EPUB paragraph 40 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
It is hard to date with precision Cettie’s transformation from an alert, capable woman into a professional invalid. She had never had a strong constitution: As early as the 1880s, Junior had taken care of many household tasks, such as buying carpets and overseeing repairs, because his mother lacked the strength. By the early 1890s, she complained of “a general state of prostration.” John had always confided in her about business and in 1893 was still sending her detailed reports about Mesabi ore. Then, abruptly, in the mid-1890s, his letters to her became empty and platitudinous, stuffed with bland descriptions of weather, garden walks, or golf, and they remained so for twenty years. It is hard to avoid the impression that he was deliberately tiptoeing around unpleasant subjects out of respect for her delicate medical state.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Mesabi Range · John
EPUB paragraph 41 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Cettie suffered from so many strange symptoms and vague ailments as to defy precise medical diagnosis. She complained in the 1890s of asthma and colitis, as well as sporadic problems with her eyes and spine. For her intestinal troubles, doctors ordered her to cut out fruits and vegetables in favor of a diet rich in milk, cream, butter, and eggs. At first, despite her problems, she was not bedridden. She and John took long drives before lunch, and around 1900 she often sneaked in several holes of afternoon golf. Then, in April 1904, at the height of the publication of Ida Tarbell’s series in McClure’s Magazine, she had an attack, perhaps a mild stroke, that left her nearly paralyzed. As she told her diary, “Dr. Allen says it will take two years of the most quiet living to be myself again. This I accept and shall gain daily feeling thankful that it is no worse.” John took her to Forest Hill, where she sunned on the porch and listened to him read aloud daily portions from With God in the World by Bishop Brent. She never entirely recuperated.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Ida M. Tarbell · Forest Hill · World · Allen · McClure’s Magazine · John
EPUB paragraph 42 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
The image of Cettie projected by her family was invariably that of the stoic mother. “Everything which came to her, she accepted,” her daughter Edith once wrote, “and she bore her frailty of body with uncomplaining patience.” Outsiders, however, saw less of this patient nobility. Where she had always been considerate with servants, she now became finicky and demanding. “Her hot milk must be brought to her at 11 o’clock each morning,” one of Rockefeller’s secretaries, H. V. Sims, recalled. “The little napkin which went with it must be inserted by the maid between the 4th finger and the little finger—or all was wrong.” She would ask nurses to extract shawls from the middle of a tall stack without disturbing the others. Everybody crept on eggshells around her.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · H. V. Sims
EPUB paragraph 43 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
John learned to coax and humor her to get his way. The nurses often wilted in the stifling heat that Cettie demanded and were afraid to open the window. John would waltz in and say, “Mother, don’t you think you should have the window open just so much?” He would spread his fingers slightly apart. When she replied, “Very well, John, if you think so,” he signaled the nurses, when she wasn’t looking, to open it far more. John treated his wife tenderly, but his behavior now became largely ceremonious. If she stayed up too late with guests, he would slip his hand through her arm and announce, “This is good night, as it is Mother’s bedtime.”
