Frederick Koch’s Upper East Side town house sits on a quiet street off Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is January 2013, and in a few weeks’ time Frederick’s hard-hat-wearing younger brother will dip a ceremonial shovel into a mound of dirt in front of the museum, officially breaking ground on the David H. Koch Plaza. Frederick has devoted his life to the arts, but it’s David’s name that’s plastered on some of New York’s most prestigious cultural real estate, including the former New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.
The world of the Upper East Side elite is a small one, and Frederick and David occasionally bump into each other at galas or charity functions. These short, awkward exchanges (“Oh, hi, Freddie”) are pretty much the extent of their contact. Unlike David, who enjoys the status that comes with his high-profile philanthropy, Frederick conducts his life as if almost striving for obscurity. Thanks to Charles and David’s recent political infamy, he is now thought of as one of the “other” Koch brothers.
Frederick is so private about his affairs that during the 1980s, after underwriting the $2.7 million construction of England’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (in the shell of a fire-ravaged Victorian playhouse), he kept quiet about his gift for several years as the British press tried to dig up the name of the angel donor. When Frederick’s role was finally revealed, he told the BBC in a rare interview, “Never ask from where I came, nor what is my rank or name.” He was quoting Lohengrin’s warning to Elsa when the knight comes to her aid in Wagner’s romantic opera. When Elsa later poses the forbidden question, her savior disappears in a boat pulled by a swan.
Built of white marble, Frederick’s six-story neoclassical town house is one of a trio commissioned in the early 1900s by dime-store magnate Frank Winfield Woolworth, and designed by Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert, one of several architects favored by New York’s industrialists during the Gilded Age. Woolworth gave the town houses to each of his three daughters as wedding gifts. Six East 80th Street, the property Frederick now owns, belonged to the tycoon’s youngest daughter, Jessie. Woolworth was said to have wept on the day he gave Jessie away to James Donahue, the Irish-American scion of a less prominent family who made its money in the fat-rendering business. Donahue was a man of vices—gambling, booze, and young men in particular—and Woolworth’s doubts about the pairing proved well placed. In 1931, during a luncheon at the couple’s home, Donahue excused himself from the table and locked himself in the bathroom. He staggered out a few minutes later exclaiming, “I’ve done it.” Despondent over his finances and recently spurned by a young sailor, Donahue had gulped down seven mercury bichloride pills. He died within hours.
Frederick acquired the property for $5 million in 1986, three years after cashing in his Koch Industries stock and in the throes of a frenetic buying spree of historic homes and artwork. Frederick’s longtime architect Charles T. Young spent the next decade restoring the town house to its former splendor, and in many cases surpassing it. Frederick spared no expense. He continued a marble balustrade that ended after the first floor up the staircase and through the remaining five floors of the house. He replaced the crumbling plaster walls with carved limestone from the quarries of Caen in northwestern France, the kind that would be found in a Parisian town house of the French Régence period. In one case, Frederick made structural alterations just to create enough wall space to hang one of the masterpieces of his art collection, widening a pair of stone columns to fit William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s The Abduction of Psyche.
“Sotheby’s for years has been trying to take this away from me,” Frederick tells a visitor. “And I keep telling them, ‘I can’t move it. It’s part of the architecture of this room.’ ”
Frederick’s office is located in what was James Donahue’s bedroom. Ornate paneling that once adorned the Palace of Versailles lines the walls. A bookcase, as in some murder-mystery thriller, conceals a hidden passageway designed, Frederick explains, “so that the six servants in this house would not be aware of Mr. Donahue’s comings and goings.” It leads, past a row of stained-glass windows inlaid with the initials of the Donahue clan, to what was Jessie Donahue’s bedroom and is now Frederick’s.
Not that he actually sleeps there.
Frederick spent millions getting every hand-wrought, filigreed detail just right, but he doesn’t actually live in the town house. When he’s in New York—and he moves frequently between his collection of homes—he resides at 825 Fifth Avenue. He just entertains the occasional guest at the Woolworth mansion, his private museum.
