The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  “You were married to this man for over twelve years, and you were together for a period of fifteen years,” the defense attorney continued. “You are an economist. You are a major consultant for one of the highest-end business consulting entities in the world. You had no idea if he had bank account, and in terms of your joint finances it never came up?”

  “I think consistently you’re making a connection between business intelligence and personal intelligence. I mean, I came from a place where people don’t jaywalk—it’s a very honest place. It never in my entire life occurred to me that I could be living with someone who was lying about such basic stuff.”

  The jackhammer questioning continued. Had she ever seen him with a car registration? “Many car registrations, yes,” she said. (This was odd, since her husband didn’t drive.) Were they in his name? “No, they were in the name of the trust that owned the cars.” And who funded the trust that owned the cars? She did, Sandra said. In the fifteen years they were together, did she ever see an investment or stock market account in her husband’s name? “No, I can confidently tell you that no matter how many different questions about legal documents with his name on it that you ask me, the answer will be no.”

  The questions continued, and she calmly and intelligently answered each and every one. She hadn’t seen baby pictures, but he had shown her pictures of himself when he was a youngster. She had seen pictures of people he said were his parents, who were killed in the car accident when he was eighteen. She had never gone to a Rockefeller gathering, although, she said, her husband had told her that invitations to these events had been made. She was asked if she had actually ever seen an invitation. “I didn’t,” she said. She had been interwoven so deeply into the life of the man with whom she had lived for fifteen years, twelve as his wife, that she couldn’t see him for what he was.

  When his questions were exhausted, the defense attorney said, “No further questions, Your Honor,” and the court shortly went into recess.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Country Squire

  To his friends and acquaintances, Clark Rockefeller was a prince. He was so friendly, so attentive, so eager to please. He cared about people and seemed genuinely interested in them. He was a man others sought to know and befriend, an in-demand dinner guest, an aristocrat who tossed off bons mots and society lingo—“Quite so!” “Oh, dear!” and “Good heavens!” were among his favorite expressions—and made frequent, not-so-subtle allusions to his famous family.

  To his wife, however, he was a completely different person—glum, territorial, tempestuous, and, especially after the altercation in Central Park that had led to a run-in with the police, paranoid. The handsome young man who had showered Sandra with attention and gifts was gone.

  Moving from New York to Nantucket, and then to Woodstock, Vermont, hadn’t been enough to snap Clark out of the malaise that had been brought on by his supposed nervous breakdown. By late 1999 he wanted to go somewhere even more remote, and he insisted to Sandra that they move to Cornish, New Hampshire.

  Cornish was described by the New York Times in February 2010 as “a town of about 1,700 on the banks of the Connecticut River, [with] two general stores, a post office, a church and miles of pines, oaks, farmland and rolling hills.” It was made famous by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the great late-nineteenth-century sculptor, who helped turn it into a popular summer colony for artists, including the painters Maxfield Parrish and John White Alexander. President Woodrow Wilson even spent a few summers there, making the home of the writer Winston Churchill (no relation to the British prime minister) his summer White House.

  The Cornish art colony fizzled out in the years after World War I, and in early 2000, when Clark Rockefeller used $750,000 of his wife’s money to buy Doveridge, the former estate of the renowned jurist Learned Hand, Cornish had just one famous citizen: the ultra-reclusive novelist J. D. Salinger. Some said the presence of Salinger, whose 1951 masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye stands as the ultimate depiction of teenage angst and alienation, was what attracted Rockefeller to Cornish.

  The story of Rockefeller’s arrival in town is best told from the perspective of Peter Burling, a former state senator and longtime member of the New Hampshire legislature, who grew up in the Cornish area and received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. We met at a café a few miles from Cornish, and I asked Burling why he felt Rockefeller had chosen to live there.

  “I think it had something to do with the artist colony history,” he said. “It’s quiet. It’s remote. It’s small. If you’re a great pretender, Cornish is a good place to ply your skills.

