The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (29 page)

“I’m going to put a pool in,” Rockefeller said one day, to which his excavator and by then close friend Don MacLeay responded, ‘Geez, why don’t you finish
something
first?”

The pool was going to cost $50,000. As with many of his projects, the only stage of it that was completed was the digging of a hole. Clark and the pool company didn’t get along. It seemed that Rockefeller was desperately trying to fit in with Cornish—while also defiantly trying to stand out. Either way, it was extremely odd behavior. It was one thing to want to dupe the strivers in a bustling city like New York, where one can flit from place to place and person to person without gossip and innuendo trailing close behind. But in an insular small town like Cornish, where everyone knows everybody? Perhaps he had indeed had a nervous breakdown, as he had claimed. Or perhaps Cornish was just another lark, to see how far he could push things before being unmasked.

“I don’t know,” MacLeay said, marveling at Rockefeller’s various failed undertakings at Doveridge. “I think he was trying to see how fast he could spend her money,” he said, referring to Boss. The citizens of Cornish rarely saw her, but they spoke about her often. No one could have suspected, however, that she was the one who made Rockefeller’s big show in Cornish (and in Nantucket and Woodstock before that) possible—or that he was dangerously close to losing her.

Sandra was commuting between her broken-down house on Blow-Me-Down Brook in Cornish and her high-powered job with McKinsey in New York. Sometimes she would fly to work from New Hampshire, and sometimes she would have to drive, but either way it was grueling, and she spent much of her time in hotels in New York or on the road.

“In the summer of 2000,” she told the grand jury, “I had been spending enough time away from [Clark] that the torture and the bad stuff was less a part of my daily life, and I was getting stronger. I decided to leave him. I took a small apartment in New York. I just said, ‘I need to figure things out.’”

After a while, she later testified, “I started to finally come to the conclusion that I needed to change my marital status. I said I wanted to spend more weekends in New York to sort of think things through. I wasn’t happy in the marriage at that time, and, you know, was talking about the possibility of leaving.”

With that, Rockefeller shot back to New York. No longer the dark, moody, isolated curmudgeon, he reverted to being the man Sandra had fallen in love with. He was once again on her doorstep bearing gifts, flowers, and jewelry, and lavishing compliments and attention on her.

“The old Clark was back,” Boss told the grand jury, “being incredibly personally attentive, being romantic again. Incidents like borrowing expensive jewelry from the [Rockefeller] family that he had me wear to a party. Later I found out, or surmised, that it was actually borrowed from a friend, but he claimed that he had borrowed it from the family. He introduced a new friend who had known him since childhood, who was vouching for him again. There’s a lot of stuff like that.”

She admitted in court that she reveled in the attention. “I was receptive to it, I liked it, but I wasn’t decisive about it. I still went along with my plans to separate.”

But then, one night during this period of “re-romancing,” as Boss called it, her husband, with his suave manner, his grace and charm, took Sandra to bed. “We used condoms for birth control, which meant that he had the ability to alter them, which is, I think, what he did,” she told the grand jury. “Things got a lot wetter, and I wasn’t thinking that my husband was—I mean, you don’t really think that someone is trying to get you pregnant in that kind of context.”

“When did you become pregnant?” she was asked.

“Early September of 2000.”

With that, she launched into a litany of despair:

“He was creating a cloud of paranoia around family and friends, trying to make me very nervous about how I could only depend on him.

“I was feeling, you know, the psychological effect of being pregnant, which is you feel disoriented and unsettled.

“My parents were getting divorced right at that time.

“I felt like I was too weak to figure out how to leave him at that time.

“I was also influenced by the belief that a family should be together, and that the child should be with its father, and that kind of thing.” She repeated the same sentiment during the trial: “I was raised to believe that you’re supposed to work on your marriage. It was very hard for me to leave to begin with, and to be leaving pregnant felt somehow like I wasn’t doing my duty. . . . I just felt that the burden for leaving a marriage was very high, and I was very uncomfortable leaving a marriage just for my own happiness. And the idea of doing it when there was another person involved”—her unborn child—“it was very difficult. I just didn’t feel strong enough to do that.”

