The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (33 page)

As for employment, the woman said he didn’t seem to have any. He didn’t need to work, she assumed, because he undoubtedly had a sizable trust fund. His main role in life was caring for his daughter, and the neighbors had a clear recollection of Snooks. “We sit on our stoops here—we’re friendly. The dogs are out,” she said, trying to help me understand the Hill. “There’s one fellow, Phil Short, he’s everywhere, all over the Hill, and he looks like the ballet dancer Alexander Godunov. One day we’re sitting there,” she said, meaning on Short’s doorstep, “and Clark comes up with Snooks, and Snooks sits right on Phil’s lap and starts messing up his hair. We said, ‘Phil, you have a new friend!’ And Phil said, ‘First time I’ve ever met her.’ Oh, yes, she was very precocious.

“She always said to me, ‘I want to come in and see your house!’ When she said that to the lady at number 58, she told her, ‘Well, Snooks, this isn’t a good time. But maybe you can come for a play date.’ Snooks said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t do play dates. Play dates are for children, and I’m not a child.’ She was five or six at the time. He was so proud of her, and she was so smart.”

I interrupted her to ask if she had been to Rockefeller’s house. Yes, she said, he had invited her over shortly after they met. “He was really never settled,” the lady continued. There were still boxes around a year after Rockefeller moved in, probably, everyone surmised, because he was so busy taking care of Snooks. “He’d come out in the morning and take her to school. And then he’d be running back in, because she forgot a sock or something. He was always the one who would take her to the school bus—take her everywhere.”

She paused. “You could tell he spent lots of time with her, because she really was very bright. The first time she met one of the neighbors, she said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he said, ‘Well, my name’s Elwood Headley.’ And Snooks said, ‘Hmm, let’s see. E-L-W-O-O-D H-E-A-D-L-E-Y.’ She
spelled
his name! And she was five! There was a picture of her on the front page of the
Beacon Hill Times
.”

She was referring to a photograph of Snooks standing beside a diagram she had drawn in chalk on the sidewalk: the
entire
periodic table of the elements on the corner of Charles and Beacon streets. “I said to Clark, ‘Does she know what it means?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I never learned the periodic table in
high school
, and here she is five or six at this point.”

Having seemingly left behind all the aggressiveness and unpleasantness he displayed in Cornish, Clark, accompanied by Snooks, soon became a familiar sight on Beacon Hill, the two playing and dining together. They spent a lot of time in the Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest and most exclusive libraries in America. “Predating all American public libraries, the Boston Athenaeum was founded in 1807 by a group of gentlemen who wished to provide themselves with a reading room, a library, a museum and a laboratory,” reads the visitors’ pamphlet. “Past members of the Athenaeum include John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amy Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Daniel Webster, and Lydia Maria Child.”

On Sunday mornings, Clark would read to a group of children in the Athenaeum’s children’s library. “He was an excellent reader, who could perform in a number of accents,” said someone who had witnessed him reading at the Athenaeum. “I heard him recite Robert Burns—long pieces from memory—in a flawless Scottish brogue.” By the time of their arrival in Boston, Rockefeller later said, Snooks was a proficient reader; she could read aloud from the scientific journal
Nature
when she was three. He said he once read Tennyson’s poem “The Daisy” to her twenty-five times in a single evening. She not only understood the poem, she loved it. The seemingly carefree, towheaded child, whose favorite book and movie was
The Little Princess
, was so good-natured that she seemed to hop or skip every fifth step. And the adoring father was always beside her. “I love you too much, Daddy,” Snooks would often say.

“He was so devoted to that little girl,” said John Winthrop Sears, the Harvard Law graduate, former Suffolk County sheriff, and highly respected Beacon Hill Brahmin who lived in a historic carriage house on Acorn Street, just a short distance from Rockefeller’s house. Sears had helped Clark get a membership in the Athenaeum library. I visited him in his house at the end of a charming cobblestone street. The whitehaired seventy-eight-year-old gentleman, who stood six feet four, led me into a living room that was spilling over with books. They lined the walls and littered the floor, and huge mesas of magazines and newspapers—including what he identified as a collection of forty years of the
New York Times
alone—rose in columns along the walls of every room.