  “I heard about him before I saw him,” Burling continued. “I heard there was a Clark Rockefeller who bought property in town. We were introduced to Clark at one of the community events for him. The hosts were Jim and Judy Brown. He’s a trial lawyer and she’s a constitutional law professor at Northeastern. They are very, very astute judges of character—great friends and very smart.”

  “So why would they give a party for Clark Rockefeller?” I asked.

  Burling looked at me as if I had asked a glaringly obvious question. “New neighbors,” he explained. “That is what we do. He was new to town, and Jim and Judy wanted to introduce him around.”

  I asked Burling what his expectations were before meeting him.

  “I didn’t have any expectations. There are Rockefellers in Woodstock, and I went to school with a Rockefeller at Milton,” he said, meaning Milton Academy, the Boston-area prep school whose notable alumni include T. S. Eliot and Robert and Ted Kennedy.

  Burling and Clark Rockefeller got off on the wrong foot, however, at the welcoming party the Browns gave for the new arrival, which was attended by about thirty people. He walked up to Burling’s wife, Jean, a superior court judge, and asked her, “Do you know what abstract expressionism is?”

  The senator shook his head. “Of course she did,” he said. “But it was asked in an utterly rude and humiliating way to indicate his view that she was a doofus and a rube—not a great thing to do. It cued her to the notion that this guy had an investment in putting people down and setting himself up above everybody else. I think the phrase was, ‘I gave him my usual twenty seconds.’ She has spent twenty-eight years on the bench, so she has developed her sense of what is bullshit and what’s not. She stopped having anything to do with him at that point.”

  Burling took a sip of coffee. “When somebody new arrives in any small community like Cornish, they are the subject of conversation for the next twenty or thirty days. I dismissed him as not being real. I started telling people, ‘He’s not a real Rockefeller.’ They would ask me, ‘How do you know?’ I’d say, ‘Well, all of the Rockefellers I know—and Woodstock has quite a few of them—were born in the U.S. This guy’s not from America. His adjectives and adverbs are from a different place.’ Someone said to me, ‘It’s the prep school accent!’ I said, ‘I grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, and that isn’t a prep school accent.’”

  Given Burling’s mistrust and dislike of Rockefeller, he was dismayed when the newcomer got close to, and, in Burling’s opinion, took advantage of, one of his most cherished Cornish friends, Don MacLeay. Burling said he once described Donnie MacLeay in a newspaper article as “Michelangelo with a Caterpillar tractor.” I told Burling that I was going to meet MacLeay later that day. “He’s going to take me to Doveridge,” I said.

  “Do please be careful if you get near it,” he said—a bizarre warning, but one that I would understand soon enough.

  As I walked up to Don MacLeay’s house in Plainfield, New Hampshire, a small town that abuts Cornish, I noticed a sign he had plastered to his pickup truck:DON MACLEAY

  BULLDOZING, DITCH DIGGING, TRACKING, LAND CLEARING,

  BRUSH CLIPPING, GRADING, PLAINFIELD—

  AND IF IT AIN’T COUNTRY, IT AIN’T MUSIC.

  He was a reed of a man who looked to be in his late seventies, weathered by decades of work and harsh New England winters. He motioned
for me to come inside the house, which he had built by hand. He settled into a chair, folded his spindly legs, and began to tell me his story.

  MacLeay had been on his tractor when he was introduced to Rockefeller, and, work being more important to him than meeting new people, he told the neighbor making the introduction, “Let me finish what I’m doing here, and I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “I don’t catch names very good,” MacLeay continued. “I got off the tractor and said to him, ‘So, you’re Chris Rockefeller.’ And he kind of jumped, a little irritated, because I called him by the wrong name.”

  As MacLeay and I drove to Doveridge in his truck, he told me, “I don’t know why he came up here. I guess he wanted to be in the sticks. He said he was looking for a place he could do a lot of fixing up.”

  He pulled over, parked in a grassy area off the main road, and walked me up to the twenty-five-acre property. “Well, here it is,” he said when we got to the driveway, which was blocked off with a heavy chain and surrounded by signs reading KEEP OUT, CAUTION, and BEWARE OF DOGS.