“What did you decide to do?” the lawyer asked.

“I decided to stay. . . . I said to my then husband, you know, that I thought that we should make a go of it.”

Her husband, in the game he was playing with her for control, made a seemingly odd but in retrospect quite cunning move. “For a while he wasn’t sure,” Boss testified. “He said, ‘Well, I need to think about it, and don’t come home for a while.’ So there was a phase of uncertainty.”

Sandra went home to Cornish for Christmas of 2000, and things were looking up for the couple. Not only were they reunited with a baby on the way, but also, Clark told Sandra, he was engaged in a very exciting start-Up company called Jet Propulsion Physics. He had acquired a patent in the jet propulsion field at a cheap price, virtually free, really, and he would be working with some of his academic colleagues to develop the patent for commercial use. Although she never saw evidence of the patent, she had no reason to disbelieve him. After all, he had told her about equal or even grander achievements: that he helped friends manage oil wells in Texas; that he had very close connections with Michael Heseltine, deputy prime minister of Great Britain; that he was a member of the Trilateral Commission, the private coalition of world leaders established by David Rockefeller in 1973 to foster relations between the United States, Europe, and Japan. He casually referred to the powerful organization as “The Group,” and intimated, when questioned about whether or not there might be money forthcoming, that it would be below a Rockefeller to ask for a salary. None of these things was questioned, much less challenged.

It was clear that Clark Rockefeller was again holding all of the cards.

CHAPTER 14

Snooks

O
n May 24, 2001, Reigh Storrow Mills Rockefeller, the daughter of Clark Rockefeller and Sandra Lynne Boss, was born in Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. The child’s first name was chosen by Rockefeller, after the Cornish town clerk, Reigh Helen Sweetser, merely because he heard and liked the name while standing at the clerk’s window in town hall one day.

When Reigh was born, however, Rockefeller was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at the hospital. His wife didn’t even know his whereabouts. It wasn’t until eighteen hours after Reigh’s birth that Rockefeller finally paid a visit to his wife and newborn child. Where was he during that pivotal time? As always, he was interacting with the locals of Cornish, which he continued to do for the first three months of his daughter’s life.

He had the freedom to do this because Sandra, who had taken a three-month maternity leave from McKinsey, was initially the child’s exclusive caretaker. “We were inseparable,” she would later testify, adding that her husband spent very little time with their daughter. “I think he was like many fathers, which was he thought she was cute, but he didn’t engage a lot with her at that time.”

Down the road from Doveridge, in one of Cornish’s grand homes, the White family, longtime stalwarts of the Cornish community, invited me over to talk about Clark. Laura White was his best friend for the first five years after his arrival in Cornish. A vivacious blonde, she was a single mother who worked as a flight attendant. Because she was often flying, she lived in her childhood home with her mother and father and her young son, Charlie.

Laura drove Clark to the hospital after his daughter was born, although she wasn’t clear about how long after the birth they arrived, “just that it was in the middle of the night.” She drove him in one of his growing collection of cars. For the auspicious occasion, he selected a Roadmaster, those large highway cruisers Buick introduced in the 1930s, instead of his bulletproof Cadillac limo.

He told Laura White that he needed her to drive him to the hospital because his regular driver, a fireman from the nearby community of Claremont, was unavailable. After checking on the condition of his wife and child, he instructed Laura to drive him back home, because, he said, “I have a phobia about hospitals.”

We were sitting on the Whites’ patio, looking across a summer vista of blazing green, an idyllic setting that, I sensed, had turned a bit banal in the absence of the famous man who so enlivened the little town with his oversized and outlandish antics. “When he would go over the covered bridge in one of his cars, people would say, ‘Wow!’” Laura said, referring to the National Historic Landmark bridge that spans the Connecticut River and connects Cornish, New Hampshire, to Windsor, Vermont.

She looked over at her young son, Charlie, who had joined us on the patio, and asked the boy if he wanted to tell me what he and his friends always called Clark.

“We called him Purple Pants,” said Charlie.

“Because he always wore purple pants,” Laura explained.

