The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (20 page)

The day after she met him, Alice was in the park with her cousin, who, going through an inquisitive phase, just
had
to see what was in the stranger’s wallet.

“You can’t go through my wallet!” he said, which of course made the girls want to see its contents all the more.

“Are you a mob boss?” they began, trying to guess who he was and why he seemed so secretive.

“No . . .”

“Are you James Bond? A CIA agent?”

“No, no . . .”

Alice, who had been studying history, asked, “Are you the Lindbergh baby?”

Finally he relented, sheepishly opening his wallet to show them his identification, which bore the name CLARK ROCKEFELLER.

“A Rockefeller!” the girls shrieked, because they had studied the family at Spence. The revelation unleashed a torrent of information from Clark. He was worth
exactly
$450 million, he said. Because of his enormous wealth and his famous family name, he had to be extremely careful about security. “Normal for a Rockefeller, of course,” he admitted. But it was no fun living in fear of being kidnapped and held “for millions” in ransom. However, there were perks, he added. Like having the keys to every door in Rockefeller Center. Maybe he would take Alice there to pull a prank one night: “We could turn off all the lights on the General Electric Building!” he said, referring to Rockefeller Center’s art deco centerpiece. “That would be the coolest thing ever!” Alice exclaimed. Or perhaps they could run around the
Saturday Night Live
set in the building’s NBC Studios, which Clark loved to do until his “Uncle David,” meaning the philanthropist David Rockefeller, made him stop. He was in the middle of writing a book,
American Standard
, which would “educate the middle class on how to dress and how to act,” and it was clear from his preppy clothing and perfect diction that Clark Rockefeller knew how to do all of that. He always wore khaki pants, a blood-red Yale baseball cap, and a Lacoste polo shirt, with the collar turned up. “He believed in the alligator,” Alice would later say.

Everything about the man was special, important, and, to a fourteen-year-old girl,
magical
. Soon, Clark and Alice were running their dogs down the East River Drive jogging track, singing show tunes—Clark knew them
all
—from
Annie
to Cole Porter at the top of their lungs. They quickly abandoned the dog park for the city at large. They ate hot fudge sundaes at Rumpelmayer, the ice cream parlor inside the old St. Moritz Hotel, and bagels fresh out of the ovens at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side. He took her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he knew
everything
about every painting, and would always pause reverently for “a moment of silence” in the Met’s Michael Clark Rockefeller Collection, named for his “cousin” who tragically disappeared in 1961 in New Guinea. Throughout every outing, he was constantly speaking into a radio, because, he explained, he had to regularly report his whereabouts to his security office. “See?” he would tell Alice, pointing at dark sedans in the street, which he said were forever following him to make sure he was safe.

Of course, she had to introduce him to her parents, and her mother was as entranced as Alice had been. Soon, they were all as close as kin. Alice began referring to him as her uncle or cousin (the monikers were sometimes mixed up)—while Clark introduced her as his “niece”—and her mother loved him so much that she told everyone he was her beloved “nephew.” Mother and daughter visited him in his apartment at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza on Second Avenue and East Forty-seventh Street, and while they thought the furnishings—lawn furniture, mainly—were a bit odd, they chalked it up to Rockefeller eccentricity. And when he would invite Alice’s grandmother, a socially well-connected doyenne of the Upper East Side, to lunch, he would always hand her the bill at the end of the meal, saying he had been brought up to “never carry money.” They chalked that up to Rockefeller eccentricity too.

Every Thanksgiving, he said, it was mandatory that he join the Rockefeller family for their traditional dinner at Kykuit, the historic home near Tarrytown, New York, that John D. Rockefeller had built in 1913, and that had been home to four generations of Rockefellers. Over the course of their friendship he would sometimes take Alice’s dog along with his Gordon setter to the Thanksgiving event, returning to exclaim how glorious it had been to be with “Uncle David, Uncle Laurance, and Uncle Jay,” leaving both Alice and her mother rapt with his descriptions of the vast estate, the endless servants, and the close family conviviality.

