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In 1924, John Jr., Abby, and their three oldest boys made a swing through the American West in a private railroad car, stopping to camp along the way. Outside the Northeast, Junior was seldom recognized, and he thrived on the anonymity of the open road. When they arrived at Yellowstone National Park, the family was greeted by park superintendent Horace Albright, who was startled to see the Rockefeller boys pitching in to assist the porter with the luggage. As Albright escorted them around the park, Junior and Abby were chagrined by tree stumps and fallen timber that littered the roadside. Later, in a letter to Albright, Junior offered money to clean up and beautify these thoroughfares. On their second day, Albright drove the Rockefellers to see the craggy, snowcapped Grand Tetons. Struck as with the sudden force of an epiphany, Junior decided to preserve this exquisite view for posterity.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Grand Teton National Park · Yellowstone National Park · Horace Albright · West · Albright · Northeast
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On a subsequent visit to the Grand Tetons in 1926, Junior and Abby recoiled at the creeping blight of hot-dog stands, gas stations, and gaudy billboards that were beginning to clutter the countryside around Jackson Hole. As Albright recorded in his journal, “I believe Mr. Rockefeller had a genuine distaste for the garish advances of civilization—and what’s more he feared them. So he took every opportunity he felt possible to step in and save his fellow humans from the onslaught of the crippling effects of industrial society.” The son of America’s foremost industrialist now worked assiduously to save nature’s monuments and preserve the spirit of America’s preindustrial past. It was a propitious time to do so: The National Park Service had been created by Congress in 1916 with a large mandate to promote and regulate national parks and monuments but without an adequate budget to accomplish this. The first two directors, Stephen Mather and Albright, cultivated philanthropists as a way to rectify this.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · United States · Grand Teton National Park · Jackson Hole · Stephen Mather · Albright · National Park Service
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Lacking his father’s hostility toward government and imbued with a Wilsonian sense of public service, Junior, under Albright’s tutelage, formed a unique partnership with Washington to save wilderness areas. Upon returning home, Junior began to buy thousands of acres in the Jackson Hole Valley with an eye to creating a new park—an idea anathema to many local cattlemen, hunters, and dude-ranch operators who saw this as meddling in their businesses. To minimize political opposition and keep land prices down, Junior made the land purchases through a front group, the Snake River Land Company. Though he accumulated 33,562 acres and yearned to hand them over to the National Park Service, his bountiful gift was consistently spurned due to fierce, shortsighted local opposition. Only in 1943 did President Roosevelt create the Jackson Hole National Monument and accept the Rockefeller land, which was merged into an expanded Grand Teton National Park in 1950. Once infected with preservation fever, Junior gave money to buy vast acreage for the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, plus a major tract to connect them via the Skyline Drive threaded through the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Theodore Roosevelt · Grand Teton National Park · Great Smoky Mountains National Park · Jackson Hole · Washington · Virginia · Tennessee · Albright · North Carolina · National Park Service · Snake River Land Company · Jackson Hole National Monument · Shenandoah National Park · Blue Ridge Mountains
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If Horace Albright was one of Junior’s environmental gurus, the other was Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History. As founder of a group called the Save-the-Redwoods League, Osborn sounded the alarm about the impending destruction of redwood forests in northern California, which were being felled rapidly by lumber companies. When one company started to chop down redwoods on Bull Creek Flat, an especially fine stand, Junior supplied one million dollars to stop the logging and save the virgin woods. He later gave money to save other redwood forests, along with $1.5 million to preserve thousands of pristine acres of sugar pines in Yosemite Valley. Closer to home, he assembled seven hundred acres of land along the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River that he donated to the Palisades Park Commission. What makes these conservation efforts notable is that Junior was putting his own stamp on Rockefeller philanthropy and having a striking national, even global, impact. His conservationist impulse was quite different from the forward-looking, scientific spirit that his father had exhibited in medical research and education.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Hudson River · Horace Albright · Henry Fairfield Osborn · New Jersey · California · American Museum of Natural History · Bull Creek Flat · Yosemite Valley · Palisades Park Commission