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · John
EPUB paragraph 44 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
In a 1905 portrait of her by Arthur Ferraris, which shows her in a lovely black dress with her hair swept up and holding a prayer book, she seems despondent but still sensitive and wise. She clung ever more assertively to religion and wrote to her children in the elevated language of sermons, telling Junior as he was about to embark on a trip that she was “blessed of God above so many mothers, in my children, my precious jewels—loaned me for a season to be handed back when the call comes.” On his twenty-first birthday, she congratulated her son thus: “You can celebrate your birthday in no better way, whether at home or not, than by such earnest work as I know you are giving, for God and the saving of the souls of your fellow students.” It never seemed to dawn on her to encourage her children to have a good time.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Arthur Ferraris
EPUB paragraph 45 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Cettie’s invalidism must have tormented Rockefeller. Since his boyhood, he had felt a particular affinity for women and taken special delight in their company. He would not have contemplated extramarital affairs, as other moguls might have done. He stayed loyal to Cettie and his Baptist upbringing, and he always had the specter of Big Bill before his eyes to remind him of the extreme perils of philandering. He had long lived with the knowledge of man’s sinful nature. As long as Cettie was alive, so far as we can tell, he kept his amorous impulses in check and remained a model paterfamilias.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Laura Spelman Rockefeller
EPUB paragraph 46 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
The Rockefellers found it difficult to confront the infirmities of both the mind and flesh. A whole world of forbidden, subversive feelings simply did not exist for them. If you averted your eyes from unpleasant things, they seemed to believe, they would lose their sting. For this reason, the story of the eldest Rockefeller daughter, Bessie, has long been an impenetrable mystery.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Rockefeller family
EPUB paragraph 47 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
After Charles Strong had married Bessie in 1889, he taught briefly at Clark University and then became an associate professor of philosophy at the new University of Chicago in 1892. While Charles had ambivalent feelings toward his father-in-law, he never hesitated to exploit his connections and largesse. In 1895, the Strongs had to abandon Chicago, owing to Bessie’s poor health. As Charles informed his Harvard mentor, William James, his wife’s health was “still so delicate that it seems unwise to expose her to the inclemencies of the Chicago climate, and the result is that I find myself permanently settled in New York.” So that Charles could write his treatises and live with Bessie in New York, Rockefeller gave him a thousand-dollar subsidy for a year’s work. When Bessie gave birth to a daughter, Margaret, at Pocantico in 1897, Rockefeller declared a holiday for workmen on his estate.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Charles Strong · William James · University of Chicago · Harvard University · New York · Pocantico Hills · Chicago · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Margaret · Clark University
EPUB paragraph 48 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Since Charles had become a freethinker, Rockefeller might have feared for the immortal soul of his granddaughter. “Charles would tell Margaret, ‘There is no God,’ ” Margaret’s daughter would recall. “Both mother and father concurred and agreed not to contaminate her with uncertain belief.” Perhaps aware of this indoctrination, Rockefeller was eager to keep the Strongs in New York. He had Junior approach Seth Low, the president of Columbia College, about endowing a professorship in psychology for Charles, who increasingly studied both psychology and philosophy in his work. Junior suggested that it would be more gracious to endow the chair and then let the college voluntarily appoint him, rather than to demean Charles by creating a chair expressly for him. Senior followed this advice and, after making sure that Columbia would give him the chair, gave the school a $100,000 endowment, effectively buying his son-in-law’s job at considerable expense.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · New York · Seth Low · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Margaret · Columbia · Columbia College
EPUB paragraph 49 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
For a time in the early 1900s, Rockefeller saw a lot of Charles and Bessie, thanks in part to his newfound passion for golf. Desperate for a place where he could extend Pocantico’s limited golf season, he found it in the tony resort of Lakewood, New Jersey, where George Gould and other rich residents played polo, attended tea parties, rode to hounds, and held cotillions. Rockefeller began buying property there in May 1901, and a year later a dreamlike opportunity appeared. The Ocean County Hunt and Country Club decided to merge with another club and abandon its clubhouse, which was surrounded by a golf course set amid seventy-five acres of spruce, fir, pine, and hemlock. Only eight or nine miles from the sea, this flat, sandy country had “delicious, dry air,” Rockefeller told a friend, and would permit him to golf nearly ten months a year. The big, rambling, three-story wooden clubhouse—which Rockefeller always called Golf House—had striped awnings and a glass-sheltered porch that gave a view of sheep browsing on the lawn. This hideaway could be reached only by a twisting road of crushed bluestone that ran through dense woods—perfect for security purposes. Expanding the house and adding acreage, Rockefeller transplanted thousands of trees from Pocantico to this new estate. Rockefeller loved his new, relaxed place. “I believe I have recovered my health,” he wrote to a friend from Lakewood in 1903. “I feel better now than I have felt in years.