The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Family fortunes
From humble Baptist beginnings, the Rockefellers became the richest clan on earth within one generation. They believed their wealth was God-given and changed the way the super-rich behave. As their priceless collection of art and artefacts is auctioned of
As the priceless art collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller is auctioned off for good causes, David Robson looks at the history of America’s richest clan
Family portrait, 1920.
1. John D Rockefeller Sr, who waited until his son John Jr was in his 40s before passing on his huge wealth to him.
2. John D Rockefeller Jr embarked on a spending spree, including the $100 million restoration of colonial Williamsburg.
3. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of Junior), who refused to keep meticulous accounts of her spending.
4. Abigail (Abby and Junior’s daughter). Their sons:
5. David Rockefeller, who went on to marry Peggy and give away $1.5 billion.
6. John D Rockefeller III.
7. Winthrop Rockefeller.
8. Nelson Rockefeller (who became vice-president of the USA).
9. Laurance Rockefeller
David and Pegg y ‘lived at a level of refinement that will probably never be seen again on this earth’
At Christie’s London headquarters in St James’s, the auction house’s deputy chairman, Jonathan Rendell, a grey-haired man of vast experience, is introducing his special clients and their advisers to some of the choice items from the collection of the late Peggy and David Rockefeller. It is February and this is the second stop on a pre-sale tour that has already taken in Hong Kong and will soon move on to Beijing and Shanghai, and then Los Angeles, before arriving in New York for the auction there from 8 to 10 May. The itinerary is a roadmap to the world’s most serious money. So why no stop-offs in Russia and the Gulf ? ‘No need,’ says Rendell, ‘they treat London as their base.’
The pieces in the travelling show are but an amuse-bouche (or amusepoche) for an epic assemblage of treasures that will be offered as 1,600 lots in an auction lasting three days. It will be by far the most lucrative sale of a private collection, dwarfing Christie’s Yves Saint Laurent-pierre Bergé auction in Paris in 2009, which generated a record-breaking $484 million.
Peggy Rockefeller died in 1996, David last year, aged 101. He was third generation, the youngest grandson of John D Rockefeller, who, starting in the second half of the 19th century, made the family name a synonym for wealth. On display at Christie’s is an eye-popping array of pictures. ‘Ronald Lauder (son of Estée), a great collector, says there are three sorts of paintings,’ Rendell tells me, ‘“There’s oh; oh my; and oh my God.” And here there is a lot of “Oh my God!”’
There is a mesmerising early Picasso, a full-length of a nude girl holding a basket of flowers. Rockefeller bought it in 1968 from the Paris collection of the American emigrée writer and salonnière
Gertrude Stein, whose brother Leo had acquired it for $30 in 1905. Now it will probably fetch over $90 million. The gorgeous Matisse Odalisque may well hit $70 million (the highest price ever for a Matisse). There’s a striking Brittany sea painting by Gauguin, Monet’s Gare Saint-lazare, effet de soleil and a beautiful water lilies Nymphéas en fleur. There’s Seurat, Signac, a charming little Manet of flowers in a vase, Miró, Gris, Corot, a Delacroix tiger. And so it goes on.
Until quite recently the Picasso girl was on the wall behind David’s favourite easy chair in an informal first-floor sitting room in the Rockefellers’ East 65th Street house in New York. The Monet water lilies and the Gris decorated the staircase in one of their other homes, Hudson Pines, north of the city. Renoir’s Gabrielle au miroir – the sumptuous picture of a luxuriantly fleshy, lightly clad woman, hung over the living room fireplace. This is the sale of a
lifetime in a very real sense. Not only will it attract big crowds and record prices, it also reflects what Peggy and David loved and how they lived, surrounded by beautiful things – fine antique furniture from America and Europe, oriental art, chinoiserie, a marvellous Sèvres dinner service estimated to be worth $250,000, and magnificent jewellery, not to mention three horse-drawn carriages. One only slightly over-ripe account of David and Peggy said they ‘lived at a level of refinement that will probably never be seen again on this earth’.
None of the proceeds from the auction will go into the family coffers: they will all be distributed to
David’s chosen artistic, educational, medical and environmental organisations. If the name Rockefeller is a synonym for wealth, it is also a byword for philanthropy. In the course of his long life, David gave away nearly $1.5 billion.
He wasn’t the last of the Rockefellers by any means, there’s an extended family running into hundreds, but it is highly unlikely that any will match him in stature. As chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank he was a player on the world stage, welcomed everywhere like a monarch.
Khrushchev, Brezhnev,
Gorbachev, Zhou Enlai,
Nelson Mandela,
Anwar Sadat, Pope
John Paul II – there was nobody of consequence he did not meet.
