by Mark Seal
It was clear that Clark Rockefeller was again holding all of the cards.
CHAPTER 14
Snooks
On May 24, 2001, Reigh Storrow Mills Rockefeller, the daughter of Clark Rockefeller and Sandra Lynne Boss, was born in Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. The child’s first name was chosen by Rockefeller, after the Cornish town clerk, Reigh Helen Sweetser, merely because he heard and liked the name while standing at the clerk’s window in town hall one day.
When Reigh was born, however, Rockefeller was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at the hospital. His wife didn’t even know his whereabouts. It wasn’t until eighteen hours after Reigh’s birth that Rockefeller finally paid a visit to his wife and newborn child. Where was he during that pivotal time? As always, he was interacting with the locals of Cornish, which he continued to do for the first three months of his daughter’s life.
He had the freedom to do this because Sandra, who had taken a three-month maternity leave from McKinsey, was initially the child’s exclusive caretaker. “We were inseparable,” she would later testify, adding that her husband spent very little time with their daughter. “I think he was like many fathers, which was he thought she was cute, but he didn’t engage a lot with her at that time.”
Down the road from Doveridge, in one of Cornish’s grand homes, the White family, longtime stalwarts of the Cornish community, invited me over to talk about Clark. Laura White was his best friend for the first five years after his arrival in Cornish. A vivacious blonde, she was a single mother who worked as a flight attendant. Because she was often flying, she lived in her childhood home with her mother and father and her young son, Charlie.
Laura drove Clark to the hospital after his daughter was born, although she wasn’t clear about how long after the birth they arrived, “just that it was in the middle of the night.” She drove him in one of his growing collection of cars. For the auspicious occasion, he selected a Roadmaster, those large highway cruisers Buick introduced in the 1930s, instead of his bulletproof Cadillac limo.
He told Laura White that he needed her to drive him to the hospital because his regular driver, a fireman from the nearby community of Claremont, was unavailable. After checking on the condition of his wife and child, he instructed Laura to drive him back home, because, he said, “I have a phobia about hospitals.”
We were sitting on the Whites’ patio, looking across a summer vista of blazing green, an idyllic setting that, I sensed, had turned a bit banal in the absence of the famous man who so enlivened the little town with his oversized and outlandish antics. “When he would go over the covered bridge in one of his cars, people would say, ‘Wow!’” Laura said, referring to the National Historic Landmark bridge that spans the Connecticut River and connects Cornish, New Hampshire, to Windsor, Vermont.
She looked over at her young son, Charlie, who had joined us on the patio, and asked the boy if he wanted to tell me what he and his friends always called Clark.
“We called him Purple Pants,” said Charlie.
“Because he always wore purple pants,” Laura explained.
He would stop by to visit Laura and her family almost daily, especially around mealtimes, never bothering to knock on the door, just walking in. They were that close. And when the family had intimate parties—for birthdays and such—Clark was often included.
“He hated to have his picture taken,” recalled Laura, pulling out a stack of photographs of Rockefeller with the White family. What was remarkable was that in each and every one, Rockefeller was striking a pose that disguised him. In one of him at a birthday party, his eyes were deliberately closed. In another he screwed his face into a mask and stuck out his tongue. In another he was shielding his face with his hands. I suggested that he seemed to be attempting to leave no clear photographic record of his time in Cornish. “I gave up taking pictures of him because he would ruin the ambience” is all Laura would say.
She pulled out a diary she had kept during Rockefeller’s time in Cornish. “I wrote Helmut Kohl,” she said, referring to the former chancellor of Germany, “because he told me Helmut Kohl had come to visit him in Cornish. Here’s one with Mom,” she said of a diary entry regarding her mother: “Clark Rockefeller takes us to Boston with his chauffeured Cadillac.”
The diary sparked more memories. “Oh, God! He told us he went helicopter skiing in Canada! And skiing in Italy. And that he had an apartment in Paris he was trying to sell. And when he graduated from Harvard, he traveled around the world for years. And that he had a cousin in Cap Ferrat.”