… I believe the improvement in my condition is due to my newly acquired habit of playing golf.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · George Gould · Pocantico Hills · Lakewood · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Golf House · Ocean County Hunt · Country Club
EPUB paragraph 50 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
To provide company, Rockefeller also bought the small Claflin Cottage at Lakewood, where Charles and Bessie stayed for three seasons. To hear William James, a frequent visitor, tell it, it was a gloomy place. When Strong’s first major book, Why the Mind Has a Body, appeared in 1903, James extolled it as “a sterling work, admirable for clearness of statement & thoroughness of discussion, luminous, and likely to be much used by students of philosophy.” During his stays at Lakewood, James accompanied Charles on walks around the lake and the two often paused to sit on pine needles and reflect. On such a stroll, James paid them both a high compliment when he turned to Strong and said, “I am John the Baptist and you are the Messiah.” Yet James was more versatile than Strong and came to dread these Lakewood trips, where he felt trapped by perpetual shoptalk. Charles could convert a pleasant weekend into an interminable seminar, and James voiced his frustrations to his wife, Alice, tempering them with his great admiration for Charles. “I never knew such an unremitting, untiring, monotonous addiction as that of his mind to truth. He goes by points, pinning each one definitely, and has, I think, the very clearest mind I ever knew.… I suspect that he will outgrow us all, for his rate accelerates, and he never stands still.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Alice Rockefeller · William James · Lakewood · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Strong · James · Claflin Cottage · John
EPUB paragraph 51 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
As an antidote to Charles, William James especially welcomed his Lakewood encounters with Rockefeller, who would sometimes materialize at lunch, fresh from golf. Rockefeller had only the most fleeting encounters with the intelligentsia, which makes James’s descriptions of him the more valuable. The philosopher had an uncanny knack for telescoping titanic figures into thumbnail sketches. He was especially struck by Rockefeller’s willpower and wrote to Alice about the primordial strength that radiated from him, telling her that Rockefeller was a “very deep human being” who gave him “more impression of Urkraft [primitive or original force] than anyone I ever met.” He was also unexpectedly charmed by his genial style: “Glorious old John D.… [is] a most love-able person.” To round out this portrait, he marveled that Rockefeller could be “so complex, subtle, oily, fierce, strongly bad and strongly good a human being.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Alice Rockefeller · William James · Lakewood · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · James · Urkraft
EPUB paragraph 52 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
William dashed off an even more vivid description to his brother Henry:
Names: Henry · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 53 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Rockefeller, you know, is reputed the richest man in the world, and he certainly is the most powerfully suggestive personality I have ever seen. A man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable. Physionomie de Pierrot (not a spear of hair on head or face) flexible, cunning, quakerish, superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced, a hater of cities and lover of the open air (playing golf & skating all the time at Lakewood) etc.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Lakewood
EPUB paragraph 54 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
James wrote this while Ida Tarbell was inflaming popular opinion against Standard Oil. He urged Rockefeller to discard his policy of silence and combat the attacks by letting the public become better acquainted with him. When Rockefeller published his memoirs in book form in 1909, James applauded. “This is what I proposed to you many years ago!” he wrote to him. “Expansiveness wins a way where reserve fails!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · James
EPUB paragraph 55 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
In 1902, the already somber world of Charles and Bessie Strong darkened suddenly when Bessie, age thirty-six, experienced fresh medical problems. One cannot state with certainty what this ailment was, but in one letter to her brother, she refers to her “most weak and unreliable heart.” We do know that her condition deteriorated dramatically in the spring of 1903, for that autumn Charles wrote to William James, “Mrs. Strong is pretty well for her, thank you; but she had an attack in the spring which gave some cause for disquietude.” Her granddaughter later contended that Bessie had “suffered a stroke and consequent impairments.”