One of his grandsons recounts walking round David’s bedroom after his death and being particularly struck by two framed photographs. ‘One was of him shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth, both of them looking equally delighted to be meeting each other. The other was of him with his personal office staff, in which he was beaming as brilliantly as when he met the Queen. Grandpa related to all of his employees as close personal friends, and in my experience they loved him just as much in return.’ I n the aftermath of the American Civil War, legendary fortunes were made in mining, in steel, in transport and in banking by men who acquired monopoly power – and made the most of it.
In 1877, when Monet was painting his picture of Paris’s Gare Saintlazare (now perhaps bound for China – ‘The Chinese love classic impressionism,’ says Rendell), John D Rockefeller Sr, David’s grandfather, was ruthlessly putting together the businesses that would make him the richest man in America – and one of the most notorious. He created – and virtually owned – the oil industry.
Born in 1839 in fairly humble circumstances, the second of six children, he was exposed from birth to righteousness and fecklessness in equal measure. His mother Eliza was upright, religious, an austere disciplinarian, a pillar of the Baptist church. His father William (‘Big Bill’, ‘Devil Bill’, ‘Doc’) was a businessman, conman, family deserter, daredevil, bogus doctor – and a bigamist.
When John Rockefeller Sr was 16, he found a job as an assistant bookkeeper and developed a love for detailed accounting that became a Rockefeller principle. Even as a billionaire he kept meticulous track of outgoings in a ledger, as did his son and some of his grandsons. By the age of 24, he had launched himself into the industry that would bring him untold power and riches and play a major role in transforming the economy and politics of the USA.
A devout Baptist from cradle to grave, he believed that God and Mammon walked hand in hand. ‘God gave me my money,’ he said. ‘I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience… It seemed as if I was favoured with increase because the Lord knew I was going to turn round and give it back.’
He honoured both sides of that ideal with unwavering commitment. In 1859 Edwin Drake, a former
railway conductor, struck oil in Pennsylvania, the first place on earth where this had happened. Rockefeller, in nearby Cleveland, looked on as thousands rushed there to try to make their fortunes. It was a shambles – oil was plentiful but profit was not. Lacking technical know-how and business nous, these wildcatters were cutting each other’s throats, leaving room for someone to grab hold of the market and bring order to it. With his company Standard Oil that is what Rockefeller did. It was to be the start of his empire.
Oil refined into kerosene was the most effective source of artificial lighting. Choosing refining rather than drilling, he borrowed money to invest in increased capacity and enhanced technology and set about monopolising the business. He bought failing refineries at knockdown prices and closed them down. He ruthlessly imposed his supremacy on oil producers and railroad companies, which gave him massive
rebates. He made himself the richest man in America, the greatest ‘robber baron’.
Even when he was only 20 and earning very little, Rockefeller gave away more than 10 per cent of his income, mostly to churches and Baptist causes. As he grew richer he kept increasing his giving but his fortune was growing so fast it was impossible to keep pace. Philanthropy demanded serious thought.
Together with Frederick T Gates, a Baptist minister he employed as his adviser, he developed the model for modern philanthropy: to make a few big contributions rather than a multitude of small ones. He established the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which became Rockefeller University; in the early years of the 20th century the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission largely eradicated hookworm, a debilitating condition that afflicted 40 per cent of the population of the southern states; in 1921, Rockefeller built an enormous college in Peking where the latest in modern medicine was taught. By then the Rockefeller Foundation had become the largest grant-making organisation on earth.
John D Rockefeller Sr retired from business in the mid-1890s, when he was in his mid-50s. In the following two decades he was subjected to sustained attacks in the newspapers and became the target of President Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign against monopolies and trusts. Meanwhile, although kerosene was being overtaken by electric lighting, Henry Ford was putting the finishing touches to his first horseless carriage, and in 1908 the Model T was launched. In 1911 the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil’s monopoly power should end, requiring the company to be broken up. What was intended as a punishment became a world-record bonus. Rockefeller became quarter owner of Standard Oil New Jersey and 33 independent subsidiary companies, which were more profitable than one large company. In the mid1890s Rockefeller had been worth $200 million. By 1913 he was five times richer. In today’s money that’s $24 billion. He died in 1937, aged 97.
Rockfeller had met his wife, Laura ‘Cettie’ Spelman, at high school. She was as serious about Baptist religion as he was and equally opposed to snobbery and conspicuous consumption. She wore patched clothes, did a lot of her own housework, even when they were very rich, and said that a young woman only ever needed two dresses.
They had four daughters and one son – John (as with everything else the Rockefellers were economical with names), who was always known as Junior. ‘Mother talked to us constantly about duty, training our wills and getting us to do the things we ought to do,’ he said. It was a severe upbringing and he had little contact with children outside the family. He grew up shy, withdrawn, nervous and haunted by a fear of failure. Like his father, he kept a ledger noting down every cent he spent. He was all set to go to Yale when a minister told him that ‘a fast set’ was prominent on the social scene there, so he chose instead to go to Brown, the Baptist university in Rhode Island.
