The Golden Dream Page 10

  As one Driving Club member says: “We love our club, and we like it the way it is. People criticize it, but we don’t really care. It’s part of our lives and it was part of our daddies’ lives. Some of my best friends are Jews and some of my best friends are blacks. But the club is an extension of our living rooms, you see, and our living rooms are private, like the club.”

  To which a nonmember replies: “There are two questions I’d like to ask this friendly person. First, what is so secret in his living room that some of his best friends can’t see it and, second, is he sure that some of his best friends are really his best friends?”

  The club’s president, Frank Carter, remains unfazed. “We’ve been criticized in the past and we’ll be criticized again,” he says. “We shrug it off. People can point fingers at us and call us all a bunch of snobs and bigots. They can print it in the New York Times. We’ll discuss it for a day or two, and then forget about it. We’ll just say, ‘This, too, shall pass.’”

  EAST

  10

  The Rockefellers on the Turnpike

  It might be stated as an axiom of American life that nothing ever turns out exactly as planned, and that the more monumental the undertaking, the more disastrous are the unexpected side effects. This has certainly been the case with the multimillion-dollar stretch of pavement called Interstate 95 or, more familiarly, the Connecticut Turnpike, which lines the New England seacoast, and which serves as the primary access to hundreds of thousands of New York commuter bedrooms.

  The turnpike was preceded, more or less, by the Merritt Parkway. When the Merritt Parkway—running from the state’s southwest border roughly eastward to just outside New Haven—was completed in the middle 1930s, everyone who saw it had to admit that it was something of a showplace of a road. It curved gracefully about and across the low hills, offering to the motorist sudden and surprising vistas. Its wide center malls were grassed and landscaped with a great variety of trees. For a few weeks each spring, the parkway blazed coolly with pink and white flowering dogwood and azalea. Each of its many overpass bridges was of a different design. The Merritt Parkway made entering Connecticut a particularly pleasing experience, and caused suburban Connecticut to appear to be a singularly pleasant place to live. State officials claimed the parkway was worth its cost in public relations value alone. It would, among other things, lure new money into the state.

  Of course, while it was being built, there were the usual allegations of corruption. Highway department officials, it was rumored, had been paid off by wealthy estate owners in Fairfield County in order to ensure that the highway did not venture too close to their houses. In return for favors, other landowners had allegedly been advised in advance of the highway’s intended path so that they could snap up land cheaply and then sell it, at high profits, to the state. And to be sure, when one studied the Merritt Parkway’s gerrymandering course on a map, it did seem as though some of its pretty curves and digressions—it managed to avoid the rich “estate area” of Greenwich, for example—were not entirely arbitrary or aesthetic. Still, it was a handsome piece of roadmaking when it was finished, there was no denying that.

  The years went by, however, and the Merritt Parkway did its job almost too well, tempting people in unexpected numbers from the city into the Connecticut suburbs, and it became inadequate. As automobiles got wider, the Merritt Parkway seemed to grow narrower. As automobiles traveled faster, the parkway, with its hills and turns, seemed to become slower. Friday and Sunday afternoons were the worst, with traffic jammed for miles as motorists struggled to get out of, or back to, New York on weekends. And so, in the early 1950s, as part of the Eisenhower administration’s Interstate Highway program, construction on the new Connecticut Turnpike was begun.

  The Connecticut Turnpike is a no-nonsense, no-frills affair—no dogwood trees, no planted center malls, nothing but concrete lanes and iron guardrails and blazing mercury lights and relentless toll booths spaced with gonglike regularity at intervals of roughly fourteen miles. The turnpike was designed to be flat and straight and fast, to whisk motorists from one end of the state to the other in less than two hours’ time, including a stop for a Howard Johnson’s hot dog. The turnpike played no favorites—enraging property owners whose homes and investments crumbled in its wake—as the old New Haven Railroad, which the turnpike roughly parallels, had not done. It plowed impartially through reproductions of English manor houses and through the steaming bowels of Bridgeport, taking with it tenements and tennis courts, destroying a mile of shoreline here and a three-hundred-year-old elm tree there with equal indifference. Today, the turnpike is over twenty years old, and it is still a tough, grueling road. The Merritt Parkway had banned trucks, which, as the suburbs burgeoned, demanding more goods and services, had also become an anachronistic notion. The turnpike welcomed trucks and truckers, not to mention buses, and the steady roar of the traffic it conveys can be heard, night and day, for miles away. Its stream of lights guides airplanes into La Guardia Airport from Boston. It’s an ugly, utilitarian thing but, as they say, it gets you there and it takes you back.

