by Ron Chernow
Yet Rockefeller’s insouciance also masked deeper concerns. Breakfasting with his grandchildren, he dispensed a nickel and a kiss to each, accompanied by a little pep talk. “Do you know,” he would ask, “what would hurt grandfather a great deal? To know that any of you boys should become wasteful, extravagant, careless with his money. . . . Be careful, boys, and then you’ll always be able to help unfortunate people. That is your duty, and you must never forget it.”31 The grandchildren credited their conceptions of philanthropic stewardship as much to their grandfather as to their father.
Despite his rigidity, Senior had derived real pleasure from being a father, while Junior took it all too seriously. A number of factors made Junior an inflexible parent. The controversies around his father had molded him into a man of granite respectability who found it hard to lighten up with his own family. He was overly tense and disapproving when faced with unruly impulses in his offspring. Since they were to spend their lives in the public spotlight, he wanted his children to mirror his own starchy sense of rectitude. This mattered to him so desperately that he ruled his family with a quiet tyranny, inspiring more fear than affection. Sometimes, he lashed out unexpectedly, showing flashes of anger or ridicule that he screened from the world. He tried to imitate his father’s style as a parent, but he could not do it with John D.’s good humor. “I was always so afraid that money would spoil my children and I wanted them to know its value and not waste it or throw it away on things that weren’t worthwhile,” Junior said. “That was why I insisted that my children keep accounts just the way I did and I think the effect has been good.”32
On Saturday mornings, stomachs aflutter, the children filed one by one into Junior’s study and had their account books scrutinized. Although they received only a thirty-cent allowance—much less than their friends—they had to account for every penny. They were fined a nickel for omissions and awarded a nickel for scrupulous record keeping. They were expected to spend a third of their money, save a third, and donate a third to charity. Bound by these rules, the Rockefeller children acted like destitute waifs and constantly scrounged small change from friends. As Nelson lamented, “I can honestly say that none of us has ever had a feeling of actually being rich—that is, of having a lot of money.”33 Like Junior as a boy, they often dressed in old clothes and were denied ordinary trips to theaters or the movies until they were well into their teens.
In a repetition of his own upbringing, Junior gave the children opportunities to earn pocket change at Pocantico or Seal Harbor. They made money by killing flies (ten cents per hundred), buffing shoes, working in the garden, or trapping attic mice (five cents per mouse). The six children were taught to garden, sew, and cook—once a week, they had to prepare dinner together—and were encouraged to master hand tools. Each studied a different musical instrument, with one evening per week given over to hymn singing. Even family vacations became tutorials in personal responsibility, with one son assigned to buy railroad tickets, another to run errands, a third to handle the luggage, a fourth to book hotel rooms, a fifth to shine the shoes, and so on.
Junior naively imagined that he had a fine, open relationship with his children, but they saw him as a forbidding figure, and Abby had to defuse tensions festering below the surface. She ended up serving as interpreter for them, saving the day with straight talk, common sense, and wisecracking humor. She also helped the children to please Junior in practical ways. When he wished them to memorize biblical verse, she printed out extracts on flash cards for them, and she also tidied up their account books before the weekly paternal audit.
Junior wanted to saturate the children with sermons and religious tracts. Each morning at seven forty-five, even with guests present, the butler circulated a stack of Bibles on a silver tray. Junior read a portion of scripture and asked others to read aloud before they touched breakfast. Trying to keep alive the Sabbath tradition, he led his children, single file, on Sunday nature walks around Pocantico, lecturing them on trees and wildflowers and meting out fines for those who fell out of line. One Sunday in the 1920s, he deliberated long and hard about whether to allow his children to play tennis on the Sabbath. He consented only under pressure from Abby. The children were baptized, but they never turned into such regular churchgoers as their parents or grandparents, and the Baptist Church never formed the focal point of their lives.