  I gasped. The place was a dump. The grounds were overgrown, and the house was hoisted up on jacks and appeared uninhabitable. The signs were there not to ward off thieves, MacLeay told me, but because parts of the house, stripped down to the studs, could literally come crashing down. At the time of my visit, all attempts to sell it had come to naught.

  I couldn’t imagine a successful career woman like Sandra Boss living there, and apparently she couldn’t either. She was away on business in the months after purchasing Doveridge (although Rockefeller made the arrangements, the deed was in Boss’s name).

  Rockefeller wanted MacLeay to oversee all of his home improvements, but MacLeay told him up front, “I do excavation; I’m not a contractor.” When MacLeay asked what he was going to do with the expansive estate, Rockefeller replied, “Sell honey and hard cider.” He wasn’t much better at that enterprise than he was at renovation, said MacLeay: he ordered apple-grinding machinery, but not all of it arrived before winter. So the truckload of apples he’d also ordered quickly froze.

  As we ducked under the chain and walked around the property, MacLeay explained to me Rockefeller’s habit of hiring and firing people at a furious pace. “Construction folks,” he said. “He had fourteen different masoners. He’d get in an argument and fire one, then go find somebody else.”

  He suggested we walk away from the old house and get back to the main road before something fell off the building or we slipped and fell into a trench. I asked about the gaping hole that had been dug beneath the house.

  MacLeay sighed. “The guy that raised the house jacked it up so Clark could put a foundation under it,” he said, adding that Rockefeller paid $25,000 for cement alone. “He wanted to put in a basement as a place to keep his cars. He was kind of a nut for old cars.”

  True, he didn’t have a driver’s license, but in Cornish he bought not just one car but a fleet, most of them antiques. One, said MacLeay, was a limousine, custom-fitted with seats that revolved to face each other so passengers could do business while being chauffeured, that he insisted had belonged to the Rockefellers in Woodstock.

  “What did you buy that for?” MacLeay asked Rockefeller.

  “Well, our trust is set up where we can buy anything we want, but we can’t sell anything unless it’s to a family member.” Rockefeller added that he snapped it up for a song, just so it wouldn’t end up on the scrap heap.

  “I thought, ‘Rich people are kind of odd,’” MacLeay said.

  Before long Rockefeller’s car collection numbered twenty-three—vehicles of all vintages and makes, some so old that they wouldn’t run or be good for anything but show. He kept them scattered around the property, because the garage beneath the house was never filled in, much less finished.

  “I’m going to put a pool in,” Rockefeller said one day, to which his excavator and by then close friend Don MacLeay responded, ‘Geez, why don’t you finish something first?”

  The pool was going to cost $50,000. As with many of his projects, the only stage of it that was completed was the digging of a hole. Clark and the pool company didn’t get along. It seemed that Rockefeller was desperately trying to fit in with Cornish—while also defiantly trying to stand out. Either way, it was extremely odd behavior. It was one thing to want to dupe the strivers in a bustling city like New York, where one can flit from place to place and person to person without gossip and innuendo trailing close behind. But in an insular small town like Cornish, where everyone knows everybody? Perhaps he had indeed had a nervous breakdown, as he had claimed. Or perhaps Cornish was just another lark, to see how far he could push things before being unmasked.

  “I don’t know,” MacLeay said, marveling at Rockefeller’s various failed undertakings at Doveridge. “I think he was trying to see how fast he could spend her money,” he said, referring to Boss. The citizens of Cornish rarely saw her, but they spoke about her often. No one could have suspected, however, that she was the one who made Rockefeller’s big show in Cornish (and in Nantucket and Woodstock before that) possible—or that he was dangerously close to losing her.

  Sandra was commuting between her broken-down house on Blow-Me-Down Brook in Cornish and her high-powered job with McKinsey in New York. Sometimes she would fly to work from New Hampshire, and sometimes she would have to drive, but either way it was grueling, and she spent much of her time in hotels in New York or on the road.

