The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  William Rockefeller, extending his patriarchal beneficence into the fourth generation, has endowed his country with some fifty prospective millionaires in their own right—all but two of them had not yet entered this world when he left it and nearly half of whom are still unborn.

  Nothing like this is likely ever to happen again. Inheritance taxes took only one fourth of William Rockefeller’s estate. Today they would take three fourths of an estate that size, and the rates are more likely to be raised than lowered. So there probably will not be another such dynastic transmission of wealth.

  Despite the “dynastic transmission,” William Rockefeller’s heirs have not displayed quite the talent at holding on to—and making more—money that their Tarrytown cousins have. Shrewd investments within the John D. Rockefeller line have succeeded in vastly increasing the original fortune. With the William branch, it has generally been the opposite. A myriad of costly divorces, for one thing, has taken a toll of William’s estate. With the exception of Percy—who, as his father may have foreseen, had a knack for making money in Wall Street in both a rising and a falling market—the Greenwich Rockefellers have tended to have either bad luck or little flair for making money. As a result, none today is as wealthy as the patriarch might have hoped.

  At the same time, the Greenwich Rockefellers have displayed some decidedly un-Rockefeller behavior. One girl married a man forty years older than she. Another created a stir in the newspapers while she was at Vassar by having her aviator boyfriend drop love letters to her from the sky. Godfrey Rockefeller startled the family by marrying a Jewess—or at least a woman who was Jewish by heritage. She was Helen Gratz, a baptized Episcopalian but also a member of the distinguished Sephardic family of Philadelphia, and a collateral descendant of the beautiful Rebecca Gratz, whom Sir Walter Scott used as his model for Rebecca in Ivanhoe.

  When traditional Rockefeller Spartanism has been tried in the Greenwich branch, it either has been overdone or has backfired. One Greenwich Rockefeller third-generation son was angrily disinherited for failing to meet his father’s boat upon the latter’s return from Europe. Another received so little spending allowance while at Yale that he had to go to work in New Haven as a night telephone operator in order to eat. Still another Greenwich Rockefeller refused to build a swimming pool for his family until his daughter lost enough weight to look attractive in a swimsuit.

  Even Percy, considered the family financial genius in the Greenwich branch, became the center of a certain amount of scandal following the great stock market crash of 1929. He had, it was claimed, made a lot of money in the falling market by selling “short”—selling, in other words, stocks that he did not really own but had contracted to buy at a future date, and probably at a much reduced price. There was a great public outcry about the short selling of stocks, though this had been a common Wall Street custom and remains one, under stiffer regulations, today. Percy Rockefeller was summoned to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, which was investigating stock market practices. He defended his actions and affirmed that in the “tremendous depreciation” since 1929, he had lost many millions of dollars. He needed money, and he claimed that his short selling had netted him only $550,000, which, he said, was a “slight sum” compared with his “tremendous losses.” But Percy was a jolly soul with a host of friends in and out of Washington, and he was given no more than a light reprimand.

  The Greenwich Rockefellers have always favored Yale, while the Tarrytown Rockefellers have preferred Harvard, Princeton, and, in the case of Nelson, Dartmouth. And so the cool distance that continues to exist between the two branches of the great family is based on tradition, geography, and education—not to mention a certain discrepancy in bank balances. Over the years, at least two attempts have been made to mend the split with a huge catchall family reunion, but on both occasions, negotiations fell apart on the issue of venue. Naturally, the Greenwich Rockefellers wanted the gathering to take place in Tarrytown—“They have so much more room there,” says one—at the estate most of the Greenwich group had never seen. But Tarrytown, which has always regarded Greenwich as family mavericks, not to say poor relations, demurred. And so most of the Greenwich Rockefellers have never met their Tarrytown cousins.

