by Mark Seal
CHAPTER 15
The God of War
Down the road from Doveridge was the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, the 365-acre former home of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who came to the area in 1885 in search of “Lincoln-like men” to use as models for his soon-to-be-famous sculptures of the American president and other heroic figures. In 1905, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Saint-Gaudens’s arrival, the members of the Cornish art colony—which by then included rich New Yorkers who had followed the artist to the bucolic hamlet—performed a masque, a play based on classical drama.
In 2005, the staff of the historic site marked the centennial of that seminal Cornish event by restaging the masque, called The Gods and the Golden Bowl. As he had done in San Marino twenty years earlier, Clark Rockefeller found his way into the cast.
“As I recall, he played Mars, and his daughter played a nymph,” said Gregory Schwarz, the director of visitor services at the Saint-Gaudens Historic Site. A photograph shows Rockefeller in a golden suit of armor and matching golden headpiece, his jaw clenched, holding a spear. The god of war was an appropriate role for him, because by that time Rockefeller was fighting with many of the locals.
The unpleasantness had begun in the summer of 2001, when two Cornish women, Nancy Nash-Cummings and Dr. Sylvie Rudolph, decided to go for a swim. State senator Peter Burling said of them, “Nancy is a hugely accomplished and wonderful woman. To say she is completely well read, educated, and part of the arts community is to understate by a factor of twelve. Sylvie Rudolph is a profoundly trusted and beloved physician who works at the emergency room up here. She is trained as a lawyer as well.”
Burling suggested I call Nash-Cummings and get the facts from her, so I did. When I asked how she was, she exclaimed, “I’m dandy!” then launched into her Clark Rockefeller story.
“It was such an unpleasant encounter,” she began. “My friend Sylvie Rudolph and I do a lot of walking, and there was a property that adjoined Clark’s. We stopped for a swim and our lunch. There was a big pump going in Blow-Me-Down Brook, and it was very loud, and we didn’t think they had a permit to be pumping water. So we went on Clark’s land and turned off the pump. Within seconds, a caretaker came down and asked us what we’d done. We said we’d just turned off the pump, that it was loud and noisy, and we wondered if Clark had the right to be pumping water. That afternoon, Clark began trying to figure out who we were. The first fax he sent was saying that he was going to file charges!”
Technically, they may have indeed been trespassing. But the property lines get hazy in Cornish, and the two women assumed that everything could be explained and resolved in a friendly conversation, which is of course how things would typically happen in a small, close-knit town. Nancy showed me the fax, which Rockefeller had sent to an intermediary, a local man named Max Blumberg, telling him to notify the two women of its contents regarding the bizarre incident:Dear Max,
They did it!
For me to stop Melissa [Rockefeller’s lawyer] from filing charges, I will need a written apology for• trespassing
• tampering with my pump
and a promise not ever to go anywhere near the swimming hole again.
Must receive written apology and promise by tomorrow, 10 AM, signed and dated by both persons, and stuffed into my blue union Leader [a local newspaper] mailbox.
If not received by 10 AM, with a copy mailed to Melissa Martin at [address witheld] Lebanon, NH 03766, postmarked August 2, Melissa willfile a complaint with Cornish Police
AND WE WILL PRESS CHARGES
forcriminal trespass
tampering of my power equipment
In case they do not know what that means:• They will have to go to the Cornish Police Station
• They will have to undergo arraignment in criminal court
• They will need to hire a lawyer or multiple lawyers
• They will have their names published in police logs in newspapers and public court records
• After conviction, I will pursue civil charges, which will cost them even more
Their choice. Let me know what they want to do. You might also want to let them know that I do not bluff.
“Now, I pooh-poohed this at first and said, ‘He sounds like a nut, I’m not going to do all this stuff,’” Nash-Cummings told me. “My husband was furious, because he said I had trespassed and I had tampered. And a lawyer with whom we spoke said we should write the letter of apology, because he really could take us to court, and it would be expensive, blah, blah, blah. It took me hours to craft this pathetic apology. We delivered it on time the next day, and we felt, ‘Well, this is the end of it.’ Then a month later he sent us some honey with an apology—said he didn’t realize we were women of such standing in the community or some stupid phrase like that.”