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Junior’s veneration of the past and implicit discomfort with the modern era were exemplified by several restoration projects in his later years that again marked a break with his father’s legacy. He seemed at times not so much to want to study the past as to inhabit it, taking on its recaptured dignity. His most celebrated exercise in time travel came through the Reverend Dr. William Goodwin, a professor of sacred literature at William and Mary College, who met Junior at a Phi Beta Kappa banquet in 1924. Goodwin tried to pique Junior’s interest in his personal obsession: restoring the old colonial capital of Williamsburg, Virginia. A monomaniac on the subject, Goodwin often ambled about the town in a moonlit reverie, communing with eighteenth-century ghosts. Though Junior turned him down, the Episcopal clergyman sensed that he had stumbled upon the one man in America willing and able to implement his fantasy. For the next two years, Junior had to steel himself against Goodwin’s maddeningly persistent entreaties.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Williamsburg · United States · William Goodwin · Virginia · Goodwin · Phi Beta Kappa · Mary College · Episcopal · Uncle William
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In the spring of 1926, when Junior decided to speak at the Hampton Institute, Goodwin saw a chance to waylay him to Williamsburg. When John Jr. and Abby arrived, he took them about town, a clinging, heavy-breathing cicerone. At one point Junior asked innocently whether plans existed to preserve the old buildings; at this, the minister must have seen a ray of divine sunlight. As he sheepishly said, “I found it exceedingly hard at the time not to burst forth in the presence of Mr. Rockefeller into unfolding my cherished dream.” He soon swamped Junior with artistic renderings of how the restored town might look.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Williamsburg · Goodwin · Hampton Institute
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When Junior consented to underwrite the project the following year, he estimated it would cost five million dollars and he faced the familiar dilemma of buying up land without triggering a real-estate boom. With the Rockefeller involvement concealed, Goodwin referred to his patron by the code name “Mr. David.” As lawyers, real-estate agents, and property owners flocked to Goodwin’s office in suspicious numbers, the rumor mill churned with guesses about the project’s rich backer: Henry Ford, George Eastman, J. P. Morgan, Jr., and Otto Kahn were all mentioned. When this speculation grew counterproductive, Goodwin gathered the local citizenry and announced, “It is now my very great privilege and pleasure to announce that the donors of the money to restore Williamsburg are Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of New York.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · David Rockefeller · J. P. Morgan · New York · Williamsburg · Henry Ford · Otto Kahn · Goodwin · George Eastman
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As always, the Rockefeller method was to start slowly, test the concept, and then expand. True to this approach, Junior planned to redo one building at a time. He never dreamed he would resurrect the whole town, but the idea of meticulously restoring the past cast a potent spell over his mind, and he became fantastically engrossed in the most minuscule details. As he told his subordinates, “No scholar must ever be able to come to us and say we have made a mistake.” At one point, the resident architect reminded Junior that everything wasn’t spotless in the eighteenth century. “But Mr. Rockefeller did not like that at all,” he recalled. “He wanted everything to be perfect.” Junior had a special affinity with this lovingly retrieved world. “I really belong in Williamsburg,” he once said. He and Abby bought an elm-shaded manor house, Bassett Hall, where they spent two months each year and where Abby created a first-rate collection of American folk art.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Williamsburg · Bassett Hall
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As a form of recreation rich in social value, Colonial Williamsburg captivated Junior and grew into such a passion that he eventually spent fifty-five million dollars on it. “I gave more time, thought, and attention to Williamsburg than I did to any other project I ever undertook—far more than I gave to Rockefeller Center.… The more I did the more complete the project became and the greater my interest became.” Senior never discussed Colonial Williamsburg with his son and, in solipsistic fashion, tended to edit out of his mind what he himself had not originated, even though Junior’s projects were perpetuating his legacy and enormously enhancing the Rockefeller image. Nevertheless, when Junior was later honored by the Virginia legislature, he became choked up and departed from his prepared text to say, “How I wish my father were here! I am only the son.” Such self-abnegation had become a habit—never mind that John D. had ignored the project. In 1934, President Roosevelt opened Colonial Williamsburg to the public.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Theodore Roosevelt · Williamsburg · Rockefeller Center · Virginia
