The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (30 page)

“Everything he did was to aggrandize his position,” she began. “It was to be bigger and better. He was not a very big guy if you looked at him. So everything he did was to puff himself up, just like the cock of the walk. Wearing his boat shoes in the middle of winter without socks, his yachting pants, his blue blazer, his white shirt. His chauffeur! He didn’t have a license, and every now and then he would be driving himself and I would remind him, ‘You don’t have a license, Clark.’”

He had total disdain for local laws, and when Bourne ever called him out for driving without a license, he would just “sneer.” She often questioned his identity, telling him that she had friends who knew the actual Rockefellers in Woodstock, Vermont, and those friends said the real Rockefellers had never heard of him.

“Why is that, Clark?” she would ask.

“Because I don’t use my real first name,” he replied, adding that he had changed his first name “for anonymity,” which of course Merilynn thought odd, because if he wanted anonymity he would have changed his last name. Someone less skeptical might have accepted this explanation, but Merilynn said she didn’t.

“A lot of people bought it, and when they would say to me, ‘I don’t understand. Why do you keep doubting him?’ I would say, ‘I don’t understand why you believe a word that comes out of his mouth. Don’t you recognize a phony when you see one? It is like the emperor in
The Emperor’s New Clothes
: Don’t you see he is standing naked in front of you?’ And they would go, ‘You don’t know that.’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t been to outer space to see that the earth is round, but I’m pretty sure it is, and no, I can’t do DNA research on him, but I know he is not who he purports to be. I know a phony when I see one. That is not a prep school accent, and it is not a high Boston accent. That is an Eastern European accent—I’d put money on it.’ I wish I’d bet.”

As he did with Sandra Boss, he told Merilynn Bourne about his new business venture, Jet Propulsion Laboratories. But when she asked for his company Web site, the site he directed her to had nothing but the name JET PROPULSION LABORATORIES and a box into which the user had to enter a code, which Rockefeller never divulged.

In addition to frequent visits from Rockefeller, Bourne said, she also had Cornish-area officials he had contacted show up in her office, offering grand gestures of his largesse. She related several scenes involving people in positions of power who were snowed by the supposed philanthropy of Clark Rockefeller.

“Clark has offered to buy the Highway Department a backhoe!” exclaimed the county road agent one day, meaning Rockefeller was going to give a piece of road equipment to the town that the town couldn’t afford to give itself. “Stop talking to Clark!” Merilynn Bourne would admonish. “You can only get yourself into hot water. It is never good for anyone. He is not giving us anything, because he doesn’t give
anybody
anything.”

A week later, Rockefeller was in her office in a snit, saying, “I understand from the road agent that you are not willing to accept my gift. I don’t understand.”

“Well, Clark, I have this assumption that if the town were to accept your gift, you would probably ask us in a short period of time to do something with your gift for you, for free. Would I be right in that assumption?”

“Well, yes, of course.”

“I said, ‘Well, then, it is not a gift, is it?’”

He was equally generous with the police chief, telling him, “I am willing to get you this or that for your police car,” after which the chief uwould also be in Merilynn’s office, saying, “You know, I was talking to Clark—”

And Merilynn Bourne would erupt: “Every time someone comes in here and says they were talking to Clark, it just makes my hackles come up! Why would you talk to the man? He is a liar. You can’t trust a thing he says. Stop talking to him!”

“Well, he wants to get me a piece of equipment for the car,” said the chief.

“The answer is no,” said Merilynn. “We are not entertaining the idea.”

“So, because we wouldn’t entertain the idea, he gave money to the town of Plainfield,” she explained. “Then anonymously he actually wrote a letter to the editor of the
Valley News
, signed it with the name of someone who didn’t exist, saying, ‘Gee, it’s too bad Cornish is so backward that they wouldn’t take advantage of the generosity of a man like Clark Rockefeller.’ I’m thinking, ‘If they only knew.’”

“‘I don’t understand you people,’” Merilynn remembered Rockefeller telling her. “He’d just look at you with this hooded-cobra look and sneer at you and say, ‘I’ve got important things to do.’”

