The Rockefellers on the Turnpike
It might be stated as an axiom of American life that nothing ever turns out exactly as planned, and that the more monumental the undertaking, the more disastrous are the unexpected side effects. This has certainly been the case with the multimillion-dollar stretch of pavement called Interstate 95 or, more familiarly, the Connecticut Turnpike, which lines the New England seacoast, and which serves as the primary access to hundreds of thousands of New York commuter bedrooms.
The turnpike was preceded, more or less, by the Merritt Parkway. When the Merritt Parkway—running from the state’s southwest border roughly eastward to just outside New Haven—was completed in the middle 1930s, everyone who saw it had to admit that it was something of a showplace of a road. It curved gracefully about and across the low hills, offering to the motorist sudden and surprising vistas. Its wide center malls were grassed and landscaped with a great variety of trees. For a few weeks each spring, the parkway blazed coolly with pink and white flowering dogwood and azalea. Each of its many overpass bridges was of a different design. The Merritt Parkway made entering Connecticut a particularly pleasing experience, and caused suburban Connecticut to appear to be a singularly pleasant place to live. State officials claimed the parkway was worth its cost in public relations value alone. It would, among other things, lure new money into the state.
Of course, while it was being built, there were the usual allegations of corruption. Highway department officials, it was rumored, had been paid off by wealthy estate owners in Fairfield County in order to ensure that the highway did not venture too close to their houses. In return for favors, other landowners had allegedly been advised in advance of the highway’s intended path so that they could snap up land cheaply and then sell it, at high profits, to the state. And to be sure, when one studied the Merritt Parkway’s gerrymandering course on a map, it did seem as though some of its pretty curves and digressions—it managed to avoid the rich “estate area” of Greenwich, for example—were not entirely arbitrary or aesthetic. Still, it was a handsome piece of roadmaking when it was finished, there was no denying that.
The years went by, however, and the Merritt Parkway did its job almost too well, tempting people in unexpected numbers from the city into the Connecticut suburbs, and it became inadequate. As automobiles got wider, the Merritt Parkway seemed to grow narrower. As automobiles traveled faster, the parkway, with its hills and turns, seemed to become slower. Friday and Sunday afternoons were the worst, with traffic jammed for miles as motorists struggled to get out of, or back to, New York on weekends. And so, in the early 1950s, as part of the Eisenhower administration’s Interstate Highway program, construction on the new Connecticut Turnpike was begun.
The Connecticut Turnpike is a no-nonsense, no-frills affair—no dogwood trees, no planted center malls, nothing but concrete lanes and iron guardrails and blazing mercury lights and relentless toll booths spaced with gonglike regularity at intervals of roughly fourteen miles. The turnpike was designed to be flat and straight and fast, to whisk motorists from one end of the state to the other in less than two hours’ time, including a stop for a Howard Johnson’s hot dog. The turnpike played no favorites—enraging property owners whose homes and investments crumbled in its wake—as the old New Haven Railroad, which the turnpike roughly parallels, had not done. It plowed impartially through reproductions of English manor houses and through the steaming bowels of Bridgeport, taking with it tenements and tennis courts, destroying a mile of shoreline here and a three-hundred-year-old elm tree there with equal indifference. Today, the turnpike is over twenty years old, and it is still a tough, grueling road. The Merritt Parkway had banned trucks, which, as the suburbs burgeoned, demanding more goods and services, had also become an anachronistic notion. The turnpike welcomed trucks and truckers, not to mention buses, and the steady roar of the traffic it conveys can be heard, night and day, for miles away. Its stream of lights guides airplanes into La Guardia Airport from Boston. It’s an ugly, utilitarian thing but, as they say, it gets you there and it takes you back.
