The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (35 page)

“When you walked into this fancy-schmancy club, there in the hall was the board of directors, officers of the club, and his name was up there prominently. I saw John Silber there,” said Greene, referring to the noted author, philosopher, and academic who was president of Boston University for twenty-five years. “I admired the guy, and Clark said, ‘I can have you introduced.’ And he tapped the shoulder of a big shot, an officer of the club, who took me over and introduced me to John Silber! He went in there and established himself. At a club like that, people get a hard-on over the name Rockefeller.”

Clark invited the Starbucks group to join him for the Algonquin’s New Year’s party in 2006, complete with ballroom dancing, a multicourse dinner, champagne, and a midnight rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Rockefeller’s table was front and center, filled with his friends from Starbucks, as well as other members of the Algonquin—the king and his growing court.

I asked Thomas Lee, the Boston police superintendent, about Rockefeller’s reputation at the Algonquin Club. He said he had interviewed many of the club’s members and came away absolutely certain that they had been duped.

“He was well accepted,” Lee replied. “Now, of course, the people there have said, ‘Oh, yeah, we knew he wasn’t this or that.’ But believe me, he had them fooled.”

“How did he do it?” I asked.

“A con man gets by because you want to believe what he’s telling you. That’s how a con works. People already have their preconceptions, and he just plays into what they’re thinking.”

The more I talked with people, the more I knew I had to see the Algonquin Club for myself. But my social contacts in Boston, which were not at all shabby, just shook their heads when I asked them to pull strings or make introductions. In the end, I decided to gain entry the same way Rockefeller had: through a reciprocal membership in another private club. The only club I belonged to was a spa in Colorado, with absolutely no reciprocal benefits, called the Aspen Club and Spa. I asked the concierge at my hotel to call the Algonquin and reserve a table for one for dinner that night.

“Tell them that I am a reciprocal member from the Aspen Club,” I said, leaving off the last part of the name. The concierge called the Algonquin, then cupped the phone and told me, “She said they’d love to have you, but you’ll have to pay for dinner and drinks by credit card.” I nodded agreement. “Then eight p.m. for one,” the concierge told the person on the other end of the line.

It was a vast gray multistory building with valet car parkers and gaslights blazing out front, as they had been blazing for a century and more. I walked into a small lobby, where a woman sat behind a desk. There was a board with the names of the directors on it, and I noticed that Clark Rockefeller’s name had been removed.

“Good evening, Mr. Seal! And how are things at the Aspen Club?” asked the receptionist.

“Quite fine,” I said. “Can you direct me to the bar?”

As I walked across the lobby toward the bar, I took a quick detour through the private dining rooms, named for members—the Calvin Coolidge Room, the Daniel Webster Room. There were paintings of yachts and portraits of the men for whom the rooms were named. I soon realized that the eyes of the Algonquin were on me. No one seemed to question that I was anything less than an equal, starting with the older couple having cocktails in the Marlboro Lounge, where a waiter brought me a drink and I nibbled cheese from a silver tray and wiled away an hour making light cocktail conversation. “Mr. Rockefeller would eat here or in the dining room,” a waiter in the Members’ Bar told me. When I asked if they all assumed he was a real Rockefeller, the waiter replied, “He was a
member
. So nobody asked.”

I walked upstairs to the dining room, a huge space with paneled walls, paintings, pewter chandeliers, four fireplaces, and massive picture windows. A waiter in a tuxedo approached my table, and I asked what Clark Rockefeller usually ordered for dinner.

“The smoked salmon appetizer and, sometimes, the Dover sole.”

“I’ll have it,” I replied.

As the efficient waiters and busboys served me, I asked them about Rockefeller. Though he had been a director of the club, they said, he had eventually let his membership lapse. “He was here on a reciprocal, just like you,” one of them said. How he got to be a member, no one knew. “You’re either sponsored or you just come in and fill out an application. We knew he was a member of a prominent family,” the server went on. “He was always Clark Rockefeller! Everyone seemed to like him. Nobody questioned anything.”

I returned to the Algonquin another evening. That night, a younger crowd showed up. Men in preppy clothes with their wives or girlfriends were seated in the dining room. A few business types played billiards in the Members’ Bar. As they cavorted and conversed, they were all secure in the knowledge that they were among their own kind.

