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Having failed to woo Jung to American shores, Edith consented to sail with him to Switzerland in April 1913. For weeks before sailing, Jung met with her daily, and he continued the analytic sessions on board. Sigmund Freud, who had grown increasingly disenchanted with his onetime disciple, believed that Jung was scheming for the Rockefeller money and told Sándor Ferenczi that March that “Jung has gone to America again for five weeks, to see a Rockefeller woman, so they say.” For the crossing, the Rockefeller-McCormick retinue included Edith’s son Fowler and his tutor, daughter Muriel and her governess, plus a clutch of servants; Harold and their other daughter, Mathilde, stayed behind in Chicago. In Zurich, the group settled into a suite at the fancy Hotel Baur-au-Lac, where Edith spent the next eight years. At first, nobody, least of all Edith, thought in terms of such an extended stay. For Fowler, the Zurich summer proved intolerable. “This is a very queer place,” he wrote to Rockefeller. “It has rained here this summer almost incessantly and some very peculiar weather phenomenons happen.” When autumn came, he returned to America to attend Groton, but Edith tarried in Zurich, consulting Jung daily. In October, Harold and Mathilde went to Europe, hoping to bring Edith back in November, but given her growing attachment to analysis, Harold knew this was impossible. Hence, their two daughters stayed in Switzerland: Muriel was placed in a strict German school, while Mathilde, who suffered from weak health, stayed in a sanatorium.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Fowler McCormick · Muriel McCormick · Mathilde McCormick Oser · Carl Jung · Chicago · Zurich · United States · Europe · Sandor Ferenczi · Sigmund Freud · Switzerland · McCormick · Groton
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By late December, lingering in Zurich with Edith, Harold saw the need to defend her protracted absence to her father. In a long letter to Rockefeller, he tried to explain some of Jung’s methods, though he was often reticent about the substance of Edith’s analysis. “Edith is becoming very real, and true to herself and is seeking and I am sure will succeed to find her path.… At any rate, she is in absolutely safe and trustworthy hands for no finer man ever breathed than Dr. Jung. He has an intense admiration for Edith and yet recognizes that she is the toughest problem he ever had to deal with.” To head off family criticism, Harold added, “It was a God-send that she met Dr. Jung and that her family stood back of her in her resolve and that she felt this assurance.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · Zurich
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Served with this warning to be tolerant, Rockefeller tried to be forbearing, but for a nineteenth-century man, Jung’s modern approach to nervous jitters sounded like so much mumbo jumbo. In detailed, informative letters, Harold gamely outlined Jung’s theory of the unconscious and how he investigated that realm through dreams, reveries, and free association. Rockefeller was diplomatic but obviously befuddled. “I have not been able up to date to get down satisfactorily to all the underlying principles,” he apologized to Harold. “But so long as they exercise a beautiful, helpful, continuing influence for good over the lives, that is the thing.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung
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On December 20, Harold sailed back to America without Edith. Beyond her veneration of Jung, she was immobilized by a travel phobia that made even brief train trips unbearable torments. The severity of her fears can be gleaned from a gossipy account written by her Zurich chauffeur, Emile Ammann, who was driven to distraction by her antics. He portrayed Edith as a vain, haughty, narcissistic woman with a slender waist and bright, piercing eyes. He said she was known for her eccentric behavior, her furs and diamonds, and her beautiful fashions straight from Paris and Wiesbaden. According to Ammann, she was indifferent to her family, brutal with servants, and preoccupied with punctuality in a way that mirrored her father. On his first morning, she ordered him to pick her up at 9:14. After he arrived, she checked her diamond-studded wristwatch. “Ammann,” she said, “I ordered you to be here at 9:14. You were here at 9:13. Naturally, that’s not the same thing.”
