CHAPTER 34

Heirs

Senior’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.¹ 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.”² 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.

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.”³ 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.”⁴ 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.

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.” ⁵ 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.”⁶

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.”⁷ “We have our sorrows,” Rockefeller replied to Edith. “How thankful I am that dear mother is spared them.”⁸ He was sufficiently swayed by Edith’s argument that he discontinued many of the annual gifts he had routinely been making to his grandchildren.

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?”⁹ 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.”¹⁰ 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.”¹¹ 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.

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.

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.

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.”¹²Later 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.

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.¹³ 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. ¹⁴ 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.

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.

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,

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.¹⁵

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.”¹⁶ 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.

From his first breath, John D. Rockefeller III had grown up in the long shadow of dynastic expectation. When he was born, one New York paper joked that Wall Street brokers were debating whether the event would “buoy the market or merely hold it steady.”¹⁷Tall and lean, with a long, craggy face, John had a tightly wound personality, which he inherited from his father. Shy and introspective, he was severely self-critical. Like his father, he aspired to be a paragon of virtue and, also like his father, paid a terrible emotional price for it. For all their similarities—or perhaps because of them—Junior and his eldest son had a relationship fraught with tension. John III felt overshadowed by his father and dejected by a sense that he could never measure up to his lofty standards. Babs claimed that John III was the most keenly injured by Junior’s “primly correcting supervisory stance.”¹⁸ John chafed at his father’s limitations, noting once in his diary, “F[ather] always has own way. He is . . . broad in business relations, but so narrow in some of his family details.”¹⁹ Unlike Babs, John showed no flashes of rebellion and swallowed his anger.

John went through several private schools, including the Roger Ascham School, the Browning School, and the Loomis Institute, but, unlike his younger brothers, he was not allowed to attend the progressive Lincoln School, which had been started in 1917 with a grant from the General Education Board. Embarrassed by his large jaw and convinced that the right side of his face was deformed, he began to manifest in adolescence the same litany of psychosomatic ailments (headaches, stomach pains, and so forth) that afflicted his father. In early 1922, he developed such torturous earaches that he had to spend the winter with his grandfather in Florida, where he enjoyed the old man’s waggishness on the golf course. Senior added a bright touch of eccentricity to his dour world. He filled up his diary with dreary self-deprecation: “I have no personal attraction. Nobody wants to sit next to me at the table or anything.” “I have no real friends here at school.” “Wish I was more popular.” “I wish I was different in many ways than I am.” “Am much too self-conscious at all times.”²⁰ He had inherited Eliza’s puritan conscience without Big Bill’s saving levity.

As an adolescent, John saved or donated half his income to charity and had little inkling of the magnitude of the Rockefeller fortune. According to legend, he was steering a decrepit rowboat at Seal Harbor one day when a neighbor’s son said, “Why don’t you get a motor boat?” Taken aback, John replied, “A motor boat! Gee whiz! Who do you think we are—Vanderbilts!” ²¹ At Princeton, he was not among the few hundred students who owned a car. One tale, perhaps apocryphal, claims that John was derided when he tried to cash a check at an Italian restaurant on Nassau Street in Princeton; he had accepted checks signed by George Washington and Julius Caesar, the owner explained, but he was not such a dunce as to take one signed by John D. Rockefeller. Although the 1920 appearance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, had certified Princeton’s reputation for fast living, John III did not drink, smoke, curse, or study on Sunday. During receptions at his eating club, he would only brush the silver loving cup against his lips when it was passed around in order to avoid contaminating contact with liquor. While his classmates drank themselves into oblivion, John taught English to immigrants at a local settlement house or volunteered at the YMCA. Even at Princeton, he was already serving on the board of the Dunbar National Bank, a black-managed bank in Harlem supported by his father and other businessmen. Probably more popular at Princeton than he realized, John nonetheless portrayed his undergraduate years as a lonely purgatory. Crippled by his conscience, he dwelled morbidly on his own imperfections in his diary. “Am afraid I have an inferiority complex— really know I have. Never feel as if people—both boys and girls—wanted to be with me.”²² “Can’t keep smile on my face which is most embarrassing. Muscles tremble. Give anything to be over it.” ²³ In his final bleak college entry, John recorded, “Guess the reason I am glad to get through college is because I have made rather a mess of it; also haven’t really made hardly any friends.”²⁴