It wasn’t just men who fell into Rockefeller’s growing sphere of influence and entertainment in Boston. Women were soon jumping onto the joyride as well. Another member of the early-morning Starbucks coffee group, a woman named Amy Patt, testified to the grand jury about Rockefeller’s irresistible gravitational pull. She was at the Southfield bus stop one morning, her infant in a stroller while she took her daughter to the school bus, when a well-dressed stranger came bounding up from the park across the street. “Don’t you look pretty today!” he exclaimed, introducing himself as Clark Rockefeller.

After seeing each other twice a day with their daughters at the bus stop, Clark and Amy became friends. They began meeting for a post–bus stop coffee at Starbucks and soon various other places around town, including the Algonquin. According to
Boston
magazine, they decided to “merge” their respective creative talents by writing what would quickly evolve into an eighteen-episode script for a sitcom based on the Starbucks coffee club, which Rockefeller entitled
Less Than Proper.
Of course, he planned to star in the TV series; to prepare for his television debut, he began taking classes at a local comedy center.

As the pair wrote the sitcom, it was clear that Rockefeller wanted their friendship to deepen. “He would say silly things like, ‘Oh, Amy, Amy, Amy, we should have children together,’ ” she recalled. “‘You’re so smart and our children would be so brilliant!’”

As for his wife, Sandra Boss, who always seemed to be away on business, Rockefeller had only disparaging comments. So Amy presumed his marriage was over, and that he was the one who wanted out. Of course, he gave her his standard New York City/Yale blue-blooded bio, only with some specially tailored embellishments. “He said he went to school with the writers of the Frasier character on the sitcom,” Amy said, referring to the persnickety Dr. Frasier Winslow Crane, played by Kelsey Grammer. “And said he was involved in weaponry of some sort; ballistics and things.”

She had no reason to disbelieve him. And while their relationship didn’t go any deeper than friendship, she looked forward to their time together. “He was really energetic and flirty and just sort of fun to be around,” she said.

To hear more about Rockefeller’s sway over young women, I called the architect Patrick Hickox. One night he picked me up at the hotel in his convertible BMW and took me to dinner at B&G Oysters, where, he explained, he and Clark had often dined together.

“Clark has a tremendous, passionate eye for beautiful women,” the architect said on the way to the restaurant. “And he seeks them out with great skill and charm.”

That was how the two men met. “It was a large black-tie event.” Hickox was there with his wife and “a very beautiful employee, whom I imagine Clark must have spotted at a considerable distance.” Immaculately attired in his J. Press tuxedo, Rockefeller introduced himself, and the threesome quickly became a foursome. After the gala they retired to the bar in the Boston Ritz—now the Taj Boston—where, entertained by Rockefeller’s endless anecdotes, they partied until five in the morning.

“Then we walked over—my employee was still there—to Clark’s house on Beacon Hill. It was remarkably spare—hardly any furnishings at all—but with an extraordinary abundance of paintings, most of them not exhibited, but in enormous tubes.”

“Did you believe the paintings were real?” I asked.

“I had no reason to think otherwise. They were by major people—Rothko and, I believe, Motherwell. It was quite a fantastic collection,” said Hickox.

A close friendship ensued. “At one point, some people were questioning his identity and being derogatory about it. I said, ‘Clark, I wouldn’t pay that any mind. You are your last great story, your most recent trenchant analysis, the witticism you let float in the air. That’s who you are.’ ”

Once we were seated in B&G Oysters and the wine was ordered, Hickox commented on Rockefeller’s good points: his volunteer work in the community, helping people and nonprofit organizations by setting up and servicing their computers. Rockefeller was so proficient with computers he almost had “telepathy” with them, Hickox said. He never paid by credit card, only cash. The architect said he chalked it up to being “an ideological thing,” that the man from the famous family had been taught to distrust credit. After all, he seemed finely attuned to the stock market, even e-mailing Hickox in the spring of 2008, before the American financial meltdown began that fall, “There is tremendous danger in the market. Get out of the stock market and go into commodities, into gold.”

