The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  “You’re admiring my pile of junk,” he said. The books had stacked up over the course of his thirty-five years living in the carriage house, he said. “Some of them are brand-new Economists like the ones you’re sitting on at the moment, but most of them are relics of a very active life in local politics. Things I wanted to read. The high pile of stuff beside you is the history of my father,” Sears said. “I was the family historian. Where I went wrong was not studying the history of the Rockefeller family until it was clear that there was something amiss.”

  He handed me a two-page résumé of his extraordinary life. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran of several venerable Wall Street firms, a member of private clubs, a philanthropist involved in numerous charities, and a politician of considerable renown. Yet he admitted that he had been completely captivated by the charming new arrival with the adorable little daughter.

  “I got a call from a friend, who I would say is highly respected,” Sears began after making cocktails for us. The friend was a physician from the Los Angeles area. “He said, ‘You have a brand-new neighbor. And I knew him from out west in California. Would you be nice to him?’ He described some conversations he’d had with Clark about his curiosity and his scientific bent.” Sears took a sip of rum and Coke. “This happens to me every now and again,” he continued. “So it wasn’t difficult for me to contact my neighbor, Clark, and he came into this house maybe a half dozen times with the little girl.”

  As a lifelong Boston resident, Sears knew the area’s accents intimately. So I asked him to describe Clark Rockefeller’s. “His accent was dead-on for a privileged young person on the East Coast of America,” he said. “He was very plausible. Clark had the same tones I heard in a good New England prep school. Or the nice clubs I’m allowed to belong to here. Clark was suited perfectly to the neighborhood.” He mentioned Senator John Kerry, adding that he certainly wasn’t the only famous person living on Beacon Hill. “There’s Nan Ellis, sister of the old President Bush, and the novelist Robin Cook. If we can’t impress you with a senator and the sister of a president, what can we do?”

  Early after their arrival in Boston, Rockefeller and his wife, Sandra, invited Sears to an event for McKinsey & Company. “And I sat with them at what turned out to be a grand table, because the chairman of McKinsey was at the table,” right alongside Clark and Sandra, who was of course, as a partner in the Boston office, seated next to the head of the powerful global consulting corporation. “And Sandy and Clark were still a couple at that time, and it looked like a perfectly ordinary family situation.”

  He recalled Clark and Sandra making something of a debut in Boston society on November 30, 2006, when they attended a black-tie benefit for the Mount, the grand and storied fifty-acre Lenox, Massachusetts, estate turned museum of the late novelist Edith Wharton, author of such classics as The Age of Innocence, for which she became in 1921 the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. Her tormented marriage and eventual divorce from the well-bred but conscienceless cad Teddy Wharton shared similarities with Sandra and Clark’s relationship. “Both men spent a lot of their wives’ money,” said someone familiar with both women. “Neither were what they seemed to be.” The benefit, held at the Back Bay mansion of a Boston philanthropist, was to raise funds to save the debt-ridden Mount from possible foreclosure. As the young, bright McKinsey partner, Sandra had accepted the board’s invitation to ply her business acumen as a trustee to help save the Mount. According to Boston magazine, as she and her husband entered the grand home where the wealthy crowd had gathered for the event—Sandra young, slim, and beautiful in her evening dress, Clark perfectly dapper in his dinner jacket—Boston society photographer Bill Brett raised his camera, just as he had done for the other glamorous couples entering the event. “You will not take my picture,” Rockefeller was quoted in Boston magazine as huffing as he led his wife swiftly away.

  He was not at all like the other Rockefellers who had inhabited and enriched Boston with their acts of kindness, charity, and philanthropy. First of all, Clark Rockefeller didn’t really know anybody. With the help of John Sears, that would soon change.

  “Since Clark was brand-new to Boston,” Sears said, he tried to give him a “bit of navigation legs,” including entry into the Athenaeum. “Yes, I was the prime mover; I opened the door for them there. I got them reader’s tickets. I paid for them too. I remember the first flush of excitement at doing something for a Rockefeller. And then, if they use the library reasonably and responsibly, the library will invite them to be readers without a host.”