After graduating, John traveled around the world before taking up his duties at 26 Broadway, where he placed himself at his father’s disposal. The family office was now an enormous bureaucracy staffed by more than one hundred people, including lawyers, accountants, money managers, and real-estate experts. If Rockefeller had let Junior wander confusedly during his early years at 26 Broadway, Junior handled his son in a much more direct and stifling manner. During John’s first day at work on December 2, 1929, Junior held a press conference to introduce his son then proceeded to dominate the discussion. Each time the reporters posed a question for the lanky, fidgety young man, Junior answered for him. Though Junior had soon placed his son on fifteen boards, including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute, and given him a small, adjoining office, John seldom saw his father. Obsessive and driven, John III worked around the clock, six days a week, delving into everything from juvenile delinquency to population control. Like his father in his early years, John III was often the token Rockefeller on charity boards, and all the responsibilities took their toll.

This high-strung young man needed a woman who could save him from his nervous system, as Abby had with Junior, and he found an ideal partner in Blanchette Ferry Hooker. The Vassar-educated Blanchette was a beautiful heiress, sweet and charming, who behaved with a dignified but unaffected manner. Her father had founded the Hooker Electrochemical Company while her mother had inherited money from the Ferry retail seed business. John III was such a bashful wooer that to speed things up, Junior gave him the key to a private cottage at Seal Harbor and encouraged him to take Blanchette there. The couple were finally married on November 11, 1932, before 2,500 guests at the Riverside Church.

During their courtship at Seal Harbor, Blanchette learned just how guilt-ridden John was when he handed her a comprehensive list of his faults then asked her to reciprocate. She saw that her future husband was bowed beneath the weight of the family name and fortune, and she helped him to strike out on his own. It was not easy. Like his aunt Edith, John III had suffered from intermittent bouts of agoraphobia in school, a condition that worsened after his marriage. When he and Blanchette went into society, he occasionally submitted to dizzy spells that nearly sent him into a dead swoon. Though the condition eventually subsided, as long as it lasted John and Blanchette seldom ventured out to public functions.

The least-known of the brothers, John was the most conscientious philanthropist. Besides the Rockefeller Foundation, he chaired Lincoln Center and the Population Council and become the most significant force behind the Asia Society. Avoiding limousines and luxury hotels whenever possible and often traveling under the fictitious name John Davison, he refrained from any self-aggrandizement. Oddly, like his father, John could not abide his wife’s fondness for modern art and, taking a leaf from Abby, Blanchette firmly defied him and became president of the Museum of Modern Art. Also like his father, John reacted to the controversial Rockefeller legacy by acquiring a conscience that was a punishing taskmaster. His daughter said, “He was someone who suffered from never doing things just for enjoyment.” ²⁵

If John III seemed imprisoned by the abundant family rules, Nelson seemed heedless of the inhibitions that ruled their father’s life. Nelson’s brash exuberance only sapped John’s confidence further. As the latter recorded in his diary, “Nelson dances very well. I am rotten.” “Nelson always makes a big hit.”²⁶ While his brothers were rangy, the young Nelson had Junior’s short, square frame. Named after Senator Aldrich, he inherited the Aldrich charm and extroversion, and alone of the six children he exhibited a flamboyant craving for publicity, a cheerful egotism in a family that frowned on self-assertion. A naturally commanding figure, Nelson behaved less like a student at the Lincoln School, where he zipped about in a flashy Ford roadster, than a principal. He accosted one startled new teacher with an invitation to call on him if she needed any information because “you’re new here and I’ve been around for quite a while.”²⁷ Not since Big Bill had there been such a fun-loving, narcissistic Rockefeller. Junior often winced at Nelson’s cocky antics, while Abby strongly identified with his “frank and outspoken” nature and clearly favored him over the other children.²⁸

A popular student at Dartmouth, Nelson made the soccer team and was elected vice president of his junior class. Even then, he was ingratiating himself with people, sharpening his political skills. With his worn corduroy pants and sagging sweaters, he tried to blend into the crowd, but he was a star in sack-cloth and converted the Dartmouth president, Ernest Hopkins, into a pal. He did not drink, taught a Sunday-school class, got high enough grades to make Phi Beta Kappa, and humbly rode a bike instead of a car.