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · Zurich · Paris · United States · Emile Ammann · Wiesbaden
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Ammann claimed that Edith had been able to sail to Switzerland because Jung had effectively sedated her by putting her in a hypnotic trance. The chauffeur played a pivotal role in the therapy to cure her travel phobia. Jung recommended that Edith board a train and travel as far as she could; sometimes, however, she sprang from the train in terror before it even left the station. But if she could stave off the terror and stay aboard, Ammann would speed ahead in the Rolls-Royce and meet her at the next station; if she felt secure enough to go on, she waved from the train window and he raced to the next station. Sometimes these grueling exercises lasted three hours, leaving both Edith and Ammann exhausted. Jung evidently thought Edith had to conquer her haughtiness as well, for he had her kneel down in her luxurious hotel suite and scrub the floors. Like some self-flagellating penitent, she also walked hatless and dripping through the rain while Ammann trailed alongside her in the car.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Switzerland · Rolls-Royce
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If Rockefeller had hoped that Harold would rescue Edith from this life, he was soon disabused as his son-in-law was sucked into the vortex of the Zurich group with its quasi-religious intensity. Returning to Switzerland in September 1914, Harold grew so entranced by Jung that he decided to stay and resigned as treasurer of International Harvester, ceding control to brother Cyrus while remaining a board member. He knew that such an abrupt change required some explaining. “I am trying to learn to think, for I have always had a superabundance of ‘feelings’—With Edith it’s just exactly the other way,” he reported to Rockefeller. Having grown up with both a mentally ill brother and sister, Harold was quick to brood about any deviant behavior in his children, especially the impetuous, twelve-year-old Muriel, who had started analysis with Jung that summer. The following year, Edith announced to her son, “Fowler, this question of analytical psychology is a very important one,” and he, too, was herded into analysis with a Jung associate.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Fowler McCormick · Muriel McCormick · Carl Jung · International Harvester · Zurich · Switzerland · Cyrus
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By October 1914, Edith had graduated from straight analysis with Jung and started a course of supplementary study. As Harold reported to his now-restive father-in-law, “She studies astronomy, biology and history, and music. She does not go to see Dr. Jung anymore.” Whatever patience Rockefeller had shown began to evaporate in early 1915 when Edith failed to attend the wedding of Harold’s brother Cyrus in February and did not come to Cettie’s funeral service in March—despite Harold’s talk about all the progress she had made. Rockefeller began to grumble that Edith and Harold were “banqueting” in Switzerland, forcing Harold into extended self-defense: “This is not a tabernacle of joy,” he told Rockefeller, “but a shrine to which seekers only address themselves, and it is in this spirit that I have postponed again my sailing and that Edith still finds herself held.” By this point, Harold had adopted Jung as his guru as well, accompanying him on mountain walks and idealizing him as being “as nearly perfect to my mind as a man can be.” This all sounds rather starry-eyed given Jung’s limited success with Edith. In a letter to his mother, Harold admitted that Edith was still prey to agoraphobia, had not left the hotel grounds for almost a year, and could not travel on a train for more than twenty minutes—hardly a glowing testimonial to Jung’s method.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · Switzerland · Cyrus
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What complicated relations between Rockefeller and Edith was that in working with Jung, she was trying to extirpate the cool, controlling nature she had internalized from her father. Jung classified Harold as too extroverted and Edith, like her father, as too introverted. As Harold told Rockefeller, “In Edith, Father, I see the near counterpart of your personality. I think she is more like you than any other of your children all attributes considered.… She has your purpose and tenacity without one little diminution.” Precisely for that reason, Edith knew the little devices by which her father cunningly walled himself off from people. As she wrote to her father after Cettie’s death, “There is warmth and love in your heart when we can get through all the outside barriers which you have thrown up to protect yourself—your own self—from the world.” On another occasion, she repeated this leitmotif. “I wish sometimes that you would let me get near to you … so that your heart would feel the warmth of a simple human sort.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung
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Such straight talk probably made Rockefeller squirm. The human psyche was a boggy, fetid terrain that he never cared to explore, and he had spent a lifetime trying to conceal his motives and emotions. He had been largely insulated from criticism within his own family, and Edith was the first child to press him, however gingerly, on taboo topics. It is testimony to his fatherly love that, despite his complete bafflement about her exile, he tried to respond to Edith with patient sympathy. To her plea for greater closeness, he replied, “I can think of nothing which I would more devoutly desire than that we should be constantly drawn closer and closer together, to the end that we may be of the greatest assistance to each other, not only, but to the dear ones so near and so dear to us.” For the most part, he was too shrewd to try to induce outright guilt in Edith about her stay overseas and simply said how much he missed her and that he knew her absence must be for the best.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick
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In 1915, Jung recommended that his followers read Friedrich Nietzsche, especially The Will to Power, and Edith and Harold sent a copy to Rockefeller to promote self-awareness. “It cites the theory,” Harold explained excitedly, “you exemplify the practice.” One can only picture Rockefeller’s puzzlement as he thumbed these pages. “I’m sure the book will prove very interesting reading, though it may be far beyond me,” Rockefeller replied. “I keep to a simple philosophy and almost primitive ideas of living.” In a later letter to Rockefeller—having clearly forgotten the earlier one—Harold explained that Nietzsche was attempting to show how some people need to impose their wills on others. Yet for all their efforts to enlighten him, Harold and Edith never made much progress with Rockefeller, who was comfortable with himself and lived quite nicely with his own repressions.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · Friedrich Nietzsche · The Will to Power
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Increasingly, Edith saw in Jungian psychology a mystic path as well as a therapeutic method. “You on your path have your philosophy and your religion which guide you,” she wrote to Rockefeller in words that would have sounded blasphemous to him. “I on my path have my philosophy and my religion which guide me.” Edith wanted to use the Rockefeller fortune to proselytize for Jung, and she bristled that her father demoted her and Alta to a subordinate status behind Junior. With a protofeminist consciousness, she resented the flagrant inequality in the treatment of the son and daughters. In September 1915, she told Rockefeller of her wish to help with his philanthropies. “It is beautiful and enveloping work and John is privileged in a way which Alta and I as yet have not had the opportunity of being. I am sure that as women we are serious minded and earnest and deeply interested in mankind.” When this produced no effect, Edith upped the pressure in January 1916. “As a woman of forty-three I should like to have more money to help with.… I am worthy of more confidence on your part.” Rockefeller was not exactly punishing his daughter—he was sending her $2,500 monthly and had already given her and Harold more than $2 million in gifts—but his favoritism toward his son was clear.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · John
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What Edith could not admit was that she argued from a weak position. She had cut herself off from her family, skipped her mother’s funeral, often showed little interest in her children, had crippling phobias, and had no immediate plans to return to the United States. She was a spendthrift with a habit of running up debt, which would have only deepened her father’s doubts about her ability to manage money. As Rockefeller said, citing her stay abroad, he regretted that he could not be “more familiar with your benevolences as I have been with John and Alta in respect to their contributions to good causes. This contact and the more intimate knowledge of all that they are doing in this regard has afforded me much pleasure.” Eventually, he doubled Edith’s monthly allowance to $5,000 but went no further for the moment.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · United States · John
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That Edith wanted additional money to advance the cause of Jungian analysis became clear in 1916 when she put up $120,000—$80,000 of it borrowed—to rent and renovate a posh Zurich mansion for a new Psychological Club, complete with a library, restaurant, recreation rooms, and guest rooms. The intention was to have a place where analysts and patients could socialize and listen to lectures. When the setting proved too costly, the club moved to more modest quarters on the Gemeindestrasse. Edith also sponsored translations of Jung’s work into English that significantly expanded his influence. Disturbed by this largesse, Rockefeller demanded that Edith send him a list of her chief charitable benefactions. In her reply, she showed that her gift to Jung far surpassed her donations to her two other main causes: the John McCormick Institution of Infectious Diseases and the Chicago Opera Company.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Zurich · Psychological Club · John McCormick Institution of Infectious Diseases · Gemeindestrasse · Chicago Opera Company
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Upon learning of Edith’s contribution for the Psychological Club, Freud, who had since broken with his heretical disciple, greeted the news with a sneer. “So Swiss ethics have finally made their sought-after contact with American money.” It is easy to understand Freud’s cynicism. After her gift for the Psychological Club, Edith was suddenly allowed by Jung to graduate from an analysand with unusually intractable problems to the role of analyst. That Jung had allowed the phobic Edith to function as an analyst raises some profound questions about Jung’s judgment. By the following year, Edith wrote to her father, “I am teaching six hours a day besides my own studies.”