Yet despite his bloodline and everything that went along with it, there was something sad about Clark. He said he was all alone in the world—his parents had died tragically when he was very young, he explained—after they forced him to attend Yale at fourteen because of his “genius” IQ. Even his birthday was fraught with heartbreak: February 29, 1960, was a leap year, which meant he could celebrate it only every four years. “He told these stories with such emotion,” Alice recalled, quite often accompanied by tears. What he did for work was important, complicated, high-level, and ultra-secretive—although he did share some details about that—but he always had time for the people he cared about. “I can’t love anyone or anything unless they’re special,” he often said. And Alice and her mother felt privileged to be a part of his incredible orbit.

In time Clark became, with Alice’s mother’s blessings, a sort of surrogate parent. The 1994 New York debutante season was coming up, with Alice as part of it, and Clark would guide her through it. He even escorted her to a ball or two in his tuxedo, bow tie, and dress shoes, always worn without socks. “If I had to go back in time, I would do it again, because he was important to me and I was important to him,” Alice later recalled. “I needed him then. He was my godfather, he was my uncle, my cousin. He was somebody I could turn to.”

She and her mother, in turn, had provided Clark Rockefeller with two things he desperately needed: validation that his incredible new persona was believable and, equally important, a support system—a real family—in the upper echelons of New York City.

Thus the circle that Clark Rockefeller would soon command began to grow.

In his early days in New York he had arrived at St. Thomas Church in what would become a regular feature of his MO: a snit. He had fled his previous “church home,” said John Wells, which was Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, on Fifth Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street, a venerable house of worship that bills itself as offering “the personal touch of Jesus Christ amid the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan.” He said he left that church because its elders had dared refuse to baptize the girl he was by then calling his niece, Alice Johnson. “Clark told us that he had been baptized at St. Thomas himself, that he wasn’t a member but his parents had him baptized there in the sixties,” said Wells. “So he claimed to have a long, sort of ancient family history there.”

“He wanted to have Alice baptized, and her mother was very happy about it,” said Alice Johnson’s father, who explained that his wife (now ex) could be easily impressed—especially with a fancy name—and soon began vouching for her young friend who, she was convinced, was indeed a Rockefeller. He confirmed that Rockefeller had previously been a regular at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, adding that he liked to point out that “the Rockefeller family had a home around the corner, where Nelson Rockefeller died. He died, as they say, in the saddle, with his secretary. He died happy.” Clark Rockefeller knew all sorts of such Rockefeller family minutiae.

He was brilliant, John Wells added, casting himself as properly eccentric, and he told Wells exactly what he’d told the fourteen-year-old Alice Johnson: that he was “paranoid about security.” “He would walk around with a radio device that he claimed was connected to a security office,” Wells said. “He would carry it around and periodically check in—report where he was, who he was with, what direction he was going. He claimed it was some sort of extra-high-level security service, and he had to report in at all times.”

Casting himself as obsessed with security was a clever means by which Rockefeller could deflect questions about his background. According to Wells, “In Clark World, you were always trying to find out how rich he was, because once he had established how maniacally private he was, he could take the position that he could decline questions that impinged on his privacy.”

The morning after meeting John Wells I attended St. Thomas Church. The service was certainly impressive, with its tuxedoed ushers, its rectors marching paradelike through the pews with enormous candles, its regally attired worshippers. Like Rockefeller, I was there really for the reception held immediately after the service, in which the congregants retired to the church basement. Just as John Wells had described, it was good theater. Women served coffee from silver urns. Men poured wine from bottles with impressive labels. There were hors d’oeuvres and uninhibited conversation—a sense of welcome, fellowship, civility, and trust among those secure in the fact that no evil would dare darken one of God’s grandest earthly homes.

Another early sighting of “Clark Rockefeller” came in February 1992.

By then, he had obviously deduced the credentials that are catnip to the cognoscenti. Paramount among them: a purebred dog; in Rockefeller’s case, the Gordon setter named Yates. Nothing sparks a conversation between strangers faster than a walked dog, and soon Rockefeller was meeting any number of influential people, including, he insisted, Henry Kissinger.

