The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (34 page)

“He told me he’d sold his jet propulsion company to Boeing for a billion dollars, and that was the last time he worked,” said one Southfield father with whom I soon became friendly. Rockefeller had taken him to the Harvard Club in Boston, presumably to discuss a play date for their daughters. “He told other people that he worked for the Pentagon or the CIA or the Department of Defense. Then Snooks was born, and he cashed out with the sale to Boeing.”

The father was putty in Rockefeller’s hands, in the beginning at least. “Later, I heard his wife, Sandy, was paying the bills. But he led me to believe the opposite. He said, ‘Oh, she only makes $300,000 to $400,000 a year.’ And judging from what they had”—Rockefeller showed him his collection of abstract expressionist art and some Rockefeller memorabilia—“I thought he had a lot of his own money. I mean, he talked about donating a planetarium for our daughters’ school.”

Until he made the donation to Southfield, however, he seemed content to work as a volunteer at the school’s Clay Center for Science and Technology. The school’s state-of-the-art observatory is “better than the one they have at Harvard,” said the Southfield parent.

“I’m a portfolio manager, and I asked him, ‘How are you positioned?’” the parent continued.

“Exclusively in treasuries,” Rockefeller replied, and his new friend had no reason to doubt him, since many fellow Southfield parents were positioned the same way.

The father invited me to visit him and his family at their home in the Boston suburbs. There, I found a picture-perfect house, a smart and attractive young wife, and a little girl who had gone to school with Snooks—the whole family bubbling over with enthusiasm about the doting father and the peculiar little girl who arrived at the Southfield School for the 2006 semester.

One day, the phone in the family’s house rang. On the line was a fellow Southfield father, who said his name was Clark Rockefeller, suggesting that since their daughters were the same age, “How about arranging a play date?”

Over the phone, he asked the mother what her daughter liked to do. “And I said, ‘Just little-kid things,’” recalled the mother. “She likes to play house, play teacher, play baby and mommy.’ And Clark was totally on foreign ground. He was like, ‘Does she like to go to the MFA [the Boston Museum of Fine Arts]?’ And I said, ‘She doesn’t really read. No, she’ s never been to the MFA.’

“We went to the MFA together,” the mother continued. “Snooks knew every single painting, every artist, the dates. She knew odd facts. Like we would walk around the city and Clark would say, ‘Snooks, what does this stamp stand for?’ Just the abbreviations around Boston. She would know it was the Boston Public Waterworks. She knew things that no one else knew. Especially a little girl like that.”

I asked the daughter, a girl wearing tennis whites who came to be friends with Snooks, what she thought of her. “No one else was like her,” she said. “She was the only one who knew how to read words and every time we didn’t know a word we would go to her. Like if we didn’t know the word ‘decide,’ we’d go to her and she’d tell us. She was the smartest one.”

The little girl was equally close with Snooks’s father, whom she called “Uncle Clark.” “He was nice. He taught me how to read and all of that. Uncle Clark taught me a lot of things.”

Despite Snooks’s superior intelligence, though, the administrators of the Southfield School chose to detain her in pre-kindergarten, instead of placing her in the actual kindergarten class where a child her age should have been. The reason for the setback: the girl was severely socially handicapped from the years she’d spent sequestered away from other children, something that the family I visited had witnessed. “You’d go to birthday parties and she would refuse to play with the other children,” said the mother. “She wouldn’t join in any group. If they wanted to take a group picture, she wouldn’t. Everybody would line up for pizza and cake; she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t join in. She was always doing something, a game by herself. She talked to herself, always asking things like, ‘What do people eat in Africa?’ She lived in a whole other world.”

They recalled ice-skating outings with their daughter, Snooks, and her father. “Remember how they had to carry her off the ice?” asked the mother.

“She would just start babbling,” said the father.

“Screeching and screaming,” said the mother. “Temper tantrums.”

“Saying, ‘Reigh is good, Reigh is good,’” said the daughter. “We’d be sitting there and she would be, ‘Reigh is good, Reigh is good, Reigh is GOOD!’”