Dressed in a navy blazer, striped shirt, and thin cobalt tie, Frederick moves through the rooms of his home like a curator, his arms folded behind him. “If you pull the carpet back you’ll see a Versailles parquet,” he says, touring the dining room. He pauses to point out paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Edward Burne-Jones, and Gilbert Stuart; Aubusson carpets; a set of ten mahogany dining room chairs that once belonged to financier J. P. Morgan.
In one bedroom, he shows off a canopied bed that he calls “the most important piece of furniture in the house.” It belonged to Marie Antoinette, a wedding gift from the mayor of Paris when she married Louis XVI. “I’m amazed even to this day that I was able to get it out of France. I bought it in Monte Carlo, which may have been the reason.”
He is at ease talking at length about every object in the house, and the intricacies of procuring or rehabilitating each of them. But when the topic turns briefly to his brothers, and whether they share his artistic sensibilities, Frederick tenses. “William does—David’s twin brother,” he replies. “He has a wonderful collection of all kinds of things.” Then he changes the subject.
Frederick displays one of his most treasured pieces on the top floor, in a sun-drenched, glass-enclosed conservatory that was once Jessie Donahue’s studio. On a pedestal beneath a circular skylight ringed with the signs of the zodiac sits a marble head wearing the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. The sculpture dates back to AD 130. “That is Antinous,” Frederick explains, “who was the lover of Emperor Hadrian.… Antinous accompanied Hadrian on a voyage down the Nile and at some point they stopped. Antinous went swimming and drowned in the Nile. The emperor was so grief stricken that he decided to immortalize Antinous and name him god of the Nile—and required people to worship him.”
Very few depictions of Hadrian’s lover exist. When the Roman Empire fell and Christians rose to power, they destroyed almost all the images of Antinous. “They very much resented having been ordered to worship the boyfriend of the emperor,” Frederick says. The marble head of Antinous, severed from a larger statue, was discovered in the eighteenth century in a swamp on the grounds of what was Hadrian’s estate in Tivoli.
What attracts Frederick to the objects he collects is not always their aesthetic value, but the hidden tales they tell, which he enjoys recounting with the flair of a raconteur. “Do you know the story of Stanford White?” he inquires, gazing at a painting of the original Madison Square Garden, when it was located on Madison Avenue and 26th Street. White, the arena’s architect, was gunned down in its rooftop restaurant in 1906 by Harry Thaw, the son of a Pittsburgh railroad magnate. Thaw was consumed with jealousy over White’s past liaisons with Evelyn Nesbit, a former showgirl who had been the architect’s mistress before marrying Thaw. “He was obsessed with Stanford White’s previous relationship with Evelyn Nesbit,” Frederick says. “After they married he tormented her by asking her to reveal all the sexual positions that she had enjoyed with Stanford White. All that did was fuel his rage.”
Frederick thinks of himself as a writer, and though he never plied this trade professionally, his collection provides an outlet for his natural gift as a storyteller. There was a time, however, when Frederick had his own ambitions of literary and theatrical acclaim. After moving to New York City’s West Village in his late twenties, Frederick had once approached John Mason Brown, an esteemed New York theater critic and author (as well as a fellow Harvard alum) for career advice. Frederick told Brown in a letter that he “hoped to be a playwright before too long—and a drama critic much sooner.” But ultimately he never pursued these goals with much vigor, to the intense frustration of his industrious father.
But Frederick’s mother took pride of her son’s quiet, prolific arts patronage, especially his funding of the Swan Theatre, a name Frederick says he chose “in tribute to Shakespeare, who was sometimes called the Swan of Avon.” In 1986, Mary Koch traveled to England to watch her son appear side by side with the Queen of England at the theater’s opening.
During the 1980s, to house his growing collection of Victorian art, which was said to overrun warehouses on both sides of the Atlantic, Frederick envisioned creating a museum in London akin to New York’s Frick Collection. “Frederick Koch had the eye of a true connoisseur,” said London art dealer Julian Hartnoll, one of the agents Frederick enlisted to do his buying. “He did not follow the flash or the ostentatious preferring the academic, the intellectual, and the byways of art history, literature, and music.”