Names: Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · William James · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Strong
EPUB paragraph 56 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
In the few brief, cryptic references to Bessie’s illness in the press, it was always said that she had withdrawn from Lakewood society to lead a quiet life—a cover story that does not begin to capture the pathos of what happened. Overnight, the stroke or heart condition turned this pretty young woman into someone much older and frailer. The Rockefellers always suppressed the fact that it affected her mind. As Strong’s friend George Santayana wrote, “She was always, as they put it, in delicate health, which was a euphemism for not being in her right mind.” Turned into a semi-invalid who spent much of the day in bed, she shuffled slowly about the cottage in a gray shawl, careworn and bent. She sometimes lapsed into morbid fears of poverty, retrenching on household expenses, reworking gowns to save money, and informing friends that she could no longer afford to entertain. During these periods, Charles supplemented her spartan grocery orders with extra purchases. Even as she wondered darkly in early 1904 how she and Charles would survive, Bessie was worth $404,489.25, with an estimated annual income of $20,030. At moments, she also threw off her imaginary cares and gaily announced that they were rich.
Names: Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · George Santayana · Rockefeller family · Lakewood · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Strong
EPUB paragraph 57 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
After a while, transported into a dreamworld, Bessie started to babble in childlike French. William James arrived in Lakewood one day and was thunderstruck by Bessie’s condition. To his wife, he reported Bessie’s words as follows:
Names: Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · William James · Lakewood
EPUB paragraph 58 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
“M. James, cela me fait de joie de voir votre bonne figure, vous avez un coeur généreux comme mon papa. Nous sommes tres riches maintenant. Mais Papa me donne tout ce que je lui demande pour le donner a ceux qui ont besoin. Mois aussi j’ai un bon coeur.” (Translation: “Mr. James, it gives me joy to see your nice face, you have a generous heart like my papa. We are very rich now. But Papa gives me everything I ask him for, to give to those who are in need. I too have a good heart.”)
EPUB paragraph 59 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
A flabbergasted James said afterward, “It was just like a fairy-tale.” It was an indescribably sad fate for the one Rockefeller daughter who had gone to college.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · James
EPUB paragraph 60 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
It was also a bitter irony for Charles Strong, with his overpowering intellect, to become a nursemaid for the blighted, demented Bessie. Solitary and emotionally blocked, he soon grew bored with any conversation that did not revolve around philosophic disputation. His letters to William James contain few personal asides or mundane details, and they read like philosophic abstracts. For such a man to have ended up the caretaker of a wife spouting gibberish must have been an intolerable strain. In the spring of 1904, nervous and rundown, Charles took a leave of absence from Columbia and sailed for Europe with Bessie. He planned to consult with French specialists in nervous diseases and hoped that his wife might be helped by the warm climate of southern France. It might also have been for Charles a chance to escape from both his overbearing father and father-in-law.
Names: Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Charles Strong · William James · Europe · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · France · Columbia
EPUB paragraph 61 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Like Bessie, the Rockefeller’s youngest daughter, Edith, was beset by nervous troubles throughout her life. Unlike Bessie, her maladies led her on an odyssey of sustained introspection unique in Rockefeller annals. She experimented with psychology and other spheres alien to the rest of the family, subjecting the Rockefeller verities to the cold test of modern skepticism and threatening her relationship with her father along the way.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Edith Rockefeller McCormick
EPUB paragraph 62 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Among the four children, Edith seemed the family changeling. Where her siblings had been submissive children, Edith was recalcitrant, headstrong, and outspoken. Once, as an adolescent, she greeted Grandma Spelman with a hug so fierce that she cracked one of her ribs. She read voraciously and by an early age entertained religious doubts. In a smart but not reflective family, Edith had intellectual aspirations. “Reading has always been more important to me than eating,” she confessed to a newspaper reporter late in life. “Except in a case of dire starvation, if a bottle of milk and a book were placed on the table, I would reach for the book, because I must feed my mind more than my body.” Such a person might well find something antiseptic about the Rockefeller life.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Lucy Henry Spelman
