The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  From what Burling heard, Rockefeller bad-mouthed him all over town. “From time to time, I was the subject of some pretty deprecating things that Clark had to say.”

  In Cornish, as was his pattern, Rockefeller gravitated to a church—specifically Trinity Church, the 1808 wooden structure that Walker Evans had photographed and that the National Register of Historic Places had listed as critical to preserve. “It’s a gorgeous, wood-framed church, the second-oldest Episcopal church in the state,” said Burling. “I had purchased it in 1984 with a promise that I would give it to the town.”

  “The church was like his child, his baby,” Cornish selectwoman Merilynn Bourne told me of the state senator’s devotion to the place, which he spent twenty years lovingly restoring. By 2004 it was in immaculate repair, and Burling decided to make good on his promise. It should have been his shining moment.

  “But Clark, who had other plans, scurried around quite a bit, stirring up virulent opposition to the town accepting the donation of the church,” Burling said.

  What rationale could Rockefeller possibly have provided against Cornish’s accepting such a generous gift?

  “The church is a wreck,” Burling quoted Rockefeller as saying to anyone who would listen. “It’s not properly restored. The town shouldn’t take this on.”

  “Goodness knows what else he said to people. He obviously had the ability to convince almost anybody that it was snowing in August,” Burling said.

  The stage was thus set for what came to be called “the famous town meeting of March 2004.” Burling was the moderator, and the first order of business was whether Cornish should raise $110,000 to build a new satellite police station as an annex to the fire station. “I opened the discussion on that warrant article, and the first thing I see is Clark, in the front row, putting up his hand to be recognized. I said, ‘Yes, Clark, you have the floor.’”

  Burling recounted what happened next like a boxer recalling a fight, his wounds still smarting. “His hand went into his pocket. He pulled out what appeared to be a check. He said, ‘I have here a check for $110,000. If the town will accept Burling’s donation of the church and sell it to me for one dollar, I will donate the money to build the police station.’”

  He let out a long sigh. “It was a breathtaking performance. New England communities find it very difficult to see public demonstrations of wealth like that. You could hear the sound of teeth hitting the floor and see four hundred and ten mouths hanging open. I swallowed hard. He was putting me in a box. One of the selectmen said he was watching my face and the first thing that crossed his mind was, ‘The fucker has put Burling into an impossible situation.’”

  Rockefeller’s cunning gambit paid off. He gave Cornish $110,000 of Sandra Boss’s money to build the new police station, and the town sold him the church for one dollar. He could claim to be more generous and to care more about Cornish than Burling, and furthermore, he could try to fill the church with a congregation of his choosing—one that, Burling said, would help Rockefeller mount a campaign against Gene Robinson, who had recently been appointed bishop of the New Hampshire diocese. Robinson, whom Burling called “one of the most wonderful men you will ever meet,” was the first openly gay, noncelibate person to become a bishop in the Episcopal Church, and many conservative church members were opposed to him.

  Even after the town meeting, Burling was not quite prepared to accept defeat. “I must admit I got a little naughty at this point,” he said. “The deal was, I gave the church to the town. No mention was ever made of the contents.”

  I asked Burling what was inside the church he had so lovingly saved, only to lose it to the man who by then had become his nemesis. “A granite baptismal font, some furniture that I had made for the back of the church, a portrait of Philander Chase—one of the most important Episcopalians from Cornish and the first bishop of Ohio—plus the usual collection of hymnals. There were these wonderful organs from the mid-1870s, and more.”

  He continued, “So I call Clark up and say, ‘Clark, I’m glad you got the church. I’m going to give the contents to the historical society. You might want to acquire this stuff from them or make a donation.’ He went just through the roof, saying, ‘You dirty bastard! How dare you! That stuff is included in the deal!’ I said, ‘Clark, this is property that was not part of the purchase of the church.’”