CHAPTER 33
Past, Present, Future
Blessed with his father’s longevity, Rockefeller outlasted all his sib-lings. Though Frank was vice president of two Cleveland steel companies in his later years, he never got over his antipathy to John and raged against him till his dying day. In 1916, John gave a thousand dollars apiece to Frank’s three daughters and contemplated forming trust funds to provide each of them with a lifetime income. Nevertheless, even on his deathbed, following a stroke in early 1917, Frank still ranted against his oldest brother. “I was with him constantly and was there when he died,” said one of Frank’s friends. “You can understand the depth of his feeling when I say that his greatest fear during those last days was that John might try to come and see him.”1 After Frank died in April 1917, John and William attended the Cleveland funeral at Lake View Cemetery, where Frank was lowered into the plot he had chosen apart from the rest of the Rockefellers. Frank’s wife, Helen, and his three daughters had no plans to perpetuate his crazy vendetta and after the funeral cordially received John, who canceled his dead brother’s outstanding loans.
In his last twenty years, Rockefeller felt the subterranean pull of tender boyhood memories. In June 1919, right before his eightieth birthday, he and William loaded up three Crane-Simplex touring cars and set out for the verdant Finger Lakes region of their boyhood. They returned to Richford, Moravia, and Owego and so cherished the memories that they reenacted the trip every year until William’s death in 1922. The Moravia house, with its splendid view of Owasco Lake, now lodged convicts from the Auburn prison who were working, by a bizarre coincidence, on the nearby Rockefeller Highway. On Rockefeller’s last visit, gazing at the old frame house, he doffed his cap, bowed his head, and declaimed with an actor’s panache, “Farewell old home!”2 Several days later came news reports that the house had burned to the ground, probably from a faulty chimney. Affected by the news, Rockefeller jotted down in a short-lived diary that he kept, “That was the scene of our first business venture, when we engaged in the raising of a flock of turkeys.”3 He had traveled so unimaginably far beyond his rustic boyhood world that his life seemed unreal to him at times.
In June 1922, following one of these upstate jaunts, William Rockefeller consulted doctors about his problems with a raspy throat and was diagnosed as having throat cancer. In this weakened state, he decided to canter briskly through Central Park one day, contracted pneumonia, and died shortly afterward. In a letter to Henry Clay Folger, Rockefeller eulogized his brother as a “strong, resourceful, kindly man.”4 Though always overshadowed by John, William left a sizable fortune of about $200 million ($1.8 billion today), eclipsing the estates of Payne Whitney and Thomas Fortune Ryan. Yet aside from a million-dollar gift for war relief, William had shown no charitable impulses, even though John had pleaded with him to endow educational or medical projects. Virtually all of William’s estate went to his four children: Emma Rockefeller McAlpin, William Goodsell Rockefeller, Percy Avery Rockefeller, and Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge.
By 1922, Rockefeller had lost his parents, his four brothers and sisters, his wife, his eldest daughter, two grandchildren, and the vast majority of his old business partners. As he wistfully told Henry Clay Folger, “The ranks of the older associates are thinning out and we of the Old Guard naturally draw closer together.”5 He understandably dwelled on his own mortality. In July 1919, on his eightieth birthday, Junior wanted to give him a Rolls-Royce, but he asked how much it would cost and took the $14,000 check instead. As part of the festivities, Rockefeller told the press that he devoutly wished to live to one hundred and credited his good health t
o golf and a daily tablespoon of olive oil. The white-haired Dr. Biggar repeated his long-standing prophecy: “Mr. Rockefeller will live to be 100 years old.”6 Rockefeller and Dr. Biggar shook hands on a pact that they would play a round of golf on July 8, 1939. Dr. Biggar, alas, canceled the appointment: He expired in the 1920s while his celebrated patient, touting the Biggar gospel of fresh air and five daily periods of rest, soldiered on. Because of Rockefeller’s abstemious eating style, along with a substantial loss of bone mass, his weight dipped below one hundred pounds. Once tall and rangy, he was now a wizened little man, no taller than his son.