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Another project conceived in an analogous spirit was The Cloisters museum, which reflected Junior’s long-standing interest in medieval art, with its hierarchy, exacting craftsmanship, and strong spiritual content. His West Fifty-fourth Street home was decorated with gorgeous medieval tapestries, including the Hunt of the Unicorn, and his collection expanded after William Welles Bosworth introduced him to a highly romantic sculptor named George Grey Barnard. Barnard traveled through France and Italy each summer, scooping up Gothic statues and other medieval treasures and bearing his trophies back to New York. The Cluny Museum in Paris gave Barnard the idea for a medieval museum in upper Manhattan which came to be known as The Cloisters (later the Barnard Cloisters). In 1914, this one-man museum opened on Fort Washington Avenue in a small brick building. Barnard created for visitors a full-blown medieval fantasy: Robed figures would lead visitors through a shadowy, churchlike interior perfumed with incense and echoing with medieval chants. By the time Barnard put up his entire collection for sale in the 1920s, Junior had already purchased one hundred Gothic pieces from him, storing most of them in delivery tunnels at Pocantico. The Metropolitan Museum of Art took the entire collection, with money provided by Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · William Welles Bosworth · New York · Pocantico Hills · Paris · Manhattan · George Grey Barnard · The Cloisters · France · Italy · Metropolitan Museum of Art · West Fifty-fourth Street · Cluny Museum · Barnard Cloisters · Fort Washington Avenue
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As a boy, Junior had frequently taken horseback rides along the Hudson to a high, wooded point that enthralled him. Even then he had vowed that he would someday buy the land and give it to the city. Now such an opportunity presented itself. Having bought the Cornelius Billings estate and other parcels near Barnard’s museum, he offered them to the city for a park. Five years later, the city accepted this gift for a new Fort Tryon Park and honored Junior’s proviso that four elevated acres be set aside for a new museum, The Cloisters, to house the medieval art collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · George Grey Barnard · Cornelius Billings · The Cloisters · Hudson · Fort Tryon Park · Metropolitan Museum
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As with Colonial Williamsburg, Junior loved the demanding scholarship that went along with the creation of the medieval museum. He paid for a building that ingeniously blended cloisters from five French monasteries as well as many pieces that he had previously bought from Barnard. As he was reviewing plans for The Cloisters one day, he noticed a room marked “Tapestries” and asked James Rorimer, the curator, what he had in mind. “Oh, something like the Unicorn Tapestries,” Rorimer said airily. Junior grimaced. But, in an act of supreme sacrifice, he eventually parted with his precious tapestries. By the time the Cloisters opened in 1938, Junior had donated or underwritten the cost of more than 90 percent of the art displayed.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Williamsburg · George Grey Barnard · The Cloisters · James Rorimer · Cloisters
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The greatest friction between Junior and Abby arose over the subject of modern art, which exposed fundamental differences in their personalities. Junior seemed to be unnerved by the outlaw, bohemian side of modern art, its free experimentation with form and content. While he was stubbornly mired in the past, as if escaping the strife associated with his father’s career and the Ludlow Massacre, Abby embraced change and responded to the freedom and spontaneity of the new European art. She was enamored of German Expressionist paintings, with their bold colors, grotesque themes, and nightmarish sensuality. When she began to collect such works, Junior found them raw and harshly unappealing. Banishing the forbidden art to an upper-floor gallery at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, he often struck a patronizing tone when talking about Abby’s picture collection. “These were strange, irresponsible objects that she was bringing into his home,” said their son Laurance. “He did not approve of them.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Laurance Rockefeller · Ludlow Massacre · West Fifty-fourth Street
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Many things about modern art—including the sometimes garish colors, dreamlike imagery, and violent or distorted forms—disconcerted this inhibited man. “I am interested in beauty and by and large I do not find beauty in modern art,” Junior said, preferring the classic beauty of, say, Chinese porcelains. “I find instead a desire for self-expression, as if the artist were saying, ‘I’m free, bound by no forms, and art is what flows out of me.’ ” Junior must have identified the freedom inherent in modern pictures with Abby’s emancipation in collecting them, for otherwise it is hard to account for his vehement resistance to her avocation. Frustrated by her husband’s hopelessly blinkered vision, Abby found compensation in her sons, especially Nelson, who shared her love of these threatening objects.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson Rockefeller