One day, while walking Yates in the Tudor City neighborhood of New York, he met Sharlene Spingler, a young woman who had just downsized that day from a spacious 1905 brownstone to a one-bedroom apartment, having lost her home to her brothers in an estate battle. Sharlene was taking her black shar-pei and red-and-white English setter for a walk. Suddenly, “a short young blond man, looking to be somewhere in his early thirties,” came bounding across the street to greet Sharlene, a stranger to him, and her two dogs.

“I love your dog, that English setter!” said the stranger. “I’ll do anything for you! I’ll walk your dog.”

“I thought that was a little forward,” Sharlene said, but at the same time there was something appealing about it.

We were sitting at a restaurant in Grand Central Station in New York when Sharlene, an extremely intelligent blonde with a rapier wit whose family had arrived in Manhattan in 1643, told me about the encounter. “It was my first day there,” she said of her new apartment. “He just saw me in the street with the dogs. But dog people are like that. They’ll just talk to each other.”

That was, of course, the beauty of it for a striver like Clark. Connected by their dogs, they quickly became, well, if not friends, at least acquaintances. Then came what Sharlene called the infinite tales that the enigmatic young man began telling her. She related them to me one after the other, all improbable upon reflection, but seemingly plausible—for a Rockefeller—at the time: He said he was friends with Henry Kissinger. He said he would take a Learjet with his dog to London, where “the food is so terrible I just bring cereal.” He said he regularly invited friends to run their dogs with him at the storied 3,400-acre Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown. He said his profession was “advising foreign governments on how much money to print.” Once, the socially well-connected Sharlene introduced him to some friends who suggested it would be nice to have a Rockefeller on the board of a satellite company they were launching and asked him what he would like in return. Rockefeller rose from his chair and said, “Gentlemen, there is nothing you can do for me, as I don’t wish to jeopardize my tax status. I am tax exempt by an act of Congress, and Texas is my official residence.” (He also told Sharlene about the various presidential inaugurations he had attended.) If that résumé wasn’t enough, his clothing completed the portrait. “He was always in his bright green corduroy pants with ducks or something flying over them,” said Spingler. “With a pink shirt. And a blue blazer. And a green bow tie. Looking like a typical Yalie.” Soon he was helping her to configure her computer—he was a computer wizard, no doubt about that—and taking the computer to work on in what he said was his office, at the prestigious No. 5 Tudor City Place.

If he was indeed a human sponge, absorbing ideas, dreams, identities, and personas from everyone with whom he came in contact, what Rockefeller gleaned from Sharlene Spingler was something huge for what he would become in New York City. Through her, he learned how to gain entry to the portals of some of the world’s most exclusive private clubs.

“He knew how to work the churches, so the obvious next step would be the private clubs,” said Sharlene. “Back in 1993, you could join the India House, a private gentleman’s club on Wall Street, for $850 to $1,200, for which you would get reciprocal memberships at”—and here she listed some of the premier private clubs in the city, among them the Lotos, one of America’s oldest and most esteemed literary clubs and a preferred destination for Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Roosevelts, and Rockefellers since 1870; and the Metropolitan Club, founded by the leaders of New York City in 1891.

These were just the beginning of the bonanza of reciprocal private clubs that the India House membership would include. “He went through the back door,” Sharlene patiently explained to me, just as she had explained to Clark.

Thus, with just a down payment of $850 to $1,200, Rockefeller was not only able to gain membership in the private clubs of the richest and most powerful citizens of East Coast society, but also to take an important first step in making their members think he was one of them.

Shortly after his 1992 reemergence, Clark Rockefeller moved into a one-bedroom apartment at 400 East Fifty-seventh Street, an imposing prewar white-brick art deco building. One day in 2008, I rode the elevator to the seventh floor, where I was greeted by a statuesque and effervescent brunette named Martha Henry, who runs Martha Henry Inc. Fine Art. She lived in 7L, the apartment adjacent to Rockefeller’s. She showed me the door to his apartment, 7M, catty-corner to hers.