As Hickox ordered two oysters each of six varieties, I asked him how Rockefeller had fit in with the Starbucks group. “Oh, he was lovely, provocative,” he said. “On occasion we’d talk very seriously about business, invention, and technology. But fundamentally this was a
divertissement
, for amusement. We talked about cars, anything. Clark has a profound love of music, ranging from torch singers to great opera, to opéra bouffe—the light opera of nineteenth-century France. We had a little group of two, where we would whistle in very complex harmonies. We named our group the Whistlepoofs, after the Whiffenpoofs of Yale. I lent him recordings of all of the Whiffenpoofs of the entire twentieth century, which he then put into digital form and returned the CDs.”

Taking a sip of Chablis, he said, “Clark
adored
the music of Cole Porter.”

“Which songs?” I asked.

“Oh, I can tell you one he especially loved—‘From This Moment On,’ which is a very beautiful song, really the embodiment of the quintessential brilliance of Cole Porter: to take a line, a little phrase, a particle of speech, and create a small universe of it. Clark loved diction, language.”

We sipped more wine and hummed a few bars of the Cole Porter classic, about a world that turns on a dime on account of a beautiful woman. “One night, Clark came over and he had
nine
versions of the song,” Hickox said. “We listened to them all, and he tested us on them as to who the singers were. Tough test.”

It wasn’t just American music; Rockefeller had a broad range in tastes, stretching to the obscure. “He’s the only person I know who could play the didgeridoo, which is an extraordinary Aboriginal wind instrument. A long, long horn. One night—God knows why—I asked him if he played this instrument, and he got up, ran over to his house, and within minutes came back with an eight-foot-long horn, which he then played with extraordinary resonance and power.”

Hickox was just warming up. “On Saturday mornings, even when we’d been out late the night before, he’d make it a practice to read to children at the Athenaeum. He was an excellent reader. He was a true connoisseur.”

“And a true con,” I said.

“I actually don’t like the word ‘con,’” said Hickox. “I mean, you are allowed to use that word, but it is not a word I would use. There is no question that this person over time presented a variety of personalities, but I never thought of him as being a person of multiple personalities or any of that.”

The oysters arrived on a bed of ice on a tin tray. “I think there’s a concept of this person as not being real,” Hickcox said. “But there’s no doubt that this was somebody who was loving and caring. And I’m sure that other people have described the care and attention that he had for his little girl. Not in an obsessive way. There’s little doubt for me that he was a caring father. His love for his daughter was moving. I think the love for his daughter was the most central reality in his life.”

“Maybe the only reality,” I said.

“I wouldn’t say that, because I think many, many things were real for Clark. And I hesitate to say this, but it may be that to some extent, for Clark, things that are imaginary were very, very real. That’s why the con man description may be really off. This was somebody who might be involved with changing the world intellectually.”

I raised a skeptical eyebrow, but he continued. “I’m an architect. You know what I do for a living? I hallucinate. I hallucinate things and they become real. I have an office. I attach dollars and cents to this. But it may be that all of us in varying degrees do this because otherwise we would be completely stuck with a preexisting reality.”

He looked at me and drove his point deeper. “You’re involved in a voyage of discovery,” he said of my mission to capture the riddle of Clark Rockefeller on paper. “You don’t know where it’s going to end. To some extent you pose to yourself and to the various people you interview what
might
be a reality, and then you test for that, and as time goes on a vision is becoming clearer and clearer. So something that’s really very imaginary and fictional gains greater and greater materiality.”

He was saying that all realities exist because of ideas and visions that come from our imagination. If you look at it that way, I thought, we’re all posers. Rockefeller, however, clearly took his ability to construct assumed and exaggerated realities to extremes. Hickox compared his friend’s American odyssey to something out of the novel
Tom Jones
, or a book by Joseph Conrad. “There is a phrase of Truman Capote’s: ‘a genuine fraud,’ ” he continued. “Not that the person is a complete fraud. Quite the reverse. It’s a person who actually may be genuine, but built upon a fictional armature. I think all Americans are our own inventions. That’s part of the allure of this country. And in some ways one has to see Clark as an archetypal immigrant who constructs a new life and a new persona, free of the constraints of the country he left behind.”