Despite all of this, Rockefeller was determined that in the following year his daughter be reinstated from the pre-kindergarten to what he believed should have been by now her rightful place in the first grade. He went on a crusade to make this happen, promising the school that he would make a major donation.

“Clark had told us that he was planning on putting in a planetarium, and I think he threatened the school with different things,” the father said. “In our conversations, he gave me the impression that he would repeatedly use the idea that he was going to put in a planetarium and possibly more than that as sort of a threat to the school that they should be more attentive to his child, forgiving. They had to put up with a lot of BS. It was amazing what they put up with. He was just not accepting of the fact that they made her go to pre-K. He was very offended that she was put down. And I suppose as a parent I can understand that.”

So the implication was the planetarium in exchange for moving his daughter out of pre-kindergarten and into the appropriate class for her age group?

“Totally,” said the mother.

Clark Rockefeller not only snowed the school with his famous family name and promised munificence, he snowed the parents in the living room, they both had to admit, so much that they were comfortable leaving their daughter with him at times. “He would watch the girls,” said the mother.

“Is Uncle Clark a genius?” asked the daughter.

“Perhaps,” said the father. “I don’t know. But he’s a bright guy, I’ll tell you that. He knew how to push people’s buttons, what to say, to get their attention. John D. Rockefeller’s first company was Clark and Rockefeller. He was a produce vendor. His partner’s last name was Clark. I mean, that’s obscure. Clark just
knew
.”

Although parents are discouraged from visiting the school during classroom hours, they are invited for special occasions, like parents’ night and the Christmas pageant. Rockefeller showed up at these events, of course, rarely, if ever, with his wife, but, as always, totally in character. In this instance, he was the generous philanthropist from the famous family who was going to donate a planetarium to the school. “Bow tie, navy jacket, khakis, sometimes loafers, sometimes Top-Siders,” said the mother.

“I forgot to add something,” said the daughter. “I remember that Uncle Clark never wore socks.”

In the fall of 2006, Sandra Boss brought up the subject of money with Clark. She recalled in court that her husband had told her that he could not sell his art collection, which was held in a family trust, for ten years. He had said this when Sandra first met him in 1996, however, so the ten-year limit would presumably be up, she felt. Surely he would finally sell a piece of art and contribute some money to the marriage.

The art collection was the only tangible proof that he really was a Rockefeller, Sandra explained. “It was lovely, and it was one of the ways that seemed convincing about having some connection with his family, that he had this great modern art,” she said, adding that art authorities far more knowledgeable than she had deemed it authentic. When I heard this statement in her testimony, I called former New York art dealer Sheldon Fish, who saw Rockefeller’s art collection many times before he decamped to Peru. “I must say the quality of the art was extremely high,” said Fish. “Very convincing! I even offered him $800,000 for his Rothko in 1999 and he turned me down saying, ‘Prices have gone up.’ ” If Rockefeller’s paintings had been forgeries, Fish noted, they would have had to have been painted by a phenomenal expert, “able to copy different styles so exactly! One giveaway with new copies of modern art is checking the drying of the paint. It takes at least twenty years for paint to ‘dry.’ ” Fish didn’t bother to give Rockefeller’s paintings the fingernail test—if you stick your nail into a dry painting, it won’t penetrate, he explained—because he was certain the paintings were real. “I saw him unpacking a Mondrian that he said he bought in Japan. He told me he spent ten million a year on art.”

“Lots of people from museums came in and looked at it; they thought it was great, so I thought it was real,” Sandra Boss continued. “At random one day, in probably October or November of 2006, he said, ‘Wow, I’ve been following the prices, and I think it’s worth over a billion dollars now.’ ”

She was questioned as to whether she had ever asked her husband directly if he might not consider “selling off a painting” and perhaps “put a couple million dollars away.” Of course, she had asked him to sell a painting many times, she replied. “I was pretty shocked when, after he spent all of our money and refused to save any of it, that he then suddenly said, ‘No, we’re not going to sell a painting.’ ”

Still, she stayed with him, steadfastly attempting to hold her family together in the waning months of 2006. She had gotten him to move to Boston, and Snooks was happily enrolled in school—no longer in pre-kindergarten but, thanks to her father’s influence, in first grade. “He said he would stop micromanaging her and we would share in her care, that he would basically let her have friends, that he would act like a normal human being,” Sandra said. “But that was not true.”