  There are also differences in attitude and life style between the Greenwichites and the Tarrytonians. “Everything is very grand at Pocantico Hills,” says Mrs. Godfrey Rockefeller, munching a peanut butter sandwich in the library of her big Georgian house on Mead Lane—typical of the cozy, informal Greenwich Rockefeller style. “Even the children’s playhouse there is three stories tall. They’ve tended to concentrate on philanthropy, public service, and corporate finance. We’re more interested in our homes, our families, and our pleasant lives. We’ve stayed out of the limelight.” Staying out of the limelight involves a great deal of visiting back and forth between the Godfrey Rockefellers’ and their Greenwich relatives’ houses—Rockfields, the James Stillman Rockefellers’ place just behind them, and cousin Avery’s pleasant Wild Wings on Lake Avenue. Godfrey Rockefeller, a retired banker, is still an avid skier (a leg recently broken in a skiing accident will, he insists, not keep him off the slopes). He and his family keep a winter ski chalet in Mad River, Vermont—a chalet with its own private ski lift. “Whenever anybody thinks of Rockefellers, they think of the John D. branch,” he says a trifle wistfully. “But we’ve accomplished things too. It would be nice if someone acknowledged us once in a while. But most people, except here in Greenwich, don’t know we exist.”

  Currently, the most distinguished of the Greenwich Rockefellers are probably James Stillman Rockefeller and his nephew William. James Stillman Rockefeller, the son of William G. and Elsie Stillman Rockefeller, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale (1924). Married to the former Nancy Carnegie and now in his mid-seventies, he rose from a job with the brokerage firm of Brown Brothers & Company to the position of president, and then became chairman of the board of the National City Bank of New York. In the process he collected directorships of such prestigious corporations as National Cash Register, Kimberly-Clark, and Pan American World Airways. His son Andrew (Yale ’51) lives nearby in Greenwich.

  William Rockefeller, a hearty, husky bear of a man, is Yale ’40. He is the son of William Avery Rockefeller, the grandson of William G. Rockefeller, the great-grandson of William Rockefeller, Sr., and the great-great-grandson of the William Rockefeller whom everybody on both sides of the family would prefer to forget, who allegedly toyed with a servant girl and yet who sired sons who would make the name Rockefeller internationally synonymous with enormous wealth.

  When the present William married his pretty wife, Molly, his mother said to the bride, “You realize that you will have twenty-nine first cousins living in Greenwich.” At first, Molly Rockefeller thought that her mother-in-law’s comment was made out of a sense of family pride. She soon realized, however, that it was intended as a warning. Perhaps because of this, the young William Rockefellers defected from family tradition somewhat and settled in a large old house on Grandview Avenue in nearby Rye—“where you can walk to the station, walk to Rye Country Day School, and walk to the hospital.” William Rockefeller says: “It wasn’t just all the relatives, but as far as we were concerned, Greenwich had just gotten too big. It may sound snobbish to say so, but when I was growing up the people who composed Westchester and Fairfield County society were a very small group. Everybody knew everybody else. We dated girls from Larchmont, Pelham Manor, Greenwich, and Darien. But as these towns get bigger they get more isolated and self-contained. I grew up in Greenwich when Greenwich was nice. But now every time a company promotes a man to a big spot, the place he wants to move to is Greenwich, and all the big old places get broken up to make room for the new people. But Rye, because of its location, is different. It’s on a peninsula, so it can’t get bigger. There’s just no more land.”

  Bill Rockefeller remembers when, growing up in Greenwich, there were really two kinds of Greenwich soc
iety. “There were the people who lived in the city and came to Greenwich for the summer, and there were the people, like us, who lived in Greenwich and went away for the summer. The two groups never met.” For years, Greenwich Rockefellers have been summering in the Adirondacks near Saranac Lake (while the Tarrytown Rockefellers summer in Seal Harbor, Maine), where great-grandfather William Rockefeller—“who was a great sport”—bought a large tract of land and built an elaborate “camp,” with separate buildings for dining, cooking, sleeping, etc. The family has managed to hold on to much of the acreage, and Bill Rockefeller, his brother Frederic (Yale ’47), and his sister, Mrs. Miles J. McMillin, the wife of a Wisconsin publisher, and their families share several of the numerous cottages. “It is a bit clannish, I admit,” says Bill Rockefeller. “We sit on the porch and watch the kids.”

  Bill Rockefeller is a partner in the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Shearman & Sterling, and serves on the boards of a number of worthy institutions, including the Miriam Osborn Memorial Home (for elderly women) and the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is a past president of the ASPCA, and is currently president of the Metropolitan Opera. He used to do much more, until one of his three daughters (“No sons, much to my father’s eternal disappointment”) asked at the dinner table, “Which meeting are you going to tonight?” He was reminded then of a little ditty his mother once composed:

  When to meetings I go,

  With the greatest of skill,

  I always contrive

  To keep perfectly still.