She sent me a copy of the letter, which was typed on stationery with the word DOVERIDGE at the top. Rockefeller wrote that his ire had been sparked because some other culprit had been tampering with his pump: disconnecting its hose couplings, filling its gas tank with sugar, even stealing it. “We have avoided reporting the incidents to the Cornish Police because we don’t want to involve them without a definite suspect,” he wrote. “We have now installed a wireless motion-activated night-vision camera, monitored by Tasco Security, in a tree near the pump’s location and hope it will help catch the perpetrator.”
He ended the letter on a cordial note: “Please accept the enclosed jars . . . of honey, produced by our bees—the first of the season. Let us not speak again of our differences from a few weeks past and let us hope we can catch the responsible person soon.” He signed it simply “Rockefeller.”
The incident was typical of the face Rockefeller presented to Cornish. His obsession with security bordered on the fanatical. At the entrance to his home he parked an old police car, which he had purchased at auction, with the words DOVERIDGE SECURITY stenciled on its side. When he wasn’t riding his Segway—which always caused a stir—he was chauffeured about town in his armored Cadillac.
The god of war, secure in his fortress, was ready to do battle in Cornish.
One of his early enemies was Alma Gilbert-Smith, the founder of the Cornish Colony Museum, a shrine to the artists who had inhabited the town in its cultural heyday. The artists were long gone, but their art endured—much of it was in Gilbert-Smith’s home, which formerly belonged to Maxfield Parrish, whose colorful, romantic, sometimes whimsical works made him the most frequently reproduced painter of his era. The magnificent fifty-acre estate, called The Oaks, was where Parrish created many of his greatest works.
“Parrish built this house following the curve of the hill,” said Gilbert-Smith, a dark-haired, diminutive woman with a slight Spanish accent she had picked up during her years living in Mexico City and South Texas. As she took me around the estate, she asked, “Do you smell the lilacs and the apple blossoms?”
There was a pool out back overlooking an extraordinary view of Mount Ascutney, across the Connecticut River in Vermont. “Parrish and the other artists of the Cornish Colony built what they called moon pools, to reflect the moon,” Gilbert-Smith said.
She motioned to an adjacent house. “That building over there was Parrish’s fifteen-room studio. And these,” she said, indicating a patch of pink flowers, “are Lydia Parrish’s original peonies” (often depicted in the artist’s work). Among the Cornish Colony artworks inside my hostess’s house were Daniel Chester French’s sculpture The First Minutemen in Concord; Saint-Gaudens’s giant gilded sculpture Diana of the Tower (“the Saint-Gaudens Historic Site has the same Diana in bronze, and I kind of tease them, ‘You guys scored a bronze; I scored gold as part of my collection’”); and her most prized piece, Parrish’s North Wall, the largest single-panel mural he ever created, a five-by-eighteenfoot extravaganza of color and light.
As we continued our tour of her property, Gilbert-Smith told me a story. “I had a fire on February 24, 1979,” she said. “One of the worst fires in New
England history. At night. We had no water. All we could do was throw snow at it.”
We were in her backyard garden, and she gestured toward a very high second-story window. “My husband actually jumped from the second story, carrying a big Parrish. He’s a Whitney, [from a family] who had the good fortune of collecting Cornish Colony artists when the artists were still alive.” She added that her husband was a descendant of “Colonel Barrett, who led the Minutemen,” and General Benjamin Lincoln, “who took Lord Charles Cornwallis’s sword of surrender.”
The implication was clear: this was the home of real American bluebloods, and they would do anything, including risking life and limb, to honor and protect the legacy of the Cornish Colony artists.
We went back inside for tea, and Gilbert-Smith told me, “Parrish entertained often here. President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and [the writer] Winston Churchill visited and praised the beauty of the property and the artist’s gardens. And Isadora Duncan danced in the music room.”