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For once heedless of her husband’s wishes, Abby joined with Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Sullivan in 1929 to found the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which provided an outlet for the talents of many wealthy New York women. It was a brave act at a time when most Americans still sneered at such artistic innovation. At first, the museum rented gallery space in the Heckscher Building before moving to a West Fifty-third Street house owned by the Rockefellers. Even as the museum grew in popularity, Junior kept up his deprecating tone. “I showed Papa the pictures and the gallery today,” Abby wrote to Nelson, “and he thinks that they are terrible beyond words, so I am somewhat depressed tonight.” Filling the breach left by his father, Nelson was named chairman of the museum’s Junior Advisory Committee in 1930—he was only twenty-two and still in his last semester at Dartmouth—and ended up as its president.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson Rockefeller · Museum of Modern Art · Rockefeller family · New York · Lillie P. Bliss · Mary Sullivan · West · Dartmouth · Heckscher Building · museum’s Junior Advisory Committee
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Notwithstanding his hatred of modern art, Junior became the museum’s chief benefactor, donating a total of six million dollars in endowment grants and land. So considerable was the Rockefeller largesse behind MoMA that one historian has written that “since the beginning” it has “been a Rockefeller responsibility, a protectorate, one might almost say.” Modern art nevertheless remained contentious at home. Distressed that her budget allowed her to buy just one small Matisse painting and drawing, Abby instructed an intermediary, “Please tell him [Matisse] the only reason I have no more is my inability to acquire them.” To remedy this, Abby invited Matisse to dinner in December 1930 and the French master grew impatient that someone of Junior’s cultural attainments could be so insensitive to the beauty of Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, and Braque. One editor present, Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair, registered Junior’s tactful response, saying that “the philanthropist, who had listened very politely, regretted quite as politely, and in the most polished French, that he must still appear adamant. Then, with an engaging burst of confidence, he added that Mr. Matisse must not altogether despair, because, though he might still seem to be stone, he suspected that Mrs. Rockefeller, thanks to her very special gifts of persuasion, would eventually wear him down to the consistency of jelly.” Unfortunately, this charm was strictly for public consumption and Junior kept up his stony obduracy.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Museum of Modern Art · Frank Crowninshield · Matisse · Cézanne · Picasso · Braque · Vanity Fair
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Overriding Junior’s objections, Abby served as MoMA’s first treasurer and gave the museum its first fund for acquiring art. She was a blithe, energetic, ubiquitous figure in the museum’s maiden years. All this prodigious work only alienated Junior further, a disapproval so noticeable to the young director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., that he once told Abby, “Remember me cordially to Mr. Rockefeller (who I find hard to forgive his granite indifference to what interests you so much).” Philip Johnson was no less scornful: “He was a bulldog, a very strong man, one who would say, ‘As my wife you can do this and not that.’ ” Since Abby’s involvement with MoMA coincided with the years in which her children graduated from college, married, and started jobs, it grated on Junior that he could not now have his wife all to himself. “We children, who had been his competition, were on our own now—presumably our needs were no longer a threat to him,” said David. “But here was the museum, more complex than ever, demanding her energy, and it rankled.” Having bequeathed a stunning 181 artworks to MoMA in 1935 alone, Abby attained a new celebrity status and was featured on the January 1936 cover of Time magazine, which named her “the outstanding individual patron of living artists in the U.S.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · David Rockefeller · Museum of Modern Art · United States · Philip Johnson · Time · Alfred H. Barr
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Abby’s work gave the family an important presence in art patronage that it had largely lacked to date because of Senior’s conspicuous indifference to painting, inherited by his son. However much he inwardly writhed with displeasure, Junior kept the money spigot open. After Lillie Bliss died in 1931, her collection came up for sale—brimming with twenty-four Cézannes, nine Seurats, eight Degases, and so on. She had left it to the museum with the proviso that it have an endowment fund sufficient to ensure its permanence; Junior gave $200,000 and Nelson $100,000. In 1935, to encompass this swelling collection, the trustees voted for a new building to be fashioned by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone in the International Style. For the site, the Rockefellers provided land on both West Fifty-third Street and West Fifty-fourth Street and contributed 60 percent of the building-fund money. The homes of Senior and Junior were razed to make way for the museum and the adjoining Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. In early 1938, Junior and Abby moved into a new apartment at 740 Park Avenue. For Junior, it must have been the ultimate affront that his nine-story mansion had been demolished to make way for modern art.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Philip L. Goodwin · Edward Durell Stone · West · Park Avenue · West Fifty-fourth Street · Cézanne · Lillie Bliss · Seurat · Degas · International Style