To be sure, a number of city planners and environmentalists have questioned not only the aesthetics but also the economics of the whole thing. If the millions of dollars—at over a million dollars a mile—that were spent on the Connecticut Turnpike had been spent, for a fraction of the cost per mile, on refurbishing the rickety old New Haven Railroad line and its wobbling tracks, would not New Yorkers and suburbanites alike have been given a cleaner, safer, cheaper, and faster way of getting into and out of the city? But the voices of these visionaries have not been heard. Today, the dirtiest, most expensive, riskiest, but unquestionably the quickest way to go to and from the northeast suburbs of New York City is on the turnpike.
What the Connecticut Turnpike connects New York City to is a series of Fairfield County towns with pretty Old English and Old Testament names such as Greenwich, Stamford, Weston, Westport, New Canaan, and Darien. These Connecticut towns are generally considered to comprise New York’s most desirable suburbs. Though there are pockets of suburban wealth in both New Jersey and on the northwestern shores of Long Island, neither “Jersey” nor “the Island” have ever managed to match the mystique of Connecticut’s superiority and style; they have long been regarded as suburbs for the middle class, and “middle class,” in New York terms, is sometimes another way of saying “Jewish.”
For years, the queen of these Connecticut towns was unquestionably Greenwich, but the turnpike—as it has done to towns throughout the length of its route—has changed Greenwich considerably. Where it used to be a wealthy, countrified bedroom town—with winding streets and private lanes, no street lights and no sidewalks and a single shopping street—it is now a mini-city with hotels, motels, expensive restaurants, glass office buildings, apartment houses, and condominiums. But though many old Greenwich residents deplore the changes, there is at least one family who have lived there for several generations, who have become so cozily a part of Greenwich that they almost symbolize the town, and who have never seen any reason to live elsewhere: the Rockefellers. Turnpike or no, they stay.
There are two kinds of suburban Rockefellers, and there is a difference. There are the Tarrytown Rockefellers, whose vast estate-compound at Pocantico Hills is the largest privately owned property in New York’s Westchester County. They are the Rockefeller Brothers—John D. III, David, Nelson, Laurance, and the late Winthrop—whom everybody knows about. Then there are the Greenwich Rockefellers, scarcely fifteen miles away from the others, in Connecticut, whom nobody has heard much of, which state of affairs suits the Greenwich Rockefellers perfectly. The Greenwich Rockefellers are sometimes called “the poor Rockefellers,” though they are hardly that.
“People, when they refer to us at all, tend to refer to us as ‘the other Rockefellers,’” says Godfrey S. Rockefeller, a tall, spare, scholarly-looking man who has the pronounced “Rockefeller nose.” “But we’ve never been the ones for publicity the way the other branch of the family have. We’re very private people. Of course, we used to be known as the Eastern Rockefellers, since my grandfather came east from Cleveland in 1867, long before John D. Rockefeller came.”
Mr. Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller’s grandfather was William Rockefeller, the older brother of the first John D. Rockefeller, whom everyone thinks of when thinking of Rockefellers. The two brothers could not have been more unlike. John D. Rockefeller was skinny, parsimonious, pious, and abstemious. For two generations in the John D. branch of the family, liquor was never served or consumed in any household. They had few friends, and life revolved around the family and the Baptist Church. Years later, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., described in his autobiography the lonely austerity of growing up in Cleveland:
Our social life, looking at it from today’s standards, was cramped. It centered on the church. We didn’t have in Cleveland a social life that other children had. We didn’t go to school and when children visited at Forest Hill they were apt to be the friends of Father and Mother. Everything centered around the home and the church and there was nothing else. Our prime interest in the Sunday school centered around the orchestra because we all played instruments, myself and my sisters. It was a sort of social group by itself. Otherwise we had no childhood friends, no school friends.
William Rockefeller, by contrast, was a big, jolly man who loved good drink and good times and was not the least bit churchly. He once commented that the best thing about Sunday was the sound of church bells ringing across a golf course. When he arrived in New York to represent his younger brother’s growing oil interests, he was immediately taken in by—and in a sense became the leader of—the so-called Standard Oil Gang, which included Henry H. Rogers, and James Stillman of the National City Bank; Stillman became William Rockefeller’s closest friend. In addition to his Standard Oil activities, William, along with Rogers and Adolph Lewisohn, put together the United Metals Selling Company in 1898. The company controlled, among other things, Anaconda Copper, and within a short time 55 percent of all the copper sold in the United States was being sold by the United Metals Selling Company. With his easygoing ways and great charm—qualities that permanently eluded his younger brother—William Rockefeller moved rapidly into New York society, and acquired a large summer place on the Hudson in fashionable Tarrytown. There, a few years later, despite the differences in their personalities, his brother John joined him, establishing for himself what would become the famous John D. Rockefeller family compound at Pocantico Hills.
In 1864, William had married Almira Geraldine Goodsell, and they had four children—William G., Emma, Percy, and Ethel, who later changed her name to Geraldine after her mother’s middle name. All four embarked upon a social life that made their cousins’ lives seem decidedly dour and gloomy. As one of William G.’s grandsons, another William Rockefeller, asserts, “There was never so much Baptism in our branch.” And as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., wrote of his cousins: “We children didn’t have what those children had and we used to notice the difference. They had a gay kind of social life, with many parties which we used to wish we could have.” John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—or “Senior,” as he would always be called—thoroughly disapproved of all this gaiety on the part of his neices and nephews. There were terrible rows on the subject of gaiety as opposed to piety and, already, a deep rift between the two branches of the family had begun to form. Finally, “to get away from his overpowering uncle,” as William G.’s grandson puts it, William G. pulled up stakes in Tarrytown and moved across the state line to Greenwich, Tarrytown’s rival as a summer resort. He was followed by his brother Percy, and the family rift was complete. It would remain for a hundred years.
William Rockefeller’s children may have inherited their father’s ebullience and sense of fun, but they also inherited some peculiarities that have tended to show up in both “lines” of the Rockefeller family. (For example, William Sr.’s and John D. Sr.’s father—still another William—was once indicted on a charge of having impaired the morals of the family’s servant girl; he had to move, one jump ahead of the sheriff, with his family from Moravia, New York, to Owego, in another jurisdiction, to avoid going to jail; here, in a small, untended graveyard by the side of a country road, repose a number of early, unheralded, and perhaps best-forgotten Rockefellers.)
William Rockefeller’s son William G., founder of the Greenwich branch, for another example, became a hopeless alcoholic, to the horror of his teetotaling cousins. Daughter Gerladine (née Ethel) was a beautiful and popular debutante who had a passion for animals—canines, in particular. Soon her passion began to seem more like an obsession. During her lifetime she owned literally hundreds of dogs. She married Marcellus Huntley Dodge, a grandson of the founder of the Remington Arms Company, and became a matriarch whom even her older brothers and sister dared not cross. She ran the Dodge family office and her husband, “Marcie,” with an iron hand, and acquired more and more dogs. She built a huge estate, called Giralda, on hundreds of acres in Madison, New Jersey, and filled it with dark and heavy furniture and hangings, and she built a large and extraordinarily ugly mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street in Manhattan, and filled that with more dark and heavy furniture and hangings. Though she never spent a night in the New York house, she bought adjacent pieces of property as soon as they became available until she owned most of the north side of the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and the entire Fifth Avenue frontage between her house and the Knickerbocker Club on the Sixty-second Street corner. These lots she kept vacant, and let them become overgrown with weeds and scrubby trees—to provide a “woods” for her dogs, though the dogs never visited the New York house either.
For years, the Dodge mansion remained New York’s mystery house—shuttered and locked and dark and forbidding, illuminated only by a faint light from behind a barred caretaker’s window. The reason—often wondered about—for the erratic placement of exterior windows was that the entire top floor of the mansion had been designed for use as a kennel. Geraldine Dodge was odd, all right, but a personal tragedy made her even odder. Her only child, a son on whom she doted, was traveling through Europe with a fellow Princeton graduate when his car struck a tree and he was instantly killed. After the accident, Mrs. Dodge began to withdraw. She secluded herself in her New Jersey house, and she and Marcie Dodge began to occupy separate houses on the estate, just far enough apart so that they could “see each other’s lights” at night. Occasionally, they visited each other. Finally, her husband had her declared incompetent and made her his legal ward. After his death, she became the ward of her banks and lawyers. She lived on and on. For eleven more years, not a soul entered her Fifth Avenue house save her elderly caretaker, who had one dog for company. Mrs. Dodge died in 1975.
When the contents of Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge’s houses went under the hammer in 1976, her possessions—including a collection of bronze animals and strange bronze hands—brought close to seven million dollars at Sotheby Parke Bernet. It was not, the auction house admitted, the intrinsic value of the collection that produced this imposing figure. Instead, the mystery and publicity surrounding the strange lady brought throngs of the curious to the auction held on her New Jersey estate, and made everyone want to go home with a souvenir of the riddle that had been Geraldine’s life. Huge sums were bid for pots and pans, for her ancient hats and fur coats, and for Louis Vuitton trunks that had not made an Atlantic crossing in more than sixty years. Later, the New Jersey property itself was sold to the Prudential Insurance Company for use as a conference center. The Fifth Avenue property was sold for ten million dollars, and the house was razed in the early spring of 1977; a luxury apartment tower will rise in its place.
Geraldine’s brothers, William G. and Percy Rockefeller, married two sisters, daughters of their father’s best friend, James Stillman. William G. Rockefeller married Elsie Stillman, and Percy Rockefeller married Isabel Stillman. Both families remained in Greenwich, and each couple produced five children. The William G. Rockefellers had four boys and one girl—William Avery, Godfrey, James, John, and Almira. The Percy Rockefellers countered with four girls and one boy—Isabel, Winifred, Faith, Gladys, and Avery. All ten children grew up in Greenwich as double first cousins on comfortable estates on Lake Avenue, Mead Lane, and Middle Patent Road. The cousins remained remarkably loyal to Greenwich. William Avery, Godfrey, James, John, and Avery all married and established residences of their own in the community—Godfrey and his brother James in houses that are back to back. Faith Rockefeller married Jean Model and settled in Greenwich, as did her sister Winifred after marrying Brooks Emeny. Almira defected when she married, and moved to Philadelphia. Isabel Rockefeller and William Avery Rockefeller tightened the family ties even further when they married Frederic and Florence Lincoln. Today, there are seven different Rockefeller families, all interrelated, all close, representing the third and fourth generations of the family who have favored the Connecticut suburb.
When William Rockefeller, Sr., died in 1922 at the age of eighty-one, he left an estate of close to $200 million and a will that was unusual in several respects. For one thing, in contrast to his brother John D., who gave away nearly $600 million to charity, fun-loving William made no philanthropic bequests whatever. He did, however, devise a will designed to keep his fortune intact as long as legally possible—“through lives in being plus twenty-one years,” that is, through at least two generations, in a series of trusts, with distribution not to be made until the fourth generation. He left heirs, in other words, who had not yet been born. He made a single exception with his favorite son, Percy, who was left three quarters of his trust outright. Commenting on this arrangement a number of years later, in 1937, the New York Journal-American said:
William Rockefeller, extending his patriarchal beneficence into the fourth generation, has endowed his country with some fifty prospective millionaires in their own right—all but two of them had not yet entered this world when he left it and nearly half of whom are still unborn.
Nothing like this is likely ever to happen again. Inheritance taxes took only one fourth of William Rockefeller’s estate. Today they would take three fourths of an estate that size, and the rates are more likely to be raised than lowered. So there probably will not be another such dynastic transmission of wealth.
Despite the “dynastic transmission,” William Rockefeller’s heirs have not displayed quite the talent at holding on to—and making more—money that their Tarrytown cousins have. Shrewd investments within the John D. Rockefeller line have succeeded in vastly increasing the original fortune. With the William branch, it has generally been the opposite. A myriad of costly divorces, for one thing, has taken a toll of William’s estate. With the exception of Percy—who, as his father may have foreseen, had a knack for making money in Wall Street in both a rising and a falling market—the Greenwich Rockefellers have tended to have either bad luck or little flair for making money. As a result, none today is as wealthy as the patriarch might have hoped.
At the same time, the Greenwich Rockefellers have displayed some decidedly un-Rockefeller behavior. One girl married a man forty years older than she. Another created a stir in the newspapers while she was at Vassar by having her aviator boyfriend drop love letters to her from the sky. Godfrey Rockefeller startled the family by marrying a Jewess—or at least a woman who was Jewish by heritage. She was Helen Gratz, a baptized Episcopalian but also a member of the distinguished Sephardic family of Philadelphia, and a collateral descendant of the beautiful Rebecca Gratz, whom Sir Walter Scott used as his model for Rebecca in Ivanhoe.
When traditional Rockefeller Spartanism has been tried in the Greenwich branch, it either has been overdone or has backfired. One Greenwich Rockefeller third-generation son was angrily disinherited for failing to meet his father’s boat upon the latter’s return from Europe. Another received so little spending allowance while at Yale that he had to go to work in New Haven as a night telephone operator in order to eat. Still another Greenwich Rockefeller refused to build a swimming pool for his family until his daughter lost enough weight to look attractive in a swimsuit.
Even Percy, considered the family financial genius in the Greenwich branch, became the center of a certain amount of scandal following the great stock market crash of 1929. He had, it was claimed, made a lot of money in the falling market by selling “short”—selling, in other words, stocks that he did not really own but had contracted to buy at a future date, and probably at a much reduced price. There was a great public outcry about the short selling of stocks, though this had been a common Wall Street custom and remains one, under stiffer regulations, today. Percy Rockefeller was summoned to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, which was investigating stock market practices. He defended his actions and affirmed that in the “tremendous depreciation” since 1929, he had lost many millions of dollars. He needed money, and he claimed that his short selling had netted him only $550,000, which, he said, was a “slight sum” compared with his “tremendous losses.” But Percy was a jolly soul with a host of friends in and out of Washington, and he was given no more than a light reprimand.
The Greenwich Rockefellers have always favored Yale, while the Tarrytown Rockefellers have preferred Harvard, Princeton, and, in the case of Nelson, Dartmouth. And so the cool distance that continues to exist between the two branches of the great family is based on tradition, geography, and education—not to mention a certain discrepancy in bank balances. Over the years, at least two attempts have been made to mend the split with a huge catchall family reunion, but on both occasions, negotiations fell apart on the issue of venue. Naturally, the Greenwich Rockefellers wanted the gathering to take place in Tarrytown—“They have so much more room there,” says one—at the estate most of the Greenwich group had never seen. But Tarrytown, which has always regarded Greenwich as family mavericks, not to say poor relations, demurred. And so most of the Greenwich Rockefellers have never met their Tarrytown cousins.
There are also differences in attitude and life style between the Greenwichites and the Tarrytonians. “Everything is very grand at Pocantico Hills,” says Mrs. Godfrey Rockefeller, munching a peanut butter sandwich in the library of her big Georgian house on Mead Lane—typical of the cozy, informal Greenwich Rockefeller style. “Even the children’s playhouse there is three stories tall. They’ve tended to concentrate on philanthropy, public service, and corporate finance. We’re more interested in our homes, our families, and our pleasant lives. We’ve stayed out of the limelight.” Staying out of the limelight involves a great deal of visiting back and forth between the Godfrey Rockefellers’ and their Greenwich relatives’ houses—Rockfields, the James Stillman Rockefellers’ place just behind them, and cousin Avery’s pleasant Wild Wings on Lake Avenue. Godfrey Rockefeller, a retired banker, is still an avid skier (a leg recently broken in a skiing accident will, he insists, not keep him off the slopes). He and his family keep a winter ski chalet in Mad River, Vermont—a chalet with its own private ski lift. “Whenever anybody thinks of Rockefellers, they think of the John D. branch,” he says a trifle wistfully. “But we’ve accomplished things too. It would be nice if someone acknowledged us once in a while. But most people, except here in Greenwich, don’t know we exist.”
Currently, the most distinguished of the Greenwich Rockefellers are probably James Stillman Rockefeller and his nephew William. James Stillman Rockefeller, the son of William G. and Elsie Stillman Rockefeller, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale (1924). Married to the former Nancy Carnegie and now in his mid-seventies, he rose from a job with the brokerage firm of Brown Brothers & Company to the position of president, and then became chairman of the board of the National City Bank of New York. In the process he collected directorships of such prestigious corporations as National Cash Register, Kimberly-Clark, and Pan American World Airways. His son Andrew (Yale ’51) lives nearby in Greenwich.
William Rockefeller, a hearty, husky bear of a man, is Yale ’40. He is the son of William Avery Rockefeller, the grandson of William G. Rockefeller, the great-grandson of William Rockefeller, Sr., and the great-great-grandson of the William Rockefeller whom everybody on both sides of the family would prefer to forget, who allegedly toyed with a servant girl and yet who sired sons who would make the name Rockefeller internationally synonymous with enormous wealth.
When the present William married his pretty wife, Molly, his mother said to the bride, “You realize that you will have twenty-nine first cousins living in Greenwich.” At first, Molly Rockefeller thought that her mother-in-law’s comment was made out of a sense of family pride. She soon realized, however, that it was intended as a warning. Perhaps because of this, the young William Rockefellers defected from family tradition somewhat and settled in a large old house on Grandview Avenue in nearby Rye—“where you can walk to the station, walk to Rye Country Day School, and walk to the hospital.” William Rockefeller says: “It wasn’t just all the relatives, but as far as we were concerned, Greenwich had just gotten too big. It may sound snobbish to say so, but when I was growing up the people who composed Westchester and Fairfield County society were a very small group. Everybody knew everybody else. We dated girls from Larchmont, Pelham Manor, Greenwich, and Darien. But as these towns get bigger they get more isolated and self-contained. I grew up in Greenwich when Greenwich was nice. But now every time a company promotes a man to a big spot, the place he wants to move to is Greenwich, and all the big old places get broken up to make room for the new people. But Rye, because of its location, is different. It’s on a peninsula, so it can’t get bigger. There’s just no more land.”
Bill Rockefeller remembers when, growing up in Greenwich, there were really two kinds of Greenwich society. “There were the people who lived in the city and came to Greenwich for the summer, and there were the people, like us, who lived in Greenwich and went away for the summer. The two groups never met.” For years, Greenwich Rockefellers have been summering in the Adirondacks near Saranac Lake (while the Tarrytown Rockefellers summer in Seal Harbor, Maine), where great-grandfather William Rockefeller—“who was a great sport”—bought a large tract of land and built an elaborate “camp,” with separate buildings for dining, cooking, sleeping, etc. The family has managed to hold on to much of the acreage, and Bill Rockefeller, his brother Frederic (Yale ’47), and his sister, Mrs. Miles J. McMillin, the wife of a Wisconsin publisher, and their families share several of the numerous cottages. “It is a bit clannish, I admit,” says Bill Rockefeller. “We sit on the porch and watch the kids.”
Bill Rockefeller is a partner in the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Shearman & Sterling, and serves on the boards of a number of worthy institutions, including the Miriam Osborn Memorial Home (for elderly women) and the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is a past president of the ASPCA, and is currently president of the Metropolitan Opera. He used to do much more, until one of his three daughters (“No sons, much to my father’s eternal disappointment”) asked at the dinner table, “Which meeting are you going to tonight?” He was reminded then of a little ditty his mother once composed:
When to meetings I go,
With the greatest of skill,
I always contrive
To keep perfectly still.
For if I show interest,
Or seem a bit witty,
Wham, there I am,
On another committee.
Molly Rockefeller recorded this message in needlepoint on a pillow for her husband.
“People nowadays tend to give their children things instead of time,” Rockefeller says. “I found I was guilty of the same thing. It burns me up to see the way people in Rye will give a kid a Thunderbird for his eighteenth birthday; the parking lot at Rye Country Day School is jammed with Thunderbirds. When I was a kid in Greenwich we had bicycles.”
The youngest generation of Tarrytown Rockefellers—the so-called Cousins—have frequently claimed that it is an onerous thing to be born with the name Rockefeller. The fortune that John D. Rockefeller left is now so vast that it has a life of its own, a life that can crush the dreams or ambitions of mere human beings. Several of the Cousins in the John D. branch have tried to give their money away in order to attain freedom from its great weight. But it cannot be done. They are bound to their wealth by so many trusts and legal instruments that it is theirs to live with and deal with like a congenital disease. Some have talked of changing their names in order to be rid, in part, of the weighty connotation.
It turns out not to be easy to be part of the “poor branch” of the family, either, for somewhat different reasons. “It was very tough on the girls growing up,” says William Rockefeller. “They were always being teased about their name. Their friends all assumed that they were enormously rich. Particularly after Nelson became governor, and all the facts about how rich that side of the family was came out in the press, my daughters couldn’t understand why we weren’t living on the same grand scale. They’d say to me things like, ‘Why can’t we buy it, Daddy—we’re Rockefellers, aren’t we?’ It was a very tough thing for them to understand.”
Perhaps that is why, now that they are grown, all three daughters are turning their backs on both Greenwich and Rye, on New York suburbia altogether, and have scattered in disparate directions. The oldest, Mary, is married and raising two boys in Chicago. The second, Edith, married to a sales executive with Boeing, lives in Seattle and works as a cartographer. The youngest, Sally, graduated recently from the University of Vermont, where she majored in forest management, and then headed for the great outdoors to work on reforestation projects.
When she was a student at the Oldfields School in Maryland, Sally Rockefeller encountered a classmate named Eileen Rockefeller. Eileen turned out to be one of David Rockefeller’s daughters. “At that point, I’d never even met David,” says Sally’s father. Despite the century-old family schism, and the fact that, according to strict genealogy, the two girls were a full generation apart, they became friends.
Now that his daughters are grown and gone, Bill Rockefeller has a new project that greatly excites him. “After years of trying to get people to give me money,” he says, “for Cancer, the Metropolitan Opera, the ASPCA, and so on, I’m finally in the delightful position of being able to give some money away.” He has been made president of the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation—appropriately, since he was one of the few people in the family who got on rather well with his despotic great-aunt. Since Geraldine Dodge’s husband and son both predeceased her, her entire fortune was left to charity. The Geraldine Rockefeller Foundation will not nearly approach in size the massive philanthropic instruments created by the John D. branch, but with the sale of Giralda, the Manhattan real estate, the money achieved from the Parke Bernet sale, plus her own and her husband’s personal fortunes, it will not be small potatoes by any means.
The final thrust of the new foundation has not been completely determined, but Bill Rockefeller feels that animals, for which Geraldine Dodge had such a passion, should be at least partial beneficiaries. Secondary schools, both public and private, will also benefit, along with programs such as Head Start, which help underprivileged children. The rest of the foundation’s emphasis will probably be felt in New Jersey, where she lived, in education and in the arts.
“She may have been difficult,” says Bill Rockefeller, “but she left a will that we’re very proud of.” It is a will that may help change the image of the Greenwich Rockefellers, and establish them as philanthropists in their own right.
As for Tarrytown, across Westchester County on the banks of the Hudson, William Rockefeller waves a jaunty hand from his home on the Sound, and says, “Anyone with any sense knows that summers are cooler on the Sound than they are on the river.”