Finally we got down to the reason for my visit: Clark Rockefeller, whom she referred to as “the defendant,” owing to the fact that he was on trial in Boston at the time.
“The defendant was very dismissive of the Cornish Colony,” she said, and I could tell that the wounds he had inflicted on her by his artistic arrogance were still very fresh. “It shows how much of an art historian he was. He said to me, ‘Who cares about these obscure nineteenth-century artists?’
“Well, excuse me,” she said, indignant at the memory of the carpetbagger who would so casually put down the artists to whom she had devoted much of her life. “They were the core members of the golden era of the United States: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Thomas and Maria Dewing, Frederick MacMonnies, Frederic Remington. Right now this obscure nineteenth-century art—as the defendant put it—is still being bought by real Rockefellers, and by people like the Whitneys, the Vanderbilts, the Astors.”
She added that the two great intellectuals who had called Cornish home in recent years—J. D. Salinger and the controversial Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie—also admired the work of the Cornish Colony artists. “Both Salinger and Rushdie asked me to open the museum on days when there would be no one here,” she said, “so they wouldn’t see people. And I opened the museum so they could go through.”
“Did Rockefeller visit the museum?” I asked.
“No, he never did.”
Which led us to the story of her unfortunate encounter with him. “Let me bring the book,” she said. She left the room and returned with a copy of A Place of Beauty: The Artists and Gardens of the Cornish Colony , by Alma M. Gilbert and Judith B. Tankard, a teacher at Radcliffe College. “Judith Tankard is the preeminent authority on gardens, and I am considered the preeminent authority in the world on Maxfield Parrish,” she explained. The book focused on the artists and gardens of the Cornish Colony, both back in the area’s heyday and today. “Maria Dewing had one of the great gardens of Cornish,” Alma Gilbert-Smith explained. I knew that Maria and Thomas Dewing—whose painting Roses had recently “sold for several million,” Gilbert-Smith noted—were the longtime owners of Doveridge.
Clark Rockefeller “completely demolished” the gardens after he purchased Doveridge, Gilbert-Smith said, “so I wanted to use Maria Dewing’s photographs of the gardens in the book, because they were very famous. I had originally asked the previous owner of Doveridge if they would allow us to have some photographs, and she said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then she sold the property to Sandra Boss. I found out there was a new owner, so I approached them.
“I understand you recently acquired the Doveridge property, and welcome to the area,” she recalled telling Rockefeller. She felt sure there would be no problem whatsoever getting his permission to use photographs of the gardens of Doveridge, both historical and current. “Knowing the Rockefellers of Woodstock, I knew that they were very generous, very art-oriented individuals.”
In her first phone call, she cheerily explained that she was in the process of writing a book on the major properties of the Cornish Colony, where the artists lived. And of course she had received permission from the former owner to photograph whatever was left of Maria Dewing’s extraordinary gardens. At this, the Cornish art historian’s face darkened and her voice deepened in imitation of the inconceivable reply she received on the telephone that day.
“He said, ‘Well, you don’t have my permission.’ And I said, ‘No, sir, that is why I am calling.’ And he said, ‘Well, no. I am a very famous person.’ As soon as I heard that, I said, ‘Excuse me, there are a lot of famous persons here.’ He said, ‘I don’t want anyone to know where I live.’ I said, ‘I think it’s public knowledge that you live here. I mean, I read in the paper that a Rockefeller was moving to the area.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but they don’t know where. I wouldn’t let them know where I live, and I forbid you to take any photographs.’”
I could sense her anger simmering. “I said, ‘This is one of the very important gardens. If you don’t want me to take photographs, I will not take photographs. I’ll have to use vintage, historical photos of the home.’ He said, ‘No. I won’t allow you to do that.’ I said, ‘You don’t have a choice. There are historical photos, and you cannot prevent me from putting them in my book.’ He said, ‘Excuse me, I can not only prevent you from putting them in your book, I can prevent that book from coming out. I can put an injunction on your little book!’”