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A soaring nocturnal vision of Rockefeller Center. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
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enior’s worst forebodings about the fates of his grandchildren seemed to materialize during the 1920s, especially with the McCormicks. He had long doted on his grandson Fowler, who had become a friend, acolyte, and traveling companion of Carl Jung, whom he lauded as a “God figure” in his life. Having weaned Fowler away from conventional mores, Jung might have inadvertently prepared the ground for Fowler’s unorthodox marriage. In 1921, the tabloid press feasted on the racy divorce of James Stillman, Jr., and Anne “Fifi” Stillman. Fifi—a striking redhead with a flirtatious manner and volatile temper—was a siren to young men, and Fowler became smitten with her when he roomed with her son Bud at Princeton. Scenting danger, Edith warned her father in 1922, “There is always a pitfall for a rich young man in a much older, designing and fascinating woman.” To Rockefeller’s horror, Fowler later married Fifi, a divorcée who was eighteen years his senior and had four children. Although he occasionally received the couple (who remained childless), Rockefeller was heartsick over the match and doubtless blamed Edith’s self-absorption for her children’s troubles.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Fowler McCormick · Carl Jung · Princeton University · James Stillman, Jr · McCormicks · Fifi · Anne “Fifi” Stillman · Bud
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Beautiful and temperamental, Edith’s daughter Muriel had her mother’s headstrong nature. When Rockefeller sent her a birthday check in 1922, she mailed it right back, professing outrage that he would express his “loving feeling in such a materialistical manner.” Since her parents were leading patrons of the opera, Muriel decided to become a diva and appeared with her mother at a fund-raising luncheon. “Following the luncheon,” reported one Chicago paper, “after the coffee had been drunk and the men guests were lighting up their cigars, Miss McCormick drew a slender ebony cigarette holder and cigarette from her gold mesh bag and joined the smokes.” Adopting the stage name of Nawanna Micor, Muriel studied opera with Ganna Walska, acted briefly on the New York stage, and even tried her luck in Hollywood before turning to interior decorating and marrying Elisha D. Hubbard, the son of a former bank president.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Muriel McCormick · Ganna Walska · New York · Chicago · Elisha D. Hubbard · McCormick · Hollywood · Nawanna Micor
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Rockefeller received more warmth from her sister, Mathilde, a bright, winning young woman and the only McCormick child exempted from analysis with Jung. Fearful that Mathilde would fall prey to some scoundrel in Switzerland, Rockefeller told her: “We want you all to be true Americans and to love your own country and not to be enamored with the allurements that come especially to our American girls sometimes by the fortune hunters of the world.” Rockefeller had the talents of a sibyl in these matters. In 1922, Mathilde, seventeen, decided to marry her Swiss riding master, a forty-five-year-old widower named Max Oser. Having paid for Mathilde’s expensive riding lessons, Edith felt betrayed and was sure the treacherous Oser was out to bilk them. As she told her father, Oser had only taken an interest in Mathilde because she was “the daughter of wealthy parents and the granddaughter of the wealthiest man in the world. As we unfortunately all too well know, all of the children are flattered and toadied to by people of none too worthy characters, who hope thereby to get money from them.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Mathilde McCormick Oser · Max Oser · Carl Jung · Switzerland · McCormick
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Forgetting her own recent escapades, Edith mounted her high horse and sounded like a conservative, self-righteous mother, suggesting that Rockefeller withhold money from his grandchildren to make it “less possible for them to be taken in by swindlers and by evil minded people.” “We have our sorrows,” Rockefeller replied to Edith. “How thankful I am that dear mother is spared them.” He was sufficiently swayed by Edith’s argument that he discontinued many of the annual gifts he had routinely been making to his grandchildren.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick
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Refusing to accept the match with Oser, Edith attempted to scare the daylights out of Mathilde, telling her that the twenty-six-year age difference between her McCormick grandparents had yielded a terrible legacy of mental illness among their seven children. “Two died young and two are insane,” she pleaded with her daughter. “Do you not see how unjust it is to bring children into the world doomed to insanity?” Not relenting after Mathilde’s marriage in 1923, Edith refused to see Max Oser or even her own grandchildren for many years. When the couple visited America in 1929 in an attempt to close this breach, Edith told Mathilde that she still had no desire to see her grandchildren. “Children really aren’t at all important,” she informed her daughter, “they’re just necessary for procreation.” Edith grew so spiteful that when Mathilde and Max planned to visit Senior, Edith telegrammed ahead to her father: “I would appreciate very much if you did not receive the fortune hunter Mr. Oser in your home.” About to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, Rockefeller was in no mood to snub a beloved granddaughter, so he graciously received Max, Mathilde, and their children at Lakewood. Rockefeller even slipped into a confidant’s role with Mathilde, who poured out her troubles about Edith. After being reviled as a robber baron for so many decades, he enjoyed playing the sage, soft-shoe grandfather.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Mathilde McCormick Oser · Max Oser · Lakewood · United States · McCormick · Max
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Rockefeller continued to feel highly protective toward his granddaughter Margaret, who reminded everybody of Bessie as she grew up, making her an object of special concern. She had grown up in a lonely, bookish atmosphere with her father, Charles Strong, who kept Margaret away from America—to Rockefeller’s everlasting dismay. Paralyzed from the waist down by a tumor on his spine, Charles was confined to a wheelchair cushioned with a rubber pillow, and this made his life only more cerebral. While staying in his Paris apartment or his villa at Fiesole, Charles and his close friend George Santayana shared a paternal solicitude toward Margaret, who was always encircled by suitors. Her marital plans provided grist for speculation between these two weighty philosophers.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Charles Strong · George Santayana · Paris · United States · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Margaret · Fiesole
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It was Santayana, not Strong, who gave away the bride when Margaret married the fashionable George de Cuevas in a Paris church in 1927; Margaret thought that her father would disapprove and got married while he was out of town. After her solitary, repressed home environment, Margaret was swept up in de Cuevas’s warmth, spontaneity, and charm. Almost invariably labeled a Spanish nobleman, de Cuevas was neither Spanish nor noble but the scion of a Chilean banking family that was richer in land than cash, and he was clever in plotting ways to remedy that deficiency.
Names: George de Cuevas · George Santayana · Paris · Margaret · Strong
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In January 1929, Margaret gave birth to a baby girl named Elizabeth (followed by a son, John), and later in the year she and George headed off to America “to see the old man Rockefeller, now 90 years old,” as Santayana described their plans. “He has already treated Margaret generously—she has $75,000 a year—but gratitude is the hope of favors to come, and no doubt they will do their best in Florida to make a good impression, to be passed on from the old gentleman to John D. Jr. who now holds the purse-strings.” Later on, George de Cuevas jested that he had trekked off to the Florida jungles to play golf to provide for his children. He knew the proper line to take with Rockefeller and portrayed Margaret as a poor waif who needed protection. Margaret and George moved to America with their two children in the 1930s, a stay punctuated by return trips to Paris and Florence, and for several years they lived near Rockefeller in Lakewood, much as Charles and Bessie had done three decades earlier. In his will, Rockefeller offered striking proof of his concern for the welfare of Bessie’s daughter. Since he had already distributed almost all of his money to his philanthropies and children, he left an estate of only $26.4 million, with $16.6 million of that skimmed off by state and federal taxes. In a decision that took many people by surprise, the chief recipient of the remaining money was Margaret Strong de Cuevas—a tribute both to Margaret and to her now sainted mother.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Margaret Strong de Cuevas · George de Cuevas · George Santayana · Lakewood · Paris · United States · Henry George · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Margaret · Florida · Florence · Queen Elizabeth · John
EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c34_r1.htm