Despite his rather eerie, cadaverous look, Rockefeller still gazed shrewdly at the world, his eyes alert as he sized up newcomers. He tried to banish gloomy thoughts and admit only joy and pious gratitude for God’s bounty. Though somewhat lonely and susceptible to occasional bouts of depression, he would rally and emerge more ebullient than before. Typically surrounded by six or eight people at golf or meals, he cultivated the company of younger people, especially younger women. On his eighty-sixth birthday, he wrote the following sugary verse:
Four generations of Rockefellers in 1928. From left to right: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Abby (Babs) Rockefeller Milton, and Abby Milton. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play—
I dropped the worry on the way—
And God was good to me every day.7
Throughout his life, the mutable Rockefeller had continually re-created himself while adhering to certain core principles. As H. G. Wells wrote, “Manifestly he has grown and broadened at every stage of his career.”8 Perhaps the most startling transformation came in his behavior toward women as he sloughed off the old Victorian inhibitions. Free from Cettie’s restraining influence, Rockefeller became positively ribald. When an old colleague, William T. Sheppard, introduced him to a Mrs. Lester one day, Rockefeller said suggestively, “Mr. Sheppard, your friend, Mrs. Lester, is very easy to look at.” Junior stood there aghast. “I beg your pardon,” he apologized to Mrs. Lester, “but my father has picked up some slang phrases without understanding their meaning.” Evidently no prude, Mrs. Lester shot back, “Oh, Mr. Rockefeller, you do not need to apologize for your father.” 9
It was a rare golf party that did not include a lady golfer for Rockefeller’s delectation, and when he got off a good shot he erupted into a little mock Charleston, telling the lady, “You ought to kiss my hand for that.”10 When crowds clustered about him in public, Rockefeller conspicuously waved at the pretty young women. “He was like a little boy in his playtime,” noted one photographer.11 Rockefeller, for the first time, had an identifiable lady friend: Mrs. Ira Warner of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the stout wife, then widow, of an optical-instruments manufacturer and a constant visitor at both Kykuit and Ormond Beach.
Rockefeller increasingly used the afternoon drives as opportunities for hanky-panky. Wearing thick black or amber goggles to screen out the sun, he sometimes borrowed a veil from one of the lady passengers and laced it dramatically across his face and wound it around his ears. He sat tightly wedged in the backseat between two buxom women, usually neighbors or visitors, with their laps covered by a blanket, and he became notorious for his hot schoolboy hands roving under the blanket. The man who had been a model of self-mastery now seemed, on occasion, an itchy-fingered old satyr. Tom Pyle, the head gardener and gamekeeper at Pocantico, steered the second car in the daily motorcade and was often astonished at his employer’s outrageous behavior. When Rockefeller’s car stopped one afternoon at a traffic light, a young woman riding in the backseat with him suddenly burst forth and scrambled back to Pyle’s car. “That old rooster!” she said. “He ought to be handcuffed.” Pyle noted that some local matrons enjoyed the hot seat and frequently returned for more. “I never decided whether different women received different treatment or whether some found it acceptable to be pinched by a ninety-year-old multimillionaire.” 12
As if he were living his life backward, Rockefeller belatedly entered adolescence in his ninth and tenth decades. It was as if, after all his preternatural exertions, he had attained the one thing denied him: a carefree childhood. Growing younger in spirit, he became something of a clotheshorse with an extensive wardrobe of dandyish costumes. He now owned sixty stylish suits and several hundred ties and sometimes changed outfits three times a day. To Junior’s astonishment, he squired ladies to concerts and dances at the Ormond Beach Hotel. “What a gay person you are becoming: An opera one night and the Governor’s ball another,” he wrote his father. “I do hope things will quiet down before Abby and I arrive.”13 Around this time, Rockefeller also developed a strange fondness for antic behavior. One evening, when the dinner talk turned to corns, Rockefeller said, “I never had one and to prove it I will show you my foot”—then he peeled off his shoe and stocking and placed a bare foot on the table. 14
As he and his guests drove through the Florida countryside one afternoon, they nearly ran out of gas but found a rural filling station nearby. When a husky country woman appeared, the chauffeur asked for five gallons—which struck her as too small for this mammoth vehicle. Where were they going? she asked. Leaning forward in the backseat, Rockefeller piped up, “My dear woman, we are on our way to heaven. And we’ll get there sooner or later.” She peered at him dubiously. “Yer may be on yer way to heaven, whoever you are,” she told Rockefeller, “but I warn yer you’ll never get there on five gallons o’ gas!”15 It became one of Rockefeller’s favorite tales. Often, if there were empty seats in the car, he picked up hitchhikers or pedestrians to keep the stream of conversation flowing.