CHAPTER 17

Peach Melba Nights

O
nce Snooks was safely on the school bus, Rockefeller would stroll east on Beacon Street to the Starbucks on the corner, where he soon attached himself to a group consisting of lawyers, researchers, businesspeople, and a local architect who got together for coffee on their way to work. They had a name for themselves: Cafe Society. I went to that Starbucks one morning, and the group was easy to spot—a convivial bunch of men and women in the middle of the store. When I introduced myself, they seemed quite ready to speak about the man who had become a Beacon Hill fixture as easily as he had obtained a new e-mail address ([email protected]).

One morning, they recalled, the aristocrat in the Izod shirt had been out of breath when he arrived, having stopped at his house on Pinckney Street after dropping off Snooks at the bus. According to Bob Skorupa, a lawyer, “He said, ‘I’m exhausted. I’ve just pushed an armoire up to the fifth floor of my house.’ That’s how he integrated himself. You immediately knew he had a five-story house.”

With Snooks on his shoulders, they said, Clark was soon a familiar sight in the neighborhood, heading home or to church, or to karate classes, or to lunch at the Algonquin Club. If Snooks was given the kids’ menu, the little girl would snap, much to her father’s clear approval, “We are adults. We would like
adult
menus.”

As the Starbucks group got to know him, they came to like him and accept his eccentricities, because, after all, he was a Rockefeller. He told the coffee klatch that he had been the inspiration for the smart, effete character Dr. Niles Crane on the TV series
Frasier
. When the other Starbucks regulars rushed off to work, Clark would linger, because he really had no place to go.

Patrick Hickox, with his degree from the Yale School of Architecture, was known for designing homes and buldings on the East Coast. He wore his hair long, dressed in a boldly striped jacket, and spoke with a Yankee flourish. Of his friend Clark, he told me, “He said he was extremely good at thinking through processes and problems. He described himself as having been involved with the military, essentially as a contractor, and said he had benefited financially from the two Iraq wars. I never got too deeply into it, although on a couple of occasions we talked about projects he had worked on. Clark was not one to boast about his accomplishments.”

Bob Skorupa, the attorney, added, “One day he said there was a sled or a rocket out in New Mexico, on some military base, and it had blown up and somebody died. He said, ‘I designed that.’ I hadn’t read anything about it, but afterwards I went and looked, and buried deep in Google was a story about some accident with a rocket. Some guy had died. So that really happened.”

John Greene, a dark-haired, blunt-talking businessman, picked up the thread. “Once, he was going to New York, and he said he could catch a ride on a CIA or Navy transport plane.” Greene smiled. “Cool. He had those kinds of connections.”

One reason they believed him was that he was a member of the Algonquin ClUb, a refuge of the upper classes since 1886. It stood imposingly on 217 Commonwealth Avenue, just a short stroll from the Starbucks, and Rockefeller somehow let it slip that he was not merely a member, but a
director
, of the club. On several occasions he invited his newfound friends to join him there. “It was quite splendid,” said Hickox, “and as far as I could discern, the people there were very fond of him. He was a bit eccentric, but rather modestly so. Clark was cordial and amusing to the staff, and they were clearly affectionate.”

I asked him if he recalled any specific instances of Rockefeller’s interacting with other members at the club. “My understanding is that he gave an introduction to the German consul general—introduced him in a speech . . . in
German
,” said Hickox. “Clark was a lively, very compelling conversationalist.”

They all agreed that the aristos at the Algonquin, a number of them related to
real
Rockefellers, never questioned his identity. “He invited Bob and me to go the Algonquin,” said Greene. “His name was up on the wall—as an
officer.
You think he would pay for breakfast, since nonmembers can’t pay. But the next day, he asked us for the money.”

“Yankee thrift—that would be typical of the Rockefellers,” Hickox explained. “John D. was famous for his thrift, and Clark was very, very reluctant to go out and have an expensive dinner.” When they did go out for drinks, Hickox said, “Clark would often just get a soda water, because that would not even appear on the charge. It made him very uncomfortable to spend money.”