Frederick proposed siting his gallery in historic St. John’s Lodge, a neoclassical villa located in London’s Regent’s Park. But his plans to overhaul the interior led to a protracted standoff with British cultural authorities, during which Frederick threatened to return to America with his collection of nineteenth-century art, a move one local architectural historian dubbed “crude bluff and blackmail.”
The fact that the Brits did not grasp his vision perplexed him. “The lodge is deteriorating rapidly now,” Frederick fumed in the late 1980s. “If I don’t take it on, it will probably go to some millionaire Arab.” He wasn’t far off the mark. St. John’s Lodge now belongs to the Sultan of Brunei.
Fed up with bureaucratic wrangling and unwanted press attention, Frederick ultimately settled on a secondary location. Sutton Place was situated on more than 700 picturesque acres about a half-hour’s drive from central London. A courtier to Henry VIII built the 50,000-square-foot Tudor mansion in the early sixteenth century, and it once belonged to the reclusive American oil billionaire John Paul Getty. Through a charitable foundation, Frederick purchased Sutton Place for £8 million from another reclusive American owner: Stanley Seeger, whose fortune, like Frederick’s, derived from an industrial empire. Frederick embarked on an extensive £12 million restoration project. But even before completing it, he baffled the British art world when he began selling off the Victorian masterpieces he’d spent the previous decade amassing.
“It certainly smelled of a person who was over extended,” said someone who knew him during the 1990s, adding, “It certainly appeared to me that it was going to pay the gardener.” But which one? He owned three other estates that required exorbitant upkeep.
Finally, in 1999, Frederick put the newly restored home on the market for £25 million. Maintaining the large estate which had a staff of twenty cost a small fortune, and according to Frederick, he wanted to move on to other projects. “I found that you don’t own the houses, the houses own you,” he says. “They make so many demands on you.” Sutton Place sat on the market until 2005, when a mysterious buyer purchased it through a middleman. Frederick later discovered the new owner was Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, number 34 on Forbes’s billionaire’s list.
“I got my investment back,” Frederick says with a trace of bitterness. Though he relinquished Sutton Place and, with it, his ambition of a museum dedicated to his art collection, his cultural legacy lives on in other venues. A trove of musical scores, manuscripts, historical documents, and artistic ephemera snatched up anonymously from the auction market during the 1980s reappeared in the Frederick R. Koch Collection, now housed in Yale’s Beinecke Library.
The collection includes everything from the handwritten scores of Mozart, Schubert, and Stravinsky, to the letters of W. H. Auden, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust, and from the poems of Jean Cocteau and Victor Hugo to the manuscript drafts of Henry Miller and Oscar Wilde. “What struck me most was how he knew his collection in the most intricate detail,” said Vincent Giroud, the Beinecke’s former curator of modern books and manuscripts, who worked closely with Frederick to document the collection. “I’ve met many collectors who could be wonderful people and very generous, but are not very knowledgeable about what they have. That’s not at all his case.” He added, “He has the mind of a scholar himself in many ways.”
Frederick lowers himself into an armchair in a second-floor sitting room. He has not spoken to the press in more than twenty-five years, since the British media descended on him like a pack of wolves. Even before that, he refused all interviews and stayed conspicuously quiet as his younger brothers savaged one another on the pages of national newspapers and magazines.
“Shall we delve into Koch world?” he asks.
But first a formality. He unclasps a clear plastic envelope and withdraws a crisp document. “If you would sign this, please.” It’s a contract requiring that “all writing pertaining to Frederick R. Koch, including personal subject matter revealed in research and interviews,” be submitted “for his approval.”
No journalist could agree to these terms, and when his visitor explains this, Frederick’s genial demeanor ices over. “My brothers and I,” he warns, “are practiced combatants in the field of public relations.”
