The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (36 page)

“How do you think he learned so much to construct this new persona ?” I asked.

“Prodigious reading,” said Hickox.

“And Clark Rockefeller was his greatest creation,” I said.

At that moment, Hickox turned his attention to the oysters. “So, at the risk of being pompous, I am going to show you how I eat oysters,” he said.

This was exactly what he had done with Clark, he said, picking up an oyster.

“I brought Clark here and started describing the aspects of the oysters, and Clark turned to somebody he had been chatting with and said, ‘Look, really, an oyster is an oyster,’ in his rather peremptory and aristocratic way. I said, ‘Just wait.’ So then I ordered carefully, and as we had the oysters—we had two of each variety, just as we’re doing tonight—I described each of them.”

He did so again, differentiating the Wellfleet from the Malpeque and the Pemaquid and instructing me to raise the shell to my mouth and drink the oyster whole. As I did this, he described the various tastes, which he called low tide, medium tide, and ocean. “Very similar to wine, oysters are conditioned by their
terroir
”—meaning the region they are from. Rockefeller became instantly attuned to the complexities, the salinity versus the vegetable nature. In Hickox’s words, “Some have sea breeze and some have a kind of earthiness rather like seaweed. Within minutes Clark was thinking along those lines. And that’s how Clark was with art, with literature, with conversations, with wit.”

He mentioned martinis. “He was not very fond of wine. He would drink an excellent wine if one offered it to him.” Hickox motioned to the bottle in the ice bucket. “He enjoyed this very Chablis.” But when Hickox made him a perfect vodka martini, “so icy that you could see turbulence in it,” another new world opened. “He said it was the best martini he ever had.”

“He was a sponge,” I said.

“Well, if a sponge could also be analytical, then he was a sponge. He learned things very fast. He was not rigid.”

After dinner, Hickox took me to the Beehive, a nightclub across the street from the restaurant. “I thought this would be useful for you to see,” he said. The place was loud, lively, and filled with attractive young women.

“Clark charmed women,” he continued. “Much like a cat delivering mice and dropping them in one’s shoe, Clark would bring over women and say, ‘This is Patrick Hickox, not just one of the greatest architects in this area, but anywhere.’ And I would immediately find an enthusiastic crowd about me, wishing to hear my insights about art, architecture, and the future of civilization.”

He said he and Clark “went to all sorts of water spots to play among the demimonde of the nightlife of Boston.” He said that Clark would lure women by employing “the reverse of a pickup line. Within seconds he would have them engaged and following his every word. Then he would lead them away enchanted.”

“And would he say, ‘I’m Clark Rockefeller’? That was the best aphrodisiac,” I said.

Hickox nodded his agreement. “One day he mentioned that he liked a certain woman because she didn’t like to dance, and he said he hated dancing,” he continued. “A couple of weeks after that, I said, ‘Clark, I ran into your dancing teacher . . . and she said that you are a very fine dancer.’ ”

He had caught his friend in a little white lie, but the architect didn’t dwell on it. He preferred to recall the nights when the two of them would also frequent the bar in the Liberty Hotel, the former Charles Street Jail, which had been transformed into trendy lodgings. The main bar, for instance, was called the Clink. “Yes, that was definitely a favorite,” said Hickox. “A couple of other places I might have really liked he would reject, saying they were overly gerontological.”

“Gerontological?” I asked.

“Rather rudely suggesting that the people were not young enough,” he said.

Oysters. Martinis. Young women. Dancing teachers. Where was Sandra Boss during all of this nocturnal merrymaking?

“Did he ever talk about how he fell in love with his wife?” I asked the architect.

“Not a peep,” he said.

Despite the high life he was living in one end of Boston, Clark Rockefeller was sinking in another, as best illustrated by an episode that unfolded in the waters of Boston’s Back Bay. After meeting a couple who were fellow parents at Southfield at the Boston Sailing Center one day, he gave them the usual buildup, saying that his father had sold his company to the U.S. Navy for a fortune, and that he himself worked for the Department of Defense. But he always had time in his insanely busy schedule to indulge in his love of sailing. He had just returned from a sojourn in France, sailing for the America’s Cup team. So when he invited the couple to go sailing with him on what he described as his “yacht,” they were of course extremely excited.