  Which the highly educated and erudite staff of the Athenaeum would have done, Rockefeller or not, Sears insisted. “That is not a place where a Rockefeller takes the place by storm. They are pretty accustomed to grand folks.” He went on to name several Rockefellers he had known who had lived in Boston and become his friends. “Nelson Rockefeller had a function for me when I was running for mayor of Boston in’67. These are not novelties. We weren’t exactly bowled over, but it was sort of fun having Clark.”

  As the conversation stretched on, I could see that Rockefeller had moved yet another step up the social ladder, entrancing the longtime Boston business leader and politician (and former sheriff!), his highly educated Beacon Hill neighbors, and the extremely astute staff at one of America’s most prestigious libraries. Sears said that a pleasant two-year friendship ensued, as the proper Bostonian would bump into Clark and Snooks on the street and later entertain them in his book-filled house.

  Sears smiled slyly and said, “He gave me a book on the Rockefeller family.”

  “I’d love to see it,” I said.

  “And so you shall.”

  He rose to fetch the volume, David Rockefeller: Memoirs. The cover had a black-and-white photograph of the famous scion in profile, which actually looked a little like Clark. I read the front flap copy: “The youngest child of John D. Rockefeller, Junior, one of the richest men in the United States, and the great patron of modern art Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. He graduated from Harvard College in the depths of the Depression and studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D.”

  John Sears told me to turn to the title page. There was Clark Rockefeller’s flamboyant handwriting, familiar to me by then, in an inscription dated 12/26/06:Although I have not seen him since the late eighties or the early nineties, DR did send me (perhaps by mistake) two copies of his Memoirs. Signed. One of these shall now belong to you and I hope you enjoy it. I feel so privileged to have met you this year—Thank you for all your kindness. Your neighbor, Clark Rockefeller

  The book was also signed by David Rockefeller. I asked Sears if he thought the author’s signature was authentic, or if he thought Clark had forged it. “I have no idea,” he replied. “I knew Nelson Rockefeller, but I never knew David.”

  Sears said he had gone to Rockefeller’s house, around the corner, a couple of times. “A Mondrian painting was laid out on the floor,” he said. “He told me how much he paid for it, at least a million dollars.”

  With that we took our drinks and walked up spindly stairs to the terrace on the top floor of his carriage house. From there I could see the spires of Boston. Down below was another, more recent landmark, which Sears pointed out. On the corner of Beacon and Brimmer streets was a bar called Cheers, which inspired the hit 1980s television series.

  “Snooks got into Southfield,” said Sears, referring to the Southfield School for Girls, which shares a campus with Sears’s own alma mater, Dexter, where John F. Kennedy was also educated. “It’s a very special school. They taught me Latin at eleven. A different teacher drives the school bus every day. I think that very well-run school was as badly fooled as any of us. But, then, I don’t think it mattered to them that that little girl’s dad was called Rockefeller.”

  Every morning Clark would take Snooks to the bus stop on the corner of Beacon and Brimmer, and every afternoon he would be waiting there to pick her up. “All of the people who h
ad children in Dexter or Southfield got to know Clark and Snooks,” said Sears. “He got to know all of the young parents who lived in the neighborhood.”

  If I wanted to know more about Clark’s time on Beacon Hill, Sears suggested, I should show up at the bus stop around 7:30 the next morning.

  There were Porsches and backpacks all around as the resident parents engaged in the early-morning ritual of getting their kids off to school, the boys in their Dexter caps, the girls in their crisp Southfield uniforms. By 7:30 a large and chatty group was gathered in front of Cheers, waiting for the arrival of the buses. Once the children were safely aboard, the parents stood there waving as they shouted, “Bye, Daddy! Bye, Mommy!” The parents did not move from the corner until the buses were out of sight.