  To be sure, a number of city planners and environmentalists have questioned not only the aesthetics but also the economics of the whole thing. If the millions of dollars—at over a million dollars a mile—that were spent on the Connecticut Turnpike had been spent, for a fraction of the cost per mile, on refurbishing the rickety old New Haven Railroad line and its wobbling tracks, would not New Yorkers and suburbanites alike have been given a cleaner, safer, cheaper, and faster way of getting into and out of the city? But the voices of these visionaries have not been heard. Today, the dirtiest, most expensive, riskiest, but unquestionably the quickest way to go to and from the northeast suburbs of New York City is on the turnpike.

  What the Connecticut Turnpike connects New York City to is a series of Fairfield County towns with pretty Old English and Old Testament names such as Greenwich, Stamford, Weston, Westport, New Canaan, and Darien. These Connecticut towns are generally considered to comprise New York’s most desirable suburbs. Though there are pockets of suburban wealth in both New Jersey and on the northwestern shores of Long Island, neither “Jersey” nor “the Island” have ever managed to match the mystique of Connecticut’s superiority and style; they have long been regarded as suburbs for the middle class, and “middle class,” in New York terms, is sometimes another way of saying “Jewish.”

  For years, the queen of these Connecticut towns was unquestionably Greenwich, but the turnpike—as it has done to towns throughout the length of its route—has changed Greenwich considerably. Where it used to be a wealthy, countrified bedroom town—with winding streets and private lanes, no street lights and no sidewalks and a single shopping street—it is now a mini-city with hotels, motels, expensive restaurants, glass office buildings, apartment houses, and condominiums. But though many old Greenwich residents deplore the changes, there is at least one family who have lived there for several generations, who have become so cozily a part of Greenwich that they almost symbolize the town, and who have never seen any reason to live elsewhere: the Rockefellers. Turnpike or no, they stay.

  There are two kinds of suburban Rockefellers, and there is a difference. There are the Tarrytown Rockefellers, whose vast estate-compound at Pocantico Hills is the largest privately owned property in New York’s Westchester County. They are the Rockefeller Brothers—John D. III, David, Nelson, Laurance, and the late Winthrop—whom everybody knows about. Then there are the Greenwich Rockefellers, scarcely fifteen miles away from the others, in Connecticut, whom nobody has heard much of, which state of affairs suits the Greenwich Rockefellers perfectly. The Greenwich Rockefellers are sometimes called “the poor Rockefellers,” though they are hardly that.

  “People, when they refer to us at all, tend to refer to us as ‘the other Rockefellers,’” says Godfrey S. Rockefeller, a tall, spare, scholarly-looking man who has the pronounced “Rockefeller nose.” “But we’ve never been the ones for publicity the
way the other branch of the family have. We’re very private people. Of course, we used to be known as the Eastern Rockefellers, since my grandfather came east from Cleveland in 1867, long before John D. Rockefeller came.”

  Mr. Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller’s grandfather was William Rockefeller, the older brother of the first John D. Rockefeller, whom everyone thinks of when thinking of Rockefellers. The two brothers could not have been more unlike. John D. Rockefeller was skinny, parsimonious, pious, and abstemious. For two generations in the John D. branch of the family, liquor was never served or consumed in any household. They had few friends, and life revolved around the family and the Baptist Church. Years later, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., described in his autobiography the lonely austerity of growing up in Cleveland:

  Our social life, looking at it from today’s standards, was cramped. It centered on the church. We didn’t have in Cleveland a social life that other children had. We didn’t go to school and when children visited at Forest Hill they were apt to be the friends of Father and Mother. Everything centered around the home and the church and there was nothing else. Our prime interest in the Sunday school centered around the orchestra because we all played instruments, myself and my sisters. It was a sort of social group by itself. Otherwise we had no childhood friends, no school friends.

