The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (27 page)

In the library of the Lotos Club, Rockefeller might enjoy a midafternoon Manhattan cocktail. On one of these cocktail hours, Quigley found his friend staring for an interminable time at the bookshelves that surrounded them. There were literally hundreds of books, but it seemed that one in particular had perturbed him. Finally, Rockefeller rose and plucked a volume from the shelf, turned it around, and put it back so that you couldn’t see the title on the spine.

“I just couldn’t look at
that
any longer,” Clark said.

Quigley got up to look at the title:
Titan
, the biography of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow.

From the library, they would retire to the club’s dining room, where Clark would usually order the same things, which Quigley sensed were touchstones of his youth. “Oh, let’s have the oysters Rockefeller!” he would exclaim as the waiters hovered and the eyes of the members were directed his way.

It quickly became a tradition: oysters Rockefeller with a Rockefeller. “Quigley, do you know why they call them oysters Rockefeller?” Clark asked on one occasion, after the dish of oysters baked in spinach arrived at their table. “Because they’re
green
.”

Clark also relished dining at the Seventh Regiment Mess, the restaurant in the Park Avenue Armory, which was something of a club for its well-heeled regulars. “We’ve been members for years,” he told Quigley in the historic room where “Uncle David”—the only surviving grandchild of John D. Rockefeller—often ate. “Clark always used the word ‘grand,’” Quigley remembered. “Everything we ate, or everything we talked about, he would say, ‘Oh, isn’t this
grand
!’ I love that word. I just thought it was a real signature of Clark.”

At the end of many a meal of the beef ribs and succotash that were the Seventh Regiment Mess’s specialty, Rockefeller would fold his napkin and exclaim, “Isn’t this just grand!” If it was an extra-grand evening, Quigley recalled, he would add, “‘It’s a peach melba night!’ And then he would order peach melba, and there we were, two grown men, sitting there eating parfaits.”

As for buying a piece of art by his friend, that enterprise had a less than grand end. Despite his promises, Rockefeller hesitated to purchase a Quigley painting—they were then selling for approximately $10,000. Still, he wanted to ensure that others did by enlisting one of the world’s great art dealers, Larry Gagosian, to represent the artist. “Some people are after that guy, and he never calls back. With me, he calls too much,” Rockefeller told Quigley.

He called the Gagosian Gallery and said he wanted to buy a Quigley. One of Gagosian’s associates immediately contacted the artist, and just like that, Quigley was asked to send over transparencies of his work. “Tomorrow, Sandy and I will go to Gagosian in New York and look at your portfolio,” Rockefeller wrote in an e-mail to Quigley on October 11, 1998. “We will take along a very important person from the Whitney Museum, and we will place an order for twelve paintings. . . . This operation should impress Gagosian quite a bit.”

Rockefeller repeatedly assured Quigley that price was no object when it came to purchasing art. He wrote as much in a letter of recommendation for the artist:

To Whom It May Concern:

Mr. Quigley asked me to provide references of his talent, the financial value of his works and his financial potential as an artist. I must consider any collector asking such a reference totally unfit to own art of any kind. In short, I consider Mr. Quigley one of the greatest talents of our time, and feel convinced that history will judge him so. I own one of the largest private collections of modern art and I strongly believe that Mr. Quigley’s works will stand on equal footing with works by many of the greatest artists in my collection. I do not know about Mr. Quigley’s prices or whether they represent value. For every work that I own, I’ve always paid with a blank check and asked my banker never to bother to tell me the amount. I consider this practice the only way to build trust between living artists and real collectors. The question of whether I consider Mr. Quigley’s works a so-called good investment, I can only reply that I truly loathe anyone who buys art with no motives other than profit and greed. I sincerely hope that so-called art investors will lose every last cent on their purchases and beyond. Unfortunately, they would not with a Quigley.

He signed the letter with only his last name, in imposing swirls and downstrokes. Rockefeller later claimed that he had purchased a small work of Quigley’s, which, he said, made him the only living artist in his collection.