Each year, Rockefeller threw an annual Christmas party at Ormond Beach for his neighbors. The Casements was illuminated with a radiant star of Bethlehem over the door and glowing candles twinkled in each window. Rockefeller appeared in a tuxedo, bowed, pronounced seasonal greetings, and distributed gifts. He then led the group in Christmas carols and tooted party horns along with the children. Rockefeller increasingly warmed to strangers. One day, George N. Rigby, the local newspaper editor, wrote an article titled “Ormond the Different,” a panegyric to the town’s friendliness. When Rockefeller went to congratulate him, they chatted outside the newspaper office, beside a railway siding. As people on the train recognized Rockefeller, they pressed their faces to the windows and started taking pictures. Far from minding this attention, Rockefeller seemed to bask in it. Back in the car, Mrs. Evans reproachfully asked whether he had not made a spectacle of himself. “Of course,” he said. “But I wanted to prove that the article Mr. Rigby wrote, ‘Ormond the Different,’ was true.” 16
After a life spent fleeing the press, Rockefeller proved an instinctive master of the new cinematic medium. Curt Engelbrecht, a photographer for the Hearst newsreel company, Movietone News, pursued Rockefeller until he agreed to pose for the cameras. On his ninetieth birthday in 1929, Rockefeller donned a foppish light-gray cutaway suit, white vest, and boutonniere and spent two hours slicing an oversize cake and ad-libbing before the cameras. As Engelbrecht recalled, “He had a lot of fun playing the star of the production, and he was not ready to stop until the last foot of film had been used.”17 In movie theaters across America, audiences saw John D. Rockefeller on the screen, walloping golf balls with a fierce but clumsy stroke and leading cronies in a rousing medley of hymns. People suddenly found something endearing about this anachronistic old gentleman who had graduated to the status of an American legend.
Why the sudden change in Rockefeller’s image? The titan was always a touchstone for American attitudes toward money, and the nation worshiped it in the 1920s. The passage of time had also spread a mellow glow over his depredations, which seemed to belong to an earlier, half-forgotten era. He also represented an increasingly honored American type: the practical, thrifty, laconic men who had established the country’s
industrial base. Now succeeded by salaried managers and corporate bureaucrats, these first-generation industrialists retrospectively took on a new heroic sheen. Perhaps the most obvious reason for Rockefeller’s enhanced stature was that the public now associated him far more with philanthropy than with Standard Oil. The press, once hostile to him, formed his biggest cheering section. “It is doubtful whether any private individual has ever spent a great fortune more wisely than Mr. Rockefeller,” Pulitzer’s World editorialized in 1923, while the Hearst press, not to be outdone, stated, “The Rockefellers have given away more money and to better advantage than anybody else in the world’s history since the ark stranded on Ararat.”18
Even as Rockefeller became sporty and dapper in the Roaring Twenties, keeping up with the times, his son clung to dark business suits and starched white shirts. Now in his fifties, graying and bespectacled, Junior began to look like a museum piece. In 1923, as if taking refuge in a more comforting past, Junior had his office at 26 Broadway renovated by Charles of London, who installed oak paneling from an English Tudor mansion, bookcases with leaded glass panes, an Elizabethan conference table, and a Jacobean refectory table. While the Standard Oil companies raked in money from the auto boom, Junior preferred horse-drawn carriages and balked at setting foot inside an airplane.
Nothing made both father and son seem so old hat or controversial in certain quarters as their emphatic support of Prohibition. Not only had they never tasted liquor in their lives, but they had steadily supported the Anti-Saloon League and given it $350,000 since its founding in 1895. Before enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920, Rockefeller had doubted that prohibition would work. “It is a vile agent of destruction,” he said of drink, “yet men will go on making it and selling it. It is the right hand of the devil.”19 Yet whatever their private skepticism, the Rockefellers were strongly associated with temperance. To connoisseurs of bathtub gin, Junior seemed a rich, stuffy prig who denied the worker a glass of beer. “One glass of beer may lead to another,” he declared. “Therefore, I say one glass is one glass too many.” 20 By 1926, Junior had sufficient doubts about the course of Prohibition that he withdrew his support from the Anti-Saloon League, but it was several years before he entirely retracted it.