She let the words “little book” hang in the air for a moment, then continued.
“You know, I’m processing that, the ‘little book.’” She went on to say that she had written fourteen books. She flashed a defiant little smile. “So I said, ‘Well, this book is going through.’ He said, ‘No, I’m putting an injunction on it. I am a very famous person, and I don’t want anybody to know that I’m here.’”
That’s when Gilbert-Smith let him have it. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. Rockefeller, if you don’t want anybody to know that you are here, how long do you think it would take for it to come out in the press [that a Rockefeller was suing to stop publication of a respectable coffee-table book]?’ I said, ‘I am a media darling, and I can make an awful lot of noise.’ Then I said, ‘My publisher in California,’ and he said, ‘What did you say? ’ I said, ‘My publisher in California, Ten Speed Press, will probably be very annoyed and will do a little publicity on their own if you try to place an injunction on our book.’ He said, ‘I’ll think about it and talk to my attorneys.’”
“You see?” Gilbert-Smith asked, and of course I knew what she was driving at. She couldn’t have known the significance of it at the time, but in retrospect she realized that that one word, “California,” must have had quite an effect on Rockefeller, since he was a “person of interest” there in the disappearance of John and Linda Sohus. She heard from Rockefeller’s attorney very quickly: his client wouldn’t allow new pictures to be taken of Doveridge, but he wouldn’t place an injunction on the book. “So you see that the only color images in that section of the book are the paintings [of the gardens] by Thomas and Maria Dewing,” she said.
Rockefeller’s caustic encounter with Alma Gilbert-Smith and his broadside against the women who turned off his pump at Blow-Me-Down Brook were merely preludes to his biggest conflict: the battle over Trinity Church.
His main antagonist was Peter Burling, and before waging war over the church they had engaged in several preliminary skirmishes. “It embarrasses me to talk about this, but at some point Clark decided he would take on parts of my persona,” Burling told me over breakfast. The senator had once owned a 1937 GMC pumper fire engine, which he had purchased for $200 in the mid-1970s to protect his horses in the event of a fire. He had long since abandoned it, but Rockefeller managed to scoop it up, and it became part of the growing collection of vehicles scattered around Doveridge.
“Clark, what are you going to do with a fire truck?” the locals in Cornish would ask.
“I’m g
oing to drive it in parades and give kids rides,” he would reply.
Next, Rockefeller and Burling clashed over a small house that had belonged to Rosie Leclaire, beloved caretaker for Burling’s grandfather, who was a close friend of the famed jurist and Doveridge resident Learned Hand. (“One of the things I cherish most in my grandfather’s papers is a note that he sent to Judge Hand: ‘To walk in the Cornish woods with you is one of the high points of my life,’” Burling said.) When Leclaire died, Burling was named executor of her will. Her only significant asset was her house, and Burling was determined to sell it for the best possible price and give the money to her heirs.
Enter Rockefeller, who put in an insultingly low bid for the property. “I got the suspicion early on that Clark was dampening interest in the house, letting people know that there was no chance that they were going to get it, because he, Clark Rockefeller, would make sure that he got it, so nobody else need bother. So I decided I would throw a bid in; I wasn’t going to let him be the only bid. This is Rosie! She would have expected me to defend her interests.”
Burling’s exasperation was evident. “I got this phone call from Clark: ‘You are trying to force me to pay more money! You don’t want this house! I’m going to take it! It’s my house!’”
He shook his head. “Please. It was just fucking insane—sorry for the French. But that’s what it was. I’m standing there listening to the shouting, and I said, ‘Clark, we’re going to make sure there is a fair price paid for the property.’ So I threw in another bid, and he went nuts and raised his bid. Of course, who knew at the time he was spending Sandra’s money? I think that might be the moment that he really decided that I was the enemy. But it’s clear that on some level his ego really needed to challenge me. He focused on me as the big boy that needed to be knocked down or replaced.”