He shows his visitor out into the January chill. Nearby, excavators are gnawing through concrete, as preliminary construction for the Met’s new David H. Koch Plaza gets under way.
As the Koch brothers reach their sunset years, each has left his mark in a vastly different way. If Frederick’s imprint is the most understated, Bill’s is as flamboyant as the Pucci silk that lines his suit jackets. Bill has lived on his own terms, played by his own rules—a maverick quality that led to some of his biggest triumphs, such as when he flipped the bird to the naysayers and claimed the America’s Cup. But it also mired him in bizarre tabloid controversies and bruising lawsuits, such as the ongoing legal imbroglio over charges that he kidnapped and falsely imprisoned an employee.
Bill is a connoisseur of proverbs and aphorisms. One he has used often is, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” But he seems to have difficulty discerning the sometimes thin line between justice and retribution. One could argue that Bill spent a lifetime digging graves.
Since boyhood, his search for the most basic tranquility often seemed only to create more turmoil. His pursuit of his rightful place within his family nearly destroyed it. The past tumult with his brothers has driven him to work doubly hard to forge the kind of togetherness among his own family—which includes five biological children and a stepson, whose ages range from eight to twenty-seven—that eluded him during his own upbringing.
He has done this, of course, in his own grandiose, Bill Koch way.
In recent years, he’s created a series of extravagant family compounds, where one day he hopes his children and grandchildren will gather. The Western town—for which Bill bought a movie set’s wardrobe so friends and family can dress in costume when they visit—is part of this plan. In late 2012, Bill seized what he called the “chance of several lifetimes” to buy two prized properties, one belonging to the Du Pont family and the other to Bunny Mellon, in the Cape Cod enclave of Osterville, where the billionaire has owned a home since the 1980s. Bill plans to join both plots, creating a Koch family version of the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port.
These estates, he believes, will give his children “a reason, when they get older and they have their own families, for staying together.” Bill will one day pass down a vast fortune to his descendants, but what he really hopes to leave to them—family equanimity—he can’t draft into an estate plan.
Over the course of his life, in addition to building an enviable fortune, Bill has amassed an incredible collection of art, antiques, and historical artifacts, especially those of the old American West. He has given thought to whether he should divide the Picassos and Monets, the Homers and Remingtons, among his children or perhaps donate his treasures to museums. His own father’s art collection had caused strife between Bill and his brothers. “I don’t want to do that to my kids,” he reflected. Nor did he want to foist his tastes on them. Bill saw in his collection his own life story of accomplishment and adversity, pleasure and pain, serenity and struggle. He wanted his children to experience “the thrill that I did doing my own thing; everybody has to find his or her own way in life,” he said. “… I’m much more interested in having my children being my legacy than this art collection being my monument.”
Charles also has an eye toward future generations. In the midst of the 2012 political campaign, and as Koch Industries posted record revenues of $115 billion, he became a grandfather. “My proudest accomplishment,” he said of the baby boy, born to his son, Chase. The child’s name is Charles.
The CEO has much to be proud of. The world will feel his impact long into the future. His company produces some of the most elemental ingredients of our modern society—energy, food, building and agricultural materials—and its products intersect every day with the lives of every American.
There is also the intangible, but no less pervasive, aspect of his influence. He has arguably done more than anyone else to promote free-market economics and the broader ideology surrounding it. By mainstreaming libertarianism, he helped to change the way people think. Absent his money and strategic vision, the country would be a different place. Few people can claim they changed the world, but this is undeniably true of Charles. And he’s not done.
At seventy-eight, Charles has no plans to retire—“I’m going to ride my bicycle until I fall off,” he has said. Koch Industries continues to grow and innovate under his leadership, always looking for new business opportunities, even if they take the company outside its comfort zone. In April 2013, word leaked that Koch Industries had commenced early talks to buy the Tribune newspaper chain—a prospect that stoked predictable outrage on the Left. The deal, involving turning around an ailing company and possible synergies with other Koch properties, such as papermaker Georgia-Pacific, seemed like a classic Koch transaction. But it also appeared to have an ideological component (though the company denied this was the basis of its interest). “They always have a desire to better understand how the media works and how they can influence coverage really on economic issues,” said one ex–Koch executive. “They would not have done this if it didn’t make good business sense, but this wasn’t just business.” In the end, Koch passed on Tribune, and instead it paid $7.2 billion for electronics maker Molex, a major supplier of components to Apple.