  The senator clearly relished his brief victory. “So I gave this stuff to the historical society, and, very sadly, I realize I never should have done it. Clark just turned his guns on them. He threatened them,” Burling said, “telling them, ‘That is my property, and if you try to take it out, my lawyers will be in touch with you.’ It was a horrible performance. The people of the Cornish Historical Society are salt-of-the-earth, wonderful folks, and they were just crushed. He literally bullied the historical society into giving him all of the stuff. They were shaken. They just kind of folded, like a leaf in the wind. They had no idea what they were dealing with. At that point, none of us had any idea who we were dealing with.”

  “Who did you think Clark Rockefeller really was at that point?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think he was a Rockefeller, but I had no idea who he was.”

  The battle over Trinity Church caught the attention of the Valley News, a daily newspaper covering parts of New Hampshire and Vermont. On July 3, 2004, reporter John Gregg wrote about Clark Rockefeller’s plans for the church, adding that he “declined repeatedly” to say whether he was related to the John D. Rockefeller family. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not,” Rockefeller told the newspaper. “It’s not something I would confirm or deny.”

  Rockefeller’s warlike spirit also manifested itself at home. At Doveridge, where his art collection was stored in tubes to protect it from the nonstop construction, Rockefeller exerted complete power over his child, his wife, and her finances. “The defendant controlled all the money,” Sandra Boss testified. “The defendant spent all of the money. There were no savings. I didn’t control the checkbook. He looked at the bank accounts all the time. I didn’t know what the online passwords were. It was very challenging to get money without asking for it.”

  When Reigh was three or four, the age when most children of privilege are enrolled in preschool, Rockefeller made a decision: “He wouldn’t let her go,” said Boss. He rarely allowed her even to associate with other children, let alone spend several hours a day in a schoolroom with them. “I wanted her to be engaged in more formal activities, so she would have more social activity,” said Boss.

  “And why didn’t that happen?” she was asked.

  “The defendant did not like the available options and thought he could do a better job.”

  Rockefeller controlled both the heat and the food supply at Doveridge, usually leaving Sandra—who was by then earning $2 million a year—hungry and cold in her own home. “When I was in New Hampshire, the defendant declined to provide me with enough to eat,” she testified. “I woke up hungry most nights.”

  “Was there any heat in the house?” she was asked.

  “Honestly, very little,” she said. “In the main house there was often not enough heat, except in the part where he was sleeping.” Which indicated that by then the two were sleeping apart. She was trapped, she said, and afraid. She was asked in court if she ever tried to assert herself. “I asserted myself, [but] the abuse was pretty rough,” she said. “There was a very angry response, a lot of yelling.”

  She wanted to leave him and escape the horror show that Doveridge had become, but she couldn’t figure out a way to do it without losing her daughter in the process. She was asked, yet again, why alarms didn’t ring in her head after she failed to see “all the regular indicia of somebody who has a real life, an ascertainable, identifiable person,” in the words of Rockefeller’s defense attorney.

  “I was focusing on things like getting enough to eat and getting enough time with my daughter,” she said. “I didn’t have a lot of energy for this topic” of her hu
sband’s nebulous identity, which at that point she still had not seriously questioned.

  “So you’re waking up cold and hungry, he’s incredibly abusive to you . . . You’re telling us that even though you’re the person making $40,000 a week, you don’t change the situation?” asked the defense attorney.

  “I was afraid,” she said at one point.

  “You were afraid that if you went to a lawyer you would lose custody of your child?”

  “The defendant, on one occasion when I told him that I was strongly considering getting a divorce, screamed at me in front of Reigh that if we did [divorce] he would manage to get full custody of her.”

  The isolation of Cornish added to the haze in which Sandra found herself. “I needed witnesses,” she said. “This is a person who had established a somewhat credible reputation in the world. It was going to be very difficult for me to get out.”

  The defense attorney asked her with whom Rockefeller had established a credible reputation.

  “As far as I knew, he had good contacts with many of the neighbors, who thought he was a very nice guy.”

