. I admired them from afar. They represented the epitome of college fashion and sophistication, but I had little to say to them, and they showed no great interest in talking with me, either. Instead my closest relations were with other residents of Thayer Hall, including Walter Taylor, my class’s sole African American. Walter also seemed out of his element and a bit lost, so we had much in common. Sadly, for reasons I never learned, Walter did not return to Harvard after that first year.
I realize now that had I gone to boarding school, as so many sons of wealthy parents did, I would have been part of the very group I secretly envied but with which I felt so ill at ease, and my life at Harvard would have been more immediately pleasurable and certainly very different from what it was. Upon reflection almost seventy years later, however, I do not believe the rest of my life would have been as interesting or constructive as it has been. Having to deal with my early insecurities at Harvard and to struggle for academic achievement and social acceptance made me a more open-minded and tolerant person.
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