The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (26 page)

Her husband wielded his powerful name in much the same way: the less he said about it, the more it stood out. And no one had reason to doubt the authenticity of the name, just as no one had reason to doubt the authenticity of the art that hung on the walls of the newlyweds’ apartment. The paintings gave credence to the name and vice versa.

So why couldn’t he just sell a piece of art—which would certainly have fetched millions—to contribute financially to the marriage? Sandra replied that he told her the paintings were held in a family trust. “He said, ‘It’s a great inheritance and there’s a limit on selling it. We can sell it in ten years.’”

Until then it was theirs to enjoy. “We celebrated our first art purchase, a large painting by Rothko, on a cold, wet New York City afternoon,” read an article titled “The Spitting Image” in the magazine
ARTnews
, which was attributed to Sandra Boss but believed to have been written by her husband. “Our dealer and a Rothko expert had just arrived at our apartment when Yates, our 85-pound Gordon Setter, returned from his walk, jumped on his usual spot on the sofa, and shook his head. A four-inch swath of saliva emerged from his mouth.” It landed on the Rothko, and Rockefeller nonchalantly wiped it off with a paper towel, which Sandra wrote was the proof of her husband’s insistence that fine art and purebred dogs could live together harmoniously, despite their “slight incompatibilities.”

Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller were similarly different yet compatible, at least in the beginning. “They were both very stiff, very formal; she was very distant in some ways, equally awkward,” said a friend who had gone to dinner with them on several occasions, which began with cocktails at one of Rockefeller’s clubs, usually the Lotos, the tony literary club housed in a Vanderbilt mansion, where the staff always greeted Clark with a chorus of “Good evening, Mr. Rockefeller.”

Once, they went to a club that had a splendid view of the skyline. Gazing out the window, the friend recalled, “I said, ‘Look, Clark, you can see Rockefeller Center from here!’ And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a key, and he said, ‘Yes, I have the key right here!’ That’s really the first moment I smelled bullshit. I just thought, ‘There’s no fucking way there’s one key to Rockefeller Center.’ What did Sandra say? Probably nothing. I just remember the way she would say his name—absolutely two syllables: ‘Oh, Cla-aaaark!’ And he would call her
Sohn
-dra.”

Although the friend’s husband, a respected professional with a recognizable name, was impressed, she wasn’t. “I was repulsed by the name-dropping and the excessive wealth and the khaki pants and the polo shirt. Also, they weren’t really people that you wanted to be around. They weren’t warm. I found myself just kind of looking at the clock, thinking, ‘Please, God, let this dinner be over.’ I think other people were excited to be with a Rockefeller. It didn’t matter how awkward it was to be with them. It was worth it, because they were Rockefellers.”

The grandiose career, the silk ascots, and the museum-quality art collection (whose authenticity was never questioned) all gave credence to the con.

As her position at McKinsey grew, Sandra was away from her husband more and more, which left him with plenty of time to walk Yates in Central Park, where, he liked to say, “My dog was very much in love with Amelia, Henry Kissinger’s dog.” Broadway producer Jeffrey Richards crossed paths with Rockefeller while walking his dog through the park one day. They got to talking, and Richards told him he was producing a new play by David Ives, who had written
All in the Timing
. Rockefeller exclaimed, “I’ve seen that play
six times
!” He then hinted that he might like to become a backer of Ives’s next play. It would look quite wonderful to have a Rockefeller on one’s résumé, thought Richards, who arranged to introduce his new potential investor to Ives. Rockefeller offered to fly the play wright to the south of France on his jet, which he kept at Teterboro, the airport for private planes in New Jersey. However, neither the jet nor the investment ever materialized.

At home, Clark grew ever more focused on Sandra and her work. “Particularly in the early years, he was unhappy with the limited amount that I earned at my job and put a lot of pressure on me about it,” she testified. “I observed that
he
could get a job that paid, and contribute, and he said that was what he was doing in this nonprofit advisory arena that was very important and would lead to big things.”

What were those big things? “He said he was expecting that he might get an appointment of some kind as a result of the work he was doing,” said Sandra.