  For if I show interest,

  Or seem a bit witty,

  Wham, there I am,

  On another committee.

  Molly Rockefeller recorded this message in needlepoint on a pillow for her husband.

  “People nowadays tend to give their children things instead of time,” Rockefeller says. “I found I was guilty of the same thing. It burns me up to see the way people in Rye will give a kid a Thunderbird for his eighteenth birthday; the parking lot at Rye Country Day School is jammed with Thunderbirds. When I was a kid in Greenwich we had bicycles.”

  The youngest generation of Tarrytown Rockefellers—the so-called Cousins—have frequently claimed that it is an onerous thing to be born with the name Rockefeller. The fortune that John D. Rockefeller left is now so vast that it has a life of its own, a life that can crush the dreams or ambitions of mere human beings. Several of the Cousins in the John D. branch have tried to give their money away in order to attain freedom from its great weight. But it cannot be done. They are bound to their wealth by so many trusts and legal instruments that it is theirs to live with and deal with like a congenital disease. Some have talked of changing their names in order to be rid, in part, of the weighty connotation.

  It turns out not to be easy to be part of the “poor branch” of the family, either, for somewhat different reasons. “It was very tough on the girls growing up,” says William Rockefeller. “They were always being teased about their name. Their friends all assumed that they were enormously rich. Particularly after Nelson became governor, and all the facts about how rich that side of the family was came out in the press, my daughters couldn’t understand why we weren’t living on the same grand scale. They’d say to me things like, ‘Why can’t we buy it, Daddy—we’re Rockefellers, aren’t we?’ It was a very tough thing for them to understand.”

  Perhaps that is why, now that they are grown, all three daughters are turning their backs on both Greenwich and Rye, on New York suburbia altogether, and have scattered in disparate directions. The oldest, Mary, is married and raising two boys in Chicago. The second, Edith, married to a sales executive with Boeing, lives in Seattle and works as a cartographer. The youngest, Sally, graduated recently from the University of Vermont, where she majored in forest management, and then headed for the great outdoors to work on reforestation projects.

  When she was a student at the Oldfields School in Maryland, Sally Rockefeller encountered a classmate named Eileen Rockefeller. Eileen turned out to be one of David Rockefeller’s daughters. “At that point, I’d never even met David,” says Sally’s father. Despite the century-old family schism, and the fact that, according to strict genealogy, the two girls were a full generation apart, they became friends.

  Now that his daughters are grown and gone, Bill Rockefeller has a new project that greatly excites him. “After years of trying to get people to give me money,” he says, “for Cancer, the Metropolitan Opera, the ASPCA, and so on, I’m finally in the delightful position of being able to give some money away.” He has been made president of the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation—appropriately, since he was one of the few people in the family who got on rather well with his despotic great-aunt. Since Geraldine Dodge’s husband and son both predeceased her, her entire fortune was left to charity. The Geraldine Rockefeller Foundation will not nearly approach in size the massive philanthropic instruments created by the John D. branch, but with the sale of Giralda, the Manhattan real estate, the money achieved from the Parke Bernet sale, plus her own and her husband’s personal fortunes, it will not be small potatoes by any means.

  The final thrust of the new foundation has not been completely determined, but Bill Rockefeller feels that animals, for which Geraldine Dodge had such a passion, should be at least partial beneficiaries. Secondary schools, both public and private, will also benefit, along with programs such as Head Start, which help underprivileged children. The rest of the foundation’s emphasis will probably be felt in New Jersey, where she lived, in education and in the arts.

  “She may have been difficult,” says Bill Rockefeller, “but she left a will that we’re very proud of.” It is a will that may help change the image of the Greenwich Rockefellers, and establish them as philanthropists in their own right.

  As for Tarrytown, across Westchester County on the banks of the Hudson, William Rockefeller waves a jaunty hand from his home on the Sound, and says, “Anyone with any sense knows that summers are cooler on the Sound than they are on the river.”