In his sophomore year at Brown he met Abby Aldrich, the daughter of a powerful Republican senator. She was everything he wasn’t. Outgoing, energetic and free-spirited, a breath of fresh air. She was his salvation.
‘My mother would say, “We’ve always done this. Why should we do anything else?”’ he said, ‘but my wife’s typical question was, “Why not do it another way, or better still, why not do something else?”’ He asked her to keep detailed Rockefeller-style notes of her spending. She flatly refused.
They were a rich young couple but not insanely rich. Rockefeller Sr, a loving father, was worried that too much money would affect his children’s happiness and imperil their immortal souls (later Junior would similarly delay passing on mountainous wealth to his offspring). It was only after 40-year-old Junior acquitted himself well in the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre crisis in 1914 – where 25 people including 11 children were killed by militia sent in to put down a strike on the Rockefellers’ Colorado coalfield – that his father became convinced he could handle the wealth to which he was heir. He started turning over
immense sums to his son. By 1920 Junior had $450 million.
He too launched into major philanthropy, acquiring land for the National Park Service, helping to restore various European universities after the First World War and embarking on the restoration of the 18th-century colonial capital Williamsburg, Virginia, which cost him $100 million, rather more than he’d bargained for. But for him it was the project of all projects: ‘I gave more time, thought and attention to Williamsburg than to any other project I undertook – far more than I gave to the Rockefeller Center.’ That was saying something. The Rockefeller Center, whose construction he masterminded, was a development on a scale never previously attempted in New York, built in the early 1930s when the economy was wrecked and the Rockefeller fortune had been halved by the Wall Street Crash.
Thanks to Abby’s liberating influence, Junior accepted that a man could buy things for himself. He bought Renaissance masterpieces, a magnificent collection of Chinese porcelain and, in 1923, he paid $1.2 million to a French count for the 12th-century Unicorn Tapestries, which he later donated to the Metropolitan Museum to hang in The Cloisters in upper Manhattan, the building of which he had financed.
Meanwhile, Abby had fallen in love with modernism. In January 1936 she appeared on the cover on Time magazine, hailed as ‘the outstanding individual patron of living artists in the US’. Seven years previously she, together with two other moneyed female art enthusiasts, had founded New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Junior, however, loathed modern art. His puritanism was bred in the bone and he found the self-expression and experimentation of modernism distasteful, probably even sinful. While Abby had encouraged him to buy what he loved, he denied her the money to buy what she loved. The only money she had was her (not inconsiderable) personal allowance. She could not afford major paintings but was able to buy drawings by Seurat, Picasso and Matisse, a watercolour by Derain, and so on. These were going quite cheap. ‘I won’t be able to give you any large sums of money or any important pictures,’ she told Lillie Bliss, one of her MOMA co-founders, ‘because John does not like modern art.’
‘It must have been awful for her to be Mrs John D Rockefeller Jr and not be able to make major acquisition for her own institution,’ said her friend the architect Philip Johnson. ‘John was a bulldog, a very strong man who would say, “As my wife you can do this but not that.” The museum was her revolt all right. She had to do it.’
In 1934, the trust funds Junior had set up for his sons and his wife came on stream. For the first time she had enough money to buy whatever modern art she wanted. It is fascinating to see photographs of the couple’s contrasting Manhattan sitting rooms in 1935: his with classical columns, antique furniture, a lavish chandelier and an array of Chinese porcelain; Abby’s with art deco furniture and plain walls lined with a mouthwatering display of modern masterpieces.
The Christie’s auction of Peggy and David Rockefeller’s collection has echoes of both his parents. There is antique furniture and porcelain Junior would have liked, but the stellar items are paintings that Abby might have chosen. Indeed, the man who most influenced them in their collecting was Alfred Barr, who, at 27, had been Abby’s pick as MOMA’S first director. In 1948, by then long gone from MOMA, Barr and his wife Marga visited David and Peggy’s new house on East 65th Street. On the wall were some very ordinary 18th-century portraits, including two of men in red coats. ‘How can you bear to be surrounded by so many little men in red coats?’ asked Marga.
‘Peggy and I were taken aback by her bluntness,’ said David, ‘and more than a little annoyed, but upon reflection we had to admit that the art on our walls was not of great calibre.’ Barr became their mentor. He started to point them in the direction of carefully chosen dealers. In 1951 he introduced them to the sexy Renoir painting Gabrielle au miroir, which they bought for $50,000.
Like both his father and grandfather, David married the right woman. Peggy and he were together for 56 years. Speaking of Junior and Abby, Peggy said, ‘She loved him in spite of all the restraints placed on her. She understood him very well. She really was extraordinary.’
Describing Peggy, her son David Jr says, ‘She was unafraid to speak her truth and that was very, very good for a person of my father’s stature. Someone in that position does not often have people telling the truth to him, and my mother did that, not meanly but directly.’
And unlike Junior and Abby, David and Peggy never bought a painting they didn’t both love.
‘God gave me money. I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money’