She stopped to think back for a moment. “Oh! He told me a good one! He said, ‘Did you know Britney Spears is a physicist?’ I said, ‘No, Clark, she’s not a physicist.’ But he said she was, and he said, ‘I’ve had my people call her people, and she’s supposed to be coming up this weekend!’ The weekend happened, and I said, ‘Clark, did Britney Spears come?’”
She moved on to another tall tale. “He said he was in touch with [radio host] Garrison Keillor. He said, ‘My people are talking with Garrison Keillor, and Garrison is coming to the house to do a performance when the house is completed.’ ” Garrison Keillor never came to Doveridge, and Doveridge was never finished. Still, Clark Rockefeller came to win over many in Cornish. While he might have seemed odd, and more than a little “off,” he was still somehow, as always, let in. He had created perhaps his biggest, brashest, loudest, and frequently angriest character yet, a country squire in a historic house with a seemingly bottomless bank account.
It’s not hard to imagine that this welcoming community would find room for someone with all of these quirks, because, of course, New Englanders are known for their eccentricities. This was, after all, a very small town, whose famous covered bridge still bore the ancient sign WALK YOUR HORSES, beneath which was stated the penalty for those who trotted across the bridge: TWO DOLLAR FINE.
As Laura’s mother said, “He was the most exciting thing to happen around here for a long while.”
Many locals recalled him sailing down Platt Road, which runs in front of Doveridge, on his Segway, the two-wheeled gyroscopically balanced “personal transporter” on which the rider stands erect behind handlebars. The Segway was invented by another New Englander, Dean Kamen, who lived in a hexagonally shaped house of his own design just outside of Manchester, New Hampshire. And while a New Englander created the Segway, no one in Cornish seemed to embrace the newfangled gadget, aside from Rockefeller. “It wasn’t something the ordinary person in Cornish was going to be seen going out to the barn with,” recalled Senator Peter Burling. “But at some point, I was literally in the barnyard watering the horses, and up Platt Road comes Clark. In his Yale baseball cap. On a Segway.”
Burling recalled, “I think I must have said, ‘Oh, my God, look at this!’ In twenty-twenty hindsight, there were so many visual hints that it was all wrong, and all phony, and just plain stupid.” But back then, the senator added, the man in the Segway was big news in Cornish, and all doors were open to him.
He was a regular presence in the Cornish Town Offices, a red-brick building in what comprises Cornish’s town center. BINGO EVERY TUESDAY, read a sign out front. At her desk in the office was Merilynn Bourne, chairwoman of the Cornish Board of Selectmen, who essentially ran the town. A busy, no-nonsense blonde with a New England accent, she was known as Clark Rockefeller’s fiercest critic during the time he lived in Cornish. She flew into a nonstop rant the moment I said his name.
“Everything he did was to aggrandize his position,” she began. “It was to be bigger and better. He was not a very big guy if you looked at him. So everything he did was to puff himself up, just like the cock of the walk. Wearing his boat shoes in the middle of winter without socks, his yachting pants, his blue blazer, his white shirt. His chauffeur! He didn’t have a license, and every now and then he would be driving himself and I would remind him, ‘You don’t have a license, Clark.’”
He had total disdain for local laws,
and when Bourne ever called him out for driving without a license, he would just “sneer.” She often questioned his identity, telling him that she had friends who knew the actual Rockefellers in Woodstock, Vermont, and those friends said the real Rockefellers had never heard of him.
“Why is that, Clark?” she would ask.
“Because I don’t use my real first name,” he replied, adding that he had changed his first name “for anonymity,” which of course Merilynn thought odd, because if he wanted anonymity he would have changed his last name. Someone less skeptical might have accepted this explanation, but Merilynn said she didn’t.