In cross-examination, the defense attorney Jeffrey Denner suggested that Rockefeller’s claims regarding high-level appointments—not to mention the $50 million he said he had paid to the U.S. Navy to settle his late father’s embezzlement lawsuit—might have stretched a normal person’s credulity.

“Now, you are an astute economist and business consultant, are you not?” the lawyer asked.

“At the time I was a twenty-six-year-old. I knew nothing about this kind of stuff,” she replied.

Sandra’s busy schedule at McKinsey gave Clark, who had no work of his own to do, even more time to engage in what was becoming his consuming occupation: walking his dog and collecting new friends. One was an artist named William Quigley, whose work was bought by politicians, entertainers, and business leaders. One day a friend informed him that she had been walking her dog in Central Park when a short man with a Gordon setter bumped into her.

“She said, ‘Bill, this guy took me to his house, and his art collection is unbelievable!’ ” Quigley told me. We were sitting in his studio in SoHo, in lower Manhattan, where his large, bright canvases were scattered all around us. A somewhat stocky man with long hair and an amiable demeanor, he quickly warmed up about Rockefeller, pulling out letters and other mementos from the copious time he had spent with the purported connoisseur. He said that his friend, who was Canadian, had never heard of the Rockefeller family. But the art stunned her. “You have to see it!” she urged Quigley, who was living in Los Angeles at the time. To sweeten the pot, she told Quigley she had shown her new friend transparencies of his work, and the great collector was
impressed.
“He wants to meet you!” she exclaimed.

“And I said, ‘Well, who is it?’”

The artist shot me a wry smile. “She said, ‘I really don’t know. He’s got a really big name, from a big American family, and I just forget.’”

“And I was like, ‘How can you not know? Is it Vanderbilt? Mellon?’”

“No, something longer,” the friend said.

They went round and round, but she couldn’t remember, until the next day, when she called Quigley and blurted out, “His name is Clark and he’s a
Rockefeller
!”

Quigley almost dropped the phone.

His friend had been walking her dog with a Rockefeller? The artist was floored—even more so when his friend told him, “Yeah, and he’s a really, really sweet guy. You’ve got to meet him.”

Quigley flew to New York and his friend set up the meeting. Arriving in the lobby of the collector’s apartment building, Quigley found a slight man dressed in what had become his daily uniform: baseball cap, polo shirt, blue blazer, khaki pants—the picture of preppydom. The man reeked of old money, good breeding, and impeccable taste. Immediately, Quigley knew he’d found Clark Rockefeller.

“Oh, you must be Quigley,” Rockefeller said coolly, employing the single name he would use to address the artist from that point forward.

They went up to Rockefeller’s apartment, where the great man offered the artist a glass of sherry, but he didn’t show him the art. Not yet. He had learned the power of restraint by then, how not showing all of his cards at once only added to his mystique. He asked Quigley how long he would be in town.

“Three days,” Quigley replied.

After some small talk, the artist took his leave. Two days passed, with no call from Rockefeller. Then, on the night before Quigley’s departure, his phone rang. “Quigley, I would like you to come up to my apartment and see the art,” said Rockefeller, instructing him to arrive at 10 p.m., when he would be taking his dog for his nightly walk.

They took the dog for a long walk around the park. Finally, Rockefeller said he was ready to return to the apartment and show his new friend his art collection. “We go into the apartment,” Quigley remembered. “It’s probably by this time ten-thirty, and I walk into this collection. I had been reading Lee Seldes’s
The Legacy of Mark Rothko
at the time, one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It really gives you an inside story of the business of the art world.” Suddenly he saw on one wall
Black on Grey
, one of Rothko’s late landmark works, a version of which would sell for $10 million at Christie’s auction house in 2007. “That legitimized everything for me,” said Quigley. “I was like,
Are you kidding?

“Down the hallway I see another Rothko,” Quigley continued. “Then I turned into the living room, a modest-sized room, which didn’t have a lot of elaborate furniture. Two black sofas with a lot of dog hair on them, and a little coffee table. Light hardwood floors that were kind of worn. It wasn’t anything that impressive.”

But there on the wall was another canvas almost inconceivable for a residence. “A ten-foot Barnett Newman,” he said, referring to the abstract expressionist pioneer who died in 1970. He added, “With a brown swipe on the bottom left-hand corner that he said his dog did. He was muddy one day and got brown dirt on the bottom of the painting, and Clark just left it.”