I asked her how he could have so successfully duped almost everyone in such a sophisticated place as Cornish. “Two things: Cornish, the artist colony, has some history, some panache and sophistication,” she replied. “It has class. And [Clark thought], ‘It is filled with a bunch of little country bumpkins, and I can impress the heck out of them.’ Absolutely, that is all he tried to do. Who the hell who lives in Cornish comes to a town meeting in March with Top-Siders and no socks? His sweater was draped over his shoulders and tied around his neck. It was
The Preppy Handbook
. I grew up in Newport, Rhode Island. I’ve been there, done that, seen it. I have one friend who still puts his sweater over his shoulders, and I tell him all the time, ‘You know, you are like sixty-two years old. Don’t you think it’s time to put that sweater routine away?’

“So, yes, I think he duped the town, and it was a shame,” she continued. “I wish the town had been a little smarter. Not everybody can see through people like Clark. You heard what Sandra said on the witness stand: ‘I can be brilliant and amazing in one area and very stupid in another area.’ I think people like Clark look for people like Sandra, who have low self-esteem when it comes to personal relationships. I think that’s where he was able to take advantage of her. She’s actually a very quiet, reserved, conservative female. She may work in an area of high finance, but she’s a consultant. She is not the CEO running the company. And someone like Clark was able to spot the weak one in the herd and think, ‘This is where I’ll focus my attention—build up her self-confidence, make myself important to her.’ He’s sitting home all day long being the preppy while she goes to work.”

After her three-month maternity leave, Sandra had to return to work in New York, leaving her baby in the care of a nanny. Sandra would return home midweek and stay through the weekend to be with her daughter. Soon, however, the first nanny quit, and another was hired, and then babysitters replaced the nannies, working shorter and shorter hours, until Clark became convinced that he was the best person to care for Reigh.

“He did not want to hire any more nannies,” Sandra testified. “He said he thought he could do a better job.”

Clark and Reigh bonded over books. She was only a little over two when she began reading, and reading—which was the route Clark Rockefeller took to discover America—was what made him initially connect with his daughter. “He liked being able to engage with her intellectually,” Sandra Boss said.

For the next few years, Clark took charge of Reigh. Sandra was traveling all week much of the time, leaving her husband in full control of their daughter, their house, and her checkbook. She argued that living in Cornish had become intolerable for her, but Clark would not budge.

“The defendant wanted to live in the country and was not willing to entertain discussions of moving,” she testified. She said Rockefeller even preferred for her not to come home midweek. He seemed to want to keep his life in Cornish—and his daughter—to himself.

“Reigh is very smart,” Sandra told the grand jury. “She learned the alphabet when she was very young, and she learned to read very young. When she became intellectually interesting, he got interested in wanting to basically control her—he would have used the word ‘guide’ her. He told me he had made the unilateral decision that he was going to be Reigh’s primary caretaker. Because I was working and he felt he wasn’t contributing enough, and he wanted to take care of her. I disagreed with him, but he said he wasn’t terribly interested in my opinion.”

Her husband “really dominated the situation” with their daughter, she said. As the child grew, he “was unable” to grasp her emotional needs. “And so he obsessed on her intellectual development, pressured her to learn very quickly. He became very routinized about what she would eat, what she would wear. . . . I didn’t mention before, he used to tell me how to dress. He would insist that I wear certain things. He started doing that with her.”

Merilynn Bourne had a clear memory of that. “He dressed her exactly the way he dressed himself. She wore the same little Izod or Lacoste shirts with the alligator and the same khaki pants and the same L.L. Bean lobster belt and the same Top-Siders, boat shoes without socks, and the little pageboy haircut. I said, ‘She’s simply an extension of himself. It’s self-love; it’s not parental love.’ He made her quote lines, scripture, and then pranced her out and made her perform.”