“A lot of people bought it, and when they would say to me, ‘I don’t understand. Why do you keep doubting him?’ I would say, ‘I don’t understand why you believe a word that comes out of his mouth. Don’t you recognize a phony when you see one? It is like the emperor in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Don’t you see he is standing naked in front of you?’ And they would go, ‘You don’t know that.’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t been to outer space to see that the earth is round, but I’m pretty sure it is, and no, I can’t do DNA research on him, but I know he is not who he purports to be. I know a phony when I see one. That is not a prep school accent, and it is not a high Boston accent. That is an Eastern European accent—I’d put money on it.’ I wish I’d bet.”
As he did with Sandra Boss, he told Merilynn Bourne about his new business venture, Jet Propulsion Laboratories. But when she asked for his company Web site, the site he directed her to had nothing but the name JET PROPULSION LABORATORIES and a box into which the user had to enter a code, which Rockefeller never divulged.
In addition to frequent visits from Rockefeller, Bourne said, she also had Cornish-area officials he had contacted show up in her office, offering grand gestures of his largesse. She related several scenes involving people in positions of power who were snowed by the supposed philanthropy of Clark Rockefeller.
“Clark has offered to buy the Highway Department a backhoe!” exclaimed the county road agent one day, meaning Rockefeller was going to give a piece of road equipment to the town that the town couldn’t afford to give itself. “Stop talking to Clark!” Merilynn Bourne would admonish. “You can only get yourself into hot water. It is never good for anyone. He is not giving us anything, because he doesn’t give anybody anything.”
A week later, Rockefeller was in her office in a snit, saying, “I understand from the road agent that you are not willing to accept my gift. I don’t understand.”
“Well, Clark, I have this assumption that if the town were to accept your gift, you would probably ask us in a short period of time to do something with your gift for you, for free. Would I be right in that assumption?”
“Well, yes, of course.”
“I said, ‘Well, then, it is not a gift, is it?’”
He was equally generous with the police chief, telling him, “I am willing to get you this or that for your police car,” after which the chief uwould also be in Merilynn’s office, saying, “You know, I was talking to Clark—”
And Merilynn Bourne would erupt: “Every time someone comes in here and says they were talking to Clark, it just makes my hackles come up! Why would you talk to the man? He is a liar. You can’t trust a thing he says. Stop talking to him!”
“Well, he wants to get me a piece of equipment for the car,” said the chief.
“The answer is no,” said Merilynn. “We are not entertaining the idea.”
“So, because we wouldn’t entertain the idea, he gave money to the town of Plainfield,” she explained. “Then anonymously he actually wrote a letter to the editor of the Valley News, signed it with the name of someone who didn’t exist, saying, ‘Gee, it’s too bad Cornish is so backward that they wouldn’t take advantage of the generosity of a man like Clark Rockefeller.’ I’m thinking, ‘If they only knew.’”
“‘I don’t understand you people,’” Merilynn remembered Rockefeller telling her. “He’d just look at you with this hooded-cobra look and sneer at you and say, ‘I’ve got important things to do.’”
I asked her how he could have so successfully duped almost everyone in such a sophisticated place as Cornish. “Two things: Cornish, the artist colony, has some history, some panache and sophistication,” she replied. “It has class. And [Clark thought], ‘It is filled with a bunch of little country bumpkins, and I can impress the heck out of them.’ Absolutely, that is all he tried to do. Who the hell who lives in Cornish comes to a town meeting in March with Top-Siders and no socks? His sweater was draped over his shoulders and tied around his neck. It was The Preppy Handbook. I grew up in Newport, Rhode Island. I’ve been there, done that, seen it. I have one friend who still puts his sweater over his shoulders, and I tell him all the time, ‘You know, you are like sixty-two years old. Don’t you think it’s time to put that sweater routine away?’