Quigley, you will not believe it. I just bought one of your paintings. I walked along Eighth Avenue in search of packing tape when I looked in the window of a second-hand store that sometimes has art. A friend of mine found a real Murillo [Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, the Spanish Baroque-era painter, 1617–1682] there a few years ago worth probably more than a million dollars. The store, owned by an antique dealer who specializes in early American furniture, buys entire estates, usually just to get antique furniture cheaply. They never have any clue about their inventory and they often sell things without knowing what they really have. An abstract in the corner of their storefront window caught my eye and you could not imagine the surprise when I saw the initials W.Q. 1991 in the lower right-hand corner. On the back, in typical Quigley style, it said, “W.Q. 1991. Title: Abrupt Break.”. . . I bought it. . . . I love the little 12 x 16 piece. You have superb talent. Did you get my message about Gagosian? Please let me know your thoughts. I will meet with him next week and pressure him.

But neither Rockefeller nor the Whitney Museum bought a Quigley painting from Gagosian, or directly from Quigley.

Beneath his sunny façade, everything wasn’t going swimmingly for Clark Rockefeller, especially at home.

To his friends, he’d say things like, “Sandy’s coming in this weekend. We’re going to have a delightful time. We may go up to Nantucket or we may go up to the Vineyard.”

In actuality, Sandra was working extremely long hours and drifting further and further from her husband. His behavior was often irrational, especially when it came to going to Connecticut. While he delighted in telling friends of his sojourns on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, he drew the line when it came to Connecticut, where he had spent a past life as Christopher C. Crowe, and where he had eluded the state authorities while they were trying to question him in relation to the disappearance of John and Linda Sohus. “He wouldn’t come to Connecticut,” said his friend John Wells. “He claimed it was because his parents had their accident there. We had an apartment there with a lot of storage space. At one point Sandy drove up because Clark had a bunch of old issues of the
New Yorker
magazine that he wanted to store. Rockefeller Center publications were mixed into the stack.”

“He had this crazy Connecticut neurosis,” added another friend. He was so adamant about this that he once “threw a fit” when he realized that the car he was in was about to cross the state line. “Before we crossed the border into Connecticut, Clark made everybody stop and use the bathroom, because he wouldn’t let us stop at all after that,” said the friend. Once they crossed the Connecticut line, the friend added, Rockefeller turned up his collar, put on a hat, and hunkered down low in his seat. “The dog was bouncing all over the car and barking at everybody, and Clark was just—I mean, he really was acting like someone who didn’t want to be seen. It was just over the top.”

By the end of 1999, Sandra was about to be made a partner of McKinsey & Company, one of the youngest partners in the firm’s history. She was now making major money, which was still controlled by her husband, who deposited her checks, paid the bills, and filed her taxes. The money wasn’t the only thing he was controlling. “He cut off my contact with my friends,” Sandra told the grand jury. “He cut off my contact with my family. He wouldn’t let me make long-distance calls. He would scream at my friends. . . . He’s, as I learned, capable of being an extremely scary and intimidating guy.”

She didn’t have to be asked to elaborate.

“He would scream at me and scream at me and scream at me until I couldn’t resist,” she continued. “He didn’t hit me in the face because he knew that that was like the one thing in my upbringing—I was taught that you had to stay in your marriage unless you’re hit in the face or he cheats. . . . Otherwise you have to work on your marriage, because that’s the commitment you’ve made. So he didn’t hit me in the face. I didn’t know he was cheating until later.”

“Let me ask you: did he hit you other places?” the prosecutor asked.

“At that time he used other techniques,” she said, including sleep deprivation and sexual coercion. “Basically, just kind of proof of ‘I’m master’ kind of behavior.”

“Why did you stay with him?”

“One, I was terrified,” Sandra answered. “I could tell that he wasn’t going to let me go. I didn’t know why I had been picked for this situation, but I could tell that he was really strong, and I couldn’t figure out how to get out. The other thing was that, you know, I had this upbringing, which is very much about duty and honor, and you’re supposed to work on your marriage. My parents had a horrible marriage and stayed together thirty-five years. I was taught life is hard—suck it up.”