  “In the summer of 2000,” she told the grand jury, “I had been spending enough time away from [Clark] that the torture and the bad stuff was less a part of my daily life, and I was getting stronger. I decided to leave him. I took a small apartment in New York. I just said, ‘I need to figure things out.’”

  After a while, she later testified, “I started to finally come to the conclusion that I needed to change my marital status. I said I wanted to spend more weekends in New York to sort of think things through. I wasn’t happy in the marriage at that time, and, you know, was talking about the possibility of leaving.”

  With that, Rockefeller shot back to New York. No longer the dark, moody, isolated curmudgeon, he reverted to being the man Sandra had fallen in love with. He was once again on her doorstep bearing gifts, flowers, and jewelry, and lavishing compliments and attention on her.

  “The old Clark was back,” Boss told the grand jury, “being incredibly personally attentive, being romantic again. Incidents like borrowing expensive jewelry from the [Rockefeller] family that he had me wear to a party. Later I found out, or surmised, that it was actually borrowed from a friend, but he claimed that he had borrowed it from the family. He introduced a new friend who had known him since childhood, who was vouching for him again. There’s a lot of stuff like that.”

  She admitted in court that she reveled in the attention. “I was receptive to it, I liked it, but I wasn’t decisive about it. I still went along with my plans to separate.”

  But then, one night during this period of “re-romancing,” as Boss called it, her husband, with his suave manner, his grace and charm, took Sandra to bed. “We used condoms for birth control, which meant that he had the ability to alter them, which is, I think, what he did,” she told the grand jury. “Things got a lot wetter, and I wasn’t thinking that my husband was—I mean, you don’t really think that someone is trying to get you pregnant in that kind of context.”

  “When did you become pregnant?” she was asked.

  “Early September of 2000.”

  With that, she launched into a litany of despair:

  “He was creating a cloud of paranoia around family and friends, trying to make me very nervous about how I could only depend on him.

  “I was feeling, you know, the psychological effect of being pregnant, which is you feel disoriented and unsettled.

  “My parents were getting divorced right at that time.

  “I felt like I was too weak to figure out how to leave him at that time.

  “I was also
influenced by the belief that a family should be together, and that the child should be with its father, and that kind of thing.” She repeated the same sentiment during the trial: “I was raised to believe that you’re supposed to work on your marriage. It was very hard for me to leave to begin with, and to be leaving pregnant felt somehow like I wasn’t doing my duty. . . . I just felt that the burden for leaving a marriage was very high, and I was very uncomfortable leaving a marriage just for my own happiness. And the idea of doing it when there was another person involved”—her unborn child—“it was very difficult. I just didn’t feel strong enough to do that.”

  “What did you decide to do?” the lawyer asked.

  “I decided to stay. . . . I said to my then husband, you know, that I thought that we should make a go of it.”

  Her husband, in the game he was playing with her for control, made a seemingly odd but in retrospect quite cunning move. “For a while he wasn’t sure,” Boss testified. “He said, ‘Well, I need to think about it, and don’t come home for a while.’ So there was a phase of uncertainty.”

  Sandra went home to Cornish for Christmas of 2000, and things were looking up for the couple. Not only were they reunited with a baby on the way, but also, Clark told Sandra, he was engaged in a very exciting start-Up company called Jet Propulsion Physics. He had acquired a patent in the jet propulsion field at a cheap price, virtually free, really, and he would be working with some of his academic colleagues to develop the patent for commercial use. Although she never saw evidence of the patent, she had no reason to disbelieve him. After all, he had told her about equal or even grander achievements: that he helped friends manage oil wells in Texas; that he had very close connections with Michael Heseltine, deputy prime minister of Great Britain; that he was a member of the Trilateral Commission, the private coalition of world leaders established by David Rockefeller in 1973 to foster relations between the United States, Europe, and Japan. He casually referred to the powerful organization as “The Group,” and intimated, when questioned about whether or not there might be money forthcoming, that it would be below a Rockefeller to ask for a salary. None of these things was questioned, much less challenged.