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Sigmund Freud · Psychological Club
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Edith was also subsidizing writers and musicians. Her most important patronage was of James Joyce, who had found sanctuary in neutral Zurich during the war. In February 1918, Edith set up a bank account for the financially beleaguered Joyce that allowed him to withdraw a thousand francs monthly. Eager to thank his anonymous patron, Joyce managed to ascertain her identity. When Joyce met Edith, she said to him, “I know you are a great artist” then bubbled over with talk about Jungian analysis. In her typical domineering fashion, Edith decided that Joyce should undergo analysis with Jung and she would pay for it. Possibly because he spurned this offer, Joyce found his credit line abruptly terminated after eighteen months. The author did not welcome the volte-face. As Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann observed, “It is unlikely that Joyce would allow [Edith] to escape scot-free from artistic punishment; and in the Circe episode of Ulysses, Mrs. Mervyn Talboys, the society woman with a riding crop and a sadistic bent, may owe something to Edith Rockefeller McCormick, a noted horsewoman.” Even Joyce’s wife, Nora, made Edith the butt of ribald jokes, wondering what kind of sumptuous underwear the rich American woman wore.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Zurich · Richard Ellmann · James Joyce · Joyce · Circe · Ulysses · Mervyn Talboys · Nora
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Edith certainly had her ridiculous aspects. She was an unlikely cross between the grande bourgeoise and the impractical bohemian, a dreamer caught up in the cultlike atmosphere of Jung’s practice. Yet in the Rockefeller family, she was a pioneer, the first to peer into the mysteries of human nature and confront social inhibitions and moral restraints that had long been held sacrosanct by the family.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Rockefeller family
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It seemed at first that the mutual interest in psychoanalysis might bridge the temperamental divide between Edith and Harold. He was patient, compassionate, and eager to see his wife freed from the demons that beset her. “I must tell you in a word how lovely Edith is developing,” a rhapsodic Harold wrote to his mother in September 1917. “You would not know her.” Indeed, Edith seemed to be thriving in Zurich, her caseload of patients growing. “New patients are coming to me all the time and I have had some fifty cases now,” she told her father in 1919. “I hear in a year twelve thousand dreams.” This pleasant interlude might have lasted forever if Harold had not been named president of International Harvester in 1918, pulling him back into the workaday world of Chicago.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · International Harvester · Chicago · Zurich
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Psychoanalysis had stimulated both Edith and Harold to experiment freely with their lives. Like other novices, Edith converted Jungian analysis into a license for wildly uninhibited behavior. Jung himself did not believe in or practice monogamy. “Ammann,” Edith told her chauffeur, “if your unconscious causes you to love several women, you need not feel any guilt.… Psychoanalysis will conquer all.” She posted Emma, her private secretary, at the threshold of her hotel suite to safeguard her trysts. One day, Harold showed up without warning and brushed past Emma before she could stop him. A startled Edith began to shout, “Harold, I … shan’t have it. You’re not to come to my rooms without first having Emma announce you.” Now that Harold and Edith lived far apart, each had numerous opportunities for escapades.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · Emma
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Edith’s liaisons managed to skirt scandal until a young Austrian named Edwin Krenn came onto the scene. A man of shadowy antecedents—Edith described him as the son of a famous European painter—he was short, blond, chubby, and always foppishly attired. When he arrived in Switzerland and entered analysis with Edith, he did not have any apparent means of support. Edith not only financed him but helped him to obtain Swiss citizenship. She was convinced that he was an architect of genius, and they became constant companions, driving together in the afternoons, attending theater in the evening, then retiring to her hotel suite for private dinners. According to Emile Ammann, Jung warned her of the scandal that might erupt from this love affair. “This is my problem,” Edith replied curtly, “and I can do what I please.”