After his parents scotched his dream of becoming an architect, Nelson majored in economics. For his honors thesis, he wanted to write an essay that would vindicate his grandfather and Standard Oil and was eager to hear the story from the patriarch’s own lips. A wonderful raconteur about so many events, Rockefeller carefully avoided serious discussion of his business history. “I was thinking the other day that Grandfather has never mentioned the Company to us,” Nelson wrote to his father, “nor has he ever told us anything about his stupendous work in organizing the Company and leading it for so many years.”²⁹ To remedy this omission, Nelson asked if his father could set up a talk, saying it “would be an outstanding and unforgettable experience in our lives.”³⁰

While Rockefeller mulled this over, Junior mailed his son the hagiographic Inglis manuscript, which Nelson found engrossing. “It was thrilling!” he told Junior. “For the first time I felt that I really knew Grandfather a little—got a glimpse into the power and grandeur of his life.” ³¹ Nelson did not realize that he was only reading a pretty family fiction; the Rockefeller children were being duped, inadvertently, by family public relations. As for Rockefeller, though flattered by the request, he declined to speak to his grandson, leaving Nelson—like Junior and the other Rockefellers—no better informed about Standard Oil than any well-read stranger. Senior’s behavior guaranteed that anxiety over the fortune’s legitimacy would spread to his descendants, strengthening their guilty consciences. In his thesis, Nelson, coached by Inglis, flatly denied that Standard Oil ever drove competitors from business unfairly. “These companies were treated with extreme fairness and in many cases with generosity,” he wrote, dismissing as mythical that Standard Oil had amassed power “through local price discrimination, bogus independents and espionage.” ³²

In 1929, Nelson turned twenty-one on the same day that Rockefeller reached ninety. “The 90 makes my 21 seem mighty small and insignificant,” he wrote his parents, “just like a little sapling standing by a mighty fir. But the sapling still has time to grow and develop and someday it might itself turn into a tree of some merit. Who knows?”³³ Nelson leaped at any chance to golf with Rockefeller in Florida and was an attentive audience for his yarns and witticisms. After one 1932 visit, Nelson told Junior that Rockefeller “certainly is an extraordinary man, about the finest I know. There are few people that I really admire as being all-round success, but he leads the list. His point of view and outlook on life are so perfectly grand. And what a sense of humor!”³⁴

In the autumn of 1929, in his can-do, take-charge style, Nelson declared that he would marry a childhood friend, Mary Todhunter Clark, known as Tod. Thin and aristocratic in manner, she was a granddaughter of George Roberts, a former president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Junior was irate that Nelson had not consulted him and consented only after Abby lobbied him. Nelson and Tod went to Ormond Beach to see Rockefeller, who gave his blessing after golfing with this young lady from the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia. Tod struck observers as witty and intelligent, an excellent mimic and fine sports-woman, if rather cool and self-contained. On June 23, 1930, Nelson married her in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, while police restrained a thousand spectators outside. At the last minute, Rockefeller could not come and sent $20,000 in securities instead. More and more, he refrained from trips that might threaten his health.

For their honeymoon, Nelson and Tod spent two weeks in Seal Harbor, where they were attended by twenty-four servants. As a wedding gift, Junior treated them to a nine-month around-the-world trip that took on the trappings of a state visit. At each port of call, they were escorted by Standard Oil officials who introduced them to prime ministers and other dignitaries. For Nelson, the meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in India had one severe shortcoming: “He showed no interest in me whatever,” he complained.³⁵

During the summer of 1931, Nelson started work at 26 Broadway, where he felt crowded out by Junior’s phalanx of advisers. In an abortive venture, he launched a company for marketing merchandise and discussed the project at length with Rockefeller in Florida. “Every morning we’d take turns reading Psalms before breakfast, which consisted of floods of orange juice,” said Nelson. He made his mark by hustling tenants for Rockefeller Center and ended up as the project’s chief panjandrum. During his eventful career, he served as an assistant secretary of state for Latin America under Roosevelt and undersecretary of health, education, and welfare under Eisenhower. When sworn in as governor of New York in 1959, he took the oath of office on the Bible of his great-grandmother Eliza. After thirty years and five children, the marriage to Tod ended in divorce in 1962. When he married Margaretta “Happy” Murphy the following year, many people thought his marital history had irreparably harmed his presidential ambitions, and he had to settle for the vice presidency under Gerald Ford.