  Finally, she insisted that they make a change, at least in their residence. “I began to threaten him that I would leave him if the situation did not change dramatically. As the situation got unacceptable, I pressured for the move to Boston.”

  She was already working in McKinsey’s Boston office. “I wanted to get closer so I could spend more time with Reigh. I said, ‘We have to move to Boston. We have to put her into a school.’ ” Rockefeller conceded to give it a try. “Reigh and the defendant started spending more time in Boston, attending events and just generally getting into the city.”

  At long last, Sandra said, her husband “acquiesced.” He would move from Cornish to Boston. Of course, he would require suitable accommodations, which he and Sandra found on Beacon Hill—one of Boston’s oldest and most expensive neighborhoods—in a five-story, ivy-covered town house at 68 Pinckney Street. The price: $2.7 million.

  Clark Rockefeller moved to Boston with his wife and five-year-old daughter in September 2006, leaving behind in Cornish his unfinished house, his historic church, and many unanswered questions.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Boston Brahmin

  For almost a month during Rockefeller’s trial, I stayed in Boston, at the Taj Boston, the historic hotel just outside the Beacon Hill neighborhood where Rockefeller had lived with Sandra and Snooks. Shortly after I arrived in the city, I walked to Beacon Hill, and from the moment I set foot there, I knew why Clark Rockefeller had acquiesced to move from Cornish to Boston in 2006.

  According to the Web site Beacon Hill Online, “Beacon Hill is a 19thcentury Boston residential neighborhood situated directly north of the Boston Common [the city’s lush and sprawling park] and the Boston Public Garden [America’s first botanical garden, created in 1837]. Most people think of city living as anonymous and isolating. But this cozy enclave, filled with nearly 10,000 people, is more like a village than an anonymous city. It has a rich community life, with neighbors knowing neighbors and everyone meeting on the Hill’s commercial streets and at its myriad activities.” John Hancock had lived on Beacon Hill, in a “country house,” when the area was pastureland, the Web site noted, and by the 1800s the area was home to Boston’s wealthiest families, known as Boston Brahmins, the name taken from the highest caste of Hindu society.

  I walked up Charles Street, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, and then took a right on Pinckney, continuing to number 68, where Sandra, Clark, and Reigh had lived. It was a charming, elegant ivy-covered house, with gaslights burning out front. Senator John Kerry, I learned, had a house right around the corner. Here the German immigrant had found the address of privilege he had always been looking for.

  It was a quiet morning, and the street was empty. Then a man approached, walking a dog. I stopped him and introduced myself, and the moment I mentioned Clark Rockefeller, he smiled and said he lived practically next door to him. He gave me his telephone number and said, “Call my wife. She can tell you everything you need to know.”

  A few hours later, I was sitting in the living room of a house rich with history, civility, and good taste, listening to a friendly, erudite woman tell about the arrival of the stranger who had taken her neighborhood by storm. “The whole Hill was fascinated and obsessed with Rockefeller,” she said after she had served me coffee. “We knew him as a wonderful father. ‘Mr. Mom,’ we called him. They lived here for a year and a half to two years, and we saw his wife one time. Seriously. Supposedly she had the little girl on weekends, but we never saw her.” She recalled that she had met Clark on the street. “He said, ‘Clark Rockefeller. And this is Snooks.’ We never knew her name was Reigh. He always called her Snooks.”

  She described him as having “sort of the ruffled New Hampshire look—yoU know, the Birkenstock sandals.” She added that he always wore an Izod shirt, a blue one or a red one, with the collar turned up, preppy style, with either red pants or his khaki pants, and always Top-Siders, without socks. “In the wintertime, I know he had to have had on more than that, but he always looked pretty much the same.”