He would stop by to visit Laura and her family almost daily, especially around mealtimes, never bothering to knock on the door, just walking in. They were that close. And when the family had intimate parties—for birthdays and such—Clark was often included.

“He hated to have his picture taken,” recalled Laura, pulling out a stack of photographs of Rockefeller with the White family. What was remarkable was that in each and every one, Rockefeller was striking a pose that disguised him. In one of him at a birthday party, his eyes were deliberately closed. In another he screwed his face into a mask and stuck out his tongue. In another he was shielding his face with his hands. I suggested that he seemed to be attempting to leave no clear photographic record of his time in Cornish. “I gave up taking pictures of him because he would ruin the ambience” is all Laura would say.

She pulled out a diary she had kept during Rockefeller’s time in Cornish. “I wrote Helmut Kohl,” she said, referring to the former chancellor of Germany, “because he told me Helmut Kohl had come to visit him in Cornish. Here’s one with Mom,” she said of a diary entry regarding her mother: “Clark Rockefeller takes us to Boston with his chauffeured Cadillac.”

The diary sparked more memories. “Oh, God! He told us he went helicopter skiing in Canada! And skiing in Italy. And that he had an apartment in Paris he was trying to sell. And when he graduated from Harvard, he traveled around the world for years. And that he had a cousin in Cap Ferrat.”

She stopped to think back for a moment. “Oh! He told me a good one! He said, ‘Did you know Britney Spears is a physicist?’ I said, ‘No, Clark, she’s not a physicist.’ But he said she was, and he said, ‘I’ve had my people call her people, and she’s supposed to be coming up this weekend!’ The weekend happened, and I said, ‘Clark, did Britney Spears come?’”

She moved on to another tall tale. “He said he was in touch with [radio host] Garrison Keillor. He said, ‘My people are talking with Garrison Keillor, and Garrison is coming to the house to do a performance when the house is completed.’ ” Garrison Keillor never came to Doveridge, and Doveridge was never finished. Still, Clark Rockefeller came to win over many in Cornish. While he might have seemed odd, and more than a little “off,” he was still somehow, as always, let in. He had created perhaps his biggest, brashest, loudest, and frequently angriest character yet, a country squire in a historic house with a seemingly bottomless bank account.

It’s not hard to imagine that this welcoming community would find room for someone with all of these quirks, because, of course, New Englanders are known for their eccentricities. This was, after all, a very small town, whose famous covered bridge still bore the ancient sign WALK YOUR HORSES, beneath which was stated the penalty for those who trotted across the bridge: TWO DOLLAR FINE.

As Laura’s mother said, “He was the most exciting thing to happen around here for a long while.”

Many locals recalled him sailing down Platt Road, which runs in front of Doveridge, on his Segway, the two-wheeled gyroscopically balanced “personal transporter” on which the rider stands erect behind handlebars. The Segway was invented by another New Englander, Dean Kamen, who lived in a hexagonally shaped house of his own design just outside of Manchester, New Hampshire. And while a New Englander created the Segway, no one in Cornish seemed to embrace the newfangled gadget, aside from Rockefeller. “It wasn’t something the ordinary person in Cornish was going to be seen going out to the barn with,” recalled Senator Peter Burling. “But at some point, I was literally in the barnyard watering the horses, and up Platt Road comes Clark. In his Yale baseball cap. On a Segway.”

Burling recalled, “I think I must have said, ‘Oh, my God, look at this!’ In twenty-twenty hindsight, there were so many visual hints that it was all wrong, and all phony, and just plain stupid.” But back then, the senator added, the man in the Segway was big news in Cornish, and all doors were open to him.

He was a regular presence in the Cornish Town Offices, a red-brick building in what comprises Cornish’s town center. BINGO EVERY TUESDAY, read a sign out front. At her desk in the office was Merilynn Bourne, chairwoman of the Cornish Board of Selectmen, who essentially ran the town. A busy, no-nonsense blonde with a New England accent, she was known as Clark Rockefeller’s fiercest critic during the time he lived in Cornish. She flew into a nonstop rant the moment I said his name.