So typical of an aristocrat, Quigley thought. But there was more. “Two Clyfford Still paintings—one of my favorite artists,” he said. “
Large
paintings. And then a Robert Motherwell over his fireplace. And I remember there were either two or three Rothkos.”

The value was incalculable, but that wasn’t the main thing for the artist. The main thing was that all that art was right there under one roof, and not in a museum, which left him reeling. “I was very, very excited. Impressed. Not impressed like, ‘Wow, I met a Rockefeller.’ That was definitely part of the equation, but . . .” He seemed at a loss for words.

“I was really overwhelmed,” he said. “I mean . . .
Mondrian.
And I was looking at them very closely. I never had any doubts that they were legitimate, never thought that they were reproductions or anything. I looked at them very closely and I thought, ‘Wow, these are amazing paintings.’ And I felt like I had a bit of a relationship with a lot of these artists. I knew a lot of their work. I was showing with Manny Silverman at the time, and Manny is the premier dealer for this type of work in the United States, maybe. These guys were my heroes. So I think that’s what made Clark and me get along so easily in the beginning, because I actually knew the history of abstract expressionism. That was my forte.”

Quigley and Clark spoke for about forty-five minutes. “I don’t even think we sat down. I was so overwhelmed by the paintings. And then I petted the dog a little bit more, and then he said, ‘Well, it’s getting close to my bedtime, and it’s getting late. So let’s just stay in touch, and I’ll communicate with you.’”

Quigley flew back to Los Angeles, and he and Rockefeller stayed in touch. Clark even helped him with his Web site, as he had done with so many friends. “Clark and I started to develop a friendship by e-mail and by phone.”

Soon, however, Quigley moved to New York, where his affiliation with the important collector intensified. Later, when Rockefeller hit the headlines and Quigley was besieged by the media, he released a statement about his friendship with the supposed scion of the great family:

It seemed he knew everyone in the art world, although he hated the idea of art for investment. He was a purist with impeccable taste, and we had a wonderful dialogue simply based on this. I would go to galleries where the dealer would pull out a whole collection of an artist’s work because Clark made a phone call.

Clark knew more about the history and aesthetics of art than most artists I meet. He was extremely well versed and schooled in art history and had very strong viewpoints on certain painters and artists. I was both complimented and excited about the romanticized, historic affiliation of being courted by a Rockefeller. Obviously, the family owned some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. After seeing the collection I never doubted his identity. He took me to extravagant social clubs, where everyone referred to him as Mr. Rockefeller.

Although I have been fortunate to have met many great people who have supported my work from all walks of life, the dynamics of this particular relationship instilled additional confidence and faith that what I was pursuing in my paintings may have some historic merit.

In the back of his mind, Quigley hoped that his new friend might be interested in purchasing some of his art. But very soon what began as a business relationship developed into a friendship. Quigley became immersed in the great man’s life. They settled into a routine of sorts, meeting at 3 p.m. sharp at one of Rockefeller’s private clubs, usually the Lotos. “We’d sit in the little library and discuss the weekly events.”

Everyone in the Lotos knew him. There was even a list of members posted in a window box at the entrance to the club. Quigley saw the name L. Rockefeller, which of course referred to the esteemed naturalist and philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller. And near that: C. Rockefeller.

“Quigley, if I made you a member here—and maybe I can get the yearly fee reduced for you—we could put a Q above R on the list, Quigley and then C. Rockefeller,” said Clark, seeming to relish the idea of helping his friend gain entry into one of his clubs.

On rare occasions Sandy would join them, but most of the time she was working. At that time she was involved in a major McKinsey project in Toronto, which necessitated continual travel. That left the two men to traipse around New York City. Sometimes Rockefeller would invite a distinguished guest to join them, as he did once at the Metropolitan Club. “He was a professor from Harvard,” said Quigley. “Very intellectual. And all they did was talk about quantum physics and literature, but mainly about Star Wars and quantum physics. I was in the middle of these two guys, and it was like Ping-Pong. I couldn’t keep track of what they were talking about.”