“She was going to be the ultimate proof, the ultimate vindication, of his talent,” the prosecutor David Deakin would later say of Rockefeller’s obsession with his daughter, whom he soon began calling Snooks, probably after the small daughter of the Savio family in Berlin, Connecticut, with whom he had lived shortly after arriving in America. “I think it’s clear that he found in Reigh the ability to accomplish something real. She was going to legitimize him. He was going to give her the opportunities that he didn’t have. She would become someone extraordinary. In raising Reigh Rockefeller, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, or Reigh Rockefeller, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, or Reigh Rockefeller, the president of Stanford University, he would be known as the father of Reigh Rockefeller. And that was a real accomplishment in his mind.”

The child would have a profound effect on Clark Rockefeller. As she grew in years and intelligence, he came to love her and be absolutely devoted to her. And with that love and devotion, the man who so successfully was able to flee all remnants of his past had at long last acquired an anchor, the one person he couldn’t cheat, con, or escape. “The one real thing in his life was his daughter, and his love for his daughter,” said Boston deputy police superintendent Thomas Lee. “Everything else has been a fraud.”

CHAPTER 15

The God of War

D
own the road from Doveridge was the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, the 365-acre former home of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who came to the area in 1885 in search of “Lincoln-like men” to use as models for his soon-to-be-famous sculptures of the American president and other heroic figures. In 1905, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Saint-Gaudens’s arrival, the members of the Cornish art colony—which by then included rich New Yorkers who had followed the artist to the bucolic hamlet—performed a masque, a play based on classical drama.

In 2005, the staff of the historic site marked the centennial of that seminal Cornish event by restaging the masque, called
The Gods and the Golden Bowl
. As he had done in San Marino twenty years earlier, Clark Rockefeller found his way into the cast.

“As I recall, he played Mars, and his daughter played a nymph,” said Gregory Schwarz, the director of visitor services at the Saint-Gaudens Historic Site. A photograph shows Rockefeller in a golden suit of armor and matching golden headpiece, his jaw clenched, holding a spear. The god of war was an appropriate role for him, because by that time Rockefeller was fighting with many of the locals.

The unpleasantness had begun in the summer of 2001, when two Cornish women, Nancy Nash-Cummings and Dr. Sylvie Rudolph, decided to go for a swim. State senator Peter Burling said of them, “Nancy is a hugely accomplished and wonderful woman. To say she is completely well read, educated, and part of the arts community is to understate by a factor of twelve. Sylvie Rudolph is a profoundly trusted and beloved physician who works at the emergency room up here. She is trained as a lawyer as well.”

Burling suggested I call Nash-Cummings and get the facts from her, so I did. When I asked how she was, she exclaimed, “I’m dandy!” then launched into her Clark Rockefeller story.

“It was such an
unpleasant
encounter,” she began. “My friend Sylvie Rudolph and I do a lot of walking, and there was a property that adjoined Clark’s. We stopped for a swim and our lunch. There was a big pump going in Blow-Me-Down Brook, and it was very loud, and we didn’t think they had a permit to be pumping water. So we went on Clark’s land and turned off the pump. Within seconds, a caretaker came down and asked us what we’d done. We said we’d just turned off the pump, that it was loud and noisy, and we wondered if Clark had the right to be pumping water. That afternoon, Clark began trying to figure out who we were. The first fax he sent was saying that he was going to file charges!”

Technically, they may have indeed been trespassing. But the property lines get hazy in Cornish, and the two women assumed that everything could be explained and resolved in a friendly conversation, which is of course how things would typically happen in a small, close-knit town. Nancy showed me the fax, which Rockefeller had sent to an intermediary, a local man named Max Blumberg, telling him to notify the two women of its contents regarding the bizarre incident:

Dear Max,

They did it!

For me to stop Melissa [Rockefeller’s lawyer] from filing charges, I will need
a written apology
for

• trespassing

• tampering with my pump

and
a promise

not ever to go anywhere near the swimming hole again.

Must receive written apology and promise by tomorrow, 10 AM,
signed and dated by both persons,
and stuffed into my blue union Leader [a local newspaper] mailbox.

If not received by 10 AM,
with a copy mailed to Melissa Martin at [address witheld] Lebanon, NH 03766
, postmarked August 2, Melissa will