The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  The mystery man himself would later insist that during this four-year hiatus he was being mentored by a gentleman named Harry Copeland, who he said became his godfather. Later, some people would surmise that he was referring to the former habitué of the Belmont Park racetrack on Long Island. He was known as Harry the Horse for his prowess in predicting the ponies. But that Harry Copeland died in the late 1990s, and neither his daughter nor anyone else I could find knew of any ties he had with Christian Gerhartsreiter, Christopher Chichester, or Christopher Crowe.

  Everyone agrees on one thing: if he had been ghostlike in his first decade in America, he became a real ghost for the next four years.

  “He was gone,” said Boston police deputy superintendent Thomas Lee. The veteran police officer had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the immigrant’s roller-coaster life, except for the period from 1988 to 1992. “We don’t have good information about where he was during those missing years,” said Lee.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Again, he was someplace pretending to be somebody. I don’t know who.”

  “Four years and not a single clue?” I asked.

  “Not for sure, no,” he said. “Nineteen ninety-two may be the first time we have him again, living in an apartment in New York.”

  He emerged then, as usual, in church.

  St. Thomas Church, founded in 1823, is the epicenter of Episcopalianism in New York City, located on one of the most stellar stretches of Fifth Avenue. The church’s French High Gothic building was completed in 1913, “of cathedral proportions, with the nave vault rising 95 feet above the floor,” according to St. Thomas’s visitor information. At the time of his arrival in the church, he would have seen many of the leaders of New York business, politics, and society, including Brooke Astor, who often attended with her friend Hope Preminger, the former fashion model who became the wife of film director Otto Preminger, as well as piano legend George Shearing and his wife, Ellie.

  The church was a magnet for the then thirty-year-old expatriate, who had been driven underground for for years by what to him must have seemed like the uncivilized bleating of law enforcement officers. Its spires must have been a beacon of hope to the immigrant, now washing up as an entirely new person in New York City. “If you do not currently have a church home, or if you are new to New York City and have not yet found a church home, might you consider joining us?” asks one pamphlet.

  The man who responded to that summons was no longer Christopher Crowe. When he entered the magnificent Gothic church, he had an equally magnificent name and a meticulously researched persona to go with it. “Hello,” he greeted his fellow worshippers in his perfectly enunciated East Coast prep school accent, wearing a blue blazer and private-club necktie, which he would usually accent with khaki pants embroidered with tiny ducks, hounds, or bumblebees, worn always with Top-Sider boat shoes, without socks. His voice was as distinctive as his attire, a deep, hypnotic melody coming from the back of his throat, a voice that, to his mind and those who met him during this defining epoch, was the epitome of good breeding, vast wealth, and impeccable taste. “Clark,” he said, “Clark Rockefeller.”

  Where, how, and when he conjured up the name may never be known, but in no time at all he had spread it far and wide, first at St. Thomas and throughout the city. He would later inflate it to James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller, but to those he met in the beginning he was just plain Clark Rockefeller, the reluctant scion of the family with the country’s most famous name.

  “In the late nineteenth century, St. Thomas was the church of the prominent but much newer money in New York—the Vanderbilt crowd, but not the sort of old Yankee New Yorkers,” said a longtime member I’ll call John Wells, who was one of the first to meet Clark Rockefeller when he arrived at St. Thomas sometime in early 1992, and who would eventually have close ties with him. We were sitting in one of New York’s parks, and before Wells got to Clark, he felt it important to set the grand scene where the wily German debuted his greatest character. “The church has hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments,” said Wells. “Their music program is second to none. Their choir is fantastic. Their main organist used to run the music at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The rector, when I started going there, was John Andrew, who had been chaplain to one of the archbishops of Canterbury, and who had an affiliation with the Queen Mother. At the same time the church has attracted a lot of people who like to play at being New York society. The congregation ranged from people who actually were members of New York society to people who were totally playing the game.”

  It was a Saturday when Wells and I met, and I told him I would be up bright and early for services the next morning, so that I could experience the church where Clark Rockefeller struck gold. “You’ll see tomorrow,” he said. “The ushers wear morning suits every Sunday—you know, the striped trousers and gray jackets? On major Sundays they wear long cutaways, like a tuxedo. St. Thomas is the church around which the whole Easter Parade started. They would carry the altar flowers from St. Thomas Church to St. Luke’s Hospital, when it was still on Fifth Avenue, and people would come out and see it.” As Wells’s oral history confirmed, this was a church where plenty of people pretended to be slightly more—or a lot more—than they actually were. “Back in my time, there was somebody lurking around calling himself a lord, who was nothing of the sort. He would come to church in hunting clothes and jodhpurs. It’s a place where everybody is a little bit preposterous. Clark Rockefeller was just a little more preposterous than anyone else.”

  “There are plenty of perfectly nice people there as well; it’s not as if the whole parish is caught up in some head game,” Wells continued. “But there is definitely a certain element of people trying to live out their fantasies.”