EPUB paragraph 63 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
In 1893, twenty-seven-year-old Bessie and twenty-one-year-old Edith went to Philadelphia for a rest cure at the Hospital for Orthopedic and Nervous Diseases, run by the patrician neurologist-cum-novelist, S. Weir Mitchell. A specialist in female nervous disorders, Mitchell separated his patients from their quotidian world, banning casual visits or even mail from relatives. Rockefeller visited his daughters only once, in February 1894, and would have heartily endorsed their program of relaxation, massage, good food, and electrical stimulation of muscles. Bessie responded better than Edith, who required an extended follow-up rest in a cottage at Saranac Lake in upstate New York.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · New York State · Philadelphia · S. Weir Mitchell · Hospital for Orthopedic · Mitchell · Saranac Lake
EPUB paragraph 64 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
In November 1895, hard on the heels of her recovery, Edith married Harold McCormick of Chicago, who had just graduated from Princeton. He was the son of Cyrus McCormick, the developer of the mechanical reaper and founder of what became International Harvester. Junior had befriended Harold at the Browning School and was the inadvertent matchmaker. During the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he, Cettie, and his three sisters traveled west to Chicago by private railroad car and stayed with Nettie Fowler McCormick, Cyrus’s indomitable widow, at her Rush Street mansion. Devout Presbyterians and generous donors to missionary work, the McCormicks resembled the Rockefeller family in many respects. They had raised their children strictly, giving them small allowances and urging them to donate to the poor. There was also a streak of mental instability among the McCormick children that would be far more pernicious than that among the Rockefeller offspring.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · International Harvester · Princeton University · Rockefeller family · Chicago · Cyrus McCormick · Nettie Fowler McCormick · World · McCormick · McCormicks · Browning School · Cyrus · Columbian Exposition · Rush
EPUB paragraph 65 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
The Rockefellers deplored the vogue among rich Americans of marrying off their daughters to titled Europeans and welcomed the McCormicks as an upright, God-fearing industrial family. As the heir to a fortune, Harold McCormick did not have to allay suspicions that might have shadowed another suitor for Edith’s hand, and John and Cettie found something winning about his expansive ways. He was an athletic man with luminous blue eyes and a dreamy gaze who wore jeweled cuff links and embroidered vests. Among his tightly wound in-laws, he stood out for his free and open manner. Yet he got along well with Senior and was the only son-in-law allowed to smoke in Cettie’s presence.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Rockefeller family · McCormicks · John
EPUB paragraph 66 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
The only misgivings that John and Cettie had about the marriage centered on Harold’s drinking. Several times before the wedding, Rockefeller tried to extract a pledge that he would abstain from liquor, but each time Harold firmly resisted. “While I believe we hold the same general views as to the ruin wrought in the world by strong drink, and as to individual responsibility with regard to it, I am convinced that for me a life pledge is not for the best,” Harold told Rockefeller two months before the wedding. As a concession, he stopped drinking briefly. Senior was again receiving threats, and Harold closed his note by adding, “I am distressed to have the subject renewed, and just at a time, when you, and therefore we, have much anxiety and worry by reason of the cranks.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Harold McCormick · John
EPUB paragraph 67 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Edith and Harold were to be married in November 1895 at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan, but Harold got a cold and the ceremony was shifted to the Buckingham Hotel. Right before the wedding, Senior sent for his daughter, telling her that they needed to have one last confidential chat. Once they were alone, Edith recounted in a later interview, he said in his most portentous manner, “I have brought you here to make a request that lies very close to my heart and a request that has been very carefully considered.” “Yes, father,” Edith replied, “but why be so serious.… what is this request that stirs you so much?” “It is this daughter. I want you to promise never to serve a drink of liquor in your home.… Promise me that and you will never regret it.” As Edith recalled, “Unthinkingly, I said, ‘Why, of course, father,’ and immediately set off in a peal of laughter over the solemnity of what seemed such a trivial request.” This agreement concluded, father and daughter proceeded to the ceremony, and Edith entered on her father’s arm, wearing a tiara of diamonds and emeralds given to her by Harold. In the press coverage, Edith was labeled the “Princess of Standard Oil” and Harold the “Prince of International Harvester.” Henceforth, Edith was always known as Edith Rockefeller McCormick, signaling that she planned to retain her own identity.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Standard Oil · Fifth Avenue Baptist Church · Manhattan · Buckingham Hotel · Harold the “Prince of International Harvester