For its enormous size, Koch Industries is a deeply personal creation that embodies the values, passions, personality, and philosophy of its CEO. Charles diffused Market-Based Management throughout every crevice of his empire so his philosophy would live on after his time.
His choice of successor is a secret Charles keeps even from his closest friends. He’s often asked whether he’s grooming his son, Chase, who works for Koch Industries’ fertilizer division, to take over. “We have the best leaders and the most depth of leadership we’ve ever had,” is his standard nonreply. But in 2013, thirty-six-year-old Chase joined Koch Industries’ board of directors, a quiet sign that he’s taking on a more prominent leadership role in the company. In December he was named president of Koch Fertilizer.
Chase’s older sister, Elizabeth, another heir to the Koch kingdom, has taken little interest in the affairs of the family company. She’s a thirty-eight-year-old writer who lives in Brooklyn and runs a small, boutique publishing house. “I remember declaring to my parents in about ninth grade that I was a bohemian who was never going to play sports or do anything related to math,” she once told Town & Country. “My father is very big on creating value. I told him I may not make the world a better place—right away.” Charles’s literary daughter is deeply conflicted—haunted even—by her family’s colossal wealth, and she has written unsparingly about her “disturbed and convoluted relationship with money.”
“Even though I was born into an obscenely wealthy family, I do not toss money around like garden fertilizer, especially not in places where anyone is likely to see me,” she wrote in one essay. Elizabeth noted that she has “invested great amounts of creative energy into pretending” she does not come from money. “Gratitude is in me somewhere, but so buried in shame I have trouble finding it.”
Both of Charles’s children, family friends say, have their dad’s humble bearing. Like his own father, Charles tried to ensure that his kids did not grow up with a silver-spoon mentality. “Elizabeth and Chase are down to earth, and they’re just solid individuals,” said Bob Buford, president of Wichita’s Zenith Drilling. “That’s not easy when you grow up in the atmosphere they’ve grown up in.”
The way Charles’s children came up contrasts sharply with the ostentatious upbringings of their cousins, said a close family friend. “There’s no comparison to the way that David and Billy raised their children—no comparison.”
David, like his older brother, owns 40 percent of Koch Industries, and one day his three children stand to inherit a major stake in the company. His eldest son, David Jr., is fifteen. He’s a cerebral teen who’s passionate about aviation and history. “Very intellectual, very smart,” said his godfather, John Damgard. “He is a World War II history buff.” His sister, Mary Julia, thirteen, is a talented ballerina. “Drop dead beautiful,” Damgard said. “I don’t know how David is going to deal with the first guy that wants to take her out on a date.” John Mark, their youngest, is eight.
When the company eventually enters its third generation of family ownership, a new round of internal debate may well erupt over whether Koch Industries should remain private or go public. Their birthright, as Fred Koch warned their fathers, may be a blessing or a curse.
The Koch Industries of the future is likely to be a far less political place. Beyond donating to Republican candidates, Chase Koch has had little involvement with his father’s ideological projects. And according to one Koch veteran, many at the company wish Koch Industries would simply steer clear of politics. “A huge element of the company never understood why Koch got involved with politics to begin with,” he said. “A good core leadership group there wants to run the business. They don’t want to get into politics because there is no upside to the political game.”
Charles and David hold like-minded political beliefs, but history will judge each differently. “David is a true philanthropist,” the Koch veteran said. “David’s [giving] is about making the world a better place. Charles’s is about changing the world.” It seems to matter little to Charles whether his name endures; he cares that his ideas live on. But David wants to be remembered for his benevolence, and any New Yorker can tell you that evidence of his good deeds is becoming harder and harder to miss.