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Edwin Krenn · Emile Ammann · Switzerland
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Alone in Chicago, Harold was highly susceptible to alluring women. Since he and Edith had recently made a five-year commitment to support the Chicago Opera Company, many pretty, aspiring singers passed his way. In September 1919, when the Chicago Opera performed in New York, a Polish singer named Ganna Walska tracked him down at the Plaza Hotel. Even though he was now balding and pudgy, Walska claimed that she swooned over his “wonderful boyish blue eyes.” A voluptuous woman with a hypnotic gaze, Walska wore ponderous jewelry and oversized hats and fancied herself a femme fatale; much like Edwin Krenn, she was a gold digger who wrapped herself in a cloud of exotic mystery.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Ganna Walska · Edwin Krenn · New York · Chicago · Chicago Opera Company · Plaza Hotel · Opera
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In 1920, the two McCormick daughters, alarmed by their mother’s affair with Edwin Krenn, pleaded with Harold to come to Zurich at once. By this point, Harold was already smitten with Walska and had little incentive to terminate the match, but he perhaps went to Switzerland, in part, because of Rockefeller’s concern about the perilous state of Edith’s finances. Bent upon showing that she possessed her father’s business flair, she had blundered into one catastrophic deal after another. In late 1919, a German scientist had come to Switzerland peddling a secret process for hardening wood, which was supposed to make it usable for everything from railroad ties to telegraph poles. Even Jung initially encouraged Edith in the venture. She set up a company, appointed herself board chairman, and invested $100,000, promising to boost that amount to $1 million. Rockefeller pleaded with Harold to stop her. “I am opposed to Edith having anything to do with the project at all. I fear that it will result in great loss and trouble. I most earnestly entreat her to discontinue this not only but not to engage in any business schemes.” There was a touch of the willful adolescent about Edith, chafing at daddy’s authority, and Rockefeller’s intervention probably backfired. He quickly proved to be prescient: After the German scientist left Switzerland, Edith could not reproduce his results, and eventually she had to write off a $340,000 investment. Edith also piled up staggering debts to support the Chicago Opera and gave a $300,000 piece of property to Cook County for a zoo; Harold, Rockefeller, and Junior first learned of this last act of munificence in the morning papers. By early 1920, Edith’s debts had ballooned to $812,000, and her father was obliged to tide her over with a transfer of Standard Oil of New Jersey stock.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · Ganna Walska · Edwin Krenn · Standard Oil of New Jersey · Chicago · Zurich · Switzerland · McCormick · Cook County · Opera
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However sharp Rockefeller was in criticizing her finances, he was even more concerned about his daughter’s negligence as a mother, especially toward his favorite grandson, Fowler. As lovingly as he could, he prodded Edith to devote more time to her children. As he told her in April 1921:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Fowler McCormick
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Edith dear, the financial question, while important, is not important when compared to the other question—the great question of your being present with your children. And how sadly they need your presence, and how very solicitous we are all for them! In this connection I may add that you could have been a great comfort and help to your mother and me. But this sinks into insignificance also, when we consider the dear children.… I am not lecturing. I am not scolding. I love you, Edith dear; and I am still hoping.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick
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By late August 1921, Edith had sufficiently overcome her travel phobia that she was able to book passage for America, where she planned to visit her father upon arrival. She had not set eyes on him for eight years, yet when she docked in New York, she told him that she wanted to bring along two companions: Edwin Krenn and his old boarding-school chum, Edward Dato. Properly offended—and possibly privy to rumors about Edith’s affair—Rockefeller insisted upon seeing Edith alone. She grudgingly agreed to venture to Lakewood alone to see him. It took ten years for Edith to explain to her father why she never arrived on the agreed day. “When I got to the ferry, a terrific thunder storm broke the terrible heat and my nerves which had been sorely tried by the difficult divorce conditions of my arrival in New York added to the treatment of my children, broke down and I was forced to turn back instead of going to you.” This was as close as father and daughter came to seeing each other during the last nineteen years of Edith’s life. Despite eight years of intensive study with Jung, Edith still could not fully conquer her travel phobia, at least when it came to seeing her father.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Edwin Krenn · New York · Lakewood · United States · Edward Dato