“So, yes, I think he duped the town, and it was a shame,” she continued. “I wish the town had been a little smarter. Not everybody can see through people like Clark. You heard what Sandra said on the witness stand: ‘I can be brilliant and amazing in one area and very stupid in another area.’ I think people like Clark look for people like Sandra, who have low self-esteem when it comes to personal relationships. I think that’s where he was able to take advantage of her. She’s actually a very quiet, reserved, conservative female. She may work in an area of high finance, but she’s a consultant. She is not the CEO running the company. And someone like Clark was able to spot the weak one in the herd and think, ‘This is where I’ll focus my attention—build up her self-confidence, make myself important to her.’ He’s sitting home all day long being the preppy while she goes to work.”
After her three-month maternity leave, Sandra had to return to work in New York, leaving her baby in the care of a nanny. Sandra would return home midweek and stay through the weekend to be with her daughter. Soon, however, the first nanny quit, and another was hired, and then babysitters replaced the nannies, working shorter and shorter hours, until Clark became convinced that he was the best person to care for Reigh.
“He did not want to hire any more nannies,” Sandra testified. “He said he thought he could do a better job.”
Clark and Reigh bonded over books. She was only a little over two when she began reading, and reading—which was the route Clark Rockefeller took to discover America—was what made him initially connect with his daughter. “He liked being able to engage with her intellectually,” Sandra Boss said.
For the next few years, Clark took charge of Reigh. Sandra was traveling all week much of the time, leaving her husband in full control of their daughter, their house, and her checkbook. She argued that living in Cornish had become intolerable for her, but Clark would not budge.
“The defendant wanted to live in the country and was not willing to entertain discussions of moving,” she testified. She said Rockefeller even preferred for her not to come home midweek. He seemed to want to keep his life in Cornish—and his daughter—to himself.
“Reigh is very smart,” Sandra told the grand jury. “She learned the alphabet when she was very young, and she learned to read very young. When she became intellectually interesting, he got interested in wanting to basically control her—he would have used the word ‘guide’ her. He told me he had made the unilateral decision that he was going to be Reigh’s primary caretaker. Because I was working and he felt he wasn’t contributing enough, and he wanted to take care of her. I disagreed with him, but he said he wasn’t terribly interested in my opinion.”
Her husband “really dominated the situation” with their daughter, she said. As the child grew, he “was unable” to grasp her emotional needs. “And so he obsessed on her intellectual development, pressured her to learn very quickly. He became very routinized about what she would eat, what she would wear. . . . I didn’t mention before, he used to tell me how to dress. He would insist that I wear certain things. He started doing that with her.”
Me
rilynn Bourne had a clear memory of that. “He dressed her exactly the way he dressed himself. She wore the same little Izod or Lacoste shirts with the alligator and the same khaki pants and the same L.L. Bean lobster belt and the same Top-Siders, boat shoes without socks, and the little pageboy haircut. I said, ‘She’s simply an extension of himself. It’s self-love; it’s not parental love.’ He made her quote lines, scripture, and then pranced her out and made her perform.”
“She was going to be the ultimate proof, the ultimate vindication, of his talent,” the prosecutor David Deakin would later say of Rockefeller’s obsession with his daughter, whom he soon began calling Snooks, probably after the small daughter of the Savio family in Berlin, Connecticut, with whom he had lived shortly after arriving in America. “I think it’s clear that he found in Reigh the ability to accomplish something real. She was going to legitimize him. He was going to give her the opportunities that he didn’t have. She would become someone extraordinary. In raising Reigh Rockefeller, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, or Reigh Rockefeller, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, or Reigh Rockefeller, the president of Stanford University, he would be known as the father of Reigh Rockefeller. And that was a real accomplishment in his mind.”
The child would have a profound effect on Clark Rockefeller. As she grew in years and intelligence, he came to love her and be absolutely devoted to her. And with that love and devotion, the man who so successfully was able to flee all remnants of his past had at long last acquired an anchor, the one person he couldn’t cheat, con, or escape. “The one real thing in his life was his daughter, and his love for his daughter,” said Boston deputy police superintendent Thomas Lee. “Everything else has been a fraud.”