On January 14, 2013, less than a week before Barack Obama was inaugurated to his second term, the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated David for his latest act of munificence—$65 million to finance new fountains and a facelift for the four-block stretch of Fifth Avenue between 80th and 84th Streets.
When the museum first announced his contribution the previous year, at the peak of his political vilification, the Met went out of its way to state that David’s gift would not come with naming rights—a decision it later reversed. The Met’s director, Thomas Campbell, would say only that the museum’s board “reflected on the generosity and level of commitment that David’s gift represents,” and “thought it was the right thing to do.” Donors weren’t exactly standing in line to cut $65 million checks.
His contribution predictably made waves. “Boycott the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” one New York art critic fulminated, “until it rejects the Koch cultural bribe.”
At the groundbreaking ceremony, liberal New York politicians were placed in the awkward position of beatifying a man whose politics they repudiated. Seated to the right of the podium, then–Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer maintained a straight face throughout the ceremony, fully aware of the irony of the spectacle he was witnessing. When the Democrat finally rose from his chair to take his turn lauding the Met’s generous benefactor, he could not contain himself from saying what many others were thinking. “I never thought I’d see in my lifetime Manhattan liberals praising David Koch. Well, it’s $65 million!”
Of the Koch brothers political duo, David emerged from the election with the most damage done to his legacy—part of this was inevitable as the wealthiest man in media-centric Manhattan. The taint of politics now intrudes on his reputation as one of America’s most prolific philanthropists, the John D. Rockefeller of the modern era. In recent years, David has doled out eight- and nine-figure gifts with barely a second thought—$100 million for the David H. Koch Center, an ambulatory care facility at New York–Presbyterian Hospital; another $100 million for the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, plus $20 million to build childcare facilities for its staff; $25 million for the David H. Koch Center for Applied Research of Genitourinary Cancers at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center (where David receives treatment for his prostate cancer); and the list goes on. But his name has also become a homing beacon for left-wing activists. Protestors even occupied the American Museum of Natural History’s David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing, which he paid $20 million to underwrite in 2006.
“While people may not agree with his politics, what he’s doing has been extraordinarily helpful for the arts and in terms of medical research,” said Rachel Moore, the CEO of the American Ballet Theatre, on whose board David has served for nearly thirty years. “It’s too bad that people decided to cast aspersions on his philanthropy just because they don’t like his politics, because they’re very separate.”
In October 2013, environmental activists picketed Boston’s WGBH, where they delivered a petition, signed by 70,000 people, calling for the public television station to oust David from its board of trustees. A major financial backer of the station’s popular science series NOVA, he had served on the board since the late 1990s without controversy, until his political activities began to attract notice. David’s critics consider his role in bankrolling groups that sow doubt about the existence of climate change particularly objectionable. And they claim that his position may allow him to influence WGBH’s programming agenda and perhaps NOVA’s treatment of global warming.
There is no evidence to suggest David has ever attempted to sway coverage, though, as a major donor, he holds a certain indirect clout. This became clear after New York’s WNET, where David also served as a trustee, aired a documentary called Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream. The income equality–themed film, which debuted the week after the presidential election, focuses on 740 Park Avenue, the haven for New York’s ultrarich where David and his family reside. David is one of the film’s central characters, and it includes an interview with a former doorman who identified the billionaire as the 31-unit building’s stingiest resident. “We would load up his trucks—two vans, usually—every weekend, for the Hamptons… multiple guys, in and out, in and out, heavy bags. We would never get a tip from Mr. Koch. We would never get a smile from Mr. Koch. Fifty-dollar check for Christmas, too—yeah, I mean, a check! At least you could give us cash.”
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that David was “apparently so offended” by the documentary that he decided against making a hefty contribution to WNET. Eventually, he resigned from the board outright. The fallout caused another Koch-related documentary in the PBS pipeline to get defunded. Called Citizen Koch, it explores the increasing influence of money in politics, following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, and it centers in part on Governor Scott Walker’s battle with Wisconsin’s public employee unions. “It’s the very thing our film is about—public servants bowing to pressures, direct or indirect, from high-dollar donors,” the filmmakers told Mayer.
When David donated $100 million to Lincoln Center in 2008 to underwrite the renovation of the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater) concerns about the political baggage of the Koch surname were of a different sort. One long-serving Lincoln Center board member said he worried that people would associate the theater with the former mayor of New York City, Ed Koch. “I said, ‘Oh, Christ. People are going to call this the Koch’ ”—pronounced like scotch—“ ‘Theater.’ ”
“We were all aware of who he is and what he’d done and there were many who didn’t agree with his politics,” the board member noted, “but the fact of the matter is, he was very generous in his offer and, therefore, as a fiduciary, really, that was our sole consideration.” He added, “I hate his politics, but there’s no question of his genuine generosity in this area. It can’t be doubted.”
David’s pledge for the New York State Theater coincided with a moment in Manhattan’s philanthropic evolution when several major cultural institutions marketed branding opportunities as if they were sports franchises. David’s friend and 740 Park Avenue neighbor Stephen Schwarzman set the financial bar, in early 2008, for the naming rights of a major cultural landmark with his $100 million donation to the New York Public Library. In recognition of his gift, the library etched his name onto the exterior of its iconic, flagship location at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Schwarzman’s contribution made Lincoln Center fund-raisers realize the true value of the status symbol they had to offer. Noticing David and his wife, Julia, making a conscious effort to raise their profile in New York, they zeroed in on the industrialist as their lead prospect.
“There are some people who carry around with them a certain sense of guilt over how much money they have, or a certain unease about it—he was not one of those people,” said a former Lincoln Center official involved in the naming talks, who recalled the billionaire proudly showing off a model replica of his 25,000-square-foot Palm Beach villa during a meeting at his office. But he said that unlike other rich contributors, who give away money largely for reasons of self-aggrandizement, David wanted to ensure Lincoln Center remains a cultural mainstay for generations. The billionaire could have pressed for his name to remain on the theater in perpetuity—the deal granted to audio pioneer Avery Fisher, for whom another Lincoln Center venue is named—but he instead agreed to a term of fifty years (at which point his heirs will have the option to make another contribution to keep his name on the building). “In 50 years, you are going to need money again to fix this place up, and I don’t want to stand in the way of that,” David told Lincoln Center fund-raisers.
“That struck me as being incredibly enlightened and putting his own personal grandeur aside for the benefit of the public in New York City,” the former official said.
Yet no one slaps his name on a Lincoln Center theater—or the Met, the Smithsonian, and any number of museums and medical research centers—without consideration for how future generations will remember him. It is an act of legacy burnishing as old as the industrial world itself, the cleansing of an unfathomable fortune amassed through the most brutish of industries. Despite David’s motives, his philanthropy resembles the latest variation on Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth,” in which the tycoon who gives away his millions before he dies will find “no bar… at the gates of Paradise.”
“Carnegie, Mellon—take any of these great philanthropists or these great industrialists of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century,” the former Lincoln Center official said. “They are not remembered for the rape and pillage of our environment or the way they mistreated people. They are remembered for the contributions they’ve made financially as philanthropists. There is a long history of people who profit through other people’s detriments and who also do a lot of good in different ways, and I think that’s what will happen with the Kochs.”
On October 30, 2013, New York’s glitterati queued up in front of a headset-wearing event planner outside the David H. Koch Theater, located adjacent to two other Lincoln Center venues in a plaza featuring an elaborate fountain. She held a clipboard with a list of names, which she shouted over the rush-hour din as socialites took their turns mugging for the cameras in front of a Clinique “step and repeat” banner. When a bystander inquired about the glamorous, jewel-bedecked blonde who was presently posing for the paparazzi, a bearded photographer swiveled his head. “Don’t know, don’t care,” he replied. “She’s probably just married to some rich guy.”