When Laurance was born in 1910, the family chose this strange spelling of his name to honor the ailing Cettie. “This we do so as to make it as much like Laura as possible,” Junior told his mother.³⁶ Everybody said the thin, sharp-featured Laurance looked more like Senior than any of the other children did. Bright and laconic, with an incisive wit, he also had his grandfather’s enigmatic detachment. However, he lacked the “power to concentrate on difficult and routine tasks,” as Junior said when Laurance was at the Lincoln School.³⁷ The boy took up photography, built a wooden auto powered by a motorcycle engine, and showed a flair for gadgetry. As a philosophy major at Princeton, Laurance shed many of his boyhood religious beliefs in the face of rational scrutiny. While studying at Harvard Law School, he developed pneumonia during his first semester and had to spend the winter with Senior at Ormond Beach. Because he had qualms about the social philosophy of the law and had to struggle to get through his finals, he decided to drop out without taking his degree.

In 1934, Laurance married Mary French in Woodstock, Vermont. A charming Vassar graduate of quiet strength, Mary was the granddaughter of Frederick Billings, a president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Mary’s brother had roomed with Nelson at Dartmouth. Laurance had his grandfather’s sound instinct for business opportunities and the same unwavering confidence in his own judgment. When he inherited Rockefeller’s New York Stock Exchange seat, he became the youngest member of the exchange. At twenty-eight, with his friend Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, Laurance joined a syndicate to buy Eastern Airlines, eventually becoming its largest shareholder. He also took a sizable stake in the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which surged ahead on the strength of aviation contracts during World War II. He was later involved in the Viking rocket and other aerospace projects, and enjoyed flying his own plane. After the family made its first trip to the Grand Tetons in the early 1920s, he became entranced by conservation no less than his father had been. “I was the youngest one there, and therefore the most impressionable,” he said. He later created vacation resorts in places of unspoiled scenery, managing them through a company called Rockresorts that eventually owned some of the world’s most gorgeous vacation spots.

Winthrop’s life nearly started out with an embarrassing blunder. Junior and Abby were about to christen him Winthrop Aldrich Rockefeller (after Abby’s brother) when they realized what his initials would spell and scrapped the middle name. He was a chubby, maladroit boy who bore the brunt of Nelson and Laurance’s sadistic urges. When he developed kidney trouble, his two older brothers considerately reminded him that another young cousin named Winthrop had died of kidney disease.³⁸ Abby felt protective toward her vulnerable son and once said of him, “Abuse only makes him angry and much worse, while for love and kind treatment he will do anything.” ³⁹

There was something ineffably sad about Winthrop’s youth. Squirming under his father’s stern rigor, he longed for escape to a less-taxing world. Easily distracted, he did poorly at Lincoln and Loomis, where he enjoyed playing practical jokes and chasing girls. A big, handsome, hulking boy—at sixteen he was six-foot-one and weighed 185 pounds—he lacked the energy and drive that came so effortlessly to his more dynamic brothers. Winthrop later admitted that as a Yale undergraduate, he had mastered only two subjects: how to smoke and how to drink. At first, he could not keep down more than three drinks without getting sick: “Unfortunately, I later got over that.”⁴⁰ At Yale, he played cards and—committing one of the cardinal Rockefeller sins—began to neglect his account book. In the middle of his freshman year, Winthrop realized that his prodigality might cost him his allowance, and he negotiated a large rescue loan from Babs.

During the 1933 summer vacation, he toiled as a roustabout in the Texas oil fields for Humble Oil, which was now owned by Jersey Standard, and he felt more at home doing manual work among these rough, simple men than he had among his Yale classmates: “That was what I had been looking for! . . . men working with their hands, producing something real. . . . I was fascinated by everything I saw—I wanted to become part of it, to do what they were doing, to prove to myself that I was as good a man as any of them.”⁴¹If a tonic for his morale, the Texas adventure did not enhance his school performance, and he continued to favor booze and cards. At one point while Winthrop was in Texas, a New Haven publican named Curly Levine made the mistake of sending him a telegram at West Fifty-fourth Street. Junior read the message and secretly contacted Yale president James R. Angell, who informed him that Curly was mixed up with gambling and shady elements. When confronted, Winthrop broke down and confessed to his horrified parents, “Curly is a Jewish bartender in a speakeasy in New Haven where I have gotten liquor while I was at college. ” ⁴² In his junior year, Winthrop was expelled from college after being discovered in the shower with a young lady.

After Yale, Winthrop resumed work for Humble Oil in the Texas fields. When he announced the news, Rockefeller, whatever his reservations, expressed pleasure at a family member being back on the Standard Oil payroll. When Winthrop visited Lakewood to tell him about Humble’s advanced production methods in Texas, the old man listened patiently, then said, “Well, brother . . . I appreciate that—but I must remind you that the important thing is the figures.”⁴³ In his amiability, Winthrop reminded people of Rockefeller, and perhaps for that reason he was very sensitive to the contradictions of the old man’s personality: “There was always an indefinable aloofness, a detachment that I cannot describe. He was warm, human and real—his every act was an act of warmth—and yet this other quality was there.”⁴⁴ The other brothers did not see this subtle discrepancy between the inner and outer man.