  The moment I uttered the name Clark Rockefeller, they shot daggers at me and began to disperse rapidly. Most were unwilling to talk. However, one or two eventually acquiesced. Some merely wanted to talk about the man who had brought notoriety down on them; others felt compelled to do so, so that the truth about the real Clark Rockefeller would be told.

  “He told me he’d sold his jet propulsion company to Boeing for a billion dollars, and that was the last time he worked,” said one Southfield father with whom I soon became friendly. Rockefeller had taken him to the Harvard Club in Boston, presumably to discuss a play date for their daughters. “He told other people that he worked for the Pentagon or the CIA or the Department of Defense. Then Snooks was born, and he cashed out with the sale to Boeing.”

  The father was putty in Rockefeller’s hands, in the beginning at least. “Later, I heard his wife, Sandy, was paying the bills. But he led me to believe the opposite. He said, ‘Oh, she only makes $300,000 to $400,000 a year.’ And judging from what they had”—Rockefeller showed him his collection of abstract expressionist art and some Rockefeller memorabilia—“I thought he had a lot of his own money. I mean, he talked about donating a planetarium for our daughters’ school.”

  Until he made the donation to Southfield, however, he seemed content to work as a volunteer at the school’s Clay Center for Science and Technology. The school’s state-of-the-art observatory is “better than the one they have at Harvard,” said the Southfield parent.

  “I’m a portfolio manager, and I asked him, ‘How are you positioned?’” the parent continued.

  “Exclusively in treasuries,” Rockefeller replied, and his new friend had no reason to doubt him, since many fellow Southfield parents were positioned the same way.

  The father invited me to visit him and his family at their home in the Boston suburbs. There, I found a picture-perfect house, a smart and attractive young wife, and a little girl who had gone to school with Snooks—the whole family bubbling over with enthusiasm about the doting father and the peculiar little girl who arrived at the Southfield School for the 2006 semester.

  One day, the phone in the family’s house rang. On the line was a fellow Southfield father, who said his name was Clark Rockefeller, suggesting that since their daughters were the same age, “How about arranging a play date?”

  Over the phone, he asked the mother what her daughter liked to do. “And I said, ‘Just little-kid things,’” recalled the mother. “She likes to play house, play teacher, play baby and mommy.’ And Clark was totally on foreign ground. He was like, ‘Does she like to go to the MFA [the Boston Museum of Fine Arts]?’ And I said, ‘She doesn’t really read. No, she’ s never been to the MFA.’

  “We went to the MFA together,” the mother continued. “Snooks knew every single painting, every artist, the dates. She knew odd facts. Like we would walk around the city and Clark would say, ‘Snooks, what does this stamp stand for?’ Just the abbreviations around Boston. She would know it was the Boston Public Waterworks. She knew things that no one else knew. Especially a little girl like that.”

  I asked the daughter, a girl wearing tennis whites who came to be friends with Snooks, what she thought of her. “No one else was like her,” she said. “She was the only one who knew how to read words and every time we didn’t know a word we would go to her. Like if we didn’t know the word ‘decide,’ we’d go to her and she’d tell us. She was the smartest one.”

  The little girl was equally close with Snooks’s father, whom she called “Uncle Clark.” “He was nice. He taught me how to read and all of that. Uncle Clark taught me a lot of things.”

  Despite Snooks’s superior intelligence, though, the administrators of the Southfield School chose to detain her in pre-kindergarten, instead of placing her in the actual kindergarten class where a child her age should have been. The reason for the setback: the girl was severely socially handicapped from the years she’d spent sequestered away from other children, something that the family I visited had witnessed. “You’d go to birthday parties and she would refuse to play with the other children,” said the mother. “She wouldn’t join in any group. If they wanted to take a group picture, she wouldn’t. Everybody would line up for pizza and cake; she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t join in. She was always doing something, a game by herself. She talked to herself, always asking things like, ‘What do people eat in Africa?’ She lived in a whole other world.”

  They recalled ice-skating outings with their daughter, Snooks, and her father. “Remember how they had to carry her off the ice?” asked the mother.