  11

  Troubled Darien

  Each of the Connecticut suburbs has attempted to cultivate a personality and an aura of its own. Greenwich, despite the fact that many of the old estates have been razed and subdivided, still likes to think of itself as providing the grandest Connecticut address. Farther up the line, wealthy and conservative Southport regards itself as “what Greenwich used to be.” Westport is “swinging”—artistic and liberal, popular with advertising and other media folk. Woodsy Weston is quieter, more family-oriented. When choosing a Connecticut suburb, one is supposed to take these differences into consideration.

  Then there are the two pretty, well-manicured towns of New Canaan and Darien. New Canaan—to people in Darien, at least—is regarded as elegant but stodgy. It is a town preferred by dowagers and wealthy retirees. It is comfortably isolated. It is far from the Connecticut Turnpike and, by train, must be reached by a special spur of the New Haven tracks (which dead-end at New Canaan). Darien is considered a livelier, more fun-loving, party-going town for younger, upwardly mobile families. But Darien also lies hard by Exit 13 (a number which the superstitious find ominous) of the Connecticut Turnpike, and thereby hang many of the town’s recent problems.

  It used to be that the Darien Police Department had little to do besides quiet an occasional noisy party or domestic argument, and ticket cars without parking stickers at the railroad station. “Our main excitement was helping get pet cats out of trees,” says a member of the Darien police force. But in the twenty years since the turnpike opened, the population of Darien has doubled, from 11,000 to 22,000. Most of the big old houses remain, but they have become crowded in by smaller, less expensive houses, many of them built for corporation executives stationed in the New York area for two- or three-year periods. There is much more turnover in real estate than there was a generation ago. Though it used to be that everyone in Darien “knew everybody else,” this is now no longer the case, and long-time Darien residen
ts now encounter strange faces in the shops and supermarkets. In the last ten years, twenty-one new commercial buildings have been built in the town, and the number of employees who commute into and away from Darien each day has doubled to three thousand. Two new motels have opened, bringing in transients for the first time.

  There are still the small expensive shops along Darien’s main street, but there are also new shops, restaurants, and bars where both the atmosphere and the customers are somewhat less refined. In 1975, Darien had its first murder in more years than anyone can remember—a triple homicide in a barroom brawl. A year earlier, the town had its first bank robbery and, shortly afterward, its first street holdup. The incidence of shoplifting and bad-check passing has climbed alarmingly, along with break-ins and residential burglaries. Home owners who never used to lock their doors when they went out are now installing elaborate burglar alarm systems, and shops and banks now scan customers with mirrors, sheets of one-way glass, and closed-circuit television cameras. Because of the town’s easy access to the turnpike, trucks now turn in to the quiet, tree-shaded streets at night and park in front of empty houses, and within hours, burglars will have removed everything of value. Darien has now learned of the “specialty burglar,” who may choose to go only after silver, or jewelry, or paintings, or furs, or hi-fi components, or Oriental rugs.

  The local newspaper used to print routinely, as social items, details of residents’ vacation plans. Editors have been told to discontinue this, and to print nothing until a vacationer returns. The news that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so are departing for their winter home in the West Indies would almost certainly guarantee the arrival of a burglar’s truck the following night. Though the town is proud of its fast and efficient police force, many residents are even hesitant to notify the police when they plan to be away. The fear is that the police, in their “dealings with criminals,” may let a fact slip out that would lead to a burglary. The owners of expensive and expensively decorated houses used to be delighted when magazines like House Beautiful and House & Garden wanted to photograph their gardens or interiors, along with floor plans. “Now,” says one woman, “I’d have to think twice about letting anyone into the house to take pictures. When something like that is published, it’s like a blueprint for a burglary.” (Friends and relatives of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney were shocked when she published a book of pictures of her daughter’s dollhouse—a detailed and miniaturized room-by-room version of the Whitneys’ Kentucky mansion: for twenty-five dollars, a burglar could have an itemized catalogue of the house’s costly contents. In Darien, the opening of houses to tours on behalf of a charity was once a popular fund-raising technique. Today, the best houses in Darien refuse to participate in such tours. “It’s a shame,” says one woman. “The only people you can get to show their houses are the ones where there is nothing pretty to see.”