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A month after Edith returned to Chicago, Harold filed for divorce. Like her father, Edith harbored hopes for a reconciliation, but Harold had the stronger legal case: His lawyer, Paul Cravath, had brought over from Europe a witness who had apparently observed Edith’s infidelities. This unidentified witness was convincing enough that Alta suggested that her sister make an early settlement. By Christmas, Edith was forced to sign a harsh divorce settlement, stipulating that she would receive no alimony and would pay Harold $2.7 million for their homes, plunging her further into debt. (In 1922, Edith still owed $726,000 to the banks, despite having received more than $14 million from her father over the years.) As if to register sympathy for his son-in-law, Rockefeller sent Harold a $1,000 Christmas check even as his daughter was signing the punitive papers. Though Edith pressed him to cut off communications, Rockefeller stayed in touch with Harold, but they saw each other less frequently as time passed.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Chicago · Europe · Paul Cravath
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Upon returning to Chicago, Edith planned to establish a center for Jungian psychology, possibly housed in the Villa Turicum. Not particularly modest about her aspirations, she explained, “It was pointed out to me that, psychologically, Chicago will be the greatest center in the world. That is why I have come back to live.” Before long, Edith attracted one hundred patients to her private practice, many of them socialites enticed by the Rockefeller and McCormick names. Perpetuating her interests in astrology and the occult, she paid fantastic sums for horoscopes and hosted occasional séances; at one session, she swooned into a trance then announced that she was the reincarnated spirit of Tutankhamen’s child bride. Also feeding the curiosity of prospective patients was Edith’s rumored liaison with Krenn. As in Zurich, they made daily rounds together: They lunched together, then shared language tutors, followed by late-afternoon tea and evening movies. Some observers thought Krenn might be involved in a homosexual affair with Dato, although it is impossible to verify the truth of these assertions.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Edwin Krenn · Chicago · Zurich · Edward Dato · McCormick · Villa Turicum · Tutankhamen
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Still persuaded of her business acumen, Edith started a real-estate venture in late 1923, headed by her European companions and called Krenn and Dato. Once again, she proved as gullible and impulsive as Rockefeller had feared. To float the venture, Edith deposited $5.23 million ($45 million in today’s money) in an entity called the Edith Rockefeller McCormick Trust, naming Krenn and Dato as cotrustees. Seeing Edith about to step off another cliff, Rockefeller wrote to her, “I shall expect later on that you will have great disappointment in connection with these real estate transactions, and it would give us all great humiliation to find a duplication of the experience which you have already had in your business adventures with foreigners.” The warning was not heeded. Though Edith planned to build affordable housing for the poor near Highland Park, Krenn and Dato’s flagship venture was to be a 1,500-acre haven for millionaires on Lake Michigan called Edithon, complete with a marina for owners’ yachts. For the town’s design, Krenn ransacked the styles of Atlantic City and Palm Beach. Trapped in Chicago by her travel phobia, Edith could not visit the building site or inspect the books or even stop by the Krenn and Dato offices. When Edith proudly mailed her father the firm’s prospectus, he must have groaned inwardly, and he issued yet another jeremiad. “While you are a brilliant and mature woman of great mental capacity, I cannot forget you are my own flesh and blood. Therefore, it seems my duty to warn you of the pitfalls and vagaries of life.” Rockefeller had already heard reports that Edith was again borrowing heavily and that midwestern creditors were in New York, inquiring about her net worth. Yet Edith took umbrage at her father’s well-meant concern: “I cannot refrain from telling you that I have been pained by your expressions of doubt as to the way my business Trust is managed and as to my two partners. Both Mr. Krenn and Mr. Dato are men of the highest integrity.” By 1927, as they lurched toward disaster, Krenn and Dato waded deeper into debt. The firm was not strong enough to withstand the 1929 crash, which left Edith with piles of unsold real estate. She never recouped her huge losses.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Edwin Krenn · New York · Chicago · Edward Dato · Palm Beach · Edith Rockefeller McCormick Trust · Highland Park · Lake Michigan · Edithon · Atlantic City