  William Rockefeller, by contrast, was a big, jolly man who loved good drink and good times and was not the least bit churchly. He once commented that the best thing about Sunday was the sound of church bells ringing across a golf course. When he arrived in New York to represent his younger brother’s growing oil interests, he was immediately taken in by—and in a sense became the leader of—the so-called Standard Oil Gang, which included Henry H. Rogers, and James Stillman of the National City Bank; Stillman became William Rockefeller’s closest friend. In addition to his Standard Oil activities, William, along with Rogers and Adolph Lewisohn, put together the United Metals Selling Company in 1898. The company controlled, among other things, Anaconda Copper, and within a short time 55 percent of all the copper sold in the United States was being sold by the United Metals Selling Company. With his easygoing ways and great charm—qualities that permanently eluded his younger brother—William Rockefeller moved rapidly into New York society, and acquired a large summer place on the Hudson in fashionable Tarrytown. There, a few years later, despite the differences in their personalities, his brother John joined him, establishing for himself what would become the famous John D. Rockefeller family compound at Pocantico Hills.

  In 1864, William had married Almira Geraldine Goodsell, and they had four children—William G., Emma, Percy, and Ethel, who later changed her name to Geraldine after her mother’s middle name. All four embarked upon a social life that made their cousins’ lives seem decidedly dour and gloomy. As one of William G.’s grandsons, another William Rockefeller, asserts, “There was never so much Baptism in our branch.” And as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., wrote of his cousins: “We children didn’t have what those children had and we used to notice the difference. They had a gay kind of social life, with many parties which we used to wish we could have.” John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—or “Senior,” as he would always be called—thoroughly disapproved of all this gaiety on the part of his neices and nephews. There were terrible rows on the subject of gaiety as opposed to piety and, already, a deep rift between the two branches of the family had begun to form. Finally, “to get away from his overpowering uncle,” as William G.’s grandson puts it, William G. pulled up stakes in Tarrytown and moved across the state line to Greenwich, Tarrytown’s rival as a summer resort. He was followed by his brother Percy, and the family rift was complete. It would remain for a hundred years.

  William Rockefeller’s children may have inherited their father’s ebullience and sense of fun, but they also inherited some peculiarities that have tended to show up in both “lines” of the Rockefeller family. (For example, William Sr.’s and John D. Sr.’s father—still another William—was once indicted on a charge of having impaired the morals of the family’s servant girl; he had to move, one jump ahead of the sheriff, with his family from Moravia, New York, to Owego, in another jurisdiction, to avoid going to jail; here, in a small, untended graveyard by the side of a country road, repose a number of early, unheralded, and perhaps best-forgotten Rockefellers.)

  William Rockefeller’s son William G., founder of the Greenwich branch, for another example, became a hopeless alcoholic, to the horror of his teetotaling cousins. Daughter Gerladine (née Ethel) was a beautiful and popular debutante who had a passion for animals—canines, in particular. Soon her passion began to seem more like an obsession. During her lifetime she owned literally hundreds of dogs. She married Marcellus Huntley Dodge, a grandson of the founder of the Remington Arms Company, and became a matriarch whom even her older brothers and sister dared not cross. She ran the Dodge family office and her husband, “Marcie,” with an iron hand, and acquired more and more dogs. She built a huge estate, called Giralda, on hundreds of acres in Madison, New Jersey, and filled it with dark and heavy furniture and hangings, and she built a large and extraordinarily ugly mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street in Manhattan, and filled that with more dark and heavy furniture and hangings. Though she never spent a night in the New York house, she bought adjacent pieces of property as soon as they became available until she owned most of the north side of the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and the entire Fifth Avenue frontage between her house and the Knickerbocker Club on the Sixty-second Street corner. These lots she kept vacant, and let them become overgrown with weeds and scrubby trees—to provide a “woods” for her dogs, though the dogs never visited the New York house either.