  As for employment, the woman said he didn’t seem to have any. He didn’t need to work, she assumed, because he undoubtedly had a sizable trust fund. His main role in life was caring for his daughter, and the neighbors had a clear recollection of Snooks. “We sit on our stoops here—we’re friendly. The dogs are out,” she said, trying to help me understand the Hill. “There’s one fellow, Phil Short, he’s everywhere, all over the Hill, and he looks like the ballet dancer Alexander Godunov. One day we’re sitting there,” she said, meaning on Short’s doorstep, “and Clark comes up with Snooks, and Snooks sits right on Phil’s lap and starts messing up his hair. We said, ‘Phil, you have a new friend!’ And Phil said, ‘First time I’ve ever met her.’ Oh, yes, she was very precocious.

  “She always said to me, ‘I want to come in and see your house!’ When she said that to the lady at number 58, she told her, ‘Well, Snooks, this isn’t a good time. But maybe you can come for a play date.’ Snooks said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t do play dates. Play dates are for children, and I’m not a child.’ She was five or six at the time. He was so proud of her, and she was so smart.”

  I interrupted her to ask if she had been to Rockefeller’s house. Yes, she said, he had invited her over shortly after they met. “He was really never settled,” the lady continued. There were still boxes around a year after Rockefeller moved in, probably, everyone surmised, because he was so busy taking care of Snooks. “He’d come out in the morning and take her to school. And then he’d be running back in, because she forgot a sock or something. He was always the one who would take her to the school bus—take her everywhere.”

  She paused. “You could tell he spent lots of time with her, because she really was very bright. The first time she met one of the neighbors, she said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he said, ‘Well, my name’s Elwood Headley.’ And Snooks said, ‘Hmm, let’s see. E-L-W-O-O-D H-E-A-D-L-E-Y.’ She spelled his name! And she was five! There was a picture of her on the front page of the Beacon Hill Times.”

  She was referring to a photograph of Snooks standing beside a diagram she had drawn in chalk on the sidewalk: the entire periodic table of the elements on the corner of Charles and Beacon streets. “I said to Clark, ‘Does she know what it means?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I never learned the periodic table in high school, and here she is five or six at this point.”

  Having seemingly left behind all the aggressiveness and unpleasantness he displayed in Cornish, Clark, accompanied by Snooks, soon became a familiar sight on Beacon Hill, the two playing and dining together. They spent a lot of time in the Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest and most exclusive libraries in America. “Predating all American public libraries, the Boston Athenaeum was founded in 1807 by a group of gentlemen who wished to provide themselves with a reading room, a library, a museum and a laboratory,” reads the visitors�
�� pamphlet. “Past members of the Athenaeum include John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amy Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Daniel Webster, and Lydia Maria Child.”

  On Sunday mornings, Clark would read to a group of children in the Athenaeum’s children’s library. “He was an excellent reader, who could perform in a number of accents,” said someone who had witnessed him reading at the Athenaeum. “I heard him recite Robert Burns—long pieces from memory—in a flawless Scottish brogue.” By the time of their arrival in Boston, Rockefeller later said, Snooks was a proficient reader; she could read aloud from the scientific journal Nature when she was three. He said he once read Tennyson’s poem “The Daisy” to her twenty-five times in a single evening. She not only understood the poem, she loved it. The seemingly carefree, towheaded child, whose favorite book and movie was The Little Princess, was so good-natured that she seemed to hop or skip every fifth step. And the adoring father was always beside her. “I love you too much, Daddy,” Snooks would often say.

  “He was so devoted to that little girl,” said John Winthrop Sears, the Harvard Law graduate, former Suffolk County sheriff, and highly respected Beacon Hill Brahmin who lived in a historic carriage house on Acorn Street, just a short distance from Rockefeller’s house. Sears had helped Clark get a membership in the Athenaeum library. I visited him in his house at the end of a charming cobblestone street. The whitehaired seventy-eight-year-old gentleman, who stood six feet four, led me into a living room that was spilling over with books. They lined the walls and littered the floor, and huge mesas of magazines and newspapers—including what he identified as a collection of forty years of the New York Times alone—rose in columns along the walls of every room.