When the couple arrived at the Boston Sailing Center for their day at sea, Rockefeller was waiting with his daughter, Snooks. However, his yacht was in the shop, he explained, so they would have to go out on one of the sailing club’s considerably smaller boats. “We were a little disappointed not to be going on a Rockefeller’s yacht,” the husband remembered.

The man was even more disappointed when they got out to sea in the little borrowed sailboat, and the America’s Cup sailor didn’t seem to know what he was doing. Other boats were flying past them, as the sailboat seemed to flounder in the gusty wind. The boat was flopping around in the water, practically sideways, and Rockefeller had absolutely no control over it. Things got so desperate that Rockefeller even turned the boat over to his daughter to sail, which made the couple on board even more nervous. Finally, when they were marooned in the middle of the bay, not moving, just drifting, a kayaker passed by and the couple yelled out for rescue.

“Can you give us a tow?” they asked, and they threw out a rope for the kayaker to tow in the party of four.

“And this is an America’s Cup sailor!” the man who went on the boat exclaimed.

Clark Rockefeller was clearly adrift.

CHAPTER 18

“Find Out Who He Is”

I
n December 2006, four months after the Rockefeller family had moved to Boston, Sandra Boss decided to leave her husband. The last straw, she told the grand jury, was an incident involving their daughter.

“The school called Clark and me into a parent-teacher conference on, I think, December 2, 2006. They said they had been trying to get ahold of me and hadn’t been successful. It turned out that Clark had given them a fake cell phone number for me, and had been preventing me from seeing them.” She added, “He had been telling me that they didn’t do parent-teacher conferences.”

When Reigh’s teachers finally got her mother and her father in the same room, they expressed some serious concerns.

As Boss recalled, “They said that she, while very intellectually impressive, was having a temper tantrum practically every day. She was really struggling socially. She was five at this time. She would go to the teachers and say, ‘Please tell me what to play.’ She really had been harmed at that point by his excessive control of her. I spoke to Clark the day after this event and said, ‘We really need to follow the teachers’ instructions to get some behavioral help for Reigh, and this is proof that we have to change how we’re caring for her.’ He screamed at me. He threatened me. He told me that I could never talk to the school again. He just went psycho.”

“Just to be clear,” the prosecutor asked, “what was his position about getting a therapist or a counselor for Reigh to address some of the issues that were raised at school?”

“Unequivocal refusal. He wouldn’t allow it under any circumstance.”

Leaving Clark Rockefeller was no simple matter, however. It would require careful planning if she wanted to exit the marriage with her daughter, and she was determined not to allow the child to remain in her husband’s custody. She spent a week trying to find suitable legal representation.

“It took a lot of strategy to figure out how to get me out,” Boss said. “I was quite worried about my safety, and, frankly, he was stalking me in the night and doing a lot of crazy stuff before I left. It was very, very dangerous. I was advised by a psychotherapist brought in by my lawyers that I couldn’t take [Reigh] out right away—that it would result in severe danger for all of us.”

She wasn’t asked to elaborate on the “crazy stuff” that her husband was doing, and she didn’t. Instead, she outlined her plan of attack to regain control of her daughter and of her own life. He was taking care of their daughter two-thirds of the time. Sandra immediately claimed two days a week. “Then we started the procedure to get her out. The only thing I focused on was taking care of Reigh. My obsession was her safety. I immediately expressed my concern that he would kidnap her.”

On January 17, 2007, almost two months after she had determined to leave Clark, her attorney filed the divorce petition. Both parties’ lawyers quickly filed a child custody claim (Sandra paid all of Clark’s attorney’s fees). Thus began what would turn out to be a full year of contentious negotiations. Sandra moved into an apartment in a building across from what is now the Taj Boston hotel. “I was able to see Reigh two days a week, and the defendant was seeing her five days a week at that time,” she said.