  For years, the Dodge mansion remained New York’s mystery house—shuttered and locked and dark and forbidding, illuminated only by a faint light from behind a barred caretaker’s window. The reason—often wondered about—for the erratic placement of exterior windows was that the entire top floor of the mansion had been designed for use as a kennel. Geraldine Dodge was odd, all right, but a personal tragedy made her even odder. Her only child, a son on whom she doted, was traveling through Europe with a fellow Princeton graduate when his car struck a tree and he was instantly killed. After the accident, Mrs. Dodge began to withdraw. She secluded herself in her New Jersey house, and she and Marcie Dodge began to occupy separate houses on the estate, just far enough apart so that they could “see each other’s lights” at night. Occasionally, they visited each other. Finally, her husband had her declared incompetent and made her his legal ward. After his death, she became the ward of her banks and lawyers. She lived on and on. For eleven more years, not a soul entered her Fifth Avenue house save her elderly caretaker, who had one dog for company. Mrs. Dodge died in 1975.

  When the contents of Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge’s houses went under the hammer in 1976, her possessions—including a collection of bronze animals and strange bronze hands—brought close to seven million dollars at Sotheby Parke Bernet. It was not, the auction house admitted, the intrinsic value of the collection that produced this imposing figure. Instead, the mystery and publicity surrounding the strange lady brought throngs of the curious to the auction held on her New Jersey estate, and made everyone want to go home with a souvenir of the riddle that had been Geraldine’s life. Huge sums were bid for pots and pans, for her ancient hats and fur coats, and for Louis Vuitton trunks that had not made an Atlantic crossing in more than sixty years. Later, the New Jersey property itself was sold to the Prudential Insurance Company for use as a conference center. The Fifth Avenue property was sold for ten million dollars, and the house was razed in the early spring of 1977; a luxury apartment tower will rise in its place.

  Geraldine’s brothers, William G. and Percy Rockefeller, married two sisters, daughters of their father’s best friend, James Stillman. William G. Rockefeller married Elsie Stillman, and Percy Rockefeller married Isabel Stillman. Both families remained in Greenwich, and each couple produc
ed five children. The William G. Rockefellers had four boys and one girl—William Avery, Godfrey, James, John, and Almira. The Percy Rockefellers countered with four girls and one boy—Isabel, Winifred, Faith, Gladys, and Avery. All ten children grew up in Greenwich as double first cousins on comfortable estates on Lake Avenue, Mead Lane, and Middle Patent Road. The cousins remained remarkably loyal to Greenwich. William Avery, Godfrey, James, John, and Avery all married and established residences of their own in the community—Godfrey and his brother James in houses that are back to back. Faith Rockefeller married Jean Model and settled in Greenwich, as did her sister Winifred after marrying Brooks Emeny. Almira defected when she married, and moved to Philadelphia. Isabel Rockefeller and William Avery Rockefeller tightened the family ties even further when they married Frederic and Florence Lincoln. Today, there are seven different Rockefeller families, all interrelated, all close, representing the third and fourth generations of the family who have favored the Connecticut suburb.

  When William Rockefeller, Sr., died in 1922 at the age of eighty-one, he left an estate of close to $200 million and a will that was unusual in several respects. For one thing, in contrast to his brother John D., who gave away nearly $600 million to charity, fun-loving William made no philanthropic bequests whatever. He did, however, devise a will designed to keep his fortune intact as long as legally possible—“through lives in being plus twenty-one years,” that is, through at least two generations, in a series of trusts, with distribution not to be made until the fourth generation. He left heirs, in other words, who had not yet been born. He made a single exception with his favorite son, Percy, who was left three quarters of his trust outright. Commenting on this arrangement a number of years later, in 1937, the New York Journal-American said: