1000 LAKE SHORE DRIVE
“All the Rockefellers are peculiar.” This was the sentiment expressed, in the summer of 1978, by a former Rockefeller-by-marriage, Mrs. Barbara Sears Rockefeller—born Jievute Paulekiute—the famous “Bobo.” The ex—Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller was referring specifically to such members of the family as her husband’s aunt Alta Rockefeller Prentice, who lived reclusively on a vast Massachusetts farm surrounded by a collection of ancient automobiles; to a cousin, Ethel Rockefeller, who changed her name to Geraldine, married Marcellus Huntley Dodge and shared a New Jersey estate with him, though in separate houses, and collected dogs; to William G. Rockefeller, a chronic alcoholic; even to her former brother-in-law Nelson Rockefeller, who had a curious fondness for fires and firemen, and coincidentally managed to be on the scene at the time of two major conflagrations, where he was able to put on a fireman’s helmet and help man the hoses—at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at his Governor’s Mansion in Albany. But the oddest Rockefeller of all was certainly Edith Rockefeller.
Edith was the second-oldest daughter of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the founder of the fortune. In her youth, Edith displayed few signs of becoming a future grande dame and social force. On the contrary, she was a demure, shy child, with pale hair done up in modest ringlets, gray eyes, a high forehead—not really pretty, but not bad-looking, either. Her favorite pastime was riding her bicycle, and her principal social activity was teaching a Sunday-school class. She was considered bookish. All this changed, however, on November 26, 1895, when she married Harold Fowler McCormick, the son of Cyrus Hall McCormick, Chicago’s “Reaper King.”
Edith’s older sister Alta had also married a Chicagoan, Ezra Parmalee Prentice, but the Prentices had moved East. The new Mr. and Mrs. McCormick, however, announced that they would make Chicago their home, and moved into a huge, turreted stone mansion on Lake Michigan at 1000 Lake Shore Drive. Chicago was still a very young city, a creation of the railroad-building boom that had followed the Civil War, and just two years before Edith Rockefeller’s arrival it had made its first bid for greatness, and to be taken seriously as an important metropolis, with its World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the same Exposition that started Julius Rosenwald on the road to riches when his brother-in-law got the ice-cream concession. Chicago was proud of its muscular newness, and even of its growing reputation as a capital of vice and crime. Guidebooks were actually printed to direct out-of-towners to the local dens of sin—to one street where every building consisted of a saloon, and to a number of other areas devoted exclusively to prostitution.
Chicago boasted of being the home of the “world’s richest streetwalker,” who called herself Waterford Jack (her real name was Frances Warren) and who claimed to have worked the streets without missing a night for ten solid years until she was able to open an establishment of her own, where, after deducting her commission, she invested the earnings of her girls and helped them to become rich as well. The banks Waterford Jack used were proud to have her patronage. Down the street from Waterford Jack’s place was another celebrity in this “Gomorrah of the West,” a barkeep named Mickey Finn, whose specialty was a concoction made from raw alcohol that had been soaked in snuff, plus a secret ingredient he claimed to have obtained from a voodoo witch doctor. So powerful was his potion that, after downing it, its victims remained comatose for days, and Finn kept drugged gentlemen in stacks in his back room until they came to—usually with no recollection of what had happened to them—having been relieved meanwhile of their wallets and other valuables.
Coincidentally, the World’s Columbian Exposition also marked one of the last public functions of the great Chicago dowager Mrs. Potter Palmer, the jewel-encrusted belle of an old Kentucky family who had married one of Chicago’s richest men. Potter Palmer had started out as a dry-goods merchant, and had made himself wealthy—and popular—by initiating the uncommon practice of letting his customers take goods home from his store on approval. From laces and pinafores he had gone on into real estate, and had built the Palmer House, the city’s most luxurious hotel, which he presented to his bride as a wedding gift. For more than twenty years before Edith Rockefeller’s arrival, Bertha Palmer had been the unquestioned ruler of Chicago’s social seas. When royalty visited, a reception at Mrs. Palmer’s was a required part of the schedule. Her annual New Year’s Day party provided the only barometer in town as to who was who. Every year her guest list was scrutinized with care and some anxiety since, unlike Mrs. Astor, whose list was rigidly predictable, Bertha Palmer’s was not, and she had a way of dropping people she felt had fallen from fashion. She also ran the city’s annual Charity Ball, the principal fund-raiser for worthy causes and the “deserving” poor. Her taste in art, for its time, was avant-garde. She was among the first Americans to appreciate the Barbizon and Impressionist painters, and her collections of Monet, Degas, and Corot became the nucleus of the Chicago Institute of Art. She was also an early feminist, and at the Columbian Exposition her domain was the Woman’s Building, which she saw to it was designed by a woman architect, and which was devoted to exhibits heralding the strides of American women in science, politics, the professions, education, and the arts, as well as displays of model kitchens, nurseries, and more traditional female endeavors. After finishing her work with the Exposition, Mrs. Palmer more or less retired from the Chicago scene, and began spending more and more time at her house in Newport and in Europe. The post of Chicago’s grande dame lay open. Edith Rockefeller McCormick would step forward to fill it.
Twenty-odd years earlier, Bertha Palmer had established her social leadership by orchestrating, in Chicago, the wedding and reception of her sister Ida to Frederick Dent Grant, the son of the President of the United States. Both the President and Mrs. Grant had come out for the festivities, and were almost if not quite outshone by the beautiful hostess and her emeralds and diamonds. Edith McCormick would launch herself in Chicago in an equally dramatic fashion. The McCormicks had had, in short order, four children—John Rockefeller, Fowler, Muriel, and Mathilde—but Muriel was her mother’s clear favorite. Kindergartens and nursery schools were not common in the United States in the early 1900s—they were a European upper-crust convention—and when little Muriel McCormick reached the age of five, her mother decided to start her own school for toddlers. Edith McCormick’s kindergarten, however, was drawn along far less egalitarian lines than Edith Stern’s some two dozen years later. The McCormick classes were designed exclusively for little girls of Chicago’s upper crust, including the various McCormick relatives. (One young pupil was Felicia Gizycka, the daughter of Count Josef Gizycki and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson, a cousin by marriage.) Edith McCormick appropriated her mother-in-law’s ballroom for a classroom, hired a small staff of French teachers, and all the classes, as well as the games, were conducted in French.
Now, having established “mon lycée,” as she understandably called it, she began to make a series of spectacular public appearances. Though Edith McCormick’s collection of jewels was not as large as Mrs. Potter Palmer’s, it included certain single pieces that were considered beyond price. There was, for example, one necklace, specially assembled by Cartier, which was composed of ten large emeralds spaced along a rope of 1,657 diamonds. Another necklace was fabricated, reportedly, from the Russian crown jewels—twenty-three large pearls, twenty-one large diamonds of various sizes and shapes, plus a hundred “lesser” diamonds. One long rope of perfectly matched pearls had cost $2,000,000. Though she had taught Sunday school as a young woman, she detested hymns; she had, she said, been forced to sing them so often as a child by her pious Baptist father. But she loved opera, and selected the Chicago Opera Company for her special patronage. She would arrive at the opera in her plum-colored Rolls Royce driven by a chauffeur in a plum-colored uniform, in her jewels, and wearing her famous ermine cape composed of 275 skins which fell like a tent around her. News that Mrs. McCormick was planning to attend the opera was enough to guarantee a sold-out performance. A small woman, she was particularly proud of her little feet and slender ankles. When she was helped from her car, she was always careful to flash a glimpse of ankle, around one of which she often wore a gold bracelet—a fashion touch previously unheard of in Chicago.
The McCormick dinners at 1000 Lake Shore Drive were more like state occasions than parties. And no wonder. Mrs. McCormick demanded that menus and place cards be printed in French for every meal, including breakfast. For formal dinners, the menus and place cards were engraved in gold. Seated dinners for two hundred or more were commonplace, with a footman stationed behind every other chair. Four butlers were required to serve a simple luncheon for two. For large gatherings, guests might be served on the golden service which Napoleon had given his sister Pauline. It consisted of over a thousand pieces containing over 11,000 ounces of gold.* It was said of Edith McCormick that “she taught Chicago how to wear and to own a dress suit.” Still, for all their opulence, there was not much merriment at Edith McCormick’s parties, and at her first formal dinner in Chicago she noticed this, recalling later, “My party was not very well under way before I noticed a certain lack of spontaneity that had marked the other dinners I had attended. The gaiety seemed forced and formal.” She asked her husband why this might have been, and he told her, “My dear, don’t you realize that these red-blooded young Chicagoans are used to having their liquor? They simply must have their cocktails, their wine, their highballs and cordials.” But this was too much for Edith. She might have rebelled against her teetotaling father in hymn singing, but she would not break her girlhood pledge to him never to drink or serve alcohol in her home. Though her husband and (privately) her guests continued to complain, evenings at the McCormicks’ remained relentlessly sober.
There was intoxication of sorts, of course, to be gained from viewing the furnishings of 1000 Lake Shore Drive itself, which Edith had assembled to recall the days of the French royal court. This was due in part to the fact that one of Edith’s odd beliefs was that she was descended from the noble de La Rochefoucauld family of France. Though the Rockefellers had originally come from Germany, Edith saw the name Rockefeller as a kind of corruption of Rochefoucauld, and occasionally signed her letters “Edith de La Rockefeller.” (Edith also believed that she was the reincarnation of the child bride of King Tutankhamun.)
Certainly the house contained many splendid things. One rug had been the gift of the Shah of Persia to the Winter Palace of the Tsars of Russia at St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great. Later, it had been presented to the Emperor of Austria in gratitude for the Austrians’ aid to Russia. When it eventually made its way to a London auction house, Edith bought it for $185,000. In the large room which Edith called the Empire Room, there were four of Napoleon’s royal chairs, two marked with the crest and initial “N” and two marked with “B” for Bonaparte. On the fourth floor of the house was a 15,000-volume library of rare books. One book alone was valued at $30,000. There was an Histoire Héliodore worth $6,000, a Pâtissier François dated 1655, and an illuminated Byzantine manuscript of the New Testament in Greek valued at $14,000. And there was much, much more. In her Aubusson-carpeted bedroom, Edith McCormick slept in an oversized gilded Louis XVI bed, and on her dressing table reposed a long gold box with the initials “M.L.” emblazoned on its top in diamonds, said to have been a gift from Napoleon to the Empress Marie Louise. The various halls and sitting rooms were filled with Buddhas from Chinese temples, tapestries from Brussels, and old English silver pieces dating back to the time of Oliver Cromwell.
To care for the acreage of her house and its contents, Edith had her staff—among them a first and second butler, two parlor maids, a coachman, footman, houseman, and no fewer than six detectives. One man’s daily duty was simply to polish the silver. Another’s was to wind the clocks. Edith’s personal maid had an assistant, called the sewing woman, and the sewing woman had her own assistant, called the mending woman. Another woman only arranged the flowers. In the kitchen were a chef and a sous-chef to work at the big coal stoves—Edith would not permit the use of gas—and any number of scullery helpers. Perhaps because of the sheer logistics of the problem, Edith McCormick refused to learn any of her servants’ names. Nor would she speak to any of them, nor were they permitted to speak to her. In fact, she would speak to only two members of her staff—her chief steward and her personal secretary. All instructions were then channeled down through the chain of command. When she ventured out in her car, the full schedule of stops, times, and pick-up points would be typed out for the chauffeur in advance, thus eliminating the need for any communication between Mrs. McCormick and her driver.
Only once was the unalterable rule, that no member of the staff should ever interrupt Mrs. McCormick during dinner, broken. This was when her oldest child, John Rockefeller McCormick, was ailing with scarlet fever at the family’s country place in Lake Forest. After much discussion in the servants’ quarters, it was decided to whisper to Mrs. McCormick during dinner that the little boy had died. Mrs. McCormick, appearing more annoyed by the interruption than by the news, merely nodded and the dinner party continued.
Though Edith Rockefeller McCormick may often have seemed an extraordinarily cold—if not totally unfeeling—woman, there was no doubt about her devotion to the opera, and to uplifting the musical tastes of her adopted city. (To be sure, it might be argued that, on the evening of her son’s death, she felt that her first obligation was to her dinner guests, who were still living, rather than to her child, who was past help—but still, one wonders.) Her pre-opera dinner parties were particularly harrowing. For these occasions the hostess kept a small jeweled clock beside her place at the head of the table, along with a printed card listing the number of minutes she expected each course of the meal to take—“Soup: six minutes; fish: seven and one half minutes,” and so on. The purpose of this was to ensure that the McCormicks and their guests would be in their seats at the opera house punctually for the opening curtain. Guests on opera nights had to be on their toes, or half-eaten plates of food would be snatched away from them by the efficient servants because Mrs. McCormick had signaled that the allotted time for the course was up. She got away with it because—well, because she was a very rich woman who was used to getting her way, and because there was no one of sufficient audacity around to challenge her.
She hated anything that smacked of scandal, and was exceptionally sensitive to public criticism of anything in which a whiff of immorality was involved. But her tastes in opera were quite modern, and she was influential in bringing Mary Garden to Chicago to sing the title role of Salomé, the relatively new Richard Strauss opera based on a verse play by Oscar Wilde.
Mary Garden, to begin with, was herself controversial. By all accounts she was as much a performer as a singer—a kind of early-day Maria Callas. One went to see Mary Garden more than to hear her. She was a genius at generating publicity about herself, and cared little whether the publicity was good or bad, as long as Mary Garden’s name was mentioned. She was a legendary beauty, and was said to have scattered broken hearts across the map of the United States and Europe. It was said that she had lovers by the score. It was said that she had once given birth to an illegitimate child. Whenever a new rumor about Mary Garden’s freewheeling private life appeared, she called a press conference to deny it, thereby creating more columns of print. She had become, in the process, an enormous box-office draw, and she translated her flamboyant living style into flamboyant performances on the operatic stage. For all of this, there were some people in Chicago who felt that Mary Garden was stuff too strong even for the tastes of “red-blooded Chicagoans.”
Then there was the problem of Salomé. Richard Strauss was a hugely popular composer, but the name of Oscar Wilde had fallen under a definite cloud. Wilde had come to Chicago in the early 1880s, and Chicago had not been impressed with the fey young man who lolled about on sofas swathed in fur lap robes and silk scarves and who sniffed a nosegay of fresh lilies while he talked incomprehensibly about “the new aesthetics” and “art for art’s sake.” Wilde’s timing for his Chicago visit was also unfortunate, in that he arrived at the same moment as John L. Sullivan, who had just won the world’s heavyweight title. The newspapers made much of the contrasting styles of the two visiting celebrities—Sullivan, the shining example of American manhood, and Wilde, the epitome of European decadence. One paper called Wilde an “ass-thete.”
Then, in 1895, Oscar Wilde had unwisely chosen to sue the Marquis of Queensberry over allegations concerning Wilde’s relationship with the Marquis’s son Lord Alfred Douglas. The papers of the day had been very dainty about reporting the exact nature of this untidy matter—so dainty, in fact, that most American readers had no clear idea what it was that Oscar Wilde had been accused of doing. Even the word “pederasty” was considered too strong for print, and so readers were required to use their imaginations about what had been going on. All that was clear was that it was something “unnatural” and vile, that Wilde had been carried off to Reading Gaol for his part in the nastiness, and that Wilde was a degenerate and an enemy of decency and morals.
Thus it was an incendiary mixture that Edith McCormick was planning to bring to the stage of the Chicago Opera Company, but, needless to say, tickets for the opening-night performance sold extremely well. Mary Garden had made a special study of the dance in preparation for her Salomé because, as she said at the time, “I want the Dance of the Seven Veils to be drama and not Folies Bergère.” And her opening night was nothing if not dramatic. She threw herself into the role with as much histrionics and frank sensuality as she could muster, and red-blooded Chicago, which published its “Sporting and Club House Directory,” was scandalized. Of Miss Garden’s fiery Salomé, the music critic Percy Hammond, calling Miss Garden “the feminine colossus who doth bestride our operatic world,” wrote that her performance was “florid, excessive, unhampered tour de force, lawless and inhuman.”
The reaction of Police Chief LeRoy T. Steward, who had also been in the opening-night audience, was more specific. “Miss Garden wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip,” he announced. “There was no art in her dance that I could see. If the same show were produced on Halsted Street the people would call it cheap but over at the auditorium they say it is art. Black art, if art at all. I would not call it immoral. I would say it was disgusting.” Chief Steward then announced that he was sending his head censor, Detective Sergeant Charles O’Donnell, to see the second evening’s performance and deliver an opinion. Still another custodian of public morality was Arthur Farwell, who, though he had not seen Salomé, denounced it generally. Miss Garden, Mr. Farwell said, was a “great degenerator” of public morals, and he would not see the opera lest his own morals undergo degeneration. “I am a normal man,” he said, “but I could not trust myself to see a performance of Salomé.”
Miss Garden was outraged, and shot off one of her famous ripostes. “I always bow down to the ignorant and try to make them understand,” she said, “but I ignore the illiterate.”
The controversy drew long lines at the box office, and the second performance quickly sold out.
Detective O’Donnell’s report was also negative. The show was an affront to decency. Though Chief Steward was willing to compromise if Miss Garden would “tone down the head business”—in which Salomé dances with the severed head of the prophet—Miss Garden refused to alter a single gesture or bit of business. Inevitably, the opera’s great patroness, Edith McCormick, was drawn into the fray, and in her memoirs Mary Garden directly blames an uncharacteristic attack of spinelessness on Edith’s part for the closing notice of Salomé that was posted the following day. According to Miss Garden, Mrs. McCormick sent for her and said, “The truth came to me after your third performance … I said to myself, Edith, your vibrations are all wrong.” And so the opera that had promised to be the most successful of the season was closed. Edith’s “vibrations,” of course, came from her intense dislike of any scandal. But the closing of Salomé was also, as Emmett Dedmon put it in Fabulous Chicago, “a recurrence of Chicago’s unpredictable puritanism—which tolerated the nation’s largest vice area on the edge of its business district but rose up in horror over a sensuous work of art.”
In the years after the death of her elder son, Edith McCormick seemed to grow odder. She became more interested in the occult and the supernatural, and in reincarnation. She paid $25,000 to have her horoscope charts written. She became even more autocratic and demanding. Now even her three surviving children had to make appointments through her private secretary in order to see her. She built a huge forty-four-room mansion in suburban Lake Forest called Villa Turicum, but never moved in. Barrels full of French china were shipped to Villa Turicum but never unpacked. Antique French and Italian pieces of furniture were arranged in the principal rooms, but were never taken out of their packing crates. Thirteen master bedrooms of identical size and shape were completely furnished with identical pieces—only the colors of the walls were different—but no one ever spent a night in any of them. Gardens were filled with topiary and hothouses with flowering plants, but their only use seemed to be to supply fresh flowers for 1000 Lake Shore Drive, and these were delivered daily in a lavender truck.
At about the same time, in New York, Edith’s cousin Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge was beginning to do similarly strange things. She built a large and exceptionally ugly house on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street in Manhattan, filled it with dark, heavy furniture and hangings, and, like Edith, never moved in, though she bought adjacent pieces of property as soon as they became available until she owned most of the north side of the block between Sixty-first Street and the Knickerbocker Club on the Sixty-second Street corner, and between Fifth and Madison Avenues. This acreage she let become overgrown with weeds and scrubby trees. The purpose of this, she explained, was to provide a “woods” for her dogs, even though, like her, the dogs never came. For years the Rockefeller-Dodge mansion remained New York’s mystery house—shuttered and dark and forbidding, illuminated only by a faint light from behind a barred caretaker’s window. People wondered especially about the erratic and helter-skelter placement of the exterior windows: the reason was that the upper floors of the house had been designed as a giant kennel—a kennel that was never inhabited by man or beast. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge’s peculiarities were also blamed on the death of a son, her only child, who was killed in an automobile accident just after his graduation from Princeton.
In Chicago meanwhile, Edith McCormick continued to preside over the Chicago Opera Company and her grand, stiffly regimented dinners. She was becoming a creature of habit. She would invariably open a conversation at dinner by asking the gentleman on her right, “What has been interesting you lately?” Then, when it was time to “turn the table,” her right-hand partner would hear her ask the identical question of the gentleman on her left. Her other interests included walking, and she took the same walk, carrying the same muff, every day. She established a zoo, and pronounced herself particularly partial to the giraffes. Her astrologist had told her that she had her own Christmas, which she celebrated “by the stars” on December 15. She studied philosophy. “My object in the world,” she once said, “is to think new thoughts.” And in the Beyond she communicated with Ankn-es-en-pa-Aten, Tutankhamun’s bride, her previous incarnation. She also took up song writing, and at least six of her sentimental love songs—including “Love,” “Between,” “Thou,” and “It Is Spoken”—were published.
But close friends—and she actually had a few—had begun to suspect that, for all her wealth and social power, Edith Rockefeller McCormick was a seriously unhappy woman. A scandal in her own family life was brewing, and she knew it. Already there were whispers. It involved her husband, Harold McCormick, a short, balding, bespectacled man with the figure of a pouter pigeon. It appeared that though he seemed genuinely to love Edith, and that though she seemed almost passionately to love him—all the love songs, she said, were written to him—Harold McCormick had, as they put it in the delicate language of the day, “an unfaithful nature.”
Today we would no doubt diagnose it as satyriasis, combined with a taste for easy women.
* At 1980s gold prices of $500 an ounce and more, that would work out to at least five and a half million dollars’ worth of flatware.