She lived with her husband in New York from the autumn of 1994 until the end of 1998. Then, she testified, “Suddenly Clark, who had become quite unpleasant, but was otherwise generally functioning, suddenly he freaked out. I don’t know how to explain it, but he claimed that he had had a nervous breakdown. He was getting more angry and more scary.”

One incident, whether coincidental or not, seemed to have set off the nervous breakdown. He got into a fight with “some random bystander in Central Park,” Sandra said, presumably while walking his dog. The fight was a loud one, and someone called the police. “The police had followed him in a car. I saw him walking back toward our apartment, and then I saw a police cruiser pull up, and he had a discussion with the officer.”

He rushed into the apartment and told Sandra that he had had enough of New York. He was “overwhelmed” by the city, he told her. “His work was very stressful. That was right around the time of the Asian financial crisis [which began in July 1997, in Thailand, with the collapse of the baht, and then spread across Asia, raising fears of a worldwide economic meltdown]. And he said that some of his clients had run into severe problems.”

The clients had the gall to be upset with him for the crisis, he said, as if he could somehow have protected them from the tsunami of financial problems a world away in Asia.

Sandra believed him, despite never having met a single “colleague, supervisor, underling,” or anyone else who worked with him in his supposedly high-level financial advisory business. She believed him enough, in fact, to consent to his demand to move from New York to Nantucket, knowing that she would have to commute to her office in New York and live in a hotel during the workweek. “It seemed like it was going to make him happy, and that was good,” she said.

At the end of 1998, Rockefeller sent out a mass e-mail to his growing circle of acquaintances, presumably from his office at Asterisk LLP:

First, I must tell you why you’ve not heard from me. While I’m in a meeting at the UN the Friday before Labor Day, I stared at some papers, a delegate handed it to me . . . then I remember nothing until I woke up at a New York hospital five hours later. The hospital discharged me shortly afterwards and the doctors told me that I suffered from severe exhaustion. In short, a quote “burnout.” The obvious cause: too many 19-hour days. During June, July and August, I generated 1,085 billable hours, about 400 hours more than persons in comparable working situations. I’ve had other stressful situations last summer, including the unexpected retirement of my partner from Maine that almost ended up in a mid-air collision; and in all fairness, I must add Shelby [his other Gordon setter] to this list, too.

I love the little hound, but she adds quite a bit of work to my day, and her early-rising habits did not exactly help me get the extra sleep I so desperately needed. On the advice of my doctor, I have decided to change my lifestyle. My plan: I will take a sabbatical from my work and go to stay at my cousin’s villa in Cap Ferrat, France, a small village on a peninsula between Nice and Monaco. Shelby and Yates will accompany me. How long I stay will depend on how I like it. I will return in six months or, if I feel like it, stay longer. If I continue my sabbatical through the summer of ’99, I may either stay in France at a friend’s summerhouse in the Brittany/Normandy region, or even visit Shelby’s former home state, Montana.

Sandy also appreciates my mood. She can now stay in Toronto full time and no longer needs to commute on weekends just to see me. Sandy will take the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s as vacation and we will return to Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Dolomites in Italy. We went there last year, and did absolutely nothing for one month and loved it. Yates had a good time there, too.

I should also tell you that my firm will close its New York office in March. Rising rents and a new landlord who did not renew our privilege to bring dogs in the building have forced us to follow through on our plan to, quote, “go virtual,” sooner than we had intended. The main office of our firm will no longer meet at a physical location, but conduct our business electronically. We decided to invest almost five million in the creation of a private network in our Washington DC office.

He was not in Cap Ferrat or Cortina d’Ampezzo, but on Nantucket, usually alone, with his wife away at work at least four days a week. When the high season arrived and the rent quadrupled due to the tourists, the couple moved to Woodstock, Vermont, the summer home of Laurance Rockefeller. All this time Sandra was climbing higher and higher in McKinsey. Her layabout husband kept insisting that he was succeeding in business too, though Sandra couldn’t see it in terms of any dollars and cents he brought in. He only put pressure on her to earn more.