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Throughout the 1920s, Edith kept reassuring her father that she would visit him but never made the trip. One is finally left to wonder whether her travel phobia provided her with a handy excuse to avoid a problematic relationship. Father and daughter often exchanged brief, loving letters and never lost touch, but they continued to disappoint each other. Edith wanted a modern father, not the antique figure she got. She tended to approach him as an oracle but then was hurt and baffled by the advice she received. Edith never expressed any remorse for having deserted her father during the last twenty years of her life. She had long been liberated from such outmoded concepts.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick
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John D. Rockefeller with his adored grandson David in the 1910s. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · David Rockefeller · Rockefeller Archive Center
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f Rockefeller gave way to many lonely moments after Cettie’s death, he was also liberated from the marathon ordeal of her illness. In the coming years, even as his shrunken frame grew spindly, he seemed lighter and more ebullient, more Bill’s son than Eliza’s. Though he lived a solitary life in many ways—Cettie and Bessie were dead, Edith was in Switzerland or Chicago, Alta was often at her Mount Hope farm, and Junior was busy disposing of his fortune—he assembled a substitute family around him.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Chicago · Switzerland · Mount Hope
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Until her death in 1920, his prim, precise sister-in-law Lute pitched in as his hostess. But the most enduring presence after Cettie’s death was the buxom Fanny Evans, Rockefeller’s cousin from Strongsville, Ohio, who served as his housekeeper and companion. Rockefeller engaged in wry banter with Evans, who was thirty years his junior. As they sat at opposite ends of the dinner table, Rockefeller took a wicked old man’s delight in both ribbing and flattering her. “I am constantly calling her an angel to her face,” he told his son, “which causes her to throw up both hands and register somewhat of incredulity.” They saluted each other as “Mr. Rockefeller” and “Mrs. Evans,” though he sometimes called her Aunt Fanny. They conspired in the fiction that he had to submit to her tyranny because she governed his social calendar—a useful device for getting rid of people who stayed too long. Among the supporting actors was the smartly attired Swiss valet, John Yordi, who did everything from overseeing his master’s diet to entertaining him on the organ. (He specialized in hymns, of course.) Invested with dictatorial powers, Yordi was authorized to stop Rockefeller from engaging in anything too strenuous.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Lucy Spelman · Strongsville · Fanny Evans · John Yordi · Ohio · Evans
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After all the agonizing effort expended by Junior and Abby on Kykuit, John and Cettie spent little time there. Cettie died soon after the renovation was complete, while he preferred his Lakewood hideout in the spring and Florida in the winter. His romance with the southern latitudes blossomed during his February golf vacations in Augusta, Georgia, where he could hop a trolley car or wander the streets without bodyguards. For all of Pocantico’s magnificence, he felt caged and cut off from the outer world there, held hostage by his wealth. Had he not gotten too chilly on the golf course each morning, he might have selected Augusta for his winter home. When a friend then sent euphoric letters extolling the climate of Seabreeze, Florida, Rockefeller contacted the U.S. Weather Bureau and ascertained that Seabreeze regularly soaked up more winter sunshine than Augusta. Since this would extend his golf season, he made an exploratory trip there with Dr. Biggar in 1913 and found the weather just splendid. Rockefeller spent several winters at the nearby Ormond Beach Hotel, created by Henry Flagler, taking up a whole floor with his entourage, and then finally bought a house in Ormond Beach in September 1918. One must note a small irony. For years, Flagler had begged him to come to Florida, but only after Flagler’s death in 1913 did Rockefeller regularly visit the state, again suggesting his tacit disapproval of his friend’s divorce and ostentation in later years.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Henry M. Flagler · Hamilton F. Biggar · Pocantico Hills · Kykuit · Lakewood · Ormond Beach · Augusta · Florida · Georgia · Ormond Beach Hotel · Seabreeze · U.S. Weather Bureau · John
Source: Ron Chernow, Titan. Names and relationships retain the full atlas’s extraction limits. Map points are references; historical sites and regions can be approximate. Open the full interactive atlas.