  These were presumably the people the newly christened Clark Rockefeller intuitively knew would open their arms wide to him, hoping that some of the dynastic Rockefeller magic might rub off on them and raise them to a higher plane. John Wells would play a key role in connecting Rockefeller to some of the young, impressionable parishioners, who would in turn help him climb the ladder of social success.

  “I remember meeting Clark at one of the coffee hours,” he continued. “The coffee hour is just a reception after the Sunday service. They would have a long table with silver coffee urns and two ladies of the parish pouring coffee and that sort of thing. The church did theater well. Clark introduced himself, or I was introduced to him. I think I might have even asked, ‘Are you one of the Rockefeller cousins?’ His response was, ‘No, I’m one of the cousins’ cousins.’ ”

  Wells took that to be a very subtle way of conveying, Yes, I am a Rockefeller, but I don’t take my famous family or myself too seriously.

  Rockefeller would soon take up with Wells’s crowd of friends, who often socialized after church. Brunching with the young lions of St. Thomas Church, the newcomer had quite a tale to tell, one that would have been absolutely impossible to believe if a mere mortal were telling it, but coming from a Rockefeller it sounded not only wild and crazy but also improbably true.

  “He intimated that he was from the Percy Rockefeller branch of the clan—not John D. ultra-rich, but plenty rich,” continued Wells. “He even had an old painting that he said was Percy Rockefeller. He claimed to have grown up on Sutton Place,” he said, indicating an East Side enclave of some of the grandest town houses and most prominent names in the city. “He said that he would see the steeples of Queens from his backyard, peeking out over his fence. He claimed to have gone to Yale at something like age fourteen. He had the Yale college scarf with the blue stripes on it. He said he had one of the J-boats from his grandparents—you know, the classic 1920s, 1930s sailing yachts.”

  He was referring to the big yachts built during the Great Depression for the likes of Vincent Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. “I wish I could summon his voice,” Wells said, indicating that it reeked of being to the manor born. He told Wells that his J-boat was n
amed True Love, and that the family was miffed that the producers of the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story, starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, had lifted the name to use for the yacht in the film.

  “He said, ‘The family was highly irritated,’ ” said Wells. But then Rockefeller added that he had recently sold True Love to the pop star Mariah Carey and her husband, Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola, “who wanted it for a fancy yacht to watch the fireworks from.” Wells recalled Rockefeller saying this with “Utter disdain” for the nouveau riche couple. “And he was laughing at the idea of them using it as a pleasure boat, because, he said, ‘A J-boat is a racing boat and not a proper place to host parties.’ ”

  As always, the bonfire had begun with these tiny sparks, one or two well-placed individuals impressed by the friendly stranger with the colorful life. In the case of the newly minted persona of Clark Rockefeller, one of these was a fourteen-year-old girl walking her dog in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza in affluent Midtown Manhattan. She was a student at Spence, the premier all-girls private school, her parents worked very long hours—her mother as a doctor, her father as a lawyer—and not one in a string of thirteen different nannies could succeed in keeping her cloistered inside her family’s apartment at the prestigious United Nations Plaza.

  Seeking companionship, she would escape to the park with her English pointer and her homework. It was here in early 1992 that she met the charming older man, then thirty-one, with the enormous eyeglasses walking a black-and-tan Gordon setter, the four-hundred-year-old breed favored in Great Britain for hunting pheasant, grouse, partridge, and woodcock, which he named Yates, after the obscure nineteenth-century British novelist and dramatist Edmund Hodgson Yates. They struck up a conversation, and the girl, whom I’ll call Alice Johnson, was immediately taken. He was so friendly, so smart, and, best of all, he cared about her. Almost immediately, he was helping her with her homework and they were walking their dogs through the park together.

  The day after she met him, Alice was in the park with her cousin, who, going through an inquisitive phase, just had to see what was in the stranger’s wallet.

  “You can’t go through my wallet!” he said, which of course made the girls want to see its contents all the more.

  “Are you a mob boss?” they began, trying to guess who he was and why he seemed so secretive.

  “No . . .”

  “Are you James Bond? A CIA agent?”

  “No, no . . .”

  Alice, who had been studying history, asked, “Are you the Lindbergh baby?”

  Finally he relented, sheepishly opening his wallet to show them his identification, which bore the name CLARK ROCKEFELLER.

  “A Rockefeller!” the girls shrieked, because they had studied the family at Spence. The revelation unleashed a torrent of information from Clark. He was worth exactly $450 million, he said. Because of his enormous wealth and his famous family name, he had to be extremely careful about security. “Normal for a Rockefeller, of course,” he admitted. But it was no fun living in fear of being kidnapped and held “for millions” in ransom. However, there were perks, he added. Like having the keys to every door in Rockefeller Center. Maybe he would take Alice there to pull a prank one night: “We could turn off all the lights on the General Electric Building!” he said, referring to Rockefeller Center’s art deco centerpiece. “That would be the coolest thing ever!” Alice exclaimed. Or perhaps they could run around the Saturday Night Live set in the building’s NBC Studios, which Clark loved to do until his “Uncle David,” meaning the philanthropist David Rockefeller, made him stop. He was in the middle of writing a book, American Standard, which would “educate the middle class on how to dress and how to act,” and it was clear from his preppy clothing and perfect diction that Clark Rockefeller knew how to do all of that. He always wore khaki pants, a blood-red Yale baseball cap, and a Lacoste polo shirt, with the collar turned up. “He believed in the alligator,” Alice would later say.