For three years, Winthrop enjoyed the camaraderie of the Texas roustabouts and smoked, drank, and philandered. Winthrop was “big and broad-shouldered, like a friendly young Koala,” said one contemporary magazine writer. ⁴⁵ In this schizoid existence, he worked and ate with other workers during the week and lived on seventy-five cents an hour, then dined on weekends at a country club with the company president. Winthrop welcomed his transient experience of ordinariness in Texas. As he once noted with regret, if your name is Rockefeller, “you can almost feel the prices rise when you walk into a store.”⁴⁶

Returning to New York, Winthrop trained at the Chase National Bank, worked for the Socony–Vacuum Oil Company—the former Standard Oil of New York—and served as a vice chairman of the Greater New York Fund. These jobs drew less press attention than his evening prowls through café society. As one reporter remarked, Winthrop “handled all the night life” for the Rockefellers.⁴⁷ As his drinking and womanizing crept into gossip columns, Junior scolded him, but Winthrop resented his father’s autocratic manner and attempt to perpetuate what seemed an obsolete way of life. After one quarrel, Winthrop said bitterly, “By God, if I ever have children, I’m going to talk to them, not just make an appointment to see them and then get up after five minutes to go get a haircut.”⁴⁸

In 1948, after dating actress Mary Martin, Winthrop married a voluptuous blonde named Barbara “Bobo” Sears—née Jievute Paulekiute, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. Junior and Abby boycotted the Florida wedding, and the marriage scarcely lasted the year. When Winthrop later bought a large spread, Winrock Farm, in Arkansas, Junior found one excuse after another not to visit. Much to the surprise of his family, Winthrop was elected Arkansas governor in 1966, the first Republican to manage that feat in ninety-four years.

Like Winthrop, David was pudgy as a child but was spared the rough attention of his older brothers. Like a miniature banker, he moved with serene self-confidence and punctiliously kept his account books. Smart, docile, and cherubically round-faced, he was adored by Rockefeller, who loved to croon carols with him at The Casements. As Rockefeller told his son after one of David’s holiday visits, “He is a worthy son of worthy parents, and his grandfather dotes on him.”⁴⁹ David reciprocated the affection, calling his grandfather “the least dour man I’ve ever known, constantly smiling, joking, and telling shaggy dog stories.”⁵⁰ Senior once told John Yordi that David was the grandchild who most resembled him.

As the youngest son, David was solitary, yet he compensated for this by creating a self-contained world, collecting butterflies, moths, beetles, and grasshoppers. (Eventually, he developed a world-famous trove of forty thousand beetles.) By the time he graduated from the Lincoln School, he was, like Rockefeller, outwardly genial and inwardly reserved. Steady and methodical, he experienced no scandals or crises at Harvard, graduating cum laude in 1936 after having written his senior thesis on Fabian socialism. After a postgraduate year at Harvard and another at the London School of Economics, he completed a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago. Though his thesis, “Unused Resources and Economic Waste,” dealt with issues of corporate concentration that had preoccupied his grandfather, David arrived at free-market conclusions and criticized monopolies as counterproductive. While paying tribute to Standard Oil for imposing order on an anarchic industry, he agreed with the court’s 1911 decision to break up the trust. As he later argued, “Some units [of Standard Oil] are now bigger and better than grandfather could ever have imagined even the whole company would be.”⁵¹ This preference for neoclassical economics reflected changes both in the Rockefeller family and in the American business community.

Upon leaving Chicago, David worked for eighteen months as an unpaid secretary to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York. He had the wisdom to marry a feisty, red-blooded woman, Margaret “Peggy” McGrath, who complemented his more detached personality. She came from a comfortable but not blue-ribbon family and had little tolerance for grandiosity like Nelson’s. With a sometimes fiery temper and activist bent, she donated her time to worthwhile causes, including saving the Maine shoreline, raising cattle, and working on behalf of farmland conservation. David dedicated his career to the Chase Manhattan Bank, rising to the chairman’s post and becoming an eminent, peripatetic international banker. As he told an interviewer, he was “the first member of the family since Grandfather who has had a regular job in a company and has devoted a major part of his time to being in business.” ⁵²