  “She would just start babbling,” said the father.

  “Screeching and screaming,” said the mother. “Temper tantrums.”

  “Saying, ‘Reigh is good, Reigh is good,’” said the daughter. “We’d be sitting there and she would be, ‘Reigh is good, Reigh is good, Reigh is GOOD!’”

  Despite all of this, Rockefeller was determined that in the following year his daughter be reinstated from the pre-kindergarten to what he believed should have been by now her rightful place in the first grade. He went on a crusade to make this happen, promising the school that he would make a major donation.

  “Clark had told us that he was planning on putting in a planetarium, and I think he threatened the school with different things,” the father said. “In our conversations, he gave me the impression that he would repeatedly use the idea that he was going to put in a planetarium and possibly more than that as sort of a threat to the school that they should be more attentive to his child, forgiving. They had to put up with a lot of BS. It was amazing what they put up with. He was just not accepting of the fact that they made her go to pre-K. He was very offended that she was put down. And I suppose as a parent I can understand that.”

  So the implication was the planetarium in exchange for moving his daughter out of pre-kindergarten and into the appropriate class for her age group?

  “Totally,” said the mother.

  Clark Rockefeller not only snowed the school with his famous family name and promised munificence, he snowed the parents in the living room, they both had to admit, so much that they were comfortable leaving their daughter with him at times. “He would watch the girls,” said the mother.

  “Is Uncle Clark a genius?” asked the daughter.

  “Perhaps,” said the father. “I don’t know. But he’s a bright guy, I’ll tell you that. He knew how to push people’s buttons, what to say, to get their attention. John D. Rockefeller’s first company was Clark and Rockefeller. He was a produce vendor. His partner’s last name was Clark. I mean, that’s obscure. Clark just knew.”

  Although parents are discouraged from visiting the school during classroom hours, they are invited for special occasions, like parents’ night and the Christmas pageant. Rockefeller showed up at these events, of course, rarely, if ever, with his wife, but, as always, totally in character. In this instance, he was the generous philanthropist from the famous family who was going to donate a planetarium to the school. “Bow tie, navy jacket, khakis, sometimes loafers, sometimes Top-Siders,” said the mother.

  “I forgot to add something,” said the daughter. “I remember that Uncle Clark never wore socks.”

  In the fal
l of 2006, Sandra Boss brought up the subject of money with Clark. She recalled in court that her husband had told her that he could not sell his art collection, which was held in a family trust, for ten years. He had said this when Sandra first met him in 1996, however, so the ten-year limit would presumably be up, she felt. Surely he would finally sell a piece of art and contribute some money to the marriage.

  The art collection was the only tangible proof that he really was a Rockefeller, Sandra explained. “It was lovely, and it was one of the ways that seemed convincing about having some connection with his family, that he had this great modern art,” she said, adding that art authorities far more knowledgeable than she had deemed it authentic. When I heard this statement in her testimony, I called former New York art dealer Sheldon Fish, who saw Rockefeller’s art collection many times before he decamped to Peru. “I must say the quality of the art was extremely high,” said Fish. “Very convincing! I even offered him $800,000 for his Rothko in 1999 and he turned me down saying, ‘Prices have gone up.’ ” If Rockefeller’s paintings had been forgeries, Fish noted, they would have had to have been painted by a phenomenal expert, “able to copy different styles so exactly! One giveaway with new copies of modern art is checking the drying of the paint. It takes at least twenty years for paint to ‘dry.’ ” Fish didn’t bother to give Rockefeller’s paintings the fingernail test—if you stick your nail into a dry painting, it won’t penetrate, he explained—because he was certain the paintings were real. “I saw him unpacking a Mondrian that he said he bought in Japan. He told me he spent ten million a year on art.”

  “Lots of people from museums came in and looked at it; they thought it was great, so I thought it was real,” Sandra Boss continued. “At random one day, in probably October or November of 2006, he said, ‘Wow, I’ve been following the prices, and I think it’s worth over a billion dollars now.’ ”