  Everything about the man was special, important, and, to a fourteen-year-old girl, magical. Soon, Clark and Alice were running their dogs down the East River Drive jogging track, singing show tunes—Clark knew them all—from Annie to Cole Porter at the top of their lungs. They quickly abandoned the dog park for the city at large. They ate hot fudge sundaes at Rumpelmayer, the ice cream parlor inside the old St. Moritz Hotel, and bagels fresh out of the ovens at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side. He took her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he knew everything about every painting, and would always pause reverently for “a moment of silence” in the Met’s Michael Clark Rockefeller Collection, named for his “cousin” who tragically disappeared in 1961 in New Guinea. Throughout every outing, he was constantly speaking into a radio, because, he explained, he had to regularly report his whereabouts to his security office. “See?” he would tell Alice, pointing at dark sedans in the street, which he said were forever following him to make sure he was safe.

  Of course, she had to introduce him to her parents, and her mother was as entranced as Alice had been. Soon, they were all as close as kin. Alice began referring to him as her uncle or cousin (the monikers were sometimes mixed up)—while Clark introduced her as his “niece”—and her mother loved him so much that she told everyone he was her beloved “nephew.” Mother and daughter visited him in his apartment at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza on Second Avenue and East Forty-seventh Street, and while they thought the furnishings—lawn furniture, mainly—were a bit odd, they chalked it up to Rockefeller eccentricity. And when he would invite Alice’s grandmother, a socially well-connected doyenne of the Upper East Side, to lunch, he would always hand her the bill at the end of the meal, saying he had been brought up to “never carry money.” They chalked that up to Rockefeller eccentricity too.

  Every Thanksgiving, he said, it was mandatory that he join the Rockefeller family for their traditional dinner at Kykuit, the historic home near Tarrytown, New York, that John D. Rockefeller had built in 1913, and that had been home to four generations of Rockefellers. Over the course of their friendship he would sometimes take Alice’s dog along with his Gordon setter to the Thanksgiving event, returning to exclaim how glorious it had been to be with “Uncle David, Uncle Laurance, and Uncle Jay,” leaving both Alice and her mother rapt with his descriptions of the vast estate, the endless servants, and the close family conviviality.

  Yet despite his bloodline and everything that went along with it, there was something sad about Clark. He said he was all alone in the world—his parents had died tragically when he was very young, he explained—after they forced him to attend Yale at fourteen because of his “genius” IQ. Even his birthday was fraught with heartbreak: February 29, 1960, was a leap year, which meant he could celebrate it only every four years. “He told these stories with such emotion,” Alice recalled, quite often accompanied by tears. What he did for work was important, complicated, high-level, and ultra-secretive—although he did share some details about that—but he always had time for the people he cared about. “I can’t love anyone or anything unless they’re special,” he often said. And Alice and her mother felt privileged to be a part of his incredible orbit.

  In time Clark became, with Alice’s mother’s blessings, a sort of surrogate parent. The 1994 New York debutante season was coming up, with Alice as part of it, and Clark would guide her through it. He even escorted her to a ball or two in his tuxedo, bow tie, and dress shoes, always worn without socks. “If I had to go back in time, I would do it again, because he was important to me and I was important to him,” Alice later recalled. “I needed him then. He was my godfather, he was my uncle, my cousin. He was somebody I could turn to.”

  She and her mother, in turn, had provided Clark Rockefeller with two things he desperately needed: validation that his incredible new persona was believable and, equally important, a support system—a real family—in the upper echelons of New York City.

  Thus the circle that Clark Rockefeller would soon command began to grow.

  In his
early days in New York he had arrived at St. Thomas Church in what would become a regular feature of his MO: a snit. He had fled his previous “church home,” said John Wells, which was Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, on Fifth Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street, a venerable house of worship that bills itself as offering “the personal touch of Jesus Christ amid the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan.” He said he left that church because its elders had dared refuse to baptize the girl he was by then calling his niece, Alice Johnson. “Clark told us that he had been baptized at St. Thomas himself, that he wasn’t a member but his parents had him baptized there in the sixties,” said Wells. “So he claimed to have a long, sort of ancient family history there.”

  “He wanted to have Alice baptized, and her mother was very happy about it,” said Alice Johnson’s father, who explained that his wife (now ex) could be easily impressed—especially with a fancy name—and soon began vouching for her young friend who, she was convinced, was indeed a Rockefeller. He confirmed that Rockefeller had previously been a regular at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, adding that he liked to point out that “the Rockefeller family had a home around the corner, where Nelson Rockefeller died. He died, as they say, in the saddle, with his secretary. He died happy.” Clark Rockefeller knew all sorts of such Rockefeller family minutiae.