EPUB paragraph 68 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
With his children, Rockefeller had tried to create that most elusive thing, a self-perpetuating puritanism, but he was destined to produce at least one rebellious spendthrift and that honor fell to Edith. After an Italian honeymoon, at last emancipated from her austere past, she and Harold moved into a grand stone mansion at 1000 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. In this Gold Coast fortress, barricaded behind a high iron fence, Edith vied for social preeminence. She displayed in bold relief qualities that Rockefeller had struggled to root out of his children—vanity, ostentation, narcissism, and hedonism—but they were redeemed in part by her prolonged introspection and intellectual fearlessness. In Chicago, away from her father, Edith cultivated a separate set of interests.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Chicago · Lake Shore Drive
EPUB paragraph 69 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
All the affectations of European royal courts were displayed in Edith’s mansion, and Chicago society tattled about her “imperial complex.” After being welcomed by footmen, guests were escorted into sumptuous rooms embellished with beautiful pictures and chandeliers. Edith decided that the Rockefellers were descended from the noble La Rochefoucaulds, and this accounted for a French motif throughout the house. Her dinner guests, sometimes numbering as many as two hundred, received menus and place cards printed in French and engraved with raised gilt letters. The guests dined off a gilded-silver service that had belonged to the Bonapartes and footmen stood stiffly behind every second chair. Edith had a majestic empire room that featured four of Napoleon Bonaparte’s royal chairs—two with Ns emblazoned across the back and two with Bs. Edith slept in an ornate Louis XVI bed and kept a gold box on her dressing table that had been a gift to the Empress Marie Louise from Napoleon.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Rockefeller family · Chicago · Empress Marie Louise · Napoleon · La Rochefoucaulds · Bonapartes · Napoleon Bonaparte · Louis XVI
EPUB paragraph 70 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Edith was not shy about her self-presentation. She ran through clothes like a queen, renewing her wardrobe yearly, and always shimmered in jewels. A 1908 painting shows a demure, gray-eyed Edith gazing knowingly at the viewer in tiara and expensive décolleté gown, a boa draped over her shoulders. A short, slender woman, she daringly exposed her ankles and wore a gold ankle chain. On one social occasion, she appeared in a silver dress of such imposing weight that it was said she could scarcely breathe. She had one cape of 275 animal skins, laboriously stitched together, which all but smothered her. Doubtless to her father’s horror, Edith assembled a jewelry collection that would have made an eastern potentate blush. She had a Cartier necklace strung with ten emeralds and 1,657 tiny diamonds. For her wedding, her parents gave her a $15,000 rope of pearls, a modest gift soon overshadowed by her $2 million string of pearls. In 1908, discovering that Edith and Harold were borrowing to support this luxury, Rockefeller scolded Harold: “Since my attention was called to this subject, I have made inquiries of Alta and John as to their expenses, and find that theirs have been less than one-third of what yours have been.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · John
EPUB paragraph 71 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c21_r1.htm
Edith’s temperance pledge cramped her style as a hostess. Noticing that her soirées lacked a certain sparkle, she turned to Harold for an explanation. “My dear,” he said, “don’t you realize that these red-blooded young Chicagoans are used to having liquor? They simply must have their cocktails, their wine, their highballs and cordials.” No child of John D. Rockefeller would flout a temperance oath made to him, so Edith had to contrive ways to compensate. “I invited the most brilliant men and women whom I met,” she told one reporter. “I gave musicales at which I presented the greatest artists of the day.” She befriended artists, intellectuals, and society figures and developed into a prominent patroness of the arts, collecting antique furniture, lace, Oriental art, and fine books.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick
Source: Ron Chernow, Titan. Names and relationships retain the full atlas’s extraction limits. Map points are references; historical sites and regions can be approximate. Open the full interactive atlas.