With Junior’s six children, Rockefeller suffered much less anguish, for they were brought up under their father’s unswerving discipline. In his desire to have a shining, spotless family and cleanse the Rockefeller name, Junior became a hard and often unforgiving parent. Of the children, Babs, the sole daughter, was most often at loggerheads with her parents. She felt that Abby doted on her sons and that Junior singled her out for a disproportionate share of pent-up rage. Junior was poorly equipped to fathom youthful revolt, especially when it came from an emancipated daughter. Tall, lithe, and slender, a true child of the Jazz Age, Babs looked terrific in flapper outfits and cloche hats, enjoyed high-speed chases in her sports car, adored tennis, and patronized Harlem jazz clubs. She also adroitly managed to evade her chaperons, and on the night Uncle William died in 1922 it took time to track her down at a Long Island party. She hated churchgoing and mockingly recalled “the fannies waving” during morning prayer. In keeping her accounts, she settled for a slapdash job and refused to follow tradition and hustle for pocket change. “I can always get a dollar from Grandpa,” she boasted to her brothers, knowing her grandfather’s weakness for the ladies. At Brearley and Chapin Schools, she showed little initiative and resented her father’s caustic comments about her report cards, not to mention his meddlesome calls to school to check up on her progress.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Abby Rockefeller Mauzé · Long Island · Harlem · Jazz Age · Uncle William · Brearley · Chapin Schools
EPUB paragraph 10 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c34_r1.htm
Junior offered his children a $2,500 reward if they did not smoke before age twenty-one, and for Babs he tossed in a car as well, yet she started to sneak cigarettes at fifteen. After inhaling a single cigarette in October 1922, Babs, nineteen, sat down and wrote to her father as if confessing to some monstrous crime: “This is going to be the hardest letter I have ever had to write.… I’ve smoked, thereby losing my car. Mama told me to take it up to Tarrytown tomorrow and put it away.” When Babs brazenly continued to smoke, Junior volunteered to double her allowance if she abstained in the future. Even after she set her bed ablaze while smoking in bed, she still was not cured of the habit, and Junior was horrified when she added a taste for bootleg liquor.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Rockefeller Mauzé · Tarrytown
EPUB paragraph 11 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c34_r1.htm
Babs saw her father as a tense man who converted everything into a test of morality and his personal authority. Like her brothers, she found redeeming qualities in her grandfather, including good-humored sympathy, that were sorely missing in her father. Twice during the winter of 1923–1924, Babs was dragged into traffic court for speeding, and twice she pleaded guilty. While Junior would not countenance this, Senior dropped her a comforting note, admitting that he was partial to fast cars himself. The clashes with her father scarred Babs. As Laurance’s daughter later said of a talk with Babs about her upbringing,
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Rockefeller Mauzé · Laurance Rockefeller
EPUB paragraph 12 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c34_r1.htm
I cannot convey the tone of bitterness that crept into her speech.… She constantly said that [her father] meant well and expressed her admiration for [him], and yet it is clear that she feared and hated him. He never got angry in the sense of raising his voice or losing his temper. When he got angry, he would get very sarcastic as she recalled. She viewed him as a man who was incapable of enjoying himself.
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EPUB paragraph 13 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c34_r1.htm
On May 14, 1925, Babs married a young lawyer and childhood friend: the handsome, easygoing David Milton. Twelve hundred people, including Governor Al Smith, attended the wedding at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, with Ivy Lee hovering in the background, making sure photographers did not snap pictures of Babs in her wedding gown, lest anyone accuse the Rockefellers of ostentation. In the press, the story was predictably served up in hackneyed prose as a fairy-tale union of the “world’s richest bride” and a “penniless law clerk.” Later, with more truth than diplomacy, Babs pronounced the day after the wedding “her first day of freedom.” As a vast, expectant throng craned their necks outside, Babs and David slipped out a back door. When Junior saw the crowd standing outside, he asked if they would like to come in and see where the wedding had taken place. Pretty soon, he and his sons were squiring curiosity seekers, twenty at a time, to tour the flower-filled rooms. Eighteen years later, following in Edith’s footsteps, Babs divorced her lawyer husband. She then married Dr. Irving Pardee, a neurologist, and, after he died, Jean Mauzé, a senior vice president of the United States Trust Company. In her later years, she was a substantial contributor to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and other New York City institutions.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Abby Rockefeller Mauzé · David Rockefeller · Ivy Lee · Rockefeller family · New York City · United States · Jean Mauzé · Al Smith · West Fifty-fourth Street · David Milton · Irving Pardee · Memorial Sloan-Kettering
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.