Rockefeller was like a wounded lion. When he wasn’t tending to his daughter, he roared about the various sins he said his wife had committed against him. He moved into a small apartment overlooking the school bus stop on Beacon Street (the town house on Pinckney Street was to be sold) and entered his financially struggling singlefather phase. It wasn’t pretty. “He was
furious
!” said one friend. A fellow Southfield parent remembered, “When they were going to get divorced, I asked him, ‘How are you going to divide things up?’ He said, ‘Everything is going to have to be sold. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe she’s doing this.’ Looking back on it now, his whole cover was about to be blown. Sandra was the money that allowed him to have the antique cars, the artwork, the clubs, and when she pulled the plug, he was incredibly distraught.”

Rockefeller vowed to interview every divorce lawyer in Boston so that Sandra wouldn’t be able to hire any of them due to conflict-of-interest restrictions. But she had secured a lawyer, and a good one. Strapped for cash, he asked people to buy back the antique cars they’d sold him or buy furniture that he’d received from Sandra after their split. Don MacLeay, the elderly Cornish excavator, was the recipient of one such request. “I had sold him a ’91 Buick, and he called me up and said Sandy was getting a divorce. He said, ‘Gee, Don, I want you to go down and pick up the Buick and send me the money.’ It was $4,500. I’m thinking, ‘Somebody who has been spending all this money, why the hell is he worried about $4,500?’ By this time my wife was seriously ill. I said, ‘Clark, I’ve got a lot of problems.’ Two or three nights later, he called me: ‘Did you pick up the car?’ I said, ‘No. I’m not going to. I’ve got troubles too!’ ”

Rockefeller snapped, “Well, you’re no longer my friend!”

Rockefeller also spoke to the art dealer Sheldon Fish, another friend, about his divorce. “He told me, ‘Sandy only wanted my money. She married me because I’m a Rockefeller,’ ” Fish recalled. “He said, ‘She used my name, and now she wants everything. Maybe I can trade the paintings for custody of Reigh.’ ” Soon after that he made a second call to Fish, who was then living in Peru. “He said, ‘I had to give Sandy all the paintings for custody of Reigh. I don’t have anything. I’m down to my last two million, which is nothing today. I’m in bad shape.’ I said, ‘Come down to Peru. Two million here is worth a lot more than two million there.’ He kept changing the stories. He told so many, and twisted them all around.”

His writing partner, Amy Patt, also noticed the change during Rockefeller’s divorce proceedings. First, he said he was looking for a job and his search wasn’t limited to the weaponry or ballistics fields. “He mentioned that the Dexter Southfield School was talking with him about hiring him as a publicist for the school,” she told the grand jury. He was so distraught about the divorce and the prospect of losing his daughter that he couldn’t concentrate on writing the sitcom anymore. Finally, they decided to abandon the project, but not before Rockefeller confided to Amy what he planned to do if indeed Sandra was successful in moving Snooks to London: interview for a job with overseas companies, he said. In fact, the Chinese government had recently approached him to work for their missile department.

“That’s what I do, Amy,” he told her, alluding to his background in ballistics and adding that the Chinese had offered him a three-year contract worth $1 million a year. And if things got rough in the divorce, he assured her, his powerful friends in the Chinese government would step in “and help me take care of the situation.”

When she asked what he meant by “the situation,” he would only say, “It was something about his daughter, something like ‘to get my daughter back.’ ”

Later, he asked Amy to lie to his daughter’s guardian ad litem, the person designated by the court to protect and oversee visitation rights with a child in a divorce case. “To say that I was his girlfriend,” Amy explained. “He felt that it would show him in a good light, that he was in a stable relationship.” Amy refused.

Even the architect Patrick Hickox, Rockefeller’s most ardent defender of all the people I met, noticed a disturbing change in him after Sandra cut him off. Hickox told me about a trip the two of them took to visit Rockefeller’s home in Cornish around the time of his divorce. “We went driving up in my little sports car,” Hickox said. “He put me up in this guesthouse that he had.” The genteel architect blanched the moment he set foot into his lodgings. The house was vacant, mattresses sitting on the bedroom floor. “There were sheets that had never been used that he took right out of the plastic bags. I drove him up the hill and dropped him off at his house, and when I went down it was a little bit after midnight. I went around the house and systematically checked all the windows and all the doors and locked everything. I have a knife that I kept under my pillow.”