“You’re admiring my pile of junk,” he said. The books had stacked up over the course of his thirty-five years living in the carriage house, he said. “Some of them are brand-new
Economist
s like the ones you’re sitting on at the moment, but most of them are relics of a very active life in local politics. Things I wanted to read. The high pile of stuff beside you is the history of my father,” Sears said. “I was the family historian. Where I went wrong was not studying the history of the
Rockefeller
family until it was clear that there was something amiss.”

He handed me a two-page résumé of his extraordinary life. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran of several venerable Wall Street firms, a member of private clubs, a philanthropist involved in numerous charities, and a politician of considerable renown. Yet he admitted that he had been completely captivated by the charming new arrival with the adorable little daughter.

“I got a call from a friend, who I would say is highly respected,” Sears began after making cocktails for us. The friend was a physician from the Los Angeles area. “He said, ‘You have a brand-new neighbor. And I knew him from out west in California. Would you be nice to him?’ He described some conversations he’d had with Clark about his curiosity and his scientific bent.” Sears took a sip of rum and Coke. “This happens to me every now and again,” he continued. “So it wasn’t difficult for me to contact my neighbor, Clark, and he came into this house maybe a half dozen times with the little girl.”

As a lifelong Boston resident, Sears knew the area’s accents intimately. So I asked him to describe Clark Rockefeller’s. “His accent was dead-on for a privileged young person on the East Coast of America,” he said. “He was very plausible. Clark had the same tones I heard in a good New England prep school. Or the nice clubs I’m allowed to belong to here. Clark was suited perfectly to the neighborhood.” He mentioned Senator John Kerry, adding that he certainly wasn’t the only famous person living on Beacon Hill. “There’s Nan Ellis, sister of the old President Bush, and the novelist Robin Cook. If we can’t impress you with a senator and the sister of a president, what can we do?”

Early after their arrival in Boston, Rockefeller and his wife, Sandra, invited Sears to an event for McKinsey & Company. “And I sat with them at what turned out to be a grand table, because the chairman of McKinsey was at the table,” right alongside Clark and Sandra, who was of course, as a partner in the Boston office, seated next to the head of the powerful global consulting corporation. “And Sandy and Clark were still a couple at that time, and it looked like a perfectly ordinary family situation.”

He recalled Clark and Sandra making something of a debut in Boston society on November 30, 2006, when they attended a black-tie benefit for the Mount, the grand and storied fifty-acre Lenox, Massachusetts, estate turned museum of the late novelist Edith Wharton, author of such classics as
The Age of Innocence
, for which she became in 1921 the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. Her tormented marriage and eventual divorce from the well-bred but conscienceless cad Teddy Wharton shared similarities with Sandra and Clark’s relationship. “Both men spent a lot of their wives’ money,” said someone familiar with both women. “Neither were what they seemed to be.” The benefit, held at the Back Bay mansion of a Boston philanthropist, was to raise funds to save the debt-ridden Mount from possible foreclosure. As the young, bright McKinsey partner, Sandra had accepted the board’s invitation to ply her business acumen as a trustee to help save the Mount. According to
Boston
magazine, as she and her husband entered the grand home where the wealthy crowd had gathered for the event—Sandra young, slim, and beautiful in her evening dress, Clark perfectly dapper in his dinner jacket—Boston society photographer Bill Brett raised his camera, just as he had done for the other glamorous couples entering the event. “You will
not
take my picture,” Rockefeller was quoted in
Boston
magazine as huffing as he led his wife swiftly away.

He was not at all like the other Rockefellers who had inhabited and enriched Boston with their acts of kindness, charity, and philanthropy. First of all, Clark Rockefeller didn’t really know anybody. With the help of John Sears, that would soon change.

“Since Clark was brand-new to Boston,” Sears said, he tried to give him a “bit of navigation legs,” including entry into the Athenaeum. “Yes, I was the prime mover; I opened the door for them there. I got them reader’s tickets. I paid for them too. I remember the first flush of excitement at doing something for a Rockefeller. And then, if they use the library reasonably and responsibly, the library will invite them to be readers without a host.”