That evening the American Ballet Theatre was opening its fall season with the world premiere of The Tempest, the ballet company’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, the former artistic director of Russia’s famed Bolshoi Ballet. The performance, largely underwritten by David Koch, marked the American Ballet Theatre’s return to this venue after nearly forty years. David played a behind-the-scenes role in making that happen. When he negotiated the naming rights of the theater, he expressed his desire—a wish, not a precondition—that the American Ballet Theatre might someday find a home in the newly rechristened David H. Koch Theater. “That was always his hope that we would perform there,” said Rachel Moore. David later helped Moore’s company negotiate a three-year contract to perform an annual two-week run at the Koch Theater.
As the 6:30 p.m. curtain approached, the celebrities began to trickle in. Down the red carpet sauntered Sigourney Weaver in a dark green sequined gown. Actress Bebe Neuwirth glided past wearing a red strapless dress, followed shortly by heiress Nicky Hilton in purple lace. Actor Alan Cumming wore a white cravat and Louboutin sneakers, stopping to flash a peace sign at the photographers before continuing on to the theater.
Finally, a six-foot blonde stepped in front of the cameras, wearing a turquoise floor-length gown. “Julia, look this way!” one of the paparazzi shouted. The photographers knew her by sight. The hostesses who had once thrown up speed bumps to Julia Koch’s social ascent were now mere footnotes. Julia had started out fitting society ladies for events like these when she worked for Adolfo; now she was one of Manhattan’s doyennes.
Julia arrived alone. Avoiding the red-carpet fanfare, her tuxedo-wearing husband, looking slim and tanned, joined her later in their balcony seats. Two short performances preceded The Tempest’s premiere, and as the orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3, David watched the ballerinas of the American Ballet Theatre dance en pointe in the George Balanchine–choreographed “Theme and Variations.” He admired as usual the graceful athleticism of the dancers, one of the reasons that David, an old jock himself, enjoyed this form of theater over others.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Koch empire, far less graceful performances were playing out. At that moment in central Texas, cleanup crews worked to contain 17,000 gallons of oil that had spewed from a pipeline owned by a Koch Industries subsidiary. In the political wing of Koch world, Americans for Prosperity was unleashing attack ads against two Democratic senators whose 2014 races could decide control of the upper chamber of Congress.
Julia was cochairing the Tempest-themed gala that would follow the premiere. During intermission, the wait staff stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the theater’s second-floor promenade, encircling the tables that had been set for the after party, which ballet benefactors had paid as much as $5,000 a person to attend. Event designer Bronson Van Wyck had transformed the space into a brooding seascape, which included a series of forty-foot pillars crafted to evoke tornadoes, a nod to the violent storm that opens the first act of Shakespeare’s tale. A soundtrack rumbled with the low growl of approaching thunder, and smoke machines billowed a light fog that clung around David’s feet as he clasped the hands of well-wishers and huddled in conversation with Peter Martins, the Danish dancer and choreographer who heads the New York City Ballet (the company that calls the Koch Theater home for the majority of the year). David may have been considered a conservative pariah in other parts of the country, but here he and Julia were royalty.
The curtain came up a short time later on Prospero, the sorcerer protagonist of Shakespeare’s tale, preparing to exact revenge against the brother who usurped his throne by summoning a tempest. The story is one of power, betrayal, retribution, and redemption—themes that David understands better than most.
The maelstrom that consumed his family had lasted twenty years. At the eye of their storm was the love and legacy of a father who taught his sons to be tough and competitive, to stand their ground and land their punches, never realizing that his boys would one day turn these attributes to the destruction of one another.
After putting some distance on their feud, Bill reflected that one of the final sticking points that had prevented him from achieving peace with his brothers was an item that held nothing more than sentimental value. It was the portrait of their father, painted by a little-known Southwestern artist named Herman de Jori, which hung in the family home under the glow of a display light. Bill ultimately let it go. The contested painting remains in Wichita, where it hangs in Charles Koch’s office to the right of his desk, the patriarch looking down on his son with his lips frozen in a tight smile.