Which the highly educated and erudite staff of the Athenaeum would have done, Rockefeller or not, Sears insisted. “That is not a place where a Rockefeller takes the place by storm. They are pretty accustomed to grand folks.” He went on to name several Rockefellers he had known who had lived in Boston and become his friends. “Nelson Rockefeller had a function for me when I was running for mayor of Boston in’67. These are not novelties. We weren’t exactly bowled over, but it was sort of fun having Clark.”

As the conversation stretched on, I could see that Rockefeller had moved yet another step up the social ladder, entrancing the longtime Boston business leader and politician (and former sheriff!), his highly educated Beacon Hill neighbors, and the extremely astute staff at one of America’s most prestigious libraries. Sears said that a pleasant two-year friendship ensued, as the proper Bostonian would bump into Clark and Snooks on the street and later entertain them in his book-filled house.

Sears smiled slyly and said, “He gave me a book on the Rockefeller family.”

“I’d love to see it,” I said.

“And so you shall.”

He rose to fetch the volume,
David Rockefeller: Memoirs
. The cover had a black-and-white photograph of the famous scion in profile, which actually looked a little like Clark. I read the front flap copy: “The youngest child of John D. Rockefeller, Junior, one of the richest men in the United States, and the great patron of modern art Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. He graduated from Harvard College in the depths of the Depression and studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D.”

John Sears told me to turn to the title page. There was Clark Rockefeller’s flamboyant handwriting, familiar to me by then, in an inscription dated 12/26/06:

Although I have not seen him since the late eighties or the early nineties, DR did send me (perhaps by mistake) two copies of his
Memoirs.
Signed. One of these shall now belong to you and I hope you enjoy it. I feel so privileged to have met you this year—Thank you for all your kindness. Your neighbor, Clark Rockefeller

The book was also signed by David Rockefeller. I asked Sears if he thought the author’s signature was authentic, or if he thought Clark had forged it. “I have no idea,” he replied. “I knew Nelson Rockefeller, but I never knew David.”

Sears said he had gone to Rockefeller’s house, around the corner, a couple of times. “A Mondrian painting was laid out on the floor,” he said. “He told me how much he paid for it, at least a million dollars.”

With that we took our drinks and walked up spindly stairs to the terrace on the top floor of his carriage house. From there I could see the spires of Boston. Down below was another, more recent landmark, which Sears pointed out. On the corner of Beacon and Brimmer streets was a bar called Cheers, which inspired the hit 1980s television series.

“Snooks got into Southfield,” said Sears, referring to the Southfield School for Girls, which shares a campus with Sears’s own alma mater, Dexter, where John F. Kennedy was also educated. “It’s a very special school. They taught me Latin at eleven. A different teacher drives the school bus every day. I think that very well-run school was as badly fooled as any of us. But, then, I don’t think it mattered to them that that little girl’s dad was called Rockefeller.”

Every morning Clark would take Snooks to the bus stop on the corner of Beacon and Brimmer, and every afternoon he would be waiting there to pick her up. “All of the people who had children in Dexter or Southfield got to know Clark and Snooks,” said Sears. “He got to know all of the young parents who lived in the neighborhood.”

If I wanted to know more about Clark’s time on Beacon Hill, Sears suggested, I should show up at the bus stop around 7:30 the next morning.

There were Porsches and backpacks all around as the resident parents engaged in the early-morning ritual of getting their kids off to school, the boys in their Dexter caps, the girls in their crisp Southfield uniforms. By 7:30 a large and chatty group was gathered in front of Cheers, waiting for the arrival of the buses. Once the children were safely aboard, the parents stood there waving as they shouted, “Bye, Daddy! Bye, Mommy!” The parents did not move from the corner until the buses were out of sight.

The moment I uttered the name Clark Rockefeller, they shot daggers at me and began to disperse rapidly. Most were unwilling to talk. However, one or two eventually acquiesced. Some merely wanted to talk about the man who had brought notoriety down on them; others felt compelled to do so, so that the truth about the real Clark Rockefeller would be told.